Naming

"I'd really, really love to name a kid Π. The problem is, he'd get away with murder, because when he got in trouble, you couldn't call him by his full name."

Me, yesterday, in a post-Sunday school conversation. One of the kids found this hilarious, and insisted that I share it with the world.

Cretins

I do not identify with the Democratic Party. I am not a registered Democrat, and have no plans to become one. I am not, today, committed to voting for Barack Obama. I desperately want John McCain to lose, and I am aware that would result in an Obama victory, but because I live where I live, my vote won't make that any more or less likely. Oregon's going for Obama by a wide margin, no matter what I do about it.

What infuriates me to the point of despair about the Democrats is how cowardly they are. Now, yesterday I wrote about Republicans' moral cowardice, which I think explains their argumentative tactics more than any genuine viciousness or belligerence: I think they've found something that works, and even though they probably find it troubling, they can't take the risk of pursuing a less certain strategy, even if the less certain strategy is the defensible one that would let them sleep easily at night. That's what I mean by moral cowardice.

The Democratic leadership's cowardice is of a different sort. They are completely bewildered by the concept of making opinion, and are petrified at the risks of so much as trying it. Instead, they have no choice but to follow it. There is not an ounce of granite anywhere in their spines, not an ounce of stubborn confidence that if they repeat the truth enough times and defy anyone to prove them wrong, that public opinion may come around.

The latest example of this is offshore drilling.

I've written about this before. The arguments for changing the law to let oil companies drill offshore are moronic. The additional oil absolutely cannot make a difference in the situation we currently face, because it can't get to the marketplace in any reasonable timespan. Nothing uncertain about that: it can't.

If being anti-drilling were a Republican position, they would put that simple fact into the echo chamber and flog it, publicly, with all their might. They would know that sooner or later, people's opinions would change. They would have the courage, the determination, the fortitude, to plough right into even a strong and fierce front of public opposition, and bend it back into opinion that supported them.

If I live to be two hundred years old, I doubt I'll ever see the Democrats pull off that kind of shaping.

They've already caved on offshore drilling, and are now trying to find the least bad, least damaging framework to open it up. Why? Because they read the poll numbers, and their cowardly little knees went to knocking. "Oh no! Those mysterious people out there who sometimes vote for us, but not very often, don't like our position on this issue! Persuade? What's that? Educate? What's that? Lead? I've never heard that word before. Our only choice is to make sure that whatever we tell them we're going to do is exactly what they want done at that specific moment!"

That, while we're on the subject, is precisely why every Democratic candidate for major office is in favor of the continued employment of capital punishment in this country. They see the numbers, and their backbones turn to water. And that is the chief deal-breaker that keeps me from voting Democrat anytime there's a Green Party candidate available. Cynthia McKinney is an exception, and one that's really complicating my decision of what to do with my vote for president -- I'm all but decided to write in Helen Prejean -- but further down the ticket, it's Green where available, case-by-case in all other circumstances.

I will say that this flaw is far more forgivable than the flaw I was chewing the scenery about yesterday evening. In some ways, it's almost encouraging. If the idea of a powerful and effective government is scary, and the idea of a rickety government that can't get its act together is somehow comforting, then everyone ought to vote Democrat every time. Not only are Democrats the party that eat their young, that run campaigns like circular firing squads, but they certainly can't take an agenda and marshal enough public support behind it to make any fundamental change.

Obama may defy that historical pattern on a few points. He may be able to talk people into seeing things differently. But I'm not encouraged by his performance on the two issues I've cited here: offshore drilling and capital punishment. He isn't putting much kick into swimming against the current. I'm afraid he's tainted by the all-pervading Democratic culture of followership. I'll need much more powerful evidence before I can muster up too much enthusiasm for the idea that he can make things different.

And to this day, I still don't think the guy's that good of a speaker. And I base my opinion on a deeper and more studied background of judging speaker effectiveness than about 99.999% of the population. Mostly, it's about the baseline expectations, and how far someone moves beyond that baseline. My baseline is, I think, different from others'.

I will be less disappointed if Obama wins than if McCain does, because I'm less opposed to an empty and repetitive charade than I am to rewarding vicious slander, thereby reinforcing it and guaranteeing its reuse in the next electoral cycle. But I still haven't caught the enthusiasm of either party, and I don't expect to.

Crevasse

I can argue like a Republican. Check this out: here's how a Republican would argue against the McCain-Palin candidacy.

Premise #1: Watch this.

Premise #2: Read for yourself what Obama wanted taught to kindergarteners. Search in the page for this phrase: "All family life courses of instruction," and then jump down to paragraph nine. Read it in its entirely, especially the parts about "touch an intimate part of another person."

Let it dawn on you that Obama wanted Kindergarteners to learn about bad touches, so they could protect themselves.

Now, if I'm a Democrat, I stop here. I've refuted another Republican lie. But I'm a Republican, remember? Of course I won't stop here.

JOHN MCCAIN BELONGS TO THE PARTY THAT GAVE US MARK FOLEY.

HE SPENT CAMPAIGN FUNDS ON A TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENT ATTACKING BARACK OBAMA FOR TEACHING KINDERGARTENERS ABOUT BAD TOUCH.

THE CONCLUSION IS CLEAR.

JOHN MCCAIN IS PRO-CHILD MOLESTATION.

NOT JUST THAT, BUT JOHN MCCAIN PERSONALLY RAPES CHILDREN. SEEN YOUR CHILD LATELY? JOHN MCCAIN IS PROBABLY RAPING YOUR CHILD RIGHT NOW.

Here's the point of what, I admit, is an incredibly tasteless post. Do you find it over the top? Do you find it excessive? Hyperbole?

Have you forgotten Susan Smith?

Have you forgotten Newt Gingrich's words to the AP, explaining what happened to her? "I think the mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick society is getting and how much we have to have change. I think people want to change, and the only way you can get change is to vote Republican."

And you did know, didn't you, that Susan Smith's stepfather was a local Republican leader, right? And that he molested her? YET ANOTHER REPUBLICAN CHILD MOLESTER. THE REPUBLICAN PLATFORM REQUIRES EVERYONE TO MOLEST THEIR CHILD EVERY HOUR ON THE HOUR OR BE PUT TO DEATH.

See? I can argue just like a Republican. Keep this in mind the next time you get tempted to say that there's no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, that all politicians lie. Ask yourself if you can even imagine Obama saying any of the kinds of things I've laid out above.

And then be honest with yourself, and ask if Republicans would hesitate for one heartbeat before they leveled charges that were that inflammatory, or even worse, based solely on the two minor, easily-explained gaffes that I pointed out above in John McCain's clumsy attack.

These are all things Republicans would say in the blink of an eye, with no twinge of conscience.

A few weeks ago, we heard about how Barack Obama was playing the race card when he referred to an image from a Republican ad. In the ad, Ben Franklin's face on the hundred dollar bill turned into Obama's. Obama mentioned, in passing, that Republicans would point out that he didn't look like the guys on the currency, which was factually 100% correct. For the next several days, all we heard was how Obama was playing the race card.

Now, all we hear is about how sexist Obama and Biden are. Not about the sexism card. Not about the McCain campaign's ineptitude in failing to vet Sarah Palin, in failing to find out about the ethics investigation, in failing to find out about her comical reversal on the Bridge to Nowhere, on failing to find out all sorts of embarrassing details. No, Obama's a sexist. Previously, when he made an objectively, factually verifiable comment, he was playing a race card. Now that he's pointing out facts, he's a sexist.

And they aren't embarrassed. They aren't capable of being embarrassed.

I have my problems with the Democratic Party. Part of me will not be pleased if they win the White House this November. But part of me is ready to say that I will no longer live in a country ruled by a party that embraces wrong, that is unashamedly vicious and dishonest. I am not idealistic about politics, but there are lines that may not be crossed, and there is wickedness that is not tolerable in a leader.

I think John McCain and Sarah Palin want, by their own understanding of the country's problems and their own proposals, to make things better. But I think they've weakened, and realized that doing wrong brings short-term advantage, and their moral cowardice has moved them to embrace that short-term advantage. And they've taken their block of voters with them. Plenty of people I would otherwise respect and think of fondly, I get closer and closer to hating. This resentment can't fester forever. The Democrats can't be the adults, the party that chooses decency, the party that stops at the line, forever.

For most of the twentieth century, the white supremacists took every vicious, violent, dishonest, and wrong advantage they could to keep nonwhite folks out of any position of power. When the dam broke, it broke violently. And I just can't believe Republicans can't see what they're storing up for themselves. They are brewing up a broth of hatred, and immersing themselves in it, thinking they'll always be safe. I keep telling myself, they can't be that foolish. They can't. There are limits. They just can't.

But maybe they can. They did, after all, elect George W. Bush, and then return him to office for a second term.

He was incompetent. Utterly unequal to the office. In hindsight, that's open-and-shut, and no longer a matter of opinion. It wasn't that he was stupid, because he wasn't; but it was flat true that he was stubborn, self-satisfied, and incurious. A competent president must question himself. That simply isn't a hard idea to understand. Bush refused to do so, so Bush was unfit to be president. I said this, over and over and over and over and over again, in 2000. I have never been so right in my life. And it has never felt worse. I said it again in 2004. Right again, overruled again, should've listened to me again. Being Cassandra sucks.

Three times in a row is not tolerable.

Robert Lifton has written several books explaining how doctors who practiced in Germany during the Nazi years could break down every principle they ought to have embraced, to silence their consciences so much that they could be concentration camp operatives. He's talked about the kind of disconnect, the kind of dual consciousness, that made such choices tolerable. And I am convinced that perfectly intelligent, perfectly principled Republican friends and associates of mine have given in to exactly that kind of mental disconnect. If they ever stopped to really associate the words, the attacks, the decisions, with themselves, they'd be too appalled to continue one more second. But as long as they can convince themselves that it's all some sort of semi-real game, some sort of fake Monopoly money and Monopoly speech and Monopoly debate and Monopoly ideas and Monopoly smears and Monopoly slanders, it's all okay, all the game pieces go back in the box, and the next morning everyone is friendly again.

That will not work forever.

That won't even work one more time. The time for that has passed.

I am already at the end of my rope, and I am a born-and-raised Texan. I have all the reason in the world to feel fondness and patience toward the Republicans in my circle. But this is no longer something I can wink at. This has crossed the line.

It's too late for John McCain to clean up his act and run the kind of campaign he promised. He simply has to lose. If he wins the presidency, then this nation has lost its soul, has violently flung aside everything that made it special.

McCain once opposed torture, saying that torture strikes not only to the very heart of right and wrong, but to the very heart of who we are. When he said it, his words delighted me, because in my academic work I've been building for years on a core idea that ethics aren't a set of rules, but are a set of identity elements that tell us who we are. But as part of the image overhaul he carried out on himself to quiet the fears of the Republican base, McCain has even backed off from his anti-waterboarding position, and now apparently no longer cares who we are, or whether we're throwing away who we once were.

And that is not tolerable.

He has to lose.

In a landslide.

Creativity

Two good political one-liners I've heard lately:

"Sarah Palin's not the pig -- she's the lipstick."

"Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a governor."

Credentials

As a professor of Communication, I am prepared to say, for the record, that anyone who takes six years and five colleges to earn a bachelor's degree in Communication is not president material. Or even vice president material.

That is all.

Remission

So today, I got to thinking about the contour of ignorance.

And this is not an excuse to bash other folks. I'm talking only about my own ignorance.

Lots of folks wonder about the future. I can't say I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I believe I've reached my very own "End of History," as Francis Fukuyama might say. He was naïve to say it when he did, and maybe I'm equally naïve, but all I'm really saying is that the future isn't that interesting to me. Instead, I wonder about what I don't get.

A lot of folks wonder what tomorrow will bring. If they just hold their horses long enough, they find out. Even quadriplegics in a persistent vegetative state make it to tomorrow in no more than twenty-four hours. It's a singular stream with a single current and fewer surprises than we like to pretend there are.

What interests me more is what I don't get.

I notice that a lot of folks oversimplify matters that I know to be complicated. Here, in Oregon, when people find out I'm from Texas, they oversimplify what Texans think, believe, experience. People of just about any political stripe oversimplify their opponents. People who are scared of any discrete group oversimplify their motives, ideas, behavior. People who aren't sure how to tackle a problem are often the first to oversimplify its essence and the proper solution. And, of course, me being an academic and all, I have this terrible bent toward spotting the complexity in things, sometimes needlessly, so all those oversimplifications stand out to me like signal flares at midnight. Hazard of the trade.

But what I've noticed is, for any human experience, there are those who level it down to something manageable and comforting, and there are those who grapple with it in its endless complexity, usually because they have no other choice. And as I see people around me respond cluelessly to others, to situations, to phenomena, I wonder what it is that I'm clueless about. I have absolutely zero doubt that I have many, many clueless spots; I'm just unsure what they are.

I've taught my students for years that whatever opinions they have about culture, and the typical habits and behaviors of other national/ethnic/racial groups, I can identify another group who has the same reaction to them. A lot of my students are Caucasian and sheltered, so they sometimes report that they think African-Americans are belligerent, hostile, abrasive, and otherwise discomforting. And it startles them when I tell them that some Japanese folks would regard them with identical discomfort, finding them too aggressive, too belligerent, too likely to invade their space, be uncomfortably direct, show overt hostility when it wasn't called for, etc. Instead of thinking of themselves as an endpoint against which others' behavior ought to be measured, what I want them to understand is that they occupy a spot on a continuum, and there are people groups in spots on either side of them.

That truth strikes me as powerful enough that I'm pretty certain that others have much greater insight than I do into the very moments of other people's cluelessness that attract my attention. My gut tells me that the simple distinction between cluelessness and savvy actually conceals an identical geometry of situatedness: I'm not the enlightened one; I'm just further along the spectrum than some, while not as far as others. And I'm sure I display my cluelessness to those others.

My instincts tell me that those who have direct experience can claim a certain gold standard of authentic understanding, but in my less sure moments, I doubt even that is true. People who are outside observers can chip in yet another kind of wisdom, yet another stream of clues, which put experience into its proper perspective, while those who actually live through the experience, who distill it out of their sense data and interpretive filters, are actually at a disadvantage in understanding what their memories have recorded. If I were to sketch a Johari window, I'd now be talking about the blind self.

And the interesting thing about cluelessness is that it's much more multivariate and multidimensional than the future. As I said earlier, the future emerges from the present, even if sometimes we completely overlook the elements of the present that converge to create that future. But overcoming ignorance isn't a simple forward motion. Instead, I think of it as a point in endless space, from which there is the opportunity to push outward, as light from a candle, propagating in all directions. I can be clueless, I can have potential to overcome my limits, in empathy, in aesthetics, in reasoning, in prediction, in ethics, in grasp of natural forces, in any of a literally unbounded set of types of knowledge. The possibilities sprint out in front of my imagination, even in its most febrile explosions.

It's a lot more interesting than the future. And besides, there's no need to worry about tomorrow. Today has evil enough of its own.

Burn Down The Mission

So tonight I watched Rick Warren's Civil Forum on webcast.

John McCain makes it all sound so simple, doesn't he?

Barack Obama's answers to the questions weren't nearly as fluent as McCain's. Obama was very careful with the words he chose. And that was true for every question, not just the questions for which anyone could've predicted that McCain's answer would please the crowd more than his. He weighed his words for the entire hour, and he often cautioned that there weren't simple formulas under which the decisions would make themselves.

McCain, to almost every question, had an answer that would fit on a bumper sticker.

This is nothing new.

Understand, I was once a hard-core, far-right conservative. In 1979, when I was in fifth grade, I made up my own pro-Reagan flyers and handed them out. I chose Baylor for college, thinking, among other things, that I'd fit right in politically. And six years later, when I left, I'd done a complete pendulum swing, and it was because of exactly what I saw tonight in the contrast between McCain and Obama. I'd realized that the scale of the problems that the president and Congress address gives them a density of complication that absolutely rules out reduction to slogans. I might forgive a parent for explaining these things to very young children in short words and sentences, but the president of the United States is not my parent and I am not a child.

Now, I will admit, some of the difference I saw tonight had to do with the questions, the questioner, and the venue. Rick Warren's questions were always going to be a downhill fight for McCain and an uphill fight for Obama. Everyone knew that. Points to Obama for braving it, and points to McCain for visiting the NAACP convention this year, after Bush boycotted it for the first umpteen years of his political career. Very rarely is a speaking situation, or an audience, a level playing field. Part of McCain's fluency and part of Obama's caution had to do with the tilt of the subject matter. But that was far from all of it.

The Republican Party is running on a long historical cycle of providing easy answers. The Democrats have, for this century and much of the last, been the party that described problems as multivariate and complex, and offered cautious, complex responses that were often not very comforting. That, I think, is what we saw tonight out of McCain and Obama. Nothing has changed. The parties are playing to type.

And after the last eight years, it just dumbfounds me that anyone on earth can still find simple solutions attractive. What is it going to take? How many ham-handed, clumsy moves are going to have to blow up in our face before we accept that perhaps governing this country is harder than it looks? That a governing strategy can't fit into five words, and if someone manages to do it, then what they've just produced isn't substance, but spin? Is the past five years of the Bush administration not enough to show people that incompetent government by the incurious and the unprepared, by people who are caught off guard by what they didn't stir themselves to think about, has real consequences? Consequences that don't go away overnight?

In my darker moments, I sometimes think very hateful thoughts. I think thoughts that prominently include the word "stupid," repeated over and over again. I compare people who would swallow this kind of appeal to dog food. To furniture. To breakfast cereal. To a bag of hammers. To dirt. Brain damaged dirt. But once my frustration cools off, I remember once again how wrong I am to think such things.

It's not stupidity, it's fear.

The electorate puts me in mind of a cancer patient. Barack Obama fits the role of a skillful, educated and supremely ethical doctor. The very best doctors, when talking to cancer patients, have to dance their way through a minefield. They have to accentuate the positive, but it's horribly wrong, even wicked, to eliminate the negative. They have to hedge, they have to point out risks, they have to admit what isn't understood. Their ethics require that they seek out informed consent. That, I assert, is what Obama had to offer tonight: a diagnosis. Diagnoses aren't clear-cut, because human bodies are unpredictable and idiosyncratic, and treatment is often painful, carries risks, and bears no guarantee of success.

John McCain is a pharmaceutical sales rep. He's got some pills to sell. His claims about the pills are power-worded. Whether he's right or not, and even if in the back of our minds we know that the doctor is probably closer to the truth, it's very appealing for us to think about swallowing a pill and watching all that bad, scary cancer just vanish as the magic medicine spreads through us and wipes it out like an eraser. We want to believe it. And so many Americans have talked themselves into a defeatist funk when it comes to understanding any of these issues, or either party's position on them, that investing the discipline to make a truly rational decision seems to them to demand a much higher cost than they think they can afford.

I used cancer patient as my example, rather than any other ailment, because I've known too many cancer patients who let fear, frustration and the temptation of despair turn them to irrational silliness: "alternative" medicine that amounted to voodoo. People whose fear is that powerful may as well be drowning. They'll grab at the explanation that ends in more hope, no matter how transparently foolish it may be.

I still have nagging, stubborn, possibly even indelible objections to Barack Obama's bid for my vote. But I am not on the fence when it comes to who is making the stronger case. I still expect I'm going to write someone in. But I have no illusions about what John McCain is doing. As much as his negative ads aggravate me, after he made lofty promises to stay entirely away from such campaigning (and while he makes the jaw-dropping claim that his campaign hasn't been negative), that's not my biggest grievance with his argument set. My biggest gripe is with its dishonest, violent, condescending simplicity.

Intermission

To teach by Socratic
Is enthymematic.

Commission

So this morning, I got to thinking about the geometry of emendatory claims. Partly, this comes out of my academic work, and partly it comes out of yesterday's Sunday school lesson.

Yesterday, the Sunday school lesson was over Genesis 1. From about verse 4 to the end of the first chapter, God does a lot of dividing: light from dark, dry land from water, water above from water below, vegetation and animals each into their own kind, and so forth. One of the points I made was that a lot of the Old Testament is based on an understanding of God as the One who decrees boundaries. We then talked about Christ's critique of the Pharisees, about His complaint that their traditions had entirely missed the point of the Torah, and I explained it this way: whenever parents lay down boundaries for their kids' behavior, what do the kids immediately do? One person said "Cross them!" That was somewhat true, but another person had an answer I liked better: "Push them." If you tell kids, "This is the line between what is permitted and what will get you in trouble," they will become loophole-seeking missiles. They will edge closer and closer to the line, displaying amazing creativity at cooking up circumstances that the original line didn't enclose, doing as much as they can get away with without being demonstrably outside the line. And the Talmudic hyperinterpretation of the Torah strikes me as exactly the same thing: we obsess over the precise square nanometer of territory that is bad territory, ostensibly so that we can stay off it and on the safe space. And Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees, "Instead of killing entire forests to overanalyze the point at which you move outside God's will, why not work on being in the center of His will?" And an interesting corollary: in Genesis 1, all those boundaries and divisions that God made corresponded to natural laws, but throughout the Gospels, Jesus broke natural law whenever He had a reason to do so, and promised us that anyone could ask God to suspend natural law, even to make mountains fly through the air, and if we were within His will, He would grant those requests. So here too, the boundaries don't matter nearly as much as the center.

The analogous tidbit from my academic work goes something like this: in too many professional fields, one of the biggest problems is finding an effective way of teaching ethics to new initiates. One big, glaring flaw in the prevailing understanding of ethics is exactly what I've described above: too many people understand ethics only as a line between the conduct that is ethical and the conduct that is unethical. Unethical conduct brings consequences: punishment, loss of status, even just internalized guilt. Therefore, people rationalize and hair-split and plead special circumstances to try to dodge the injury of being judged unethical. Instead, a lot of folks say, we ought to stop thinking of ethics as a floor of behavior below which we must not fall, and think of it instead as a ceiling, as a body of ideas to which we aspire. Instead of being afraid of ethics charges, we ought to hope someday that we can be fully ethical. Instead of worrying about drifting too near the edges, we ought to turn our attention to how to reach the center. And that turn of thought is tied a great deal to identity, to thinking of proper behavior as tied in with who we are. When we treat ethics only as a raised guillotine, we apply it to our conduct, and we have all sorts of incentives to dissociate that conduct from ourselves. But instead of dissecting my sentences to argue that something I said was not technically a lie, maybe I should turn my treatment of truthfulness around and say instead that I want to be, to myself and others, an honest person, so I want to go the extra mile and sacrifice expediency to carve myself into that shape.

To take that back to Biblical teachings, it seems plain to me that a wrong understanding of what God expects is a fear of judgment of individual deeds, and a proper understanding is that He expects us to embrace an identity as His children, as followers and loyalists of His. And that's a completely different strategy for daily life. I don't want to be near the edges, I don't want to keep my attention focused on a floor that I'm in danger of falling through. Instead, I want to dig in deeper toward the center, to stretch higher toward completeness, all the while knowing that anytime I make any progress, it's because my stretching pleases Him, and He gives me, as a gift, what brings me nearer.

Omission

So this is part two of what I wrote about yesterday. I got carried away by the momentum of a rant, and I left out entirely the bit of an idea that had originally spurred me to write.

I'm definitely not sold on Barack Obama, and the chief reason is the capital punishment deal-breaker I mentioned yesterday. He's reluctant, he supported the moratorium in Illinois, he thinks it should be reserved for the "most heinous" crimes, but that's simply not enough. I'm over a decade into refusing to vote for candidates who support capital punishment, and it doesn't feel right to abandon that just because the Greens were lame-brained enough to nominate an utterly unacceptable candidate. The other day, it struck me that I could write in Sister Helen Prejean, or something. But what interests me most is one of the little eddying dynamics that McCain's line of attack may be generating. He's making Obama actually look more acceptable as a president than I'd previously found him. It's not going to overcome my big issue, but I suspect it might actually win Obama more votes than it loses him. Here's why I think that.

Obama does, indeed, have a problem with seeming too good to be true, and for that reason he sets off a lot of people's healthy skepticism. We've been through enough rounds of highly respected, highly accomplished, seemingly upstanding and virtuous public servants tumbling from their pedestals, especially in the past few years, that the arrival of someone with as many obvious plusses as Obama is bound to make people brace themselves, to snap into place as the first chapter of a depressingly familiar story. But McCain's charges against him, most of them venial, (and I almost wrote "niggling," before deciding that would be a really unfortunate choice of words) actually serve to give him a third dimension, to help him step off the page and into reality. They give him balance. And they give me this feeling of relief: if those are his downsides, I can live with them.

I've seen this kind of thing happen with the hiring of new faculty members. During the interview process, and for the first few days, new folks are on their best behavior; they guard against letting any trace of their character flaws slip out. But after the honeymoon's over, after the first impression is made, then they settle in and get broken in, and you start to see them at less than their best, and that's the phase at which I hold my breath: is this going to be a nightmare colleague, or is this going to be an occasionally annoying, once-in-a-while disorganized, on-certain-issues clueless, human being? Once I've seen most of the weaknesses they're carrying, almost all the time I wind up telling myself "This isn't so bad. This is a lovable person, flaws and all." On a handful of occasions, that's not been the case, and the person's downside is something I really can't live with: an explosive and violent temper, or a constant cycle of playing people against one another, or a deeply-rooted contempt for the students, etc. But that's uncommon.

I've heard about Obama that he's ambitious, and sometimes climbs over people to get to his next strategic foothold. True, I find that pretty unattractive, but I also find it pretty unattractive that surgeons, some of them, actually enjoy the sight of blood. I think that's downright creepy. If I knew it was true of someone who was in the room with me, I really think I'd find an excuse to get up and leave. But when I apply a coldly rational perspective to it, it becomes clear that this is not only a helpful trait for a surgeon, but is almost a necessity. I don't suppose they have to like blood, but they've got to be unbothered by it. And in the same way, out of the universe of all presidential candidates who will ever exist, I defy anyone to conceive of one who was free from ambition, one who didn't have to juggle an incredibly complicated, nationwide, web of relationships, and therefore to downplay closeness to some people when the larger objective demanded it. I don't like to think of friendships and working relationships being moved around a chessboard like that, but anyone who thinks they can explain to me how a person can go from anonymous to nominee to the Oval Office without doing it is welcome to try. I don't think it's possible.

I've heard that Obama's inexperienced, and I think he's already had the best answer to that: Rumsfeld and Cheney were two of the most experienced members of the Bush administration, having served at the top level of the executive branch as far back as the nineteen seventies, but the work product they left behind is not exactly anything to brag about.

I truly wonder if McCain wouldn't have been better off putting all, and I mean all, of his focus on answering the question, "What does a McCain presidency have to offer this country?" The fact that Obama was a pretty picture, but utterly two-dimensional, could have helped McCain out a lot, but only if he called as little attention as possible to it. Yesterday, I was listening to NPR in the evening, and they played a clip of Obama responding to the past couple of weeks of McCain attacks, and I thought his response was pitch-perfect: "That's the best you can do?" That's exactly how I feel. That's the best you can do? That's all you found? You put your best strategic heads together, and you came up with a comparison to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? Wouldn't putting that airtime into your own strengths as a war hero, as a multi-decade leader in national security, as the one who wrote the textbook on crossing party lines and speaking painful truths to one's own party, have been a better investment?

Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre about the impossible hurdle that horror writers face: you can make the unseen terror more and more nightmarish, more and more blood-chilling, but sooner or later you have to throw the door open and show it, and then you lose every time, because the reader (or audience member) will say "That's scary all right, but imagine how scary it could have been." You throw open the door to show a ten foot tall cockroach, and the reader says "That's horrible, but what if it was a hundred feet tall?" I don't think the analogy applies perfectly to politics, because there are plenty of imputed horrors that do stick, and are deal-breakers, and that do sink a candidacy, but in this case I really think that's what's happening. The charges against Obama are irritating, if true, but on the scale of presidential failings that could doom a candidate, they're pretty piddly, and that may have something of a boomerang effect of making him less of an image, less of a carefully manicured brand, and more of a recognizable human being, complete with body odor and morning breath and the occasional bad mood. Those things aren't damning; they're the sharp details that transform a photograph into a presence.

Transmission

To begin with, I'm not sold on Barack Obama. Now, I lived in Texas long enough, and had enough frothing at the mouth Republican friends whose world apparently was populated only by allies and nemeses, that I know some folks reading this will find that hard to believe. (Plenty of my Republican Texas friends didn't fall into that category at all, by the way, and more than a few were sharp and sophisticated enough that they could mix it up with me and leave me very hard pressed to defend what I thought. That was fun. But there was no shortage of the other kind of Republican as well. Plus, there are tons of lame-brained Democrats, and besides that, I'm the furthest thing from a party-identified Democrat. Is that enough disclaimers to soothe any stung feelings? I hope so, because this parenthetical already feels like the end of a pharmaceutical commercial; I should be reading it really quickly under my breath and saying "See your doctor at once.")

Okay. So I'm not sold on Barack Obama. A long time ago, I stopped voting for Democrats because they continued to support capital punishment, which is absolutely indefensible. That's an act of moral cowardice on their part for which I can't forgive them. I don't like the fact that Republican candidates tend not only to tolerate capital punishment, but to be downright gung-ho about it, but at least that's a logical output of their views on related subjects, so I won't call it moral cowardice. They aren't in a position that ought to lead them to the conclusion that it should be rejected, mistaken though their position is, so I'm not as down on them as I am on the Democrats. I'm still more likely to vote for a lump of goose poop than your typical Republican, but I'm not as griped at them.

Two paragraphs in a row have drifted off into fairly nonessential background. Let's see if I can keep this one on track. I'm not sold on Barack Obama. But, I must admit, I think a lot more highly of the arguments he's making for his candidacy these days than I do for McCain's arguments. It's a hazard of the trade: whenever I encounter arguments for or against any position, part of me makes like an Olympic judge and gives them a score, or, more accurately, like a restaurant critic, and gives them a thumbs up or a thumbs down based on their flavor.

McCain needs to exercise some quality control on his arguments, because, oh sweet mashed potatoes and gravy, they're getting downright awful.

"Obama looks too presumptuous. He thinks he's the president already. He's the messiah." There you go. A big segment of the electorate, quite possibly enough of a critical mass to swing it, will decide not based on their rational deliberations, but based on a gestalt, affective impression of the candidate. Plus, one curiously reliable explanation of voter behavior laid out by a German scholar named Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann says that voters don't fear a bad outcome to their decision; they only fear an unpopular commitment. They don't necessarily vote for the candidate they want, but rather for the candidate they think will win, because they don't want to cast their vote for the losing candidate and thus experience the wave of social isolation that comes from knowledge that the majority of one's neighbors disagree. That was a convoluted sentence, but a simpler way of putting is that people don't want to commit to a decision that the majority of people around them wouldn't agree with, and that desire to make popular decisions is more powerful than what we think of as an ideal voter's decisionmaking processes. You might wrinkle your nose and say "That can't be right," but Noelle-Neumann can cite some otherwise inexplicable election results to make a powerful case for her model.

So what? Well, so it's pretty danged dumb for McCain to pursue this line of argument about "He's too adored, the crowds are too big, anytime there's a swing of voter sentiment this large and this sudden, it has to be a fad," because every time he or one of his people or one of his commercials repeats it, the opening premise of that argument hammers home the fact that Obama is extraordinarily popular. "He's drawing too large of a crowd, which is bad because ... " is a doomed argument, because that opening observation does all the damage that's going to get done: not to Obama, but to McCain.

Two other McCain arguments make my head hurt. The first one is off-shore drilling. This beaut is as much of a winner as his gas tax holiday from a couple of months back. Yes, people are concerned about gas prices. Yes, it's a pocketbook issue that's on everyone's lips. But as we always told our novice debaters, you do not throw out a bad argument and hope people are too stupid to see through it. There's a fair debate to be had over whether offshore oil drilling is a good idea or not. I know what I think on the matter, but the technology does continue to improve, and I'd be willing to listen and hear that case made. But what's simply not open to question is that offshore oil drilling cannot, and I mean cannot, and let me emphasize cannot, do anything about oil prices in any time horizon that has anything to do with anyone's well-being. We're talking over a decade before that oil makes it to a customer, and that's the verdict of oil industry analysts, not those crazy kelp-hugging surfer hippies. And I'm quite confident, or perhaps I should say hopeful, that our petroleum-usage ten years from now won't look anything at all like it does today; if it does, that's a damning failure on our part. Taking a step to insure we'll have enough oil in 2020 is something like taking a step, back around 1970, to make sure we'd have enough asbestos for all our building needs: stupid, blind, irrational. But even if reasonable people can disagree on that, there's no room for reasonable disagreement on the fact, the fact, the fact, that a big spurt of petroleum that's over a decade away means zero to the problem of gas prices. Is anyone reading this enough of a clown to assert that you know today what the pricing situation will be with gasoline over ten years from now? No sane person thinks they can make any reliable prediction about what it'll be ten minutes from now. It's like taking one look at your newborn son, and sending off the measurements for his prom tuxedo. Dumb. And an argument can be both dumb and appealing, and dumb/appealing arguments can make a temporary difference, but the simple fact is that a whole lot more information circulates through the electorate than in years past, and that information wears down the dumb/appealing arguments, and leaves behind a sediment of distrust.

Speaking of a sediment of distrust, I'll keep what I have to say about the other bad McCain argument pretty brief. McCain says Obama canceled a visit to an American military base in Germany because he couldn't take cameras along. That is a damned lie. McCain's people publicly cite three sources for the claim, and all three say they never said anything of the kind. Lies are the worst arguments of all, because the truth is like the Furies; it's implacable, and it will eventually incinerate the lie that occluded it. And in this instance, it's more than halfway done with the job. And lies are like meth: a very brief boost, and a whole lot of collateral damage left behind.

For the past two presidential elections, I've voted Green: Nader/LaDuke, and then Cobb/LaMarche. I'd do so again, but they nominated Cynthia McKinney, who is, to put it mildly, a clown. I don't mind her race, I don't mind her gender, but I do mind the loose and jangly condition of her brain cells. She has a track record of blindingly dumb behavior. No way in the world I'll cast my precious endorsement for her to take on the authority of the Oval Office. I am not that reckless, and I do not hate my country enough to do that. I hope no one does. So does that mean I'm going to have to hold my nose and vote Obama, or else sit out? That's something I'm struggling over. I think McCain is taking wild hail-Mary shots, because he sees this election as a big ol' boat that can only turn slowly, with a lot of advance notice. I suspect McCain's arrangement of the tempo of this campaign includes a lot of outrageous charges right now, and a lot of offense and a lot of friction, and when he's opened up (he hopes) enough of a crack in Obama's strengths, then he can mellow out and devote more of his message to the kind of campaign he promised he'd run at the beginning. The problem is, his charges aren't just outrageous, but are actually clumsy. I've heard professional athletes in a dozen sports tell stories of playing against someone who has them hopelessly outclassed in strength, size, or any other important trait, and they say they've got nothing to lose, so they swing for the fences instead of playing it safe. That's all very fine and well, but swinging wildly, swinging with one's eyes shut, isn't an improvement over playing it safe. And if it gets too late in the campaign and this kind of thing continues, at a certain point it becomes earth-scorching; just a bitter, purposeless raging against the pain of losing. Hillary came perilously close to that, and I hope McCain's decency will assert itself in time to turn him aside from it. I don't see his arguments getting him where he wants to go. I haven't yet decided where my vote's going, but he's certainly not making any headway in winning it with his current message.

Transformation

Oh, all right. I'll write something in English.

The other day, I either heard or read something about Christian culture, and it got me to thinking about the glide path of transcendent passion. "Christian culture," as explained by the person who brought it up, referred to carrying out certain acts, habits, enforcing certain rules, that would be a logical product of Christianity, while not attending church or believing that faith in Christ was necessary for salvation. Someone who found teachings like "turn the other cheek" appealing, enjoyed the odd contemporary Christian artist, felt a little swell of good feeling if they saw a cross or other Christian symbol displayed in public, might be an acculturated Christianoid, but might keep an actual relationship with Christ at arm's length.

That got me to thinking about Judaism, and its status today not only as a belief system, but as an ethnicity and a culture. The effect, if not the purpose, of the laws of kashrut, has been, throughout history, to keep its practitioners a community separate from their neighbors. Orthodox Jews who keep kosher can't partake of a meal prepared in a kitchen used by people who don't keep kosher, even if the food itself is marked with kosher symbols: the ovens, the dishes, even the dishwasher may introduce contaminants. And when people can't exchange visits, their ability to build two-way friendly relationships based on equality is severely stunted. A fair number of rabbis point to this explicitly, and assert that it is part of their reason for existence that Jewish people are to be set apart. The strong prohibition against outmarriage is another factor in making Jewish people a carved out pocket that stubbornly resists assimilation. "Assimilation" is a dirty word to such folks, as a matter of fact.

The funny thing is, I've known a fair number of Jewish folks who identify Judaism as their heritage, their community, the people with whom they're most comfortable, and all or nearly all claim to be atheists. I remember, when I was younger and saw things more black and white, that I thought "atheist Jew" had to be an oxymoron, since one element in the definition of "Jew" was belief in one and only one God, the God of Moses and Abraham. Now I know better. Until recently, though, I would not have thought that such a thing existed within Christianity: an atheist Christian. And a big part of my heart rebels at the stretching of that label to cover people who bear such traits.

What that's got me thinking about now is the curve that this seems to follow: the Israelites were bonded together into a devout, tightly-knit nation whose norms were powerful and strictly observed, as a result of a number of founding and re-founding events in which G-d showed His love for them. Then the rabbis took over, and with the apparent intent of training such devout people to express their love in a more and more perfect way, they explained the Torah to death in the Talmud, and the institutionalization of worship ran amok. Today, respect for the Talmud is based in some part on its place in tradition, its status as a link with the past, and in some cases the extremely distant past: a lot of folks who put stock in its teachings would explain that it has passed the test of time, that it's something that endures in a world that changes too rapidly. But they can feel this way, and at the same time not believe that there is, or ever was, a G-d.

And it worries me that this path is being cleared, one inch at a time, for the Gospel. It's being re-explained, re-invented, re-packaged in more clever illustrations and analogies, catechized into more formulas, pinned down and chloroformed into more and more sermon helps, codified into more sub rosa orthodoxies, and it's getting easier and easier to "do Christianity" on autopilot, by recipe, and in so doing extinguish the joy and the passion and the transformation.

One symptom I'll single out for concentrated griping, and it's one that I've disliked for a long time: the "This is a Christian nation" crowd, who want to stick the Ten Commandments on the walls of public buildings and pick fights over adult-led prayer in K-12 schools. Talk about freezing up Christ's love for us in institutions! Talk about picking a battle that doesn't amount to pocket change in the big picture. An image of the Ten Commandments isn't magic. It isn't like the special effects Ark from a Spielberg movie. It doesn't give off any kooky kind of God-radiation that smites down evildoers. It's just flippin' ink on paper, or, if they ponied up extra cash, notches carved in rock. When people hide it in their heart, and become aware of their sin because of it, then yes, God's word is powerful; when animated by the Holy Spirit and put in motion to convict people of their wrongdoings, it's miraculous. But fetishizing it is an exercise in Christian culture, not growing nearer to Jesus. My proof? All the folks who think the Bible is a great book of teachings, whether or not anyone named Jesus ever lived in the first place. No shortage of those.

I'm positive none of this is original with me. But lately it's been falling squarely within my gaze, and it worries me. We are equally good at producing carbon dioxide and institutions, which is to say that both are by-products of our everyday, unconscious activity. In an MBA class I taught last Spring, we talked several times about how business leaders are always trying to bottle and reproduce revolutionary change, and how impossible it is to do so. When the Holy Spirit works the miracle of faith in a heart deadened by sin, and that heart turns to Christ and believes, that's something revolutionary. When we try to bottle that, to freeze it, to photograph it, we take a step on the path that the rabbis followed in producing the Talmud. And I suspect Jesus would call that the wide path, and encourage us to take the narrow one instead.

Transition

So at this point I've got Jesus beat by six years.

Thirty-nine is thirteen times three, so I'm in for the good luck trifecta.

When I was a kid, before all this newfangled cable and satellite nonsense, we got five channels on our TV: the three networks, public television, and just one independent station. And that independent station was, yes, channel thirty nine. And that's me. Independent. Unmarried plus eccentric equals independent. See? My snooty colleagues aren't the only ones who can do that highfalutin' math thing.

1939 is the year World War Two started. Note to self: find a pretext to invade Poland.

It's also the greatest year in the history of the American film industry. The Best Picture nominees that year were Dark Victory, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, and the winner was Gone with the Wind.

When the Israelites had been wandering in the wilderness for thirty nine years, they were almost to the promised land.

There are thirty-nine islands in the Cyclades archipelago in the Aegean sea. Only twenty-four are inhabited. Can't say if I've fully inhabited twenty-four years so far.

And, last but not least, this is the last birthday before the fortieth. I imagine that one will take some getting used to. This feels more like the last day of summer vacation. (Which, come to think of it, isn't that far off.)

Relationships

So it was February of 1991, and I was in Chicago, debating at the Northwestern tournament, and something unexpected happened. We were debating a team from Boston College, Craig Cerniello and Darren Schwiebert, who, to be frank, were better than we were. Not that there was any shortage of teams about whom that could've been said. And I should mention that by "we," I mean myself and Robert Scott McWilliams, current whereabouts unknown to me. We were affirmative. It was an affirmative that Rod Phares had dreamed up over Christmas break, concerning China and ozone depletion. Those details don't matter. My confidence had taken some stout blows from recent events. I don't think that mattered much either. It was round one, and we had a mediocre judge whom I won't name, since I just called that judge mediocre and this is an open blog, but a judge who knew us and had been very good for us before. Still, we were getting pretty clearly thrashed. It wasn't bad to the point of embarrassing, but it wasn't a debate anyone should have a hard time deciding. Something happened between the second negative rebuttal (Cerniello) and the second affirmative rebuttal (me):

I suddenly understood debate.

No angel choirs, no "click" in my head, nothing overt. I wasn't sitting under a banyan tree, and I didn't come up with any eightfold path. I just, all of a sudden, understood that all these zillions of different arguments that I was trying to take care of, like chasing drops of mercury after a spill, weren't zillions of arguments after all. It was all one big argument. It was one coherent whole.

I can put that into words today, and I could've put it into words before that day. Millions of times I'd had coaches tell me that the smart debating was about understanding the relationship between all the issues. I knew that. I could say those words. Doing it, though, was much more difficult. I'd been trying for years, which probably explains why I was such an unsuccessful debater. No false modesty there: year after year, I truly stunk. But in this round, all of a sudden, it wasn't a zillion little arguments anymore: just one. It was something like those Magic Eye 3d pictures, even though I've never yet gotten one of those to work. Maybe tomorrow I suddenly will, and that'll change my life again.

I think that may have been the single lesson that made all of my ten years as a debater (first debate in 1982, last in 1992) worth it. And it knocks me for a loop that I completely left this out of the study I'm currently hammering into shape about the effects that a debate career have on the skill set of someone who goes on to be an educator.

It absolutely changes every conversation. It's especially handy in the classroom, because I can hold an entire lesson in my head as one big set of interwoven claims, held together by relationships. If a student is having trouble with one concept, it's really easy for me to step out, grab the bigger picture, and use it to explain that one trouble spot to the student. It also comes up in meetings a lot: I find that I have an easy time asking, "Is this really where our trouble is? Are we really dealing with the issue, or are we spinning our wheels?" I can do that because I've got a good protection against tunnel vision.

Another study that someone ought to do someday would investigate whether former debaters are inoculated against sound-bite political strategies. In particular, the study ought to examine the relationship between success in debate and resistance to that kind of tactic. Plenty of debaters can handle lots and lots of separate statements, just like keeping lots of balls in the air. But the debaters who take it up a notch have to understand how those statements fit, how they cohere, and I get the feeling there would be an entirely different response from that group of people to the typical political campaign messages.

And the cynical part of me can't make up its mind whether debate coaches could use that to actually promote their programs, or whether it would become vitally necessary that we hide those results, so that elected officials don't get ahold of them.

The other thing I meant to mention is, I'm still struck to this day by how sudden it was. I am not exaggerating when I trace that entire realization, a realization that stuck, a realization that turned me from a mediocre debater into a decent, and occasionally quite good, debater; a realization that's been this turbo-charge to my career, descended on me in about a three minute window. Less than that. I am absolutely sure that there was a second when I couldn't make it come together, and one second later I could.

Other places I've noted my belief that people do not learn until they are ready to learn. That process can't be hurried through any trickery or force known to humankind. People either cannot, or will not, or the entire point might be that the two are not distinct. But when it was time for me to get it, suddenly I got it. And once I understood that about my students, it made many things about teaching make sense, and seem tolerable, that previously didn't and weren't.

Relinquishing

Every few years I lose almost everything I own.

I moved from Georgia to Arizona in 1997, from Arizona to Texas in 1999, and from Texas to Oregon in 2007. Each time, I packed up my books and shipped them, but otherwise took only what I could fit in a Toyota Corolla. A tiny Toyota Corolla.

And on a bunch of occasions I've done this or that stupid thing and managed to wipe out every document I had on my computer. That meant I had to rewrite all my lectures, all my syllabi, all my assignment instructions and activity materials, from a blank page. Sometimes I could reconstruct what I'd done before from memory, but more often I had to just rack my brains and do a total rewrite.

It's surprisingly liberating. I don't necessarily look forward to that ruthless culling that precedes a move, but once I get started, it's actually pretty painless. I tend to find out that much of what I've accumulated is just junk, and that when I'm rid of it, I feel proud of the accomplishment.

Same thing with the computer disasters. I'm convinced that they're a big part of why I've never fallen into a rut in my teaching. Instead of doing the same thing over and over again, I get to reinvent a lot of things, and put to work the lessons I've learned from teaching prior classes. And if I weren't forced to do it, I would never exercise enough initiative and discipline on my own to get it accomplished. It takes a catastrophic wipeout to make it happen.

That's been on my mind lately as I hear news about the floods through Illinois, Iowa and Missouri. I do feel a good deal of concern and compassion for people who are in danger, who are afraid for their lives, but I really have a hard time having much empathy with people who lose a lot of possessions, and then say something like "My entire life has been destroyed." Really? Your life is made of stuff? Stuff is just stuff. Stuff gets tiresome and can always be replaced. Even when they're talking about things like photos, I don't really get why they treasure them quite so much. I've been fond of a few pictures in my life, and have even managed to lose one or two that I really wanted to keep, but it's not the kind of thing I lie awake at night and stare at the ceiling about. In most cases, I can remember in great detail what the photo looked like, and that's good enough.

So I can't decide whether that's a failure in my own heart, or a distortion in other people's values. But I do know I'm not wedded to stuff, and to date it's been a pretty good way to live.

Recherche

So one of the things I get to do with my three months of vacation is work on my academic research. College professors try to write and publish in their academic fields for a few reasons:

• It keeps us up-to-date, both by putting us in touch with the outside world and by forcing us to read other scholars' research;
  
• It enhances the school's prestige;
• It gives administrators a way to measure performance, for purposes of hiring and promoting;

So over the past several years, I've submitted a lot of academic papers to conferences in the field of Communication. Most have been accepted, and a few even got what we call "Top Paper" recognition. Now, however, what I need to do is beat these projects into shape, which is to say that I need to improve them, tighten them up, and submit them to academic journals for publication. The standards that journals apply are a lot higher, so I need all the help I can get.

That's where you come in.

Honestly, I need fresh eyes. I've been working on some of these things for so long that I've stopped noticing details. I don't need other academics to comment on the finer point of this or that theory; I need someone to read what I've written and say, "You know, that makes me think of ..." no matter how tangential.

I've got a separate blog on Blogspot, this one set to private, which I'm using to develop three old conference papers in particular. Well, two conference papers, and the third project is actually my doctoral dissertation. If you'd be interested in reading up on what I do as an academic researcher, and giving me your reaction, then send me an email, ideally from a gmail account, and I'll send you an invite that'll let you read the blog.

One more time: what you reply with doesn't have to be lofty or academic in tone. It could just be "Here's something funny that popped into my mind while I read this." That could help a great deal.

Hope you're having a good summer.

Refresher

Okay. Apparently a big ol' segment of the human race needs a review of the flippin' obvious.

The sidewalk is for two-way traffic. That means that even though you've selected a direction, believe it or not, other people are permitted to choose to walk in the other direction. Almost all sidewalks are wide enough to accommodate this. Stay on your right, and they'll stay on their right, and everything will be fine. No, your right. Your other right. Get over on the right. The RIGHT! There you go.

But, yes, of course, how heartbreaking, you're walking with a friend, and the two of you really really really enjoy walking side-by-side. You enjoy it so much that you can't do without being abreast of one another for one single footstep. You've got to be able to see your BFF out of the corner of your eye, or the universe might explode. You can't even move closer to each other; you're the optimal distance apart! How dare these other people meddle in your perfect spacing?

Except that you need to. The typical sidewalk is wide enough for one person walking each direction. If you're walking side-by-side with a friend, and someone approaches from the other way, then you need to move over. It's not their duty to step off into what in Oregon is squishy and full of goose poop. You need to make room. You can go back to walking abreast one entire second later. You'll live.

No, no dirty looks. No, no indignant huffs. Just move the flip over, and be on your way.

No, no exemptions just because you're absorbed in a deafening conversation via your phone. Your joke stopped being funny the fifth time you had to shout the punchline. And even less so if you're texting. Instead, try being aware of the world around you. Yes, I left the word "revolves" out of that sentence; that was intentional.

These aren't difficult rules to live by. If you fail to, one of these days you're going to get shoved into traffic or thrown under the wheels of a thundering Schwinn. Get it together.

Disrobing

In the first place, I feel fully dressed in my T-shirt and boxers. My boxers are very definitely old-person undergarments; they're loose, they come down to my mid-thigh, and the fly has a button. I've answered the door in them, gone out to get the mail or to get something from my car, and felt completely covered.

In the second place, Oregon has wonderful evening breezes. I walk home from work, and the first thing I want to do when I get in the door is open the windows and the sliding glass door and let in some cool air. But I also want to shed my belt, and usually my pants as well. And here's where it gets slightly irrational. I always wait until my pants are off before I open the window.

And the reason I do doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I feel fully clothed in my boxers, but I feel very odd taking off my pants in front of an open window. I can't pin down how it's any different from taking off my coat, which I'd feel perfectly normal doing in front of an open window. Before, I'm fully clothed; after, I'm fully clothed. During, I'm fully clothed. So what's weird about it?

It seems to me that it's an example of some of the fuzzy-logic, very pragmatic cultural knowledge that most people soak up without thinking about it, but that a few people have a hard time handling. Clothing norms, in general, are more complicated than many of us realize, which is the chief reason young children don't grasp them too thoroughly. To a toddler, it's difficult to understand why it's okay to take off your hat in public, but not okay to take off your underwear. Both are discrete articles of clothing that cover specific body parts.

Even worse, the norms aren't universal; they're subject to extreme cultural variability. I've read about aboriginal cultures in which complete nudity is customary in just about all situations, but they'd find it deeply humiliating if anyone watched them eat. They build very solid shelters in which everyone can eat all alone, out of sight of everyone else. I can't imagine what they'd make of our restaurants. Probably the same thing we make of pictures of nekkid folks in National Geographic: we just roll our eyes and wonder at what weirdos they are.

Most folks walking around have some sense of what semantic meaning is, and all but a few recognize syntactic meaning with just a brief explanation and a couple of simple examples. But I think we way downplay the difficulties that crop up with the third dimension of meaning: pragmatics. I know that most folks understand what dyslexia is, and that more and more folks have a grasp on other learning disabilities, such as auditory processing, dysgraphia, etc., but surprisingly few have any idea about nonverbal learning disorders. We're beginning to recognize the problem in kids: they aren't sure when it's okay to enter a conversation, or how to use eye contact when interacting with others, or how much personal space others expect. Similarly, they may not understand what clothes to wear, or possibly how to wear them, which is an even more complex subject.

And I suppose I also think that we underestimate the degree to which the affective, pragmatic, nonverbal stream of information is becoming more complex all the time. We all take it as obvious that there are more things to know, that we swim in a sea of information, that advances in communication technology produce more and more data that everyone is expected to absorb and process, but I wonder if we recognize that the world is also a more complicated place in ways that aren't reducible to data? What with increasing immigration, the erosion of ethnocentrism, and in general growing understanding that difference is less a threat than a resource, there are more pragmatic modes, more ways of behaving, more fuzzy, complex formulas for complying with others' expectations than in the past.

I suspect we don't recognize it. I think we're still stuck on trying to persuade the recalcitrant that those who are different aren't necessarily wrong or bad, so we haven't made more than inching progress in the next step, which involves sizing up just how much we have to learn, and how we're going to do it. And when we do, and when we realize that these aren't things that fit neatly into formulas, textbooks or training sessions, I think we're probably in for a brand new type of information sickness, something like the overload people feel after the first few days in a new job or a new school, but far more intense. And along the way, I suspect we'll see symptoms that resemble those of data-driven information sickness, including memory lapses and other burps and slips in rational thinking.

Like odd depantsing rituals.

Discipline

Over the past forty-eight hours, I fought my battle with coffee. It was over a lot sooner than I expected. All the same, I doubt I'll touch the stuff before August.

Coffee is addictive. And I don't mean that in any cute sense of the word: I mean that it creates physical dependency, and if a dependent person cuts down on coffee intake, there are withdrawal symptoms. That's simply a fact. A scary fact.

When I was in graduate school, about a decade ago, I went hog-wild on coffee. There was a very nice locally-owned coffee shop just about a block from my workspace, so I frequented it. This should give you an idea of just how frequent my frequenting was: they had, as many college-town businesses do, a punch card setup. Ten punches got you a free beverage. They weren't very smart about it, as they gave a punch for everything, even a small house blend, and the freebie was good for anything on the menu, no matter how expensive. But their foolish generosity was my boon, and I traded in a whole lot of punch cards. To be precise, it was not at all unusual for me to start a day with a brand new punch card, and, by the end of the day, fill it and claim the freebie. That was a lot of coffee. It gradually dawned on me that it was an unhealthy amount.

What saved me, I think, is that I hadn't been a coffee drinker before that. I started drinking coffee at that phase of my education, because my doctoral adviser was a hard man to pin down, but could often be enticed into stepping out for a cup of joe. At first, I had to have a mocha with a lot of whipped cream. Then I managed to choke down flavored coffee with lots of cream and sugar. The next step was unflavored coffee with cream and sugar, then just sugar, and now I drink it black. As a matter of fact, I like cafe Americanos, nothing added except, occasionally, an extra shot. The point of that little beverage history is that I worked my way up to my ridiculous overconsumption of caffeine pretty darned quickly, inside of a year or two. And I gather, from purely anecdotal evidence collected from friends and family, that what causes the addiction is heavy consumption of coffee over a long period of time. I wasn't able to put the serious hurt on myself in just two years, praise God; it takes year after year after year of steady coffee consumption.

So, earlier this week, I finally asked myself why I was still brewing up coffee every morning. It's summer. I have no need to get out of bed until I feel like it. I have no particular need to be alert. Once I realized there was no positive reason for me to go straight from my warm bed to a warm cup of coffee, I decided this would be a good week to see if addiction had set in.

Oh boy.

Tuesday was the day. I didn't suffer any symptoms until about two or three in the afternoon, but then it hit: the caffeine deprivation headache. Boom. Boom boom boom boom boom, like a jackhammer. And the pain pulsed with my heartbeat, which meant when it came time for me to take my regular half-hour walk home, I felt the headache at quadruple intensity every time I climbed a hill. By the time I got home, I was so wrung out from pain that all I wanted to do was go straight to bed. I slept fourteen hours: 6 PM to 8 AM.

And then I felt fine.

Yesterday, I had a little ghost headache in the afternoon that didn't amount to anything. Today, we'll see, but I don't expect anything fierce. I think my body shook it off in one day. And I think it did so because of a choice I made about twelve years ago.

Around the time that my excess consumption of coffee started scaring me, I made a firm resolution and cut back to one very strong cup, very early in the morning. Except in special circumstances, such as when I have to stay awake to drive, I never drink coffee more than about an hour after I wake up, and I never have a second cup. On more than a few occasions, my colleagues have requested, or even demanded, an explanation for this. I tell them that I have quite enough trouble falling asleep at night without making matters worse with too much caffeine, and this is true. But it's not the chief reason. The idea of being deep into caffeine dependency, with no way out except through a lot of pain, is one I find quite unsettling. And even though I drink coffee just about every day, it seems as though limiting myself to one early cup makes for a shallow dependency that's easily dismissed. Every few years I go off coffee for a while, and the effects are mercifully brief, so I'm not inclined to mess with what works. Yes, this being the Pacific Northwest, I keep passing places where I can smell it, and oh, does it ever smell enticing. But some sacrifices are worth it.

Something like the above reasoning explains the majority of odd choices that I make: choices about food, about sleep, about spending money, about making friends, about driving a car, about how I teach my classes, and the list could go on. Much of what I do doesn't make sense to other people, but I'm not inclined to mess with what works.

Doom

For the most part, I love being a teacher, and I can't imagine doing anything else for a living. There's just one part of the job that I don't like.

It's very easy to get the wrong impression, and to think that just because students apparently are paying attention, giving good feedback, saying positive things about the class, that somehow I'm setting their feet on the right path and steering them away from mistakes. I thought that for the first few years I taught. Then, I had to learn the hard way: I never, never, never steer them away from a mistake. Never have, never will, can't. They steer themselves away, when they do. And they don't very often.

I am not saying my students are stupid. The run of them make better decisions than I did at their age. But what I learned the very hard, and painful, way, is that I cannot stop a student from making a mistake. They have to make their own mistakes. I can't protect them, I can't shield them, I can't get through to them. They do what they do because they decide it's what needs doing.

And really, that's the way it should be. I made a choice to teach college, and it has a lot of benefits. I don't talk to parents, ever. I deal with people who are young, energetic, creative, and fun, but still have at least a sketchy foundation of adult behaviors, so I don't get worn out and wrung out by excess childishness. I've had friends who taught younger students, and while they reap enormous rewards themselves, they also suffer from a particular kind of burnout that I think would claim me pretty quickly. College is the right age group for me to teach.

But the thing about college students is, it's a mistake to protect them. By this point, the time for protection has passed. Since this is their first stage of being out from under adult command, it's actually very important that they make and implement their own decisions, even if those decisions are disastrous. I can put it this way: it's more important for them to do an idiotic thing that they decided to do than it is for them to do a wise thing at someone else's insistence.

But it's more than a mistake to protect them: it's just plain impossible. I have, over the years, watched students of mine, students that I cared a lot about, destroy themselves. I've seen them spiral down into drug use. Some aren't alive anymore. At least one is in prison, and won't be out anytime soon. And I remember everything I said and did, chiefly because I go over and over it; and I remember moments when I thought I'd made a difference, only to find out later that I hadn't. No one ever actually teaches a college student; instead, college students take advantage of the resources around them, including but not limited to what their professors have to say, to teach themselves. And it simply doesn't matter how right I am, or how vividly I remember making the exact same mistake in my young adult years: if a student is hell-bent on doing the dumbest thing imaginable, then I am powerless.

And every once in a while I feel like Jeremiah. I explain to students that what they intend to do is a bad idea, even though I know full well that my words are bouncing off. What motivates me to do it anyway is a pretty dreary purpose: I don't want them to be able to claim that no one warned them. When a moment of accountability arrives, when a consequence comes thudding down, I don't want them to be able to lay the charge at my feet that I never cautioned them. I want to be innocent of their blood. What I want is really much more: I do want to reach them, to persuade them, to lead them away from danger, but I know better by now than to think that can happen. College students change their behavior for one reason, and one reason only: because they've decided it's the wise course of action. And while that's inescapable, it does also result in a lot of agonizing moments for their teachers, friends, and loved ones: moments of absolute paralysis and impotence.

The thing about it is, people do not learn what they are not yet ready to learn. People learn when they're ready, when they reach the proper spot in their developmental track, and not before. And there is zero, and I mean zero, and let me emphasize zero, way to speed up that process. It happens at its own pace. When a toddler is terrified of monsters under the bed, an older person may chuckle, may remember a similar fear at a similar age, but the older person cannot transfuse the knowledge that there are no monsters under the bed into the toddler's mind. To the toddler, they're there, waiting. And it's one of the toughest things for the older person to have empathy for the toddler, to experience what it's like for an irrational threat to be absolutely real in the mind.

Just one sore spot I'll get specific about, and then I'll put this behind me: moving, transferring, etc. to be closer to friends and family. I had an advisee do it, and I have a Sunday School student who's about to do it. It's their choice, and it's not my place to tell them it's not a good one. But it isn't. Life moves on. Surrendering to homesickness is not a move toward growth, but toward immaturity and stagnation. It's wonderful to be close to one's family members, but not wonderful to be stuck on the end of an umbilical cord. And being needy and dependent on one's high school friends to me seems uncomfortably similar to peaking in high school. Yes, those years are enormously influential, and most folks acquire wonderful friends and wonderful memories then. But it comes time to move on. There are hordes of people in the world ready to be wonderful friends. If an old friend shows up in the same neighborhood, or the same line of work, then that's great. But holding back and limiting one's options in order to stay close to high school friends really strikes me as tragic.

Despite all of the above, despite the frustration of being powerless, I still love being a teacher. It's actually somehow comforting to know that the students I teach are in control of what happens to them. Certainly limits my ability to screw things up.

Dodging

I dodge cyclists. I do this by walking on the extreme edge of the sidewalk. Cyclists have this thing about blazing straight up the middle. I've trained myself to stay way over to the side, to avoid collisions. So far, I've been lucky; no collisions yet.

I dodge goose poop. There are lots and lots of Canada geese here, and their poop is at least as large as that of a mid-sized dog.

I dodge bootlicking. Most of my students seem to have a fair helping of integrity, but there are always a few who think the way to get what they want is to be excessively ingratiating. They don't appreciate how much that gives me the creeps. So, they'll try to find out my viewpoints on various issues, especially political ones, so they can parrot them back to me. I therefore try to be pretty hard to pin down.

I dodge socializing. Both at work and at church I have wonderful friends who frequently invite me to their homes, or to come out and meet them for dinner and fun. But one thing that hasn't changed, and probably won't, is that I'm much more happy in a room by myself with a good book than I am in crowd. Work involves being around people, and so does church, and as long as those are inescapable, I'd just as soon they be nice, interesting, fun people, but I still don't seek out people when I want to enjoy myself; I seek where they aren't.

I dodge stodginess. I don't do what I'm supposed to, what would make sense to other people. I'm an academic, which makes it okay to be eccentric, and I take full advantage of the privilege.

I dodge pain. I make light of too many things. I laugh at what really ought to be addressed. But I'm far from alone. I think it's a culture-wide sickness.

I dodge God. Fortunately, He's quicker.

I dodge androgenic alopecia. I use a Gillette Mach 3.

I dodge popular culture: no TV, few movies. With a breathtaking economy of movement, I simultaneously dodge dementia.

I dodge spiders. Once in a while, one of them catches up to me. He usually doesn't live too much longer.

I dodge easy categorization. When people find out I'm from Texas, they can't believe it. When people find out I'm a Southern Baptist, they can't believe it. And the list goes on.

I dodge raindrops. I find it does little good, but I love a challenge. I even find futility kind of charming.

I dodge sniper fire. I must be good at it, since they haven't hit me yet.

And even if everyone around me converts to Islam, I will not. I will stubbornly dodge the Hajj.

Destinations

For this one, I need help, in the form of comments, from my fellow Oregonians.

I'm not taking a big out-of-town trip this summer. For one thing, I don't have the money. For another, I don't have time, as I have this steady dribble of little responsibilities and duties and chores that will keep me tethered to home.

This is not a bad thing, really. I've grown into a homebody in my middle age. What I've decided to do, though, is make a lot of little one-day excursions. And in Oregon, there are a lot of those available.

What's below is a draft list of places I plan to visit. If you spot good choices that I'm overlooking, do please put up a comment and add to them.

The criteria are pretty simple: it needs to be easy to get to. That means either it needs to be a two-hour drive or less from Eugene, or it needs to be accessible by Amtrak. (I love Amtrak!) And it needs to be worth the visit. And it can cost something, but it shouldn't be opulent. I can spend one night, or possibly two, but single day trips are what I'm really after.

Here's what I have so far:

• Portland/Seattle. I'm going there at the end of June. The Indigo Girls are playing in Eugene, Portland and Seattle on consecutive days, so I'm following them up the coast on Amtrak, then coming back home and getting back to work.
  
• Along the way, I do plan to swing out and see Multnomah Falls.
  
• And I may take in the Japanese Garden again; I saw it in December, but I'm told it's spectacular in the summer.
  
• And I've been commanded to go to OMSI.
  
• Coos Bay/Bandon. A couple of folks in my Sunday School class are Coos Bay natives, and they tell me there are all kinds of coolness to be found in these two towns, some of it little-known.
  
• And although I took one excursion to the coast last fall, and checked out both Florence and Newport, I by no means exhausted everything there was to see. I skipped Heceta Head, and rolled through a lot of towns like Yachats.
  
• The South Sister/Mount Pisgah. I haven't been much of a backpacker thus far, but I'm very okay with extremely long walks, even strenuous ones, and I'm told either or both of these treks would include some mind-slamming views. I'm also told I need to check out Sahalie Falls while I'm out that way.
  
• The church has an excursion to Triangle Lake in mid-July, so I'll get a good look at that.
  
• Speaking of the church, the college fellowship folks are talking about a road trip to Ashland for the Shakespeare festival. I'm quite intrigued by that.
  
• And closer to home, places I can reach on foot, include Spencer's Butte and Gillespie Butte.
  

That's the beginning of the list. Help me make it longer, eh? Thanks.

Detritus

Fun is not the point. Fun is a by-product.

There's a difference between instrumental goals and terminal goals. I don't arrive at work on time because arriving at work on time will make the clouds part and the angels sing and my life suddenly feel complete and fulfilling. I arrive at work on time because it helps me to be a more effective educator: I can get my morning scut-work done before class, I can start class on time, and so forth. Many things in my life are subordinate to the goal of being a good educator of students.

But even that's not the terminal goal. The terminal goal is glorifying God. Whenever I do a good job of keeping that in mind, it settles a lot of unsettled things in my life.

But back to fun, I run into this problem all the time. I have too many students, and even the occasional colleague, who put fun too close to the core of their value array. And that's asking for trouble. I cannot think of a single endeavor about which I can say "I am doing this solely for the purpose of having fun," that won't wind up disappointing me. Many things that need doing can be fun along the way, but there's always a more substantive objective. I usually have fun when I teach, have fun when I work with my colleagues, have fun when I write test questions (it's so easy to write a good, rigorous test question that just happens to have a bit of a joke in one of the wrong answers), have fun when I do almost anything. But anytime I'm tempted to think, "I don't want to do this for the sole reason that it isn't fun," I'm straying from sound decision-making into frivolity.

It occurs to me that this has something in common with the kind of conceptual inflation, the kind of bubble, that surrounds efforts to raise people's self-esteem. That, I am convinced, is one of the most benign-sounding terrible ideas of all. If someone has a fever, it's a mistake to treat just the fever except in circumstances when the fever itself has become life-threatening. Those circumstances are pretty rare. Similarly, it is a mistake to treat low self-esteem except in that limited set of circumstances when cratered self-esteem is making suicide look like a good idea. Yes, in situations like that, I can see it. But the overwhelming majority of the time, it seems to me that addressing self-esteem without addressing the inputs that caused it to sag is cutting a corner, taking a shortcut, taking the easy way out, running away from confronting core issues. If you've got such a huge, festering boil in you that it's raising your body temperature a degree or two, then you accomplish nothing by popping an ice-pack on top of it to cool it off. Instead, it needs to be opened up and drained. And where people have complex, layered, multivariate distortions in their perceptions, their relationships, their expectations, their self-talk habits, etc. that are dragging their self-esteem down, then it's the inputs that have to be treated, not the symptom.

That was a bit of a digression, but it's an opinion I've arrived at after a bunch of years navigating the Communication Studies field and seeing what kinds of atrocious thinking we sometimes get up to. And my feelings about fun are closely related.

When you cut the corner and just try to raise someone's self-esteem, the outcome is bound to be inauthentic. If people compliment me just because they think I'm having a down day, then sooner or later I'm going to figure out that the compliments were just a product of sympathy, not an expression of genuine admiration. The whole "everyone gets a trophy, everyone gets to be valedictorian" perspective on self-esteem produces only phoniness. It doesn't produce enduring confidence that has a hard center and resists setbacks; it produces a fake, frothy ersatz self-esteem that can't stand up to an imagined cross look from a friend.

And I get the same dissatisfaction whenever I put my own enjoyment at the center of an activity and measure it by how successfully it entertains me. Things that are worth doing have a purpose, have a product, and are satisfying to complete because I know they needed doing. I get up and go to work every day knowing that I make a difference, that I help old children become young adults, that I encourage and nurture and cultivate and train and strengthen. It's all exhausting work, but at the end of it, I feel a very sturdy sense of joy at what I've racked up. And, along the way, there are endless opportunities to have fun.

That fun needs to be kept to the edges, at the periphery, so it doesn't dilute the actual serious work, but just flavors it and makes it a bit more palatable. Fun can be energizing, and the energy can flow back into the effort. But fun for the sake of fun just doesn't compute. It just reminds me too much of empty calories. Good, nutritious food can be prepared in appealing ways, but when we pull out all the stops to just slap together chemicals that have a pleasing flavor, the outcome is an abomination. Or at least that's how it strikes me.