Besides reading newspapers so I don't have to, and watching TV so I don't have to, bloggers should follow the social sciences so I don't have to. So if I get something wrong here, it's because of bloggers! But I am confident I have autoethnography right. It goes like this: for publication in scholarly journals, you (a social scientist, not a blogger) write about stuff you personally like or don't like...and because what's personal is political, you claim your whole group likes or dislikes the same things and this is politically significant and everybody better pay attention!

This may or may not work. To get you tenure, I mean. For example, if what you personally like is rum, sodomy, and the lash...well, that's certainly got potential. But if your group is "the Royal Navy," nobody is even going to pretend to care. Me, I don't care for any of that, plus I have never been in any navy. I am waaaay disadvantaged at this modern racket. Is there any notable group I am even in?

Um...how about Guys Named John. No, wait: Guys In Latin America Named John Who Can Correctly Spell It. I am not currently in Latin America but when I am, I seem to be the only person who knows where the "h" goes. The name is fairly common, competitive certainly with Spanish Juan and Portuguese João. But both languages look out only for their own silent letters, not English's. I cannot be the only Anglophone visitor to notice this. But maybe I am!

Another teeny-tiny "group" I technically belong to is Habsburg-Americans. My father's parents were born in Franz Josef's realms, and his father certainly did long time in army uniform, during WWI and for a good hard while after it, as a POW in Italy. But I don't recall their wearing T-shirts that said this. The old country was, for them, old, or so I inferred. They said little. True, they never learned to speak English well, and if their long-ago neighbors enjoyed a comparable lack of schooling, nobody thereabouts learned to speak any language well. Perhaps bold tales of injustice overcome could be spun out of this? I doubt it. Their empire was arguably superior to anything that came after it, but Habsburgs ain't hip and never will be.

(And have I myself ever even suffered an anti-imperial slight? Maaaaybe, if you're prepared to stretch a point, which by the way you darn well better be because stretching the point is what autoethnography is all about! I still think it is strange that no one in Maribor betrayed any recognition of my name. Then again, the visionary industrialist was not just post-Habsburg but also pre-Communist, which from the fashionability standpoint is probably the worst combination there is. Of course no one was going to turn pale and stare furiously, then go slack, reach into a drawer for a giant gold key, and say, "So, somebody has finally come to repossess that villa. We knew it had to happen!")

A group that definitely exists and to which I definitely belong is Ivy Leaguers. But as awesome as that is – look at all the people who know nothing about it yet cannot resist saying something stupid about it – I already know it will never make me rich or even popular. But how about specific Ivy Leaguers? Published idiocy is chiefly or entirely about Harvard, maybe Yale, Princeton in a pinch; it just about never is about Cornell. But then, maybe neither dumb nor smart opinion should be. Here are the most prominent modern Cornellians: Ann Coulter, Sandra Fluke, and Keith Olbermann. Such aggrieved fame as is there is incoherent. With all due respect to Miss Coulter, here is a bunch of cold asteroids, and if you still doubt that, I have just two more words for you: Ed Marinaro. No; as obscure as this Ivy subgroup is, it will not win sympathy, mainly because it will not win anything.

Cudgeling my large brain, however, I do come up with another Ivy angle: Cornell Men Who Weren't In Fraternities. I don't know if it's still true, but in my time, half of all upperclassmen joined frats. It really was a big deal. Think of all the political hay that could be made of this! If any male Cornellians were public figures, which as I have demonstrated is scarcely the case. It sure isn't for me. Well, I'll stop complaining, or threatening to complain. Yet if notoriety of any sort does somehow come my way, I will seek to amplify it, by mentioning that the former housemate who threw that Cinco de Mayo party some years later loaned me his copy of Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. The very existence of such a book could cause a juicy scandal nowadays! I mean if properly managed by bloggers. In point of fact, I was amazed more than anything by the book's bluntness, and only many years later, when I read a summary of it in a newspaper in Portugal (apparently there is a Portuguese version), would I at last appreciate its wisdom. One way or another, though, this should confirm my membership in a much-misunderstood group.

(10/21/18)