Peak

Getting there

Fall

Amazing - the change of one day in Autumn, seen my office window!

Meanwhile, in the FIrst Year Workshops...

I haven't been telling you much about the weekly meeting of seminar fellows (peer advisers to the first year class) I facilitate. That's not because it isn't a great group, or because we haven't been having fun. This is the part of running the First Year Program I most enjoy - a broader range of students than I would otherwise meet, caring and sharing about the whole incoming class as whole persons.

Anyway, this is the second week of two on themes of diversity, a word used in so many ways it's in danger of losing all critical egde - aren't we all "diverse" in our own fabulous ways? We've tried to give the discussions content by stipulating that the first week focus on questions of privilege and the second on intersectionality. Privilege is hard to talk about, but people sort of know what it is. (A good starting point in getting beyond the canard that "everyone is privileged in one way" is here.) Privilege needs to be discussed because it's something its beneficiaries are usually unaware of benefiting from, and because determining what you should do with/about your privilege is often situational. (Don't do this.)

Intersectionality, meanwhile, is a long word with a little known origin - the double disprivilege of black women - that's new to most, and difficult to mobilize. Generalized it can get flabbily generic: "we all have overlapping identities! nobody is just one thing!" Establishing solidarity across marginalizations is important, but at least as important is realizing that forms of oppression and dehumanization cluster in predictable ways and compound each other in profound ways - kind of like privilege. How to link all these problems? One student found the cute explanatory diagram above which got our discussion going, but it was another's clever read on it which really took us places. Bob is oppressed for being stripey and a triangle, but he's also blue - which might be a very good color to be. Privilege and intersectionality in the same picture! Complicated and real... You can take it from there.

Stranger and stranger

This past week's session of the New School History course worked especially nicely! Our period was the 40s and 50s, the main theme the school's place - as a place - in the city. The readings were Alfred Schütz's 1944 American Journal of Sociology essay "The Stranger"; the first four chapters of Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was The Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (Vintage, 1997), a narrative of a vet's becoming a bohemian writer in the Village and The New School in 1946; and "Our Way of Life Makes us Miserable," a 1964 Saturday Evening Post essay by Erich Fromm. Each fascinating on its own, they also resonated with each other and with our class discussions in many delicious ways. Let me mention a half dozen of the most suggestive.

1.
Broyard mentions taking classes from Fromm, whom he found pompous but also irresistibly magnetic. Fromm was one of the New School refugee scholars who added a touch of Weltschmerz to Broyard's generation's giddy exploration of the possibilities of postwar peace.

Fromm, we learn, tried to make his students aware of their own fear of freedom, something which made no sense to Broyard and his classmates, but they accepted everything he said ... because we liked the sound of it - no one knew then that we would turn out to be right in trying to escape from freedom (15-16).

2.
Describing a class on Gestalt psychology (in which he claims to have heard a dead person sing), Broyard makes an interesting observation about the refugee scholars: It seemed to me that Germans were sometimes stunned into a kind of stupor by an ordinary insight, which they would then try to elevate into a philosophy or a system. Colliding with a modest fact in the midst of their abstraction, they just couldn't get over it. (17) This probably describes many a non-philosopher's response to philosophy! But it also resonates with Schütz' account of the cognitive experience of "strangers," who, new to an environment, don't share its denizens' almost thoughtless "thinking as usual." 502:

In fact "thinking as usual" tends to be incoherent and even contradictory as theory (500), but it's sufficient to the task of making a home in this world (so long as it doesn't change). Its recipes tell people how to respond to common types of situations as a matter of course - almost anonymously. The stranger, however, already reeling from the failure of his own culture's "recipes" to make sense of the new environment, sees the incoherence and contradictions in cultural patterns which he experiences not as a shelter but as a labyrinth, in which he has lost all sense of his bearings (507). In a spot-on phenomenology of what it is to be in a foreign culture, Schütz notes that the stranger can't distinguish individual from type: the observed actors within the approached group are not - as for their co-actors - of a certain presupposed anonymity, namely, mere performers of typical functions, but individuals. On the other hand, he is incined to take mere individual traits as typical ones. (506) So it's no wonder the stranger might stumble and even be vaulted into philosophy by what strikes a native like Broyard as an entirely ordinary insight or modest fact!

3.
Schütz' essay "The Stranger" is one of his most influential but it has also had its critics. As I learned this past summer, his good friend Aron Gurwitsch (who joined The New School faculty after Schutz' death) found it so offensive he broke off their correspondence for a year. How could Schütz, a student of Husserl, sound so unphilosophical - suggesting that the goal of human life is to be at home, or find a way to be at home, in an incoherent "thinking as usual" that rarely rises to the level of thought, let alone philosophy? In its cool sociological-philosophical stance Schütz' essay does seem to pathologize the stranger's assimilation-complicating objectivity, which seems a problem for the host society as well as for its guest, not an opportunity for true thinking. Indeed Schutz observes that The doubtful loyalty of the stranger is unfortuantely very frequently more than a prejudice on the part of the approached group (507) since the stranger has made the fateful discovery that all "thinking as usual" is unreliable. We're surely not just talking about philosophers here, whose questioning you don't need to be Leo Strauss to think will never sit well with the thoughtless masses. Schütz's essay was published in 1944. Could he, ten years in America and starting to sound like an American pragmatist, have forgotten that one lethal strand of modern European anti-semitism was couched in precisely these terms? I want to learn more about Schütz, and about the New School exiles' views about the Jew as outsider condemned or blessed to objectivity, to be the critic and conscience of the world.

4.
It turns out that Anatole Broyard is more than just another native, too. Through a process of self-invention described in part in Kafka Was The Rage, Broyard became an influential critic and book reviewer for the New York Times - one of the ultimate arbitrators of taste. But his was more than the familiar story of a kid from podunkville making it in New York. As even his children learned only after his death, Broyard was a Creole from New Orleans whose light skin allowed him to "pass" for white. Broyard's success in "passing" is hard to discuss (especially for me, who as a white man doesn't have to work to "pass" as a typical individual). It certainly raises powerful questions about the sacrifices demanded by assimilation. As I noted in a blog post a long time ago, it's hard now not to read works like Kafka Was The Rage as an account of losing a self as well as making one. The tragedy - and the comedy - of my story was that I took American life to heart with a kind of strenuous and ardent sincerity that young men usually bring to love affairs, Broyard wrote in the books' "Prefatory Remarks." While some of my contemporaries made a great show of political commitment, it seems to me that their politicizing of experience abstracted them from the ordinary, from the texture of things. They saw only a Platonic idea of American life. To use one of their favorite words, they were alienated. I was not. In fact, one of my problems was that I was alienated from alienation, an insider among outsiders. (viii) If the Jew was paradigmatic critic and conscience of Europe, what W. E. B. DuBois called African Americans' "double consciousness" affords a similarly prophetic burden of "objectivity" on this side of the Atlantic.

5.
These are becoming little essaylets so I'm going to resist the temptation to do more than remind you of Broyard's odd claim, in response to Fromm's famous ideas in Escape from Freedom (or, in the British edition I was transfixed by in college, Fear of Freedom), that we would turn out to be right in trying to escape from freedom. By the time of his 1964 essay he had factored in how the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction and consumerism exacerbated modern people's inability to assume responsibility for their situation, and for each other. Can we lead truly human, loving and reasonable lives as strangers to ourselves? Discuss!

6.
Let me turn to the present, and to the world of our students. We started our lecture by asking them to help us assemble a typology of kinds of strangers. It being midterm, most were unconstrained by the terms of Schütz's discussion, but in its way this only made the resulting catalog more interesting. Here it is. (The last item was my addition.)

Once you've finished your mélange of Schütz, Broyard and Fromm, you might want to go through this list with our questions about the circumstances, anxieties and insights of strangers in mind. In my discussion group we had particularly lively discussion about 4, 7, 8, 12 and 13.

7.
The main subject of our discussion, however - and here I will, I promise, end! - was students' reports on interviews they had conducted across the university in recent weeks. In pairs, they had been tasked to approach a fellow student and someone who'd been at The New School at least five years. What they found was intriguing in detail and in general - the divisions know little of each other, change produces anxiety, etc. And while my students mainly interviewed their Parsons instructors, they still learned that identity here is fluid - many faculty and staff members were New School students once or started teaching while students elsewhere, and many still are. But discussing this on the heels of our multifaceted exploration of strangers and The New School made something else clear to me too. Being a school of strangers (in all those senses of the term) is in our DNA. From the start, The New School sought out students who already had lives, and probably already had degrees (degree programs came very late in our story). Most of its faculty had appointments at other schools or careers as artists or professionals in their fields - a situation not that different from today where, despite the growth in full-time faculty like me, the majority of classes are taught by part-time faculty. This wasn't because of economic necessity (at least not in the initial scheme) but essential to the place The New School sought to be. Here people could become familiar with people they'd otherwise encounter only as strangers, could explore their own stranger selves as students or as teachers. This is part of what was subversive in the concept of "adult education," I suppose. It survives in our understanding of ourselves as an urban school with no campus of our own (with its attendant "problem of community"), as a place uniquely suited to help students develop the aptitudes, appetites and agility that will make for success in the complex and ever-changing world because they're already partly immersed in that world while here. Do we help people find multiple homes, or enable them to be strangers everywhere?

Do you hear it too? The discussions described in Broyard, and the charged encounters of worlds of fear and hope, echo on in our halls.

Post-op

Curious what The Greenwich Lane, the development rising in the space where Saint Vincent's Hospital once stood, will look like? Behold!

The original plan was for more than twice as many units (450 instead of 200) but apparently there are still many enticing options. And while there are plenty of pricier possibilities, the Times reports that you could nab a one-bedroom apartment in the tall block along Seventh Avenue for just over $2 million - sales start this week!

Hudson Valley

Spent a lovely Autumn day with friends up the Hudson. A few views:

The northern tip of Manhattan at Spuyten Duyvil and the New Jersay Palisades aflame with Fall foliage from the Metro North train
The views north and south from Walkway over the Hudson, the pedestrianized 125-year-old  railroad bridge at Poughkeepsie
A grand old building at Vassar College, my grandmother's alma mater, and a grand old tree she must have known, perhaps even sat beneath

Landlubber

Latest word from Google is that we'll soon be able to get personalized maps - maps showing us the things we're most likely to be looking for; indeed, we'll get them whether we want to or not. This os what they've been doing for some time on searches (which is why it's a good thing periodically to use a different search engine, like the deliberately memoryless DuckDuckGo) and, more generally (unless you take the time, every time, to disable it), advertising.

Why does the extension of this customization to maps seem so troubling? It's not just that what shows up on my map will be for sale to the highest bidder, though that's a huge concern. And it's not that we don't know that people have (and should have) their own private geographies - I've often encouraged students to map these out, in fact. It's that without a common map we couldn't notice these difference, enjoy them and learn from them. We might eventually lose all sense of public space, that last vestige of the common good. Critic Evgeny Morozov:

The main reason to celebrate maps that aren't personalized has nothing to do with technophobia or nostalgia about the pre-Google days. It's quite simple, really: When you and I look at the same map, there's a good chance that we might strike a conversation about how to enrich the space that the map represents—perhaps plant more trees or build a sidewalk or install some benches.

Morozov's article puts together several things I've been trying to find words for, such as the implications of the way in which Mapquest, GPS and friends let us get by without any sense of direction, distance, journey: it's just turn right in a bit, get in the left lane, turn left and then right, recalculating, everything's ok, right again... We could drive through the same neighborhood a dozen times without knowing it. Without ever learning the "lay of the land" would we even know what land is?

Zounds

Yesterday was the official launch of the print and e-book versions of my book - rather moot since Amazon's been disbursing copies for weeks. But nobody told me there's an audiobook, too. Well, there is. (Actually it was there in something I signed, but I didn't think it would come out with the book.) Listening to it - the sample is more than enough for me;

the whole book takes the reader 5 hours 42 minutes - is profoundly strange. That's not me!! Is that what my writing sounds like? It's a little pedantic. Oh well, I suppose it's still better than the computer-generated "video" of the book description, with one of those voices you can choose for your GPS - and which pronounces Job to rhyme with Bob!

New streetscape

Trees have appeared in front of the new University Center. Very nice!

Our mid-century neighborbood

I'm not sure where she found it, but my co-teacher J found this amazing picture of the Jefferson Market area once upon a time. How much has changed! The Sixth Avenue El - I'd quite forgotten that it was at the end of the block where The New School erected the Urban building on 12th Street! And that huge block - a women's prison, now a beautiful garden (which New School once tried, happily unsucessfully, to acquire). Our local landmark, now a library, was quite overshadowed - except for what looks like a garishly white marble portal... On the other hand, most of the other nearby buildings are unchanged!

Collegial advice

Though myself a blogger, I don't really follow very many other blogs. Make that next to none. But not quite none. I keep up with Reuters Faith World (which I learned about from my elusive journalist uncle D), and with Tenured Radical, and not just because its incisive and fearlessly honest writer happens now to be a New School colleague. Recently, TR took on one of the toughest questions facing us university folks - whether and how to encourage bright undergraduates to pursue further studies. I have for some time now seen it as my responsibility to tell students that the academic job market has dried up, that the likelihood of landing a full-time job in a place they want to be is very slim, that if they go to graduate school they should try to find a way to go without accruing debt, and, finally, to ask themselves if they would feel they had wasted their twenties if they wound up with a dissertation and no job at thirty (i.e., make sure you're doing research work you love).

Some of my friends are appalled that I do this, and it makes me sad, too - my generation faced quite different prospects, and I wish some of my most promising students could do what I've been able to do. But the current system is sending thousands of bright young people to certain disappointment and even bigger debt... What to do? And what else can they do? The oracle speaks! Faculty are wrong to think that undergraduate students know how difficult the situation is, so have a responsibility to inform them. But she draws up a fantastic list of questions we might pose our questions, which manages to be empowering rather than dispiriting:

• Have you researched the current state of academic employment in this discipline? Do you know where and how to do that? Are you willing to invest less than $100 to get the resources you need to do that?
• Do you know what the possibilities are for people with a Ph.D. in ________ to find employment outside of the academy? Would you consider being a dean, a program director, or another kind of administrator? Would you see working on renewable contracts, rather than the tenure track, or becoming an administrator, as a failure? Name three things you would like to do if you don’t get a tenure-track job.
• Do you really love to write? Not like it, or see it as instrumental to a university career, but really love it enough to persist until you become really good at it?
• Does research compel you?
• Do you see a broader political or intellectual public for your work than the university –based specialists in your field?
• Are there other disciplines than the one you wish to apply in that might offer better prospects for academic or alternative employment?
• Have you considered taking two-three years off to work in this field, or a related one, in order to find out if you really need to go to graduate school at all?
• Have you taken any graduate classes to understand what commitment you must make to succeed in graduate school? Do you know how long you might be there?
• Do you have loans already? Have you visited the financial aid office to have your repayment rate calculated on those loans? Do you have access to family wealth?
• Do you have the self confidence, and the patience, to fail? To try again? To reimagine your career and/or intellectual goals? To do this more than once?

The rest of the article, and the discussion it inspires, are worth reading too. I know it's what I'll turn to the next time a student asks about graduate school.

SciFi

Science fiction writer extraordinaire Kim Stanley Robinson reading from his newest book and sharing some of his consistently brilliant insights:

He defines science fiction, a genre he's "patriotic" about, as recounting "histories we can never know" - futures which might unfold (like the thoroughly realized world of 2312, when humans have rendered many other planets and moons of our solar system habitable by "terraforming," and have also speciated into several sizes and a panoply of genders), counterfactual pasts (like world history had the Black Death wiped out the population of Europe in The Years of Rice and Salt) or stories of the unknowable past (the new novel Shaman takes place 30,000 years ago). I'm persuaded that it's a serious form of moral critique and imagination.

Brooklyn slice

I went to my first literary party this evening - invited by an alumna who works for the small independent literary publisher whose reception it was. (No, it wasn't at the pizzeria below, but in an old brownstone in Clinton Hill. Not Ray's was on my walk over.) I don't do parties well,

but this one was quite fun. Met a bunch of people - all just by first name, though the surnames have been easy to reconstruct - who write, edit, publish or review interesting books. All were wittier and more agile small talkers than me. Several were aware of my book, which was a little terrifying. None has read it yet, though some said they would. (!)

Paying it forward

In tomorrow's Sunday Review, an article about an epidemic of little acts of charity: people in drive-through restaurants paying for the people in the car behind them.

Whereas paying it forward in drive-throughs occurred maybe once or twice a year a decade ago, now fast-food operators said it might happen several times a day. 

And sometimes whole chains of forward-paying unfold, the recipients of one person's generosity paying in turn for the car behind them. These chains can get quite long.

Perhaps the largest outbreak of drive-through generosity occurred last December at a Tim Hortons in Winnipeg, Manitoba, when 228 consecutive cars paid it forward. A string of 67 cars paid it forward in April at a Chick-fil-A in Houston. And then a Heav’nly Donuts location in Amesbury, Mass., had a good-will train of 55 cars last July.

Serial pay-it-forward incidents involving between 4 and 24 cars have been reported at Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Del Taco, Taco Bell, KFC and Dunkin’ Donuts locations in Maryland, Florida, California, Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama, North Dakota, Michigan, North Carolina and Washington.

More typically, though, it’s one customer acting alone and perhaps routinely. “We have a lady who always pays it forward in the drive-through, every day,” said Aaron Quinton, co-owner of Old School Bagel Cafe, in Tulsa, Okla. “I point at the person behind and she just nods.” 

What a wonderful phenomenon! What to make of it? The writer and some of the folks she talks to think it might be a reaction to dysfunction in Washington, and I'm tempted to connect it to our evident inability as a society to take care of people we think should be taken care of (health care? a living wage? gun safety?), but that hardly explains the Tim Horton in Winnipeg. An interesting angle is the anonymity of it.

“If you paid for someone inside a restaurant, they would see you,” said Jessica Kelishes, a marketing representative for an auto parts distributor, who pays it forward at Del Taco, McDonald’s and Starbucks drive-throughs in Banning, Calif. “I just do it out of kindness rather than for recognition.” She said her kindness stemmed from feeling blessed and wanting to share her good fortune. But others have told drive-through cashiers they wanted to pay it forward in gratitude to drivers who waved their car ahead of them in line or after noticing in the rearview mirror a woman weeping into her steering wheel, and wanting to make her smile. Cancer survivors have done it in appreciation of life, and new parents have done it to celebrate their baby.

But more often there is an expressed desire to do something good at a time when so much else in the world seems so dishearteningly bad. It’s a stark contrast, and perhaps a backlash, to the seemingly unremitting reports of unkindness in the news — politicians shutting down the government, N.S.A. spying, teenage suicides resulting from cyber-bullying, vicious slayings at a mall in Kenya, gas attacks in Syria.

“It’s about giving, and letting people see not everybody is bad, and there are nice people out there and maybe we can turn it around,” said Connie Herring, an optical technician in St. Pauls, N.C., who pays it forward at drive-throughs at least once a week. 

It's a classic "random act of kindness" - not quite random (there seem to be regular seeders) but disconnected enough from the systems and relationships it softens or corrects to be powerful, and small enough to be accepted as a gift and perhaps passed on: a presentiment of a kinder world. I imagine the gesture of commensality and shared humanity makes the food taste better, too.

Job, a life

I did not, when I accepted the task of doing the Job volume for the "Lives of Great Religious Texts" series, think very much about audience. To the extent I thought about it at all (as an ordinary academic I don't imagine anyone much will actually read what I write), I imagined some undergraduate classes, and some of the kind of folks The New School sought in "educating the educated," that elusive but exquisite beast the "educated lay reader." During the writing, I realized it might also be read in seminaries, and perhaps in religious reading groups. But I should have known better - especially given the argument of my book! I should have remembered that Job is the truest friend and witness of many who suffer, that the Book of Job offers a voice, a framework, a vindication for people enduring terrible afflictions but unable to find a sympathetic hearing, who share the biblical hero's fervent wish (and the frame of my book) 

Oh, that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book! (Job 19:23)

Today I got what probably won't be the last message from a stranger entitled Job: my biography. The writer (who heard me "On Point") has been housebound for two decades with an undiagnosable disease but consoled by mystical experiences in the way Job was consoled by the voice from the whirlwind. He's written several book manuscripts about his experiences but publishers aren't interested: can I help? Can I?

Curtains

In our New School history class yesterday, we took the students to the Orozco room. One student took the panorama below, which, for all the inevitable distortion, gives a remarkably good sense of it as a space. Behind J and me, you see "Struggle in the Orient," a tableau you may recognize; just beyond us are the portraits of Gandhi and Naidu. Between the windows is the "Table of Universal Brotherhood," with its multiracial vision of global harmony, occasion for many a bigoted response in its time. (Today we see mainly missing women.) To their right is "Struggle in the West" with Mexico, Lenin and goose-stepping Soviets, including Joseph Stalin. This is the wall which was once covered over with a yellow curtain - see the image from "New School Keeps Red Mural Hidden" below.

This visit was, I dare say, the highlight of a week which somehow fell flat. The analog last time round was a great success - "I think we did the three-ring circus of The New School proud today," I crowed - so this was a bit of a surprise. The week was devoted to two important programs which, for a brief time in the 1940s, made The New School an even more than usually cool place - Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop and the Ecole Libre - and the theme of art as politics. Plenty interesting, you might think... but not to our mostly Parsons students. That what we hope is a complicated but empowering sense of place means little to them was clear from my students' response to the Orozco room. It's dated; worse, in its way, it's off-limits to students. And when I showed them the recent cool student efforts to bring it up to date, indifference: what would be the point of trying to make it relevant today? It's a slumpy part of the semester in a class already dealing with the low morale of required courses, but these responses cut to the quick. Next time, we hope for more interested students; even then, we may have to leave these parts of the story out.

Smooth sailing

until the next manufactured crisis. Thank you, President Obama, for not negotiating with hostage-takers, and for maintaining the rule of law.

Butterflies

We had our Religious Studies Program Fall roundtable today, a great showcase of the kinds of work being done in and around our community. Our theme was "Science & Religion," an old chestnut, but I think we succeeded in surprising people with interestingly new approaches.
First, two colleagues (one a biochemist) shared the work they've been doing over the past several year to put together teaching modules on debates about stem cell research. They focused on the very particular case of a Catholic family whose son had a genetic disease which would have ended his life had they not had a second child whose bone marrow stem cells allowed gene therapy. The Catholic Church disapproves of this, but these were Catholics, too, acting on their consciences - a more nuanced way into religious questions about the ethics of stem cell research than you usually hear, and a reminder that science-religion questions are being worked through on the ground all the time.

Next, a Buddhologist took us through - and beneath the surface of - the Dalai Lama's well-known statements about the primacy of science. Yes, he has said that any Buddhist tenet disproved by science should be abandoned, but he also thinks basic Buddhist things like the law of karma are "hidden," beyond empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. This is what scholars of religion call a "protective strategy," but our discussion went a more interesting direction. Apparently the Dalai Lama's true concern is to get allegedly empathy-expanding meditation practices into schools, and if calling them "science" or "secular ethics" is what is needed to achieve this end, so be it.

Finally, one of our seniors - yes, a student! - presented her ongoing research on the Big History project. As she explained it, this movement seeks to place human experience in the 13.82 billion year history of the universe, offering a unifying and grounding "origin story" like those which religions have traditionally offered. Students first lose themselves in the vastness of time and then find a new purpose in appreciating the precious contingencies which have made human life and reflection possible. Big History doesn't do much with religion, but in presenting itself as a successor to religious traditions it raises all sorts of questions - not least whether it has parted ways also with science, which abjures big stories in favor of an open-ended experimental method.

We had some unfortunately all-too-common technical difficulties with set-up, so I didn't get a chance to offer my introductory remarks, but in retrospect I'm not sure they were needed. I was going to suggest three phases of discussion about science and religion:

(1) science vs. religion, the Enlightenment view of zero-sum competition which is still alive in New Atheism, and in the equal and opposite reaction of a certain evangelical suspicion of science;

(2) science and/or/as religion, more subtle views which appreciate that many early "natural philosophers" (as well as some contemporary scientists) understood themselves to be doing both science and religion, and imagine various ways in which science and religion are friends, allies or even (as in Bruno Latour) doing many of the same things;

(3) ... and science and religion, the postsecular moment in which larger questions about the nature of secular institutions, values and categories make the science/religion question seem just an aspect of broader debates, large or small

Not needed! The presentations themselves made this amply clear.

Straighten up and fly right

At the post office today, I saw something I thought must be a prank. But no - to celebrate stamp collecting the US Postal Service has recreated the most famous blooper in its history, the 1918 "inverted Jenny." Just in time for the crash and burn of the US government...!