Yet What About Boredom?

After the tumultuous events of the mid-20th century--mass murder and such--is it so surprising that some people opted for boredom, the flat banality of the suburbs? Yes, Skokie was dreadful: it sucked the life out of people. But what alternative? Perhaps avoiding attention, especially in a world in which attention means harm and trauma and pain, is the only strategy worth anything at all. What's so bad about being Portugal--off the radar screen, so to speak?

Democracy and Stupidity and Election Day

I'd like to think that democracy is a good thing, yet so many people are clueless about the the world--they live in a delusion, an infantile fantasy world. Recall that the Germans elected Hitler. Here, because we have been so far away from the rest of the world, we've been able to survive idiots as leaders--and mete out vicious harm on the hopeless minority groups: indigenous people and their descendants, blacks, immigrants, anyone perceived as different or vulnerable. I recall once going to a Catholic wedding and seeing the eucharist and thinking, no wonder they despise(d) the Jews, those who refused this communion. It would have taken an astonishing, mostly impossible courage and moral imagination to resist the demands of the church hierarchy and accept others not in the religious community as human. And this from people who, in Protestant America, themselves were often despised and destroyed. I'm reading David Mura's Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. He went to my high school, maybe in the class a year or two ahead of me, and writes about the secret, hidden world of suburban Japanese Americans. In Skokie, I had grown up thinking that no one on the planet could have lived in a more boring, less potentially "novelistic" environment. I should have known better: I should have known about the rage and frustration that existed behind closed doors. Joyce should have clued me into that--the lives of quiet, often inarticulate desperation. Of course, there were many (are many) who live in a kind of oblivion, idiotically unaware of what their society inflicts on others or even delighted by it, yet any society will inevitably produce some, a few, someone, who are (is) aware of the brutality, who live(s) with the knowledge of terrible crimes (the Holocaust, Japanese internment, slavery, systemic discrimination, thwarted hopes and dreams, just the generalized stupidity of massive bureaucratic organizations, the clumsy, callous pain meted out on defenseless, unknowing people) that have been committed, continue to be committed. Can we have democracy and obliviousness? If someone doesn't know--can't know or won't know--should he or she be allowed to vote? Hitler wanted to kill Jewish women and children because he didn't want their descendants trying to gain revenge. (I'm not even talking about the crime of killing anyone--men, women or children.) And sure enough, he was able to locate enough others who, for whatever reason--racism, fear, routine, indifference, sadism, nihilism--decided to kill defenseless others. The idea that the Jews offered a threat! A people without weapons, accustomed to take whatever punishments those in power decided to inflict, a hopeless minority (some peasants in small villages, others sophisticated urbanites--it didn't matter)--these are the people he sees as the direst threat against Germany! He might as well have accused falling leaves of betraying the nation: they presented the same level of danger. And then, of course, whoever survived turned into fanatics themselves--in different ways, of course. The Jewish Century looks at three examples: the socialists in Russia who themselves became the victims of a lunatic, the capitalists in America who through education and perserverance climbed into the middle class, and the nationalists in Israel who must see virtually anyone as an enemy. Revenge, indeed.

Stalingrad

I read Antony Beevor's book on Stalingrad. The callousness towards life on both sides astonishes me. There was one moment when, to combat cowardice, a Russian commander shot every tenth soldier. Behind every unit was another unit making sure that the first unit didn't run away. At one point the German soldiers saw that they had just shot at a boat of women trying to get away--and they felt bad about it! Hours before they had been shooting and killing women and children. The soldiers also looked around the steppes and thought--this might be a good place to have a farm. After they were surrounded, they thought--the Fuhrer (I can walk!) will rescue us. There's hope and then there's delusion. But perhaps the kind of delusional beliefs found among the Nazi soldiers parallel the everyday delusional beliefs among people today.

Books

I just finished reading Van Vogt's awful The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The human scientists aboard the exploring spacecraft do astonishingly idiotic things, suggesting that the crew is actually a group of 12 year old boys. They take anti-sex medicine and, in one episode, are attacked by an alien who captures them to implant eggs in them (the worst nightmare of pre-adolescents--turned into females). One of them, a Nexialist, always figures out what the crew should do, although he's constantly bickering with the idiotic interim commander.

At the same time, I've started to read Pessoa's incredible The Book of Disquiet. From the introduction written by the interestingly named Richard Zenith:

"The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfillment never measures up to what we imagine. . . . How is it done? By not doing. By performing our daily duties but living, simultaneously, in the imagination. Traveling far and wide, in the geography of our minds. Conquering like Caesar, amid the blaring trumpets of our reverie. Experiencing intense sexual pleasure, in the privacy of our fantasy. Feeling everything in every way, not in the flesh, which always tires, but in the imagination."

And now from Pessoa himself--writing under one of his heteronyms, Bernardo Soares:

"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't now where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social center, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing--for myself alone--wispy songs I compose while waiting.

Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book or travellers can when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not interested, that's fine too."

Students

As I am now a minor official of the hegemonic state, part of my job is to inform future cubicle workers about how they will never be members of the educated, technocratic elite.

Today I tried to inform my students that pronoun agreement was important--that there are people out there (not just English teachers) who actually know something about grammar and who make judgments about people based on their writing ability and their knowledge of grammar. Is it true anymore? Perhaps not. Still, is there any way to respect the language and its logic? Is representing the educated elite the only way to stand for clarity and humanity in language? One side of me wants to agree with my students, ignorant as they can be, that it's all right to rebel against the arbitrary strictures of grammar. Yet another part of me wants to insist on the logic of grammar (and I'm not talking about the prejudices of style--splitting infinitives and the like). The corruption of language by the state and its advertising minions depresses me. I like the ambiguity of metaphor, the possibility of disordered creativity found in the oddities of language. Yet I also like the purity of grammar, the way that logic informs a sentence. Either language has meaning or it doesn't. Either it reflects the world--and tells the truth about the world--or it doesn't. Orwell comments in an essay that he had the capacity to face unpleasant facts. He also decried the corruption of language. Put them together.

The Academic System: Smart People Do Dumb Things, but Dumb People Rule

Some people, with some justification, are suspicious of smart people, yet they often do not have the same suspicions about dumb people. And, oddly, dumb people tend to rise up in institutions, particularly academic ones. We now have administrator generators in graduate education programs. It used to be that administrators came from marginal academic areas like Speech. Now they emerge from college administration programs. My last encounter with my current avatar involved a discussion about student evaluations: we now rely on them to tell us if an instructor is doing a "good" job--turning teaching into a consumer product. This adminstrator told me that the student evaluations were the only way to see how we compared to other schools. Education as a competitive sport? I don't care how I compare to other schools--or even other teachers. If a teacher has knowledge and believes in it, then there is a good chance that he or she will be able to impart that knowledge to others. That is what we must believe in. At best, students can have only a vague idea about how well an instructor knows his or her field. The best way to evaluate each other is to have a colleague sit through a term, but, obviously, we can't do that. Instead, we undermine our status and transform ourselves into articulate sales personnel. What a ghastly mistake student evaluations have been--another idiotic legacy of the 1960s. Of course, I question those mandarins who arrogantly insist on pompously intimidating students, but we disrespect teachers by insisting that their knowledge is meaningless. And, yes, smart people can do dumb things, but now our lives are directed by an administrative caste that is oblivious to what a college, any college, needs or ought to be. Little wonder that students come into the academic world with a sense that their instructors are servants.

Teaching Today

At times, teaching itself can be rewarding, especially in those few moments when, despite a culture that actively encourages stupidity and indifference, even a "studied" indifference, younger students actually respond to something that I say. Most of the time, they, like my colleagues, view me as a lunatic, an eccentric, or, even more often, a bore. And at those times I ask myself, what awful crime did I commit in a previous existence to merit such a hell. A student asks me why she didn't get an "A" on a paper if she did all that was asked in an assignment, and I tell her that, while she believes she did everything on the assignment, her work still didn't have as much quality as I was looking for. Only in a society that sees writing as a form of filling in blanks can such a notion thrive, can the idea of quality evaporate. But perhaps I, too, am a parody of the intellectual. The cynical idealist--the oldest cliche on the planet. I can't go on. I'll go on. Go on?