Hildegarde

One of the things I’m doing this term is teaching an adult speech class at night–it’s a requirement for graduation where I am, and there are a lot of people who have work and family obligations that make it hard for them to keep a full time schedule, and they end up suddenly with one course to go and no way to take it at the usual time. 

These are adults I’m dealing with here, and as a teaching experience it’s a lot better than my usual thing.

Of course, absolutely the best is teaching ctizenship classes.  But that’s a story for another time.

My topic today is–what the hell ARE they teaching in the elementary and high schools, anyway.

And I know I rattle on about that a lot, but this is a special case. 

Every once in a while when I do rattle on about the dismal standards in elementary and secondary education, someone will throw in a commnent saying that, well, what can you expect if all you teach them is about how victimized they are and why they should feel a sense of grievance.

I’ve said before that I think this is not what is happening–most of my students seem to be the products of places whose first priority is to make them believe, deep in their guts, that they’re completely and utterly worthless and stupid and have nobody but themselves to blame for the failures they’re about to become.

But yesterday, in my speech class, I ran into that wall of gratuitous ignorance I never can figure out, and this time it was among students who didn’t want to be ignorant and really cared about knowing what was important to know.

One of the students in my class gave as a graded speech one written by Maya Angelous who mentioned Fannie Lou Hamer, and when the speech was over, some of the people in the class wanted to know who this was.

My student–a black woman–didn’t know.  Neither did any of the three older black women in the class, at least two of whom are very gung-ho about knowing black American history.

So I explained–about Lyndon Johnson, and the Democratic National Convention in 1964, and the Mississippi Freedom Party.

Which went over big in a class that is close to half African-American, and really, I was happy to do it, but–what the hell goes on during Black History Month?  We make a fairly big deal about it in Connecticut.  Schools put up posters and decorate classrooms and do projects on whatever, and I’d like to know what the whatever consists of.

I know, I know, this is just a variation on a theme, and I sound that theme too often.

But these are adults I’m dealing with in this class.  They’re not eighteen year olds without a  clue what an education is for.  They want one and need one.

And most of them read, if not as often or as much as I do, still considerably, and many of them read specifically in the area of black American history.  It was night classes that made me realize that there was a population out there that was tring to self-educate as best it could in the areas it didn’t manage to pick up in school. 

Of course, my knowledge isn’t encyclopedic–am I the only person of the right age who spells “encyclopedia” by singing the Jiminy Cricket song in my head?–and I knew as much about this as I did because I read it in the Simon Schama book I was talking about the other day, which turns out to be a very nice piece of work.

Even so, I think I will go back to working on that How To Be An American website, and start putting something together that will outline American history, with links.

But then, if it were up to me, I’d make every conservative in America read A People’s History of the United States and every liberal read A Patriot’s History of the United States–just so that I could get them all past the either/or to an understand that, in this particular country, it’s always “and.”

Now I go to teach the eighteen year olds who don’t give a damn, and I’m depressed.

For those of you who never watch television, I understand–I rarely watch it either, and until very recently, I hadn’t had a show I checked in on regularly since grade school.

The show that brought me back was a Fox production called House, starring Hugh Laurie, about this absolutely off the wall out of control diagnostic genius who is everything you wouldn’t expect in the hero of a doctor show–addicted to pain pills (he has real pain, but still), arrogant, rude, sneaky and with an absolutely unbudgeable core of integry.  I’m with Joan Baez–a saint is a nuissance to live with at home, but I also think the real saints were probably more like Gregory House than the sugar-coated stuff they handed out in Catholic schools.

At the end of last season, a couple of things happened–House was inadvertantly the cause of the death of his best friend’s girlfriend; one of his diagnostic team committed suicide–that resulted in an even more elevated level of drug abuse that resulted in a series of auditory and visual hallucinations that resulted in his nearly killing somebody on purpose.

So, in response to this, he checked himself into a psychiatric facility to find somebody to help him go cold turkey off the pain pills and therefore end the hallucinations.

So far, so good–long term drug abuse, even if you’re not getting high, is going to have consequences.  And over the course of the last five seasons, the show has managed to make the point that “drug addict’ is not necessarily the same thing as “waste of space rotting on a street corner.”

I’m all for whatever challenges the conventional psych wisdom about the human personality.

But last night, there was a two-hour season premier episode, and I find that I’m left completed baffled about what is going on here and why.

And in case you think this is just about the television show, think again.

Because it fits in with all the rest of what I see, the relentless straitjacketing of everything and everybody according to the latest psychological “wisdom” on offer.

Or, to make it clearer, it runs into something my father used to tell me:  happiness is a tenth rate ambition.

Here’s how it went.  House spent his time in the psych facility until he was clean and no longer hallucinating, and then, as was his right by law, since he was there voluntarily, he wanted to leave.  His doctor agreed that he had that right, but said that if he took it, the doctor would not write the necessary letter to the state medical licensing board to have House’s medical license reinstated.

Now, right there I got a little confused.  There was nothing in the last episode to indicate that House’s license had been revoked, and I find it hard to understand on what grounds it could have been revoked.  House is a diagnostician, not a surgeon.  He rarely even sees the patients, never mind does anything physical to them that could hurt them. 

But, okay, willing suspension of disbelief, at least until the disbelief got too impossible to handle.  House moves on to the long term program, at which point…well, what?  I’m not sure, exactly.  He does a lot of his usual confrontational things, interferes in a case in a way that gets somebody hurt, finally Gets With The Program, and is finally released as  New Man, who admits that he Wants To Be Happy.

Um?

I mean, what?

There’s absolutely nothing–and I mean nothing–in all the therapy you see that indicates that anything was ever “wrong” with house (no admissions of abuse, for instance, no traumas) except the obvious:  meaning that if your IQ is twice as high as anybody around you most of the time, you get a little warped. 

But surely, you can’t “cure” that, and you wouldn’t want to.

And it isn’t as if the sight of House doing nice things for other people is really all that new.  Even the Old Man did quite a lot of nice things for quite a lot of people, he just didn’t suffer fools gladly (or at all). 

But the other thing he did–the thing that has made this show as popular as it is–was to insist on his right to be himself.

As far as I can figure out, this is what House is now supposed to be cured of.

I object, really, to this idea that ifyou don’t have one of the Accepted Goals, then there must be something “wrong” with you, that you must  be in need of “help.”

I object to the idea that the only “normal” option is to “want to be happy”–not to want to succeed, not to want to make an historically significant contribution, not to want to perfect yourself.

I think that’s why I get so incredibly antagonistic to the calls, in a lot of the Humanist publications I read, for a stepped-up program of mood alterning drugs that will help us all to avoid depression or sadness or even inefficient functioning.

A lot that gets done in the world get done because some people have other goals than personal happiness, or personal contentment.  Hell, nothing ever gets done when we’re content. 

The goal of life is not, at least for me, to feel good as much as possible, or to feel satisfied, or to die thinking I’m fulfilled.

Besides, people who reject that trajectory are valuable and rare.

The Dr. House who told a mother who wasn’t vaccinating her children because that was all just a scam perpetrted by pharmaceutical companies that “You know what they make a lot of?  Little tiny coffins.  They come in all colors…”

did more for the children of that mother, and children everywhere, than a thousand carbon copies of his oh-so-empathetic best friend.

If the character of House is now “cured” and into being happy, I’ll find something else to watch.

Or maybe I’ll have to learn to be rude myself.

Or something like that.

One of the things I have hanging around the house is a tiny litte paperback book entitled Liberalism is a Sin.

I don’t remember the author off the top of my head, but the book was written originally in, I think, French, and published near the beginning of the 20th century.

The “liberalism” it reers to is not the sort of thing President Obama goes in for–although the author probably wouldn’t have liked that either.

“Liberalism” in the context of this book means two things:  democratic government and the lack of an established state church.

Both of these things–and therefore the government and society of America in particular–were contrary to the will of  God and even m ore so, destructive of true religion.

Religious toleration was destructive because it led to “religious indifferentism,” meaning the idea that any religion is as good as any other and it didn’t matter if you were a Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew.

Democracy was destructive because, in failing to mirror God’s government of the universe (which is a Kingdom with Christ at its head), it also failed to instruct men and women in their proper posture as subjects of the King of Kings.  By learning day by day the necessity of humility before the sovereign King on earth, we were to learn the necessity of humility before ths sovereign King of Kings.

Believe it or not, this little book is still in print.  You can order it from any of several Catholic mail-order companies, and it shows up every once in a while in those city bookstores run by nuns to provide “religious articles” and all things Catholic to the general population.

I’m not suggesting you read it–it’s silly and annoying and incredibly obtuse–I’m bringing it up because it occurs to me that it outlines, without fuss, what is probably the biggest reason why I am not ever likely to end up a believing  Christian.

For better of for worse, the language of Christianity, and the iconography of the Christian chuches, is monarchical.  Christ is the “king of kings,” we’re told, and “born is the king of Israel.”  He is “the Lord.” 

The Catholic Church–and the Ortohdox churches, come to think of it–are structured monarchically as well, as systems of hierarchy meant to mirror the celestial order.

The problem is, nothing else is structured that way, at least not in the free West–and not only is nothing else structured that way, but the idea of having a relationship with any other human being as lord and master is generally assumed to be a bad thing. 

Even in situations where the structure of the relationship seems to call for that kind of thing–say, the relationship of a worker to his boss–the general assumption is that the “lord and master” thing shouldn’t be true, and if it is, then something has gone wrong. 

But it’s not that I  react negatively to such imagery.  Rather, I react uncomprehendingly.  It just does not compute.  That is, I think, why I have such an inordinate amount of trouble with Tolkein–“you are my king,” they say to Aragorn, and my head goes, “yeah, so what?”

Actually, I think the problem goes deeper than that. I think there’s something in me that finds expressions of kingship and of “fealty” and subjection to kingship faintly silly.  I enjoy the Lord of the Rings movies, but every time we get to the kneeling parts I look at the screen and all I see are a lot of grown men inexplicably playing dress up.

I have no idea whether the iconopgraphy of Kingship is central to Christianity, or just an accident of history–having come to prominence in a monarchical age, perhaps it just adapted the imagery of the world around it to explain itself.

I do know that the iconography of kingship is not going away.  The least impressive backwoods preacher, belting out a sermon in a tarpaper shack in the Smoky Mountains, has just as much to say about kingship as does the Pope.  And he’s speaking to a congregation that not only has no use for kings in real life, but isn’t even sure it approves of Presidents.  You give some guy all that power in one place and, you know, he gets ideas.

I wonder how much of the decline of Christianity in Western democracies is the fulfillment of the vision of the man who wrote Liberalism is a Sin–that is, is a result of the fact that they are democracies, and the people in them can no longer be reached, intellectually or emotionally, with a narrative couched in images of Kings and kingdoms, sovereigns and subjects.

A couple of days ago, I  had an e-mail exchange with someone who had also read an article on immigration and Europe posted to Arts and Letters Daily.  It included a quote from Jurgen Habermas saying that Europe didn’t realize that its very ideas of freedom and democracy derived from Christianity.

I’ll say here what I said there–I think our ideas of equality derived from Christianity (back to St. Paul, and there is neither Jew nor Greek), but our ideas of democracy derived from the Greeks and the Roman, and the great genius of Cristianity was in the way it managed to embrace and incorporate those cultures.

And I think that the people out there who have dedicated themselves to converting me–and there are quite a few by now–are going to have to find a system of imagery to explain themselves that bypasses the Kingly one.

Because it’s not that I’m rejecting that imagery.  It’s that I literally can’t make it make sense to me.

And I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one.

Well, I really hope the link I posted yesterday was to James Lileks’s criticism of the Guardian “what it’s like in America” piece, and not to the Guardian piece itself, but Mab’s post made me remember the one article on the subject I was ever really impressed with. 

Or maybe impressed isn’t the right word.

It was a short little piece, written for a Finnish newspaper by a young woman who had come to study for a year or two at a small public university in Missouri.   And what struck me about it, aside from its lack of prior commitment to animosity, was just what it was the young woman h ad chosen to be amazed at.

It’s not true, she said, that Americans spend all their time putting on a false friendliness.  Americans are actually friendly.  Her first day in town, she was struggling with her luggage and her street maps and was met by one of her professors, who  promptly stowed his bags in his trunk, drove her to where she was supposed to live, and got her bags inside.

Apparently, this is not something a professor would ever do for a student in Finland.  I say “supposedly,” because she didn’t actually say that.  She just kept going on and on about how wonderful it had been to get all this help from a professor!

The empasis was in her article, not in my post.  If that makes sense.

The other thing she was astonished at clarified something for me that I had never before understood.

She looked around this college town and saw lots of houses with flags flying in the front yards or from the windows, and she met lots of fellow students with flag decals on their cars or their notebooks.

Where in Europe, she said, this kind of display would mean an obsession with unhealthy and belligerent nationalism, in America it seemed to just mean that people liked being Americans.  Even some of the people who opposed the war in Iraq had flag decals and tended to get upset if you started to talk trash about the country at large.  It was one thing to disparage Bush and  Cheney.  It was another thing to run down “America.”

Um, okay.

I’ve lived a significant portion of my adult life outside the United States.  It still baffles me when I see polls that show that German, French and even British people don’t like being the nationality they are and don’t think their countries are good or admirable places.  You’d think that just family feeling would take care of that kind of thing.

And I wonder, as I’ve said here efore, how much of the “immigration problem” in Europe is actually an attitude problem.  Immigrants come here and are surrounded by Americans who like being Americans and are always talking up the virtues of the country.  Immigrants get there and all they hear is talk about how awful and corrupt their new society is. 

I mean, I don’t know–that could have something to do with the willingness of immigrants to assimilate, don’t you think?

I remember reading–apropos of the bit about the professor who drove the young woman to her new housing–many  years ago, a memoir by a writer of Indian descent who said he had decided that America was the place to be during his first term at Yale Graduate School. 

He was walking down a street in New Haven when a cab puled up and stopped.  The man who got out was the Dean of the Graduate School, and when the driver took the man’s bags out of the trunk, the good Dean picked them u p himself and carried them into his house. 

This was, apparently, absolutely unheard of in India, where an important man like a Dean would have somebody to carry his bags for him.

Sometimes, reading these things, I wonder if I’m still in the twentieth century.

A few years ago, I started up a web site called How To Be An American, which was meant to collect material from every state, and from people of different political and religious and philosophical persuasions from every state, as a kind of resource to counter things like the Guardian article.  Then my life went to hell yet again, and I didn’t have the time.

I still own the URL.  Maybe I should go back to it.

In the meantime, sitting up here in New England where practically nobody owns a gun, practically nobody goes to church and the wild turkeys could be the basis for one of those Fifties black and white monster movies, I’m going to go back to reading Simon Schama on the West Point tradition of the citizen engineer soldier.

A coule of days ago I wrote a post reflecting the kind of thing I  feel at the start of every term these days–and I really wish I had kept a link to the New Yorker article that explained the way teacher tenure works, for Mab, because although it’s much worse in NY than in CT, the system is essentially the same–

But anyway, I wrote this kind of depressive post, and a lot of you got alarmed and worried about me, and I appreciate that.  But the reason that post sounded so odd and so oddly without energy is only partially the emotions I was feeling.

Partly, it was due to the fact that I was, and am, reading one of those books that seem to make me incapable of writing anything.

I’ve said on several occasions, now, that for me reading has a component very like listening to music for most people.  Good prose and bad prose are at least partially determined, for me (I keep saying that), by how the work sounds in my head.  Some people write prose so good  (think Norman Mailer) that it overrides any considerations of content.  I once read sixteen solid pages of a Mailer novel before I realized that, on any rational level, the man was making absolutely no sense at all.

Some prose is so bad it’s like the proverbial nails on the blackboard, which none of my students would get because they’ve never had blackboards, they’ve had white boards and markers.

But you know what I mean.  Clunky, cliched, jerky, jarring–and eventually I just put the book away.

Although I can read some really badly written stuff, if I’ve got some kind of incentive.

That said, the book I’m reading now–The American Future: A History, by Simon Schama–is not badly written.  It’s not Mailer and early Hemingway level well written, mind you, but it’s not bad, and the book itself is interesting. 

Schama is a professor of history at Columbia University who does a lot of work for the BBC.  His Histsory of Britain was spectacular in both book and video form, and for close to a decade now I’ve thought he was a Brit who just happened to be satisfyingly pro-American.  In fact, he’s an American from upstate New York. 

Which just goes to show, I suppose–Columbia’s history department is also  home to the notorious Eric Foner, who is, shall we say, not so pro-American.

In a way, Schama’s American biography is a bit ironic, as I got hold of this book because I thought it was yet one more of those things written by various Europeans where they come here, look around, interview a black ghetto gospel choir,. an unemployed factory worker, and the kind of hillbilly who keeps a statue of Jesus glued to his rifle scope to help h im kill the deer, and then declares that he’s “discovered” the “real America.” 

These can be absolutely hilarious, especially the ones written by French guys, and I recommned them to any American with a free afternoon.  Or just go do a search and see if you can find an article called “Notes from the Olive Garden” by James Lileks.

Actually, that’s here

http://web.archive.org/web/20030416020456/http://www.lileks.com/writings/screed/olivegarden.html

and well worth reading, even if I’ve bugged you with it before. 

But in spite of not being that, the content is definitely interesting.  I’m on a long chapter, called “American  War,” outlining the history of the Meigs family in the United States Army, which includes a very laudatory sketch of the history of West Point and a few asides on why the US has a better officer class than anybody else, with “better” meaning “not so likely to think they’re better than anybody else and stage a coup.”

But I find that I just can’t write when I’m reading this thing.  The narrative voice–and there’s nothing wrong with it, really–creates a kind of white noise in my head, and nothing of my own ever forms there.

I have no idea why this should be so.  I have writers I can’t read when I write because I start to sound like bad imitations of them, because their own narrative voices are so strong that I can’t escape them, but that is not this. 

I have other writers I can always write to, and some–the mid-career P.D. James, all of George Steiner–who actually seem to make me write better, or at least make me feel that I’m writing better.   

And now it seems I’ve found a writer I like to read, but am going to have to give up when it comes time to producing serious work.

I think it’s very strange.

For Mab–most of the kids I teach would not be in university (or even in high school beyond a certain level) in most countries in the European Union.  I don’t know what Russia is like. 

But most American college students would not be admitted to university in the EU, not just my remedial kids–they’d never have passed the exams that are required there.

And that is, as I’ve said before, the real problem here–we are trying to force feed education to a group that isn’t interested in it, doesn’t want it, doesn’t understand it, and at worst resents the hell out of it, as nonsensical hoops they have to jump through to get something they want. 

Okay, I’ll admit it.  I was having trouble writing this post because the noise in this room was incredibly.  There was smeobody behind me on some sort of video thing blastingit away, and it was hard to think.

But that’s par for the course lately, too.

And maybe I’m getting old, and that’s all this is, but what I’m really getting, I think, is tired.    I’m tired of fighting with people who don’t want help and don’t care if they get it.

Never mind, like I said, being interested in an education.

I think I started in on this project thinking that I was in a position to do good–to provide a first class resource to kids who normally get the kind of teachers who can’t get hired anywhere else doing anything else. 

A lot of my kids come from school systems where there will be three textbooks for a forty-student class, where the toilets flood on a regular basis and are fixed only sporadically, where there’s no chalk and no paper, where teachers take the roll, put their earphones on, and listen to their iPods until class time is over, letting the students themselves cause havoc.

Logic says that there must be, in these systems, students who really want educations and can’t get them, and other students who would be interested if they were ever offered them.  In the ten years I’ve been doing this–well, nine–I haven’t found more than one or two.

And then I wonder if it’s possible that even the poorest kids who wander through the place I teach have managed to acquire rich kids’ disease.

And now I should explain rich kids’ disease.

But I’m too tired, and I should find something to read.

So, a few notes–

First, I thank Mike for worrying about my computer, but my guess is that it’s less my computer that’s at issue than my Internet connection, because I’m probably the last person on earth to have dial-up.  Yeah, yeah.   I know.   I get that argument whenever my son goes to college.  But it’s a long story.

For John–my place calls itself a university, although it grants master’s degrees but not doctorates.  But then, practically every place in the US calls itself a university these days.

For the rest of you–I agree with Gail, that every teacher has horror stories about students, but I wasn’t complaining about the students in the last post.

I was complaining about the administration.

I would have complained if the new disciplinary rules had applied only to my kids, who are after all in special remedial programs and very possibly in need of a lot more structure than the average student.

But the new rules apply to everybody, even in honors classes. 

They’re very like the rules in elementary and high schools which assume that every student is a delinquent until proven otherwise–no going to the bathroom without a pass, and all the rest of it.

There’s a teacher in my place who will ock a student out of the classroom if he leaves to go to the bathroom, even with permission. 

Now, I fully agree that the felt need for all this is a function of the fact that my place is not exactly first tier–it’s barely fourth tier–and that therefore the quality of the students we get is generally low.

But what low quality consists of is more complicated than you think. 

Yes, we get plenty of students who don’t have much in the way of intellectual ability, who in any sane world would never go to college at all–not because there’s something wrong with them, or because they’re in some way inferior, but because their talents lie elsewhere.

And yes, virtually all the students we get, even the very best ones, lack the cultural context to do real university level work. 

But lately, the big issues have been…well, discipline.

“Pass your papers in, ” I say, and a horde pf people stampedes towards my desk.  It seems they’ve never simply sat at their desks and passed papers forward before.

It’s a little thing, but it astes an enormous amount of time.  I used to not bother to ask, assuming that they’d know that papers were due today and they should leave them on my desk before the end of class, but that resulted in howls of protest–but you didn’t collect them!  so it doesn’t count that I don’t have my paper in!

Then there is the simple problem of classroom noise, the constant talking at high volume–no need to whisper or pretend, you’re just talking. 

Again, it’s the kind of thing I expect from my kids, because of who they are, but I get the same reports from other teachers who have honors students or kids in regular classes.  They waste a third of every class period just trying to keep order, and sometimes it does’t work.

I think Gail has a point, too, when she notes that many of them come from schools where “getting an education” meant just showing up, or maybe not even that.  It didn’t matter wht they did.  They passed.

I still don’t think we should have instituted the new rules we have.  Granted, nobody can teach anything in a classroom that has been reduced to chaos by students who won’t shut up, and no course goes very well when half the students aren’t doing any of the homework.

Hell, in the kind of course I teach, which is workshop-oriented, the course is literally impossible when half the kids don’t do their homework.  If you haven’t done the paper, you can’t bring it in and have somebody else critique it.

But I don’t think the answer to any of this is the kind of rules we’ve n ow instituted.  It’s not treating these kids like they’re four year olds.

My optinum solution would be to end this incredible idiocy of insisting that “everybody” has to go to college.

Barring that, I’d say let’s go back to the old system–if you didn’t show up or do your work, you failed; if you disrupted the classroom, you got kicked out of the course.

I generally lost half my class before the end of any term.

But I think the body count was only so low because I was really far too lenient about deadlines.

So I was going to access a good computer today, so I decided to wait to post this.  I like it when I can just sort of do it and not have to struggle with the one I’ve got a home.

Instead, I’m struggling with something else, and it’s more and more an issue in the places where I teach.

Traditionally, college students are considered to be–at least in regard to their academics–all grown up. 

Teachers took attendance, of course, and collected homework, but it was up to the students how they handled their academic life.  If they handled it badly, they flunked out–and too bad, but it was past the time of handholding, and that was that.

Increasingly, in the places I teach and in the programs I teach, policies are being changed to resemble something like high school–teachers take attendance and report it to the administration, who contacts students who are cutting class a lot and tries to “intervene” to “help” them “stay on track,” all in the name of “retention.”

Sorry about all the scare quotes, but this situation is making me fairly nuts.

So far, it’snot compulsory for students to attend college.  One has to assume that if they’re there, it’s because they want to be there.

And that assumption, of course, is false.  Most of the students who show up in my classrooms don’t like school, and never have.  They would have dropped out at fifteen or sixteen of the state still let them, except that they’ve been told they have to go to “college,” because without “college” they won’t get a job.

And they won’t, because high school no longer guarantees the skill set that employers want, not because that skill set couldn’t be learned in high school, but because nobody teaches it. 

The kids I teach have no idea what an education would really look like–in fact, they have no idea what actual training would really look like.  Their experience has taught them that being made to sit still in classrooms for five hours a day most of the months of the year and then to be made to feel like idiots and failures over what goes on there are the dues necessary to”get a good job.”

So, of course, they try to get away with doing the least work possible. 

So, of course, lots of them just stop working altogether, just stop coming to class, and either drop out or flunk out.

The universities want to “retain” these students because retention is an economic issue–a student who drops out stops paying tuition.  In the publicly funded places, lots of student drop-0uts lead to questions about whether the institutions are doing a good job or whether we should halt their funding.

The legislatures want to “retain” them because–well, it’s hard to know why.  They assumption that “education is good” seems to be without content. 

But what’s bugging me today is  not the students, but the methods we have begun to use to keep them students.  It’s beyond my comprehension what value a “college” program has when it’s run like this–when we track and map and cajole as if these were four year olds instead of eighteen and twenty year olds. 

When I get really pessimistic, I think this is one more example of our burgeoning inability to accept that other people know what’s in their own best interests–that we should be able to force people to act for what we’ve decided is “their own good.”

Mostly, though, I think it’s just a symptom of the fact that we’ve stopped thinking, period.

I can’t imagine that we honestly think we’re preparing them to get and hold better jobs.  There isn’t a job on the planet where your supervisor is going to call you up at home and chivvy you along because you didn’t make your deadline this week, then hold your hand until you get the work done.   If you miss a few deadlines, you get fired, and that’s the end of it.

Most of all, I think, my real problem this year is that I hate being a cop.  I spend so much of my time taking attendance, doubling checking homework, and chasing people around for deadlines, I do about half the teaching I used to.  And the worse the situation gets systemwide, the narrower are the limits I have to work in.

I used to tell kids at the start of the term that I was not a deadline Nazi.  They could hand things in when they wanted, be as late as they wanted, I didn’t care–but they didn’t have the right to complain that they would have done better if I’d been more of a Martinet.  People pay me to write, I told them, and I couldn’t write ten papers in two weeks and do it well.  If they wanted to try, they were welcome.

I had more than one student over the years who did try it, and failed the course (inevitably) and then came back in subsequent terms to retake the thing and get it right.

These days, though, that’s more and more not an option–no, no, we must help them to succeed.

So I’m not feeling very successful.

I need to start this post today with a clarification.

I thank all of you for your condolences, and they are very much appreciated, but I wasn’t actually depressed or despairing. 

I do get depressed and despairing, but not usually off this kind of thing.   For better or worse, what really gets me depressed is failing to do something I think I should have been able to do.  I did go through a period, when Bill was sick, of thinking (subconsciously) that I should be able to cure cancer, but that passed, and I didn’t think that this time.

What was bothering me the other day, what is bothering me now, what bothers me on and off as it comes up, is this incredible, pounding need we all seem to have to convince ourselves that “it will be all right.”

If it was just the secular people who were doing it, this would make a certain amount of sense,  but religious people do it just as often, and what’s odder, they do it in exactly the same way.

We not only put an enormous amount of effort into denying that really bad things  happen and there’s nothing we can do about them, but into “managing” the “experience” once it happens.

And the “management” is always the same.  An entire “grief counseling” industry has grown up in this country (and, for all I  know, outside it) whose purpose is to provide “guidance” to make the pain not so bad, or the utter wreck of hopes and dreams palatable enough to let us go on living.

If you read any of these books–and I have read several, usually recommended by people I like and who have been good friends to me, and whom I know mean well–you’ll find a tone of advice about how to “work through” pain, but the “working through” tends to be a kind of deflection.  Feel the pain–wall in it, even–because eventually you will get tired of it, or inured to it, and then you can get on with building your life back up, or justifying it to yourself, so that you can accept it, or even embrace it.   The idea that accepting some of the realities of life might be wrong–and embracing them something worse than wrong–seems not to have occurred to the grief counselors.

The idea that either of those things might actually be impossible is, as a matter of dogman, ruled out of hand.

To a degree, but only to a degree, modern grief counseling is sort of like ancient Stoicism.  Stoicism recommended a kind of apathy–learn not to care much for the things of this world, it told us, and you will not feel pain when you inevitably lose them.  Stoics cultivated a deliberate emotional alienation from every part of life.  They strove to be as indifferent to pleasure as they strove to be indifferent to pain.

Grief counseling is more like the afterthought of Epicureanism than it is of this, in spite of all the calls to “embrace” and “accept” loss and pain.  The Epicureans believed that the meaning of life was to be found in the pleasure we got out of it.  Unlike a lot of modern  people who pretend to take up their philosophy,  the Epicureans didn’t define pleasure as “as much sensation as you can cram into every waking minute, no matter what that sensation is.”  They sent a lot of time talking bout the “pleasures proper to man” rather than the ones “proper to beasts.” 

Even with a more sensible definition of “pleasure” than that common to the denizens of Studio 54, Epicureanism ended up hitting the same brick wall all attempts to ground the meaning of life in “pleasure”(or “experience”) do–the fact not only that we all die, but that almost all of us die only after a long period in which life diminishes.  It is not just death that is in the future of all of us.  It is pain and decline.

Okay, I know, I know.  I’m sounding enormously depressing again.  But this is the reality for all of us.  And this is the single issue that every human philosophy and religion must try to solve.  If we cannot confront this honestly, if we cannot explain it adequately, then no matter what else we can find that is good in our philosophy, that philosophy is essentially trivial. 

Grief counseling, it seems to me, is a declaration of surrender on the part of modern secular philosophy.  The ultimate question, having een met, is incapable of answers.

The problem is, grief counseling also seems to be a declaration of surrender on the part of religion these days.  Go into any Catholic parish or theoretically “conservative” megachurch these days, and you will find pastors and ministers “trained” in grief counseling techniques. 

On one level, of course, this makes perfect sense.  It’s human nature, and common sense, to want to avoid pain.  That’s why the Bible contains the book of Job with its decades-later, tacked-on happy ending, instead of the original version, which left Job devastated and destroyed with no recourse but to a kind of radical trust:  if  God wants this for me, then I have to accept that it is good, even if I can understand none of it. 

The religious connection notwithstanding, though, I can’t help thinking that grief counseling is one of the worst examples of the scientification of everything.  John Donne understood more about death and dying, grief and loss, than any grief counseling book anybody has ever given me.  Start with Meditation 17, and go from there.

But while I’m in the middle of recommending things to read, try Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self Help Book.

It’s not a self help book.

It’s usually filed under fiction in bookstores, but it isn’t a novel in the usual sense, either. 

I don’t know how to explain what it is.

But it’s Walker Percy, the guy who wrote The Thanatos Syndrimne.

So it’s interesting.

And it addresses these questions exactly.

So, I’m at that part of the week where I’m so tired I could just fall over, and I’ve got to get through today before I can just relax.

And I must admit that I admire the hell out of the restraint of some of the posters here, who did not jump all over Mab as to whether the list of things she said were “based on fact” actually were (I’d say half of them were, and half of them were interpretations.)

But Mab’s post proved my point, in a way–sitting half a world away, she’s heard of the crazy Republicans but not the crazy Democrats.  The people who say that the  Bush administration caused 9/11 on its own, that the  Bush administration was going to suspend the Constitution to make W. President for Life, that the  Bush administration was busy installing a “theocracy” on the United States via secret D.C. organizations that brainwashed Congressmen into a religious cult…

We used to call it “Bush derangement syndrome,” and Mique is surely right.  There are as many of those on the left as there are on the right. 

The difference is that MSNBC has not given any of the left wing nutjobs his own hour-long television show, that the partisan left shows (like, say, Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow) don’t give air time to these people, and so far none of the nuttiness seems to be emanating from the elected officials of the Democratic Party.

Which means that the public perception of who is actively crazy is different, and public perception is everything.

That said, and in spite of the fact that it’s the anniversary of 9/11–is there something wrong with me, that I don’t get caught up in anniversaries?  I didn’t even get caught up in my own–

Anyway, in spite of all that, something has been bugging me.

On the day we buried Joann,  I put a note to that effect up on Facebook.  I don’t think I understand Facebook ye, or I don’t use it right, or I just don’t have the time, or something.  But I put the note up there and then I went around and did stuff.

Some of the people who responded did so with some version of “this too shall pass.” 

I tend to have a lot of respect fo ancient wisdom, and this is very ancient wisdome indeed.  You can find it in the  Bible and in the pre-Socratic Greeks and in Shakespeare and on Hallmark cards.

But every time I hear it, it occurs to me that it isn’t actually true.

Or rather, that it’s only half true. 

It is certainly not the case that grief or even bad luck passes for everybody.   Some people simply undergo a series of really bad things and then die, nd I’ve known a few of those. 

It’s no use saying, either, that there is no such thing as “luck” or that we make our own, because we don’t, always.  Bill and Joann died from a type of cancer so rare that the number of cases in the US each year is in single digits and the number of cases worldwide isn’t large enoug, o coherent enough, to provide risk factors.  What’s more, they’re the only siblings on record with the disease.  It isn’t thought to have a genetic component.

Well, okay, everything has a genetic component.  But you know what I mean.

One of the things about the last few years with Joann was the way in which the course of her disease followed Bill’s so that I tended to have a clearer idea of what the doctors were saying than most of the people around her. 

And, of course, I couldn’t say anything about it.  The news was all bad, and I knew it, but I couldn’t say anything about it to my brother in law or my other sister in law or my mother in law.  I suppose doctors put things in the terms in which Joann’s doctors put them (and Bill’s) in order to give patients and their families hope, but once you hear the spiel you never forget it.   I knew it was all over but the shouting (and the pain, and the deterioration) when the doctors started talking about how they were going to treat this as a chronic condition and help Joann live with it.  There are actually cancers you can do that with, sometimes for decades at a time, but this is not one of them.

Aside from the obvious here–things did not get better in time for Joann, after all–I think I can sa with some certainty that things are not likely to get better in time for my mother in law.  She’s in her eighties.  She’s buried three of the four children she gave birth to.  She’s got diabetes among a dozen other ailments.  She’s not holding up.

The other thing that occurs to me is that, in the end, we all reach a point where things do not get better with time. 

Nothing is certain except death and taxes, the man said, but the important part of that observation is that death is certain.  No matter how many wounds it may heal along the way, time eventually plows us under

Maybe I’ll go look up Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy if I can wok up the energey to shift through the piles in my office.

Or maybe I’ll just drink tea and watch Harry Potter movies until my eyes fall out.