Doyle's Blog

Silly Dream

2012-01-17T08:32:00.000-08:00

So I dreamed that NCU actually did change its mascot, but not to the Cute Puppies. Instead, we became the NCU Wet Willies. The reasoning was that since it rains all the time in Eugene, we're soaking wet, and we're trying to do God's will, so we're the Wet Willies.

There was no suit with a big foam head. Instead, all the athletes in all the sports started giving Wet Willies: the cross country kids gave them to other runners, the basketball and soccer players to the other team, etc. Now that I'm awake, I'm not quite sure how that would work in volleyball, and in softball it would take split-second timing, but whatever. I'm also not quite sure why referees weren't calling fouls or tossing our players out, but give me a break: it was a dream.

So then, all the other teams started wearing earmuffs every time they played us, and as a result they couldn't hear one another or their coaches. Plus, for some reason I remember that the cross country runners got really sweaty ears, and that was bad for running. Anyway, all our teams won the NAIA championship in all their sports, and everybody was really excited.

And then I woke up, and instead of snowing, it was raining. Perfect.

Contrastive Apologetics

2012-01-15T07:27:00.000-08:00

So last night I started reading The Crescent Through the Eyes of the Cross, by Nabeel Jabbour, and as of now I'm about halfway through it; that's how hard it is to put down. One thing he said wasn't new to me, but I'd never thought about it in this context, and another thing stopped me dead in my tracks for just a few minutes.

I'm familiar with the fact that reasoning in syllogisms (B because A, C because B, D because C, so if you believe A, you must believe D) is a very western thinking pattern but not universal, so one common failing in our efforts to preach the gospel is that we package it in a way that doesn't make sense to hearers from other cultures. Far more effective throughout most of the Middle East is narrative reasoning that makes its point indirectly, but unmistakably. Strongest proof of the premise: Jesus didn't reason in syllogisms, but taught in parables. Paul, on the other hand, was all about the syllogism, but his education had a huge root in classical Greco-Roman thinking.
The thing that hadn't occurred to me is a question Jabbour says many Muslims ask of Christians: "Why do the Christian nations favor Israel over the Muslim world when Islam is so much closer theologically to Christianity than Judaism? Jews deny that Jesus was the Messiah, and the Talmud even says Jesus is in Hell. Islam accepts that Issa was born of a virgin, did many miracles, and is in Heaven with Allah. Why can't Christians recognize their brothers?"

Put those two together, and here's my answer to both:

There was a family made up of father, mother, and several children, and the mother's father lived in their household. He had not aged gracefully, and was known for his sharp tongue. He denounced the father's work, the mother's decisions, and the children's lessons and games with loud, hurtful language. When guests came to visit, they marveled at the hostility the grandfather showed, and praised the family for taking care of him, even while he made his presence so very unpleasant.

One day, a visitor came from a neighboring town to complete a brief business errand. His parents had been childhood friends of the father and mother, but tragically, were no longer alive. Upon his arrival, everyone was struck by his resemblance to the children. He could easily have been mistaken for their brother! He spent the evening with them, telling stories and enjoying games, and everyone agreed that his nature fit with theirs perfectly. At the end of the evening, he said, "Why don't I simply become part of your family and live here? You can tell everyone that I'm another of your children that was away at school, but returned home to live in the house because of my great love for all of you?"

The mother smiled. "It is a blessing to us that you've visited, and we treasure your friendship, but we have no room here. Our family fills all the rooms in the house."

"But if you were to move your father out, I could take his room," the young man said. "He undercuts everything you do and say, while I am much closer to you in appearance, belief and attitude. I would fit here perfectly. Why not accept me in his place?"

Very, very gently, hoping not to hurt his feelings, the father replied, "Even if my father-in-law's words do not please us, my family would not exist without him. The relationship we have with him is genuine. It is living proof of our family's history. The relationship you propose is based on deceit. You are very near to us, but to tell the world we shared a blood tie would be a lie. We hope always to enjoy your friendship, but friendship with you is not a sufficient reason for us to deny what is."

It's a clumsy first attempt, but at least it doesn't fall into the error of framing the reasoning in a way that will only breed confusion, not understanding.

And that leads me to wonder whether anyone has paid serious attention to contrastive apologetics? Contrastive rhetoric is a fairly young field, having begun in the 1960s with the work of Robert Kaplan, and that makes me curious as to whether anyone has tackled the work of reframing reasoning that clarifies difficult questions in Christian thought in argument patterns that work in different cultures? That might be a research project for this summer.

Superiority

2011-08-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Walking is superior to bicycling.

My feet will never go flat before, during or after my walk.
Jesus never rode a bicycle on water.
"There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast." -- Paul Scott Mowrer
My feet don't need a lock, rack or cage, and Eugene is not the foot theft capital of the nation.
There is no need for, and therefore no such thing as, a walking helmet.
I only have to beware of distracted and/or psychotic drivers about 5% of the time, when I'm crossing a street. And even then I mostly have stoplights and crosswalks on my side.
The LORD has not required of us that we do justice, love mercy, and go for a humble bike ride with Him.
There are no catchy eighties songs with accompanying cheesy dances about biking like an Egyptian.
I'm fine with walking a mile in someone else's shoes, but I'll pass on riding a mile in someone else's bike shorts.
Falls being inevitable, would you rather skin your knee or rack yourself on a solid metal bar?
Cool, thick, velvety green grass is meant to be felt between toes, not gouged out by tires.
Biking across the stage for your diploma, or down the aisle to your groom, will get you talked about. Doubly so if you pop a wheelie.
"Walking takes longer than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed." -- Edward Abbey
Expensive bicycles are a status symbol, but a foot is a foot is a foot.
God didn't pluck Enoch off his bicycle straight into Heaven.
"There is this to be said for walking: it's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog." -- Edward Abbey
If God had gone biking through Eden in the cool of the day, He would've roared up on Adam and Eve before they could hide in the trees, and pastors everywhere would be denied a prime sermon illustration.
Making a bicycle consumes finite resources and energy, generates pollutants, and is repetitive drudgery; making feet is part of makin' babies, which is all-natural and fun.
"Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities." -- Lewis Mumford

Cinema

2011-08-10T20:18:00.000-07:00

Just like last summer, I've spent the past three months checking a lot of movies out of the Eugene Public Library. Here, without further elaboration, is how much I enjoyed each movie I watched from start to finish between May 1 and today.

★★★★
None.

★★★☆
A History of violence
Eagle vs shark
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
Fireproof
Happy feet
Little Miss Sunshine
Primer
The Pursuit of happiness
There will be blood
Waking life
World's greatest dad

★★☆☆
Amazing grace
Capote
Dark city
Something the Lord made
The Accused
The Chronicles of Narnia. Prince Caspian
The Cider House rules
The Curious case of Benjamin Button
The History boys
The Hours
The Ring
Patton
Walk the line

★☆☆☆
Bulworth
Chronicles of Narnia. The voyage of the Dawn Treader
Know1ng
Martian child

☆☆☆☆
None.

Parity

2011-03-09T04:54:00.001-08:00

So this morning I heard, on NPR, a man from Tucson argue that it was a good idea to force college campuses to allow people to carry handguns. According to him, only law-abiding citizens obey the current rule against it, and he needs to pack his own protection against outlaws. He spoke approvingly of mutually assured destruction, saying it had done a fine job of keeping the world safe from nuclear annihilation for almost seventy years. And that got me to thinking, y'know what? We should also abolish traffic laws.

Seriously: we should paint over all the stripes, take down all the signs, eliminate all the speed limits, and, most of all, repeal the DUI laws. Because, y'know, only the law abiding respect them anyway. It's a war zone on them roads, what with drunk and crazy drivers thirsty for the blood of decent people. The only thing they understand is force! I should be free to run them off the road, knock them from their cars, run over them, reverse, run over them again, back and forth and back and forth until they're roadkill.

Now, I'm a little too tenderhearted for such work, so I might need a pint or two of courage, and that's where repealing the DUI laws comes in. If I'm just as much of a loose cannon behind the wheel, just as much of an unpredictable source of instant death as anybody else, then everybody will know to keep their distance from me, and I'm a lot more likely to get where I'm going without interference from other drivers. Oh, I suppose there's danger I might get in a one-car accident, but where's the fun in bothering to think about that when I'd rather get all worked up over the bogeymen of other cars, all driven by evildoers who have to be kept in check?

I mean, it's clearly my right to drive my car on sidewalks, through hospitals, up the escalator at the outlet mall, isn't it? The right to do anything you want in your car is part of what makes America great! Don't tell me anyone's un-American enough to think that there's a right way and a wrong way to drive a car. We don't cotton to that kind of traitor talk around here. Matter of fact, I think that's one of them Muslin Sorry laws, isn't it? Not here, thank you so much. We fought them over there to prevent them coming over here and actually stopping at all the stop signs just so they can slip in a quick prayer toward Mecca. Them big flowing robes just cover up the fact that they actually wear their seat belts. I'll tell you, Jesus would've weaved in out of traffic and run over kindergarteners in a crosswalk if He had sinners to smite and demons to cast out. Would've carried a handgun, too; Judas could kiss a barrel of cold hard steel for his trouble.

Bring 'em on!

Meatier-ology

2011-02-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

Students who take more than one class from me get accustomed to hearing fresh riffs on a running analogy. Here, I'm going to set down the extended dance mix as a pre-writing exercise before I submit it to the National Communication Association convention in the GIFTS (Great Ideas For Teaching Speech) division.

Communication is like the weather.

The weather is a complex system made up of a brain-mangling array of inputs, all mixed together in a system so complex and chaotic that we can't master it. Weather forecasting is not an exact science, and people are (for the most part) comfortable with that. But it's also not meaningless speculation, on a par with horoscopes: there are some observable signs that are powerful predictors of certain kinds of weather. Furthermore, weather follows cycles, with certain weather events being more likely at certain times of day or year. Communication is similarly impossible to map precisely, but is subject to forecasts of varying reliability, and those probable events also tend to wax and wane cyclically.
If communication is like the weather, then culture is like the climate. The climate yields the raw materials for weather, along with a landscape that channels or obstructs the development of weather systems, but the weather also renews the climate: a wet climate will generate rainy weather, and the rainy weather re-moistens the wet climate. Furthermore, if I move a few feet in any direction, it's unlikely the climate will change much, but as I travel dozens, hundreds, thousands of miles, I'm likely to see large variations in climate. However, that curve isn't smooth: at particular spots far removed from my point of origin, I might find that original climate substantially reproduced. Similarly, culture supplies the raw materials and the parameters for communication, but communication renews or changes the culture. If I move a few feet, I'm not terribly likely to find that the culture has changed (although I might stumble into a different co-culture, much like stepping from sunlight into the shade), but a longer journey increases the likelihood I'll find cultural difference. Still, there are places very far apart that are pockets of substantially the same culture.
Technologically mediated communication (the internet, cell phones) is air conditioning. We create a pocket of weather carved out from the surrounding weather for our comfort. Similarly, we use technologically mediated communication for very self-serving self-presentation, and to overcome physical barriers (distance, an expectation of non-contact) that would otherwise interfere with our communication choices.
Verbal communication is air, and nonverbal communication is water. These are the newest riffs on this analogy -- in fact, I just thought them up this morning. Deprived of either one, we don't live long, but either can harm us if they're polluted. Air is influential (barometric pressure, wind), but water provides many of the most important clues about imminent events -- think clouds -- and is the easiest to feel and the only one that can be seen. Still, even water that can only be observed indirectly can impact comfort and structural integrity: humidity can make us sweat and can ruin documents and artifacts. Finally, water manifests in many distinct states: vapor, liquid, snow, ice, sleet, dew. Correspondingly, we can't be mentally healthy for long if deprived of communication, but toxic communication can injure us. A lot of us think of words as the substance of communication, but nonverbals provide many of the clues that predict the development and outcome of a communicative encounter. Nonverbals tend to engage more of the senses; only blind people ordinarily employ touch in reading, and it's not possible to smell or taste a word. Chronemic messages are only indirectly observable, but make a big difference in human comfort and relational stability. And, yes, nonverbals come in many forms, from voice qualities to touch to posture to the rest of a very long list.

Cartoon

2011-01-31T10:52:00.001-08:00

I've got about six weeks to get my submissions written for this year's National Communication Association convention. Two of my papers will be quick and dirty, but one is a sustained scholarly effort. What's below is my attempt to sketch what I think the final product will look like, to give myself some guidance. If you have a thought, do feel free to share it.

Premise number one: Christians exist for the purpose of drawing near to God. We can only do so, we can only bridge the alienation brought about by our sin, because Christ took the punishment and reconciled us to God. Once we accept this, we are in right relationship with God, God's children, and from there we walk daily with Him, growing nearer to Him as the Holy Spirit works to conform us to the image of His son.

The important bit: the Christian life is relational.

Premise number two: this relational essence makes it the higher priority than message content in things we say to, about, and in service of, God. Paul Watzlawick wrote in Pragmatics of Human Communication that every message has a content dimension and a relational dimension. If a wife asks her husband to lift something heavy for her, and he, watching TV, says "I'll come do it at the next commercial," he may think she's just made a simple request and he's agreed to do it within a reasonable time, which is what the content conveys, but she may fume that he treats her as less important than the television, which is a relational message. Transferring that concept to this discussion, much of what we do, including Bible study, including worship, including prayer, including fellowship, including serving people in need, involves producing and consuming utterances, each of which has a content and relational dimension, but if premise number one is correct, then the relational dimension is always dominant over the content dimension.

The important bit: what we say is never as important as the way our sayings position us relative to God.

Premise number three: our relationship with God is primarily instantiated in a single dialectical tension, not the several that turn up in relationships between humans. Leslie Baxter's work argues that people experience the desire to be together and apart, to be open with one another and maintain privacy, to work up a repertoire of traditions and be spontaneous, and that the life of a relationship is the endless collaborative balancing of those tensions. But all three are meaningless in the relationship between human and God: we're never apart from God, we have no privacy from Him, and we cannot surprise Him. Instead, I tentatively assert that our dialectical tension in relating to God is wisdom vs. innocence. God calls on us to trust Him with a childlike faith, but also allows us to argue with Him, even occasionally letting us win the argument.

The important bit: our relational positioning with God drives us to find the right mix of trust and critical acuity.

Premise number four: Christian argumentation has to date been dominated by an apologetic tilt, which has much in common with multi-vitamins. Taking One-A-Day® can be a good idea if someone's diet actually lacks an important nutrient, but anyone who eats a balanced diet doesn't need such supplements. It's been said that Americans, who lead all other nations in consumption of vitamin pills, simply have the world's most expensive urine. Worse, in some cases high doses of vitamins can be toxic. The fit of this analogy comes from the largely unacknowledged dangers of apologetic argumentation; where someone's faith is crumbling because they can't get over a reasoned objection to Christianity, then apologetic work is a vitamin, correcting a deficiency. But where people pursue such arguments for their own sake, they risk damaging their faith. C. S. Lewis, widely regarded as the contemporary champion of apologetics, repeatedly warned people not to attempt to build up their faith by winning debates, insisting that his own apologetic work had weakened his faith, and the only correction was to experience God's presence directly. Again, the relationship was far more important than the content.

The important bit: Trying to win arguments that prove God's existence or other Christian teachings can address specific obstacles to faith, but is equally likely to weaken it if deployed unnecessarily.

Premise number five: The proper role for Christian argumentation can be understood along the lines of work done by Doug Ehninger in the late nineteen sixties: argument as mutual correction, as a way of granting personhood to another, making oneself vulnerable to another and thereby building a bond. God shows us by joining in argument with us that He is not distant, detached, uninvolved, and as we argue with Him, we are forced to accept correction where we are wrong. Similarly, the arguments we have between ourselves should be opportunities to build fellowship, to grant one another the dignity of making our reasons explicit and being open to persuasion by the other, to surrendering our positions when they are successfully refuted. In all these instances, the relationship is far more important than the content. Rabbinic scholars fell into the trap of adding layer upon layer of content over the Torah, drowning it in commentary and judgments, at the price of a dynamic and engaged relationship with God and one another, and if we pull back from unnecessary apologetic argument and instead use argument as exploration of difference and a procedure for building trust, then we arrive at a more robust and sturdy bond.

The important bit: Argument as procedure has the potential to strengthen relationships, and the Christian life is relational in its essence. ■

I know I'm using argument in incommensurable ways, between us and God and between person and person, but that's one of the things I'll get sorted out. This is just a start, and I've got six weeks to develop it.

Round numbers

2011-01-29T07:44:00.001-08:00

I don't know if anything like this happened when I was ten years old. My memory doesn't reach back that far. But when I was twenty, I hit a fork in the road, followed by a comparable fork at thirty and forty, and now I honestly wonder what's going on.

At twenty, I reached the culmination of seven years of non-stop obsession, which built to a climax that didn't leave much more to do. I'd had my first competitive debate at thirteen, and knew immediately that I'd found what I wanted to be good at. The problem was, I'm really not cut out to be a competitive debater. I can think like a debater, and I'm reasonably good with words and on my feet, but I don't have the cut-throat instinct. My competitive streak is about the size of an eyelash. Still, I poured time and effort into debate, and slowly, slowly grew into my potential, which was never much to begin with. In April of 1989, I was in the room as my teammates won the national championship for intercollegiate debate, making fairly heavy use of arguments I'd researched. We celebrated madly that night. This was it, was what I'd always wanted, dreamed about, and I had it.

About ninety days later, give or take, I turned twenty. About ninety days after that, give or take, I quit debate for the first time. I came back for a full season, quit again, came back for one tournament, and retired permanently.

That didn't mean I was soured on debate, though: I'd just made a decision to become a college debate coach. I loved the activity; I just figured all the struggling I'd done, the snail's pace of my improvement, the dozens of places I got stuck, would make me a fantastic teacher of debate. And, honestly, I was better as a coach than competitor. Working with some incredibly gifted colleagues, I was part of a coaching staff that took the University of Georgia program from an underperforming team with loads of potential to a performance, in my last year, that they've still never matched, and that no public school in the history of intercollegiate debate has ever exceeded: second and third place at the NDT (National Debate Tournament) in a single year. Kansas matched it back in 1976, and Emory would later surpass it in 2000 with first and third in a single year, but it's still an achievement I'm proud of my part in. That was my launch into intercollegiate debate coaching: I went on the job market that year, was a fly-in finalist for four different jobs, and was snapped up by Arizona State.

After two years at Arizona State, I very suddenly reached saturation, rapid-onset burnout, and decided I had to walk away from debate altogether. I left Phoenix for a job in Nacogdoches, Texas; it was one hundred percent teaching. It's not as though I wanted to be a teacher, but that was the only work experience I had outside debate coaching that could potentially pay my bills.

During the summer between my last year at Arizona State and my first at SFA, I turned thirty. At twenty, I peaked in direct involvement with debate, and almost immediately lost my love for it. As thirty approached, I peaked in my indirect involvement with debate, and it happened again.

So then, at SFA, I began to learn to teach, which was even more painful and difficult than learning to debate had been. Praise God, the job had me teach a single class, public speaking, over and over and over again; at one point, I had seven sections, which meant I'd teach each lesson seven times, usually in the same week. I can't imagine a more perfect setup for learning to teach, and it paid off. By my third or fourth year, students had begun telling me that I was their favorite teacher, and it slowly dawned on me that teaching was actually a very enjoyable way to spend my days. In my eighth year of full-time teaching, I started on a three year winning streak, and if you're good with math, you can see the pattern cropping up again: in 2007, SFA awarded me the Teaching Excellence Award. Within weeks, I'd accepted a job at Northwest Christian College, and at the end of my first year there, the graduating seniors voted me Professor of the Year for 2008. The following year, I won the 2009 President's Award for Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership. And about sixty days later, give or take, I turned forty.

So does this mean my love for teaching is about to take a fall? I have seen a few signs of that. The fall term has been tough in each of the past two years. The little spells of mild depression that I fight off from time to time are coming a little more quickly, and are going from mild to moderate. My snap diagnosis is that the dislocation from Texas to Oregon, far away from family and everything familiar, is catching up with me. That might mean I'm going to wither on the vine here, or it might just mean that I have another adjustment to make, and have to be patient and give it time. It's the kind of thing I can't judge while I'm in the middle of it; when I emerge from it, I should have more of a read on what's going on.

And I am very attuned to the potential irrationality of thinking this way. I might just be seeing animal shapes in the clouds. There's nothing magical about periods of ten years, and what I'm describing as though it were a reliable pattern could be nothing but coincidence. It is entirely plausible that my love for teaching could deepen and settle on a reasonably smooth curve, accounting for the occasional dip, for the rest of my days. And there's a very real danger that if I pay too much attention to this alleged "pattern" of round numbers, then framing effects might take over and I might bring it about when it wouldn't have happened otherwise. I might sabotage a career that I love dearly, give it up to corrosion and self-doubt, when it didn't have to be that way. So I'm on guard against that. But the pattern is striking enough that it would be foolish to ignore it entirely.

And I always hope I'll get to the end of these things and either the act of writing will have given me clarity, or that I'll at least have a good zinger to reward anyone who's had the patience, or the lack of anything better to do, to slog through this. Neither seems at hand in this case. So, allakazaam, blog post is ended.

Musing

2010-12-29T13:41:00.000-08:00

When at home, I fart
Unapologetic'ly.
Pt. Pt. Pt. Pt. Pt.

Manifesto

2010-12-17T11:22:00.000-08:00

Time for a new chapter.

Today I got my course evaluations from the term that just ended, and they made plain to me how urgent it is that I charge into battle for the substance and authenticity of what happens in my classroom. I've been a young teacher, trying to figure things out. I’ve been a comfortable teacher with good, developed instincts. I’ve been a popular teacher on a Christian campus with small classes, enjoying positive, light-hearted, friendly relations with my students. None of those teachers are gone; they’re all sedimentary strata in my foundation. But now it’s time for something different, and I plan to pursue it with all the stubborn militancy I can muster.

I do not believe in memorization and will no longer encourage or reward it.

I do not believe in note-taking for note-taking’s sake, and will no longer encourage or reward it.

I do not believe in playing school, and will no longer encourage or reward it.

The overwhelming majority of students here at NCU, and on other campuses across the country, are stubbornly wedged into a set of habits and assumptions that are channeling their time, energy, potential, straight down the drain. I have coexisted with those habits and assumptions for too long. No longer.

To begin with, I, my colleagues, and my students, have to fully grasp that learning is worship.

My students are very committed to the idea that worship has to be authentic, that it cannot consist of going through the motions, but somehow they don’t take that idea with them into the classroom. There’s a widely shared separation of NCU life into the sacred and the profane. The sacred is the ministry work, like staging chapel celebrations, doing community service, or leading small group Bible studies. The profane includes things like jury duty, visits to the doctor, and getting an education. Activities in the second category can be ministry opportunities, as it certainly would be possible to witness to someone in the jury pool, but they aren’t anything anyone would seek out for spiritual development: they’re to be tolerated, not wholeheartedly tackled and experienced.

I’m not convinced that in every case our students choose, consciously, to put getting an education into that second category, but the choice is unmistakable based on their behavior. They pour all their ability and energy into ministry work, but laugh to one another about how often they write papers the night before they’re due, or pull all-night cram sessions just before a test. And, naturally, they rarely take a glance at the graded papers, and take it for granted that material learned for a test is to be forgotten the second the test is over. The notion that the papers might be documents of their intellectual development that need periodic revisits, or that they might retain and make use of the material covered on a test, is entirely foreign.

It’s crazy. They don’t study the Bible that way, but every academic subject gets that arm’s length, dismissive treatment. And what’s crazy about it is that this isn’t a monastery or a convent; it’s a university, and they made the deliberate choice to enroll. The primary purpose of this institution is to offer programs of study that culminate in academic degrees. They came here for the purpose of earning such a degree. Now, I do understand that to a certain extent, people at this stage in life struggle with self-discipline; it’s too tempting to go straight to the enjoyable activities, the socializing, the work that yields instant reward. That’s true on Christian and secular campuses alike. But I’ve also seen impressive, substantive, polished work whenever they make the connection between their efforts and direct service to God. It’s not easy to play a musical instrument, but I’ve heard performances that gave me chills. It’s not effortless to plan a worship event, but I’ve seen worship events that went off like clockwork, with truly thoughtful, thought-provoking elements incorporated seamlessly. The problem is that they don’t see the connection between schoolwork and serving God.

That’s a shame. Christ’s followers certainly did.

Yes, He healed. Yes, He worked miracles. But what He did most of all was teach. He didn’t have a lot of use for people who followed Him around only to see the signs and wonders. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” He said. And He didn’t just teach them how to interpret scripture, how to pray, how to do things that felt sacred: He taught them what to do with their money, how to handle conflict, how to manage contracts. Paul, His apostle to the Gentiles, would go on to castigate believers who stopped working at their jobs so they could idly await His return, saying “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

Oprah Winfrey, explaining why she builds schools in Africa and not in the United States, said “If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.” We’ve had plenty of visitors to campus who talk about the level of need they’ve seen outside the United States, and our students overflow with compassion for children who are hungry, who are victims of abuse. But I wonder if a single one of them appreciates how appalled those same children would be to see them squander their opportunity to learn? When they work to feed the hungry, I know it moves them to think about how blessed they are to have enough food; for abused children, to think about how blessed they were to grow up safe, protected, among loving family members. But they work to exhaustion in order to provide for children who are hungry for education, for learning, for a chance to take possession of their own lives, and they never see the slap in the face they give those children by making a mockery of their own access to exactly what the children crave.

I genuinely don’t get the reasoning that leads students to enroll at a Christian university, identify as fellow Christians who are giving up their entire lives to service, but then do a marginal, half-hearted job on the meat of that affiliation, the completion of coursework to earn a degree. Why not cut out the middleman and go straight to work at a church? The answer is, because most healthy churches won’t hire them unless they have a college degree, and, in many cases, seminary training to boot. What can we infer from that? Could it be that their elders, their role models, see value in the discipline of undertaking complete preparation, a wall-to-wall education, before embarking on a life of service?

And if schoolwork is profane, then why a Christian college? Daily toothbrushing is a good idea, but I doubt many of our students go out of their way to insist on a Christian toothbrush. Dental hygiene is one of the necessary, unavoidable tasks that are preparatory to active participation in the Kingdom of Heaven for another day, but I can’t think of a Christian way to brush one’s teeth that is distinct from an atheist’s approach. If schoolwork goes in the same category as toothbrushing, then why a Christian college? It seems beyond obvious to me that exploring the order in God’s creation is, itself, a form of worship, and pushing back ignorance and choosing to learn critical thinking skills is an offering to God. So why do so many students bring such a meager, poor, depleted offering?

I’m not just talking about sloppiness, by the way. Plenty of type-A, very hard-working students approach schoolwork in a spirit that is very self-centered and entitled. Just this semester, I’ve had several of my more successful students insist that I should design my classes around memorization and taking notes off Powerpoint, two activities that have only the most remote relationship to learning, and a much closer relationship to going through the motions. Several highly capable students dropped my Introduction to Mass Communication class after they tried to memorize everything covered on the first test, but met with disaster. One in particular told me that her learning style involved memorization, and if I didn’t re-design the class to reward memorization, then I was a bad teacher. I replied that it was far more important to me that they understand the course content, and that things memorized for tests tended to be forgotten almost immediately. I’m sure I’m correct about that, but I made zero headway in getting any agreement from her. In other classes, students complained that I’m no longer using Powerpoint, because they don’t know how to take notes. There’s ample research supporting the notion that Powerpoint deadens understanding and atrophies listening skills, and I explained that every time a student asked me to go back to Powerpoint, but they’ve got their comforting routines of writing down the bullet points, and when I disrupted those routines with the radical notion that they should pay attention and engage the material, they turned sullen and put the blame on me for their struggles.

Finally, I think this culture stays wedged in place because of my own behavior, and the behavior of my colleagues. I’ve said for years that I don’t want my students to like me right now; instead, I want them to look back in twenty years and like what I did, and what effect it had on them. If they like me too much right now, then I’m not challenging them enough. A colleague of mine asked me the question, last Spring, “Do you really believe that a class has to be hard for students to be learning?” I bobbled the question at the time, but it’s stayed on my mind ever since. The answer is yes, in a certain sense, it does. Christ’s followers were disciples because they’d taken on discipline, and we today separate our curriculum into academic disciplines because they should have rigor and challenge, and completing them should require more from students than they arrive able to do. A native speaker of Spanish who’s a published author, poet and playwright in Spanish, should not enroll at an American university to major in Spanish. That person has mastered the language, so completing the program is a waste of time and effort.

And I’m afraid that we’re all creeping closer and closer to expecting nothing from our students. We do Powerpoint slides because they’re easy to develop into routines. We give cursory attention to written work, because it demands less effort from us than digging in and grading it line-by-line. We take our cues from student performance, easing back on the level of difficulty in tests and assignments if the grades go down. In some cases, if students become enough of a hassle, we cut corners and overlook whatever we need to in order to make them go away. None of that is tolerable. All of it sells the students, and the service of teaching, short. And I am as guilty as anyone of practicing it. And I have decided not to anymore.

It is no more acceptable to play school than it is to play church. We offer teaching and learning as a form of worship. And scripture makes it clear that God doesn’t want offerings brought reluctantly, or from mixed motives; if we offer something to God, it needs to be in joyous gratitude for what we’ve been given, and if it’s not the best we have to give, then the joy and the gratitude is awfully hard to take seriously. I have no reasonable expectation that I can bring this off perfectly, but I am determined to double down on an insistence on learning, and a challenging of play-school routines and behaviors. And I think I might get my wish: fewer and fewer students are going to like me right away, but if I do it right, more of them may like what they see a generation from now.

Pyrrhism

2010-10-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

I know all the fake arguments in favor of colleges having football teams (building work ethic, learning to function in a team environment, teaching leadership) and the real argument (money), but today I choked on the gear-stripping irrationality of college football in the face of recent discoveries about the price the game exacts from its players. Mounting evidence suggests that Owen Thomas of U Penn committed suicide in large part because he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a kind of brain damage previously thought to result from too many concussions. But Thomas hadn't had many concussions; instead, he had the little brain traumas that are a part of the ordinary play of the game, and aren't addressed by any medical intervention. Now, he's obviously an outlier; most football players don't suffer brain damage that leads them to suicide. But from what his case reveals, it seems equally obvious that most, if not all, football players suffer brain damage, and a lot more severe damage than we admit to ourselves.

Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy? Is there another human on earth that remembers why colleges exist? I come to work every day, roll up my sleeves and put eight hours of sweat into training students to use their brains in constructive ways. Why on earth is it tolerable for a college to sponsor a brain damage factory? I doubt I could talk an eating disorders clinic into sponsoring the Coney Island 4th of July hot dog eating contest, but the overwhelming majority of institutions of higher education in this country use, as one of their chief marketing tools, a frontal assault on the bricks and mortar of their students' cognitive faculties. Absolutely insane.

Crossways

2010-09-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

So it struck me again this morning what a hard time the Second Amendment folks have keeping their story straight when it comes to their articles of faith. Elsewhere I've written about the fact that "Banning guns won't stop gun crime, but will just drive gun sales underground" applies with equal force to outlawing abortion, but there's no shortage of politicians and private citizens who think a gun ban would be an absurd failure while clinging just as desperately to the dream that criminalizing abortion would stop the procedure like flipping off a light switch.

Here's another: gun advocates say it's not the guns that kill people, but the choices made by the owners of the guns. Okay, stipulated. But then, the same people are often the quickest to bray for "tort reform," which would effectively cripple the ability of any private citizen to file a lawsuit, and the only support they offer for their position is a string of decontextualized anecdotes about "frivolous" suits. Do they not get the disconnect? Is it really that hard to see that even if a handful of people pursue absurd litigation, that says absolutely nothing at all about the importance of access to the courts as a leveling tool between the wealthy and the powerless? Are they equally in favor of tearing down fire stations because from time to time someone calls in a false alarm?

It's bad enough that their argument is dumb; it's maddening that they recognize how dumb an argument it is in another context, then double down on that dumb argument when it apparently fits a different issue.

People aggravate me.

Craponymous

2010-09-12T07:02:00.000-07:00

So I've noticed, just this fall, that the mighty wave of girls named Madison from the past generation or so has started to break across our campus. And this morning I was struck by the singularity of naming female children for US presidents' last names: Madison, Kennedy, Reagan. I then decided, as a public service, to single out presidential last names that would be most unfortunate girls' names, just in case:

Polk
Fillmore
Cleveland
Hoover
Truman
Johnson
Bush

Credentials

2010-09-07T15:51:00.000-07:00

Where's Sarah Palin when you need her? Is there some sort of Palin-911 I can dial?

I've got this neat set of really sharp steak knives, but I hear I'm not allowed to perform surgery on anyone because some elitist liberals decided that you have to actually know things like medicine and human anatomy before you can get a license. That's obviously wrong and evil, because it isn't what I want to hear; if I could only find Sarah, I know she'd give me that warm smile and reassure me that I should be able to do anything that licensed doctors get to do. She'd tell me that studying and learning and mental discipline just turn you into a liberal, and ignorance and insistence are the way to true happiness and goodness. Jesus certainly never would've wanted me to know anything, would He? I need a big ol' fix of Sarah, stat.

I also want to pilot a 747 this afternoon. I don't need flying lessons or anything, do I? Tell Sarah to block out a double appointment for me; this could take a while.

Onomatopoeia

2010-08-22T21:57:00.001-07:00

This is another silly word game that goes here just so I can look back years from now and shake my head over the wastes of time that I turned to for entertainment.

Troy Dean is our newly-arrived campus pastor, and in one of our first conversations, he told me about a sewing circle at his old campus in California that they called the Stitch-n-Bitch. That was certainly cute in its own right, but it got me to thinking of other crafts that would pair neatly with speech acts, and I came up with ...

Weave-n-Grieve
Tattoos-n-Bad-News
Needlepoint-n-Anoint
Flower-Pressing-n-Second-Guessing
Claymation-n-Character-Assassination
Lithography-n-What's-Wrong-With-Me?
Macramé-n-Auto-Da-Fé
Origami-n-I-Want-My-Mommy

Others came up with "Paint-n-Complaint," "Stained-Glass-n-Talk-Out-Your- ..." which you can probably finish.

Outside

2010-08-02T10:50:00.000-07:00

I have a Palm Z72, a stone-age precursor of the iPad, that goes everywhere with me. I bought it three or four years ago, and I use it as my personal Bible. It has Olive Tree software on it and five Bible translations: the NIV, the Holman, the New King James, the Spanish NIV, and David Stern's Complete Jewish Bible. The three biggest advantages it has are, first, it fits in my pocket, which means I've always got it on me, never true of my previous Bibles; second, I can navigate it a lot more quickly than a bound Bible; and third, it has a search function, so if I remember just a few words of a verse, I can track it down in a matter of seconds. I must admit that I've wondered a few times, since I have it, why I still put effort into memorizing Scripture?

This is actually a specific example of a wider debate raging in circles from education to journalism to brain science: why should students memorize facts if any conceivable "fact" is a few keystrokes away? Why bother to memorize phone numbers if they can all be saved in your cell phone? But on the other hand, what do you do if you lose your cell phone, or your internet access?

This morning, a story on NPR made it clear to me that this isn't a new problem. They interviewed Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist with the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, and she made the point that human teeth aren't nearly as formidable as the teeth of most other animals, primarily because we're tool users. In other words, our knives, forks, kitchen graters, food processors, all serve as "teeth" in the same sense that a cell phone's contacts list outsources what we once housed in our memories. For that matter, cooking is really just off-site digestion.

The fact that so much of our food is prepared in more and more complex ways gives us a greater degree of control, but it also makes us a lot more vulnerable to mishaps. It's a lot easier to cut yourself with a knife than it is with your own teeth, and a knife makes a better weapon against someone else than an incisor does. And the more we depend on a highly elaborate diet made up of many ingredients and multi-process preparation routines, the more simple disruptions to daily life can sabotage the task of getting fed at all. People who know how to secure simple food, how to live off the land, fare a lot better when things fall apart than highly civilized people do. And for each of those weaknesses, there's an analogue in the storage and retrieval of information.

In particular, primitive hunters and gatherers in prehistoric times had to spend a lot more time and energy just feeding themselves enough to fend off starvation, but in many ways their lifestyle was healthier than ours, and few suffered from obesity or eating disorders. There's plenty to be said about information overload, but what interests me even more is the growing number of people who identify as their number one fear the experience of being absurd in a social encounter. It used to be that I could count on public speaking turning up as most people's top choice, but I've seen survey results over the past few years that pegged small talk with a distant acquaintance as scarier still. And in my gut I suspect that the different ways we produce, consume and retrieve information are at or near the heart of the forces pushing that change. Definitely something I'm keeping my eye on.

Movies

2010-07-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

In 1996, I yanked the plug on my cable TV. In the ensuing fourteen years, I haven't been a TV watcher, and I've noticed some huge benefits. This is all very unscientific and speculative, but I have no doubt at all that my attention span and memory both have grown explosively since I gave up TV. There are hints in the literature that because viewing is so passive, long hours of engagement with TV programs causes some vital brain functions to atrophy, but none of the research supplies a definite answer. From my experience, though, I'm entirely sure, which means I'm very happy with that decision and plan to stick to it.

It did come at a price, though: it all but froze my pop cultural literacy back in 1996. These days, with the passage of time, that price has grown more and more noticeable. Often, students try to illustrate a concept in class using a TV commercial, or a character from a TV show, and I have to look helpless and say "Well, that's on TV, so I have no idea about that."

When it comes to movies, they're a bit of a gray area. I tell my students, "I see about a movie a year." The TV embargo has changed my thinking patterns so much that I struggle against succumbing to the created world inside a film. The camera points your eyes where they're supposed to go; the music, and other aesthetic clues, tell you which emotion to feel; it's such a mental frog-march that I feel out of place and cynical, so it's rare, these days, that I enjoy a movie start to finish.

With all that said, a few years back, about a month before I arrived in Eugene, a beloved non-chain video store named Flicks and Pics succumbed to the new media environment, and the Eugene Public Library bought up most of their collection. I discovered the library last summer, and now think it's one of the most potent forces for truth and justice within about a million miles of me, so this summer I finally approached their DVD shelves to take a careful look. And there I discovered movie after movie that at some point I'd wanted to see, but never got around to watching.

This summer has been my movie summer. What's below are all the movies I checked out from Eugene Public Library and watched all the way through. That's not to say I found it easy to do so: there's an even longer list that I quit watching in the middle, or that I checked out and then never watched in my allotted three weeks. With most of these, I had to pause at least once and go do something else. And possibly the most intriguing bit is that I have actually noticed my attention span and memory don't have the edge they had last spring. Even this much viewing time, spread out over nearly three months, has had an effect, and not a good one, on my brain wiring. For that reason, I'm cutting off the film festival at the end of this week, what with the arrival of the new month. I might take it up again next summer, but we'll have to see about that.

One quick gloat: I saw every movie on this list for free. I love the Eugene Public Library so, so, so much.

Without further ado, my summer viewing. The explanation of the stars is at the bottom.

★★★★

Hotel Rwanda
The Up Series (7 Up – 49 Up)
The Devil Wears Prada
That Thing You Do!

★★★☆

The Great Debaters
Harvard beats Yale 29-29
Wag the Dog
American Gangster
Paranormal Activity
The People vs. Larry Flynt
I ♥ Huckabees
F for Fake
The Color Purple
Erin Brockovich
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Taxi to the Dark Side
Rabbit-Proof Fence
Super Size Me

★★☆☆

Good Night, and Good Luck
The War Room
A Prairie Home Companion
The Last King of Scotland
Charlie Wilson's War
Pan's Labyrinth
Sicko
Monster's Ball
Blades of Glory
All the President's Men
Barbershop
To Sir, With Love
Grave of the Fireflies
The Remains of the Day

★☆☆☆

Grosse Pointe Blank
Hot Shots!

☆☆☆☆

Fantastic 4. Rise of the Silver Surfer

The stars are a measure of how far the movie deviated from my normal enjoyment of movie-watching. The four star movies were so engrossing that I could've, or did, watch them at one sitting, and if I had to pause them, my mind stayed on them and I wanted to get back as soon as possible. Three stars means I got to the end of the film and judged it a positive experience, and two stars signals that it was an acceptable experience, not worse than my average visit to the theater. One star means I was disappointed, and zero stars means the film was embarrassingly bad; there are so few of those because I was more inclined to shut a film off and take it back than to finish it if it was that bad. I'm honestly not sure why I watched Fantastic 4 through to the end. Within each rating category, I've got the films listed in the order I saw them.

So that's that. Now, back to a diet of reality over image.

Makings

2010-07-29T16:52:00.000-07:00

I remember, in my doctoral seminar on rhetorical criticism, nailing down the difference between a diachronic and synchronic angle of attack on communicative practice. Diachronic refers to movement through time, while synchronic is identification of relationships at one moment in time. The simplest illustration of the concept involved a game of chess: you might map the moves made by one piece, say, the queen's bishop, all the way through the game, and that would be diachronic. Or you could stop the game about five or ten moves in, identify the strategic potential of every piece on the board, which pieces were under attack, which side had the stronger position, etc., and that would be synchronic.

I learned those lessons in a classroom in Georgia, where the home folks have an especially deft grasp of the concept. Small town Southerners want to know two things when they meet you: where are you from, and who are your people? Effectively, those are the two dimensions that Einstein identified as a continuum: where did you come from in space and in time? What is your place and your lineage? Who came before you, and who surrounds you? They ask because they're looking for that one clue that will sum you up.

The answer, in my case, is cartoons. Cartoons play a major role in both my heritage and my neighborhood.

I grew up in Richardson, Texas, a little suburb of Dallas. My mother still lives there, and I go back to visit every summer. Put a blindfold on me and I could probably find almost any square inch of the town. Mike Judge didn't grow up there, but he did live there for part of his childhood, and it was from the Richardson Public Library that he checked out his first books on animation. In case the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the creator of Beavis and Butthead, as well as the second longest-running animated show on network TV, King of the Hill, which, he's said in interviews, he modeled on his memories of Richardson.

The longest running animated show on network TV is The Simpsons, created by Matt Groening. He didn't spend any part of his formative years in Richardson, but rather in Portland, which means he's not from my town. He is, however, one of my people: he's my fifth cousin. On my father's mother's side of the family, three more generations back, one of my female ancestors was a Groening who married into Schmidt-ness. Her great-granddaughter, Anna Schmidt, married Glen Srader, and about fifty years later, I came along. Admittedly, both of these links are pretty tenuous -- Mike Judge and I shared city limits only for a handful of years, and Matt Groening and I are as closely related as, oddly enough, Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt.

But that's a wild enough coincidence to make me stop and appreciate it. Animated shows that have long, healthy runs on network TV are not common as houseflies; the only two people in my generation that have succeeded in creating such works both show up in my heritage, one each on each of its axes, the diachronic one and the synchronic one, my place and my people.

Muddle

2010-07-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

By the power vested in me as a professor of rhetoric, I'm begging, pleading with the human race, and particularly people who write for a living, to figure out the difference between "begs the question" and "raises the question." They do not mean the same thing.

When an occurrence makes it a good time to take up and discuss a burning question, that's raising it, not begging it. BP's oil spill in the gulf raises the question of whether deep-water offshore drilling should be allowed. Question-begging is a logical fallacy, and has a very precise and technical meaning, namely that an arguer has simply assumed the very part of the argument that needs to be proven. If NCU had a cookie-baking contest, and someone said "Just give the prize to Doyle, since he makes the best cookies of anyone on campus," then that would be question-begging: the whole point of the contest would be to put all the entrants' cookie-baking skills to the test.

And for goodness' sake, there are few enough people left with the crumbs of critical thinking to be aware of, and care about, flawed reasoning, so if we start tossing fallacies onto the linguistic scrap-heap because we're too lazy to get our distinctives right, then we speed up our civilization's decay. Believe me, it doesn't need the help.

Mourning

2010-07-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

I stopped going to church around the time I turned fourteen, and returned just a few months after my thirty-second birthday. Both the stopping and the restarting came shortly after events that could easily be misinterpreted.

June 3, 1983 was my last day of eighth grade, and was also the day my father laid down on the floor to watch television and died of a completely unexpected heart attack. My fourteenth birthday came six weeks later to the day, and, near as I can recall, I stopped attending church that very week. But it would be far too tidy to explain my decision as anger against God. Goes the conventional account, if my father, whom I loved very much, could be torn away from me like that, then I wanted nothing to do with God. Simple set piece in a thousand novels and screenplays. The problem is, it wasn't that way at all: I still gave God all my loyalty and called myself a Christian. What I couldn't stand was church.

I'd been warned that churches don't handle grief very well. I was braced for the fact that they'd be supportive for about two to four weeks, show up with casseroles, keep us company around the clock, and then they would decide we'd grieved long enough, and vanish. Actually, the vanishing wasn't so bad; we were sick of having a full house, and the thought of one more casserole was enough to squelch my appetite. But what was awful was the way they treated us when we did see them.

Comforting, it seems to me, is a very context-specific skill. People tend to be surprisingly good at it when they're actually, physically in attendance at a funeral, or paying a condolence call to the home of someone who's suffered a loss. Where people aren't good at it is anywhere else. Catch them at the grocery store, at school, or, worst of all, in the hallways of the church, and they're like fish out of water. They're absolutely terrified that anything they do or say will cause you to burst out crying, which will immediately make the universe explode. That's precisely what happened next: people I'd known all my life from church took unmistakably to avoiding us. I wouldn't say we were ostracized or shunned, because there was no sense of hostility or disapproval; worse, people tried to make it look casual, or accidental, as though they just hadn't seen us, which was far, far worse because it was such a glaring, if wordless, lie. I weathered this for a couple of weeks, until one Sunday morning, as we headed home, my mother turned around from the driver's seat of the car and asked a question I never, ever thought she'd ask.

"Do you want to keep going to church?"

Until then, it had simply never been open to discussion. There was nothing optional about attending church. But she'd seen what we'd seen, and even if she had the strength to take it, she wasn't about to let it happen to her sons. All three of us stopped going to church. She started back within the year, and my brother returned to regular church attendance, I gather, when his soon-to-be wife conveyed to him that she would only marry a churchgoing man. For me, it took a bit longer.

During my entire time as a debater and debate coach, I didn't take seriously the idea of joining a church. When you're on the road as many weekends as I was, it's virtually impossible to put down roots at a church. If you only show up every third or fourth Sunday, then each time you go, you have to keep reminding people what your name is. I simply didn't bother. Then, for about two years after I walked away from debate, I was still too occupied with decompression, with getting used to a humane rhythm of life and a bit of self-care to think about giving up Sundays for Christian fellowship. And, I suppose, at the back of my mind I was still nursing old resentments.

The other date that's easy to misunderstand is the day I first went to the church I wound up joining: September 23, 2001. Twelve days after September 11th.

No, I didn't start back to church because September 11th put the fear of God in me. Nothing like that. Even though I've been a Baptist all my life, most of my extended family is Methodist, and with one cousin in particular I used to have a good running bout of mutual teasing about the denominational gap. She moved out to East Texas and joined a Methodist church, but eventually grew disenchanted with it and moved her membership to the local Baptist church. You'd better believe I let her know how good it felt to finally, once and for all, claim victory over the Methodists. A year or so later, she made a mid-summer move to the town where I lived, and called me up one day saying she'd found the church she planned to join, and was I interested in visiting it?

I walked through the front door, and within five seconds I knew I belonged back.

I visited a few more times before I joined, but I've never had any doubts since about whether I belong in a church, in fellowship, in Bible study and teaching, and in service. I remember what my life was like during my unchurched period, and I don't want it back. I remember that my faith was a fact, a single facet of the totality of me, but still something thin and insubstantial and completely unsatisfying. The reality of belonging to a church, of working within it, giving to it, clinging to it as it goes through its ups and downs, is extremely powerful. I'm better with it and weaker without it.

So it's not as simple as quitting church because of a death, and it's not as simple as coming back to church because of a shocking event. An outsider who didn't have all the facts could note the timing and feel very convinced of the cause-effect relationship, but that outsider would stray far from the truth simply due to taking the interpretive path of least resistance.

I remind myself of this when I see sloppy scholarship, much of which consists of the kind of easy-path "reasoning" described here. In all human activity, and particularly in the traumatic human experiences that work enduring changes, there will nearly always be more to learn, more to explain, than just stringing together each event with the nearest plausible and easily-explained antecedent. But if I had a nickel for every time I saw exactly that kind of ramshackle work lauded as groundbreaking, my church could pay off the mortgage with just one month of my tithe.

Manbits

2010-07-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

So I got to thinking this morning about male nipples, and not for the first time.

Nipples aren't sex-linked; they're like arms, legs, ears, the standard equipment that every human being grows from scratch, whether male or female. Male nipples are vestigial, never having been hooked up to a fully functioning mammary gland. Culturally, at least in our culture, it's only the mildest of aberrations for a man to display his nipples. Certainly he, I, shouldn't do it at a formal dinner party, or where food is being prepared or served, but on a public street there's nothing wrong with it, especially on a hot day.

And from time to time, I give in to my silly side and use the word "nipples" in class, referring to the male variety. One example: people ask me what's the longest my beard has ever grown, and I tell them it's been down to my nipples. That nearly always gets a nervous giggle, because students' first thought is that I've just said something off-color. If any of them try to correct me, I point out what I wrote above.

Today, however, I got to thinking in a different direction: what if women had a visible, non-functional man-bit that it was moderately acceptable to display? I reasoned by analogy from the nipple, which is not really the glandular tissue but merely a covering for the duct, and wondered what it would be like if women had ... well, if they had a part that rhymed with "so dumb," only without the contents that rhyme with "mutts." And what if it was located a bit higher than the male version, which, given how many young women display their bare midriffs, would mean it was often visible? People are certainly weird and irrational enough to find that attractive, sort of a like beauty mark: a little, wrinkly beauty mark, for the abdomen.

Wonder if they'd scratch it when it itched?

There's no real point to this. I didn't have any flashes of life-changing insight, or anything. It's just a sample of what it's like being in a line of work where you get paid to think about what most people ignore. Even when I'm not on the clock, my thoughts still spill out in weird directions.

Meaning

2010-07-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

I often wonder why in the world God spoils me so much. I wonder why He built into me so many quirks and eccentricities that incline me toward teaching, and then shaded my pleasure centers so that I enjoyed it this much. It just seems almost too perfect; I'm designed to do something, and I'm wired together to love doing just that thing. It's a wonderful way to live, and someday I'm going to have to ask Him why I was the lucky one. I get reassurance that the teaching goes well from course evaluations, from occasional teaching awards, but all of those are flawed measures for reasons I've written about elsewhere. But what happened yesterday was flawless and unmistakable.

Last fall, two of my graduating seniors, who happened to be engaged to one another, dropped in during my office hours and asked if I would marry them. Yesterday, I did. That's still sinking in. I can turn that reality over and over and over in my mind, and it is smooth and solid and impermeable. There are absolutely no "Yeah, but" cracks anywhere in it, and for an academic to surrender to an idea's completeness is no small thing. I was not a perfect teacher for Jordan or Tessa; I had my off days, sometimes wasn't patient enough, sometimes explained things poorly, sometimes sat on assignments and didn't get feedback to them in a timely fashion, but there is absolutely no denying, or even shading, the reality that the time we spent as professor and students was a time of growth and transformation. I made a difference with them, and they made a difference with me. I've known for years that I made a difference with students, and I've definitely been aware that they left their mark on me, but usually it's the sort of thing that's in the air, invisible, out there somewhere, but not easily sensed or gauged. In this case, it was right in my face and unmistakable. Once or twice yesterday I gave in to feeling joyful about it, but most of the day I was simply caught up in awe. It's a very big feeling, by which I don't mean that I felt swelled up or important, but simply that the feeling was overwhelming.

I, of course, fell prey to my usual flaw of hanging back, being a little too reserved, doing and saying less rather than taking the risk of doing or saying enough. The wedding party were all in their early to mid-twenties, and although they kept inviting me in to the conversations, inviting me to sit with them and enjoy things, I kept holding back, aware of my age, afraid of being absurd, not wanting to take attention away from Jordan and Tessa in the middle of their celebration by becoming conspicuous. And following my rule -- at all costs, don't touch students -- I offered Jordan several very professional handshakes, when what I should've offered him is what every other male at the wedding did; a big bear hug. He hasn't been my student for seven months, and won't be ever again, so it was perfectly in line to show, to express, that he wasn't just a student I enjoyed hearing speak up in class, or whose papers I enjoyed grading, but that I now regarded him as a friend, as someone I respected and loved, as a brother in Christ, as someone I was proud to say I knew. I also hung back from Tessa, but that felt different; she was a beautiful bride, radiating joy, surrounded by bridesmaids and family and mentors and friends and teammates and a huge crowd of people, all drinking in her presence, so whether I stepped forward and chipped in fully didn't feel as important. Such things are slippery and hard to frame in words, but that was my take.

Oh well. Even a year into my forties, I've still got a lot of growing up to do.

And on second thought, I don't want to figure out what God is up to, and why I've got it so good. If I ever grasped the reason, I might see my way to where it could stop. And if it's ever going to, I'd rather not know.

Before conclusions

2010-06-27T14:10:00.000-07:00

We have no reason to believe that we are living in the end times. None.

Get out your Bible, painful though it may be, and read Matthew 24. Stick with it at least through verse 36. See? No one knows the date. The angels don't know; only God the father knows. Only Him.

This gets on my nerves as much as anything else my brothers and sisters in Christ get up to. "We can tell from the signs that we're living in the end times!" No, we can't. We fit what we notice into Biblical teachings, but that's no different from seeing animal shapes in the clouds. Partly it's how our brains are wired, and partly we do it for the thrill. And sometimes we do it with a conscious agenda of lighting a fire under sluggish Christians, which is probably the worst motive of all.

The end will come when it comes. Our job is to live as though we expect it one second from now. But we have zero, and I mean zero, and let me underscore zero, rational basis for saying it'll be in the next year, next ten years, in our lifetimes, or even in this millennium. If Christ tarries until the year ten thousand, that's His call. So enough with the scraped up solemnity and suspense over the end times. Really; enough already.

Toward justice

2010-06-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

I just was treated to a bad argument that I enjoyed enormously. And I don't mean "enjoyed" in the sense of belittling it, but rather that I wanted badly to agree with it, and wished that it weren't such a bad argument. I'm putting it here just so I can come back later and marvel at its damaged beauty:

Juries and judges in capital cases should be instructed that if the defendant is sentenced to death, the sentence is carried out, and the defendant is subsequently proved innocent, then the judge and the entire jury will be put on trial for murder.

Wow. Terrible reasoning, but I love it. Why oh why can't it make sense?

Along sidelines

2010-06-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

I have to confess that I don't get cheerleading, and in particular competitive cheerleading. Cheerleading originally had as its purpose whipping up the crowd so the players could feed off their excitement and play harder as a result. The fact that cheerleading is itself a competitive sport seems absurd to me. Often, the cheerleaders ride to the contest site in fifteen passenger vans, so should we make fifteen passenger van driving a sport? Have van drill teams? Have the drivers do ballet moves as they climb out of the van and close the door with the perfect measure of loudness, calibrated down to the last decibel? That doesn't seem any less silly to me than judged cheerleading contests.

More importantly, it strikes me that the move in this direction is one symptom of a very serious sickness in our culture, whether we tag it declining social capital, or alienation, or any of a dozen other labels. At the beginning, cheerleaders interacted with the crowd: they projected excitement and enthusiasm, and they led fans to encourage, vocally, the players on the field. What do they lead now? Some places don't even call it cheerleading anymore; they just call it cheer, as in "cheer camp." And now it's all about performance, all about "we'll leech some of your attention away from the field and show off our dance and gymnastics moves." It's atomized, not collective; it's not about putting fans and athletes together into one cohesive group, but rather about letting fans channel-surf from the game to the dance recital and back again.

I have a niece who's very active in cheer, and I suspect she wouldn't agree with much of this. I know the participants enjoy it, and as a performance style I know it has its fans. So why not completely decouple it from athletic events and stage cheer recitals? Why not give it another name -- "cheerdancing," say -- and go back to actual cheerleading at the games? Then those who turned out for the recitals could make up a community of people who appreciate the performance style, and the actual cheerleaders would return to building up cohesion between players and spectators, and instead of fragmenting and pulverizing, everyone could celebrate what they all mutually enjoyed again.

Following form

2010-06-08T06:36:00.000-07:00

So there's this so-called imponderable question that makes the rounds in all the lists: why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets? I've seen various answers -- Cecil Adams said it was to keep their heads warm in open cockpits, while Marilyn vos Savant said it was because they didn't really want to face what they were about to do -- but as far as I'm concerned, the answer is pretty obvious.

Much of Japanese culture is based on 型, pronounced kata, which means the proper way of doing something. They have a proper way to do everything, from wrapping presents to greeting strangers. And when I say that the way is proper, I don't mean that it's normal or typical or expected, because all cultures have a normal way to give a present or offer a greeting. In Japanese culture, there are fine, precise details to those and other tasks, and there's a good deal of pride, and a good deal of cultural capital, available to those who execute them perfectly.

One way this shows up is in wearing the proper clothing for whatever one is doing. To play golf, you must wear golf clothes. To hike, you must have a hiking outfit. If your clothes aren't consciously and carefully matched to your activity, then the activity itself is less worthy, less satisfactory.

Therefore, if you're going to pilot a plane to your country's glory, you've got to be decked out in proper pilot attire. And what do pilots wear on their heads? (Or, what did they in the 1940s?) An aviator's helmet. Kamikaze pilots wore helmets so they would look the part, which is vitally important from one end of Japanese culture to the other.

Against Facebook

2010-06-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

This was originally a Facebook note. I posted it to explain why I was cutting back from 400+ friends to about a tenth that many.

My take on communication technology is that balance is everything, and for most folks, there’s a tech-facilitated path that they won’t have an easy time keeping balanced. I see mothers yack on cellphones while ignoring their infants, I see teens who text obsessively and can’t pay attention to their professors or to traffic, and I see my own struggles keeping Facebook in healthy balance. I tend to hover over it and throw unhealthy amounts of the day into it. That’s been behind my decision to shut it down when school is in session for the past few terms. The problem is, that hovering isn’t any healthier during the summer; I need to be productive during the summer, and even when it’s time to relax, I don’t relax very successfully when I’m Facebook-tethered. I’ve never been a smoker, drug-taker or heavy drinker, but the Facebook dopamine squirt gives me trouble, and I’m convinced that the healthiest way to reach balance is to muscle my way to it with no half measures.
I take seriously the privacy concerns people are reporting, and I’m very sure we haven’t seen the whole picture. Facebook is not providing all its geegaws as a public service; they are in this to make money, and they are continually working behind the scenes to make it more profitable than it is. Today’s Facebook is effectively already yesterday’s Facebook. While the loss of privacy might seem to be a latent threat, it disturbs me that if it were an active threat and I was at risk, I would have no way of knowing it. I keep my privacy settings fairly tight, but more and more I feel like someone driving on a busy highway who gives the road no more than half their attention; it’s not enough, and I need to drive a lot more defensively.
Finally, I’m more or less sure Facebook has passed its peak. More and more people use it less and less, and the bulk of material that’s even marginally interesting comes from a handful of my four-hundred-plus friends. For a while, I thought that was seasonal, but I’m growing more sure it isn’t. What was once pretty robust and enjoyable has become thin gruel, so it’s a good time to cut way back before my expectations are dashed any further.

There are little reasons, little annoyances, that add an ounce or two of pressure on top of the above, but those three are the major driving forces. Because of them, I’ve arrived at a tentative plan to go on a mass un-friending, and cut back only to people in three categories:

Family
Graduates from my department
A handful of people who were hard to find, and I don’t want to lose again.

Before I do that, I’ll collect a lot of email addresses of other people, just so I have a way to contact them. But it’s time to become one of the low-activity Facebook users and move to using it for a purpose, not just for the sake of using it.

Quip

2010-05-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

The Freshman's Alphabet Waltz

You, in a world of expanding diameter
Here's some advice in dactylic tetrameter
A is abandon, so leave your old fears behind
B is beginnings refresh and renew your mind
C is call home so your parents can sleep at night
D is discern and steer clear of what isn't right
E is expect the adjustment to challenge you
F is forgive minor cruelties that others do
G is go places and see things you never saw
H is your honor, a trustworthy inner law
I is "I think," so please think before saying it
J is use judgment, so pause and reflect a bit
K is seek knowledge that drives away mystery
L is let go of mistakes that are history
M is make sure that you sleep enough not to die
N is to never deceive yourself with a lie
O is occasional treats to anticipate
P is have patience for others to imitate
Q is for quiet time just between God and thee
R is your roommate; remember the line for P
S is stay here on the weekend and grow some roots
T is to tame your tongue; don't be a smartyboots
U is umbrellas are useless in Oregon
Soon as you put yours away it'll pour again
V is brief victories, followed by war again
W is weekends; don't play till your work is done
X is exhibit good manners to everyone
Y is your conscience; don't do what it won't allow
Z is for zero regrets twenty years from now

Quadrature

2010-05-24T07:22:00.000-07:00

More and more I get the disturbing feeling that what I teach in the classroom has a lot in common with multivitamins, and not in a good way. I gave up on multivitamins about a year ago: I'd read accounts for and against them to get a sense of how the evidence stacked up, and it finally swayed me to the view that they do little besides give Americans the most expensive pee on earth. In fact, a lot of things we do when our health is squarely in the center of our attention have little effect; health, whether good or bad, is accumulated via very long waves of habit and behavior, some of which stretch back before our birth. Much of what we're up against, health-wise, is written in our genes.

That's actually not what got me to thinking this morning, but the analogy is striking. What stirred me up was yet another mention of prior knowledge as a pivotal factor in reading effectiveness. Put plainly, guiding a student to becoming a good reader has less to do with technique, SQ3R, instruction, drills, or anything along those lines than it has to do with simply knowing a good deal about a lot of things. People will find passages more difficult to read if they don't have a foundation of knowledge about the subject, and this degree of difficulty dwarfs verbal skill and instruction as a predictor of reading comprehension.

Me being in the communication racket and all, I immediately see parallels in my field. One interpersonal communication theory, Uncertainty Reduction, says that we communicate for the purpose of reducing uncertainty and beefing up the baseline from which we interpret, explain and predict others' behavior. For the most part it tracks the effect prior knowledge has on reading effectiveness, but with reference to conversation and other forms of relational communication.

That idea has a couple of huge implications for teaching. I work my hiney off trying to beef up people's communication competence, trying to put them through their paces at communication behaviors and skills that will help them reach out to others more effectively and appropriately, but the truth is that all this concern with technique is a tiny splinter in the huge beam that is situational or contextual knowledge. I'm not giving back my paycheck or anything, but it is a bit humbling.

The other implication was taken up by E. D. Hirsch in a book I was reading this morning. He makes the argument that in the early years of primary school, we need to teach students a much more uniform foundation of core knowledge to help them achieve cultural literacy. And he begins by acknowledging that this runs into trouble with people who are committed to making public education diverse and multicultural. According to him, diversity in the delivery of cultural artifacts is like teaching thirty different students in your English class thirty different versions of the alphabet: laudable in the abstract, but an invitation to chaos when it comes to the simplest learning skills that they'll need later on.

His argument has some appeal, but I'm not convinced. It reminds me of a couple of things I take up in my classes, one of which is the controversy over African-American vernacular English, more commonly known as Ebonics. The way I explain it to my students is that if you've got in your classroom a bunch of kids whose co-cultural heritage gives them a shared way of speaking, then you have no hope of teaching them a different way to speak if your approach is to say "Your way is lazy and wrong, and must be replaced by intelligent, right speaking." Instead, what teachers should do is invite students to become bilingual. AAVE is an internally consistent dialect, but there's another dialect, Standard Spoken English, that ranges between useful and indispensible in workplace situations, so it's worthwhile to learn it as a marketable skill, same as bookkeeping, to have available for use, rather than to change the worth of anyone's identity. And I think that distinction is important to maintain when we get to thinking about context and background knowledge. Hirsch's argument about the democratizing effect of a cultural core does homogenize and artificially normalize too many ideas held by the dominant group in a way that is false to fact, but if we keep our focus squarely on the usefulness of shared knowledge, as set apart from the correctness of that knowledge, the dangers that come with that homogenization might recede a bit.

The other thing it makes me think of is the never-ending tension between objective and interpretive perspectives on communication. I've written about this elsewhere, and my students have heard me talk the idea to death: some elements of communication can be measured empirically, while others can only be reported as experience, which some hearers say they share to varying degrees of fidelity, but which can't be captured and bottled. No one understands communication if they devote all their attention to one or the other of those two perspectives. Reasoning from that, I think it's probably true that we've neglected the importance of context and background knowledge, but to go so far as to say they're all that matters runs along the same lines as saying the measurable elements of communication tell us everything we need to know about how it works, which is downright silly. So these are wobbly ideas that are trying to find a balance: in some ways, this tracks the theory-practice dialectic that's coming up over and over again in my work with intraprofessional controversies, because background knowledge is what we accrue inductively through practice, while technique is quite similar to theory: a recipe for behaving, as compared to a recipe for knowing.

And as with most things communication-related, it's a bit of a mess. But as with most such things, it's also fascinating and fun to work through, and the more years I do it, the more I enjoy it.

Quintessence

2010-05-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

One thing surgeons and serial killers have in common is that people who are squeamish about the sight of blood are that much less likely to become either one. Similarly, one thing police officers have in common with humanity's biggest bungholes is that both tend to be comfortable asserting authority. If you're not the kind of person who can do that, you might have other faults, but there's a glass ceiling separating you from the pinnacle of obnoxiousness. It also limits your career potential in law enforcement.

At this point, it would be easy for you to get the wrong impression. This is not an anti-police officer piece. Quite the opposite actually; as I write this, I'm caught up in a burst of impatience at how deeply and powerfully the anti-police officer feelings run in this town.

Eugene is a town of aging hippies. By and large, hippies don't warm up to people in uniforms who tell them what they may and may not do. Plus, some hippies, although not quite all, gravitate toward recreational activities that are very illegal. Eugene is also a town with a critical mass of citizens that identify themselves politically as left-wing. For that reason, they're very skeptical of appeals to law and order, and believe police activity usually is orchestrated, and almost entirely behind the scenes, to benefit those who have spent many generations in the wealthy and powerful class, and intend to stay there and to keep out anyone who looks, thinks, or lives differently. And Eugene is a college town. The traditional college-age population is finely situated to be anti-police for the same reason that so many of them go through a rough patch with their parents: they feel ready for complete autonomy, but chafe under the last bits of parental authority, and the friction between those two states builds and builds until something gives.

The output of the above factors, and probably a few others I haven't considered, is a seemingly endless flood of anti-police invective. Lots and lots of people here in this town hate the police. All police. And that goes hurtling past silly, far into the realm of the outright asinine.

Not all police officers are bullies. Not all police officers have a dysfunctional need to give orders, intimidate, demonstrate their power; far from all of them do. But too many of my neighbors and associates put on a convincing imitation of two year olds who fear and hate being vaccinated: they've got a keen memory of a few incidents that involved pain, and they therefore refuse to grapple with the reality that one moment of unpleasantness is probably a small price to pay for protection against a slow death, quite likely dragged through racking, lingering, hellish torment. Two year olds are shortsighted because they're two years old. But at some point, the two year old worldview has to give way, one hopes, to adulthood.

Even given occasions when a police officer behaves badly, it's just absurd to conclude that that police officer, let alone all police officers, carries that as a deeply engraved personality trait. Police work is grueling, and the bad days are unimaginable. A police officer who's gruff during a traffic stop may still be shaking from their own brush with mortality, while grieving the recent loss to violent death of a good friend, or even several good friends. I know how much of my civility I misplace after a day when students have talked back to me, or even just been sluggish in class, so I don't feel as though I'm in any position to hold them to a standard that's ridiculously higher when their working conditions are ridiculously more stressful.

And yes, obviously there are bad police officers. There are also bad plumbers, bus drivers, house painters, pastors, and weasel shavers. But not nearly as many people are willing to condemn those entire professions based on nothing but a few experiences, backed up with images on TV and the trash talk of immature friends. (Well, maybe pastors, but not the rest.)

The funny thing I'm left wondering is whether this marks the beginning of a swing back to where I started my adult life. I came out of high school far more conservative, politically, than ninety-nine out of a hundred people you'll ever meet. But the lifeblood of my education, from secondary to higher to postgraduate, was in debate, and I was slingshotted to the extreme opposite just by the painful experience of listening to arguments made badly. I went to Baylor, which was a pretty inbred nest of conservative thought, and it was like what I imagine musicians must suffer, having to listen to their favorite music being played sloppily and off-key for year after agonizing year. It soured me on what I'd originally believed. I've since maintained that I'm not really pro-Republican or pro-Democrat, not really pro-liberal or pro-conservative, but rather that I'm anti-bad argument. Throughout most of the Rush Limbaugh era, the boldest and most shameless blast of really embarrassingly bad arguments has come from the right, and that has kept me pinned against the opposite wing of politics. But it looks as though living in Eugene is starting to change that.

To an extent, I'll admit, I think this points to how much growing up I still have to do. The truth is that most of the musicians I know actually seem very patient with bad singers and performers. They apparently have the wisdom and kindness to rejoice at others' enjoyment, and to tame their own prissiness and pedantry enough to look past failures of execution to the overflowing heart that motivated the music. If I were a better person, I would be equally pleased to see the passionate engagement and boldness that drives people to enter into substantive conversation and at least attempt to stake out a defensible position. But that might be one of the marks that years in academia has left on me: hearing badly-made arguments still repels me. It doesn't say good things about my allegiance to the truth, but it's a consistent pattern.

Have to wait and see where it sends me next, now that I'm here.

Qualifying

2010-05-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

Today, I got my first look at my course evaluations for the Spring 2010 term. My Interpersonal evals looked good, the Public Speaking ones were extremely positive, and the evals from Listening Behavior tore the roof off the house. It seems that in the opinion of the students, each of those classes went very, very well. The one outlier was Communication Theory.

I've been thinking a lot about that class. It's only the second time I've taught it, and the first time it's been its own class, as opposed to a special problems. Back in January, I announced that there would be two tests in the class, both at the very, very end: one would be an objective test over all the theories we'd covered, and the other would be an essay test, for which I'd give them the essay questions beforehand. In fact, I posted the essay questions before the first class meeting, so they had fifteen weeks to craft their answers. I also posted a study guide for the objective test around the third or fourth week, and stopped talking about it.

Late in April, about a week before the objective test, I mentioned it. More than half the class looked very surprised. "We have a test next week?" Not only had I told them at the start and provided a study guide, but the test itself was on the syllabus calendar. In bold. Bright red. But it was a complete surprise to them. More than half the class failed the test, and on the course evaluations I just read, they pointed to the arrangement of the class, and that test in particular, as the reason they didn't think the class was well taught.

What this makes me think is that I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't.

I'm also the lead instructor for First Year Seminar, so we did focus groups and other such activities to find out how we could make that class a more useful, positive experience for incoming freshman. What was the one message everyone agreed upon? What did they hammer into our heads? "Don't talk down to us or treat us like children. We're adults, and you should show us the same respect you show each other." But what happens when I don't nag them every week to study for their comprehensive final, like mom nagging them to clean their room? Well, that means I don't understand their needs as learners.

Their other repeated complaint, on the SSI and in feedback to our marketing firm, is that classes at NCU lack rigor. In this sense as well, my Theory students wound up unhappy receiving exactly what they'd asked for.

What they seem to think will happen in the workplace after they graduate is that their bosses will assign them only short tasks that fit within the attention span they choose to bring to bear, and whenever they do any longer-term work, their managers will manage their time for them. I don't think it works that way, but I suppose one of us is right, and if they are, things will work out. And if I was right, they won't be able to say no one tried to teach them differently.

Understand that I don't, by any stretch, think the class went perfectly. I learned a lot of lessons about how to tackle that class, and I think it'll look quite different the next time I run it. And I do continue to turn over in my mind what they say, because it is dangerous to rush to judgment and assume my own perspective on the class is all that matters. What they wrote, and what I learned, have a year and a half to percolate through my mind before I have to gear up to do this again.

But dangit, this is a class for majors! When I teach the general interest classes that draw people from every major on campus, I'm at peace with the reality that only some of what I talk about will strike a chord with them, and they'll pursue it and connect it with their own experiences and values, and retain that much. All the rest will go pouring out their other ear and be forgotten. But when it comes to Communication majors taking their survey of Communication Theories class, this is their toolbox. These are the ideas that make up the backbone of the field of study. It is not acceptable to me that they "play school," that they go through the motions, that they cram for a test and forget what was on it as soon as they get to their second post-test beer. Not acceptable. If we talked about Coordinated Management of Meaning in January, then it's downright important that they still grasp CMM in May, and in August, and May of the following year, and on and on. If they disagree, too danged bad: time for me to be a granite wall in their path, and they can either change their ways, or else wipe out on my stubbornness.

And I can also say that this experience provides some measure of reassurance on a worry I nursed through most of last year: it's a bad sign when you're too popular with your students. I don't want them to like me too much right now; instead, I want the twenty-years-from-now version of them to look back and like how much they grew under my instruction. Their work ethic and responsibility is not a fraction of what it will be, and if I fit their expectations right now, then I'm lowballing terribly. With this class, I got a glimmer of hope that they encountered the level of expectation that will stretch them into their best selves.

Quasi

2010-05-13T19:05:00.000-07:00

In most activities people pursue with any appreciable intensity, there is a kernel of value embedded in an outer layer of utter absurdity.

I'll start backing up my assertion with the example of sports. I think any sport that picks up a serious measure of longevity has at its core an essence that is enjoyable and worthwhile. I think athletes who play those sports make great memories for themselves, form powerful bonds with teammates and rival competitors, and learn valuable lessons about discipline, teamwork, patience, humility, and the list goes on. But beyond that core lurk the toxins of popularity and money, and as soon as the sport picks up a sizable audience, whether regional, nationwide, or even global, the latent profit creates a bubble of false, distorted value that utterly skews the priorities of those who play it and those who follow it.

Oddly enough, virtually the same thing is true, straight down the line, for academic research. Any academic field that attracts a critical mass of researchers, plus consumers of the research, is definitely on to something. No matter how many hasty, lazy thinkers want to say we're nearing the end of science, and we know everything that needs to be known, we still discover every day new cracks and crevices of reality and human experience (not the same thing at all) that bear examining. But the way academic research works at universities, those crevices become veins of valuable ore to be mined for profit, until almost overnight the scholars are producing obscure, silly, contrived research projects that have vanishingly small power to change anyone's life for the better. I trained in the doctoral program of a Research I university, and my professors all assumed I'd go to a huge state school, crank out five or six journal articles each year, teach at most a single class, and effectively work in a think tank, surrounded by grad students who were my research disciples.

Didn't quite turn out that way.

You see, one of the few pursuits that I don't think is a core of value surrounded by a cocoon of absurdity is teaching. Teaching, from inside to out, is pure value. It's definitely the case that learning can range from worthwhile to absurd, and the unbalanced relationship ultra-orthodox Judaism has with Talmud study merely for study's sake has lately underscored that for me. But teaching, as far as I'm concerned, as far as my reasoning can take me, is worthwhile all the way through.

And notice what do I do for a living? I dabble in research on the side, and I even serve the athletic program at my college. But the kernel of what I do is teaching. Teaching makes everything else run; teaching is what defines me. It's my top priority. It's easily the most worthwhile, least counterfeit, enterprise I pursue, and I believe it's the most world-changing outlet for my energies that God provides.

I take great comfort in that. I think it's probably my best protection against burnout.

Quondam

2010-05-06T08:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had a moment of sledgehammer empathy.

To begin with, I was a very mediocre debater. I had to work incredibly hard to rack up what little competitive success I did finally wind up with. And since I was on one of the very best college debate squads in the nation, that meant I was reminded on a daily basis how far below most of my teammates I was in talent and skill. In part, this was healthy, because all my life I'd been one of the smarter kids, and things had come to me easily, so this showed me how small a pond I'd swum in, and gave me more realistic measures of how I stacked up against the rest of the world. It also lit a fire under me to work harder, which revolutionized my daily routine: since I'd been very young, I'd gotten by despite underperforming. Now there was something I craved, and all the effort I could possibly devote to it resulted only in inching progress. In many ways, that matured me, and made what I do today possible.

Those were the nice parts, but there were dark and painful parts as well. I remember how it felt not to measure up. I remember being a junior, and then a senior, and still not making the elimination rounds at the major tournaments, or winning big debates against good teams. I remember what a ripping, tearing sensation it was to grapple with the reality that my best simply wasn't good enough, that this was something that just wasn't in me. I could put everything else in my life aside and do nothing but debate, but I would never be anything but mediocre. I remember fantasies and daydreams that on particular occasions shriveled up and died, as I figured out that they were out of my reach no matter how hard I tried.

So where does the empathy come in?

Yesterday I had a student visit my office who'd done badly in one of my classes. The student is on academic probation, and is now facing academic dismissal from the school. In the past, I've been pretty clinical about this: college is not for everyone, and if someone's combined maturity level and intellectual chops don't, after repeated chances, produce the calibre of work required, then it's appropriate and even healthy to remove them, to steer them onto another path. But too often I pull back, brace myself for the tears and obvious grief, go robotically into my soft, gentle voice and relaxed eyes, and simply try to wait them out. Too often I judge them, condemn them, sit still and attentively while they speak their piece, and wonder in my head how much longer it will take.

Even if what I do is necessary and proper, and I do believe it is, the detachment from real pain and real grief is not acceptable. I have been guilty of it, and I repent of it. It's not enough just to put on a display of sympathy. It's not enough to show "appropriate empathic concern." If I'm not willing to endure the hurt, to call to my mind exactly what scars that hurt left on me, then I don't have enough motivation, enough passion, to tackle the teaching enterprise and give my all to helping them find a way to grow into and through the challenge of college. I do have to keep firmly before me the reality that the pain grew me, that the pain was necessary, but if I fall into the trap of becoming too blithe, too flippant, too much of a spectator and not enough of a participant, then I can't be the teacher I want to be.

And yes, effectively what I'm writing here is "Bring on the burnout." This is a recipe for shortening my teaching career. But no one ever said I should return what God gave me unmarked and undamaged. If I don't guard myself enough, then I can't be available to students in years to come, but if I make the converse error of guarding myself too much, then I become complicit in cruelty, and as far as I'm concerned, the proper direction to err is obvious.

Quantum

2010-05-01T15:36:00.000-07:00

There's something downright Heisenbergian about the question of whether any of us were wanted, or planned, by our parents.

I use that term advisedly because in my case, I both was and wasn't. I know absolutely for sure that I was conceived accidentally, as a result of a failure of birth control. I also know absolutely for sure that my parents wanted me very badly, that they put a lot of planning and thought and patient waiting into the enterprise of bringing me into their household.

I know these things because I'm adopted. My mother has related enough details about the biologicals and their situation that I know my conception was an unwanted surprise. But I also know my parents were fully invested in the project of raising me from moment one.

For most people, the question is cloaked in mystery. It's not an easy topic to take up with one's parents. Amusingly enough, I do know about my pastor, because his father, the pastor emeritus, shared with us the answer to the question in the middle of a sermon. No, they hadn't planned on him. But for the rest, I'm not sure how it could be dropped smoothly into conversation, without kicking up a fair amount of discomfort. And I'm not sure how completely it would be possible to believe a positive answer. It's not possible to accidentally adopt a child, but the only evidence that a borne child was planned and wanted is self-reporting, which is necessarily shaky.

I find nicely ticklish the fact that most people do not know the answer to this question, and at the same time that I do know the answer, and that it's really two answers, and that they're opposites.

I like that. It's just sort of the way the world is.

Awful

2010-04-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

Connie Wilmarth
Tried to kill Darth
Vader with her cotton twill scarf
Whistling Liszt
Torqued her wrist
Tragically, he died unkissed

Awkwards

2010-04-23T15:33:00.000-07:00

So today in my Interpersonal Communication class, we were doing assertiveness exercises. For that purpose, I had to make up unreasonable requests. Students read aloud the unreasonable requests, and then took turns responding assertively -- stating their position, acknowledging others' feelings, using dominant nonverbals, saying "No" clearly, etc.

Anyway, I had fun making up the unreasonable requests. Here they are:

Hey, can I have fifty dollars?
Hey, can I have a big hug and kiss?
Hey, I need someplace to crash tonight, but I’m not sure what time it’ll be. Would you just leave your front door unlocked so I can come in whenever?
I know you’ve got a huge final tomorrow morning, but my friend is only in town tonight and we want to play some deafeningly loud music all night. That’s okay with you, isn’t it?
So I get all these hilarious jokes in my email about politics and race and sex and things, but then I feel left out because I have no one to forward them to. Mind if I start sending them all to you?
My kid is selling candy bars for a band trip, but no one’s buying and this is the last day. Could you buy five hundred dollars’ worth?
Could you type up my senior capstone for me? And parts of it aren’t really written yet, so could you write those?
Hey, I’m going to an unlicensed bungee jumping place and it’s going to be a blast. Come with me!
Wow, I forgot my toothbrush. Could I borrow yours?
You’ll do me a big favor and babysit my nineteen Ritalin-addicted children tonight, right?
I really need to test my eighteen-wheeler’s brakes. Would you go lie down on the driveway?
I’m training my pit bull, Susan, to protect the house. Would you put on this jumpsuit made of beef and let her chase you?
So my grandma gave me this rifle for my birthday and I need to break in the scope. Would you put this apple on your head?
Wow, I’m wearing brand new underwear today, and it’s really itchy and uncomfortable. Could we swap?
I’m feeling a little judged right now. Would you please renounce Christ and embrace Satan for me?

Awards

2010-04-02T13:07:00.000-07:00

When I was seven years old and in second grade, the teachers staged an all-grade spelling bee one afternoon. As I recall, it was raining outside, so they had to cancel recess, and this was to give us something that held our attention. But when it was all over, I was the last one left standing. Over thirty years later I remember it clearly, because I was only seven years old and therefore very impressionable. I was still voraciously consuming any data that helped me see where I stood against my peers. The prize was nothing special: one of the teachers bought me a Fudgesicle at lunch, which cost all of thirty-five cents. Well, that, and I got a bit of bragging rights out of it.

Over the past three years, I've been on something of a winning streak. Back in spring of 2007, I won the Teaching Excellence award at Stephen F. Austin State University. A year later, spring 2008, the graduating seniors at Northwest Christian College voted me professor of the year. And last year, I won the President's Award for Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership. This year, the school nominated me for the Donald H. Ecroyd award, which is given by the National Communication Association. A few folks have asked, "What are you going to do when we run out of awards for you to win?" And all of that has set me off thinking about what these mean.

In the first place, they don't mean what they apparently mean. They do not mean I was one of the best teachers at SFA in 2007, or the most inspiring at NCC in 2008, or the best faculty member at NCU in 2009. They mean, in each case, that a group of people cobbled together a template and found what they perceived was the best match from the available candidates. The SFA award involved a nomination packet, and past winners weren't eligible, and the assembling of the packet itself was an exercise in rhetorical effectiveness. It didn't prove I was better than others at teaching, but that I was better than others at arguing in favor of my teaching abilities, which is an entirely separate matter. As far as "Professor of the Year," I've often pointed out that in the 2007-08 school year, I had only about three seniors in all of my classes, so if the seniors voted me an award, that may have more to do with who they didn't like than who they did. ("Not him! ... Not her! ... Not him!! ... Who's left?") The President's Award, of course, was selected by a committee. Enough said.

I do take them as encouragement, and as far as that goes, they're nice. But when people ask if I'll be disappointed when there are no more awards to win, the answer is of course not. I've been encouraged all I need; it's to the point where I see very plainly who isn't getting encouraged and needs it, and it would genuinely feel better to see some of the encouragement flowing to them than to have to go through the whole awkward cycle of graciously responding to congratulations.

They can also be a bit of external validation. The school's motive in sending me in for the Ecroyd award is to lay hold of a selling point for the school. Of course we brag about how much we value teaching, and what high quality teaching we think goes on here, but most schools do that. A prospective student considering the school is badly in need of tiebreakers, of evidence that sorts out the claim schools make to the quality of their teaching in order of strength. The judgment of outsiders from other schools that the teaching happening on this campus, in the communication program, is in the very top tier in the nation, would be a powerful persuader.

On the subject of symbols that are easily understood, they're also a message that I can pass on to people I left behind in Texas who might be wondering if I'm settling in here. My mother, naturally, got very worried about my third year review, but it was nice to be able to quiet her worries substantially with a very conceited summing-up that I didn't feel in my own heart at all: "Mom, they only give two awards to faculty, and I'm the only faculty member who's won them both, and I won one of them the first time it was given. If I don't pass third year review, it will be very interesting to hear why." That helped her, but was very difficult to say, just because I don't at all feel as though I stand a head higher than my colleagues. I'm in awe of a great many of my colleagues, and on a lot of days I think I hit somewhere in the middle of the faculty or below. It's just that I've got both a knack and a deep academic background for being very visible and very hard to ignore.

What the awards are not, what they never will be, is proof of good teaching. When I gauge how a year went, the awards never cross my mind. Instead, I round up all my memories of student progress, student excitement, and I even watch for some delayed-reaction change. Often students will tell me directly that I'm making a difference, that they feel encouraged or challenged, or that they're using whta I teach and that they see its value. That, as any teacher who has any business in the profession can testify, is the real award. It can't hang on a wall or go on a vita, but it can be treasured in the heart, and it's the one thing that has any hope of making up for the ratio of labor-intensity to pay.

Fore

2010-03-29T07:29:00.000-07:00

I've made a point of not linking to other sites or pasting other people's writing here because I wanted this to be all or nearly all my original work. But in the past few days, I've run across two quite powerful uses of historic perspective as argument, and I'm sticking them here in hopes that they fuel more reasoning of this kind. Critical thinking has far more to do with simply refusing to forget, refusing to give in to the manipulations of those who try to force forgetfulness, than it might seem.

Example #1:

"You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials
to dictate energy policy.
You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.
You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.
You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.
You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.
You didn't get mad when we gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.
You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.
You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans...oh hell no."

Example #2:

Democrats: "We need health care reform"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Give us a majority and we'll do it better"
Democrats: "Done, you have majority of both houses"

12 years later, health care is irrefutably worse in every respect for every single person in the United States
Democrats: "We need health care reform"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Americans are tired of partisan politics!"
Democrats: "OK, let's compromise"
Republicans: "OK, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done"
Republicans: "Too liberal, get rid of half your ideas"
Democrats: "Done. Time to end debate"
Republicans: "Too liberal, we need more debate, we will filibuster to prevent you from voting"
Democrats: "OK, we'll vote--sorry guys, debate is ended. It's time to vote on the bill"
Republicans: "Too liberal, we vote no"
Democrats: "OK, it passed anyway--sorry guys."

One month later
Republicans: "Wait--wait, OK, we have less of a minority now so we can filibuster forever."
Democrats: "Sorry, the bill already passed, we need it to pass the House now"
Republicans: "But we have enough to filibuster"
Democrats: "Sorry, the bill already passed, we need it to pass the House now"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You haven't listened to our ideas! You've shut us out of this whole process!"
Democrats: "Sorry, show us your proposal"
Republicans: "Smaller government"
Democrats: "That's not very specific"
Republicans: "OK, here's our detailed proposal--It's our common-sense ideas we spent 12 years not enacting"
Democrats: "OK, we'll add a bunch more of your ideas"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You included all these back-room deals"
Democrats: "OK, we'll get rid of the back-room deals"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You're using obscure procedural tricks to eliminate the back-room deals!"
Democrats: "No, we're using reconciliation, which both parties have used dozens of times for much larger bills"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! You're pressuring Congressmen to vote for your bill! Scandal!"
Democrats: "It's called 'whipping', it's been done since 1789"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Can't you see the American people don't want this?"
Democrats: "This bill is mildly unpopular (40-50%), doing nothing (your proposal) is extraordinarily unpopular (4-6%)"
Republicans: "We need to start over! We need to start over!"
Democrats: "We should really consider voting--"
Republicans: "Liberal fascists! Start over! Clean slate! Common-sense! America!"

Use your brain. And never forget that one of the chief functions of your brain is to house your memory!

FYS

2010-03-27T19:08:00.000-07:00

Last summer, I was appointed lead instructor of First Year Seminar. FYS is a class for incoming first-year students; any of you from SFA would recognize it as SFA 101. We made a few changes last fall, and we saw bits of progress in how well the class does what it's supposed to, but we're making more radical changes for the fall 2010 term. I'm posting them here in hopes of getting comments and suggestions from anyone who reads these notes. In no particular order:

We've already changed it from a once-a-week class that runs all fifteen weeks to a twice-a-week class, Tuesday-Thursday, that runs only eight weeks. The plan is that we'll cover college survival on one of those days, say Tuesday, and then on Thursday the class will mutually tackle a book, movie, or other text. Tentatively, I plan to have my class watch Gattaca and then carry out a series of in-depth discussions on it. One of my colleagues plans to spend the eight weeks talking about comic strips and editorial cartoons, and having students bring different ones for discussion each Thursday.
One complaint we've had hammered into us is that we've been guilty of talking down to the incoming first-years and conveying the impression that we don't think they're ready to be adults. So, instead of devoting entire class meetings to things like study skills, doing laundry, getting enough sleep, etc., what I tentatively want to do is track down concrete ideas like spaced repetition and resources like Anki, give a five minute PSA for such things in class, and then leave the burden on the students to do something about them.
The Tuesday class needs to become a lot less about generic college survival, and a lot more about knowledge specific to Northwest Christian University. We've talked about making a list of four or five topics on which new students need information, and then letting the students in the class add another two or three, subject to our approval. We would then make those topics available for sign-up, and students would do a group project consisting of interviewing members of the campus community, video-recording their answers, and editing the highlights into a short primer on the subject. Examples: campus safety, campus traditions, etc. For each topic, we would get to name one person as an "expert" whose advice had to be included (For campus safety, Jocelyn Hubbs? For campus traditions, Carla Aydelott?) but beyond that, students would get to do it themselves.
One topic that we might handle with that model, or that we might turn into a class topic, is how to find one's way around Eugene, which is an extremely confusing town to the newly arrived. We tend to have a fair number of Eugene natives in any particular section, but we could turn that to an advantage by enlisting them to come ready to help explain the town's layout, and to talk about at least one out-of-the-way place in Eugene that it's worthwhile to know how to find.
Similarly, we've talked about having the advisor for each academic major talk on camera for no more than a minute and a half about that academic field, and then have them choose one of their outstanding majors to talk for another minute and a half about what it's like to take those classes, study that material, etc. That would make up most of our comprehensive coverage of the majors on campus. We'd still do the majors fair, but for that we'd run an informal contest among the faculty for the most creative way of getting and keeping students' attention.
We plan to move class out of the classroom as often as possible. Last fall, my section took one class meeting and went for a walk around the neighborhood, including our campus and the neighboring University of Oregon campus, and they said they got a lot out of it and enjoyed it immensely.
One change we implemented last fall, which I'm very happy about, is that each section is taught by a three-person team: a faculty member, a staff member, and an outstanding undergraduate student. One idea I have for this fall is to set aside one day when the faculty and staff instructor won't come, and label it "What students know that faculty and staff are better off not knowing." The student instructor could decide what to cover, what to explain, and also could take any questions from the first-years that they're not comfortable asking if a faculty or staff member is in the room.
One assignment we've discussed is to send each first-year out to visit something within walking distance of campus, and then write (or record) a review highlighting the details that might be easily overlooked, both good and bad. This could include restaurants, shops, etc. but could also include entirely free attractions like Alton Baker Park or the first Friday at Jordan Schnitzer Museum.

Right now, the word we get from the students who take the class isn't positive. They complain about having to take it and tell one another it's a waste of time. Now, a little of this negative feeling, I admit, I disregard: I think of it as something similar to complaining about cafeteria food, or how strict one's parents are, both of which people routinely exaggerate because doing otherwise is uncool. But I do think we could do better than we're doing, and I am anxious to get any feedback anyone's willing to offer. If you have ideas for other improvements, or topics that ought to be addressed, please do comment and say so.

Last, if you want to continue to be part of this discussion after I yank the plug on my Facebook for the final month of school, you can find this post on my blog, along with most of the rest of my Facebook notes. I only write on the blog sporadically, but it does stay up and updated even when I'm not on Facebook. And I'll probably solicit feedback again just as soon as I'm back on in May, so as ideas occur to you, do please nail them down so you can set me up in a few weeks.

Foreigners

2010-03-27T09:49:00.000-07:00

As with most matters that aren't blazingly obvious, there are good arguments for and against the Health Care bill that is now law. I've lived more than three quarters of my life in Texas, so I have a long list of friends who are very politically conservative, and I've known in my life intelligent conservatives who could marshal evidence and reasoning in a most impressive fashion to sell their side of a controversy.

I will note, in revving up to make my point, that one of my favorite advisees has a fascination with the national debt, and has accurately pegged its root cause as the runaway growth of non-discretionary spending, much of which comes in the form of entitlements. In that sense, the fact that the Health Care bill widens access to Medicaid is a fairly compelling argument against it, and one I take seriously. It's not a simple "Oh mercy, it spends a lot of money" argument, because none of the people who make that argument show any interest at all in restraining spending on their own priorities. It's an argument that an identifiable root cause of a major systemic threat is made more robust by this bill. It's a good argument, and I wish I'd heard more about it in the run-up to the bill's passage.

I didn't. Instead, I heard a lot of garbage.

Example #1 of garbage: the bill is unconstitutional. This is, to put it charitably, asinine. Congress has the power to levy taxes and charge the IRS with collecting them, and that's exactly how the mandate in this bill will work. The Republican attorneys general who are challenging the bill are pouring their states' taxpayer dollars down a rathole. I'm sure they'll make a lot of voters happy by doing so, since it'll create the illusion that their side is at least attempting to strike a blow against tyranny, but those resources will go absolutely nowhere: they won't educate or make safer a single human being, and they will not change the law.

Example #2 of garbage: the bill will result in the diversion of people's money to fund abortions over their objections. No it won't. Every possible safeguard has been written in to wall off money from abortion unless people knowingly spend their funds for such coverage. The Catholic Health Association and more than fifty thousand nuns are satisfied with those protections. The drumbeat of complaints about abortion funding reminds me of a story one of my students told a few weeks back about an acquaintance who had attempted suicide dozens of times, because she thought it was the only way she could get her parents' attention. Ending abortion is no longer a serious agenda item for the Republican Party; when's the last time you heard any new developments on the Human Life Amendment first proposed during the Reagan Administration? Instead, it's a fire alarm they pull whenever they want to bring things to a halt.

But the most rank example of argumentative garbage is this one: "In passing the bill, Obama, Pelosi and Reid ignored the will of the American people."

No they didn't.

I'm in favor of it. I'm an American.

I'll go further: the opponents of it are not as American as I am. I am a real American, and those who spearheaded opposition to it are anti-American.

To belong in this country, to be fully invested in what this country is about, you have to be willing to accept as legitimate the outcome of elections and votes even when you don't agree with them. If you only believe in democracy as long as your side wins, then you don't believe in it at all. And when you start responding to setbacks by encouraging threats and violence, then you're no different from the fifth rate tyrants in little kleptocracies scattered around the world and through the corridors of history.

One of the irreducible difficulties with democratic rule is the presence of a residue of people who are not interested in listening to reason, who are driven by fear and hatred and have absolutely zero-point-zero capacity to be persuaded by evidence or explanation. I make them sound pretty scary, but as Christ said of the poor, they'll always be with us. In fact, I think it's very important to accept them and take care of them, and to be keenly aware that they're still our neighbors and brothers and sisters. They're ours. Just because they're entirely demented doesn't make them unlovable, even though showing love to them certainly is not an uncomplicated pursuit.

But for God's sake, you surely don't want to put them in charge!

More and more, I see hatred and fear and irrationality being cultivated and choreographed for political gain, and that's turning a latent destructive force inside the system into a vein of power to try to run the system. It can't possibly work, and it will scorch the earth. But what chills me is the apparent satisfaction of those engineering the efforts with exactly that outcome: if they can't get the result they want, then let the earth be scorched. Either they will operate the levers of power, or they'll play Samson in the temple.

There are a few creeping signs that sane, wise, intelligent conservatives are waking up to how far their loudest voices have slipped in that direction, and efforts may be underway to rehabilitate American conservatism, to wean it off rage and enmity and restore it to engagement. It's certainly something I pray will happen. I would dearly love, as I've written in this blog a dozen times, to lose an argument with a conservative because they were just too good and made too much sense. It's happened before. But what I can't have any more of is making my argument to a brick wall, to the angry, implacable face of someone who has rejected me as an enemy because I disagree.

People who do that are not Americans. America is not about that. And I will not let them lay claim to it. It's not theirs; it's ours. And we won't let go of it. The sacrifices of our brave ancestors that they frequently lay claim to are not theirs to invoke: Americans have not died on battlefields, or been shot down in city streets, to protect the rights of the enraged to shut down deliberation and impose their will. They died to protect an experiment in bringing opposed political factions together in dialogue to decide together. That's worth defending at a price so high that it might astonish the ones who are spoiling for a fight.

They'd best beware.

Fun

2010-03-22T18:17:00.001-07:00

Today, for whatever reason, I got to thinking up jump-rope rhymes.

Brian Kaelin
Parasailin’
Stole a smooch from Sarah Palin
Secret Service
Got all nervous
Started to holler “Saints preserve us!”

Kirsten Madsen
Yells “Egads!” ’n
Welcomes all the high school grads in
Fish week hoe down
Never slow down
Challenge her to a samba showdown

Steven Goetz’ll
Beat Steve Poetzl
In a race to eat a pretzel
Shove and push
Land on your tush
Pass out just like President Bush

Beacon Soccer
Off my rocker
I love you just like a stalker
Chew and chomp
Cheer and stomp
Name my kid Marcel Duchamp

In our chapel
There’s no lap pool
We baptize with Diet Snapple
Justifies
Old self dies
Just too bad it draws the flies

Doyle Srader
Ex-debater
Back when our mascot was “Crusader”
Spoke the truth
Chipped a tooth
Brought back the ghost of John Wilkes Booth

I must alert you
Here comes Virtue
Show some respect or they might hurt you
Sing real purty
Fight real dirty
Then eat a cupcake for dessert-y

Michael Bollen-
Baugh went strollin'
Met the PoPos out patrollin'
Fueled their ire
Opened fire
Now he sings in Heaven's choir

We've got a poetry contest coming up. I'm giving serious thought to entering these. What do you think of "Jumprope Variations" for a title?

Fobbing

2010-03-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

So last fall, I had a student show up in class and attempt to hand me work that was a week past due. She identified what it was loudly enough for the class to hear, and I said "That was due a week ago," which they all knew, since they'd all turned it in. At the end of the term, three students put on my course evaluation the complaint that I had publicly embarrassed someone in front of the class. My mind flashed back to that day, and I thought I didn't embarrass her; she embarrassed herself!

Now, I know the discreet way of handling such encounters: just tell the student "Hold on to that for now and let's talk after class." Usually I do that automatically. But this occasion was so very absurd that I had a hard time feeling much regret at not being my usual, careful self. It was the student's own words and volume that drew everyone's attention to her attempt to turn work in a week late. They all knew my policy was not to accept late work. What privacy did she have left after she got through attempting, publicly, to do something a roomful of people knew wasn't going to succeed? If she'd jumped out the window and tried to fly, would I have "embarrassed her publicly" if I'd said "Oh dear, she seems to have hit the ground?"

Paul Watzlawick, a Stanford professor of psychiatry, wrote a book in 1967, Pragmatics of Human Communication, in which he talked about how the parties to a communicative encounter punctuate the exchange differently. Each one perceives a different moment, act or utterance as the starting point, and then views what follows as set in motion by that precipitating event. When I teach it, I always recite this quip by Ogden Nash, paraphrased slightly: "He drinks because she nags, he thinks. She thinks she nags because he drinks. And neither will admit what's true, that he's a drunk and she's a shrew." Neither side sees themselves as the provocateur, but only as a helpless respondent.

I do know that I have to tread very cautiously when dealing with students, that I have to think carefully about every word, every facial expression, and the timing of all of it. I know that things which seem to me entirely innocent or forgettable can stir up all kinds of headache. But I also know that a particular type of student thrives in a very dysfunctional, rotten way in a climate of gentleness and discretion: the one who's learned to play the system. I've made it a practice to be blunt and abrupt in many situations just because I'm positive that a lot of students need exactly that: no leeway, no ambiguity, just a very sharp boundary.

Sometimes students bear an external locus of control, putting all the responsibility for their classroom experience on everyone except themselves, because they lack the help they need, or they're still overcoming past nightmares from teachers who have no business being in the profession. But some, I'm convinced, deliberately exercise that external locus, positively refusing to take ownership of how they feel, because that choice generates leverage against their professors, a way to take charge of the situation. As a strategy for changing the subject and moving the pressure off themselves, it can be very effective in the short term if the professor isn't ornery enough to put up some resistance to it.

So I do think this particular student did do more to embarrass herself than I did to cause her embarrassment. And I think at least two of her classmates offered misplaced sympathy, which made matters worse. It grieves me that she probably managed to insulate herself from the entire setback, to arrive at a decision that she did nothing wrong, that I just didn't do a good enough job of teaching her. That's tragic. Setbacks in classes can actually be good things if students take the feedback that what they're doing isn't getting the results they want, but when they satisfy themselves that the problem lies elsewhere, outside their control, that's when they set themselves up for repeated failure. If they can do it once, they pave the way to do it again and again, in all subsequent iterations of the lapse, and the older they grow in the pattern, the more stubbornly lodged it becomes, and the more sophisticated their rationalizations. I must admit, I'm not very optimistic about this one.

Watzlawick would say that all of the above is just my own punctuation of the encounter, but there comes a point where I push the squooshy academic "All knowledge is situated" stuff aside and say, she brought it on herself.

Fit

2010-03-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

To begin with, I really love living in Eugene. Probably close to half my enjoyment of the past three years can be attributed to the climate, the culture, the politics, and the scenery. It's a wonderful place to live. Every time I leave town on a trip, it's not long at all before I wish I was back home. And yesterday afternoon, it hit me very suddenly what might explain that.

I'm adopted, in case you didn't know. My mother (not adopted mother; mother) told me that from the very beginning, when I was still too young to understand what it meant. There was never a painful sudden realization of anything, because she made sure that I was never unaware of it. Still, a few of the details didn't come out until I grew up enough that it occurred to me to ask the right questions. When I was in my early twenties, I finally asked for the first time, "Were my biological parents married?" She paused a long time before answering and said "They were both in graduate school, and they didn't think they could support a child and do that at the same time." And I said, "Come on, answer the question," and she finally admitted, "No, they weren't." For close to twenty years I've known that I'm illegitimate, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. It means that on the few occasions someone's called me a bastard, I've been able to answer "Yep!"

But yesterday, I put two and two together with two, two, and two, and came to a big realization. I was conceived by two graduate students who weren't married, during the Summer of Love. And not either edge of the Summer of Love, either: the smack dab center of it. If we define summer as June, July and August, which is quite reasonable, then my entry into the world bisected it precisely.

Summer of Love.

Unmarried biological parents.

Who were not only in college, but grad school.

Very, very likely I am the offspring of two hippies.

Now, the only hitch in my theory is that this all happened in Texas. Texas was not exactly a hippie-magnet. Dallas has its Bohemian neighborhoods, but they're a bit put on. It's hard to imagine a VW bus with a gun rack, and a banner reading "War ain't healthy for buckeroos and other living critters," but maybe. At any rate, if I've got that much concentrated hippie in my DNA, then is it any surprise that I've found such a snug spot in Eugene?

What's far more surprising is that I survived thirty years in Texas without getting myself lynched.

Gathering

2010-02-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

Above, behind windows
I bear witness to their daily walk
Prisoner’s march with fingerprint gait
Through tingling raindrop seeds, their fists stretching pockets
Eyes downcast
Snubbing the sidewalk to gaze into flames of worry
Which of us
If a student asks for a bucket of water
Will give him a flashlight instead?

The near sidewalk lies directly beneath my window
Invisible until I rise from my chair, which I seldom do
Unless a familiar laugh or raised voice tumbles up
And in the classroom it’s easiest to see the back row
Because I’m a bit farsighted and they’re in my field of vision
But you who are nearest me are invisible
Unless I fold my neck in half and squint

So, on the sidewalk they advance and retreat
But only one out of dozens is bound for my office
In the classroom they come and go
Talking of g______ Loren Crow
But only a handful of you draw near enough to make contact
And then I fumble and hem and haw and flounder
And you are the hardest ones to see
They, who keep their distance
And fit my field of vision
And fit my expectations
And my stereotypes
And my stencils
And my habits,
Are vivid
Detailed
Defined
Sharp
There

My mentors all agreed,
The best teachers keep a healthy separation.
And the fox walked away with his nose in the air, saying
I am sure they are sour.

Paired and in packs, footfalls synchronized
They circulate woes, treasures
Burning through a meager cache of sleep-heaped energy
To peel one layer off the universe
While daylight spills between their gripping fingers
A breeze swirling against an avalanche

I own no square inch of land
Still, the Oregon countryside takes my breath away
I must not touch artwork on a gallery wall
Still, open doors usher me in
I may approach this near, but no nearer
And understand this much, but no more
And offer, but suffer frequent rejection
Still, I witness their daily walk
Through the window
Across Alder
And bathe my heart in a glorious, excruciating joy

Now monkey-walking through bicycle racks to exhume a buried smile
Now swinging keys on a lanyard for the soothing propeller motion
Now shouldering a backpack strap to a more comfortable spot
Now text-walking in front of an oncoming bus
As the Angel of Death moistens her icy white lips
Now halting mid-step, remembering they must be two places at once
Or two people
Now exploding into full sprint to escape the slugs

Each passage drips into my memory
Deposited in a half full cavern of stalagmites
Downy freshmen who grew a lustrous coat
One day finally exiting the MEC, robed and capped
And setting off for other sidewalks

Gesture

2010-02-21T09:50:00.001-08:00

The literature on nonverbal communication is stuffed full of research into the link between gestures and speech. And lately I've noticed that my favorite fidgets and my favorite ideas all have to do with finding unstable balance points.

My students must get sick to death of hearing about dialectical tensions, but most of the academic notions that fascinate me the most are some sort of variation on that. Between kindness and cruelty, which is the good one and which one do we want to minimize? Easy: kindness is good, and we should minimize cruelty. But between, say, sleep and being awake, which is the good one and which one do we want to minimize? They're both good, but each one is the negation of the other, so we have to figure out what balance to strike between them. And we can't do it once and for all, because our need for each changes with circumstance. That's a short run through the idea of dialectical tension. It's a big idea in relational communication: relational partners want both time together and separation, both familiarity and spontaneity, both openness and secrecy. And the balance of each has to be continually renegotiated, and it's the renegotiation that is the lifeblood of the relationship. The idea pops up in a number of other places, and every time it does, it tickles my curiosity just perfectly. I often woolgather about it when I'm out walking.

The other thing I do aimlessly is fidget, and it struck me this morning that most of my commonest fidgets are about balance. I balance on one foot and swing the other one around. I balance books on my third finger and spin them, just like a basketball player with a basketball. I twirl pens through my fingers and around my thumb, which works best with pens that balance easily, and might not work at all with poorly balanced ones.

There's no end of aphorisms about the importance of balance, and most of it just makes me impatient. I'm not at all drawn to the abstraction in those sayings. It's the experience of hitting a tricky balance just right that pleases me. It feels like mastering the arrangement that truly makes a difference in the world. Far more than marshaling brute strength, I think that grasping the multiple interacting forces and learning to maintain balance between them, even as they change, is what it takes to be the source of influence more than the target.

Gauging

2010-02-20T14:46:00.001-08:00

They did it again, this week. Twice. They notified a room full of people, "I am intimidating."

Generally, it's a pretty dicey undertaking to make bold, public declarations about other people's perceptions of oneself. The risk of being made absurd is unnecessarily high. And I think a lot of the students I teach are treading close to that line. I've noticed it over the past year or two: more and more college students drop into conversation, or an assigned speech, their assertion that "I intimidate the people around me." And I have no idea where it comes from. We're not talking huge, hulking bruisers, or decorated sharpshooters; not a Nobel prize winner among them. They're just ordinary eighteen, nineteen year old college kids, who are convinced that they make other people's knees shake and stomachs turn to ice water.

My first diagnosis was plain old narcissism. These are kids whose parents, all four or five of them, and grandparents, all twenty-three of them, repeated hundreds of times a day how special they were, how talented, how beautiful, how much better than other children. Now, if they find the people around them unresponsive, it can only be because they are so formidable, so wonderful, that they shock everyone into silence. That must be it.

But it's also been showing up on my course evaluations, too: they tell me that I'm intimidating, that they feel afraid to approach me. And if they're intimidated by a pasty, middle-aged academic dressed in Wal-Mart clearance, they're bound to find the world outside pretty daunting. Somewhere along the way, the benchmark has moved: a fairly large segment of the generation currently coming of age is primed to find people intimidating on the weakest of cues.

The students who claim the label for themselves do have in common a tendency to be assertive. They don't apologize, they don't talk around things, they simply say what they mean. As far as I'm concerned, that's a positive and healthy thing, and I've been known to frame my remarks that way as well. But is it really the case that if we aren't radiating uncertainty, if we aren't indirect in all our remarks, that we project an uninviting hardness that repels people? Are we drifting in the direction of our neighbors across the Pacific, sliding culturally into the high-context obliqueness that makes conversation a mix of ceremony and detective work? I don't suppose it's a catastrophe: cultures do change, and if that's what we have in store, then I suppose it'll be interesting to watch it happen. But it does make me curious what forces are driving us that way.

And I think it has a good deal to do with the particular brand of alienation that's taken over this country's culture. It's the same phenomenon that makes the typical American so conflict-averse, so certain that having an argument must mean ending a relationship. My sense is that we've built on top of being over-medicated, and now our everyday conversations are over-choreographed. Probably some of the blame for that falls at the feet of my field, but as with any helpful advances that pare down the messiness and danger in life, it's tricky getting the balance right.

Governmentality

2010-02-07T17:27:00.001-08:00

One of my more cynical, but firmly and confidently held, beliefs about politics is that each party quietly keeps alive the issue that is its greatest source of public outrage, because it needs the outrage for fuel, for dollars, for attention. Republicans don't really want to stop abortion. If they had to, they'd quietly supply the funds to keep the abortion clinics in business. If abortion went away, how far would they have to travel to find another hot button that works so reliably? Democrats don't really want good race relations for the exact same reason.

To that list, I have to add two more very convenient outrages in the Republican column: terrorism and budget deficits. I've spent nearly a decade scratching my bald head over the utter irrationality of the Republican position on terrorism, and how it flies in the face of very recent, very powerful historical evidence: the British and the IRA. How did the British treat IRA terrorists? They refused to militarize the conflict, refused to treat arrested IRA members as prisoners of war despite demands from the prisoners that they do so. Instead, they proceeded as though the bombers were common criminals, and the symbolism and imagery were powerful. And where is the IRA now? Where we would like al-Qaeda to be: on the trash-heap of history. So why should we militarize our confrontation with al-Qaeda? What sane person could think it's a solution? What does it do other than let us flex our muscles and congratulate ourselves on what mighty warriors we are? It reminds me of kicking the computer to try to make it work. It's certainly tempting to do so, but anyone who thinks a kick genuinely will make a computer work better is an imbecile. So why do Republicans cling so stubbornly to militarizing the al-Qaeda conflict? Because they don't really want it solved. Why would they? If it goes away, they lose a key leverage point.

Same thing, by the way, goes for deficit spending. Anyone who can still say "tax and spend Democrat" without being washed away by a tidal wave of absurdity is living in Oz. The Bush deficit is the crust, mantle, and outer core of the "Obama debt." Clinton gave us a surplus, Bush poured it down the drain, and Obama is foundering under a wave of rage over how large the debt is. It's insanity, but it's outdated fidelity to the hoary old symbols of American politics: Republicans cut the budget and Democrats bust it. Yes, and once upon a time we thought all Jewish people were nebbishy and incapable of fighting, before the IDF came along and re-defined "tough." But to be Republican right now is to sound the alarm about the deficit, all the while never allowing oneself to be pinned down to what program one would actually cut. Republicans panned Obama's State of the Union for not being adequately serious about budget cuts, but then also complained when he canceled NASA's efforts to return to the moon. Which is it? What do they want cut? Answer: nothing. They want the deficit nice and high. While it's high, they have an easy leverage point.

Please understand: I've written a lot about Republicans in this post, and, in fact, I think what passes for Republican thinking and Republican leadership is, at this precise moment in history, unbelievably toxic to our country's well-being. But that's not at all to say that the Democrats don't have their own convenient problems that they don't, at all costs, want solved. I mentioned race above, and there are others. It's just that Republicans, having decided winning back a majority trumps all other objectives, have theirs very prominently on display at the moment.

That's one of the sad but true qualities of elected officials: you must pretend to grasp the seriousness of a problem and be committed to solving it, as long as anyone is listening. But in your heart, you know how badly you depend on the problem's continued existence. How they straddle that hypocritical chasm without falling in, I couldn't tell you. I'm glad I've got the job I have, and not theirs. It must just suck the soul right out of you.

Gandalf

2010-02-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

Last night, the library held its second annual Mystery Party, set up as a big, live action game of Clue. Last year, we had fairly straightforward character names taken from the game, and we were left to our own devices to think up details. This year, they chose "books made into movies" as the theme. Students dressed up as the Wizard of Oz characters; Harry, Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter; Max and the Wild Thing from Where the Wild Things Are; Sam-I-Am from Green Eggs and Ham; Dustfinger from the Inkheart trilogy; and Jadis the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. My colleague Loren Crow, our Bible professor, dressed up as Darth Vader, and I was Gandalf.

The murder victim was a screenwriter, Mr. Write. The game began with Steve Silver, the detective, introducing each of us, and we had a minute or two to give an opening rap. He told us in advance that he would ask two questions:

Where were you on the night of the murder?
What happened?

Last year, I used this blog to compose mine, and I wound up pleased that I'd recorded it here for memory's sake. This year I didn't compose it here, but I'm nevertheless going to set it down so I can look back on it later. It's pretty clearly a step down from last year's, but a few of the bits went over well.

"A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he intended to.

Where were you on the night of the murder?

"On my way to Hogwarts. They've hired me as an adjunct; I teach spelling. But I soon realized that there was a stowaway on my eagle: Gollum had climbed aboard, smuggling explosives in his underpants. We took an emergency detour to the Cracks of Doom to drop him in. Again. After that, my eagle needed refueling, so we cut across to Oregon and I sent him out to fish for salmon, while I swung by this library to check out some rare books. I dig rare books.

What happened?

"Knock knock.

Audience: Who's there?

"J. R. R.

J. R. R. who?

"That's what the screenwriter said! I mean, no Tom Bombadil? Merry and Pippin turned into something out of Dumb and Dumber? Frodo reduced to a whiner with one facial expression? Saruman vanishes from the story right in the middle with absolutely no explanation? I'm telling you, at one point the screenwriter wanted the trees to do a song and dance number to 'Let Me Ent-ertain you!' I decided to kill -- to kill -- to -- (violent fit of coughing)

"Sorry, too many centuries of smoking pipe-weed. I've been trying to kick the hobbit.

"Anyway, I decided to sneak up on him, make blinding light come out of my staff, and give him a good grilling! Unfortunately, I mispronounced one word in the spell, and made fire instead of light. And as for the grilling, weeeell ...

"That's what happens when you don't spell-check."

Likeness

2010-01-30T13:53:00.001-08:00

"Speaking generally, we may say that the rhetorical function is the function of adjusting ideas to people and of people to ideas."
-- Donald Bryant, "Rhetoric: Its Scope and Function," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 39, 413.

"God has prepared the whole world for the gospel and the gospel for the whole world."
-- Don Richardson, in Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, 4, 172.

Loo

2010-01-26T09:10:00.000-08:00

It's a grim sign that I have to haul out the cliché hammer again this quickly, but I have no choice. I am mortally sick and tired of hearing about "kitchen table decisions." To every single official and spokesperson belonging to the Obama administration I beg you, for Heaven's sake, knock it off. At the kitchen table, I don't decide; I chew. Chase down a herd of cows and watch them go to town on their cud if you think a flood of brilliant plans comes out of chewing. In all honesty, I make a fair share of my important decisions on the crapper, but don't hold your breath to hear that in an Obama speech anytime soon.

Litter

2010-01-25T06:36:00.000-08:00

By the power vested in me as a professor of rhetoric, I hereby put the world on notice that I do not have a "radar screen." If you've confused me with an aircraft carrier, get glasses. I have five perfectly good senses, and occasional twitchings of a sixth, but I do not sweep a beam of electromagnetic radiation round and round for the purpose of identifying the range, altitude, direction, or speed of both moving and fixed objects. That would be rude. Plus, I'd have to do some sort of Regan MacNeil trick with my head, which would hurt. On first usage, this metaphor might've been vivid; on second, it might've been tolerable. By now, it's been beaten past death into unrecognizable corpse pulp, and it stinks up far too many conversations.

Please be advised: I have declared the entire world around me a no-fly zone. If you put something on my radar screen, I reserve the right to pick it off with a Sidewinder.

Logic

2010-01-16T10:59:00.000-08:00

I spent enough years in debate that I judge arguments just as much on entertainment value as quality of reasoning. Today I was treated to a real delight: Rush Limbaugh says the Haiti earthquake was made to order for the Obama administration, and Pat Robertson says it was sent by God. If both those claims are true, then obviously God must be a Democrat!

Measurement choices

2009-12-30T13:06:00.000-08:00

So I'm collecting facets of reality in preparation for the first lesson in my Communication Theory class. Virtually every theory we study is either social scientific or interpretive in nature, so we begin by nailing down what that difference means. It's a cool little idea to play with, and also a fairly important pillar of God's creation, but I'm more and more sure that it's best learned through multiple examples. I'm posting this to preserve the ones I've spotted, and to invite others to contribute more.

I always introduce the concept with a simple thought experiment: suppose I bring a tape measure to class, and the day's activity is to determine the tallest student in the room. How might we accomplish that? We talk about precise definitions of "tall," how to minimize errors in measurement, etc., but at the end of that, we understand that we'd take the tape measure, measure each person in class, and the record of inches and feet would settle the matter. The most important part: once our data were collected and properly understood, it would no longer be rational to disagree. You might speak up and say "Well, Brody (or David or Jordan or whoever) might be the tallest to all of you, but not to me! I have my own opinion about who the tallest student in this class is!" But your classmates could demonstrate that you were simply mistaken. Part two of the thought experiment: what if, instead, the day's activity is to determine the most likable student in the class? Not only could we not do that with a tape measure, but no instrument exists that would settle that question. We might each supply an answer and discuss our answers, but it would be entirely acceptable to disagree with the majority: "Bob might be the most likable to you, but I personally find Fred more likable." Nothing wrong with that.

Many times, students' first reaction is to ask, "So it's just opinion?" Then I explain that opinions are things to which reason is entirely irrelevant -- my example generally is the relative tastiness of chocolate versus vanilla -- whereas interpretive theories deal with questions that aren't exhausted by collection and analysis of data, but are proven intersubjectively. People are free to like or dislike any author, according to their taste, but enough people have found Shakespeare's work exceptionally powerful that obviously something exemplary is at work in his writing, even if there's no literary tape measure that can give it an exact weight.

Those are my starter examples. Here are others that I've been collecting:

An archive versus a memory. Maintaining an archive is an attempt to record objectively demonstrable remnants of past events. On the other hand, memory is a trace of our own subjective experience of those events. And if we compare our memories with other people's, we're likely to find that certain of our stored impressions are widely shared, while others are unique to individuals. But even those, and perhaps especially those, are worth examining: often it's the unique perspective that influences people to think in new and creative ways.
A health inspector versus a restaurant critic. A health inspector will conduct a thorough examination of a restaurant, checklist and swabs in hand, and will issue a report consisting of data collected through techniques that are standardized and replicable. A restaurant critic will report her subjective judgment of the restaurant's success or failure at delivering an enjoyable eating experience. Parallel concepts are nutrition and flavor.
Nature versus nurture. Our genes determine certain of our traits, but other traits are our own response to our experience, which is some part happenings in the outside world and some part our own interpretation of those happenings.
God's sovereignty and faith.

That last one brings me back to where we usually wind up the discussion: the big picture of this duality is that there is a reality out there, a reality outside our skulls that is independent of our observation. Even if we were all struck dead at the same moment, the tallest among us would remain the tallest. But there is also a reality inside our skulls, inside our thoughts, and that reality is not identical for any two people: if every human on earth was struck dead at the same moment, the question of who was the most likable would vanish, because there would no longer remain any sentient people to like, dislike, or behave in a way that was worthy of liking or disliking. And a very simple, straightforward definition of God can be derived from this: God is the one for whom the outer and inner reality are unbroken, continuous.

If you've got any other good illustrations of the gap between that which is demonstrated objectively, and that which is argued with intersubjective accounts of experience, I'd love to pile up a few more. It's a powerful idea, and the more illustrations I've got to bolster it, the better we do.

Mañana cosa

2009-12-29T18:03:00.001-08:00

During my first two years at NCU, everything I did seemed to endear me more and more to the students, which was a bit worrisome, because I honestly don't want to be popular with my students. Fortunately, that now seems to be turning the corner.

I don't want my students to like me too much right now. Rather, I'd much prefer that they like me ten or twenty years down the road. I want the more adult, mature, fully launched, professional versions of themselves to look back and say "Doyle made my life hell, but under his teaching I grew a lot more than I would've, if left up to my own motivation." This in some ways is a lingering effect of my years at SFA back in Texas. There, I taught a lot of lovable students, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of my daily interaction with them. Nevertheless, it was one of the least competitive four year institutions in one of the nation's largest states, and I told the students, very bluntly, at the very first meeting of each class, that I believed one out of three of them did not belong in college and were wasting their time. My classes almost always started with twenty-four or -five students, but a typical class would collapse down to fourteen to sixteen students as the non-serious ones dropped, and some fell to six or eight. One summer class made it all the way down to four students, whom I then tried to teach with just as much energy and enthusiasm as I would've for twenty-five.

NCU is very different. Many of the students here were raised right, which is to say that they set high expectations for themselves and thrive on being challenged, and that makes them a joy to teach. Others don't have that advantage, but do keep the focus where it belongs, so when a class speeds up and becomes difficult, they put the pressure squarely on themselves and do all they can to keep up. Students like that are the reason I teach: I do my best to come alongside them and give them support, and I've got a much bigger opening to make a genuine difference in their emergence into the world, which is more rewarding than a paycheck ten times the size of mine.

But then there are those, admittedly fewer than at SFA, but still a good number of students, who tell themselves lies and choose to believe them. They peg the degree of effort and risk that they're willing to tolerate very low, and then start looking for loopholes and opportunities to offload blame. I feel a great deal of compassion for them, because I know in how many cases they're using strategies they learned from their parents, and for which they've been rewarded with success for most of their lives. Still, no matter how much compassion I might feel, if I want to do my job the right way then I have to become the stone wall in their path and put a stop to their winning streak.

In fact, it's not terribly different from my years working with the two-year-olds in the nursery. Almost all were strong willed, but, on top of that, a few also suffered from extremely poor parenting. Even with the worst of them, if I said no, meant no, and made it stick, they soon learned that they couldn't get around me. Then, once we understood each other, their behavior would improve, and many of them grew to genuinely like me. College students have a lot more resources, a lot more tools, for the purpose of trying to escape my grasp, such as reinterpreting my decisions as lacking legitimacy. That means I'm generally not in their lives long enough to see the fruits of my efforts. Still, it's the first move of saying no and making it stick that is so vitally important. And for some of them, I'm not the first. But even for them, every exposure to that lesson supplies a fresh chance to decide to turn things around. And even if I wish I could be spared the immediate effects of butting heads with them, the knowledge of why it matters makes it worthwhile.

Some of what went on in the term just ended genuinely amounts to the palpable manifestation of my own shortcomings: I did, in fact, have a grumpy semester. I was struggling under some particular kinds of pressure and life stress that were bigger than what I can easily contain, and I took some of it out on my students. I do regret that; I've beat myself up for it pretty soundly. But much of the discontent I saw on my teaching evaluations was easily recognizable as students attempting to blame me for what they did to themselves. The down side of that is, if they're caught in that pattern, they're pushing back the day that they'll break through and understand what needs to change if they want to be successful or happy. But I don't worry about it too much, because that process never gets set in motion until someone finally digs in her or his heels and tells them "No," and I know I did that. If a few more people do it on this campus, then they have a good shot at changing their ways before they make it to their first job. If not, I'm quite confident a boss won't hesitate before teaching them some painful lessons.

Much of teaching is not about immediate results, not about instant gratification, but rather about setting in motion ripples across a body of water. The size of the body is invisible, and I can't even see how quickly the ripples are moving; all I know is that I did throw the stone. I know that someday, a quick aside I threw out in class may suddenly fall into place for one student with the force of a wrecking ball. I know that because I know what effect my own professors had on me. And I also know that imposing high expectations is a choice I've never regretted in all my years of teaching. I knew from the start that any approach, any choice at all, would please some students and make others unhappy. What I caught on to, just a few years into my teaching phase, was that my choice was making the hard-working students very happy, because at last someone was lowering the boom on their lazy, manipulative classmates, and that I was disappointing students who wanted to pour their energy into anything other than doing what they were capable of. That profile still gives me peace and satisfaction, even if occasionally I have to weather my share, or even more than my share, of complaints. Ultimately, these students are growing up, not down, and if I get out in front of them and expect more than they're currently willing to give, then I feel as though I'm on the right side of history. And a few years down the road, I expect to be a lot more popular with them than I am today.

Magisterial children

2009-12-28T13:12:00.000-08:00

When I was fourteen years old, I didn't like being around young children. Naturally, my mother chose that year to announce that I'd outgrown an allowance, and she'd lined up a job for me in the church nursery, sitting with two-year-olds, on Wednesday and Sunday nights. I dragged my feet the entire way. This was about a year after I'd stopped going to church, so I suspect she had multiple purposes for this move, but whatever her reasons, she downright insisted that I give it a try for at least one evening. One evening was all it took: I stayed in that job for the next four years, and would've stayed longer if I hadn't left for college. I still really don't enjoy being around badly behaved children, but after all these years of teaching, I've managed to grow a little helping of patience. I'm not a patient person by nature; it's the product of a lot of hard work and struggle, and as with most of my toughest life lessons, I've adopted a quick bit of verbal shorthand to put me back in a good mental spot when needed: "They're just kids being kids."

Kids are kids, sometimes. It's difficult, frustrating, to be a kid, and it's important to keep certain kinds of misbehavior in perspective. I'm not talking about cruelty, or the kind of violence that goes beyond simple roughhousing, but rather a certain flavor of orneriness, a certain failure to be wise. Those are just part of the ugliness of growing up. They're certainly things to reach past, to look forward to the end of, but a sharp, severe reaction to them is very likely to be an overreaction.

Those are all old thoughts. The connection I've made tentatively a few times this year, and more firmly over the past few days, is something new.

I struggle daily with anger, and in particular I get angry about politics. I have very nasty feelings, and sometimes say very nasty things, in response to twists in government wheeling and dealing. And yet, I know full well that any elected official, at any point on the political spectrum, is trapped between the needs and demands of different people who pull in endless different directions at once. I know that political language is designed to strike balances that necessarily are unstable and unsatisfying. I know that political decisionmaking is ramshackle, that compromises stray vast distances from the original need that gave rise to a proposed change, and that any reform which purports to sweep aside the swirling chaos is really just an exercise in gross oversimplification. Simple problems tend to get taken care of by the parties on the scene, without the need for government involvement. With very few exceptions, politicians who "talk straight" are the biggest liars of all, and no matter how entertaining or soothing their words might be, it's necessary to spot the mismatch between their plain speech and the ornate problems they discuss.

So what I'm trying to do, more and more, is tell myself "This is just politicians being politicians," and then to draw that thought into some measure of tolerance and respect for those whose words and decisions ordinarily would infuriate me. They're doing work I would never want to do. They're doing it under circumstances that they don't control, in a political environment they inherited. And just as I found myself more patient with children when I worked directly with them, got to know them, got to leave my mark on their behavior, I also suspect that if I involve myself more in public deliberations, the more salient the complexity of reconciling everyone's needs may be.

One of the earliest lessons I learned about working with youngsters, first toddlers and then teenagers, was "Don't take what they say at face value. Double-check for yourself." Not a bad idea with politicians either. And in all three cases, it's not an excuse for hatred or undue anger; it's just a by-product of what they're working through.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T11:12:00.000-08:00

Granularity of knowledge requires both investment of effort and immersion in uncertainty. And like any good Baptist, I'm really into immersion.

One of the things that comes up in this or that commmunication class is the phenomenon of "political correctness." Whenever I hear that phrase, I clench my teeth. And that's not because, as is fashionable, I hate hate hate political correctness, or love to bray in my best Texas twang, "Ah'm nawt politically kerrect, haw haw haw!" Actually, I do my best to be politically correct, and I think the original idea that was parodied, caricatured, distorted, malformed, and lied about into something almost universally despised, was a good one. It's something I was taught as a child: good manners. Call people what they want to be called.

Years ago, I asked a friend of mine, "So I get that I'm not supposed to call you Indian. But I gather 'Native American' is not quite right. So what do I call you? Indigenous Turtle Islander?" She said "How about Cherokee?" Problem solved. Larger lesson: call people what they ask to be called. That's just respectful. Is it hard to keep track? Well, I can keep track of their names, can't I? Is one additional identity marker really that much more work? I had asked my friend to provide me with a label that fit her, but was also universal. Why did I think that a reasonable request?

Around that time, I dated an African-American woman for most of a summer. I found out right away that she preferred "African-American" to "black," which was fine with me. But the first time she called me white, I said "No, don't call me that. Call me European-American." What followed was a calm, and even fun, discussion of reciprocity and respect. My position was that she was free to call me white if I was free to call her black, and I would be glad to call her African-American if she'd call me European-American in return. She said our positions weren't mirror images of one another. Over time, we both converged toward a middle ground that chiefly consisted of treating the entire matter as an ongoing conversation. And not a touchy or sensitive one: a very interesting, rewarding one, packed with good, meaty, thought-provoking mutual lessons.

What I believe often holds people back from such conversations, and I'm no exception, is uncertainty. It was a very pleasant, and honestly very unexpected, surprise that we were able to explore the issue without stepping on one another's toes. But typically, when I meet new people and there's an identity issue, I freeze for just a moment because I'm afraid to mis-step, to present myself as a clumsy or insensitive person. It's genuinely not that I fear offending them; life isn't wrapped in cotton-wadding, and those who wear big people pants can handle offensive messages and offensive encounters without a trip to ICU. But I do work hard at telling others about myself through both my words and my actions, and I don't want that gestalt message to include the kind of sloppy, arrogant ignorance that I associate with the outright bigots I've known. It's easy to put such uncertainty in the same category with other fears that aren't tied to genuine danger: public speaking is the first one that comes to my mind, because it's my line of work. But categorizing it that way doesn't lay the issue to rest. Yes, we probably should confront the fear and muddle through it. Easier said than done.

I got to thinking about these things this morning as I listened to an interview on the radio at the end of which the announcer said "Merry Christmas," and the interviewee answered "Happy Holidays." That got me to thinking about the stink surrounding which greeting to use. It does strike me that the best solution is just to ask people which, if any, holiday they're celebrating, and wish them one of those: Merry Christmas, or Joyous Kwanzaa, or חג מולד שמח ושנה טובה. That does require extra effort, but I doubt the effort is what holds people back. I think the bigger barrier to finding out may be fear of uncertainty, which I'm convinced underlies the trap of alienation from which this culture doesn't seem to have any luck escaping.

(On a random note, I actually didn't start naming this month's blog posts with "M C" so that they'd fit "Merry Christmas." I named the first post of the month "mountain climbing" because of its subject matter, and what resulted was just serendipitous.)

Movable claims

2009-12-23T09:48:00.000-08:00

I get tickled when I spot patterns of reasoning that transfer neatly between political opponents. The example I've carried around for years is, "Banning it will just drive it underground." What's the first objection to any gun control law? "If guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns." How about restrictions on abortion? "All prohibiting abortion will do is drive women to back-alley quacks or coat hangers." What strikes me about this is, the reasoning seems compelling to them on their pet issue, but it stops making sense as their feelings change. Why distrust a ban in one case, but think it's a constructive move in the other? Why is it that people who make the defiance/driving underground argument on the one issue don't thereby cultivate at least some recognition of its force in the other?

So this morning, I noticed another one: "Teach the controversy." That's the line taken these days by a certain stripe of politically active Christian on the question of what ought to be taught in high school biology classes. They realize they've lost the fight on outright creation science, so instead they argue that teaching evolution as though it's an undisturbed consensus is misleading, and instead educators ought to teach the controversy. Don't just stick to the scientifically-developed precepts of evolution through natural selection; instead, introduce objections to those findings alongside them, and leave students to sort out what they believe. But I remember reading James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, and I followed the textbook wars in Texas, which was and is one of the primary national battlegrounds for culture clashes in K-12 curriculum, and on that subject, as with gun control vs. abortion, the arguments are neatly flipped: the right wingers want to teach a stable, pseudo-consensus view of history, and their opponents want to "teach the controversy" by including such disturbances as marginalized voices, unflattering accounts of the nation's founders, and stories about American war crimes. Here again, people will argue "Teach the controversy" on one issue, and "We've got the truth, so why contaminate it with nonsense?" on the other, and flip back and forth between those moves without any apparent internalization of their premises.

People are funny. And politics is not about good reasons. Political argument is very much kabuki theater. The forces that settle political disputes have very little to do with anything said for public consumption: the public arguments are engineered to lay on a veneer of deliberation, but the deliberation actually makes no difference. It reminds me of Milli Vanilli, who danced around and appeared to sing, but really had nothing to do with the production of their music. It also reminds me, as I wrote a while back and worked into my rhetoric class, of placebos, in the sense that many patients somehow manage to overcome their symptoms and right themselves in response to the appearance of medical intervention that actually isn't in any way bioactive.

And it seems to be the way of the world. Now I see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.

Meaningful contradictions

2009-12-21T08:29:00.000-08:00

Whenever someone says "Don't you impose your God on me; your religion might be true for you, but not for me," I wonder how sound that person's math skills are. Does two plus two equal four only for me? Is that true for me, but not everyone else? Or how about their grasp of elementary science: is gravity true only for me? If you're sufficiently exercised at all the suffering caused by gravity (people falling down, buildings collapsing, avalanches), can you simply reject it? Step off a skyscraper and fly around like a bird?

But then, just a couple of weeks back, I wrote a blog entry about my take on evolution, and I said that God, by choice, leaves His existence in the realm of that which could be otherwise, which the Greeks categorized as phronesis, as distinct from episteme, true knowledge. God leaves enough looseness and slippage in the world, enough plausible alternative explanations, that people come to Him only by choice, and never because they're trapped into it. But if that's the case, then I bump up against a contradiction: above, I'm asserting that His existence, sovereignty, role in creating and sustaining the universe all are features of reality, universally and uniformly applicable everywhere and to everyone, meaning they're in the realm that which could not be otherwise, the true knowledge that Chaïm Perelman says is the product of demonstration, not argumentation.

Not long after I spotted this knot, its solution also struck me, much to my delight. I've never been terribly convinced by attempts to disprove God's existence through reductio ad absurdum. Using language, a finite system, to try to map the features of God, a transcendent being, is a sketchy undertaking in the first place. And where we find that things we believe to be true about God result in contradictions, it's foolishness to spring to the conclusion that we've just eliminated the possibility of His existence. What's far more likely is that the reconciliation of His attributes requires knowledge that our brains can't contain.

A week or so ago, I stumbled across a YouTube clip of Carl Sagan discussing the fourth dimension and showing a 3D shadow of a hypercube. The best we can do in understanding dimensions beyond the three of our senses is cobble together mathematical equations about them; we can't visualize them, and there seems widespread acceptance that this is just a shortcoming of our brain architecture. If that's easily accepted, then why do we struggle so mightily to understand that a far more complex problem might not yield all its nuances to our ability to capture meaning in words? God is all powerful, all knowing, all good, and evil exists in the world; the fourth statement in that series contradicts the first three. But it doesn't, because it simply describes a problem whose answer we don't know. To claim that no answer can exist, just because no human with a human brain has produced the answer, is hogwash. Another example: God is sovereign and orders all things, yet human beings have free will. Those two conditions can't both exist as propositions, but that simply means the logic that reconciles them is more than we can grasp.

A lot of times, I imagine a three-year-old toddler trying to tell her toddler friend what her mommy does all day at work. Does the toddler understand it all? Does she have the vocabulary and sophistication to explain it? Do those failings mean that her mother's job simply doesn't exist? Of course not.

So the reality of God's existence belongs both in the realm of that which could, and could not, be otherwise. And all I've found is that those categories of knowledge, however useful they've been since ancient times, are still of human construction and thus, necessarily, incomplete and imperfect.

Mediocre commitment

2009-12-17T11:40:00.001-08:00

In the first place, in case there's any doubt, I am grateful for the existence of competitive debate. I owe much of what I do successfully as an educator to the years I spent pouring most of my energy and attention into winning debates. Here are just a few of the ways my debate heritage has imprinted my teaching:

It taught me to be quick on my feet. Very little has built my credibility with students like my response latency.
It taught me to be assertive, and, when necessary, nonverbally dominant. I have very few classroom disruptions, and the handful that happen rarely drag out for more than a few seconds.
It made it very real to me that college students can excel, can work hard, can understand unbelievably complex concepts if they're given the right motivation. That certainty is the best inoculation against low expectations.

The list is nowhere near exhaustive. The one bonus I noticed most recently was the way debate prepared me to grade essays. I spent most of my debate career giving the first negative constructive (if you never debated, don't worry about the lingo), which means I was exposed over and over again to the experience of needing to pick apart someone's arguments on first hearing, under enormous time pressure. Every speaker in the debate has to do that, but the first negative is the first speech where actual line-by-line clash occurs, so there's a certain first impression to the picking apart, a certain feeling of getting first crack at the other team. In some debates, my immediate reaction was "Oh gosh, is that all they've got? That's pathetic. A good hard sneeze will make them fall apart." In others, their positions were solid enough that I had to rack my brain, but I managed to come up with winnable arguments in opposition. And in some debates, what they said was of such high quality and made so much sense that I had to shake my head and think, "Too good. I'll make noise, but it doesn't look good for us." So last week, when I was grading essays, I noticed that my brain was back in first negative mode, and where I could sneeze hard and make the essay fall apart, that was a C or below; where I could think of some things to pick apart, but on the whole what they said was sound, that was somewhere in B range; and when, as happened encouragingly often, I thought "Too good; nothing much to quibble with," then those were A essays. And the fact that I was using that gear in my brain both sped up the work and gave me an extra layer of enjoyment, based on my association with those past experiences.

So, as I started out by saying, debate has done a lot to equip me for what I do today. And, since I'm the communication faculty at NCU, and the director of forensics to boot, it would seem that I'm in a position to give that learning experience to the students here. Unfortunately, there are a few complications.

To begin with, virtually no one here has a background in debate from high school. Some college debate teams put a lot of time and resources into novice development, teaching college students how to debate from ground zero on up, but other college debate teams mostly recruit successful high school debaters and teach them from moderate experience up to the top of the activity. All the programs I worked with during my full-time coach years fell into the latter category. Honestly, my debate coaching instincts don't run in the direction of teaching novices. I can certainly do it -- I taught novice labs at summer workshops for a number of years -- but it's much harder work, and doesn't come at all naturally.

To continue, learning how to debate is very time-intensive, and I've rarely seen college students as overcommitted and overstretched, time-wise, as I have at NCU. Students here do a lot of stuff. Scholarship athletes hold key posts in student government. RAs also do small group Bible studies. And I've got at least two team members who have both of those sizable commitments on their time, not to mention classwork, before they ever set foot in my office to practice anything forensics-related. If we had a critical mass of students who could find two two-hour blocks of time each week in their schedules, then I could devote one to bringing them up to speed on vocabulary, concepts and strategy, and we could use the other each week for a practice debate. But I may as well wish for the moon.

Not only that, but the very best format of debate isn't practiced at all in this part of the country. I debated NDT/CEDA, which is research intensive and involves the most actual speaking time of any of the formats: nine minute constructives, six minute rebuttals, two for each debater in each debate. But tournaments in that format simply don't happen much in the Pacific Northwest, and not at all in Oregon. Instead, people here do parliamentary style debate, which is different in a number of ways. In parli debate, research is certainly a good idea as preparation, but it's against the rules to cite the research directly in the actual rounds. This means it's often a winning move simply to make things up. (I didn't originally write "things.") Plus, the speeches are both fewer and shorter, which makes the debates more shallow. The benefit for time invested is a lot less; not zero, but a lot less.

Last complication: I got out of full-time coaching back in the last century because I was burned out on it. I started debating in the fall of 1982, and seventeen years later, I had simply worn out the game. In my last year of coaching, all the debates were sounding alike. I was no longer getting excited about any debate, even debates that I could tell were extremely good. In the years since, the burnout hasn't worn off; I'm glad I debated, and I'm glad I still have the skills and confidence that debate built into me, but I'm not especially interested in being actively involved in debate. It's devilishly hard work for me to get the slighest bit motivated to think, or otherwise work, on debate.

Put all of that together, and I'm left in a terrible dilemma. The students' commitments mean they don't have time to reach a certain minimum level of competence before going to compete, and they compete in a severely limited format, and I'm not as much help as I could be both because my coaching gifts aren't geared to novices and I don't really want to be thinking about debate. We put in token effort and make token appearances, but there are days when I think if we're going to do it in this half-hearted, halfway fashion, we may as well invest that time and effort in something else. But every time I have that thought, I remember what an enormous difference the opportunity to debate made in my life, and I feel an almost painful wish to give that to my students.

To be honest, dealing again and again with this dilemma is about the only part of my job that I genuinely don't like.

Mountain climbing

2009-12-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

So this week's news has been all taken up with the three climbers who went missing on Mount Hood. One has been found, dead. The other two are still missing, but the weather has turned severe enough that the search has been halted indefinitely, and I'm hearing that there's less than a one percent chance that they're still alive. This story keeps grabbing my attention in part because it's touched off a debate about whether all climbers should carry beacons. It's also dredged up a loose end from the talk I gave to the incoming frosh last August, a loose end I wound up not including.

Nearly all college students bellyache about the core. They don't understand why they have to take classes from departments outside their major. Some think that they do understand, and the reasons they come up with don't cast us in a very good light: it's busy work, it brings in tuition money for the school. I'm frequently surprised at how many of my very good, very mature students are the loudest to complain about having to take core classes.

I planned to set aside some time in my talk with the frosh to take up this very subject, and this is how I was going to introduce it: when I lived in Arizona, I used to hear on the news about pinheads taking off to hike the Grand Canyon in the middle of August and taking nothing with them. No backpack, no cell phone, no water, nothing. And, naturally, a lot of them ran into trouble that they didn't see coming, and had to be rescued. Now it certainly should be possible to go on a hike without bringing along a cell phone: the cell phone does nothing to help me put one foot in front of the other. But a wise person will bring along a cell phone in case something unexpected does happen.

This Mount Hood story has a lot of folks demanding that reckless hikers and climbers who need rescuing be billed for the rescue, or even that certain zones be declared no-rescue zones; if you enter them, and something goes wrong, well, been nice knowing you. Most of us have a very easy time identifying sloppy and inadequate preparation in other people's behavior, and seeing it as a very clear-cut and egregious wrong, the kind we would never commit.

But that same principle of necessary preparation for the unknown is in play when it comes to core classes. Nearly everyone changes career fields many times over the course of a lifespan. I, for example, am already in my second occupation, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were more changes in store down the road. We take core classes, loading up with extra knowledge of such things as history, social and natural sciences, and basic skills in writing and math, for the same reason that competent mountain climbers take along a camping stove. They likely don't enjoy shouldering the extra weight, but it is reasonably foreseeable that under certain circumstances, it will help them survive.

Unfortunately, necessary preparation is burdensome, and thus requires discipline, and people at this developmental stage have just emerged from under the externally imposed discipline of their parents, and are too giddy with relief from that emergence to be in a frame of mind to impose self-discipline from inside. But they're very ready, attitudinally, to look with disdain on hikers and climbers who set out on a journey unprepared. I just wish I could find a way to make that connection real for them, and make it deep and powerful enough that it would drive them toward cultivating a good attitude about boning up in core classes.

A biogenesis for Doyle

2009-11-27T09:46:00.000-08:00

Which would be more impressive: taking a pool ball and placing it, by hand, in a pocket, or sinking all fifteen balls with one shot? (This is not a trick question; go with the obvious answer.)

You do not honor the giver of a gift by loudly proclaiming your refusal for all time to use what was given. You do not display your loyalty, patriotism and virtue by pledging that you will be stupid. If Osama bin-Laden tells you that today is November twenty-seventh, it is not a blow for freedom and the good guys to say no, no, it's Wombatzember eleventy-zilliard. It's just ridiculous flailing.

A lot of my students are young Earth creationists. That's fine; at that age, I was a Republican. People outgrow ideas as they sag and buckle under the weight of information and life experience. (I'm not a Democrat, just in case you drew that conclusion.) But outgrowing young Earth creationism is pretty urgent, as clinging to that belief doesn't accomplish anything they think they're accomplishing.

To begin with, it doesn't make a danged lick of sense. I won't try to lay out the case for natural selection, because it isn't my field and I would have to shave off nuances and mangle details all over the place. But I've studied it a good deal and struggled through explanations from colleagues of mine who know what they're talking about, and I don't have any residual doubts.

But what's more, acknowledging natural selection doesn't negate faith in God. It is true that it offers an account of how life could have come about on Earth without a Creator (although it doesn't entail that conclusion), but that's entirely consistent with God's character. God does not hold us hostage. The door into God's presence is not locked from the inside. People whose character moves them to flee from Him will find that He's left space for them to live with that choice. If, every single day, fiery letters arose in the sky with the sun that said "I exist. And hurry up and get saved, won't you?" then the matter would be settled: only terribly insane people could reject God. (Well, possibly also people who were both blind and skeptical.) But that's simply not the way things are. Chaïm Perelman talks about the difference between demonstration and persuasion, and the Greeks distinguished ἐπιστήμη, true and certain knowledge, from φρόνησις, practical reasoning. In each case, the former refers to matters about which there is not room for reasonable disagreement, while the latter consists of that which could be otherwise. God leaves His existence in this world in the realm of things which could be otherwise, because if He didn't, the entire concept of "faith" would be nonsensical.

Last, we are intelligent and capable of reasoning because God gave us those gifts. We were made in His image, and beasts were not. We were made capable of reasoning in complex, abstract and subtle ways that separate us from His other living inventions. When we stubbornly insist on mutilating reason in order to show our loyalty to Him, we don't glorify Him at all. Instead, we trample on His gifts. God does not require of us that we believe anything that is not true. When we find that a matter is complex, why should that surprise us? The world is complex, as is its Creator. When we grab at slogans or brutally simplify matters in order to silence people who question, or even deny, God's glory, we duplicate their errors; but in our case it's worse, because we do it in His name.

The more we know about how natural selection has shaped life on Earth, the more wonderful it is. God set in motion a pattern of forces, operations and dynamics that brought about all of it, like a pool player setting up the universe's most breathtaking trick shot. And before any of us came to be, as products of that miracle, He knew us. And understanding that is in no way a rejection of faith: furthest thing from it.

A mnemonnie for Conic

2009-11-19T06:34:00.001-08:00

For years, when I've covered informative speaking, I've talked about what a good idea it is for a speaker to give the audience memory tricks for the material in the speech, and I always ask students for examples that they used in school. They offer up Roy G. Biv, King Philip Came Over For Good Steak, and a few others, and I always chip in Please Excuse My Drunk Aunt Sally. That's a memory trick for the order of operations in math: first, do parentheses and exponents, then multiply and divide, and finally, add and subtract.

The students giggle at my version, because their teachers say Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. But, as I explain, that makes no sense. Excusing my drunk Aunt Sally is understandable, because she's probably a little too loud, and might even be hitting on everything in pants. But if she's dear, then why are you asking people to excuse her? Are you ashamed of her? What, is it because she's old? Because she's not cool? What's wrong with you?

Anyway, every once in a while I wake up in the middle of the night, wide awake, and there's no telling where my mind will wander, and last night I had an attack of wakeful, wandering mind. And I got to thinking about other phrasings of this mnemonic. It being the middle of the night and all, I have to admit that a lot of them sound like the title of a horror movie.

Please educate my dumb Aunt Sally.
Please exterminate my deadly Aunt Sally.
Please exfoliate my dry-skinned Aunt Sally.
Please expel my delinquent Aunt Sally.
Please excommunicate my Donatist Aunt Sally.
Please execute my diabolical Aunt Sally.
Please exorcise my demonic Aunt Sally.
Please extradite my drug-dealing Aunt Sally.
Please eat my delicious Aunt Sally.
Please exhume my dead Aunt Sally.

A palindrome for Loren

2009-11-18T07:09:00.000-08:00

So yesterday afternoon, my Bible professor colleague broached the subject of palindromes. I thought for a minute or two and came up with one that included my name: "Le Doyle, el yodel." Not exactly deathless verse, but it serves. That left him empty-handed, so we talked for a moment about how we might work his name into a palindrome, but nothing presented itself, and he had to run on to class.

Now, every day I have a half-hour walk to and from work, which is a nice, unhurried span of woolgathering in my day. All sorts of doodads and geegaws cross my mind. This one raveled together on this morning's trip. Imagine that, to everyone's surprise, an active volcano roared up out of the ground right behind the Pomajevich Faculty Building. I mean, it's been that kind of year, right? In keeping with our luck? And since we're all academics, the first order of business wouldn't be to call 911 or run for our lives. No, we would have to label it. The volcano would need a name. Since this volcano would obviously have as its agenda burning up Christians, we'd name it Nero.

I'm sure you see this coming.

Our reckless, wildly irrational students, bringing to bear the same good sense that drives them to take nutria on a merry chase -- because, after all, you can shake off rabies with nothing more than a good night's sleep and a dose of Airborne®, right? -- would frolick in the magma. Naturally, they'd borrow Tracy's shovel to scoop up a big helping of it, put it in a heat-resistant bucket, and bring it to BTH class. And when Loren asked, "Youngsters, what in the world is that?" they'd answer ...

"Nero lava, Loren!"

QED.

Words on warrants

2009-10-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

I get very tickled whenever I remember that Antonin Scalia is Catholic.

A whole lot of Christians misunderstand Judaism. I've been reading up on the Oral Torah, including Klinghoffer's Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, as well as a fair number of other interfaith dialogue works by folks like Amy-Jill Levine and Jacob Neusner. The notion is that the Talmud, which is filled with rulings and teaching stories from hordes of rabbis, is the written recording of an oral tradition that God handed down to Israel at Sinai alongside the written law that survives as the five books of Moses.

Not everyone goes along with it. Karaites accept the Tanakh as sacred, but reject all of the oral tradition as the work of humans and therefore not binding in the same sense. Jesus spoke against the oral tradition here, although digging out exactly how far His criticism went is more than I want to take on in this post.

To turn aside to Scalia for a second, I can report that he's the most rabid proponent of the idea that the Constitution ought to be construed only according to its original meaning, and that the legislative intent of Congress is irrelevant to understanding the meaning of a statute. In other words, binding documents are dead, not alive, and people who arrive later and explain their meaning anew using changed circumstance are doing violence to the best way of applying the law. He doesn't believe the Constitution is a living document; it means what it meant in 1787, and no more.

What tickles me about that is that the Roman Catholic church is, of the Christian denominations in the United States, the one closest to Rabbinic Judaism in its treatment of sacred scripture. Along with the Bible, there's the catechism, there's the magisterium, and there's a whole lot of tradition. Catholics include the Apocrypha in their Bibles, and popes, from time to time, announce that by divine revelation they've added to the understanding of what the Bible teaches, such as the immaculate conception and Mary's bodily assumption into Heaven.

Martin Luther's break with the church, with "Sola Scriptura" as his motto, is such a Scalian move. But in matters of faith, Scalia sides with people who want to make the Bible into a pliable, renewable, re-readable document in a way he'd never tolerate when it comes to the Constitution. I guess God is more in need of our help to clarify what He was saying than James Madison is.

Words over weddings

2009-10-14T10:04:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to record this while the big' ol smile still hasn't faded from my face.

Not long after I arrived at NCU, a young man named Jordan transferred in from East Bay, and became the first Communication major that I didn't inherit from my predecessor. A semester or so later, a young lady named Tessa also chose Communication. The neat thing about that was, they were dating steadily. A few months ago he proposed to her.

And they just paid me a visit, and asked me to officiate at the wedding in July.

Wow.

Words on wheels

2009-10-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

Korie Homan and Esther Vergeer reach the finals of the U.S. Open in wheelchair tennis ... in a walkover.

Less than two weeks later, after serving for thirty years as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking ... steps down.

40

2009-07-14T08:19:00.001-07:00

So what do you do when you have two incompatible ideas in your head, and they both have that special gravitational force of being powerfully true? We've got all kinds of theories, from cognitive dissonance to dual-processing, but the matter is far from settled.

People live by symbols, and also by experience. Some rites of passage are experiential, like taking one's first step, and others are symbolic, like turning eighteen and becoming an adult in the eyes of the law. At the end of today, I'll hit one of the symbolic ones. This is the last day of my thirties, and tomorrow is the first day of my forties.

Forty isn't old; I don't have the slightest qualm about saying that. But I'm firm in my conviction that forty is no longer young. Teenagers are clearly young. People in their twenties are young adults. Even people in their thirties have lost only the outer layer of newness. But by forty, I've left being "young" behind by almost any reasonable measure.

The "almost" is in that last sentence because I don't feel "no longer young." I've always felt as though the conventional associations with my numerical age didn't quite fit; I felt like a young 30, a young 35, a young 39. Because I'm an academic, I get to indulge my eccentricities and approach a lot of my daily work very playfully, and because I deal with people in their late teens and early twenties, I get to soak up a lot of the enthusiasm and fun that they radiate like little quasars.

But it does feel as though something is changing.

Now, don't get the idea that I feel gloomy or depressed about turning forty. That's not it. But it has hovered in the dead center of my attention for the past few days, and out near the periphery of my attention for most of the past year. Forty has always felt as though it was going to mean something, as though something was going to change. Between those two statements, meaning and change, I think meaning is far more likely, since it is symbolic, rather than experiential. But it might turn out to bring change as well.

What I half-expect to happen is that mortality will become more real.

I know that I'm not going to live forever. I've known it since I was a very young toddler. But knowledge can be superficial or deeply internalized. Small children can repeat back the definition of death, and even paraphrase it back to show that they comprehend it, but it isn't entirely real to them so long as their world is half-pretend. And the idea that knowledge moves from symbol to a pattern of experience is something I've taught a whole lot of first-year students as they arrived on campus. I tell them a story of a gruesome accident that I almost had while driving on a rainy night, and how it took the dangerous and potentially fatal nature of driving from my conceptual knowledge to my lived experience, and made me a much safer driver. I tell them their awareness of the difficulty of college and the necessity of working responsibly and with discipline is only conceptual, but will have to become experiential if they want to survive. And I say all that to say that I think my awareness of the end of life is about to move another big monster step away from the conceptual and toward the experiential.

What's puzzling is how passing a purely symbolic milestone is supposed to accomplish that. Couldn't tell you. Beyond that, I'm not sure what changes will come with it. I have started to think across the span of what I've done to date and to weigh it, measure it, evaluate it. Is it enough? Have I used my years well? How much can I do with the years ahead? I don't regard them as scarce, but neither are they infinite. What in my life is wasteful? What areas of my life are about to fall out of my complacency and start to demand careful arrangement?

Age is just a number, and my rational faculties tell me it's silly to dwell on July 15, 2009, because it's unlikely to be categorically different from the 16th or the 14th. There's genuinely not a reason to perceive the crossing of a boundary there, because that transition is continuous, not stair-stepped. But the symbol is powerful, and it's working on me, and what that work turns out to be is something I'll have to wait and see.

Program note: I'm not, by any means, done with abortion thoughts. Those got shoved aside as I put more hours into getting my summer online classes ready to go, but I have several more to post. I imagine that'll be the last half of July.

Abortion 2

2009-06-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

Years ago, a case came to the Supreme Court, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, which was about the state's duty to remove a child from the home if there was clear evidence of abuse. One of the issues batted back and forth was what was described as the razor's edge problem: you've got to protect the child, but if you're mistaken and the parent is not guilty of abuse, then you've done a horrendous injustice. The entire margin of error for acting correctly in such a situation is about zero. Social workers in that situation are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

That's not the only razor's edge problem in this world. I teach a number of classes that include major writing assignments, and a lot of the writing that students turn in is, honestly, embarrassing. I've worked for my entire career on what to do about it, but it's not as easy as it looks. My first instinct is just to knock off tons of points for sloppy writing. The problem is, that pushes many students toward being alliterate, of being anti-reading and writing, which is almost worse than never having learned to read and write in the first place. So I can't turn a blind eye to sloppy writing, but I also can't go in, guns a-blazing, and try to obliterate it with the force of my wrath. What I have to do is carefully balance points lost for errors with resources for improvement, as well as a good deal of encouragement anytime I do see good writing out of someone who'd previously struggled. This might seem a pretty simple idea, but it's tempting just to treat bad writing as an enemy, a pestilence, something to be stomped out with as much force as necessary. It has in common with DeShaney a fierce and desperate wish to pin down the problem to one simple target, and then bash away at that target with shock and awe tactics. In reality, the solution can be just as bad as the problem if applied bluntly, with no precision.

So I do understand that motive. I understand the feeling. I don't judge it and I don't condemn it. But I have to reject it. It's childish, and it's counterproductive. There are vanishingly few genuine problems in this world that can be done away with through an application of force to one spot, one straightforward cause. Almost anytime we hear someone assert otherwise, what we're really hearing is their fear, not their reasoning.

And abortion is the most glaring example of this.

I genuinely don't get why people who otherwise are so skeptical of government solutions to anything make such a huge, and completely irrational, exception to argue that outlawing abortion would be a step in the right direction. Outlawing alcohol worked great, didn't it? Outlawing gun ownership will certainly get guns out of the hands of criminals, right? Why, outlawing driving in excess of the speed limit has made our interstates safe enough to picnic on!

In the late 1960s and 1970s, before Roe v. Wade, there was a good deal of agitation for repeal of the laws prohibiting abortion. Doctors and nurses in particular knew just how many women were showing up in emergency rooms after botched back-alley abortions, or coathanger self-abortions. That is what is achieved by criminalizing abortion. Not fewer abortions, because I guarantee you that the botched and coathanger abortions succeeded in killing those babies. But they also resulted in gruesome deaths for the women, which is surely not what was intended.

I'm very much in favor of finding a way to make fewer abortions happen. Criminalizing them is not that way. It's another razor's edge problem. Ideally, you want to give the procedure to the medical profession, because that can have two beneficial effects:

Fewer dead women.
Less secrecy, which means more opportunity to talk, to offer help, to witness, to love.

Unfortunately, persuasion and witnessing don't work every time, and some women exercise the freedom the law gives them. But the solution is to step up the help and the witnessing. Getting impatient and swinging a sledgehammer blow at the procedure is just going to have the backfire effect of driving the women underground, where they will still kill the baby, and often themselves as well.

Peter didn't want to stand idly by while the soldiers arrested Jesus, so he lashed out at Malchus, servant of the High Priest, cutting off his ear. Jesus denounced Peter's act and healed the servant. Jesus never demanded imprisonment for sinners, but went to them, spoke to them, met their needs, loved them, told them to go and sin no more. That's the model we should follow. We clutch the idea of a law to ourselves as though it's the answer, but the only thing it provides is false, illusory comfort, and enough history of disastrous backfire that we have no excuse for not knowing better. Abortion is a razor's edge problem, and we stand more risk of getting it wrong by trying to cut through it than we do by waiting and praying and keeping our emphasis on Christ's Great Commission to all of us.

Abortion 1

2009-06-05T08:40:00.001-07:00

Here, for the record, is Doyle on the issue of abortion as of June 2009.

Premise One: Every single abortion is a murder. Yes, you read that right. Keep reading.

When does life begin? Unclear. That's not a scientific or medical question; instead, it's a philosophical question. You can make a case from Scripture that it begins at conception, at the first breath, or at the moment God created Heaven and Earth. Of the various arguable starting points, the case for any of them is not so much more powerful than the others that the matter is settled, so what remains is to decide which way to err. If a body in an Emergency Room might be dead or might be alive, doctors would err on the side of making sure they weren't letting the patient die. That simple, clear-cut judgment call illustrates an elegant way to settle the matter of which starting point should be accepted. Even if I can't make an airtight argument that a fertilized egg is a full human being, I can say that if such a claim meets minimal tests of rationality to become admissible, and no other framing of the question can dismiss it, then I ought to lean toward embracing it.
It may be killing, but is it murder? That's an easy one: yes. It's premeditated, and the life being extinguished is entirely innocent.
What about rape or incest? The conditions of the child's conception are in absolutely zero way relevant to this question.
What about cases in which the mother's life is in danger? If we take our faith seriously, then we place such cases in God's hands and trust Him. I like to think I take my faith seriously. I'm not always perfect in doing so, but that's what it dictates in this matter.

Premise Two: Abortion should be completely and utterly legal. No restrictions, no waiting periods, nothing.

I do not believe in outlawing abortion. I believe in stopping abortion. The two are entirely distinct. Anyone who believes in gun ownership should have an easy time grasping this: I assume that in your perfect world, zero people would die from gunshot wounds, but wishing for that world does not place you in favor of gun control. Outlawing something, criminalizing it, prosecuting it, has absolutely no necessary relationship to stopping it.
Nothing in my Bible gives me permission to agitate for the passage of laws against particular sins, and then walk away satisfied. My Bible teaches me that my job is to spread the Gospel, and then leave each person's sins to their growing relationship with their Father, and to the transformative work of the Holy Spirit. That's how abortion can be stopped. Using the bludgeon of the law to stamp out abortion strikes me as profoundly un-Biblical.
Would I, then, be opposed to laws against murder? Do I think there's any role at all for a criminal justice system? I think all of these human institutions are effectively playground equipment. I think they set up human encounters, and it's the way we handle these encounters that gives us the opportunity to glorify God, or else fail to do so. That said, I do not trust in law enforcement to protect me from being murdered. God has chosen the last moment of my life and the cause of my death. Until that moment, I am invulnerable. At that moment, nothing can save me. Again, if we took our faith seriously, we wouldn't bicker over these things nearly as much.
I finally believe that dishonest, power-hungry, ambitious people routinely and deliberately exploit the very emotional, fervent opposition to abortion among Christians in order to make themselves powerful. I believe most politicians who talk the loudest about being "pro-life" actually want very badly for abortions to continue, because for them, abortion is a self-replenishing fountain of campaign contributions. All they have to do is step in front of a camera, make a statement whose language pushes the abortion button and the checks come flowing in. And it breaks my heart that my Christian sisters and brothers are so eager, so hungry, to be exploited in this fashion. It's true that a clear cut face-off between good and evil is more emotionally satisfying than a murky, complicated problem that's tied up with poverty, ignorance, and people's sin nature, but it's also true that our craving for that kind of satisfaction leaves us defenseless against deceit. The Bible is filled with warnings against those who will deceive us, and we're so convinced that when deceivers appear, they'll wear horns and a tail and a T-shirt with 666 emblazoned across it, that it never occurs to us that someone in a suit, with a southern accent and an American flag lapel pin, might be distorting God's word in the same way the serpent distorted it in the Garden. But scarcely a day goes by that I don't see exactly that happen.

There's more. There's a good deal more. But those are the four corners of my position on abortion. In the wake of Dr. Tiller's murder, I get the feeling it's going to be a long, hot summer, and for the rest of this month I plan to set down in words a lot of what I don't understand, what I do understand, and what I wish more of my Christian family understood.

It was a very jittery summer

2009-05-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

So, here's the plan. Starting next week, every weekday morning, I'm going to visit a Eugene coffee house, order a Cafe Americano, take in the atmosphere, and record my impressions. I want to do a different one every day, and see how long I can keep that up.

I need your help making my list, since the yellow pages and Google maps both are woefully incomplete. Starting with them, and then adding others from my own memory, I've generated the list below, and I'm inviting your additions. But the two parameters are, they've got to be primarily coffee establishments, not just restaurants with good coffee; and they've got to be places I can walk to, just because places I can't walk to are places I'll never frequent.

The starting point is the Northwest Christian campus, and I'm willing to walk for up to an hour. That means I can make it to the far reaches of Willamette and the high 20s, but not places out on River Road, in Santa Clara, etc. I might entertain possibilities on Coburg Road, as I can walk there from my apartment.

With all those parameters set, here's the list so far. If you see holes in it, please fill them in.

Espresso Roma
The Buzz
Dutch Brothers
Full City
Gary’s Coffee
Wandering Goats
Novella Café
Perugino
Bean Buzz
Espresso Barn
Midtown Coffee
Java Generations
Theo’s Coffee House
Vero Espresso
Amazon Coffee
Allann Brothers Beanery
Eugene Coffee Company
Supreme Bean
New Odyssey
Café Aroma
Quick Fix Coffee

(And no, before anyone asks it, I am not going to Starbucks!)

It was a very simple point

2009-05-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

"To understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."

Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich are literally sick with fear that you might read the above paragraph. Why? Because it's the rest of what Sonia Sotomayor said. They've lied yet again, and their worst nightmare is that they'll get called on it. I'm more tempted by the minute to throw up my hands in despair that people fall for their garbage time after time.

What Sotomayor said was perfectly valid and needed saying, hearing, and taking seriously. The Supreme Court accepts all sorts of cases, including family law cases, hiring and firing cases, cases about police conduct during searches and arrests, just to name a very few examples. In each of them, understanding what exactly went on and what it meant is a difficult, complex task. The easy cases are filtered out by the lower courts: what reaches the Supreme Court is what no one else could resolve.

And have you ever noticed that both the Senate and the House of Representatives are diverse by design? They include people from all different parts of the country, because much of the legislation they consider looks very different to people who live in different places, and it's important to include all their perspectives in the vote. And have you noticed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff is made up of the heads of each of the different branches of military service? Whenever you must get the decision right, you've got to take input from people who bring every kind of background to the table. Refusing to do so, or even arguing against doing so, is sheerest imbecility. No one's proposing that we give Latina women all nine votes on the court. But Judge Sotomayor is saying it improves the Court's functioning to include one such vote, and she's dead right. Slam dunk. Not even close.

In my Organizational Communication class, we have a unit about diversity, and a lot of my students are surprised to find that among corporate CEOs, there's roughly zero-point-zero disagreement that diversity is good for business. In any organization, it's a powerful advantage, a generator of profits, to have people of different sexes, different races, different demographics of every description at the table, and the reason can be summed up as, they know things. They have different traditions upon which they draw, different experiences to bring to the discussion, identify with the public outside the organization a little differently, and in ways that add data to the decisionmaking pool. In the business journals, this is as obvious as gravity: diversity is good. Why a few wingnut loudmouths can't figure it out is a mystery to me, since you'd think as much as they worship at the feet of business leaders, they might pay some attention.

And yes, I know, there are some folks reading this who think that the law is simply the law, and interpreting it is no more complicated or ambiguous than double-checking the math after someone balances their checkbook. I'll refrain from calling that viewpoint stupid, in the face of very strong temptation. Instead, I'll just say that if that's your stance, then you don't know anything at all about the law. Nothing. You are miles and miles, light years upon light years, from understanding anything at all about legal decisionmaking. And anytime you're out of your depth, the humble and gracious and virtuous thing to do is to listen more than you talk. If you can't bring yourself to do that, and you simply must bray someone else's talking points over and over again, then be good enough to forgive us when we ignore you. Shh. Grownups are talking.

It was a very dirty trip

2009-05-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

I last washed my car two years ago, give or take a month.

It struck me today that my car has Texas dirt on it.

And Oklahoma dirt.

Kansas dirt.

Colorado.

Wyoming. Utah. Idaho.

And Oregon dirt. Lots and lots of Oregon dirt.

I wonder, if I started an archeological dig on my car, would I find strata?

Artifacts?

And really, is there any reason I should put the effort into washing it?

That last one's not a rhetorical question. Can any of you think of a reason I should wash it? It's not as though I will, but if you've got one, at least I can feel properly guilty about not doing it.

It was a very bad thought

2009-05-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick tip.

From now on, every time you hear anyone call Barack Obama in particular, or the Democratic Party in general, "Socialist," I want a little subtitle to pop up before your eyes, and it should translate their remark to this: I do not know what the word "socialist" means, and I have too little sense to avoid using words that I don't understand.

That's all.

It was a very good concert

2009-05-10T23:34:00.001-07:00

Indigo Girls, with Matt Morris opening.

It was a very good year II

2009-05-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

Post #100

2009-04-17T06:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a beautiful day, so we had class outside on the back porch of the Tri Pi sorority from Animal House. One of the afternoon's highlights was a visit by a pair of mallards, a drake and hen. They waddled up within a few feet of us, pecking at the odd bug, and continued on their way. I hoped they'd join the conversation with a "Mwack!" or two, but they weren't feeling talkative.

Parting

2009-04-15T06:48:00.000-07:00

Last fall, one of the students in my Introduction to Communication class, a junior, came to my office and told me he wanted to switch his major to Communication. I knew him a little bit, and recognized that he was both likable and smart, so this was good news. He joined the forensics team and went to a tournament with us (no, he's not pictured below), and wrapped up Intro with solid work and a nice, high grade. Then he signed up for five, count them, five classes with me for this term. I joked with colleagues that after that kind of ordeal, he'd probably drop out.

Early this term, to my surprise, everything began to unravel. First, his attendance turned spotty, then he stopped turning in work, and finally, he just looked miserable in every class meeting. I sat him down in my office to ask if he was having problems, and we had a good talk. Despite that hopeful sign, all three patterns just accelerated: more skipped classes, more forfeited assignments. He became so disruptive in class that one day I had to bark at him, and another day I nearly threw him out. I announced syllabus revisions in all my classes to give myself authority to crack down, and that contained his behavior problems a bit, but the absences and zeros piled up. I worried about him much of the time, and began drafting in my head a tactful suggestion that he take some time off from school. He was just spinning his wheels, and his school experience had devolved into an empty charade. I had become more of an enforcer than an educator, and while that's also a form of teaching, it's not a good one. When it becomes a chronic problem instead of an occasional lapse, then radical changes are in order.

About a week ago, in the middle of a class discussion, he piped up and said he didn't like being told what to do, didn't like being required to follow assignment specifications in detail, didn't like having to be organized or systematic, and didn't understand why such things were necessary. He said his goal was to move the culture in the direction of authenticity and spontaneity, so no one would ever have to sweat over the minutiae of any kind of message. My suspicion, then and now, was that I wasn't hearing the output of his thinking, but the blowback of his frustration. He didn't truly think organization and detail were unimportant. I asked him a couple of probe questions about how, say, medical school should be taught, and he conceded that they're necessary in some contexts. But I think what I was hearing was exasperation passing the critical pressure and erupting. It certainly cast what happened next in an interesting light.

Yesterday afternoon, after skipping his (my, our) morning class, he came to my office and told me he was dropping out to enlist in the military. This from the guy who doesn't like to be told what to do. But it did mean he'd take himself out of the classroom and into a different environment, so I assured him right away that it was a good idea. He told me that most of his friends were opposed, since he's a second semester junior and could finish his degree in just one more year. But he had his parents' blessing; they said that if he was sure he'd be happier after the change, then they agreed. And I think they're probably right. True, he's going to bang his head against military discipline, but he won't be in a schoolroom anymore. I honestly think fifteen years of education burnt him out on this learning environment. He's got very distorted, romantic notions of what life is like outside the classroom, and at this point words are just bouncing off him. He's got to go see for himself.

My fervent hope and prayer is that this is an opportunity for him to grow, to rise to a challenge, to change his ways. I'm still fond of the kid, even though he's generated no end of stress and grief in my life, and the best news in the world would be to hear that he was thriving. He even hinted that after serving his hitch, his GI Bill benefits might bring him back here to school, but I don't expect that to happen. I think I'm seeing the last of him.

And last night, I grieved a little. This place is going to be different without him, and it's not the same kind of difference as saying goodbye to graduating seniors. That's poignant, but it's also a celebration and a success. It doesn't even feel the same as students transferring away, because at least there's a continuity and a next chapter ahead. This is a change that I hope, and have reason to believe, is positive and an improvement, but it's still a breaking off, a rupture, an unculminated, failed attempt at earning a degree. It feels right, but it doesn't feel good. Still, I woke up this morning in a much better mood about it, so I guess one night of grief isn't so bad. God's still got His eye on this kid.

Now, in about half an hour, I have to go to my morning class and nail a cheater. My week so far is not exactly an advertisement for my line of work.

Pescado/Pilgrimage

2009-04-12T20:35:00.000-07:00

So on Saturday, I was enjoying a nice, slow breakfast at the OPH, poring over the Saturday Register-Guard, when I noticed in this year's People Choice Awards that second place for best sushi had gone to Izumi Sushi and Grill.

Izumi Sushi and Grill? I thought, wrinkling my brow. Then it hit me: there must be a new sushi place in town I'd never visited. And apparently a pretty good one.

Well, I said to myself, borrowing the words of the elder George Bush, this will not stand. And just a few hours ago, the Easter Bunny presented me with a first-time visit to Izumi.

泉 means "spring water," which strikes me as apt since I explored it on Easter Sunday, and also since it's located just a stone's throw from the McKenzie River, which supplies Eugene (and me) with tap water. And about five years ago, Organic Style magazine crowned it the best drinking water in the United States, so that's no faint praise. I will point out that the McKenzie flows out of the Cascade snowpack, so it's not exactly spring water, but no need to be pedantic. As restaurant names go, it's pretty nifty.

戴
き
ま
す

Lower left are two 鰻握り, eel nigiri. Upper middle are three 鮭巻き, salmon rolls. Lower middle is 鱈場蟹握り, king crab nigiri. And on the right side, from far to near, are とろ, toro, 鯖, mackerel, and 鱸, striped bass. The 麦酒 is 麒麟一番, naturally.

I tried the king crab because the odd associate of mine from Alaska recommended it quite wholeheartedly. Of course, that recommendation came with a warning that it has to be absolutely fresh to be any good. I hoped that Oregon was close enough to Alaska, and a good sushi place obsessive enough about the freshness of its product, that it might hit the mark. And I have to say, I was disappointed. It was crab meat. Nothing special. I mean, it wasn't bad. It wasn't, say, "imitation krab meat." But it's not something I'll order again.

The toro was also a letdown. I'm starting to think toro is mostly hype. I've had it a few different places now (Sushi Domo, Sada, and now Izumi) and it never lives up to my expectations. All the folks who say it's a delicacy must either have refinement to their palate that I'm missing, which is certainly possible, or else they're admiring the Emperor's new clothes.

The striped bass was nothing special. The mackerel and eel were both quite good, but they usually are. So far, nothing to rave about.

But oh. The mainstay of the meal. Oh my. Oh my my my my my.

Years and years ago I visited a place in Addison, Texas called Mr. Sushi. The sushi fans I knew in Texas always lowered their voices when they mentioned it. Once I finally scraped together enough scratch to afford a visit, I found out right away what they were whispering about. I popped tuna into my mouth and made a discovery.

I don't know if you can pinpoint a memory of first stumbling upon something new and wonderful. Maybe it's the first time you touched silk, or maybe it's the first time you smelled the perfume or cologne that hooked you. But it's an electric sensation, a combination of pleasure and utter surprise, a revelation, a sense of "This is all the more wonderful because I never dreamed this existed." That evening at Mr. Sushi, I finally understood all the yammering about appreciating sushi for its texture. It's a hard thing to describe. You've either experienced it, in which case you already know what I mean, or you haven't, and this won't help. But the tuna that night was firm, solid, had integrity, and then suddenly vanished when I bit down. I don't mean it was like cotton candy, insubstantial and unsatisfying; no, the farthest thing in the world from that. Biting down on it made it surrender, in a funny kind of way. It wouldn't dream of being stringy or tough or rubbery, because that would be rude, and this was an impeccably well-mannered mouthful of food. I slowed down to savor it, which I rarely do, and when it was gone, I wished for more. And dreamed of more for several nights following.

I went back to Mr. Sushi a number of times, hoping for a repeat performance. I usually enjoyed myself, but it was never quite as intense again. But tonight, at Izumi, the salmon was fully that good. As before, I was in awe of the food's texture, and even as I finished a mouthful and was convinced that I had a handle on how good it was, I always gave in to utter astonishment at how good the next one turned out to be.

Probably there's a point to this: the delicacies ranged from fair to mediocre, while the staple was spectacular. Probably there's an aesthetic principle at work. But why spoil a good meal by extracting too much lesson from it? Why chloroform a butterfly that's so beautiful, it takes your breath away?

ご
馳
走
様
で
し
た

Parody

2009-04-12T07:56:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure where this came from. The person from whom I copied it said they found it in a Facebook group. My suspicion is that wasn't its origin, but who knows?

Regarding gay marriage, I don't think marriage should fall under government control at all, for either heterosexual or homosexual couples. The same legal force that (correctly) keeps prayer out of schools needs to keep badges out of weddings. But I'm also very, very pro-good argument and anti-bad argument, and, unfortunately, most of my Christian sisters and brothers are absolutely addicted to bad arguments. And what's listed below is a very impressive and entertaining demolition of some very bad arguments.

Enjoy.

Top 17 Reasons Why Gay Marriage is Wrong

Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Gay culture is a new fad created by the liberal media to undermine long-standing traditions. We know this is true because gay sex did not exist in ancient Greece and Rome.

There are plenty of straight families looking to adopt, and every unwanted child already has a loving family. This is why foster care does not exist.

Conservatives know best how to create strong families. That is why it is not true that Texas and Mississippi have the highest teen birthrates, and Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire have the lowest. This is a myth spread by the liberal media.

Marriage is a religious institution, defined by churches. This is why atheists do not marry. Christians also never get a divorce.

Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why our society has no single parents.

Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.

Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

Gay marriage should be decided by the people and their elected representatives, not the courts. The framers checked the courts, which represent mainstream public opinion, with legislatures created to protect the rights of minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Interference by courts in this matter is inappropriate, just as it has been every time the courts have tried to hold back legislatures pushing for civil rights.

Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because "separate but equal" institutions are a good way to satisfy the demands of uppity minority groups.

Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

METEORS and VOLCANOES.

Potty-training

2009-04-10T10:38:00.001-07:00

No, no pictures this time. Pictures of potty training wouldn't be pretty.

It really, really stinks to be a baby. It stinks to be unable to move unless someone moves you, to be unable to see properly unless someone props you up and turns you in the right direction. A good portion of babies' crying is nothing but frustration at how helpless they are, until, little by little, they master their equipment, and become capable of moving themselves. Then all that pent-up desire and curiosity comes gushing out like a fire-hose, and that's what we call the terrible twos. Speaking of gushing out like a fire-hose, that's right around the time for potty-training. True, for some kids, all of that plays out prior to their second birthday, but I worked in a church nursery with two-year-olds the entire time I was in high school, and nearly all of them had at best a sketchy mastery of potty usage.

So, I got to thinking about potty-training this morning. A few things occurred to me.

For the parents, it obviously can be a frustrating time: lots more messes that are gross, a fair measure of embarrassment, and the maddening reality that the kid may not be in any hurry to complete the changeover.

For some kids, the prospect of potty-training is downright scary. Some find that big ol' appliance in the bathroom just a little intimidating. Some are troubled by the flush.

For some kids, it's clear what to do and how to do it, but it's just too much hassle. Because they're still very new at getting from place to place and manipulating their toys in the proper fashion to have fun, it's a major investment of time to hike off to the bathroom and go through the proper motions for a mess-free defecation, and sometimes they just don't want to sacrifice.

And really, all that's available to the parents is helping the child understand how it works, and then encouraging and reminding, all the while applying a light touch. Getting worked up or heavy-handed has two problems: it's equally likely to backfire as to succeed, and even if it does succeed, it leaves unwanted trauma in its wake.

Strange thing to be thinking about, I agree. But it floated into my head and stayed for a visit because of its uncanny resemblance to a struggle that virtually all college students have.

College students are a lot like toddlers. They're mastering their equipment, so when they try to carry out normal adult tasks, many times their efforts are slow, incomplete, sloppy, or not very well thought out. But at the same time, they're operating off this huge, pent-up gush of frustration and desire for autonomy that goes back years and years, all the way to, well, toddlerhood. Now that autonomy has (mostly) arrived, they're giddy with it, which means that sacrificing even a little bit of it for a clean and orderly outcome can seem like too much. Plus, the work itself may seem intimidating or scary, and procrastination works as a turning away, a refuge. Not a safe or permanent one, but one that's easy to hand.

All the while, we who work with them wait impatiently for the discovery that procrastination is not what people who want to succeed, or even just want a low-stress life, should practice. While they labored under the supervision of parents and high school teachers, the tempo was set for them: daily homework, daily parental insistence that they complete it before turning their attention to anything enjoyable. Effectively, the parents and teachers changed their diapers. Then, they arrived at college, and it was time to get potty-trained in a hurry.

And I know that I'd get better results if I could follow the advice I set down above for potty-training: if I could model the behavior, explain its benefits, and then wait for them to grasp on their own how much better their lives could be if they applied responsible, well-paced effort to their assignments. The problem is, the calendar is the boss of all of us. Pediatricians can tell young parents, "Don't worry; the child will pick up potty training on her/his own at the right time. They're not going to have to take their potty to college with them." Sound advice. But when I've only got fifteen weeks to deliver content and measure their mastery of it, there simply isn't the luxury of surplus time for them to mull over the merits of planning far ahead and distributing large tasks over many work sessions. Instead, I have to rig the classes to reward those who do, and leave those who don't defenseless against the consequences they heap up, and then dig in my heels and be ruthless about carrying out what I've constructed.

But it's the perennial struggle. If I, or anyone else, ever finds a way to help college kids tackle their work and do it in manageable bites, instead of bragging to one another about how cute and charming and awesome it is that they wait and pull all-nighters to get uncomplicated projects done, then the biggest portion of their stress will fade, and their biggest waste of effort and energy will be channeled into something more productive.

And, of course, I'm over-romanticizing. If I didn't have this problem to bash my head against, it'd be something else. That's simply the way the world works.

Pobrecito

2009-04-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

Today we had a one-day tournament on the NCU campus. We named it for the little guy in the first three pictures. I won't post his name here, because posting pictures of a child together with a name on an open blog isn't the world's wisest move. But the rest of the pictures are of the (other) kids competing. A good time was had by all.

Periodistas

2009-04-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, I saw the Newsboys in concert just a few blocks from my office. Here are some mementos. In proper Memento fashion, I've got them posted backwards, with the headliner on top, and the opening acts (Decemberadio, Vota, Bread of Stone) in reverse order of appearance below.

ל״א

2009-03-31T06:25:00.001-07:00

College professor
Public addressor
Sporting a beard
Cranium sheared
Overgrown youngster
Muscular lungster
Sunday school teacher
Created creature
Middle aged Texan
Often perplexin’
Plausibly logical
Archaeological
Playfully scrappy
And, finally, happy

11101

2009-03-29T06:11:00.001-07:00

は

じ

め

ま

し

て

北

西

の

基

督

教

大

学

の

ド

イ

ル

ス

レ

ダ

|

で

す

熱

血

教

授

で

す

Vingt-trois

2009-03-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

His sheep listen to His voice; He knows us, and we follow Him. He gives us eternal life, and we shall never perish

361^0.5

2009-03-19T06:33:00.000-07:00

Diecisiete

2009-03-17T06:32:00.000-07:00

By the power vested in me as a professor of rhetoric, I hereby pronounce "awkward" a cliché

— — — — • • • — —

2009-03-13T06:24:00.001-07:00

All is in the hands of Heaven except for the fear of Heaven

22/2

2009-03-11T06:14:00.001-07:00

Technology hates you and is trying its hardest to destroy you

VII

2009-03-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

Always keep your eye on the ball

五

2009-03-05T06:39:00.000-08:00

The truth is not popular

3

2009-03-03T06:04:00.001-08:00

I will listen

Two

2009-03-02T06:54:00.000-08:00

Hurt forgiving

Noon

2009-02-28T05:44:00.000-08:00

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.

Toot

2009-02-27T17:50:00.000-08:00

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. Krackle! 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 friend 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."

Kook

2009-02-27T07:12:00.000-08:00

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.

Refer

2009-02-26T06:15:00.000-08:00

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!