American Resilience

One of the clichéd news stories that inevitably follows natural disasters of whatever kind – fires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes – is the “resiliency” of the people of whatever community might have been afflicted – national, regional, state, or local – and how they pull together to help one another overcome the hardships and calamities and blah blah blah. It’s going on right now in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, which ended up not being the end of civilization as we know it as predicted by the media last weekend. But their search for disaster did eventually find flooding in New England, and so they abandoned their disaster stations along the Carolina coast and New York City (which turned out to be busts) and scrambled up with their waders and rain slickers into the floodwaters of Vermont and New Hampshire in time to cover the resilience of the residents in pulling together to bring their communities back to where they were and even more blah blah blah. And all this is couched in banalities about the “character” of the people, of the community, be that community the United States, New England, Vermont, Joplin MO, Greensburg KS, or wherever . . . at least in the U.S. We’re a resilient people. We pull together as neighbors. We help one another. Blah blah blah. The whole familiar meme is one of self-aggrandizement. Look at us, we’re so special. But I’ve looked around the world and I don’t think we’re all that special. We’re at best human. Communities across the globe and across time have come together in time of crisis and worked together to rebuild. It’s part of the warp and weave of civilization, of being human (and, truth be told, many nonhumans). Not the special trait of the American character. If there’s a special trait of the American character, at least as championed in the media, it’s the ability to hoist it up on its own petard.

Blind Date

I only had one blind date in my life. (I’m assuming at 62 and married I’m not likely to have any other.) I was 18 years old, my first semester in college, Wichita University, most of my friends through high school had gone to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and a couple of them – Gary and Sally – invited me up to Lawrence for a weekend. Gary’s father (also my doctor) loaned me his Cadillac for the weekend, and I drove it up the Kansas Turnpike at 100 mph (20 over the limit), making the trip in just about two hours. Gary and Sally (not a couple, just two of my best friends) had set me up with a first year student and had purchased tickets for the university production of Othello. The three of us drove to the women’s dorm (there were separate women’s and men’s dorms back then) at the top of the hill, where we met my date, a pleasant, attractive young woman from Texas. There were no implications to the pairings, just some sort of necessary gender parity expected at the time. I hadn’t been to many plays at that time, and I don’t think any Shakespeare, but I found the production engaging, perhaps only because it was one of the first times I’d been out of Wichita on my own, and I was in Lawrence, at the university, a sort of Kansas Shangri-La at the time. After the play, we went to Pizza Hut (that’s about as good as it got for dining in Lawrence then), and it didn’t take long at all before my blind date began her torrid critique of the play – not the writing (it was Shakespeare) or directing or acting or design, but rather the casting – Othello (the Moor) by a black man (“negro” if not “nigger” was the word she used) opposite a white Desdemona. And they kissed. On the mouth. She was nonplussed. She was upset. She was livid. And she didn’t pick up for an instant that Gary and Sally and I were silent, sharing furtive, embarrassed glances, not knowing at all what to do or say, doing and saying nothing. The pizza couldn’t come soon enough. The night couldn’t end soon enough. And that was the whole of my first and only blind date. I can’t know if that was a factor in my eventually being drawn to the theater. Othello did become one of my favorite Shakespeare play. And I did drive back from Lawrence to Wichita at 80 mph. I’ve been wary ever since.

All the President's Reads

One of the criticisms (there were many) of President’s Obama’s relatively brief (ten days, cut short to eight by Hurricane Irene) vacation to Martha’s Vineyard was his reading list, which included Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante, Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, David Grossman’s To the End of the Land, and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. (The first two are assumed to have been purchased for Obama’s two daughters. If any of them were assumed to have been purchased for his wife, I haven’t heard.) The criticism, as outlined by Tevi Troy in the National Review, is three-pronged.

“First,” as Troy scolds, “five of the six are novels, and the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality.” Apparently, the reading list of a president (or anyone else?) is somehow an indication of their relationship with reality. If you read nonfiction, you’re engaged in the here and now (even if that nonfiction is a history of the Trojan War? If you’re reading fiction, you’re floating around in some imagined universe of worlds created by the minds of beings not of our planet that have no bearing on our reality. But isn’t that the whole point of summer – especially summer beach – reading, to escape the day-to-day slings and arrows of political assholedom?

Second is the problem of subject. The Bayou Trilogy is a mystery, which is apparently below the dignity of presidential reading (at least openly), I guess because it’s a lesser form of escape. To the End of the Land is about an Israeli woman who walks miles to avoid news of her soldier son, which according to Troy, “could create complications for Obama on the Israel front.” And Room is about a mother and child trapped in a small room, not something a president trying to escape the reality of being trapped in the White House should be turning to. (But wait a minute, don’t these criticisms contradict the criticism above that he shouldn’t be trying to escape . . . ? It’s tough to follow the conservative arguments.)

Finally, Obama’s reading list is, as Troy notes, “mainly liberal books.” According to the conservative blogger Mickey Klaus, it’s “heavy on the wrenching stories of immigrant experiences, something the President already knows quite a bit about.” (Again, that this contradicts the argument that the list represents an escape from reality is apparently not a concern.) Apparently Obama should be including some Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck. Or Dick Cheney. Or Machiavelli. To Troy and Klaus, “the list reveals an intellectually incurious president.” As if he’s never read anything before in his life. Maybe Obama should follow his predecessor’s example and pick up a copy of The Pet Goat? But it might already be in the White House library. And maybe he’s already read it. Just because he’s curious.

I really don’t have any problems with the president’s reading list, except that I fear it’s just another of those empty exercises that all presidents are expected to engage in – what’s the president reading on his vacation? How do we know any president reads any of the books that are touted on their lists? And think about this: Obama’s list includes six full-length books, including Cutting for Stone, which I have on my own to-read pile, and it’s 534 pages long. Are we supposed to believe that he’s going to read all of these books while he’s on Martha’s Vineyard for ten days, while he’s also walking the beach with his wife and kids, golfing, boating, and still keeping regularly briefed on the state of the union and the world? This to me is being “out of touch with reality.”

Mr. President, just pick a book, whatever book you want to read for whatever reason – interest, information, amusement, instruction, escape – and read it when you have the time. And don’t feel you have to tell anyone about it.

Lets Go

Old Navy, seeking to cash in on the start of another school year (meaning the start of another college football season), has created a new product line of licensed college and professional sportswear, “Superfan Nation.” One of the products in the line is a T-shirt with the logo and team name of one of dozens of schools and the words “Lets go!!” above. But as my grammar check suggests, there should be an apostrophe to indicate the contraction for the imperative “Let us go” as opposed to the verb indicating release, as in “The quarterback lets go of ball.” There’ve been rumblings in some quarters about how this is just one more indication of how no one knows anything anymore about grammar or punctuation or generally how to write good. Or even more generally about how our education system has let us down (let’s down?) and everything would be right in the world again if we just went back to phonics and cursive and dipping Susie’s pigtails in the inkwell. As a retired professor of college composition, I can’t get worked up about this corporate violation of our language. I see worse dozens of times every day just reading the newspapers (how many know the difference between “every day” and “everyday”?). Actually, I have less of a problem with the missing apostrophe than I have with the double exclamation points (they should only be used sparingly, only in dialogue, and only one at a time, please!!), though considering the sporting context, I could accept one. But then the exclamation point is an end point, indicating the end of a sentence, thereby making the capital “G” in “Go” a spelling error. Old Navy is offering to replace the faulty T-shirts and are reprinting them with an apostrophe. But I would suggest they go the next step (let’s go the next step) and fully correct the locution: “Let’s go!” (With the quote marks.)

Mindset List

Each fall, as college freshmen crawl onto college campuses with their microwaves, micro-fridges, HD TVs, iPads, and parents’ credit cards, Beloit College releases the “Mindset List,” a reminder of just how out of touch their teachers are and how unaware the incoming students are. Some representative examples from this year’s list (students born in 1993):

What Berlin wall?

They have grown up with bottled water.

Pete Rose has never played baseball.

Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.

Being “lame” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.

Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN.

They grew up in Wayne’s World.

Fox has always been a major network.

Burma has always been Myanmar.

I’ve always found this list amusing, even slightly interesting, though it’s always greeted by the news media as some sort of revelation, a bonk on the cultural head walking through the door of the new school year. But of course it’s the kind of thing that could have been compiled for every year for the past several thousand years. Consider what the list might look like from the year I entered college (students born in 1949):

Who was Hitler?

They have grown up with running water (and indoor toilets).

Babe Ruth has never played baseball.

Women have always gone to college (and voted).

Being “a retard” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not mentally disabled.

Walter Cronkite has always been reading news on TV (and always will).

They grew up in The Twilight Zone.

ABC, NBC, and CBS have always been (the only) TV networks.

Israel has always existed.

There are inevitably several responses to this list. The most ignorant is to denigrate or mock the incoming students for somehow being naïve or lacking in historical and cultural knowledge when all they’ve done is grown up in a different time with a different history and culture. As noted above, we all have had our “mindset list.” This year’s students are no different than last year’s or ten years ago or fifty years ago.

Another response – and probably the most prevalent, particularly by the network and cable newsreaders (and their writers) – is a sort of oh-my-god-can-you-believe-how-old-we’re-getting? This is a wholly self-centered response – what does this say about me? Well, if you’re really this old, don’t you know by now that time moves on, things change, progress happens? Why are you surprised by history?

Of course, the most valid response is that for which the list was originally intended, “as a witty way of saying to faculty colleagues ‘watch your references.’” We teachers grew up in a much different history and culture than our students, and there is often a disconnect between our experiences and allusions and references and theirs. And we have to be aware of that. We’re moving out of a world they’ve never known, and they’re moving into a world we’ll never know. We have just this brief overlay or worlds where we might make some contact and understanding. If we work on the continuity, not the distance.

Writing Desk (2)

A few days after I posted a blog entry about the writing desk built by my great-great-great-grandfather 160 years ago that I inherited recently, I received the following email from my uncle (my mother’s brother):

Hi JL:

Your mother sent me the story about the old desk. I am glad it is in the hands of someone that appreciates it. I also noticed the story was about your memories, not necessarily historical fact. But memories make better stories. Here are some of my memories.

About the Philco radio, I remember when we moved to Harper for three months in 1933. The radio rode in the rumble seat of Abe's Ford roadster with Gwen and I and Rogena rode in front where it was warm. So the radio came a year or more before 1933.

About the desk. I am quiet sure the desk never made it to the basement. On Edwards street it was always in the corner of the dining room. In the desk was an old cigar box full of pencils and misc. I suggested to my mother that she replace that old box and get something better. She informed me that the cigar box had been there as log as she could remember and it was going to stay. I know the desk has traveled from Illinois to Lincoln Nebraska in the 1890's, to Wellston Oklahoma, to Wichita, to Greensburg Kansas And several stops I do not know about.

About steam radiators, your McClure grand parents may have had steam radiators, but the Kaucher's did not.You probably didn't meet steam radiators in homes till you moved to Minnesota.

You should remember grandpa Frank Dixon. He was blind by the time of your memory. The maternal grand parent was Overman.

I recommend everyone write their memoirs. It is fun to reminisce in the stories even if you are not a writer. I will look forward to more stories. Maybe one about the riots in Berkeley.

Karl

How wonderful this digital world of the web can make these connections, pass along this kind of information, preserve this family history. It might be that no one ever accesses it again, or that no one cares. But it’s there if anyone should care to search for it, like a pirate’s treasure buried in the sands of some Caribbean island. And that in itself is pretty cool. In a digital sort of way.

(I do have the cigar box (El Roi-Tan) referred to in the message and have returned it to its rightful place in the desk. The “riots in Berkeley” he references is the 1969 People’s Park demonstrations that I participated in the summer I spent in Berkeley. I had no idea he even knew about that.)