"I try all things; I achieve what I can"
Gerard swings for the fences. American Digest tends to do that. He posted this back in November, pre-Thanksgiving, amid the rending of garments and whatnot over the proper order for all things holiday. So it was out of order, and I waited, and here it is. Of course once you watch it you’ll realize tout suite that it it isn’t out of order at all. I haven’t been wearing reading glasses for long, and this one forced me to figure out what to do with them when something gets in my eye.
When I started this creative writing class, I swore that I would only write original content. Meaning that I would not go back through my years of essay/poetry/flash fiction blogging for material. Thus far I have honored that. But our last assignment is to write a poem that involves the concept of or a sense of time in some way, and damn it, I knew immediately that I had the perfect piece to go back and pull forward. Here’s the original from (oh my) nearly 5 years ago. I love that I’ve been recording things for this long. Since what, 2008, I think. How’s that for a sense of time?
Here it is, poemized. Poetified. Poefied. It’s probably not the final form. We always revise and revise and revise, of course. But how nice this is:
We Have a Dance that Makes Us Forget
We’re incredible, you and me.
We should be fetal and weeping
all the things that come our way.
But we barely notice as we act like waking up this morning
erases all the times he woke us up last night
the poor boy and his cutting teeth and
whatever the rattling wind
did to his dreams.
And in the fog of another morning
we are buried under the things.
But we’re incredible, you and me.
We should be dim and unresponsive
if we could afford the lapse.
But we barely notice as we give the girl a ‘good morning’
and a choice of food for breakfast.
She crests the stairs carrying
the bags under her eyes
that her father gave her.
And the harried ballet of the birth of a day gets eased by
– we’re already late.
But we’re incredible, you and me.
We should be hunched and scuffling
if we could even move that fast.
But we barely notice and we make a little dinner
and go “ga-ga” to the boy
and “use your manners” to the girl
and we smile and
have a family hug.
And they want to hear music now because
they dance to everything that isn’t sleep.
The old men on the TV continue to beat each other dumb
while the old man in his chair heaves a sigh
that comes out like the ghost of his grandparents
rushing to turn up the radio.
A sigh that works like amnesia.
The television disappears with a click.
A fog horn mourns in the distance.
The music plays and our people dance.
We’re incredible, you and me.
What if I just drove hard
with a picture in my head of where I wanted to go
and that picture was a desert.
I drove and I dreamed and I screamed and I became
a carbureted harbinger of ills that I can taste when I speak them.
And I spoke of where I wanted to be –
black charred sands
ice cold mornings
a lifetime of miles from her grave.
What if all I could do on the way was
vent that little cigarette window and watch my spent ashes
dancing an unlikely moment in the eddy
while I rod full throttle
with a picture in my head of a place that doesn’t exist
because it might be the only way I can stop seeing that forest –
damp green sanctuary
damn dirty cliché
all moss and mood and running snow
pooling in raucous serenity
where the world’s worst poems about loss
collect to commiserate over their feelings of inadequacy
and where a dipped toe stirs guilt into prophecy –
white noise
the pestilent buzz of a dead limb
the prayer that didn’t take
And what if I was Jonah
driving in a panic away from the mouth of a giant fish
because in the rearview I saw inside its maw
and I saw that wicked forest
mocking me forever as it begged me home.
So I had to fly forward to a burnt delusion
to leave that pretty little place in the woods
where I buried her.
I do love my donut mornings. They’re getting to know me, and when I slapped down my full punch card like it was the winning domino – ameriCANO, mutha fucka! – they gave me the coffee I asked for, and gave me the donut free, too. Thanks, friends.
But first, in my car, I rounded a turn up high on a hill before descending to the beach for my goodies, and was greeted with a view of an aircraft carrier lumbering through Elliot Bay. Probably the Stennis from Bremerton – that’s the one we usually get around here. A quick check reveals that no, it’s actually the Nimitz heading back after sea trials and flight certifications. Another tool in the fight to maintain rights like our freedom of speech.
Having seen the Nimitz out there, I figured it would be worth it to give you a peek into what I am working on at school. This is my Social ethics class. As you can see, the questions are framed to discourage disagreement with the prevailing ideology. It doesn’t mean that the questions can’t be answered in the negative, but most young students aren’t geared for that. They’re just going to read the question and answer it, and store that tacit agreement away in their consciousness. It’s soft, oblique conditioning, and the teachers know full well what they are doing.
This week we did sexual and racial discrimination. People have lost jobs and have had their right to free speech completely revoked for saying some of the things I say below. Innocuous things that nonetheless are not allowed to stand against the dominant narrative on campus. Which is relevant to last week’s topic of free speech and speech codes. Campus speech codes claim to target and limit hate speech, but their target is, in every instance, free speech. My current college has a seemingly reasonable speech code, but it uses words like “harm” and “harassment” without making any effort to define them. When those definitions are left up to the accusers, good people get hurt.
The questions are in italics, and come from the teacher. Answers are where you’d expect them to be:
1. Can you think of other instances or phenomena that are indicative of, or might contribute to, the so-called “rape culture”? What, if anything, can men do to fight against “rape culture” and stereotypes that promote overt male dominance?
I find, first of all, May and Strikwerda’s statement that “rape is a crime perpetrated by men as a group, and not just the individual rapist” to be wildly irresponsible. It’s a moralistic assignment of blame without due process, and a sort of high command to all men to stop everything now and do everything differently. To imply that there is no such thing as a man who is innocent of rape is so absurd that it alone is enough to refute any claim of a rape culture.
If there is a stereotype of overt male dominance, I don’t know it. It’s a trope that’s been “fought against” for so long, and opposition to it has been the dominant narrative for so long, that it seems unlikely that if the stereotype does exist, it holds any sway in society. I just don’t see how socialization can still be blamed for “rape culture” when for decades now the overwhelming social momentum has been against it.
2. In regards to racism and sexism, to what extent [if at all] do you think that being “tolerant” involves tolerating others who are intolerant? In other words, if we are to truly respect others as autonomous agents, how ought we respond to those who do not respect others? Explain your reasoning thoroughly.
This takes us back to the free speech discussion in some ways. It seems more right to tolerate an intolerant person, if his intolerance doesn’t come in the form of speech or expression that causes harm, however we might define that. So yes, in terms of an obligation to respect the autonomy of others, we should tolerate the intolerant up until the point that his intolerance is an infringement on the rights of someone else, does someone else harm (which we must clearly define first), or otherwise restricts the autonomy of another. Still, to show too much respect may cross into the territory of the self-deprecating person (or Uncle Tom or Deferential Wife) in that we may forfeit our own rights and demonstrate a lack of respect for morality in general by doing so. All of which makes my answer remain a firm “yes.” Tolerate the intolerant, but do not tolerate her infringement on your own rights.
3. While we may reserve the right to socially exile or pressure others to be respectful to all, to what degree do you think such pressure should be exerted legally? For example, the fact that former Los Angeles Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, was banned for life from the NBA for his racist comments. Or the President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, who publicly spoke about men being better suited for the sciences and engineering because of their innate aptitude for such demanding fields, while women have more natural “family desires”. Should either, or both, of these individuals be legally or professionally punished for such statements? Why or why not, and to what extent?
I’m all for people like this being professionally punished. The court of public opinion matters, and is a helpful check against unwanted behaviors. Legally speaking, however, no. They may have made poor comments, but they did not cross any boundaries of free speech protections that would warrant legal ramifications. Certainly nothing in our readings would support legal action, even the broadest of speech codes. There was no incitement to violence, and no issues of time and place that would have bestowed their comments with anything resembling a promotion of physical harm.
4. Choose one of the media items from this week’s module that you found the most interesting and summarize its content. Why did you find it interesting? What, if anything, do you think could be done to promote equality between the sexes, races, or both?
I think that to help equalize society, the primary focus needs to be on honesty. For instance, the article “Debunking the Mythical Gender Pay Gap” does not debunk what it claims to. The gender pay gap, the “77 cents on the dollar figure” makes no effort to control for any variables at all. It is the average of all women’s earnings in the US subtracted from the average of all men’s earnings in the US. That is literally all of the data that goes into that number. No data about the types of jobs, hours worked, education of employees, tenure, or even how many women vs men are in the workforce. Therefore, to start a conversation about equality with the 77 cents premise is to start the conversation dishonestly, and push for change from there.
And so much of the rest of our conversations about equality go the same way. The data concerning police brutality does not remotely support the claim that minorities are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. An honest conversation would start by acknowledging that fact, but that never happens.
We cannot work to promote equality between anything if we are not willing to be honest about it.
No doubt I’m a morning person. I like being up and ahead of the game.But it still needs to be mostly dark and quiet. I like, I think, using the time for introspection. I’m not sure any other time of day works as well. Once the sun has come inexorably up, it’s the the dull usuals on a march, slightly out of step. And as I wrote on that post in the link:
I’m a little tired of everything I have, and am frantically searching for something which, next year, will be what I remember about the great way that this summer wound down. The soundtrack to the end of it all, or something.
Or the beginning. As much as I will be railing against it in February, I always look forward to the winter, just like I always look forward to the change of one season to the next both times it happens here in Washington. Winter changes to Summer, and three months later, Summer changes to Winter. You only have to brace yourself once a year.
I’m not tired of everything I have, though. Going back to school has catalyzed a sea change in the tenor, the mood, the psychological weave of things. It creates an anticipation and uneasiness. A worried excitement. But “sea change?” That’s gotta be from…surely it’s another…
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.
Yep, another eternal turn of phrase from Shakespeare. Eturnal Shakespeare. If it wasn’t for Shakespeare and the Bible, I’m not sure we’d be able to have a useful conversation about anything. Which is a pretty good explanation for the miserable gewgaw language of the social justice movement. Tottering as they are through an education whose strictures carefully target the most important influences, while wheedling students with the most useless reassurances of their personal value. When you’re ignorant of what made you, you can’t make anything yourself. But you can certainly, efficiently, make nothing of yourself.
I’m sharing the table with my mother in law right now. She writes and speaks for a living, on various socially useful subjects. I’m not sure what’s she’s working on, but she’s taking calls and typing away and leaning in to the screen and, well, this: If my wife were home to see this dynamic – me, with her mom, the two of us just doing our thing together – she would weep tears of joy, and perhaps kill herself knowing that life has reached its zenith. There can be no more surprises. Unlikely affinity is one of life’s most subtle and rewarding little charities.
I did say “socially useful subjects” which may have pinged your radar once or twice as a pernicious little turn of phrase. You are not wrong. She is political, and devoted to the cause. Refugee-positive in a “we must be universally welcoming and open” kind of way. It’s sentiment over reason, and to my mind it comes apart far too easily far too early, but I do not brusquely shrug it off. She is a thinker and does nothing carelessly and I admire that. It is an unrealistic expectation that all careful thinking will arrive at the same conclusion. In the case of me and her, it does not. In the case of millions of people, it does not. If any of us believed in the virtue of universal agreement, we would hate free speech because it is the ultimate impediment to that brutish uniformity. It is an honor to be sharing writing space with an intelligent dissenter.
I work hard to not be reactionary with people. To be in an argument the way it seems people used to be capable of doing: calmly and with generosity. Jonathan Haidt’s work about the increasing volatility of polarization is instructive here. It’s actually true that people used to be much, much kinder in disagreement than we are now. If I could reach back to the past and pull anything forward, it might be that proclivity. But to be really trite, things are the way they are because they are. We didn’t just decide to be inflexible and abrasive one day. We built the structure for it. Here we live. I’m generally comfortable with the idea of people disagreeing with me, doing different things. But the virtue signaling gets so tiresome. Therefore – cue the cliche – we don’t talk politics. Why would we? Football teams don’t play each other hoping for a tie, or to end the game with the other team’s players wearing their uniform. If you want a fight, face your opponent. If that opponent is family, don’t be a jerk. Leave it.
Though I do giggle when I muse about what my mother in law probably thought I was doing when I was working an intelligence position in the Army. SPIES! And now that Hillary has done what Hillary has done, people who formerly had a contempt for all things governmentally secretive and clandestine have to abandon that contempt for a forced ambivalence. “Security clearances? Well, those aren’t really a big deal, anyway. Certainly nothing to get all ‘legal’ about. Amirite?”
Moving on.
It’s a little dark outside. I think Autumn has finally turned out the lights for the year. Or dimmed them, anyway. But the world doesn’t buzz like the dining room lights do. It’s all just wan and limp, leaves and limbs hanging damply, without actually being damp. This will be the scene Monday, when I head back into the classroom. I have two classes on campus, Creative Writing directly prior to American Government. Online I have Social Ethics and the bonus freebie class: Health and Fitness. I expect a lot proselytizing over high fructose corn syrup and big bad evildoers like Monsanto, but like anything, I’ll take what learning I can and apply it where I am able.
History final done. 98%. Philosophy tomorrow. Thanks for following along.
I’ll get up in the morning and, well, my calendar is suspiciously clear. Take the kids to school, have a donut. Something must be missing. My wife will tell me. With work, and fixing everyone else’s problems, she’s busier than an Arabic crossword puzzle, but she immediately knows everything that is happening always. She’s in bed upstairs right now, probably. Text exchange from a couple of hours ago:
“Heading home.”
“OK. Taking my history final. Downstairs with headphones on.”
“OK. I won’t bother you. Kids in bed?”
“Yes.”
And yes, we capitalize and punctuate our text messages completely and properly. Honest. You probably don’t, and I don’t hate you for it, but come on. Think of the children. Speaking of the children – I have no idea why, but I wasn’t expecting her to come down and check on the kids. Of course she’s going to do that. She’s mom. I’m at a desk strewn with notes, headphones in, “Classical for Focus”playing, and she buzzes through. My immediate thought, which sidetracks me from my test just the tiniest bit, is “Oops. I hope the smell has cleared up.”
But you didn’t need to know that.
Kids are hell, you know? They never work right. I consulted a professional this morning about how to deal with a soulless, life-sucking gila monster of a five year old boy, and what did he do? He behaved. All friggin’ day. What a jerk. He’s in the room to my left, second door. Sleeping in June under the biggest down comforter you’ve ever seen. I absolutely never have any idea what the hell is going on with him. Strangest person I’ve ever met, by far. The Girl is behind the first door on the left. Always sleeps as close to falling off the edge of the bed as possible. She’s so indescribably normal that as long as she is around I will never, ever have to worry about feeling like the world is a messed up place. Trump is President! Islam is peaceful! There’s a meteor coming! Cars change the climate! WE’RE ALL GONNA – oh, hi sweetheart. Yeah, I do think a little cappuccino chip ice cream sounds nice right now. She’s Fonzie to me, giving a little thump to my jukebox whenever I need the song to change.
I used to talk about her quite a lot when I blogged in the past. Well, I always blogged in the present, it just happened a while back. Nearly four years ago I said this:
We laugh and we make light of injury, but we are honest, too, about unpleasant things when they come up. They come up rarely with a four year old. Most of them are still of her own making, and it is the unfortunate mark of mankind that she will eventually become collateral damage to the world’s unsavory appetites. She is still Eve, but she’s grasping the apple now, and using it to change the channel.
She’s inspiring. They all are. There’s this one, too:
I am trying to swing her from “gotsta” to “have to,” and little things like that. But I sincerely hope that when this exuberant and darling miscommunication goes away it is replaced by something as beguiling and dear. Whatever it is will be a surprise. It’s like our rain in that you don’t get to see it coming. One day the child is simply doing or saying something different, and you wonder if you can watch her the way you used to watch the sky for lightning, all vague and knowing that if you look too close, you’ll miss the flash.
And so many more. My poor Boy doesn’t have as many pages in the literary canon, but when he came along, things, as they say, got real. That Boy and I have been arm-in-arm, face-to-face, and fighting tooth-and-nail since I quit my job to stay home full time two and a half years ago. The misery he has wrought. I hate him. I honestly think that I am emotionally healthier for allowing myself to keep a little place inside me where I hate him. They say hardship shows you things about yourself, things you did not know, things you would not have known. The Army gave me some of that. Life in general has given me some, too. This boy has set a new standard. He has picked up the dust from the ground and made another me. The breath in my nostrils. A me that I am never without.
I’ve been blogging for a long time. Eight years, with some breaks in there. My first post was in May of 2008, just a month after our Girl was born. My first post:
To me, protesting is like being uncontrollably horny while being irreversibly unattractive. No matter how much effort you put in, the only satisfaction you get at the end of the day is from yourself.
Blogging is a little different from that. I get the satisfaction of writing. And, when all goes well, the satisfaction of a usually odd little cabal of friends and followers. I used to have a little mini-family on the computer, half a dozen or so people I had never met, tracking each other’s lives through our posts and comments. Two of them have been good enough to come here and comment, another I see on Facebook sometimes. Some of us occasionally were picked up and linked to by larger websites, and those were really cool times. There’s a hell of a joy when you go to a website that you consider something of an A-lister, and to see yourself quoted and linked there.
That won’t happen tomorrow. I’ll wake up with my calendar still empty, still menacing me with implications, and this post will be here. It’s just a crank of the shaft, a little something to get the pistons firing. Building the canon.
Last night I turned in my final paper for English, and my finger was hovering above that decisive mouse-click – ‘SUBMIT’ – as if hand and mousepad were like-charged electrons, just trying to keep the hell away from each other. It’s hard to be sure that you’re finished. And that’s the end of English 102. I have final exams left in History and Symbolic Logic, then a summer Biology class. Big wheel keep on turnin’.
You’re all well past this. You’ve been in the classrooms, done the cramming, fretted over the bibliographies, cursed the MLA/APA/Chicago tango, and had your futures in front of you. So it may strike you as a little droll, but how incredible this all is. Doing the work. Doing well. Being one of the good students. Heck, not even that, but merely being one of the students at all. In high school I was a non-student. A class-skipping idiot with no forward movement, embarrassed to show my face in class, afraid to go home. Every assignment intimidated me, because I already knew I wouldn’t try to do it. I know what it is like to be lazy, and I don’t think that I was that. It was worse. I was perniciously unproductive. Pointedly, actively opposed to doing what I knew was right. After missing my graduation because I didn’t have enough credits, I hacked through summer school and correspondence courses so that I could get my diploma mailed to me. I swear even the mailman was ashamed of me. I took a few sheepish runs at community college in two different cities, failing or withdrawing from nearly every course I took. And throughout those years I essentially cooked my way around a few different restaurants in Littleton and Ft. Collins, being the roommate that nobody wanted. I’m sure a therapist could suss out the actual underlying reasons: a spoiled boy given to believe that the world would see his talents and come to him without asking anything in return. Or a kid subconsciously so tired of hearing about his potential that he chose to prove everyone wrong. Still, too myopic to realize that not achieving your potential is different from not having potential. Whatever. It’s all shredded cheese now, never to be made into a wheel again.
One day I rode my bike to the Army recruiter.
And now, since April 4th, I’ve written two 5-page papers and one 10-page paper, along with all the attendant outlines and intermediate work. I’ve done over 30 writing assignments and 4 tests for a History class. Burned through two spiral notebooks formulating proofs and taken 8 tests for Symbolic Logic. And, God help me, it was easy. Did I mention that I’m an at-home Dad with nearly 100% of the domestic and landscaping duties, and a dog that’s more work than the furnace in A Christmas Story? This is not complaining. This is not me saying “look at all the shit I have to do.” These things are my duties. Life is service, and I am honored to do mine. If I had this attitude while I was in the Army, I’d be almost 20 years in right now, and thinking “retire now, or go for Sergeant Major?” But I also wouldn’t be sitting at this table, writing this post, worrying about my children, and doing the planning I should have been doing 20 years ago. I suppose those things could be happening in some form, but it wouldn’t be this one. And this is the only one I want.
Everything would have been different if none of it was the same. But, as it turns out, everything was exactly the way it was.
It’s a little embarrassing to be doing at 41 what I should have been doing at 21, but I’ll do this until the GI Bill runs out in a few years, and then find a way to a Master’s with any luck. I can live with that.
The author’s crime is that she perfectly understands her subject.
Years ago, when I was in my writing heyday, my posts were family-forward. Often, they were poetic and fluid and flirting with sentimentality to a degree that I think I stayed fair of. I so very badly wanted to be nice, always thinking I could say something important and be rightly understood while still invoking an artistic pathos that could, hopefully, pardon me for the crime of trying to make a point. I remain committed to being understood, though I am losing some of my interest in being pardoned.
I’ve been reading articles about the heavy ideological orthodoxy in American colleges for a couple of years now. It has been easy to read the articles and shake my head, all concerned, tell myself that I can teach my kids to see through it, and generally wish it weren’t so. But when I realized that I was more likely to talk my teeth out of bed than convince anyone around me that it mattered, I decided to go back to school. Of course, it would be absurd for that to be the only reason. It would be absurd and far too egomaniacal to go to college just because nobody was listening. Unless that’s simply another deflection, built in a world unwilling to be told anything. Unless getting people to listen was exactly the best reason to go to college.
There’s really only two occasions for not listening to something. One is that you are distracted. The other is that you know you are wrong. I think the majority of our social tension stems from the fact that fundamentally and frighteningly, an awful lot of people are backing away from their realizations that they are about a cell wall away from being proven inexorably wrong. Liberal America is a society quivering at the recognition that it’s being found out, and with black lives matter and transgender bathrooms and safe zones and disinvitations, it is littering the sky with chaff as it retreats.
I have no idea what role I am playing in this retreat. Some cynical cossack, maybe, hoping to cut off and isolate the fleeing ideologues wherever I can. Whatever the case, I’m in it now, having not so much jumped in feet first as broken the surface from below. An apologetic periscope. Today, after a few weeks of chasing light skirmishes, I spied the armada.
This submission was the flagship, and it is what I saw in class. If you are a liberal, you know what’s wrong with it before you’ve even read it. If you are conservative, you probably don’t know what’s wrong with it at all (aside from being a bad read). If, however, you are a conservative who pays attention and has a healthy instinct for precognitive bullshit, you are looking forward to this conversation like a lion in the veldt. It all came from one paragraph of a three-paragraph introduction that we were asked to analyze for:
Language elements
Thesis statement
Set up for follow-on paper structure
First, the paragraph:
“Learning more about the differences in communication styles between men and women will aid in the more successful sending and receiving of messages, both verbal and nonverbal. For example, a woman may communicate in a way that has meaning to her. However, the man receiving the message may interpret it differently than she intended due to their differences in communication style. This can cause conflict and lead to further problems in the relationship. However, if the man decoding the message were familiar with his wife’s style of communication, he may have interpreted it properly therefore avoiding a conflict situation. The reverse, when men are communicating to women, is also true. Husbands and wives are interdependent, and their level of commitment and desire to maintain a healthy relationship often depends on the other person (Weigel & Ballard-Reisch, 2008). ”
The glaring atrocity in that paragraph is not, as you might have guessed, the terribly incompetent citation at the end. The atrocity, as any liberal – and my English class, but I repeat myself – would have noticed right away, is that this paragraph is a detailed manifesto of anti-gay bigotry and hatred. To say “husband and wife” is to say that there can be no other arrangement. It is, in a word, offensive. It’s a paper about the ways that communication can affect a marriage, and all it took was one mention in one paragraph on one page of an example wherein a man is married to a woman, to make this an offensive piece worthy of discussing in English class from that perspective. Communication and marriage health, which were the aim of the paper, are now off the table. The paper is meaningless as written, and suddenly only has value as a minutiae-laden narrative in the marriage debate.
Imagine, by those standards, if I say “this guy was driving his Chevy Suburban down the road when he ran a red light because he was texting on his iPhone.” We would have to conclude that:
What a way to view the world.
It takes work to actually eradicate the usefulness of reality altogether.
Can you get your mind around the guided ideological acrobatics it takes to turn that paragraph into culture crime? To be able to read that paragraph and scream “REPUBLICAN CHRISTIAN BIGOT?” It could be kind of laughable, except that it’s damaging. And it’s intentional. You have to be taught to do that, to read it as my class did – to read it through the eyes of a Social Justice CSI – and to abandon intellectual rigor and intellectual honesty. You have to be taught to do that, because we are not, by nature, that cognitively antagonistic. We want and look for things to make sense, and it takes work to make us stop doing that. It takes work to make us actively ignore the good sense of our ordered reality, and choose instead a substitute that is painful and destructive. It takes work to actually eradicate the usefulness of reality altogether. It takes work to choose a path that is antithetical to our instincts to survive. It has to be approached, considered, planned, and carried out. And it’s being done, on purpose, supposedly because our instincts are wrong. What hamartia. What incredibly proud miasma.
Once that work has been done, the only possible outcome is to create more angry people who are not on topic anymore. This poor girl’s paper has a topic, but it has been rendered meaningless. All the more impressive, if only speculative, is that as she is a college student, there is a better than 90% likelihood that she is the ideological twin of my classmates (Heterodox Academy is an amazing place to learn more about this). If she is liberal like they are, you can bank on the fact that she did not, accidentally or otherwise, write a paper denouncing gay marriage. But that information is a layer or two beneath the surface, swimming around with things like attention, evidence, and context. Who she is and what the paper actually says are instantly rendered second-tier details, because the first words build a path to social commentary. This reaction, this interpretation of a slice of a thing independent of the actual content and theme which it accompanies illustrates the disproportionate importance placed on conscience over merit.
We did manage to spend about 5 minutes on the thesis statement, but the rest was lost in a little quagmire of unsupportable accusations. I can usually see these things coming, but my radar must have been jammed today, because I was shaken when this discussion actually became about the author’s offensive exclusion of same-sex marriage. Not her refutation or criticism of it (which would not have happened because it wasn’t her topic), but simply about how offensive it was that she didn’t mention it. I’m not kidding you. Classmates were, by verbal declaration, offended by it. The teacher even asked – you know how people do when they’re asking while nodding their heads up and down for pre-affirmation – “is anyone offended by this?” The simple omission of a mention of same sex marriage becomes synonymous with condemnation of same sex marriage. And it’s grounds for personal offense. Omission is all it takes. I’ve written about this before, years ago, and I’m not alone. It’s been said time and again that in today’s violently accusatory world, the only way to be innocent of a crime is to protest it, actively and loudly. You are racist, for instance, if you are just hanging around and being not racist. You only stop being racist when you are marching in a parade against it. And even then, check your privilege.
I hope you’re still reading, because here is the spotlight moment. Here is the dye in the vein, the mass on the scan: This paper was written in 2014. A year or so before Obergefell, and therefore a year or so before there was any way to characterize marriage other than as a heterosexual union. For this author to have written her paper with a nod to same sex marriage would have been like writing a paper on football by saying it is played on horseback in a baseball stadium. But there’s your ordered reality, eschewed and forgotten for the cause. Which means what, exactly? It means that in this case, according to the retreating culture, the author’s crime is that she perfectly understands her subject.
I’ll drive on. I have to. I’m too good not to. But this was certainly an eye-opener, only four weeks into a community college associate’s program. There are rough seas ahead. The necessity to maintain generosity and virtue is not lost me, so I think a lot and pray a little on my consequent behavior, knowing that I can do good, even with these people. Especially with these people. My team is whoever is around me.
You’ll get this in a minute. Or two:
“I’ve never understood it, and it speaks so poorly of you.”
It’s important first to understand why that quote matters. Why it matters to have something speak poorly of you. Seriously. We’re in a world where wrong is relative. I want to scream just typing that. Wrong is relative. Wrong is not always the same. Wrong depends on circumstance. To depend upon something means to be determined or influenced by it. In a world where wrong depends on circumstance, there can be no honesty. Because honesty needs – honesty depends upon – consistency. Honesty is determined and influenced by consistency. But to a relativist, right and wrong depend upon circumstance. Every time a circumstance changes, a thing that is wrong has the capacity to become un-wrong. Everything that is wrong has the capacity, depending upon circumstance, to become right. This cannot be considered consistent, and therefore cannot be considered honest. And so we’re back to the quote:
“I’ve never understood it, and it speaks so poorly of you.”
In a relativist world, whether something speaks poorly of you depends on circumstance. Which, as I’ve established, means that it can’t ever matter. What does that mean, anyway to have something speak poorly of you? It means that through your actions, you’ve created a sort of signpost that you hold in front of yourself that says “liar,” or “jerk” or “hypocrite.” It means that you carry indignity before you wherever you go. If you’ve been told that something speaks poorly of you, you can bank on the fact that you’ve done something wrong. However, we’re still in this world where wrong can be right, humiliation can be dignity, and shame can be pride. You can be told that something speaks poorly of you, but you don’t have to care. All you have to do is say so.
In nearly every educational facility in America, they are saying so.
I know, I’m the conservative you haven’t unfriended on Facebook yet. The conservative who doesn’t “constantly post that Republican crap.” I’m posting that Republican crap right now. Please understand, when someone has a lot of posts that are not in agreement with you, that does not constitute hostility. It is exactly what you are doing, so please be a little more generous. Do you have any idea, any idea at all, how many slaps in the face I endure every day from your untethered “likes” of Huffpo and NYT and (oh God, save me) John Oliver links? Do you get that? And by untethered, I mean that you don’t do anything except click the “like” button. You never explain yourself, never lay claim to any sort of thinking you have done on the subject. You’ve just clicked ‘like’ in the social media equivalent of “so there.” Please explain yourself, because guess what? Most of the time, I click on those articles and read them. I do you that favor. But it’s not a favor, at all. A favor is defined as “an act of kindness beyond what is due or usual.” For me to read the articles you like is not beyond what is due or usual. It is exactly what is due and usual. I owe you that as a matter of course. We owe each other that as a matter of course. But if you don’t care what’s right and wrong, that doesn’t matter much.
Having said all that…
There’s not much to this post, but watch the two minutes (less, actually!) of video. It’s video! YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ ANYTHING!
Steven Crowder has gotten plenty of play for his rant at UMass during this presentation about political correctness gone mad, because it has that “epic smackdown” kind of feel to it. But after watching this, I think it’s more important to give less than two minutes to Milo Yiannopoulos, the Catholic Greek Conservative who also happens to be queer as a three dollar bill, while he gives a very level-headed summary of the campus virus. The video should start right up at 44:16. Give it a listen from there until 46:10.
It’s so amazing when the mundane is revelatory.
I got to be a social justice warrior. Teacher said:
“And Bernie Sanders is incredibly popular among people your age.”
A loaded pause. Her eyes dart to me and then away as she realizes. I smirk:
“I should report you for that ageism.”
We moved on, into typically unpleasant territory. But it’s only unpleasant because I notice things. More on that later. Now, though, it really is largely pleasant. The class isn’t terribly active, not many people have much to say , and many of the teacher’s prompts get met with the dreaded silence. But there are still real discussions and exchanges of ideas, and the general intellectual exercise is invigorating. For the first time in my life, I am genuinely bummed every time class is over.
Also, I’m old and prepared enough to be able to take the passively hostile environment in stride. The fact is, they don’t know they’re being hostile. Having one side to every story is all they’ve ever known, and the presumption of ideological ubiquity is very pacifying. Knowing this, I am patient and generous. Being generous in disagreement is a character virtue that is needed long before you earn the right to be confident in agreement. If I teach anyone anything, I hope it is that.
I sit in my chair in there, usually pretty wound up because I’m still in the honeymoon phase of college and I just love to be there, and I keep having reasons to say little things that are fun and enlightening. Maybe I’ll start cataloguing these things, the things I can’t believe I have to say out loud. What was Monday? Oh yeah: “I care what happens to white males.” Uncontroversial, and generally unconsidered. There should be a word for that sort of thing. All by itself, it isn’t a very interesting sentence. But imagine what that sounds like, in today’s quivering social climate, to the generation of kids who have completely shuffled the concept of whiteness into the File of Immediate Offense. Imagine how racist it must sound to have a white male say “I care what happens to white males.”
“WHY IS HE MICRO-AGGRESSING ME?”
“Are you sure it’s a micro-aggression? He said ‘white male.’ That’s like a, I don’t know, really big aggression.”
But anyway, I said it. And it was very quiet after, save for a refreshingly sincere-sounding chuckle from a big – I think Italian – fellow named Carlo. I don’t think angels have wasted their time blowing their trumpets towards a college campus in a long time, but they could have used that moment for a warm-up. It’s so amazing when the mundane is revelatory. I’ll just call them that, if there’s any more: Mundane Revelations.
There has been one more. Wednesday we found out, when the teacher asked, that I am the only person in the room who has served in the military. This surprised me, because an anonymous student had included in her thesis a very succinct definition of what the military teaches its members to think about the enemy. So specific that you’d expect it to require firsthand knowledge. “In the room” kind of stuff. Granted, based on what she wrote, it was the wrong room to be in. But we’ll get to that.
Keep in mind, as I’ve said, I’m very generous. I’m not just sitting in there waiting for my chance to poke people in the eye. I’m not antagonistic by nature. Then again, I wouldn’t have to be. In academia, the antagonism is prevenient to anything I could bring to the table. I just walk into the classroom and sit down amidst it three times a week. In this case, it was written on the board and staring at me for a good ten minutes, and being read aloud. I measured it as being worth leaving alone, until the teacher said to me “And what does the military teach you about the enemy?”
It’s too bad that this was an aside, and not the whole topic. I wanted two hours in a room with these kids. I wanted to do more, more, more. I gave them what I could in one sentence:
“I know Hollywood pretty much only tells the truth, but the military actually does not teach us (as I pointed at the thesis and read it word for word from the board) ‘that the enemy is subhuman and does not deserve our empathy.'”
I mean, I know you hate Ted Cruz and all, but managing to crowbar that tidbit into the analysis is really something. I got a little wet from the bubbles bursting and had to wipe myself off. It turns out that those bubbles are made mostly of drool and tears.
As noted, that was Wednesday. On Friday we quite literally spent the entire hour using the word “extremist” interchangeably with “Republican.” For realz. While talking about John friggin Kasich, people. And it was casual as hell. Nobody was laughing, it wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t even thought about. It was as if they were just saying Coke and Pepsi to mean the same thing. Just to avoid repetition or something. “You can’t just say Republican in every other sentence. Replace it with extremist from time to time. Same-same.” Alas, this class is about writing papers, and I’m there to re-learn how to do that, so I didn’t take the time to interject. I’ll have my chance to have these discussions in the years to come, though I do feel a bit of a responsibility to help broaden the perspectives of these youngsters.
It’s a fun dualism, to learn and to teach. I wonder if being a parent is anything like that.
Andy Havens 