Autism vs. the Gate Keepers
If you’re over 30 and reading this in the US, have you ever wondered why, election after election, things never seem to change in any substantial way?
I remember my first presidential vote here. The governor of Arkansas promised substantial change. We got more the the same with him. Subsequent elections brought more of the same. With the senator from Illinois, we were offered hope and change. We again were duped. We got more of the same.
There have been various explanations as to why this is offered from the political pundits. From the right, we hear about the “administrative state” or “permanent Washington.” We don’t hear much from the left on the issue, at least in a negative sense.
With this in mind, I came across a pamphlet recently that added to my knowledge on this issue, and I wanted to share a bit of it as a sort of book report.
I was thinking of this in terms of my career path. You see, when being a forensic scientist (digital multimedia forensic analyst) was assigned to me, it was (to my mind) a logical extension of my being an artist. I was “the Photoshop guy” as it were, non-binary aside. Thus, it was logical.
As I prepared for my first murder trial, I was informed by the prosecutors that I needed published sources for all of the things that I had done in relation to the case. Big problem. I’d been an artist since ever since, but I had never written down anything. So, with the year of trial prep that I had, I set about to write my own Photoshop book (you can still find it on Amazon). I had the text reviewed by the best and brightest at the time. When it first came out, it was a best seller. Since then, it’s been purchase around the globe. It’s quite a point of pride for me, considering I was new to the verbal world when I wrote it.
Fast forward a bit, and word gets out in my agency that I know a thing or two about Photoshop. The Latent Print Unit (LPU) wants Photoshop training. I wrote the book and have been using the tool since version 2.5, so I agree. On the day that we’re supposed to be setting up the training room, someone comes over from Training Division to tell me that the class has been canceled … by Training Division.
I didn’t understand. The LPU wanted to be trained. I knew it backwards and forwards. What could possibly be the reason to cancel the class? They said, it was because I didn’t have certification from the state as an instructor or a curriculum designer.
After six months of waiting, I finally got to sit for California Peace Officers’ Standards and Training’s (POST) Instructor Development Course (IDC). It was two weeks, 80 hours of instruction on how to design courses and how to teach. What I saw was unique to me, how to act “normal” - to mask - such that one could present information that was required but that the students probably didn’t want to learn. For me, it was a total waste of time - though I did meet some really nice people.
So, I had the certificate. Good to go, right? Wrong. I wasn’t a vendor. Training Division required their classes feature a certificate at the end. There wasn’t a method for offering this internally as they hadn’t “created” the course in Training Division and I wasn’t a vendor. This is where I began my business venture and became a vendor, but I never did teach that free internal class to the LPU.
In trying to understand this at the time, I couldn’t figure it out. I simply didn’t understand the playing field.
Later, in presenting findings in trial, I was asked about my certifications. I had none. I wrote the classes that I taught (I’m certified to do that). It was a chicken / egg situation. I taught the Photoshop classes that people used to get certified with the two certifying bodies. Shouldn’t I be qualified to testify as to my expertise?
What I didn’t understand, no … what I wasn’t aware of, was the presence of a species of human protecting its turf. I was unaware of the Professional Management Class (PMC). This class are the occupants of the “administrative state” or “permanent Washington.”
Catherine Liu writes, in Virtue Hoarders, “For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes.” These were the gatekeepers.
I’ve encountered them again in teaching, in my current profession. You see, who better to teach about their special interest than an autistic person. Sure, we could use help in structuring “lessons” to appease common core apologists. But, if you really want to know something at a deep and profound level, ask an autistic.
Yet, the PMC has placed so many barriers to teaching in the way of would be teachers. So many autistics, who would be amazing teachers, simply give up in the face of so many useless and irrelevant standardized tests. But the PMCs at the Big Ed companies won’t let the system change. There’s too much money at stake.
As I contemplate next steps in my teaching career, I have to begin the process of “clearing” my credential next year, I’m pondering these words from Liu’s Virtue Hoarding:
Because of the ideological distortions of leftist politics by PMC values, self-criticism must be the beginning of all political engagement. We have to abandon the way the PMC wants us to think about success, intelligence, racism, violence, children, reading, health care, well-being, pleasure, and sex. We have to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits. We have to understand ourselves as the universal subject of a history dominated by capitalism’s dynamic, exploitative, and punishing powers. It will not be easy, because PMC elites control so much of our lives and quietly threaten us with exclusion if we do not follow their sanctioned lines of milquetoast politics.
The PMC would have us forget that as a class, it has served capitalism and the profit motive very well: tragically, it has also been hugely successful at monopolizing the language of progressive and enlightened politics, even as it has abandoned the best aspects of liberal professionalism and the democratic culture in which such ideas of intellectual autonomy can thrive. The values of professionalism, with its disinterested call for accountability and respect of truths arrived at by a community of researchers, are critical to building socialism. Professionalism is not the enemy of solidarity. Professionalism and its disciplinary limits are necessary for nurturing socialist specialists who will be needed to oversee massive economic redistribution and the strengthening of public infrastructure and public goods that will be necessary for the environmental survival of the planet and the political survival of democracy.
The PMC elite has refused to name the economic system that has ruined our planet, undermined our trust in public institutions, destroyed public health, diminished our childhoods, and litigated our pleasures. Neither evil nor virtuous, the PMC is a secular and material antagonist. In calling out capitalism as the enemy of the people, we must also name our enemy’s most assiduous courtier and sycophant: the professional managerial class.
Can I make it through their gauntlet and clear my credential, considering “PMC elites control so much of our lives and quietly threaten us with exclusion if we do not follow their sanctioned lines of milquetoast politics.” Will I still be me in the end?
What do you think …?