tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36528279440141249482024-03-13T23:45:46.435-07:00Rhetoric at the Rim of RealityA Ph.D rhetorical theorist takes a weekly look at the relationship between superstition, politics, and cultural norms in explaining how our sense of reality gets created.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-75401259947852965672013-05-26T09:10:00.007-07:002013-05-26T10:51:21.224-07:00How to be Vegan and Ambivalent about It<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: #fffefd; color: #001320; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; text-align: justify;"><i>It's not what goes into your mouth that defiles you; you are defiled by the words that come out of your mouth. </i>-- Matthew 15:11</span></div>
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<span style="color: #001320; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 20.99431800842285px;"><i>It's not easy being green</i>. -- Kermit the Frog</span></span></div>
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This morning for breakfast I had toast
and some stuff that looked pretty much like ham salad – but it
didn't have any ham in it. Instead the “ham” was made up of the
pulp from carrots, beets, apples, and sauerkraut. It didn't taste
bad; in fact, after pretty much sticking to the vegan diet for the
past year, I thought the concoction tasted pretty good. Notice the
contingency of the phrase “after pretty much sticking to the vegan
diet for the past year,” because I'm confident there was a time not
too long ago when I would have turned my nose up at the fake ham
salad. I must admit the dab of peanut butter I put with it certainly
added something to the flavor. The amazing thing is, however, it did
taste pretty good, even without the peanut butter, and that's because
if you stick with eating a certain way for an extended period of
time, your preference for particular tastes begin to adapt to
whatever you are eating.</div>
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When my wife, Ruth, started this diet
(I supposed I should use the word “lifestyle” because a “diet”
is something you choose for the short term, but a “lifestyle” is
something you're supposedly in for the long haul), I was not going to
do it. At the time she told me she was changing to a “plant-based”
diet, I was on a “gas station-based” diet – practically
everything I ate was brown, round, and rolling on the grill at the
Speedway. Gosh, I loved that food, and I still get my cravings for
it, but I'm doing better about living day-to-day without it. It took
an extra six months and a movie called <i>Forks Over Knives</i> to
convince me to try to change over to a vegan diet, and just basically
eat what Ruth did. I still cheat on the “lifestyle.” I don't
have the willpower to overcome 50 years of programming in just a year
or so to entirely forgo meat and cheese, but I often surprise myself
on how well I do it. Ruth is a devotee, however, and can navigate a
buffet like zealot. I'm not that strong; if we're at a party or some
other social gathering, somehow, a tiny particle of beef or cheese
finds its way onto my plate to hide beneath the broccoli.
</div>
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So, the Big Question is, of course,
“Why veganism?” Why bother? I often tell people I do it because
Ruth does it (and there's a certain amount of truth to that since I
wouldn't have started if she hadn't gone first). I like the answer
“I do it because my wife wants me to” because it lets me off the
hook from doing the explaining why a plant-based diet is a good idea
and really worth the effort. You see, here's the rub: as a
rhetorician, I understand when people ask questions because they are
really more interested in making an argument rather than getting an
answer. So, not always, of course, but often enough, I get people
who ask me “Why do you bother with this diet when it's so much
easier to eat like everybody else?” when they don't really want to
know why I do it but are really just wanting to justify why they eat
like everybody else. Honestly, I don't care why other people eat
what they do. So, it's in those situations when I'd rather not
bother with the argument at all that I just put it back on Ruth. So,
I circumvent the argument; I say, “I do the vegan thing because meat
and cheese makes my ears bleed.” And then they go, “What?” and
then I say, “You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” and they
give up wanting to argue with me because they figure I'm just another
henpecked husband who does whatever his wife wants him to. (Again,
there may be a certain amount of truth to that, but I'm not nearly as
henpecked as I am unwilling to argue with people who have already
made up their minds about something.)</div>
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Ruth, by the way, goes way beyond the
vegan thing and actually tries to follow a sparse “plant-based”
diet that also puts strict limits on sugar, salt, oil, and other
evils of processed food. I'm not so much committed to that lifestyle
because living without meat and dairy is hard enough, and it's taking
me more than a year to wrap my brain around how to do the vegan thing
while working in town without remembering to pack a lunch. Ruth
would be happy to have you know that while a vegan diet is a
<i>healthier</i> diet, it still doesn't mean it's a <i>healthy</i>
diet if you are living off of french fries, doughnuts, and soda
(which technically can be all vegan because you can get all of those
things without meat, dairy, or eggs). Ruth's diet is about heart
health, and eating that way really is a good way to help avoid heart
attacks, strokes, diabetes, and even cancer.
</div>
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It's not that I have a death-wish, but
the reason I'm not as good at avoiding “the other bad food” is
because when I get too hungry my belly can get louder than my brain.
If I'm hungry, my brain can yell its fool head off about cancer and
diabetes, but it can't get louder than my belly singing “The Supper
Song of Freedom.” (It's lyrics goes a little like this: Eat what
you want, Eat what you want, you may die tomorrow of a heart attack,
but you're suffering right now from hankering for something greasy.
Don't fear the cancer; fear the hanker).</div>
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Some people choose to do the vegan
thing for ethical reasons. They see the needless butchering of
animals as an evil humans can live without. I have no argument with
these people any more than I have arguments with the people who
believe humans have a right to shoot anything that moves. I am not
interested in arguing either way. It's not that I don't have an
opinion on the morality of killing animals for particular reasons;
it's that I don't think my opinion is necessarily better than anyone
else's on this so I'm not interested in participating in an argument
in which I can see validity on both sides of the aisle. If there's
one seriously good idea I picked up from studying rhetoric, it's that
it's really okay to stay uncommitted and agnostic when you're not
persuaded by the evidence “for” or “against” something.</div>
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So why do I follow the vegan diet?
Sometimes it's because I love my wife enough to want to support her
in something that she believes so deeply in (Heaven knows there's
enough ideas she believes in that I can't find myself supporting);
sometimes it's because there's nothing else in the house to eat; and
sometimes it's because I just want to see if I can please both my
brain and my belly with stuff that isn't going to kill me somewhere do
the road. Perhaps when I have expired, I can come back as a vegan
zombie and while other zombies are craving brains, I can be moaning
for “Grrrrains!”</div>
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Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll
be back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-11602456256701670782013-05-19T09:03:00.002-07:002013-05-19T19:11:41.186-07:00Goodbye, Southern High.<br />
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On Thursday, I retire from teaching
public high school and tonight I will watch my last group of seniors
graduate. Sometime next week, they will start the process of
knocking the building down. It's not that the district is taking my
retirement that seriously; they were planning on knocking the
building down anyway because a new high school (right next door) will
be finished this summer.</div>
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Somehow it feels completely
appropriate that they are knocking the building down the same year
I'm heading off to The Great Pasture of Retirement. Both the
building and I are 52, and I suppose if I were to hang around much
longer, they'd be taking a bulldozer to me as well. To be blunt, my
values are no longer welcome in teaching. Like the building I'm
leaving behind, my wiring is out of date. I know that needs some
explaining, so here goes:</div>
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My dad was a school teacher before me (and he taught in the very same high school where I have taught for the past 30 years). Back when
I was in college, I was majoring in Journalism, but I had my eye on a
teaching career. My dad didn't want me to do go into teaching. He
was afraid I'd become disgruntled over the small salary he'd had to
live off of to raise his family; he didn't want me to make the same
mistake. When I broke it to him that I was getting my teaching
certificate, he said, “Well, all right, but you know how much it
pays. Go ahead and become a teacher, but I never want to hear you
complain how much money you're making.” That's been the deal for
the last 30 years; I've never complained to him about my salary (even though
for better than the past 15 years, my beloved school district was
literally the lowest paying district in the state of Ohio).</div>
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So, I didn't become a teacher for the
money (nor, for that matter, have I ever met a teacher who did). I became a
teacher because I liked the respect and dignity that came with the
job. I've said to several principals I've worked with over the years,
“Look, I could get a better paying job. I need my respect. If I
don't have my dignity, I might as well be a circus clown.” Now, as
far as I can tell, everyone has something they are really good at;
for me, it's been teaching high school English. You can ask anyone
in my family – I'm a lousy plumber, a horrible mechanic, a terrible
carpenter, and I couldn't dig a straight ditch to save my life –
but put me in a room of snarly teenagers, and I can get them to care
about Dickens' “Great Expectations,” and I can get them to feel
pretty good about their ability to write. Call it a “gift” or
“calling,” but I've been blessed to work in my old high school
with the people who would respond to the enthusiasm I'd bring to
my lessons.</div>
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Now, it's time to go. Call me cynical
(perhaps I am), but the qualities that used to be valued in being a good
teacher are no longer relevant in the contemporary classroom. What
used to make me a good teacher is that my students knew that I cared
about them and that I did my best to make them feel welcome. Now what is being valued in teaching has nothing to do
with treating students like human beings. What is now considered the
most valuable skill in teaching is the ability to document what you
plan on teaching, document what you teach while you're doing it, and
document how you plan on reteaching the same material once you've
documented that the students didn't master the material the first
time you covered it. In other words, it's about faking a ton of
bureaucratic paper work so if the need ever arises, the district can prove that you presented
the material. How you presented the material, whether it was merely
a thick life-sucking packet of tree-killing handouts or through an engaging Socratic
discussion makes no difference whatsoever. This is to say, no one
cares anymore why students didn't learn anything from your
instruction, the administration only cares about the evidence in triplicate that
proves you offered the instruction.</div>
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Of course, the logic behind this
thinking is madness itself. Clearly, if you test a roomful of
students and 90% of the students pass the test, the instruction had
to be there or where would the 90% have learned it from? But it's no
longer about common sense, teaching now is about cranking out the
paperwork. Simply put, humanity is no longer relevant. I can't stay
around and teach when my value as a teacher is based on my ability to
document what I'm teaching and not on my ability to get my students
to care about their own development as citizens and fellow human
beings.
</div>
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This past January, I had a student
whose step-father shot himself in front of the family. When the girl
told me what had happened, I hugged her and said, “I'm sorry to
hear that you have to go through this. Don't worry about your
English grade; you've got bigger things to care about right now.
I've got your back; you will pass English this spring.” Was
making such a promise ethical? Given the modern obsession with
testing and scoring, absolutely not. Was the promise profoundly
moral? Give my life's interest in preserving dignity and concern, it
absolutely was. The girl in this circumstance is probably the most
dramatic example of the need to protect and prize our students'
humanity, but I could take you desk by desk and tell a similar story
about each of my students: this one has to work til midnight in a
fast food restaurant to help her parents pay their rent, this one has
been pregnant since February and has no idea if she can handle
college and a baby, this one can't concentrate because her boyfriend
has been hurting her a lot more lately but doesn't know how to break
up with him without getting beat up for trying. Desk after desk,
story after story, I know these people. My students are not merely
data entry points on some chart they are constructing in Columbus
based upon their OGT scores. Nonetheless, if I were to hang around
next year, 50% of my next evaluation would come directly from their
standardized test scores.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When I was writing my dissertation on
the history and theory of rhetorical authority, I devised a formula
for determining “good” authority from “bad” authority. It's
not really that complicated: “Good” authority is concerned with
the dignity of the people it works with; “Bad” authority is not.
I called the good form of authority “pro-agentic” because it
takes the agency of other people as its highest responsibility; I
called the bad form of authority “pythonic” because like a large
and powerful snake, bad authority likes to constrict other people and
squeeze them into seeing the world according to its own narrow point
of view. The best example I can come up with for the “pythonic
ethos,” – that is to say the form of authority that denies the
other's humanity to achieve it's own political agenda – is the
current educational environment that is only willing to look at the
data generated by test scores and the documents that “prove”
instruction occurred to determine the worth of a classroom teacher. I think Tina Turner would say, "What's love got to do with it?"</div>
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God help us all; kick me out and knock that building down. There's
no longer room for teachers like me – we're as obsolete as
blacksmiths in a Ford factory. Once I'm gone ,who is going to teach
students that how you treat people is more important that how you can
manipulate them into doing what you want? That's a trick question,
of course, because it's not on the test.</div>
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Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll
be back next week (but I won't be a school teacher, I'll just be
another Old Fart who pines long and loud about the Good Ole Days).</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-35603008380739743402013-05-12T05:56:00.001-07:002013-05-12T17:35:22.273-07:00Why Words Are Stronger Than Welts<br />
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A Zen <i>koan</i> is a short parable
that gives us something to think about that snaps us out of our
routine mindset. One of my favorites goes like this: A neophyte monk
goes to his master in the Buddhist temple where he has gone to live
and says, “I've been here a few months, and I've been meditating
for 12 hours a day, and I don't think it's working for me. As much
as I try to find the Eternal Quiet of Being, I feel – underneath it
all – as though I am a bottle that is filled with gunpowder and
could explode at any moment. Can you explain why I feel this way?”
The master nodded serenely and said, “You feel this way because
everyone feels this way.”</div>
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I don't know if everyone feels as
though they were going to explode, but I certainly can relate to the
idea that we all struggle and yet, we forget that everyone else has
their own struggles as well. Today is Mother's Day, and my mother
passed away nine years ago. Some days I miss her so much I find
myself crying while sitting all alone in my truck as I'm driving to
work. Other times, I go months without thinking of her at all. Like
the Zen <i>koan</i> above, I feel my own relationship with my mother
is uniquely complicated, but I suppose the truth really is that
everybody's relationship with their mother is uniquely complicated.</div>
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Although it is difficult sometimes to
explain to people the benefits of a rhetorical education, one boon is
the ability to use words to make subtle (but important) distinctions.
Throughout my life, I don't think I ever had a moment when I didn't
<i>love</i> my mother, but I had many stages in my life when I didn't
<i>like</i> her very much. As a child, I had expectations that my
mother was never able to meet, and it wasn't until I was well into my
adulthood that I was able to understand enough of my mother's own
history to comprehend that it was her own struggles with life that
prevented her from being the mother I felt I deserved. It's
difficult even now with her being gone all this time to explain how
the pains of my childhood have molded the man I am today, and,
furthermore, regardless of how I wish now things had been different
in the past: I am who I am, she was who she was, and underneath it
all is not a bottle that could explode at any moment, but the
enormity of grace that comes from learning how to forgive.</div>
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I grew up in an era in which “child
abuse” existed as a matter of everyday existence, but did not exist
as a recognizable classification of behavior; that is to say, during my
childhood, nobody called it “child abuse,” people just referred
to it as “parenting.” People who worked with my mother later in
life used to tell me how kind and loving she was to them, and
whenever I heard them say such things, I inevitably had a brief bout
of vertigo that comes from cognitive dissonance. Whenever people told
me how kind and loving my mother was, they were completely unaware
they were talking about the woman who used to beat me as a child
frequently and violently with a wide variety sticks and boards. My
brothers and I were beaten so often by our mother that we became
“connoisseurs” of beatings, and even now can reminiscence over
the finer ones. “Remember when I was beaten for getting muddy at
that construction site? Ah, that my friend, was a very good
beating.”</div>
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It wasn't until decades into my
adulthood that I was able to wrap my mind around that idea that my
mother had been beaten during her own childhood and grew up believing
that not beating your children is a form of neglect, and that somehow,
beating children is a way of demonstrating that you care about them.
Although I was frequently beaten as a child, I resolved growing up
that I never was going to beat my own children. Although beatings
were a regular feature of my childhood, somehow the concept that it
was an essential (even “normal”) part of life never made it into my belief system the way it had been entrenched into my mother's.</div>
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I would be lying if I said I still
don't feel the psychic wounds of my childhood thrashings. However, I
think I can honestly say that I have learned to forgive them. I live
with the hope that whatever psychic wounds I may have fostered on my
children are forgiven as well. Time will tell; like the rookie monk,
we don't understand what everyone else is going through.</div>
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Of all the things I held my mother
accountable for as a child (in addition to resenting her beatings, I
was disgruntled over her indifference to the way I was bullied by
neighborhood children), I can nonetheless feel an astounding depth of
gratitude for the things my mother did right. Pretty much at the top
of that list is this: my mother took me to the library. When I look
back at my childhood, I can remember the public library as well as my
mother's kitchen. These trips to the library were magical. The idea
that we could go to a place where we could surround ourselves with
books and that we could take several of them home with us astonishes
me even now as I relive those feelings of being allowed to choose to read
anything I wanted. I escaped into books, and somewhere during those
escapes, I picked up the odd idea that words were more important than
welts. And that is why I revere words and the potential they hold to
achieve what violence never will. And, that is perhaps the best
definition I can give Rhetoric: the belief that people who achieve
their ends by violence and coercion are inevitably flawed and
corrupted by their faith in violence.</div>
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On this Mother's day, I am grateful
that I learned, perhaps in worst way possible, that words are
stronger than blows, love is stronger than fear, and forgiveness is
the greatest strength of all. This morning I am missing my mother
enough to cry again, by myself as I type this. Underneath it all is a
bottle waiting to explode, and beneath that, love and forgiveness.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically and I'll be
back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-30225987900836625632013-04-28T09:42:00.001-07:002013-04-28T14:48:54.033-07:00So Much Depends Upon a Red Wheelbarrow<br />
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It's spring. Oh, I know spring has
been here for about a month as far as the calendar is concerned, but
real spring – actual spring – doesn't look at the calendar, it
looks at the buds blooming on the fruit trees.</div>
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The Grass has sent me official notice
that the upcoming mowing season is going to be fiercely competitive.
I surprised my green nemesis by opening the mowing season a week
earlier than it expected, and I may have caught it off-guard the
first time on the opening match of the season, but The Grass is
already determined to dominate the standings by mid-July. My
neighbor, Bill, had some extra blades that happened to fit the
Craftsman 21HP and so my mount is feeling especially eager to take on
the competition. I still have to put on a new filter and change the
oil in order to get the Craftsman fully psyched up for the summer
ahead, but the filter is already in the cab of the truck waiting for
the next trip into town to meet a doppelganger at the parts store,
and I've already drained the old oil out so there's no turning back
on the process of transfusing new blood into the Briggs and Stratton
heart of the 21HP.</div>
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The garden has accepted its cold
weather class of 2013 with loving welcome. The cabbage, cauliflower,
and brussel sprouts have been in the ground for better than a week,
and yesterday, I threw caution to the wind and put peppers and tomato
plants in the ground. A frost can kill those pepper and tomato
plants, but the forecast for the week ahead has lows in the mid 40s
so I'm tossing the dice to see if I can get those summer bounties a
few weeks earlier this year.
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The garden never looks as good as it
does when it's first planted. Someday soon, a few weeds will poke up
through the ground and try to bring chaos to my nice orderly rows,
and by late August, the Law of Entropy will prevail over my attempts
to keep the garden pretty and neat. There are humans among us who
have that gift for keeping a garden as lovely on it's last harvest in
the fall as its first plant in the spring, but I will never find
myself among their demographics. I am too paranoid of chemical
companies to use products to keep the weeds under control, and by
late summer, when it's really hot outside, I become too much aware of
the relatively cheap price of a can of tomatoes at Kroger to care
about fighting off the pagan weed invaders that storm the territory
of my civilized plants. In the first few months of each spring, I
will ruthlessly hunt down and hoe out the vanguard of the heathen
weed invaders, but by the time the thrust of the horde arrive, I'll
be safely retreating to the air conditioning in my basement. I have
a rototiller, but it hates to start almost as much as I hate to use
it so there's only so many times I'm willing to drag that beast out
of the barn.</div>
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What a relief it is to have warmer
weather. We spend so much time in the winter trying to just endure
the indignities of cold weather that by the time in late April or
early May when we can finally leave the house without a jacket, the
whole of nature is mildly intoxicating. Spring gets into the blood
stream and travels up the spinal column where it hypnotizes the brain
into thinking that building a patio is a good idea. “Look at it
this way, Brain,” argues the rhetoric of Spring, “All you have to
do is the planning. Back and shoulders will do all the heavy
lifting; you won't have to lift anything; all you have to do is ride
around inside the skull and think about how nice it's going to be
when it's all finished.” About this time, Back and Shoulders start
to put in request for vacation time, but Brain is too twitterpated by
Spring to take their demands very seriously. “Yes,” whispers
Spring seductively, “Look at the Lowes' ad. Patio stones are on
sale this weekend. You know how much you like saving money, right?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It's spring, and so much depends upon
a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater. When I was in high school,
I thought this William Carlos William poem represented everything I hated
about poetry. I couldn't understand it because it didn't seem to
have a point. As a high school freshmen, this poem represented
everything that was wrong with my high school education. The state
could force me to go to school and listen to such drivel, but it
could not compel me to like it, and I refused to like it. When I was
in the 9<sup>th</sup> grade, I had no use for poetry. Poetry was too
genteel to be respected by my testosterone-fueled adolescence, and I
didn't want to have anything to do with it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now, a lifetime later, this poem
represents everything that was good about my high school education.
This poem, at least as I interpret it now, is a way of saying, “So
much depends upon our ability to appreciate the simple pleasures of
life. Without our ability to recognize beauty in the ordinary, we
are lost to our own humanity.” If there is anything that is
lacking in the new, draconian, standards-or-die formulas for
education, it's this message that our humanity is far more important
than any score on a nationally normed evaluation. What our students
need, in my humble opinion, is far more time to consider why beauty
is important and far less time trying to prove that they have
mastered some skill that makes them employable to corporate hacks who
believe only their own money is beautiful.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Wow, almost slipped into a rant there.
Could go on about it, but hey, it's spring, and at least for now,
the garden is free of weeds. Brain doesn't want to go on writing;
Brain wants to plan a patio. I will be teaching this poem this week, and I expect my sophomores will hate it until I explain why so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll
be back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-21509590610570765702013-04-21T14:44:00.001-07:002013-04-22T03:27:39.671-07:00The Dance of Meaning: Violence and Rhetoric<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<i>It has become appallingly obvious
that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”</i> – Albert
Einstein</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<i>There are lots of causes I'm
willing to die for – but not one cause I'm willing to kill for.”</i>
- Mahatma Gandhi</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>"I wish the entire human race had one neck, and I had my hands around it!"</i> – Charles Panzram</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7Bj_qHcoWHw/UXRdFfw84KI/AAAAAAAABPU/glesdfFQGJM/s1600/boston1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7Bj_qHcoWHw/UXRdFfw84KI/AAAAAAAABPU/glesdfFQGJM/s320/boston1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Not all messages are made up of words.
Perhaps the best messages are wordless – a mother's kiss on her
baby's forehead, a handshake the seals a deal, a hug at funeral.
Words have more precision, but actions have more impact. In the long
run, we don't remember what people say; we remember how they made us
feel; we remember their silent presence long after we've forgotten
any particular thing they've said. We need words to think about the
lessons that come to us across the course of our lives, but the
wisdom we garner through life comes from collecting experiences –
not thinking about them.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As an English teacher, words have been
my stock-in-trade. Whatever reputation I have built as a writing
instructor has come through the trust I have put into the way words
can shape thinking and the skill I have developed in showing others
the importance of using the right words for the right occasions. As
a rhetorical theorist, I have looked at words the way mechanical
engineers look at materials and consider the forces necessary to bend
them to produce specific results. As a musician, I have played with
words and cared as much for the sounds they produce as the meanings
they convey. As a reader, I have often admired the words of fellow
human beings who have been able to stir passions within me for places
I've never been and strangers I will never know. While a picture may
be worth a thousand words, words are able to paint pictures that see
through the dull materiality of this world and reveal glimpses that
can only been seen by the heart. I value words; I don't always trust
them, but they have nourished and sustained me well beyond the mere
mortal limitations of my physical body.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If life is a performance, then actions
and words dance before us. Sometimes actions delicately lift words
into the air and suspend them overhead to be admired and acknowledged
before being returned gracefully to the ground. Sometimes words
jaunt behind the back of actions and come leaping forward in
syncopated gyrations. Sometimes actions and words compete for our
attention while moving frantically before our eyes; other times, each
will support the other by waiting with an outstretched hand while the
other commands the spotlight. We derive meaning by recognizing their
engagement with each other; confusion comes when words are out of
step with actions or actions are no longer in sync with what's being
said.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Humans today are absurdly verbal and
frequently hyperconscious of their verbosity. See, just reading that
last sentence, made you think about it. At some time in eons past,
however, there must have been a time when language was more defined
through behavior than through orality. People moved and other
understood one another through gesture and facial expression;
critical evaluation of who we are to one another based upon what
we say to one another came much, much later. As the human ability
to express ideas grew through language so did the human capacity to
understand ideas expand as well. While on some tacit level, we may
have always understood that some behavior was “right” or “wrong,”
it took words to articulate the conditions upon which we could come
to some agreement that any particular behavior was “right” or
“wrong.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As far as I know, I was not around
eons ago when people began to reify the notions of “right”
behavior and “wrong” conduct. On the other hand, I was around
during my childhood, and I have fuzzy memories of learning the
consequences of misbehavior and the rewards of being virtuous. Some
lessons came from my parents who were not averse to beating me with a
stick to convince me of the error of my ways. Some lessons came from
my brothers who were willing to throw punches to inform me of my
place. I also remember one kid from a neighborhood I grew up in who
had a couple of cronies hold my arms while he punched me in the gut
to let me know that he was dangerous. Each of these lessons I may
have been able to comprehend if I had been merely told, but the
memories of the personal violence I hold in my body go way past the
linguistic neurons of my brain and are buried deep within the muscles
that actual bore the bruises. I wasn't there the first time in
history when someone desired something that someone else had and then
used violence to take it away from the other, but I was there in my
childhood the first time someone decided I needed to learn something
through a painful thump.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And this is it then: why I care so
much about protecting and advancing the power of language. The
ultimate lesson of my childhood simply was that the ability to hurt
another person does not evoke respect for any idea, it merely induces
pain and the fear of pain. Ideas that are accompanied by either
violence or the threat of violence are morally corrupt. If you
wrench my arm behind my back, I will loudly proclaim your
superiority, but I will not believe it. If I survived my childhood
with any belief intact, it is that violence is incompatible with
morality. You cannot convince anyone of the “rightness” of your
position and threaten to hurt them at the same time.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This week, hundreds of miles from my
backdoor, a couple of people tried to send a message by killing and
injuring strangers at a sporting event. At the time of this writing,
we have not heard their “explanation” of their message. The only
message we heard was that they were horrible, horrible people for
being willing to kill random strangers. Someday, sooner than later I
imagine, journalists will squawk their message and try to
contextualize what these people “wanted to say” with what they
actually said by blowing up bystanders. It doesn't matter what their
“other” message is. Violence is not rhetorical. Violence is the
anthesis of rhetoric. You can disagree with me if you want to, and I
promise I'll not hit you with a stick, punch you in the gut, or send
shrapnel into your flesh. Because of this, I don't need to argue my
moral superiority. Nonviolence is merely morally superior to
violence. Always and forever.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically and I'll be
back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-32635445937236292122013-04-14T08:24:00.001-07:002013-04-14T08:24:23.559-07:00When Cogs Go to College<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tysuIaOidzs/UWrJt-E9eYI/AAAAAAAABNk/pOz-_f4bQ-U/s1600/studentcogs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tysuIaOidzs/UWrJt-E9eYI/AAAAAAAABNk/pOz-_f4bQ-U/s320/studentcogs.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Humans are only fully human when
they play.” – Friedrich Schiller</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I attended a workshop this week at a
local college that put high school writing teachers into conversation
with their college-level counterparts. It was an interesting
conservation to hear the college instructors remark that their
highest concern for entering college students is their students
struggle with the inability “to think critically” about their own
writing or about the writing of others. The high school teachers
responded by pointing out that their job evaluations are dependent
upon their students scores on standardized tests, and “critical
thinking” skills are not on the test. “Critical thinking,” by
the way, is the ability to recognize alternative solutions and to
observe how alternative perspectives change the validity of
assertions. Students who are good at “critical thinking” often
do poorly on standardized tests because they end up valuing too
highly the alternatives to the “one right answer” that must be
discovered when questions are put into the format of the
four-response bubble-sheet.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Although the chronological line
between an eighteen-year-old senior leaving high school and an
eighteen-year-old freshmen entering college may seem thin to students
and their parents, the gap between what high school teachers are
expected to teach <i>to</i> their students and what college
instructors expect <i>of</i> their students is significant.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I italicized the prepositions “to”
and “of” in the previous sentence because I wanted to emphasize
that if there is an important difference between high school and
college, for the most part it comes down to the question of who is
ultimately held responsible for the student's classroom success. In
high school, the teacher is held responsible for whether the students
learn what is expected of them, and in college, students are held
responsible for their own learning. It may seem like a simple
concept, but the ramifications of this shift between the burden of
academic success moving from the shoulders of the instructor onto the
shoulders of the student are huge. Many students enter college
expecting it to be a mere continuation of high school and are stunned
to find out that the information that was spoon fed to them in high
school is now their own chore to collect and digest.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The hot political buzzwords in
education right now are “college readiness” and “accountability.”
The argument coming from governors' offices and statehouses of
legislators is that because college is so expensive, someone needs to
be held accountable for the costs of remediation when students show
up on college campuses unprepared to handle the rigors academic work.
Inevitably, the public school system is held to blame when students
are not ready for what their college instructors expect of them. The
students, themselves, are not held responsible because they are
depicted as the victims of the education that was offered to them.
Thus, the political machinery cranks out ever more policy that leads
to making public K-12 education even more draconian and joyless
because “clearly the students are not being made to work hard
enough so let's just keep making the work harder.” The problem
with this thinking, of course, is that the whip of policy keeps
cracking at the horses pulling the carts while the passengers taking
the free-ride are not overly concerned about these changes because
their responsibility pretty much ends with showing up to get on the
wagon.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As a teacher with both a Ph.D and 30
years of classroom experience, let me share something with you –
three basic ideas of education that are being ignored in the
psychotic bureaucracy that is currently dictating how public schools
must be run and how public school teachers must conduct their
classes. I call them the <i>Three Basic Truths of Teaching</i>.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Basic Truth #1: <i>Nobody learns
anything unless they see a value in it.</i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In an ideal world, the transition
between high school and college would be like a move from the shallow
end of a swimming pool into the deep end – requiring the same
skills but offering more depth and greater possibilities to the
swimmer. From an outside observer's perspective, the surface level
looks to be the same, and from this point-of-view, some people might
even argue there's no difference at all for the swimmer who stays on
top of the water. Unfortunately, swimmers who are unprepared for the
deep end of the pool find out fairly quickly there is a massive
difference between being able to survive when you have your feet on
solid ground and when you don't. Students who are not “college
ready” have been in the water for years but have never learned to
swim because they have not understood the necessity for being able to
tread water without a solid footing beneath them. Frequently,
students who do really well in high school end up failing out of
college because they only learned as much as they needed to get by,
and when that strategy just doesn't work for them at the
college-level, they sink under their own inability to take
responsibility for their education. The solution is not to make the
public school students stay in the water longer but to see that they
take responsibility for learning to float while they are there.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If we really want to make students
“college ready,” students are going to need to feel what they are
being taught is going to help them succeed in life and not that they
are being taught esoteric nuggets of information merely because it is
“very likely to show up on the test.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Basic Truth #2: <i>A little fun goes a
long way in motivating people to take on difficult challenges</i>.
Most people are willing to put in a good effort even when challenged
with rigorous problems if they have the expectation that they can
have a little fun in the process. If there is one thing that is
really destroying education right now, it is the grim seriousness
that now hovers over schooling like a scary dark cloud. Children are
being robbed of their childhoods in the name of bureaucratic
efficiency. Instead of letting kids have the time and space to enjoy
life, every moment of school now is about The Grind. Teachers who
engage in any activity that cannot be be defended by charting it
directly from the <i>The Holy Writ of National Standards</i> are
suspected of heresy. People who do not work in the modern K-12
classroom have no idea how much paperwork is now required to be
generated to document how each and every standard is being covered.
Teachers are unmotivated to make classes “interesting” because
they are being asked to spend more time documenting what has been
taught rather than spend their planning time thinking about how best
to teach what comes next. Classrooms have become joyless instruction
pods because the testing corporations who have bought the ears of the
policy makers insist that teachers are not pushing their students
hard enough. God forbid, teachers and students actually enjoy any of
the content – this is why the new Common Core Standards do as much
as possible to replace literature with “informational texts” –
because, you know, students might actually like storytelling.
Furthermore, the values that students learn from literature (such as
the importance of being kind to others or why being honest pays off
in the long run) are not on the test.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Basic Truth #3: <i>Education that does
not respect human dignity is not education, it is propaganda</i>.
All people, but I would say <i>especially</i> children, know when
they are being treated like cogs in a great assembly line rather than
as human beings. I was at a conference a few years back when during
the keynote speech, the CEO of a national organization claimed “More
than two-thirds of fourth graders can no longer read at a fourth
grade level.” Really? It seems to me when two-thirds of a
population cannot do something then somebody is lying about what that
population should be able to do – after all, what in the heck do
we mean by “a fourth grade level” if the majority of fourth
graders can't do it?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
People have feelings. People have
wants. People need motivation. Numbers do not have feelings.
Numbers do not have wants. Numbers do not need motivation. Teachers
and students are people, and they deserve to be treated like people.
What is really being lost in the great debate about what makes
students “college ready” is that teaching “the standards”
does absolutely no one any good if we don't recognize that we aren't
really teaching “the standards,” we are teaching human beings.
Right now, there is far too much pressure on teachers to “teach
standards” and not enough room is being left over for “teaching
students to be students.” I've said it here before, but it needs
to be repeated – as long as the testing corporations can reap more
profit from student failure than from student success (by marketing
the “remedial” material back to schools), the cycle of “test,
fail, blame, and remediate” will only continue to get worse.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll
be back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-65534170605621378322013-04-07T07:15:00.002-07:002013-04-07T07:15:29.016-07:00To Our New Robotic Overlords: Go Screw Yourselves
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iFiiW6oSrBA/UWF_ErsL36I/AAAAAAAABJ8/syD3WhL9Wk0/s1600/laughingrobot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iFiiW6oSrBA/UWF_ErsL36I/AAAAAAAABJ8/syD3WhL9Wk0/s320/laughingrobot.jpg" width="209" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Whether or not the title of this
week's post is <i>funny</i> is debatable, but at least it's based
upon a <i>principle of humor </i>that could lead a human reader to an
amusing and humorous interpretation. You see, robots are machines,
and since machines are manufactured by having components held
together by screws, telling a robot to “go screw yourself”
(especially a robot who has been put in charge of converting humans
into slaves for the benefit of the system that built the robot) lends
itself to the jocular ambiguity of a <i>pun</i> by referencing a
traditional epithet that has long been applied to reprehensible
leaders who would exploit their lackeys (and that epithet being, of
course, that if the leader is determined “to screw” his minions,
he should rather emphatically go satisfy his lascivious requirements
through an exclusive and solitary onanism).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now here's an important question:
Would a robot find the preceding paragraph funny? If you are human,
you might respond to this question by saying the question itself is
absurd. Because robots are incapable of experiencing human emotions
and laughter is an emotional response triggered by a comic awareness
unique to human sensibility, the question as to whether a machine can
determine 'if something is funny or not' is meaningless. This is to
say that humor is <i>subjective</i>; in order to decide if anything
is funny, the circumstances require a human <i>subject</i> capable
of personal and intuitive response. While people can argue over
whether or not any specific joke is funny, we are likely to find near
complete unanimity if we are arguing instead whether or not machines
are capable of appreciating humor.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now a thought experiment: Suppose an
eccentric billionaire came to you and offered you an insane amount of
money to create a robot that would laugh at his jokes. This leads to
an ethical dilemma, right? Do you create a robot that seems to laugh
at the billionaire's jokes in order to become fabulously wealthy, or
do you lose your chance at having all that wealth by honestly
admitting to the billionaire that because machines cannot really
laugh, taking his money for a laughing machine is inevitably an act
of fraud?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Some people might respond to this by
saying, “If someone has more money than brains, then you should go
ahead and take the money and build a robot that plays a recording of
laughter when the billionaire uses a particular tone of voice that
indicates he is being sarcastic. It doesn't matter if the robot has
no more sense of what the billionaire is saying than any typical
department store mannequin, if someone is willing to pay billions of
dollars for a laughing robot, it doesn't matter if the robot can
actually laugh at what is being said, the billionaire <i>only needs
to believe</i> it is laughing
at his jokes. If a robot played a laugh track at intervals <i>that
gave the impression</i> it was laughing at the appropriate times, it
would be up to the billionaire to decide if he was being ripped off.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Other people would respond by saying,
“Taking money for one thing and delivering a product that does
something else is fraud. It doesn't matter how much money is
involved. Because robots cannot interpret humor, a uniquely human
ability, taking money for “an authentic laughing robot” would be
dishonest no matter how satisfied the billionaire would be with the
results of a machine that would produce laughter at convincing
intervals.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Suppose in your conversation with the
billionaire, you ask him, “Why do you want a laughing robot? Why
not just hire a panel of clowns to laugh at your jokes? Surely you
can afford to hire people to laugh at what you say.” And the
billionaire responds, “I don't want people to laugh at what I'm
saying merely because I'm paying them to laugh at what I'm saying. I
have tried this method in the past, and when I pay people to laugh at
what I'm saying, they laugh at everything whether it's really funny
or not. What I need is an objective measure of humor. I know that
not everything I say is funny, but some of it is. I want a device
that can tell me when I've said something funny. If I had a robot, it
would be completely objective in determining whether something is
funny or not because robots cannot be bribed.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This, then, is crux of the problem:
The human desire for “an objective measure” of “something that
cannot be measured objectively” cannot take precedence over the
logic of measurement. That is to say, a fundamental principle of
rationality maintains that “a motive to have specific information”
cannot supersede “the reasoning that can provide the information.”
To be blunt, I'll put it this way: Anyone who claims they can
objectively measure anything that depends upon human subjectivity is
either a fraud or fool.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the example above, the
billionaire's access to endless wealth is irrelevant to obtaining the
information he wants. Because humor is by definition “subjective,”
an “objective” measure of humor cannot be had at any price.
Money can buy a lot of things; it can purchase agreement, but it
cannot shop for <i>authenticity</i> for things that cannot be
<i>authenticated</i>. Numbers are very good at describing things
that can be measured – the distance between New York and L.A., the
weight of an elephant, and average salary of postal workers in the
United States. What numbers cannot tell us is <i>qualitative</i>
information than in simply not reducible to <i>quantification. </i>The
distance from New York to Los Angles is 2,778 miles; but who
can save authentically that “It's too far to walk”? The
subjective determination that “It's too far to walk” is based on
a wide variety of human motives and conditions. It wouldn't be too
far to walk if you had the right motivation to walk it. Even if
99.9% of a survey of the general American population declared that
“It's too far to walk,” you might walk the distance if you had
the right motivation. We might use statistical data to learn that
the average salary of a postal worker is $48,380. Whether you
believe they don't make enough money, make too much money, or make
the right amount money, your belief can be justified by a wide
variety of arguments, but your opinion can not be quantified into the
“one right answer” because there is no one right answer.
Opinions are subjective. Only numbers are objective, and numbers
can't have opinions.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
To recap: <i>Objective</i> data can
provide information that can be <i>authenticated</i>. <i>Opinions</i>
can be informed by objective data, but because interpretation is a
<i>subjective</i> human response, opinions can only be justified,
they cannot never be <i>authenticated</i>. Anyone who claims that
they can provide an <i>objective answer</i> to a question that
requires a <i>subjective response</i> is being disingenous. If vasts
amounts of money are involved, it is my <i>informed opinion</i> that
fraud on a massive scale is inevitable.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If you are a human, you may interpret
this essay as an inditement of the corporations that are currently
conspiring “to grade” student writing with “intelligent
software.” I would argue that while the software may be
intelligent, the people who believe in the results are not. Whether
those who are either developing the software or buying the software
are being entirely honest about their motives for saying they believe
in the results depends entirely on how much money they are being
given to <i>authenticate</i> the results.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Was this essay “well-written”? I
don't suppose any machine could offer an opinion about this one way
or other. Software can offer information that can make predictions
on the quality of writing based upon the metrics of sentence length,
vocabulary usage, and grammatical conventions; Software cannot “read”
writing for content and recognize subordination of ideas, rhetorical
fallacy, or metaphorical language. I'll believe in software that can
make accurate predictions of the greed of corporate hucksters,
short-sighted politicians, and budget-conscious school administrators
long before I'll ever be able to accept the existence of software
that can judge “good writing.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I will
return next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-66091064466078302492013-03-24T11:05:00.005-07:002013-03-24T16:11:47.961-07:00How to Spot a Fool<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><i>“</i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The
fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head,
see the world spinning 'round.”</i> – Paul McCartney</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> Last
year, 43 people met their fates at the hands of government
employees who were commissioned to snuff out the life of America's
most notorious criminals. People, of course, like to argue about the
merits of capital punishment and whether or not the government should
be in the business of offing its most loathsome citizenry, but I'll
save all my arguments for it and against it until another day. Today,
I want to talk about “Fools,” and I have a good story about
someone who was once executed on death row that illustrates the
rhetorical point I want to make. </span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> The
number of people killed by the government, with full intent and in
front of reporters who witness the event in order to write about it,
is down by more than half since 1999 when we ended the Millennium off
with a bang by launching 99 criminal explorers into the dark void of
The Great Unknown. One of the first lessons they teach in a basic
news reporting class is the list of values that make a story
“newsworthy” </span>typically includes such factors as
prominence, proximity, timeliness, impact, and human interest. Even
when we're knocking off the nation's ne'er-do-wells on almost a
weekly basis, it makes for a pretty good news story; however, back in
1966, when the country went that entire year with only being able to
check off one name from its list of people on Death Row, putting
someone into an electric chair to toast the soul out of them made an
exceptionally good news story.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
James French was only thirty years old
when the State of Oklahoma strapped him into an electric chair and
sent his wind sweeping down the plain, but by then, he was ready for
it. French was one of those people your parents warn you about when
you are learning to drive and you're tempted to pick up hitchhikers.
Contrary to traditional parental wisdom, not everyone who is
meandering around this country by sticking out a thumb and taking
rides from strangers will kill you – I, for one, hitchhiked from
Athens, Ohio to Yellowstone National Park and back when I was a
vacuous college student, and I made the whole trip without killing
anyone. French, however, was one of those horror movie type of
hitchhikers who pretty much ruined it for all the nonviolent ramblers
who are simply out to score a free ride. I don't know if it was just
a rookie mistake or what, but French had only made it from Texas to
Oklahoma when he decided to take his benefactor hostage for a while
and then kill the fellow for his car.
</div>
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After French was caught and he came to
the inescapable conclusion that he was going to have to live out the
rest of his days in prison, French decided he would rather have the
management shorten the length of his stay rather than prolong it.
Three years into his new career as a lifer, French murdered a
cellmate in order to insure that he could get his name added to the
list of people waiting for a coveted oneway ticket to ride Old Sparky
to the Outer Banks of Eternity. Back in the mid 60's, it was easier
to catch a ride in a rusty pickup truck on a dusty two-lane road in
Texas than it was to secure a seat in an Oklahoman electric chair.</div>
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Perhaps it was the heat of that hot
day in August of 1966 when French took his final walk that inspired
him or maybe he'd been thinking about it from the moment he found out
he'd won his chance to be the only guy to be killed by the government
that year, but French came up with the perfect rejoinder to the
reporters who were anxious to have a good quote from the prisoner
when they asked him, “Do you have any last words?” French said
to them, “Hey, fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow’s
paper? ‘French Fries’!”</div>
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This type of sardonic remark is what
separates genuine fools from mere posers. Contrary to whatever you
have heard, fools are not stupid. Fools recognize where they are and
who they are with, and nonetheless, they say whatever's on their mind
without regard for its propriety or its ramifications for themselves
or others. A genuine fool isn't courageous in face of danger; a fool
is unconcerned by it.</div>
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There are lots of ways of dividing
people into two groups: the rich and the poor, the young and the old,
and those who prefer chocolate over vanilla – to name a few.
Separating people into the groups “the intelligent and the obtuse”
doesn't really get at identifying the qualities of fools because
fools are neither intelligent nor obtuse. Fools exist in a space
that is not defined by their degree of knowledge or intelligence, but
is distinguished, rather, by their heedless behavior. There are
people who support the systems that direct their lives (call them
“followers,” perhaps); there are people who fight against the
systems that direct their lives (call them “rebels”); and there
are the people for whom the system doesn't really come into their
decision making – not because they rage against it or want to
challenge its prescriptions, but because they simply don't believe
the rules that applies to everyone else actually applies to them, and
these are the people who merit the title “fools.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A rebel can be an idealist who images
a better world in which the systemic order that controls people's
lives has changed, and a rebel can be willing to accept the
consequences of challenging the system that controls them. A rebel
understands (or at least works under the assumption that he or she
understands) the motives of the authoritarian forces that are in
control, and the rebel operates to subvert the powers that are
indifferent to their notions of injustice. A fool, on the other
hand, is no rebel. A fool has no desire to change the system because
the fool is either unaware of the system or believes the system is
unaware of them. A fool isn't necessarily stupid and willing to
sacrifice his or her own dignity to appease the Powers That Be; a
fool lives unconcerned with the opinions of the Powers That Be
because the fool is too preoccupied with living in a world defined by
the fool's own epistemological boundaries.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In many card games, the Joker is a
wildcard that can replace any other card and thus, act like a magical
card that randomly appears from a player in need of taking a hand.
In the original games based upon the Tarot decks where “The Fool”
(the card that later became the Joker in modern decks) appears, “The
Fool” card does not <i>replace</i> another card (that is to say it
takes on the identity of another card) it merely temporarily excuses
the player from following suit. Thus, the original wildcards were
not like cards with superpowers that could suddenly out-trump any
other card on the table, the purpose of the original Jokers were to
create a space for the player where the rules were temporarily
suspended and did not apply to the player. Thus, fools are neither
people who either seek to win by following the order supplied by the
rules nor are they people who seek to change the rules for the
benefit of themselves and others; fools are people who simply exist
outside of the game, and they allow us to recognize how we are
playing the system that they, themselves, cannot recognize. That's
enough for now to think about. As we approach the first day of
April, let's just remember that people do not choose to be fools,
fools are merely who they are.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically and I'll be
back in a couple of weeks. I'll be taking next weekend off to spend
time with the family and to recover from an anticipated
overconsumption of chocolate bunny ears.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-24575074057057445122013-03-17T10:44:00.002-07:002013-03-17T17:15:07.905-07:00My Blarney Has a First Name: Lucky<br />
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“<i>A mind needs books like a sword
needs a whetstone</i>.” – Tyrion Lannister</div>
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“<i>They got little baby legs that stand
so low, you got to pick em up just to say hello.</i>” – Randy Newman</div>
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A few weeks ago, a student of mine
suggested that my St. Patrick's Day post should be dedicated to
leprechauns. So here it:</div>
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Eloquence is a sort of magic, isn't
it? At the heart of magic is the idea that invisible powers
controlled by mere words can somehow manifest changes in the physical
world. Everyday we use magical words to get what we want –
sometimes we get what we want by by speaking into small, shamanistic,
expensive, electronic devices that hurl our words at the speed of
light to people many miles away and within half an hour, they bring
us a pizza.
</div>
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What's that you say? Cellphones are
not magical? I disagree. Cellphones are magical; cellphones employ
the wizardry of contemporary technology to send our ideas, our
desires, our pains, and our insights into a world of silence. Then,
magically, what we send out comes back to us – reshaped, refined,
and disguised as response that emerges from a collective intelligence
that somehow has heard our intangible words and was moved by them.
You do not need to understand the physics of frequencies to speak
with someone on the other side of the world; you do not need to speak
the magical tongue of binary code to send a text. Do you need to
understand the mechanics of eloquence to make its magic work on your
behalf to get you what you want? No, of course, not. Beauty may be
in the eye of the beholder, but magic rolls off the tongue.</div>
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Here, then, lies the paradox of
leprechauns. What is the source of the leprechaun's magic and how do
we explain its limitations? If the leprechaun's magic is powerful
enough to produce pots of gold, then why isn't the magic powerful
enough to defend the leprechaun from occasionally falling into the
clutches of mere humans who can exploit his magic for their own
personal gain? The rules seem simple enough: catch the leprechaun
and hold him tightly in the grip of your fingers, and he will be
obligated to grant you three wishes (or at the very least, a
sugar-coated breakfast cereal packed with marshmallow shaped like
stars and moons). Don't look away, the folklore warns, for if the
leprechaun catches you looking away, even for a brief moment, he's
sanctioned to blink away and leave you holding smoke. Three wishes
– no wishing for extra wishes – three as in the Christian
Godhead, the bones of your elbow, the states of time, and parts of
an atom – three, that's all you get, three. There are stories that
can explain where the leprechaun's gold comes from (I'll tell you
below) and there are psychological explications for his diminutive
size (yeah, I'll give you that too), but how do we explain how such a
powerfully magical being is incapable of living other than as a
fugitive? Leprechauns are always on the run; where are they running
to? Where are they running from?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Some anthropological historians tie
the stories of leprechauns to the <i>Tuatha Dé Danann</i>, a group
from Irish mythology who were driven into hiding in underground
dwellings to escape the bloody swords of Gallic invaders. Over the
course of many centuries, as group after group of violent invaders
arrived to plunder and kill the local population (no wonder there's
so many people with a temper living in “ire”land), the <i>Tuatha Dé
Danann</i>, or "peoples of the goddess Danu,” became literally
smaller in the imaginations of the people who stayed to live on top
of the ground as they envisioned the nearly forgotten ancestors who
had vanished when they went underground. As for the “pots of gold”
– throughout the many dark centuries when the constant threat of
invasion hovered overhead like dark and menacing storm clouds, people
who were able to accumulate a little wealth often buried their money
in pots to keep it safe from being plundered by violent outsiders.
When the original owners of these pots either died (from war,
disease, accident, or malnutrition) or they simply forgot the right
location for their buried treasure, then the “forgotten” riches
became the windfall of the forgotten people who came to be known as
the <i>luchorpán</i>, the Old Irish
term that literally meant “small body.” After all, being an
underground people gave them a valid claim to anything found beneath
the soil.</div>
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And
here, I'll give you some speculation. Why are the “pots of gold”
to be found at the end of rainbows? My guess is that even without
the Biblical influence of Genesis – in which God offers “the
rainbow” as a gesture of His promise that He would henceforth
eschew genocide to resolve any future disappoints He may be having
with the human race – the rainbow is an archetype for peace because
we see them so often after the violence of storms have passed. Once
the violent invaders have left, it's safe to go dig up your pots;
once the storm has passed, the rainbow will show you where you buried
your wealth. It's almost as though the gold itself would be shedding
its light to the sky instead of the other way around.</div>
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Leprechauns,
of course, in our current popular imagination, are always wearing
green outfits – which makes sense if you are small, secretly rich,
and you need as much camouflage as you can to keep strangers from
manhandling you. The Irish country is lush with its green flora.
Oddly enough, however, the elfin mascot of Irish kitsch that we think
of is inevitably clad in green is more a product of 20<sup>th</sup>
century marketing than medieval folklore. Up until the late 19<sup>th</sup>
century, the most common depiction of leprechaun in poetry and prose
was in red, and even this was highly dependent upon the location in
Ireland where the leprechaun was believed to be living; in some
locations, he was just as apt to be clad in plain brown leather.</div>
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Here
in the US, the most famous leprechaun is Lucky, the mascot for Lucky
Charms. Lucky seems not to give a hoot for gold, but he's got a meth
addict's mania for oddly-shaped marshmallows. Lucky Charms was the
brainchild of a guy named John Holahan
who in 1962 first came up with the idea of throwing marshmallows into
breakfast cereal. In the history of “Great Food Ideas,” Holahan
stands shoulder to shoulder with John Montagu, the 4<sup>th</sup>
Earl of Sandwich, who came up with the idea of sticking meat and
cheese between bread so he could eat and play cards at the same time.
Holahan's first idea for Lucky Charms is the marshmallows were
supposed to represent the tiny icons that could be added to charm
bracelets (which were in vogue in the early 1960s), but that idea
eventually became crushed under the pagan mysticism of Lucky's occult
affiliation with the Tuatha Dé Danann. According to the secret lore
of General Mills, the different shapes of the marshmallows invoked a
wide variety of shamanistic abilities: Shooting Stars gave consumers
the power to fly, Horseshoes conveyed the power to speed things up,
and Blue Moons could invoke the power of invisibility. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Charms#Marshmallows" target="_blank">Click here if you think I'm making this up</a>.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Does God exist? Of course He does.
How else can we explain that Lucky Charms is no longer available in
Ireland. General Mills stopped selling their Lucky Charms in Ireland
(and the rest of Great Britain for that matter) sometime in the mid
1990s. There are still some diehard fans in Ireland who pay roughly
$12 a box online to have it shipped to them across the wide Atlantic
ocean. General Mills most likely stopped selling the cereal in the
United Kingdom because Lucky the Leprechaun became too politically
incorrect to defend, and it was only a matter of time before someone
called the cereal company out for using a twee character to hock
their sugar. General Mills, of course, never felt obligated to
explain why they decided to pull the plug on their overseas
shipments. You say you don't believe in magic? Let me introduce you
to the great wizard Amazon.com.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking, rhetorically or
otherwise, and I'll be back next week. And may you know nothing but
happiness from this day forward; Happy St. Patrick's Day.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-59125698955358857812013-03-10T11:55:00.002-07:002013-03-10T11:55:56.387-07:00In Praise of Corporate Education -- Encomium to Ephemera
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How many times in the course of a week
do we take the mouse in hand, move the cursor over an underlined
word, and click on a link without so much as a second thought?
Hypertext has given us the gift of intellectual liberation and the
joy of perpetual distraction. Once upon a time in the dark and
declining years of the late 20<sup>th</sup> Century, people who
wanted to read for information were forced to limit their attention
spans to one artifact at a time – on paper nonetheless. In those
primitive days, prior to the Age of the Internet, human brains were
shackled by the inability to focus upon more than a single idea at a
time. Many young people today cannot even imagine the horror of
being required to think critically about a single topic in depth.
Now, however, like our children, we are blessed to live in a
technical paradise where every individual awareness is able to buzz
around cultural ideas with the freedom, curiosity, and intellectual
acumen of bees in a field of infinite flowers. So much “cognitive”
honey comes from our technically-advanced ability to gather the sweet
random nectar of informational blurbs that we ought to live in
perpetual gratitude that – like our friends the bees – humans can
sustain themselves indefinitely on sugar and need never fear any
disease that could theoretically arise from the ceaseless ingestion
of sweets.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I have heard the whining of doubters
and naysayers, Luddites from an obsolete era, who bemoan the
“sacrifice of substance over style” and who remain fettered to
their antiquated belief that knowledge without understanding is
vacuous. These frumpy curmudgeons like to hide behind their rich
vocabularies, their extensive life-experience, and their astute
perspectives as though expertise should matter more than the popular
opinions of wealthy corporations, bribed legislators, or bemused
consumers. Anyone who wants to argue that the sustained
contemplation of significant subjects is more important than the
immediate digestion of poorly-considered sentiments has no place in
either modern education or on Facebook.
</div>
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Teachers today have it so much easier
than their counterparts had it in that long ago era of ten or so
years ago. Back then, instructors had no choice but to rely up a
competent understanding of their disciplines; those teachers of that
bygone age did not enjoy the modern luxury of a checklist of factoids
that students need only memorize without having to go to all the
bother of learning the context that would make it meaningful. As a
society, we have come so far so quickly that it's easy to forget that
it was only a few years back when teachers were charged with
inspiring enthusiasm for their subjects and stimulating intellectual
curiosity among their students rather than galvanizing them with fear
for the next round of high stakes tests. Today's teachers are freed
from the anxiety of authentic assessment (say by getting to know each
student as an individual through their written responses or their
classroom responses), and need only worry about constructing the
mounds of evidence their administrators require to demonstrate they
have methodically, robotically, and tirelessly covered their
checklist of generica (otherwise known as their “state standards.”)
Contemporary teachers have been freed from the burden of even the
need of having to like their subject matter or their students; to
demonstrate success as a teacher today, practitioners need only
manufacture small mountains of paperwork proving that everything that
must be taught has been taught. Teachers who have been able to adapt
to these current mandates can be as sympathetic as headstones as long
as they can provide evidence they have been force-feeding students
nothing but the isolated and disconnected details off their
state-mandated checklists.</div>
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The ubiquity of the internet allows us
instant access to an endless flow of delightfully insubstantial and
ill-considered postulations. Let us all be grateful then that there
is more to life than wisdom and significance. Because consumers are
trained by wildly entertaining advertisements to ignore the
duplicitousness of marketers, it is more than a wonderful coincidence
that corporations have taken over the curriculum now provided to
public school teachers. If, as in days gone by, teachers were
allowed to motivate students to go beyond the platitudes of facile
compliance and encourage students to investigate the complexities of
their subjects (rather than mouth the rote material that will allow
them to demonstrate the competence of their test-taking abilities),
students might find themselves in the uncomfortable and scary
position of actually questioning the thinking behind what they are
being told. Many well-intentioned corporations are paying
legislators good money to insure that state departments of education
lean on local administrators to prevent any nonconformity among their
teaching staff in allowing any original or unauthorized student work
to be considered as evidence of “learning.” Anyone who believes
teachers should be allowed to offer their own opinions on the
competence of their students should be driven out of town on the
horse and buggy they came in on. The only fair way to insure that
every student is being programmed to mindlessly accept the
philanthropic generosity of our corporate overseers is by not
allowing teachers to value any student output that will not be
covered on their standardized tests.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In order for the corporations to
maximize their profits from the production of standardized tests,
they need to be able to rely upon the steady stream of income that
comes from selling remediation materials to the same students who end
up flunking their tests. Without these profits, corporations would
not be able to be so openhanded in their support of state
legislatures. Because of the campaign contributions that many
legislators receive from the testing corporations, it clearly would
appear as a conflict of interest to them if they were to subvert
corporate profits away from their benefactors by allowing schools to
determine for themselves who should or should not graduate from high
school. By taking financing from corporations to assist them in
their ability to govern, legislators have an ethical obligation to
see that the children of their state do not develop the ability to
question the credibility of the ceaseless deluge of useless, random,
and questionable information that mollifies them on their smartphones
and laptops.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Our children deserve a happy life of
mindless acceptance of corporate propaganda because in the perfect
democracy of the internet, all opinions are welcome and the best
opinions come with coupons for inexpensive pizza. Anyone who insists
that real education is difficult and students are better off studying
the complexities of academic life should take a break from being such
a know-it-all and go enjoy some pictures of cats with hilariously
misspelled captions. Grumpy cat agrees with me on this one. (Oh, by the way, I submitted my retirement application this week).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll be
back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-21410099009093321212013-03-03T11:42:00.002-08:002013-03-03T11:42:16.565-08:00They Might Be Giants, But They Definitely Are All Dudes
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<b>Spoiler Alert</b>: This week's
column discusses Bryan Singer's film <i>Jack the Giant Slayer</i>.
If you plan on watching the movie and you expect to be surprised by
anything that happens in the film, then you might be better off
skipping this post. It's not my intention to ruin this movie for
anyone, but I'm not going to try to leave out the typical details
readers would expect a writer to keep out of a film review. I'm not
interested in writing a traditional film review, I want to discuss
the <i>rhetoric</i> of this movie. For what it's worth, I would give
the film a solid three stars out of four. It's pretty much the movie
you would expect to see – lots of eye-popping visual effects,
plenty of gratuitous violence, and a plot that's confined to the
moral conventions of a medieval fairytale like a straitjacket. </div>
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Walking out of the movie theater
last night, my wife, Ruth, was indignant at the ending of <i>Jack the
Giant Slayer</i>. I don't think I'm exaggerating by saying she felt
betrayed by the movie's ending, and it took probably five minutes in
the cinema's parking lot for her to cool down. The source of her
umbrage? She expected a payoff to the feminist undertones developed
earlier in the film. I didn't expect any feminist message by the end
of the film, and I was not disappointed – but then again, I'm a
guy. I didn't expect a movie based on the archetypical notion that
“the princess needs saving” to have any expectation of
consciousness-raising for its audience. If I was surprised by
anything, it was by how much Ruth expected to see the princess
depicted as other than subordinated to Jack, the title character, by
the time the credits started to roll at the end.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Okay, here's what happened: A central
element to the plot was that a population of evil, ugly, and
hygienically-challenged giants could be controlled by anybody who
wore a magical crown that had been crafted centuries before by a
legendary king. During the last 15 minutes of the film, there was
the inevitable struggle for the magical crown that could stop the
giants from laying siege to a castle where they intended to gorge
themselves on the people trapped within. (For a movie that lacked
precious little possibility for product-placement advertising, I
think the producers missed a golden opportunity by not having the
giants refer to the king's stronghold as “the White Castle” and
the soldiers they intended to eat as “sliders,” but that's
neither here nor there.) Anyway, after Jack The Title Character had –
at the last possible moment – realized he could kill the giant who
was holding the magic crown by tossing a magic bean down the
monster's gullet, the farm-boy turned adventurer then rushed outside
in his climactic moment of glory to make the invading horde of giants
take a knee and reconsider their whole strategy of pausing to gloat
before eating their adversaries. What ticked Ruth off was that it
was Jack who came smugly ambling out of the castle to control the
giants and not the Princess Isabelle. Both Jack and Princess Isabelle
had been alone together when the giant – who had been holding the
magic crown – died of IWD (Invasive Weed Disease), and Ruth
fervently expected that common farmhand would turn over the crown to
his princess before going outside to prevent the invading giants from
commencing with their post-victory smorgasbord of human flesh.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Rhetorically, I think I understand why
Ruth had such high expectations for Jack to hand over the magic crown
and let the princess end the film by being the one who saved her
realm from the hungry, hungry, huge guys. And, furthermore, I think I
can explain why this ending never even occurred to the filmmakers
(and if it did, why they probably never gave it a second thought).
Perhaps, if the film had ended with the couple walking out together –
with the two of them holding the magic crown high in the air each
with one hand between them, then the movie would have had a <i>modern</i>
fairytale ending, but it would have failed the internal consistency
of its patriarchal subtext and risked offending its primary audience.
The Golden Rule of Capitalism is “Never risk offending your
primary audience.” Of course, I intend to explain all of this
below.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
First, here's why I think Ruth
expected Princess Isabelle to save the day with the magic crown. At
the very beginning of the movie, the film cut back and forth from two
parents telling reading the same bedtime story to their children –
Jack's dad reading to him the story of the giants' previous defeat at
the hands of magic-crown-holding King Erik and Princess Isabelle's
mother, the current queen, reading the identical story to her. By
inter-splicing these two stories of Jack and the Isabelle in the
opening, it would be reasonable to expect that perhaps the film would
portray the two protagonists as equals. As the film leaps ahead 10
years to show Jack as a young man traveling to the city to sell off a
horse, the viewer soon encounters Isabelle traveling in disguise in
the same market as Jack. The two quickly run into each other.
Again, with this first encounter between the two main characters, it
would not be unreasonable to expect that the rest of the film would
try to maintain a balance of “his story” to “her story.”
Furthermore, given the film's early depiction of young adult
Isabelle's willingness to defy her father's injunction against
traveling alone outside of the castle, it's not difficult to
understand how Ruth (and other people expecting a more contemporary
portrayal of womanhood) would read into the story that this princess
is not going to be the typical traditional heroine who will need a
man to save her, but rather a post-modern, feminist princess who will
demonstrate her independence by seeking out her own adventures –
regardless of whatever her father's patriarchal rule demands of her.
Later, after Isabelle has been transported to the land of the giants
by the miraculous growth of the beanstalk beneath the hut she had
been trapped in, both the film audience and the other characters in
the movie have it pointed out to them that given the choice of
climbing down the beanstalk to return to the safety of her father's
domination and the dangers of independently exploring the territory
of cannibalistic giants, Princess Isabelle opts for the risk of the
giants. While in generations past this decision to go it alone in
the wilderness may have been played off as a sign that a princess is
not smart enough to go back down a beanstalk, in the context of this
film, it is clear that she was bravely looking for her own adventure.
Additionally, when this film is put into the context of other recent
“fairy tale” movies, such as last summer's <i>Snow White and the
Huntsman</i> in which Snow White
fights like a ninja, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that
perhaps by the time the movie ends, Princess Isabelle would end up
holding the crown that controls the dreaded giants as a paragon of
female empowerment.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And
here's why I think it never even occurred to the filmmakers to end
the movie with Isabelle saving the day (or at the very least, sharing
the day with Jack). Although the movie winked at the audience with a
self-awareness of modern irony (in one scene, for example, a giant
attempted to bake “pigs in a blanket” with actual hogs enveloped
in flour blankets), too much attention was given to maintaining the
traditions of patriarchy within the story itself. When Jack
encounters Isabelle at the market for the first time, Jack takes a
punch in the face to defend Isabelle from some ruffians who clearly
had no idea who they were dealing with. From this moment on, it is
clearly a “guy film.” One way to distinguish a “guy film”
from a “chick flick” is count the number of explosions it
depicts, but another is to actually count the number of female
characters. With the exception of the queen who reads to Isabelle as
a child, and whose disappearance by the time Isabelle comes of age is
reduced to nothing more than the screenwriters' need to explain the
princess' “rebelliousness” in her insistence on going off alone,
there are virtually no other female characters in the movie. Not
only are all the giants filthy, rude, and violent, they are all dudes
as well. All the king's knights who travel up the beanstalk to
rescue the princess are men and all the soldiers who fight off the
giants at the movie's conclusion are men. If there are women shown
among the crowd at the market or within the crowded castle, they are
nothing more than scenery. If I wanted to really push how masculine
the undertones of this film really are, I'd point out that the
princess's name “Isabelle” is meant to point out how pretty she
is; she “is a belle.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="" name="firstHeading"></a> As
a viewer, the rhetorical message I think the filmmakers wanted to
send to it's primary audience of young men is that given enough
courage and determination, anyone can overcome the stigma of poverty
to defeat the giants of power, wealth, and influence. Early in the
film, Jack is told in no uncertain terms that no matter what happens,
there is no chance of a romance with the princess because he is a
commoner and only the privileged nobles have any opportunity to court
royalty. Given the gorgeousness of <span lang="en">Nicholas
Hoult (who does an admirable job of playing Jack), there is virtually
no one in the audience who would believe that Jack wouldn't end up
with the princess once he saves her from those awful, smelly, and
apparently misogamistic giants. By the end of the film, not only has
Jack defeated the giants, but he has overcome his humble beginnings
as well, demonstrating the tired and medievally anachronistic message
that there's nothing a little bravery, optimism, and hard work can
overcome – unless you are unfortunate enough to be born too big,
too ugly, and too grimy for Hollywood's perfect aesthetic, then you
deserve whatever gigantic fall to earth that comes to you.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="en"> Keep thinking
rhetorically and I'll be back next week.</span></div>
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<span lang="en"> </span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-70978351442401853432013-02-24T06:39:00.001-08:002013-02-24T06:39:09.416-08:00The Tang of Reality
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W5W5X4sHz-g/USolHWgYfII/AAAAAAAABGQ/hZ5uSByB_io/s1600/tanginclouds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="273" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W5W5X4sHz-g/USolHWgYfII/AAAAAAAABGQ/hZ5uSByB_io/s320/tanginclouds.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The tapestries of our lives are so
tightly woven that it's surprising to discover the seemingly
disparate memories that can come from pulling upon a single thread.
Thus, as I consider the beginnings of my difficulties with organized
religion, it seems odd to me that some of my troubles began with
Tang.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As a child growing up in the 1960's, I
was fascinated by Tang. Tang was a brightly-colored, powered, orange
drink that came in a long, glass jar. Tang wasn't just powdered
orange juice, it was better. All Mom had to do was spoon a little
Tang into a glass, mix in some water, and - voila - there it was: the
perfect beverage.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I knew it was the perfect beverage
because the commercials said so on TV; "Holy Smokes!"(as
Rocky the Flying Squirrel would say to Bullwinkle when he got really
excited), Tang had been created for astronauts to drink in outer
space. I was 8 years old the summer Neil Armstrong became the first
person to walk on the moon, and words can not adequately express the
excitement and coolness I experienced by being able to guzzle the
same drink as the space heroes of Apollo 11.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
At least a quarter of a century has
passed since I had my last glass of Tang, but I can still taste it:
an orange flavor as it would have been replicated on the Starship
Enterprise. "Warning! Warning! Will Robinson!," I could
imagine the robot from Lost In Space saying upon analyzing a glass of
real orange juice and finding pulp in it (few things were as
repulsive to me as a child as orange juice pulp). Tang was
everything a kid could want from a drink: sweet enough to make your
eyes pop, tart enough to make your lips pucker, and smooth enough to
swallow in a gulp.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I remember holding a jar of Tang,
unscrewing the lid, staring into the bright, orange powder, and
thinking, "Science is so cool." As an adult, I don't know
if Tang had really been developed by NASA scientists (picture this: a
group of NASA scientists all wearing long, white lab coats at an
important meeting. The chief scientist is holding a clipboard as he
stands at the head of a long table. He looks at his clipboard for a
moments and says, "Alpha team reports little progress in the
development of an 'O' ring that can withstand the intense
temperatures of reentry; Beta team is struggling still with the
detachment of the second stage boosters, but, hey, good news, Omega
team has perfected the process of turning orange juice into powdered
sugar granulates.") or if Tang was created by someone who was a
genius at marketing products to children (picture another room: this
one contains the 1968 annual awards ceremony for advertisers.
Standing at the dais is a man dressed in a tuxedo, and he's holding a
trophy with something that looks like a small golden cow pie on top
of it. "I'd like to thank the Academy," he says, "for
winning 'Best Scam on American Youth' for the third year in a row.
But I'm not going to rest on my laurels, I'm in the process of
developing a plot to sell tennis shoes to teenagers for $100 a pair."
A gasp goes through the crowd; "It'll never happen,"
someone whispers.). The point is, however, I believed Tang had been
created for astronauts because that's what I had been told, and
that's exactly what children do: they believe whatever they are told.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Some folks see nothing wrong with
exploiting the credulity of children, and furthermore, find it
charming or amusing to tell a small child anything. I expect (though
I've never read any research to confirm this) that very few people
suffer any permanent damage from the discovery that their parents are
in reality the ones who hide money under their pillows in exchange
for lost baby teeth. Unfortunately, the problem I had in being so
gullible as a child was that I tried to believe too much at one time.
In church I had been led to believe that Hell lies a couple of miles
beneath the surface of the ground, and Heaven floats on top the
clouds just above our heads. I had no problem believing this because
first, I was a child; and second, the integrity of the people who
told me these things was beyond question.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As a child, there was no question that
Heaven floated on top the clouds within the atmosphere of this planet
because I had been told so in church, and while I could imagine
angels poking holes in the clouds to keep an eye on us down here
below, I could not imagine the people in church lying about it.
Church, as far as I could surmise as a child, was the very last place
a person would want to tell a lie. Furthermore, the idea that Heaven
is located in the clouds just a few miles above our heads was
supported in dozens of ways. In Sunday school, I was taught the
Bible story of how God had grown angry when a group of people had
built a tower so tall and so close to Heaven that it trespassed on
God's personal space. God not only knocked it down, but He scattered
the people who built it across the entire planet and made them speak
different languages so they wouldn't try it again. Also, my mother
owned an oversized, illustrated Bible, and I can remember the sense
of awe and wonder I felt at looking at an incredibly rendered drawing
of Jacob lying at the foot of a magnificent staircase with angles
ascending and descending from Heaven in the clouds. Moreover, I had
no reason to doubt the ministers who assured us that after Jesus had
risen from the dead, eyewitnesses had watched him ascending into
Heaven. On the day of the Ascension, Christ had floated up into his
home in the clouds; he had not merely grinned like Alice's Cheshire
cat and disappeared.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Every bit of religious instruction I
had as a child taught me that Heaven was a real place that floated on
the top of the clouds. The evidence from Bible stories, the
testimony of Sunday school teachers and ministers, the portrayals of
oil paintings and other illustrations in everything from religious
literature to magazine advertising convinced me of the truth of this.
And yet . . . there was Tang, the preferred beverage of astronauts.
I had held the amazing jar of orange powder in my hands; I had
watched with my own eyes the miraculous transformation of plain water
into the world's most perfect beverage. And, with every glass of
Tang came the confirmation that people had traveled straight through
the clouds on their way to the moon, and they never saw hide nor hair
of the denizens who lived there.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
After Moses left Egypt to wander with
his people lost in the wilderness for 40 years, God sustained them, I
was told, with manna that fell from Heaven. I've never tasted manna;
however, twenty-five years after my last glass of that tart orange
drink, I can still taste the Tang.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically and I'll be back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-90417061656278568532013-02-10T11:00:00.001-08:002013-02-10T11:00:34.027-08:00Love People and Avoid Falling Objects
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
No one who has ever stubbed a toe
against something in the dark while trying to make their way to the
bathroom in the middle of the night has ever seriously questioned the
existence of their external reality. If there is one thing that
reminds us that we are indeed trapped within the soft, tangible
sponge of our human flesh, it's a sudden and unexpected jolt of
stabbing pain. In the dark whenever a traumatic sting of reality
creates a brief flash of throbbing fireworks within our heads, the
philosophical question that bursts into our consciousness is not
whether the thing we banged into is imaginary or concrete, but rather
why does it hate us so much that it would attack us when we least
expect it? While there may be times when after waking in the middle
of the night, we lie awake in the silent comfort of our beds and
contemplate who we are and what we're doing with our lives; when the
whiny demands of our bladder force us to leave the safe confines of
our sheets to navigate the nocturnal quagmire of our homes, we know
exactly who we are: we are the vulnerable victims of inanimate
objects that are waiting for just that right opportunity to hurt us.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Do inanimate objects really hate us
and want to hurt us? Of course they do, I don't know a single person
who has not at some time in their lives been smacked, whacked, or
bashed by a devious, lifeless thingamajig that took precisely the
most opportune moment to snap, break, or splinter. Show me someone
who doesn't believe that nonliving things hate us, and I'll show you
someone who has never had to start a lawnmower. If you want to
believe that our physical reality is not filled with sharp objects
that are yearning to poke us or heavy objects that are craving the
chance to fall upon us, then that is certainly your <i>prerogative</i>,
but I would remind you that the word “prerogative” comes from the
Latin <i>pre</i> meaning “before” and <i>rogare</i> meaning “to
ask” so, in other words, if you go through life expecting not to
get hurt by inanimate objects, then you are – in the immortal words
of Charles Darwin – “asking for it.” Okay, maybe Charles
Darwin never said that, but he would have said it if he weren't so
afraid of something falling on his head. Or maybe that was Sir Isaac
Newton who eventually learned not to sit under apple trees and who
was also a pretty smart fellow even if he did use far too many vowels
to spell his first name.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Although you may be wondering if I
have a point to all of this, (and trust me, you're not alone in this
as I have spent the last half hour wondering the same thing myself),
the crux of it all is if the physical world doesn't care all that
much for us – icing up our car windows to make us late for work or
spilling hot cups of coffee on our clothes fleeting moments before
important meetings with people who then have to wonder if we might
make it a habit of going around looking like scruffy refugees –
then it is vital that we try our best to love one another, stains and
all. If the world is determined to send spiteful clods of goo and
gloom into our lives, then we need to recognize just how important it
is to look out for each other and love each other regardless of our
imperfections. All of us are stuck with the same menacing gravity
looking to trip up our feet and the same winter clouds hovering above
our heads looking to darken our perspectives. It's not a coincidence
that we celebrate Valentine's Day in mid-February; if we didn't have
little cardboard hearts to remind us that it's the love we have for
each other that brings meaning to our existence, then we might not
make it to March.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I'm not just talking about the Big
Romantic Love, either. I've been married for more than a quarter of
a century, and I am truly blessed to be able to say I have that Big
Romantic Love. No one has it better than I do when it comes to
having a supportive, affectionate spouse. The love I feel for (and
from) my wife, Ruth, has saved my life more often than all the safety
belts in America has saved the lives of automobile passengers in the
past fifty years; nonetheless it's the Bigger Love, the love for what
happens to all of us, that provides the spark that inspires the
internal desire to keep moving forward when the world keeps offering
reasons to retreat into solitude and despair.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
While it's easy to argue that love
means a lot of different things to lots of different people, the
Bridge of Love spans everything from momentary affection to lifelong
ardor, what it really comes down to, however, is our ability to
communicate that we care for each other. The love I feel for others
– my family, my friends, my neighbors, my co-workers, my students,
and those kind-hearted strangers who are willing to let me know that
we are safe in each other's presence – may not equal the depth and
intensity of the love I feel for my wife, but it's the totality of
our mutual love that makes life worth living. While it's often
tempting to surrender to cynicism and chalk up all expressions of
fondness to the marketing forces of florists and confectioners, let's
remember that a simple post-it note can be as powerful as a diamond
in letting someone know that you care about them.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A story: Years ago, in the early
decades of Christianity, a man was imprisoned for marrying Roman
soldiers who were forbidden by the empire from wedding their
sweethearts. The commanders of the legion in those days believed
that soldiers who left wives behind were less willing to risk their
lives in the heat of battle. While in prison awaiting the day of his
execution, the man became friendly with one of his guards, a jailer
whose name was Asterius. After they grew to know each other well
enough, Asterius asked his prisoner if there were any truth to the
stories of miraculous healing that were sometimes attributed to
conversion to Christianity. Asterius had a daughter who had been
born blind, and he was willing to bring his girl to meet with the
prisoner if there were any chance that he might be able to help her.
Before long the prisoner and the daughter of his jailer became good
friends. She brought him food and he gave her the feeling that there
was more to life than merely surviving from one day to the next –
even though as a man whose execution day had been set, that pretty
much summed up what he should have been doing. On the day of his
execution, the man gave Asterius a note to give to his daughter that
said she should never give up hope and that his love for her would
survive well beyond his actual physical death. “She won't be able
to see this,” Asterius told the prisoner. “I believe she will,”
he said. He had signed the note, “from your Valentine,” and
this, of course, was the first Valentine note ever given. She did
see the note; her eyesight had been miraculously restored. Although
Valentine, the prisoner, had been put to death, his affection for the
daughter of the guard who would take him to his doom continued to
live on and still continues to live on in the small acts of love we
do for each other in his memory.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Anyone who would say they need a story
to be literally and historically true in order to believe in it
entirely misses the point of St.Valentine's Day. It's not facts that
sustain us in the cold dark days of February; it's love. You can't
“prove” love. You can only share love. And, perhaps, hope the
next random sharp object to poke you in the chest is the point of
Cupid's arrow. This week, in honor of Valentine's Day, I'm even
going to try to love the people I don't care for very much. To
paraphrase John Lennon, <i>imagine</i> everyone doing that.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically and I'll be
back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-83794868631270243852013-02-03T12:15:00.000-08:002013-02-03T12:15:02.052-08:00Beowulf Sets the BarThis post is lovingly dedicated to Stella Singer and Josie Bloomfield.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This week Beowulf died. . . again; this
time, perhaps, for the last time. The final tests are sitting on my
desk waiting to be graded, and since I'm retiring from teaching
public high school this spring, this is very likely the last time
I'll be there when the great monster killer draws his final breath.
More than a few of my seniors felt a quiver of relief as Beowulf
expired from an enormous dragon bite to the neck; there's always a
group of students who bore quickly and who live in perpetual hope
that the next unit will be marginally more interesting than whatever
we are studying now. For me, it was a poignant moment, as perhaps it
should be in the presence of any death, let alone that of a great
king; however, my grief this time was not for the mythic hero as he
expired from the scalding, lethal venom that coursed through his
veins, but for myself. This time as Beowulf died, I felt sorry for
myself. Beowulf may be dead, but I'm just getting too old to take
another group of high schoolers back to Geatland.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Not all of my seniors, of course, are
cynical, apathetic, or burned-out, and I remain extremely grateful
that there are still some students who allow themselves to get swept
up in the ancient adventure of this classic literary journey.
Despite the best efforts of political factions who work tirelessly to
wring every bit of joy out of teaching and learning, a core group of
students – who actually like thinking and who don't mind thinking
about difficult material – still persist in the habit of finding
life interesting. It was for them, as much as myself, that I grew
sentimental over the death of Beowulf. Certainly, next year when
I'm gone (and appropriately enough the building I'm teaching in now
becomes a parking lot), the school district will find someone to pass
out the Beowulf books and cover the material. However, it won't be
me, and never again, will I have a chance to share some of the
intriguing insights that I have gained from repeatedly reading and
explaining the text. So, with your indulgence, here are some of the
life lessons I've learned from reading Beowulf. Keep in mind,
however, I am not a medieval scholar; I'm a rhetorician. The aspects
of the text that excite my attention might cause some serious
consternation to some of my friends who really understand the history
of the period and know what they are talking about when discussing
<i>Beowulf</i>. So, Stella and Josie (who are such terrific
<i>medievalists</i> that they do not need to rely upon autocorrect to
spell the word “medievalist”), please forgive any of my 21<sup>st</sup>
century anachronistic goofiness that may cause you to think I give a
doctorate in English a bad reputation.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lesson #1: <i>Every problem has a
mother</i>. If I had to choose the greatest life lesson that comes
from studying <i>Beowulf</i>, it's that life is always waiting for
you to think that you have a specific problem completely licked
before it reveals to you that you're not even half finished with it
yet. Anyone who has ever tried to keep a worn-out old car
street-worthy knows exactly what I'm talking about. In the story of
<i>Beowulf</i>, the greatest, strongest, bravest mortal to ever kill
a sea monster (while swimming in full chainmail armor) arrives in
Denmark to help its king, Hrothgar, deal with a real-life bogeyman
who has been showing up at night to cannibalize his soldiers. After
building the greatest drinking hall in history, Hrothgar soon learned
he had to cut the taps off early each evening because if he didn't, a
10 foot Nordic hillbilly would come in and snack on his men after
they had passed out on the floor. At first, our sympathies are with
Grendel (the mutant yokel from the sticks), because, hey, who doesn't
enjoy a Danish as a midnight treat? However, for the Danes, having
to leave the most glorious mead-hall ever built after just a couple
of rounds of Jägermeister is like owning a 72 inch plasma flatscreen
TV and only being able to watch PBS. It's not something to brag
about to the neighbors, anyway.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So, after 12 years of being man-chewed
by Grendel, Hrothgar is more than a little pessimistic when Beowulf
shows up and claims he can kill the guy. He offers Beowulf a near
gameshow list of prizes if he can exterminate Grendel. On the one
hand, Hrothgar figures if somehow, miraculously, Beowulf can succeed
it would be worth whatever it costs to get back to some serious
Viking-style drinking, and on the other hand, if he finds Beowulf's
remains half-eaten on the floor the next morning, then it wouldn't be
the first time he had to have his people clean up that sort of mess.
When Hrothgar goes to check on the results the next day, he is more
than a little surprised to see Beowulf standing gleefully naked while
waving Grendel's arm around like a boy scout learning semaphore.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Naturally, that night Hrothgar and
Beowulf party like it's 1399. Over dinner, Hrothgar rewards Beowulf
with an impressive stack of gifts, and Beowulf replies that he was
glad to lend a hand (or in this case, an entire arm from the shoulder
down). All of their company pass out in a glorious drunken stupor the
way God intended them to (or at least, according to the theology of
the anonymous Christian monk who first put the story to paper). When
they woke up the next day, however, everyone was deeply disappointed
to discover that nothing makes a hangover worse than the suddenly
recognition that you still have a monster problem. And that
realization – in a story about a guy who can hold his breath for
half a day while swimming underwater or who can hit a dragon in the
head so hard that it shatters his sword – is a truth that goes
beyond time itself: you're never really finished with a problem until
you've dealt with its mom.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lesson #2: <i>A good reputation is
better than a cave full of treasure</i>. Although Beowulf had no
idea when he was tearing Grendel's arm off with his bare hands that
he would also have to go after Grendel's mother the next day, the
idea was not entirely unappealing. After all, Beowulf had not
traveled from Geatland (which is now a part of modern Sweden) to
merely return with a boatload of expensive rewards, he had gone with
the intention of making a name for himself. Killing a second monster
would only add to his renown. To Hrothgar, his men, and Beowulf's
crew, the second demonic fiend looked to be much more difficult to
kill than the first; whereas Grendel would come to them, Grendel's
Mother would have to be killed in her own cave, miles under the sea,
and thus, she had the home field advantage.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When it came time to leap into the
dark waters, Beowulf did not hesitate to take on the half day swim
underwater to go after Grendel's Mother because, after all, what's a
little thing like breathing when there's hero work to be done? After
fighting off a few other sea monsters on his way to the cave, Beowulf
finally located his second adversary standing next to an enormous
pile of treasure. He knew he was in the right place when he also
noticed Grendel's body on the floor lying next to the trove of
riches. The first sword Beowulf used against Grendel's Mother (lent
to him by a cowardly thane of Hrothgar who did not have the nerve to
go after her himself) turned out to be about as useful as wheels on a
rocking chair, and Grendel's Mother nearly killed him before he
figured that out. As fate would have it though, Beowulf spotted a
giant's sword mixed in with the treasure, and it turned out to be
just the thing for killing a big, ugly, angry sea-hag. Despite
Hollywood's assertion otherwise, Grendel's Mother was no Angelina
Jolie.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
After killing Grendel's mom, Beowulf
decides he is not at all interested in any of the treasure that's
strewn about cave, and so he decides to cut off Grendel's head and
take that as a souvenir instead.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The acid in Grendel's blood dissolves
the blade of the giant sword, and thus, Beowulf is left holding a
huge, useless handle. By the time Beowulf gets back to the surface,
only his men were left waiting to see if he had survived; Hrothgar's
men gave up hours before. When Beowulf climbs out of the water
carrying Grendel's head and the heavy hilt that no one else can even
lift, no one bothers to ask why he left so much treasure behind in
order to come back with the creepy head of his enemy and a ruined
giant's sword. Beowulf didn't want the treasure because any treasure
he would have salvaged would have belonged to his king (who happened
to also be his uncle) back in Geatland, and because Beowulf had no
interest in wealth. As far as Beowulf was concerned, what matters
most in life is what people know about what you've done; having
possession of expensive, shiny stuff doesn't even factor into it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lesson #3: <i>It's all good as long as
you haven't killed any family</i>. In the third part of the story,
Beowulf returns home to Geatland and hands over his bounty to his
king and uncle, Hygelac. In turn, Hygelac gives Beowulf some good
stuff back, but it's really besides the point because Beowulf knows
he'll never have to pay for a drink again for the rest of his life.
Later after his uncle dies, Beowulf is offered the throne by his
aunt, Queen Hygd, but he declines because he knows it's not really
his right to become king (his cousin, Heardred was next in line).
Hygd wanted Beowulf to become king because she knew her own son,
Heardred, was too young and inexperienced to last very long as king.
She was right; before long, Heardred has died on a battlefield, and
Beowulf becomes king. Then, nothing happens for 50 years.
Presumably, Beowulf's half-century reign as king is uneventful
because no one wanted to battle with an army lead by Beowulf.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This leads then to the final epic
fight of the story between Beowulf and a fire-breathing 40 foot
lizard. Even though Beowulf had to be well into his 70s by the time
a dragon goes on a rampage and starts burning down random Geat
villages, Beowulf slaps on his old armor and heads out after the
beast. Beowulf takes a dozen of his best men with him, but when it
comes time to fight the dragon, all but one of them run away. At
this point, we learn that Beowulf has never had a son and his last
surviving relative, a thane named Wiglaf, is the only one of
Beowulf's crew willing to stand next to him as he fights his final
monster. The dragon takes a fatal knife to the belly, but only after
it has already delivered a terminal bite to Beowulf's neck.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As he is dying, Beowulf says to
Wiglaf, (and I'm paraphrasing, of course) “Don't worry about my
dying. It's all good. God will take me into Heaven because I always
kept my word, I never instigated a fight, and I never killed a family
member.” This, as much as anything, gives me hope. How awesome
would it be if, upon our own deaths, God held us to the same
standards Beowulf expected to face in the afterlife? I, for one,
would be much relieved to find out that bar we had to cross to reach
Heaven was pretty much being honest, not looking to start a fight,
and not killing any kinfolk. And now I've said that to my students
for the last time, I can only hope they can live up to it. God bless
us, one and all.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll
be back next week.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-19865706583465615322013-01-27T10:35:00.001-08:002013-01-27T11:57:15.181-08:00This First Cut is the Deepest: Getting Past Writer's Block<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-13jSfLiAtok/UQVzS_sloaI/AAAAAAAAA_8/5BAFo_msIyE/s1600/450px-ChainsawartinBrienz.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-13jSfLiAtok/UQVzS_sloaI/AAAAAAAAA_8/5BAFo_msIyE/s1600/450px-ChainsawartinBrienz.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Polonius (upon seeing Hamlet engage
in a book): What do you read my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words.
[Act 2, Scene 2]</i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
About half an hour north from where I
live on my little ten acre homestead in rural Southeast Ohio, the
local community college used to host an annual fair and trade show
for foresters and lumberjacks. One of the regular features of this
expo was an ongoing demonstration of wood sculptures carved entirely
through the use of chainsaws. It was one of the displays that kept
folks coming back year after year. No matter how many times I
witnessed it firsthand, the intricacy of the detail that the carvers
could achieve with such large, heavy, awkward, and dangerous
equipment never failed to surprise and astonish. It wasn't magic,
but it seemed like it. It was almost something you would have to see
with your own eyes to believe: burly men swinging chainsaws with wild
precision attacking huge logs to whittle out beautiful works of art.
That artists can create beauty at all is a mystery worth careful
consideration; that such beauty can be made with raucous implements
that can devour human flesh as quickly as it can chew lumber moves
our contemplation from an appreciation of the sublime to an
admiration of the surreal.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Not to put too fine a point on it, but
I don't sling chainsaws; I sling words. Big fat clumsy words that are
just as dangerous in their own ways as chainsaws but without the risk
of immediate amputation.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A slip of a chainsaw can cause a
wood-carver to lose part of a foot, but a poorly reasoned idea can
wound a reputation for a lifetime. I don't really expect that
anything I write will be discussed in the distant future, but if any
of my views should somehow escape the black hole of obscurity from
which I compose, I would want them to be good ideas. I suppose that
is as much as any of us who write can ever hope for: a gratuitous
optimism that somehow our good ideas will linger awhile beyond our
mortal time frame and the bad ideas will rest with our bodies beneath
a solid six feet of dirt. Beyond my own little world of experience
and verbiage, I want the same to hold universally true for all
writers; regard it as my “rhetorical creed,” perhaps, but I want
to believe that good ideas that have been well articulated have a
Darwinian advantage over bad ideas that are poorly expressed.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Here's the deal – almost everyone of
us has had one of those rare moments when an excellent idea has
presented itself and then, while considering the prospect of the
enormity of the task of putting the idea into writing, has walked
away from the project because the climb to articulation seemed too
steep. Those of us who write (and teach writing) face the same
mountainous climb as Sisyphus when it comes to putting ideas into
comprehensible prose. The understanding that the words that end up
in our sentences will never fully live up to expressing our ideas can
produce a vertigo that prevents many people from writing altogether.
While chainsaws threaten to tear into skin and muscle, criticism of
our writing, especially the writing we care the most about, threatens
to rip into our souls. It's not just the effort to climb the
mountain where we reach the peak to where we have said what we needed
to say that intimidates us; it's the expectation that behind us,
holding on to our rope, is the deadweight of the internal critic who
wants to find fault with every verbal choice we make. Sometimes when
we are trying to write, it's as though we can hear that annoyed and
anxious climber behind us saying, “Be careful where you put that
comma or you could fall to your doom! Are you sure you want to use
that adverb there? It could mean something else to another reader,
and the next thing you know you're out fifty feet of good rope.”
Given the difficulty of saying things well with an interesting style
that nonetheless conforms to the dictates of Standard English, it is
a wonder that mere human beings strive at writing anything.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The question, then, is “How do we do
it? How can we carry our ideas up the steep mountain of composition
without getting overburdened from either the weight of our own
condemnation or the heavy criticism of others?” There is,
unfortunately, no single easy answer to this problem; there is no sky
lift that will hoist you effortlessly up to a finished composition.
There are, however, many solid techniques that struggling writers can
use for making the journey easier. The first, perhaps, is to stay
aware that writing is usually difficult for most people. Knowing
that writing is difficult doesn't excuse you from not doing it, but
it can help you get past the idea that it should be easier.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The second trick for developing
fluency in writing is to focus on where you are now instead of
continually reminding yourself of where you want to be. As an
alternative to feeling overwhelmed by the amount of distance you need
to cover to finish the project, think about how much easier it is to
merely write the next sentence or polish off the paragraph you're
working on. Instead of thinking in terms of “miles to go,” think
in terms of “steps ahead.” Slow progress builds momentum. Once
you get so far, writing often takes off on its own.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A third strategy for getting writing
done is to realize that everything and anything can be changed later
so it's better to just get things down poorly and revise later than
it is to attempt perfection on the first try. Perfection is
never going to happen; you can reach a point of deep satisfaction
with your prose without harboring the needless expectation you have
to love every word as it appears in your composition.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A fourth important tactic to keep
writing going is to see readers as co-travelers instead of as
audience members. A co-traveler is someone who goes along with you
for the journey, but an audience member is there to witness a
performance. While writing can be thought of as a performance, it
shouldn't be the point of your writing. When performance takes
precedence over message, the point of the journey (your message) can
get lost. Your concerns regarding other people's opinions on how well
you are climbing can overshadow your concern for completing the
journey. A co-traveler is there to help you find your way and to
enjoy your company; thinking about how best to accentuate your
reader's experience is a better alternative to feeling the weight of
worrying about responding to a critic's displeasure.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Finally, and perhaps the best trick
for making writing easier is to take yourself and your prose less
seriously. While writing is always going to carry the risk of
misinterpretation or offense to other people's sensibilities, you can
take comfort in the knowledge that you are almost certainly going to
care more about the inadequacies of your writing than other people
will. If you start up a mountain and realize this is not the scenery
you expected, then you've got the choice of plodding on ahead to see
where it takes you or starting afresh up a different mountain.
Sometimes, allowing the words to come out to see what they have to
tell you is completely worth the anxiety of not knowing what lies
beyond the turn up ahead.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If writing isn't your thing, I guess
there are always going to be chainsaws. On the other hand, if you
want to write on a Sunday morning, you are far less likely to disturb
the neighbors than if you were in the backyard knocking out your next
masterpiece with your 110 decibel Husqvarna. Keep thinking
rhetorically and I'll be back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-32379928127074567632013-01-20T11:44:00.001-08:002013-01-20T11:44:43.747-08:00Tongue in Cheek with a Mind of Its Own
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Rhetoric is the Art of speaking
suitably upon any Subject.” – John Kirkby, <i>A New English
Grammar</i>, 1746.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Somewhere over the rainbow, way up
high, there's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby.” – Yip
Harburg</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Have you ever accidentally bit the
inside of your cheek and then noticed over the course of the next few
days how often your tongue goes there to fiddle with the injury?
Perhaps while sitting at a conference table or across a meal with
some friends, the disturbing thought might creep into your
consciousness that you probably look slightly foolish with your
tongue pushing your cheek out in curious gyrations. Without having
been aware of it, you may have appeared to the people you are sitting
with as to have taken up the habits of chewing tobacco or harboring
small rodents in your mouth. Once you become aware that you are doing
the tongue-to-cheek yoga, it seems like it should be easy to stop,
but it never is. You can say to yourself, “Okay, tongue, let it
go,” and then a few minutes later, there's your tongue rolling over
the spot again like a dog with its favorite chew toy. It's in these
moments when we realize that our conscious brain may drive the car,
but there are other passengers in there riding along, playing with
the radio, and leaving snack food containers in the back seat.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Why is this? How is it that our
primary consciousness can make a direct and simple request for our
tongue to stop what it's doing, but the tongue merely waits until
consciousness is preoccupied with something else before it continues
its rumba with the inside cheek of the mouth? How can this one
muscle of our body be so disciplined when we ask it to savor a flavor
or enunciate a thought become so independent and rude when it wants
to massage a minor mouth injury? Clearly, the conscious mind likes
to think it's the captain of the ship, steering our lives through the
sea of existence, but somehow our bodies have hidden crew members who
pursue their own agendas well beneath the ordinary apprehension of
awareness. Every weekday morning as I step into the shower, I remind
myself of how much time I actually have to bathe, to get dressed, and
to scurry out of the house without being late for work. Once in the
shower, however, the soothing warmth of the water commandeers the
body, and after a few minutes when the work-brain begins to insist it
needs to move along or be late, the rest of the body sings a chorus
of “not yet, not yet” and the eternal struggle between mind and
body continues like a ceaseless round of tug of war.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It is in these moments when our
primary identities seem to want one thing while other subconscious
influences seem to desire something else that our central conscious
identity – the one who thinks of itself as “you” and who uses
the first-person “I” to refer to itself – catches glimpses of
the other energies that motivate our decisions. As much as we may
want to think of ourselves as singular, rational, self-determined
individuals who make conscious choices based on evidence and
experience, the reality is we are actually a menagerie of wild ideas,
feral emotions, and peculiar behaviors that, for the most part, the
zookeeper of our conscious keeps contained and sedated for the sake
of propriety and self-preservation. Just as our tongue seeks out the
sore, sometimes this precarious collection of rogue ideas and
unexpressed passions looks for cracks in our central understanding of
“what's real” or “what's true”, and this probing can lead us
to ongoing feelings of anxiety over comprehending both our the
universe and our role within it.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sometimes, at seemingly random
moments, we find ourselves struck with an awkward discomfort for
being nothing other than ourselves, and we wonder, “Where is this
worrying coming from?” It's coming from the discomfort of being in
charge of a zoo where all the animals want fed at the same time.
It's coming from the sneaking suspicion that there's more going on
than we'll ever know or be able to get a handle on. It's coming from
a bewildering onslaught of information and a never-ending discussion
on what we're supposed to care about. Well, what if don't care about
the same things as other people? There's so much we are supposed to
care about – from personal hygiene to world hunger – how can we
care about it all? No wonder we sometimes find ourselves overwhelmed
by life, and we can't exactly put a finger on what is bothering us.
Perhaps it is because being human means we are going to be bothered
by a lot of things: ideas, feelings, and behaviors that overwhelm our
ability to cope with them all at one time.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
One of the wisest counselors I ever
knew once said, “The word “should” is the most mentally ill
word in the English language because whenever we are using the word,
we are not dealing with the way things are but dealing with an
illusive concept of how things ought to be. The world we actually
live in will never be the place we think it 'should' be.” This
idea – that reality ought to be different than it is – is perhaps
the most dangerous beast we try to contain within us. While there is
nothing wrong with seeking a better life for ourselves, our families,
our nation, or our world at large, merely complaining that the world
needs to change is an attempt to escape our reality rather than deal
with it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This, for me, is where rhetoric comes
in. Being able to communicate well with others, appreciating the
factors that are mostly likely to influence thinking and behavior,
are not the contemptible tools of manipulation, but the implements
for carving out our place in the world. Though rhetoric is often
maligned as the empty bombast of politicians and snake oil swindlers
use on the naive, its true purpose is not to mesmerize people into
believing what is not true, but to highlight the most sentient
aspects of whatever we honestly do believe is true. As much as
rhetoric is the study of how to convince others of the rightness of
our particular ideas, it is also the art of consciously tracking the
ways in which we talk to ourselves when we are seeking the answers to
the quintessential questions that afflict our mortal existence.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There are, of course, many other
options for remedying the psychic discomforts that come with modern
human existence. Some people find release from anxiety in prescribed
anti-depressants while others sedate themselves through alcohol and
other widely available psychotropics. Some folks have found great
relief through the salve of religion while others have found equal
solace in the concepts of philosophy. I don't recommend it for
everyone, but I have found the study of rhetoric to be an excellent
tonic for ongoing relief from the reoccurring angst that comes with
the chronic fretfulness of contemporary life. The study of rhetoric
has helped me understand the boundaries of reality and become more
comfortable with the acknowledgement that there's always going to be
more to life than merely distinguishing between what is right from
what is wrong and separating what does exist from what does not.
Unfortunately, better understanding of theory does not always lead to
better practice. This past week after telling myself I was not going
to lose my temper at a presentation on “improved educational
practices,” I completely went off on a rant after the presenter
used the phrase “inarguable research” when describing how
treating children as cogs rather than human beings will results in
higher achievement scores. I guess when it comes to controlling my
tongue, I sometimes have more to worry about than it roaming around
the inside of a cheek.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My original intentions when setting up
this blog was to focus upon the arguments that people use to defend
beliefs that diverge from mainstream thinking. More and more,
however, as weeks have passed, I have come to the realization that
the question that concerns me most is not really “why do some
people believe in the existence of spaceships, ghosts, werewolves, or
angels?” but rather what does the word “existence” really mean?
When we draw the line of existence, between what is and what is not,
how do we define the context for the conditions in which things can
exist from when they cannot? This is my ongoing journey, and for the
readers who are going down this path with me every week, I cannot say
how much I appreciate your company and your comments.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I will
return next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-64812588763439504412013-01-13T11:47:00.001-08:002013-01-13T11:47:42.578-08:00Hot Under the Collar: Spontaneous Human Combustion
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“When you're hot, you're hot, and
when you're not, you're not.” – Jerry Reed</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Goodness gracious, great balls of
fire!” – Jerry Lee Lewis</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I remember sitting in a ninth grade
science class and hearing about “spontaneous combustion” for the
first time. The teacher was explaining that sometimes natural
biological and chemical processes can lead certain materials to
ignite all on their own without human intervention. The idea of some
thing suddenly and unexpectedly bursting into flames boggled my
teenaged brain. The idea made the world a different place for me, a
more dangerous place; until that moment, I did not know that anything
could catch fire all by itself. “It happens sometimes in hay
barns,” the teacher said. “If a farmer bales his hay before it's
dry enough, then the moisture in the hay can cause it to build up
enough compressed heat to start a fire. Poof! Just like that, a
mixture of heat, oxygen, and other gases resulting from fermentation
inside the bale can cause hay to explode into flames.” I was still
trying to decide whether I wanted to believe whether things could
actually, just on their own, erupt into flames when a classmate
raised his hand and declared, “It happens to people too.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“What does?” the teacher asked.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Sometimes people just burst into
flames,” my classmate offered. “It's called 'Spontaneous Human
Combustion.' I read about it. It happened to a character in one of
Dickens' books.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“There's not a lot of evidence for
that really happening,” the teacher replied. “Let's just stick
to what we know can happen.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“If it never happens, then why is
there a term for it?” The student was persistent. “If it never
happens, then where did Dickens get the idea that it did? He didn't
just make it up, did he?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A weird nervous tension filled the
room. It was one of those rare moments when even the students who
never pay attention seemed to be paying attention. We could see the
frustration on the teacher's face, but we couldn't really understand
it. The science teacher seemed to be getting angry, but we couldn't
tell why.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Look,” the teacher said with
about 50% more volume than necessary. “This is science class.
Here we study what can actually happen in the world. In English
class, you don't have to worry about what actually can or can't
happen. Charles Dickens was under no obligation to write about the
real world. Dickens told stories. Stories aren't real. In the real
world, hay bales sometimes catch themselves on fire, but people
don't. Now, let's move on.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But, of course, my squirrelly freshman
classmate was not going to let it go. Something he said had touched
a nerve, and he wanted to find out what the teacher would do if he
continued to push it. Back when I was a student, these experiments
typically ended with someone getting kicked out of the room and sent
to the principal's office. “How do YOU know what's real?” the
student asked. “Charles Dickens was one of the most popular writers
in history. How can you say you know more than he does about
spontaneous human combustion?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Science isn't about what's
popular,” the teacher said emphatically. “Science is about what
people can prove. It doesn't matter how popular Dickens was.
Dickens also wrote about ghosts. Lots and lots of people believe in
ghosts, but that doesn't mean they exist. What we talk about in
science class is based on evidence, not wild stories!” At that
point, the science teacher commanded us to open our textbooks to the
end of the chapter and to start answering the review questions on
page 64. The kid who had been arguing for the existence of
spontaneous human combustion continued to hold his hand in the air,
but the teacher began ignoring it. After a few minutes, the teacher
relented and said to the kid, “If this has anything to do with
what's on page 64, go ahead, but if this has anything to do with
people catching fire, I don't want to hear about it.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“I was just wanting to know how many
people would have to catch fire before you felt you had enough
evidence to believe that people catch fire,” the student said
smugly.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The teacher sent the student to the
principal's office. “What'd I do?” the kid asked repeatedly as
he walked out the door. “I told him I didn't want to talk about
it, and he wouldn't let it go,” the teacher said to the rest of us
after the kid had left, and the door shut behind him. Nobody said
anything to the teacher; we went back to silently writing out the
discussion questions on our notebook paper. I didn't say it out
loud, naturally, but I remember thinking, “What the heck just
happened here?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Although I did not understand back
then why the teacher became so upset, I think I have a pretty good
understanding of it now. This particular teacher has spent years
becoming a science teacher because there was something within his
love for science that spoke directly to his identity. Something in
the way science explained the world outside of him helped him define
his inner reality as well. Just like the rest of us, this teacher
carried a psychic model of the world in his head that explained to
him why things happen. When the student challenged his psychic model
of how the universe works by insisting on the possibility of
spontaneous human combustion, the teacher responded as though this
challenge to his way of thinking was equivalent to a personal attack
on his character. When the student insisted on an explanation for
something that did not fit into this teacher's personal scientific
worldview, the teacher did not experience the student's questions as
a legitimate exploration of reality but as a subversive and
disrespectful expression of insolence. In other words, what could
have been an amusing discussion on the remote possibility of people
bursting into flames turned instead into a defensive, uneasy
declaration of authority and dogmatism. Perhaps had it been a
different day or had the comment come from a different student, the
teacher would have responded by making a joke or by saying something
to the effect that science has a low tolerance for unorthodox
phenomena, but on this day, the teacher heard the reverberation of
impertinence echo within him from his student's remarks, and he
exiled the heretic to the dark retribution of the principal's office.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I suppose that everyone who has ever
attended public school has at some point been there when an ordinary
conversation takes a grim turn, and contention, rather than real
flames, flared up seemingly without warning. And, of course, this
type of human interaction is not by any means limited to schools.
People can get angry anywhere. All of us at some time in our lives
have been victims to the blind allegiance we give to the models of
reality we build in our heads, and heaven help those who accidentally
bump into our most heartfelt beliefs and threaten their stability.
In our heads, we construct scaffolding hobbled together from odd
scrapes of old parental warnings, religious indoctrination, civil
obligations, and toothpaste advertising. On top of this scaffolding,
we heap layers of desire for the people we want to be, along with the
debris we create from the yearning not to be the people we once were.
Do people sometimes, unexpectedly burst into flames? You know we
do. We all have.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll
be back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-85133189181769321822013-01-06T08:50:00.000-08:002013-01-06T11:44:09.616-08:00Bullets and Bubbles<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tMK4pFOGiAI/UOmrHvwYhmI/AAAAAAAAA_M/0NA-rI9xT00/s1600/bubblesheet+blues.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="309" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tMK4pFOGiAI/UOmrHvwYhmI/AAAAAAAAA_M/0NA-rI9xT00/s320/bubblesheet+blues.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Late last summer, the legislature in
the state I teach in finalized some changes to my retirement system.
Due to one of those changes (pertaining to a new five year wait for
retirees to see an increase in their cost of living allowance), I
have been telling people I plan on retiring after the end of this
school year. While it's true that I have a financial incentive to
get out, it's not really the reason I'm walking away from a job I've
loved for 30 years. The truth is I am a coward. This is not an easy
admission to make publicly, but I am no longer comfortable in the
school district where I have made my work life – the same district
where my father once taught, and the same district where I graduated
high school.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Truth be told, my financial excuse to
retire is just a smokescreen; when I told my superintendent that I
would be retiring at the end of the year in order to avoid the
deadline decreed by the retirement system changes, he did not
hesitate to say that he would hire me back. So as far as the money
goes, I really could have my cake and eat it too; I could take a
retirement, get my cost of living increases, and pick right back up
with the same job next year. The truth, then, as to why I feel the
need to move on is that I don't have the guts to stick around any
more.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now given the amount of media that has
been devoted to school violence in recent weeks, your first guess
about why teaching school now fills me with dread and apprehension
might be that I'm afraid that the madness that killed students and
teachers in Connecticut might somehow show up where I work. If that
was your first guess, then you probably are not a public school
teacher. The school teachers I know and work with are not much
afraid of crazy guys with bullets, but we are having nightmares about
crazy guys with bubble sheets.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the small rural district where I
teach, many people consider guns as much a part of their
everyday life as country music on their radios. Where I teach, the
district always schedules a day off for the first day of deer season,
and back at the beginning of my career, students thought nothing of
displaying their rifles in the gun racks that hung in the windows of
their pickup trucks. While students no longer display their weaponry
in the parking lot, it would be ridiculous to assume they don't own
it or can't get their hands on it. For at least some of my students,
they consider buying and selling guns a hobby no more dangerous or
delinquent than trading baseball cards. More often than not, these
students started their gun collection through a gift from a relative
as a birthday or Christmas present.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
While I would rather live in a culture
that did not offer my students such easy access to such lethal
devices, I am not really concerned about it either. Right or wrong,
I mentally categorize school shootings in the same psychic file
drawer I put deadly lightening strikes, peanut allergies, and bee
stings. I am not saying these are not matters of real concern; I am
saying as a teacher, my life is already filled with too many other
things to worry about. While all deaths are serious, and my heart
goes out to every parent who has lost a child, of all the students I
have lost to tragic circumstance, none has died at the end of a gun;
they have died while riding four-wheelers, falling out of boats, or
driving too fast on rural highways.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My district's response to the recent
tragedy in Connecticut was to lock the school's front door and keep
an adult posted by the door to let people in. I don't even care if
this is a good idea or not; other people can debate the marginal
increase of security we gain by paying people with college degrees to
devote part of their day to opening doors on the outside chance that
some crazy person with a gun might think shooting the glass door
apart is too much effort. The danger to my students lives that I'm
concerned about – the fear that is driving me to another line of
work – is not some loud, random, sensational violence that barges
in from the outside; it's the quiet, systemic, corporate violence
that is slowly killing us from the inside.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I'll tell you what I'm afraid of. I'm
afraid for the future survival of my students and my colleagues, and
I do not want to be around to watch the carnage that I know is
coming. Soon, because of bureaucratic decisions made regarding how
students are to be tested and how teachers are to be evaluated, there
is going to be some serious destruction to the lives of people I care
deeply about, and I am not willing to hang around and be one more
martyr to the cause. On this let me be perfectly clear, there is
nothing hyperbolic or fantastic about my comparison of the dangers of
bubble sheets to bullets. The difference between the two in terms of
lives destroyed is merely in how long it takes for the destruction to
set in.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In case you do think I'm exaggerating,
then let me lay it out for you. In Ohio, where I teach, the degree
of difficultly of the standardized tests and the impact on the lives
of students and teachers has gradually been ratcheted up for the past
two decades. We started nearly twenty years ago with a “proficiency”
test that students needed to pass in order to graduate high school;
that initial test was based (supposedly) on what a student should
know entering the ninth grade. From there, about a decade ago, the
state moved to “the Ohio Graduation Tests,” a series of five
tests given at the end of the sophomore year and (supposedly) based
on what students were supposed to know by the end of their 10<sup>th</sup>
grade. The big difference between the OGTs and its predecessor is
that the newer test covered two more years of material and students
had fewer chances to pass them. This fall, the state released its
new plan for standardized testings; starting next year school year
(or the year following if the details of the funding have not been
worked out by the legislature), students will be expected to pass 10
“end of course” exams and an additional “ACT/SAT” style test
in order to graduate from high school. If you hear a gurgling sound,
it's the future of many well intentioned students and their teachers
going down a drain.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
With “end of the course” exams,
students who fail these particular tests will not only face the
humiliation of retaking an exam, but the entire class it was based
upon as well. What this realistically means is that a significant
percentage of students who would have otherwise graduated high
school, will drop out of school because of either their inability to
pass these more difficult exams or their unwillingness to spend extra
years in high school trying to earn all of their necessary graduation
credits. In the past few years, I can count on one hand the number
of students who didn't graduate from my high school because they
either couldn't pass the OGTs or quit trying, and let me tell you
folks, nothing is more gut-wrenching than seeing the principal tell a
student in May of their senior year that they will not be walking on
graduation night with their peers. How many more students will now
quit school because instead of having two years and half years to
pass five exams, they will need to pass three or four a year for
their first three years of high school? You want to talk about
school violence? Let's talk about the economic bomb that blows apart
a student's future every time one of them is faced with finding working
for the rest of their life without a high school diploma. With the
OGTs, Ohio's current graduation rate is 74% (and much, much lower if
you are a minority student or come from a family of poverty). How
low do you think the graduation rate will fall after we have instituted
the newer “more difficulty” yearly exams? I don't want to be
around to find out.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The new state required teacher
evaluations are just as draconian. Now, as matter of Ohio law, 50 %
of all teacher evaluations are to be based on their students'
standardized test scores. Setting aside the argument that a whole
host of social and cultural factors have a greater impact on student
scores than the efforts of individual teachers, setting aside the
argument that these tests can only pretend to assess what they are
supposed to measure (I have a Ph.D in composition, and I don't have
the foggiest idea how anyone can delineate the difference between
what a high school freshman, sophomore, or junior should know at the
end of their subsequent English classes), setting aside the sheer
waste of instructional time and resources we will will spend on
remediating students who will be merely waiting until they reach the
age that will legally allow them to dropout; the other 50% of the
evaluations come from a newly prescribed rubric that principals must
follow that has been designed to document teacher flaws rather than
report upon their strengths. This means that even teachers with relatively good student test scores can expect to receive poor
evaluations because of the design of their evaluation rubric.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Call me a coward. I do not want to
see it as it unfolds. Already I am hearing from first year
colleagues who are overwhelmed and disheartened at the sheer inanity
of the new procedures we are being asked to follow in anticipation of
the coming storm. Veteran teachers have not only been given the
financial retirement incentive to leave the profession, but we are
seeing our ability to engage students crippled by redundant and
meaningless assessments that we are being forced by our
administrators to design and score.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This week my principal sent an email
to the staff telling us that we were expected to have a “bell-ringer”
assessment and an “exit-slip” assessment for every class, every
day. Now, a little quick math: suppose I see roughly 120 students a
day. That's two pieces of paper per student per class. If I could
manage to file, read, score, and record all of these pieces of paper
in just 30 seconds per page, it would only add roughly two hours to
my daily workload. This, of course, comes on top of all the other
data I'm supposed to be collecting to show evidence that I'm doing my
job.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Call me a coward. I need to go. The
evidence of my teaching used to be the lifelong intellectual and
financial success of my students. With the new testing requirements
and the new teacher evaluation rubric, my worth as a teacher is being
reduced to some statistical analysis based on some arcane logarithm
that no one actually believes in. Soon, as a required offshoot of
all of this, The State of Ohio (along with many other states) will be
positing teachers' names and evaluation scores on an easily
accessible public website. Whatever happened to the dignity that
came with being a teacher? There is no humanity in being a dot on
graph, and given a choice, I'd rather face the bullets than the
bubble sheets.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll
be back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-43085435413305137022012-12-23T08:42:00.002-08:002012-12-23T12:06:17.913-08:00Ten Beliefs That Help Me Be Happy<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P0m7CjapC1M/UNc0SMM6NKI/AAAAAAAAA2U/fMBNguUaoB0/s1600/happyheart+ornament.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P0m7CjapC1M/UNc0SMM6NKI/AAAAAAAAA2U/fMBNguUaoB0/s320/happyheart+ornament.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This past month I've written on
several holiday themes including admiring Scrooge's iconic grumpiness
and the rhetorical acrobatics of explaining Santa to a child. Just
as an indoor cat will sneak up on a Christmas tree ornament, the end
of the year now encroaches on our festive dispositions. Thinking
about the year ahead creeps into the back of our heads upon stealthy
feline paws that threatens to pounce on the serenity we allow
ourselves once everything is unwrapped and we finally let go of the
folderol that makes this particular holiday so fraught with the
opportunities for disappointment. Once the true tranquility settles
in on Christmas morning, it's easy to get nervous in that peaceful
silence that follows if we start to wonder, “Okay, now what?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As a dose of prevention in keeping
myself from getting wound back up just as the holidays are getting
wound down, I thought I might take stock of the spiritual beliefs
that help keep me centered when it feels as though the rest of the
world is tilting and spinning, and the pull of inertia on my moral
compass makes me question the location of all that is right and good.
Below is a list of 10 of my core beliefs, and a brief explanation of
why I believe them. If instead of internalizing my beliefs, you
might take some time before the New Year to list out a few of your
own core beliefs, you may find that having a list similar to this to
be the salubrious tonic that will get you through the cold winter
months ahead.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>
Ten Core Beliefs</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
1. <i>Everyday life screws with our
ability to apply our abstract principles of right and wrong.</i>
While discussing hypothetical situations, it is a lot easier to
recognize how we want to react to moral dilemmas. But, everyday life
isn't hypothetical. Real life is complicated. Real life has an
amazing ability to come up with a bazillion intervening factors that
have a sincere impact upon our ability to judge what's right and
what's wrong. Every time we encounter a difficult moral decision,
circumstance matters. There just is no easy way to fit the geography
of real life onto the flat template of “never do this” or “we
should always do that.” In theory, the shortest distance between
two places is a straight line, but in real life, the shortest
distance is sometimes to go around the mountain rather than to try to
climb up it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
2. <i>Some difficult ideas cannot be
reduced to simple platitudes</i>. Not everything in life can be
reduced to a simple formula or a basic rule of thumb. It takes real
intelligence, for example, to recognize a distinction between “what
is real” and “what we know about it.” <i>What is real is a
question</i> of existence; <i>what we know about i</i>t is a question
of interpretation. When people conflate their <i>interpretations</i>
with their <i>reality</i>, problems arise in that they think what
they know is <i>real</i> instead of mere <i>belief</i>. Most of
humanity's self-inflicted tragedies have come from people who have
hurt others while suffering from a madness that has convinced them
their dangerous delusions carry the authority of an inescapable
actuality.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
3. <i>If an idea can be misinterpreted,
there will be people who will misinterpret it.</i> This core belief
is almost a correlate to Murphy's Law which says “If something can
go wrong, it will go wrong.” The human brain is a pattern making
machine; we see faces in electrical outlets merely because the three
slots line up with two eyes and a mouth. Because our brains are able
to make inferences and draw conclusions, then it is inevitable that
from time to time, we will make the wrong inference or draw the wrong
conclusion. As far as I can tell, there are some people who seem to
have a knack for drawing the wrong conclusion from whatever evidence
presents itself. There are few things in life more annoying that
someone who will argue until they are blue in the face that their
interpretation is “the correct one” when any variety of
alternative interpretations can be considered just as probable.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
4. <i>In general, it is better to be
kind than correct</i>. How often in life have we found ourselves
arguing with someone over something of little importance but somehow
the argument itself takes on its own importance? While we may gain a
brief jolt of self-satisfaction when we “win” those arguments,
let's consider what we lose when we've forced another person into
conceding. What we lose is our higher nature. Every time we bully
someone into admitting they are wrong, we have taken another step in
the direction of caring more about an ideal than someone else's
feelings. Whenever we damage a relationship with someone out of some
allegiance to an abstract principle, we've done nothing but
demonstrated that an ideal is somehow more important than an actual
human being. In the long run, what people will remember about you is
how your “ideals” were reflected in how you've treated them, not
in your stubborn dogmatism regarding some abstract principle.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
5. <i>Something is wrong whenever we
value “stuff” over people</i>. Everyone likes their stuff, and
most of us would like more stuff. But, really, how much stuff do we
need to survive? Everyone should have a warm, safe place to sleep; a
decently-filled belly, and a place to take a shower. After that,
stuff just gets piled on stuff, but many people are actually willing
to hurt or kill others to keep them from taking the stuff they don't
actually need to survive. The Bible says, “the love of money is
the root of all evil” and that's because money is just a way of
keeping track of how much stuff we can get without recognizing how
much stuff we don't really need.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
6. <i>Anger and Fear can prevent us
from thinking straight</i>. Whether you believe in evolution or not,
there's a reptilian part of your brains that is completely devoted to
“getting ready to run or getting ready to rumble.” Whenever our
lower emotions (anger and fear are just a couple of them; hatred and
jealously are also on the list) take over the management of our
consciousness, we become prisoners of our darker passions. There's
something chemical in our brains that prevents us from reasoning well
while we are in the midst of panicking. While there is nothing wrong
with being passionate about our beliefs, we need to recognize
whenever our temper or frustration has moved us from rational beings
to snarling animals. It's best to stop in the midst of a heated
argument to see if you can regain control of the thinking part of
your brain rather than it is to keep charging ahead like a bull who
can only focus on the red flag.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
7. <i>Whether life is getting better or
getting worse is a matter of perspective</i>. You want evidence that
life is getting worse, it's there in abundance. Gravity and entropy
are never going to go away. It takes no effort to focus on either
what's wrong or what's missing if you want life to be different from
that way it is. And, at the same time, if you want verification that
things are getting better, all you have to do is look for
justification because it is all around you. Good things are
happening; hard work and dedication is paying off. Now, which
perspective is going to make you a better person? Since neither
perspective is necessarily incompatible with the other, how much of
one are you willing to allow to either support or destroy the other
outlook? It's not really about either being pessimistic or
optimistic; it's about be aware that either perspective is a choice,
and all choices have both their liabilities and their benefits.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
8. <i>The best religion is the one you
follow, not the one you preach to others</i>. If there is an
Ultimate Truth out there, and you've found it, then do me a solid
favor and show me the way rather than try to drag me to it. If there
is a path to salvation, it must point in the direction of personal
responsibility. How can anyone become responsible if they don't have
the agency of finding the truth out for themselves?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
9. <i>You don't need to understand what
someone was thinking in order to forgive them</i>. Forgiveness means
letting go of something you hold against someone else. You don't
have to forget what has happened, you only need to allow it to be.
If you think you need to wait to understand someone else's
motivations for what they have done before you can let go of it, then
you may end up holding on to those feelings forever. How often do we
understanding why anyone else does anything? How many times in our
own lives have we done something that we can't even explain to
ourselves why we did it?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The secret to forgiveness is the
acknowledgement that forgiveness lives within our own control and
other people do not. We cannot change what other people have done in
the past or will do in the future; we can only change how we decide
to feel about it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
10. <i>Forgives of others is a gift we
give ourselves</i>. The terrible truth about resentment is that it
is an acid that burns from within; typically when we hold on to
grudges and bitterness, those harsh feelings harm only ourselves.
Sometimes people stay angry for years at what someone else has said
or done, and they end up prolonging and exacerbating their own
emotional damage because of it. Letting go of resentment is a gift
we give ourselves because we victimize ourselves when hold on to
anger, sadness, and frustration that may affect the other person not
at all. When we learn to weed the garden of our hearts of old
animosities, we make room to grow the fruits of our own contentment.
If you are unconvinced that forgiveness can improve your life, then I
offer this simple experiment: try it for a day. Plan on forgiving
someone for 24 hours and see how it feels. You can always pack the
anger back into your heart if really need it, but I suspect that once
without it, you'll want to remain free of its burden.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As always, I invite readers to respond
in the comment section of this blog (below). I'm probably going to
take next week off so I'll see you next year. Until then, keep
thinking rhetorically.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-72631493437330752712012-12-16T08:30:00.002-08:002012-12-16T08:30:44.105-08:00Time and Tragedy
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Time is on my side. Space is around
my belly.” – Woody Herb</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Time is different on a roller
coaster than it is for the folks waiting in line at the DMV.” –
Arlo Lizzard</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“There never seems to be enough time
to do the things you want to do once you find them.” – Jim Croce.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Time heals all wounds and wounds all
heals.” – Anonymous
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It's no secret that this blog is a
rehearsal for a book I'm planning on working on next summer after I
retire from teaching public school. If I should live that long, that
is; after all – the world is supposed to end this coming weekend.
Some of what shows up in these posts from week to week will reappear
in the book; most of it will certainly disappear into the bleak
dystopia of The Great Digital Purgatory. The Great Digital Purgatory
is a vast wasteland where ideas – some good, some not so good –
go to sit out eternity waiting to be found and reconsidered in some
mythical future where truth matters more than lies and kindness
motivates us to finally take care of one another.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Years from now when I'm no longer
withdrawing air from my breath account and I've not only ceased
writing, but my body has ceased even in the act of decomposing, I
expect that everything I've ever posted to the internet will in some
sense still exist – that is to say, it will still be recorded
within numerous redundant storage drives – but will be forgotten
and lost, buried in the vast landfill of The Great Digital Purgatory.
C'est la vie. It's not going to stop me from cranking this drivel
out.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If I'm remembered at all, if any of my
words pop up randomly in some galactic search engine of the future, I
hope it's for saying that I loved every last one of you who ever gave
me a spare moment of your attention. Only love is eternal. I think
I can really die happy if the love I've expressed into the universe
holds the potential for popping up, randomly and at unexpected times,
on someone's screen in the far distant future. If you are reading
this a thousand years from now, and you have no idea who I am, don't
be surprised to find out that I love you. I always have.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I expect very little from this
particular post will make it into the book that is to come because
this week I want to write about a national tragedy that occurred a
few days ago, and by the time I get around to compiling the book,
this tragedy – for the vast majority of Americans who are not
personally invested in the lives of its victims – will have been
replaced by the latest tragedy. By the time I get around to writing
and publishing the book, whether it's next summer or a year from now,
this week's particular tragedy in which some tragically mad young
adult quickly and brutally ended the lives of 20 elementary
schoolchildren and a half dozen of their teachers will have been
mostly forgotten. In a few short months, this particular tragedy
will be nothing more than a footnote because as tragic as this mass
murder was, the shooter failed to achieve the all-important body
count that would move him to #1 in the standings; the real horror of
this weeks atrocity is that this particular abomination only comes in
at #2 in total victims served (for school shootings that is) and as
such will not be worthy of further reflection because, hey, who's
going to want to remember #2? No, by the time my book on the
intersection of rhetoric, politics, superstition, and reality comes
to print, the national consciousness – as driven by the national
news media – will have long forgotten what a terrible week this was
in the light of the next terrible week that is to come.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
While we may be running out of fossil
fuels and other natural resources, our supply of national tragedies
flows from a source of never ending sorrows; we will never run out of
tragically crazy people who want nothing more than to die with a
brief acknowledge from the national media that they did indeed exist.
If the price of their admission to the national consciousness is the
cost of more innocent lives, more brutally slain schoolchildren, then
that is the expense they are willing to pay because as far as they
are concerned the price of the suffering they inflict upon others
costs them nothing extra. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Tragically crazy people who kill others
for the sake of notoriety are already so miserable that they are
willing to die for their brief mention in the national media; the
concept that the misery they can cause others through their victims'
deaths or permanent injuries can somehow increase their own
personally misery does not compute. When someone is at the very
brink of despair and is looking for their own annihilation to put an
end to whatever personal misery is motivating their self-destruction,
the idea that anything – even the lives of babies – can increase
their misery is meaningless because in those deep, dark caverns of
despair, the concept that life holds any value has been lost to them.
People who have lost the ability to recognize the value of their own
existence are incapable of appreciating the value of the lives of
others.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
By the time someone has crossed the
bridge into the mental/spiritual/emotion landscape where their own
personal existence has no meaning, the meaning of the existence of
others is nothing more than a high score in a video game. I'm not
suggesting, by the way, that video games (or violent lyrics or
slasher movies or any other pop culture scapegoats that typically
take the blame for causing people to go tragically mad) have anything
to do with inspiring these people to take up weapons against their
unsuspecting and vulnerable victims; I am arguing, however, that
their final body count does matter to them in the same way that
making it into Guinness World Book of Records matters to someone who
in May of 1973 jumped 14,325 times on a pogo stick. Since 1973, it's
never mattered whenever someone has jumped less than 14, 325 times on
a pogo stick. The only time it's ever going to matter again is when
someone jumps 14, 326 times.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Earlier this week, before someone went
into a elementary school and began their quest to die and get their
name and pictured splashed on Fox News, someone else on the other
side of America went into a shopping mall in Oregon (at Christmas
time, it's Christmas time, remember?) and began shooting at random
strangers. That person only managed two kill two people, a hospice
nurse and a youth-soccer coach, before being assisted by the police
in his suicide by notoriety. While the mall shoppers of Oregon's
continue to seek out bargains to the increasingly creepiness of
Silent Night playing in the background, the death of that particular
shooter is quickly sinking into becoming a footnote of a footnote;
his identity, which will not pop here, will only be linked to infamy
by his chronological association with the bigger massacre that
happened a few days later. What a loser; he only took out the lives
of two very good people who were deeply loved by the others in their
lives. He only destroyed the hearts of a handful of people whose
lives were forever touched by the kindness of a hospice nurse and a
fellow who gave his time to coach soccer.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When you go into a doctor's office and
the physician wants to test your reflexes, you get a small smack on
the knee with a tiny rubber hammer. If all is well, your knee
responds by flying upwards without any conscious thought of your
brain. Every time someone in this country goes tragically mad and
seeks out to end his life by attempting to set the new world's record
for most innocent lives lost, the national knee is hit with the
rubber hammer of awareness that perhaps, just perhaps, having more
guns than human beings in this country may not be a good thing.
Oddly, the knee jerk reaction doesn't come from the people who want
to ban guns, but from the people who expect that others will want to
ban their guns. This week the only people I've read who've said
anything about gun control has come as a response to the people who
immediately feel the need to defend their own possession of deadly
weapons.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I guess it's time now for my
“rhetorical term of the week”; this week the term is
“tautology.” A “tautology” is a statement of so blindly
truth that it's utterance adds nothing to a debate. To the gun
control debate that inevitably emerges whenever blameless, innocent
babies are slaughtered while learning to read their ABCs or add whole
numbers, I want to point out (once and for all) that the statement
that “only criminals use guns to kill people” is <i>tautological</i>
because, yep, once you kill someone with a gun, you're a criminal.
The two people who went tragically mad this week, both the one in the
shopping mall and the other in the elementary school, were both law
abiding citizens right up until the moment they put their first
bullet into someone. This is just as true for everyone else walking
around with a gun right now.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
To those who carry around the means to
causally end the lives of others, even my own, you have my love. Go
ahead and shoot me; I won't like you, but I won't stop loving you.
For whatever it's worth, if there is some box score that might
reflect how my life is to be accounted for, I want to be held
accountable for the number of people of whom I loved, not the number
of people I have threatened. On this, I agree entirely with Gandhi,
who died at the bullet of a stranger, who said there was lots of
causes he was willing to die for, but not a single one he was willing
to kill for.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Merry Christmas; keep thinking
rhetorically; and I may or may not be back next week (depending on
that whole “end of the world” thingy).</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-71702202504032105192012-12-09T07:39:00.002-08:002012-12-09T14:51:03.734-08:00The Rhetoric and Psychology of Grumpiness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bmY4AZ1SeUM/UMSxYUjWM1I/AAAAAAAAA1w/NSn0u8nHcPA/s1600/scrooge-icon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bmY4AZ1SeUM/UMSxYUjWM1I/AAAAAAAAA1w/NSn0u8nHcPA/s1600/scrooge-icon.jpg" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><i>"Before I draw nearer to that stone, tell me! Are these the shadows of things that must be, or are they the shadows of things that MIGHT be?"</i> -- Ebenezer Scrooge</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
Nietzsche famously said, “What
doesn't kill me, makes me stronger.” Well, syphilis killed
Nietzsche; it didn't make him stronger. This weekend I'm suffering
from a head and chest cold; it's not killing me, but it also isn't
making me any stronger. It's making me grumpy.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Although there seems to be some kind
of strength in grumpiness, it's all bravado and exterior. Whenever
we find ourselves pushing others away with grumpiness on the outside,
on the inside is the frightened, whiny voice of the inner child who
is experiencing the dilemma of both wanting to be comforted while
needing to be left alone. Grumpiness is the hard outer coating we use
to disguise from others the empty fragility we are experiencing
within.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Grumpiness works in the short term to
wall out minor, exterior, psychic nuisances while we focus on coping
with some pressing inner turmoil. Thus, as a temporary method of
isolating ourselves while we aim our awareness at some particular
emotional concern, grumpiness is an effective tactic to block the
outside world for a little bit so we can tend to an insistent, inner
conflict. Grumpiness in the long term, however, will trap us in our
own mental fortifications and make us prisoners of our own
selfishness. While a shot of grumpiness can give us a brief resolve
to keep moving onward, grumpiness, like whiskey, offers only a
temporary jolt of willfulness and its chronic use leads to a
miserable addiction to loneliness. Just as alcoholism destroys the
body by hardening the liver, habitual grumpiness calcifies the soul.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Nietzsche said what doesn't kill us
makes us stronger; I say what feels good in the short term will
eventually wipe us out. This is because unhappiness is a bus and
cheerfulness is a bicycle. It is so easy to get on the unhappy bus
and let life take us wherever it wants as long as we can just sit
there passively, as passengers, and let the wheels go round and
round. Looking out the window on the unhappy bus, we are not likely
to admire the scenery, but we can still tell ourselves, “Hey, we're
only passing through these blighted neighborhoods, we don't have to
live here.” But no bus ride last forever; eventually, we are going
to have to climb out of Jonah's whale and deal with the realities of
our ultimate destinations. Fortunately, bus terminals are only
terminal when we can think of no other place to go.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Bicycles, especially bicycles of
cheerfulness, will get us where we want to go, but we always have
some hard peddling ahead of us to get them to take us there.
Furthermore, when the hills of life are too steep, we have to get off
and push. I don't know about you, but I always feel embarrassed and
vulnerable whenever I'm riding a bike and I have to give up on a big
hill and start walking the bike the rest of the way to the top. I'm
embarrassed because I didn't have the stamina to keep working the
machine, and anyone who drives by is clearly going to witness that I
didn't have what it takes to make it up that particular hill without
giving up first. I'm no telepath, but cries of “loser” echo in
my head whenever cars pass silently drive by. Walking a bike up a
hill feels vulnerable as well because someone who hasn't the strength
to keep a bicycle rolling may not have the strength to defend
himself. Cheerfulness is a breeze when we feel the pull of gravity
on our side; on the other hand, a causal smile can turn into a
disturbing grin when we feel ourselves being forced to be nicer than
want to be whenever our stamina gives out on life's upslopes.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Why is it, then, that short-term
pleasures are so bad for us in the long run, and long-term benefits
only come from ongoing struggles? That's the whole question of
existence, isn't it? Why can't we just be grumpy and be happy in our
grumpiness?
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The answer, of course, is our basic
human anatomy and our essential spiritual core pulls us in two
opposing directions. Our physical bodies require certain resources to
survive and thrive while our spirits need entirely different
resources. As long as we are stranded here within several dozen
pounds of flesh, our bodies are going to want things that make it
feel good. While our stomaches can be sated with a big meal, the
sensation of satisfaction is never complete. No matter how much we
eat, we will eventually get hungry again. Thus, what satisfies the
body – frees it from desires of hunger, lust, sleep, and comfort –
will always diminish over time. The soul hungers for completion as
well, but finds its satisfaction in making connections outside
itself. It is the purpose of the soul to reach out and connect; it
is its reason for existence. Lifelong contentment then requires
building the souls capacity to connect with others and this requires
the work of peddling cheerfulness. Happiness takes an effort; if you
want to be unhappy, then just get on the bus.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Just as the physical body is never
finally satisfied and will always perpetually return to a state of
want, the soul, too, will never saturate its need for more and
greater connections to the universe as long as it dwells within its
skin-covered container. I remain optimistic about this. Although
different religions tell the story in various ways, I suspect that
when the body dies and finds its completion in the ground, the soul
exists as a channel within the universe and continues to make
connections long after its previous body has returned to dust. I
can't imagine, however, that the soul – as a channel for inspiring
truth and grace – will in the afterlife require or desire the
paraphernalia of identity anymore than it would want the face that
once distinguished its body. In other words, I believe when the body
dies, identity goes with it, but whatever was kind and cheerful
continues to radiate through the spirit that continues onward in some
alternative existence. If there's an afterlife, I can't imagine I'll
care anymore about the name I once had than the weight I once had.
If, after I've given up the habit of inhaling, it turns out not to be
true, and death is as complete for the spirit as it is for the body,
then don't bother me with the details of how you've come to know
this. Because, right now, I'm grumpy, and I don't want to hear it.
If you have cookies, however, I might be willing to listen.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll
be back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-36691539355486860212012-12-02T11:47:00.001-08:002012-12-02T11:47:21.969-08:00Yes, Virginia, There is an Answer to Your Uncomfortable Question<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pmvjYf68INY/ULuwAhBio1I/AAAAAAAAA1c/0GSa28hiP8E/s1600/santapaper.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pmvjYf68INY/ULuwAhBio1I/AAAAAAAAA1c/0GSa28hiP8E/s320/santapaper.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Francis Church and Virginia O'Hanion
are two names that most contemporary Americans would not immediately
recognize. In September of 1897, these two people had a brief
conversation through their local newspaper that, at the time, went
mostly unnoticed. But, not entirely unnoticed, since a few readers
of the day found it worthy of saving, and they pasted it into their
scrapbooks. Although the entirety of their conversation took up less
than 500 words, and it's original location was buried on the
newspaper's editorial page, crammed in the third of seven columns
between a story about the value of new “chainless” bicycles and a
story on how an independent candidate would serve the politics of
Tammany Hall, over the next century this discussion would become the
most reprinted newspaper article to ever run in any English language
newspaper.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of course, while the names Francis
Church and Virginia O'Hanion may not be generally recognized, their
story – that of an 8-year-old girl writing the newspaper at the
advice of her father to find out if there really is a Santa Claus –
has become an annual fixture of American Christmas lore. In the years
since it's initial publication, the story of a young girl's sincere
letter to the editor and it's heartfelt response has undergone
numerous transformation including a radio cantata, two animated TV
specials, a made-for-television movie, and a broadway musical. After
the original copy of the letter had been discovered in a scrapbook
after being thought long lost by O'Hanion's descendents, one
appraiser set the value of the authenticated artifact at somewhere
between $20,000 and $30,000. While we are apparently able to set a
price for a historical document with a meager 45 words written on it
by a young girl who had been provoked by her friends to question the
reality of the mythic supplier of her yule-time bounties, how do we
put a price on the sentiment it evoked? Furthermore, how great a
price do we place on “realistic” truth?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Virginia O'Hanion's letter was short
and to the point; she wrote, “DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old. Some
of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, 'If you
see it in THE SUN it's so.' Please tell me the truth; is there a
Santa Claus?” Rhetorically, O'Hanion's letter painted Francis
Church (the newspaper's reporter who had been given the job of
crafting their response) into the proverbial corner. The elementary
schoolgirl had challenged the newspaper to give her the truth and had
gambled the paper's reputation for trustworthiness on their response.
On one hand, Church had the choice of affirming Santa's existence
but risking the newspaper's reputation as a reliable source for
factual information; some journalists consider publishing anything
that cannot be verified through empirical observation as a violation
of a nearly-sacred ethical obligation to print the truth. On the
other hand, declaring that – based upon all available evidence –
Santa Claus did not exist risked losing readership to people who felt
newspapers have no right to decimate their children's cherished
belief in a supernaturally jolly and generous gift-giver. The
challenge Church faced was to craft a response that would satisfy
both the journalists who would accuse Church of selling out to
sentimentality if he wrote something he knew to be untrue and the
intent of O'Hanion's letter which was to settle definitively the
question of Santa's actual existence.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Anyone with an interest in rhetoric
can find much to admire in how Church met the challenge of answering
the question of Santa's existence while keeping both his journalistic
integrity and his compassion for a girl who demanded the truth but
who was not, perhaps, entirely ready for it. What everyone seems to
know is that Church responded, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa
Claus”; what few people seem to know is this particular line is
neither the title of the response nor even the articles' opening
remark. In formulating his response, Church begins by saying that
O'Hanion's friends were wrong about Santa's existence because they
were victims of a pervasive skeptical mentality that had gripped
contemporary society. This skepticism, Church argues, is unable to
recognize the limitations of its own reality by ignoring the vast
intelligence that lies beyond what small minds are capable of
understanding. Church writes: “All minds, Virginia, whether they
be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours
man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the
boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of
grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.”
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In considering his response, Church is
well aware that his correspondence is not with a singular, particular
child, but with a broad spectrum of readers including those who would
want to know how a newspaper can deal with the truth of an innocent
question posed in a cynical world. Church, rather than run away from
the implications of asserting a mythical being does exist, embraces
the ramifications of those who would argue that Santa doesn't exist.
Church's first move in defending a belief that cannot be empirically
verified is to impugn the intelligence of anyone who argues that all
knowledge should be empirically verified. What Church argues in his
opening remarks is that imposing the limitations of common, ordinary
existence upon a supernatural reality does not disprove the existence
of the alternative reality, it merely demonstrates a sad inability of
the skeptic to see beyond his own little world. In other words, from
the beginning of Church's reply, he sets up nonbelievers as victims
of a socially-constructed reality that trains its inhabitants to
disrespect anyone who attempts to see beyond their own self-imposed
templates of what they believe can exist. Thus, by saying O'Hanion's
friends are wrong because they are too small-brained to contemplate
the possibilities beyond their own existence, Church is challenging
anyone who would object to his argument to first admit that they
might themselves be too stupid to see beyond their own little worlds.
Instead of being painted into a corner by what could be an
embarrassing question for a newspaper reporter to answer, Church
begins by painting his readers into the corner of small-mindedness if
they would disagree with him.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Church goes on to argue that human
life without the magic of romantic interpretations is doomed to the
sad, unfriendliness of drab realism. Church writes, “Alas! how
dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be
as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike
faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.
We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal
light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”
As a rhetorical theorist, I am of two minds regarding Church's
argument here. It's hard to disagree that life without the magic of
romantic whimsy is tedious and worrisome. Still, I always find
arguments based upon the idea that it's better to live with happy
fantasies rather than hard truths a bit dangerous. How much reality
do we need to ignore to be happy? How much fantasy can we accept
before our optimism gets in the way of future self-interests?
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Perhaps, the best we can strive for is
to find the middle ground, as Church does when he concludes by saying
that we all need a little Santa in our lives. Church writes, “No
Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand
years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now,
he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.” The trick
in believing something that is otherwise unbelievable, then, is to
recognize that when our brains demand dominance over our hearts, our
hearts need to resist just enough to show the brains how little it
actually knows about how to live.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and
I'll be back next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-57285469387942683382012-11-25T07:54:00.001-08:002012-11-25T07:54:31.146-08:00The Talking-Bear Zombie Apocalypse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HreWHT5bq5s/ULI_J-yPHrI/AAAAAAAAA1I/60X2JkVD8PU/s1600/yogiz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HreWHT5bq5s/ULI_J-yPHrI/AAAAAAAAA1I/60X2JkVD8PU/s320/yogiz.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
When I was a kid, Yogi Bear was a very
popular cartoon character. As a child, I had no idea that the
cartoon bear was named after the celebrated, Yankees baseball player,
Yogi Berra. Even to this day, Hanna-Barbera (the animation studio
that created Fred Flintstone, George Jetson, and Scooby Doo in
addition to Jellystone's most notorious picnic basket swindler)
vehemently denies they named their conniving brown bear after the
baseball legend, but it's hard to believe that in 1958, when H-B
studios introduced TV audiences to Ranger Smith's woodland nemesis,
that Berra (by then a three-time American League MVP) was not what
they had in mind when they choose to lop the “ah” off of Berra in
naming their character. While it's easy to understand why
Hanna-Barbera did not want to pay any royalties to an already wealthy
sport hero, it's nearly impossible to accept that the phonetic
similarity between the two names is mere coincidence. As Thoreau
famously wrote in the fall of 1854 after some dairymen had been
accused of watering down their product, “Some circumstantial
evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Throughout my elementary school days,
Saturday mornings were magical: no school and, for a few sweet golden
hours, cartoons. I guess you would have to be pretty close to my age
to appreciate the magic of Saturday morning cartoons in those days.
Today, people can watch cartoons at any time day or night by pulling
up a YouTube video, popping in a DVD, or turning to a 24 hour cartoon
cable channel. But in my childhood, we could only see cartoons on
Saturday mornings or (if we were lucky enough to get to go to the
movies) sometimes between the feature film and the coming
attractions. The other thing that made cartoons magical while I was
growing up in the 1960's is that the studios in those days were not
under any governmental dictates to make their products “educational”
for kids or “palatable” to parents. No one in those days needed
to learn anything from the hijinks of Bugs Bunny, who regularly
dabbled in cross-dressing, or Yogi, a bear who felt no need to
consider the ethics of filling his stomach with the contents of some
random stranger's "pic-a-nic basket." Today producers who
make all the new cartoons have to consider their “educational
value” because somehow in the past 50 years, American Society has
been brainwashed into believing that every single moment of a kid's
childhood needs to be “educational.” Do you want to know why
American Society is so fascinated with the “zombie apocalypse”?
It's because it's already happened, but instead of a virus that makes
people stumbling morons that have an appetite for brains, it's a meme
that says our kids are only as smart as their last test. In the
movies, zombies hunger for brains; in our current “educational
climate,” our students hunger for authentic learning.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The reason I started this post off by
talking about Yogi Bear is that his catch phrase was “I'm smarter
than the average bear.” That fact that Yogi walked around in a hat
and a necktie and he could talk was certainly a tip off that he was
intellectually superior to the typical hibernating/honey-loving North
American Ursidae, but let's remember that it was Yogi's own
self-assessment; Yogi Bear never actually took a standardized test to
demonstrate that his intelligence lie above the 50<sup>th</sup>
percentile. Smokey the Bear also wears a hat and can talk so Yogi
isn't unique in either his fashion or vocal abilities, but I think it
would be pretty safe to predict that compared to most bears we would
find in the woods, both Smokey and Yogi would completely skew the
bell curve if they were ever tested. Notice, by the way, that while
Smokey and Yogi both wear hats, neither wear long sleeve shirts;
that's because the 2<sup>nd</sup> Amendment protects their rights to
show off their arms.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The point about Yogi being smarter
than most bears is that even if it's true, in the grand scheme of
things it does not really matter much, if at all. The average bear
doesn't have the intellectual or verbal capacity to consider its
ability to acquire and apply knowledge, and even if through some
massive, immediate mutation, all bears gained the capacity to think
about their relative intelligence compared to the other bears they
know, bears would still be too concerned with surviving hunger and
hunters to care. Even if bears are capable of learning to ride
bicycles (as some circus bears do), that particular ability has
little relevance to surviving in the woods (let's face it, there are
plenty of redneck hunters who would love nothing more than to shoot a
bear off a bicycle if they had the chance, but I digress).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
As far as humans are concerned, being
smarter than the average bear doesn't mean squat. Even in his
cartoon world, Yogi does not get any real respect for his verbal,
fashion, and problem-solving abilities. He still has to steal from
humans to stave off the unrelenting appetite of his bear anatomy. A
bear needs around 20,000 calories a day to prepare for hibernation;
that's a lot of picnic baskets to purloin especially if you've got a
little sidekick to feed. Why Yogi keeps Boo-Boo around defies his
supposedly superior bear-intelligence – the only thing Boo-Boo
seems to offer is criticism for not buying into Ranger Smith's
propaganda that talking bears need to abide by human law. No,
Boo-Boo, no; bears should stick it to The Man. Bears have no
representatives in human legislatures; bears need to be bears and
have their own moral codes based upon their own obligations to each
other. Yogi needs to tell Boo-Boo that following the Man's law will
only get his head sent to a taxidermist and mounted above Ranger
Smith's fireplace.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So what do cartoon bears have to do
with the current slow death of modern education? Just this: there
is an important difference between education and propaganda.
Education is a human right to knowledge and understanding that will
help people both secure their economic prosperity and understand
their social obligations to each other; propaganda is information
designed to control the thinking of others to manipulate them into
making decisions against their own best interests. Real education
teaches people to think for themselves; propaganda teaches people not
to question what they are being told and that if they end up crushed
by a system run for the betterment of an elite few, then its their
own fault for not learning to move their pegs quickly enough to the
few holes allowed by the system.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The educational system of the United
States has been taken over by the corporate propagandists who both
supply the standardized tests and then turn around and sell the
remediation materials for the students who fail to achieve at their
“acceptable” levels. State governments have been hypnotized by
the money being offered by the testing corporations to believe that
“the harder we make the tests, the more the students will learn.”
I may be only slightly smarter than the average bear, but I have 30
years of classroom experience, and if there is a single thing I know
about education, then it's that no one learns anything because it may
or may not be on a test. People acquire knowledge because they
become engaged in the material based on a wider variety of
psychological motivations. Telling students that they will need to
know something because it will show up on a test someday is not only
the most disengaging method for providing content, it offers fear and
anxiety as a reason to learn something. Fear and anxiety not only
make for poor inducements to learning, but they suck the life out of
children and turn them into zombies only capable of choosing the one
right answer out of four on multiple choice questions. These zombies
do not hunger for the brains of others; they hunger for
understanding. Perhaps they hunger the most to know why they can't
be allowed to grow up and learn at their own pace instead of being
told how inferior they are for not learning at some mythical rate
predicted by a chart with an up-sloping diagonal line.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There is a simple solution to the
madness that comes from “the harder the test, the more they will
learn.” State governors and their legislators need to be required
to take the tests they are now requiring for high school graduation,
and their scores need to be reported on a government website (just as
teachers evaluations based on their own students test scores are now
being required). This would bring a great dose of sanity to the
insanity of the corporate testing machine who increase their profits
through requiring more frequent and more difficult exams that require
schools and parents to shell out more for remedial materials. A
testing corporation's hunger for money is analogous to a bear's
hunger for calories – but that's the type of thinking governors,
legislators, and departments of education need not worry about – no
one is making them accountable to the new, harder tests that they are
requiring. Here's another question they apparently do not need to
answer: if a state's dropout rate is already more than a third of
the student population, who is really being helped by making it more
difficult to graduate? If you answered “C,” the corporations who
believe that only money can do the real talking in American politics,
then you were correct. Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll be back
next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-88116680535286694262012-11-18T11:51:00.002-08:002012-11-18T11:51:31.362-08:00The Hyde We Keep Hidden<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pTs6cV8dnVE/UKk10BzHTmI/AAAAAAAAA0w/06H3HK3snlk/s1600/JekyllHyde1931.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pTs6cV8dnVE/UKk10BzHTmI/AAAAAAAAA0w/06H3HK3snlk/s320/JekyllHyde1931.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
(Fredric March in the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>A change had
come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the
horror of being Hyde that racked me.</i> – Dr. Henry Jekyll (from
Robert Louis Stevenson's <i>Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i>).</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> How many
people are you? When you get up in the morning and you're putting on
your pants, how many people are with you as pull on your jeans one
leg at a time? Sure, <i>physically</i>, there's just the one waist
to button up; but, <i>metaphysically</i>, how many folks are you
stuffing into those denims?</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Should we
begin to count? First, there's the “Presently-Conscious You”
that's only semi-aware of putting on those pants because
Presently-Conscious You can put on the pants without wasting too many
awareness-sucking brain cells on such a mundane task. If you are
like most people – that is to say, most other people (I'm not yet
including all the people you are going to turn out to be by the end
of this essay because so far I've only listed the first) –
Presently-Conscious You is spending those few moments it takes to get
to the second leg of the trousers to commune with “Future You.”
Future You is who Presently-Conscious You is worried about first
thing in the morning because there's all those things that could
happen to Future You if Future You forgets even one of all those
things that needs to get done today, and Presently-Conscious You
wants nothing more than to keep Future You out of trouble if
Presently-Consciously You can help it. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Just ten
minutes or so before finding the pants to begin the day, both Future
You and Presently-Conscious You were nowhere to be found because
“Fast-Asleep You” was busily clearing out the memory space in
your brain from all the “Dream Yous” that your mind spent being
throughout the night. Of course, by the time you've moved past the
pants to put your shirt on, Presently-Conscious You has no
recollection of the Dream Yous that you were the night before;
however, Presently-Conscious You may have a fleeting pang of
disgruntlement for “Night-Before You” who stayed up too late
(once again), and now Presently-Conscious You is tired and grumpy
from not getting enough rest.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> For many
people, Presently-Conscious You doesn't become “Entirely-Conscious
You” until it's had time for a cup of coffee to drag it from
“Wishing-You-Could-Stay-Home You” to
“I-Guess-I'm-Leaving-For-Work-Now You.” Once out of the house,
“Now-I-Have-To-Deal-With-Other-People You” begins quietly
rehearsing the personas you will need to have on hand as you move
across the spectrum from the
“Gosh-You're-Nice-Why-Can't-More-People-Be-Like-You You” to the
“Please-Go-Away-Before-Your-Annoying-Presence-Sucks-The-Soul-Out-Of-Me
You.”</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Throughout the
course of your day, the “You-At-The-Moment You” has much to do
with the people you have to become in order to deal with the people
you happen to be with. Get stuck in line at a store behind someone
with little patience and less intelligence and you might become
“I'm-Clearly-Not-With-This-Person You.” Get a chance to have
lunch with a sympathetic friend and you might become
“Glad-I-Can-Talk-With-Someone-About-My-Life You.” Get caught
between two arguing co-workers and you might become either
“I'm-Not-Taking-Sides-On-This-One You” or
“I-Need-You-Two-To-Get-Along You.” Get a phone call from a family
member, and you will need to become “Somebody's (Spouse, Mom, Dad,
Sister, Brother, Son, Daughter, Cousin, Aunt, Uncle, Nephew, Niece,
etc.) You.” Who are you when you get the house to yourself because
family/roommates/friends are all occupied elsewhere?
“I-Get-To-(Watch, Read, or Play)-Whatever-I-Want You.”</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> How many is
that so far? Furthermore, you are not just those people you become as
a reaction to others or circumstance, you are also the
“Person-Who-Used-To-(Drink, Smoke, Chew, Swear, Gamble, Overeat)
You” and the “Person-Who-Needs-To-(Exercise More, Eat Right,
Catch Up on the Bills, Mow the Grass, Finish Homework, or Feed the
Cat) You.” You are also both the “I-Survived-My-Childhood You”
and the “I-Fear-Getting-Older You.” You are both the
“I'm-Tired-Of-The-Same-Routine You” and the
“Change-Makes-Me-Nervous You.” You are both the
“I-Need-To-Watch-What-I-Eat You” and the
“I'm-Going-To-Regret-It-Later-But-Bring-Me-The-Cheesecake-Anyway
You.” Of course, you understand why both the “I-Need-To-Diet”
and “Bring-It-Anyway” Yous can sit side by side at the same
table, right? It's because the “I-Need-To-Get-On-The-Scales You”
doesn't have a doctor's appointment for another three months and
won't manifest with it's conjoined twin “What's-My-Excuse-This-Time
You” until they are trapped in the doctor's waiting room.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Now,
put all those people you are aside for moment, and imagine there's
only two of you. Who are you now? Who is the other person? When
Robert Louis Stevenson first published </span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
in 1886, the book was an immediate and spectacular hit with its
Victorian Age audience. A massive bestseller in both England and the
US, the novel sold more than a quarter million copies by the turn of
the 20</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">th</span></span></sup></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
century, and within a year of its initial publication, the story had
been adapted by more than a dozen theatrical groups for performance
on the stage. Many early readers recognized the tale as a metaphor
for their contemporary society's desire for the prurient struggling
to emerge from a stifling sense of social propriety. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> In
the deca</span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">des
since, the frightening story of a virtuous and respectable doctor who
transforms himself into a vile and murderous misanthrope through the
miracles of modern chemistry has become a perennial cultural icon.
The story has resurfaced in more than 120 film versions so far; the
first was released in 1908 while movie production was still in its
infancy. In 1931, the version featuring Fredric March became the
first horror film to receive an Academy Award. Over the years,
cinematic adaptions have included versions featuring Tom and Jerry,
Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis, and Eddie Murphy. The stylistic
range of the filmed versions has stretched from the bright simplicity
of Japanese Anime to the gritty shadows of B-grade American horror to
the flamboyant extravagance of Indian Bollywood musicals. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> What is
it about this story of one person who can become an entirely
different person that resonates so deeply within the universal human
psyche? Is it the fear of becoming someone we're not or the
inevitable recognition that time holds the potential to do to us what
Jekyll's potion does to him? If you imagine who you were ten years
ago, how have you changed? When you imagine yourself ten years from
now, who will you become? What, we may ask “ourselves” in the
presence of inevitable change, can we keep essential and inert as we
move from one age to the next or even, perhaps, as we move from one room
to the next? Before trying to answer the question who we want to be
ten years from now, we might want to decide who we want to be later
this afternoon.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> What
may be the most morally intriguing mystery of Stevenson's story is
the question of why someone would make the conscious choice to become
someone vile or sinister. If we could choose to be someone else, why
wouldn't we choose to be someone better than who we are now? In the
original story, this was precisely Jekyll's intention. At first,
the experiments Jekyll makes with his personality-splitting potion
are an attempt to expel the evil within him; unfortunately, after
feeling the dark freedom of Hyde's inhibitions, the good doctor
eventually loses his ability to return to the person he wants to be
and finds the temptation to become a monster overwhelming.
Eventually, Jekyll ends his transformations once and for all by
killing them both.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> The
implications of all of this, in regards to our ability to communicate
with others and, perhaps, to negotiate with ourselves, is that time
and place has great deal of influence on who we are and how we need
to express ourselves. An awareness of who we need to be at any
particular time can help guide us in how we talk to others; this
awareness not only can be fruitful in helping others understanding
us, but can also produce benefits in how we understand ourselves.
Perhaps you can get “I'm-Trying-To-Fall-Asleep-Now You” to
ruminate over this later tonight as you are drifting off to become
all those other strange people in your dreams.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> Keep
thinking rhetorically, and one of the cast of all the people I am
will be back next week.</span></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3652827944014124948.post-18970082695414390722012-11-11T09:48:00.001-08:002012-11-11T11:11:49.274-08:00Alien Visitation: Smells Like Roswell<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OFNe4jSSoHA/UJ_kyJ3e7OI/AAAAAAAAA0g/KRATDTy2AD4/s1600/aliennews.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OFNe4jSSoHA/UJ_kyJ3e7OI/AAAAAAAAA0g/KRATDTy2AD4/s320/aliennews.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Before we set out to answer the
question, “Is there intelligent life in outer space?”, we should
first try to determine if there's any legitimate supply here on
earth. The vastness of space can overwhelm our human imagination
with it's nearly infinite enormity, and yet, the dark reaches of
outer space's staggering depth is nonetheless paralleled inch by inch
with the nearly endless length of human gullibility.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Although there's no documented
evidence that Lincoln actually said, “You can fool all of the
people some of the time,” the truth of the aphorism shoots through
the human experience like a particle beam. I used to work with
another schoolteacher who liked to say, “No Lower Limit,” any
time other teachers shared their stories of astonishingly stupid
student behavior. By this expression my fellow teacher meant that
while human genius must certainly have its upper limits, the well of
human stupidity is bottomless; as soon as you think you've scratched
the bottom after hearing the dumbest response ever fallen from the
lips of a student, you can only establish a personal benchmark
because tomorrow (or as soon as five minutes from now) some other
student is going to say something even more inane.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of course, you do not have to be a
schoolteacher to know the truth of this axiom; anyone whose job
requires them to deal with the general public witnesses the accuracy
of “No Lower Limit” on a daily basis. I suspect if there is
intelligent life in outer space, aliens with foreheads the size of
dinner plates have designed advanced technology to harness the
endless supply of human stupidity to power their spaceships. The
energy from a single season of “The Jersey Shore” could propel an
entire fleet of spacecraft more than twice the length of the Milky
Way.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Have “Beings from Other Planets”
ever really visited our planet? An astrophysicist could perhaps offer
a <i>quantitative</i> estimate of the odds of alien visitation based
upon calculating the number of likely inhabitable planets divided by
current approximations of the likelihood of surpassing the physical
barriers to traveling faster than light speed. As a rhetorical
theorist, however, I would rather offer my <i>qualitative</i> opinion
based on the likelihood of ever getting a straight answer from anyone
who might actually know anything definitive one way or the other.
Thus, my rhetorical assessment of the E.T. visitation question is
that the truth, at this point, is unknowable.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the more than six decades that have
passed since July 8, 1947, – when Walter Haut, the public
information officer for the 509th Atomic Bomb Group at Roswell Army
Air Field, issued a press release claiming the army had recovered a
crashed “flying saucer” from the desert – so much bad
information has entered the public sphere that sorting out the
ontological truth of alien visitation is no longer feasible. If we
take the events of Roswell as a shining example of how much can go
bad in building a historical record of a supposed paranormal event,
then we can understand why both the adamant skeptic and die-hard true
believer are both sinking in the mud of unreliable information.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Here's what we do know: In the summer
of 1947, <i>something</i> made a mess on a ranch about 30 north of
Roswell, New Mexico. The foreman at the ranch had no idea what made
the mess, and he collected some of the debris to show his family. The
debris was strange enough to make him wonder what it was. Later,
after the ranch foreman confided in the local sherif and then shared
his story with the local newspaper, the army grew interested in the
odd debris, and they sent some folks out to investigate. On the
morning of July 8, Colonel William Blanchard, after examining
fragments of the debris, directed his public information officer, 1st
Lt. Walter Haut, to issue a press release stating that the United
States Army Air Force had recovered a crashed "flying disc."
Later, the very same day, after both national and international news
agencies began reporting the story, the US army hastily issued a
retraction claiming the debris did not come from a flying saucer but
rather from a weather balloon. In the following few days, some
newspapers ridiculed Haut for his initial press release, and by the
end of July, 1947, the incident had pretty much left the public
consciousness.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
For next 31 years, no one gave much
thought about the story of “the flying saucer that turned out to be
a weather balloon.” Then, in 1980, two writers by the name of
Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore published a book about the
wreckage found in the desert, and they claimed that one of the men
sent to investigate the debris, Army Major Jesse Marcel, quckly
recognized the material as extra-terrestrial and then conspired with
his superior officers to construct an elaborate coverup of the
incident. Berlitz and Moore, who claimed to having interviewed more
than 90 witnesses in researching their book, alleged that more than
mere spaceship rubble had been recovered, but actual alien corpses
had been recovered as well.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Since the first publication of Berlitz
and Moore's book, <i>The Roswell Incident</i>, several other authors
(notably Kevin D. Randle, Donald R. Schmit, Stanton Friedman, and Don
Berliner) have written books reporting “what actually happened”
at Roswell after interviewing hundreds of supposed eyewitnesses. In
the decades that have followed the publication of Bertliz and Moore's
first book on the subject, the awareness of the <i>mythos</i> of the
downed alien ship collided with the public imagination, and the city
of Roswell learned to both live with and capitalize upon this
awareness by becoming the Mecca for tourists interested in UFOlogy.
Travelers today to Roswell can discover street lights shaped like
alien heads and a wide variety of t-shirt shops, knick-knack stores,
and diners that cater to people who seemly cannot get enough kitschy,
plastic souvenirs.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Since the 1990's, the official account
of the US government is that there actually was a cover-up of what
happened at Roswell, but that the Army was not covering up the
recovery of an alien spacecraft, but rather the wreckage of <i>Project
Mogul</i>,<span style="color: #0b0080;"><span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><u><span style="background: #ffffff;">
</span></u></span></span></span>a top-secret weather
balloon device that was being developed to spy on Russian nuclear
weapon development.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Regardless of whether you choose to
believe the government's latest version of what actually happened in
the desert outside of Roswell or some hybrid story of the more than
half dozen authors who have produced contradictory book-length
explanations for what happened, the point I would like to make is
this: with so many inconsistent and conflicting stories, how can we
believe anyone's account of what happened? The first book that
researched the incident came from interviews conducted nearly three
decades after it happened. Out of the hundreds of people who
subsequently have made claims to having some first-hand experience
with the crash debris, how many of those people are either flat out
lying or have mentally relived other people's stories so often in
their minds that it became their own stories as well? Even if some
people are sincere in their beliefs that they experienced something
“not of this earth” in handling the debris, how many of those
people could actually distinguish alien material from mundane human
produced rubble?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Before leaving Roswell behind this
week, there are two additional points I would like to make. First,
regardless of whatever credibility issues Walter Haut may have
suffered later in life (years after Haut survived the national
ridicule of his initial press release he went on to open a UFO museum
for tourists in Roswell), Haut was a bona fide war hero who deserves
our deepest respect for flying 35 missions as a bombardier during
World War II. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And second, regardless of any evidence anyone might
produce to show that the debris from the Roswell crash site was (or
was not) extra-terrestrial, it seems extremely improbable to me that
a sufficiently advanced alien race that has developed the technology
capable of traversing the far regions of outer space would struggle
with the concept of “brakes.” Imagine this, an alien spaceship
is hurling in our direction at near light speed when a mechanical
engineer announces to the ship's captain that <i>somehow</i> they
have lost their ability to stop or slow down. “See that class-m
planet over there?” the captain says to his navigator. “It's
three fourths covered with water. Aim directly for one of its
deserts.” Perhaps, on other planets, there is also “no lower
limit.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll
see you folks again next week.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00531059125199831797noreply@blogger.com0