Americans, Informing Ourselves

So, here I am on this cool and windy first of October. It’s been exactly two months since my last posting, and what an eventful two months. The academic job search is winding up. I’ve got seven positions picked out, I’m getting my C.V. in order and I’m drafting my first cover letters. My dissertation’s data collection continues. I say again, the scarcity of subjects on the one hand, and the economics of paying them (namely out of my own pocket) on the other, continue to plague me. But all in all it’s been a good start to this, my fourth and final year in Illinois. “One day at a time” is my mantra. For the moment, I’m collecting subject data, teaching, preparing job applications, getting ready to do a couple of invited presentations and looking forward to Nicole coming up for Thanksgiving or thereabouts. Today, things are alright all in all. And now on to the topic of the moment.

            I try to talk about politics only in moderation, and there are several good reasons for this. First, I’m not a political theorist, so my opinions on this subject are on the level of the laity. That wouldn’t stop me from commenting, except that it’s also not a subject that passionately drives me. That’s not to say that I don’t have a developed political philosophy or set of beliefs at the very least, but it’s one of only many important and interesting issues. Still, the time has come to take it up again.

            One thing that has disturbed me of late is the almost willful ignorance of people on the right and the left concerning government issues and government power. Now, I have good and dear friends on both right and left, and that’s ok with me. What’s interesting is how both sides view the president. The president, being the visible head of the country, comes in for all the praise, and more often all the flack, that the citizenry has to shell out. This is generally unfair. People often forget what they learned in civics class about the system of checks and balances, how the legislative branch and the executive branch of government balance each other or, more often, antagonize one another. In short, if Congress develops a truly amazing bill which the president supports and signs into law, then the president should rightly be praised for his support and his signature, and Congress would, in its turn, deserve the praise for developing such a fine law. When they’re at odds, the same applies. It wasn’t Congress who didn’t want to see draw downs in troops overseas over the last three years of the Bush administration. It was Bush himself who vetoed a number of spending measures that included troop reductions. See how it works? Now, let’s get to a few things of today.

            One thing that I hear people slamming Obama over these days is the numerous near-shutdowns of the federal government. The closest call probably came in early August, when a number of people came within a hair’s breadth of not receiving their social security payments due to a government shutdown. Now, the causes of the government’s spending crunches are numerous, increasingly complex, and wide open to debate. I’m not interested in the causes. I’m interested in the back-and-forth between Obama and congressional leaders. It seems to me that the problem with Congress is that there is just enough of an imbalance between parties so that either party can block, stall and obfuscate until Hel freezes over when the other party sponsors a bill that the first party doesn’t like. It’s like a board meeting where you’re one or two votes shy of a majority, and the opposition digs in its heels just because it doesn’t want to see your item pass. When you strip away the political language, the high government positions, and the scope of the bills and measures we’re talking about, the general tendency of the behavior on both sides is petty,, counterproductive, and self-serving. Big surprise? So, why blame the president? In this model of behavior, the president is less the commander and chief and more the mediator. He has no dictatorial power here. He cannot order John Bainer, Harry Reed or any of the rest to do this or that. It is Congress who must pass or fail to pass a spending bill. In that situation, Obama is nearly as helpless as you or me. This is not me praising Obama. This, ladies and gentlemen, is me stating facts about the dynamics of the powers involved. It’s not Obama who pisses me off when the government is about to shut down. Rather, it’s the Congress at large and the wrangling congressional leaders in particular.

            Let’s move on to the ongoing recession and the unemployed. Here again, Americans love spouting off at the mouth about what caused it all or who’s to blame for today’s unemployment rates. People, Democrats and Republicans, moderates and independents, do me a favor and listen for a moment. The causes of the recession are numerous. People on both left and write have written book after book trying to figure out what caused it. Those books go all the way back to 2007 and are still rolling off the presses. Some are thoughtful and thorough examinations of the causes of the recession, while many others are little more than book-length rants against one side or another. One thing that is clear is that the recession’s causes are not going to be summed up in a few words over a cup of coffee. The same holds true of the solutions.

            Solving our economic woes remains a nasty and protracted business. Whatever solutions, plural, we ultimately find to be successful, they will be solutions that encompass everyone. It may be that the upper 1% should pay more taxes. Warren Buffett seems to think so in any case. It may be that unemployment laws are rewritten. It may be that tax credits, deferments and so on are extended. I don’t know. And I have no idea what the best thing to do would be. Once again, I’m not writing this blog to provide solutions. That is beyond both my knowledge and my interest. However, let me point out a couple things about how we talk of such things.

            I know a lot of people who are out of work. I may soon be one of them. That being said, why are the unemployed blaming Obama? Well, he’s visible. But is it right to do so? Let’s not forget that Obama inherited the current economic crisis. The market collapses happened under Bush’s administration; though, blaming him for the collapse of the markets is just as questionable as blaming Obama for their continuing struggles. Now, what’s important to me is not whether Obama has a magic solution. Unlike most Americans, I don’t expect him to, because I know my history. The Great Depression was not solved overnight. It was not ended with one or two sweeping initiatives. Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t succeed in every one of its programs. In fact, a good chunk of them were dry wells, and if anyone will please study your history, you will see that only the massive industrial boom brought on by America’s involvement in the second world war finally closed the doors on the Great Depression. No, I don’t think we should start a world war, folks. But my point should be obvious. Obama is correct when he observes that the causes of this current recession did not arise overnight. Nor, too, will the solutions take effect immediately.

            Because I have some perspective on the economic crisis, I am watching Obama for different reasons. I am not waiting for his all-inclusive solutions. Rather, I am watching his initiatives. His efforts are what concern me. Right now, the American Jobs Act is up for debate, and once again, most people have no idea what they’re talking about when they begin slamming it. The Whitehouse has published a fact sheet on the proposed law, breaking down the effects of its proposed measures. I’ve read it, and I won’t summarize it here, because I want you to read it too and form your own opinions about it. Just Google the phrase ‘American Jobs Act.’ It’s the first entry that comes up.

            Now what I do want to invite you to do is this. Compare the American Jobs Act and the rest of Obama’s proposals with the New Deal. Look up the New Deal, the measures and programs that Roosevelt initiated, the ones that failed and the ones that worked. Finally, if you have been criticizing Obama lately, ask yourself after getting informed whether your criticisms are fare and constructive, or whether you’re doing what a lot of people I’ve run into are doing, and making yourself look foolish. And yes, democrats have been as foolish about Obama as republicans. And you cannot infer from this blog what I think of these issues. My point has not been to advocate a plan or a bill or to support Obama. My goals have been two:  to remind us all of some of the basic realities of how the government works, and to invite all of us to consider our opinions and what we say about the president, especially before we say it. I don’t care what conclusions you come to, for or against the president’s initiatives. I care about whether or not your opinions are as well-informed as they should be and whether you actually do understand, to the extent that we can without being economists, the nature of the mess we’re in. If I’ve accomplished even one of those goals of mine, I’m happy. If I have actually managed both, I’m quite satisfied with this blog.

2011 Convention Memories

            The first star trek convention I attended, back in 2004, was about memorabilia. I’d never seen most of that stuff before, and admittedly, there were some very special items being sold there. It was the Vegas convention, after all, and Vegas is always bigger than anything else because it’s the main show for Creation Entertainment. Meeting the actors was just as important, but I was very focused on bringing home mementoes, things I could touch and hold, as it were. 2011 was far different, and it its way, far better. This year marks forty-five years of star trek history, and for me at least, it was all about experience, memories.

            I was able to attend the Nashville convention because it took place in my home state, and I could attend without having to pay airfare or hotel booking or dining prices. Hundreds and hundreds in savings. I didn’t attend on the first day of the three-day convention, because there wasn’t much I wanted to see. Day two as a different story. I got there only to discover that I’d had the cab drop me on the opposite side of the building from the convention center. That was a long walk I tell you. I got there and the process of standing in line began. That’s just part of the experience; you stand in line after line after line for everything. Nashville wasn’t too bad as far as that went, nothing like Vegas. That’s the advantage of having fewer attendees.

            The first presenter, Max Grodenchik, was typical of the actors who spoke. He talked about his acting experiences both in trek and outside of it, told us how he landed the job as Rom, and took questions from the audience. Things got interesting during the following presentation though. I had known that John Paladin was going to do a special on Klingon makeup, and as part of his presentation, he was going to have a volunteer put on stage and transfigured into a Klingon in front of God and everybody. Not to be too blunt, but I wanted that person to be me. Didn’t we all hope to be up there? I was curious to see for myself what the Klingon face looked like, and as visual as makeup is, I dreamed of being able to wear that face for myself. Well as it happened, the makeup artist got wind of what I’d said to fellow fans in line about it and approached me in the memorabilia room before the first show and introduced himself. To make a long story short, he was just as happy to find a volunteer as early as possible in the day, and he was fine with it being me.

            I sat on the stage under the spot lights and he applied makeup while taking questions from the audience. The makeup consists of a face piece and a wig and some coloring to blend my natural skin tone with the prostheses. When it was done, I wore the long hair and the forehead ridges. Touching the ridges for the first time was interesting. And it was the real thing, exactly the sort of stuff he, John, had put on .G. Hertzler or Bob O’Reilly when they went on set.

I didn’t realize just how much it’d transformed me until I left the stage and was swamped with photo requests. For the next two days, people would stop me randomly or come up to me as I stood around and ask for either pictures of me in makeup or to have their picture made with me. It was flattering and I admit I enjoyed it as much as anyone would have. But for what it’s worth, I didn’t just enjoy it because so much attention was coming my way, I enjoyed it because it allowed me to contribute something meaningful to my fellow fans at the convention. I mean, if they couldn’t get photographs with the actors who portrayed the Klingons, getting a photo with someone who, at the very least, had been turned into a real Klingon was maybe the next best thing. I’ll never forget the Kiskinus family. It’s a Greek last name and I doubtless misspelled it. But Autumn and her mother pretty much hung out with me this weekend. They were always spotting me in the memorabilia room, and if memory serves, Autumn was the one who wanted to snap the pic of me eating my chicken sandwich. After all, when did you ever see a Klingon eating a chicken sandwich? I definitely saw the humor in it. The thing with the makeup stretched over both days I attended, because I slept in the makeup. I really wanted Hertzler and O’Reilly to see me in it. The following morning, in fact, Paladin said the makeup looked as fresh as it had when he first applied it. I’m glad I was careful with it, and the Klingons’ reactions to it were worth losing sleep the night before, but I digress.

I’d say the most memorable presentation of Saturday was Kasey Biggs, Deep Space Nine’s Damar. There was something he said about the acting classes he teaches, and I’ve endeavored to recall it word for word:  “even though not everybody I teach is going to go out there and become an actor, I can teach them one thing, how to live in the moment. Too often we’re focusing on the future or the past, what I did yesterday or the things I have to do next week, but if you’re going to act, you’ve got to live in the moment, in the now. And I try to give them the tools so they can learn to grasp at right now. I don’t think you can have a full and satisfying life until you learn how to appreciate right now.” It was well put and meaningful. Not that the rest of the guys were chopped liver, by no means, but it was thought-provoking.

The photo ops on Saturday and, indeed, throughout the convention were fun and the pictures of me in Klingon makeup are probably hilarious, but I have to say I truly treasure the autographs. The autographs, with one exception, were complimentary parts of my ticket package. But until about 3:00 Saturday morning, I couldn’t find any way to make a signature meaningful. I’d probably manage to lose whatever I had signed, even. It was frustrating. People love autographs, but for blind folks, your normal autograph just isn’t such of a much. Finally, a solution came to me, a novel idea. First, I went through the episodes and movies and found one character quotation for each actor whose autograph I was receiving. I made a list of these quotes with space underneath each quote for the actor to sign, each to his own character’s dialogue as it were. I kept my list in hand, and for each actor, instead of having them do something meaningless like writing, “to my good friend Brad,” I asked each man if he would read his character’s dialogue as he signed his name, and whether I may record them doing so. I expected flat refusals. What I got was interest and excitement. Every single one read his line, and only William Shatner couldn’t get recorded, only because there wasn’t enough time with the hundreds in line behind me waiting for his autograph. Max Grodenchik was the first I tried this on. When he understood what it was I wanted, he got into it! He wanted to record his line three times to get it right, and he even gave me some vocal coaching on my own Rom impersonation. The rest of the actors were delighted, frequently asking if they themselves could hold my digital recorder and often taking extra time, by their own choice, to read over the lines before recording them. To a man, they seemed to think this was a novel way to get an autograph and in many cases, the reading was followed by their comments on the line I’d chosen. Kasey Biggs described the experience as wholly unique, and we talked for a minute about how important and transformative the particular line I chose had been for his character. It seemed that they all appreciated the fact that I chose meaningful lines. In many cases, the lines I chose came from episodes they spent a while talking about or citing as meaningful for their characters’ development during their on-stage presentations. Well I sure wasn’t going to use throwaways. The most special instance of this came when I saw J.G Hertzler on Sunday. At one point in his presentation, he’d hinted at his favorite moment as Martok, and I felt a thrill shoot through me, because the line I’d chosen for him was from the very scene he was describing. It was Martok’s speech to Worf on the worthiness of marriage. It was especially meaningful that so important a line, important to me and too, to my fiancé, was equally meaningful to him. He read it well, even if he was a tad too close to the recorder’s microphone.

Sunday was as jam packed as Saturday. By Sunday morning I was tired, because I didn’t want to sleep too heavily and risk ruining the makeup. The first event Sunday morning was a continental breakfast with O’Reilly and Hertzler. This took place well before their stage presentation, and it was the first time fans saw them at the convention. Only 30 tickets were sold for this event, and I was glad I took the trouble to buy one of them. They were hilarious and personable. They remembered your name when you told it to them, and they were obviously happy to be there. While they didn’t comment to me directly about the makeup, I got word that they’d spoken with John Paladin about it and were very impressed with his makeup job on me. Well I was glad. It was positive attention for me, but also for the makeup artist. John really did do excellent work on me, and if I wore it well, most of the credit goes to him. That made sleeping in the makeup worth it. Their on-stage presentation was hilarious and noisy as hell. They gave you good natured ribbing when you asked questions and the audience loved them. Me, no less than anyone else. They were also the two best readers of their dialogue, coming very close to their on-screen performances of the text, which says something considering that those performances are both more than a decade in the past. On the other hand, I treasure those that weren’t close to their set performances, because they read them live, and the vocal divergences simply represented other possible interpretations of those character moments.

Sunday closed with William Shatner. The afternoon saw the hotel packed. Hundreds of people showed up who hadn’t been there all weekend long. And of course, they were there for Bill. I went to the photo line an hour beforehand, because I had had experience with Vegas and knew that in his case, I’d better get there early. By the time he appeared for the photo op, the line stretched for more than five hundred people, and I was about fifteenth in line. His on-stage talk was lively and drew on four and a half decades of star trek memories as well as talking about his future projects. It was here that I finally got to do something I’d meant to do when I saw him in Vegas. When my turn came in the Q and A, I took the opportunity to thank him for narrating so many of his own books, explaining that I’d likely have never read them if he hadn’t narrated them. He seemed touched by this, because almost nobody asks him about his books. His movies, music and plays, yes. But almost never the books. I wanted him to know that all those hours in the recording studio had mattered to someone.

These experiences are unforgettable, and though I spent a respectable amount of money at the convention, I spent it on things like photo ops and the breakfast, things that would leave me with experiences and memories, which you can’t lose the way you can lose a t-shirt. I plan to save those recordings, backing them up as I would my dissertation, to which this last year of study is devoted. I intend to have the quotations paper they all signed framed. Something to hang on the wall. I’ve made a few Facebook connections with fellow fans, and there are people I definitely intend to keep in touch with. Again, experience. It was enjoyable to be around hundreds of people who were as geeky as me, who knew all the obscure details of the characters and who could appreciate quoting the dialogue These are normal people, people with jobs and families and drudgery and troubles, but for one weekend, you get to forget being who you are, whether plumber or housewife or doctoral student or soldier, and you become a star trek fan, nothing more, nothing less and nothing else. If I could attend any other convention, just one more in all of my lifetime, I’d attend the Vegas convention of 2016. Vegas is the main attraction, and 2016 will mark star trek’s 50^th anniversary. That convention had better be a blowout, and I intend to be there, God willing.

Some Reflections on Suicide

            This somber blog entry actually started life almost a year ago as a Facebook note, when a professor of mine, a man I respected and admired, took his own life. I’m revising and reposting it for two reasons. First, more people read blogspot.com than the forum where this first appeared, and why blog if you don’t want people to read? Second, recent events have given me more to think about when it comes to suicide, and I find myself still wanting to write. No, another friend of mine is not dead; I’ll explain in due time if you’ll read on. But as you read, consider these questions:  is suicide worse for those left behind when they are left wondering why, or is it worse when those left behind know exactly why.

Until the last year or so of my life, I’d known only one person before this who took his own life. It happened about five years ago, and as for the young man in question, he was a vengeful, hateful person whose passing didn’t disturb me in the slightest. In case any of my readers (always assuming anyone reads this) knew him and actually cared for him, I’ll refrain from mentioning his name. But his suicide was a vindictive act, intended to inflict pain and guilt upon a select few against whom he held a grudge; that was his own assertion at the time, not hindsight. The fellow even called up those whom he hated as he was dying and told them that they were responsible and that he did not forgive them their offenses. No I was not one of those whom he hated, this young man; having said that, I did not mourn his passage. I found him somewhat pitiable, but grieve, that I did not do.

In September 2010, a senior professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois took his own life. This was a man I’d worked with, taken classes with, done research with and who sat on my doctoral examination committee. It seems egocentric to say that this suicide matters more because he matters more to me, but let’s leave aside accusations of egocentrism for the present. He did matter to me, a lot more, more than the first person I talked about. More relevant to the discussion of suicide is the unanswerable question, at least, unanswerable in his case. Why did he do it? It’s a question I attempted to persuade myself not to investigate, not because I feared the answer, but because I had, and still to this day have, no means at my disposal for finding an answer. Even those closest to him may not have anything approaching an answer. And that lack of answer is something we will simply have to deal with. And yet, because this is suicide, that lack of answer proves more vexing than it otherwise would. Why do I say this?

In the weeks following my professor’s death, I read and reread the doctoral dissertation of someone who has been like a sister to me for a lot of years, because it is most germane to the point. Consider this from the concluding chapter, “Despite its unfortunate prevalence, suicide-related bereavement is a non-normative, sometimes traumatic experience that stands in sharp contrast to the normative nature of non-traumatic loss” (Anderson p. 115). Too true. A common sense conclusion, if most diligently researched. My complements. What that conclusion means today is just this: if this man, respected scholar, popular professor, devoted family man and sincere in his Christian beliefs, had died of a heart attack, in a car accident, had even, let’s say, been murdered, the nature of what it is I felt would be different. The “why” would still have been asked, but the question of agency, or at least, his lack of agency in the matter, would make wrestling with it a bit easier. Who can control the car accident, who can control the death by natural causes that overtakes you, who indeed can foresee and forestall a senseless violent crime? In the three preceding questions, we would do well to ask, fore who can know the mind of God? Our recourse in those former cases to the will of God is more than just a pat answer, though it can come across as such depending on who’s delivering it. Yet in those cases, we must perforce accede to the will of God, because as his ways are indeed, not our ways, nor his thoughts, ours. Yet suicide. Such divinely oriented reasoning seems to fail with suicide in so far as the death of the person is concerned precisely because it does not appear to be the will of God that you do such a thing. … An inherently interesting choice about your existence, to decide not to exist anymore. And then to do it, to perform the final instantiation of agency that, in and of itself, deprives you of all further agency, forever. To, in a manner of speaking, short-circuit God’s plan.

What is the bible’s answer on suicide? In truth, the bible itself is little help here. The word, “suicide,” doesn’t appear in the King James Version or the New American Standard Version at all. And there are, so far as I can see, only four genuine suicides in all of scripture, with three more popularly being offered up as examples of suicide. The others are arguable, because it’s debatable whether Jonah wanted to take his own life (Jonah 1:11-15), that is, did Jonah throw himself into the sea expressly to end his own life, and a similar question shows up when we look at Sampson’s death in Judges 16:21-31. . Similarly, some suggest the case of Abimelech as a suicide in the scriptures, but when you read Judges 9:54, you see clearly that his servant actually kills him. Abimilech requests the favor, granted, but Abimelech’s death still comes about through murder at another person’s hand. Of the other four, the suicides of Ahythophel, 2 Samuel 17:23 who hanged himself when his advice went unheeded, and the case of Zimri, 2 Kings 16:18, who burned his palace down around him to avoid capture, are relatively obscure incidents. The two most well-known are probably the suicide of Judas as recorded in Matthew 27:35 and the death of King Saul and his armor bearer as recorded in 1 Samuel 31:1-7. In none of these cases does scripture say anything explicitly about taking one’s own life or about God’s view of one who has done so. There is the commandment that forbids willful murder, but whether, “thou shalt not commit murder,” extends to the self is open to some interpretation. Most theologians think that it does and that Judeo-Christian scriptures forbid suicide by implecation.

So know, resort to the divine does not provide comfort or answers to the “why question or to any other questions where suicide is concerned. I have concluded, tentatively, that it’s not an answerable question for me in my professor’s case, as I’ve said, but it is difficult to stop asking it, and perhaps that too is as it should be. Normative grief, not maladaptive grief, to borrow once more from that excellent dissertation. Quite normative, quite unpleasantly normative. And I was just a student. Not a parent or, god forbid, a child, of which he left behind three, ages 12, 9 and 7, one of whom had a birthday right around the day he died. And for the record, I wasn’t his wife either.

All of this leads me away from 'why' and towards something a bit less abstract, anger, and, forgiveness. Wow, isn’t that just a can of worms. Yes, I am well aware that anger is considered one of the five stages of grief, both on the part of survivors and on the part of those suffering, say, a terminal illness. Yes, anger is normal. I know. And yet, I did not wish to be angry with this man. I had never been angry with him until that time. As a student and junior colleague—we were collaborating on research after all—I never had cause to feel anger towards him. And yet it was not entirely non-altruistic anger. Like many others, I was angry that he knowingly and willfully did this and left his children behind. 12 isn’t old enough to know and understand everything, but it’s old enough for death. And you can’t tell me that poor boy won’t, or hasn’t since, attempted to draw a connection between his father’s death and his recent birthday. I’m sure no such connection exists, but try telling him that. And what of the other two? "Daddy’s not coming home anymore?" To what extent do children of that age cognitively understand death, let alone suicide? I don’t know. I was 7 when my grandfather died, and I certainly understood it. I still remember the day I was told about it, January 5, 1990. I remember where I was, when in the day it was, and exactly what words my father chose to tell me. And if that memory is so clear to me, I must assume that they, his children, could not be unaware of his death. They must know, and it must be terrible, and just what the hell was so bad that he did it? That he caused the situation wherein they struggle with it and ask, ‘why?’ I have, sadly, no answers for them. No one does. Even were God to attempt an answer, his best reply would be, “I am.” And, being God, that will be sufficient. Temporally, they have it bad. That’s the long and the short of it, they have it bad even now and likely will for a long time. I’m so sorry, Children.

As for my own anger, it revolved around the question in the last paragraph. What could have been so wrong with his life that permanently checking out seemed like the solution? Nothing is that bad. No shame, no disgrace, no stress, nothing, is that bad. Admittedly, I’ve never been suicidal, never wanted to commit suicide, never planned it. I have friends who have thought about it, even planned and attempted it, so I realize my opinion here is not the only one available. But to those friends I would ask, in all sincerity, what stopped you? If you planned, or attempted suicide, you’re still here. And the fact that a person plans but does not attempt, or attempts, and does not succeed, in committing suicide is significant. It’s fairly easy to do, after all; the human body is remarkably destructible. And he did it. It has the hallmarks of something that was deliberated, meticulously planned, and put into action. And what, I return to the point, could have been that bad? Money? Sex? Departmental politics? Somehow I doubt it. Not that I’m in any condition to doubt, because had you asked me to list faculty members in my department who would be likely to commit suicide, none would have appeared likely, but he would have appeared less so. But I was wrong, it seems. That leads me to his mental state. Did he suffer debilitating depression? Did he suffer a nervous breakdown? Those are the kindest explanations, because they present an act committed by a man not in full possession of his faculties at the time. And for my part, I’d like to believe that such a thing was the motivator, and those explanations, if true, are likely forever hidden from my knowledge. Still, it appears to have been deliberated. The disappearance was deliberate, the location of the car and the body were equally well-chosen so as not to be spotted by aerial surveillance. This was not an impulse suicide, which makes it all the worse on those left behind for that. It also, at least to my thinking, makes it harder to attribute his actions as being the product of a mind that was faltering at the time. He didn’t get drunk and then attempt something stupid, as someone did in my home. He didn’t get some piece of particularly bad news, go into his office, lock his door and blow his brains out. This was calculated, thought about. Concluded. I suspect he went away for a while, gave his life some serious thought, and decided that it was no longer bearable, or would be a case of diminishing returns, for him to continue to live it. As I say, that makes those kind explanations questionable, and questioning is what I was, and still am, reduced to. More to the point, the absence, or the improbability of those kind explanations left me unable to mitigate my anger and puzzlement in that way. Only time has been able to partially do that.

I started out by offering two questions. Who has it worse, the ones who are left to wonder why, or the ones who know why. This brings me to my second example, and I warn you, you may feel like laughing at it. But if you stuck with me this long, keep on going. The second suicide, the one that raises that second question of mine, concerns a person who, in most senses of the word, never existed. I’m something of a role-play game (RPG) player. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, this is where you create an avatar and role-play through it, constructing a life for your character and making them live it. It’s a form of acting, I suppose, except that it’s acting without a pre-written script. Yet, it is acting in the sense that you must be faithful to your character in his or her portrayal, making them react as their personality would cause them to react, not as you yourself might feel like doing. So you immerse yourself in your character when you act or when you role-play or when you write a novel, and you observe their world and their emotions closely. This is what novelists and actors and gamers have in common.

Without boring you with detail, I’ll say this much about my character. He is thirty years old and a moderately successful movie maker and theater director. Now, I actually had to do my homework in film making and stage directing to make this convincing, mind you. This character of mine had a lover, played by a friend of mine. She was a deeply troubled woman, this female character. Whatever troubles my friend may have, they’re nothing like the ones her character had. I digress. As you no doubt have figured out, my character’s lover took her own life. She blew her brains out in a public place, having already written a suicide note explaining the reasons. The note was written to my character and for him alone, and it explained very clearly why she was taking her own life. While it would probably not be accurate to say that he caused her to pull the trigger, it would be accurate to say that he had an indirect hand in her motivation to kill herself; at least that’s how he sees it.

Now back to the real world. I watched these characters’ situation with interest, and I, like my friend, was saddened when his lover shot herself. For my friend it was worse because the character belonged to her, but let’s not get bogged down in detail. The point of this story is this:  in this case, there was an explanation. As my character observed to a friend of his, “I can’t even ask why.” The note was clear and left no doubt. Yet, I found even through vicarious experience, that having an explanation made it no easier to deal with. In fact, the explanation may have made it worse. That is to say, if what a person says in a suicide note can be taken as representing their true motivations, you may be left feeling like you should’ve foreseen it, like you should’ve known that was the problem and like you should’ve been more intuitive, more on the ball, more competent in dealing with that person. You may feel as if, had you but been a little more attentive, a little more in tune with that person, you’d have seen the problem and have been able to act. This is classic survivor’s guilt. And it is as bad, in its own way, if not worse than not knowing why at all. I know that now. I even wrote to my friend asking her this, “you tried to show me what was wrong with her. Did she die because I didn’t pick up on the clues and have my character act appropriately?” Yes, I was experiencing second-hand survivor’s guilt, wondering whether I, Brad Blair, should’ve seen what she, my friend, was trying to tell me. It was a miniature version of the type of survivor’s guilt I would doubtless feel if a friend of mine, or Heaven forefend a lover, took their own lives, suicide note and all. When I realized what answers this role-play experience had given me, I knew it was time to revise this essay. I hope I don’t have to revise it again.

Anger plays its part in both cases. In my professor’s case, certainly. And my character is angry at his lover for doing this to him. I was even upset with my friend, if on a much lower key, for doing this to her character and, by extension, to me and to those few who had extensive interactions with her character. Yet I mentioned forgiveness. That’s part of it too, and it applies in both situations, where a reason is known and where it is not. If we do not forgive, we will not be forgiven. True, but more importantly, and more to the point of those scriptures that echo that sentiment, is the notion that forgiveness is psychologically necessary in order to close the grieving process. Ok, I can accept that. So, even though I was only a student, only a colleague, and this isn’t as near to me as it is to his children and widow, I too must forgive. And I shall, even without understanding, I shall, because I must. I have no alternative. Or rather, the alternatives, what my dear friend Amy called complicated or maladaptive grief, these are things I must needs avoid. And so I shall forgive. My character will also forgive, and his case, he has the added burden of forgiving himself. It’s easy to beat yourself up and hard to stop. And yet, for his own sanity, he will have to forgive. He has no particular grasp of the bible, so that sort of reasoning wouldn’t reach him, but he must accept that in the end, it was his lover who pulled the trigger, and he will need to let it go if his life is to ever be normal again.

It’s interesting to me how a lack of knowledge on the one hand, or how complete knowledge on the other hand, affects the emotional responses to suicide. I’m left asking myself this:  in the real world, which would I rather have, the bafflement and puzzlement of not knowing, or the risk of the associated survivor’s guilt that may come with knowing full well why the person is gone? My answer doesn’t stem from any religious background, but from my own philosophical perspective. I do not agree with Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four when he writes his party slogan, “ignorance is strength.” Rather, in knowledge lies power and wisdom and resolution, depending on how the knowledge is used. So, I’d rather know. That being said, that’s all for today.

Quality Products? Don't make me laugh.

You know I have to say before I start, there are two things that ‘m not. I’m not a socialist, and I’m not an engineer. Socialism and engineering, you ask? What the hell is Brad on about? Well, hey, at least I got your attention. There’s a concept that’s been niggling at me as I buy things over the years and as I replace them. It goes by various names, but it’s most commonly known as planned obsolescence. Yes, it’s a real principle of manufacturing, and I’m going to talk about several varieties of it and I’ll give you a ton of examples. The idea goes like this:  make a product in such a way that the customer will have to keep pouring money into your business to keep using the product. Take light bulbs, for instance. Light bulbs burn out after a few months or so, depending on how often you use them, and you have to go and by more. Why not make a light bulb that lasts for a long time? Well, it’d be more expensive, some say. Actually, it’d be cheaper. If you’ve got something that you don’t have to replace for a decade, you’re saving God alone knows how much money. In fact, someone did make such a light bulb several decades ago, and guess who doesn’t get to buy it? You and me.

            Let’s think about our technology. Software is often written with this idea in mind. Write up an operating system for a computer or some other piece of tech, and then release an, “upgrade,” in such a way as to make what the user has totally useless for anything in the future from your company. Microsoft does it all the time. Windows XP is a perfectly good operating system, for example, but it’s no longer sold or supported by Microsoft. Now don’t tell me it’s because our computers today would be incapable of doing their jobs running XP. I know better, and I’m not a techy. You see it in car parts. Cars wear and tear faster than they ever have now, and they have so many computer chips and microprocessors built into them that often times, repairs can exceed the cost of a car, especially if it’s used and you didn’t spend thirty grand on it. Who does this benefit? Auto manufacturers, of course.

            I could find you example after example of this practice. Everything from disposable razors to the blacktop material on our road ways to laptop computers. Laptops are a great example. If a component in a laptop fries, often times you just have to buy a new machine. Same goes for cell phones. The technology is not only so miniaturized as to make repairs expensive and cost prohibitive, there’s no percentage in HP or Samson making computers and phones that you could actually fix when they go bust, because if they did, they’d lose revenue on new purchases. In short, they make more money when you are forced to purchase a whole new unit.

            And the most damnable thing here is that it’s planned! These people don’t regret how much you’re out of pocket every time your machine blows a fuse. They love it! I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, “well unfortunately, you’ll just have to replace the unit,” whatever the thing happened to be.

            So let’s consider planned obsolescence systematically. The first thing to know about it is that it’s not knew. It’s a longstanding tradition in American manufacturing. The second thing to know is that it comes in several flavors. It impacts just about every area of your life where you use material, and we’ll cover that too. First, let’s deal with the history of it. In his 1840 book, Democracy in America, the French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville recounts a conversation with an American sailor that centered on why American ships of the day were built to last such a short time:  "I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years.”

            The term, “planned obsolescence,” that describes what de Tocqueville was talking about, was first coined in 1932 by a fellow named Bernard London, but the real pioneer of this philosophy was an American industrial engineer by the name of Brooks Stevens. He used it as the title of his talk at a Minneapolis conference in 1954, and he kept the catchy little phrase, employing it to describe his idea of how customers should be thought of. According to Stevens, planned obsolescence means, “Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.” And from that point, the ball got rolling in a big way. Planned obsolescence is a fundamental feature of a larger industrial practice known as “value engineering.” Select the parts that you know are going to have the shortest life expectancy and make the product from those parts. Then, when you’re caught, rationalize it by pointing out that you’re saving the purchaser money when he buys your product. That’s actually a very clever bit of BS there, folks, because what’s really going on is the opposite. So let’s look at several different versions of planned obsolescence (examples included), and if you’re not pissed by the time you finish reading this, you’re probably a product manufacturer.

            The most readily apparent form of planned obsolescence is “technical” or “functional obsolescence.” A product is engineered with parts that are guaranteed to wear out or to break after a set number of uses or number of hours of use. Your laptop is an excellent example. The physical materials that are used in, let’s say, the hard drive’s construction or that the screen uses each have life expectancies beyond which they will simply fail. In truth, your laptop could be made of more durable material. Yes, it would cost you more to buy it at the outset, but hell, the thing might last you for 15 years. Who among us wouldn’t jump at that chance! I’ve replaced laptops so many times it’s not even funny. I got four and a half years out of one machine, and I was impressed. Most laptops, if used as frequently as students and business execs use them, will wear out in three to five years. Another version of technical obsolescence is to make the cost of replacement parts equal to the cost of a new unit. Whoever heard of repairing a cell phone? You can’t really do it, because a third strategy is to make the product, “non-serviceable.” That’s a fancy way of saying, “we don’t have replacement parts at any price, because we never meant to fix it.” Another very common form of planned technical obsolescence is for a company to release new products with increased functionality, improved software or some other design feature that, in some way, is utterly incompatible with the old stuff. We saw this when DVD disks replaced VHS cassettes, for example. I’m not sure if blue ray is replacing DVD; I think the jury’s still out on that one. But you take my point. Let’s move on.

            Another type of planned obsolescence is known as “notification obsolescence.” Have you ever seen that little notification on your water filter that tells you to replace it? There are products out there which thoughtfully notify the user that a replacement is necessary. These notifications are frequently followed by the breakdown of the product. But even where the product itself doesn’t break down, what do we, as conscientious consumers, do when our products tell us that they’re about to fail? Well, we replace them. So why not, reasons a company, program that failure notice to kick in at point X in the future, regardless of whether or not the product is about to physically break down. Here’s a concrete example. Most inkjet printers have cartridges that you have to replace. Now, how does the printer know when the cartridge has run out of ink? It’s not that smart. I remember old dot matrix printers that would just keep right on humming when the thing was out of ink, for instance. Actually, if you look at your printer, (go ahead and look), what you’ll find is that the cartridge contains a proprietary smart chip installed by the cartridge maker, and that chip tells the cartridge that it’s out of ink. Now, it doesn’t matter that the cartridge may still have ink in it, as they usually do. And it doesn’t matter that the cartridge could probably be refilled, which it could if you had a handy supply of ink. The coding on these proprietary chips is written to make damned sure that that ink cartridge is never usable again, not on that printer anyway, and you’re only option is to buy a new ink cartridge with a new smart chip. This is what is called, “programmed obsolescence.” It’s called, “programmed obsolescence,” because the failure of the product isn’t due to some random component wearing out or breaking down like in our laptop or cell phone examples. It’s a deliberate failure of the product, programmed to occur at a specific point in time during the thing’s life cycle. Neat, isn’t it?? Go look at your tech devices and then tell me I’m wrong. I’m not an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist. I’m just telling you what’s going on. Here’s some more.

            One more technical example is worth mentioning. It’s your batteries. Have you noticed how many products you have that use those special lithium-based rechargeable batteries? I can think of three things that use some type of lithium-based battery within two feet of me. The special thing to note about these batteries is how they only last for about 400-500 recharges. My digital book player’s battery, for example, definitely is meant to last about 400 charge cycles. Funny thing is, it’s not the battery itself that’s the problem. Most specialized batteries, like what goes in your cell phone or your laptop or whatever, have an integrated circuit built in to them that regulates the charge and sets the full-charge point of the battery. They have to have these circuits in them. Otherwise the battery becomes very dangerous. The sucky thing here is that the manufacturer sets the circuit’s algorithms in one of two ways. They can program the circuit to do its thing for about as long as the battery itself will last. This is the reasonable or decent thing to do. That way, your battery really does work for you as long as it was meant to. What most of them, including the manufacturers of several of my most frequently-used devices, do instead is to set the circuit to tell the battery that it’s failed out on you after a predetermined number of recharges. It doesn’t matter that the battery you’ve got is physically capable of lasting much longer, the integrated circuit is shortening its life cycle. That’s why they tend to lose charge and run down so much faster after a certain point. Now I’m not a manufacturing engineer, so I can’t tell you in precise detail how that’s done. Yet, it is indeed done.

            Let’s consider one final type of planned obsolescence, and this one’s not technical. It’s called by several names, “Style obsolescence,” “psychological obsolescence,” or “obsolescence of desirability.” As you probably picked up, this type of product obsolescence has nothing at all to do with the things you buy. It has everything to do with you and your own mind. If a company can convince you that the gismo you have is out of date, old fashioned, uncool, or somehow undesirable for your personal or professional image, you will, naturally, opt for something that is more desirable. We see it in clothes all the time, with this style being considered classy one day and trashy the next, but the really amazing area where this happens is cars, and as a blind person who doesn’t drive and never will buy a car, I feel uniquely qualified to be the outside observer here, America. There’s nothing wrong with an older car if it’s maintained. But if you want to be cool or seen as having class or status, your car will be the year’s current model. What’s the difference between a 2011 Honda Civic and a 2010 Honda Civic? Or what’s the difference between a 2011 Ford Fusion and a 2008 Ford Fusion? Well, not much. Nothing important, that’s for sure. But the reason that someone trades in their 2009 model Ford for a 2011 model often has to do with some minor gismo that’s been added, or a more stylish-looking interior, or with some other completely superficial change. And the automobile industry makes its bread and butter on this knowledge. They know how important the car is in the American psyche, and so you see them continually updating. It’s old news too. In 1941, Alfred Sloan was retiring as the CEO of General Motors, and he had this to say:  "Today the appearance of a motorcar is a most important factor in the selling end of the business—perhaps the most important factor— because everyone knows the car will run.” You, the car-driving public of which I’m not a member, were bought and sold a long time ago by the auto industry. Like I say, it’s a damned car. If it runs, why get a new one? Well, you still do get new ones, and you’re paying for it every single time.

            All of this, this planned obsolescence, this value engineering, this mass-produced and disposable stuff that we use, this is as much a part of the American way of life as Old Glory or the hot dog or Yankee Stadium. It’s very much an American thing. We pioneered the concept, and we’re selling it to the world. That is not to say that it is an inevitable result of capitalism. I’m not a socialist, remember? It is perfectly possible to have a capitalist-principled economy without the notion of planned obsolescence. For example, In Britain, it’s considered a violation of the customer’s rights to make products that utilize programmed obsolescence or the types of technical obsolescence we’ve been talking about here. The British Office of Fair Trading and their Trading Standards Institute have the responsibility of seeing to it that companies don’t make products that fall apart just after the warrantee expires. Now I didn’t write this to get you to do anything. You can’t. But I want you to know. Planned obsolescence is a very cynical and dishonest practice that has taken very deep root in our American culture. So remember that next time you by:  a disposable razor, a shirt, a laptop, a cell phone, a car, a piece of furniture, … do I need to go on? Have a good one.

Brad's Independence Day Blog Post

Well, I hope everyone’s celebrating this July 4 safely and happily. I’m no different. I’ve got two friends up here from Tennessee and my fiancé is here. I’ve got three ribeye steaks in the fridge awaiting my attention; Nicole doesn’t care for steak, so she has a polska kielbasa waiting for her. And of course, my sour cream mashed potatoes for later. But that’s all for later. This being Independence Day, I thought I’d start with a little independent thought, something a bit deeper than, “hey ain’t America grand!” Well, it is, but here’s a bit of independent thought nonetheless.

            Firstly, how old is the United States? A lot of people think the American Revolution, or as most serious historians call it, the American War of Independence, started in 1776. I choose to call it the revolution, because my PhD is in German Studies, not history, and I grew up here, so that’s what I’ll call it, please and thank you, to all historians. That being said, I dabble in history myself, so here we go. Well the first thing to note about that 1776 Revolution business is that the armed conflict actually started with a day-long clash between British regulars and units of the Massachusetts militia on the road from Lexington to Concord on April 19, 1775, almost 15 months before any declaration was signed. So, maybe the United States would be considering its 236^th, not its 235^th, birthday., and maybe Independence Day should’ve been April 19. An interesting thought. Or, we should consider that the war didn’t end until 1783 with the signing of the treaty of Paris. Until that time, or at least until Yorktown was fought in October 1781, American independence was by no means a settled question or a foregone conclusion as we like to popularize it. So, perhaps we should be talking about our 228^th birthday. And what about this July 4^th business anyway?

            Well, John Adams sure didn’t think Independence Day should be celebrated on July 4. He thought it’d be July 2^nd, and with good reason. On the 2^nd, the second Continental Congressed voted and passed a resolution put forward by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia calling for the thirteen colonies’ separation from Great Britain. The next two days were spent revising a certain draft declaration that’d been prepared for the congress by a committee of five men headed by Jefferson,. On July 3^rd, John Adams wrote this very famous and oft quoted letter to his wife:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

            Well I don’t know about solemn acts of devotion. Most people I knew drink, barbecue and shoot off fireworks, but hey, you can’t have everything, John. So we celebrate it on the 4^th, the day the Declaration was adopted, though I, like John, think that July 2^nd would be a more accurate representation of history. Interestingly, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, political rivals and friends for decades, both presidents of the United States, both being the only signers of the declaration to become presidents of the United States,, also share this in common:  they died on the same day, within hours of each other. They died on July 4, 1826, fifty years after the declaration’s adoption. John Adams’s last words as noted down by those at his death bed were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” What John didn’t know was that Thomas Jefferson had died at Monticello some several hours before. But oh well. Another point of trivia, President Calvin Coolidge, 1921-1928, was born on July 4, 1872, the only president born on that day.

            Now,  look at our country and what it has become, and I wonder how well we’re living up to what the founders set up. In a country where the government can slap a wiretap on you without due process, where we detain people at a military base in a foreign country and hold them there for years without trial (Guantanamo Bay), in a country that tolerated and supported people like Joe McCarthy and the executive decisions of George W. Bush, I just have to say, it’s interesting. We trade our civil liberties away in the belief that we’re making ourselves into a safer nation. See everything in the Patriot At. I’ve actually read the thing, and hey, folks, it’s still in effect. Well a good bit of it is anyway. I think of that great old American statesman and thinker, Benjamin Franklin, who looked his fellow countrymen squarely in the eye and told them that a man who would trade his liberty for a bit of safety deserves neither liberty nor safety. Or a Mark Twain put it, “patriotism means supporting your country always, and your government when it deserves it.” In light of the Patriot Act, I think the late comedian George Carlen said it best, “I love the freedoms we used to have.”

            That being said, I am an American. I have no desire to move to Canada, though I would if it got bad enough. I’ve already said much about the moral zeitgeist, and I don’t need to rehash our education system or our general lack of moral consensus. I could point out our imperialist nineteenth century as an example of the fact that freedom is relative. Until the end of slavery, Blacks didn’t rank as people, but property. And the native American population? I think we all know what happened there. The Mexican War was a land grab, pure and simple, and the Spanish-American War? Yeah that one, the one nobody seems to know about anymore? Again, land grab. And I dare any historian to refute those contentions. In fact, many historians agree with those contentions.

            Still, I am an American. I may not be as oblivious on Independence Day as a lot of people, drinking beer and grilling hot dogs and waving flags. I am critical of this country. But I’m critical about it because I care about it, and it’s going straight down the tubes, has been for years, and it’s accelerating. But meanwhile, happy 4^th.

a quick update

Just looking back at my blog, I see it’s been two months, almost exactly two months, since I posted anything. Not to say I haven’t been writing, no indeed. Rather, what I’ve written has been mostly for the benefit of professors and myself. Or rather, I’ve benefited when the professors read and assign grades to what I’ve written. May was a turbulent month. May usually is, seeing as it’s always the end of a semester,, but this May was especially hectic. For some time my summer funding was in doubt, and I was seriously contemplating the possibility of begging. Well, maybe not begging, but the university took its time deciding whether or not to rectify its own mistakes where my funding was concerned. Well, we got there in the end. My funding’s guaranteed through next May, so the public food banks will have to wait on me another year.

            Nick came up in May, and that made May better than it otherwise was going to be. I also co-taught a summer course in May, and I haven’t heard from my fellow TA since we wrapped it up on the 27^th. Humph. I’ll undoubtedly see them all in August. Meanwhile, this summer, oh boy, this summer. My dissertation’s lit review will get pumped out this summer, little as I’m looking forward to that. And I’m completing the capstone translation project for the graduate certificate in translation studies that will be attached to my records. For it, I’ve written my own translation of Franz Kafka’s “Ein Hungerkünstler.” Poor Nicole was kind enough to sit through the text. And speaking of Nicole …

            She’s here. She got here on June 3, after a Greyhound trip that featured multiple delays and lasted a full 36 hours. Horrid. She got here and slept for the better part of a day, and I felt myself obligated to run out and buy her some chocolates to make up for the horribly long trip. We’ll be here until the 18^th of July, when we take off for North Carolina and a week with her parents. Before we leave, Nick and Chris Hailey will come up the first weekend in July and we’ll all do something for the fourth. Probably something involving the hand cut ribeye steaks in my freezer. I think Nicole will feel outnumbered by the males in the house, but she’s learning that her vote is usually the only one that counts anyway, her being a woman and all. Though in fairness to Nicole, when I showed her the draft of this blog, she said that it’s not whether or not her vote counts that she’s contemplating, but rather as she puts it, “the sheer amount of maleness,” that will be in the house. I had to chuckle.

The only other event of the summer I should mention briefly here is the upcoming star trek convention in Nashville at the end of July. Needless to say, I’ll be there and can’t wait for it. Still, the convention is such a rare and special thing that it will get its own blog entry when it happens. Meanwhile, I’ve put together a few thoughts on Deep Space Nine, and I’ll probably take Nicole’s wise advice and publish them as a two or three-part post, rather than in a single post that runs for 10 pages, as some of my others have done. And there’s a non-trek-related blog post in the making, and it will be coming up soon. This here is just a friendly update to let you, whoever you are, know that I’m still here and still writing.

Just what are you without college?

                You know, a few days ago I asked some of my friends for their ideas for another blog posting. I took a break from blogging so that I could concentrate on approaching course deadlines and get some rather nasty assignments off my desk. But I have now reduced the amount of things on my desk, and I return to my blog. My friends wanted me to talk about college. More specifically, the cultural pressure on young people to go to college, both positive and negative and the stigma attached to those who discover that they’re not suited for college. Well that’s an important topic, and so, having spent ten years in college and graduate school, and having spent the past four of those years with a steady teaching load, I feel myself well qualified to reflect on these things.

                Firstly, how does our society view college? Well, I realize I’m speaking in generalizations, but that’s alright. College funds are a good place to start. How often do you hear things like, “saving for your children’s college education,” and so on. That begs the question of whether or not it’s the parents’ responsibility to foot the bill for tuition. That’s a whole other discussion and I won’t get into it. Still, the presence of college funds for children, whether formally established as in an escrow account or just some sort of savings that you funnel your spare money into over the course of the first eighteen years of your kid’s life, college funds are a popular thing to set up. Of course, a college fund presupposes that a child will want to go to college, that their vocational interests will be of such a nature as will be most benefited by college experience.

                This assumption, that college is definitely the best place for our kids to go, has had a number of interesting consequences. I’ve talked about the lowering of college admissions standards, a phenomenon with many causes, so I won’t rehash it here. I’ve also talked about the spike in gen ed coursework. What I haven’t discussed yet is the proliferation in truly useless degrees. By ‘useless,’ I don’t mean English degrees or philosophy degrees or other subject-related degrees, whether or not they have immediate applicability to the working world. By, ‘useless,’ I refer to degrees that don’t actually result in the training of a student in a particular area of study. After all, engineering, economics, entomology and English literature all have this in common. When you’ve done with the coursework, you’re quite knowledgeable in that area. Or at least, you ought to be. A senior-level English lit major can talk about Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Blake, Plath and Ginsburg with a greater depth of knowledge than someone who didn’t study them. An engineering student can talk about metal fatigue, polymer synthesis and hydrostatic pressure. An entomologist can distinguish between multiple species of beetle and discuss their lifespans, habits and place in the food chain. This is what we expect. These are the results of their separate educations regardless of what you or I may think of their chosen field of study.

                So what sorts of degrees qualify as useless? Consider some of the following. A certain university in the south offers the following:  B.A. in liberal studies, B.A. in continuing education, B.A. in college studies. A certain school in the southeast offers an M.A. in Liberal Studies. Another offers an M.A. in Liberal Education. My own schools, all three of the ones I’ve attended, offer such degrees. These degrees are largely composed of a large dose of courses in various sectors of the humanities, together with a series of courses the student chooses in consultation with their advisor. The university propaganda insists that these sorts of degrees are intended for the self-starter who doesn’t want to be confined to a particular major and who wants to be prepared for a wide variety of post-collegiate studies. Trust me. I’ve read the catalogues and that’s just how they’re advertised. The problem is that I’ve also met the types of students to whom these degrees appeal. I’ve met a lot of them. Multiple examples. With few exceptions, these degrees attract the type of person who can’t otherwise pick a major. You can’t stay in “undecided status,” lacking a declared course of study, forever. But if you could, these people would. They tend to either have no idea what interests them as a course of study or, conversely, to have so many disparate and conflicting interests as to be paralyze by their own minds and unable, or unwilling, to make a choice and settle into a degree track. These people also have no sense of what they want to do with their lives and only the vaguest notion of why they’re in school in the first place. In short, most of your liberal studies majors aren’t cut out for college, but our society has given them the notion that they don’t have a choice.

                So what about those who recognize that college isn’t for them and who choose not to pursue it? These sorts of people don’t run to type. You can’t generalize and say that someone chose not to go to school because they’d rather do manual labor, for example. I’ve met a lot of intelligent people who don’t want to break their backs for a living, and yet who also don’t care for the college environment. That being said, I’ve met a number of degree-holding people who are working in fast-food. Hmmmm. Still, what does our society say to the person who doesn’t want to go to college?

                Well, how often have I met people in companies of one stripe or another who are blocked from further advancement owing to a lack of credentials. Not executive credentials or some company credential, but specifically, a lack of a 4-year degree. And how often do such people find themselves working below much younger, and much less experienced people, people who have arrived at their positions either by default because they had a 4-year degree to their credit, or alternatively, because their degree opened rungs on the career ladder otherwise closed off. I’ve met a lot of people in this position, and they have my sympathy. Often, experience, hard-won experience, is trumped by a piece of paper with B.S. or MBA written upon it. Speaking of the MBA, we’ve done a good job at nullifying its value too. Initially, the MBA was an advanced business degree intended for those who’d gone to college and then worked for a few years, gaining experience before going back to school. It was never meant to be a prerequisite to working in the business world. Except, of course, that it has become just that. Often times you won’t even find entry-level work in business without this Master’s in Business Administration degree. Something’s gone wrong here. And I’m not a disgruntled laborer or middle-level exec pointing this out. I’m one such educated person, and I’m here to tell you, their complaints have a point to them.

                I recently came across an interesting book put out in 2010, Blue-Collar and Proud of It, by Joe Lamacchia. Joe Lamacchia is a successful, intelligent, articulate man, a millionaire several times over, and he never spent a day in college. He runs a series of landscaping concerns in Boston, and his book is a compilation of information about various trades. Most of it is aimed at those who want to work with their hands, and it discusses each trade, the work involved, the work environment, the training and certifications you need, and contains a state by state guide to trade schools and special training institutes and apprenticeships for the various trades it discusses. It’s a hefty volume and I didn’t read every page of it, but his introduction runs along the lines of this blog. Joe points out that we’re brainwashing our youth into believing that they’ll never be anything unless they go to college. Now, Joe has nothing against college. He’s not an anti-intellectual. Anti-intellectuals are easy to spot and easier to dismiss. To those who want to go to college, he’s all for it. His book is aimed at that segment who doesn’t really want to go, but who has come to believe, because our culture has told them so, that they won’t amount to a damned thing without going. And so they go. They march through the 4-year degrees and leave with the credential, and they’re still stuck not knowing what they want to do with it. Something’s gone wrong here.

                My message is simply this. Just because you don’t want to go to college doesn’t mean you’re not a worthwhile person or can’t contribute meaningfully to the society in which you live. There are many ways to make a living and be productive, and not all of them, despite what your parents or your teachers may have told you, require college educations. College educations have their purposes, and those are good purposes. I could never have done anything other than go to college. It was and is the best thing for me beyond any question. But everyone isn’t me. And I know this.

                My message ends with this challenge to my non-college-minded friends and loved ones. Be careful that you don’t fall into the trap of thinking that deciding not to go to school is the end of your decision-making process. You still have the same obligation to find your area where you can contribute. I don’t care what it is. But it should be something where you feel useful. Drifting is a non-option. But if you’re searching, then don’t stop searching until you’ve found it, and once found, pursue that goal with all the discipline and diligence required of you. Not going to college doesn’t mean that what you choose will be easy. It can be as hard in a different way, but the same habits of discipline and hard work that allow you to survive a doctorate are the same ones that allow you to go to trade school and then work your way up to expert status in a trade or some other profession. I don’t care what people do for a living. I just care that they’re trying to do something.

Our Dying American Nation

Note:  you may want to print this out if you can. It’s quite long. Thanks in advance for taking time to read it. Hope it’s worth it to you.

            My friends, I bring you sad news today. Our nation, The United States of America, is dying. This has been weighing on me for a while; it’s not a new thought to me. What is more, I’ve discussed it with some over time, explaining most of what I’m about to say, and sadly, most sadly, it seems to stand the test of logic as well as the test of history. Now when I say America’s dying, I don’t mean “dying” in the sense that we are about to be conquered by some foreign power, our government deposed and our constitution eradicated. That would be death of a very crude sense, and if that was the danger, people would likely recognize it and act to prevent it. No, this death has been, and continues to be, a slow process, as gradual as erosion and as telling. Somehow, I can’t escape the notion that what we are today is not what we were meant to be, not what the founders intended, not what Lincoln fought to preserve, not even what we were trying to be three generations ago. It crops up everywhere, in our current climate of moral relativism, in our homes and in our education system. So I will discuss these three things. I will think about what they were, imperfect though they were in the past, and what they have become. And then I will ask you whether you agree or disagree that our nation is on the decline.

Section I:  Moral Relativism:  or, “I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, ok?”

            Moral relativism is a topic I’ve talked about before, so I won’t repeat that blog post. This is still the longest section of this blog, fare warning. The difference is that this time, moral relativism gets placed into the context of our history. What is moral relativism? Moral relativism is the view that no moral values can be assumed to be better or right when compared with some other set of moral values. For instance, suppose we have a ruler that measures 1 foot. Everyone knows that, for better or worse, 12 inches is equal to 1 foot, and so we’re able to make measurements. What we’ve done today, though, is to break the ruler into parts and say that a foot is 3 inches to you and 7 inches to me and 11 inches to someone else. Of course if we did that, we’d have no way to make measurements, and so our society has become as far as values and value judgments go. Put another way, it’s what we mean when we say things like, “that’s wrong only to you,” or “all religions are just different roads to the same place,” or it’s what we appeal to when we demand with outrage, “who are you to tell me I can’t do that?” In a climate of moral relativism, there aren’t any moral absolutes, and there aren’t any principles beyond individual conscience to guide us as a society when making decisions.

The consequences are all around us. Need proof? Ask yourself, and then ask your neighbors a few of these questions:  who or what is God, what does it take to get to Heaven, is it better in the long run to look out for others or for yourself, is there a question of right or wrong when it comes to homosexuality, teen sex, adult romantic relationships today? These are only a sampling of the questions you could ask, but start with these. I guarantee you’ll get a whole array of answers to each. Nor is it my job here to give you the right answers, though I know what some of them are. See there? Stop. Did you just think to yourself, “or you think you do,” or, “well, you know what answers you think are right?” If you didn’t have that thought, someone else did, and they will let me hear about it, rest assured. So let’s look at our moral compass and what it used to be.

I’m going to start by taking issue with the Christian right in this country. Discussions like this are usually started by appealing to our “Christian” founding fathers and appealing for Christians to lead government and make biblical decisions on behalf of Americans. You’ve heard arguments like them before I’ll bet. The problem with the whole, “our founding fathers were Christians and so our government should be Christian,” argument is that it’s misleading in some respects and wholly false in others. First, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to take two examples, were highly skeptical of organized religion, and there is some doubt as to whether they held to a Christian view at all. Moreover, the first amendment is a good one. No matter how we may quibble over what freedom of religion means, one thing that it definitely means is that the government won’t establish a state church or impose religious practice on the populace. Nor will the government claim responsibility for insuring the religiosity of our laws. That sort of government is called a theocracy, and that is precisely what the drafters of the constitution hoped to avoid in the Bill of Rights. By contrast, see Saudi Arabia or the Vatican, states whose religion not only guides the decisions of law makers, but forms a fundamental underpinning to the laws of the states themselves. In the one case, we’re talking about sharia (Islamic law), and in the other case we’re talking about the ecclesiastical law of the Roman Catholic Church. Fare enough. This is not the sort of state we were meant to form, and we have not. So, let’s have an end to the whole top-down model of a Christian government making decisions for the nation, shall we?

Now you might ask at this point, if we’re not supposed to be a Christian nation of the theocratic sort, then how can I imply there should be any morality to our laws or acts as a country? The answer forms the basis of our own decline. First, for all that people’s opinions were as prone to error then as they are today, one thing that can be truthfully said of the people of the country at its founding is that most of them were churchgoers of one stripe or another. The church was a relatively strong institution in the colonies and in the early United States. Now, I don’t mean the Baptist church or the Presbyterian church or the Catholic church. I mean Christ’s church, the body of believers irrespective of denomination who were genuine in their Christian faith and were true followers of Jesus. As it happens, some of them were Presbyterians or Baptists or Catholics, and some weren’t associated with any one denomination at all. So be it. That’s not to say that people were holier two centuries ago, or that their political opinions were of a better nature because they were churchgoers, or even that their theologies were less prone to error than some theologians today. However, one thing that can be seen is that the church permeated society. The moral law, whether explicitly taught and respected, or whether implicitly understood on the level of an unspoken societal convention, or whether rebelled against and despised, was a construct that was recognizable and was adhered to or broken in full awareness of social or sometimes legal consequences. There was, for example, no question of gay marriage being legally instituted, because it was unthinkable to the people of the time. Not because people were somehow less enlightened about sex either. The ancient Greeks, for example, applauded homosexuality as being a very manly business, and many educated people at the beginning of our nation’s history would have probably known this. So no, it wasn’t a question of enlightenment in the sense of knowledge itself. It would have been a question of instating something that wholly went against the moral law that held force in America at the time.

Ok, there I go. Well I’ve done it. I’ve brought up gay marriage, and now I have to finish with the topic. Now that I’ve used that example I can’t abandon the topic without seeming inadequate or cowardly, nor can I go on with it without incurring wrath from all sides. There probably isn’t a more sensitive issue facing the moral conscience of the country, nor is there one so apt to trigger defensiveness and fury on both sides, for and against. So be it. I still have to deal with the question. First, before I do, a rebuke to both sides. To the militant gay activist, parading through the streets shouting your sexual preferences isn’t helping. I know there are gays in America. I have gay friends, after all, and going around proclaiming your sexual preference, asserting your rights about it and daring people to challenge you is as silly an act as my going on television and proclaiming my unabashed heterosexuality. So stop it, it’s not helping. To the radical Christian right, the Westboro Baptist Church for instance, what do you think you’re doing! Those so-called Christians who beat the crap out of gays or who, as Westboro does, picket gay servicemen’s funerals and the like, you’re really making my job hard. For what it’s worth, gay folks out there, Westboro does not represent true Christianity as Jesus taught it. Moreover, homosexuality isn’t an issue that Jesus had a special loathing for. He came to forgive sin, all sin, and homosexuality is no worse on the sin scale than any other sin, sexual or otherwise. No one’s getting picked on here, ok? This issue of gay marriage simply happens to be one that’s a political hot potato and under heated discussion. So don’t call me a homophobe, please and thank you. When the extreme left and the extreme right insist on militancy, reasoned discussion about the rightness or wrongness of something becomes impossible. Still, I’m going to try.

There are many directions I could go in to explore the topic of gay marriage and America’s changing moral zeitgeist. The one I choose is the short-lived DOMA statute. Now let me just say this at the outset. I’m not a legal scholar, though I enjoy law. Nor do I intend to quibble over legal inconsequentials. Now then, this law, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was passed back on September 21, 1996. For our purposes, the law had two very interesting features. It explicitly defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman (section 3). Further, it released states that don’t have civil union or gay marriage statutes from any obligation to recognize civil unions performed in other states (Section 2). In short, if you obtained a civil union in Vermont and have legal rights as a married couple, you don’t have those rights anymore if you move to Illinois or Tennessee. The bill, it should be understood, isn’t banning gay marriage or forbidding states from passing laws that allow gay marriage. The bill is defining marriage at the federal level. The law did a few other things, but we’re going to focus on section 3 which is particularly under attack at present. Now, about section 3, where marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, I find these comments of the bill’s sponsors including Georgia Representative Bob Barr who authored the bill, most interesting:  “the bill amends the U.S. code to make explicit what has been understood for over 200 years; that a marriage is the legal union of a man and a woman as husband and wife, and a spouse is a husband or wife of the opposite sex.” Remember what I said about the moral law being explicitly, though often implicitly, in effect? Here we have it. We never defined marriage as one man and one woman in our federal laws or our constitution because there was no need. It was implicitly understood, as Barr put it, for over two centuries that real marriage equals one man and one woman. That’s not a popular position anymore, and I very well could draw fire for supporting it. So be it. The fact is, it took over two centuries of change before such a fundamental question needed to be explicitly answered. I’ll go a step further, had we tried passing this law decades ago, it would’ve been laughed off. Section 3 in particular would’ve been seen as superfluous, because after all, the reasoning might have ran, who needs to define marriage? We know what it is, don’t we? Apparently, we do not.

Those of you who follow the news will recognize this law because our president has recently decided that he doesn’t find section 3 to be in keeping with the constitution, and our current attorney general, Eric Holder, agrees. You may recall that the Justice Department issued a statement about a month ago that it would no longer defend section 3 in court, though the law will be technically in force until and unless it’s legally repealed. So far section 3 has not been repealed. I add that both President Clinton and Congressman Barr, who strongly supported section 3 in 96, have recently changed their tunes. No surprise for politicians. Barr apologized for his authorship of the bill back in 2008, and Clinton in 2009, big surprise, issued a half-retraction of his 1996 comments about marriage being a one man, one woman thing, stating in 2010 that it would be wrong to oppose gay marriage and that people should be allowed to do what they chose. Well, I’m not a politician, and saying what is politically expedient isn’t something I’m used to doing, so I guess I can’t really comment on how sincere or insincere their latter statements are.

Ok, enough about the law itself. Now I’ve already made the point that until recently, we would never have thought it necessary to put a formal definition of marriage on the books. Now we have felt it necessary, and why? Our definition of marriage, implicitly held and explicitly acted upon for centuries, was biblically based. The Bible makes no bones about qualifying only a union between man and wife as valid. Nothing else is. Now the Bible doesn’t give direction as to the marriage ceremony itself or at what point a man and woman should be recognized as married, and the resulting variety of marriage ceremonies or lack thereof is endless, but on what a marriage itself is, on that point the Bible is very clear, and so too were we. But marriage is only one issue. I could discuss corruption in our legal system, where the man with the most money, who can hire the best lawyers, hire the priciest shrinks and either buy off or discredit the opposition’s experts while bribing the judge and jury is likeliest to win his case. Or consider the Nuremberg trials. When the Nazis on trial defended themselves with the appeal that they were only following orders or the law of the land, the chief prosecutor often responded, “but isn’t there a higher law you should have been obeying, one above your own laws?” You’d never hear anything like that in today’s courts. I could discuss our business practices. Consider the meltdown in the housing market and the spike in foreclosures mostly caused by lenders rushing to give money to people they knew couldn’t afford to repay and then repossessing their homes. How often have we seen news items about corrupt lending practices or corrupt foreclosure practices. Have you ever known so many homes to be repossessed? Open a bible to the book of Micah, in the Old Testament, and read the first two verses of chapter 2. Do they not resonate with our time? Are we not living in such an age as that one? I could discuss teen pregnancy and the fact that many schools are passing out condoms and telling kids to, “just be careful.” I could discuss politics, but I won’t because the political arena was hardly ever better than it is now. I could, in short, discuss any number of spheres of American life where we once held to something resembling a moral standard and now no longer do. I could, but I’m writing a blog entry, not a book. I don’t have the time to write such a thing, and I doubt you’d want to read it. So let the marriage question stand as being symptomatic of our changing moral zeitgeist as I tackle my final question in this section.

You might wish to accuse me of contradicting myself even now. I’ve said that we held to a moral standard, but that it wasn’t imposed on us. I’ve implied that our government should make decisions based on the moral law, but that the government shouldn’t oppose it’s morality on its citizens. True. So how do I avoid backing myself into a corner? I think the answer lies in the words of Jesus and his conception of the role of his people in our societies, what his notions were, and what they were not. Since misunderstanding abounds, let me deal first with what Jesus did not mean before getting to what he did mean. For centuries, the Jewish people longed for their Messiah. Some still do. The Messiah, it was believed, would be a kingly personage who would arise and lead the Jews out from under the yolk of Roman domination. Some were undoubtedly disappointed when Jesus made it clear that that was not his intention. His kingdom, he explains often, is not a temporal kingdom of emperors and procurators and so forth on Earth as was the empire the Jews loathed. His kingdom was a spiritual kingdom, a heavenly locale into which we should aspire to enter. It was not in his plans that men should rise up, overthrow existing governments and impose top-down theocratic rule. If it were, this well-known story would look different:

Then the Pharisees met together to plot how to trap Jesus into saying something for which he could be arrested. They sent some of their disciples, along with the supporters of Herod, to meet with him. “Teacher,” they said, “we know how honest you are. You teach the way of God truthfully. You are impartial and don’t play favorites. Now tell us what you think about this: Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" But Jesus knew their evil motives. “You hypocrites!” he said. “Why are you trying to trap me? Here, show me the coin used for the tax.” When they handed him a Roman coin, he asked, “Whose picture and title are stamped on it?” “Caesar’s,” they replied “Well, then,” he said, “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God.” His reply amazed them, and they went away (Matthew 22:15-22).

Now if Jesus had been a political rebel, inclined to set himself up as an earthbound king, or if he had had an interest in imposing his legislation upon men here on Earth, his answer might have been different. He might have said you shouldn’t pay your taxes and that you should rebel against anyone who wasn’t a believer and that only a government of believers is worthy of being obeyed here on Earth. He said none of those things, not one. If he had, only Christian theocracies would be valid and moral forms of government for Christians. Some people on the Christian right still think this. It’s just not so. He didn’t command us to overthrow unbelieving governments or to write constitutions establishing a state church. In so far as he had anything to say about oppression and government, which was precious little, he said this, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light" (Matthew 11:28-30). There is no theocracy there, no call to replace a moderate government with the militant Christian right. That’s not to say that just any government should be tolerated. I am glad the American Revolution took place, but one should be careful when asserting that Jesus wanted this type of government or that type of government. Any government is capable of making moral or immoral decisions whether it’s an absolute monarchy or a representative democracy.

The beauty and the danger about freedom, particularly the freedom that representative democracy enjoys, is that it means freedom to make choices. We can choose what sorts of people rule over us; at least, we’re supposed to be able to. The actual machinery of American presidential politics is something else altogether, and it goes beyond my limits in this post to comment on the system as it actually exists. Fundamentally, however, it remains true that we can choose, and that ethic of choice, of giving humanity its freedom to choose lies at the heart of Christianity as well. Jesus wants people to choose him. He leaves us free at every moment of our lives to reject him, and free too to reaccept him. Thus, it makes no sense to say that Jesus imposes a form of government upon us or that we should desire a select handful of people to impose religious doctrines upon the land from on high. Again, we’re confronted with the ethic of choice. So then, you might fairly ask, if it’s all down to our choices about governments and religions and so on, and we’re free to choose, where am I going with what Christians are in society?

            That’s a good question, and I come to it now. I only took that digression to dispel some myths and confusion as to what Jesus intended. Now let’s talk about what he actually meant to happen. Here again people will disagree with me, but I must not concern myself overly much with that. If you want to know what role Christians are to play in politics, in cultural reform, in society from the top to the bottom and in the middle, one need only look as far as Jesus’ salt metaphor found in Matthew, Mark and Luke,  “You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless,” (Matthew 5:13).

            “Well wonderful, Brad,” you might say, “but what does all that mean?” To understand what Jesus was getting at, let’s think for a minute about how we use salt. We’ll get back to society momentarily, but without understanding his metaphor, my ultimate point is lost. First, and most apparently, we season with salt. Have you ever had French fries with absolutely no salt on them? If you have, you probably remember it as something less than thrilling. Or, try making mashed potatoes without any sodium. Use unsalted butter too, and don’t add any salt. Most people would describe the result as bland or flavorless, even if they couldn’t tell you specifically that it was in need of salt. We use it in baking too; my fiancé’s chocolate chip cookies require just a pinch of salt, and if I were to leave it out, they wouldn’t be quite right. Also, we never use a lot of it. Unless you’re just strange or don’t know what you’re doing, you’re never very heavy-handed with the salt shaker. The results of this can be disastrous. Just a bit of salt, a pinch, a dash, or for larger recipes, a T-spoon is all that’s required. But notice how, once added to your food at the table, the salt pervades the whole dish you added it to. Only a tad of salt makes a whole serving of mashed potatoes taste well-seasoned and excellent rather than bland and unappetizing. The reason is that the salt works its way into the whole mixture, effecting the whole thing. Also, salt is a preservative. When ships went out to sea in the days before refrigeration, meat that was stored on-board for long voyages was packed in salt. The salt worked its way into the meat, drawing off the liquid in the meat and killing the bacteria that would otherwise spoil it. Thus, a ship’s meat supply could last for months.

            Now to Jesus’ metaphor. He calls his people the “salt of the Earth.” If we apply the principles of seasoning to society, we see that Christians are to behave as salt does, pervading society, seasoning it with righteous conduct and righteous thought. You won’t get a society filled with nothing but Christians, just as a dish of salted mashed potatoes will never be, no matter the quantity of salt added, a dish of salt. Nor does Jesus expect this. But rather, if Christian ideals work their way throughout our society, how might that change the face of America today. What would happen if  we saw an increase in openly Christian truckers, Christian lawyers, Christian judges, Christian bankers, Christian garbage collectors, Christian railroad workers, Christian restaurant staff and, most relevant to me and my position, Christian researchers, Christian university administrators, Christian professors and Christian students? Not all of them would have to be preachers, by no means. Just people like you and me who do our jobs and make our way in society, but who are Christ-like in their dealings with one another and in their attitudes. My guess? It’d be an interesting place to live. So no, I’d never suppose that we need a right-wing Christian government imposing its notions on the rest of us, but if there were a revival of Christian thought throughout American society in all walks of life, one inevitable effect would be the election of Christians to our public offices. That would be … fascinating.

            In any case, it’s not happening. What moral consensus we had has slipped away, and now all notions of decency or right conduct are open to question and are subjected daily to criticism and attack. As I said in my blog post about the professor at Northwestern who had a display of exhibition sex in his class (see “Open? Or Trashy”), today the buzzwords are “tolerance,” “fair-minded,” and “open.” Tolerant, that is, of anything and everything the speaker wants or thinks, fair-minded, as long as you agree with what the other person thinks, and open, that is, to anything and everything. If you object to something, and heaven forefend you should say that something is “wrong” as you frame your objection, you are labeled as “intolerant,” “bigoted,” and “closed-minded.” Well my friends, welcome to the society we’ve built. It wasn’t always like this. I tell you it wasn’t so once upon a time, but we have made it so. Our post-modern, “anything goes and everything is right and proper,” mindset has made it so. Let me leave this segment with a warning. We must reinstate some moral consensus in our society, because if we don’t, the moral slide will continue until finally, everything will be tolerated except for those doctrines which refuse to tolerate anything and everything. Namely, the Christian doctrine. To put it another way, when the final crash comes and you finally are confronted with the unthinkable or the intolerable, remember the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, speaking in a different time and place about Christians’ passive acceptance of the attitudes and actions of a certain totalitarian state:

In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me —
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Section II:  Our Homes

            The last section was a very long one. I know. But the reason it was so lengthy is that the next two things I’m going to talk about have their first causes, their ultimate causes, rooted firmly in moral relativism. From there all the rest springs. My friend Nick and I have had countless conversations about the present state of our schools and the kinds of kids our education system is producing. I’ll get there, but before I do, I have to consider the American home today. After all, if the primary cause of our ills is rooted in moral relativism, the first and worst root of moral relativism is found in our homes. It all starts at home, the values that make us who we are, or that fail to, they all start with mom and dad and the things we’re taught from earliest childhood. The problem today is that many parents feel it the school’s duty (not theirs) to instill values, and while the schools do make some strides towards instilling civic values and so on, the core values (those related to family, work ethic and right behavior) are, or at least they ought to be, taught at home. Long story short, we’ve lost our way. How so, you ask? Read on, and let us reason together.

            I think a prime example of what I’m talking about is found in what Nicole’s “Family and Close Relationships” professor called “permissive parenting.” Yeah I know. I discussed gay marriage in the last section, not being gay, and now I’m going to try to talk about parenting, not being a parent. Leastways, I’m not a parent yet. Those of you who are parents, you automatically have the advantage of me. You can reply that I don’t know what I’m talking about, because I don’t have children, to which I reply, does the fact that I don’t have kids invalidate my reasoning? Of course it doesn’t. As long as what I’m saying stands the test of reason, at least be willing to hear me out. You may even agree with me by the time we’re done. Now then, Diana Baumrind defines three styles of parenting:  authoritative, authoritarian and indulgent, this last also known as permissive parenting. Maccovy and Martin  expanded the three styles to four by including “neglectful parenting” which I won’t discuss in the hope that it’s obvious to us all that no one (who doesn’t deserve to be locked up) actually wants to be a neglectful parent or supports parental neglect. We’ll start with permissive parenting.

            Permissive parenting is more friendship-based. You see it in action when parents are more worried about being a friend to their kids:  mothers getting matching belly button piercings so that they’ll seem “cool” to their daughters, fathers buying their sixteen-year-old sons brand new cars and giving them to their kids outright (all costs paid, gas included and repairs on dad), or parents letting kids decide what chores they’ll do, on what days and for how much pay, and so on. Discipline in this parenting style is subordinated to getting along, and rules aren’t really enforced. The whole idea of top-down rule setting and the flow of discipline and expectations from parent to child is at odds with the idea that you are your kid’s friend. So, you don’t see a whole lot of rules or firm discipline in these families. The kids do more or less as they please, and the parents are complicit in the kid defining freedom and respect for him or herself. This parenting style is the origin of the “spoiled brat.” You’ve seen these kids too. They’re the ones from the mcmansions in the suburbs who loaf around in designer jeans in school, daring teachers to tell them off for sexting or sleeping in class. Side note:  for those of you not in the know, sexting is the practice of trading sexual texts on their cell phones. Moving on … Is it so hard to imagine the results of this? It shouldn’t be. I teach the adults that these brats become. Around here I’m talking about the rich snobs from the Chicago suburbs whose parents pay for absolutely everything and who walk around with a sense of entitlement and an ego the size of Chicago itself. You may have taught them yourself if you’re a teacher or a GTA. Maybe you’re not a teacher, but a stay-at-home mom or a working mom or a working dad,  and you look at your kid’s friends and go, “what brats!” Well, that’s probably because of permissive parenting, because of parents who feel it more important to be buddies rather than parents with expectations, standards and discipline. Permissive parenting is the cancer that’s killing any sense of discipline and value structure our generation might ever have had. “That can’t be,” you say. Well let’s see.

Tell me why, for instance, Facebook is now teaming up with the Department of Education to hold schools, and particularly principals, responsible for after-hours FB bullying? Think I’m joking? I’m not. Facebook is cooperating with the department of education to make the Facebook content of minors available to schools so that principals and teachers can follow up on night time or weekend Facebook bullying. It’s not fully implemented yet, and who knows, someone might kill the proposal before it goes into effect. When I heard this my question was , excuse me, but whose job is that? Whose job is it to talk about bullying and how to deal with it? Whose job is it to crack down on their bullying children and set them straight on what’s acceptable and what isn’t? First and foremost, the parents, and if parents were parenting, this little news article I read about Facebook and the DOE would never have been written. One more example of permissive parenting … in a certain school district in central Tennessee, there’s a practice known as guidance hour in the elementary schools. As best I understand it, the kids are visited once a week by the guidance councilor for an hour to talk about things like bullying, appropriate conduct and how to respond to bullies. Again, not saying the schools shouldn’t say something about it, but where does the responsibility, the teaching if you will, on those subjects properly begin? In the home! And it’s not happening! That’s why I say permissive parenting is killing us, my friends.

            The other extreme of parenting is the authoritarian. I feel sorry for these kids too. Your authoritarian parent definitely believes in rules and discipline, and that’s about all they believe in. You don’t see them explaining rules or expectations or the reasons for them. You often see rules laid down and punitive discipline enforced without mercy. I could site an example or two, but I’d deeply offend the people involved and I don’t want that at present. Suffice it to say, conformity to parental wishes is often the overriding concern. My issue here is not that this style lacks discipline. Far from it. It does, however, lack the warmth and understanding that are the positive aspects of permissive parenting. Often times, children of authoritarian parents obey out of fear, not because they’ve come to understand that what’s being asked of them is right or that behaving in this or that way is socially appropriate and will advance them further in life as they get older. The consequences? Baumrind suggests that kids like this will often end up cracking under the pressure and losing it, or running away or rebelling and saying, to hell with this. I’ve seen two out of the three happen, and in some cases I’m watching it on an ongoing basis. There’s got to be a better solution, something that incorporates the best of both worlds, the permissive and the authoritarian parent.

            Now we come to authoritative parenting. Because it shares its root word, ‘authority,’ with authoritarian parenting, authoritative and authoritarian parenting may be easily confusable terms. They should not be confused, however. They are very different. Authoritative parenting, like authoritarian parenting, is strong on expectations, standards of behavior and the enforcement of discipline. The key difference is that this parenting style takes the children’s faculties of reason into account and acknowledges them as growing and developing beings. This type of parent will not only set forth rules and limits, but he will explain them:  this is why you need to keep your room clean, or this is why I’m restricting your computer gaming time during the school week or this is why I insist that you call and ask permission if you want to stay out later than we discussed. It’s a balance. You, the child, have rules, and you will be punished for breaking them repeatedly, but you will understand the rules and why they are there, and hopefully, one result is that you’ll be less inclined to break them.

            Looking back on it, I can tell you that I am a product of authoritative parenting. Because my father was often overseas on deployment, much of my formative parenting was done by my mother. She was a strict parent by and large. There were rules. Study time came before playtime, always. If I had a dip in grades, the automatic assumption, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, was that I hadn’t been applying myself, and I was grounded for laxness if she was especially convinced that I’d been slacking off. Moreover, yes, I got spankings for severe rule breaking too. In this day and age when kids threaten to call child protective services for a swat on the hand, most parents shudder at spanking. I was spanked. Not excessively, and not often, but it happened, and I can’t say that I didn’t deserve it on those occasions. I never once thought of calling CPS. My mother was definitely more of a parent than a friend, not always easy to confide in, not someone who always invited confidences, but if I didn’t know the right or the wrong of a thing, I knew she’d have an opinion, and more often than not, her opinion became a binding rule if the matter was serious enough. Yet, I understood the rules. They were explained. And we could talk about them. I could ask questions. On occasion, I could get a rule changed if I could make a case for it i.e. I’m older now than I was when this rule was put into effect and I can be responsible without this rule or with a modified rule. Sure enough, as I got older, rules changed to reflect my increasing maturity. At a certain age, for instance, I was permitted to stay home if I didn’t want to go somewhere unimportant, and if the house was left in order during her absence, this was taken as a sign of responsibility on my part. I knew what was mine and what wasn’t and how to keep from breaking stuff, for example. When I was in my later teens, I could go out with my girlfriend if I chose. All that was asked was that I phone home if I was going to be late. If I wanted to spend the night, this was acceptable, provided I obeyed the rule that said I should call home and ask permission. Permission was granted, but it was important that I demonstrate my familial respect by making the effort to ask, and I got in trouble for not asking. Oh indeed I did.

All of this is not to say that I agree with everything that went on in my house. Few people keep all the traditions and rules of their childhood homes when they themselves become parents, but I can look back now and very clearly see those things that were beneficial for what they were. Baumrind and others champion authoritative parenting as the best parenting style today, and while I’m not a fan of clinging to any one theory or school of thought, I can understand the respect that exists for it. Nor, let me add, am I forgetting the myriad factors of personality, environment and genetics that come into play in children’s development. I know well that it’s much more than matching a parenting style to a family and watching the result. The parenting style does matter, however, and permissive parenting is just a bad idea. Authoritarian parenting isn’t that helpful either as far as I’m concerned. Some point out that in other cultures, many Asian cultures for instance, authoritarian parenting styles are the norm and work just fine. Well that’s great. I’m not Asian and I don’t live there. This blog entry is passionately American in its views, because that’s where I live. I spend my professional life exploring other cultures and ways of thought, but this blog, its criticisms, its ideas and its praises are written by an American, to Americans and for Americans. So for our purposes here, I don’t really care how anyone else in the world does the whole parenting thing. I care how my fellow Americans do it, or fail to, and I care very much about how I’m going to do it.

Section III:  American Education:  Now we’re really in trouble.

Finally I get to break my own pattern. I talked about gay marriage, and I’m not gay. I talked about parenting, and I’m not a parent. Now I’m going to talk about education, and yes, I am indeed an educator. At the college level, perhaps, but it still counts! Awesome! So here we go. When it comes to our education system, we’re in deep crap. That’s the long and the short of it, and sadly, some of the laws we’ve come up with to pull us back out of it are only piling the crap on. It’s not a pretty picture. So I’ll talk about the effects that attitudes and laws are having. In the end, it all goes back to a decline in American values and ultimately, our atrophied moral compass.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is as good a place to start as any. If you’re a teacher, skip the next few sentences, because you know full well what I’m going to say. First, a bit of description. NCLB was proposed by Bush, the last Bush and was rapidly passed into law in January 2002. It’s intent was to establish objective measures of student progress in core subjects like math and reading, and also, to urge schools to improve the performance of students over time. What this meant was that states developed a series of standardized tests for the basic subjects, like Tennessee’s Gateway exams, and the school’s pass rate, it’s grade if you will, was determined by taking the measure of passing scores on the various tests. The goal was that each testing area should improve with each successive year i.e. fifth graders should do better in language arts next year than they did this year, and in the year after that, etc. This was known as the school’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), and it was measured by comparing kids’ scores on these tests with the scores from last year, the year before, and so on. A school whose overall AYP score wasn’t up to that state’s established standard was, in short, put on probation and told to shape up. If it didn’t, other measures like replacing the teachers or closing the school permanently could and would be taken. I remember a number of Memphis city schools closing as a result of this. Quite a number of teachers lost their jobs too.

Now again, I don’t have the time or the desire to break down NCLB provision by provision and talk about what each provision means, what it ought to accomplish and so on. This isn’t a law treatise, and a full critique of NCLB would be a paper unto itself. There are more knowledgeable people who can write those. I will tell you what I have seen, however. If the school’s future is tied solely to these tests (as is, in fact, the case), several things are going to happen. First, states will often lower their standard tests’ passing scores, which increases the pass rate that the state in question can claim when reporting to the Department of Education. Missouri, for example, openly admitted that it lowered its passing test scores so that its overall numbers looked better. In other words, make the tests so easy that virtually no one, not even the laziest among us, can fail them. Second, the schools are going to put pressure on teachers to “pass” students. If a teacher is handing out F’s, so the thinking goes, the school’s pass rate is going to drop and all hell will break loose on that school. Ergo, the teacher is strongly encouraged to make the numbers look good. So, nobody fails. Finally, the standardized tests are the things that really matter nowadays, and teachers are acutely aware that their very jobs depend very heavily on both passing their students and on their students passing the end-of-year test in their subject. So, you often see teachers teaching to the test, so to speak. That is, teaching only those concepts that they know will be tested and leaving the rest of their subject alone, because what matters, remember, is that passing test score.

Now that’s a fare description of only some of the bureaucratic consequences that fall upon states, schools and teachers as a result of this law. I’ll take it a step further though and tell you what kind of kids George Bush’s legacy is producing. At a certain school in central Tennessee, Nick was student teaching. I got daily reports of his teaching experiences, and one very interesting experience of his revolved around homework. There have always been kids who just didn’t do their homework. In the 90’s, such kids were penalized. You got a 0 for missed work, and a whole slew of 0’s added up to a low grade on the report card. We all knew this! It was just understood that you do your homework, suffer through it, and get the grades. Well, not anymore it seems. His cooperating teacher told him on day 1 of his student teaching, “look, you’ve got to just give them the points. If you don’t give them to them on the front end, you’ll have to make it up on the back end when grades are due.” Now what sort of system could make a teacher say that? Was she a lazy teacher? An incompetent teacher? Not from what I hear. My understanding is that she’s an excellent teacher, but NCLB forces her to face the reality that she could be jobless if her kids fail that test in May. And, newsflash, the kids have figured it out! Nick assigned a short essay and the kids had a week to do it. Only 13 out of 150 kids turned it in on time. That next Monday, the day it was due, all of his classes spent the period doing makeup work, and guess what the makeup work was? If you guess, “the original homework assignment,” you get a gold star. Students know that teachers are powerless to punish them for laxness. So they are, practically speaking, free to blow off the teacher’s expectations because truly, we have made the teachers almost unnecessary in our schools. We’ve made the standardize test the god of our education system, and even that has been so watered down that any student can pass it with minimal effort. It’s been ten years since the law was implemented, folks. An entire generation of elementary kids grew up and passed through high school under this system, and they’ve taken the lessons that NCLB has taught them out into the real world. Hey George, as a college instructor, thanks a bunch.

Is it any wonder that kids are dumber than they’ve ever been? Is it any wonder that laziness is rampant among American youth today? Are we surprised that the most frequent complaint of our brighter kids in school today is that school is boring and pointless? Haven’t we made quite sure that it has become just that? And we’re not done. Now let’s look at college, want to?

Do you have any idea how many college freshmen, and even upperclassmen, lack basic written communications skills? Can you imagine the number of student emails I’ve gotten that resemble text messages? The watered down school curricula trickle upwards to the college level. Universities suffer from two ills today as I see it. First, we’ve done a great job and pushing a college education on every up and coming child. We’ve convinced these kids that you can’t be anything without a college degree. College just isn’t for everyone, but no one recognizes that. As a result, the four-year degree is now what the high school diploma was two decades ago, a minimum standard. That’s why you see people with B.A.s working at McDonalds. I wish I was kidding. When you flood the market with people who have bachelor’s degrees and when any bachelor’s degree will due so long as you’ve got one, you devalue the whole college experience and make it almost worthless. It’s a credential, functioning now as the high school diploma used to. There’s even a movement in higher ed to refer to the educational years of a person’s life not as “K-12,” meaning kindergarten through 12^th grade, but as “K-16,” the 16 being the fourth and final year of college. When my professor first mentioned this, I asked her if she was joking. That particular professor never jokes, however. If you still can’t believe it, look up the University of Texas’s K-16 Education Center. Is it any wonder that so many college instructors and many of the brighter students are disillusioned with it? For instance, I once had a conversation with someone who’d taught freshmen and sophomores at both a community college and at a university, and his term for teaching these levels of instruction was “College High.” I think you take his point.

If you need it explained, however, think about basic Bachelor’s gen ed requirements nowadays. For those of you who haven’t been to college, these are a core set of courses that all students have to take, courses in history, English, science, math, the fine arts, etc. They may have nothing to do with your major, but everyone has to take a selection of them. There are now more of these requirements than ever. I estimate that a diligent freshman entering the University of Tennessee or the University of Illinois today would need two very loaded years, or two and a half years to complete all the gen ed course requirements that will be laid on them, and why? Well, from what I can tell, the answer is because they aren’t learning what they used to in high schools anymore. I’ve met many students who couldn’t write a basic summary or a short essay, many who had zero critical thinking skills and not a few who could barely comprehend a basic text. And is it their own fault? Not completely. The fault lies with the education system that passed them along up through the grade levels thinking only about that bottom line, the test score. Now the community colleges especially, and the four-year colleges and universities too have to pick up the slack and scramble to provide these adults with the fundamental skills they should have gotten, and never did get in their earlier years. I feel sorry for everyone involved, for the schools who struggle with the mandate of passing tests or closing up, for the students whose education suffers, for everyone, in fact. But I’m also angry.

I’m angry because I can see what is happening. I’m not the only one who can, but I do see it. We have taken the spirit of competition out of our schools. There are no more honors students and average students, no more high achievers and slackers, no more winners and losers, not anymore. Not in any real sense. We’ve created a world in which everyone’s a winner, a world in which all students are equally bright and successful. No one is more gifted or less talented than anyone else anymore. And we’ve created this world, this K-16 universe, only at the cost of any semblance of true education we ever had. We used our attitudes to create it, our assertions that there is no right and wrong, there are only people. We gave up our values, our work ethic. No one need work hard to succeed, because everyone’s successful now, and to say otherwise is to attack someone’s self-image. Finally, we made it law, and now it’s done.

My one question as all this happened was, where are the parents? I said it all starts at home. Where were the parents who pushed their kids to succeed, rewarded them for success, encouraged them when they struggled, and got on their butts when they got lazy? Where were the parents who went to open house or the PTA conferences and teamed up with the teachers to get Jonny to buckle down and hit the books? Where were the parents who enforced homework and took away privileges for failure to do homework, who rewarded diligent attention to homework with extra privileges, who made it understood that work always must come before play and that means doing your homework no matter how much you can’t stand it? I don’t know. Do you? If I had to guess, I’d say that the parents, the permissive, blame the school for all the child’s problems, parents are still permissively going on with business as usual. They’re going on “affirming,” “validating” and “engaging in meaningful dialogue” with their child without realizing that they are, in fact, the parents and as such, have responsibilities that go beyond being their child’s buddy or best friend. Parenting is a dying art in our country. How can we be surprised that education is dying too?

Concluding comments

First, thanks for reading. I’ve written over nine thousand words, and at last I’ve come to the end. It’s taken only two days to write this in between grading and the other stuff I’m doing, but it’s done now. If you’ve read this far, you have my gratitude. I’ve said only what has desperately needed to be said for years now. I’m not the first to say it, and I’m not the last. Will I, or anyone like me, be heard? I don’t know.

I want to close with a message of hope. The decay that I’ve spent 14 pages of my plain and simple blog describing, and whose consequences could fill volumes, is not irreversible. It can be reversed. It can be corrected. It would take hard work and not a small amount of courage to do so, but it can be done. To do so, we would have to reject the whole postmodern construct that we’ve built up. We’d have to resurrect some of our old values, religious and secular, values relating to the family, to work, to school, to diligence and the drive to succeed. We’d have to parent differently, to teach differently and to think differently about ourselves, who we are and where we’re going. We couldn’t legislate it. NCLB has proven that you can’t legislate success. We’d need a grassroots movement. Remember the “salt of the Earth” comments? Well, that’s just what we’d need. I hope we can do it. I hope we find it within ourselves to set things right in America. All I can do is what everyone needs to do. I’m going to go on and live my life. I’m going to raise my children with the right values and teach them to value the right things. I am going to remember at all times that, as friendly as I might be with them, I am their parent first and that means I am responsible for overseeing what they become. I can do no less. So tell me, what will you do?