Hildegarde

It’s that part of the summer where I have to turn on the air conditioner as soon as I wake up, which is not something I’m fond of.  It also means that my allergies tend to need about an hour to cool out before I’m completely competent, and that has some interesting consequences for the writing.

Yesterday, both that and the after-project fuzz put me in the position of sitting on the loveseat, running a bunch of cable news stations on the television set, and periodically being brought up short by the airing of a very strange ad.

I don’t know how many of you out there have seen this ad.  I’ve only noticed it myself over the last week or two, and only really noticed it yesterday.  This may be because it hasn’t been running long up here–and I think there are indications that that might be the case–or simply that I’ve had my mind on other things. 

Yesterday, however, I had no such impediment to noticing it, and I noticed.

It’s a clumsy ad.  The production qualities are not good.  It comes off as the kind of thing the local cable company helps local small businesses to make, except that it’s even less entertaining than that. 

I’m actually very fond of some of the local ads.  There is this guy named Carl who owns two Tru-Value hardware stores up north of me, plus a carpet place.  He runs ads with his wife and with one of his favorite employees.  Then there’s Family Ford, which features the family.  So far, the wife’s the best actor of the bunch.

This ad, though, is just sort of flat.  A woman who looks Native American comes out and asks if you could use $2500 in your bank account by tomorrow.   Then she gives a little spiel about how this money is expensive, but if you’re in a bind it may be worth it, call this number.

Apparently, there is small print showing on the bottom of the screen that gives the first clue as to what’s going wrong here, but I don’t actually look at the television when I “watch” it, so I didn’t see it.

I did get the distinct impresson that there was something very, very wrong here.  So I went and looked it up on the Internet.

And that’s where the fun started.

You’ve got to understand, up front, that I am not the sort of person who claims that I’m “good at math.”  I’m not particularly good at math.  I managed to pass two semesters of calculus in college, and my board scores were very good, but I’m limited, and I know it.

All of this makes me better than the average American math phobic, but still.  My father in law, who never graduated from high school, could stand at the cashier’s in the grocery store and total the bill up in his head before her machine did it.  I am not that good.

I am also not the kind of person who feels that government needs to rush in to save people from themselves whenever they do something I personally think is stupid.

I don’t even think government should rush in and shave people from themselves when they’re doing what is demonstrably and objectively stupid. 

That’s why I don’t oppose “payday loans,” where people go in and borrow $300 on Monday and pay it back in two weeks and the interest amounts to $50.  The interest is awful, but if you’re making minimum wage and that’s the only way you can get the electric bill paid, it serves a purpose.  People who want to run the payday loan companies out of business need to establish a different process by which the kind of people who use them can get done what they need to get done.

All that being said, however, this was a kicker.  The ad was placed by a business calling itself Western Sky Financial.  If you go to their website

http://www.westernsky.com

you get some very interesting information.  And you do get the information.  There is no attempt to mislead anybody.   That’s a very important point.  Somebody took a lot of effort to make sure that they could not be criticized for running a scam. 

Of course, they have been accused of running a scam, but that’s because the whole thing is so outrageous, a lot of people assume that it must be one.  What it is, I think, is the legendary “tax on people who can’t do math.”  Yes, I know, that’s supposed to be the state lotteries, but this really comes closer to the mark.  You spent a dollar or two, or even ten, a week on lottery tickets, you’re being foolish.  You get involved in this thing and you’re ruining your life.

Everything about this thing is bizarre.  First, there’s the question of the company, which the ad tells you is a Native American owned company.  Then it lists a single individual living on a reservation in South Dakota as the owner. 

There’s a lot of other Native American language in the ad and on the web site–the agreement for that loan, for instance, includes a provision that the terms will be adjudicated under tribal law (and not the law of the federal or state US government) and that you give up all rights to do things like bring complaints with state and federal agencies or file a class action suit.

Whether the company is actually run by Native Americans is not so clear.  When you look at the application process, you see that when you apply for a loan, that loan is processed not by WSF, but by a California payday loan company called Cashcall. 

Nobody seems to know if WSF has contracted with Cashcall for processing services, or if Cashcall has contracted with WSF to provide cover for its own activities. Whichever way it is, Cashcall has a very bad rep and literally thousands of complaints against it with BBBs across the country.

Of course, that may not matter much, because the real interest in the small print.  Remember that these are not payday loans in the usual sense.  People take on loan agreements that last for years.

And the lowest possible rate of interest you can get on these loans is…115%.

That is not a typo.

Of course, not very many people get that prime rate of 115%.  The company will quite cheerfully tell you that it’s much more normal for the rate to be 139%.  And it can go higher.  As high as 300%.

And the fees are incredible.

For instance:  if you take out a loan for $1500, the company charges you a one-time initiation fee of $500, which comes right out of the loan.  That means you only get $1000 in actual cash, but you pay back the entire $1500 over the course of a few years.  Your final tab?  Over $4000. 

If you take $2600–the largest amount available–your fee is only $75, which doesn’t sound bad.  Unfortunately, the total cost at repayment is at over $11,000.

And you’re not guaranteed to get off even that cheaply.  One of the provisions of the contract you signed is that the company gets to change the terms any time it wants, for any reason it wants. 

Just because it wants to.

I know, but now, most of you are probably thinking that nobody would enter into a contract like this without being brain dead.  Even people who are not good at figuring out how much their dinner at TGIFriday’s costs if they put it on the credit card and pay only the minimum should be able to figure out this is awful.

Even desperation doesn’t completely explain how people get sucked in by something like this.   Yes, desperation can make your mind go blank.  This requires your mind going vegetable.

I’m happy to report that the Internet is full of people who are good at this kind of math and willing to help out the people who aren’t.   If you plug “western sky financial scam” into Google, you get whole lists of financial and debt blogs with very full and complete and comprehensible explanations of the deal, the problems with the deal, and the various problems people have had dealing with the company.

And there have been a lot of problems.  Some people complain that after they called the company, they started getting dunning phone calls even though they never took any money.  Other people say their phones were innundated with voice mails and text messages–hundreds in a single day–trying to sell them payday loans and other high-interest financial “services.”

In the meantime, the states of West Virginia, Maryland and Colorado are all going after the company to force it to cease doing business in those states and to stop it from collecting any more payments on any loans it made in those states.   The states don’t seem to buy the idea that if the thing is run out of an Indian reservation, it doesn’t have to follow state and federal laws.

My guess is that I’m seeing these ads in Connecticut now because the company is looking to replace lost territory with new territory–and because Dick Blumenthal is no longer our attorney general. 

Blumenthal is a good man in a lot of ways, although he’s a little too much of a welfare-state liberal for me–but on stuff like this, he was stellar.

This will be the first test of his successor’s resolve and drive and intensity.  I’ll be waiting to see the result.

And in the meantime, I keep trying to think of a character caught in something like this, or perpetrating something like this.

People are very odd about money.

Well, the ms went back yesterday–hard copy UPS, electronic copies of corrections in the e-mail.  I spent all night having weird dreams about how my back yard–a flat, straight expanse that runs down to a brook–was really hilly and hard to walk on and full of logs with their bark stripped.

There was always some guy knocking on a back door that doesn’t exist to see if he could have the wood.  I was always coming out of the back door that does exist and telling him he was welcome.

I have no idea what any of that means, although there is a pile of wood out there, near the garage, from when we trimmed the bushes on either side of the front porch steps.  They needed a lot of trimming.  The forest was on the verge of taking back it’s own.

Still, I have no idea what it means, and I suspect it’s just a variation of my usual mental state after finishing a project.  I get sort of floaty and disoriented, as if the world isn’t working right.

This morning I even managed to oversleep the alarm clock until eight.  I’m not going to make sense at all today.

Yesterday, though, didn’t make a lot of sense either.  I get up very early to work, so I was done early, and out and doing errands before eight thirty.  By the time I got home I was exhausted, and it was barely even lunchtime.

So I sort of drifted around the house, and when I finally felt half awake, the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial came in.

Now, to be reasonable here for a minute or two:  I do understand that the public reports of a trial are not the same thing as the trial, and that what we see on television is not what the jury sees in real time in the courtroom.  It’s not really all that surprising that the verdicts that come in are often not what we expected them to be.

There’s also the problem caused by that endless series of commentators.  Even TruTV, which used to be CourtTV, and which broadcasts trials in their entirety, tends to use the time when the court breaks for lunch or the lawyers ate at the bench whispering to the judge to bring on legal experts to discuss what’s happening, which usually comes down to telling the audience what they should think about what’s happening.

The legal experts were close to unanimous in this case–it looked to them as if Casey Anthony would end up guilty on at least one of the murder counts.  There was a weight of opinion out there that the only real question was whether Casey Anthony would get the death penalty.

I didn’t watch the trial in real time on TruTV, which stayed in session right through the Fourth of July week-end, including Saturday, Sunday, and the fourth itself.

In fact, the Anthony trial was in session at least on Saturdays for a couple of weeks–is this something new in Florida, or did the court make some kind of exception for this trial in particular?  I’m sure most trials, even of heinous serial murderers, would not be in session on July 4th.

At any rate, I didn’t watch the trial in real time.  I had work to do.  What I did do was watch the closing statements and the prosecution’s rebuttal.

And I will say that, from what I saw there, I was surprised at the verdict. 

I am not one of those people who yelled and screamed that the O.J. verdict was all about race.  I think Johnny Cochrane was right–if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.  That needn’t have been the case, but the prosecution made such a big deal (beforehand) about how important a piece of evidence the glove was. 

Right after they did that, and O.J. stood up and couldn’t get the glove over his hand, my father called me from Florida and yelled for six straight minutes about what an idiot the prosecutor was.

Yesterday, the jurors weren’t talking to the press, which is of course their perogative.  I expect that sometime in the future one or more of them will agree to talk to one of the true crime shows.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not a little worried, at the moment, at being attacked by outraged members of the public.

Certainly there’s enough outrage out there.  Last night there was a “put your front porch light on for justice for Caylee Anthony” thing going on, and my sister in law was among the most enthusiastic participants.

Casey Anthony, in the meantime, will very soon be free.  She’s been in jail for almost three years.  The counts on which she was convicted–four of giving false information to a police officer–carry only up to a single year each.   The only reason the judge shouldn’t release her immediately when she comes up for sentencing tomorrow would be if he didn’t agree with the verdict either.  Even if he does send her to jail, it can only be for a few more months.

What’s interesting to me about all this is this–there were 10 counts for the jury to consider, four murder counts, one count of aggravated manslaughter, one count of aggravated child abuse, and four counts of lying to a police officer.

The jury deliberated for ten hours.  That was it. 

Given the enormous complications in this case, I expected them to be out for a week.  The press expected them to be out for an hour and then back with a guilty verdict.

The only way the jury came back so quickly with acquittals is if the jurors didn’t believe the prosecution at all.  And I mean at all.

And they didn’t believe the prosecution in spite of the fact that Casey Anthony herself seemed to have spent much of the investigation trying to end up in the electric chair.  There were so many different lies, so many different evasions, so much crazy behavior–at one point, Casey told her parents that she had a rich boyfriend in Jacksonville and she was taking Caylee with her to see him on a long weekend.  The boyfriend never existed and Caylee was already dead.

At the trial, the defense seemed to me to be doing the real world equivalent of a mystery writer’s “throw garbage at it”–they came up with scenario after scenario, speculation after speculation, and threw in the “Casey’s father sexually abused her when she was a child thing” just for good measure.

The result, of course, is that Casey and her parents are now estranged, and may be for ever afterwards.

It was, to say the least, a very strange case. 

And I don’t know what to make of it, even now that I’m reasonably awake.

So, it’s the day before the fourth of July, and I’ve just spent three hours trying to find instances of people in dialogue talking about things that “don’t make sense,”  and then get them to say something else.

And then I decided that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to take a short break.  So I went reading through the comments on yesterday’s post, and there I found something that sort of startled me.

Robert says that a man (or woman, I suppose) has to go “through Good to get to Great.”

And I’m not really sure that’s true.

One of the first things I ever learned in American history, once I got beyond the elementary level, was this:  John Adams was a good man but not a great one;  Thomas Jefferson was a great man, but not a good one.

Here’s exactly the sort of thing I should be talking about before the fourth of July.

Anyway, the reason for that particular truism in my history classes in complicated, but let’s just say that I came along at just about the point when high school history classes were trying to find some way to acknowledge both Jefferson’s achievements and the unholy mess he made of almost all his personal life.

But that kind of distinction between great and good comes up other places, too–the one that keeps popping into my head is actually from the first Harry Potter novel, where Olivander tells Harry that Voldemort did great things–terrible things, but great.

All right, the reference is silly, but it’s early in the morning and I’ve been working.

Given that kind of distinction, however, Hitler would be a great man–and if a great man is in some way a genius, he probably was one.   Jonas Salk would be both great and good.

If you see what I mean.

I want you, however, to contemplate the live and times of a man of whom you have probably never heard:  Robert Carter III, master of Virginia’s Nomony Hall through the American Revolution and Subject of Andrew Levy’s The First Emancipator:  Slavery, Religion and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter.

 Before I get started, let me say this:  this is one of the best books I have ever read in my entire life.  Ever.  It’s well written and well researched.  It covers territory I was never aware of before I read it.  And it outlines the life of a man nobody has ever heard of–until recently, when Levy decided to make a point of it–but whose story has implications for virtually everything about American history and our understanding of it.

Robert Carter was of the same generation as Jefferson and Madison, and he knew them both.  In some ways, he did them one better.  He was the richest planter in Virginia during most of his life, and he had sense enough to start investing in manufacturing when the planter class was trying to hunker down and pretend that economic change hadn’t already come.

He was also the owner of 485 slaves–and one day in 1795, he showed up at the county courthouse with a “deed of gift,” which freed them.

Okay, the actual operation of the Deed of Gift was more complicated than late, and took longer to unwind.  Carter actually freed his slaves over a period of years, although once he’d made the decision he had a tendency not to worry if one of the slaves ran off under his own power. 

But the fact of the matter is that he did free them, along with teaching them skilled trades so that they had something they could use for work when they were out on their own, and teaching them to read and write even when it was against the law, and worshipping next to them in the same pews and taking communion with them in the early revolutionary Baptist church.

He did all those things, in fact, that I was always taught in history class it would be impossible for a man of his time and station to do.  The contradictions in the life of a man like Jefferson, for instance, are explained by saying that in that time and in that place, he did (almost) everything he could do.  The same is said of Washington.

But here is Robert Carter, and the time and the place did not stop him.

What started him, though, was almost as important.  What started him was religion.

One of the things Levy’s book is good for is the way in which it illuminates the complicated place of religion in Revolutionary War sympathies, especially among those people who were not among the pantheon of Founders.

That pantheon was mostly highly educated and either Deist (like Jefferson and Madison) or “rational Christian” (like Adams, who favored state established churches but did not believe in the divinity of Christ).

Among more ordinary people in Virginia, however, the religion of the Revolution was Baptist.

And the Baptist Church was not the Baptist Church you see today, in either the north or the south.

I suppose the closest you could get today to what the Baptist Church was then would be the Pentacostals and the Holy Ghost People–and then you’d only get close, not all the way.

Baptists in the Revolutionary War era spoke in tongues, got slain in the spirit, wailed and screamed and jerked around on the floor–and sat side by side, black and white, slave and free, rich and poor.

And took communion together, black and white, slave and free, rich and poor.

And all that kind of thing was actually illegal in Virginia at the time.

In fact, one of the other things this book is good for is explicating just how complicated and detailed were the laws of Virginia regulating slavery.   Before the end of the Revolutionary War, it was illegal for a slaveowner to manumit even a single one of his slaves, and Carter only got away with teaching his to read and write and practice trades because, being Robert Carter and the richest man around, the authorities were too deferential to touch him.

But the other thing Robert Carter was was an American original all out religious loon.

I’m not saying that because he converted from the establish Anglican Church to the Baptists, or because he took communion with his slaves. 

Actually, Carter was a pretty tame Baptist, as that kind of thing went.  He had been brought up a Virginian aristocrat.  He wasn’t about to start dropping to the floor and wailing in religious ecstasy.

The Anglican Church at the time had strict customs for separating the races and the classes.  Families “bought” pews, and the richest families bought the most expensive ones, near the front.  Blacks, free or slave, had their own churches elsewhere.

That Carter would reject this in favor of the more egalitarian arrangements of one of the dissenting sects isn’t crazy, nor do I think he’s crazy because he came to his decision as the result of a religious experience. 

Most of the people I have known in my life who have converted to Christianity from something else, or from indifference, have done so because of an intense personal experience in which they were sure they were directly in contact with God.

No, what makes Carter such an odd figure religiously is that he kept converting.  Having moved from the Anglicans to the Baptists, he became disenchanted with the Baptists as they became more conservative (no more everybody side by side) after the War.  He then founded his own Baptist Church on the old lines, then moved away from that to Swedenborg’s Church of the New Jerusalem, and finally.

He was in the midst of Swedenborgian enthusiasm when he made the Deed of Gift.  Living in a small house in a working class neighborhood of Baltimore in the years afterwards, he morphed into a kind of Deist.

He was, in fact, almost as much of a religious mess as Jefferson was a personal one.

And yet it was religion that made Robert Carter want to free his slaves, and want to meet with them on as much of a plane of equality as possible before that. 

And it was religion of a particular kind–anti-rationalist, depending on revelation and not reason, rejecting the entire Enlightenment project in favor of an emotive connection with the radical equality implicit in Paul to the Corinthians, but never explicit until then.

No, I’m not advocating that we should all go off and start speaking in tongues–although, when I was a child, I was sometimes taken to tent meetings by a babysitter, and in those days I could get slain in the spirit with the best of them.

I’m just saying that it would be hard to decide if Robert Carter was a great man, or a good one, or both.

And that the actual relationship of religion to the American founding, and the American present, is a lot more complicated than either side of the church/state debate likes to make out.

So, here I am.  The day is beautiful.  The pollen count is virtually nil. 

And, for once, I’ve gotten what feels like serious work done.   At least, it’s work I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have to change tomorrow.

Considering what things have been like around here during these revisions, that’s not a small thing.

I’ve now reached the point, however, where if I do anything more, I’m going to start messing things up.

Mostly what I have been thinking about is those bad books–the ones we can or cannot say are objectively bad, or objectively good, although I still think it’s easier to put a finger on the bad.

But what about Bad books–Bad with a capital B, books that are in some way morally wrong, or socially dangerous.

I’ve spent enough time around the kind of people who–like me–tend towards Free Speech and Free Press absolutism to know that the usual argument for the uninhibited right to say or publish anything at all, no matter what, is:  no girl was ever ruined by a book.

I forget who said that–Clarence Darrow?–but it comes down to saying that we should all have freedom of speech and publication because such speech and publication doesn’t really have consequences anyway, and because this is especially true of fiction.

It’s an argument that’s always bothered me, because it seems to assume that the only reason we should have a right to speak and publish is because it doesn’t matter anyway.  It has no consequences.

This seems to me to be demonstrably untrue–although not untrue in the way people who want to censor think it is.

I don’t think, for instance, that Mortal Kombat or Natural Born Killers can or does cause teen-agers to run out and imitate the action.  It is probably the case that, given somebody who is already predisposed, playing video games or watching movies or reading fiction might give concrete expression for future action.

On the other hand, I think that such people, completely deprived of any fictional enactment of the things they want to do, would figure out specific ways to get them done anyway.

What I think fiction does do is a lot more subtle and a lot more insidious. 

I think fiction can make the impossible look possible.

Let me see if I can find a way to put this that makes sense.

Back when I was in college, there were several novels that came out purporting to show the shape of things to come.  One was called Walden Two, and it was written by the behaviorist pscyhologist B.F. Skinner.

In this novel, children who have been raised from birth in a completely controlled environment now live in a paradise where there is no jealousy, no ambition, no greed–Communism with sex, more or less. 

And it seems perfectly plausible.  Skinner wasn’t a great writer of fiction, but he wasn’t a bad one.

Novels and movies teach us things about human behavior, but a good enough writer can make behavior sound plausible that is not true to the real world at all.

I’m not talking, here, about behavior that is “realistic” in the way that, say, Jane Austen is realistic and Stephen King is not.

I can say that fiction can present behavior that is simply not true to human functioning and make it seem as if it were real.

In the real world, the strong prey on the weak whether they’ve been preyed on themselves or not.  In lots of fiction, the strong prey on the weak only because they’ve been preyed out, and they can be fixed by learning the truth about themselves.

Think for a moment about Patient Griselda, the abused wife of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, who by meekly accepting her husband’s endless beatings and bowing to his will, eventually shamed her into treating her well.

There are hundreds of thousands of women on this earth who buy that particular fiction.  It’s been made plausible in hundreds of stories throughout the course of time.

And it’s a lie.

Fiction is the art of telling lies. 

Good fiction is the art of telling lies well.

Only great fiction is the art of telling the truth.

I don’t really know where I’m going with any of this. 

But here it is.

For those of you who liked the title but didn’t get the reference to The Addams Family…um.

But it’s a little earlier this morning, and I may be a little more coherent.

The question of what makes a bad book of fiction is more difficult than the question of what makes a bad book of nonfiction, for this reason:  it’s more difficult to come to some kind of agreement about what a novel is for. 

Nonfiction books are of several types–how-to, argument, informative, polemic.   There are more, but you see what I mean.

Each of these categories has an internal logic.  A how to book that didn’t teach you how to do anything is objectively a bad how to book.  Even if we enjoy the book enormously, it has failed to do what it set out to do.

 I’m not sure we have the same kind of consensus about what a novel is for. 

Even genre novels, which at least theoretically have boundaries on what should and should not happen within them, turn out to have fuzzier borders than any of us notices at the beginning.

What makes a good mystery novel? 

I tried to make a case for the idea that the standard should be the mystery, specifically the fair play mystery–but most of the readers of this blog rejected that, in favor of more general standards having to do with character and plot that could really be applied to any fiction.

In some genres, there seem to be almost no established boundaries at all.  I’ve come to the conclusion that a novel is “science fiction” if its writer and its publisher say it is.  Beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to work with in the way of intra-genre definition.

But even the more general standards–characterization, plot, not being pulled out of the story–don’t help much, because we’re still left with coming to some consensus of what the novel is for.

If the novel is for the enjoyment of readers–if the novel exists for no other reason than to make readers happy–then even the most general of standards are useless. 

Bad grammar?  Bothers some people but not others.  Cardboard characters?  Some people positively adore them.  Plots full of holes?  Think of the fifth Harry Potter novel–it sold 850,000 copies in hardcover.  Anachronisms?  Hell, most readers won’t even notice them.

If the only purpose of a novel is to produce a subjective experience in a reader, then no novel can be called “bad” as long as it produces that subjective experience in some reader somewhere. 

My father called any mystery novel whose solution he could figure out before he reached the end “bad,” but I almost never care if I can figure the thing out.  It’s not what I’m looking for.   What was a “bad” mystery to my father was, very often, a very good one for me.

The problem goes farther than this.

Assuming that a novel is “for” giving the reader a subjective reaction, we can’t even say a novel is “bad” if readers get a different subjective reaction than the one the writer intended them to have.

For one thing, we’re in the same position with the writer’s intent here as we often are.  Writers think the intend things and subconsciously intend others.  Writers have died and their intent can no longer be divined with certainty.   Writers do things they didn’t intend that turn out to be much more spectacularly impressive than anything they did intend.

Milton was of the devil’s party and didn’t know it–and whether he intended it or not, he produced one of the most vibrant and compelling characters in the history of literature while doing it.

This is why, in the formal study of literature, the work always begins with definitions.  Before anybody can talk about “good” or “bad” books, they have to know what the book is supposed to be doing.

I think a lot of the arguments here about whether we can say that one work of literature is superior to any other are really arguments about what the novel is for–what it exists to do.

 My favorite expression of what literature is for is still Kesey’s:  it’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen. 

I used to think that was pretty clear, until I started writing this blog.

In the meantime, of course, I think I can define lots of things that would make a novel “bad.” 

Highest on the list for me would be clunky, awkward, or leaden prose.  In the end, the music of the writing will always be, for me, the most important part of reading fiction.

But I can’t even look to formal literary studies for support on that one.  There’s a lot in the canon–not just the “required reading list,” but the books that have survived for generations without benefit of English Departments–that seem to me to be leaden as hell.  Think of Middlemarch.  Or anything by Thomas Hardy.

As we go down the list, I tend to agree with most of you that anachronisms and other inaccuracies are a Bad Thing, but I’ve been told in no uncertain terms, by readers elsewhere, that that kind of thing doesn’t matter at all as long as there is  a “good story.”

But I don’t think we could even agree on what makes a “good story.” 

Looking through the openings people sent me to check out, the only one that grabbed me was the beginning of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and that was the only one I was really interested in reading, but I’d be willing to bet that that wouldn’t be the choice of most of you here, including most of you who are here because you read the books I write.

For a long time, I reacted badly when people told me that what was important was “a good story,” because what they seemed to mean by that was a book where lots happens! people go running around having action!  shots ring out!  cars explode!  aliens land!  everybody goes rushing around madly and never thinks about anything!

Anyway, if you want to know what I think makes a novel “bad,” ones that do that stuff are the top of the list.  And the use of that particular definition for a “good” book is common enough so that I can be pretty sure that if people start telling me it’s a “really good story,” I’m going to hate it.

If the purpose of the novel is that people should (subjectively) like it, then there can be no standard of good and bad. 

People will like anything.

Let’s put it this way:  I never want to revise a book this way again.

I finished up this morning and then looked through the pages I have that I can consider “done,” and what I’ve noticed is that it’s not that I’ve changed all that much as a total of the book, but that I keep changing the same things over and over again.

I know there are a lot of people out there who work piecemeal and even like it, but I am obviously not one of these. 

If I think about it, I am not even one of these when I read.  I like my books to feel whole and complete in a way that is not just the sum of their parts.

With this, I just kept doing things and then redoing them and then putting them back to the way they were before, so that now nothing feels as if I’ve got it right. 

And then, of course, the inevitable happened.  I looked up this morning, double checked the edit letter, and realized that at the end of it there were a stack of queries of small things on a page by page basis that I hadn’t even realized were there.

These are not huge deals, and they can be done in a couple of hours, but still.

The plan now is to do those first thing tomorrow morning, then start on Friday reading through the entire manuscript from top to bottom, just to see if it feels right.

And then I’m going to declare myself done, because I’m going to be out of time.

This is the second time in three years I’ve gone sort of bezerk over revisions.  I figure my editor is just sitting somewhere being grateful that I didn’t do what I did with Wanting Sheila Dead and rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

But something is wrong with my head these days, anyway, and I’m not too sure what to do about it.

Maybe it’s just this latest round of everything going wrong at once, but I’m becoming practically reclusive.  I usually have several days during the year when I have friends over, or students, or somebody.  This year I did nothing but work on Memorial Day, and I seem to be setting myself up to do nothing but work on the Fourth of July. 

I almost never talk to anybody on the phone except for lawyers. 

And I have no idea if that’s something I want, because I’m sort of unkinking from all the crap, or if I’ve just been sort of stunned into immobility.

I do think that it’s entirely possible that these revisions wouldn’t be taking so long to do if I was in my usual frame of mind.

Whatever’s going on, I feel sort of listless and lethargic, and nothing I do seems to be worth the time and trouble to do it.

I expect I’ll snap out of it eventually, but in the short run it’s not the cheerfulest I’ve ever been.

But, for the record, a couple of notes from over the past three days:

First, Cathy F knows I think she’s a paragon among psycholigists, but I was very careful to say that I was NOT talking about academic psychologists, but about what went on in K-12 schools.  And I think I’ve got that pretty well taped, at least as far as it concerns CT.   For better or worse, we have been saddled with a generation of school teachers, school nurses, and school social workers who have been encouraged to think of themselves as “experts” and of parents as (at best) dangerous obstructions, if not downright toxic elements in the lives of their children.

And all of that has been accompanied by a near mania for conformity–anything that does not conform to what these people have decided is “normal” is automatically viewed as “disordered,” as what somebody in the comments called “issues.” 

Even the kind of thing that seems to me to be self evident–for instance, that not all people want to “belong” or to “fit in” with whatever group they happen to be among; or that different people may feel differently about time spent alone and some people may actually like it–is undiscussable.  The kid doesn’t have a ton of friends?  There must be something wrong with her.  Find her a therapist.

Welcome to my childhood.  And that was well before this wave of coercise psychobabble.

Second, I don’t agree with whoever said that every book presenting an argument should be properly footnoted and sourced.  There are different kind of books, and I see nothing wrong with straightforward polemics that don’t pretend to be anything else.   Those can be a lot of fun, and the sourcing would add nothing to them.

My problem with Gore’s book is that he declared his intention of countering a culture that had abandoned reason and the resort to facts, and then he didn’t give me facts.

But even in a polemic, I’ll willing to say this:  particular is better than general.

“The study called ‘Evidence for Anthropogenic Global Warming in Polar Ice Cap Formation 2001-2007″ by a team of climate scientists led by Dr. Howard Fiddlecrab at Johns Hopkins University concluded that between .4 and .7 inches of ice was lost in Antarctica each year from 2002 to 2006.”

is an intrinsically better sentence than

“One study done by climate change scientists suggests that it’s possible that as much as .7 inches of ice is being lost in the Antarctic every year.”

The first sentence imparts actual information.  The second sentence imparts mush. 

That would be true even in a polemic. 

What’s more, putting words into quotation marks when they do not represent the actual quote is just sloppy.   These days, all you need to do is Google it.

If you want to see a polemic on the liberal side that is well written, try Eric Altermann’s Why We Are Liberals. 

Like the Gore book, it’s essentially preaching to the choir, and if you come in from the other side you’ll do a lot of eye rolling, but it’s well written, it states its particulars and it delivers actual information.

And it was clear and detailed enough so that, by the time I had finished it, it helped me understand why I’m a libertarian and not a liberal.

And also where my tendencies run closer to liberal than conservative, and where closer than conservative than liberal.

I’m going to go off now and get something to eat.

So, okay.  Periodically, I generate quite a bit of heat on this blog by saying that I think that there are objective standards that can be used to determine if a book is “good.”

Let me go to a related question:  are there objective standards for what makes a book bad?

As with questions about what makes a book good, I’m not talking about taste, here–what I find enjoyable and what I find not enjoyable are entirely subjective, and rather beside the point.

I’m brought to the question of the day by a very specific book:  Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason. 

And interestingly enough, I’m not brought to it by any of the usual suspects.

Gore’s book is mostly a pile of platitudes with a peculiar quality of having  been written in a bubble.  Published in 2007, it laments the “fact” that Americans have been shut out of the public forum now that that forum has been taken over by television. 

Reading through it, I found myself checking back to the date, over and over again.  Gore seems to have missed the whole Internet-bloggers-rule-the-world thing, and to be fretting needlessly over a looming catastrophe that has already played itself out and passed into only dimly remembered history.

Whether or not you’re going to “like” this book has a lot to do with whether or not you buy into this particular set of platitudes.   If you do, you’ll love it and think it’s smart.  If you don’t, you’ll roll your eyes and pick up the next volume by Bill O’Reilly.

If you’re deliberately contrarian, as I tend to be, you’ll go slightly crazy during the long chapter on how government shouldn’t keep things secret but should put all the information out there so there can be reasoned public debate.

I went crazy during all that because I kept thinking:  fine.  Then let’s let everybody who practices affirmative action in college admissions and hiring put all their numbers out, by race, so we can actually see who’s right and who’s wrong about standards being either kept steady or bent in terms of race.

I also got a little nuts in the parts about how Americans are being subjected to a campaign of fear–after all, I’ve actually seen An Inconvenient Truth. 

The parts where Gore goes on at length–very superficially, but at length–about neuroscience just sounded like the text of a science class book reporter written by a mediocre seventh grader.

No, the thing that got me wondering if it was possible to call a book objectively bad was this:  there is an enormous, gaping disconnect between the book’s central thesis (we aren’t using reason and logic anymore because we don’t read enough, but watch television instead) and what the book actually does.

Or, rather, doesn’t do.

And what it doesn’t do is make an reference to books.

Okay, I’m getting convoluted here.

This book exhibits a nearly mindboggling dearth of actual references, and a nearly complete dearth of primary references.

There are end notes, but there are no markers in the text to tell you when something will have a note at the end.  You have to go to the back of the book and look up the page you’re on to see if there are any references to what you’re wondering about.

The chances are, there won’t be.  At one point, Gore misquotes Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli–or I think he does.  I only think because he does not identify ‘the treaty” by name in the text, and there is no note at the back identifying it either.  The quote is in quotation marks, signaling that it is supposed to be verbatim, and it is ascribed to a treaty signed by John Adams in 1797,  but there is no Article in the Treaty of Tripoli that says the US isn’t based on Christianity OR Islam OR Judaism OR any other religion.  The actual quote refers only to Christianity, and starts “As the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion…”

I have more patience than some of you do with the weasel word thing–the constant circumlocutions about how “it may be possible” that something happened “as much as X times.”    It doesn’t make me think that well of his character, but I get the bit about covering your ass.

What gets me, however, is that after references like this, I go back to the end notes and find, not a reference to the actual study–but to a newspaper or magazine article about the study.

So I’m told that “one study” “suggests” that “as many as 27” Iraqi prisoners were murdered by US service personnel, but I don’t get the name of the study or the auspices under which it was done, and when I look at the end notes I find a reference to a NY Times article about the study and no explanatory matter following the reference that would give me the name or the auspices.

And it’s just not that once.  It’s over and over again.  I have yet to find a single reference to an original source anywhere.  I get newspaper and magazine articles, op ed pieces, quotations from talking head news shows–it’s insane.

My son’s prep school wouldn’t have accepted this as a research paper in junior history.  Or English.

Hell, I wouldn’t accept this as a research paper. 

It began to get a little raw, being lectured page after page about how the Republicans are trying to destroy reason and logic by going for the emotions instead, and how they never presented any evidence–only to be handed nothing in the way of actual evidence for that thesis or any other.

For all I know, everything Gore says in this book may be true.  The simple fact is, given the research he’s presented to me, I could never find that out. 

I got excoriated somewhat a few years ago for saying that Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code was a bad book because almost every claimed ‘fact’ in it (including the streets in Paris) was wrong. 

In that case, though, the book was a novel, and the argument could be made–and was–that it didn’t matter what was wrong, as long as the story was good.

I do think, though, that if a book tells me it is defending the use of reason, logic and evidence in public debate, and then gives me absolutely none of the last and little of the first two–

I have an objective basis on which to say that book is bad.

So.  Experts.

Well, let me say something first–as long as we’re talking about the kind of thing Cheryl is, where what schools are doing is simple enforcing on-site behavior (sit still and shut up in class unless called on, for instance), I’ve got no problem.

I do have a problem with things like anti-bullying initiatives, and directing the school nurse/social worker/teachers/whoever with “identifying” children who are “at risk” for–well, you name it. 

I’ve got several problems with this.

First, forget an ideal world.  The fact that the world is not “ideal” doesn’t give a school–or a government–the right to run around policing the behavior of citizens who have been charged with no crime and then enforcing its ideas of what should be done to fix it.

Governments should be prevented from interfering in the private lives of their citizens except in cases where probable cause that a crime has been committed results in trial and conviction. 

And such a process should be undertaken only when the accused has been given full due process rights–the right to confront his accusers (no anonymous accusations with the accuser’s identity kept secret), no summary punishment before judgment, the right to a speedy and public trial, and all the rest of it.

“We’re just trying to help, it’s not punishment!”  is disingenuous.  If the government is coercing me into behavior I would not undertake without the coercion, it is indeed punishment.  If it’s forcing behavior and requirements on my child (drugs like Ritalin, therapy) against my best judgment, it’s punishing both me and my child.

This is the case even if the government is right in its assessment of what needs to be done.  Just because it w0uld be a good idea that we do X does not mean that the government has the right to require us to do it.  It doesn’t even mean that it is right that government get involved in the issue at all.

The second issue pertains directly to the school:  the purpose of the school is the academic preparation of children for later study and work.  The school is not a hospital.  It is not a social services center. 

When school becomes the locus for “identifying” and “treating” “at-risk” children, the very nature of it changes not only for the children so identified, but for all the children in that school and for all their parents.

We require children to be in school. For the vast majority of those children, that means public school.  And by making public school a place primarily concerned with “social services,” we leave parents in a position where they are unable to protect themselves and their children from government coercion in the latest fashionable conformity group think.

Schools should be schools.  If you think the government should get involved in “identifying” “at risk” children, then it should be done in its own venue and away from schools where parents are required to send their children whether they want the “services” or not.

And that would be true if the people who were doing the identifying were actually expert at something. 

But they’re not.

I don’t know what’s going on in academic and research psychology.  I do know that the teachers, nurses and social workers who do the “identifying” of “at-risk” children do it largely using checklists that are ridiculously broad and based on assumptions that are almost entirely unexamined and largely untrue.

Let’s take, for instance, the now discredited claim that Ritalin only works to improve concentration in children who actually have ADD and ADHD.  That one was hauled out for years as “proof” that these “disorders” actually existed,  and to bludgeon parents with the “imperative” to drug their children.

Well, oops.  Turns out, nobody had checked–and when they did check, it turned out that all kids responded pretty much the same way to Ritalin.

Right about now, Elf is going to jump in and say that if you’d ever met a real ADHD child, you’d see how extreme his behavior is.  And that may be true–but extreme behavior isn’t necessary for a child to be “diagnosed” on one of those checklists.  In fact, the principle characteristic of those lists is precisely that they assume that perfectly normal behavior is somehow a “symptom.”

In case you don’t believe me, let me give you this one:

http://www.brightfutures.org/mentalhealth/pdf/professionals/bridge

s/adhd.pdf

Okay, you may have to copy and paste that to get it to work.

But–look at the items on that list.  Fails to pay attention when spoken to directly?  Have these people ever MET a ten year old boy? 

What’s more egregious, however, is the fact that there are no hard and fast standards for these things.  Whether or not some behavior is actually a symptom is left up to the discretion of the person doing the checklist–in other words, it’s entirely about subjective impressions.

And it’s NOT a case of the “professional” making a recommendation which the child’s parents can choose to accept or reject.  The “professional” has an array of coercive measures to use to impose her will, and she will in fact use them.

As I’ve pointed out on this blog before, back in the Nineties, when the craze for “diagnosing” children with ADHD was at its peak, Connecticut schools in several districts routinely threatened parents with referral to CPS if those parents refused to put their children on medication.

Somehow, “do what we tell you to do or we’ll do our best to destroy your family” doesn’t seem much like a platform for parental choice.

There are, by the way, checklists for things like bipolar disorder and childhood onset schizophrenia, too–and, in the hands of people who are not experts, they’re just as dangerous.

Hell, I’d say that even in the hands of experts, they’re dangerous.

As for things like the anti-bullying and anti-drug and alcohol programs–they’re almost universally based on assumptions that are just plain wrong, and they’re completely immune to the evidence against them.

One of the most popular “drug education” programs in the country was repeatedly shown to actually increase drug experimentation in students who completed its course.   It’s still being used in high schools nationwide. 

If this is “expertise” and “science,” then I’m going to consider becoming a creationist.

But the cure for it is simple–recognize that schools are there to teach academics, period.  Locate the “services” off the scho0l campus, where they can be accessed by families IF those families want them.  Allow the ordering of children and families into such programs ONLY when a full due process trial procedure has been negotiated.  Strip teachers, nurses, social workers and school psychologists of the right to diagnose anything.

And understand this–the government has limited legitimate functions.  This kind of thing isn’t one of them.

Every once in a while, I find myself stuck in situations and I can’t figure out what I’m doing there. 

This is one of them.  I have no idea why so many of you seem to have assumed that, because I presented the case I did yesterday, I wanted to school to be involved with it.

For what it’s worth, I spent the most of the blog post the day before yesterday saying I didn’t approve, or appreciate, the new school anti-bullying initiatives.

But just to clear up my position here:

1) I gave the case I did for two reasons.

First, it is obviously egregious.  As far as I know, all the students and all the kids knew that Marnie’s party was a deliberate attempt to destroy Carla’s, and that included Marnie’s own mother.  There was no ambiguity there about what was going on or why.

Second, because this particular case is much more similar to what girls to do each other than the usual definitions of “bullying.”

Cathy F says that the psychological definition of “bullying” would now include this under something called “relational aggression,” but I assumed there would be a way to shoehorn the incident into the definition.

If there hadn’t been, the schools would be pretty much precluded from addressing MOST of the adolescent cruelty occuring on their campuses.

2) I’m on record here of being opposed to the entire “whole child” view of education. 

And this kind of thing is an example of that.

“Whole child” education is first and foremost an attack on the child’s right to privacy, or even right to be left alone.

In a ‘whole child” environment, the school owns the child body and soul.  Every aspect of the child’s life is available for scrutiny and reprogramming.  No private space is left for the child to develop on his own, think on his own, believe on his own, be himself.

And the purpose of that education is assumed to be therapeutic.

What I want is schools that teach reading, writing, arithmatic and then higher education subjects, and that leave their students alone otherwise.

3) That having been said, there is no way that an incident such as this could have taken place entirely off school grounds.  Kids will talk about the situation.   They’ll talk about it at lunch.  They’ll talk about it at recess.  Everybody in the class will know, and everybody in the class will talk.

I still don’t think the school should be involved, but we need to get past the fantasy that anything that happens among a bunch of kids who go to school together will be entirely ignored once they get onto school grounds.

4)  When I say that teachers collaborate in the construction of “popular” and “in crowd” cliques in school, I don’t mean that they taunt “unpopular” kids.

In fact, running an anti-bullying initiative could–and I think most often will–be a form of “relational aggression” in itself.   No matter how the programs are run, everybody will know immediately who they are supposed to be “helping,” and the bad news will proceed from there.

But the more usual thing is simply in the body language and automatic choices of teachers, and, in my experience, especially of female teachers.  

Who gets chosen to run the class when the teacher is out of the room?  Who gets picked to go out and throw erasers at the wall (a big one when I was in elementary school)?  When a teacher has a great new idea for a project, who does she pick to help her start it?

When I was in junior high, the most popular teacher in our school–very young, taught Spanish–decided it would be a really great idea if we had a Tri-Y club, a Four-H thing for teenagers focussed on charitable projects, like working in the local Goodwill Thrift Store.

To get the club started, she picked the girls I think she was honestly convinced would be the ones who would really participate and get things done–it was just that ALL of them were card carrying members of the class’s “in crowd.” 

If you’d told her she was shoring up junior high status cliques, she’d probably have been indignant. She was just calling on the girls who participated most often and energetically at school!

High school status cliques affect everybody in a school, including teachers, and in ways no anti-bullying program ever could, or would, address.

5) When I said that Carla’s mother was trying to help her to be more “popular,” I didn’t mean what a number of you seem to think I meant.

I meant that Carla’s mother was trying to help her not be the one kid in the class who gets left out of everything.  That’s a painful position to be in.  And I don’t think any parent wants that for her child.

But I also have to admit that I always wondered why we call the people in a high school’s top status clique “popular.”  In my experience, such people are often the least popular–in terms of being ‘well liked”–people in a high school class, generating mostly recentment and anger rather than admiration and good will. 

(Drum roll here–anybody remember Molly Ringwald’s little speech in The Breakfast Club?)

6) The whole status clique thing last for many people far beyond high school.   It’s the basis of “clubs” without membership lists that leave who gets in to the discretion of the bouncer at the door.   It’s the basis for clubs with blackball rituals.  It’s the basis for the endless “who’s in and who’s out” features on entertainment television.

I don’t think we’re every going to get rid of it, and I don’t think we should inflict school “experts” on our children in an attempt to do so, no matter how egregious the case.

Yes, not even in that egregious a case.

I am having one of those mornings where I really shouldn’t write anything, not the blog, not a post card.  I’m in a foul mood for a reason that even I accept as being essentially trivial–but I’m like anybody else.  Push my buttons, and you will get a response.

So I’m going to try to ignore than, and go on with what I started yesterday.

The following is an actual incident.  It really happened.  I would like to know if any of you consider this incident bullying, and if not, what you would call it.  I’d also be interested in knowing what you think should have been done about it and who should have done it.

It is, if anything,  a perfect example of the way in which I think teachers and parents collaborate with the convoluted system of “in” and “out” that happens in American public junior high and high schools.

When my niece was in eighth grade–junior high, here–one of the girls in her class (we’ll call her Carla, I don’t actually  know the real name) decided to give a party.

Carla was chubby and shy and not very “popular,” and her mother thought she’d help make the party a success by allowing it to be the first girl/boy party given in this particular class.

And, indeed, at the beginning, it was a success.  Carla sent invitations to every single boy and girl in her grade, and the vast majority of them accepted immediately.

There was a lot of excitement in the class, and Carla was suddenly a lot more “popular” than she’d ever been before, and everybody was happy.

Then, about a week after Carla’s invitations went out, a girl we’ll call Marnie sent out another set of invitations, to her own party.

It was also a girl/boy party.

It was on exactly the same night as Carla’s.

And it did not include everybody in the class.  It purposely excluded the “dorks,” including Carla herself.

And that’s when the kicker happened, or what seemed like the kicker to me.

All the people invited to Marnie’s party dropped Carla’s party.  Carla’s party was left with only herself and two or three others. 

And the parents all knew that Marnie’s party had been organized specifically to spoil Carla’s. 

Among the people who knew that this was going on was my sister in law, whose response was, “well, you can’t make people like somebody they don’t like.”

I agree that you can’t make kids like kids they don’t like, but that didn’t seem to me to be what was going on here.  The issue, to me, was not who “liked” who, but rather simple manners–you’d accepted the first invitation, you’d better be seriously ill before you ditched it.

Needless to say, none of the parenets of the girls who ditched Carla’s party for Marnie’s felt this way–they all seemed to feel that this kind of thing was perfectly natural and not only couldn’t be helped, but required nothing on their part but accepting the brute fact of it. 

The school was a private (well, parochial) one, and therefore could actually have done something about the situation, but they didn’t feel it was their place, so that was that.

But in most cases I don’t think the school could in fact get involved, and yet this is the kind of thing–not name calling and taunts–that is most likely to be visited on “out” girls. 

I don’t see that it would fall under the definition of “bullying.”  I don’t see that a school would be able to do anything about it as long as the parents were willing to let it happen. 

And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think the incident came about because Marnie or the other girls who ditched Carla’s party had once been bullied or ostracized themselves.

In fact, I think most of this kind of thing is perpetrated by people who have been largely immune to both bullying and ostracism.

The urge to attack and destroy the weak seems to me to be inborn in human nature.  We have to teach out children out of it.  These parents–most parents–decided not to teach.

But even if the school tried to “do” something about this, I doubt it would have been worked.  In the long run, children accept the standards their parents set over those set by the school if there’s a conflict.

There was only one real way to save that situation–for parents to tell their children, “sorry, you accepted the first invitation, you’re committed.  You can’t change that now.”

It didn’t happen, because the parents themselves didn’t agree with that concept of civility.

So, was that “bullying”? 

Should the school have done anything about it?  Could the school have done anything about it?

And if the school had tried, do you think it would have worked.