Dogma, or, parallel rants

Reading the comments at the end of an article on the new Texas Board of Education history standards, I encountered several delightful sentiments, propagated by both “liberals” and “conservatives,” such as

Nothing like creating history to suit the political values of a few morons with some power.

Congratulations Texas knuckledraggers!

Next thing the liberals will want us to honor all the Al Qaeda terrorists that have been killed.

The Bolshevik liberals and the lesbocracy are wielding too much influence in society and trying to indoctrinate the children to be little hate-America firsters.

As an educator, I blush with pride at such nuanced, well-crafted arguments. As a citizen, it fills me with confidence that such obviously talented and erudite folks have their hands on the pulse of our republic.

Grassroots political discourse, whether at work or the world at large, fascinates me, and I often avoid completing my obligations by wading through the discussion boards appended to articles on controversial issues. If I want the temperature of the populace on a given question, such posts shed raw, passionate insight about what people really think. Invariably, my discussion board reading yields, on both sides of the political spectrum, ugliness, prejudice, bile—the sort of rhetoric that distresses (and angers) EB.

Politically, many of the comments disgust me, but I find them invaluable because they remind me that no matter how polite people might be in public, no matter how reasonable they might seem in a face-to-face discussion, they’ll often harbor unspoken resentments that they take with them into the voting booth. The anonymity of the Web offers an outlet for such frustration and bias, lets the hidden anger burst onto the screen, and forces us to confront difference.

Unfortunately, while the panoply of voices reflects the diversity of the English-speaking world in all its repulsive and beautiful splendor, the degree of argument rarely rises above the level of what child development experts refer to as parallel play. The writers tend to use weak-sense critical thinking to advance their own agendas, and they frequently ignore contradictory evidence. The rare well-reasoned case (no matter what the ideological stripe) finds itself ridiculed and attacked with ad hominem arguments. In short, most of the writers exit with the same beliefs that they entered with, and true intellectual synthesis rarely occurs.

Many, such as Daniel Wood in this provocative blog, decry this phenomenon, and during every election cycle one reads commentary to the effect that “things are getting worse.” Well, while it’s difficult to argue that close-minded political partisanship aids participatory democracy, as a nation we’ve experienced it from the start. Dewy-eyed nostalgia for the golden age of political civility flies in the face of the tradition of anonymous political invective that the founders imported from England. In many ways, the anonymity of Internet discussion boards echoes the pseudonymous, hate-filled pamphlets and articles that checked the facts at the door. Before Swift Boats and racist push polling,  Alexander Hamilton was Tom Shit and Andrew Jackson was an adulterer whose wife was a bigamist. Ah, the good old days of Jefferson and respectful political discourse . . .

Of all the damsels on the green,
On mountain, or in valley,
A lass so luscious ne’er was seen,
As Monticellian Sally.

Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?
What wife were half so handy?
To breed a flock of slaves for stock,
The blackamoor’s the dandy.

Spring beckons . . . blogs shrink

Louise Glück crystallizes the day in three lines:

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,

bits of green were showing.

Come to me, said the world.

65 degrees. Sunny. Finally.

Humiliation: A Party Game for Geeks

During a swampy run this morning, my mind wandered to David Lodge’s Changing Places and academic novels (props to my boy KW) in general. One memorable scene involves a parlor game called Humiliation. Lodge’s Desiree Zapp explains the rules:

The essence of the matter is that each person names a book which he hasn’t read but assumes the others have read, and scores a point for every person who has read it. (135)

In the novel, Howard Ringbaum wins by declaring that he never read Hamlet, a disclosure that the rest can’t believe. Given that the world’s total number of published books lies between 74 and 175 million, even the best-read folks can participate in this activity, and it’s fun to consider why we’ve resisted certain famous texts.

Lodge’s characters only play three rounds, but I’ll up it to ten. Remember, you need to pick books that you think other people have read but that you somehow avoided.

In no particular order, but humiliating nonetheless:

1. Hard Times, Charles Dickens (I loathe him and the time I’ve wasted on his books.)

2. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas (I’ve seen, like, a thousand film adaptations, but no dice on the novel.)

3. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (Isn’t War and Peace enough? Really.)

4. Angels in America, Tony Kushner (Gulp. No excuses.)

5. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (I’ve read every other Pynchon novel save this one and the new one; my theory is that my paperback copy is just too cramped and ugly.)

6. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand (I know that I should read this because Bert Cooper wants Dick Draper to read it, but I hated her tiny Anthem and just can’t get up the energy to tackle 700+ pages of a book I might not love.)

7. Dune, Frank Herbert (How I finished high school without reading my best friend’s favorite book, I’ll never know.)

8. The Professor’s House, Willa Cather (Oh, the shame. I own it. Damn.)

9. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (I totally want to read this. Who knows why I haven’t.)

10. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster (I love Howards End,  and I own this book, but I suspect it’s dull as dust.)

FAIL!! Will I get kicked out of the club for this? One could adapt the game for films, too, and I know that I’d score big with E.T.

 So, how many points do I earn?

HSN throws a strike

My parents, mall junkies, would flit back and forth between high-end stores, while I wandered aimlessly looking for ways to burn up the four or five hours between my long-gone fiver and the trip home. South Coast Plaza, circa 1976, frequently brought big-time sports stars to lure in the crowds, and I, for free (sic!!!), received autographs from the likes of Brooks Robinson (whom I see has gone corporate) and Ken Norton (ditto).

One day, however, the Pickwick bookstore scheduled my all-time baseball hero, Nolan Ryan (damn it, him, too) to appear and sign autographs. Oddly, they slated Ryan’s appearance in the middle of a school day, but, miraculously, my father pulled me out of school and off we went.

Big stuff, this, what with the chance to shake hands with the fastest pitcher in baseball, a man I had witnessed throw his record 383rd strikeout a few years earlier in the nose-bleed seats at the Big A.

Well, surprise, my father got us there like two hours early, so we waited . . . and waited . . . and waited some more. Hours later, management announced that freeway traffic prevented NR from attending the signing. My vocal, pissed-off father somehow failed to salve one crushed little boy’s disappointment. So, so close. I pined about it for weeks.

Flash forward to 1990 and a mouse- and roach-infested Chicago apartment. MM has the Home Shopping Network on, and it switches from an ad for clothes, or whatever she was looking for, to a signed Nolan Ryan baseball like this one:

In graduate school and newly married, I knew better than to blow $40 on a useless ball, but, one messy fight later, I called the number on the screen. Total self-indulgence and reckless selfishness? Yes. Poor fiscal management? Check. A ridiculous line in the sand given my weak-kneed propensities in more important arenas?  Affirmative.

None of that mattered, though, when, ignoring the fierce glare from the sofa, I unwrapped the package, took the ball in my hands, and felt waves of emotion (silly but authentic) sweep over me.

Fourteen years late, the boy got his hero’s autograph, but he’s still waiting for that handshake.

Standing no, or, follow the herd

Last night, I joined SH and JZ for a lovely supper, and then we watched a college production of August Wilson’s Fences. During the curtain call, amidst slow-to-moderate clapping, someone stood up. My first thought concerned rudeness: this oaf couldn’t wait to head back to his house for a rousing late night  round of scotch, Parcheesi, and stimulating conversation of the “pass the remote” variety. Wrong. His seat-mate stood up, too, triggering a slow-mo ovation akin to a tepid attempt to start the wave at a ballgame:

Eventually, everyone stood up, even the lame-ass in seat H113 who most definitely thought that while the performers offered an admirable interpretation of the characters, they missed ovation quality by a Josh Gibson–style home run—or two.

So, why rise? Why contribute to the fraud? Certainly the performance didn’t move the audience to a spontaneous outpouring of vertical love. Perhaps fear of scorn generated the sloth-like journey up the Everest of praise. Indeed, JZ later quipped that the students’ parents and friends might have shot us some icy stares had our butts remained in our chairs. Nobody wanted to seem like the last physical hold out, even though most of the audience mentally resisted the whole charade, as the sheepish side-long glances and confused, polite smiles attested.

Maybe the evolution of the standing ovation from rare commendation to routine civility illuminates our actions. When I mentioned the scene later to SP, she half-jokingly attributed it the culture of self-esteem and its throw-confetti-for-mediocrity ethos. In this vein, one wouldn’t require an electric thrill from the play to jump up and heap accolades on the actors (translation: Because this experience moved my soul, transformed my core, I want to shower you with love and recognition). Instead, one might rise—over the course of a painfully long minute—as if to say, “Your play adequately met my theater-going needs for the evening, and thus I’ll stand just as I will when somebody changes my oil and remembers to change the filter or someone gives an unenthusiastic but competent presentation at my committee meeting on Monday.” Who need enthusiasm, really?

In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (a book that I read in a Sociology of Work class as an undergrad), Arlie Russell Hochschild writes,

Feeling as it spontaneously emerges acts for better or worse, as a clue. It filters out evidence about the self-relevance of what we see, recall, or fantasize. (28)

She continues that

We are capable of disguising what we feel, of pretending to feel what we do not–of doing surface acting. . . In surface acting, we deceive others about what we really feel, but we do not deceive ourselves. (29)

The gap between the act and the thought devalues the former and threatens the latter. When I reveal my emotions, when I tender my love (little l or otherwise), I desire as little distance between deed and idea as possible.

I, coward and hypocrite, want my ovation back.

267 pounds

The blonde hipsters all refer to the class as “RPM,” but the official name “Les Mills RPM” appears on the laminated pass required to secure a bike at my new fitness center. After two weeks of staring at the pass and wondering who the hell Les Mills could be, I finally thought about him when I wasn’t spinning and sitting in a pool of sweat and thus looked him up. Now, before cranking my computer out of idle, I postulated two theories, both of which proved completely inaccurate.

First, I guessed that Mills raced bikes (a lot of thought went into that one, let me tell you) and that everyone but me knew about him. Second, I concocted a story about some tanned fitness jack of all trades with a base of operations in Newport Beach and a stratospheric net worth. My metaphoric basketball didn’t even hit the backboard, save for the pile of cash.

No svelte biker or buff pitch man, Mills, aged 75, represented New Zealand in several Olympic games  in  . . . wait for it . . . shot put and discus. In shot put, he ranked seventh in the world during the 1964 games. At 6′ 2″, Mills topped the scales at 267 pounds. While still competing at the highest levels, he opened a gym in 1968. Now, as the creator of BodyPump, BodyFlow, BodyAttack, BodyCollapse, and BodyAneurysm, in addition to RPM, Mills no doubt worries a lot about “stock portfolios,” “investment-grade art,” “tax shelters,” and other chimeras.

Here’s a picture (Les, clearly no longer 267 pounds,  is on the far right; his son, Phillip, who appears to be the company’s mastermind, stands on the left):

Mills also served as mayor of Auckland from 1990-1998

Alas, I couldn’t find any vintage Olympic  pix on flickr or google images.

Ah, listen to the lovely sound of curiosity sated. Unfortunately, the next time I’m weakly climbing a “hill” and dripping sweat on my Les Mills RPM ticket, I’ll need to look for another distraction. The history of Schwinn? The environmental footprint of water bottles? The tensile strength of exercise mats? I’ll think of something.

Who’s your zonkey?

Newly licensed AD continues to press her daddy for a zonkey. This campaign commenced about a week ago, and it includes ample doses of unadulterated cuteness:

One, of course, should not confuse the zonkey (zebra stallion/donkey mare) with the zorse (zebra stallion/horse mare):

So, how much would it cost to buy a zonkey? Well, the owner of “Assay” claims that the trained one-year-old zonkey is “a steal at $3900! [sic]” Perhaps. Perhaps.

The real cost in these creatures, though, comes in the boarding. AD and SD’s horse Magic, a registered Tennessee Walking Horse with a slobber problem, runs $240 a month, with periodical necessities such as the farrier ($25 a pop), vaccinations (a cool $100), and incidentals (grooming supplies, wormer, etc.) I won’t even mention the blood test to see if both of the theoretical gelding’s testicles were truly snipped,  a test required after the barn owner spotted Magic pitching woo with his sexy stable mate (Mr. Wannabe Stud [the horse, not the barn owner] currently resides solo): full penetration, apparently, as Mr. Wannabe Stud (the barn owner, not the horse) told my then fifteen-year-old daughters with a relish bordering on the creepy. The $200 blood test was “inconclusive,” and the vet “recommended” another, more expensive, test to “verify” the first one. Get used to living alone, Magic.

So, mean old dad told bright eyes that she certainly could have a zonkey if she sold her car and got fitted for some sweet new threads at Culver’s or Burger King so that she could keep her zonkey rolling in oats and hay and ambiguous medical tests. She’d certainly look cute riding little Baba Looey to school, but I’m guessing that cuteness won’t trump the utilitarian blandness of a certain silver Honda Civic parked in a certain driveway. Now, if she had asked for a zorse, I totally would have complied: exponentially cuter and surely worth a second job at the compost plant.

Ten items in my mental toy box

 

Coleco Electronic Quarterback

Stratego

Strat-O-Matic Baseball

Heroes in Action

Hot Wheels (click for some old-timey television ads)

Snoopy Kite

Little People

Big Wheel (click for a vintage commerical)

Star Trek Phaser

Atari 2600

Twelve shades of random

“What did you do before the Internet?” impishly asked SGS the other day as I yet again indulged my annoying need to research some so, so important fact (the etymology of frazzle, perhaps, or maybe the inventor of the ball pit) in the middle of a conversation. Well, it can’t beat the egalitarian spirit, convenience, and speed of the Internet, but my parents’ set of Collier’s Encyclopedias (and, later, the much more intimidating Encyclopedia Britannica) provided one geeky boy with more than enough information to hatch an idea or two.

Digging around Google Images, I found a picture of a copy that looks as well loved as mine:

Those bands of red and gold against the cheap black binding still send a Pavlovian impulse to my brain . . . Those black and white line drawings, that characterless font, the sprawling, derivative articles (“Motion Pictures,” “Hypnosis,” “Amphibians”), the washed-out prose, the suggestions for further reading: *sigh*

Ol’ HVM captures the spirit of the game:

The most exciting days often began with the search for a definition of a new word. One little word, which the ordinary reader is content to pass over unperturbed, may prove . . . to be a veritable gold mine. From the dictionary I usually went to the encyclopedia, not just one encyclopedia but several; from the encyclopedia to all manner of reference books; from reference books to handbooks, and thence to a nine-day debauch. A debauch of digging and ferreting, digging and ferreting. (Plexus 63)

The Internet still satisfies the thirst, but for pure tactile, olfactory pleasure, for sheer gratuitous facts, for pointless pseudo-intellectual debauchery, nothing can top a romp through that cracked, musty Collier’s—or maybe I’m just old.

Meta Matters

So, for whatever reason, my friends EB and SGS decided that I must start a blog despite my lack of interesting material. Well, I vacillated for a bit, scoped out their genius blogs, pondered how to start. The meager sum of my thoughts involved creating a list of American authors and commenting on whether they would make great bloggers or pathetic ones. Thomas Wolfe, for instance, might set the blogosphere on fire with his twice daily 10,000-word entries on his coffee and cigarette habits, while Emily Dickinson would wow the crowd with her tiny gems pregnant with the cosmos and the crucible. Hemingway would suck.  Dos Passos would rock. You get the picture: light, fun, pretentious.

On the very day (really, SGS, really) that I planned to unveil this hypothetical masterpiece, I discovered that EB had received a metaphorical kidney punch at work. Ignorance. Injustice. Insanity. Suddenly, my intellectual froth seemed perfectly ridiculous and inadequate. Suddenly, a bouncy prose style and a half-digested concept appeared as useful as a fourteenth-century map of the world.

Anyway, I’m arriving late to this party, and with empty hands, because EB needed her posse to shut up and listen. Blogs can wait, but friends can’t . . .