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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
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
His sheep listen to His voice; He knows us, and we follow Him. He gives us eternal life, and we shall never perish
By the power vested in me as a professor of rhetoric, I hereby pronounce "awkward" a cliché
All is in the hands of Heaven except for the fear of Heaven
Technology hates you and is trying its hardest to destroy you
Always keep your eye on the ball
Doyle Srader has come unstuck in time.
No, I'm not bouncing back and forth between World War Two and Tralfamadore. I only mean that Friday gave me fresh reason to appreciate how different time looks to me from the way it looks to my students, and even most of my colleagues. Thursday night, I went to the Spirit Showcase. It was an excuse, and any excuse is a good one, to drop in at Cozmic Pizza and have a Rings of Saturn, although the beer they talked me into, a Belgian Witbeer under the brand name "Mother Ship," was truly awful. But I enjoyed the music, in no small part because the players were all NCU students. After that, we had a debate team meeting, because we needed to get in at least one complete practice round before today's tournament. That started a few minutes past nine, and when it was done, they all wanted to debrief. And then I still had my walk home. I didn't get to bed much before midnight, so I slept in just a bit.
None of that put my attention on time. It was on my walk to work that I confronted the difference. The sun was all the way up, and there was noticeable traffic, from cars to bikes to other walkers. Nothing extraordinary, nothing I wouldn't expect at that hour, but not what I'm accustomed to, anymore. These days, I walk to work in near pitch darkness, with very few other people around, and that has become very precious to me. The stillness feels safe and soothing. I don't need it all day, but it's a part of my morning routine, and when I missed it on Thursday, I missed it.
The actual thought that brushed through my head that day was, "So this is what it's like." And that thought bridged me over to musing about television, which also imprints people's perception of time.
At present, I don't own a television. Furthermore, I haven't had a working television with cable in almost thirteen years. Very occasionally I see a few minutes of TV at someone else's home, or in a hotel room, but I nearly never sit down with the purpose of watching an entire program. Over Christmas, I had a brief flirtation with Netflix downloadable programming, but during the term I have nothing like the time it takes to watch anything substantial. For all those reasons, I spend almost zero percent of my day immersing my brain in a reality that includes quick cuts, TV editing, and metered time for advertisements. I simply don't come in contact with that experiential rhythm, and that's a major difference separating me from most other people I see daily.
So, my start and finish time are different. My start is quiet and free from people. I skip out entirely on night-life, which is when most folks do a good deal of socializing. And then, during the day, I live in a continuous reality, and there aren't clear on-off switches between messages of substance and sales pitches.
Simplest way to put it is that I live on farmer time. And I can live with that.
So tonight, the library is having Mystery Night. It's a live action game of Clue. They asked me if I'd be part of it, and they gave me the name "Sergeant Skittles." They didn't tell me much else, except that I should have an opening speech explaining my role in the game. This is what I came up with.
"Skittles, here. For many years, I was head of the vice squad in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Those were mean streets. Without warning, you might find someone had thrown a Jawbreaker. And then your teeth would tumble to the ground. Krackel! More than once, I barely escaped a beating, or a bullet, or feeling my bones Crunch, thanks to my two assistants, Mike and Ike. They were real Lifesavers.
"On the side, I moonlighted as head of security at the chocolate factory. One night, I heard a ruckus and stepped outside to investigate. There was a man demanding that we let him in. He definitely was not a Jolly Rancher. It was ... Boddy.
"He had thought up his own candy bar. I think he'd been to a few too many state fairs, and had seen a few too many deep fried inventions, because he tried to turn the method inside-out. His big idea was a chocolate-covered pork chop. He'd tested it on a few focus groups. Named it after himself. And when they bit into it, and he asked, 'So do you like the taste of the Boddy?' he never quite understood why none of them stayed around long enough to fill out the questionnaire.
"I listened to the end of his sob story, and I said 'Shut your Gobstopper.' When he lunged at me, I buried my fist in his Jelly Belly, and the boys took him out. I thought I'd seen the last of him.
"It was later that same night that I first met ... her. The love of my life. As soon as she walked in, I saw that she was quite the Red Hot. I thought, Payday! It was my Baby ... Ruth. Her eyes, her lips, her Mounds, her Watchamacallit. She was my Almond Joy. We liked to get all Nestlé and watch the Milky Way. Then we'd step outside to look at the stars. I began to dream that maybe we could raise our own Junior Mints, who might grow up to think that their Pop Rocks. But I didn't count on ... Boddy.
"Looking back, I don't quite remember which of my jobs I was working when I met Ruth. That should've been my first warning. Boddy homed in her weakness. He found the temptation; he knew she had a long history as a groupie. And when a rap concert came to town, he got her a phone number, and then a hotel room key. When I caught up with her, I said 'Listen here, Miss Smarties. I thought you and I were a perfect match before I knew you were a tart!' I turned my back, my heart broken in Reese's Pieces, but it wasn't until I heard her Snickers that the first hot tear ran down my cheek, and I thought, This is what it sounds like when Doves cry.
"The next morning she left town on a tour bus, snuggled in the arms ... of M&M.
"Despite all that, I am not guilty of the murder of Mr. Boddy."
I think I'm going to start my own political movement. I've got this great idea for fomenting and harnessing a lot of latent collective rage: we're going to be the anti-subpoena party.
Now, I know, I know, at first mention it sounds wonkish and unsexy, like something only lawyers would pay any attention to, but bear with me. This has potential.
The issuing of a subpoena is rarely good news, and often is extremely unwelcome, but nevertheless, is frequently both necessary and understandable. The sketchy ones can be a sign that the justice system is having a sloppy or irrational day, but when that happens, there are ways to quash it. That attempt might succeed or it might fail, but even then there are always lessons learned, ways to do it better. The fact that it's not always used perfectly is no more of a rational argument against it than occasional false alarms are an argument for abolishing fire departments.
Sound reasonable? Well, say goodbye to reasonability, because all that is about to change. This country needs an anti-subpoena revolution, and here's my first crack at a manifesto:
- A subpoena is big, bad, intrusive government at its worst. So the government wants your information? So it can't enforce the law without it? Well, isn't that just too bad? It's not the government's information; it's your information. It belongs to you.
- A subpoena is wasteful. What do they do with your information once they have it? They run straight to the press and leak it, and your privacy swirls right down the drain.
- And even though the cases of corruption and misconduct are actually few and far between, I can take every one of them I find, as well as a few legitimate cases that I can twist and distort to seem like corruption, and repeat them with drumbeat insistence until people with the critical thinking skills of a dishrag decide that they're all just greedy grabs for power.
- Oh, and I need a complete bonehead argument. I can't launch my own democracy-mangling pustule of a movement without an argument so stupid that it makes you slam your head on your keyboard in despair. Mmm ... how's this? Pluralize the word, and you get "subpoenas." Say it out loud. You see? You see right there? It's a code word for the secret terrorist plot to put hormones in our water and conquer us through genital shrinkage! I'll repeat this a few dozen times on an AM radio show, getting more and more worked up, and I'll change reality! Although, honestly, that'll be the easiest part, since the listeners won't have too tight a grip on reality to begin with.
Job numero uno, I have to condition everyone to turn their brains off whenever I mention the word. They can't be permitted to think about catching criminals, about the impossibility of prosecuting lawbreakers effectively without obtaining evidence. Can't let any of that rationality or perspective seep in through the cracks. Can't let anyone suspect that a subpoena might be a useful tool instead of, or even at the same time as, a headache. Nosirree: I have to stamp that right out!
Oh, and I probably need to associate it with one political party, too, so the target is a manageable size. Let's see: which one paints itself as the party of law and order? Ahhh, perfect! And I need a catchy three-word label, just because it's not a political movement for the brain-dead if I don't regularly drop productive discussion for a round of childish name-calling. How about "subpoena and railroad?" No, too many syllables. "Subpoena and screw?" That has promise. "Subpoena and ballerina?" I may have to keep working on that part.
But boy, am I rolling now! Soon as I get momentum, I can lure all the braying, brain-dead breakfast cereals who get their political commentary from the slogans and the brutal oversimplifications recruited for my angry mob, and I can so monkey-wrench the government that it can't get anything accomplished, and we're all less safe, and then I can exercise my newfound leverage over this scorched-earth country that once upon a time worked, however messily or imperfectly.
Let's roll.
For smallness, the bantamweight champ is
The miniature NCU campus
Community here
Is like Biosphere
With one good-sized boot, you could stamp us.
I take the bridge 'cross the Willamette
'Smore comfortable than if I swam it
But I lose my nerve
When bicyclists swerve
They won't turn their iPods off, dammit!
A Beacon's a pretty good balla
Who carries his weight as a schola
To take OIT
He'll fire off the three
And bring home a victory -- holla!
I have eight new holes in my walls: seven at home, one in my office. And I halfway expected that I'd feel sad about this, but instead it feels as though a piece of clothing that was askew is now straight and comfortable.
Throughout my life, I've had a hard time moving from one home to another, and each time I've endured a burst of intense homesickness that lasted anywhere from one night to a few months. When I came to Oregon, I festooned my apartment and office walls with framed pictures, all of which came out of the several shoeboxes I keep on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. (I also splurged, from my first paycheck, on a large print of "A Saturday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte," by Georges Seurat, which I've always wanted to have on the wall, over the couch.) And for a while, I would come home each night, flake out in my big, overstuffed papa chair, and feebly enjoy the sight of reminders from my past.
But most of that enjoyment has faded. It hasn't left me desolate, though; it's been replaced, and quite thoroughly.
Back in Texas, I was especially close with one branch of my extended family. The kids in the house, especially, were dear to my heart. But as it is with many academics, I have a tricky time forming and maintaining close relationships, which is part eccentricity, part having a brain wired to wrestle with abstraction and academic writing, and part work stress. That's not to say I had more work stress than the family members, because I clearly didn't, but it was different: it followed an entirely distinct pattern, and that made it hard for me to understand their struggles, anticipate their rhythms and vice versa. Definitely vice-versa. From time to time, that trickiness grew into rockiness, and sometimes became open disaffectation. And after a number of years of patching it up, seeing it fall apart, and patching it up again, I arrived at one firm decision that broke the cycle. One of the unspoken rules, the unwritten laws, was that they waited until I contacted them, and then we would plan some sort of get-together: dinner at their house, or occasionally something different. But it was left to me to get the ball rolling. And at the time, I saw rational reasons for this: they had lots of responsibilities, compounded by the fact that they had to coordinate all of them. Both kids had needs, both parents had duties, and all of it had to be sorted out and attacked as efficiently as possible. My load of obligations wasn't always smaller, but it was always simpler.
Eventually, that wasn't a good enough reason anymore. My chief gripe, which we discussed on a few occasions, was that whenever I contacted them and my timing was less than perfect, it felt to me as though they became angry and blamed me for whatever they found difficult about their life. I felt attacked for not having perfect timing. I felt attacked for my insensitivity at intruding when they felt overwhelmed. The fact that I had no idea what went on in their home if they didn't take the initiative to keep me informed didn't temper their anger at all. I tried over time to be a patient and supportive family member, to let it roll off, to see it as frustration that wasn't really aimed at me. But finally, when I received three tongue-lashings in one week, it became too much, and I arrived at a decision: I'm not going to yell back, I'm not going to sulk, I'm not going to do anything at all but wait for them to initiate contact. It seemed to me like a good solution. I'm intruding? My timing is bad? Fine. They can set the tempo. If they need to turn their attention elsewhere, I can wait. I ran this reasoning by a number of friends, some of whom were mutual friends with these family members, and there was a strong consensus that turned out to be prescient: "You're never going to hear from them. They wait for you to call because that puts them in the driver's seat. All get-togethers are at their house because that's their turf. This has all been a power game."
I didn't want to believe that, and I still don't entirely buy it. But what happened next was pretty strong evidence. Did they contact me? Nope. When I bumped into them spontaneously, they always made a point of telling me how much they missed me. I believed that about as much as I believed someone who says they're starving when they've got a complete meal two inches from their fingers. Several times I thought, sourly, You know, your phone makes outgoing calls as well as taking incoming ones! But I chalked this up to learning how things really were, and tried to be thankful for the lesson. The same friends who'd predicted this now said, "You're finding out what they apparently thought of friendship with you all along. They were fond of you when you were right there and they didn't have to exert any effort, but they won't stir themselves to keep it going. It's nothing personal; you just misunderstood what was there in the first place."
This wasn't initially going to be a history of that period of transition, but since it's out there, I can explain now why I have eight holes in my wall. When I moved here, among the pictures I put up on my wall were a number of photos I'd taken of the two kids from that household. I had been extremely fond of them, and I'd taken a lot of pictures of them that turned out very well. About three days ago, I thought, Why are those still on my wall? It wasn't that the pictures made me feel angry or sad, but more just that they no longer fit. They didn't stir anything in me, the way they used to. For the first time, I thought, what would happen if I took them down?
I expected that it would feel wrenching to do so, but as it turned out, I was wrong. This morning, the whim struck me, and I dismounted the seven pictures of the kids that were hanging in my apartment. And there was no pain, no grief, no hurt. It felt as though I had tried to remove a tree that I thought would have very deep, strong roots, but discovered instead had no roots at all, and came up easily.
And it would be easy to misunderstand this: I'm not saying I don't feel anything for these family members anymore. That's clearly not right. I have no plans to shred the pictures, or burn them, or even just throw them away. As soon as I have time to de-frame them, they'll go back in the shoebox and into the closet. In other boxes in the closet I have books I'm not currently interested in reading, and clothes I don't currently wear, but I've kept both sets of boxes for a reason.
I worried, when I moved out here, that losing the family ties and church ties I had back in Texas would leave me bitterly lonely. And it's true that I'm a lot less involved with my church here than I was with the church there: I got very deeply involved, and was actually named the College Ministry Coordinator, but have had to unplug myself from a fair number of activities just because there are only so many hours in a day. And as far as contact with family goes, I call my mother on Sunday afternoons, and we talk for about an hour, and that's it. Very different from my pre-move life.
What's different is the role of my job.
My job has filled in the space that used to be occupied by family and church. None of my colleagues are rivals, since none are in my field: they range from supportive and helpful to very firm and close friends. And the difference in how students relate to me is absolutely remarkable. Back in Texas, I'd occasionally get a bit of encouragment from one of my hundred and fifty students: maybe three or four times in a semester. I treasured those, and still do, but there's just no comparison to the student-teacher tie at this school. These folks encourage me, praise me, express gratitude, seek me out, include me in their play, several times a day and dozens of times a week. Keeping the healthy distance between student and educator is a serious challenge here, and one that I work very hard to balance, but it's a good problem to have. I feel incredibly close to my students, and that makes the workday a joy.
Aside from that, it makes the distance from my old life feel like growth, like progress, like going from the previous chapter of my life to the next. So when I made eight holes in my wall (nail holes where the pictures used to be), all I really was doing was rearranging the decorative symbols to match the new, very comfortable, very healthy reality. And that took me by surprise. But it was a pleasant surprise.
Yoko Ono is the exact same age as my mother.
And that's not the only thing they have in common.
It's not funny, it's not funny, it's a real disorder that disrupts the lives of a lot of people. It's no laughing matter. I know that. But I can't help myself.
Somehow, this morning, I got the image in my head of a narcoleptic figure skater. And it's kept popping back in, off and on, all day.
Not very adult of me.
February is shaping up as my snarky month. (Well, snarkier.)
This week, I had a fresh burst of frustration over the stimulus package and the opposition to it, so I fired off two letters to the editor; one to the Vegetable-Guard, and one to the Oregonian.
The R-G letter (which ran today):"People are dying of salmonella? There’s not a minute to lose! Quick, pass a tax cut for people with salmonella! Don’t bother spending the money on food safety to actually hire enough inspectors to put teeth in the law. It’s not the government’s money; it’s the people's money! Get those refund checks mailed out to their graves, so we can pay someone to put a nice coat of varnish on their tombstones.
"We’re losing more veterans to suicide than we are soldiers in combat? There’s not a minute to lose! Quick, pass a tax cut for veterans who’ve committed suicide!"
The Oregonian letter:"The goal was bipartisan support for the stimulus plan, but it didn’t quite happen. In case this happens again, I have some tips for President Obama for the next go-round.
"Your first missing piece was war. There just wasn’t enough war to interest your loyal opposition. Next time, tell a lot of lies and tangle the country up in an unnecessary and incompetently fought war, because we know from experience that if you do, the Republicans will crowbar open the ATM and invite you to help yourself.
"Better still, you could just switch parties. If you yourself are a Republican, you can propose three trillion dollars to buy tap-dancing shoes for leprechauns, and the Republican caucus will mob the cameras to say, with straight faces, that it’s the most common-sense, family values, anti-terrorist idea they’ve ever heard, and fiscally conservative to boot."
They're clearly over the top and not entirely fair. They're more an expression of frustration than anything else. But they're also not altogether off-target.
Wonderfully bad arguments.
God is love.
Love is blind.
Stevie Wonder is blind.
∴ Stevie Wonder is God. ■
Nothing is better than sex.
A gumball is better than nothing.
∴ a gumball is better than sex. ■
Nobody is perfect.
I am nobody.
∴ I am perfect. ■
Since I love you, I am, by definition, a lover.
All the world loves a lover.
You are all the world to me.
∴ you love me. ■
Woohoo, it's snowing!
I love Oregon.
This Wednesday is the submission deadline for papers for the National Communication Association's annual convention. I have a project that's ready to write, but I have to do some heavy-duty work to get it done by Wednesday, so I'm feeling weighted down and unwilling to start. In this blog post, I'm going to try to free-write the argument I'm making in the paper, in hopes that if I can get it to come clear, the actual academic writing, with evidence and citations and everything else, will go a bit more smoothly.
On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus. That day, he put together a multimedia package of writings, photos and video, and sent it to NBC News. They aired selected photos and excerpts from the video, and read aloud portions of his writings. Over the next several days, they endured a firestorm of controversy, including complaints from victims' family members, from Virginia law enforcement, and from rival network heads. NBC's chief spokesperson in the affair was Steve Capus, president of NBC News. He defended his decision to air the material, but one of his concessions struck me funny at the time, and I copied it into my idea log. He said, "Sometimes good journalism is bad public relations."
What I study is the way professionals argue among themselves about the essence of the profession, and, in particular, about how the traits of an ideal professional come together to form an identity, a profile. Judges call this judicial temperament. Doctors all carry around an idealized cognitive model of the person who is most fully a doctor. I've been working to demonstrate, in several different fields, that when a controversy erupts inside a profession, it's possible to catch glimpses of that identity in the space between the arguments each side makes. I also believe that in those controversies, the identity is managed, renewed, re-created, reinforced, and sometimes radically altered.
Journalism is an interesting case, because they can't make up their minds whether they are a profession. The classic professions are doctors, lawyers, and the clergy. What makes an occupation a profession is tricky to pin down, but some of the more important markers are a commitment to serving the public, possession of arcane knowledge not available to everyone, an insistence on autonomy and freedom from outside judgment of the quality and appropriateness of the work, and heavy reliance upon colleagues.
Journalists do, typically, view themselves as public servants, do insist that only they are qualified to judge their work, do operate in collegial networks, but have kind of a nuanced position on arcane, secretive knowledge. It's a constitutive idea in journalism that a great journalist can explain anything to the readers or viewers, and that success is measured by effectiveness in that very task. The notion, then, that journalists are the guardians of something not everyone can understand (medicine, law, religious teaching) is not a terribly good fit. And that's where one of the more stubborn objections to calling journalism a profession comes in. Professions tend to include licensing: lawyers pass the bar, doctors are licensed, clergy are ordained. Journalists, however, have as part of their heritage the notion that anyone with a sharp eye, an ability to distill information down to the essence, and a flair for writing, can be a journalist. Formal training may be helpful, but is not necessary.
Public relations, on the other hand, is working itself into a frenzy trying to build all the trappings of a profession: certification, ethical codes, accrediting standards for colleges that have PR majors, and so forth. And PR has a relationship with journalism that reminds me of the tie between an adolescent and a parent: very troubled, very turbulent, but still unbreakable and even (at times) rewarding. Many people move from one occupation to the other, in both directions. And journalists have the same concerns as PR people: getting the message right, and doing the right thing for their various publics, and doing all of it ethically while staying afloat as a viable business enterprise. The difference is simply that journalists are the public version, and PR people take on private interests. And a number of commentators from inside the field say that when PR was new, underresourced, and not very powerful, and journalists were still resource-rich and in their element, the relationship actually worked quite well. But now that PR is a multi-billion dollar industry, while journalistic organizations are cutting budgets to the bone, the relationship has inverted, with PR people exercising more power and bringing more resources to bear on getting their way. Public trust in journalism is evaporating, which hurts both occupations, and the tie they share is plunging down below dysfunctional to downright toxic.
With that in mind, here's how the debate over the airing of Cho's video plays out.
Capus lays out the following arguments:
- This is plainly newsworthy. It is a look inside the mind of a mass murderer.
- It wasn't done recklessly; he and the entire staff agonized over whether they should release any of it, and if so, how much.
Arguments made by critics in the profession included:
- Airing the video at all was inappropriate, since the ravings of a madman have no news value, and it encouraged other mentally ill people who might want their views aired on network TV to do the same thing.
- Even if airing the video once was defensible, airing it over and over again was just sensationalism.
The points of stasis, then, involved the threshold decision to air the footage (newsworthy or not?), and the secondary decision of how often to repeat its broadcast (gratuitous or not?). In each case, NBC could arguably be guilty of showing material that was designed solely to shock, rather than to inform, or could be found responsible in its decision to provide its viewers with the manifesto of a mass murderer, and responsible in the restraint it showed when it repeated the broadcast on subsequent showings.
A couple of bits out of the research I did into PR and journalism point toward some answers. One pair of authors talked about the need for journalism to adopt an ethic of care. On the way to their argument, they pointed out how journalists atomize their audience, emphasizing difference over connection (difference is what makes a story newsworthy) and being careful to keep all difference equal and unjudged. Another observes that journalists have always relied on sources to generate the content for their reporting, and that PR can be defined very, very simply as the professionalizing of sources. Since this is obviously a study in the use of an explosive source, one loaded with power but also loaded with danger, there's something to this angle. One author talks a good deal about journalism's "epistemic authority," especially in the context of the growing importance of marketing in news programming. Does something become news just because it draws attention? Is there a difference between need to know and want to know? Since NBC's threshold decision involved whether the video was news, the epistemic authority question is on the table. Yet another said what made a journalist a journalist was the ability to take an entire event and produce a condensed version that interested onlookers could digest without suffering information overload; that trait of journalism seems a good parallel to the "How often shall we re-air this?" decision, which went along with "Which excerpts shall we air in the first place?" In fact, since one major difference in journalism today and journalism in its earliest days is (a). broadcast and (b). 24 hour broadcast, I think I can make the argument that "how often can we re-broadcast this?" is a parallel issue to "how much shall we include?"
Okay. That's a mess. Let's see if I can untangle some of it:
- Professionalizing of sources.
- Epistemic authority.
- Distillation vs. frequency (editing).
- The atomized audience.
Two of those are cross-boundary relationships: the professionalized source and the atomized audience. Two of those are issues that are internal to the enterprise of reporting: epistemic authority and editing. Epistemic authority and editing have the most salience to the two points of stasis identified above. Professionalizing of sources and the atomized audience have the most potential to explain the rhetorical situation against which the argument was joined.
Hmm.
That's enough clean-up work that I can change tasks and go do something else. I might come back and try to fiddle more with this later today or tomorrow.
The only sport I keep up with is tennis, and I never miss Jon Wertheim's commentaries, especially the weekly mailbag. I've even sent a few quirky bits over the years, including this idea about Taylor Dent winning the White House and appointing Don Budge to the Supreme Court, this limerick about the Bryan brothers, and a few other limericks for a contest.
Well, his latest challenge was to predict what the Russian player Marat Safin will do when he retires from tennis sometime this year, and I'm mildly tickled that he published my answer and called it the first winner.
This kind of thing seemed a lot more important back when I lived in Nacogdoches, and we had to make our own fun, because, God knows, there wasn't any naturally-occurring fun to be found. Now it's retreated into proper perspective, as a dorky and guilty pleasure.
This term I'm teaching five classes: Public Speaking, Intercultural Communication, Rhetoric, Nonverbal, and Interpersonal. It's a good, meat-and-potatoes lineup of core classes in the Communication field. The first four are daytime classes, with mostly traditional undergrads and an occasional nontraditional, which the locals call an OWL, for Older and Wiser Learner. Cute, but I can't seem to get used to it.
That fifth class, Interpersonal, is nothing but OWLs, because it's an entirely online class. It's being offered through the Professional Studies Program, the PSP, which is designed for older adults with full-time jobs and family responsibilities, who want to finish their bachelor's degree. The classes have much longer meetings, are scheduled at night, and are delivered in eight-week terms instead of fifteen. For me, teaching at night is a peek through the gates of hell, so I teach online instead. And my experience with this online class is overhauling one of my major age-linked schemata.
What I now think is, there is no such thing as childish behavior: there is only overwhelmed behavior.
For all these years, I've mentally sorted my students into two categories: children and adults. The children are the ones that put everything off, don't follow instructions, don't stay caught up on the reading, and put more effort into complaining and arguing over class policies than they do into completing the work. And just as I had a knack for keeping two-year-olds in line with a mix of affection and firmness, I've had a lot of success teaching students who displayed those behaviors: I catch them being good, I spot opportunities to be playful and to affirm them, and then whenever they're irresponsible, I act decisively and firmly and make the consequences too serious to take in stride. Just lopping off ten points is a stray raindrop: a zero, and the prospect of additional zeros, is more like a bone-rattling thunderclap.
But through my career, almost every time I've had a student old enough that they'd held a full-time job past the entry level, or married and raised kids past infancy, I never had to resort to that latter repertoire of teaching tools, because it seemed as though they got it. They were adults. They worked ahead and kept up. Sometimes I'd have younger students who practiced all those behaviors, and I decided either they had exceptional parents, or were exceptionally mature. But year after year, I made my snap judgments and sized up students either as children or adults.
This online class is challenging that.
Nearly all the students are displaying some of the behaviors I listed above as "childish." But at the same time, from their writing, and from some of their other behaviors, I can see that they aren't children at all: they do grasp, as a core truth, that they have responsibilities, that consequences aren't a game whose object is outplaying the teacher. Many of them pile up evidence of being sober, settled, functional adults, and yet they still do this incredibly scattershot job of following directions, keeping up with deadlines, being thorough with their proofreading, and other competencies I've always thought of as the hallmarks of adulthood.
This morning, the real difference popped into my head. One second before it did, I was mystified. One second later, it was so obvious that I kicked myself for not seeing it before. The dividing line isn't maturity. The dividing line is between being challenged and being overwhelmed.
Most of my OWLs are devoting their daylight hours to getting their degree. Some of them work, but the work is scheduled around college. They tell me about deals they've hammered out with their spouses to reallot household and child care duties. College has its footprint in their schedule, and even though they find it challenging, they at least have a chronemic architecture that they can adjust this way and that to try to improve the situation.
The PSP students, I firmly believe, have an invisible college career underway, which looks to me like a recipe for disaster.
My class is online. They work on it only when they log into the computer. They don't ever have to set foot on campus. The other classes are night classes. It's not clear to onlookers that they're any different from a PTA meeting or a night out with friends. The whole enterprise doesn't have a footprint in their schedule. I'm not sure anyone's counseled them that it needs to have one, that they need to carve out X number of hours in the day and say "This is school-time, and I am unavailable." As a matter of fact, I think our admissions counselors tell them that this isn't necessary, that they can handle finishing college without letting anything else slip. And I suspect the counselors frame it as, "It's a challenge, but you can rise to the challenge."
But I think that's an important difference: when you plan for it and give it space in your week, it is a challenge. When you simply stuff it into any available cracks, piecemeal, then it goes from challenging to overwhelming.
The puzzle is, I'm not sure what I do about it. I have limited opportunities to advise these students. They have assigned advisors through the PSP program. I can give them tips for scheduling their studying, their classwork, but the few times I've ventured into that territory, it seems as though they don't take me very seriously. I encounter an attitude of, "That sounds nifty, but you have no idea what it's like to work forty hours, and then shoehorn in your kids' need for attention." True, but they have no idea what it's like to successfully complete a degree. Not only did I complete three, but I've been a mentor to dozens upon dozens of students who've made it happen, many of whom did have jobs and kids.
Well, any time I'm at a loss for what to do, there's one surefire place to start: pray about it. Pray for them. And while I do, occasionally, I need to do so a lot more, and a lot more often.
It never occurred to me I'd reach a thousand this quickly, but now, looking back, it seems very predictable.
Obviously I don't mean blog posts. Every morning, I walk to work, roughly two miles and some change. The route takes me through Alton Baker park, past an off-the-leash dog run where I get to smile at dogs of every breed and age frolicking together, and over the Willamette River on an arcing footbridge. The trail has three or four short uphill stretches that make me lean into my stride, and it's quiet and peaceful enough that I get a good deal of thinking done. Once I get fresh air, (relative) peace and quiet, and a little extra blood to my brain, I tend to brim over with ideas, which is a tremendously exciting way to start and end the day.
So I take that walk just about every morning, and take it home again just about every evening, and by "every" I mean every. I come in to my office almost every Saturday, some Sundays, and even when I'm on vacation. Coming in to the office doesn't mean I spend the entire day behind my desk; instead, I frequently go wander downtown Eugene, doing this or that. My office is nicely located to serve as my base of operations for those expeditions. So, now that I've been here a full seventeen months plus about two weeks, I've done the walk to and from my office on just about five hundred days. If I haven't done it a thousand times yet, then I'm no more than a week or two away.
And next year I teach my one hundredth public speaking class. Some people rub their eyes and say that can't be right, but for a stretch of several years, back when I was at SFA, I taught nothing but public speaking: five sections a long term, two in the summer, and two extra as an adjunct at Angelina College. Keep up that pace for a few years -- sixteen sections a year -- and the double-digits just melt away, and it's no wonder that my public speaking odometer will roll its third digit during my fortieth year.
Forty. Wow. I turn forty this year. The Summer of Love, of the first human footstep on the moon, is two full generations behind us.
In a couple of my classes, we've been talking about communicative codes, and how they are a product of culture. This morning I was struck by the disproportionate layers of meaning wrapped around tens and multiples of tens. True, it's how many fingers we've got, unless our chromosomes did some wacky gyrating, and it's how many commandments God gave Moses while He was still clearing His throat, lexically speaking.
Multiples of ten are nice, round numbers, chiefly because they end in zero. And my brain could ricochet off and chase the concept of "zero," but I've read other people's take on it, and honestly, I've got nothing to add. But the niceness of round numbers tickles me, since it's precisely the round shapes that don't fit ordinary geometric operations. Yesterday, in my nonverbal class, I explained the difference between analogic and digital signals: first, I showed the visual light spectrum, the rainbow, stretching from red to indigo, followed by a huge box of hundreds of crayons. The unbroken spectrum is analogic, and the crayons are digital. Then I showed them an animation of a circle with an inscribed polygon inside it that grew more and more sides several times a second, and I explained how Archimedes approximated pi by that method. From those beginnings, we talked about the relationship between analogical and digital, about portability and convenience and imprecision and infinite vs. finite adjustment. Multiples of ten are good for ballparking, for stepping over the quagmirish details of a complicated number and just getting the nearest landmark in its neighborhood. How old am I? After July, I'll be in my forties. Nice, round number that lets people leap to conclusions about where I am emotionally, developmentally, philosophically.
And then I'll turn fifty, and that'll be ten times more ... well, I'm not sure of that. But it'll clearly be ten more.
The school paper put out the word for people to send in short Valentine's Day messages for their honeyloves. They offered to publish them under pseudonyms. This was, of course, too good of an offer to resist, especially since I'm technically the newspaper's faculty overlord. Anyway, when I should've been working, this is what I whipped up:
From: Humpty Dumpling
To: Lovezilla
Honey bucket, our love is a picture drawn in graceful strokes and vivid colors that started out as a fingerpainting by a toddler with alien-hand syndrome, but was swiped off Grandma’s Frigidaire® by a wizened old stevedore with an extra nostril and a secret love affair with three wigmakers, all sisters, so he could code into those hypnotic, Pollockesque swirls a hidden message detailing where the booty from the bank heist might be unearthed some moonlit night, as the nutria frolic under the whispering elms for joy of fertility and outsized rat exuberance.
And that black and melon polka dotted blob to the left of center, shaped a little like the squirrel parts your dog threw up under the ottoman? That’s a special kiss from me for each of your sweet, sweet eyebrows. Treasure it always.
John Updike died, night before last. I spent part of Wednesday evening listening to a radio broadcast of an interview with Updike from about twelve years ago. He stayed on one theme for a bit: the idea that his writing was a message from his present self to his past self. The impossibility of that set me off thinking about noncongruence.
A point I make in many of my classes is that perfect fidelity in understanding another person's reality is necessarily and forever beyond our reach. We are all locked up in our own skulls. We have absolutely zero way of knowing what the world feels like, seems like, even looks like, to any other human being. We can approach another person's perspective, we can grasp parts of it, we can rough it out, but we can never perfect our understanding of it. It's like calculus: we draw nearer and nearer, but we never reach precision.
That got me to thinking about seeing underwater. We see shapes and colors, but the shapes are wavy and the colors filtered. Of course, that's a pretty bad analogy for a lot of reasons: swimming goggles can minimize the effect by pushing the medium away from our eyes just a few centimeters, whereas there's no way to push away the chasm of difference that separates us. And fish do just fine with underwater sight, because their eyes are built for it. For that matter, air also distorts our vision, although not as much. It filters color as well, or the sky wouldn't be blue. So that connection really wound up more a dartboard than a springboard.
I did get a little taken with the nonreciprocity between nonidentity and age, though, because of the point from Updike that got me started. I am not the same as you, and that difference is unbridgeable. I am not the same as my younger or older self, and in one sense that difference is also unbridgeable, but in another sense, it might not be. It's nonsensical to talk about sending messages to the past; can't be done. But you can send a message to the future: in some ways, what I'm doing as I type this is exactly that. I've already gone back and read some of these older blog entries and been reminded of attitudes, opinions, powerful feelings that I held at the time, and I've watched the curve as they faded. But is that the same? Can I understand perfectly my mental state from before? Or am I making up an edited reconstruction of those moments, tainted by my changed perspective, and then fooling myself into exaggerating its precision? These previous writings, feelings, thoughts, all happened to me: can I recapture them? Heraclitus had an easy answer; I can't step into the same river twice. And an axiom of Communication is that each and every communicative encounter is unrepeatable. But is that true of intrapersonal communication? What about when a person returns to a childhood haunt, and the sights, sounds and smells bring back the feelings and the extremely vivid memories? Is that a reconstruction, or is that congruence with a former self?
That got me to thinking about God's freedom from limitation, and it occurred to me that when we say He's omnipresent, that means not just everywhere, but, as we already knew, everywhen. He's in every age, every second, every event. And what that tells me is that God is free from dimension, which limits us. Einstein had a lot to say about spacetime, about how distance is distance is distance, whether measured in separating space or in separating time. That's also true of identities, I think: from here to there, from me to an other, from now to long ago, or even one second ago.
So then, as I was walking to work, I was giving myself a dork's morning warmup by running through the labels for sense data from each of the five senses. Most people know the first two: visual, pertaining to data from your eyes, and audial, describing data from your ears. The other three make good trivia: olfactory, which is data from your sense of smell; gustatory, which comes from your sense of taste; and tactile, from touch. The interesting thing, though, is that while we refer to messages of scent as "olfactic," we change the term slightly and call messages through touch "haptic." Why the change, I wondered? And then I saw how many different words "tactile" supplies with a root: "tact," which you could define as having the right touch in an interpersonal situation that was touchy, and "tactics," referring to taking a strategy out of the planning room and onto the battlefield, where you actually touch (violently) your adversary. (Or where you deploy any strategy. It's obviously not limited to waging warfare.)
Maybe that's the way to understand the limit: we can't be perfectly congruent, we can't achieve perfect overlap, but we can touch. We can come in contact. The contact can be a full-stretch fingertips-only touch, or it can be an embrace of unconditional acceptance, or a grappling backed by strength in a bid to impose mastery. Maybe the touch metaphor is an entry point to understanding distance and the lower limit of its challenge.
This'll take more thought.
Anything taken to extremes, no matter how good, turns bad. Anything. Write it down. Memorize it. Live by it. Water is a necessity. Life can't exist without it. But there's such a thing as too much water: it's called "drowning."
Less money for government and more for taxpayers can be good news in some situations. I'll even go a step further and say, many situations. But I've spent the last two days writing angry letters to the editor over the Republican Party's downright irrational obsession with cutting taxes more and more and more.
The Republican leadership is always the first to remind the country that we're at war. But until this decade we'd never, in our entire history, cut taxes during wartime. And we certainly never did it again and again and again and again and again during wartime. That was Bush's brilliant idea, and it's near the bottom of that list. Remember soldiers with no body armor? Vehicles that couldn't withstand an IED? Have you read, heard about, or even known veterans who were denied care? When the coffers are empty, the government can't wage war, and soldiers pay with their lives, and children pay by growing up without parents, and veterans pay in pain and hunger. That cause and effect chain is as simple and inexorable as they come, and the consequences are gruesome.
And have you noticed over the past few years that the supermarket has turned into a death trap? That no sooner are spinach and tomatoes are cleared of E Coli risk than the peanut butter is laced with salmonella? Noticed that this didn't seem to happen nearly as often years ago, have you? That's because back then, we actually paid for enough food inspectors to give us a reasonable expectation of clean food! More and more, people from other countries are having to take the precautions, when they visit the United States, that Americans took for years when we visited developing countries. And it's not that we don't have the level of affluence necessary to police our food; it's just that we've got this wildly moronic idea that the more we slash taxes and hollow out government programs, the more virtuous we are. Dying of salmonella is a virtue I can cheerfully pass up.
And been on the highways lately? I wouldn't recommend sipping coffee while driving unless you want it in your lap. And before you cross an overpass, be sure your will is up to date. Can't maintain the infrastructure if we've cut taxes so near the bone that cement and iron are out of reach. Cardboard just won't cut it.
Understand me: I spent my teenage years and early twenties as a die-hard conservative. I know conservative beliefs, conservative reasoning, conservative arguments, and being a bloody fool isn't anywhere in my understanding of what constitutes a conservative. It's been a pretty unmistakable hallmark of this generation's crop of conservative leaders, but there are much better conservative ideas out there. Mindlessly baying "cut the taxes! Cut the taxes!" is not a platform, is not public service, is not anything other than an excuse not to think, not to lead, Grover Norquist be damned.
The thing about the economic stimulus package is that every minute of delay robs it of effectiveness. Another thing about it is that it already contains tax cuts! For the Republican leadership to dig in their heels and demand more, given the state of government resources, given the past eight years of ramshackle, paper-thin services under Republican budgeting, is intolerable. From 2006 to the present, they've been taking loss after loss because people are tired of having the government steered straight into the shoals, and it looks as though they need another loss, and possibly another, and another, and as much as I hate to say it, they may simply be incapable of learning any better.
I don't want that to be true. I want wise, balanced, considered government that bargains integratively and legislates creatively and finds a way to transcend difference and incorporate both sides' good ideas into the outcome. Instead, we seem to be stuck with an opposition with its needle stuck in exactly one groove, and a groove that anyone who isn't blind and brain-damaged can see is a straight road to disaster.
Get us out of this, someone. We need an opposition party that can muster some brainpower. And we need it now!
In 1994, I first joined what was then called the Speech Communication Association. I loved belonging to a nationwide professional organization that I affectionately dubbed "Ska." But in 1997, they changed the name to National Communication Association, and for a while I grieved the loss of coolness. Then, one day, the light bulb flickered on.
Someday, I want to run for second vice president of NCA. My platform will have one plank, and my vision for the convention will be straightforward. My platform will be, we should stop calling it NCA and instead call it "Nicka," and my convention theme will be, "Nicka, please!"
George Gerbner was a Communication professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and later at Temple University. He's known in my field for Cultivation Theory, which says that the contained reality inside a television engraves itself on its viewers' beliefs. People who watch a lot of television wind up with very skewed ideas about how dangerous the world is, how often people are victims of violent attack, what percentage of the population is female and/or nonwhite, and other distortions. Gerbner's team backed these claims up with a good deal of evidence, whereas what I'm writing today is pure speculation. Zero evidence backs it up, but it's a study just begging to be done. Won't be by me, but if it ever does get done, I'll hang on every word of the reported results.
TV shows have in common with movies and books the trait that they're made up of characters and plot, and characters and plot are coherent. They have a logic to them. If the dramatis personae on a show do something that's "out of character," then that becomes a complaint, a sore spot, a moment that a typical viewer might not enjoy. The exceptions, of course, are out of character acts that advance the plot, by dropping clues as to what will happen next, so even when the viewer can spot deviance, it's still of a sort that will be recombined into the larger logic of the story, just as any dissonant phrase in popular music is very likely to be resolved into the theme. And when people consume a steady diet, evening after evening, afternoon after afternoon, weekend after weekend, year after year, of coherent characters and structured plots, it really seems to me that they get the wrong idea about how life works. At the very least, they have a track of expectations hidden somewhere in the confused tangle of the mind that becomes a stumbling block to reasonable deliberation.
This is my perennial grumble, but I think I'm on to something here: my students fall into a very weird form of denial when it comes to getting their work done. They dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes, joking all the time about how awful their procrastination is, and then put themselves through unbelievable torment to try to recoup. And one of the most striking things is how utterly dumbfounded they are on those occasions when the catch-up effort fails. When I grade work and it doesn't pass, or when someone submits an assignment after the deadline and I won't accept it, I don't often see anger or anguish or other "ang" words as the first reaction. Many times I see them as a delayed, second reaction, but the first reaction is almost always puzzlement, incomprehension, utter unpreparedness for the state of affairs. It's not that they see what's happened and they're upset; it's as though they never considered this possibility in the first place, as though water were dry and gravity repelled instead of attracting.
And I'm starting to think it has something to do with overexposure to TV plots.
In TV plots, there are complications, and those build enjoyable tension and curiosity, and then there's a resolution. There's always a resolution. It might not happen this week: it might be strung out over an entire season, but good writing includes a tying up of loose ends. Something swoops in and writes an easily understood ending to the story. And if Gerbner's right that what we see about danger, and about the distribution of demographic groups among the population, primes us to expect the same patterns in real life, then it wouldn't surprise me at all if people expect their problems and challenges to follow the same trajectory: to descend, as though attracted by a strange teleological gravity, toward a solution all by themselves, even in the absence of anyone's deliberation or planning.
And, of course, life isn't life that.
The other thing is, people aren't characters. People do not have a logic that holds them together. People have, at all times, the potential to behave "out of character," and the problem is not with the people, but with the phrase "out of character." That's an attempt to rationalize our incomplete and sloppy pigeonholing of people, our forceful insistence that our perceptions are not only accurate but normative. You should behave the way I expect in all matters, large and small. That, of course, is both impossible and silly, since you can't ever fully understand my expectations and I can't ever fully grasp your motivations, but we do follow that cycle of error over and over again. We especially do it in interpreting people's nonverbals, which is something I'm attuned to right now since I'm teaching the class, but we repeat it in just about all areas.
I have one Communication major, one of my very favorites, who drops by and has lengthy talks with me, and much of them consist of variations on one theme: "I'm not like other people. I'm very complex." The second half of that theme is true: she is quite complex. But where she goes astray is with the first half: assuming that other people are not. We have a label for this: the illusion of asymmetric insight. That's the assumption that other people are easily understood, but that none of them truly and completely understands us. She puts it neatly, but she's not the only one who falls prey to it. I'm aware of it as an idea, a phrase that I can invoke to diagnose a particular tangle of thinking, but I stumble over it all the time.
The thing is, life does have an Author and a plot, but our silliness is in trying to compare the plot of life to a plot authored by a human. I know I'm a broken record, but His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. My Sunday School class is currently in Genesis, and we're coming back every week to the difference between Cain's descendants and Seth's descendants: Cain's descendants were movers and shakers who made names for themselves by their accomplishments, and Seth's descendants called upon the name of the Lord and waited patiently for the seed of the woman who would overturn the serpent's victory. So it's become a slogan for us: are you making a name for yourself, or are you calling on the name of the Lord? It's got to be one or the other, because doing both isn't an option. And that idea pops up again right here. If I know that I'm an infinitely complex character, participating in an infinitely complex plot, and the Architect of its logic has no need to round the plot off and shape it into an easily chewed and digested bite of narrative that I can fully grasp, then I have far less reason to be complacent, far less reason to trust in my own perceptions and my own judgment, and far more reason to stretch myself and at the same time fall back on my dependence on God.
Put in fewer words, if I can't figure out the story of my life, then my only other option is to walk by faith.
You've got to feel sorry for people, and inhabitants of places, whose perfectly good names suffer from associations they never asked for.
Oświęcim is a decent-sized city, between a quarter and a third the size of Eugene. I know that Poland has a long history of anti-semitism and mistreatment of Jewish people, but despite that, it just seems as though there must've been a day when people who lived in Oświęcim could claim their hometown without bracing themselves. We, of course, know Oświęcim as Auschwitz. That's not just the name of the death camp: it's the name of the city nearby. It must be a tough thing to write on a stamped envelope.
Then there's Alzheimer. Nice enough name. There aren't any Alzheimers in Eugene, but Charles and Judith Alzheimer live in Klamath Falls. But Alois Alzheimer had to go and describe this new degenerative and terminal brain disease back in 1906, and now the name has passed into the language as a heartbreaking, nightmarish, slow death sentence. And the more the epidemic takes root, the more that's got to be a constant source of cringing. Speaking of which, Dennis and Theresa Dahmer live in Portland. I imagine that's not uncomplicated either.
And the associations aren't always negative: sometimes they just plain don't fit. A few years back, I knew a young man who debated for Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He was soft-spoken, white, and within the normal range of charisma and social skill for a debater: not hopeless, but slightly on the geek side. And his name was Michael Jordan. And I'm sure that was a perfectly nice name to have when his parents gave it to him, but by the time I met him, he'd been through years of meeting new people and having to exhale hard and be patient while they got their jokes out of their system.
It's like a lightning strike or an earthquake: the kind of thing that robs you or your home of a good name just seems so wanton. You can beef up your health against illness and lock out burglars with better security, but how do you protect your name from other people's deeds?
Dear Future,Today, Barack Obama will be inaugurated. That'll happen about two and a half hours from when I'm beginning this. I'm setting down my impressions and feelings, and trying to record some of how I felt during the campaign, just because events look so different on their backside, and this, of everything that's happened in my life, feels the most like a historic turning point. (No, I don't count September 11: step outside and ask passersby how many can tell you anything at all about the Haymarket massacre.)From early in the campaign, I was confident Obama was going to win. A colleague of mine grew up in Mississippi, and then spent many years of her adult life in Tennessee, so she'd seen over and over again how violently bigotry can erupt and turn people toward irrationality. Many times she came to me and said, "You still think he'll win?" I quoted back to her from To Kill a Mockingbird: "It's not time to worry yet. I'll let you know when it's time to worry." That story ended with what looked like a defeat, but showed just a twinkle of progress, and sounded a faint prediction of future success. I hope this story doesn't end that way.It definitely could, though. Expectations are so high. That worries me. The higher they are, the more completely they shatter when they drop. This won't be a storybook presidency. The Obama team has their clumsy days. We've seen several already. He's filling pretty small shoes, so he'll look good just by his distance from the baseline, but given everything he's up against, I doubt it's enough to sustain the insanely inflated hopes of his most zealous fans.Most of my students would have absolutely zero idea why the election of John F. Kennedy was such a victory over bigotry. If they know anything about him, they know he was young, thought good-looking, had a pretty wife, was shot, and it's cool to speculate about the possibility that his assassins successfully covered up their crime and got away clean. ("They" didn't. Oswald did it, acting alone. Zero doubt.) But it would startle most of them to learn that for much of its history, the Ku Klux Klan has had three chief targets: blacks, Jews, and Catholics. It would upset them to read front page editorials from major newspapers from the teens and twenties of the last century, saying Catholics couldn't be trusted, saying the flow of Catholic immigrants should be choked off in favor of more desirable races. They would reel at some of the arguments deployed against Al Smith in his run for the presidency, and at the delicate negotiation John F. Kennedy had to carry out to become the nation's first Catholic president.And only. Almost two full generations later, there hasn't been a second.Great Britain has had its first female prime minister, as have Israel and Germany. First and only. There hasn't been a second. Breakthroughs are not normalcy. Countries can be one-hit wonders just as easily as actors can win an Oscar and then vanish. What we need is a distinguished career, a string of victories. After that happens, I'll be more ready to say we've reached an era of post-racial politics.
I took the above picture on September 7, 2007. A while back, the elder George Bush mistook September 7 for Pearl Harbor Day. Now it's looking as though what was a decent-sized rally, in a decent-sized room with a few thousand people, was a Pearl Harbor Day from the Doyle's-eye view of history: a sneak attack and a sudden reversal. It's a slightly shaky analogy, given that Pearl Harbor unleashed an extinguishing strength, whereas Obama followed the momentum of his uprising all the way to victory at the ballot box. But strength is still arrayed against him, and its recent setbacks aren't terminal; it hasn't given up or fallen asleep. The mistake, from either Obama's backers or his opponents, would be to make any claim today about race problems in this country being at an end. But as I've told students a zillion times, problems aren't licenses to panic. Problems aren't the green light to hunker down and prepare for battle. Problems are openings for solutions, and solutions can turn out to be opportunities to grow together in trust and loyalty. One of my favorite new colleagues, our new math professor, assigns problems every day, and the students don't panic or prepare for battle (ideally): they simply work the problems, identify the solutions, and move on with their newfound knowledge to tackle bigger and better problems.My colleague from Mississippi and Tennessee is downright feisty about reminding people that this isn't an ending. At least once I've heard her say, "Everyone wants to make Obama out as Moses, like this is our nation's arrival in the Promised Land!" But when Moses appeared and was elevated to leadership, that wasn't the end of the journey. All the hardest parts still lay ahead. That's where I think we are today, and I hope we don't test God's patience nearly as much as the Israelites did.When the United States gets its second African-American president, or possibly the third or fourth, and there have been a few female presidents, Latino presidents, and no one any longer pays much attention to the candidate's race or gender, then I'll concede that we've left the problem behind. The first time a toddler manages to get it in the potty, that's not the end of potty training: it may be an encouraging step forward, but until there are dry nights and accident-free days, the transition is still underway. I don't expect the end of this will happen in my lifetime, but to be honest, I'm not sure I expected this encouraging step forward to happen in my lifetime.And as I've been writing, I've tried to settle on an example of a criterion we applied to our earliest presidents, but that we've left behind and no longer apply. For a moment I thought I had one: family! In generations past, if you weren't from one of the powerful families, you had no hope of making it into the top circles of influence. It was the whole "first families of Virginia" phenomenon, and it's downright striking how many of our presidents have been distant cousins. I wanted to say we'd left that behind, but then I remembered exactly who's exiting office today. There went that argument.But so far, so good: Obama's showing signs that he's going to muddle through with better-than-average effectiveness. He's unashamed to listen, even to his opponents. He's been steering away from excess and toward pragmatism. I think we're going to need a gigantic dose of patience, and I don't think right now we're primed to be patient -- patience and fever-pitch excitement coexist pretty uncomfortably, as any small child demonstrates on Christmas Eve -- but I'm not terribly worried about the future. So to you, in the future, I can send a report of realistic, counter-inflationary guarded equanimity. I don't believe the hype, but neither do I believe the gloom and doom. And I don't believe the lies either, and I'm encouraged that a critical mass of the electorate didn't, or today we'd be inaugurating someone else.
In the field of communication, we make a big deal out of cognitive complexity. Cognitive complexity is the ability to understand the thoughts and opinions of other people. It's not the same thing as empathy, although the concepts are similar: it's understanding another person's reasoning, not their emotions. (And that's an oversimplification of empathy. But I'm going to plough ruthlessly on.)I've been reading a book the past couple of weeks that's stretched my cognitive complexity in a delightful way: Why The Jews Rejected Jesus, by David Klinghoffer. He makes a pretty thick, complex argument about the relationship between Christians and Jews, but on the way to his conclusion, he stops repeatedly to develop the support, scriptural and otherwise, for the Jewish position that Jesus was not the Messiah. And I have to say, the guy's pretty good. In isolated cases, he's downright compelling. In others, his blind spots are all over him. He complains about how Christians veer back and forth between precise readings of Old Testament prophecy and loose, metaphoric understandings, but he never seems to notice the same variation in his own references. His, of course, are part of the oral Torah, and thus are all perfectly sound interpretations. Of course. One of the big thrusts of his claim is that Christians misunderstand the Old Testament because they study it only after they've encountered the New Testament, and view it through that prism. He admits that the same in reverse is true for Jews, but since they don't regard the New Testament as meaningful in the first place, it's no great downfall to be unable to understand it.One of the places where he's downright compelling is where he goes back through some of the citations in the Gospels of Old Testament prophecy, especially from Matthew, and points out how sloppy they are. They're the worst kind of prooftexting, the kind that we would never tolerate in a Sunday School or Bible study. They pluck out two or three words, a random detail, and completely ignore the thrust of the passage. And sonofagun if he isn't absolutely correct. When I landed on that realization, it sent some ripples through my world. I haven't had any serious questions about my faith in a very long time, so the fact that he scored a hit put me in a frame of mind that I thought I'd left way, way behind.My settling down had a lot to do with a realization I arrived at over the summer, after I listened to a recording of Alan Jacobs' biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian. Jacobs drew a lot of it from Lewis' own writings, and one passage in particular focused on a span of a few months or years when Lewis made himself a regular guest at the Socratic Club, an Oxford debating society. On those occasions, he'd let the other club members lay out their arguments against God's existence, or against Christianity, and he would then swing into action and demolish them. But Jacobs reports that Lewis stopped this pretty abruptly, and wrote in his journal that every time he was able to prove something about God, he felt his faith weaken.I've thought for years, and the idea is not original with me, that God doesn't lock the door. There is room inside every scrap of proof for the determined nonbeliever to wiggle free. There is comfort and ease for the person who wants to total up all of human existence and say "Just the product of random chance." It is part of the remarkable genius of God's creation that His signature is all over it, but someone who wants to find no God in any of it can put that world together out of their perceptions, with His permission. God's position on evidence and proof is difficult to pin down. The Bible is full of good, sound reasoning, but also contains intermittent reminders that reasoning isn't going to get us everywhere we want to go. God's thoughts aren't our thoughts. Both Christ and the apostle Paul made the point that God put much truth beyond the reach of our reasoning abilities, and that things are arranged to permit us to reason our way in completely the wrong direction. In the same way a toddler doesn't have to construct syllogisms to prove that Mom and Dad will still provide food, clothing and love tomorrow, same as today, a child of God doesn't have to prove what they live by. Still, there's a proffer of proof, a teasing of proof, a taste of proof, in the case built in each of the four Gospels. And Christ almost seems to play "get away - closer" with the entire question, sometimes supplying proof, sometimes changing the subject, sometimes teaching that a desire for proof is a symptom of the problem.I think it's probably a good sign that I continue to make like Jacob and wrestle with the question. I never regard the matter as settled, because settled matters can be ignored, but an ongoing wrestling match is a magnet for attention. Not only that, but it's surely the trajectory of all branches of learning, from science to the humanities to the most obscure branches of trivia, that the most fundamental, bedrock teachings show cracks and imperfections as we learn more and build more on top of them. Those cracks just spotlight the limitations of our intelligence, the flaws in our perceptual apparatus and reasoning skills, not that truth itself has changed or become obsolete. So why should it trouble me that the proofs offered at Christ's arrival show the same slippage? And it's especially telling that these slippages point me back to relationships, to the positioning of the critic against the text. David Klinghoffer is a devotee of the Torah, so his starting assumptions will aim him in a direction from which the New Testament is going to look hostile and threatening. To him, that's a stumbling block: to me, it tells me more about him, and therefore how to love him better, and it also tells me more about the text itself. So the simple matter of interpreting the text by reading its passages against one another isn't the entirety of the enterprise.These are wandering thoughts, and I don't think there's any real likelihood that they'll cohere and quiet down anytime soon. But it's very enjoyable, especially for an argumentation dork like myself, to probe around in the crags and jags inside of my framework of reasoning and notice that something too simply called out as a flaw is actually a lesson. And I know I'm not done learning those lessons, and that I'm not anywhere near exhausting them. Probably not in this lifetime, actually.
