New Monastic Individuals

OOPS!

2012-01-30T11:00:00.002-05:00

In his new book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, Zbigniew Brzezinski warns that “America’s emphasis on ‘material wealth, on consumption and on the propagation of self-indulgence as the definition of the good life’ could endanger its pre-eminence as a global power.”

He adds to that the creeping dissolution of America’s sustainability as a society, emphasizing such things as “a growing and ‘eventually unsustainable national debt,’ faltering public education and an increasingly gridlocked and highly partisan political process, misguided foreign policy decisions (most notably George W. Bush’s determination to wage an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq) and the growing mastery, by potential rivals, of ‘21st-century modernity.’” You know, just a couple of minor, easily remedied ailments.

Of course, the Tea Potty visionaries will say that’s just one person’s opinion. You know, sort of like Charles Darwin. And the photo of the cargo ship destroying a bridge? That could happen anywhere to anyone. What’s the big deal? Infrastructure? What infrastructure?

BTW—"A wise man may look ridiculous in the company of fools." -- Confucious

Getting Scarier

2012-01-29T14:54:00.003-05:00

If you really want to get scared, don't bother getting a scary movie. Nope. Just inform yourself about how Israel is planning to deal with Iran's nuclear potential.

And this is not an if but rather a when. And, in the minds of the majority of Israeli decision makers, the when is during 2012. And that's what's left of this year!

Personally, I'm very conflicted about America's relationship with Israel. But, apparently, however America feels about its relationship with Israel, in the final analysis, doesn't matter to Israel. My concern about Israel's "plans" is a reference the above cited article makes regarding the 40 some sleeper cells that the combined intelligence agencies know exist now throughout the world. Anyone who thinks that Israel's planned big bang in Iran will not set off the alarms among these sleepers is whistling in the graveyard.

Seriously. Remember 9/11 and multiply that by various other corporatocracy landmarks around the United States and throughout the world. It's not only that the Middle East will go up in flames; it's everywhere!

BTW—"I do not know what the third world war will be fought with, but the fourth world war will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein

Brooks And Krugman

2012-01-27T15:50:00.002-05:00

I’m guessing that David Brooks and Paul Krugman rarely agree on much, but I think today they do agree—at least subtextually—on America’s cultural and institutional malaise and what’s not actually being done about it.

Brooks found Obama’s State of the Union speech to be too little and maybe too late, and Krugmanfound Mitch Daniels’ response to lack accuracy and truthfulness. But both seemed astounded that neither speaker was identifying the existing and impending crises. Check them out.

I was especially impressed that Brooks counseled the President that now is not the time for a retreat into election-year timid gradualism. I second that emotion. And I think the electorate will as well.

BTW—"People always clap for the wrong things." -- Holden Caulfield

Hard News

2012-01-23T16:58:00.003-05:00

The hard news I mean is not the so-called well documented and multiple confirmed stuff. The hard news I mean is the information that we Americans refuse to acknowledge and outright deny. Two stories over the last two days demonstrate this clearly.

My first hard news has to do with my favorite topic (some might call it my obsession), education, what I prefer to call learning, and, no, they’re decidedly not the same. In his marvelous piece on the educational charade called Race To The Top, Michael Winerip delineates precisely how this program to create so-called excellence in American education does nothing but push the burden down into the states and cities. It scatters meat bones to the starving and shortchanges the people doing all the work. And the accumulated results are meager and exploitative.

In terms of real money, this Obama administration charade is done on the cheap. $5 billion sounds like a lot of money until you spread it out and realize, for example, that New York state’s share, the largest 4 year federal grant from the program, is $700 million, one third of one percent of the state’s $230 billion education budget. And that includes providing money to all the hoops and hurdles the feds mandate. In addition, the states need to provide all the stuff that the feds don’t provide (relevant standardized tests, alternate forms of evaluation, etc.).

In short (read the whole piece; the details would make an excellent absurdist play) Arne Duncan and his minions determine that hoops and hurdles must be conquered before the little bones get tossed, but the local districts must blindly figure out the what, the how and the why…and hope they’re right. That’s hard news, because we Americans tell ourselves it’s some sort of answer, and even if it isn’t we look like we’re doing something. Hence, the charade.

And that leads to my second hard news, which is consistent with the idea that the American Dream is actually grounded in our persistent and pervasive need to deny actuality. We continue to be Delmore Schwartz’s “True-Blue American,”
Jeremiah Dickson:

“Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began:
Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European;
Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between;
Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing
in his breast
The infinite and the gold
Of the endless frontier, the deathless West.
…‘Both: I will have them both!’ declared this true-blue American.”

In a different article, regarding Apple’s use of China’s and other nations’ work forces, production operations and general valuations of education and life expectations (none of which is based on a dream), we can get the hard news about the actualities of life in the new era (information age, whatever). It's hard news, because we know we can't accept it.

The difference is profound between what we Americans think we deserve and ought to have compared to what actually is available to us as individuals living in the now. The article indicates “there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.” The problem is that according to the high expectations dream, everyone deserves to go to college. But the company executives say “they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find.” And those with the college degrees won’t work for those wages.

The article cites an example, a Chinese worker, a project manager named Lina Lin, approximately of the same employment status as many of our out-of-work managers in the U.S., who “earns a bit less than what [her co-equals in the U.S. were] paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.” The point being that Mrs. Lin has reasonable expectations—not a dream—and with her husband socks away a fourth of what they earn. If she wants more—a house, for example, which we all assume to be ours as part of the dream—she will most likely wait until that desire has a reasonable degree of actuality about it.

The hard news is that so many of the over-qualified and out of work among us are dismayed that the dream isn’t the actuality. This is hard news to swallow…for us. That having all or both or every works in dreamscapes but not where we live, not now in this life. Jeremiah is part of our mythology.

BTW—"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." -- Will Durant

When The Bronx Is Up And Your Battery's Down

2012-01-19T16:52:00.008-05:00

[This story and its subsequent serialization has been re-posted to my alternate blog—Cyberspace Glass House.]

a story (maybe)

Warren never thought he might be a voyeur. Not ever. It muttered perversity, hidden motives, raincoats and humiliation. A little too abnormal for Warren.

He was watching this week's talk show. The producers had selected sexual addiction. The talk reminded Warren that he needed a drink.

He poured himself a Bombay over ice.

The show focused on this addiction with voyeurism as an example. The addiction expert talked about voyeurism as the singular manifestation of the sexually addictive personality. Those were his words. Warren shrugged off a tic of relevance. He looked at the panel of guests. They had been through therapy and had been freed. They smiled mirthlessly. Warren sipped some Bombay.

He thought of himself as an observer, but he wondered what they would think of him anyway. The host hadn't asked them that. About ambivalent or unconscious voyeurism. Warren investigated lives first hand, personally. He desired an intimate view, unobserved, from a distance, yet absolutely concerned and focused. Warren cared about people. He really did. From a distance. He could recall being that way as a child. But this was not an addiction. It was life. It made him feel good and safe. Like a child.

The screen's digital blinked 3:23. He had to be at Consumer Enhancing, Inc's brainbash at 8:00. After work, he had to get the 6:00 train to be on time to his Applied Microlinguistics class at The New School.

His recent lapse into self-absorption had been keeping him awake like this. Margrit, on the other hand, had discovered her own pace and moved more quickly. That made her sleep more peacefully, more deeply. Her Group had told her that it would, and it did. And that was all she needed. She smiled mirthlessly, too.

One of the show's guests talked about having high levels of low self-esteem. The key was to avoid negativity. That triggered guilt and obsessive behavior. Like sexual addiction. Warren suspected his self-absorption had to do with low self-esteem as well as obsessive behavior. He had gone to college, so he could make some connections. But none of the guests was discussing the anxieties part. Warren always thought having anxieties was one of those givens he kept hearing about. Givens are important for connections, especially when you discuss things like self-esteem. He had made the connection, but they hadn't. In fact, Warren had recently concluded that his anxieties had been his guide through adult life.

That's what first led him to take up the ad's teaser for the course on Applied Microlinguistics. He mentioned it to Margrit one day before she left for work, and she said it was something that would probably appeal to someone like him. So he enrolled. Margaret had also suggested some therapy, but Warren thought he'd try The New School first. The thought of applying the new technologese to the improbabilities inherent in language amused him. The experience also might give him an edge at work. That he could use. It would be an applied connection, sort of.

But the New School jaunts had tweaked something quite unexpected. It came to mind amid the gin and the talk show. He had never connected his observing with anything aberrant. It also never seemed addictive. Perhaps that connection was a bit too visceral. The New School trips had made him feel invisible. It brought a lightness, an airiness to him that had never before accompanied his observing. Someone else might have called it a liberating experience. Warren wouldn't concede that much. He held liberation in very high esteem, sort of beyond reach.

He first noticed this invisibility when he became conscious of following complete strangers down the sidewalk and into shops. An outsider might have thought they were acquaintances. But Warren's feeling was that he was invisible. No one knew him in The City. No one cared what he did so long as it wasn't overtly criminal or threatening. But now with this addiction idea and how important the trips to The City had become, he began to have some concern.

Perhaps one Bombay would be insufficient. He deferred to experience and poured another. Less ice this time. His diversions always led in this direction, especially late at night.

He liked the invisibility. It covered him like a cocoon, being there without being there, sort of. And The Apple provided the perfect environment. The chances of being sighted were as remote as a DNA match up.

Mostly he pursued females along the various strange streets and parks. He studied them like an artist auditioning models. They held only superficial interest for him, and then only so far as they brought him closer to a truer understanding of the female form.

to be continued (maybe)

BTW—"Deprive man of his life lie and you rob him of his happiness." -- Ibsen

Risk Averse And Still Believing

2012-01-13T17:23:00.003-05:00

I guess you really need to be a classroom teacher to understand thoroughly what’s involved in the learning process. And yet multitudes line up to offer their simplistic solutions (see Kristof below) to the problems besetting (besieging?) what, how and why public education (learning) continues to founder in the US. Some of these visionaries even speak from exalted positions of influence and power.

Mayor Bloomberg of NYC is one of them. When one thinks of Mike, one doesn’t connect him with naïveté. And yet there he was in his State of The City speech (heavily larded with education solutions) claiming that NYC will entice “the top college graduates” to sign up to be urban educators. Don’t hold your breath, Mike. You might want to check out the cubicles in your old haunts around The Street to see the faces of those “top college graduates.” They are not as naïve as you. They have friends and former classmates who face the humiliation and frustration of being public educators. You also mention a desire to reward “highly effective” teaching, as much as a $20,000 bonus after two years of such teaching. Do you know anyone who can confidently spell out precisely what that is? Is it getting students to excel at fitting a standard answer sheet, a standard established by whomever? Do you want standardized answers from the people who work for you?

There is nothing standard in any public classroom when the teacher enters the room, closes the door and faces those expectant and challenging gazes. Some need parenting, some need convincing that learning is fulfilling, and all bring personal, singular issues to that classroom each day.

A well-kept secret within the confines of our benighted culture is that, as a group, America’s classroom teachers are a singularly risk-averse class of people. I say “class” with pun both intended and unintended. To clear the air, I’m well-aware of the conventional “wisdom” that teachers are “lucky” because they work only 180+ days, 6 hours per day and because with tenure they have absolute job security (discounting lapses into moral turpitude, the meaning of which even attorneys are unsure of these days). Of course, they get paid only for those 180+ days; July and August are not paid vacations. Nonetheless, they have a pretty comfortable situation…compared to say the hard labor of financial cubicle dwellers or sales managers or telephone answerers.

But there’s the irony. Because they have it so easy and comfortable, they are risk-averse regarding change and challenge. Ask any teacher—especially outside the school building—what the problem is with American education, and she’ll bend your ear as long as you keep buying the drinks. But then ask her what she thinks she can do about those problems, and she’ll say that teachers’ hands are tied by the administration and the contract. She has been winnowed to an acceptance of the status quo waiting for intelligent, sympathetic, confident leadership. But she continues to show up hoping that something, someone will change.

Now think about this for a minute. According to Nicholas Kristof, classrooms are led by either good teachers or bad teachers. He doesn’t account for average teachers. That is, he doesn’t know about this huge risk-averse group. Good teachers take risks. They push the learning envelope, and most of the time the students, the actual learners, and their parents are thrilled by the experience. The administrators, not so much. They suspect outside the lines or outside the box thinking, challenges to the standards, to the system, because most of them were severely risk-averse until they figured out that, as such, they could conform to whatever the latest “standard” of educational leadership (i.e., administration) they could fit in at much higher pay and squeeze themselves into one of the comfortable niches in the hierarchy and simply drift away. No risk takers in their ranks. And bad teachers are frustrated because they made a bad choice and have tenure (they’re vested in the position, the school and the community), and they can’t adapt to the lack of certainty that enters the classroom with them each day, each class period. It’s far more challenging than they could ever have imagined. They’re stuck, dissatisfied, self-loathing and would leave if they could figure out the way. They’re not bad people; they’re misplaced people, and, yes, they don’t belong there.

But what about these risk-averse, average teachers, who, despite the disparagement they face from their students, parents, administrators, colleagues and especially know-nothing pundits (see Kristof above) and politicians, continue to believe that what they’re doing or trying to do has purpose? Each time they close the classroom door behind them, they believe that learning will be possible in the next period of minutes, that who they are and what they’ve trained for can reach someone even if not everyone. They don’t have the luxury of thinking about a race to the top or about being highly effective. If a teacher can surprise one student about how much that student knows, that can be enough. That can be enough for today, and maybe, if she can get through the night without too many wake ups, this average, neither good nor bad, teacher will do a little better tomorrow. Yes, she will do a little better tomorrow. She believes that.

BTW—"To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while."

-- Josh Billings

Words For Our Times

2012-01-08T12:14:00.002-05:00

Yes, these words from Julian Barnes' excellent The Sense of An Ending, seem terribly relevant to the tone of our era.

“But time…how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

BTW—"Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is." -- Jorge Luis Borges

An Alien Perspective On Us

2012-01-04T16:03:00.004-05:00

After reading the results of the Iowa Republican caucuses, the US’s purported exercise in ground level democracy-in-action, I couldn’t help feeling a combination of embarrassment and chagrin. I had no dog in the fight, but c’mon man, can’t our only other political party with big bucks and big power do better than this? Weren’t these the mealiest, whiniest, woosey-est, group of playgrounders that’s ever been touted by our scrounging infotainment news media?

So feeling this way I wondered what our global democracy brethren thought of such paltriness. I started with the BBC’s north American editor, Mark Mardell. Here’s what he concluded:

“This is Romney's real failure. There is a hunger on the right for something fresh and different.

There's a mood in the country that the system is broken and doesn't work for ordinary people. There is a yearning for a populist politics that stands up to the powers that be.

Romney is almost an incarnation of the establishment, from his well-manicured rallies to his tightly organised campaign lubricated with plenty of lucre, from his past as a successful businessman to his career as a problem-solving politician.

He is not going to capture the public mood with that record, any more than he has won the heart of his party.”

So Romney wins by failing. Santorum almost wins by rejecting the 21^st century. And Ron Paul wins by promising no war, no effective government and financial policies that would resuscitate The Gilded Age. What the hell is going on here?

BTW—"It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others." -- Wolfgang Pauli

Climate Change And Denial

2012-01-03T11:07:00.006-05:00

I'm not a scientist. In fact, I would say I have extremely limited schooling in the sciences. In fact, my science schooling never got beyond high school biology and an undergraduate minor in earth sciences. But that doesn't mean I don't try to comprehend what's going on with our climate. Apart from what I read in print and follow in the various electronic media, I make sure to observe the natural world.

A few years ago, my daughter, the science teacher/environmentalist, registered my backyard (with its natural pond and flora and fauna) as an official wildlife habitat. I take some pride in that and try to maintain its wildlife character as much as possible. Part of my responsibility, as I see it, is to note any changes and make certain that I interfere as little as possible. For three years, the habitat's environment flourished. Mallard ducks regularly used it as a mating stop over. For a brief period a giant blue heron dined on the frogs. Each spring I would notice the swelling of the frog egg sacs on the bottom of the pond. All sorts of unfamiliar birds flocked to the bird feeder as the seasons changed. A couple of adolescent foxes ranged around the area, keeping a keen eye on the area around the bird feeder. An occasional red-tailed hawk would swoop down and grab a chipmunk. But all of the above sightings have ceased. And despite my efforts to remain non-interfering, something has changed.

I built the pond's dam across what had been a shallow brook, which I didn't know at the time was runoff. Over the years I used packets of barley hay to reduce the amount of algae that accumulated and did my best to scoop out what I could of the leaves. But now, even the duck weed and other aquatic vegetation have gone. Except for the regular local birds continuing to come to the feeder, life seems to have gone out of the place. Something has changed.

I think this will be a tough winter for the animals and the vegetation. It has already been warmer than usual so that the grasses and garden plants will be burned once the frigid air covers them without having a blanket of snow. We've had occasional long dry periods in the summer months around here, but I can't remember having especially dry winters. And yet my pond's surface is lowering to mid-summer levels. The deer haven't been around as they usually are to ravage the evergreens. This winter will be tough not because we will have too much snow and high heating bills. It will be tough because we won't.

I'd like to suggest that all of the people who deny climate change as a human source problem and all those people who affirm it as such simply stop their prattle and have a look around. We are at the point now where, whatever the cause, we need to begin agreeing on how we are going to prepare for the consequences of what's already going on. No matter what supreme being, life force or anything else we believe or don't believe in, living species on this planet do become extinct. Part of the exceptional hubris of our being human is that we think we are other than all the rest of the biological species. In short, I guess we assume that we will think our way free of extinction. And here, again, I'm talking about extinction by natural causes, no matter the triggering machinations. The natural world is an action/reaction arena. It has neither an intelligent design nor an exalted conscience. It doesn't care about anything or anyone. It has no anthropomorphic characteristics, but it is morphic. And that's what we should be focusing on.

Because, no matter whether you believe dinosaurs existed shoulder to shoulder with humans, you can't deny that they existed. And they don't exist anymore. And lots of other species don't exist anymore. And that's the morphing part of nature. It's worth noting, by the way, that among the most persistently surviving species, the ones with the least developed intelligences have survived the longest. This morphing business doesn't happen over night. And once the sea levels begin to inch their way up the shore line, by the time we notice the nearness of their lapping at our foundations, it will be much too late to make other arrangements.

Our problem is that we are like the child in the game of hide and seek who believes that if she can't see you, you can't see her. Because we can't see the initial cyclical changes that are part of a developing pattern, we think they don't exist and therefore the pattern doesn't exist. For example, when I feel the heat from a bright sun as though it is burning my face in ways I have never felt it in my 73 years, is that something I should ignore as a transient experience signifying nothing special, or should I take note and ask other people if they have been having similar experiences and seeing other unfamiliar manifestations? Or maybe none of this matters. Maybe people like me are just a bunch of latter day Chicken Littles.

BTW—"Peeping through my keyhold I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brian: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is." -- Annie Dillard

Happy New Year?

2011-12-29T11:34:00.003-05:00

Ah, the vanity of human wishes! Ah, if only ‘twere so! But perhaps my cynic’s eye and keyboard see too much through a glass darkly. Or perhaps all of this is hubristic human sound and fury, variegated tales told by claques of idiots that accumulate followers like ants rushing to droppings. We seem to be in the midst of something, but only the idiots feel sufficiently certain to venture an opinion as to what it is or whether it matters.

I offer only questions.

As we face the actuality of legendary disproportions between the moneyed class and everyone else, will the “everyone else” decide to change things culturally? If they indeed even approach the 99% of their claim, what would happen if they were to decide to end their consumption of the stuff they are told is essential to their good living, the stuff that keeps stuffing their stuffings (to paraphrase George Carlin). What if they bought only what they need? Would that make their lives measurably uncomfortable? Would they feel better or worse than they do with their mountains of debt?

That’s our national life, happy or not-so-much. And we have international lives also, though most of us Americans couldn't care less about considering or thinking about the international we-the-people. Even so, something in our hearts wants to urge our “exceptionalism” on the peoples of the world. That, unfortunately for our hearts, involves certain degrees of risk. For example, will the risk of ramping up our sanctions on Iran, which has so far had the effect of Iran threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, sort of the aorta of our fossil fuel artery, actually serve to force Iran to halt its nuclear weapons development? So far, how has the flexing of our most-powerful-nation-in-the-world muscle worked out? We droned a couple of ruthless dictators to eternity, but beyond that, have we furthered the cause of peace anywhere in the world? Will our recent sale of $11 billion worth of weaponry to Iraq prevent its oncoming civil war? Or isn’t that what we mean by “exceptional?”

Are we sufficiently engaged in the lives of those closest to us? Or is that just another of those mushy, pappy rhetorical questions common in the self-help print and electronic media? Or is it, in fact, a serious question for our times? What if all the friending and following we spend hours on, and what if the texting we do in lieu of talking, and what if all the virtual worldliness we engage in are just other ways of pulling us apart? If it’s bringing us together, why can’t we feel that?

Happy New Year? It’s possible…I suppose.

BTW—"Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare."

-- Japanese proverb

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda…A Different Kind of Holiday Story

2011-12-22T10:10:00.004-05:00

Headline composers constantly search for short words to save space in their compositions. As a result, they sometimes find and use out-of-fashion, even archaic words. Such was the case when the word “rue” caught my eye as I scanned today’s Times. One doesn’t frequently hear or read “rue” these days. I’m not sure we have much capacity for ruing in our culture right now. Anyway, there was the headline: After Fatal Standoff, Agency Rues Not Doing More.

The two key words here are “rues” and “agency”. I suspected that “rue” had Anglo-Saxon, specifically Germanic roots, and I discovered that it did. Generally, it meant and continues to mean “feel sorry over,” but in the Middle Ages the nuance “repentant” was added—tuck that thought away for later. “Agency” has special significance for this news story. “Agency” howls with the shrill note of bureaucracy and its manifold screw-ups and buck-passing. “Agency” is the ultimate source for the standard comment, “Shit flows downhill,” to which I would add, “And the lower downhill one finds oneself, the deeper the shit.” The human functionaries in agencies have developed carefully articulated ways of stating how things are done in certain ways, and when those certain ways result in large catastrophes (Remember “Good old Brownie” during the bloody sludge of Katrina?) all sorts of cover language is mounted to offer how sorrow everyone is and how they all wished that they had done things differently—if only they had thought to…

Indeed, things coulda, shoulda and woulda been different for Ms. Grimmer and her two kids if someone among the endless agencies she encountered and pleaded with had only thought to… What if those various social service people had taken a longer look at and investigated more thoroughly into the pallor on the faces of the children and the squalor they were living in? Once he was told by Ms. Grimmer that she had a gun, what if the deputy had bothered to ask why or where she kept it? What if the people who saw the children walking bare foot had asked if they needed help?

One answer to these questions and to all the questions that are so obvious in the context of Ms. Grimmer’s story is that in our culture as they register statistically, the physical lives of human beings have a low priority. Everything falls under a grand scale of individual responsibility (except for those in the agencies) and of general accounting. How much is it worth in the long run? Do we need to fund these agencies forever? Or as the Victorians during their Dickensian days would say, “It is necessary to have the poor among us so that we can best display our charity.” The local, state and federal agencies are the accountants, and, similar to financial accountants, a large part of their responsibilities is to obfuscate and redirect the truth. In addition to re-reading Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” this holiday, you can get an American version of what I’m writing about in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The agency mindset prevails in both. Dickens added remunerative repentance for Scrooge to his story; Melville, however, wasn’t feeling so generous. Melville always scrupulously studied the American way of doing things.

Addenda: Two very relevant stories by Matt Taibbi, here and here.

BTW—"Every man wishes to be wise, and they who cannot be wise are almost always cunning." -- Samuel Johnson

Our “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”

2011-12-21T15:44:00.006-05:00

My experience with poetry and poets has convinced me that each poet has one great poem in her or him. The odd thing about the phenomenon is that the great poem is usually the least complex, most straightforward and shortest in the repertoire. Such is the case for Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach".

In the midst of our current national malaise, the simple, singular sense of dread in the poem resonates with our experience. As a poet, Arnold, like most Victorians, I suppose, has drifted into a kind of literary neverland, well beyond the reach of our contemporary needs, wants and, especially, sensibilities. And yet, compared with the majority of his contemporaries, he stood among the elite, not only as a poet, but also, perhaps especially, as an essayist. As revealed in many of his famous essays, he was not very much pleased with how the empire was running amok, extending its reach far beyond its grasp and fundamentally ignoring its domestic social disparities

This poem came back to me when its final line flashed through my mind—“where ignorant armies clash by night.” At that moment I was not thinking so much about the general futility and ignorance (“We don’t know what we don’t know.”) of war as I was of the general futility and ignorance within our political and cultural institutions we are currently experiencing (to our eternal chagrin and embarrassment), particularly in the way they continue to exacerbate our domestic social disparities.

And I was glad that I had searched the poem, punched it up and read it once again. The reference to the two lovers in the context I think is particularly poignant. Lovers generally feel insular, but within the circumstances of the poem, the insularity implies a certain sense of isolation and fear. The third stanza suggests this feeling. A “Sea of Faith” has been changed to a sea of “melancholy” with its “long, withdrawing roar/ Retreating, to the breath/ Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world.” This changed world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;/ And we are here as on a darkling plain.”

I guess the feeling of those lines just quoted is the feeling that took me back to the poem. That is how I’m feeling about the world we have made for ourselves recently. Everywhere we turn on this “darkling plain” we see beaters, cheaters, three-piece criminals, blathering and bloviating pundits, high-priced scoff lawyers, unthinking, unknowing educational specialists and on and on. I can only hope that somewhere at some isolated place on this plain are two lovers hugging each other for dear life.

BTW—"Destiny is not a matter of chance, but of choice, not something to wish for, but to attain." -- William Jennings Bryan

In Memoriam: Ken Liberman

2011-12-19T12:50:00.000-05:00

Love is stronger than death even though it can’t stop death from happening,

but no matter how hard death tries it can’t separate people from love.

It can’t take away our memories either.

In the end, life is stronger than death.

-- anonymous

Ignorance

2011-12-14T16:17:00.003-05:00

These single word titles remain with me. I’m sure they’ll pass with time. This one is especially risky in its implicit pejorative tone. Be that as it may, let’s begin with the New Monastic Individuals banner.

Christopher Marlowe makes his assertion—actually a moral imperative—from the perspective of the peak of the Renaissance, a 300 year period marked by a resurgence of learning from classical models and by general reforms in education. One could almost say it was a remarkable period in western human history very much the opposite of the period we’ve been moving through over the last 30 to 50 years. We’ve been sort of De-Reannaisancing. I think we can extrapolate from Marlowe’s remark that ignorance is a sin, because it is so easily remedied; that is, one does not know, because one has not attempted to know. Ignorance, therefore, results from Sloth, one of the Seven Deadlies.

Before going farther, let’s remember that ignorance is not the same as stupidity. Stupidity is the lack of intelligence, the lack of an ability to learn. The individual lacks capacity not resources. No manner or degree of effort or help would change that status. Often, of course, the word is used pejoratively, as in “That was a stupid thing to say.” But we are all in some ways judgmental and those kinds of remarks do slip out.

From my perspective, humanity suffers from two kinds of ignorance. The first kind, what I’ll call naïve ignorance (which could be redundant but sometimes redundancy works for emphasis). This is the ignorance of the child. From lack of experience and human interaction and the lack of a successful learning progression (both formal and informal) the person simply doesn’t know and/or, as Herr Cheney said, doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. Given the capacity to learn (see above on “stupidity”), the naïvely ignorant individual will whittle away at that ignorance and move on to knowing.

Then, of course, we have the willfully ignorant. Our society seems to be spawning them at an alarming rate. These are individuals (and they often form kindred groups) who have the capacity to know but are determined not to exercise that capacity. Why would any human being do that? The causes vary.

In some cases the individual has decided it’s too much trouble, it takes too much energy and too much time, and, besides, he has other important things to do, like friending, texting and surfing or just watching TV. In addition, some justify it by asserting that belief, the absence of thought, gives them better insights and peace of mind; they are, in that way, willfully, blissfully ignorant. And then there are the arrogantly and defiantly ignorant. These are the humans—the Tea Partiers or Latter Day Know Nothings, for example and other groups are legion—who stand proudly behind their willful ignorance of everything from knowledge of the actual Tea Party and its social and economic context to what is actually causing the daily widening of the income gaps among their fellow citizens. These people actually think that too much thinking is the cause of so much of the misery they witness everywhere. And they dare you to release them from their ignorance.

I could go on to discuss how media play handmaiden to this pandemic of ignorance, but that would become far too academic. My fear is that we all have become too complacent about this plague of ignorance. It reminds me of the plague scene in Monty Python where the death workers pull their cart up to each house and matter-of-factly shout, “Bring out your dead!” Have we become that way about ignorance? Has it become so pervasive, so culturally ensconced that we feel it is part of what being human means?

BTW—"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." -- George Bernard Shaw

Dread

2011-12-13T07:54:00.002-05:00

I seem to be following a new pursuit these days. When I’m about to use a word in a very important (for me) context, I check the online dictionaries and even some times the Online Etymology Dictionary. I do this to discover any nuances that might create positive or negative enhancements to my usage. Word nuances, even meanings, do change over time. Consider “terrific”. Once a negative word, now a strong, positive word. But that’s not my point about “dread.”

As I was coming back from Manhattan yesterday, “dread” crawled into my consciousness. I had read a book review recently about the music scene in Manhattan during the mid-70s. The reviewer cited the shabbiness, ruthlessness, and danger that marked the physical city, but he also noted the high levels of passion and creativity in the new waves of music and art that were shouting out from places long gone now…in every sense of that phrase.

Manhattan fairly throbbed with good and bad energy in those days. The Bronx literally was burning, George Steinbrenner was locking in his iconic managerial style, Son of Sam terrorized all 5 boroughs, the streets were alive with hangers-out and hangers-on, the subways sported graffitied shoutouts…and everything was dirty and smelled of street food. And I loved it. I suppose I loved it because I didn’t need to live there. Even so, the sense of dread the residents had was authentic with direct, in-your-face causes. Not the dread I see now every time I visit the City and elsewhere, especially my little burb.

The dread I see now in the faces on the streets, on the subways, uptown as well as downtown are the Disneyfied dread, the dread of niceness. Have a nice day. Isn’t she nice? That was so nice of you, thanks so much. The streets do not throb these days so much as they rush straight faced, masked with a devotion to duty, to earning, getting the next new thing or new life. Times Square never was a square, but it is now. It is square squared. During those 70s only the tourists were square. Now everyone is.

So dread comes to my mind. And as always with me, I see it radiating out through the U.S. A dictionary will tell you that “dread” means “to fear greatly.” But it also means “to feel extreme reluctance to meet or face.” That’s one of those nuances I was talking about. That’s what seems to be radiating everywhere. It’s what Matt Taibbi was writing about regarding Occupy. Those people are reacting to the dread; it’s also why they’re not a movement, why they’re merely calling out the dread, why, as Beckett said, “Nothing to be done.”

Everything, anything that should be, used to be worthwhile is now only while. We seem to be whiling away, not even fearful, only reluctant. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there is no here here.

BTW—"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues." -- Elizabeth Taylor

Occupy

2011-12-02T14:34:00.002-05:00

1. To fill up (time or space)
2. To dwell or reside in.
3. To hold or fill (an office or position).
4. To seize possession of and maintain control over by or as if by conquest.
5. To engage or employ the attention or concentration of

Occupy entered the language ca. the14th century. By the 16th-17th century it became “a euphemism for ‘have sexual intercourse with,’ which caused it to fall from polite usage” (Online Etymology Dictionary).

Isn’t it strange how words can be clothed with special garments depending on contemporary context. “Occupy” would seem to have such easy specificity. But even before the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” jettisoned its “Wall Street”, the word had layered significance, as in its 5 lexicographic usages above. That said, in its current abbreviated form, the phrase, reduced to the word, gathers heaps of even more significance. It conjures imagery, scenes from the past of lunch counters and university offices, military discussions, and so on. So much so that this specific exteroception has grown to become a multifaceted interoception, to use one of Antonio Damasio’s concepts of self coming to mind.

On the other hand, or, perhaps, consistent with that metastasizing cognition, the more it means and does, the more the word loses some of the clarity of its force and utility. And this leads to a possible answer to the questions that bother so many people about Occupy. If it’s a movement, what is its destination? If it’s a symbolic gesture, urging some sort of (political, social, cultural, fill-in-the-blank) change, a call for action, perhaps, then who are the targets of its mustering?

I don’t think it’s any of that. I think the phrase and then just the word grew from a combination of frustration and rage, first targeting a specific impersonal institutional behemoth, seen to be crushing the life out of our society—Wall Street—but as it continued to grow, to metastasize, it associated with all the impersonal institutional behemoths that fail to respond to the humans whose visions and goals the institutions are constituted to facilitate. But these monsters function in opposition to those visions and goals. They, in fact, serve certain other, anonymous masters.

So Occupy has become more while it has become less. Its persistent epidemial growth has mostly infected larger and larger groups and individuals who have a very distinct sense of betrayal. The vagueness of Occupy’s purposeful meaning arises from the gnawing malaise endemic in each participant and his and her associates. What all agree on is this sense of betrayal. And nowhere is this sense more focused than in all our governmental institutions, local, state and, especially, federal. When people in a presumed representative government have become convinced that their representatives have betrayed them, they will do something to let everyone know.

We might just be re-experiencing the early 1950s. This Occupy word just might be a re-imagining of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!”

Perhaps among the tent dwellers and drumbeaters and within all those betrayed, Occupy’s voice is getting ready to sing its epic.

BTW—"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." -- Mark Twain

Is

2011-11-30T11:58:00.005-05:00

Speaking of philological arenas (see 11-29-11 post), I often wonder at the bland hauteur of the commentariat over the recent 20 years or so. Here I’m thinking specifically of their scoffing bemusement over Bill Clinton’s now famous/infamous response:

“It all depends on what the meaning of is is.”

We could start this discussion by pondering the lines from Pulitzer Prize winning American poet Galway Kinnell’s “Prayer”: “Whatever what is is is what I want.” But I’ll wait until later for that. We have more gritty stuff to consider.

I think it’s fair to say that American English trends downward into a kind of bland artificially sweetened vanilla. It’s not merely our hurried elliptical syntax; e.g., “It was so fun” for “It was so much fun.” Or “vers(e)” for “versus”. It’s more about unconscious imprecision, not only in oral usage but especially in written usage. Some of this is actually embedded in the etymology of our language…which brings us back to “is.”

I’m neither smart enough nor energetic enough to seek this out, but somewhere in the dim mists of our language’s development (so to speak) the articulation of an entity’s state of being—the infinitive “to be”—got reduced to “is.” I’m reasonably certain that specific kinds of states of being (physical health, mental state, etc.) had distinct articulations. For example, Spanish makes such distinctions with “ser” and “estar.” Other casual, lazy shifts have been creeping in. “Honey, I shrunk the kids” shoves the appropriate past tense form, “shrank” onto the dump heap for the less accurate and harmonious past participle form. The same laziness happened to “sank.”

I once had a long philological discussion with a colleague about this “is” business. His focus at the time was on the shift in Protestant theology from hard core to socially comforting, a kind of vanilla-gizing of faith (see Harry J. Ausmus, The Polite Escape). My part was to indicate “is” functions as a copulative (as it used to be known) and as such is redundant vis-à-vis its completer (or complement, as it used to be called). So that it has meaning only in so far as that completer has meaning. And so, “is” has meaning but not ontological meaning, not directed meaning except as it copulates (so to speak) with a noun or adjective, within which it is subsumed.

This distinction could have been what Bill Clinton had in mind. The same kind of distinction he made, incidentally and apparently, between sexual intercourse and fellatio as “having sex.”

I’ve always enjoyed Galway Kinnell’s playfulness in his poetry, especially when he reveals to us the uncommonness inherent in common things (see “St. Francis And The Sow”). What could be a more common verb than “is”? We overuse it unconsciously, failing to uncouple it from its noun or adjective, thus making our prose dreadfully long and dense. And yet, when we consider its potential uncommonness when positioned distinctively and uncommonly in syntax, as in Kinnell, we can see indeed how it can have different meanings. Another way to write Kinnell’s line so that the significance might gain some intensity would be: “Whatever is is is what I want.”

I think all of us could feel better if we were (subjunctive mode, also on its way out) to pause and consider how language works.

BTW—"Language is the source of misunderstandings." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Believing And Reasoning

2011-11-29T09:18:00.002-05:00

I had a visit from the Watchtower folks recently. A white woman and a black woman, each had selected the appropriate accoutrement to blend with the suburban demogaphic they found themselves in. I was not in a good mood; both the Jets and the Giants are playing like bureaucrats—guaranteed pay, all talk and no go, wishing they were anywhere but on the playing field. But I digress.

I forced a deadpan greeting in response to their cheeriness. They were wondering how I felt about the headline on their magazine, “Is belief in a Creator reasonable.” At times like these, as is my knee-jerk wont, I decided to turn this distasteful invasion of my domestic life into a teaching/learning opportunity.

“That, of course, is a contradiction,” I said. The white woman, overly gelled and bleached hair suburbanly coiffed, facial creases suggesting harsh dieting and/or a formerly debauched life, cocked her head puppy-like and looked to her companion.

“What do you mean?” she asked, sincerely nonplused. At this stage in her re-born life, she most likely doesn’t suffer many contradictions.

“Believing and reasoning…they don’t belong in the same sentence,” I said. “You can’t believe that something is reasonable.”

She turned to her partner again. Then there was a brief silence. They seemed to communicate something non-verbally. My guess is their trainer unwittingly had set them up for this embarrassment, his or her belief and faith being so blinding that it allowed for accepting everything. The two proselytizers slowly turned and departed my porch.

I was not smug about or even proud of what I had done. It rendered no real satisfaction. I’m certain they assured themselves that the brief result of their interruption of my day was a blessed saving of their time, which then could be better spent with someone more accepting, less critical, someone more like them.

My problem these days is that when people like those two enter my philological arena, they expect me to ignore what I know and play according to their ignorance. My perspective on the enormously complex issues that our culture is refusing to acknowledge can begin to be unsnarled if we would all simply exercise our minds and use language more precisely so that what we think are minuscule distinctions can be known to be not miniscule but rather substantive, the exact rooting out of the beginning of the solution.

BTW—"Understanding is a kind of ecstasy." -- Carl Sagan

Jabberwockies And Melting Watches

2011-11-09T10:50:00.012-05:00

One romantic impulse is to turn from the “real” and create the surreal. Edgar Allen Poe, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Salvador Dali, Philippe Soupalt and Andre Breton, to name some of the more prominent among the anti-realists/surrealists, all emerged during times of cultural crises. That is, they witnessed what to them was the distortion and deterioration of what had been ennobling in their cultures and reacted by creating visions contrary to what those around them considered the “real” world or “reality.” I use quotation marks around “real” and “reality”, because those are social constructs, temporary understandings of a perceived world beyond the subjective world of the individual. That is, they are understandings limited by acceptable social standards, whether or not they represent what you or I see and perceive.

The issue I want to explore here is the coming awareness that what we would ordinarily accept as our “real world” has begun to emerge as a surreal world. This has been notable in the encroaching political campaigns and the insidious creep of Internet phenomena into our brains, but even more so, I’m reading it in pundits’ attempts to explain what’s going on and/or to ignore it altogether (which might be even more troubling).

Consider, for example, this week’s lead stories in the major news media outlets. Two sex scandals now engross the attention of the casual information seeker. This, of course, in historical perspective, is not extraordinary. What is extraordinary is the style applied by commentators and reporters. In Herman Cain’s case, he manipulated his announced press conference, attended only by the press, into a political speech. And none of the reporters called him out on it. It was a deadpan sideshow worthy of P.T. Barnum. In the case of Jerry Sandusky’s raping of at least one child, the story is not about any of that—it’s about King Joe Paterno and his Shakespearean fall from grace. And what will become of Penn State’s financial viability now that its $70 million per year TV revenues will be threatened? Cue Chicken Little.

In the case of the Happy Valley hoi poloi, the greatest concern is for the media treatment of Papa Joe and the former-agri-school-now-research-center-academic-mecca’s reputation.Somehow the sodomized person has been overlooked, as well as the others whose actual numbers remain obscured by the prurient headlines. My favorite line from Cain’s performance was “I have never acted inappropriately with anyone. Period.”—which makes me feel a little sorry for Mrs. Cain. Cain’s puffery and Dickensian bluster should make us all wonder about how such a style can carry such a person to such heights of responsibility. Is this the de riguer style for high-flying management?

The other thing that gets me about the Cain kerfuffle is that so many people are concerned that he is polling so high in the GOP primary race. What are they thinking about? —And this gets me back to my original point— I can’t be the only sentient person who observes the stagnation in our culture and how the punditry is so timid about calling it out. They allow Cain to be taken seriously. Consider: The absurdity of a national government that refuses to govern, an aloft, affluent financial exchange that has become nothing if not the east coast casino for the really high rollers adrift in a parallel universe (re-read Wolf’s “Bonfire of the Vanities”), a demos that has serious concern for the plight of a talentless factoid woman created out of her father’s one-time claim to fame as the defense attorney for a murderer, and on it goes. We make the Weimar culture seem like a stable, productive society. Money makes the world go round, indeed.

In many ways, thanks not in small part to the immediacy of our digified culture, we have become the surreality that was the surrealists’ escape mechanism from the cultural crises they faced. Lewis Carroll’s famous Queen of Hearts could easily stand in for any of the so-called leadership of bloviators in our politics. And his delightful Jabberwocky satire, “`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves  /Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:/All mimsy were the borogoves, /And the mome raths outgrabe.” stands in for our serious poetic arts. Joyce’s voice in Finnegan’s Wake, e.g., “or proclaim him offsprout of vikings who had founded wapentake and seddled hem in Herrickor Eric, the best authenticated version, the Dumlat, read the Reading of Hofed-ben-Edar, has it that it was this way” could be the text of what we now call political discourse. Or the poetry of Soupault and its similarity to Bachmann’s ravings: “Wednesday on a barge/and you Saturday like a flag/the days have crowns/like kings and dead men/lissome as a kiss my hand/rests on chained foreheads/A child cries for her doll/and we'll have to start over again/Monday and Tuesday cold-blooded/four Thursdays off from work”. And then we have the visuals dumped online in YouTube to distract and titillate. Compare them to Blake and Dali. These artists visualized how we look from outside our normality, our “reality.”

Or as Poe put it: “All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream.”

BTW—"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian." -- Dennis Wholey

The “Anonymous” Maelstrom

2011-10-27T08:27:00.004-05:00

I became curious this morning in reading letters to the editor regarding this cycle of fuss over the TRUE, SINGULAR authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, emerging from the film “Anonymous” (keep the title in mind for reference later in this post). Incidentally, the producers and marketers of the film are very grateful for the fuss. These letters rehashed the usual stuff, citing their own credentials and obscure names. Any former and current English majors can recall suffering through the pointless discourses on the non-controversy. I was/am one of them. The only good thing that came/comes out of this is the various editions and variorums from which we learn something that ought not be overlooked—different versions of each play concocted textual revisions to suit a specific director’s concept. This is the point I’d like to explore in the wider context of performance art as collaborative creativity.

Over the preceding year I’ve posted a couple of ideas about what I‘ve learned from my brief flirtation with song writing. The most important thing I learned is that it is a dynamic collaborative effort. As the resident lyricist in our humble group of the four creators of the finished songs, my lone contribution was the concept. Or as the music composer said once, “Rog, you bring the concept in your poetry, and then you and I hammer out the first version of the song.” Over the course of several screaming matches (hammering out) and bottles of wine, I eventually discovered that the “poetry” (I had to clarify with the composer the significant differences between poetry and lyrics) was merely a way to start thinking about where the final creation could go. From the point where we were confident that we had something worthy, we took it to the studio to let the audio engineer/musician/producer and our artist create something close to a final version (I’ve also learned that there never is really a final version). Primary authorship or whatever Roger meant in that lyric are literally meaningless speculations—the performance of the songs is primary. And when or if they are performed live, they enter a new stage of “authorship.”

Performance art of any kind, but especially theatre, music and, probably, dance should each have the authorship ascribed to Anonymous. Each of these art forms demonstrates a collaborative effort, some more than others, some contributions more nuanced than others. I recall a lyric I wrote about happiness (in response to a comment from one of the four that my lyrics were never about happy things), which went through its early stages in the usual way. But when it got to the studio our audio/musician wizard listened a few minutes, then wondered aloud, “What’s a happy sound?” As usual, he provided his own answer: “A banjo. You can’t make an unhappy song if you have a banjo in it.” And that sound precisely provided the lilt and joy buried very obscurely in my words.

The same is true in theatre but even more so. The original playwright (notice, not “write” because a “wright” is a maker) scrawls, revises, hopes, and then sends it to a producer and director, who then cast it according to their desires, the cast of which then interprets it according to their experiences and the directions, then playwright, director and cast make textual changes according to whatever has happened to the original concept…and then the play is performed and textually altered according to audience and acting interactions. I realize that’s very sketchy, but it also supports the notion of actual anonymity. The playwright might get the Tony, but as Hamlet says, “The play’s the thing.”

(If you really want to spend your time slogging through the fuss go here.)

I can’t imagine any play, so-called Shakespeare or Shakespearean (notice the anonymity implicit in the adjective form), the precise single authorship of which can be assured. It simply doesn’t matter. What I can imagine is a person, let’s call her Shakespeare, standing among the groundlings, wide-eyed in awe at the sights and sounds which have grown miraculously from her personal itch of an idea.

BTW—"An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site." -- Frank Lloyd Wright

O.W.S. Up Close And Personal

2011-10-24T09:33:00.001-05:00

Yesterday my wife and I were in Manhattan to join our son and daughter-in-law at Riverside Park in a very positive experience, the Walk To End Alzheimer’s. As our extended family has been learning, those involved in the experience of the disease can feel very isolated, alone in this singularly worsening struggle. But when we saw the 5,000+ participants, each bearing his and her personal witness, we felt a strong sense of community and the possibility of finding the way to prevent such frustration and despair. In all, it was a very uplifting time well spent.

After we crossed the finish line, we grabbed a downtown subway, my son and his wife heading toward a birthday party, my wife and I heading toward O.W.S.

It was a typically brisk and sunny October day. But once in the canyons of the financial district, mostly all we could feel was the wind driven, dark briskness. As we approached tiny Zuccotti Park, we followed the sound of the incessant bongo, congo, over-turned paint tubs, and anything-will-do drums. The general smells, aspects, signs, street performers and hangers-on were about what I expected. I have experienced more protest demonstrations over the years than I perhaps should have, so the sensory experience was mainly familiar. The size, however, impressed me in its compression. The overtly THERE of the police presence had assured that.

But that diminished size on that dainty island of trees on the floor of the magisterial canyons served what I think has become the unpronounced effect of the phenomenon. On our return to Connecticut, I told my wife I was having trouble putting what effects the experience had on me into one sentence. I said it didn’t feel like a movement, certainly not in the sense that the anti-war demonstrations were. We mulled over that, and then she said the experience was not of something going somewhere toward a fulfillment; it was a symbol of something, of something very large, very profound and very disturbing. Rather than being demands for specific remedies to be instituted, most of the posters were (as I noted in a previous post) howls of anger, pain and the unnerving certainty that our culture has fallen into a very undemocratic way of life.

Of course, the occupiers included the usual numbers of beaters and grifters. But in most faces, whether young or old, I could see through the cloud of grim seriousness, that same look on my fellow townspeople’s faces, their frustration, their uncertainty and their angst that truly seeps through their ironic and ubiquitous “Haveaniceday!” Niceness is that pat on the head that the plutocrats and their stooges everywhere in authority give us as they reach into our pockets and pass along our earnings to grow us farther and farther apart. It is the pap that floods through direct mail and TV that has us pony up $6.9 BILLION to pay for this year’s Halloween gourmanderie. (Incidentally, $6.7 billion would provide the funds necessary to cover globally the currently unmet modern family planning methods.)

Two posters remain in my memory. One, attached to a cardboard cutout of Pres. Obama, says succinctly, “We gave you our money. But you didn’t give us any change.” The other, created by a student working on his MA in English and snatched up by the Smithsonian, reads, "Literacy, Legitimacy and Moral Authority: The People's Library,” cited in The Occupied Wall Street Journal issue 3.

BTW— “Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some Thoughts From J. William Fulbright

2011-10-21T08:11:00.000-05:00

The following quotations come mostly from Senator Fulbright’s The Arrogance of Power. I’m posting them today in the aftermath of our self-congratulation for having arranged and facilitated the assassination of two extraordinarily evil human beings. Fulbright’s comments occurred in the middle of our Vietnam experience, but his points are more transcendent than immediate. I fear that we are bereft of such voices in our current era, and we need them at least as much and probably more now. Please read.

On U.S. Foreign Policy: "Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily - a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But ...when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism."

On the Arrogance of Power: "[P]ower tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations - to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work…[The arrogance of power is defined as] the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission. The dilemmas involved are pre-eminently American dilemmas, not because America has weaknesses that others do not have but because America is powerful as no nation has ever been before, and the discrepancy between her power and the power of others appears to be increasing."

On Imperial Temptations: "Despite its dangerous and unproductive consequences, the idea of being responsible for the whole world seems to be flattering to Americans and I am afraid it is turning our heads, just as the sense of universal responsibility turned the heads of ancient Romans and nineteenth-century British…It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission. When a nation is very powerful but lacking self-confidence, it is likely to behave in a manner dangerous to itself and to others. Feeling the need to prove what is obvious to everyone else, it begins to confuse great power with unlimited power and great responsibility with total responsibility: it can admit of no error; it must win every argument, no matter how trivial.”

On Transforming Other Nations: "We all like telling people what to do, which is perfectly all right except that most people do not like being told what to do…Traditional rulers, institutions, and ways of life have crumbled under the fatal impact of American wealth and power but they have not been replaced by new institutions and new ways of life, nor has their breakdown ushered in an era of democracy and development…Bringing power without understanding, Americans as well as Europeans have had a devastating effect in less advanced areas of the world; without knowing they were doing it, they have shattered traditional societies, disrupted fragile economies and undermined peoples' self-confidence by the invidious example of their own power and efficiency. They have done this in many instances simply by being big and strong, by giving good advice, by intruding on people who have not wanted them but could not resist them."

BTW—“It’s hard to convince people that you’re killing them for their own good.” -- Molly Ivins

Me, Matt, O and Greece?

2011-10-20T12:53:00.004-05:00

I might have a man crush on Matt Taibbi. (“Man crush” is one of those cutesy post-modern phrases that I hope has a brief shelf life.) I bring that up, because when I looked at the cover of the new issue of Rolling Stone, I saw that Matt has written an article, and I stopped everything to read it. Unlike most of his work, it is brief, but it is just as zealous and on top of things as usual.

He and I give full-throated support to the O, but that’s about as far as we go together on the future of OWS. Matt still wants the O to work the system…against all odds (more on that in a minute). He urges the O to strive for an organized specific 5-pronged attack to heal and punish all the wrongs that have been done to people who earn their livings…the O. The 5 prongs are as follows:
• Break up the monopolies
• Pay for your own bailouts
• No public money for private lobbying
• Tax hedge-fund gamblers
• Change the way bankers get paid.

These are excellent, specific strategy and policy ideas, but I immediately saw the plausibility issue. Each of the 5 requires movement by agencies and institutions within the existing system, which, to this point, have shown not only a reluctance to act strongly and directly but also to obfuscate issues and re-direct intentions so that any sense of exigency (Matt’s final paragraph) is lost or buried in the various media. The suffering and anger that O demonstrates uses Wall Street (and/or other symbols of irresponsible and disdainful power) only as a stage. It is not demonstrating to nibble here and promise there. It has no program or direction (with all respects to Matt), because it wants not to repair the broken system. It wants to replace the broken system.

Which brings me to Greece. Greece? Yes. The streets of Greece right now look like this.

Photo:AngeloTzortzinis/AgenceFrance-Presse

And our streets could look like that, also. Oh, you say, those spoiled, crazy Europeans just like to make lots of noise and burn and break things…especially the Greeks. I thought about that, but then I read into this article regarding this week’s Greek general strike. My mind locked on an interview with a demonstrating 70 year-old middle class, retired former bank employee who had been supporting the government (not unlike most of the O). She said, “We have been crushed as a people…I have never been a leftist; I voted for [the prime minister, Papandreou]…I consider myself a middle-class person, but they’ve pushed us to become extremists.”

I wonder if the inarticulateness within the O and the passive aggression of our ruling oligarchs will soon mount sufficient pressure so that no ideas or middle class niceness will suffice to prevent an explosion. Will “they” have pushed US also to become extremists? Not like our so-called “revolution” but rather more like our “irrepressible conflict.”

BTW—"The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them." -- William Clayton

10/17 Redux

2011-10-18T07:51:00.002-05:00

Occasionally, I’m bothered by my posts. I get a gnawing sensation that I didn’t quite do what needed doing. I woke this morning with such a feeling.

I searched through what’s left of my memory and recalled something Jean Baudrillard wrote. I know—Beaudrillard? I realize his writing is dense, actually in some cases impenetrable. But the following lines came to me in the context of what I was trying to get at yesterday about the O.W.S. phenomenon…I used that word, “phenomenon” for a specific reason, very much having to do with Beaudrillard’s comments on technology in a hyper-market culture.

He writes: “A technological civilization is one in which the means absorb the ends. Traditional norms place limits on power; technical norms are a form of power...Ethical meaning derives from a limitation of power...Power is more spectacular [spectacle is the ultimate mediated expression of market culture] than the limitation of power!”

I think my closing comments yesterday about the discomfiting pathos of the O.W.S. could have been stated as a pathetic irony that the protestors have been trapped in their own choosing of protest (spectacle), the very thing that forms the power of the highly technologized market culture, the very thing(s) they object to. Or to quote Beaudrillard, “the means absorb the ends.” Hence, the ongoing uncertainty inside and outside the protest about what’s going on and where it is going.

BTW—"Do not fear your enemies. The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear friends. At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care; they neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exists because of their silent consent." -- Bruno Jasiensk,

The O in O.W.S.

2011-10-17T17:37:00.004-05:00

I suppose it’s time that I “weigh in” (what’s the provenance of that? one wonders if it’s from the weigh-in prior to a prize fight, and that its usage suggests some kind of wordsmith pugilism.) on this Occupy Wall Street conundrum and/or quandary. Perhaps you were not aware that a quandary or a conundrum simmers among the commentariat and presumed political class regarding O.W.S.

The problem with these hacks is that their approach is so 20th century. They haven’t noticed that we are no longer a community of common purpose and cause. As Janis said, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Just ask any of the Tea Partiers. They can offer only a retrospective. But at least they have a direction, albeit a retreat to what never was. As they march towards the sunset of what they think America was, they are oblivious to what America has become. And in that regard, they share a mindset with the comentariat and political class.

In prior posts, I have discussed the fundamental shift that has occurred in our culture during our tech-driven 21st century meandering. We have become a segmented culture, huddling in our preferred electronic gated communities. We perceive so-called “social networks” as cutting edge technologies that are keeping the web of our culture viable. The fact (according to researchers much more current than I) is that these networks function mainly to cuddle us closely with like-minded others so that whatever knowledge or information we share does not follow a discourse but rather amounts to a national and global head-nodding group-in. Moreover—and this is to the point of this blog—not only does it not foster greater democracy, but it also plays into the schemes of authoritarian regimes everywhere, yes, including the finance empire in the U.S.

What we read and hear from the 20th century thinkers is their wonderment over these leaderless and goal-free mashups appearing in varying numbers and places, especially in the U.S. but also in Europe, creating a reprise of their own most recent upsets. But in the U.S. there is something special, indeed something new and different. These throngs seem to have no direction, no demands, no leader(s). They seem not to seek anything in particular, no “Peace Now!”, no “We Shall Overcome.” This does not seem strange to me. For want of a better reference, these mashups are meant merely as howls, the sounds in Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem, the cries of fearful, desperate wounded people, howling in pain at the ignorance, inhumanity and psychic destruction of a culture that has lost its singular consciousness and conscience all for the sake of consuming and greed.

Nor do these occupiers seek any focus or direction. Their actual pathos is that they understand that no direction, no goal, no resolution will be able to make a difference. They can look around and see that nothing they have done or not done has made anyone even flinch. So their purpose is merely to occupy, to be the occupiers. Even as these people of the mediated generation are mindful of the emptiness of spectacle, they are even more mindful that the actual revolution will not be televised, tweeted or followed.

The deep pathos of their phenomenon can be felt in the following comment recently offered by one of the occupiers on the actual Wall Street: “Demands are disempowering since they require someone else to respond…It’s not like we couldn’t come up with any, but I don’t think people would vote for them.”

BTW—“The thief is a gentleman when stealing has made him rich.” (Proverbs, 138.3) A.C. Grayling. The Good Book: A Humanist Bible.

A Look Back To See Forward

2011-10-10T08:44:00.002-05:00

While going through my hard drive to see what I could discard, I came across this old blog post. It struck me that these might be some thoughts that not only I should keep in my forebrain, but also some thoughts for us all to consider. So here they are:

“New Monastic Individuals” Reconsidered and Clarified

Somewhere during the course of any lengthy human engagement—a job, an education, a marriage, writing a novel—the individual pauses and asks, “Why am I still doing this? If I had known it would be so unfulfilling, would I have started it in the first place? And why did I start it in the first place?” This being my 345^th post, it’s time for an accounting.

Part of Google’s service to its bloggers is the Google Analytics site, which provides the blogger with every conceivable amount of information to enable her to determine the effectiveness of her cyberspace enterprise. As you might guess, this can be both a blessing and a curse. For example, I visit my analytics daily and see that the underperformance of my blog has sustained its visitor stats plus or minus 20 since its inception. Occasionally, I’ll be surprised by a comparatively high number from a heretofore non-visitor, like yesterday from Argentina an above average number. I also have the hangers-on like (perhaps another new monastic individual?) the sole person in Indonesia who has been faithful to my diatribes. And so on. I can claim about 150 total visits daily, about 130 U.S. and the rest global. An exceptional day (again for whatever reason) would muster around 200 visits.

So that’s how I’ve been doing, and that’s what got me thinking as in paragraph one above. In my efforts to be logical and objective, I went back to the original post (see “Archive”, December 5, 2006) to revisit my stated purpose and context for this endeavor. Have I been true to that? If not, where did I stray and drift? The sad news would be that I did not stray or drift but rather that the purpose was irrelevant or boring or both (more on this later). To be honest, I think once I got into the heat of certain topics and observations of our culture and politics, I forgot about my purpose in pointing out how America has succumbed to the ease of media pap and the lure of handy nostrums and palliatives as answers to our self-engendered malaise and angst (more on my vocabulary and style of discourse later). We Americans have lapsed from our original vigorous thinking and creating.

In short, the whole point of being a self-appointed American New Monastic Individual, to preserve the integrity and essential value of Enlightenment thought and process in the course of our culture, became dissipated among my various rages and ventings regarding contemporary events. Today, I would like you to think about what we have been burying under our layered attempts to believe our way into feeling good rather than being good, running away from an American community rather than building an American community. We worship at the shrine of individuality but we ignore the fact that originality is the foundation of individuality; we want individual rights without individual responsibilities. As I wrote on December 5, 2006, I need to keep in mind my purpose “to reverse our age of disenlightenment and to accept fallibility.”

How exciting it must have been to live during the Enlightenment, pushing back at all the belief systems that had been used to keep people in their places! How exciting to use the mind to discover the workable means to explain the ways of humanity to humanity! How exciting to allow thought to be the granite upon which human community and society could be structured! And what has become of that? Why do the Originalists on our Supreme Court use their beliefs to divine what they assume were the thoughts of the true originators? The originators (founding “fathers”?) were powerful people with singular motives, but they were able enough and thoughtful enough to use thought to build something original and, with effort, lasting, that encompassed more than their insular, segmented ambitions. And that’s what’s missing in us.

Have we become too busy or too lazy to re-discover that? Some people ask me why I’m such a hater of American culture. I don’t hate American culture. I lament its lack of courage. Pres. Obama’s shibboleth is “audacity.” And his watery-eyed believers said, “Yes we can!” But honestly, can you tell me or show me where I can find this audacity? Do we have even the glimmer of an understanding of the degree of audacity it took to do what was done in 18^th century America? Could we ever pause from our rush to have stuff to peel away the dross and detritus of our materiality to look at who we have become?

These days everything is about believing. What do we fear about thinking? When I hear virtually every politician say, “I believe…,” I think, “Don’t tell me you believe. That’s not any of my business. Tell me what you think, because that’s all about my business!”

Why has believing become the venue of our discourse? Why can’t it be the inspiration of our discourse, from which careful thought will follow? People who bloviate about the Declaration of Independence focus on the first few lines, but that document would not have had any impact were it not for the details in the so-called “bill of particulars,” which listed all of the offenses of King George. The document is a legal brief set in clear, ironclad inductive logic. Where have you read anything remotely like that coming from today’s “leaders”?

So this rambling review is my effort to reclaim my purpose, to retrieve and preserve the best of what America can be by looking back at the bedrock of our origins. In that pursuit, a word about my style: I have been told that the form of my discourse slams the door on enlightened exchange of ideas. I will admit that, and I will try to improve by finding a way to leave the door open to my timorous visitors.

And, regarding “timorous” and other such vocabulary, I have been told that my language is beyond the reach of the casual reader. That confounds me. When I read and come to a word I don’t understand, I go to a dictionary and look it up. And, because one is reading my blog online, one can simply google the word (as I did for the spelling of “timorous”) and come back to the reading. Part of retrieving an Enlightenment culture is to become a lifetime learner. You can’t learn it all, but you can learn as much as you can in the time you have remaining. In a conversation with my daughter about Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience”, I came up with the idea that his position on our relationship to government was that we really couldn’t expect much from government until we had thoroughly understood how to govern ourselves as individuals. Incidentally, Henry was, contrary to the legend, a very sociable person.

I feel better now.

BTW—"Don't ask me any questions, because I just might tell you the truth." --Flannery O’Connor

Bobby Bacala? Why Not?

2011-10-05T09:19:00.004-05:00

I can’t be the only person who noticed this. Chris Christie could have easily and credibly been the stand-in (stunt double?) for Steve Schirripa, the actor who played Bobby Bacala on “The Sopranos.” Why bring this up now, as the dust settles in the aftermath of the mediated circus surrounding the spurious Christie presidential profile?

Just maybe Christie’s obviously faux comments about readiness, family, all the heart-strings melodrama he heaped on his various press conferences (wasn’t this the longest unwillingness in recent American political history?), just maybe he had more practical strings tugging him back to New Jersey. That state’s current political dynamic is, indeed, closer to Bobby Bacala than it is to, oh, let’s say former Gov. Thomas Keane. At least that seems to be the case according to a little profile of how Mr. Christie runs things at New Jersey’s ground level.

He just might be demurring to give himself more time to prepare for the inevitable harsh scrutiny from various forms of media that descend on a national candidate’s local reputation. (Who would have thought that a painted-over forgotten rock would have put a candidate between that rock and a harder place?) I can only imagine how difficult it must be to move through the rarified yet earthy atmosphere of New Jersey politics without necessarily rubbing shoulders and glomming some hefty lunches with some fringe Tony S. and Bobby B. types. After all, it’s only business. And that pained expression on all their faces (including Christie’s), as they move through those business days, indicates the moral and ethical turmoil that they surely must wrestle with.

Perhaps by 2016 Christie will have provided sufficient cover and/or removed any “obstacles” to a smoother campaign ride. And if that comes real, and if our increasingly fragmented demos decides to be honest, then at last we will have a leader in the White House who truly represents the criminality that actually controls what the demos believes is its diligently selected governance.

BTW—"Pure truth, like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth than to refine themselves." -- Charles Caleb Coltonru

th, like pure gold

Should I Feel Better?

2011-10-01T10:35:00.005-05:00

Given the malaise I mentioned in my last post, should I feel exponentially better now that my government has assassinated “a leading terrorist threat” to my country? I’m not sure. I’m conflicted.

How much do I fear the threat of jihadi terrorism? Now that I think seriously about it, I don’t think I fear it much, at least not by comparison (more on that in a minute). And I hasten to add, probably the reason I don’t fear it so much is that the little I know of the vast anti-terrorism machine that our government and others have mounted is doing a superior job of preempting actual attempts. And that’s a good thing, certainly worth the cost.

On the other hand, now in retirement and well into my senior years, spending a great deal of time at home alone, living a life of isolation on a suburban street pretty much otherwise devoid of humanity, I think about the rise of “home invasions” (you just have to love that phrase, shades of the military, implying something larger, more ominous than a meth-crazed adolescent). In my more macho moments, I feel I could fend off the invader(s). Perhaps I could exercise my dissuasion skills, or, at worst, grab the cane by the front door (being too short for me, the cane is otherwise useless) and begin some sort of suicidal pummeling of the far younger, more muscular invader. But in my more rational moments, I have actual fears about such things.

Local newscasts fill their first 30 minutes with reports of such things. I suppose most of the people like me shrug this off, thinking “Well yes, but that’s why I’ve sacrificed so much to live in this idyllic suburb.” But then I think about the strange cars I see cruising my street and others in the neighborhood, which are either seriously lost or nefariously casing the joint. So I have these simmering concerns.

The calculus of home invasions slowly rises, partially as a result of the fraying of everyone’s livelihood, about which (see yesterday’s blog) people in positions of responsibility are agog and agape concerning what can be done (besides removing more benefits, allowing failed Wall St. execs $13 million severance checks, ad nauseum), running around sighing, “Nothing to be done. Nothing to be done.” (cf. Waiting For Godot). This official mucking around all leaves me and the rest of US to wonder about our security, per se.

And so, no, the assassination of al-Awlaki, while welcome in the same way we welcome the removal of a nest of diseased vermin, does not make me feel more secure. In fact, it reminds me how much more immediately vulnerable I am. Because my local and state communities have had to cut so deeply into their budgets and cut back on security services, I’m certain that the actual invaders have been taking careful notes and making careful plans. All the hope in the world won’t matter much in that context.

Why am I such a glass-half-empty person? I am, because there is nothing theoretical or remote about home invasions. Just ask Dr. William A. Petit Jr., the sole survivor of the Cheshire, CT home invasion slaughter.

BTW—"Maybe this world is another planet's hell." -- Aldous Huxley

Pathetic Indecision

2011-09-30T13:25:00.001-05:00

Is anybody getting excited about anything? Take a break from your struggles for a moment. Be an outsider. Try to imagine the impression you would get from the news reports about the US. Does the US present to the rest of the world the image and behavior of strength, wisdom and power? Or do we appear as a cowering, uncertain, timorous, amorphous glob of humanity waiting for Godot?

We’re all muddling and puddling around, waiting for the next person to make a move. Even the President. Have you noticed? He’s now deciding to be assertive (do I dare say, confrontational?). In another blog I mentioned (in the context of his apparent penchant for playing basketball) that his nature is to avoid the elbows, broken noses and scars from playing in the low post. He prefers the outside shot. He has a problem. He mistakes gritty rhetoric voiced in spiritual cadences for toughness. He can’t keep hope alive when his listeners can’t imagine their future. There’s a pathos developing in his administration. His advisors are fronting his new campaign with the idea that he’ll dig deeper into the surprise groups that supported him in 2008. His advisors are thus as delusional as he is about what’s going on at ground level.

And, of course, we are ground level. We, the people, mope around, grousing about the painfully slow withdrawal of our pittance of benefits, losing our grip on the promise of hope. What are we to do? How can things have come to this pass? The promise of hope has slid upward into the hands of the mighty, and we are left to shrug and convince ourselves that this despond is like all the others, a temporary feeling of helplessness from which we all will rise in glory. But then, what if we backslide again? What will have become of our progress? Oh my.

Perhaps we should stay the course. Be patient. Yes. Do nothing. Stay put. That’s always worked so well in the past.

ESTRAGON: Didi?

VLADIMIR: Yes.

ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.

VLADIMIR: That's what you think.

ESTRAGON: If we parted? That might be better for us.

VLADIMIR: We'll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.

ESTRAGON: And if he comes?

VLADIMIR: We'll be saved.

Interesting Times And A Story

2011-09-15T09:21:00.002-05:00

This post will require more than the usual amount of reading time.

We indeed are living in interesting times. Three stories from two of yesterday's newspapers provide examples of our lives.

• NYTimes front page above the fold: 2.6 million Americans "slipped" (oops! shit happens) below the poverty line ($22,000+/year), totaling 46.2 million in poverty, the highest number in 52 years.

• NYT business section, p.1: Target's Web site crashes from crush of customers wanting as many of the Missoni fashions they could get their hands on. Missoni? Who knew?

• Connecticut Post (local paper) business page: General Electric is investing $118 million in German expansion of GE's European interests, providing 7,000 local jobs.

In my class on Tuesday, I asked the students if, during the various September 11, 2001 memorials, they had heard all the references to "Things will never be the same again." I then asked them if they understood what "the same" was. They were/are not sure.

And now for the story. It's called "Best Friend." It's from a series I wrote about an imaginary suburban town (Is that redundant?). For example, Mr. Flynn of this story gets his just desserts in "Jogger," a story I posted here a couple of years ago.

She made us all feel like her best friend. But no one really knew her. That's the way she wanted it, too—close and neat. Women seemed to feel they owed her something. She seemed so special and needy. The men thought only of her charms. Most of the men. Not me.

The people at the bank barely raised an eyebrow when this thirty -five year old with three kids and an executive husband listed only three references on her resume. And they certainly couldn't resist giving her the job after they saw the results of her test and office management skills in the trial run. Her high scores gave them all the excuses they needed to place her where they wanted her...up front, close to the entrance, the first to greet everyone.

She quite simply had the looks. Not New York. The difference was obvious to Deerfield Hollow people. She smiled too much for one thing. She was more like Neiman Marcus, midland, fresh and cheeked out with a confusing brightness that pleased. And all around her beauty was a caressed perfection that people just stared at. Really. No one in the place had ever expected to see anyone like her. She was a gift from God plunked in the middle of their everydayness. I am reluctant to use the word beautiful, but that's the only word that fits.

Her looks disarmed the other women. She was too beautiful to be an enemy, so they never seriously considered competing with her for the well-established, slightly frosted male customers. You know, the ones who come to negotiate the multiple figure loans.

I guess I was fortunate because I was a younger man. Youth didn't seem to appeal to her. I'd hear the women say she didn’t go for the veal very much. But she looked plenty toward the seasoned mutton, the ones with the camel hair overcoats and the hurried looks in their eyes. They'd check her out over by the loans department behind her desk, straight up and smiling, arching her back and flexing her neck every time one of them came into the bank. I'm sure she never did that when I entered her space. I'd have noticed it.

It's what my job is about. Observing things. I'm the Savings Supervisor. Sounds important, I know. I started as a teller in this same branch, and supervisor was my reward for perfect attendance and the most error-free work. They figured I was into the bank, that I had found my home here. I guess they felt I'd do about anything for the bank. And they were right. As long as I stayed with this job. But that remains to be seen. The fact is that I'm local, and the bank, which is just across route 432 from The Chaise Lounge, where some of the managers go for long lunches (not me, of course), is only ten minutes from my parents' house where I'm living.

So the main thing I do while I'm emptying and filling the automatic teller and re-shuffling forms and checking paper work is to keep an eye on everyone. Except the managers and the vice presidents, of course. And they specified that I keep my eye on this new woman in loans, when she came on board (like they say), because she was working close to their side of the dividers, and they didn't want to seem to be watching her. So that's why I know so much about her moves and other peoples' ways of looking at her. I know. It sounds bad. But I'm not really such a bad guy. I know about grace and charm. I have a sense of discretion.

The important thing was that no one could figure out why she chose to work at the bank. She sure didn't need the money, not with her hubbo working for Stanley Markham, Inc. on the Big Board out of Chicago with offices in the Apple, to which he went sometimes when he wasn't flying to places all over. Most of the bank's newcomers arrive with that weird look, bugged out eyes, thin lips and creasy lines around the mouth. They last about a month and then go back to the boredom they came from. But not this one. She seemed to relish this as her home, and she seemed even more to be looking for someone. She had needs that made boredom a welcome distraction, needs that ran deeper than any danger I wanted to learn. At least, that's how I saw her.

And that's why I'm bothering to tell about her. It began with the phone calls, and then the personal letter came. The phone calls never lasted. Her phone would ring, she'd answer, and then she'd hang up. Just like that. No talk. I'd watch it. Every time the same thing. Almost every day. It's not the kind of bank where everyone in the place doesn't know it when your phone rings. They all look at the sound of the phone. What else are you supposed to do? No talking. Just hanging up. So then she'd get sad looking and start staring at people to see if anyone's noticed, but everyone except me is back at their counting or whatever. I just look at her and smile. She knows it's my job. So she looks back at her terminal and starts tapping the keys again. Then she looks up at me looking back at her. And that's it. Like that every time until the letter came.

The tough part was that Gladys had to be the one who got the mail in the morning. I always liked Gladys because she never gave me the kind of trouble the other ones did. She didn't give me the attitude that I was always out to hit on her or something. Of course, the other ones didn't like her for that, I suppose. One time the manager (the one before the one now, the young stud, Brit Townsend) said Gladys was almost too dykey to work up front. He said it to his secretary when I was standing there waiting for some paperwork. I wanted to say something about young studs, but I didn't.

So Gladys got the mail and it had this letter for this beautiful woman who sat no more than five feet away from Gladys and whom Gladys liked to consider a close companion and maybe a good friend. Anyway, they ate lunch together almost every day. I'll call the beautiful one Allison. It's a name I've always wanted for the girl I finally end up with (not that I want to end up with this one, oh no, not me, thank you). It's soft but formal sounding and that's why I like it.

So Gladys gave Allison her mail this day, and Allison took one look inside one of the envelopes and began to cry. Just like that. God, she even cried beautifully.

But Gladys got all worried and seemed to think she ought to be helping Allison through this. And Allison was very appreciative on her part but seemed to be saying she would be all right. Would Gladys mind watching her post for a few minutes while she left the bank, sort of cover for Allison, if you know what I mean? Now, I'm the one who's supposed to make sure things like this don't happen, no one leaves the bank without telling me. (Remember, The Chaise Lounge is only five minutes away.) But I let this one go, because even I was feeling sorry for the way Allison seemed to have been crushed by this letter. Well, no, she wasn't exactly crushed. More like one of those teary moments when you don't know whether you're happy or sad about what's just happened. That's how she seemed.

So I looked over at Gladys, and she was staring at me but quickly turned back to what she was doing. Gladys began to droop about as much as Allison. I thought that I had better ask about this.

Gladys stiffened as I approached Allison's desk.

"You covering for Allison, Gladys?"

"Yes. She said it would be all right. She said she asked you." She whispered. I've never told people they couldn't speak in normal voices. But that wasn't the point.

"She said that? She said I said it would be all right?"

"That's what Allison told me. Or else I wouldn't be here. I know the rules," she said. "You know that."

This time Gladys seemed a little testy, a little put out by my checking up, as though it had more to do with her than with Allison. I wondered what Allison could have been thinking about. She had lied. And she knew what the bank said about dissembling. It was clear right on the application form. I had made certain of that. I had helped with the re-wording of the new form.

"I know, Gladys. It's all right," I said, nodding some reassurance and lightly patting her on the back. I noticed how that helped at times like these. I had studied the managers, especially the way they were with the women employees. "Why don't you just return to your position? I'll take care of things here." She looked at me for a moment, then glanced at the front window, maybe hoping to see Allison returning. "Everything will be fine. You don't have to worry about Allison."

"Well, OK. If it's all right with you. I guess it's OK," Gladys said. "You sure it'll be all right for Allison?"

"Absolutely," I said.

Then Gladys returned to her position, and I began studying Allison's work. Everything was fine. No. Better . Everything had been done so that it could be triple checked in half the ordinary time. In addition, her workplace was immaculate, even more than the manual demanded. I had nothing to criticize and several things to praise. I wasn't sure what to do. I felt in my position, especially as far as the managers were concerned, I ought to do something to start settling things down. Then I made a decision, which I'll never forget. It's the reason all this really got started.

I decided to talk to Allison about the letter and about why she thought it would be OK with me if she just walked out, not to mention the dissembling with Gladys. Naturally, I waited until the end of the day, during balancing. I approached her then. The managers were in the conference room preparing for a large meeting in the Apple. No one could see me approach her, not even Gladys.

"Excuse me, Allison."

"Oh, Mr. Flynn, how are you? Is everything all right?"

"Well actually, Allison, that's why I wanted to talk to you."

"Really?"
"Well, yes. But it's not what you might think."

"I don't understand."

I haven't explained how Allison looked when she talked to people individually. She always seemed to be asking for approval, as though she'd just finished crying, even when she'd just been smiling politely. Her vague eyes begged to assure me that she would make up for being less than my expectations. That's how Allison always looked when she talked. So I wasn't sure what to say.

"It's about today. Asking Gladys to sit in for you." I had this feeling that I was apologizing for something I was supposed to be reprimanding her for.

"Oh, yes. Oh, Mr. Flynn, I'm so sorry. I know. I know I shouldn't have done that. Gladys told me. You're not angry with Gladys, are you?"

"No. It's just that it's my job. You know. I'm supposed to keep everything in order."

She didn't say anything. I was hoping she would. I'm never good at times like those, when people don't jump into the space I leave for them. When they don't, I usually say or do something regrettable.

"Why don't we talk about whatever is bothering you, Allison?"

"Oh, Mr. Flynn, I think that would be marvelous."

As I think of it now, the situation was very strange. She was there, thanking me, acting as though I held the balance of her life in my hands. I can think of that now, but then, standing there in front of those approval-seeking eyes, I took on a very uncharacteristic role.

"Why don't I give you my phone number?" I said.

"Oh yes. I'd love that. We could talk."

Her voice and face were beyond sincerity. They had an eagerness that suggested moments like these occurred only once in each of our lives.

I left it at that. When I got home, I went straight to my room, flipped on the PC, stared at the screen and wondered how I could get away from this. Usually I can do that. Get into the PC. Do some figuring, get some advance on an idea the managers have been stuck on, and offer them a suggestion in the morning. It's helped me a little. But not this time.

The figures blurred together. I looked at the phone on my nightstand. If I called Allison, it would be more than a promised phone call. It would be stepping over. I'd be out of the bank business and into another kind of business. She sounded as though she might be needing a friend. But she had Gladys for that. I had never done that. I was never anybody to somebody like that. If I called her she might think she could be a friend at work along with all the other stuff. The PC's cursor blinked, and I decided to call.

"Hello?" Her husband answered.

"Yes. This is Mr. Flynn. From the bank. The Savings Supervisor. Where Mrs. Caudill works."

"Oh yes. Mr. Flynn."

"Yes. I'm sorry for bothering you at home. But may I speak to Mrs. Caudill?"

"Sure. Just a minute."

He seemed so cheerful and polite. I'm not sure why I expected something different. "OK, honey, I've got it," she said. Her voice had changed. The tone and pitch were as though she was someone else. "Oh, Mr. Flynn, I'm so glad you called. It's just that I have trouble getting privacy here. You know."

"Yes. Now, Allison, the reason--"

"Please, you don't have to explain. You said you'd call, and here you are. It's so wonderful of you. Really."

"Oh, that's all right."

"The problem is I can't really tell you very much. Not now. You know."

I wasn't sure what I was supposed to say then. I thought maybe I could straighten things out quickly, informally, over the phone. I tried to think of a suggestion.

"Mr. Flynn?"

"Yes. I think maybe the phone's not a good idea, Allison. What do you think?"

"I'm not sure. I do value your advice. You seem to know so much about what's going on and how I should handle things. Maybe if we met somewhere. You know. Had coffee or something. We could go somewhere that people we know don't usually go to. We'd be freer to talk then. You know."

At the end, there, I was thinking of Gladys. I was wondering if Gladys had called Allison. And if she had, was she free to talk to Allison? Was it because I was on the phone? What if she hadn't talked to Gladys? Why hadn't they talked on the phone?

"Mr. Flynn?"

"Yes. That seems like a good idea. But, Allison, tell me something."

"Yes?"

"What about Gladys?"

"Gladys?"

"Yes. Have you talked to her? I mean since today."

"Oh, yes, well in a way, yes. But this is different."

"It's just that I thought you were so close. Such good friends."

"Oh, of course. But this is one of those things. It's hard to explain. Gladys has different ideas about some things. You know."

"Yes."

"Where shall it be?"

"What?"

"Where would you like to meet?"

"Oh yes. Yes. Well, why don't I call you back? No. Better yet. I'll talk to you tomorrow at the bank. OK?"

"But I thought we could set it up now."

"Well, I have to check my schedule. Let's do that. At the bank. Tomorrow. OK? I'll talk to you then. Bye."

After I hung up, I thought about speaking to Gladys. She would be easier to start with. More careful with her words. I would understand her better. Gladys was not like Allison in any way at all. She went completely unnoticed by almost everyone in the bank. I don't know why, either. She was an extremely good worker and a pleasant enough person. I guess her problem was that she blended in. I noticed that people could walk by her all day and at the end of the day ask if she had shown up for work. She was dark, probably a little too short and heavy, dressed in business clothes and probably wore too much blue eye makeup. But I had no reason to think she wouldn't be a good person to ask about Allison.

I approached her as soon as she arrived the next day.

"Gladys, before you begin, may I speak to you? It's about Allison, your friend."

She looked at me oddly, not surprised, as I thought she might have been, but serious, wincing, pursing and sighing as she slowly removed her glasses.

"Mr. Flynn, I'm not sure that I can do that. I know it's important to Allison, but I'm not sure I ought to. Have you asked her?"

"Well, no, but I feel, I mean, she seems to have complete confidence in my decisions."

Gladys looked at me for a long time. She seemed to be looking for something in my face. She must have found it.

"Well, Mr. Flynn, if you think so. You know how much I respect you. How everyone respects you. But this will be hard."

"I'm sure it will be, Gladys. But if I'm to help Allison, as she wants me to, then I'll need your input. You know what I mean."

"Yes, well, she's told me about this man. A married man." She looked away toward the door. "This seems so strange, Mr. Flynn."

"A married man?"

"Yes. That's what all the phone calls were."

"But she never talked to anyone. The phone rang, she'd pick up and then hang up."

"Right. That was some sort of signal. At least, that's what she said. She said it was him calling to let her know everything was all right. You know?"

"Yes. Well, what else? Is there a particular problem?"

"I don't know. Well, I'm not sure. It gets kind of weird. Nothing I've ever heard of before." She looked at the door again. "Oh, Mr. Flynn, she's here. Allison."

Allison had entered the bank and was heading to her place. She looked the same. I thought she ought to be frazzled, I guess. But she had her usual stunning clothes and erect posture, and she walked confidently.

"But, Gladys, what about the letter? Yesterday. The letter and then she asked for you to cover for her."

"Not now, Mr. Flynn. Please," she said. Then she looked at Allison, who had already begun her work. In fact, I don't think she once looked our way. Gladys looked back at me, and her eyes had straightened evenly under her thick eyebrows. "Why don't you ask her?"

I haven't had much experience with such things. My social life has been limited to reunions and a few parties with some old classmates. People seem to respect me. Like Gladys. But they don't usually call me up out of nowhere for some socializing.

But there I was. I had to find out about this, because it seemed definitely to be starting to interfere with the smooth operation of the bank, and if I was noticing it, I could be sure the managers would. So I had to approach Allison and set up this meeting she wanted.

She decided to meet the next day before I opened the bank in a different neighborhood from the bank at the Dunkin' Donuts . When I got there ten minutes early, she already had two large coffees in her hands and was standing by her car, smiling pleasantly.

"This is so nice of you, Mr. Flynn. Do you take sugar and milk. I couldn't remember, so I'm ready for both."

Her voice was even, and her face was remarkably unlined and placid. I don't think I ever noticed that before.

"Thank you, Allison. I take just milk. But what is it? You know I'd really like to help you out. I think it's important to your position at the bank. Don't you?"

Then she got her forgiveness look.

"Did Gladys tell you anything? I noticed she was talking to you yesterday."

"Yes. I mean, she said something about a married man and phone calls to the bank. But Allison you're married, and your husband has an excellent position. Has something happened?"

We were sitting at one of those tiny tables at the back, the kind with the molded plastic seats attached. Before she said anything, Allison stretched her head back and reached her arms together above her head, pulling taut the red silk blouse she was wearing. She had done her hair differently, pulled back severely and pinned in a row down the middle of her head.

"Oh, Mr. Flynn, it's so difficult to explain. I'm under so much stress. My muscles are all achey and tense." She rotated her head and bent it forward. "You know what I mean?"

I nodded without being sure.

"This started a year ago," she continued. "We were at a charity performance of the ballet, the state's touring company. A charity for safe housing for battered women. I've always been active in that. I've always felt so fortunate. Gladys was there with us. She seemed to need a night out."

"But what about the man?"

"That's just it, you see. It started out very friendly. I introduced her to him. And then, how can I say? Before we knew it, they fell in love. He's married, too."

"Oh my."

"Yes. I suppose it was physical at the start."

"Physical?"

"Well, yes. Just sex. And this man's wife seems so nice. Of course, Gladys never met her."

I looked around the Dunkin' Donuts. People in line. A few older people sipping coffee slowly and breaking crullers into bite-size pieces.

"I don't understand," I said. "Why has this entered into the bank. What does this have to do with the phone calls and the letter?"
"What? Phone calls?"

"Yes. Gladys talked to me about the phone calls. Some kind of system of signals she said. And then there was the letter. You know, the day you asked Gladys to cover you."

She looked into her cup for a few seconds, then raised her face to look at me. She seemed sad but not for herself. Her eyes looked as though she had suffered an awareness of something being utterly pathetic.

"Mr. Flynn, would you mind if we went somewhere else?"

"I don't suppose so. But why?"

"It's just, well, I just feel uncomfortable now, explaining these other things to you. There's a small park with a table just behind the shop here. We could go there."

I wasn't sure what it was all about, but I had the feeling that I could settle things more easily if I took her advice. When we got to the picnic table and she made sure no one was around, she added the strangest request.

"Mr. Flynn, would you mind rubbing my shoulders, just here, around my neck. They've turned into nothing but knots."

She moved her face from a pained expression to something just short of a smile. She turned, then bent her head slightly forward and waited for me to begin massaging her shoulders. Well, I had no reason not to massage her shoulders, but I thought that if I refused she might call off the interview, and I'd be without my necessary information. Her shoulders were much thicker and more muscular than I had imagined, and rounded, as though she practiced vigorous exercise. I spoke as I massaged.

"Now, Allison, you were about to say something about the phone calls and the letter."

"Oh yes, I was. But not really. You see, Mr. Flynn, it's more about Gladys than anything else."

She kept her face forward and rocked slightly under the motion of my rubbing.

"About Gladys? I don't understand."

"I like Gladys. You know. She's very nice. Really. She helped me as much as she could my first few days at the bank. I'll never forget that. In fact, I think of us as best friends. It's just that, well, I'm just not sure about how she sees things."

"What do you mean?"

"You know. She's a single girl. Lives by herself. She doesn't really have many people in her life. From what she tells me, she doesn't go out very much. And now this business with our friend. I just wonder. Don't you, Mr. Flynn?"

"What?"

"These phone calls and the letter, Mr. Flynn. They weren't anything special. I didn't know that's what you were asking about. I don't know about the calls. They must have been wrong numbers. And the letter. Well, that was from Gladys. It was about this man. You see?"

I looked toward the parking area. Some cars were beginning to move with the business day about to start. A few people looked our way.

"This whole thing, then, it's had nothing to do with your job at the bank?" I asked, mindful that we had to be getting to work soon, and separately for sure.

"Well, I don't think so. Have you noticed something wrong, Mr. Flynn?"

"Oh no. Not at all. In fact, I've been wanting to tell you how exceptional your work has been. It's just that Gladys, well, she said some things about these other matters and I was afraid that it could all get out of hand."

She gently removed my hands from her shoulders and turned slowly to face me. Her mouth couldn't have been more than six inches away from my eyes.

"Gladys is very nice. I like her. Really, Mr. Flynn. But if you have to rely on her for anything special. Well, I don't know. I just don't know about that." She stood, looked down at her skirt and straightened it, then raised her face again, smiling pleasantly. "That's just my opinion, of course." Then she looked at her watch. "I guess it's time to get to work now. I'll wait here for a while, so you can open the bank and get things started."

I got to my feet slowly and began walking towards the parking area. I wasn't sure what to say. But I was relieved.

"Thank you for the talk, Allison. I think I can straighten this out so that things can run smoothly again. I'll take care of everything."

The rest of the day went well. In fact, the entire week ran very smoothly. All of us were at our usual places. The managers were successful in the Apple. In their absence, I had worked out a successful strategy with Central to secure the smooth running of the bank. At the end of the week, Allison received notice from Central that she would be part of a new division opening in the Northwest. Fortunately, it coincided with her husband's promotion and transfer to the same location. People like that always seem to have things happen for the best.

Unfortunately, this and other necessary shifts in personnel meant that Gladys would have to move to the secretarial pool at Central, at least for awhile, until I saw if things continued to run smoothly under this reorganization.

My regimen returned, so I would be able to relax a lot more when I got home from my days at the bank. In general things in Deerfield Hollow look a lot better than they did when this disturbance broke out. Like almost everything, there's the good with the bad. Gladys barely speaks to anyone any more. I guess she blames some people at the bank for her re-positioning. I honestly feel bad about Gladys. She probably is a nice, dependable, loyal person. On the other hand, whatever troubles she had were of her own creation. Allison showed me the possible risks there. If it had not been for Allison, I think things could have turned very sour.

At least I can say that I was able to keep things in a professional perspective. I got through the whole situation without being affected personally. I guess my judgments about personalities and reliabilities didn't go unnoticed by the managers. Something must have made them decide to move me into my new office as vice president in charge of loans. I'm sure things will keep progressing from here on at my bank.

Questions For Pres. Obama From Charles M. Blow

2011-09-10T09:52:00.004-05:00

“Has he finally realized that you can’t rub the belly of the beast that wants to eat you, that you have to fight your way off the plate and bring the monster to heel?

“Does he have any interest in becoming the Obama of people’s imaginations, the one they thought they saw through the showers of streamers, and explosions of confetti in 2008 — the man who only ever existed in their own minds?

“Is the “transformative president” more than an opportunistic transformer, shifting shape to suit the moment, but truly settling on none?

“And then there is the prickly racial question that we dare not raise lest the raiser him or herself be called a race baiter: can the president win back enough of the white and Hispanic support?... Maybe some blacks are stubbornly sticking with him, in part for racial reasons. Maybe some whites and Hispanics are drifting away from him, in part for the same reasons. Who knows?”

(Go here for the entire op-ed piece.)

BTW—"Never mistake motion for action." -- Ernest Hemingway

A Lesson To Learn?

2011-09-07T07:49:00.002-05:00

Can we Americans learn anything from this simple statement regarding yesterday's shooting in Nevada?

"Sgt. 1st class Cameron Anderson, 31, of Reno, was tasked with driving the Guard's chaplain to the hospital.

'You go a whole tour in Afghanistan and no one is shot,' Anderson said. 'And you go to IHOP and several are shot. It's a shock.'"

Or is it just more of our same-old, same-old?

BTW—"The problem with America today is that too many people know too much about not enough." – Margaret Mead

Slouching Toward Dystopia?

2011-08-22T10:27:00.004-05:00

Increasingly, the word “dystopia” is creeping into the national discourse. In fact, Maureen Dowd, not noted for her dour vision and pessimism, put it right there in the title of her op-ed this past Sunday.

First, we can all agree that dystopias are artistic visions of past, present or future societal milieus. They may or may not indicate potential actualities, but they usually indicate or portray actual elements and images in their broad warning perspectives. (For the record, dystopia can be considered the hyperbolic rebuttal to Utopia; for American analogues, think of John Winthrop’s “City Upon A Hill” and most of J. Fennimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales.)

Second, a media studies class I once taught, “Sex, Violence and The American Dream,” surveyed modern media portrayals of American social or cultural milieus, which unavoidably included a few versions of American dystopias. Perhaps, the most dramatic was “Blade Runner”, Ridley Scott’s 1982 vision of Los Angeles, 2019.

The film impresses me more each time I view it. Scott’s prescience for the debilitating effects of rampant, unregulated corporatism, including the literal and figurative dehumanizing effects of such rapaciousness, and the cynical hubris behind the blind manufacturing of artificial intelligence. All of which stems from so-called “progress” with a blind eye to all things human.

The opening sequence, segued from the stark main title list, directly opens into a vast environmentally desiccated cityscape and excruciatingly dollies in on the opening corporate scene. This is an exaggeration, of course; it is a dystopia. Nevertheless, it depicts in great detail what we are now experiencing. The dim, grayness of the poisoned atmosphere and the continual rain and heat; the immersion of everything into inescapable advertising, drifting slowly around the city—a general depersonalization, dehumanization of everything permeates the experience of the film.

The film progresses through its fairly traditional good v. evil plot, but it also contains an easily unnoticed subtext: Everything futuristic about it (flying vehicles, the equivalent of smart phones, etc.), originally designed to make lives better, has turned human life into dreary, overly populated drudgery.

Finally, viewed from my perspective, “Blade Runner” also implies that we can indeed drift and slouch into such devastation without even realizing that it is happening. I sense that we have been drifting and slouching for some time now.

BTW—“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Agreeing In Our Sorts

2011-08-14T11:43:00.004-05:00

Out here, drifting in my blog-bubble, I am always occasionally thrilled that a person of greater journalistic stature discovers the same thing I discovered and posted. In a slightly different context, Sheryl Gay Stolberg has noted the same thing about our society’s newly found way to pay only lip-service to the meaning of democracy while resurrecting the myth of rugged individualism.

Mimicking how we keep our dogs to ourselves, we secure our ideas into invisibly gated niches of uncompromising mutual admiration. With a wink and a nod to sociability, we link ourselves electronically with worlds outside our invisible walls via what we euphemize as “social networks” and let that suffice as our sincere effort at communication…ahem, albeit without community.

Ms. Stolberg also cites, as I did, Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort. If for any reason you’re interested in this historic shift in our understanding of the meaning of society and governance, you could do worse than have a look at his ideas.

BTW—"Listen to the anguish of a world in which the bad things are coming out of the dark places. Listen to a world in pain. Listen. You can hear it." -- Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

In Oz Without Ruby Slippers

2011-08-09T13:11:00.006-05:00

L. Frank Baum was from all evidence a true-blue, wide-eyed American optimist. He was also, by most American standards, a very successful person. It didn’t hurt, of course, that his father was a very wealthy speculator. Here’s the point: Let’s imagine Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz without the mystical, magical slippers and the deus ex machina of the house falling on and killing the wicked witch of the east. The key is Dorothy’s acquisition of the ruby slippers. The slippers were the way back, back to bucolic serenity and sanity, back to Aunty Em’s sweetness and the workers’ simple sincerity.

We are imagining this in light of John Harwood’s recent retrospective article, regarding how the US will not rise from the ashes of this socio-politico-economic dilemma as we have done so often in the past. We’ve lost the magic, we must adapt to increasing numbers of flying monkeys: witches who refuse to melt away; munchinkins still desperately seeking a leader, any leader—and a man behind the curtain whose projected image has been exposed as a cover for indecision and pretty, empty rhetoric.

We are a debtor nation, bereft and adrift in our perceived chaotic and futile Oz. The economic furies, the flying monkeys multiply, the witches conjure misery and we cannot find our courage, our brains and our hearts. The yellow brick road leads back to questions, not answers. We are in Oz permanently, and no amount of wishing and sentimentalizing about “no place like home” will change things. We are home in our self-imposed Oz, so now what do we do?

BTW—"Things just get curiouser and curiouser." -- Alice

How Are The Kids Doing?

2011-08-07T10:53:00.002-05:00

So, how are the kids doing? Depends on whose kids are being gored and sacrificed. My kids and grandkids are doing quite well. But according to the Children’s Defense Fund’s findings, lots and lots of American kids are suffering big time. All of the facts in this post come from an op-ed by Charles M. Blow.

Number of children living in poverty: Has increased by 4,000,000 since 2000. Between 2008 and 2009 we had the largest single increase ever recorded.

Number of homeless children in public schools: Increased by 41% between the 2006-7 and 2008-9 school years.

Number of children receiving food stamps: In 2009, averaged 15,600,000 monthly, a 65% increase over 10 years.

Learning at grade level: A majority of children in all racial groups and 79% or more of black and Hispanic children cannot read or do math at grade level in the fourth, eighth and twelfth grade levels.

Child care: The annual cost of center-based child care for a 4-year-old is more than the annual in-state tuition at a public 4-year college in 33 states and DC.

Now, think about the budget cuts in your state, and the cuts coming from DC, as we worship at the altar of balanced budgets, and consider whether or not the children’s plight will be getting better in your lifetime. And are these the ones we want to sacrifice on that altar to make life better for those who are already better? Is this the kind of “transformation” Pres. Obama wants us to look forward to? Is this the fulfillment of Norquist’s shrunken government? And finally, all things considered, how many of us care about any of it?

BTW—“Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.” -- Raoul Vaneigem

The Waning Of Unum

2011-08-06T16:23:00.002-05:00

E pluribus unum. Remember that? Out of the many, one. Are you feeling that lately? Seems like ancient history, huh? As you go about your daily life, do you see and sense a unity, a healthy wholeness?

One of my many weaknesses (perhaps as a consequence of studying literature) is that I see currents in social behavior metaphorically. The other day, I drove through a section of New Haven that had been my habitual route to what had been my habitual job, teaching at Southern Connecticut State University. Recently, they hauled me out of retirement to do it again this fall. The neighborhood is between working poor and poor. Some cosmetic tweaking has been done over the 40 years of my route, but the faces of the people and the feel of the place hasn’t changed. Well, at least not much. You need to look for the details.

As I drove by the neighborhood elementary school, I noticed a new sign in the driveway—“MicroSociety Magnet School.” (For details on MicroSociety, Inc. go here.) Now that suggested a change, a directional change in the thinking of that entity in that neighborhood in our society and culture that I’ve been chewing over for some time. In brief, I sense that we, the people have lost our sense of one. That elementary school is preparing its students to live in that tight little enclave. Whatever other society exists, it exists “out there.”

We in America have drifted into isolated enclaves of self-interest. Our allegiance is to our isolated enclaves. As we’ve seen lately, the pathetic remains of our once vibrant political system have no idea of what governance is about. A growing group of representatives would like to change the Latin to e pluribus nil. And the largest, lamest groups knock each other over trying to get out of their own way.

Lots of noise has been made about how the social networking phenomenon has broadened our perspective, made us more aware of our sameness in our diversity. No, I say our confrontation with diversity has fostered our awareness of our critical need to pursue divergency. To use the imagery of the networks, we are strung-along nodes, barely aware of our edges, bouncing our various inertias against each other while we exist in clouds drifting haplessly through cyberspace.

Jaron Lanier, who knows very well of which he speaks, pretty much agrees with this assessment. For him, social networking doesn’t unify and bring us together; it disperses us into self-justifying and self-satisfying clans, what used to be called mutual admiration societies…micro-societies, indeed. He calls them “virtual clans” operating in a process he calls “cyberbalkanization.”

People who know my thought processing justly claim that I leap from miniscule motes of information and events and claim that they mark a trend. Well, I’ve been waiting a long time for some event to demonstrate this node/cloud cyberbalkanization thing. In none of the noise emanating from the DC soap opera did we hear about gathering together to dislodge us from our self-inflicted dilemma. We heard time and time again about “the other.” We thus have become nomadic clans of others, who occasionally gather to protest the existence of all the rest of the others.

We have become a dissonant, dysfunctional mass of benighted self-interests, spending all our precious time on self-justification. I have lived through several eras when this society pulled itself together and identified as a nation, one nation. This 21st century seems to promise an end to that. Whether the result of social networking or just plain ignorance mulled in selfishness, I don’t think you can find one among us who can define what the USA is.

BTW—“Progress is a comfortable disease.” -- E. E. Cummings

NYC’s Cautionary Tale

2011-07-30T12:06:00.001-05:00

Recently, the Times’ “New York” section opened with an article about how the new teacher evaluation processes are managing to…to what? Create better test takers? Create better learners? Well, not really. Mostly, to create fewer tenured teachers. Lots of people think that would answer the previous questions.

Based on my experience, I don’t think so. I know that not all teachers should be tenured. But I also know that, as faulty as the tenure system is, it’s better than a highly politicized no tenure system. Oh yes, for those who approach this debate from an irrelevant business paradigm, imagine a business, which provides its employees with no incentives for advancement or bonuses. What’s left for them? Doing a “dedicated” job? Let’s call that the 19th century Disney perspective.

The article summarizes New York’s four-point evaluative process:
• students’ tests scores
• classroom observations
• feedback from parents
• “other factors”
The teacher ranking scale is highly effective, effective, developing, or ineffective. “Principals, who make recommendations on tenure, and supervisors, who make the decisions, were allowed [by whom?] to give tenure only to teachers who were rated effective or better for two consecutive years.” Under this process, 58% of teachers up for tenure received it.

Question: For those of you who live in the world of actual human beings, where in the list of evaluative criteria and ranking scale do you see places where personal animosities and/or political leveraging just might occur? Anywhere and everywhere—correct!

During my tenure at various levels of the education world (grades 9 through graduate school) I have witnessed and participated in evaluative processes. At the university level, the process becomes more inane than at the public school level. The university evaluative process buries everything in various types of files and algorithms.

The following are some of my important criteria:

First, anyone who has not taught a class in the discipline being taught cannot be included in the evaluation. That includes parents and students. They know nothing of the general rigors involved in classroom teaching and even less of the coherence involved in the interrelatedness of the specific subject matter.

Second, apart from the obvious intramural political networks that a principal oversees, her primary responsibilities are the smooth running of the building’s environment and the integrity of her second-tier administration (assistant principals, deans, counselors, coordinators etc.). In short, she manages what isn’t going on in the classrooms. If she gets into the classroom, she’s not paying attention to her primary job. The best principal I ever worked for showed his face in our wing of the building only to ask how we were doing and if we needed anything he could supply.

Three, notice in the four-point process that each category has wiggle room, potential for elastic interpretation or otherwise ambiguous application for the deciders, but none for the teachers. Most of them have no say in what curricula and books they will be dealing with. My favorite, and perhaps the only honest point is “other factors,” because, folks, that’s actually what the bottom line usually is. Parents and students especially will never complain about the nice, gentle teacher, who figuratively spreads warmth throughout his classroom. Principals and supervisors will always demonstrate their appreciation for the teacher who volunteers for all the scutwork and non-teaching brown-nose stuff by signing off on his tenure.

When I was going through my classroom observation days of student teaching, my university supervisor, having just observed my class, said to me, “You really enjoy it, don’t you?” That’s all she said, and I passed. When I think back now about just how much stuff (you know, “objective criteria”) I didn’t know, I’m a little embarrassed. But as it turned out, enjoying it turned out to be very sufficient and effective for over 40 years.

BTW—“Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain.” -- Albert Einstein

Orwell Rolls On

2011-07-28T14:08:00.002-05:00

Remember how we used to speak in shocked tones of China’s re-education centers or camps. The detainees (read: prisoners) would do forced labor and in their spare time “learn” to be proper Peoples Republic of China citizens. We were so shocked. Maybe we still are.

But what about right here in the good old US? We’ve taken the concept of “education centers” to a whole new and profitable level. And NJ governor Chris Christie, the darling of the new right wing lemmings, is up to his political eyeballs in the venture

Is your head spinning? Mine is. Privatization of all things public seems to be the wave of the future. And education apparently serves as the proving ground for the time being. If you slap the word “education” on your venture, anything goes. Education through private testing services proves the learning process and the teachers’ value. Except when it doesn't. Private groups are called in when public processes seem to be insufficient (even though no one knows what sufficient is), and those private groups walk away when the profit margin proves to be—get ready for it—insufficient.

So detention centers—prisons—are now, and I guess have been for some time, education centers, run for profit.

I had intended to write about the latest results of NYC’s new teacher evaluation for tenure process. I’ll save that for tomorrow. One trip down the rabbit hole is quite, yes, sufficient for one day.

BTW—“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” -- E. E. Cummings

Poems And Lyrics

2011-07-26T11:01:00.005-05:00

Today, I’m pausing in my continual braying about the Lewis Carroll drama in DC. About a year ago, our fledgling group of music makers cut our first song (we’re getting ready to produce an 11 song CD this fall.). In that context I’d like you to consider the differences between writing lyrics and writing poetry. I’m a neophyte in the former and a lapsed believer in the latter. I suppose my insight about the two crafts is that lyrics succeed (when they succeed) for the same reason that poems (in the post-modern world of the arts) fail.

My experience in this began in late spring, 2010, a little over a year ago. Vin Cleary, my current songwriting collaborator (who pays his bills through his small steel fabricating business) phoned me with a proposition. “You write poetry, right?” “Well, yes I have, but not—“ “Do you think you could try writing song lyrics?” “I don’t know. But it might be interesting to try.” He had caught me in a weak moment. My weak moments occur frequently when I’m on the phone; I’ll agree to almost anything to get off the phone.

Since his youth when he played drums in small bands and before entering the age of responsibilities, Vin always wanted to keep his hand in music. He had bought a keyboard, set it up in his basement and composed chord structures (never having taken piano lessons). Thus, our collaboration began in a sort of modified blind-leading-the-blind situation: The visually impaired (him) leading the blind (me). But inexperience seldom provides a cautionary restraint on me. And so we began.

I had some recent and some old poems lying around, so I took some to him and we began my learning process. Mostly, I learned what can’t be done in lyrics and what must always be done. I learned that music is rigidly based in arithmetic; the number of beats per measure is the straightjacket into which my lofty intentions had to be verbally squeezed. Also, the “bridge” or “middle eight”, when the song shifts from established lyric/chord structure to a change in sound and meaning—is usually something expository or forward-looking about what’s been going on. If you’re writing a lyric from scratch, it’s almost as easy as it seems. But transposing from poetry to lyric is difficult.

Poetry doesn’t function that way. First, modern poetry has no straightjacket. If we agree that art is the creation of an original emotional response, poetry uses a utilitarian tool (verbal language) to accomplish that elusive end. Yes. That’s as paradoxical as it seems. That’s why it took Donald Hall (Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress) 9 years to complete a 19-line poem. Poems strive to open our emotional beings by using language in non-linguistic ways. In a real sense, poetry is about the spaces between the words rather than the words themselves. Poetry is language working against itself. It raises the experience of the language above language, per se.

Lyrics, conversely, serve their master, the musical score. How often have you heard a song that initially moved you quite a lot, yet you could barely understand the words, either because of the singer’s enunciation (Bob Dylan, John Mayer) or because of the audio levels of the production. Ode to Joy has lyrics, but they do not reach the emotional level of the music. The lyrics (though perhaps painstakingly created) are not primary to the creation of the feeling. In fact if you trace the definition of lyric, you’ll find that it represents an accompaniment to the music (of the lyre).

So there I was, in my secondary role, yet having to be summoned to initiate what Vin calls “the concept.” The problem becomes how the concept is represented in sound and language. And one person’s concept of war (mine), for example, might be very different from another person’s (Vin’s). Let’s stay with this war thing. Vin and I struggled over the lyric of an anti-war song for quite awhile and through several glasses of wine before he convinced me that too many listeners would be hurt by the words from my poem. Let’s see what I mean. First, the original poem:

Suppose this war…

Suppose this war, you know
The war we pay for with
Other peoples’ lives, other peoples’ wives
Other peoples’ arms and legs

Suppose this war is just a little war
A short war of shatter’d skulls
And stumps where hugs and walking used to be,
A little war where little girls ask,
“Where did Daddy go?” and little boys shut their doors
And fold their arms and cry away quietly.

Suppose this war, you know
The war we pay for with
Other peoples’ lives, other peoples’ wives
Other peoples’ arms and legs

But they don’t tell ya, won’t tell ya
It’s not a little war. Not a short war
It’s a long war. A forever war
Future little girls and little boys
Will be old and seeking memories
Of better days, but somehow those days will be the same.

Nothing looks sadder than a graveside goodbye
Nothing grieves longer than a parent’s forever gone child
Nothing lasts longer than the lilies growing wild
And nothing solves nothing all these years of war.

Then the lyric for the song:

Forever War

Other peoples’ lives, other peoples’ wives
Yes, it’s the war we look away from
It’s a long war, a forever war
Future little girls and boys
Will grow old seeking better memories
They will try to see beyond their war
Beyond their forever war

(hook)

Nothing looks sadder than a graveside goodbye
Nothing grieves more than parent’s forever gone child
Forever gone…forever gone child…forever gone

(verse2)

Our conscience stares down on us
It frowns, it glares at us,
It wants to change us,
It shouts at us,
“What are you thinking about?
Look to your families!
Think of your families!
This is your war,
Your forever war”

(hook)

Nothing looks sadder than a graveside goodbye
Nothing grieves more than a parent’s forever gone child
Forever gone…forever gone child…forever gone
Nothing lasts longer than lilies growing wild
A folded flag can’t replace a child who’s gone
Forever gone…forever gone child

(bridge)

We’re looking away
Why are we looking away?
What are we looking for?
Start looking at us, this is our war
This is our forever war

(hook)

Nothing lasts longer than lilies growing wild
A folded flag can’t replace a child who’s gone
Forever gone…Forever gone…forever gone child

(The lyric went through 4 revisions after we went to the studio. To hear the difference the music makes, go here, #8 on the widget)

So, this is my lesson for the year. I suppose I’m encouraged to know that I can still learn something powerful enough to make a difference in how I enjoy life. Even though (perhaps because) it has been a struggle.

BTW—"The important thing is not to stop questioning." -- Albert Einstein

Divided Government

2011-07-24T11:47:00.001-05:00

• Want to see just how ironclad the division of our government is? Go here.

• "ordinary people": I came across a journalist's use of this phrase. I suppose mostly I usually just gloss over it, but this time I thought about it. Is this conventional wisdom? What is the cutoff point for ordinariness? A movie by that title demonstrated that ordinary people can live extraordinarily painful lives. And if you're not ordinary, what are you? Maybe we ought to just dump the phrase; it's annoying and confusing.

Question—Which political party began "as an anti-tax protest and has been stridently anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim"? (scroll down for the answer)

Answer: Norway's right-wing Progress Party, which the Oslo mass murderer had belonged to before he abandoned it for greater infamy.

BTW—“Beware of the fury of the patient man.” -- John Dryden

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

2011-07-23T11:47:00.005-05:00

You would think that someone who has taught writing for 40+ years (me) would easily remember certain fundamentals. First, how do you want your reader to react? Second, with that in mind, articulate your message clearly in the active voice using unambiguous word choices. There’s more, but it’s mostly about using visualizing language (we cognify 70-80% of what we know from visual constructs) in orderly paragraphs (which are also visual markers, hence –graphs).

But, you see, here I am again fighting the blah-blahs. Today I want rather to be served by the examples of Charles M. Blow and Henry David Thoreau. Under their influences, today, brevity with clarity will be my guide. I will dump the fragment of a post, the introduction of which took me 3 hours, over a thousand words and (to finally make my point) would have required a record-breaking jumping of the shark.

Today I will simplify my view of the truth behind the DC foundering. First, consider the actualities. For the majority of the 20th century, politicians of both parties agreed (not without some famous and infamous harangues) that in the U.S. the responsibilities of governance included to “promote the general Welfare”, which was an underpinning of “in Order to…insure domestic Tranquility.” I think it’s fair to say that none of the decades after the Eisenhower years have experienced domestic tranquility. And, by the way, during Ike’s tenure, tax rates for the wealthiest were around 90%.

Simplify. During the 50 years since Ike, our society has steadily, inexorably become fragmented or “sorted” (cf. Bill Bishop) into ever-narrowing interest centers, whose identities increasingly lack national unity, no longer “out of the many, one” but rather “out of the many, still more.” They are mutual admiration nodes. Interestingly enough, these nodes languish far below the actual power levels in our society and governance, and yet they mouth and support those power levels, believing in the righteousness of the blather spewing from these centers. Grover Norquist—what a name! Must have been focus-grouped after he developed his cacamamy theory of limited government, anti-tax pledge—the single citizen who apparently has an immense lemming-node following.

Simplify. No Americans among the languishers actually feel good these days about their daily lives. Movement is important for Americans, but such movement ought at least be level, not gradually slipping. And when Americans are unhappy (a denial of their birthright, “pursuit of happiness”), they seek targets and easy assaults on those targets. The Tea Party and Norquist are the providers. They elevate government to Primary Evildoer, the reason for all our unhappiness, and they seek to “starve the beast” presumably to death.

Simplify. Let’s think about some truths. If we “shrink the size of government”, we to that degree shrink the government’s capacity to govern. If we reduce the cost of government, we reduce the services the government provides (incidentally, the more of us there are, the more must be provided). The alternative to government providing these services might be relegated to the private sector, leaving the political structure to be a quasi-corporatist state. The thing about that—which is never mentioned—is that taxpayer money is used to support the establishment of the private sector entities, but when things don’t yield the prescribed profits, the private sector walks away—and gets a tax break for its failure! It happens with all the failed private sector “solutions” to education, it happened in Iraq when Halliburton, Bechtel, etc. failed in their contracts and walked away, and on and on.

And finally, the encompassing balanced budget mythology screams for clarity. If you “believe” in the righteousness of balanced budget amendments, you must see what’s going on in your states right now as the Second Coming (all puns apply).

We Americans seem to revere wallowing in self-delusion. And self-delusion is harmless only so long as it doesn’t radiate to everyone else.

BTW—One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition. -- Alvin Toffler

Pie In The Face Or Something Else?

2011-07-19T11:11:00.003-05:00

Full disclosure: I'm a recovering conspiracy theorist. Nonetheless...

Question among the Murdoch second level aparachiks: What's a quick way to to turn the heat down on and the attention away from The Scandal?

Being aparachiks, they know what agent provacateurs are and when to deploy them. Timing is everything in these kinds of tactics, so they must wait for the exquisite moment, all the more to bring into focus the issue.

Consider this: Murdoch's media constructs all target the hoi polloi or, as the aparachiks might say, the "lumpenprole." The greater the distortion, titillation and prurience of the information, the greater the appeal. The assumption is that they don't want knowledge so much as they want thrills. What's more thrilling under the circumstances of the Emperor being squeezed by a bunch of backbenchers than to have some yabo smear that Emperor's face with something like whipped cream?

Two things happen: First, it creates instant victimhood for the elderly person, doing his best to satisfy the rage of his public. And second, it makes a mockery of the entire proceedings, an immediate sideshow. It's a highly successful diversion of attention, as we saw immediately afterward; the networks and their reporters were all focusing on the mystery man, carefully clad in his lumpenprole getup. The discussion continued about Murdoch's young wife (apparently an athlete of sorts), who jumped to smack the man in the face.

Mediated conclusion: The elderly gentleman (Emperor Murdoch), doing his best to apologize to the nation (so far, the UK) through its representatives, is attacked by a representative of the very people that his Empire strives to serve. Such a shameful injustice! We must all consider all sides of this scandal with equanimity. Harumph, harumph.

Actual conclusion: A meticulously designed and exquisitely executed diversion played everyone in the audience to be a P.T. Barnum customer. This way to the egress!

BTW—“Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by make-believe.” -- W. Somerset Maugham

Money And Its Debris

2011-07-18T10:11:00.004-05:00

I’ve nearly finished reading Martin Amis’ Money, published in 1984. I missed its fame back then, but I think its style, content and conclusion might be even more relevant today. Amis’ art is in his creation of a cultural milieu (often funny and mercilessly accurate) grounded in the gluttony of money.

And then, as I roamed through today’s Times, I landed on an article about the Murdoch Empire and how it buys off its lawsuits/critics by pre-empting litigation and quashing seriously negative public relations. This is how actual money works. Murdoch and his minions are not ordinary sham and scam artists; they are bulldozing power mongers. For Rupert Murdoch, more money is no longer the driving issue; power and absolute control, especially political, are the issues.

I thought about this while reading both the end of the novel and the Times article. You’ve read on this blog ad nauseum my comments about how money is the solitary as well as the singular metric of success in our world. But as we now see, while the layers of bought-off silence are being peeled back from the Murdoch machinations, success is merely a beginning stage. The Sherman McCoy masters of the universe in Bonfire of the Vanities puff around at this stage. They have money but little actual power.

The famous and tediously quoted sentence from Lord Acton’s letter to Bishop Creighton—“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”—included a much less quoted following sentence, a piquant coda, as it were. “Great men are almost always bad men.” Rupert Murdoch (not unlike the Koch brothers) understands that actual power is only as strong as its ability to control absolutely. None of this power involves anything to do with forms of government. Voting is irrelevant; who and what owns voting are what matter. And if one controls the means as well as the meaning of the voting one has absolute power.

From Murdoch’s point of view, Hitler made one consuming error: He made everything about him. Fox News appears to be about Roger Ailes, Hannity, O’Reilly, etc. But they are merely the front men, the carnival barkers. They are reality emanations of the actual power. During this apparent scandal, if Murdoch is seriously concerned, he’s concerned mostly that his modus operandi is being exposed…and that exposes him as an irredeemably, actual bad man.

And the debris? That’s what we must wade through daily in order to discover the truth.

BTW—“What luck for rulers that men do not think.” -- Adolf Hitler

Kirsten Mason Sings

2011-07-07T09:39:00.005-05:00

Kirsten Mason has uploaded two new songs, "Straight And Narrow" and "Tricked Out" on her Web site.

For a very different listening experience, check them out at Kirsten Mason Sings.

You can get a better insight to her reasons for singing and how she feels about the songs she sings by reading her interview on the opening page (scroll down on the right) of the Internet radio station that features her songs.

Supplemental

2011-07-06T13:03:00.002-05:00

Those of you who read yesterday’s post, “What Is Learning?” might have concluded that I was writing about what learning is not. You would think that probably because I continually reinforced that standardized measurements of achievement indicate only what the standard is, not what learning took place. In situations like these, I’d probably prefer to be wrong.

But then along comes the release of a story today about how making standard tests the metric of learning and teaching success merely opens the gate for prevarication and dissembling at enormous cost to the victims, the students. For over a decade the Atlanta schools achieved exemplary national status, its superintendent named the 2009 National Superintendent of the Year. But today we find…well, not so much.

Please read the details. For me, the culprits are not just the individuals who represent positions of trust, but even more the people of considerably higher rank (e.g., Pres. Obama and Arne Duncan) who are more interested in a fast, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’m standardized solution to a long-festering cultural illness than in fostering learning. Give Diane Ravitch’s letter to the Times a read. The last sentence says it all:

“Our desire for fast solutions gets in the way of the long-term thinking and the carefully designed changes that are needed to truly transform our schools.”

BTW—"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence."

-- Abigail Adams

What Is Learning?

2011-07-05T12:44:00.004-05:00

Representatives of the nation’s largest teachers’ union (maybe the largest union) have met and decided that standardized test results, considered with other evaluative measures (as yet not developed), may be used to evaluate teacher performance. Many voices were heard on both sides of the issue, but most saw this as the first step on the slippery slope of de-unionizing that so many other unions have experienced. Much noise will continue on this issue, but mostly the issue will be decided—like everything else in our society—by economic and financial forces. What will not be discussed is the actual nature of learning. No one seems to be publicly raising the difficult questions, much less facing the difficult answers. So, no longer having a personal or job security axe to grind, let me try.

How do we determine when and if learning has actually occurred? In a given classroom for a given lesson, what is the extent of student learning? Is learning a quantitative or a qualitative enterprise? If it is a combination of both, which has priority? In other words, is learning about stuff or about the applicability of stuff? Notice that in all these questions, learning is about the student. The teacher is only implicit. Students learn different things during each of these lessons, some of which do not even appear in the lesson plan. Has the student learned? Has the teacher performed unacceptably/acceptably/excellently? And a standardized test will not and cannot measure this learning.

The problem is in the label: “standard” implies that an acceptable level has been determined somewhere by someone—probably an anonymous committee—that everyone involved must meet, regardless of the specifics of the classroom. I defy anyone to develop a standard of learning for the students, K-12, of the U.S. Oh, of course in “The Race To The Top” it will create a set of winners, but what about all the subsets of “losers” who learned different stuff from the lessons? What about the fifth grader who got curious about the discovery period in the lesson on Christopher Columbus and went online to find out more about the kinds of people who would take those risks in those days and these days, who are sending probes to outer space to discover things, and she talks about them with her parents and her uncle who happens to be an actual rocket scientist? What about that? She might have no interest at all in the myth of Columbus. She certainly learned a great deal about discovery, but she might not do very well on the standardized test.

I taught English as language and American and British literature most of my life. Teaching the language can be very daunting, because it is always in flux, perhaps more so over the past 50 years than in the preceding 150 years. I mention this, because as I read about these standard tests, I wonder how they will deal with such changes as the following:

• “Anyone wanting to go on the field trip must have their parents’ permission.” This sentence demonstrates an error in pronoun agreement, yet a majority of today’s adult readers would not be able to find it, to say nothing of various script writers and editors.

• “The party was so fun.” Fun is one of those funny (couldn’t resist) English words. It functions as a noun, and as an adjective (in both its nominal [a “fun” time] and altered [as in “funny”] constructions. But in this recently created neologism—“so fun”—so is an adverb being used, I guess, as an intensifier of the adjective, which suggests degrees of fun known only to the speaker or writer. A clearer, more precise word would improve communication. (My theory is that “so fun” is our lazy way of saying “so much fun.”)

And these are just a couple of eccentric examples. Bring and take are two I use to tease people. Many people use bring to indicate both verbs. Actually, bring is used to indicate something being transported from there to here, and take to indicate something being transported from here to there. And so on. But we haven’t even begun to discuss the many prepositions in the language (which some of us had to memorize) and what they do and don’t do and how they affect the pronouns that follow them.

Now prepositions can be measured according to someone’s standard (with apologies to Strunk and White) form of English usage. You can test what a preposition is. But none of that quantitative stuff is as important as knowing how and where you can avoid the whole prepositional phrase conundrum with one solid, demonstrative adverb. And that’s how people ought to learn about the language.

So "standard" means what it says: It’s an arbitrary bar set at an arbitrary height, which, in fact, signifies nothing more or less than the standardizer’s world-view. Imagine a standardized world-view in the US! And imagine anyone suggesting that such a patently obvious arbitrary standard be used to determine one’s eligibility to practice her profession!

BTW—Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

-- William Butler Yeats

DSK

2011-07-03T09:49:00.005-05:00

Have you noticed how DSK is seeping its way into the global lexicon? I say "global" because it is being used in Europe as a signifier as well as in the US.

Our 21st century tendency is to morph these iconic abbreviations into multi-use linguistic tools, or parts of speech, to communicate more rapidly while adding a particular tonal subtext.

We just might quickly have some of the following:

• The manager DSKd his assistant.

• DSKing, while ultimately successful, retains certain risks.

• The principal knew she could DSK that teacher anytime she wanted to.

• A DSK team has been instituted by the company.

And so on. Keep monitoring the usage in your daily reading. Language evolves mysteriously, often in surprisingly permanent ways. We humans do indeed present an interesting study. Long after his ephemeral star-turn, Dominique Strauss-Kahn just might have permanence in international languages...whether or not he once became president of France.

BTW—“The head can be a dangerous compass to get you to where you think you want to go.”

-- Roger Conway

Emily, The Blogger

2011-07-01T19:07:00.004-05:00

Another one from my bag of do-overs. And please don't misconstrue my intentions. Emily Dickinson was far and away the most innovative, imaginative and courageous American poet of the 19th century.

Lately my reading and my conversations have been immersed in ideas and lessons in understanding social networks, social network analysis, Web 2.0, the devolution of demographics (what I once termed “divergency”) and so forth. In a comparatively short span of years, with the indulgences provided by computer hardware, software and the Web, we have become a culture of comfort-zone seekers. Facebook, Second Life, Twitter and their sundry dopplegangers provide comforting cocoons and welcome mats to like-mindedness. The good news is that we are facilitating the work of those who want to study and use their research to control and anticipate our behavior. The bad news is that while we individually feel more comfortable about ourselves and our “companions,” we are actually becoming increasingly detached from each other. The process creates the illusion of self-validation as well as community.

This got me thinking about the individual’s relationship to cyberspace. And that got me thinking about Emily.

Emily was, in her own time, an unacknowledged creative genius who, despite the fact that she lived during a period of extreme turmoil in our culture, lived almost all of her life in the protective seclusion of Amherst, MA (with the exception of a visit to Philadelphia, which is a very interesting sidebar in her life). The singular poem she wrote that resonated with my concerns about our cocooning in cyberspace is the following:

"This is my letter to the world,

That never wrote to me,

The simple news that Nature told,

With tender majesty.

Her message is committed

To hands I cannot see;

For love of her, sweet countrymen,

Judge tenderly of me."

Emily, like so many of us (yes, especially us bloggers) shout out into the void, seeking a kind of secure connection, which, in fact, is an illusion of connection, a hope associated with “hands I cannot see,” and with a willingness to “judge tenderly of me.” Emily’s poetry was at least 75 years ahead of its time, and her prescience of our time can be very discomfiting.

BTW— “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” -- E. E. Cummings

De-gourmandizing

2011-06-30T17:22:00.003-05:00

The singular benefit of having written so much stuff over the years (including fragments) is that when I encounter writer's block—such as now—I can dig through, find something more or less acceptable, more or less still relevant and post it. This is such an occasion. From my other blog, Cyberspace Glass House, I offer "De-Gourmandizing."

A gourmand is a person who delights in eating and drinking excessively. The delight is not so much in the fine tastes, but rather in the gross amounts. We Americans are painfully aware of this trait. For all the diet industry’s efforts, our per capita weight increase continues to climb. And this gourmandizing has become the signature characteristic of our culture. It has been, in fact, the metaphor of our lifestyle.

Everything about us is more for the sake of more. Think of the fast food advertising. You can supersize any meal. You can buy soft drinks in half-gallon sizes. Clothing is buy one, get one free. Groceries are buy 2 get the third one free. And we are told that wanting more expresses our constitutional freedom. That makes wanting more a distinction of appropriate citizenship. Wanting and having more, therefore, is the ultimate demonstration of one’s patriotism. And it is the DNA of our “exceptionalism.

But then, of course, somewhere along the line we must think of paying for it. And not paying for it is how we got to the place we’re in now. We can point the finger of blame all the way round the compass—credit card companies, various media formats (especially those that combine database formation and facilitate database mining), advertising exploitation of all these—but the devil is in us. All these agencies of exploitation have been doing this for a long time, so much so that we have become a then-some culture. That is, “We’ll have that and then some.”

The fact is that consumers will draw down their consumption, when and if they think it will provide a temporary remedy for the pain they’re suffering (i.e., bankruptcy, credit card trauma, foreclosure, overdrawn equity on property, etc.). Apparently this is already going on. The spending spree has begun its ending. That in my view is a good thing. But notice how our culture views this. “Nobody doubts that families need to start saving more than they saved over the last two decades. But if they change their behavior too quickly, it could be very painful…If the consumer slump continues, there is a potential for a dangerous feedback loop, in which spending cuts and layoffs reinforce each other.” In other words, we must consume our way out of this downward helix, or things will get much worse. But if you have much less to spend, and the current financial crisis has taught you that over indulging on credit is the cause of the crisis, what can you do?

My answer is to de-gourmandize. We need a cultural retro-fit of how we distinguish need from want. I also think we make a mistake if we inveigh against the capitalist manipulators and exploiters. We should recognize that they are exploiting and manipulating our own gluttonous zeitgeist. We actually believe that we are deserving of everything we want. If we were to begin with an exorcism of that singular delusion, our society would immediately move in a more civilized direction. Think of it: Veteran’s Day might have its original intention restored, rather than merely being an excuse to take advantage of break out sales of overstocked merchandise by managers who don’t know their jobs. And so on. I’m not saying stop buying. I’m saying use your common sense—don’t buy yourself and the rest of US into a deeper hole.

BTW—“What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.”

-- M. C. Escher