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Doyle Srader has come unstuck in time.
No, I'm not bouncing back and forth between World War Two and Tralfamadore. I only mean that Friday gave me fresh reason to appreciate how different time looks to me from the way it looks to my students, and even most of my colleagues. Thursday night, I went to the Spirit Showcase. It was an excuse, and any excuse is a good one, to drop in at Cozmic Pizza and have a Rings of Saturn, although the beer they talked me into, a Belgian Witbeer under the brand name "Mother Ship," was truly awful. But I enjoyed the music, in no small part because the players were all NCU students. After that, we had a debate team meeting, because we needed to get in at least one complete practice round before today's tournament. That started a few minutes past nine, and when it was done, they all wanted to debrief. And then I still had my walk home. I didn't get to bed much before midnight, so I slept in just a bit.
None of that put my attention on time. It was on my walk to work that I confronted the difference. The sun was all the way up, and there was noticeable traffic, from cars to bikes to other walkers. Nothing extraordinary, nothing I wouldn't expect at that hour, but not what I'm accustomed to, anymore. These days, I walk to work in near pitch darkness, with very few other people around, and that has become very precious to me. The stillness feels safe and soothing. I don't need it all day, but it's a part of my morning routine, and when I missed it on Thursday, I missed it.
The actual thought that brushed through my head that day was, "So this is what it's like." And that thought bridged me over to musing about television, which also imprints people's perception of time.
At present, I don't own a television. Furthermore, I haven't had a working television with cable in almost thirteen years. Very occasionally I see a few minutes of TV at someone else's home, or in a hotel room, but I nearly never sit down with the purpose of watching an entire program. Over Christmas, I had a brief flirtation with Netflix downloadable programming, but during the term I have nothing like the time it takes to watch anything substantial. For all those reasons, I spend almost zero percent of my day immersing my brain in a reality that includes quick cuts, TV editing, and metered time for advertisements. I simply don't come in contact with that experiential rhythm, and that's a major difference separating me from most other people I see daily.
So, my start and finish time are different. My start is quiet and free from people. I skip out entirely on night-life, which is when most folks do a good deal of socializing. And then, during the day, I live in a continuous reality, and there aren't clear on-off switches between messages of substance and sales pitches.
Simplest way to put it is that I live on farmer time. And I can live with that.
So tonight, the library is having Mystery Night. It's a live action game of Clue. They asked me if I'd be part of it, and they gave me the name "Sergeant Skittles." They didn't tell me much else, except that I should have an opening speech explaining my role in the game. This is what I came up with.
"Skittles, here. For many years, I was head of the vice squad in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Those were mean streets. Without warning, you might find someone had thrown a Jawbreaker. And then your teeth would tumble to the ground. Krackel! More than once, I barely escaped a beating, or a bullet, or feeling my bones Crunch, thanks to my two assistants, Mike and Ike. They were real Lifesavers.
"On the side, I moonlighted as head of security at the chocolate factory. One night, I heard a ruckus and stepped outside to investigate. There was a man demanding that we let him in. He definitely was not a Jolly Rancher. It was ... Boddy.
"He had thought up his own candy bar. I think he'd been to a few too many state fairs, and had seen a few too many deep fried inventions, because he tried to turn the method inside-out. His big idea was a chocolate-covered pork chop. He'd tested it on a few focus groups. Named it after himself. And when they bit into it, and he asked, 'So do you like the taste of the Boddy?' he never quite understood why none of them stayed around long enough to fill out the questionnaire.
"I listened to the end of his sob story, and I said 'Shut your Gobstopper.' When he lunged at me, I buried my fist in his Jelly Belly, and the boys took him out. I thought I'd seen the last of him.
"It was later that same night that I first met ... her. The love of my life. As soon as she walked in, I saw that she was quite the Red Hot. I thought, Payday! It was my Baby ... Ruth. Her eyes, her lips, her Mounds, her Watchamacallit. She was my Almond Joy. We liked to get all Nestlé and watch the Milky Way. Then we'd step outside to look at the stars. I began to dream that maybe we could raise our own Junior Mints, who might grow up to think that their Pop Rocks. But I didn't count on ... Boddy.
"Looking back, I don't quite remember which of my jobs I was working when I met Ruth. That should've been my first warning. Boddy homed in her weakness. He found the temptation; he knew she had a long history as a groupie. And when a rap concert came to town, he got her a phone number, and then a hotel room key. When I caught up with her, I said 'Listen here, Miss Smarties. I thought you and I were a perfect match before I knew you were a tart!' I turned my back, my heart broken in Reese's Pieces, but it wasn't until I heard her Snickers that the first hot tear ran down my cheek, and I thought, This is what it sounds like when Doves cry.
"The next morning she left town on a tour bus, snuggled in the arms ... of M&M.
"Despite all that, I am not guilty of the murder of Mr. Boddy."
I think I'm going to start my own political movement. I've got this great idea for fomenting and harnessing a lot of latent collective rage: we're going to be the anti-subpoena party.
Now, I know, I know, at first mention it sounds wonkish and unsexy, like something only lawyers would pay any attention to, but bear with me. This has potential.
The issuing of a subpoena is rarely good news, and often is extremely unwelcome, but nevertheless, is frequently both necessary and understandable. The sketchy ones can be a sign that the justice system is having a sloppy or irrational day, but when that happens, there are ways to quash it. That attempt might succeed or it might fail, but even then there are always lessons learned, ways to do it better. The fact that it's not always used perfectly is no more of a rational argument against it than occasional false alarms are an argument for abolishing fire departments.
Sound reasonable? Well, say goodbye to reasonability, because all that is about to change. This country needs an anti-subpoena revolution, and here's my first crack at a manifesto:
- A subpoena is big, bad, intrusive government at its worst. So the government wants your information? So it can't enforce the law without it? Well, isn't that just too bad? It's not the government's information; it's your information. It belongs to you.
- A subpoena is wasteful. What do they do with your information once they have it? They run straight to the press and leak it, and your privacy swirls right down the drain.
- And even though the cases of corruption and misconduct are actually few and far between, I can take every one of them I find, as well as a few legitimate cases that I can twist and distort to seem like corruption, and repeat them with drumbeat insistence until people with the critical thinking skills of a dishrag decide that they're all just greedy grabs for power.
- Oh, and I need a complete bonehead argument. I can't launch my own democracy-mangling pustule of a movement without an argument so stupid that it makes you slam your head on your keyboard in despair. Mmm ... how's this? Pluralize the word, and you get "subpoenas." Say it out loud. You see? You see right there? It's a code word for the secret terrorist plot to put hormones in our water and conquer us through genital shrinkage! I'll repeat this a few dozen times on an AM radio show, getting more and more worked up, and I'll change reality! Although, honestly, that'll be the easiest part, since the listeners won't have too tight a grip on reality to begin with.
Job numero uno, I have to condition everyone to turn their brains off whenever I mention the word. They can't be permitted to think about catching criminals, about the impossibility of prosecuting lawbreakers effectively without obtaining evidence. Can't let any of that rationality or perspective seep in through the cracks. Can't let anyone suspect that a subpoena might be a useful tool instead of, or even at the same time as, a headache. Nosirree: I have to stamp that right out!
Oh, and I probably need to associate it with one political party, too, so the target is a manageable size. Let's see: which one paints itself as the party of law and order? Ahhh, perfect! And I need a catchy three-word label, just because it's not a political movement for the brain-dead if I don't regularly drop productive discussion for a round of childish name-calling. How about "subpoena and railroad?" No, too many syllables. "Subpoena and screw?" That has promise. "Subpoena and ballerina?" I may have to keep working on that part.
But boy, am I rolling now! Soon as I get momentum, I can lure all the braying, brain-dead breakfast cereals who get their political commentary from the slogans and the brutal oversimplifications recruited for my angry mob, and I can so monkey-wrench the government that it can't get anything accomplished, and we're all less safe, and then I can exercise my newfound leverage over this scorched-earth country that once upon a time worked, however messily or imperfectly.
Let's roll.
For smallness, the bantamweight champ is
The miniature NCU campus
Community here
Is like Biosphere
With one good-sized boot, you could stamp us.
I take the bridge 'cross the Willamette
'Smore comfortable than if I swam it
But I lose my nerve
When bicyclists swerve
They won't turn their iPods off, dammit!
A Beacon's a pretty good balla
Who carries his weight as a schola
To take OIT
He'll fire off the three
And bring home a victory -- holla!
I have eight new holes in my walls: seven at home, one in my office. And I halfway expected that I'd feel sad about this, but instead it feels as though a piece of clothing that was askew is now straight and comfortable.
Throughout my life, I've had a hard time moving from one home to another, and each time I've endured a burst of intense homesickness that lasted anywhere from one night to a few months. When I came to Oregon, I festooned my apartment and office walls with framed pictures, all of which came out of the several shoeboxes I keep on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. (I also splurged, from my first paycheck, on a large print of "A Saturday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte," by Georges Seurat, which I've always wanted to have on the wall, over the couch.) And for a while, I would come home each night, flake out in my big, overstuffed papa chair, and feebly enjoy the sight of reminders from my past.
But most of that enjoyment has faded. It hasn't left me desolate, though; it's been replaced, and quite thoroughly.
Back in Texas, I was especially close with one branch of my extended family. The kids in the house, especially, were dear to my heart. But as it is with many academics, I have a tricky time forming and maintaining close relationships, which is part eccentricity, part having a brain wired to wrestle with abstraction and academic writing, and part work stress. That's not to say I had more work stress than the family members, because I clearly didn't, but it was different: it followed an entirely distinct pattern, and that made it hard for me to understand their struggles, anticipate their rhythms and vice versa. Definitely vice-versa. From time to time, that trickiness grew into rockiness, and sometimes became open disaffectation. And after a number of years of patching it up, seeing it fall apart, and patching it up again, I arrived at one firm decision that broke the cycle. One of the unspoken rules, the unwritten laws, was that they waited until I contacted them, and then we would plan some sort of get-together: dinner at their house, or occasionally something different. But it was left to me to get the ball rolling. And at the time, I saw rational reasons for this: they had lots of responsibilities, compounded by the fact that they had to coordinate all of them. Both kids had needs, both parents had duties, and all of it had to be sorted out and attacked as efficiently as possible. My load of obligations wasn't always smaller, but it was always simpler.
Eventually, that wasn't a good enough reason anymore. My chief gripe, which we discussed on a few occasions, was that whenever I contacted them and my timing was less than perfect, it felt to me as though they became angry and blamed me for whatever they found difficult about their life. I felt attacked for not having perfect timing. I felt attacked for my insensitivity at intruding when they felt overwhelmed. The fact that I had no idea what went on in their home if they didn't take the initiative to keep me informed didn't temper their anger at all. I tried over time to be a patient and supportive family member, to let it roll off, to see it as frustration that wasn't really aimed at me. But finally, when I received three tongue-lashings in one week, it became too much, and I arrived at a decision: I'm not going to yell back, I'm not going to sulk, I'm not going to do anything at all but wait for them to initiate contact. It seemed to me like a good solution. I'm intruding? My timing is bad? Fine. They can set the tempo. If they need to turn their attention elsewhere, I can wait. I ran this reasoning by a number of friends, some of whom were mutual friends with these family members, and there was a strong consensus that turned out to be prescient: "You're never going to hear from them. They wait for you to call because that puts them in the driver's seat. All get-togethers are at their house because that's their turf. This has all been a power game."
I didn't want to believe that, and I still don't entirely buy it. But what happened next was pretty strong evidence. Did they contact me? Nope. When I bumped into them spontaneously, they always made a point of telling me how much they missed me. I believed that about as much as I believed someone who says they're starving when they've got a complete meal two inches from their fingers. Several times I thought, sourly, You know, your phone makes outgoing calls as well as taking incoming ones! But I chalked this up to learning how things really were, and tried to be thankful for the lesson. The same friends who'd predicted this now said, "You're finding out what they apparently thought of friendship with you all along. They were fond of you when you were right there and they didn't have to exert any effort, but they won't stir themselves to keep it going. It's nothing personal; you just misunderstood what was there in the first place."
This wasn't initially going to be a history of that period of transition, but since it's out there, I can explain now why I have eight holes in my wall. When I moved here, among the pictures I put up on my wall were a number of photos I'd taken of the two kids from that household. I had been extremely fond of them, and I'd taken a lot of pictures of them that turned out very well. About three days ago, I thought, Why are those still on my wall? It wasn't that the pictures made me feel angry or sad, but more just that they no longer fit. They didn't stir anything in me, the way they used to. For the first time, I thought, what would happen if I took them down?
I expected that it would feel wrenching to do so, but as it turned out, I was wrong. This morning, the whim struck me, and I dismounted the seven pictures of the kids that were hanging in my apartment. And there was no pain, no grief, no hurt. It felt as though I had tried to remove a tree that I thought would have very deep, strong roots, but discovered instead had no roots at all, and came up easily.
And it would be easy to misunderstand this: I'm not saying I don't feel anything for these family members anymore. That's clearly not right. I have no plans to shred the pictures, or burn them, or even just throw them away. As soon as I have time to de-frame them, they'll go back in the shoebox and into the closet. In other boxes in the closet I have books I'm not currently interested in reading, and clothes I don't currently wear, but I've kept both sets of boxes for a reason.
I worried, when I moved out here, that losing the family ties and church ties I had back in Texas would leave me bitterly lonely. And it's true that I'm a lot less involved with my church here than I was with the church there: I got very deeply involved, and was actually named the College Ministry Coordinator, but have had to unplug myself from a fair number of activities just because there are only so many hours in a day. And as far as contact with family goes, I call my mother on Sunday afternoons, and we talk for about an hour, and that's it. Very different from my pre-move life.
What's different is the role of my job.
My job has filled in the space that used to be occupied by family and church. None of my colleagues are rivals, since none are in my field: they range from supportive and helpful to very firm and close friends. And the difference in how students relate to me is absolutely remarkable. Back in Texas, I'd occasionally get a bit of encouragment from one of my hundred and fifty students: maybe three or four times in a semester. I treasured those, and still do, but there's just no comparison to the student-teacher tie at this school. These folks encourage me, praise me, express gratitude, seek me out, include me in their play, several times a day and dozens of times a week. Keeping the healthy distance between student and educator is a serious challenge here, and one that I work very hard to balance, but it's a good problem to have. I feel incredibly close to my students, and that makes the workday a joy.
Aside from that, it makes the distance from my old life feel like growth, like progress, like going from the previous chapter of my life to the next. So when I made eight holes in my wall (nail holes where the pictures used to be), all I really was doing was rearranging the decorative symbols to match the new, very comfortable, very healthy reality. And that took me by surprise. But it was a pleasant surprise.
Yoko Ono is the exact same age as my mother.
And that's not the only thing they have in common.
It's not funny, it's not funny, it's a real disorder that disrupts the lives of a lot of people. It's no laughing matter. I know that. But I can't help myself.
Somehow, this morning, I got the image in my head of a narcoleptic figure skater. And it's kept popping back in, off and on, all day.
Not very adult of me.
February is shaping up as my snarky month. (Well, snarkier.)
This week, I had a fresh burst of frustration over the stimulus package and the opposition to it, so I fired off two letters to the editor; one to the Vegetable-Guard, and one to the Oregonian.
The R-G letter (which ran today):"People are dying of salmonella? There’s not a minute to lose! Quick, pass a tax cut for people with salmonella! Don’t bother spending the money on food safety to actually hire enough inspectors to put teeth in the law. It’s not the government’s money; it’s the people's money! Get those refund checks mailed out to their graves, so we can pay someone to put a nice coat of varnish on their tombstones.
"We’re losing more veterans to suicide than we are soldiers in combat? There’s not a minute to lose! Quick, pass a tax cut for veterans who’ve committed suicide!"
The Oregonian letter:"The goal was bipartisan support for the stimulus plan, but it didn’t quite happen. In case this happens again, I have some tips for President Obama for the next go-round.
"Your first missing piece was war. There just wasn’t enough war to interest your loyal opposition. Next time, tell a lot of lies and tangle the country up in an unnecessary and incompetently fought war, because we know from experience that if you do, the Republicans will crowbar open the ATM and invite you to help yourself.
"Better still, you could just switch parties. If you yourself are a Republican, you can propose three trillion dollars to buy tap-dancing shoes for leprechauns, and the Republican caucus will mob the cameras to say, with straight faces, that it’s the most common-sense, family values, anti-terrorist idea they’ve ever heard, and fiscally conservative to boot."
They're clearly over the top and not entirely fair. They're more an expression of frustration than anything else. But they're also not altogether off-target.
Wonderfully bad arguments.
God is love.
Love is blind.
Stevie Wonder is blind.
∴ Stevie Wonder is God. ■
Nothing is better than sex.
A gumball is better than nothing.
∴ a gumball is better than sex. ■
Nobody is perfect.
I am nobody.
∴ I am perfect. ■
Since I love you, I am, by definition, a lover.
All the world loves a lover.
You are all the world to me.
∴ you love me. ■
Woohoo, it's snowing!
I love Oregon.
This Wednesday is the submission deadline for papers for the National Communication Association's annual convention. I have a project that's ready to write, but I have to do some heavy-duty work to get it done by Wednesday, so I'm feeling weighted down and unwilling to start. In this blog post, I'm going to try to free-write the argument I'm making in the paper, in hopes that if I can get it to come clear, the actual academic writing, with evidence and citations and everything else, will go a bit more smoothly.
On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus. That day, he put together a multimedia package of writings, photos and video, and sent it to NBC News. They aired selected photos and excerpts from the video, and read aloud portions of his writings. Over the next several days, they endured a firestorm of controversy, including complaints from victims' family members, from Virginia law enforcement, and from rival network heads. NBC's chief spokesperson in the affair was Steve Capus, president of NBC News. He defended his decision to air the material, but one of his concessions struck me funny at the time, and I copied it into my idea log. He said, "Sometimes good journalism is bad public relations."
What I study is the way professionals argue among themselves about the essence of the profession, and, in particular, about how the traits of an ideal professional come together to form an identity, a profile. Judges call this judicial temperament. Doctors all carry around an idealized cognitive model of the person who is most fully a doctor. I've been working to demonstrate, in several different fields, that when a controversy erupts inside a profession, it's possible to catch glimpses of that identity in the space between the arguments each side makes. I also believe that in those controversies, the identity is managed, renewed, re-created, reinforced, and sometimes radically altered.
Journalism is an interesting case, because they can't make up their minds whether they are a profession. The classic professions are doctors, lawyers, and the clergy. What makes an occupation a profession is tricky to pin down, but some of the more important markers are a commitment to serving the public, possession of arcane knowledge not available to everyone, an insistence on autonomy and freedom from outside judgment of the quality and appropriateness of the work, and heavy reliance upon colleagues.
Journalists do, typically, view themselves as public servants, do insist that only they are qualified to judge their work, do operate in collegial networks, but have kind of a nuanced position on arcane, secretive knowledge. It's a constitutive idea in journalism that a great journalist can explain anything to the readers or viewers, and that success is measured by effectiveness in that very task. The notion, then, that journalists are the guardians of something not everyone can understand (medicine, law, religious teaching) is not a terribly good fit. And that's where one of the more stubborn objections to calling journalism a profession comes in. Professions tend to include licensing: lawyers pass the bar, doctors are licensed, clergy are ordained. Journalists, however, have as part of their heritage the notion that anyone with a sharp eye, an ability to distill information down to the essence, and a flair for writing, can be a journalist. Formal training may be helpful, but is not necessary.
Public relations, on the other hand, is working itself into a frenzy trying to build all the trappings of a profession: certification, ethical codes, accrediting standards for colleges that have PR majors, and so forth. And PR has a relationship with journalism that reminds me of the tie between an adolescent and a parent: very troubled, very turbulent, but still unbreakable and even (at times) rewarding. Many people move from one occupation to the other, in both directions. And journalists have the same concerns as PR people: getting the message right, and doing the right thing for their various publics, and doing all of it ethically while staying afloat as a viable business enterprise. The difference is simply that journalists are the public version, and PR people take on private interests. And a number of commentators from inside the field say that when PR was new, underresourced, and not very powerful, and journalists were still resource-rich and in their element, the relationship actually worked quite well. But now that PR is a multi-billion dollar industry, while journalistic organizations are cutting budgets to the bone, the relationship has inverted, with PR people exercising more power and bringing more resources to bear on getting their way. Public trust in journalism is evaporating, which hurts both occupations, and the tie they share is plunging down below dysfunctional to downright toxic.
With that in mind, here's how the debate over the airing of Cho's video plays out.
Capus lays out the following arguments:
- This is plainly newsworthy. It is a look inside the mind of a mass murderer.
- It wasn't done recklessly; he and the entire staff agonized over whether they should release any of it, and if so, how much.
Arguments made by critics in the profession included:
- Airing the video at all was inappropriate, since the ravings of a madman have no news value, and it encouraged other mentally ill people who might want their views aired on network TV to do the same thing.
- Even if airing the video once was defensible, airing it over and over again was just sensationalism.
The points of stasis, then, involved the threshold decision to air the footage (newsworthy or not?), and the secondary decision of how often to repeat its broadcast (gratuitous or not?). In each case, NBC could arguably be guilty of showing material that was designed solely to shock, rather than to inform, or could be found responsible in its decision to provide its viewers with the manifesto of a mass murderer, and responsible in the restraint it showed when it repeated the broadcast on subsequent showings.
A couple of bits out of the research I did into PR and journalism point toward some answers. One pair of authors talked about the need for journalism to adopt an ethic of care. On the way to their argument, they pointed out how journalists atomize their audience, emphasizing difference over connection (difference is what makes a story newsworthy) and being careful to keep all difference equal and unjudged. Another observes that journalists have always relied on sources to generate the content for their reporting, and that PR can be defined very, very simply as the professionalizing of sources. Since this is obviously a study in the use of an explosive source, one loaded with power but also loaded with danger, there's something to this angle. One author talks a good deal about journalism's "epistemic authority," especially in the context of the growing importance of marketing in news programming. Does something become news just because it draws attention? Is there a difference between need to know and want to know? Since NBC's threshold decision involved whether the video was news, the epistemic authority question is on the table. Yet another said what made a journalist a journalist was the ability to take an entire event and produce a condensed version that interested onlookers could digest without suffering information overload; that trait of journalism seems a good parallel to the "How often shall we re-air this?" decision, which went along with "Which excerpts shall we air in the first place?" In fact, since one major difference in journalism today and journalism in its earliest days is (a). broadcast and (b). 24 hour broadcast, I think I can make the argument that "how often can we re-broadcast this?" is a parallel issue to "how much shall we include?"
Okay. That's a mess. Let's see if I can untangle some of it:
- Professionalizing of sources.
- Epistemic authority.
- Distillation vs. frequency (editing).
- The atomized audience.
Two of those are cross-boundary relationships: the professionalized source and the atomized audience. Two of those are issues that are internal to the enterprise of reporting: epistemic authority and editing. Epistemic authority and editing have the most salience to the two points of stasis identified above. Professionalizing of sources and the atomized audience have the most potential to explain the rhetorical situation against which the argument was joined.
Hmm.
That's enough clean-up work that I can change tasks and go do something else. I might come back and try to fiddle more with this later today or tomorrow.
