How to Spot a Fool

“The fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head, see the world spinning 'round.” – Paul McCartney

     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.

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” 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.

     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.

     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.

     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’!”

     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.

     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.”

     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.

     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 replace 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.

     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.

My Blarney Has a First Name: Lucky

“A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone.” – Tyrion Lannister

“They got little baby legs that stand so low, you got to pick em up just to say hello.” – Randy Newman

A few weeks ago, a student of mine suggested that my St. Patrick's Day post should be dedicated to leprechauns. So here it:

     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.

     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.

     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?

     Some anthropological historians tie the stories of leprechauns to the Tuatha Dé Danann, 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 Tuatha Dé Danann, 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 luchorpán, 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.

     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.

     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^th century marketing than medieval folklore. Up until the late 19^th 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.

     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^th 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. Click here if you think I'm making this up.

     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.

     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.

In Praise of Corporate Education -- Encomium to Ephemera

  

     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^th 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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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).

     Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll be back next week.

They Might Be Giants, But They Definitely Are All Dudes

Spoiler Alert: This week's column discusses Bryan Singer's film Jack the Giant Slayer. 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 rhetoric 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. 

     Walking out of the movie theater last night, my wife, Ruth, was indignant at the ending of Jack the Giant Slayer. 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.

     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.

     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 modern 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.

     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 Snow White and the Huntsman 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.

     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.”

     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 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.

     Keep thinking rhetorically and I'll be back next week.

The Tang of Reality

    

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     Keep thinking rhetorically and I'll be back next week.

Love People and Avoid Falling Objects

     

     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.

     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 prerogative, but I would remind you that the word “prerogative” comes from the Latin pre meaning “before” and rogare 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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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, imagine everyone doing that.

     Keep thinking rhetorically and I'll be back next week.

Beowulf Sets the Bar

This post is lovingly dedicated to Stella Singer and Josie Bloomfield.

     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.

     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 Beowulf. So, Stella and Josie (who are such terrific medievalists that they do not need to rely upon autocorrect to spell the word “medievalist”), please forgive any of my 21^st century anachronistic goofiness that may cause you to think I give a doctorate in English a bad reputation.

     Lesson #1: Every problem has a mother. If I had to choose the greatest life lesson that comes from studying Beowulf, 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 Beowulf, 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.

     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.

     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.

     Lesson #2: A good reputation is better than a cave full of treasure. 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.

     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.

     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.

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.

     Lesson #3: It's all good as long as you haven't killed any family. 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.

     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.

     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.

     Keep thinking rhetorically, and I'll be back next week.