Hildegarde

So, okay, it’s Thursday, which is my worst day of the week in terms of having my act together.  I have a late night on Wednesday–I’m teaching an adult night class–and an early morning today, and I tend to be walking into walls.

Today, I’m even more messed up than usual, because when I got home last night my younger son insisted that we stay up and watch the ten o’clock encore showing of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown  Yes, I know, Olbermann is not unbiased, but neither is O’Reilly, and Greg watches him, too.

Last night’s Olbermann was a special edition of the show, a single long rant on the health care debate, occassioned by the fact that he had just seen his elderly father through a bad health care crisis.

And although I quibbled with some of his stuff–he takes the “45000 die every year from lack of health insurance” thing seriously, which I don’t think is warranted by the facts–I couldn’t quibble with the basic thrust of the thing, which is this:  it is completely insane that Americans are not furious with their health insurance conpanies.

Furious enough to get rid of them, I mean.

Because listening to this, I kept thinking that there are really two issues in the health care debate here, and getting them mushed together isn’t helping us any.

One of those issues is, of course, how we’re going to manage to make sure everybody in the US has not only access but full access to the care they need. 

The other one is what we’re supposed to do about a health insurance industry that has become little more than legalized organized crime.

I’m not exaggerating here. 

Too many of the arguments against significant change in this debate seem to be running on the assumption that health insurance and the companies that issue it behaves as it did in, say, 1960, 

Even in 1960, of course, there were signs that something was likely to go badly wrong, eventually.  Medicare exists not because Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to socialize medicine, but because private health insurance companies were refusing to insure the elderly.

After all, the elderly are the people most likely to get sick.

Right now, the insurance companies have managed to erect a nearly perfect bait-and-switch scam, thanks to both Medicare and Medicaid.

It works like this:

First, they charge significantly high premiums for health insurance coverage, usually paid all or partially by employers.

Then, if you get sick, they do whatever they can to deny you any payment–incidents have included finding “pre-existing conditions” the patient couldn’t have known about, declaring the patient should have known about it and then declaring his contract void because it was “fraud” since he didn’t disclose what he didn’t know about.  That’s my favorite one, but some of the excuses on this front are truly astounding.

But say you get past that, and you end up getting benefits.  If you’ve got something really bad,  a catastrophic illness or an expensive chronic one, then chances are pretty good that you’re going to have to leave work eventually, because you’ll be too sick to keep going.

And as soon as you leave work, you have two choices–lose your health insurance altogether, or buy COBRA.

COBRA is billed at full rates, which means that in the middle of having an illness too bad to allow you to continue working, you’ve got to come up with $1000 a month or more to keep your insurance.

And even if you manage to do that, it only lasts for eighteen months.

At that point, your options for private insurance are functionally nil.  So what happens to you?

Well, you pay for what you can, and when you can’t anymore…the government pays.

Note the sequence here–the government ends up paying for your care when it is most expensive. 

The big whacking hunking medical bills at the end of a catastrophic illness end up getting covered by Medicaid or Medicare, leaving the insurance conpanies off the hook.

And now, the insurance companies are demanding provisions in the new health care reform bill that would REQUIRE individuals to buy insurance whether they want to or not, at the risk of being fined.  People too poor to afford it would be subsidized by the government, but what amounts to “too poor” is, shall we say, contentious.

I mean, look at this situation.

We’ve somehow managed to erect a system where one group of people–insurance companies, their executives and employees–gets to collect really enormous sums of money on the basis of “contracts” that are binding on only the purchaser–a health insurance company can change the provisions of your plan any time it wants to, just because it wants to, and you have nothing to say about it; what’s more, no “competition” is available if you’re already sick, because your “pre-existing condition” means you can’t move companies.

I mean, seriously.

This is not the free market.  This is not capitalism.  This is not limited government, either, since it depands on the governments willingness to enforce “contracts” that aren’t really contracts for one of the partners.

And this is not the doctors charging this, or the hospitals. 

Olbermann ended his show yesterday by calling for a strike–for all of us who have insurance to just stop paying the premiums, cold turkey.

And that actually would be the best possible response to this.

The problem is that most people do not dare do it, because in the present legal framework, it would result in nothing but an opportunity for the insurance companies to get rid of all the sick people. 

Oh, one more thing I didn’t mention–if you happen to have insurance that you pay for yourself, in the “individual” market, the insurance companies can simply cut you from the rolls as soon as you get sick. 

So you pay all this money in case you get sick.  You get sick.  The insurance company sens you a note that says you’re “no longer insurable” and there you are, on your own again.

You just paid–in one case I know of, for fourteen years–for absolutely nothing.

I go back and forth about how I feel about single payer systems, government systems, private systems, whatever.

But I do not go back and forth about this.

I’ll wait on the provisions for covering everybody, if the Obama administration will just put an end to the ability of insurance companies to do this sort of thing and do it legally.

If the answer is that it is not possible to make a profit providing insurance contracts and fulfilling them honestly, then whether we like it or not we will need a government system.

If the answer is that it can be done profitably, but with an earnings ratio of closer to 4% than 17%, then that’s the nature of the business and if that’s not the kind of investment you want to make, you shouldn’t be in it.

What we don’t need is what we’ve got, and it’s got to end.

So, today–

I had a student who didn’t know that pig Latin was different than actual Latin.

I’m not really writing a post here.  I’m just sort of completely floored.

Not that it was the only wrong note in the bunch today, because there were a lot.  But you see what I’m up against.

I tried explaining that Latin had evolved into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, Romanian, etc, and got indignant demands to explain why there’d be so many different ones–I don’t know if my explanation that there was no Internet or television or radio to keep everybody on the same track worked or not.

I suppose this beats the time one of them thought that “Latin” meant “Spanish,” and refused to believe that there was ever a separate language.

But I protest–good writing is not a lot of emotional, airy stuff.  It’s concise, strongly worded, particular and strong.

Unlike all those polite little epiphanies about, I don’t know, life lessons in the apple trees.

Or whatever.

I’ve got to go see if my next class knows…well, anything.

I have odd relationships to words–to some words–sometimes for reasons I understand, and othertimes for reasons I don’t.

Among the terms that bug me for reasons I understand are “brainstorming” and “joystick.”  I understand those because they’re a function of the fact that I’m old, and while the definitions of those terms have changed, their meanings inside my head have not. 

When I was growing up, a “brainstorm” is what we would now call a psychotic break–a short furious period when somebody’s synapses suddenly all exploded at once, in an “episode,” which required everybody around him to figure out what to do with him next. 

As for joystick–well, let me just point out that there were no video games when I was growing up, so when some guy talked about his “joystick,” he wasn’t referring to a piece of electronic equipment.

It was “brainstorming,” that got me going this morning, though, because it’s a word I now have to encounter on a daily basis.  This is because the response of academia to the fact that so many students can’t correctly spell their own names and write them in crayon has been to try to industrialize the teaching of writing in such a way as to “guarantee results.”

I’ve gone off on this subject on a number of levels, the most important one being my conviction that it isn’t possible to teach somebody to write if that person will not read, or read much.

But today it’s the process itself that’s on my mind.

Let me start by saying that the process isn’t by any means all bad.  If  you have absolutely no ear for prose, if you’re learning to write like a tone deaf person would learn to write music, this is probably about as good as it gets.   You start by “brainstorming”–this means thinking of ideas that might relate more or less to a general topic–and move carefully and methodically through outlining, drafting, revising, rervising, until you’re left with something that looks like coherent English prose.

In a way, it’s a more elaborate version of that old grad school standby, the “railroad paper,” so named because you shot straight through it as if you were on a track.  First you tell them what you’re going to tell them, then you tell it to them, then you tell them what you told them.  It sounds awful, and it was boring as hell, but it had the virtue of putting you in a position of never being technically wrong.

“Writing as a process” is like that–follow the rules, and you can never  be technically wrong.  That means that your papers will not fail, and your communications in business or the professions will not elicit groans and hairpulling from the people you have to deal with.

The problem with writing as a process is that nobody who actually is a writer–who makes money at it, either primarily or secondarily–would ever use it.

It’s not just that the process itself is far too self-conscious–although that’s a big drawback–but that it forces you to make what would actually be bad writing choices when you know better.

Good writing is vivid, direct and clear.  “Writing as a process” will give you direct, and help you towards clear, but it’s the enemy of vivid.  Everything in the process is meant to eliminate the kind of thing–hyperbole, judicious use of slang or bad grammar, sharp particularities of anecdote and expression–that makes writing actually worth reading.

“Writing as a process” is designed to make all students write like those “thoughful essays” that appear in textbooks, those essays where everybody sounds reasonable and calm and contemplates small things as if they were of inestimable importance: the day my mother told me she really liked my hat and I finally realized she loved me; the day I realized my math teacher was a Yankees fan and could therefore be called human…

In other words, essays about the kinds of things nobody in their right minds would either write or read about.

If the only result of this dedication to “the process”  was that people who have no ear for writing were enabled to write well enough to stumble through a life where writing is required for more and more things, then all well and good.

My problem comes with the fact that good writers get killed in classrooms where writing is taught as “a process,” for much the same reason why a friend of mine kept flunking math in junior high school–my friend was unable to ‘show all work” because he wasn’t doing any (at twelve, he could look at an algebraic equation with four variables and go, “oh, the answer to that is 42”), and good writers are unable to practice “writing as a process’ because they can’t make the process make good prose.  Acceptable prose, yes.  Good prose, no.

If all writing teachers were good writers themselves, this wouldn’t matter much–the teachers would be able to tell that the writing produced by these students who were not working within the process was in fact good writing.

Unfortunately, not all writing teachers are good writers.  More and more of them are products of instruction in writing as a process themselves, and know very little else.  They also don’t seem to read much in the way of good writing.

So you put a good writer into a class where writing is taught as a process, and his grades go south really fast.

Or they do in any class with more or less well prepared kids in it.  In a class full of people who should have been doing remedial work, a student who can manage to produce comprehensible prose by any method whatsoever will probably be okay in terms of grades.  She’ll be such a relief, her teacher will love her, process or not.

It still bothers me, however, that so much writing is taught in schools and universities by people who cannot themselves write, and who don’t even know how it is done, never having been acquainted with anything but “the process.”

I’m not talking, now, about fiction–fiction is a special case–but about the kind of ordinary prose that exists in newspaper and magazine articles, in op-eds, even in blogs.

The best of that kind of thing–judged by the sheer technical beauty of the prose, now, and not the particular content–ranges from the erudite and clean (like Theodore Dalrymple) to the sharp and skewering (like, say, P.J. O’Rourke). 

And some kinds of bad writing are actually better than the “good” writing as it is displayed in textbook essays about various people’s childhoods or small moments of epiphany on various kinds of trains.

No, I’m not making that up.

If I was going to teach people how to read and write, for instance, I’d much rather assign classes one book each by Michael Moore and Bill O’Reilly than your ordinary writing class textbook.    Both Moore and O’Reilly are partisan and unfair, but it’s on purpose.  They both, uh, let’s say stretch the facts a bit, but that’s on purpose, too, and they’re committed and passionate and capable of using words to cause sparks.

You’ll note here, though–I’m not talking about the kind of reading most of you have complained about from English class.  In writing classes these days, nobody reads novels or poetry.  The standard writing course has become an exercise in “the short essay,” and the standard textbook has become a collection of such essays from whoever knows where.

That last part was deliberate–I’ve been writing for a living for twenty five  years, and I’ve got no idea where you would place most of these essays.  There aren’t all that many little magazines left, and the larger outlets usually like some connection to the wider world.  Private people have priving little epiphanies about stuff in theirneighborhoods, immigrant grandmothers and people they went to high school with don’t usually find a place on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.

Of course, maybe I’m making too much of it.  Good writing is something I love, and it’s like music, but a piece can be very good writing indeed and be otherwise worthless.  Consider the case of Stephen Glass, who did absolutely brilliant writing for The New Republic and half a dozen other publications, except that he was supposed to be acting as a reporter, and he was making the stuff up.

That’s a question–why is it that there is so little taste for, or respect for, fiction these days, so much insistence that what we read be “real?”  If Glass had been forn fifty years before he was, he’d have written short stories and been well paid for it, and that would have been that.

Okay, I’ve started wandering around in the wilderness again, and I ought to stop. 

By now, it ought to be obvious that this is one of those days I teach.

It’s Sunday, and on Sunday I have an invariable routine.  Well, almost invariable.  As long as there aren’t any plumbing problems, or funerals, or that kind of thing.

What  I do on Sunday after I work and write this blog (sometimes), is make a lot of Stash  Double  Bergamot Earl Grey tea, put “early music” on the CD player, and read whatever it is I’m reading.

At the moment, what I’m reading is the very end of the  Trollope novel, The Duke’s Children, that I’ve been reading for a while, and the music that’s going on the CD player is a collection of lute music from Renaissance Venice played by Paul O’Dette.   If this is the kind of information you like having, Paul O’Dette is the person to go to for lute music, Renaissance or otherwise, and Gerhardt Leonhardt is the person to go to for harpsichord music.   In fact, I’ve got recommendations for just about anything done before 1700.  I do not have recommendations for the piano, because for some reason I don’t really like the sound of it.

Maybe because my mother made me take lessons, and then my father laughed at what I produced. Which was legitimately laughable, but still.

One of the priveleges of being born into a rich nation in the twentieth century is the luxury of retaining resentments about things that happened when you were eight.

Both Aristotle and  Aquinas would have called me an idiot for doing it.  Or worse.

But  I do this every Sunday and I don’t write about it ever Sunday, so there must be a reason I’m bringing it up, and there is.  Two reasons, actually.

The first is an odd thing that happened in the first of my classes on Friday morning.  We were discussing the ways in which to write a “definition” paper, and therefore what a definition is, and how it can be used, and what it’s place can be in an argument.

And I went through my usual thing about how, if you capture the language, you can often win great strides without having to do nothing else–consider the war of words that is the argument over abortion in America.  If you can get people calling you “pro-life,” then what is it that they’re instinctively calling the other side?

This is all pretty standard stuff, and I don’t know what got me going in another direction, but I got started on the concept of justic in Aristotle and in Medieval  England and the way in which it depended heavily on social assumptions that we are not all created equal–that men and women, slaves and freemen, highborn and lowborn have different natures and capacity, so that treating them alike would be injustice rather than otherwise.

Then I went off on a short sketch of how we got here from there–about St. Paul to the Corinthians (you are neither Jew nor Greek…), and the Protestant Reformation, and John Locke, right down to the Declaration of Independence.

I did not do a hugely wonderful job with this.   If the lecture lasted all of ten minutes,  I would be surprised.  I just gave a sort of sketch, in order to point out the importance of definition not only for winning a finite argument but for determining the course of civilization itself.

Okay, okay.  I can’t help myself.

But what got me was that my students responded by being absolutely fascinated.  All the noise in the room stopped, and when  I stopped and sent them back to the little group project I’d given them, there was an immediately clamor that I should “talk more.”

Because “you know all this stuff.”

These are the same kids who complain that they don’t see why they should have to learn any of this stuff that doesn’thave anything to do wi th their “major.” 

These are the same kids who spend half their time telling me they’re not interested in knowing anything.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me think I’m not crazy to believe that there is a real itch for education–real education, not just training–even among the kids without trust funds.  Or much of anything else.

The second thing that’s on my mind this morning is this, which is related in an odd way:  next week-end, my older son will be going with a group of his friends to the annual Renaissance Fair (Renaissance Faire?) near Philadelphia.  They do this every year, and, for Matt, the week in question is usually preceded by several weeks of working more than usual to make sure he’s seriously funded.  I’m not sure why, since he never seems to buy anything but the occasional puppet, but, you know.  Whatever. 

I don’t know if any of you have ever been to one of these things, but the ones I’ve seen, and the ones I’ve seen advertising for, have not been about the Renaissance so much as they’ve been about a sort of faux-Middle Ages.  They don’t go quite so far as events for the Society for Creative Anachronism, where people not only dress up, but have mock jousts and things, but the fundamental principle seems to be the same:  enormous costume parties where actual knowledge of standard or intellectual history is not required.

My question is:  why?  I think I understand what my students want when they want me to talk more about the history of ideas, but I don’t understand what people get out of going to Renaissance Fairs.  I can’t ask Matt, because he isn’t one of hte people who dresses up.  He just goes, eats a lot of food, buys his puppet, and then comes home to put this latest puppet into his latest film project.

Don’t ask.

But Renaissance Fairs are not a passing fad.  They’ve been big business in the US for at least two decades, and they show no signs I can see of petering out.  They’re just not about the Renaissance, or even the Middle Ages.

I’d blame Tolkein for them, but I have a feeling that’s just too simple.

Maybe I’ll go listen to Elgar.

Okay–some breaking news.   Or something.

Last night,  one of my sons took me to see a comedian named Ron  White, live in concert (a theater, not a club) in a small city near our house.

Actually, the history of this is a lot more complicated than  I’m making this sound.  One of my sons bought the tickets for hismelf and my other son, and then couldn’t go himself.  And since neither of my sons drive, in spite of both being of age, and both of them have been at non-local schools, so they don’t have anybody in the immediate area to ask…well, there I was, with the car.

So we went.

I’m not going to complain about the performer here.  He’s what my Victorian novelists would have called “coarse,” but not so “coarse” as Larry the Cable Guy, and besides, we’ve got his albums.  I like White’s stuff well enough, and it was a decent show, and as for all the swearing–well, as my father said, if you’ve never heard it before you don’t know what it is, and if you have, you’re not dead yet.

No, what got to me about last night was the a udience.  As I said in the beginning, this was a theater, not a club.  There was a bar in the lobby, and you were allowed to bring your drinks into the theater with you, but there were no tables and no waiters.  White himself drinks from what is supposed to be a large bottle of Scotch onstage, and he’s either trying to pretend to be a high functioning alcoholic or actually is one.

But still. 

The first thing that blew me away was how many people came in late.  And not a little late.  Really late.  The first half hour of this thing was given over to a warm up guy, who was okay but not spectacular.  If people had simply come in through this guy’s act, or just when it ended–okay, I’d think that was pretty stupid, but I’d understand the rationale.  

But people not only came in during this first guy’s act, and at the end of it, but all the way through at least the first half hour of Ron White’s act itself, the one they were presumably paying to go see. 

And paying a decent amount, too.  We had very good seats, in the first three rows of the upper orchestra–if I get to choose any seats I want in a theater, I always go for first row upper orchestra right behind the rail, dead center.  We were a little off to the side, but I was still very happy.

But a big hunk of the people who were coming in late were sitting in the first three rows right in the center–in, in other words, the best and most expensive seats in the house.  And it wasn’t, as I’ve said, just a matter of five or ten minutes, so that you could say that they had had trouble in traffic (all of them? and most of them down front?) or trouble finding a place to park. 

And the thing is, it got worse.  People in all sections of the theater were constantly getting up and going out and coming back with new drinks–and that meant climbing over people in the rows, apologizing in audible whispers, and all the rest of it. 

And it went on, continuously and nonstop, throughout White’s entire performance. 

Is this something new?  I’ve never been to a comedy show in a theater before–I don’t think I’ve been to one in a club, either–is there something I’m missing here?  The streaming flow of people was really distracting and annoying, even though I was seated off to the side and therefore free of being climbed over directly.

Whatever.  It was a good enough show, with at least some new material, although bluer than most soft core porn, and I’m glad we went.

I’m just..astounded at the way people behave.

So yesterday was crazy, but let me see if I can straighten any of this out.

I don’t know enough about what was going on inside this woman’s head to say for sure, but my guess is that all this began with simple confusion.  She was an elderly woman, in spite of the hair dye and the Spandex (yes, Spandex, sorry Lymaree). 

I might not think this except that my mother, before her dementia, was the same–to her, if it was a plastic card, it was a credit card.  We would go out to the mail and I’d use my card in the ATM and she’d tell my father I was charging money on my credit card.

I can easily see how that confusion would be even greater with the VISA logo right there on the card, and my guess is that the way that entire incident started was that this woman called up, was asked if she had a credit card, said yes (because she honestly didn’t know there was a difference), was given a set of requirements, and thought she was all set.

This place will, in fact, rent to you with a debit card, or for cash, but to do it they require that you put down a deposit of $300,    But if she said she had a credit card, she would have been told that.

And I’m also not entirely convinced that she didn’t think she’d heard what she said she’d heard–I do know that neither the man who owns the place or his daughter would have said the things she said they said, but I do understand how she might have thought that’s what they’d said.

If that makes sense.

I doubt if she was lying consiously, except possibly at the very end.

And the belligerance came and went.  Once she’d accepted no for an answer, she got very retiring and meek and quiet.

If I knowhow to map this incident with complete confidence, I might be more help to everybody here.

But what struck me was the extent to which the comments were divided between the assumption that the woman had had ill luck and the assumption that she’d made bad choices.

Maybe it’s just me, or the life I’ve lived, but my tendency is to think that the most likely explanation for a life without money or success is luck, not choices.

That doesn’t work for me in the other direction–I tend to think that having money and success is the result of the choices we make. 

The problem is that we don’t all make choices in the same context–that all things are not equal in some very basic senses.

My sister and brother in law both held jobs, my brother in law had a business on the side.  They adopted older children and put a lot of work into raising them in spite of the difficulties that kind of thing brings with it.  They paid their bills.  They didn’t gamble, drink, or drug.  They bought a modest house and paid a modest mortgage–and then Joann got cancer, and it all went to hell.

Most of the people I know whose lives have turned out sadly–not badly, so much as sadly, if that makes sense–have been broadsided by luck.  The guy who lost his house on my road lost his job not because of fecklessness but because the place went out of business, right smack in the middle of an economic downturn and right after his wife had just had their second child.  I can’t see that he could have done anything other than what he did do in the leadup to all that.

The same is the case with many of my students, who come from families and neighborhoods I wouldn’t wish on the cat.  Certainly being a drug addicted crack whore is to make lots of bad choices that will ruin your life, but being born to one (or not) is out of your control.  So is going to a school where nobody gives a damn if you learn anything or not.  Children are not responsible for their parents–and no choice they can make will change their parents–but parents are a large element in the success or failure of children, both as children and in later life.

And yes, of course, there is making lemonade out of lemons.  But not all of us are capable of that–not all of us have the intelligence, or their imagination, or the drive, or the temperament. 

I wonder how much of the support for certain kinds of government programs and structures–welfare, for isntance, or even uinversal single payer health insurance–is based on the amount of weight we give to luck and work in creating a decent life for oneself.

And on that matter I get very torn.

First, I am incredibly aware of how much luck matters. 

I mean, let’s face it–forced to live a normal life, Paris Hilton would not end up with enough money to buy $3000 handbags.  The “trust fund babies” some of you complain about do nothing to make their own money or to justify their position among the rich and famous except to have been born to the right parents, or even great-grandparents. 

But it’s not just trust fund babies.  Intelligence has a strong heritable element.  Temperament has an even stronger one.  Even if you’re born to that crack addicted mother, if you’re also born with intellect and drive, you’re going to get somewhere.  It may be the Harvard Law School, or it may be the head of the biggest drug operation on the Lower East Side, but you’re going to get somewhere.

And even if you’re born with the trust fund, if you’re born without the intellect and the drive, you’re probably not going to get anywhere, except drunk.  The only reason  you won’t be counted as a casuality is because the family lawyers will keep you out of trouble as far as possible.

And while we’re talking about luck, what about the simple luck of being born in my generation instead of the ones my students belong to–a generation in which schools took standards far more seriously and there was much more of a consensus about the basic values necessary to earning respect in this society?

Second, however, I am very aware that although luck can destroy you, it cannot make you succeed, at least not on its own.

I know a lot of rich kids with first class prep school educations who got shuttled off to schools you’ve never heard of because they just didn’t get the grades to get into a “name” college. 

Stephen King said in one of his nonfiction books that not everybody can be in the right place at the right time, but anybody could go to the right place and wait–luck determines whether or not you’re going to wait in vain, but work determines whether or not you’re going to be there when the trend comes around.

If that makes sense.

Third, I’m also convinced that thinking that luck isn’t very important makes it more likely that you will succeed.  There’s psychology here that gets a little convoluted for me, because I tend to be one of those people who gets spurred on to do things when people tell me they’re impossible. 

In fact, I’ve gotten myself in some fairly stupid trouble in my life with that particular reaction.

Most people seem to be more easily discouraged, and some people seem to be very easily discouraged, and it does make a lot of difference if they’re convinced that their destiny is entirely under their control.

But when I see an old woman who is poor and friendless and sortoflost, I’m not ready to assume that she got that way by being a jerk, especially since evidence of her jerkiness was at least mixed.

And I have absolutely no idea if I’m making any sense here.

So, here it is–one of those things that just sort of happens when you’re on the subject.  If you know what I mean. 

This morning I was at the office of the place where I sometimes rent a car–long story; if you think I’m cheap about clothes, you should see me about cars–and while I was waiting a woman showed up wanting to rent a vehicle.

And I knew, as soon as she walked in, that this was not going to end well.

She was an older woman, and some of what made me sit up and take notice was the clothes, all of which were far too young for her–Latex slacks that hugged her calves, backlass wedgie heels.

And some of it was the make-up and the hair, which was not so much too young for her as it was too too, period, if that makes sense.

But most of it was the manner–in the beginning rushed and belligerent, talking through people and then arguing at the top of her voice, trying to get everything done in a rush or not at all, insisting on things that couldn’t possibly true–this is a small company, run by a father and daughter, there are no other employees to get the information tangled up–and generally being in constant  motion.

It’s more, I think, than dressing up or down, formally or informally.  And it’s more than clothes. 

There’s accent to consider, and body language, and mannerisms, and it seems to me that all those things impact what other people see in us and the ways in which they evaluate us.

And I knew exactly what this woman was going to do before she did it.  I knew that she would either not understand the difference between a Visa debit card and a regular Visa card, or claim not to.  I knew that she would insist that she had not been told that she would need a deposit if she didn’t have a regular credit card.  I knew she would try to pay in cash, which for some reason rental car companies really hate.

And I felt sorry for her–she needed a car because her own car had been repossessed.  She didn’t have a regular credit card to her name, and her car insurance had been cancelled because of the repossession.  She was old and alone and was dropped off by somebody who was obviously doing it on sufferance.  He didn’t way to see how she was and was gone when she found out she wouldn’t be getting a car after all.  She had to sit there in the little waiting room waiting for a taxi, and I know taxis in that part of the state–it was going to cost her almost as much as a full day’s car rental just to get home. 

And she still wouldn’t have a car.

But all this started because I was thinking that, in the real world, money and position (by which I mean a job/title/resume/whatever), do indeed make a great deal of difference in the way we live our lives. 

All the things that we believe so strongly shouldn’t matter, turn out to matter far too much.

But I think I’ll stick with my original instinct.

I don’t know about that thing where a man who is not a socialist in youth has no heart and a man who is not a conservative in old age has no head, but I think there’s something wrong with the internal sentiments of the kind of people who come to this realization at the age of twelve, when the rest of us are fighting mad that the world isn’t “fair.”

The world isn’t “fair,” but we should be angry about it.

If that makes sense.

I’m with Cheryl–I think Lymaree is vastly underestimated the extent to which we are judged by our appearances, even in California.  I wouldn’t expect to have any trouble in a store–well, not in the vast majority of stores–because the only issue there is ability to pay, and they don’t really care about anything else.

In virtually every other arena, however, even in areas of the country where everybody is “casual,” people do judge each other by what they wear, how they talk, how they hold themselves, and a dozen other “superficial” criteria.

And if the principle person involved in my  Worst Week-end had been smarter–well, okay, if she’d been smarter, this wouldn’t have started at all.  But if she’d been more observant and more prone to paying attention rather than asserting  her Unending Unconditional Rightness, she’d have known her assessment of me was wrong, if only because she’d have picked up on the accent.  I’ve got a Connecticut Gold Coast accent that, in spite of years of attempting to mitigate it,  you could still cut like a knife.

Then there’s “casual”–there’s casual, and then there’s casual.  I know all about rich people who dress down.  This is New England.  We invented that particular affectation.  But there are ways of dressing down and other ways, and I can certainly spot which is which. 

And, for what it’s worth, of all the places I’ve been, in this country and out, the most status-conscious, clothes-reading place I’ve ever been has been Los Angeles.  

But it’s not if we judge each other on these superficial criteria that I’ve been thinking about, but to what extent it makes sense to accommodate that.  Trollope, and Jane Austen, wouldn’t have found the clothes we wear trivial at all.  They’d have taken them as a statement of not only who we actually are, but of our allegiance to the society in which we live. 

Trollope would have had no patience with a rich person who dressed down, because he would not have seen this as humility, but as a declaration that such a person was rejecting not only fashion, but the moral foundations of the world around him. 

The old joke about the British explorer who dressed for dinner in the bush was not a joke.  Such a man was upholding the superiority of civilization over the lack of it, of the human being as civilized over the human being as…well, not.  What looks to be superficial at first glance is anything but on further inquiry.

I am very ambivalent about all of this.  On the one hand, there is a lot about post-World War II modernity that I like.  There is, for instance, the fact that in any other era, even in the Fifties of my childhood, I would, as a grown woman, have been expected to wear stockings (or, worse, pantyhose) every day, even at home. And I tend to think of pantyhose as something like hell on earth.

I don’t have much patience with clothes.  I mostly just dont’ want to think about them.  A world in which nobody else seems to be thinking about them suits me, especially when it means that I can dress for comfort rather than for form most of the time.

But milder versions of “dressing up” have their uses, too.  There ‘s a certain self-discipline involved in going about your business in a skirt and blouse and decent shoes rather than in sweats and sneakers, and something in the way of declaring a definition of “being human” that resists the wallowing in animality that’s become so prevalent lately.  The Brit in the jungle eating dinner in white tie and tails was declaring not only who he was, but who he wasn’t.

And there’s a side issue, too.  As standard uniform dress has disintegrated into wear-anything-you-want, more and more people don’t wear clothes quite so much as they wear costumes–especially women.

It’s startling how many people I see who are made up to represent something.  In my childhood, this was restricted to Beatniks, who were trying to Make A Statement.  You had Regular People–Villager skirt and sweater set, little blouse, stockings, one and a half inch heel pumps.  Then you had Beatniks–smocky dress, black tights, ballet flats. 

We all thought the Beatniks were trying too hard, and that’s something else about the way people do and do not dress today.  The ones who take care with it often seems as if they’re working overtime to be Individual, and the individuality usually seems fake. 

I’m going around and around with this, and I apologize.  Maybe what I’m trying to say is this:

a) maybe it requires a certain conformity in superficial aspects to allow for true individuality to flourish.  I remember reading an essay on the poet Stevie Smith that said she had that bedrock confictiono of her own complete ordinariness that all real eccentrics have, and that is, in fact, what my experience has been.

The men and women I see wearing quirky little costumes–peasant blouses and three tons of turquoise and silver jewelry; pegged jeans, motorcycle jackets and ponytails to the ass off the back of a mostly bald head–do not look individual to me so much as desperately self conscious, and a little pathetic.

And then there’s this:

b) maybe a certain small degree of formality is required to remind us, on a minute to minute basis, that being human is not just something we are, but something we have to live up to. 

Okay.  That’s another post for another time.

Okay, just for the sake of argument–let’s say that fiction is for what I say it is for, for people, not for plot.

I bring this up because I am in the middle of reading Trollope’s The Duke’s Children, the last in his series of Palliser novels, centered around Parliament.

For those of you who have never read Trollope, and don’t want to, let me point out that these are not “political” novels as the word would be used today.  Plantagenant Palliser–in the later books the Duke of Omnium–is a Liberal, but it would be impossible to figure out what a Liberal means from reading this fiction. 

The books center on Parliament only in the sense that they center on the lives of the men in parliament and their families and acquaintances, and in that a good deal of time is psent illustrating the way elections work and governments are formed.

So you can find out a good deal about the way that Parliamentary government works, but next to nothing about the differing positions of Liberals and Conservatives on things like, well, trade.  Or the rights of women, which was one of the Big Issues that had begun to occupy the British political mind.

The Duke’s Children does take up an issue that has been on my mind a good deal, in spite of the fact that I’m a twentieth century American and not a Victorian Brit.

That issue is hard to put straightforwardly, but I’m going to do the best I can.

How much should the appearance and actuality of wealth and rank matter to the way you will be treated by the world around you–and how much should they matter to you, yourself?

That really is putting it very badly.  Let me try to get around it sideways, like this.

The Duke’s Children is in a way the mirror volume to the first book in this series, called Can You Forgive Her?  In that first book, Lady Glencora Palliser, newly married to Plantagenant (who is not yet the Duke, because his father is still alive), nearly ruins herself by running away with the man she didn’t marry.  That man–Burgo Fitzgerald–had no money, no position (he was never going to be a Duke), and a very iffy reputation.   He was, however, the person who turned Glencora on fire.

This may seem like an old fashioned problem, one we would never have any trouble with today.   And certainly men and women today are much freer in making decisions of this sort simply by the fact that women now have control of their own money and can work at whatever profession they want.

It is one of the great annoyances of reading Trollope that he can understand this idea completely–he knows that there’s something wrong with women being given nothing to have on th eir minds but the men they marry–and still be firmly opposed to doing about it the only thing that could be done.  Trollope was not a feminist, even of the nineteenth century variety.

But although this issue seems archaic, I don’t think it is.  A great deal of the  Worst  Weekend in My  Life from earlier this year resulted exactly from people taking my appearance (including my given name), coupled with a complete lack of actual knowledge about me, at face value.  Obviously I must be doing X, since immigrants often do X because they don’t understand the social norms of this country.

But, of course, I’m not an immigrant, and neither were either of my parents.  And on one side of my family,  I’ve got people from New England going back to the seventeeth century.

The thing about Lady Glencora is this:  she was happier with Plantagenant Palliser than she ever would have been with Burgo Fitzgerald.  She did not love Palliser as she loved Fitzgerald, but she didn’t hate him, either.  Trollope was not trying to say that an entirely hollow, materialistically-based marriage would be a good one.  Lady  Glencora was very fond of Plantagenant, and happy in his company, she just didn’t have searing-gut feeling that is supposed to be “love.”

That romantic passion comes and then it goes, the Victorians would have said.   Respectability, honor and an ordered life last forever.

So far I do indeed concur.  The older I get, the more I understand the importance of a regulated life.  There’s a Victorian phrase for you.

But there are other aspects to this that I don’t find so clear.  I’m still adolescent enough, for instance, to be annoyed when people judge me by my clothes, or get angry with me because they can’t do that because all the parts don’t fit. 

I’m a very peculiar person in some ways.  There are things–and cothes are one of them–that I honestly resent spending money on, even when I have lots of money and spending a lot in one place wouldn’t change my ability to spend a lot in another.  Clothes are one of those things.  The most expensive I get in the way of clothes is L.L. Bean–the whole Vineyard Vines thing drives me crazy–and mostly I go fo whatever I can pick up in Marshalls or K-Mart for under thirty dollars.  Under twenty for stuff like jeans and under ten for t-shirts. 

And, of course, seeing me dressed like that, people make assumptions not only about my financial status–which I tend to think it none of their business, but which matters a lot in certain kinds of interactions–but about my level of education, even my upbringing.  And since none of these things “fit” what I look like, I often get people very angry–and that one time, I ended up in a situation I might have avoided if I’d just agreed to look the part of what I actually am.

Trollope’s late work is notable for the extent to which he is questioning the assumptions of a lifetime, for being unsure of where it should rest, on which side of what issues.  Lady Glencora gave up the love aof a man who was socially beneath her to find contentment, if not ecstasy, in the bosom of a proper marriage.  Her daughter, Lady Mary, will be allowed to marry her commoner–a somewhat better sort than her mother’s, as he has honor, if no more money than Burgo had. 

This being Trollope, I don’t expect to get the answers to any of the questions I’ve been asking myself lately.  And no matter how archaic this theme sounds, it’s with us still, in movies and in novels.  The importance of wealth and rank to marriage is the theme of The Notebook, the importance of wealth and rank in general is the theme of The Devil Wears Prada.

The reason why I think Trollope belongs in the Canon and those other things will never make it is this:  Trollope accepts the fact–and it is a fact–that there is a real question here.  It is not simply black and white–people who care about wealth and rank or their appearance, are bad and shallow people, and the high ground resides with the people who reject both and declare the world well lost.

For one thing, Trollope understands that the world can indeed be lost–by individuals, on an ondividual basis, in an individual life–and that that doesn’t always work out well.

I’ve been thinking all night about Robert’s comment that he doesn’t quite accept the idea that teachers are going against the entire policy of “boost self esteem”  in order to make their kids feel like failures, and it occurs to me that a) the two things aren’t incompatible and b) that the self esteem project might be less widespread than it was assumed to be for a while.

I do encounter students who seem to have emerged from programs designed to make them think well of themselves at the expense of all else, but those students are invariably at least middle class.  It’s the lower academic levels of the rich suburban districts and the lower rung prep schools that produce students like this, and they’re a disaster in a college classroom, no matter how remedial.

Not only do they not know anything, they know they don’t know it, and their entire modus operandi is a desperate defensive strategy meant to shield themselves from ever having to admit it.  When they find out that a C paper is a C paper no matter how hard they work on it, they panic and then they explode.   “Working really hard” is supposed to be the only criterion for a grade, and the teacher is supposed to accept their assurances that they “worked really hard” whether they’ve shown evidence of that or not.

But my inner city students are not like this.  They do have a certain amount of investment in the “work hard” theory of grading.  I think it’s possible that our need to emphasize how important it is to “work hard” has some unintended cosequences.

But my inner city students are not only convinced that they’re stupid, they’re convinced that they’re incapable of ever being anything else.

What’s more, this conviction is tied to one they would never voice out loud, but that’s as clear as the logos on their T-shirts:  they’re convinced that black people are incapable of ever being anything else.

I’ve given a lot of thought to this over the years.  I don’t believe that their schools, no matter how bad–and really, I’ve only hinted at how bad things can get–are coming out and telling them this sort of thing explicitly.  I don’t even think that it’s a matter of “the culture” only showing images of stupid black people and not the other kind.  After all, every day today, we’ve got at least one very smart black person talking to us from our television sets.

I do think that part of the problem is the level of economic segregation that exists in many public school systems.  

The economic part is important because when students judge themseves as “smart” or “stupid,” they’re not talking, as an expert would, about raw intellectual ability.   What they’re picking up on is ignorance, and they’re aware that they’re ignorant.   They’re aware that most of the people around them are ignorant, too.

Ignorant depends on what’s called in the literature “opportunity to learn,” and it is almost never enough to be presented with knowledge in classrooms.  Classrooms can be good if there’s no other place for you to pick up what you need to know, and they can be good if you know it and want to expand it, but if the only things you know about, say, the way the federal government works, the chances are that what you know is both limited and difficult for you to remember.

“Smart” students in this sense, therefore, tend to be found in the suburban districts.  They’re the ones with parents who know the names of their state’s senators, the basic facts of American history, the vague outlines of literary history, and all the other little, nit-picky things “everybody” knows and that teachers, books, magazines and movies simply don’t bother to expand on.

It’s extremely unlikely that a black student with parents like this is living in the inner city, for the same reason that it’s unlikely that a white student with parents like this is living in the local trailer park.  And more power to them.  I wouldn’t stick around in a crummy neighborhood if I didn’t have to.  

But there was one great advantage to the old, insular small town school, the one in a town so small that there would only be one, and that everybody went to together–schools like that always had the full range of smart to stupid kids, ignorant to knowledgable kids.  Students could see other students, just like themselves, who had achieved an academic level they might want for themselves.

Okay, I’m not trying to valorize the small town here.  I also know hat’s wrong with it, and I’ve made it my business not to participate in that kind of thing as an adult, or to put my children in the position of having only that to live in–but my complaint about economically segregated schools is still valid.

Even intellectually gifted students in inner city schools are surrounded by a sea of ignorance, so wide and so deep it’s breathtaking.   What’s more, they’re not getting much advantage from their teachers, because their teachers are invariably the worst the system can breed.

Good teachers do not tend to seek jobs in inner city schools, and if they do, they don’t tend to last long.  Fir better or worse, inner city schools are home to the children of lots of people who are not only poor, but in trouble, and often in trouble in violent, brutal and destructive ways.

I once got accused, on an Internet forum, of saying that poor people are poor because they’re drug addicts and criminals–but that wasn’t what I said.

What I said was that being a drug addict or a criminal (or both) was likely to make you poor.

The guy who thinks it makes sense to hold up a liquor store to get party money for Friday night, the woman who thinks heroin is the only thing worth living for, the couple whose entire marriage is a mess of binge drinking followed by domestic violence are unlikely to be able to afford to live in Westport, or even in Naugatuck. 

Making enough money to afford to live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood takes a certain amount of self-discipline, things that most of us take for granted that are not second nature to everybody.

Setting the alarm clock every morning and making yourself get up early so that you’re not late for work,  not going to the party on Friday because you have to study for a math test, mapping out a plan for working ona project instead of letting it wait until the last minute–most of us learn this behavior by watching our parents, not because somebody in the front of a classroom forced us to toe the line.

Inner city schools are full of kids whose parents do not behave like this–and that’s rue no matter what the racial make up of the inner city neighborhood.  This is New England.  A fair number of our inner cities are all whiite, and the behavior I’m talking about can be found just as readily in certain kinds of rural schools (say, for instance, in parts of Appalachia).

I’ve had students who have never seen any member of their family work at a legitimate job, who have never sat down at a table and had a meal with other people until they were faced with the school cafeteria, whose families live for weeks and months with an exhausted light bulb over their front door without ever thinking to change it.

I’ve pointed out, before, that one of the reasons I like the work of Theodore Dalrymple is that he’s the only person I know writing about things like this, but I want to point out something obvious here–it is extremely difficult to teach students who come from situations like these.

Good teachers have options.  They don’t have to work with students who are not only frustrating, but sometimes violent, and who come from families that will nt support the school when Junior needs extra help or a week of after school detention.

Bad teachers have fewer options, and they get shunted farther and farther down the totem pole until they come to a rest in the worst schools in the worst neighborhoods.  Tenure makes it difficult or impossible to fire them, or at least so much trouble it isn’t worth the effort if you’ve got an alternative. 

Inner city schools are the alternative.  Middle class parents will complain.  They’ll hire lawyers and sue.  Parents who will suffer in the dark rather than change a light bulb–to whom it doesn’t even occur that it is within their power to change it–aren’t likely to do either.

Bad teachers are failures, and failures have a nasty tendency to take out their resentment on whoever is handy–and the students are handy.

My inner city students do come to college with the conviction that they’re worthless and that everything bad that hapapens to them is just what they deserved. 

I think I know where they pick that up.