unapologetic conjecture

Student Wish List, Teacher Heartbreak

2012-01-29T03:32:00.000-08:00

I'm in the midst of a marathon essay-grading day, but I have to stop and write about this immediately, because it has to be one of the saddest things I've ever come across.

This year, one of the classes I'm teaching is Language Arts in Spanish. It's not a Spanish class, but a class on reading and writing skills taught in Spanish for students who are learning English in other classes but also need language arts credit. For the semester final, I gave the students a collection of prompts taken directly from the state's example state test writing prompts, just translated. One prompt asked students to imagine they could switch places with anyone in the world and tell the story of what would happen. This student lost track of the prompt during the outlining process and ended up turning in a list of things she wished she could change about herself. It's absolutely heartbreaking.

She starts by saying she'd like to be taller, because she's sick of being called a midget. Then she says she'd like to be prettier, because she's sick of being called ugly. She capitalized Ugly, as though people use this in place of her name. Then she wished she had blue eyes, that her hair weren't so black, and that it weren't so straight. She also wished she could be a bit fatter so people would stop calling her Skinny. She wished she could do well in school so that someday she could become a lawyer. Then she wished she were more intelligent. She wished she could speak English better so she could speak to more people at school. Finally, she wished she could get a job so she could help out her family and contribute more to her household.

I certainly can't reveal this student's identity, but I think I can share this essay because there are a half a dozen girls in that class who could have written this list, and dozens of boys and girls in my other classes who could have written a variation on it in English. Here's what I can't figure out how to say to her, and to all those students, male and female, carrying around all this self-loathing: "These values you aspire to are cultural constructions. You want to be fatter because you get called Skinny, and some of the other girls are risking their health and maybe their lives because they are so afraid of being called Fattie. You want blue eyes because that's the color of the contact lenses the models plop in before the photo shoot. You want curly hair while the girls (and boys) with curly hair want straight hair. And those desires to reach an unattainable standard of beauty (a standard that has been intentionally designed to be unattainable so you will buy lots of expensive and unnecessary beauty products to look any way but the way you were born to look) will eat away at you on the inside until you are filled up with anger and pain. And then you will lose the best thing you had going for you, your kindness. That warm smile you wear when you come into my classroom will fade and be replaced by a sneer. That great, quiet, nervous laugh you have will become a derisive snort. And someday you will see someone who looks just like you, or just the opposite, or anywhere in between, and you will call her Ugly. Please, oh please don't let that happen. Do not accept the behavior of the kind of asshole who would even consider calling you Midget or Skinny or Ugly or anything other than your given name, and don't replicate that behavior yourself. And don't internalize that kind of person's judgement, or you will find yourself in relationships with people who hold just as low an opinion of you as you do. Don't let that happen. Please. I'm begging."

But I can't say that (and only partly because I shouldn't be using the word "asshole" when talking to my students, even when I'm referring to someone that fills me with rage). I'm going to try to get her an appointment with one of our school's counselors, and I'm going to have a talk with one of her other teachers, a smart, successful Spanish speaking female teacher I think this student will more readily accept as a mentor. But I also can't have the conversation because there are two competing voices in my head, and they both make me so angry that I'm in no position to calmly share my fears with this student. I hear these voice coming out of my TV, I read them in the comments sections online, and now I can't get their echoes to stop. Here's what I'd like to say to those two voices.

"Hey, doofy, naive, post-millennial 'liberal' voice, shut up. No, I'm not going to tell her that she'll be a super model one day. No, I'm not even going to tell her that she can be anything she wants to be, and that, if she tries really hard, she can become a lawyer. She can hardly speak any English, and unless she stumbles on a pot of leprechaun's gold, she's going to go to work to help out her family rather than continue her education long enough to make up for the deficiencies in her English skills. Your ridiculous notion that everyone can be exactly what they want to be is well-intentioned, but also hurtful and stupid. I'm not going to tell my kids to settle, but I'm also not going to tell them that they will have it all. Self-esteem like hers is a real problem, but a self-concept that is out of touch with reality is just a gateway to narcissism, or to a crushing disappointment when she finds out that the people who told her she was perfect were liars. She is good and kind. Why isn't that enough? And why do you want me to lie to a good person?"

"And you, callous, privileged "conservative" voice, you can just shove it. I hear what you're muttering under your breath. One minute you're saying poor people need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The next you're whispering about illegal immigration and English-only education. I know nothing about her legal status, and neither do you. The difference is that I don't want to know, because I know that we're all better off if everyone in our country is educated, while you want to pass moral judgements based on an over-simplified view of a deeply flawed system you don't understand. I do know a bit more than you do about teaching people English, and I know that if I'd dropped you into a Chinese or Iranian school when you were a kid you would not have been a big fan of Chinese-only or Persian-only education. Guess what? You probably wouldn't have learned Chinese or Persian as quickly in an immersion model, either, but you would have been so focused on learning Chinese or Persian that you would have fallen years behind in science and math and never caught up to your Chinese or Iranian classmates. So don't tell me my business. Now, as for your pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps BS, here's a perfect example of why that's garbage, and only somebody who starts out with some advantages (white, male, intelligent, or wealthy) can possibly let those words come out of his mouth without sarcasm. She's right in front of you. She's a human being. She has all kinds of disadvantages, and she won't just catch up no matter how hard she yanks on her bootstraps. Don't you look away from her! She's hurting right now, and your entitled disregard for her pain is disgusting."

So you can see why I'm the last person in the world who should try to console this poor kid. There's too much shouting going on in my own head. But she handed this wish list to me. What does that say about the rest of her world?

Disappointed by Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, and Myself

2012-01-14T04:35:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was scolded on Facebook by a former student, and it’s been bugging me.

Here’s the situation: I tweeted, “Magic Johnson's catchphrase for Kobe: ‘Nothing but special.’ If I could only be one adjective, it wouldn't be a synonym for short-bus rider.”

Her response: “As much as I think you rock, that comment was uncalled for and down right degrading to people who are disabled. Not cool, I'm disappointed. :(”

That stung. Especially the frowny face. So far, I’ve come up with five reasons why that’s bothering me so much.

First of all, when I would mess up as a kid, my dad would sit me down on the couch in the living room, then sit down in a chair on the other side of the coffee table. He didn’t shout at me. He didn’t hit me. He didn’t make grand threats about prolonged grounding schemes. He’d just sit silently for a while, then say, “I’m disappointed.” That worked!

Second, I like this former student. I respect her opinion. We agree on most things, and when we disagree I take her seriously.

Third, I like to be liked. Too much. It particularly hurts me as a writer. I can’t write with the kind of conviction necessary to be successful because I’m too worried that people will be put off by what I write. It makes me a hypocrite when I explain effective advertising to my students and grade them down for targeting the ads I make them write to overly large demographics. “If someone tried to make an ad to sell clothes that both you and your grandma would like, they would fail,” I say. “Neither you nor grandma would buy those clothes.” Then I come home and try to make sure that whatever novel I’m working on won’t offend anyone. Clearly, my tweet failed to amuse as much as it offended.

Fourth, I stand by my criticism of Magic Johnson’s choice of words. I don’t think that insults the mentally disabled. I’m not saying anything derogatory about them in saying I wouldn’t want to be described as “special.” I lament the fact that the word “special” has become a euphemism for mentally handicapped. But it has. Instead of attacking the problem at the root and criticizing those who use mental disability as an insult for those who are not mentally disabled, we just keep coming up with new euphemisms. I’m not even sure “mentally disabled” is the right one anymore. Mentally handicapped? I’m usually not one to knock PC re-labeling. All too often, the root is cultural insensitivity, white men grousing that they are being inconvenienced by having to learn a new term. I do not buy into the “white-guys-have-it-so-rough” argument. My frustration comes from my position as an English teacher. “African American” might be a new thing for everybody to learn, but it’s accurate. “Special,” on the other hand, took one word with a certain definition, gave it a new one, then corrupted that one when people used it as an insult. The same thing happened with “retarded.” Instead of well-intentioned people standing up and saying, “Stop making fun of people who are ___x____” and continuing to use whichever word was most accurate, they just switched and hoped the problem would go away, thus loading up our language with a handful of terms that refer to mental retardation. I’ll bet I’d raise eyebrows if I told some parent that their child’s habit of not turning in his work retards his ability to learn the material in my class. That’s completely accurate, but I have to avoid it because the word has taken on these new connotations due to the association with the mentally handicapped. In the same way, Magic Johnson should be careful with “special.” That’s what I was trying to say. (Furthermore, I hate the “nothing but” part. How is it any kind of compliment to describe anyone as “nothing but” anything? When this student says I rock, I appreciate the compliment. If she’d said I do “nothing but rock” I’d think she was accusing me of something.) Magic Johnson’s attempt at a compliment was catch-phrasy, but dumb. That was my point.

Fifth, I’m a hypocrite, because I then participated in the very behavior I was criticizing! Instead of saying “mentally disabled,” I wrote “short-bus rider.” So I’m picking on his thoughtless use of what has become a euphemism for the mentally handicapped while using a different one. I can’t even blame Twitter, because “mentally disabled” is only two characters longer and I had some room to spare. I still wasn’t mocking the mentally handicapped, but, by using a euphemism carelessly, I was participating in the same behavior I was criticizing in Magic Johnson.

So that makes me mad at myself, but not for the reason this former student was mad at me in the first place. And that makes me mad at her. And at Magic Johnson. And, ultimately, at Kobe Bryant, whose only crime (in this particular case) was dropping 40 points on a mediocre Utah team.

See what you’ve done, Kobe? You’ve caused me to disappoint my former student! You know what I have to say about that?

:(

What Ron Paul's Libertarianism Really Means

2011-12-26T21:51:00.000-08:00

Over the next few days, and for too many days afterward, especially if he wins the Iowa caucuses, you may hear a lot about Ron Paul's crazier views. You will probably learn more about the racism in his newsletters (newsletters he now disavows, but used to brag about), his belief that there is a secret U.N. conspiracy to take over the United States, and maybe even his statement that the U.S. shouldn't have intervened to stop the holocaust. What you might not hear about are his most fundamental libertarian views. They are less dramatic, but, in a way, they are far more important, and not just because they clearly disqualify him for the presidency; so do all those other bright-hot-embers of crazy. But start paying attention to his particular breed of libertarianism, known by some within his own movement as paleolibertrianism or paleoconservatism. Here's an example that jumps out at me. Listen to what Ron Paul says about education:

Here's where the rubber meets the road: In one way, he's correct. If we're talking about natural rights, education and healthcare do not qualify. Animals in the wild do not get any public education. The government does not need to provide education in order to be preserving the basic rights of life, liberty, and property that a government must defend in order to be legitimate. But rights should not be limited in that way. Rights can also be conferred upon individuals by a society because the society recognizes these are not only in the best interest of the individual (privileges) but also in the best interest of every other individual in the society. Rights, like language, are social constructs, and we are human beings. We do not need to limit ourselves to the same list of rights protected by chieftains in caves. We can choose to do better.

Paul's example is a perfect illustration of this faulty reasoning by paleolibertarians. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he seems to be saying one of two things. Either government intervention has driven the inflation in the cost of education which now makes medical school inaccessible for "poor" people (i.e. all but the wealthiest few), and if we just got government out, the price would return to the manageable $300 a semester Paul mentions. Or he recognizes that the cost would still stay out of reach for "poor" people (just about everybody), but that the notion that an IRS agent would take away your hard-earned cash is such an unbearable injustice that it must be done away with, no matter the consequences.

Now, I don't for a minute believe that the cost of medical school would ever return to $300 a semester (or even something similar but adjusted for standard inflation) just because the government stopped giving loans. Sure, medical schools might have to close their doors, but they couldn't prepare people to be real, modern doctors for a few thousand dollars. But even if that were possible in the long run, for a period of indeterminate time (perhaps a generation?) the 99% of us who don't have the quarter million dollars medical school costs on top of the 100k a private undergraduate education costs would simply not be able to become doctors.

So, imagine Ron Paul's America: the (horror of horrors) IRS would not be able to take your tax money and give it to some poor kid who would use it, in the form of subsidized loans, to go through college and medical school and become your doctor. Yea! You've saved some money, and you haven't participated in the historic evil known as taxation. How grand. But then, when you need some surgery, you go to your local hospital and find out that there simply aren't enough doctors to keep up with the workload. Uh-oh. This isn't pleasant. Still, you have all that extra tax money you saved. Go home and enjoy that while the tumor metastasizes. But when you finally get through the waiting list, guess what? The guy who will be performing the surgery on your brain? Well, he's just not as good as you would want him to be. You see, there were ten people who could have been better, but they didn't get the necessary education because there were no federally subsidized loans to get them through school. This guy, on the other hand, had multimillionaire parents who could pay the tuition out of pocket. So you get a neurosurgeon who, in a pre-Ron Paul world, would have been the tenth best in the hospital, and now he's cutting into your brain.

Education is not a natural right, and you don't have a natural right to a decent doctor, either. But if we have the right to self-government, then that means we have the right to make choices about what we want for our own society. And if that should include creating a meritocracy capable of producing the absolute best doctors we can so that when we need them we have access to the best of the best, then we have the right to make that country for ourselves. In Ron Paul's world, a certain kind of liberty was maximized for the man on the slab in the basement. He's dead young and unnecessarily, but he wasn't forced to give money to the IRS. That is not the world you and I want to live in (and die young in).

Ron Paul, despite his most incendiary beliefs, is doing our nation a service by forcing us to have a conversation about the amount of liberty we're willing to give up in order to improve our society. This is a vital debate to have, because there is always the danger that we can go to far, or go in the wrong direction, creating a police state in order to feel safe or a control economy in order to know we'll be provided for. We should talk about how to make the best possible decisions to maximize liberty while not creating a nightmare world; all liberty and no community. But don't let any paleolibertarian or paleoconservative fool you into believing this debate is simple black and white. Don't let them tell you what the government doesn't have the right to do.

This is a democracy, or at least it should be. As long as we still have power to influence our government, we get to decide how much we want it to intrude into our lives, and how much the benefits of that intrusion outweigh the inconvenience. Our government has the rights we give it, and no more. We have the right to choose the nature of our society. All rights, even the natural ones, are rights we've had to earn back from unjust governments. They are our social constructs.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that every child has a right to a free and appropriate education, regardless of their race, disabilities, home language, or citizenship. Ron Paul can disagree with the court. That's his right, too. What Ron Paul can't do is unilaterally decide what your rights are or the government's rights are. He can tell you what he thinks they should be (and I think he should have the right to say so). But remember, when he says something isn't a right, what he's really saying is that he doesn't think our society should have that thing in abundance. So if you, like me, are in the bottom 99%, he's really saying things like education and high quality medical care shouldn't be available to you. Once you know how to read through the veil of political philosophy, he really sounds more like this guy:

No healthcare for YOU!

No education for YOU!

Abraham Lincoln Occupied Wall Street

2011-12-04T00:26:00.000-08:00

I'd never seen this before, but this is an excerpt of a speech President Lincoln gave 150 years ago today to a joint session of Congress. Want to know what the Occupy Movement is all about? Abraham Lincoln knew 150 years ago.

"It is not needed, nor fitting here [in discussing the Civil War] that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effect to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

“Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Can someone, anyone, who is more concerned with the plight of labor and with promoting the general welfare of We the People please run for President? (And I'm sorry, President Obama, but just because you're more concerned about working people than the Republican train-wreck-of-a-field does not mean you give higher consideration to labor than capital. Not after 7 trillion to the banks.)

Or will I need a time machine so I can vote for someone as progressive as a guy who's been dead for 146 years?

Help me, Doc Brown!

Squirrel!

2011-11-30T19:48:00.000-08:00

Petty political attacks aren't a big deal in-and-of themselves. They go both ways, and sometimes they're funny. But this week alone I've come across a couple that just knock my socks off. First, there was the "Obama doesn't mention God on Thanksgiving" hullabaloo on Fox. (*Check out Jon Stewart's reaction to that below.) And then, a conservative friend of mine named Derek called my attention to this one: "Another Gaffe? Obama Calls British Embassy ‘English’ Embassy" Derek actually called me out for not posting it to my status on Facebook, as though I was too ashamed to share it. Quite the opposite. As I told Derek, this is a great illustration of just how petty the Right has become. Now, like I said, the pettiness goes both ways at times, but the context is important here. This is the kind of ridiculous criticism of the President that's coming out of the Right at the exact same time that congressional Republicans are shooting down legislation to create thousands of good jobs for Americans. Moreover, the proposed jobs bills are actually paid for, something the modern Republican party likes to preach but hasn't practiced in my lifetime. So what's their beef? The bills would raise taxes by a couple percentage points on people who earn more than a million dollars a year. Note, this is on their income. It cannot make rich people poor, because it is only calculated on the next MILLION dollars they make. (Oops. I got that wrong. It's actually even less than that. Millionaires would not pay an added two percent on their income, only on their income after the first million dollars. In other words, 1st million at current, historically low rates, 2nd and 3rd million at rates still lower than they were under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Oh, and since the jobs bill was broken up, this portion is the part that provides a payroll tax holiday for working people. Historically, Republicans have treated any vote against cutting taxes as a tax hike. If that's the case, then they are refusing to hike taxes on millionaires but, by their logic, are hiking taxes on everybody else. Where does Grover Norquist stand on that?)

Ah, the Republicans tell us, but that will prevent these wealthy people from giving the rest of us jobs. Well, they haven't been doing that when they are making a million dollars. Why is it assumed they would stop doing what they aren't doing because they're miffed about a small tax increase? Isn't it possible that, if the rest of us do better, then buy products from the companies owned by the rich, making them a heck of a lot richer, they'll create more jobs than if they dodge a tiny tax increase?

Republicans love to toss around the word "entitlement" to criticize people who expect to receive benefits like Medicare and Social Security which they have paid for through through their taxes during a lifetime of work. They also like to vilify any attempt by the government to "pick winners and losers." Well guess what, folks: tax breaks for the rich are government handouts just as much as welfare checks, and they cost the rest of us a lot more than keeping a family from starving to death. Choosing to line the pockets of millionaires rather than creating more positions for firefighters and police officers is "picking winners and losers." Anybody who gives this even a few seconds thought can see that.

So the Republicans are trying to make sure you don't give it a couple seconds thought. They'd much rather you count the number of times the President mentions God, or laugh at him for mixing up "British" and "English."

Petty political pot-shots are fun, especially when they are funny. But in this case, they're not only lame, but obvious distractions meant to focus our attention away from what the Republicans are actually trying to do to those of us who don't make a million dollars a-

*Jon Stewart on the "Much Ado About Stuffing" scandal:

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Update to Alan Grayson for President

2011-11-26T21:57:00.000-08:00

I posted about how much I appreciate a true progressive speaking out. Here's a clip from one of Grayson's recent speeches. Check it out:

A Writer's Quest for Quality

2011-11-23T21:55:00.000-08:00

I love the Demotivators from desprair.com. Tonight, while gathering my thoughts before beginning Chapter 9 of my current novel [read: Procrastinating] I came across this one on another writer's blog (Lily White LeFevre's blog, here) and just had to re-post it. Okay, enough procrastinating. Let's get marching!

Run-Away

2011-11-11T02:56:00.000-08:00

I ran away from home when I was five years old. I didn’t return for almost thirty years.

Upon the arrival of my little brother, our tiny house seemed to shrink, and my parents started looking for something with a bit more room for the brave little crawler. Once they’d found the new house and boxed up our belongings, they began the move. I have few memories of the day. For some reason, I felt neglected. Maybe they were more focused on getting our furniture situated. Maybe I resented the attention my brother was demanding. Maybe I’d only recently learned that running away was an option. Who knows? Regardless, at some point I decided to strike out on my own, never to return.

I think I walked around the block. I distinctly remember that, when I returned, no one had noticed I’d left. I also remember my mother’s pitying look when I told her I’d run away, a sympathetic smile that hid amusement at my dramatic ploy for attention. I was so wounded that they had forgotten about me. She could see my pain, but couldn’t help but see it in a way I couldn’t. That larger perspective made my pain funny.

We moved away a few years later. Six cities and fifteen residences later, I passed through that town on the way to a friend’s wedding. I found the little house where we’d lived at first, and I tried to find the second. The first house created absolutely no impression on me upon its rediscovery, and the second house was so lost to memory that I couldn’t even find the street.

Twenty-nine years had passed. I was almost exactly as old as my parents had been the day I ran away. They’d never lost me. Not really. But there I was, sitting in a borrowed car, looking at a little house, wondering if there was a German word for the disappointment one feels upon returning to a place after many years to find that it is not as one remembers it. They hadn’t lost me. I’d lost myself.

Now I’m struck by the symmetry. I left that day for perhaps twenty minutes, and no one noticed. Then I left for three decades, and no one noticed. I thought they’d forgotten about me, but during the longer wandering, I forgot about that part of myself. When I returned, my mother was able to see it in a broader way, to see the absurdity of it. That stung when I was five. Now it’s a comfort. Because she could look beyond my perspective; she could see me for what I was: a five-year-old drama queen.

So often, I feel unmoored, place-less, a man who repels belonging. I wonder if I can learn to stand just a few steps away, to look down at my own hackneyed melancholy and wear my mother’s smile.

Meeting with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

2011-10-13T00:19:00.000-07:00

Today I attended a meeting with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, put on at H.B.Lee Middle School in the Reynolds School District outside Portland. The event was organized by the Oregon Education Association. The intention was to share some of our frustrations with the Secretary and hear his plans as they related to those concerns. In that, I’d say we were halfway successful.

300 educators packed one side of the school’s gym while the string orchestra played. There were 25 or so kids playing, and they were quite good. At the time, we didn’t know that was a kind of foreshadowing, because we were in for a virtuoso performance of a different kind, this one in evasion.

When Duncan came into the room, I was immediately struck by his height, and turned to my friend Jason Foltz, our OEA regional rep with whom I’d carpooled, and made a crack about how I expected Duncan was pretty good at basketball, and that was probably what got him the job in Obama’s cabinet.

Steve Novak, a former senatorial candidate and current candidate for a position on the Portland City Council, moderate the event, and gave a very brief introduction, sharing some information about the situation in which Oregon educators find ourselves. One revealing fact: In our 07-09 biennium, education was budgeted $6.3 billion by the legislature (before they cut into that). In the 09-11 biennium, we were budgeted $5.7 (before they cut into that). That’s a pretty dramatic drop-off, especially in the face of all kinds of new requirements coming down from the federal government during that time.

Then Novak introduced Secretary Duncan. He shared that Duncan had worked for seven years as the head of Chicago public schools, and that he’d previously played professional basketball. He then stole my joke, which I’m sure was entirely original when I said it. Novak also politely refrained from mentioning that Duncan has never worked as a classroom teacher.

Duncan then spoke for a moment. He acknowledged that it’s a tough time in education, and that school funding is the lowest it’s been in twenty, forty, sixty years (I suppose it has to do with how you make the calculation). He also said kids have more temptations outside of school. His interest, he told us, was in finding out how the Department of Ed. could best support us. He admitted that NCLB is broken, that it was too punitive, and that Congress was to blame for not fixing it. He promised waivers as a stop-gap since we can’t depend on Congress to fix NCLB. His interest is in working collaboratively with states, then in getting out of their way when they are doing well. I was particularly interested when he mentioned working with states to come up with creative methods to evaluate teacher performance, since I’m very skeptical about reform efforts that start with teacher evaluation and assume they’ll figure out the definition of “better teacher” later on, after they’ve measured it. He didn’t elaborate, though.

He also tied his listening tour in with the President’s push for the Jobs Act, which received applause. He described the effect the act would have here in Oregon, including $351 million for teacher retention which would employ an additional 2000 teachers, and $240 million for capital improvements which would fix dilapidated schools while providing a boost to employment. He was also very pleased with the $500 million the act would give the state in money for Early Childhood Education.

Once Duncan was finished, Novak introduced three storytellers who were chosen to explain the state of education in Oregon as it manifested in their personal experience. The first teacher, Sarah Williams, a math teacher from a community college, talked about the federal emphasis on degree completion, and how it was misaligned with the needs of many community college students. She described students who needed to pick up a few courses for work, those who transferred to four year institutions before completing their AAs, and those who received jobs before completing their AAs and chose to go directly to work in their fields. She asked the Secretary how the feds could penalize the community colleges when these students’ needs were so obviously being met.

The second storyteller, Cindy Johnson, is an Early Intervention Specialist. She works with disabled children who haven’t started kindergarten yet, helping them learn to cope with their disabilities to give them a good start when they begin school. As she explained to the Secretary, when new money is poured into Early Childhood Education programs like Headstart, although that is certainly a good thing, it makes those children eligible for Early Intervention help, even though those programs haven’t been given any new money, creating a crisis in their part of the system. She described kids with needs that were not being met because their teachers were now stretched so thin and have caseloads so large, they can’t provide the vital services they used to be able to provide.

Then an elementary classroom teacher named Joyce (I didn’t catch her last name) talked about how, when she began teaching, she was encouraged to avoid core content for the first month just to create a community of learners, but now she’s run her students through three standardized tests in the first month alone. The students are then color coded and divided into groups right down to the individual question they may get wrong, so they can be given specific instruction preparing them for specific questions. The number of minutes they spend sitting at their desks are measured so there’s no longer time to marry learning to movement. Students used to love independent reading, but now, if they score too low on standardized tests, they are taken out of their independent reading groups and put in remedial reading programs. These students now tell her, “I hate reading.” Joyce told the Secretary, “This is what No Child Left Behind has done to our schools.” The applause was deafening. She explained that we are now punished for things over which we have no control instead of being celebrated for our successes. Not only are students’ rich educations being left behind, but teachers are being left behind as well. “I would ask you, Mr. Duncan, to remove the business model from education and remember we are working with children, not interchangeable parts.”

When the applause died down again, Novak introduced educators who had specific questions for Duncan. The first questioner explained that public school teachers were out in front, supporting the charter school movement, back when we thought those would be models of innovation but would still be accountable to the public for their use of public funds. In light of the fact that 80% of charter schools are no better than their local public schools, and many are worse, she asked him to defend the push to increase for-profit and internet-based charter schools that take resources away from traditional public schools. Duncan said he did not support “drop-out factories.” He talked about some charter schools that have been very effective, but recognized that when there’s no accountability for these schools it’s a “recipe for mediocrity.” He did not talk about any method or interest in putting accountability measures in place.

The next teacher, Colleen Works, didn’t mention that she was our state’s teacher of the year. (I only know because she carpooled with Jason and I, and he bragged about her.) She’s a high school history teacher from Corvallis, and explained that she has 190 kids a day, ranging from those with the most severe learning disabilities to those who are our most advanced. She’d calculated that she’s given 30 seconds per child to prepare her lessons. She asked why, when that time is being filled by so many tasks designed to hold her accountable for her performance, there are no accountability measures being put in place for the people who design accountability measures. Duncan began with a complete non-sequitor about the importance of Pell Grants. Then he said, of accountability measures, that he favors those built around growth rather than raw measurements of student achievement. In this answer, he mentioned the Chalkboard Project, an Oregon-based non-profit school reform organization which is often at odds with teachers. The crowd booed, which seemed to take Duncan by surprise.

The next question, about TIFF and Waivers, was such insider baseball that Duncan told the questioner he’d be happy to talk with him about it afterwards.

A Para-Educator asked about the role of Paras. Duncan talked about how all the adults in a school need to work together, which didn’t seem to address her question at all. He then asked us to guess how much the federal government spends on professional development for teachers. Someone shouted “Zero!” He explained that the Feds spend $3.5 billion a year on professional development, and guessed that, with state and local funds, it’s probably double that, and yet we would guess zero because it’s spent so ineffectively. In my own personal experience, federal money that went to the National Writing Project had a dramatic effect on my teaching, but I only know about the role of the federal government in the program because they then cut that funding. I personally wonder how much of the disconnect is because of ineffective spending, and how much is simply a consequence of not advertising where the dollars come from when programs are valuable.

This brought us to what I thought was the most impressive answer of the whole event. A teacher from Beaverton asked how we could be cutting education while spending so much on the war in Afghanistan. Duncan said this question was a great one, at got at some deeper questions. He described the amount we spend on incarceration in this country, to applause. He described the need to allow immigrant children to enroll in our colleges, to applause. “Our priorities are out of whack,” he told us. He explained that he believes education is an investment, and that other countries are investing while we are cutting. “As a country,” he said, “we’re fighting for our soul.” Wild applause.

Notice what he did there? Incarceration rates are something that are determined by a host of agencies, and by different levels of government. The failure of the Dream Act can be pinned on Congressional Republicans. The rates of investment in other countries are determined by those countries themselves, and our ability to compete financially is largely determined by states, since the Feds only provide around 9% of public school funding. What was the one thing that Duncan’s boss actually has complete control over, and could eliminate almost immediately to show that we are getting our priorities back in order? The war in Afghanistan, the very thing the questioner asked about. Duncan not only dodged her question, but did it so deftly he had to stop for applause three times. That’s some fancy dancing.

The last question was the most direct. The educator asked Duncan how he would be convincing the Oregon Business Association to support us when he attended a gala fundraiser of theirs this evening. He told her that, though he believes “You will never have a great community or city without a great public school system,” we are all too mired in the blame game, that teachers need to look in the mirror, that we need to meet in the middle, and that we need to stop pointing fingers.

At that point I stood up and screamed, “BS!” Then I launched into an eloquent rant about how it was total garbage to demand that teachers meet in the middle with people who, in some cases, are ideologically opposed to public education, and that it’s unfair to tell people not to play the blame game when, in fact, teachers have made all the sacrifices and suffered all the abuse while their critics haven’t done a single positive thing for the children we serve. The crowd went absolutely nuts, and I sat down amidst a standing ovation.

Okay, that last part didn’t happen. Duncan thanked us all for coming out, we clapped politely, and our OEA vice-president, Johanna Vandering, encouraged us to send any other questions to Mr. Duncan through www.oregoned.org\tellarne and to show up at the huge rally at the state capital in February.

Maybe, by February, I will have figured out how to give that eloquent speech. But today I listened to the Secretary of Education avoid every tough question by blaming everyone else for the things that make my day-to-day job harder, then conclude by telling me I shouldn’t play the blame game. I can only hope he heard our discontent and isn’t deluded into believing we were satisfied with his non-answers to our questions.

Why I Was Accused of Teacher Malpractice

2011-09-30T23:51:00.000-07:00

I had a very jarring experience this week. After a lesson in my creative writing class on Wednesday that was not significantly different from one I've given dozens of times before, two students confronted me after class and accused me of a professional ethics violation, specifically of using my position as a teacher to share my political views. When pressed, they conceded that the views were not actually necessarily mine, and may have been balanced, but that the lesson involved politics and was therefore inappropriate. That's simply a misunderstanding of the nature of the violation they'd originally accused me of, but that didn't stop me from freaking out. I could imagine angry parents confronting me, or worse, going over my head and blind-siding my principal or superintendent with allegations of professional misconduct which could have severe repercussions. Outside of my classroom and the contract day I am quite politically active (as anyone who has read this blog before can infer), so I could imagine that someone, not knowing the lengths I go to in order to keep my views out of the classroom, might believe that I crossed that barrier I work so hard to maintain. I immediately shot off an email to my principal, both to document the incident and to warn her in case she was confronted by parents. Then I spent the evening allowing myself to get more and more worried about the situation. By midnight, it seemed sleep would be impossible, so I came downstairs and drafted a letter to my students explaining the situation. I still couldn't fall asleep until after 3:00 am. The next day, Thursday, I brought the letter to my principal and spoke with her about the situation. She was very supportive and encouraging, which made me feel a lot better. She read the letter, encouraged me to tone it down a notch, and advised me to send a kind of permission slip about the lesson home to parents next year in advance (good advice which I will follow). I read an abbreviated version of the letter to the students, and it seems the incident has blown over, though I can't be sure it won't explode at some point in the future. I wanted to share the letter here so other teachers, parents, friends, etc., could understand both my rebuttal and why I was so panicked. I apologize in advance for the length, but, as you can imagine, I had a lot to get off my chest.

"Well, my dear creative writing students, it’s 12:17 in the morning and I can’t sleep. Today (technically yesterday) I made an error in judgment and I want to apologize and explain something. So (cue trumpets), with much fanfare, please accept…

An Apology and Explanation

Yesterday, before beginning the reading of the 3rd chapter of the novel I’m writing, I meant to remember to say, albeit briefly, that there would be some references to things that are political in the text, but that the character’s views were not my own, and that if the prospect of hearing about anything political made anyone uncomfortable, they could be excused from the assignment. Once I’d passed out the copies I simply forgot.

After class, some of your classmates came to me, concerned that I was trying to share my own political beliefs. I must immediately say that I firmly prohibit any kind of witch-hunt to try to figure out who these students were. I appreciated their honesty and I think their concern is valid. Please allow me to try to explain why I also believe it is misplaced in this instance.

First of all, there’s a general misconception that teachers can’t talk about anything political. This is, on its face, not only incorrect but impossible. We couldn’t do our jobs if we avoided any topic which relates to politics. Every novel we teach is political. All the history we teach inevitably has political bias. In fact, in recent history even science has been politicized. One could argue that everything you read in school is biased toward English-speakers by virtue of being written in English, or biased toward Americans because of the way words like “color” and “theater” are spelled. The complete absence of bias is a myth, and fleeing from politics is not our job. However, we have an ethical obligation to avoid using our positions as your teachers to try to inculcate you into our own political beliefs. I take this very seriously. I do not tell students how I vote or how they should feel about specific issues, and I encourage all of you to let me know if you believe I’ve been intentionally or accidentally biased in my presentation of any information.

That being said, the explanation given by the novel’s character for the fall of our civilization could be easily misconstrued to reflect my beliefs. I can only ask you to trust me when I say his politics do not mirror my own. I understand that skeptical students would wonder why they should believe that and not feel they were being doubly deceived. If you’ll allow me, let me provide one uncontroversial piece of evidence. The character in the story expresses a fatalism about the fall of our civilization. Of course, he is speaking from a different, fictional setting in which this has already occurred. I think I can safely share that I do not believe this to be any kind of inevitability, or that the fictional story is some kind of prophecy. I am a teacher. This is an inherently hopeful profession. I would not do this job if I believed that we are all doomed. If you can accept that I differ from the character in this way, I hope you will also believe me when I say that we differ in other beliefs as well. I cannot, however, itemize all the ways I agree and disagree with the character because, to do so, I would have to expound on my own politics, which would be inappropriate.

So why, you might ask, if the assignment creates a situation wherein students can only trust that their teacher isn’t preaching his own politics, would I continue to offer up the assignment? I believe its value exceeds the risk. As developing writers, there is a value to the practice of editing and revision that can only come with repetition. You will be editing and revising one another’s work. I feel it’s important to lay the groundwork for that by modeling the proper way to receive feedback. On a deeper level, I think it’s essential for students to see that I, too, am involved in the practice of writing. Across this country there are hosts of English teachers asking students to write while not participating in the endeavor themselves. Maybe it’s not a hobby they enjoy. Maybe their work demands so much time they simply cannot fit it into their schedules. I shouldn’t judge them. But I know that, as a student, I would question the authority of any writing instructor who didn’t write, just as I would question a literature instructor who didn’t read literature or a P.E. teacher who refused to exercise.

But, you might ask, couldn’t I have chosen to tell a story that was clearly apolitical? I would argue, quite simply, no, I couldn’t. I could have told a story set in a fantasy world completely dissimilar to our own with characters barely resembling human beings, or perhaps with anthropomorphized animals, and the politics within the story might have been a lot more subtle. That subtlety might have protected me from any accusations of impropriety. But I would argue that is actually a far more dangerous situation. As with advertising or any other form of manipulation, it’s when we are least suspecting of bias or ulterior motive that we are most susceptible. For the reasons mentioned above, I chose to share the book I really am writing. But I also went out of my way to try to make sure that the politics were as even-handed as I could make them and still explain the extreme setting of the story. Hence the explanation that both sides’ worst fear came true simultaneously. Frankly, if this book were ever to be published with my name on it, I might edit that portion to more accurately reflect my politics, but I felt that would be inappropriate for a classroom. It’s true that balance isn’t the same thing as a lack of bias, but I’d again ask you to believe me when I say I chose balance to try to present a believable dystopia without injecting the class with my own politics.

So, if I made any of you uncomfortable yesterday, I apologize for not giving you an out in advance. That was my oversight. And now for the announcement part (trumpets again, please): In our following unit we were going to begin a careful examination of some literature written by some writers who are far more talented than I could ever hope to be (well, I can hope, I guess. Teacher, remember). We’re now going to move that assignment up. This will not mean any extra work for anyone. It just shifts our schedule around a bit. The reason I’m doing this is that I plan on continuing to share from the novel I’m writing, as long as the majority of you are still interested in reading it. Those of you who are not comfortable reading my writing may choose to do the same assignment, providing detailed feedback chapter by chapter, to the works of established authors from the books I’ve chosen. If you want to escape all writers’ politics, I’m afraid you’re out of luck in a creative writing class. If you don’t feel comfortable hearing a story from your teacher because of his immediate presence in the room and necessarily conflicting roles as writer and teacher, I can only hope that I am modeling accepting that feedback by not demanding that you continue to read my work, and by modeling not being offended by that choice in the slightest.

One last note: The reason it is unethical for public school teachers to share their personal political views is not because we are paid with taxpayer money. If any of you attend a public university next year you will hear lectures from professors who are also paid with public funds and who do not shy away from sharing their personal views. The reason it is unethical for teacher like me to do that is because young minds are more malleable and more likely to be swayed by authority figures. So let me say something that I don’t believe is controversial at all: You cannot hide from politics any more than you can hide from questions of religion or identity or tastes in food or people’s opinions about next week’s weather. Your best and only defense is in greeting all opinions with a healthy dose of skepticism. Whether those opinions come from your teachers or your friends or your television, I encourage you to listen or read very carefully the opinions of anyone, alive or dead, authority figure or peer, and then decide for yourselves. I admit that the notion that you should think for yourselves is my personal political belief, but I refuse to accept that this belief is too controversial, because if it is, then I’m afraid all education is impossible.

Okay, now it’s 1:31 in the morning and I will be seeing you all painfully soon. Please accept my apology for the oversight and let me know privately if you would prefer the alternate assignment."

I hope this will put an end to the whole affair. Ultimately (and ironically), I expect that will be determined by workplace, local, family, and parental politics.

Alan Grayson for President

2011-09-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

I've been thoroughly enjoying the letters Alan Grayson sends me asking for my support in his congressional campaign. If I had money (right after I gave a ton to my Mom's team for the Walk to End Alzheimer's) I'd toss some his way. I don't think Grayson would be a good presidential candidate. He's got too many knocks against him. He's funny. He speaks his mind even when his views aren't popular. He's transparently partisan, and in the wrong party for that to be a good thing. Still, he's exactly what the Democratic party needs, and what any country needs from the opposition party in one of its legislative bodies.

I'm not 100% positive if I'm violating any kind of copyright by republishing Grayson's most recent letter to me, but I figure, heck, it was addressed to me, so it's mine to do with as I please, right? So I wanted to share it with you. Enjoy!

Dear Benjamin:

If you have been hearing the term “job creators” a lot lately, it’s because Frank Luntz wanted you to.

As PBS put it, Luntz’s expertise is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their products, or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.” In other words, propaganda.

Here are some actual examples of Luntz’s fine work:

Don’t say “oil drilling.” Say “energy exploration.”

Don’t say “inheritance tax.” Say “death tax.”

Don’t say “global warming.” Say “climate change.”

Don’t say “healthcare reform.” Say “government takeover.”

And don’t say “greedy, soulless multinational corporations who don’t give a damn about you.” Say “job creators.”

Luntz is like a serial killer of the English language.

We are not Luntz-puppets. Support our campaign, because we are not fooled by Luntz word games.

As soon as I heard the term “job creators,” I said to myself, “that sounds like Frank Luntz talking.” And sure enough, it’s right in there in Frank Luntz’s latest book, Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary. Here are Luntz’s exact words: “You don’t create jobs by making life difficult for job creators.” That’s under the heading “The Ten Rules for 2012: What Americans Really Want to Hear from Their Representatives.”

Here is Luntz’s list of what we all “really” want to hear in 2012:

I will never accept the status quo.
I will never apologize for America.
I will find at least one penny of waste to cut from every dollar of spending.
I will never raise taxes in a recession.
You don’t work for me. I work for you.
I will fight for the public’s right to know the cost and consequences of every piece of legislation and regulation.
I will always prioritize American rights over the rights of those who wish to do us harm.
I will work with anyone who will work with me.
I will always support freedom.
I still believe in the American principle: of the people, by the people, for the people.

Note the absence of anything even resembling a policy, a program, or a solution to anyone’s problems. So, for instance, the Luntzified Republican Party’s health care plan really is, “don’t get sick.”

If you are sick and tired of government by cliché, you’re not the only one. Contribute to our campaign, and send Frank Luntz a message – in plain English.

And leaving Ron Paul aside, doesn’t that Luntz list sound like every single Republican candidate for President? And almost every Republican Governor? And almost every Republican Senator? And, of course, Sarah Palin?

Which suggests this startling possibility: If they all read Luntz’s book, then they all know how to read.

But that’s all they ever need to do. It must be so easy to be a Republican elected official. You never have to think at all. You just let Frank Luntz do all your thinking for you.

I look forward to the day when Frank Luntz prescribes a haircut. Then they’ll all have the same haircut.

I wish that, just once, Frank Luntz would goof on them, and tell them that what Americans really want to see in their representatives is a little, tiny moustache, just covering the upper lip, like, like . . .

Like Charlie Chaplin. You know, like in the movie “The Great Dictator.” Whom did you think I was going to say?

Here are some more Luntzisms that I just made up:

Vampires are “blood recyclers.”

Space aliens are the “differently specied.”

Plagues are “immune system strengtheners.”

Cancer is “internal genetic diversity.”

Death is “spiritual-corporeal differentiation.”

And nuclear war is “1000 points of light.”

But here’s the really sad thing about Luntz’s propaganda. Like most propaganda, it’s just not true.

FACT: In the last ten years, the population of the United States has grown by 27 million people.

FACT: There are one million fewer private sector jobs in America today than there were ten years ago.

So much for job creation. In fact, judging by employment, if the private sector were an employee, we’d have to fire him. For incompetence.

But you can count on 2012 Republican candidates all over the country repeating ad nauseam “jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators jobcreators.”

As far as they’re concerned, it’s Frank Luntz’s world. We just live in it.

Jobs. Health. Peace. That’s the real world, not Frank Luntz’s fantasy world. Make a difference; support our campaign today.

Courage,

Alan Grayson

The Best Piece on the GOP I've Ever Read

2011-09-12T23:48:00.000-07:00

I've been caught in a number of online debates recently trying, and failing, to express my frustration with the modern Republican Party. I tend to get three different kinds of responses. On says that I'm painting the whole GOP with too broad a brush, and that, even within the elected leadership, there's a lot more variation than I can appreciate as an outsider. The second says that, no matter how hard I try to be even handed, every attempt I make to describe the ideology and political strategy of the Republicans inaccurately casts them as calculating, nefarious, and cynical. The third rebuttal swallows every criticism I make and replies with an example of Democratic incompetence, cronyism, or political hypocrisy.

Then I came across this. It's written by a man who worked as a congressional staffer for GOP representatives for 28 years. His thesis; it is a concerted political strategy, it is nefarious and cynical, and the GOP is worse than the Dems. I know this piece is long, but please, take the time to read it and consider the possibility that the writer's experience might give him the authority to talk about this in a way that no other politician, pundit, or that whiny bald blogger ever could.

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

by: Mike Lofgren

Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"

Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)

"Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.

"But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP..." (Please continue here)

Back to School... for Writers

2011-08-24T01:02:00.000-07:00

[Here's a post I wrote for amwriting.com, republished here with permission.]

Over the next few weeks, across the country, students (and teachers) will be going back to school. Writers, in contrast, never stop writing, so the event has no bearing on our writing life whatsoever… except that maybe it does. Maybe, if we’re really honest, we admit that we don’t always follow Stephen King’s writing regimen perfectly. We take breaks. Sometimes those breaks are longer than they should be. Or maybe we’ve been pounding out our daily wordcount, but we need to be reinvigorated. Remembering how to “go back to school” can inform our practice as writers.

Summer Break

Hopefully the cause for our hiatus from our writing regimen isn’t seasonal. As a teacher, I’m struggling not to launch into one of my rants about how summer vacation is a throwback to an agrarian economy, how summer breaks don’t prepare students for a working world where no adults get them (not even teachers), and about how it’s amazing that our schools measure up as well as they do when compared to the schools in countries where students go to school for eleven months a year, six days a week. I won’t go into that. Except to say that it is analogous to taking a long hiatus from writing in that both are terrible ideas. Try to avoid taking long breaks from your writing. Get back to work. If that means ditching that novel which seems to be set in the nation of Writer’s-block-istan and tells the story of Prince Spamlet who is dithering about whether to choose chocolate or vanilla ice cream, drop that project and write a short story about someone in a more interesting place who actually does something that has real consequences. Or go outside and write some Haikus. It doesn’t matter. Just tell yourself, “Break’s over. Time to go back to school.”

Back to School Shopping

Students waste exorbitant amounts of their parents’ money when they beg for trendy, gaudy clothing to wear the first day of school, especially when you consider that the only thing changing faster than fashion is the size of clothes those kids fit into. Then they turn around and forget to buy paper and pencils to put in their flashy new backpacks. Some writers make the same mistake, in a way. We worry about what kinds of novels are selling and try to write the next Harry PotterHarry Potter Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7) or TwilightThe Twilight Saga Collection or The HelpThe Help (Movie Tie-In) instead of worrying about the way we’ll actually do our work. Stephen King, in On WritingOn Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft, tells the story of his uncle’s toolbox, and uses it as a metaphor for the collection of skills we acquire as writers. A student’s backpack will serve the same function. Those flashy sets of 300 colored pens of all shades; that’s an overly flowery vocabulary. The student doesn’t need all those pens, and you don’t need to use a thesaurus to find words your reader won’t know. Something drawn with a simple dollar-store box of crayons can be beautiful, and something drawn with nothing but black ink on paper can be powerful. Save those weird words for Scrabble. They don’t belong in your writer’s backpack.

Proper grammar and mechanics, on the other hand, are your notebook paper, the means to pass your work to someone else in a way that’s intelligible. If you’re really good (and sure you’re not going to create a cultural caricature or simply look like a fool) you can get away with fancy notebook paper, like writing in dialect or a character’s voice which breaks the rules. But even then, you need to know them. You can’t go to school without paper.

Make sure you have an eraser, too. The tiny little multi-colored erasers on your pencils are garbage. Get a big, fat pink eraser. You will need to edit brutally, bravely, and with some elbow grease, so make sure you’ve got an eraser that shows your commitment to that part of the process. In fact, buy more than one.

You also need to be willing to refine your skills. That’s your pencil sharpener. You don’t need a five pound electronic device that plugs into the wall. Getting better, as a writer, takes time and effort. Get a tiny little sharpener and work that pencil to a sharp point. Those little ones really work. Read some Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, or Voltaire. Those guy’s pencils were lethal. Grab some Cormac McCarthy. He’s ground his pencil down to a tiny little nub of metal and graphite. There’s barely any cheap pine left when he goes to work. Be inspired by that, and sharpen your own tools until your words cut the paper to shreds.

Don’t worry too much about what you’ll write about. Textbooks might not even be distributed until the second week. The ideas will come. When you’re shopping for your writing skills, focus on being prepared so you can do excellent work when your muse finally gives you that big assignment.

First Day Jitters

After a break of any length, you’ll come back to writing with a mixture of anxiety and excitement. The writer’s vocation is not mandatory, so if you weren’t somewhat eager, you would just watch daytime TV all year. You’ve come to this because some part of you loves it, but you also know that it will entail some struggle and possibly some heartbreak. That’s okay. Just be grateful that you attend an academic establishment with a student body of one. The teachers are not identifying the behavioral issues. The mean girls aren’t sizing up the threats to their popularity. The bullies aren’t figuring out who is skinny enough to fit in a locker and who is fat enough to create suction when tossed in a trash can. You can come back to school, write something more embarrassing than that nightmare where you forgot to wear pants one day, and no one will ever know. Rejoice in the privacy of the writer’s life.

But save everything. Your draft might be a pimple-faced kid with no pants on, but later you could put some leather pants on those scrawny legs and he’ll be a rock star.

Reconnecting with Old Friends and Making New Ones

Your summer break may have been caused by a story that was a dud. It happens. But you may also find that you and your characters just needed some time apart. Going back to school provides an opportunity to reevaluate those relationships. Sometimes, when students come back to school, they find that their inner circle is changing shape as people grow apart. This doesn’t have to mean that your characters were worthless. It just might mean that some of your acquaintances could turn out to be better friends than last year’s BFFs. Try identifying that interesting ancillary character who was more fun to write about than your protagonist. Maybe, now that you’re back in school, it’s a good time to take a whack at telling her story, or telling the same story from her point of view. Even if you maintain the same relationships you had back in the spring of your writing life, this fall provides an opportunity to get to know those characters better. As a writing exercise, imagine how they spent their summer vacations. What kinds of things did they do to fill those long, hot months? How were their family relationships? What kind of trouble were they most tempted to get into, and did they avoid that temptation, succumb to it reluctantly, or revel in it? What did they learn about themselves (or choose not to learn about themselves)? Maybe this exercise will drive you back into the story. Maybe it will drive you out, and you’ll realize you need an all-new circle of friends for the upcoming school year. That’s okay. It can be hard to make new friends and hard to say goodbye to old ones as you grow apart, but take comfort in the fact that the same thing is happening to millions of kids all over the country. They’ll get through it, and so will you.

Hitting the Books

Despite what some of my students might tell you, school isn’t just about your social life. Now that you’re back, there’s work to be done. Just in case you’re still stuck, in the vein of our return from summer vacation, allow me to give you a writing prompt to begin the school year. Consider this your “back to school” countdown:

“Nothing forced him to return. He could have hidden forever. But he made the four step voyage across the porch. Three months was too long to run away from life, from love, from consequences. He took two long, careful breaths, ran his fingers through his hair just once, and knocked…”

Hopefully that will get you going. Welcome back!

Killing the Pain of Rejection: A Writer’s Failed Experiment

2011-08-15T01:43:00.000-07:00

Today I shot my rejection letters. It didn’t make me feel better.

Sharing this story may be a mistake. It’s very bad form to whine about rejection letters. For one thing, it is whining, and that’s bad enough. No one likes whiners. But it’s even worse when it seems that a writer is slagging on an agent, so let me be very up-front about this: I am not angry with the two agents who rejected my most recent novel this week.

I have a great deal of respect for literary agents. This isn’t some form of brown-nosing because I want one of them to accept my work. I respect them because I understand what they do. Even this knowledge has been gleaned thanks to the generosity of agents; I’ve never been an agent nor do I know any personally beyond a few evenings’ conversation, but some agents keep great blogs about their work, and these give insights into why agents do what they do. First of all, agents love books, love writers, and love connecting writers with readers. They’re our advocates. They’re on our side. The trick is getting a generic someone who is generally on the side of writers to become a very specific someone who is advocating for you, personally. That’s arduous, to say the least. But I believe it’s worthwhile, and not just because of the dollars and cents (though I’ll be the first to argue that taking 15% off of something is better than keeping 100% of nothing). But agents also make our work better, and not just once we’ve acquired one. Trying to please these gatekeepers forces us to ask important questions as we write. “Who will the agent sell this to?” forces us to think about audience. “Will this grab an agent on page 1?” forces us to write a first page that will also hold a reader. “Can I pitch this to an agent in under thirty seconds?” forces us to think about theme and character in a way that can increase the coherence of a novel. Agents serve us before they ever hear from us.

And then, when they do hear from us, they try to do right by us. If they love our work and believe they can sell it, “doing right” involves signing us, helping us edit the manuscript again, and pitching it to publishers. But when they have to reject us (and they do), they really are concerned about our feelings. I’ve never met or read about an agent who took that duty lightly.

So why do rejection letters seem so curt and even callous? There are a few good reasons, none of which make a lie of the agents’ concern for the writers they deal with. First of all, if agents wrote lengthy, detailed rejection letters, they’d be wasting the time they owe to the writers they’ve already signed. An agent who writes you a five page rejection letter is an agent you wouldn’t want signing you, because she would then spend her time writing five page rejection letters to everybody else in her slush pile instead of selling your work. Besides the time management issue, agents don’t write long letters because they are making a clean break with you. Think of that horrible ex-boyfriend your friend was dating. Instead of breaking off the relationship, he acted like a jerk until she finally did it. He was a coward, and it hurt her more than if he’d come clean when he didn’t want to be in the relationship. Agents don’t want to send the false impression that they might say yes if you tweak this or that part of the manuscript. When they write “It isn’t right for me,” by “it” they mean the whole thing. That doesn’t mean they hate you or that the book is garbage. They mean they can’t enter into a relationship with that book, even if it stops leaving the toilet seat up or does the dishes more often.

I was lucky. I’d met both of the agents who rejected me at last week’s Willamette Writers Conference. They were kind and encouraging in person and followed up with supportive letters that were much longer than necessary. I would have understood if they’d sent me a one line reply, but one of them gave me two paragraphs. Both of them are on my short-list for future novels if this one doesn’t pan out. I sent them short thank you notes in which I said I was genuinely grateful for their time and consideration, and guess what? I was being genuinely genuine.

And there’s the rub. Rejection hurts. Some writers hide from that pain by blaming the agent. “She didn’t recognize my genius!” they seem to say. Bull. First of all, appreciation for any given novel is subjective. What one person my find brilliant, another may find tiresome or confusing or in need of major revision. That’s not the agent’s fault. Criticizing her for that is like saying she has the wrong favorite color. Also, agents are working, not just reading for pleasure. Maybe she enjoyed your book but didn’t think any publisher would buy it. More specifically, maybe she didn’t think any editor would buy it from her, in which case she’s done you a favor by directing you to find someone who thinks she can sell it.

Some writers blame the whole industry. I think this inclines some people to look to e-publishing, indie-publishing, or vanity publishing (not the same things, mind you). That decision should be based on other factors, like platform and audience, rather than on a knee-jerk reaction to rejection. The great thing about the self-publishing world is that there are no gatekeepers. Consequently, some readers who wouldn’t have been served by the traditional market are being connected with some writers who would have been barred by that system. But those readers have to wade through a sea of mediocrity and worse to get there, and that sea just gets more polluted when writers who fear rejection throw their muck into it without concern for who their audience might be and why the traditional publishing industry isn’t snapping them up.

Some writers turn that rejection inward. “She’s saying I’m a worthless human being.” Again, writing is subjective. Plus, she’s not saying anything at all about you. She’s saying something about your manuscript. It’s not personal. Of course it feels personal to us, because we poured our soul into that book, but, at this stage, it’s important to remember that we’re more than one novel. Faced with the choice between blaming the agent and blaming myself, I think it’s healthier and more honest to take responsibility, as long as it motivates me to write a better book next time, but not if it makes me want to reach for the bottle of vodka in the back of the cupboard.

But the pain is still there. I can’t let it consume me, and I can’t direct it at the agent who sent me the letter. So what am I to do with this feeling?

I had an idea. I decided to try to externalize it and attack the feeling directly. I printed out the rejection letters, then added a digital “REJECTED” stamp and crosshairs. They looked like this:

Even before I shot at them, I suspected it wouldn’t work. For one thing, I don’t go target shooting out of anger. I’ve only recently become a gun-owner, and I bought them for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I want to be prepared should I ever need them to feed or protect my family. Second, firearms are an interesting subject to learn about, and I’m only now realizing how completely ignorant I’ve been regarding this vast area of study I’ve completely neglected. Third, I’d like to come across as at least somewhat believable when I write about people using guns in my fiction. Finally, I admit, it’s a lot of fun. None of these reasons inclines me toward any kind of hostility involving firearms. They were the wrong tool for my purposes. I’d brought a gun to a feeling fight.

But I tried. I shot the ever-loving s--- out of those rejection letters.

As I’d expected, the exercise did little for my emotional well-being. It got a few chuckles out of some friends and family when I explained my plans. But once I was shooting, the pleasure of the experience came from trying to hit the target. I completely forgot about the abstract emotional goal. I could have been doing any other fun, competitive task. I might as well have been practicing my free throws or trying to learn a musical instrument. It had no effect on my feelings about rejection in general, or the specific disappointment those letters produced.

That shouldn’t surprise me. I’m sure there are more emotionally evolved people who can export specific feelings, physicalize them, and confront them. They’re probably mostly Buddhists, and they are unlikely to project those emotional constructs into paper targets and shoot at them.

I’m not a Buddhist. I’m just a writer. I shape feelings into letters and words and sentences. Then I hope that someone is willing to read those sentences. A reader’s empathy provides the comfort that small, singed holes in paper never can.

That’s the moral of the story: To confront rejection, put the gun away and get back to work.

"Writers Create Worlds" Poster

2011-08-10T03:46:00.000-07:00

Inspired by an excellent speech by author Chris Humphreys, which included a delivery of one of Theseus' monologues from A Midsummer Night's Dream, I thought I'd make a poster for my classroom. Teachers (and writers), let me know what you think and feel free to steal the image if you'd like it.

Can hostage-takers blame a hostage situation on the President?

2011-08-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received an email, one of those supposedly "funny" forwards that are sent on by well-meaning family, which quoted an anonymous stock broker blaming the current state of the economy on "this administration." The email went on to encourage me to see if my broker agreed.

Let's ignore, for a moment, the tone-deafness of a plea to the general public encouraging us to talk to the stock brokers most of us don't have. Blaming this administration for all our economic woes is not only ignorant, but it's insulting in that it's part of a transparent agenda that depends on our stupidity.

But it takes two to tango, right? Obama can certainly be blamed for not making a case clearly to the American people. I can't argue with that. He's done a terrible job of framing the issues. Too many Americans thought the debt ceiling was about increasing the size of government, rather than paying the bills we'd already incurred, mostly under Republicans. It's worth wondering what compulsion drives him to such weak negotiating positions. Is it cowardice? Is it an obsessive desire for bipartisanship? Is he too in bed with Wall Street to call them on their role in the economic downturn, and too dependent on wealthy donors to ask them to pay their fair share? Is it a hyper-focus on the independent voter and on re-election? If so, he may very well be doomed to fail in the next election precisely because he sought to placate the middle and thus compromised his way to their right, demotivating enough of the left to erode his own base.

But blaming this economy on the ineptitude of the administration's negotiating abilities ignores something that deserves more of our attention. If we're in the state we're in because Obama can't properly negotiate with Republicans, why should we possibly consider turning the keys to the car over to the people who pulled us into a ditch because they really wanted to drive us off a cliff? Bi-partisan compromise deserves bi-partisan blame. If we acknowledge that Obama got rolled, then the bulk of the blame needs to be with the side that pulled him so far away from what he wanted.

It takes two to tango, but hostage-takers are not dance partners. Saying the Republicans are hostage-takers is not liberal propaganda. Mitch McConnell, the most moderate of the Republicans involved in leading these debt negotiations, admitted to the strategy. “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.” In essence, "most" didn't want to bankrupt the country by refusing to pay our bills, but they knew Democrats cared more about preserving the economy than they did, and would be willing to give in to their demands. It's smart strategy. It's also shocking he would be so honest about it. But then, this is the same moderate Republican who admitted “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Not jobs. Not the security of the country. Undermining the President is the number one goal.

McConnell's honesty is refreshing, but it makes the email I received all the more infuriating. Imagine if someone walked up to you and said, is the clearest possible terms, "I'm going to punch you in the face. After I do, I want you to blame that guy over there for any pain you feel."

Wham! Stars.

As you reel back, would you ignore the man standing right in front of you with your blood on his fist and say, "What just happened? I don't understand what is causing this pain, but I seem to remember something about that guy across the room. He must have done this to me!"

Obama is certainly to blame for not confronting far-right Tea Party rhetoric more directly. He should have crossed the room and defended the American middle class from the guy threatening to punch us in the face. If we decide we need someone else to protect us because of his failure, that's sensible. We're bleeding, after all. But if we choose to look for protection from the very people who bloodied our collective nose just because they point at the President, we are responsible for the pummeling we're gonna' get.

Willamette Writers Conference

2011-08-05T22:52:00.000-07:00

Here's why I'm not going to be blogging just yet about the Willamette Writers Conference: I'm an idiot. I forgot the power cord to my laptop at home, so when the battery runs out in a moment, I'll be limited to my phone. Suffice it to say that the experience has been wonderful already. We're only through the first day, and I've already exceeded my personal goals here. It's all gravy from now on. When I get home and can plug in, I'll scream to the digital heavens about how great Willamette Writers is (are?). Until then, keep your fingers crossed for me that it just keeps getting better.

Short Story: "Painless Separation"

2011-07-29T02:57:00.000-07:00

[This story was the Featured Friday Fiction on amwriting.org. With Johanna Harness' permission, I thought I'd put it up here, too. Thanks to @johannaharness for giving me this chance!]

Painless Separation

A few weeks ago, our relationship started to get rocky. No, not rocky. It got wiggly. Anyway, I knew a break-up was inevitable.

Noah and I had been together for over six years. I wasn’t his first (I was his third), but we were both so young when we got together, we basically grew up at the same time.

I remember when Noah introduced me to his parents. They loved me immediately. They coo-ed over me. “So cute!” they told him. That felt good. I’ll miss them, too.

Mostly, our relationship was… well, you know how, when people ask about a how things are going and you say, “Great,” but you don’t really mean exceptional? You just mean that there’s nothing wrong. Noah was very stable; considerate but not particularly affectionate, dependable but not passionate.

I mean, I had my little issues. His diet, for one thing. Noah loves candy. That always bothered me. He wasn’t heavy. In fact, Noah’s a skinny guy. But he was always looking for the next gummy bear the way a less moral man might keep an eye out for floozies. It irritated me. It wasn’t a serious threat to the health of the relationship or anything. But it was the one way Noah was inconsiderate, and because his sensitivity was my favorite of his qualities, that unwillingness to think about my needs bothered me just a bit.

Still, over-all, Noah was great to me. He was protective, but not in some annoying, macho way. And tender. I liked that a lot. I guess I’d always known we wouldn’t go the distance. Relationships that start when you’re so young almost never do. But I fell into a rhythm, I got comfortable, and I guess I let myself be lulled into a false sense of security.

Then, a few weeks ago, I could tell he was just not holding on to me quite so tightly. I thought about it a lot, of course. I suspected there was someone else. I wondered if I was being pushed out. But there didn’t seem to be any evidence. I just started feeling like I was …I don’t know, dangling there, somehow.

And the more I thought about it, the worse it got. Pretty soon I was hanging by a thread. His parents, who’d been so supportive at first, turned on me so quickly it shocked me.

“I think it’s time,” they’d tell him. I was right there!

His dad was the worst. Noah’s mom would just leave the room whenever the topic of our relationship came up. Like she wanted to wash her hands of the whole thing. That stung. But his dad was really in his face, actively trying to pull us apart. I don’t think I’ll ever fully forgive his dad. And the way Noah just let his dad talk to him like that, and never stood up for me… I thought I’d never be able to forgive him, either. But then…

See, it all came to a head the earlier tonight when his dad was getting in his face again.

“But it hurts!” Noah said. See? That was the kind of sensitivity I depended on. But now it had all turned to selfishness. No concern for me whatsoever.

“We won’t do it if it hurts. It can wait a little while. Maybe tomorrow night.” His dad said this in a completely calm voice. Like postponing a breakup for a single day was some great mercy.

“Okay,” Noah said. I was in agony. He was just accepting this one day delay without a word of protest? I couldn’t believe it!

I should have been outraged. Such an obvious attack on my pride should have motivated me to break it off first. I know that now. But it just made me more desperate, more clingy. Pathetic, I know.

Then his dad said, “Oh, I have an idea!”

My hopes fell. Brainstorming about our break-up and he’d had a eureka moment. How could it get any worse?

“What?” Noah asked his dad. And there was an eagerness in his voice that shook me to the core.

“Hold on,” his dad said, and ran out of the room.

He came back a moment later holding an ice cube. Both of us were confused.

“Lean your head back,” his dad told him. Then he used the ice to numb Noah.

It’s strange, because the cold didn’t just prepare him for the breakup. It calmed me down, too. This was happening, I told myself, happening right now, but somehow it didn’t bother me as much anymore.

Then his dad took a piece of string and looped it next to me, then around behind me, and then back around to the front. He gently moved the string back and forth until it slid up above me. Maybe it was just because of the ice, but this reminded me of the tenderness his dad had shown back when I first appeared on the scene. Despite all his calls for our separation, his dad was acting like he cared again. I couldn’t feel much, but it felt good, in its own strange way. In fact, it almost tickled.
Then his dad twisted the string in front of Noah’s face and pulled the ends in opposite directions, first very gently to get his hands a few inches apart, then one quick tug.

And, just like that, we were through. There may have been a sound, but I was so surprised I honestly can’t remember if it was a pop or a bam or a squelching or just silence.

Next thing you know, I was in free fall. There’s always that moment, right after a breakup, when you’re just untethered, spinning and bewildered. For me, it was very brief.

I hit bottom fast. But, to my surprise, I felt whole. I was different, but the same. Complete, but separate. We had ended. I persisted. Frankly, I still can’t wrap my mind around it. Maybe I’m still grieving. I don’t know. But that wasn’t the end of the breakup.

His dad picked me up and set me down on the bathroom counter, right in front of Noah. It gave me a whole new perspective on him. Noah wasn’t sad, and that should have hurt me. A lot. But he looked shocked, and I could identify with that.

Then Noah smiled and examined the new gap between his teeth where I’d been just seconds before. His smile grew a little, and his eyes, already wide from the speed of the breakup, warmed up as though someone had stuck needles in them and injected them with pure joy.

“Oh my gosh!” he shouted, his voice cracking on the “oh,” with the “gosh” bursting out like an untied balloon filled with awe.

And he was so happy, so overjoyed, so beautiful that I couldn’t hold a grudge. I forgave him. I forgive him and I love him.

When the tooth fairy slips me out from under Noah’s pillow and flies me off to whatever’s next, I’ll go away happy.

GOP's Debt Ceiling Platform: "Screw Everybody"

2011-07-22T23:58:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the debt ceiling debates with growing horror. A few months back, John Dickerson, senior political correspondent for Slate Magazine, laid out the narrative he expected we'd see in this debate. First, he predicted, thing would look tense. Then, both sides would say they'd reached an impasse. Then the President would sit both sides down and cajole them to hammer out a deal. Then they'd storm out and say the two sides had never been further apart. They'd continue this act in public while the real negotiations went on in private in order to strengthen their hands, and at the last minute we'd have a deal.

That's the way it went down with the last budget negotiations, and it seemed like this political kabuki would play out that way this time, as well.

And it still could...

...except that something feels very different this time. Republicans were scared of taking the blame for a government shutdown. They were still haunted by the ghosts of Gingrich past. This time, it seems the only ghost that bothers them is the ghost of Obama future. Mitch McConnel, the Senate Minority Leader, said, "My first priority is the defeat of President Obama." He's the one who seems to be the most reasonable Republican at the table. John Boehner, Speaker of the House, looks like he's going to deal one minute, then looks like he's going to get neutered by his caucus, then turns around and says he won't budge. Eric Cantor, House Majority Whip, seems like he's either focused on causing a government default, or on taking John Boehner's job, and, luckily for him, those might come about simultaneously.

Now, I'm no economist, so I won't weigh in on just how bad it might be if we default. There's a range of predictions by the experts. When there is a range (as with Global Warming), skeptics say, "See, there's no perfect consensus, so let's not worry about it." These folks do not seem swayed by the fact that all the predictions are bad. I haven't come across a single economist who says, "Let's default. It'll be grand!"

Many Americans (a minority, but a sizable one), favor defaulting. They think this is some kind of principled stand. I'm staling a metaphor from Emily Bazelon, but this is not a fiscally responsible, fiscally conservative, or even moral principled stand. These people are not saying, "Let's spend less." We've gone out and run up the credit card bill already. Now, when the bill comes due and the only alternatives are to make that call and ask for a higher credit limit or to declare bankruptcy, they are saying, "Let's rip up that credit card bill! That'll show 'em!" I don't know what moral universe those people were raised in, but I was taught that not paying your bills was at the very least an irresponsible act, and not doing it when you have the money is outright immoral.

And we do have the money! No one can dispute that we are capable of paying these bills. The debt is growing, but that means we need to re-examine two things: Money in, and money out. That's a worthwhile conversation to have. But we do have the money. So refusing to pay our bills should not be an option.

A majority of Americans believe this. But that might not matter. In this game of chicken, it looks increasingly like Republicans are more than willing to accelerate into a head-on collision. The polite explanation for this is that they are too dogmatic. That might not seem polite, but that's what's been coming from conservative pundits. They point out that the GOP is too wedded to anti-tax dogma, too hemmed in by Grover Norquists' pledge, too beholden to the Tea Party wing, to consider revenue increases of any kind. That not coming from liberals like me. That's coming from conservatives like Ben Stein, David Brooks, and even Norquist himself, who went out of his way to try to give Republicans some cover by letting them know that closing tax loopholes wouldn't violate his pledge. Many conservatives (who aren't elected officials) are just as worried about the GOP politicians' intransigence as I am.

I took that as a good sign. See, I was under the cynical misconception that money ruled Washington. I thought, as we came down to the wire, wealthy GOP donors would get on the phone and say, "Look, Representative X, I appreciate that you're trying to protect that windfall I get from the Bush tax cuts. And I really love what the low corporate tax rate does for my company's bottom line. I have a good laugh every time you smile at the camera and call me a 'job creator' while I send American jobs overseas. You and I, we're on the same page. But Mr. Congressman, you have to understand, I have a lot of money in the stock market. A lot. Stocks and Bonds. I don't want to pay higher taxes any more than anybody else does, but I stand to lose a lot more from a government default that tanks the bond market, then the stock market, than I do from a tax increase. I didn't get to where I am without being able to do simple math. So say that you won't bend and screw as many poor people as you can, but, in the end, make sure the government doesn't default, or I won't be able to throw that fundraiser for you in September."

Every time a conservative pundit came out in favor of a deal, I assumed these calls were being made. And maybe they are. And maybe, after Obama and the Democrats give up on everything their party holds dear, that will happen.

But I'm starting to doubt it. Maybe the kabuki is really good. But we've entered into the danger zone. If a plan were to come out right now, it still might be too late to get it through both houses of Congress and onto the President's desk in time to calm the markets. Which means those wealthy donors aren't swaying their representatives fast enough. This makes me even more cynical. Because if money doesn't move Washington, what does? Oh yeah. Maybe it's the thing that can't be reported politely by conservative pundits.

I don't think anti-tax dogma tells the whole story. I don't think loyalty to the Tea Party does, either. I'm staring to think it's all about power. The Republicans were canny to recognize that they had the President over a barrel. He can't afford a default on his watch. Unemployment is the best chance their weak field of presidential candidates have. So they knew they could bleed all kinds of concessions before striking a deal. President Obama told Eric Cantor, "Don't call my bluff, Eric." Now, maybe this was simply the weakest, lamest thing a president has ever said. Maybe a man as smart and educated as President Obama doesn't know that you shouldn't announce when you're bluffing, but he is and he did and he'll get called. Social programs will be slashed. The economy will take a hit. The poor will suffer. The middle class will shrink. But the debt ceiling will be raised, the Republicans will call it a win, and Obama will live to fight another day.

Or maybe there is a bill he would veto. Maybe he's not really bluffing. And now, the only way for Republicans to find out is to push through some truly draconian bill like Cut, Cap, and Balance (the exact same Republicans who, under Bush, never cut, never capped, and never balanced) and see if he blinks. Maybe this isn't kabuki after all. Maybe this is theater of a more realist variety. Chekov once told Shchukin, "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it must absolutely go off." Perhaps the rifle is not the default, but the bluff. Now it is loaded and hanging on the wall, and by August 2nd it must be discharged in someone's face.

And this is what scares me. Because if it's not about money, if it really is about power, then all the donors can make all the phone calls and it won't matter as long as GOP politicians adhere to McConnel's number one priority. Maybe they really do want to test Obama's willingness to be a one-term president by giving him an impossible choice: Either betray everything you believe in to get the ceiling raised, or let the country default. Maybe they've done the math as well, and have calculated that even if the country defaults, they will come out slightly ahead in the lose-lose. Sure, our economy will crater, and even their supporters will be angry with them, but as long as they'll be more angry with the President, it's worth it. If that's the case, if they are really willing to rip up the credit card bill and declare bankruptcy just to win the next election, we are all in big trouble.

Because it's not just a lose-lose for Obama. It's not just a lose-lose for the people counting on a Social Security check, or the people who depend on the programs Obama will be forced to cut to satisfy GOP demands. If Republican officials are willing to enter into a lose-lose that includes the wealthy, they're really saying "Screw America. We just want the White House and both houses of Congress." And those are the last people we should want there.

Anonymous Wins an Award!

2011-07-16T00:49:00.000-07:00

Remember when I blogged about how one of my students got a poem published anonymously? (here) Well guess what! She entered the Kay Snow Writing Contest... and won! 1st Place! She said I could brag about her again. Who has two thumbs and is the proudest teacher on the internets tonight? This guy!

Parenting, Halo: Reach, and Philosophy

2011-07-14T22:24:00.000-07:00

Today I posted this picture of Noah and I on Facebook with the caption: My favorite video game buddy.

One of my favorite former students asked, "Is getting your Halo kill ratio up really exposing your son to the kind of philosophical depth that he'll need to think deeply and appreciate the finer aspects of life?"

I explained that, though it might not have a lot of philosophical depth, it will teach him a lot about how to behave in a philosophical debate. What philosophers should learn from Halo: Reach:

-If possible, go for the (figurative) backstab.

-If they see your argument coming, go for the (figurative) headshot.

-If those don't work, throw (rhetorical) grenades and hope to take the other guy down with you.

Noah will be fully prepared to major in philosophy like his parents. But we hope he majors in engineering or chemistry because, let's face it, we were philosophy majors and are counting on him for a comfortable retirement.

What does he want to do when he grows up? Wait for it... Wait for it... Design video games.

Fun with Words from Twitter, Part II

2011-07-14T00:08:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago (wow, has it been that long?) I posted an idea I thought I might use in the poetry class I'm teaching. I made lists of the nouns and verbs I found on my Twitter news feed with the intention of making a found-poem out of them, then had the students do the same with their Twitter/Facebook/Myspace (okay, not even the kids use Myspace anymore. Google Plus? Too soon). I wrote mine while the students worked on theirs. The lesson was a hit. Here's what I came up with:

8 Hours of Twitter

In my Newsfeed
Butterflies sing commandments.
Cyberpunks apply for immigration,
And farts retweet pain.

Accountants weigh corruption.
Insects transform islands.
Families prolong their vacations in sandboxes,
While cookies threaten leadership.

Photos forget portraits.
Music gropes for affairs.
Paper-dolls tote cancer.
And sluts prefer reading.

All the babble googles gibberish,
While dementors smooch sleep.

Fun with Words from Twitter

2011-06-27T23:01:00.000-07:00

When I sat down to do some writing tonight, I thought I'd get a little help from the various folks tweeting using the #amwriting hashtag. I asked for each person to give me their favorite verb, or the first one to come to mind. Only one generous soul offered; she gave me "Smooch." I was going to follow up by asking for a list of nouns, but one fellow had already tweeted "#amwriting shit" and "#amwriting gibberish," so I decided he was offering those before I'd even requested them. It seems the folks on #amwriting today are actually, well, writing, so I didn't get any other replies (yet). Instead, I scrolled through my own newsfeed and copied down two lists, the verbs and nouns that jumped out at me from each tweet. I avoided proper nouns, generally, but somehow two slipped through: "Starbucks" and "Shaq." If someone has a theory about why these two words seemed like common nouns, I'd love to hear it.

These lists turned out to be really fun to play with. As you scroll through them, you'll notice that a huge percentage of the words from either list can serve as both nouns or verbs. I placed them in the lists as they were used over the last few hours. Two words that made both lists ("Retweet" and "Google") were used both ways. Two others ("Fart" and "Sleep") were used once, but in such a way that I couldn't tell if they were being used as nouns or verbs. It's great English-teacher-geek-fun to plug each word into this formula and see how many work: A _______/ To ___________.

Also, as you read through the lists, your brain will naturally want to connect the words and make a story out of them. On the one hand, this is a marvelous demonstration of just how creative the human brain is. On the other hand, it illustrates the way we can deceive ourselves because we're compelled to create a narrative where none exists. These were all from different tweets, and even when two are connected, a reader couldn't possibly imagine how without context. For example, the noun "Dementor" is included because I follow a very funny person who tweets as though he is Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series. (Or maybe he really is. Who am I to judge?) But could you guess which of these words went with his tweet mentioning Dementors? Try to guess. Similarly, One of my verbs is "shampoo." Not only does it meet the aforementioned noun/verb test, but it was connected to a word on the noun list. Can you guess which one? I'll put the answers at the bottom.

I'm teaching a class on poetry a couple days a week for the Upward Bound Program, and I think I'll have them do an exercise with these lists. Feel free to use them, or the same activity, as you see fit. After all, these words aren't mine. Enjoy!

Verbs:

Encroach
Subjugate
Smooch
Lock
Gather
Meet
Survive
Evacuate
Hate
Threaten
Prefer
Veto
Retweet
Run
Tote
Sing
Strike
Swoon
Prolong
Fart
Sleep
Transform
Accuse
Squish
Hold
Apply
Google
Storm
Propose
License
Argue
Cancel
Fool
Assure
Send
Throw
Yell
Spoof
Teach
Model
Fear
Weigh
Balance
Thank
Show
Shampoo
Save
Forget
Grope
Still
Listen

Nouns:

Dryer
Shit
Gibberish
Whiskey
Expectations
Security
Retweet
Debt
Cheese
Cookies
Family
Starbucks
Gun
Cyberpunk
Karma
Ass
Defense
Fart
Sleep
Patience
Accountant
Butterflies
Portrait
Affair
Flake
Immigration
Law
Google
Shaq
Photo
Horror
Compilation
Summer
Reading
Lithium
Reason
Dosage
Concerns
Sandbox
Paper-doll
Noise
Community
Corruption
Work
Island
Commandment
Lyrics
Babble
Mug
Vacation
Cancer
Bid
Pain
Leadership
Metaphor
Crotch
Insect
Slut
Dementor
Music
Service

Answers: "Dementor" went with "Sluts", and "Shampoo" went with "Crotch".

@Lord_Voldemort7 tweeted:
"Dear Sluts, Nobody wants to see your public groping. The only way I'll support your PDA is if you're french kissing a dementor."

@iimaniDavid tweeted:
"'People who speak in mixed metaphors should shampoo my crotch' -- Jack Nicholson in the film As Good As It Gets"

Learning to Read Like a Writer

2011-06-19T02:08:00.000-07:00

[I've been given a opportunity to write a piece for amwriting.org, a blog for and by writers who follow the #amwriting hash-tag on Twitter. My piece will appear on the 30th. Since it's a bit of advice for writers, I should also take some other advice I give students: Whenever possible, get some fresh eyes on your work. So, here's the piece I plan to submit. Please let me know about anything I should fix, cut, or improve before this hits a site with a broader readership while bearing my name under the title. Even if it's just a little typo, let me know in the comments section below. This is the second draft, after some great help from a couple of writer friends. There's still time for more tweaks, though, so keep 'em coming!]

Here’s a secret writers need to learn in order to master their craft: Writers need to learn to read. They don’t need to consume all the books on the New York Times best sellers list just to see which kind of monster is producing the most sales. Writers need to learn to read differently from readers. Writers need to understand that reading is part of practicing.

Part of my job as a high school English teacher consists of teaching students to become better readers by teaching them to identify the purpose of their reading. Are they reading for pleasure? Are they seeking information? Are they analyzing an argument in order to be persuaded or to refute the author’s position? Good readers can do these things. And that’s enough.

But it’s not enough for writers. Writers are artists, and artists need to be able to examine the works of their peers and betters in a different way.

Consider, as an analogy, film. When one of my sixteen-year-old students goes to see the newest big Hollywood blockbuster at the Cineplex this summer, he is satisfied by the experience. As a viewer, he was looking for entertainment, and the movie delivered. Done and done. Now, the cinephile goes to the movie theater and watches the same film (not anything high-brow, but something competently-made) and is also entertained. But she thinks about the structure of the story, the characters, the setting, the themes: She is, in short, a reader of film as text, and because she can do all the things we try to teach good readers to do when they pick up a novel, she gets a lot more out of the movie. She does not, however, come out of the theater talking about the tracking and handy-cam shots, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, side lighting and back lighting, fast cuts and slow fades. These were the techniques that gave the movie its punch and made it satisfying, but they aren’t her business.

They are the business of the movie critic. The critic studied film back in college. She can not only tell you that The Conversation is her favorite Francis Ford Coppola movie, but she can explain why in great detail. She watches movies for a purpose, but it’s not to be entertained or to be informed or to be persuaded. At least, those aren’t enough. She watches movies because it’s her business, her livelihood, to evaluate them based on her vast knowledge of the way they are made, as well as what they make her think and how they make her feel.

And then there’s the film director. He watches movies differently than the casual viewer, the cinephile, and the critic. He watches to learn. For him, watching movies is part of his artistic education. It’s practice.

Writers need to do the same thing. When we pick up a novel, we can remember why we fell in love with books when we were young. We can enjoy being transported to new places, getting to know new people, and absorbing new ideas. We can even evaluate the works in the same way critics do. But we cannot afford to stop there. We need to read differently. For us, every choice of simple or complex vocabulary, every choice about following the basic rules or breaking them, every choice about revealing the minutia about a character or hiding it serves as a lesson which will make us better writers. This is because we recognize all these things for what they are: Choices. Choices made by writers. Writers just like us, only better. Admitting that last part is absolutely essential to becoming better writers ourselves. As long as we hold fast to the same choices we’ve always made, believing we are God’s gift to our readers, then not only is our writing a waste of time, but our reading is, too. Arrogant writers aren’t just obnoxious; they’re missing out on vital time to practice.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, talks about a group of psychologists who studied violin students in Germany. They divided the students up into three groups based on ability as determined by their teachers, then tried to figure out what made the great ones great, and the mediocre ones mediocre. What they found was that the great ones practiced more. Not just a little bit. A lot more. In fact, they found a magic number necessary to become a virtuoso: 10,000 hours of practice. At a good clip, that takes ten years. They also didn’t find too much deviation from that. None of the virtuosos got by with very little practice, and none of the mediocre violinists practiced for 10,000 hours and remained mediocre.

Then, the psychologist began looking into other fields, and they found that the same magic number held up in every endeavor they examined. 10,000 hours. Athletes. Computer programmers. Ballerinas. Composers. And yes, writers.

The quality of those hours matters as much as the quantity, and that’s why writers need to change the way they read; it’s the difference between 10,000 hours of entertainment versus 10,000 hours of practice. One of Gladwell’s examples of 10,000 hours is the early Beatles before the British Invasion, when they were just a struggling rock band trying to find gigs. They worked in strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany and would often play for eight hours straight to non-English speaking audiences and compete for attention with the strippers. Not only did this give them a chance to compose songs that are probably on your ipod right now, but they also had to learn dozens, probably hundreds of covers, and not just of rock and roll songs but of Jazz standards and other genres. What Gladwell doesn’t discuss is the influence of the music Lennon and McCartney were listening to, both before the Beatles formed and during this time. I would bet good money that these guys were not only reading the crowds to see what was working, but they were also listening carefully to the music on the radio and on the albums they bought, and listening in a different way than you or I. They were reading the music to become better musicians.

My preferred example (as a die-hard NBA fan), would be a basketball player. If a basketball player practices his shot for 10,000 hours, he will get to the point where he can sink his free-throws a very high percentage of the time, he’ll know where he can hit the highest percentage of three-pointers, and he’ll make some very tricky moves under the hoop on a drive. And he will lose. Why? Because he didn’t spend some of that time reading the scouting report about, and watching tape of, his prospective opponents. His 10,000 hours were spent becoming an oddity, a guy who could mop the floor with you at HORSE, and in its own way that is becoming a virtuoso. But he won’t be a great basketball player, because he didn’t learn to read his opponents.

Sure, the analogy is imperfect. Writing is at once less collaborative (despite great writing communities like #amwriting, we do our work in isolation), and less competitive (we don’t go head-to head with another author or team of authors. It’s not a zero sum game. More good books can generate more readers.) Maybe we’re less like players watching tapes of their opponents to learn to beat them and more like players watching the greats to learn from them.

So pick up a copy of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games and learn from her choice to write the book not only in first person, but in the present tense. Crack open Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and learn from his choice to eschew dialogue tags and conventional punctuation, then follow up with All the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men to reassure yourself that it’s not a fluke that just happens to work brilliantly but a conscious and careful choice he’s not always bound by. Read Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and learn how a premise that seems doomed to be saccharine and trite becomes beautiful and powerful because of careful choices of characterization and intentional withholding.

Then go grab that guilty pleasure book on your nightstand. You know you have one. This is the huge hit by that debut novelist that fills you with rage when you read about the sales figures, and you grouse about it so publicly and with such vehemence that you can’t possibly admit how much you enjoyed the book yourself. Now, when you are flying through that weak prose, that thin characterization, or that awful adverb-filled dialogue attribution that makes you want to throw the book at the wall, stop and figure out why you don’t. Sure, it’s fine to identify the things you don’t like about the book. Note those choices so you will make different ones. But also acknowledge that there’s a reason that book is in your hands, and other copies are in a lot of other hands at the same time.

If you’re willing to do that, to learn from your betters (and yes, that hack on the New York Times best sellers list is your better, at least in some way), then reading becomes part of your practice time, part of the 10,000 hours you need to rack up in order to become a true master of the art. Writing is practicing your shot. Reading is watching tape. You must do both to be great.

Why Does the Right Hate Obama So Much? Part 2: Ultra-Nationalism vs. American Exceptionalism

2011-06-14T02:59:00.000-07:00

I asked for Conservatives to explain the seeming-hatred directed at President Obama from the Right in this country, and I got some great, detailed, thought-provoking responses. I could quibble about little things (Is it Obama’s fault that Congress choose to pass a law that essentially gives law-making power to the Executive branch? That seems more like a good reason to detest a Congress that has been consistently eroding its own constitutional authority for over a hundred years.) but I think it’s safe to say that the most fundamental objection to Obama stems from the belief that he does not ascribe ardently enough to the notion of American exceptionalism. (Correct me if that’s not the fundamental concern.)

I’m still not aware of any particular policy decisions which definitively prove this theory. Sure, Democrats are always for being multilateralists when they make use of organizations like NATO or the U.N. There’s a pretty distinct double-standard on these groups when it comes to the way they are employed by Presidents of different parties. Beyond those, I’m not sure what Obama has officially done. But I am aware of the things he’s said and written, and I think words matter and should fall into the “actions” category I asked for. These words also relate directly to the question of Obama’s interactions with our allies. One of the charges is that Obama has lowered our standing with them. I tried to find some data to back up this claim. It turns out that our standing, at least as measured by polling, has dramatically improved under Obama, at least in the numbers I could find. In the year he took office, we made dramatic gains. Check out page 5 of this report. A more recent article details the improvement based on polling data throughout the world. Part of this might simply be a reaction to the global antipathy toward Bush, a world-wide sigh of relief. But we should also be willing to consider the possibility that Obama’s speeches made in other countries, and his comments regarding our own which have been broadcast around the world, have increased our soft power, something Conservatives like Donald Rumsfeld reluctantly acknowledged is absolutely essential to defeating terrorism and undermining tyrants around the globe.

Take, for example, the situation between the U.S., Britain, and Argentina regarding the Falklands, pointed out by one of the commenters. Despite the anti-Obama slant to the article, it can’t identify any actual harm done by the Obama administration’s advocacy of diplomatic talks between the British and Argentine government over the islands. Perhaps it will tick off the British, but they remain among our strongest allies in the world and like Obama a lot more than American Conservatives do. But look at the flip side. Chavez is a nutjob. He’s on TV in his country for four hours or more a day, ranting about how the evil imperialists in America only want to destroy Argentina. He gets up at the U.N. and calls Bush names to increase his popularity back home. Now he’s been undermined in the eyes of his people. We’re not crazy. We’re also not capitulating or “tossing our allies under the bus as appeasement.” Chavez didn’t get the Falklands. He didn’t even get a sit-down with the British. He was just made to look foolish.

Or consider the case with our relationship with Israel. Obama has taken a beating for saying that negotiations related to the two-state solution should start with the pre-1967 borders and then be worked out in a series of land swaps. This is exactly what the Bush roadmap said, too. The problem is that the Israelis, though desiring the pre-1967 borders as a starting point and demanding land swaps in order to maintain control over Jerusalem, didn’t want their ultimate bargaining position stated aloud. They wanted to demand more, then work to the place that Obama announced. As someone who’s been involved in formal negotiations (of the contract variety, not the peace-in-the-middle-east kind) I understand not wanting to have your final position made public. I also understand that the President is rightly frustrated with the Israeli government’s continued construction of new settlements which the Israelis know they will just demolish later, and which rile up the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab word. Putting pressure on the Israelis might piss them off, but it won’t really diminish the ultimate settlement because the tough negotiating will be about the land swaps themselves, and they already knew we expected those as part of the Bush roadmap. Obama might have hurt himself with Conservatives, both in Israel and in the U.S., but he didn’t really give anything to the Palestinians and he undermined the Jihadist Imams who want to paint Israel and the U.S. with the same brush when Israel is doing things that the U.S. has long opposed. Creating a little political distance between ourselves and Israel is in our national interest, especially if it can be done so inexpensively; Israel didn’t really lose anything, Palestine didn’t really gain anything. The only losers were terrorists and Obama’s ratings in Florida. I’d call that a gutsy move. The Israeli ambassador might say that our nations’ relationship is in the worst shape it’s been in in 35 years, but at the end of the day Israel is still completely dependent on us for their security (their soldiers might be bad-asses, but they are bad-asses holding American guns) and we will continue to provide them with all the necessary security guarantees. Again, a net increase in America’s soft power.

But did these increases in our soft power need to come at the expense of our projected notion of American exceptionalism? Perhaps. It depends on what we mean by that. I think that might be the crux of the conservative antipathy towards Obama. If I am understanding the conservative definition of American exceptionalism correctly, conservatives would prefer a weaker America as long as it fits into a very specific definition of “American,” to a stronger America which fits the definition of “American” actually held by the majority of its people.

My friend who comments as Green Globule writes that conservatives are “not looking across the ocean for a better model.” This is ironic, since the term “exceptional” was first applied to America by Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman. If he’s not a guy from across the ocean who is responsible for this particular model, then perhaps credit should go to the first people to use the phrase “American exceptionalism.” That would be The American Communist Party of the 1920s, who used it to describe why they thought the Great Leap Forward would take a long time to occur here. Only, their definition isn’t really the modern Conservative variant, because they believed it was our “natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions” that would postpone the working class from rising up and offing the rich. When modern Conservatives talk about American exceptionalism, I don’t think they’re talking about our coal deposits or the fact that we don’t self-identify as working-class and aristocrats. Green Globule points to our freedom of speech and our right to bear arms. On these grounds, I think Obama fares very well. Though he talked about closing background check loopholes to prevent the mentally ill from getting guns in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting (any talk about guns from a Democrat raises red flags with some), he is also the first modern Democratic President, to my knowledge, to acknowledge the second amendment is an individual rather than a corporate right. That is huge, coming from a legal scholar who could tell you every argument from those who say it’s a corporate right based on the placement of a comma, and who often avoids politically impossible questions by laying out both sides, slowly, methodically, until the questioner gives up. Obama went out on a limb to say that, angering some gun control folks on his left, and has expanded the right to carry guns into national parks (a particularly big deal in Alaska, where much of the state is National Parks and where you really want to be armed). So if American exceptionalism is the right to bear arms, Obama should be in pretty good standing with Conservatives.

And what about free speech (my personal favorite of our rights)? I think this, along with the other rights guaranteed in the first amendment, is actually the most important element of what makes America great. I think the FCC should be allowed to regulate frequencies so my remote control car doesn’t show up on my radio and so my radio doesn’t control my remote control car. Beyond that, I’d get rid of it altogether. Want to burn a flag? Fine. It’s a stupid protest. It doesn’t tell me what you’re opposed to, specifically. Do you hate CIA intervention in Pakistan, or hate cotton? Mostly it just tells me you don’t like my country, which makes me less inclined to listen to what you have to say. But I love that we have the right to do it. Want to call the most conservative news network “fair and balanced”? Go right ahead, and if people believe that then maybe they’ll also believe I can bench 500 lbs., I’ve climbed Mt. Everest twice, and I have a credit score that makes me worthy of a loan of ten billion dollars. I love, love, love free speech. As an English teacher, it’s my livelihood. Without it, I’d be a propaganda teacher, and that doesn’t sound nearly as fun as my job. As a novelist, it’s my hobby. As a video game playing, novel reading, internet addicted movie buff, my life is pretty much free speech and sleep. So what has Obama done to diminish free speech? What has he done to diminish the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the freedom of religion? Tonight, at the first Republican debate, the candidates fell all over each other discussing Islam, with one candidate saying no Muslim would serve in his cabinet (at least not the kind of Muslim who would want to kill us) and another comparing Muslims to communists and Nazis. And which party has been at the forefront of the movement to censor the arts? Or to pass laws preventing flag burning (which later had to be overturned by the Supreme Court)? In fact, aside from protecting the rights of corporations to donate anonymously to campaigns (Scalia says Democracy is a full contact sport when it comes to signing petitions, and I agree, but apparently the anonymity of a political donation is part of its “speech”) how have Conservatives protected the freedom of speech better than Liberals? This might be part of a libertarian’s definition of American exceptionalism (and is the place where I’m most on board with libertarianism) but it cannot be the bedrock of modern Conservatives’ definition.

Is a Conservative’s definition of American exceptionalism based on our freedom from government intrusion into our lives? That depends on what you want to be free to do. If Brian wants to marry Larry, even if most Americans want these guys to have this right, even if the state can show no definitive reason why their marriage should be prevented which is not based in a particular religious ideology, even if Brian and Larry live in a different state that wants to give them permission to do so, it’s Conservatives who want the government to step in and tell them they can’t. And if a woman and her doctor decide she needs an abortion, Conservatives want the government to step in and stop that. In fact, when the Supreme Court says the government can’t stop that, Conservatives busy themselves passing state laws that tell the doctor he has to wait a period of time, show her an ultra-sound of the fetus, give her a lecture filled with demonstrably false information about the dangers of the procedure, and then complete the procedure before the delay they caused! Want to buy some marijuana for the pain from your chemotherapy? How about an OD on opiates because you’re in misery from an untreatable illness? No, the Conservative’s definition of American exceptionalism can’t be based strictly on freedom. Just some freedoms. The ones they like.

Maybe it’s based on our wealth. We are the richest nation in the world, in total terms. That means that we’re the richest people, on average. Of course, that is of great consolation to people who don’t know the difference between a median and a mode. But if you try to do anything to help more Americans enjoy that wealth, you are a socialist or a communist, a redistributor of wealth, an oppressor who makes slaves of the poor through the soft bigotry of low expectations. (Modern Conservatives do not like this kind of slavery. They did protect the other kind, though, because, as Green Globule points out, Conservatives “first concern is against new mistakes, especially those at the national level which are hardest to undo.” You know, like the 13 Amendment barring slavery. Somebody had to make sure we didn’t jump to that decision too hastily, right?) But some Conservatives are threatening to refuse to up the debt ceiling (in exchange for concessions to limit a woman’s liberty to get a Pap Smear at a Planned Parenthood, no less) and that is the single quickest way to make sure the U.S. is no longer the wealthiest nation in the world, so this can’t be the foundation for Conservatives’ definition of American exceptionalism, either. Oh, and if our wealth were the measure of American exceptionalism, Conservatives would feel lukewarm about Reagan, the first Bush, and Obama, hate George W. Bush, and their favorite President of the last thirty years would be Bill Clinton.

Or maybe it’s our military might. This strikes me as unlikely, since there’s a great deal of dispute within the Conservative movement about whether we should be isolationists, shoring up our military defenses, or neo-conservatives, flexing our military muscles abroad to protect our global interests. Regardless, Obama seems to have split the difference. He hasn’t over-extended the military the way the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict have, but did double-down on Afghanistan and has shown he’s perfectly willing to use the military in Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan. You can take issue with some of those choices (I certainly do), but I don’t see how he could generate such hatred by splitting the difference in the other side’s internal debate.

So, if it’s not our 1st or 2nd amendment rights, it’s not our freedom from government intrusion into our lives, it’s not our wealth, and it’s not our military might, what is the definition of American exceptionalism which Obama lacks? I have a theory.

I think the Conservative definition of American exceptionalism is tautological. In essence, they believe America is better because it’s America, and Americans are better because they’re American. Only, their definition of American is only the Conservative they see in the mirror. This can be pretty easily demonstrated. Conservatives do not like it when you point out that America has made mistakes. Liberals get pilloried for this. But ask a Conservative if the majority of Americans were right to cast a ballot for Barack Obama, and they’ll tell you it was a mistake, that we are “on the wrong track.” If you talk about how we were wrong when the CIA assassinated Allende, the democratically elected leader of Chile, they’ll call you unpatriotic. But the Bay of Pigs Fiasco? A Democrat’s mistake. The whole Constitution should be read from the floor of Congress because it’s perfect, right? Now, who wants to read that 3/5ths part?

My friend Derek wrote, “Conservatives hold America as a country and an ideal in the absolute highest regard. We do believe America is exceptional. We do believe in a Divine blessing on this nation. Therefore we reject anyone who would do any thing to diminish that exceptionalism as Obama has by apologizing for America…” First of all, even when I was a Christian, I found that notion of a Divine blessing abhorrent. The idea that God prefers Americans not only shows a lazy or willful misreading of scripture, but it’s offensive not just to people outside our borders, but to Christians here, too. It reminds me of those post-game interviews when the reporter stick the microphone in the face of the star of the winning team and he thanks God for the victory. Yeah, because God preferred your team. And you’ll lose next week because God is wishy-washy. If this is the bedrock of the Conservative definition of American exceptionalism, then that God prefers the country where one of the founding principles is that the government of that country shall establish no religion which might acknowledge His preference. That God is either very humble or quite stupid.

As for apologizing for America, Green Globule echoed this sentiment somewhat when he wrote, “When I read Dreams from my Father, the one thing I was looking for above all else was that he loved and respected this country and that he believed in it. I found nothing of the sort, and generally only the opposite.” Here’s the lynchpin of the difference between the Conservative definition of America and the Progressive’s: Obama is considered un-American because he points out that America isn’t perfect. That’s considered “apologizing for America.” I shouldn’t have to write this, but for an African American growing up in the 60s in America, the country wasn’t perfect. Men were being lynched for having skin the same color as his just when he was trying to figure out his racial identity. Acknowledging that doesn’t mean a person hates America, or is apologizing for it. Recognizing that fact, and many other negative facts about American history, is part and parcel of the Progressive’s definition of American exceptionalism: America keeps getting better! We started out with slavery written into our Constitution, but we got better. Women couldn’t vote, but we got better! Children had to work twelve hour shifts, seven days a week, in dangerous conditions, but (thanks to Big Government nanny-state regulations) we got better! Somebody else invented the automobile, but we built it cheaper, faster, and better! Somebody else made it into space first, but we got to the moon! We mistreated lots of different groups of our fellow Americans for a host of deplorable reasons, and we still do, but to diminishing degrees because we keep getting better! Hell, Democracy was invented by other people, and, Green Globule, they lived “across the ocean,” but they are dead and gone and we are still here making it better. And someday we will take gay marriage and some variation on national healthcare and we’ll just keep on getting better.

But…

But it’s not a fait accompli that we’ll just go on making it better. The single biggest threat to what really makes America great is the idea that our greatness is finished, that we don’t need to look across the ocean for new ideas to take and improve because we can just sit on our hands as Americans and God’s divine blessing will keep us on top. This, I think, is really at the heart of the hatred of Obama, and it’s also the origin, at its extreme, of the whole “Birthir” movement. It’s not that Obama was born in Hawaii and spent time overseas. McCain was born in Panama and nobody found that disqualifying. It’s that Obama is willing to look at other models and listen to other ideas. He’s not blinded by the kind of ultra-nationalism that says that everything foreign is inferior and suspect and probably evil. I may disagree with him on the conclusions he comes to about half of those ideas. I may even find some of his policies infuriating. But when I have to choose between Obama and someone who is trying to placate a constituency that sees any recognition of our country’s mistakes as a sign of a lack of patriotism and any idea from any other country as dismissible, I will choose him. Odds are, most Americans will make the same choice.

And maybe that’s a mistake. We do make those.

But I vote that we keep getting better.

Why Does the Right Hate Obama So Much?

2011-06-10T23:42:00.000-07:00

I don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I’m one of these wide-eyed, naïve, hopey-changey liberals. Fine. But if we can get past the obligatory name-calling, I really wish someone would explain it to me: Why do conservatives seem to regard the President of the United States with the kind of passionate spite normally reserved for pedophile clergy, genocidal dictators, and malarial mosquitoes?

The other day I got an offer from CafePress offering me free bumper stickers. I like free. With shipping and handling, it’s almost down to my price-range. So I clicked and looked at the “Humor: Political” stickers. What I found would have made a Fox News pundit blush. All the anti-Bush “Somewhere in Texas a Village is Missing its Idiot” stuff paled in comparison. It was like Obama sat in the front row and decided to heckle Don Rickles, with the occasional rebuttal tossed in by Michael Richards on his absolute worst day ever. Some examples: “A Taxpayer Voting for Obama is like a Chicken Voting for Col. Sanders” and “Who Would Have Thought the Biggest Threat to America would Be Our Own President?” Hilarious, right?

Now, people can slap whatever they want on their cars. You want to put a confederate flag on your bumper? Hey, they’re your slashed tires, buddy. Besides the free speech argument, I don’t expect bumper stickers to make nuanced policy arguments. If the colonists had only had a 3 by 8 inch sticker that had to be read by the guy on the horse behind them, the Declaration of Independence would have said, “Hey George! Next time we shove the tea up your ass!” But those colonists did have specific, clear, and demonstrable grievances. Those grievances related directly to the way the behavior of the British affected their daily lives. They didn’t just shout ad hominem attacks across the Atlantic.

So here’s my genuine question: Conservatives, what’s your beef? What has President Obama done to threaten America? What has he done that makes him as lethal to you as Col. Sanders is to chickens?

Please don’t tell me what you think Obama is. I am a firm believer that we are what we do. What has Obama actually done that inspires such hatred?

Some more ground-rules: I don’t believe conservatives are racists. Don’t prove me wrong.

Try and avoid knee-jerk ad hominem attacks. I enjoy some good smarm, but since I’m genuinely trying to understand, try to be factual with me.

Liberals, feel free to fact-check any claims made here, but let’s allow some conservatives to make a case. That’s the point after all.

And nobody mention Kool-Aid. It’s irritating. And don’t call Obama the messiah and think it’s sarcastic and clever. Only conservatives call him that. Liberals have plenty of disagreements with Obama’s policies. I could give you a pretty long list. But my quibbles are because he’s too centrist and too willing to compromise with a political Right.

I believe the Right hates him irrationally. Convince me I’m wrong about that. Tell me what he has done to you to earn your hatred. Help me understand.

James Henry

2011-06-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

I just heard the news that my friend, James Henry, passed away.

I met James at last summer's Oregon Writing Project at Willamette University. James was an amazing man in many ways. He was remarkably social, engaging everyone immediately with his warmth. He was so open that his humility took you by surprise; just when you felt you were starting to get to know this unassuming, kind man, he surprised you with the kind of detail most people would lead with, like the fact that he'd won a silver medal at the Paralympic Games in Barcelona. Walking down the streets of Salem on some of our writing field trips, Jim would run into a stunning number of friends. It seemed everyone knew him, and for good reason; James could make a friend in an instant, and then would maintain that friendship. He continued to correspond with me after the OWP, sending me some of his writing and critiquing mine. James was hit by a car while riding his bike some weeks ago, and suffered sever injuries. He was in a medically-induced coma, but, last I heard, it seemed like he was going to pull through, and I looked forward to many more years of friendship. I'm shaken by this sudden loss and surprised by how much Jim came to mean to me in such a short time. Here's a poem Jim read last summer at the OWP. I liked it so much that I had him email it to me, and now I'm so glad I did, so I can share this little treasure he gave me:

Disarmament

Because I have one arm, people stare.
Because people stare, they remember me.

Because I have one arm, swimming is difficult.
Through difficulty I’ve learned the patience of fish.

Because I have one arm, strangers ask how.
Because they ask, I turn strangers to friends.

Because I have one arm, people judge.
Because people judge, I don’t judge people.

Because I have one arm, some things are impossible.
Rather than quit, I master the possible.

Without my left arm, my body has limits.
My body has limits, not I.

--James Henry

Dirkus Circus, Love Children, Right-Wing Social Engineering, and Ska2oosh!

2011-05-28T03:23:00.000-07:00

kaytiethelion called me out in the comments to my last post for not posting frequently enough. First of all, that's the kind of complaint I love to hear. It's so much better than "Quit your bloggin', you loser!" Second, she’s right. I should be more regular in my posts. I could post the kinds of detritus that ends up in my tweets or Facebook status updates, but that’s not really the style I want to use in this space. Twitter is for microblogging. I want this site to be for longer pieces. Sometimes they’re too long, I admit. I call that “macroblogging.” The problem is that I'm trapped in a kind of choice paralysis; what to rant about this week? There are so many great topics.

For one thing, when is it okay to root for an unstoppable German machine vs. a group of united allies? When that machine is Dirk Nowitzki, and those allies include a guy with his initials tattooed on his arms and the phrase "Chosen One" on his back.

As I told my uncle, a Dallas resident, I usually don't root for teams from Texas (the state that gave us both Dubya and Dr. Phil), but I can't help but admire the Dirkus Circus, and you've gotta' love Jose Barea, the five-foot tall Puerto Rican who is tearing up guys twice his size on both ends of the court. I rooted for Miami the last time these two met in the NBA finals, because D-wade was only in his third year in the league and was already a joy to watch. Now I'm old and I want Jason Kidd (who is about to start collecting Medicare and is blocking shots and hitting 3s better than ever) to make being old and bald halfway respectable again. Oh, and as much as Dirk is putting on a clinic on the court, he's also schooling everybody inside and outside of the NBA on humility, something that's in short supply when too much talent crowds it out in South Beach. Go Mavs!

But I'm not going to blog about that.

Not when there's an absolute rash of political sex scandal bursting out everywhere. DSK (nicknamed "The Great Seducer" in France, a country that really should know a thing or two about that) has shown that his seduction techniques leave a bit to be desired. Maria Shriver has learned that standing by your man when serious allegations come out about his sexual behavior can sure come back to haunt you when that kid at your son's birthday party has an Austrian accent. And John Edwards is learning that cheating on your wife while she has cancer might be a bigger political no-no for Democrats than Republicans (right, Newt?) but using campaign funds to pay to keep it a secret is a bi-partisan violation of the law. Oh, and we're all learning to KEEP IT IN YOUR TROUSERS! It does beg the serious question, though. Does the need for ego gratification that drives these guys into politics compel them to reach out and touch someone just because one wife seems a bit bland compared to crowds of adoring fans chanting your name, or is it the kind of narcissism that leads them to believe they can do a good job telling lots of people what to do that also makes them think they can get away with any behavior, not matter how unethical and illegal?

But I'm not going to blog about that.

Why not? Because the tabloid spectacle of love children is a distraction from the election that is starting to cohere on the Republican side of the fence, and there are some genuine policy issues that are rising to the surface there which may change the political landscape for years to come. Way back in 2010, the Republicans made great hay about the fact that Obamacare would make changes to Medicare. This freaked-out Tea-Partiers who were concerned that having a socialist in the White House might threaten their government-run defined benefit insurance plan. Enter Paul Ryan, who proposed a plan that would flip the defined benefit plan into a defined contribution plan, and one that would not keep pace with medical inflation. Oops. Well, 2010 was a long time ago, so maybe they forgot how much mileage they got out of that attack. Surprise: The Democrats didn't. When they saw that a question about how a candidate WOULD HAVE voted on the Ryan Plan sunk her in a New York congressional election, they quickly put the Ryan Plan to a floor vote in the Senate so that every Republican has had to take a stand on the plan. Oh, and the Republicans can't just run away from it. Newt Gingrich generously demonstrated why not by calling the plan "right-wing social engineering." This is what we call a Kinsley gaffe; the accidental utterance of a politically unpopular truth. The beating Gingrich took probably pushed Republicans to vote for the plan, and the beating they'll take for that will be even more unpleasant. The lesson both sides are learning: Don't mess with Medicare. Even if it's unsustainable and will bankrupt us all, you let it slide. Heaven help us.

But I'm not going to blog about that.

Not when Sarah Palin may re-enter the race. Can you imagine the possibility that someone who doesn't really have a handle on the issues but loves attention would tease the country with the prospect of running, eat up tons of airtime, then pull out at the last minute and reap huge financial rewards via all that attention for not really doing anything at all? Well, Donald Trump may be out of the race, but Sarah Palin seems like she might be in. She's moving closer to her daughter, but that means she's also moving closer to an airport, which, of course, means she's going to run for president. It's hard to predict which Republican nominee will lose to Obama in 2012, but a Palin entry would sure make the nearly inevitable defeat a lot more entertaining to watch than a contest between Pawlenty and Romney or that other guy or that other guy, so political reporters are drooling. Me, I'm waiting to see just how long she can go before talking to a reporter, live and on camera, who does not work for Fox News. Furthermore, how long will it take before people start to get suspicious about a candidate who believes she's capable of being President but is too afraid to talk to people armed with nothing but microphones and tough questions? And will any of her primary opponents point that out in order to save their own necks when things get desperate for them, or could she make it all the way to the general before Bidden or some other not-the-candidate calls her out for hiding from reality in Reality TV?

But I'm not going to blog about that, either.

Why not? I'm going to bed, because I'm taking my son to see Kung Fu Panda 2 tomorrow, and that promises a level of awesomeness none of these things can hope to compete with.

It's Thunder and It's Lightning

2011-05-07T05:18:00.000-07:00

We went and saw Thor today. Predictable? Yes. Fun? If you're a comic book geek and mythology fan, absolutely! I do have a gripe, though. Back when I heard they were going to make the movie, I immediately thought they should include the song "It's Thunder and It's Lightning" in the soundtrack. Then, every time I heard the song, I thought about how smoothly they could weave it into the story. Or just use it as a final credits track. No dice. Well, enjoy it!

The Venn Diagram of Obama Conspiracy Theorists

2011-05-03T23:34:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about how the killing of bin Laden complicated things for conspiracy theorists, especially those who hate our President. Of course, the simplest explanation is that Barack Obama is an American and did give the kill order on Osama bin Laden. That's what all the evidence points to. But conspiracy theorists aren't big fans of evidence. In fact, if evidence goes against their preferred theory, rather than simply dimiss it, they often absorb it into the conspiracy itself; every piece of evidence to the contrary becoming fake evidence which proves the conspiracy. Only, in this case, the ideological underpinnings of the conspiracy are the problem. Folks who hate our President often claim that he's not tough enough on terrorists, and this plays into their belief that he's not only a foreigner, but a secret Muslim who is probably in league with terrorists. So when he orders the assassination of bin Laden, what is a Birther to do? On the other hand, if you're the kind of jihadist conspiracy theorist who thinks 9/11 was a big fake by the U.S. Government to create a war with Islam and bin Laden is innocent or a hero or whatever, you now have to deny his death in order to avoid giving credit to America. Unless, that is, you can deny that Obama, who ordered the hit, is American, in which case a Kenyan killed your favorite terrorist. Or you can deny both Obama's natural born status and bin Laden's death.

But these positions can't overlap. Obama can't be both the American responsible for killing bin Laden and not American. He also can't have ordered and not ordered the hit. So how will patriotic Birthers handle the fact that they want America to take credit for bin Laden's death, but they don't want to acknowledge that Obama, the President who made the call, is American?

Perhaps President Obama, using his Kenyan-born Muslim genie-powers, teleported George W. Bush into the White House so Dubya could make the decision to go for it. (Seems this theory is getting some play already.) Then Obama whisked Bush II away so he could take the credit, all the while having bin Laden quietly escorted to White House basement so the two of them could spend an evening bowling with the robot that carries the floating brain of Richard Nixon?

Oh, I shouldn't even joke, because someone will voice that "theory" and cite "the internet" as their source.

Noah's "Yes Day!"

2011-05-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, my son, Noah, came home from school and wrote "Yes Day" on the calendar by the fridge. He'd read a book in the school library about the new holiday, and wanted to make sure we observed it. He explained it to me, and I thought it sounded like a great idea. In essence, kids are told "No" by their parents every day of the year. So what if there were a single day when Mom and Dad had to say "Yes" to every request? Conveniently, Noah had chosen a Saturday. We couldn't have pulled this off on a week day; we would not have had time for all his ideas in the afternoon, and he invariably would have asked me to skip work. That would have been tough to explain to my boss. "Sorry, but my son asked me to stay home today, and, well, you see, it's 'Yes Day' so..."

I decided use this as an opportunity to force him to practice his writing. He had to write all his requests down in advance. Not only would this give him time to think about what he really wanted, but it gave me a chance to vet his ideas and get some "No"s in before the big day arrived. My wife, Paige, and I explained to Noah that we reserved the right to say "No" to anything extraordinarily expensive or unsafe. Paige wanted to qualify the whole thing with "as long as it's within reason," but I felt like, since that has no real meaning to a six-year-old, we'd be giving ourselves too much flexibility. We needed to have our hands tied a bit in order for this to work.

Part of what made it possible is that six-year-olds (ours, at least) do not have particularly expensive or extravagant tastes. For example, Noah wanted to go to McDonald's for lunch. I can afford that. He also wanted to go to the park and play a whole bunch of variations on tag of his own design. I can afford that, too, though I did find myself saying, "Yes, as soon as I catch my breath." I made a few suggestions to help him out. By last evening you'd have thought it was Christmas Eve.

Here's something of a run-down of the day. Paige encouraged Noah to let me sleep in a bit later than he did so I would have energy for all his big ideas (bless her!). When I woke up, he asked me to play a particular video game with him which I don't really enjoy. I said, "Yes." After his normal allotted video game time, I reminded him that if he asked for more time he'd get it, so he chose a different game I don't like very much and asked to play that one with me. I said, "Yes."

We went to lunch at McDonald's. I don't like the food there, so I have no need to eat more than the bare minimum. I hinted that if he asked me to get a Happy Meal as well, he'd get two toys. He did ask. I said, "Yes."

After he played on the McDonald's play structure for a while, we went to Circle K and he got to pick out some candy. He picked Jujubees. I think they're gross, but those were the ones he wanted, so I said, "Yes."

Loaded up with our secret stash, we went to see Rio at the local cineplex. It's in 3-D, so it cost an arm and a leg. That's not a cliche. It's an understatement. It cost a lot more than one of my arms and one of my legs would be worth on the black market. My arms and legs are hairy, knobby, pale, and stringy. Hungry cannibals would refuse my arms and legs. On of your arms and one of your legs might have purchased three 3-D tickets.

I enjoyed the movie. It wasn't up to Paige's high standards for animated movies, and I have my quibbles with some of the choices, but Noah loved the physical comedy. It's set in Brazil, so there were lots of soccer balls kicked in faces and people being knocked down by equally round butt-cheeks. Noah would bark out big lung-fulls of laughs, and those are worth more than both my arms and legs.

We came home and Paige asked to be excused from the festivities to work on a project, so Noah and I went to the park. He has this amazing ability to tell a long narrative about the good guys and bad guys, their motivations, their preferred weapons, and a landscape of invisible obstacles, all while chasing me around. And he's asthmatic. I don't get it; how can he run around and talk constantly without taking a breath one day, then need an inhaler in order to sit on the couch and watch TV the next? Maybe, if he'd breathe while playing, he could store up some oxygen for more stressful video game sessions. Anyway, I'm not asthmatic, but he ran me ragged.

We came home and he reminded Paige about the dinner request he'd written down. Wait for it... Wait for it... Mac and Cheese. "Yes."

After dinner he seemed a bit unsure about what to ask for next, so I reminded him that I wouldn't be able to say no to a third round with the Xbox 360. We played another of his games I don't enjoy very much. It turns out that I'm not very good at it, either. Paige reminded him to be patient with his old man, and he graciously acquiesced.

When it was nearly his bedtime, he asked to watch a TV show. We'd already gone well beyond the amount of time I like to let him stare at any screen in a single day, but the book makes it clear that the kid gets to stay up really late on Yes Day, and I was raised to observe holidays in a traditional fashion. I whispered that he could choose a movie, get on his PJs, and fall asleep on the couch. We flipped through the Xbox's Netflix queue and Paige and I rediscovered Robinhood: Men in Tights. We tried to sell him on it, but it only reminded him of the Disney version, so we said, "Yes" to that.

He didn't fall asleep, of course. He never does fall asleep on the couch watching anything. He asked for some ice cream, and asked if he could help scoop it. We did that together without any serious mishaps. Now I know he can scoop me a bowl in the future.

Ultimately, Paige and I made the arbitrary decision that Yes Day ends at 10:00. The book doesn't say for sure, so Noah interpreted that to mean that it ends at dawn the following day. That's a reasonable assumption, but since it was after 10 o'clock, we were allowed to say, "No."

A few times over the course of the day, Noah asked me when it would be my Yes Day and what I would do. I told him that all the things I would want to do would be too expensive, so I don't get a Yes Day. That's not entirely true. Sure, I'd probably choose things like flying off to Europe on a private jet, only to have those vetoed on expense grounds, but I might also choose to sit in my recliner all day and watch NBA basketball. I get to do that anyway, which is precisely why kids deserve a Yes Day and grown-ups don't.

I don't even want to think about the things Noah will ask for as he gets older. Having experienced a six-year-old's Yes Day, I have no interest in a sixteen-year-old's. Considering what he chose today, I think we'll make these events the tradition. Next year, he'll resent not being able to choose new activities, but I think a day of movies, video games, and hanging in the park will go back to being cool just before he dicides it's un-cool by virtue of being spent with his dad. Still, he announced that today was the best day of his life. If I force him to relive that a dozen more times before he goes off to college, that doesn't make me a bad parent, does it?

Because it was one of the best days of my life, too.

My Greatest Professional Triumph is Anonymous

2011-04-22T23:58:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's a bit hyperbolic, but among an English teacher's dreams, the idea of having a student become a published author or poet ranks pretty high. Well, thanks to one of my creative writing students, I've now accomplished this dream.

Note the focus. She has an accomplishment. I talk about myself. This is intrinsic to the profession; her accomplishment is mine, even though I played a tiny role. A whole lot of other teachers taught this student to read and write, and clearly she has a great deal of innate talent, but when she becomes a published poet, I get to brag.

After hearing about her publication from a colleague (who deserves just as much or more credit, but this is about me here, right?) I asked the student if I could brag about her tonight. I hope she felt proud in that moment, because I'm certainly proud of her.

But she chose to have the poem published without her name! When you read the poem, you'll understand why. It's quite personal, and though it might not be her actual experience that she's expressing, it must hit close enough to home to make her hesitant to share her identity. Fine. I still get to claim my little piece of credit. I do wish she'd put her name on it though, because, separate from her emotional experience, it's a fine work of craftsmanship. When I link to it, you can see that she has skill which goes beyond the considerable power of the content.

My other reason for wanting her to get credit is that it messes with my own. Instead of being able to say, "I taught ---- --------, the one who had that powerful poem published a few years ago," I have to say, "I taught Anonymous."

On second thought, that's plenty poetic. So, thanks Anonymous. Thank you for the inspiration to me, as a teacher, and thanks for your courage in sharing your work, even if your name isn't attached. You'll be known (if only to the few readers of this poem, but they will remember you) by your work alone, and there's a special dignity to that which is rare in our world of people obsessed with taking credit. I'm glad you didn't learn that particular impulse from me. Your poem is wonderful.

So, without further ado, I give you Anonymous' "No Lollipop."

Now just try and tell me that didn't kick you in the gut. Yeah, she was one of my students.

Pity the Suffering Rich II: Olbermann Remix

2011-04-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

I wrote a very long piece about self-defeating poor- and middle-class conservatives who vote against their own self interest because they buy into the illusion that they will one day be rich. Olbermann said it better and more succinctly:

Noah as Mini-Me

2011-04-16T23:23:00.000-07:00

I zipped home from a conference so I could be here for this: Noah played the role of "Mini-Me" for one of our students, Bjorn Olsen, in an annual fundraiser, the Mr. and Ms. Central Pageant. Noah was great. He's so comfortable on a stage in front of hundreds of people that it is particularly awe-inspiring to his introvert mother. She couldn't get over it, and we were both very proud.

Nightmare and Prayer

2011-04-15T23:30:00.000-07:00

Today has been strange. As is so often the case, a strange day is a product of an even stranger night, but the particular quality of my current displacement and discomfort (psychic, geographic, and philosophical) is difficult to connect directly to the last night's nocturnal adventure. So let's ease into the weird by beginning from the present and moving backwards.

I'm sitting in the elegant but unusually dark lobby of a large hotel on the banks of the Willamette River, on an island in that river, in fact. Outside the rain that has been falling all day seems to have lost some of its passion and settled into a bored, blue-collar drizzle against the massive windows that surround the room. The large, oddly breast-shaped chandeliers are on but can't compete with the flat grayness that stretches all the way down each window to a fog on the surface of the river.

I'm waiting for my room to be ready. I'm here for the annual Representative Assembly of the state chapter of my union, the Oregon Education Association. I serve on a committee that was tasked to write a plan to educate the public about the importance of public school teachers in order to inoculate Oregon against the virulent anti-teacher fever that has been afflicting other states recently, and to prepare our own members should Oregon come down with the disease. I've never attended the RA before, nor have I participated in presenting a document of this kind on the floor of a large, formal assembly in this way, so I'm out of my element.

And I'm also not in my room because it's still not ready. I knew I would show up too early for the room. Most folks are coming in this evening because they have to teach a full day today, but our district had to cut days out of the school year because of budgetary concerns. I'm here early to stand up for teachers because schools are already embattled enough that my services as a teacher were not required today. That is the opposite of irony.

Because I knew there would be no school today, and because I hate to miss work for doctor's appointments, I scheduled my annual skin check at the dermatologist for this morning. I'm genetically predisposed to a particularly aggressive kind of skin cancer, so I go in annually to have an expert measure my moles to make sure they aren't growing or changing color. I strip down to my boxers and he takes pictures of my legs, back, and chest. Then he measures each mole in millimeters with a ruler, notes the sizes in my chart, and, assuming he doesn't feel the need to remove another with a miniature apple corer, sends me on my way. It's something I have to do just frequently enough that it never feels normal.

After the appointment I drove up here to the hotel. I was pretty sure I knew how to find it, but I wanted to try out the GPS function on my new phone. While I listened to a book on tape, a woman's urgent voice interrupted to tell me that she kept losing touch with the satellite. She didn't tell me that they patched up their relationship, but she continued giving me directions, so I assumed that her troubled marriage wouldn't prevent me from reaching my destination. Then I found myself on a bridge entering the state of Washington. It seemed entirely implausible that the Oregon Education Association would have its largest meeting if the year out-of-state, so I turned around. The woman on my phone must have felt terrible about letting her personal issues get in the way of doing her job, because once she started giving me directions again she hyper-focused in the neighborhood in Vancouver, Washington where I'd decided to turn around. When I was back in Oregon and in the parking lot of the hotel, she was still trying to tell me how to make the proper U-turn to find the freeway. I really hope she works things out with the satellite before I need her help again, because she's lost without him.

Too early to check in, I got some lunch at Taco Bell. Still too early, I went back to my car and took a nap in the driver’s seat. I am a very good napper. The ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime is my most impressive talent. Thanks to the assistance of the Taco Bell lunch, I had a strange dream that may become the seed of a small town murder mystery novel someday.

When I woke up I was completely disoriented. With my stocking cap pulled down over my eyes, my clues about my whereabouts consisted of my strange position in the reclined driver's seat, the heat of my winter coat and the comparative cold around my belly button where it had ridden up, and the plinking of large drops of water falling from the pine trees onto the roof of my car.

I reached back into my memory for some sense of my location, and this is what I found: I was not in the same place I was when I woke up from the nightmare last night, but I was equally unsure where I was.

I rarely have dreams. Or, to be more precise, I probably dream just as much as anyone else but rarely have dreams worthy of remembering, and almost never have dreams vivid enough to wake me up. Even the plot if today's cop drama is evaporating... Yes, there it goes, another genre I'll probably never try my hand at now. Last night's dream was, in every way I can think of, exceptional.

It wasn't a nightmare. Not at first, anyway. Upon waking one never knows how much of a dream was experienced and how much was exposition, but in the dream I understood that I was the director of a play on Broadway. I also knew it was a revival of something so well known, and which had been done so successfully before, that my attempt to bring it to the stage was probably doomed to failure. So instead of putting the play on again in exactly the way the audience would expect, I decided to present an interpretation depicting the dramatization of a production of the play. “Meta” is very “in” after all. So, not only was I the director, but I was an actor playing the director. Just as the play within the play was reaching its climax, the play about the production spiraled into a chaos of bodies crawling around in white, tattered robes flashing in strange lighting that made them look ghostly. I, as an actor playing the director, crouched on my knees watching the play my character was trying to direct, and these ghost figures pulled on my clothes, tugging me in every direction while I tried to shout, “Get away from me! Get away from me!” (I don’t think it’s the best line, but I guess I was not the writer.) Though I have a loud voice, I’d chosen to act like I was so scared I could hardly cry out. The words strained through my throat in a molasses moan.

But I wasn’t afraid. I was enjoying the fact that the audience was eating it up. Instead of another bored re-telling of a story they knew by heart, they were enthralled by the frightening image of a director trying to bring that story to them and being torn apart by the impossibility of the task. It was going really well.

Suddenly I couldn’t feel the hands of the other actors. I couldn’t hear their screams and wails. I couldn’t hear the music coming from the pit. The white lights, not quite a strobe because they flashed inconsistently, now disappeared entirely. In the total darkness I could only feel one hand on my shoulder, and instead of pulling at my clothes it was pushing me gently.

“Ben?” My wife’s voice, barely a whisper, slid through the darkness. “Ben, you were making noise like you were having a scary dream.”

I think I grunted.

“You sounded really scared.”

I knew that I hadn’t been. But now I was. I couldn’t remember what play I’d been responsible for putting on. Was this part of it? If so, I couldn’t remember what to do next. What was my line? What was my blocking? Where was the audience? Where was I?

Now I was terrified. I didn’t respond to my wife but looked around and ticked-off the clues that led me to slowly deduce I was in my bed, in my room, in my house. But that didn’t alleviate my fear. What had the play been? Was I still responsible for it?

I went to the bathroom, drank some water, and tromped down the stairs. There was not time for ninja-style tip-toeing. The screen of my laptop fills the living room with an ethereal light. I was in no mood for that. I flicked on the kitchen light before plopping down to write a description of my dream-turned-nightmare.

That was 3:13 am.

Now I’ve slept in my car and am ready for tonight’s events. But I can’t shake the feeling. The terror has stopped flowing, but, in its stillness, a fuzzy, slimy anxiety has grown along the bottom of my consciousness. Since last night’s performance, I’ve already played so many roles. Some were more genuine than others. I was the father and husband saying goodbye before a short trip. I was the careful driver on a rainy freeway. But some roles required more acting ability than I actually possess. I pretended to be the kind of person who isn’t bothered when a right-wing friend posts demonstrably erroneous jabs on his Facebook page, but succeeded only in stewing about my biting reply all day. I tried to act like the kind of patient who feels completely comfortable when nearly-naked in a doctor’s examination room but only barely managed to swallow my nervous jokes. I smiled and said it was no problem when the first reception desk clerk told me my room wasn’t ready, and that was the truth. I was hungry anyway. I told the second it was no problem even though it meant I’d be taking a nap in my car instead of a bed, then smiled and told the third I didn’t mind after I woke up. By then I was acting, although I would also have been acting if I’d decided to play the role of the guy who vents his frustration at the completely innocent desk clerk. My smiles only grew into overly-amiable shams as the afternoon wore on.

Tonight I’ll play a new role. I’ll stand with the other members of my committee in front of six hundred people and take credit or blame for the report we’ve written. It will be a bit of improv. Then I’ll go to a reception where I’ll pretend to be comfortable among those same six hundred strangers. Depending on the way they receive the report, my props may have higher alcohol contents.

And then I will go to bed in a hotel room. If I was discombobulated while waking from dreams first in my own room, then in my car, I can only assume I’ll be more confused staring at a ceiling I’ve never seen before, surrounded by soft wallpaper and under the gaze of what I predict will be either an inoffensive piece of neutered modern art or a near-sighted expressionist’s landscape of a farm.
But before I sleep, I’ll play one other role. I’ll be the macro-blogger who desperately wants to believe that someone reads ridiculously long posts on their computer screens. I’ll toss up this whole story. And then I’ll say a little digital prayer.

“Hello, you gods of high speed internet and Buddhas of dial-up. It’s me, Ben. If you’re there Yahweh or Quetzalcoatl or Vishnu or Cthulu, could you do me a favor? Please don’t wait until I am asleep to reach over and shake me awake. Be gentle, but let me know what play I’m in. Thanks.”

Central High's Worst Dressed Teacher Court Assembly

2011-04-15T00:43:00.000-07:00

I'm so proud of my staff today. At Central High, we do an annual teacher court to spoof the courts for homecoming and prom. We found out we were going to be on Teacher Court on Tuesday and put this together in two days. Making it a "worst Dressed" competition was Roseanna Larson's idea, and it was brilliant. The kids loved watching us humiliate ourselves. And really, isn't that what teaching high school is all about? Adil Abounadi and Shane Hedrick were such good sports at the end that I expect we'll be hearing about this assembly for at least the next four years. Pretty great day at work.

Save the NWP!

2011-04-06T21:58:00.000-07:00

Thousands of teachers who have benefited from the National Writing Project are now blogging on its behalf, and Tweeting about it at #blog4NWP. "In March President Barack Obama signed a bill eliminating direct federal funding for the National Writing Project, so NWP teachers are fighting to get its funding reinstated the best way they know how: with writing." I want to throw my hat into the ring and let everyone know how important the National Writing Project is, and how much of a return on investment it offers the U.S. taxpayer, so you can help us save this valuable program.

I’m a high school English teacher at Central High School in Independence, Oregon. I became aware of the NWP because a colleague from another district told me about the wonderful experience she’d had at the Oregon Writing Project Summer Institute at Willamette University the year before. I applied and was given an opportunity to take part in this continuing education opportunity thanks to the grant offered through the NWP. Compared to other educational reform initiatives, the outlay for the American taxpayer was minimal. Essentially, it paid for some graduate credits through the University. It's the organization provided through the NWP that makes this so much more than a handful of discrete classes. Now let me tell you about the results of that investment.

Over the course of the summer institute, I was exposed to cutting edge research and experienced educators who had been putting best practices to work in their schools for years. Not only did I leave the program with a host of new lessons, but with a framework for completely revamping the way writing instruction occurs at my high school. Part of the application process for the program involves a guarantee by building administrators that they will set aside some time for institute participants to present what they’ve learned. We also have to make a commitment to share our new knowledge with our staffs, and have to come back in the fall and report on the success of those efforts. When I shared what I’d learned through the NWP, my colleagues got very excited. We have completely changed the way we provide writing instruction, not just in English classes, but across all departments. That means that 900 kids are benefiting this year from an investment that cost the taxpayer less a sixth of what they pay for a single student in a given year. And the benefits of this investment will continue to grow. Not only will those 900 kids be better writers, but because we’ve changed the way we teach that small government investment will affect thousands of kids.

Now, I know this is anecdotal, but if other participants receive even a fraction of the buy-in from their building staffs that I have received, the NWP will improve the educations of millions of American public school students, and, when compared to the impact of the program, the outlay is tiny. The NWP is a great example of the kind of responsible, effective governance everyone can agree on. Please help us protect this valuable program for the sake of our students.

(Here's another idea: Perhaps the Fed could give the NWP a massive loan (say, $26 Billion) at an interest rate of less than 1%. Then, they could allow the NWP to use that money to loan the federal government money at much higher interest rates. The resulting income would more than cover all the NWPs expenses. Does this sound like a crazy way to fund a government program? Well then, why did we offer that same deal to the Central Bank of Libya? I think it's safe to say the investment in the NWP will benefit the United States a lot more than a gift to Muammar Qaddafi.)

Please, learn more here and contact your representative. Share my alternative funding idea, if you think it would help.

John Boehner Replies to My Letter

2011-04-02T00:54:00.000-07:00

On March 6th I sent a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell regarding a rally held in Yorba Linda, California. The rally was one of the most hateful things I've ever seen, and the hatred was directed at American citizens. The ostensible reason for the protest was that the fundraiser at an Islamic community center, which was raising money for local charities, featured a speaker who had voiced views the protesters disagreed with. Regardless of their initial reason, as the guests at the community center came in, the protesters screamed out religious slurs of all kinds at the men, women, and children. Three of the speakers at the rally were Republican elected officials. I asked Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader McConnell to take action to make it clear that the Republican Party is not the party of hatred and would not allow the members of Boehners caucus to stand for this kind of hate speech toward American Muslims. At the end of my post, I promised to post any reply I received from either Boehner or McConnell.

Well, I did receive a reply from Speaker Boehner today:

April 1, 2011

Mr. Benjamin Gorman
219 Grand St
Independence, OR 97351-2111

Dear Mr. Gorman:

Thank you for taking the time to contact me. It's good to hear from you.

Your ideas, comments, and questions help make possible my goal of leading a House of Representatives that listens and reflects the will of the American people. That's why I'd like to ask you to keep speaking out by:

* Visiting Speaker.gov to sign up for email updates on issues that concern you;
* Offering your solutions and engaging other Americans on the challenges facing our country at AmericaSpeakingOut.com;
* Joining the conversation on Facebook.com/OfficeofSpeakerBoehner/; and
* Connecting with my office on Twitter.com/SpeakerBoehner/.

I made a Pledge to America to focus on removing government barriers to private-sector job creation and economic growth - that includes cutting spending to help end the uncertainty facing job creators; repealing the job-crushing health care law and replacing it with common sense reforms that lower costs; reining in excessive regulations; and promoting an American Energy Initiative that increases energy production to create jobs and lower energy prices. I also pledged to lead an effort to reform Congress and rebuild the bonds of trust between the American people and their representatives in Washington. I hope you'll stay engaged and keep me updated on your thoughts as we work to keep this pledge.

Thank you again for contacting me and please stay in touch.

Sincerely,

John Boehner
Speaker of the House

Okay, so let's assume this was a form letter and not an April Fool's joke. This man is being asked to defend his party from the charge that it knowingly includes elected officials who participate in hate rallies directed at Americans. His response is that he's working on private-sector job creation and repealing health care reform. This strikes me as both wholly unsatisfying and disturbingly nonchalant in the face of this situation. "Speaker Boehner, is your party the party of Islamophobic hatred?" "Um, here are some other things I'm working on right now." Unacceptable.

I'll take his advice and post links to this and my initial letter on his Facebook page and the website he recommends. Hopefully that will encourage him to respond to my concerns in a more serious, thoughtful way.

Update:
I tried to post this concern to both the Facebook page Speaker Boehner mentions, and the website where he directed me. His Facebook page does not allow wall-to-wall posts, and it didn't feel right to tack this on in a comment to one of his unrelated posts. Apparently when you join the conversation, that entails responding to his posts or being rude and hijacking them. The other site was even less friendly. If I didn't want to post an idea within four categories, none of which seemed appropriate, I could post it in "other". I tried, but it won't accept links and has a word structure wherein I would be throwing out an accusation for people to vote up or down, rather than asking for a response from the Speaker. I don't want to know whether those random, anonymous strangers think it's a good idea for Boehner to do something about hate-speech coming out of his caucus. I want him to do something about hate-speech coming out of his caucus! The fact that the mechanisms Boehner directed me to make it so difficult to get a real answer reinforces my view that the Republican Party, at least under Speaker Boehner's leadership, is willing to tolerate this kind of hatred of Americans and doesn't have the slightest intention of even listening to requests that they stand up for American Muslims.

Update II:
I asked for a reply via Twitter. We'll see.

Google is making fun of my idea!

2011-04-02T00:24:00.000-07:00

Back in June of 2007, I posted an idea about touch-screen laptops here. I even sent the idea to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and asked them for $100,000 and a working prototype (a rockin' deal for them, in my opinion). No dice.

Of course, Google reads everything on the web, and someone there must have come across this paragraph:

"Oh, and since laptops can be fitted with cameras (many already have them internally) and a couple of manufacturers are already working with tabletop computers that identify the motions of hands using two cameras and parallax, why not do that on a laptop, so the person doesn't even have to touch the screen, just lift their hands off of the keyboard and manipulate the information by waving their hands like those cool ads with Jay Z? If no one is already working on this, I'm selling this idea for a cool $200,000. And a working model, of course."

Instead of paying me, for their annual April Fool's joke they made this awesome video. Turns out my idea does not make you look as cool as Jay-Z. It makes you look like a total dork. Fine, Google! I can take a hint!

Pity the Suffering Rich

2011-03-25T02:24:00.000-07:00

I read a statistic recently that was so frightening I doubted it could possibly be true. When I came across Jenny Smith’s piece on the Our Progress page, the first part in her “Are you Kidding Me” series, I could believe the stat that 42% of millionaires don’t feel wealthy. “The average respondent had $3.5 million in investable assets,” she reported. “They'd ‘like to have more.’” Who wouldn’t? I would bet that people with 3.5 mil in the bank spend less time thinking about small purchases and more time thinking about big ones. When you’re looking at really big price tags, you probably start thinking that three and a half million is nice, but four or five would sure be handy. There but for the grace of God go we, right?

But at the end of the piece, Smith shared a statistic that seemed dubious to me. “Oh, and a not-so-fun fact I learned last week - the richest 400 people in the US have more money than HALF of the country.” Sure, she hyperlinked it to another article, but I didn’t even bother clicking. I wanted to check that for myself. I went to Politifact, a group that fact-checks claims made by politicians and pundits. Sure enough, they reviewed the methodology that came up with the statistic and found that it was not only true when it was calculated using numbers from Forbes from 2009, but the gap between has grown using stats from 2010. It’s true and getting more true. (Where would Ms. Smith’s link have taken me? Turns out it would have taken me to Poltifact. I looked for any site that might dispute their findings but couldn’t find any.)

So, 400 people have more net worth than half the people in this country put together. How could this be? And why isn’t there a greater push toward a more equal distribution of wealth?

I found an answer to that question pretty quickly after I posted the statistic to my Facebook page. One friend and family member quickly responded that the Clintons, the Kerrys, numerous Hollywood big names, Michael Moore, and all the Democratic high rollers are included in those 400, and thus have no authority to speak about income inequality. So I checked through the list (it’s only 400 names, after all.) No Clintons. No Kerrys. No Michael Moore. The only Hollywood name was Oprah Winfrey. Some are certainly contributors to Democratic candidates, though. George Soros is on the list. I’m not sure if Warren Buffet is a Democrat, but he did say, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Personally, I think he has the authority to say that.

I don’t begrudge anyone on the Forbes 400 their money (as long as they got it legally and morally). I think my friend is missing the forest for the trees. The problem isn’t the top 400. It’s not the top 1% who have more financial wealth than the bottom 95%. The problem belongs to all the folks in the bottom 50% who believe that the interests of those 400 people must be protected at all costs. They believe this, I think, for two reasons. For one, they think these billionaires are a put-upon minority who require their protection. Second, they believe there’s an off-chance they will someday be in this group themselves, and that by protecting the Forbes 400 they are protecting their future selves.

The Forbes 400 are certainly a minority, but their suffering has been overstated by people who lack the most basic understanding of mathematics. The folks at the bottom worry that burdensome taxation will make these men and women poor. It will take their billions of dollars and winnow away at it until they are paupers. Now, I’m not going to weigh in on who works harder, billionaires or ditch-diggers. These folks have worked hard and they’ve been lucky. Even someone like Oprah, who had a brutal childhood, had the luck to be born in a country where a combination of infrastructure, cultural milieu, and demand for her talents could facilitate her rapid rise to Queen of Television. Did she work her butt off? (Pun avoided here.) Yes. Does she deserve to be rich? Yes. Would increasing her tax burden make her poor? No.

Income tax is… wait for it… tax on income. If income taxes are staggered so that the wealthy pay higher rates, they still make more money than everyone else. Imagine if a millionaire had to pay a 50% tax on their income of $200 thousand a year. They’d pay $100,000. They’d only make $100,000 that year. Only. Now, imagine if a billionaire in that same year had to pay 75% on the $200,000,000 they made that year. They’d make $50 million. Would the long-suffering millionaire who says they would “like to have more” suddenly give up on their financial pursuits? “Well, I wanted to have more, but going from an annual income of one hundred thousand dollars to a mere 50 million simply makes it not worth the trouble.” Find me the millionaire who isn’t interested in having 50 million dollars.

And yet, we’re told that increasing the marginal tax rate will cause these folks to stop trickling their money down to the rest of us. George Bush Sr. called this “Voodoo Economics” for a reason. And it wasn’t because he comes from a long line of rabid socialists. It just doesn’t work. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a few people does not lead to improved employment or higher standards of living for more people. Surprise: It leads to higher standards of living for a few people.

But raising the tax burden would lead these 400 people to leave the country and take their money with them, right? Then we would miss out on all those trickle-down benefits we’ve been enjoying so much! Except that’s not true after all. I got into a debate about an experiment in just this kind of thing with another college friend today. When I posted a link to a petition that would ask Congress to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, my friend asked, “How many companies have left Oregon (for example) following the recent tax increase on the top brackets?” He linked to an article about a particular company which was leaving the state. The proprietor who was taking 20 jobs with her said that the decisions was “absolutely tied to (tax measures) 66 & 67.” The problem with this anecdotal example is that it doesn’t gel with the larger statistics about employment. Since the passage of those two tax measures, unemployment has actually dropped here in Oregon by 2%. Those twenty manufacturing jobs might have left the state, but more came in to take their place.

The other little factor my friend’s article gave less prominence than the hostile business climate of post 66 and 67 Oregon: The proprietor had found a buyer for her company in Ohio. So, will the Forbes 400 suddenly emigrate to countries where their income is less threatened by taxes? No, because they make that income here in the United States! Africa has about three times as many people as the United States. I’m sure Oprah could find some despot in Africa who would offer her zero income tax if she would relocate to his country to build her house and store her wealth (and serve as a human shield in the case of a U.S. no-fly zone should his people rise up against him). So why doesn’t Oprah pull her shows off of U.S. TV and relocate? Because she’s not stupid. She knows she can’t possibly make as much money in markets where people don’t have power, let alone TVs. Think Ted Turner (also on the Forbes 400) is going to take TNT and TBS off the air and relocate to Russia if we raise his marginal tax rates? Yeah, right. Think the Koch brothers will give up on mining and drilling in the U.S. if we say they have to pay for the pollution they cause and also have to pay a higher tax rate? Let’s take a little bet on that, shall we?

But I’ll tell you what will make these Forbes 400 leave. If, out of a desire to protect the interests of these 400 people, we de-fund our education systems, cut into our infrastructure spending, and generally do everything we can to provide them with the cheapest, lowest skilled labor possible, we’ll give them a country where they can build call centers and factories, but not one where the people can actually buy the products they’re selling. Tired of hearing someone with a slight Indian accent when you call tech support? Just wait until you’re learning another language to serve the needs of someone who has more buying power than you do in some other country. It will make you wish you’d been a bit nicer to “Bob” and “Mary” from Bangalore. Which language will you be speaking in that call center? I’m not qualified to speculate, but (since this is unapologetic conjecture) let me hazard that it will be the country that realizes the fashionable “austerity measures” that are slowing economic growth are for chumps, and invests in services for the broadest swath of its consumer base. They’ll be the buyers, and buyers lead markets.

The Forbes 400 will be fine, regardless. That’s the kind of security we covet, the ability to roll with the punches of a global economy, and, combined with our innate American optimism, that’s why so many poor and middle class Americans continue to believe that they will someday breathe that rarefied air. And what’s wrong with dreaming, right? I’ve bought a few lottery tickets in my life, not because I thought I’d win but because dreaming is fun and, to a point, healthy. After a point, it’s sick. There is no lottery that will make anyone a member of the Forbes 400.

You will never be that rich.

Read that again.

You will never be that rich.

Whatever job you are currently working at does not create a means wherein, by increasing your effort, you will make a billion dollars. I could be the greatest public school teacher of all time, working 26 hours a day (yes, even if I bent the laws of space and time), creating the most wonderful lessons and meeting all of my students educational needs every day, and they will not pay me a billion dollars.
But this is America, you say. This is the land of opportunity. Anything is possible here.

Yep, but that doesn’t make anything likely. If you really want to increase your chances of getting rich (work smarter, not harder, right?), your first step should be looking into which countries really offer social mobility. You might want to move to Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany or Spain. Oh, guess what’s one of the leading predictors of social mobility. Income equality. “The greater a nation's inequality, the harder it is for its children to improve their lot,” Dan Froomkin writes in the Huffington Post. “That confirms findings by other researchers. ‘The way I usually put this is that when the rungs of the ladder are far apart, it becomes more difficult to climb the ladder,’ Brookings Institution economist Isabel Sawhill tells HuffPost. ‘Given that we have more inequality in the U.S. right now than at any time since the 1920s, we should be concerned that this may become a vicious cycle. Inequality in one generation may mean less opportunity for the next generation to get ahead and thus still more inequality in the future.’”

I have no problem with people trying to get rich. If some people from Publishers Clearinghouse show up at my door with a big check tomorrow because of something I sent them ten years ago, I won’t send them away, and you will probably hear me squeal like a six-year-old girl who just got the newest Barbie doll.

But please, if that check is for one billion dollars, and you see me on the Forbes 400, please, please don’t try to protect my financial interests. Because, since social mobility is related to income distribution, when you put my billionaire interests ahead of your own, you aren’t protecting your future self. You’re hurting your children. That’s not hopeful or patriotic. It’s selfish and stupid.

Stick a Fork in the Meta-Superhero

2011-03-12T01:37:00.000-08:00

I just saw Kick-Ass. I know some people were bothered by the amount of blood and the adult language. I wouldn't show it to my six-year-old, but I couldn't care less about those things. Those weren't my issues. Kick-Ass isn't a bad movie (meh) but it's the last nail in the coffin in a particular sub-genre, I hope. I know I'm late to the party, but as an avid comic book fan and devotee of our shared American mythology, I want to officially declare the meta-superhero dead. Fini. Kaput. Done. Played-out.

If not the original, among the first and greatest of the meta-superheroes was The Tick. I loved the dark humor of that story, which served up its satire of the comic book world through the lens of a simultaneously delusional and truly superhuman protagonist who broke out of an insane asylum in the first issue. The Tick was unaware that he was wearing a blue suit (or maybe it was his skin?), "nigh-invulnerable", ridiculously naive, and completely at home in his world of equally ridiculous super-villains. This send-up aimed most of its focus on the tropes of comic books themselves, though it had a bit to say about the nature of madness and the assumption of sanity in a crazy world. It was perfect for me as a high school student, and I will be forever grateful to Ben Edlund for speaking from within the comic book community (i.e. my world) about its shortcomings.

And then there was Watchmen. This pre-dated The Tick, but I missed it in 1986 and probably wouldn't have understood it anyway. I deeply disagree with Alan Moore's politics, a form of extreme libertarianism that casts all attempts at do-gooding as short-sighted, authoritarian, and ultimately evil, and I sympathize with his frustration over the way his V for Vendetta was twisted by Hollywood into an anti-Bush movie even though I love it. (It retains his anti-authoritarian message but turns it on conservatives, while he wanted it turned on the U.K.'s Labor Party.) Watchmen takes the meta-superhero to a much more intellectual, philosophical, and literary level, and despite my disagreements with his conclusions, I have the highest respect the way he used the tropes of superheroes to make an argument against what I am sure he would deem patronizing efforts to help others. Nothing has been done yet which reaches that intellectual level within the world of comic books or comic book movies.

And then there's Deadpool. Deadpool started off as a throw-away villain in one of the last issues of the New Mutants series, and even his name, Wade Wilson, is an inside joke, since he's essentially a rip off of the Teen Titan's villain Deathstroke, whose real name is Slade Wilson. But Deadpool, unlike his DC Comics progenitor, was funny, and after some character development in the X-Force series, he got his own comic book. How meta is Deadpool? He not only makes Shakespearean soliloquies directly to the reader about the comic, but even critiques the comics continuity, complaining that his real back-story is so mysterious because it keeps changing every time there's a new writer. Oh, and he once learned that he'd been cursed by the Norse god Loki to be a character in a comic book. Not too shabby.

(Here's Deadpool in the comic talking about how he doesn't look like the actor who played him in the movie. How you like them meta-apples?)

Hollywood recently gave us two animated super-villain spoofs which were both good despite their similarities. Much like the year when we got both A Bug's Life and Antz, 2010 gave us both Despicable Me and Megamind. Despicable Me chooses to focus on a villain who is a bit more James Bond, while Megamind goes right at the Superman villain, but both glean their share of gags by satirizing the cliches of comic books. And both are genuinely funny. And we don't need a third.

I'm half tempted to include Wanted in the list of meta-superhero movies, because it was so gawd-awful that the viewer is tempted to think they are intentionally having fun with the cliches of comic books. But they aren't. It just sucked. Then it insulted you for watching it. Not just implicitly, mind you. Explicitly. The protagonist gives a monologue at the end criticizing you, the viewer, for wasting your life doing uninteresting things. And since you've just spent the last two hours watching his muddled mess of a story, he's made himself a little bit right.

I'm also tempted to include Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but there are two reasons it shouldn't be lumped in with the meta-comic book stories. First of all, the comic-book-ish-ness of it was internally consistent and not self-referential, so it wasn't poking fun at comic books or saying anything about them. Second, as my wife pointed out, it wasn't really comic books but video game tropes which were being used as plot devices. It was like Doom the movie, only smart, well-made, and enjoyable.

And now, Kick-Ass, an inherently meta-comic book movie about a kid who wonders why comic book fans don't give the whole superhero thing a whirl, decides to try, and proceeds to learn why it's a bad idea. This premise could have been a lot of fun. As I watched the movie, at every step I could see why the writers made their choices. Now, having read up on the comic, I see that the original writer really did hew to the premise and produced a conclusion in which Kick-Ass ends up basically back where he started, rather than the happier movie ending. But even he made the mistake of introducing other, more "real" superheroes (well trained, well armed, lethal costumed vigilantes) to keep upping the ante. While this makes the story far more exciting, it betrays the idea that this kid's plan is obvious folly. Sure, things don't work out so well for the other heroes, either, but they are really heroes, and their failures are heroes' ends based on heroic flaws. The story was at its strongest when it was about this kid's wild-eyed optimism and naivete putting him in danger, but he's not naive to believe superhero-dom is possible if you introduce real superheroes! Anyway, the ending doesn't spoof cliches, but inhabits them so much that it ultimately becomes one. It even ends with a direct reference to a real comic book villain coming from a fake comic book villain who, we're to believe, is now going to become a real comic book villain.

That's why the meta-superhero is finished. He can no longer don his tights and trip clumsily into our normal world, mocking the cliches of comic books, because comic books and comic book movies are now populated with enough of this character that it would be repetitive, reductive, and nostalgic.

But will this stop Hollywood? I worry. Here's what I expect: A movie about the making of a movie about a superhero who has to learn he's a meta-superhero off-screen (but on our screen). Only it's animated. And the superhero who isn't really super is a dog.

Crap, I forgot about Bolt.

Will Republicans Allow Themselves to Be the Party of Racism?

2011-03-06T00:40:00.000-08:00

I just sent this letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,

I am writing you in reference to the protest of a dinner held to provide money to women’s shelters and to relieve homelessness. The dinner was held in Yorba Linda, California, by the ICNA, an American Muslim relief organization. The protest was one of the ugliest, most hateful things I’ve ever seen. The video footage of the event is posted here:

The rally was organized by Pamella Geller, the co-founder of Stop Islamization of America, a hate group. Speaking at the rally and depicted in the video were three members of your party, two Congressmen (Ed Royce and Gary Miller) and a local councilwoman (Deborah Pauly).

Rep. Boehner and Sen. McConnell, my conservative friends often remind me that the Republican Party is not the party of racists. They tell me that fringe elements who appear at Tea Party rallies or ask repugnant questions of their congressional representatives in public meetings are not speaking for the party as a whole, and that the party should not be judge based on these voices. I think that sounds fair. Then I see something like this, and watch Republicans, not just Republican voters but Republican elected officials, speak in favor of a protest where such pure, despicable hatred is spewed, and I can’t help but judge the whole party which allows any of its representatives to support this kind of thing. I know you want to have a “Big Tent,” but if you allow this kind of filth inside, the whole thing smells. And no amount of spin can Fabreeze this away.

Please let me, and all Americans who worry that one of our two major political parties harbors this kind of bile, know that your party is not the party of racism, not just by paying lip service to bromides or declaring your tolerance for difference of opinion, but by taking decisive action to expel those who promote this kind of hatred from your Big Tent. I am very proud of America’s broad defense of the right to free speech, and I recognize these protesters' right to spew whatever hatred they feel, but those elected officials at the rally are not granted a constitutional right to serve in your political party, and our constitutional right to assembly does not obligate you to include supporters of hate groups. I am asking you to convince me that this rally does not represent the Republican Party. Because if you just shrug or shake your heads, then, gentlemen, they are a part of you.

I’m a registered Democrat, so you might not care what I think. But I can assure you that if an elected Democrat spoke in favor of this kind of hatred of anyone, let alone Americans, and no action was taken by party leadership when it was brought to their attention, I would change my registration that very day. In that circumstance, would your party be an alternative, or a party that tolerates this kind of rhetoric?

Please let me know how you will address this disturbing event. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Gorman
Independence, Oregon

I will post their responses when I receive them.

Charlie Sheen Auditioning for Role as Super-Villain?

2011-02-28T23:28:00.000-08:00

If you haven't heard Charlie Sheen's rant on the Alex Jones show, it was quite a performance. I think the best way to catch up is to watch this animated version here on SlateV. The whole thing is so over-the-top, it seems unbelievable.

Unless...

Last night, my wife and son and I watched Megamind. Now, don't think I'm mentioning my six-year-old to make an excuse for watching an animated movie. I love this movie. In fact, I think I like it more than my son does (though we're both big fans).

[Full Disclosure: I look a bit like Megamind.]

[And not, luckily, like Charlie Sheen.]

Will Ferrell's portrayal of a super-villain becoming a hero is pitch-perfect. (The running gag of Megamind's inability to pronounce specific words is brilliant, and in the extra features they credit that to Ferrell himself, though I can't believe he's solely responsible since a major plot point hinges on one mispronunciation.) But as I listened to some of Megamind's narration, I could hear echoes of Sheen's rant.

Megamind: "Our battles quickly got more elaborate. He would win some, I would ALMOST win others! He took the name: Metro Man, defender of Metro City. I decided to pick something a little more humble: Megamind, incredibly handsome criminal genius and master of all villainy!"

Sheen: "I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time—and this includes naps—I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground."

On his critics:

Megamind: "While everyone else was learning 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider', I learned to dehydrate matter and rehydrate it at will... Sometimes I felt like it was just me and Minion against the world."

Sheen: "They suffocated my soul, they hijacked my brain, they brainwashed my friends and my family. Now I hate them violently and I will use every soldier in my army to defend myself against them, 'cause they will come at me. They will come at me with all of their doctors and their talking heads and all their other freakin' loser clowns."

On his former ally:

Megamind: "I made you a HERO! You did the fool part YOURSELF!"

Sheen: "There's something this side of deplorable that a certain Chaim Levine—yeah, that's Chuck's real name—mistook this rock star for his own selfish exit strategy, bro. Check it, Alex: I embarrassed him in front of his children and the world by healing at a pace that his unevolved mind cannot process. Last I checked, Chaim, I spent close to the last decade effortlessly and magically converting your tin cans into pure gold. And the gratitude I get is this charlatan chose not to do his job, which is to write. Clearly someone who believes he's above the law."

On his own special-ness:

Megamind: "No matter what happened, I was always the last chosen, the odd one out, the black sheep... the bad boy. Was this my destiny?... Wait. Maybe it WAS! Being bad is the one thing I'm good at! Then it hit me: if I was the bad boy, then I was going to be the baddest boy of them ALL!"

Sheen: "There's a new sheriff in town. And he has an army of assassins... I'm not Thomas Jefferson. He was a pussy... We work for the Pope, we murder people. We're Vatican assassins. How complicated can it be? What they're not ready for is guys like you and I and Nails and all the other gnarly gnarlingtons in my life, that we are high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks. Boom. Print that, people. See where that goes."

On addiction:

Sheen: "I have cleansed myself. I closed my eyes and in a nanosecond, I cured myself... It's the work of sissies. The only thing I'm addicted to is winning. This bootleg cult, arrogantly referred to as Alcoholics Anonymous, reports a 5 percent success rate. My success rate is 100 percent. Do the math ... another one of their mottoes is 'Don't be special, be one of us.' Newsflash: I am special, and I will never be one of you! I have a disease? Bulls**t! I cured it with my brain, with my mind. I cured it, I'm done ... you don't look like you're having a lot of fun. I'm gonna hang out with these two smoking hotties and fly privately around the world. It might be lonely up here but I sure like the view, Alex!"

Megamind: "What can I say? Old habits die hard!"

Okay, it's not a perfect one-to-one. Still, "high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks" with "gnarly gnarlingtons" in his life including a guy named "Nails"? How is this not an attempt at comic book villainy? Sheen must be trying to escape one of the least funny shows to ever appear on TV. I get that. Two and a Half Men was terrible. It never did anything for the art-form, but it sure did a huge favor to Everybody Loves Raymond and The Cosby Show, which look like masterpieces of the safe sitcom sub-genre by comparison. And Sheen wants to keep working. All that private-jet-two-girlfriends living can't be cheap. Oh, and he's not funny. So he wants to move into playing the bad guy. He doesn't have the reach to play Iago, so he figures he can play a comic-book bad guy. All these interviews he's doing now are audition tapes. Suddenly they make more sense, right?

Unfortunately for Sheen, Ferrell already had the job, and he aced it. If Ferrell were Sheen, he'd be shouting, "Winning!" Except that's too annoying even for a character like Ron Burgundy. But maybe Sheen can get a gig in the sequel, Megamind vs. Narcissus the Raging Tool. That is, if anyone would want to risk a dime on a guy who might shut down production at any minute. I'm guessing his next bit of work will have really low overhead to avoid too much investment at the front end. Somebody will foot the bill for a reality show that's a spin-off on his ex-wife's.

Next up on the Train-wreck TV Express: Charlie Sheen: It's Not Complicated. Winning!

Heaven help us all.

The debut of the Grammar Geek

2011-02-23T19:43:00.000-08:00

Though we haven't finished making the videos yet, one of my coworkers, Roseanna Larson, and I made the local paper with a story on the web videos we're making. Roseanna should get the credit, because the whole series was her idea, but she wanted a geek for the "Grammar Geek" role and I look the part.

Here's the article (here). I have to give the writer, Craig Coleman, a lot of credit. I freaked him out during the interview when I joked about how risky it is to write about grammar, because everyone would look the piece over with a grammar magnifying glass. I didn't see any errors.

As he mentions, some students will be editing the pieces, so I think they'll be great. I'll post them here as we finish. Wish us luck!

Murphy's Law: Gorman's Pizza Corollary

2011-02-13T22:43:00.000-08:00

I have always been a fan of Murphy's Law. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Murphy's Law states that "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."

There's a whole taxonomy of corollaries that can be extrapolated from Murphy's Law. I used to have a page-a-day calendar of them. My favorite did not come from the calendar, but from one of my professors in college, Vic Bobb, who once said, "If there are two drops of rain falling from the sky, they will both fall on your glasses, one on each lens."

Tonight I discovered my own, which shall henceforth be known as Gorman's Pizza Corollary: "If you have three pizza boxes in your refrigerator, regardless of your presumption of their order, the one you want will always be the third you open."

On Sharing the Draft of My Novel with Friends

2011-01-15T02:38:00.000-08:00

Before Christmas Break, I asked four of my colleagues from the English department at the high school where I work to read the first draft of my recently completed manuscript. That was foolish, because I then spent my whole break feeling a consistent, low-grade anxiety about their possible reactions. I recently asked my wife to read it, and she promised to start today. Now I’m an nervous wreck.

One of the things all these people have in common, besides being people I respect and care about (my wife most of all) is that none of them ripped the book out of my hands, squealed with pleasure, and ran off to tear through it in a single sitting. In fact, when I returned from my anxious break and found that most of my colleagues hadn’t read it, I was greatly relieved. As much as I would be horrified to hear that they hated the book, I think I would be even less capable of responding appropriately if they loved it. At least, when they apologized for not getting around to it, I knew what to say. “That’s okay. You’re busy. It’s no big deal,” I lied.

Don’t these people understand a writer’s relationship with his or her novel?

Of course they don’t. That’s a stupid question. To paraphrase my African-American friends, “It’s a writer thing; you wouldn’t understand.” More specifically, it’s a novelist thing. I’m not sure anyone who hasn’t written at least one novel can really understand the relationship.

I’ve been thinking about that relationship (as I’ve stewed and fretted about my coworkers avoiding me because they hated my book), and I remember hearing more than one writer describing his or her novel as a child to whom they’ve given birth. I categorically reject this metaphor. It’s wrong in too many ways. In fact, any writer who utters this kind of drivel should not only avoid using metaphors in his or her own work, but should probably also not be allowed to have children.

A novel is only like a child in the most superficial ways. It’s fun to start. It takes a while. It hurts to finish. And then it’s ready to be presented.

But even these similarities don’t stand up to close inspection. When you begin a novel, as you fall into the joy of the story and pass that point where you know it can’t all fit in a short story, you inevitably begin to dream about the rest of the book, its reception, the fame and wealth it will bring when throngs of adoring fans beg for a sequel. Not so, for children. If, in the act of making babies, you start to think about your future child, even if you limit yourself to only the most positive parts of child-rearing, the way your father will shake your hand outside the delivery room, your mother’s happiness when she picks up the baby for the first time, the look on your son’s face some Christmas morning, the pride your daughter will take in some spelling test or piano recital, the funny stories you’ll tell to his prom date to embarrass him before he heads out the door, the moment you walk her down the aisle… Any one of these moments would sufficiently ruin the mood enough that no one would ever make babies.

And yes, writing a novel is a significant investment of time, but unlike a pregnancy, there’s no natural mechanism which assures that it won’t take a year, or five years. And if you don’t finish your novel that might be a bit disappointing, but let’s not fool ourselves about the false equivalence to the heartbreak of losing a pregnancy.

I’ve heard that labor hurts. A lot. In the process of crafting your novel, you may run into barriers that might make you cry out in exasperation, but that’s not quite the same thing. Also, those frustrations, while far less pronounced than the pain of childbirth, don’t come exclusively at the end of the process. Writer’s block is the unpredictable false contraction that pops up during the first trimester, or the second, but doesn’t mean you’re anywhere close to finishing the book. Oh, and if that false contraction is bad enough, you can walk away from the novel for a year or two. I’m pretty sure you can’t take a hiatus in the middle of your pregnancy. But again, I’m not speaking from experience.

And then, when your baby is born, it’s really born. It’s out in the world, fully formed and ready to go. Your job instantly changes. And people can immediately see your baby, and coo over it, and no one I’ve ever met says, “I don’t really have time to look at your baby right now,” or “I’ve examined your baby and he just doesn’t do it for me,” or “Your baby is pretty enough, but I’m just not sure what she’s trying to say to us.” The baby is there and perfectly wonderful. The novel is a rough manuscript and you have to schlep around, begging for some agent to pimp it to publishing companies. If you treat your baby this way, immediately looking for someone to pimp him on the streets for cash, you should be locked up.

So what is a writer's relationship to his novel like? What metaphor might explain this better to that first group of prospective readers who just don’t understand how important this is to you?

I think writing a novel is more like trying to build a boat in your backyard. At first, you’re excited about the drafting of the plans. Everything is possible. Will it have a motor? Will it have a sail? Why stop at one? Maybe a crow’s nest, and replica cannons, and a satellite navigation system! Throw them all in there! Why the hell not? And if your spouse is noticing that slightly mad gleam in your eye, you don’t have to show her the plans quite yet. They’re just sketches, after all. Who cares, right?

And then you actually go and buy lumber. Very quickly you realize that you aren’t quite up to this task. You know a thing or two about boats, but mostly from pictures and movies, and there’s really not enough room in your backyard to build the Queen Anne 2. But you’ve nailed some boards together, and you’ve made adjustments to your plans, so why not continue, right? Who cares?

Now the hull is starting to take shape. You find yourself telling friends that you’re building as boat. After their reactions, you find yourself keeping it a secret again. Don’t worry. They’ll forget.

You make time in your schedule, but not too much. It would be embarrassing to have to cancel engagements because there’s a half a boat in your back yard. The neighbors complain about the hammering after dark, so you move some things around and try to do most of the work on weekends during daylight (okay, well maybe that’s the exact opposite of the novel, but we’re still closer than a pregnancy), and you just keep adding more lumber. You realize you’ve made a significant investment in this thing, but it’s a sunk cost (you do note the pun), so you can’t stop now.

You find that you’re acquiring all these new tools, too. Back in high school, your shop teacher seemed like a nice enough guy, but you just didn’t understand how he got so excited about this kind of thing. Now you imagine calling him up to show it off, but you reconsider and decide to wait until you know it will actually float.

You start to get really worried that the neighbors will look over the privacy fence and see what you’re doing. You know they’ll call you "Noah" behind your back and make jokes about the coming flood. They would call your sanity into question, and you’re not sure you could blame them. But it’s really coming together.

At the end of the building, there’s a lot of sanding and painting involved. If you hadn’t committed to the thing a long time ago, you’d never go through all this drudgery, but now it seems like an act of love. You wonder how it has come to pass that you actually take pride in your new talent for sanding. It’s not exactly something you could put on a résumé, but you’re pretty sure you’re above average at it.

Now you think it’s finished, but that means you have to decide who will see it first. It’s just too big to put on the trailer all by yourself. Plus, even though you’ve walked around the thing a thousand times, you worry that someone else will immediately see a gaping hole in the hull you managed to miss. And what if your friend takes one look at it and says, “That’s going to sink,” or “That’s the ugliest boat I ever saw,” or “I don’t get it”? Bearing these possibilities in mind, you don’t want to throw a big party, pull a huge sheet off the thing, and yell, “Tada!” So you choose very carefully, make those selective phone calls, and ask for help.

And then they say, “Yeah, I’ll come help, but I’m busy, so it might be a while.” And you want to scream, “I have a yacht in my backyard! I built it with my own two hands! We’re talking His Majesty’s Sailing Ship ‘Novel’ here! I’m not kidding, it’s a giant f---ing boat!”

But you don’t do that. Because you are already the guy crazy enough to build a boat in your backyard, and crazy people can’t afford to shout at their friends.

So that’s where I find myself.

Now, assuming my friends and my wife don’t try to save me from embarrassment by dissuading me from proceeding, I’ll try to get an agent. Basically, I’ll be asking people to climb aboard and find out if she sails or sinks once we’re off shore. I understand why people don’t want to be on that maiden voyage, even the people nearest and dearest to me.

But I wish they could understand why I’m being so weird. I’m telling you, it’s a giant f---ing boat!

The Revenge of the Great Spam Message

2011-01-03T23:54:00.000-08:00

I got another winner. Check out this... whatever it is:

"Fastened, they fastened to be taught that filing lawsuits is not the settlement to outshine piracy. A substitute alternatively, it's to tell something in the most timely sphere than piracy. Like placidity of use. It's unqualifiedly a bulky numbers easier to indispensability iTunes than to search the Internet with threat of malware and then crappy sublimity, but if people are expected to a swarms loads and stick-up permissible of ages, it's not affluent to work. They straight would sooner a squat sooner in impetuously people dream up software and Springe sites that construct it ridiculously tranquilly to infringer, and up the quality. If that happens, then there compel be no stopping piracy. But they're too sharp and horrified of losing. Risks easy to be tickled pink!"

You know, now that I think about it, it is kind of like the placidity of use. And here I'd expected a swarms loads and stick-up permissible of ages. Hmm.

Great Spam Message

2010-12-29T11:56:00.000-08:00

The spam filter on Blogger catches most of the spam messages posted to the comments, but I do get an emailed copy to see if they are real and should be posted. This one is certainly spam, but it's just too good to keep to myself. Check it out. In fact, read it out loud. It's like some brilliant nonsense poem. Paige's response: "Is that pro-piracy or against it?" I don't know. Maybe it's not really about piracy at all. Any interpretations?

"Resource, they fundamental to be taught that filing lawsuits is not the run to a precise piracy. Measure than, it's to develop something mastery than piracy. Like ingenuousness of use. It's even-handedly a fortuity easier to rush down the twist iTunes than to search the Internet with jeopardize of malware and then crappy sublimity, but if people are expected to a trough loads and linger yon seeing that ages, it's not paper money to work. They a guy be subjected to a low-lying on without note down unpropitious on people beget software and Springe sites that interchange it ridiculously fragile to picaroon, and up the quality. If that happens, then there in particular be no stopping piracy. But they're too prudent and appalled of losing. Risks fasten to be bewitched!"

Yes, that's an excellent reminder to us all; risks do, in fact, fasten to be bewitched.

Being Fair to Fair and Balanced Fox News

2010-12-29T02:58:00.000-08:00

I was first exposed to the findings of a recent study about how Fox News viewers are more misinformed than those who get their news from other sources here. Obviously, the source, NewsCorpse.com, a site advertising itself as "The Internet's Chronicle of Media Decay," might have reason to be biased against Fox, so I clicked on the link to the study itself (read about it here, complete with links to the whole study and its methodology, if you're interested). This was more balanced, in the sense that it paints a clearer picture of political bias based on party affiliation. Democrats were inclined to believe certain falsehoods, and Republicans were inclined to believe different ones. Still, the verdict on Fox News is not good. While other news sources believed things that were questionable, like the notion that the US Chamber of Commerce spent millions collected from foreigners on Republican candidates (something that's unknowable since donors identities are secret), viewers of Fox News believed a host of falsehoods at higher rates. Now, one can certainly quibble about which of these falsehoods is more significant. I was tempted to rush headlong into those tall weeds. But then I thought about my own motivation, and took a step back. Why does it bother me so much that people of both parties are willing to accept misinformation as fact? Is this intentional on the part of the media outlets, or is it a byproduct of telling one side of the story and letting people's biased imaginations fill in the gaps? And why should I spend my energy, at Christmas time no less, blasting a particular news outlet with whom I disagree.

Today I came across this piece from the LA Times (which had been published back on the 17th of December) and it answered one of my questions. Is the deception on the part of Fox intentional? Yes. As the article points out, a leaked memo from Fox's Washington editor, Bill Sammon, instructed his talking heads, not just the pundits but the reporters, to always refer to the "public option" as the "government option" or "government-run health insurance". Is that just spin in the opposite direction? Arguably so. But then he also sent this one: "We should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question." Now, that's not spin. As the Times piece points out, scientists and, well, any layman on the street or pundit behind a news desk, can dispute the interpretation of this data. Some can say it's part of a natural warming period unrelated to human action, and then try to explain why they know better than Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Global Change Research Panel, the International Arctic Science Committee, and the 32 national science academies of various countries that have all concluded that the warming is real and is the product of human action. Sure, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists eventually came around to the same conclusion, and no scientific body of national or international standing now disputes this, but there are still individual scientists who do. Maybe all the big scientific organizations are wrong. It is possible. A person can dispute that. Of course, people have the right to stick their fingers in their ears and scream that the Earth is flat, the moon is made of cheese, the sky is purple with green polka-dots, and the government of Kenya is so advanced that they identified one newborn baby as super-human and sent him to Hawaii, complete with two false birth announcements in local papers, because they knew he would grow up to be the president of the Harvard Law Review, a dismal failure as a Congressional candidate, then a U.S. Senator, and then a secret spy who'd been elected President of the United States. People can choose to believe whatever the hell they want, regardless of logic or evidence to the contrary. But if a source of news is going to intentionally misrepresent hard data rather than its interpretation, it should put that fingers-in-ears nutter on screen and call itself Batsh-t Crazy Network, or Intentionally Lying Network. But then, if it was the Intentionally Lying Network, it could call itself anything it wanted, right? It could call itself Fox News. And if people want to watch that, why should that bother me?

Of course, the pat answer is that those people vote, and their decisions affect me and the people I care about. Trite but true. I thought about railing in just that vein about the danger of a democracy in which a large percentage of the people choose to be willfully misinformed. But it was Christmas, a holiday amalgamated from the Roman Saturnalia and the Norse Yule by Christians who couldn't stamp out all the pagan reveling, so they slapped their new name on it and called it theirs. And it's great. Not only do millions upon millions of Americans not know that the holiday is placed in the calendar out of cold, cynical calculation, or that the Bible never mentions 3 Kings from the Orient, not only do they not know why they have a tree inside their houses, or socks above their fireplaces, or a magical old man completely unrelated to the ostensible rationale for the holiday, but they don't care. And when I see my son's face as he reads the tag on the gift from Santa Clause on Christmas morning, I can't blame them at all. Christmas is wonderful.

And that brings me to my conclusion about Fox News: If people want to be deceived, if thinking about things as dour as Global Warming is too depressing, while feeling rage at the location of a Mosque in New York puts a special spring in their step, who am I to say they shouldn't be allowed that? We all have our delusions, and they help us get through the day. One of my favorite quotes comes from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote, "If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely,' it would not have any significant first person, present indicative." That is to say, I cannot say I currently believe something which I know to be false. But I could say I choose to watch Fox News and believe what I hear there, and it seems that's the same thing. Now, that's not to my taste for political reasons. Perhaps if there were a true alternative, a network which deceived me into thinking there is a brilliant and evil cabal making a coordinated effort to cause all the things I believe to be wrong in the world, and a countervailing band of equally brilliant but struggling grass-roots heroes who are fending off all the things that go bump in the night, perhaps I would choose to watch that. I love novels about great heroes standing up to the seemingly unassailable forces of evil, and I choose to read my politics into those just as I'm sure the other half of my fellow Americans read the opposite politics into them. And I pat myself on the back for really "getting it" just as they do. If the book is popular enough, both right and left can join together to create a great thwacking round of applause for ourselves. But to generate a similar sound in the genre of fake news we need different networks, and, despite missteps reported by the study, it's clear that the left has really failed in that it's taken to criticizing the right for factual errors, thus eliminating the possibility of truly competing in the field of fantasy journalism.

Let's be fair to Fox; they have figured out something the left just doesn't seem to get. People are not motivated by data. It does not get them to vote a certain way, to turn on a particular station, or to sit through a commercial. When I watch the news (which is increasingly rarely) or go to my computer to read it, I admit that I do it not because I want to find information, but because I want to feel informed. Those are not the same thing. I also want to find data to solve problems (or have the information to form opinions no one cares about but me, but that's the same motivation with a diminished result). News, if done properly, can fulfill these goals. But if I wanted to be scared? If I wanted to be angry? I could turn to the tepid network newscasts, with their own biases (NBC is owned by the world's largest arms manufacturer for godsakes, and ABC is owned by Disney) and be told that everything is basically fine as long as we keep buying more guns and going to Disneyland. How disappointing. Or I could turn to Fox News, learn about the vast left-wing conspiracy to make us all atheist cogs in a communist machine, and get really pissed off and have the bejeezus scared out of me.

Sure, it's partisan, but I don't think that's the end game. Back when I used to watch Fox News in an attempt to achieve some mythical balance in my viewing, one thing that struck me was how often Bill O'Reilly made explicit mention of his ratings. He didn't mention the number of Republicans in Congress, or the number of red states, or the statistics on church attendance half as often. Fox News, more than anything, is devoted to making people watch Fox News. They are very smart people, and know that calling yourself "Fair and Balanced" helps promote that goal, while actually being fair or balanced (which are not the same thing) would undermine it. And really, can you blame them? I'm not a big fan of romance novels, but I seriously doubt that, moments before the stud with the gleaming pects rips open the heroine's bodice, he addresses the reader with a reminder that the book is just a fantasy. Fantasy is the point.

So here's a Christmas toast to Fox News: Keep up the good work, liars. You make those of us who want to get our novels published jealous of your ability to peddle in fiction. Kudos. But stop leaking those memos. It's ruining the illusion.

And here's to those who purport to be real journalists: I see why you have been so tepid in your response to the dissembling on Fox News. Nobody likes the guy who sits in the dark theater during the horror movie and whispers, "It's not real, you know." But at some point the lie is a part of the story, and you have a responsibility to cover that, too, even if people find it boring at first. Because repetition works. Just ask Fox News. And at some point, people will start to get angry when any serious person quotes Fox News. And anger works. Just ask Fox News. In fact, I'll bet people would even sit through your commercials for luxury cars and Viagra just to see a really thorough, data-driven, "fair and balanced" smack-down of Fox. Or you could just put your fingers in your ears and scream that Fox News isn't actually deceiving anyone. Hell, that works for them. But if you decide to stay mum regarding the deceptions over at Fox News, don't let that memo leak out. It's embarrassing.

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

2010-12-24T03:57:00.000-08:00

On a more festive note, here's the video Noah made today for his grandparents in Cincinnati. He did a pretty great job, I think. His dad, on the other hand, didn't figure out the settings on the camera until AFTER the video was completed, edited, and posted to YouTube, so you'll notice his amazing ability to read backwards, and you can practice by reading his shirt. Here's wishing you all a Happy Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Yule, Solstice, Festivus, or whatever holiday you are enjoying around this time of year.

Teaching to the Test

2010-12-24T03:46:00.000-08:00

Since it's Christmas break, I've had the luxury of embroiling myself in a couple minor online skirmishes regarding the state of public education. One friend wrote, "And don't get me started on teaching to the test!" I've written before about my ambivalence regarding testing. Tests are not all bad. They are a useful mechanism for a teacher to learn where his/her students are at regarding specific content. They are less effective at measuring the teachers of a large group of students, or of a whole school, or of an education system in general; you can only test what you can clearly define, and since we haven't agreed upon a succinct and measurable definition of "successful teacher" or "successful school" or "successful education system," all a test tells us is that kids did well on the test. The more pressure we put on that circular definition, the more we'll push teachers to become "successful" by getting kids to do well on the tests that define "successful".
It would be like me assigning you an 8 out of 10.
"I've tested you, and you scored an 8 out of 10. Not bad," I'd announce.
"At what?" you'd say.
"At getting an 8 out of 10."
"Well, I guess that's better than a 7 but not as good as a 9."
"Yes. You should work really hard at being a 9 out of 10."
"Okay, but at what?" you'd ask.
"At being a 9 out of 10."
"This seems a bit arbitrary."
"Just wait until I make your paycheck dependent on being a 9 out of 10 or better."
"At what?" you'd scream. But you'd work hard to get ready for that test, regardless of your thoughts about its validity, wouldn't you?

Christmas Break has also allowed me to step away from my classroom and think a bit more deeply about some other things I teach. I think about these while I play with action figures with my six-year-old. We've also been reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies, which make me think of other books and movies, as you'll see. I find myself hoping his teachers do not limit themselves to the material on the tests. But then, how would I know? If their ratings are published, as the ratings of the teachers in the L.A. Unified School District were this last year, I'd only know how his teachers rated based on test scores. I thought about what he might miss if I could shunt him off to the teachers with the best ratings in such a system. This poem is my first draft of a conclusion:

Teaching to the Test

I am supposed to teach to a test
But I keep losing my way
And teaching other things.
I suppose I am the reason that public education is failing so miserably.
What if my poor students face lives filled only
With choices ranging between a,b,c, and d
And I’ve filled their heads with lessons like these?

Don’t read books just to find the right answers.
And don’t watch movies to find out what the books say.
That’s like a seventh grader asking out a girl
By passing a note to her best friend.
Movies often get the books wrong,
But books sometimes get life wrong
So make both and see if you can do better.

Fall in love.
It will hurt sometimes.
Maybe so much you’ll curse the stars.
But do it anyway.
Chance meetings can be the starts of great romances.
Of course, they can be the beginnings of horror stories, too.
That guy might be perfect for you
Or he might be a hundred-year-old pedophile with skin as cold as ice and a burning desire to drink your blood
Or maybe just knock you up on the honeymoon when you’re just eighteen.
That’s why you need to learn to read people as carefully as you read books.

Don’t shoot Mockingbirds
Or destroy innocence for no good reason.
If you see a mob with torches and pitchforks, don’t join in; you’ll regret it later.
Sometimes witches have the answers you need
If you have some leverage.
And others are beautiful women who want to keep you on their islands and pamper you for a while.
You should let them.
When you see a piece of cake and a note that says, “Eat me,”
You should.
But don’t break in and steal food from bears.
It’s unwise.

Rich people aren’t all evil and greedy.
Poor people aren’t all stupid and lazy.
Women are not weak, and if there is an alien on your spaceship you’d better be one.
Snap decisions and stereotypes kept our caveman ancestors safe from saber tooth tigers
But now, that categorical thinking mostly makes people look ignorant or worse.
Skin color doesn’t really tell you much about a person
But culture and religion and family history are important.
If you ignore them or disrespect them, you might end up
Getting crushed by a Golem
Or accidentally marrying your own mother.

Also, not all step-parents are evil
And if you obsess about them, it can turn out very badly
Especially if you are a prince in Denmark.

If you are the extremely jealous type
Or have a weak ankle
Or are missing one scale of your impenetrable hide
Don’t be too arrogant, because someone will figure out a way to exploit your weaknesses.

One king sacrificed his daughter in exchange for a safe journey
And his wife killed him when he got home.
More often, people sacrifice their marriages while they are away.
It can have the same result, so be careful.

You cannot love your children too much
Even if it means protecting them when it seems the world is a pointless place
So hold them close in the darkness
And keep them safe, even if you can’t see where you’re going.
But you can love them the wrong way
So don’t make their girlfriends sleep on 13 mattresses
And certainly don’t send their boyfriends on quests to get the Golden Fleece
Or any other twelve crazy tests
Because that will end very badly for you.

Sometimes the world will seem simply absurd.
Learn to laugh about it.
That way, when the world is about to be destroyed
You’ll know how to hitch a ride on a passing spaceship
Or at least have grace to say, “So it goes.”

You will face battles that seem insurmountable.
Sometimes the opposing army will be so great in number that you believe there is no hope
Or the evil you confront will seem too powerful to contend with
But if you draw your sword
Or wand
Or fill your sling with small stones from the riverbank
You may just find that your friends are better than you thought
Or that you have a strength that you didn’t know you possessed
Or you are raised up on the wings of eagles
Or the Dark Lord of the Sith is really your father
And used to be played by a far less intimidating actor
And can be redeemed in the end.
People can be redeemed in the end.
But there are times when your world will be filled with every kind of misery
And it’s best to clap down the lid on false hope and hide it in the jar you’ve been given
Because, in the last battle between the gods and the Frost Giants
The gods may lose.

You can leave home
And reinvent yourself
And despite what some people say, you can come home again.
But be careful what you become while you’re away
Because you could become your enemy
Or a sad, broken man staring across a lake at a green light
Or the ruler of a powerful empire
Whispering the name of a childhood toy.
So think about the way you want your story to end,
Revise your life story. Revise, revise, revise,
Pay attention to the way that it’s told,
And care for the other characters you include.
Because, whether you go away or not
There is a sea that can only be crossed once
And an undiscovered country
That cannot be mapped by any test.

Wall-E or 1984

2010-12-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

What does this remind you of more: something out of Wall-E or 1984?

I'd ask if it's more absurd or tragic, but the clear answer is: Both.

Feeling a Bit Hopeless Today

2010-12-06T01:20:00.000-08:00

After finishing Margaret Atwood’s wonderful The Year of the Flood, I find myself running a bit low on hope.

Imagine a cult which has, for the sake of argument, 1000 members. These thousand people have come to believe that the world is going to end on December 6th of 2011, and their great Master Examplicon will call them all home to paradise in the form of poisonous kool-aid falling from the sky. They also believe that there will be signs which point to the coming of Examplicon, chief among which will be people getting hit by city buses. This happens rarely, but they take each instance as a proof. Then, as the date draws near, they decide that too few people are being hit by buses, so they take to jumping in front of them on a regular basis. Some 50 of their members die in this way. At this point, it becomes a hazard to everyone. We, as a society, not only decide they are a bunch of loonies, but that they are a danger to themselves and others. But they are firm in their faith, and go underground, waiting for the day. As a few more continue to pop up in front of buses, we try to convince them that they are crazy.

“Examplicon is not making this happen,” we say. “You are!”

“Prove it,” they say. “Only, don’t use science, as the Great Examplicon teaches us that science is a fraud. And don’t use logic, since we believe the supernatural trumps logic.”

“Don’t you see that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy?” we say.

“You are elitists who think you know better than we do because you went to fancy colleges.”

“But we didn’t. We went to colleges you’ve never even heard of. We didn’t get the highest SAT scores. We’re not super-scientists or world leaders. We’re just normal people who want you to stop jumping in front of our buses.”

“You are condescending. You think you know better than we do.”

We stare at our feet. “It’s not very flattering, but yes, we do think not jumping in front of buses is preferable to jumping in front of them.”

“You’ve just been duped by the liberal media, which paints our unusually high death rate by bus as some kind of fault in our religion.”

“No, they show you jumping in front of buses. We’re the ones who think that’s a bad idea.”

“See?” they cry. “They’ve tricked you and you don’t even know it.”

Exasperated, we feel guilty, especially the liberals among us, who would prefer to think of ourselves as open minded and tolerant of other people’s religions. But people keep getting injured when buses slam on their breaks, and people are traumatized when they see the cult members smashed bodies lying in the street. Not to mention the effects on the cult members themselves. It’s a bad situation. And it’s getting worse.

As the day approaches, the membership in the cult has dwindled, but not much, since all the victims on TV have convinced some new converts that these folks are really on to something. After all, they say more and more people will get hit by buses, and it sure seems to be the case if you watch the news.

Then, on the night of December 6th, 2011, the cult members come out of hiding and throw a big party in the ballroom of a hotel. The leader puts poisoned kool-aid in the sprinkler system, and when it rains down on the people, in the last minutes of their lives, they are certain that Examplicon has come for them, just like they’ve been told.

Now, what would you think of these people when you heard the story the next day on the TV, or read a long expose about it in Time Magazine? Be honest. Would you think they were crazy? Stupid? Deceived?

But what if the cult didn’t have 1000 members? What if it had a hundred million? And instead of jumping in front of buses, they believed plagues, famines, and natural disasters were the signs of the coming apocalypse? When a massive oil spill fills the gulf of Mexico, they say, “Well, that’s a sign.” When ice caps dry up, leaving people without fresh water, they say, “Well, that’s a sign.” When modern agriculture forces too many animals too close together near populated areas, creating new pandemics, they say, “See, that’s one of those plagues we’ve been warning you about.”

And even though scientists tell them these things are all the products of human activities, they say, “We don’t believe you.”

Or, imagine that, instead of believing the end of the world is coming in the form of poisoned kool-aid, they believe that democracy is coming to an end and the American government will fall. So they consistently vote for people who share this view, and those politicians actively work to make sure the government doesn’t get anything done. When popular legislation comes up for a vote, they filibuster it into oblivion, or load it up with so much pork it buries the country in debt. Then, these people say, “See? The federal government is bloated and ineffectual.”

“But the party you keep voting for is responsible for most of the pork, most of the corruption, and most of the inactivity of government.”

“Oh,” they say, “you’re just accepting that liberal media bias.”

“No,” we protest, “the candidate himself said he would vote against everything except tax cuts, higher defense spending, and pork for his district. That simply can’t be sustained. He kept quoting that Reagan line about government being the problem, and that Grover Norquist line about shrinking it until he drown it in a bathtub. He had no intention of governing wisely or well. And now the government is in shambles.”

“See? The federal government doesn’t work,” they say. “And, by the way, you’re a socialist.”

Like the cult members, there will be no moment of realization. When the devastation caused by global warming gets to be too great, in whatever form it ultimately takes, they’ll say, “People dying because of droughts or plagues or natural disasters… but it’s cold out today, so it’s not a global warming problem. You’re wrong. It’s just the end times.”

Or (who knows which will come first) when the Californication of the federal government is beyond repair, and the government can’t offer basic services because it refuses to tax the wealthy and can’t squeeze any more out of the poor, they’ll say, “See? This is what happens when you let a bunch of socialists have say in government and ignore the Constitution.”

I don’t want to say “I told you so,” while people lose their unemployment insurance, then their health care, then their social security, then their public schools, then their local fire fighters and police officers.

I don’t want to say “I told you so,” while people die in massive storms, or from a lack of fresh water, or in new wars over dwindling resources.

“I told you so” won’t make me feel any better, and besides, these people self-identify as deniers. They will refuse to see it anyway.

But I will be the old man who breaks a hip when the bus slams on its breaks. My son will be the young man who goes sliding up the aisle. And I feel like there’s nothing I can do about it.

Performing School Reform Backwards

2010-12-05T01:52:00.000-08:00

An anonymous poster has challenged my defense of school unions (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) in three separate posts, ad his/her arguments are worthy of a serious response. He/she has no qualms about calling me "whining" and "greedy", so I think it's a good thing the posts were anonymous, so I can avoid the temptation to return fire in kind. The poster makes some claims which I can agree with, some which need to be refuted, and poses a larger question that should be addressed.

First off, the poster claims that because teachers are fired at a much lower rate than other professionals, this proves teachers unions are an impediment to getting rid of bad teachers. This simply doesn't follow. I don't know about the situation where the poster lives, and I can't defend New York's infamous "rubber room" model, but where I teach the process to fire a teacher is pretty straight-forward. A teacher would need to be identified as under-performing by an administrator. This doesn't differ from the model in the private business world, where a boss would do an evaluation and tell an employee they need to improve to maintain their employment. Then, they would be put on what is called a "plan of assistance", in which the areas of improvement would be identified, and the teacher would have a chance to show that they have improved. If the teacher failed to improve, they would be fired. The union negotiates the mechanism by which this is to be done, but does not try to prevent it from being implemented. Teachers know we have under-performing teachers in our midst, and we know they make our jobs harder. Teachers compose the teachers unions. We want bad teachers out. The problem is that identifying bad teachers takes time. A round of bad test scores does not show that a teacher is ineffective. Perhaps the class had low skills to begin with. Just as in the private sector, a real performance review would have to be done to see if a firing would make the organization more efficient, or if it would just be a reaction to a hiccup in the market which has nothing to do with a particular employee and would thus make the whole school or company, less effective because of the loss of talent. But administrators rarely use this mechanism. Why not? Partly, it's because it takes so much time and energy. That's not the union's fault. Identifying the effectiveness of employees takes a lot of time and energy for private sector companies, too. But they do it, or they fail. So why don't administrators? I have a theory.

But before we get to that, the poster also defends our current grading system by saying that colleges need it, and regardless of the fact that grades might be inflated, grades show who the high performers in a class were. The problem with this is that it's simply not true. It might work, if all grades were inflated equally, but when they aren't, a college can't tell if one school's valedictorian will be as successful as another school's. The grades don't tell colleges or employers what a student is capable of doing. The poster challenges me to propose a better system. I can't claim to have thought of this myself, but I'm a firm believer in what is called proficiency based grading. Imagine a college (or the student's teacher the following year) looking at his or her B grade. That might mean 1) the student did 80% of the paperwork, regardless of how meaningful the work was, or 2) the student scored 80% on tests which are different from the tests given elsewhere or 3) the teacher liked the student, but not as much as the kid who got an A, or 4) the teacher had a recurring illness and the substitute gave everyone a B, or 5) something else which might be equally arbitrary. Proficiency based grading produces a report card that looks very different. It identifies specific skills. Then, the teacher assigns a score to each one (something along the lines of Exceeds, Meets, Not Yet Met). The list of skills is long and can be scaled up to match expectations determined by the state or even across the nation. Now the college or next teacher has a concrete idea of what that student can actually do. This certainly is more time consuming for teachers, but it also saves a lot of time in the beginning of instruction, when teachers have to figure out what kids are capable of doing again each year. What is the impediment to this system? If you give that long report card to parents, by and large they ignore all the skills their students have mastered, and all the ones they lack, and ask the teacher for a letter grade. Colleges, similarly, want a GPA, regardless of its meaninglessness, rather than discrete knowledge of specific skills. Identifying what kids can and can't do needs to be a serious part of any discussion about school reform. But blaming teachers unions is a lot easier.

The poster also makes reference to the tenure system. This is a common misconception, and comes from a confusion about teachers and college professors. Public school teachers, at least in Oregon, don't have anything called "tenure". For the first three years or employment, a teacher can be fired without any reason or explanation at all. That's called the probationary period. After that time, a teacher can be fired after going through that process I described above. Or they can be fired for doing something unethical. Those firings can take place whether a teacher has been teaching for four years or thirty-five. There is a lot of good research that shows that experience makes a huge difference in teacher quality. I can tell you, anecdotally, that I'm a hell of a lot better teacher now than I was during my probationary period. But the length of my service provides me no added protection if I were to slack off and stop providing my students with high quality instruction.

One area where the poster and I agree is that "teaching is extraordinarily difficult and there are lower barriers to entry." This is caused by a simple supply and demand problem. We need lots and lots of people to do something that we both recognize as extraordinarily difficult. But the poster is also opposed to paying teachers more money (we are "greedy", after all). So, what is the solution? We could raise the barriers to entry. I had to get a masters degree to get into teaching. I paid a ridiculous amount for that degree (much of which is my own stupid fault for believing that the quality of the degree and its corresponding respect from potential employers would be affected by the reputation of the extremely expensive private university I attended). I had to take expensive tests to get my license. And yet, there's good research that is leading some school reformers to believe that, after a certain point, a teacher's educational level and test scores have little bearing on their actual performance in the classroom. So if we can't adequately predict who will make a good teacher based on test scores or education, how can we put up higher barriers to entry? These barriers would keep good teachers out as well as bad ones, according to the current research, but would prevent us from meeting the needed supply. I don't have a magic bullet on this one. Free marketers would claim that more money would solve the problem, but clearly our economy cannot bear the weight of paying teachers like hedge-fund managers. So, how can we encourage our best and brightest to go into teaching? Some countries do this by making the profession highly respected. I'm not sure if that would work, and it would certainly take a while to make such a cultural change, but if we can agree that it's at least cheaper than trying to price good teachers into meeting the supply needs so that we can more easily afford to fire the bad ones, then blaming the problems of public education on teachers unions (teachers) is a really bad way to encourage anyone to go into the field.

Before I really get into the nitty-gritty, I have to address this claim, too: The poster thinks I'm "complaining about being paid more than your private sector counterparts for working 3/4 as much time (plus 2 fewer hours a day, at least) and having the opportunity to make even more working over the summer." This shows a wildly inaccurate conception of a teacher's hours. I was complaining that some ignorant people believe that teachers get lots of paid vacation, when, in fact, we are not paid for the summers or breaks during the year. I didn't say we didn't work during those times. Nor did I say we work two fewer hours per day than our private sector counterparts. I'm not sure where the poster is from, but I don't work forty hours a week, and just because I don't get paid during the summers or holidays doesn't mean I'm not working. For example, this summer I spent that time the poster believes I could have been working taking 9 graduate credits of continuing education. Taking graduate courses is required to maintain my license. When I wasn't in class, I was developing curriculum for my own courses. During the year, I spend exorbitant amounts of time grading after school and during "breaks". In fact, last year, while our school was under construction, I stepped out of my classroom on Christmas Eve and saw that the welders were hard at work on the beams that hold up the high school's new roof. For a moment, I took comfort that I wasn't the only one working at school on Christmas Eve. Then I realized that those guys were not only being paid, but were probably getting time and a half, maybe even double time. I was not being paid at all. Now, despite what some might think, I'm actually not whining. I used to work for Merril Lynch, selling stocks and bonds. I made a lot more money and worked a lot fewer hours in the private sector. And I hated it. I chose this profession, and I do it because I enjoy it, and I'm good at it. But please, please, don't believe for a minute that teachers work from the start of the school day to the end and that's it. In fact (speaking of low barriers of entry) the only person who dropped out of my masters cohort was the guy who realized just how many more hours he'd have to work to be successful in teaching than his job as a bank loan officer (where he made more money). One of the reasons teachers unions try so hard to negotiate for more pay is not because we're greedy, but because we want to be paid a fair hourly wage that corresponds to that of our private sector peers who work many fewer hours than we do. My first year (and the first year of teaching is, admittedly, and outlier because it's so difficult) I was working twelve hours a day almost every day, and when I calculated my hourly rate of pay it came to around eleven bucks an hour. Tell me a private sector employee with a masters degree putting in twelve hour days for eleven bucks an hour wouldn't be asking his boss for a raise.

Okay, now to the grand unifying theory that explains why teachers (good or bad) don't get fired, why we can't come up with a magic bullet for falling test scores and increasing drop out rates, why school reform is stuck in an intractable blame game: We don't know what we want teachers to accomplish. I can't take credit for this theory. It comes from a friend who teaches teachers at a Willamette University. In fact, I wouldn't be completely surprised if he didn't post the anonymous comments, playing up their aggressive tone and repeating arguments he knows to be baseless just to bait me into responding. Fine, Neil, I'll repeat your theory: We can't figure out how to fix our schools because we can't agree on what they're supposed to do. We can't determine which teachers are "good" or "bad" because we can't even agree on what they are supposed to do. The poster brings up the successes of students in India (an example I frequently cite in my classes to remind my students who they will be competing against). Is it my job to make my students as motivated as Indian students are when they walk through the door? Is it my job to make sure the students are as pressured by their parents as those Indian students, perhaps by calling parents and harassing them somehow? Should I focus all my energy on making sure my students can fill in the right bubbles on multiple choice tests which may have little or no relation to the kinds of tasks they will face in college or in the workforce? Should I teach them to be critical thinkers who refuse to evaluate themselves based on numbers handed down from the government? Should I make sure they can get into a prestigious university? Should I prepare them to be successful in blue collar jobs which might be vanishing before they graduate? Should I teach them my politics, my culture, or my religious preference? If not, am I inculcating them with my political, cultural, or religious values when I tell them that education is the key to success, or that work should be done on time, or that they should follow school rules? Should I teach them to respect authority by running my classroom in an authoritarian fashion, or should I adopt the "coaching" model and allow students to direct their own learning so that they learn autonomy? Should I teach them that money is how work is measured in our society and model this by leaving school when the contract day ends and refusing to work in the evenings or during the summer, or should I teach them that money and work are disconnected and undermine these future drivers of our capitalist system? Should I prepare them to take a U.S. history test written in Massachusetts or in Texas? Should I teach them to produce the kind of writing that actually gets printed, or to write in the formulaic way that gets a high score when it's graded by a computer program?

Without answers to these questions, we can't easily distinguish good teachers from bad ones, successful schools from failing ones, or even evaluate the success of the system as a whole. The poster argues that the "law of large numbers ensures that with appropriate statistical analysis it is entirely possible to measure the performance of individual teachers." This reminds me of the scene in The Hitckhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the universe's most advanced computer is asked the meaning to life, the universe, and everything, and responds with the answer "42". We could use statistical analysis if we understood the question, but there is no numerical measure for "good" or "bad", "successful" or "failing", when we can't even agree on what these terms mean.

So, dear poster, before you claim teachers (and you'll understand when I take that personally) have "failed America's students" and are responsible for "how much damage they have done to America's future due to their intransigent profligacy," I would expect that you have a bullet-proof and universally acceptable answer to the question of what we should be doing differently.

But if your answer is "Work harder for less and shut up," I hope you will reveal your name and some details I can use to personalize my next (far less polite) response.

Shaving for the Play

2010-11-26T22:16:00.000-08:00

I have a little part in our high school's winter musical (Ebeneezer), and I need to be clean shaven. So, goodbye goatee:

Before:

At least I looked a bit like Megamind:

During:

The Mess:

And After:

I'm back to looking like a cross between Gollum:

and Chameleon from the Spider-Man comics:

Which Carlos Ruiz Zafon novel is better?

2010-11-20T02:29:00.000-08:00

In my creative writing class, I have the students choose novels to read from a handful of my favorites. My process in choosing the books was pretty subjective and selfish. I made a list of my favorite books, then chose the ones that I find to be the best examples of good writing, for different reasons. The students read these novels and then break into roles, some examining word choice, some syntax, some plot, some character, some setting, etc., then report on what the book has taught them about being a writer.

One of the books on the list is Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind. I love Zafon's rich, vibrant prose and descriptions of setting most of all, but the guy can certainly tell a great story. Because I teach high school, and in a relatively conservative community, I didn't choose Zafon's next novel, the prequel to The Shadows of the Wind, called The Angel's Game. In a way it would be a far more appropriate book for a creative writing class. While Shadow is all about being a reader and lover of books, Angel's is about being a writer. Unfortunately, it's also about how being a writer can be a kind of torture that can drive you to madness and murder, and if that weren't enough to raise the hackles of some parents, the protagonist may or may not have made a deal with the devil himself. Still, as I sit here and think about it, it might be the better book. I'm interested to know, from folks who've read both, which is the better of the two in your opinion? You can vote in a simple poll below, but I'd also like to hear some explanation in the comments. Of course, it's likely that no one who comes across this page will have read both books, but if you can't vote here, take that as a sign that you have one or two books to run out and buy. Zafon is a master craftsmen at the very least, so get yourself a copy of each of these novels and give the pair to some friends at Christmas, too. They will thank you profusely.

Sent from my iPod at 3:45 in the morning

2010-10-31T22:32:00.000-07:00

Tonight, as I am about to climb into bed, I have a song in my head.

It's Cat Stevens' "Peace Train" which I heard today while watching The Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear on TV. In the darkness, as I change clothes, I listen to this mental background music and my son's slight asthmatic wheeze. He's in our bed because we have house guests, and they're in his room. I don't realize that my wife has moved to the floor. My son must have been tossing and turning quite a bit to take over the queen-sized while I wrote downstairs, his revenge for being displaced. His tossing and turning won't have any effect on me once I reach my usual near-coma state of sleep.

Before I climb in next to him , I suddenly realize I've unconsciously replaced the word "Peace" with "Sleep".

Yes, I'm climbing on the sleep train.

Sounds nice.

Tennessee's Free-Market Utopia Fire

2010-10-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard the story yet, some firefighters in Tennessee showed up to a burning house, found that the owner hadn't paid the annual $75 fee for fire protection, and watched as his house burned to the ground. Besides all the family's belongings, there were three puppies inside.

I don't fault the firefighters. They were following procedure, and under that kind of system, if they put out fires for people who didn't pay, no one would. But that's the problem. It's a thoroughly crappy system. I'll bet more than one of those firefighters was thinking the very same thing as they stood there and watched a house burn down.

Now, you're expecting me to write that this isolated (and admittedly strange) incident points to a larger issue. I won't disappoint. Because this not only points to a larger issue, but specifically refutes a whole line of argument used by anti-tax activists. When people talk about cutting taxes, without fail, they say "waste, fraud, and abuse". The line is used so much that, at the O'Donnell vs. Coons debate for the Delaware senate seat, Wolf Blitzer asked Christine O'Donnell what she'd cut from federal spending and specifically added, "And don't just say waste, fraud and abuse, because everybody says that." (She said she'd cut "waste, fraud, and abuse.")

People like me say, "Be specific. Do you consider public education waste, fraud, or abuse? What about police protection? What about firefighters?"

"No, of course not," we're told. "I mean those other things. The carpet in the statehouse was too expensive. And over here is a guy who is cheating the system to get disability when he seems fine to me. And that public education campaign got one billboard more than was necessary. It all adds up, you know."

And it does. But never to the total these folks want to cut taxes. For example, letting the Bush tax cuts expire would add 3 trillion dollars to the annual budget of the federal government. That's 3,000,000,000,000. 3 million millions. That's $3258 per man, woman, and child. Mostly paid by the top 2% who would still be paying less than they paid under that Robin Hood socialist Ronald Reagan. It would take a lot of cheap carpet, eliminated billboards, and prosecuted fraudulent disability recipients to acquire that amount of money. But it could sure teach a lot of kids, put a lot more cops on the streets, and put out a lot of fires in rural Tennessee.

The Tennesee example shows that the anti-tax jihadists aren't really interested in balancing the budget. That's a red herring. If they were, you'd see Tea Party candidates talking about cutting military spending, Medicare, and Social Security. According to the non-partisan CBO, that's the only way to balance the budget. You could cut all non-discretionary spending and only leave those three programs, and we'd be in the red forever. Read that again. Forever. There just isn't enough coming in to cover the costs of our military and our aging (and increasingly long-lived and medically treated) population. But how many Tea Party candidates will acknowledged this? None. Zip. Rand Paul did before he got out of the primaries. Then the sacred cows became sacred again. But the most holy of holies, the desire to cut taxes for the rich, remains intact, too. And mathematical reality cannot kill either one.

So if these folks aren't really serious about balancing the budget, what do they really want? They'd be the first to tell you that "utopianism" is a bad thing, the origin of progressivism and socialism and all their favorite boogie-men. But if you dangle the notion of a free-market utopia, they salivate. This was one of the dreams of the Bush team: When Saddam was gone, they'd have a sandbox in which to play out this free-market utopia fantasy. It would be great. Adam Smith's invisible hand would rule this new nation, and it would do the work of bringing about democracy and the rule of law because Iraqis would see that these things were in their financial best interest. Paul Bremer's "de-Baathification" program, which was ostensibly designed to get all Saddam loyalists out of the government, was directly connected to turning all kinds of government programs over to private (mostly foreign) companies. Sure, these disaffected former civil servants would run off to join the insurgency and wage a war that would cost U.S. taxpayers over 750 billion dollars (that's a thousand millions, or over $2,400 per man, woman, and child in the U.S.), but a lot of private businesses would make billions in return, and that would eventually sort itself out in the wash. The bloody, bloody wash. And if, in the end, the 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians and 4425 U.S. service members think the cost is too high, well, there's a guy in rural Tennessee who can tell you that you'd better figure out how to pay for a free-market utopia or about half this country will tell you it's your own damned fault.

But why stop at Iraq? Please, please, pick yourself up a copy of Max Berry's novel "Jennifer Government". It's a truly great book, entertaining, funny, fast paced and full of memorable characters and lots of action. It's also the haunting picture of a true free-market utopia. In it, the Nike company decides the best way to get some street cred for their newest shoe line is to hire a mercenary to shoot up some kids waiting in line to buy them. The protagonist, who, like everyone else, takes on the last name of the private company for whom she is currently working, is Jennifer Government. Of course, the privatized government can't just offer an FBI investigation for free using tax payer funds. It's a private company with a bottom line now, too. So Jennifer has to go to the parents of the victims and ask them to pay for her investigation. If she successfully find the killers they will be able to sue them in civil court and may be able to recoup their costs. If not, well, them's the breaks in a free-market utopia. I haven't ruined anything. In fact, I could tell you that her investigation will ultimately lead to a full-on war between Burger King and McDonald's, using the privatized mercenary forces of the U.S. Army and the NRA to wage their war in the streets of the U.S., and I still won't have ruined the book.

Buy a copy.

Enjoy it.

And then tell me it doesn't make you think twice about a strange case of fee-for-service fire protection in rural Tennessee.

A Strange Sunday of Marathons and Existential Dread

2010-10-11T00:21:00.000-07:00

Today has been a strange day. Strange in that it does not cohere, does not congeal into a narrative the way we like our days to behave. Most days are well behaved. Our routine makes them so. We wake, we dress, we look at the clock four times more than is necessary to see that we are not running late. Those of you lucky enough to have hair are unlucky enough to have to brush it. Then we commute, we work, we commute again. A spouse or parent or child thoughtfully asks us for the story of our day and we tell the abridged version prematurely. Then the next third or half of the day begins. Perhaps you, like my wife, change clothes again. Or maybe, like me, you loosen your tie, un-tuck your shirt, and affect a style that is the mullet of the middle aged professional: We work hard, and we play hard, it says. Only we don't, most of us. We watch our news or cartoons or game shows according to our predetermined age and demographic. At some point we eat, maybe with family at a dinette table, maybe on the couch, maybe standing in the kitchen as close to the microwave and sink full of dirty dishes as possible. At some point we realize that the story of our day needs a climax, and if it isn't provided by a favorite prime time show we check the internet for some email that isn't spam or call a distant friend or look for someone closer to kiss goodnight. And then the story resolves into sleep, with perhaps that epilogue of a bad dream or an anxious waking to double check the alarm clock before it wakes us and calls for our attention four more times the next morning. That is the plot of the day. That is a day that has behaved.

But today has been unruly. First of all, it had the temerity to start on a Sunday. That makes me immediately uncomfortable because I stopped going to church over a year ago and haven't figured out a defined routine for professed agnostics. I usually try to avoid this discomfort by writing until three or four in the morning (my worship, confession, and communion hour, I suppose), then sleeping as late as my wife and son will allow. But today was the Portland Marathon, and we had friends and family running, so we woke early, dressed for the predictable Portland rain (it didn't disappoint), an drove an hour and a half before I usually wake up. We made it in time to cheer on one of my best friends. When I shouted his name he was so focused, and I was so bundled in a coat, a sweatshirt, and a stocking cap, that he looked at me with utter incomprehension that verged on anger. It was a look that said, “Who the f*&% is this idiot?” He quickly recovered and apologized for not recognizing me while still on the run, which was above and beyond the call of duty, but that look was unsettling and fit the tone of the day.

We cheered on our other friend, then met up with my brother-in-law and nephews to cheer for my sister-in-law. The enormity of these runners’ accomplishment was both impressive and humbling. Not only can I not do what they were doing, but I honestly don’t believe I ever could. Sure, my body is capable of training for it, and I have the time and means, but I don’t have the necessary willpower to adopt that kind of discipline. It’s just not in me. Realizing that is a bit depressing. Stupid Sunday.

We came home after lunch with the family. On the way up we’d listened to NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and on the way back we listened to The Bugle, two of my favorite podcasts which tap into my preferred vein of humor: irreverence at the current state of the world. These are the kinds of shows that I tell my students about only if they are knowledgeable about current events. Still, while the shows lighten my mood, in the context of the realization about my own lack of willpower they made me feel guilty about my cynicism. I can’t even train to run a marathon. What right do I have to laugh at the world?

When we got home I took a long nap. Apparently I can be exhausted just by watching a marathon. When I awoke I took care of some household business, and then we put my son to bed. We’re past the climax of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but my son interrupted tonight’s reading of the story’s denouement to ask about one of the character’s deaths, and where people go when they die. This was a tricky moment for two parents, one of whom is a Christian and one an agnostic. I tried to explain that our bodies are buried, but some people think we go to heaven, and some people think we just cease to be. I told him that I’m just not sure, and asked him what he believed. This dichotomy was complicated by the fact that the character, Cedric, returns as a kind of ghost. My son announced first that he wants to go to “Jesus-land”, which I told him was great, because it sounded like an amusement park. He wondered if, because we would both be old when we die, I would be his age. I told him that could be, or maybe we could choose our ages and he’d be older than me. He preferred the idea that we’d both be kids of the same age, so we could play together, and I said I liked that idea a lot. My wife told him that she was particularly excited about the chance that he’d get to meet her grandfather, who passed away before my son was born and who was, truly, a wonderful man. Then my son changed his mind. “Maybe I’ll be a ghost. I would come back to my home and my video games. And I’d play pranks!” My wife and I had a good laugh at his delivery of these lines; he used a drooping voice that hit its lowest notes on “home” and “video games”.

But then he became more serious. “But what if there really is nothing?”

“Well then,” I said, “it would be like sleeping with no dreams. Very peaceful.”

“Like a nap that goes on for a thousand years and forever?”

“Whatever happens after we die, it goes on forever, but maybe we go to heaven and maybe we sleep. I don’t know.”

“I hope it’s Jesus-land,” he said.

“I hope so, too,” I told him.

When my wife went to sleep, I decided to go for a run. Partly, this was because I was inspired by my runner friends. Partly it was because a colleague, Tom, has encouraged me to compete with him to see who can run the most miles, and I’m more motivated by a fear of embarrassment than by anything else. I loaded a new audio book onto my ipod and headed out. The Circle K is two and a half miles from my house, so I took my credit card and ID and planned to buy one of those tiny orange juices that come in the barely translucent, cheap plastic containers with the orange milk jug lids. I thought I’d down one of those halfway through a five mile run and be healthy. Instead, I found that they don’t sell those (they might not even make them anymore, for all I know), and Kool-Aid in squeeze bottles hardly sounded like the healthy drink I was hoping for. I bought a kiwi-strawberry Snapple. I misread the label and only when I was at the counter did I realize it’s a “juice drink”, which means it could be roughly anything. Back on the road and listening to my book, War Dances by Sherman Alexie (excellent so far), I got to a story where the protagonist finds a dead cockroach in the bottom of a carry-on bag and wonders if, in its last minutes, it felt existential dread. I realized that was precisely what my son had been expressing.

“But what if there really is nothing?” he’d asked.

So I took out my ipod touch and started writing this while walking in the dark. This is less dangerous than it sounds, though I did walk off the sidewalk once and stuck a foot into some very wet grass. It also served to remind me that, though some writers might also be runners, I will always be one and not the other, as I instantly chose my preferred hobby over my reluctant obligation.

So here I am, walking through the darkness on a silent road at 11 at night, thinking about the plot of our days and existential dread. Tomorrow I will be teaching my Creative Writing students about plot. I’ll tell them about rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. But I think I’ll also point out that these things are like grammar. We need grammar to make sense of our writing just as we need plot to make sense of the stories of our lives, but the most interesting writing plays with grammar, upends it in carefully selected ways. Our lives have plots within plots, but they do not behave as Aristotle said stories should. Perhaps we do not come to a marvelous conclusion about existential dread and how to cope with it, or how to protect our children from it. Perhaps we write in the darkness. Perhaps we stumble into the street and get run over before there’s been any climax to our stories. And then maybe we go to Jesus-land.

Correction to Myth of the Evil Teacher Union

2010-09-12T01:53:00.000-07:00

Back in March and April, I wrote a six part series on the Myth of the Evil Teacher Union (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI), and in the sixth part I tried to explain that the reason the Democratic party gets money from the dues of teacher unions is simply because the Dems court the teacher unions with policies that are friendlier to public schools. If you'll forgive me for quoting myself, I wrote "That’s not because the NEA, or our state branch, the OEA, or our local branch, the CEA, is in bed with the Democratic Party. It’s because the party wants our votes more and is willing to side with us in order to garner those votes. We’re not in bed together. The union is single and dating, and the Dems keep asking us out." I stand by that part of the argument.

But my initial premise was flawed. It seems I, too, had been duped by those peddling this particular myth about teacher unions. My teacher union doesn't give any of my dues money to support political candidates, Democrat, Republican, or otherwise. As the past-president of my local chapter, Carol Phillips, pointed out to me, money that supports candidates only comes out of the OEA-PIE, a separate political action committee. If teachers want to make donations to that fund, they can. If not, it does not affect their union membership. That contribution is above and beyond the dues we pay. So union members concerned about the political leaders who tend to be favored by the majority of the union can see to it that not a single red cent of their money goes to a candidate they don't like. They can prevent that by simply not making that contribution (and the contribution is opt-in rather than opt-out, to minimize any pressure to donate). Personally, I do make the contribution. I trust the delegates who run the political action committee (Carol Phillips is one of them) to choose to support candidates who advocate its stated goals. They seek to:

» Support recommended candidates and issues that are critical to children and public education.

» Work for adequate and stable school funding.

» Give [members] a voice in the future of education.

» Allow [members] active involvement in education decision making.

Those things are all important to me. To return to my original point, I don't think any of those goals should be particularly partisan. If a Republican candidate shows they will work harder for stable school funding, or for making sure that educators are involved in crafting education policy, they will get the support of the OEA-PIE. I expect most teachers would not only be satisfied with that, but would be pleased to have both parties trying to one-up one another to claim the mantle of the most pro-public education. If the myth persists that the Democratic Party receives too much support from the teacher unions, that's not the fault of the Democratic Party, or of the teacher unions, but of the individual Republican candidates who haven't been vocal enough in their support of public schools to steal some of that support away. If, on the other hand, the myth is that the financial support comes from member's dues, then some of the fault for that misconception belongs to me for repeating the lie. I acknowledge my error.

Mea Culpa

2010-08-21T20:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I posted a clip from The Daily Show on my Facebook page. The clip showed Jon Stewart mocking the half-logic of various media figures, mostly from Fox News, first saying the cultural center in Manhattan is no big deal, then flipping and saying it’s a terrible idea because it’s insensitive. The clip was funny in the usual Daily Show way. It’s always nice to see media figures hoisted on their own petard by their own words caught by their own television networks. But the part of the clip that struck me most was the ending. Jon Stewart showed a clip of Charleton Heston defending the right of the NRA to hold their convention in Colorado Springs right after the Columbine High School tragedy. And then Stewart admitted the he’d made fun of Heston for that, and that he, Stewart, was wrong. He pulled the classic Daily Show gag on himself, and it wasn’t just funny (though he did his best to make it so). It also made Stewart’s point better than all the usual clip-a-thons could. But that couldn’t have made it easy. It’s hard to admit when you’re wrong. It’s always hard. It’s easier when it’s about something unimportant. Oddly, I think it’s also easier when one’s error is so patently obvious, so overwhelmingly clear, that you can hardly help it. That’s where I find myself.

I was wrong. Sure, I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. Admitting that one is a sinner, or only human, or even a bafoon, is pretty easy when it’s done in the abstract. But I’ve been wrong in a very specific way. I feel compelled to confess.

Last night I read SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I couldn’t put it down. At 4:30am I had to force myself, and when I woke up this morning I went right back to it. I loved Freakonomics, but SuperFreakonomics is better, or at least it affected me more, because the points made in Freakonomics were smaller and safer. I found them fascinating, but even having some of my “conventional wisdom” upended was pretty comfortable. SuperFreakonomics was less so, and all the more powerful for it. The book made me re-examine assumptions I’ve made about the safety of car seats, the danger of Global warming, and even the nature of human altruism. But the point that hit me hardest wasn’t something I didn’t know, but something I’ve actively chosen to forget.

I’ve argued that one of my chief issues with conservatism is that it’s regressive, dependent on a mythic view of the past as a halcyon time when people had “values” and everything was hunky-dory. I’ve pointed out that this is patently, demonstrably false; that we are, in every measurable way, living in the best time to be alive in human history. I’ve reminded people that the news media has no incentive to portray the world as safe, happy, and healthy. That doesn’t bleed, so it doesn’t lead. But, as an avid consumer of media (especially news media), I’ve fallen victim to the very fears I derided in conservatives. Only, because I tend to read liberals less critically than conservatives (I try to read both, but admit that I don’t read them the same way) I acknowledged that the present is a lot better than the past, but bought into the notion lots of people are peddling, on both the right and the left, that even though things are good, they are about to get a lot worse. Terribly worse. Apocalyptically worse.

Now, it’s fine to believe that as a tenant of a religion. You can say that your scripture or your prophet tells you that the end times are coming, and that’s enough. But I wasn’t doing that. I was accepting, and even preaching, that some kind of horrible dystopia was on its way, and that since this horror would come from some human source rather than a super-natural one, I could believe in it based on evidence.

But Dubner and Levitt reminded me that I didn’t find that evidence myself, or even read it from authoritative sources. I read it, largely, from people trying to sell newspapers, or heard it from people trying to glue my eyes to TV stations or even Oscar winning documentaries. But Dubner and Levitt are just trying to sell books too, right? True, but they are selling books with a different message. Their message is that we should look at the numbers, so their incentive is to find examples wherein the data conflicts with conventional wisdom. If the conventional wisdom said that the world is safe and improving, they would find examples that show that the data doesn’t back that up. But that’s not what the conventional wisdom shows, so those contrarian examples aren’t the examples they put on display. It’s not that they are apologists for a particular view of the future. They are advocates for the numbers themselves, and for the economist’s view that we should trust the numbers even when they go against what we believe.

So while I’d dismissed conservative fears of a socialist take-over of the government, or the notion that President Obama is opposed to private gun ownership, or that he’s secretly a Kenyan-born secret Muslim secret Marxist secret Black Supremacist, all because these notions lack any evidence to back them up, I’d bought, hook line and sinker, some liberal friendly notions of the coming dystopia. Foremost among these is the notion that global warming is going to destroy the world, and that gasoline in cars is largely responsible for that global warming. Turns out the latter is demonstrably untrue, and the former is wildly unlikely in the foreseeable future. That’s not to say Global Warming is a myth, or that it isn’t a pressing problem. It’s just not at all the problem I thought it was. It’s far more distant in time, far less extreme in its effects, and far more easy to solve than I ever would have expected. I won’t completely explain all that I learned from the book here (read the book!), but suffice it to say that some very smart scientists (not crazy global warming deniers, but respected environmentalists) have come up with a fix that will cost about 50 million dollars. That sounds like a lot, but compare it to the 300 million that Al Gore’s group is using to try to “raise awareness” about the coming apocalypse, it’s pretty small change.

So, if I was wrong about global warming, what else have I been wrong about. Upon reflection, I realize I’ve been wrong to be so concerned about the fight for gay marriage. Yes, it’s a tragedy that it may take a while for gay marriage to become the law of the land, but if trends hold it’s an inevitability. That’s not much consolation for gay couples who want to get married now, but it does mean I should ratchet down my rhetoric. And what about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? The human tolls are awful, and the consequences of the money wasted are only magnified when you think of all the lives that could have been saved with that money if it had been spent here on, say, better computer systems for hospitals to reduce human error, or on HIV medication in Africa. But I need to remember that, even with two wars going on, the rate of death by warfare is at nearly historic lows. In fact, so few people are killing each other in war that it’s realistic to believe that war itself could come to an end in the future, a notion that is still unimaginable for most people, despite the fact that our species got by for most of its history without anything we would call war. (For more on, check this out.)

Does this create for some fundamental shift in my politics? Yes and no. I’m still a “progressive”, a “liberal”,a “leftist”. But I don’t need to be a panicked one, and I need to remind myself that people who disagree with me aren’t woefully misinformed fools wandering headlong over a cliff. They may be right. And they may be wrong, but about things that aren’t nearly the big deal I was trying to make them.

Levitt and Dubner point out a bunch of ridiculous, inefficient government programs to illustrate that often the best of intentions lead to fixes that are worse than the problems they are designed to address. This doesn’t incline me to abandon progressivism. For one thing, I don’t buy the false dichotomy that conservatives all want a smaller government while progressives all want a bigger one. It seems to me there are a lot of conservatives who want the government to criminalize abortion, and, one would assume, enforce that criminalization, which is quite a government intrusion on private lives. Meanwhile, this progressive has always believed that it’s ridiculous that our country spends about as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. If a conservative were to give up on their anti-abortion stance, that still wouldn’t cut nearly as much federal spending out of their vision of a better government as my cuts to defense would cut out of mine. I’m perfectly willing to admit that government is not good at some things, and that many of its solutions are bad ones. I also recognize that the public sector can be just as inefficient in some areas, and with more dangerous consequences when they aren’t accountable to anyone but a small number of shareholders. On a theoretical level, I trust the American people to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else, just like Churchill said. The same cannot be said for private companies. Furthermore, I still believe the history of the United States has been one of slow but inexorable progress away from bigotry and aristocracy toward pluralism and inclusiveness. I also believe that pluralism and inclusiveness are essential ingredients to our standard of living and our financial success, creating more economic benefits than deregulation or tax cuts for the wealthy could ever hope to achieve, because the educated, tolerant middle class drives the economy more than distant haves and have-nots. I believe that standing on the side of slowing change down has, historically, always meant standing up for bigotry, intolerance, or economic inefficiency in the face of technological change. I won’t stand on that side.

Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is the time in history when conservatism is correct, when we’ve gone too far and my grandkids will look back and say, “He supported gay marriage? He railed about U.S. torture policy? He thought taxes on the wealthy should go back up to the rates during Reagan or higher, and that a robust social safety net actually produced greater economic growth in the aggregate while diminishing human suffering during economic downturns? That guy was crazy!” Maybe gay marriage will have destroyed the social fabric of American society. Maybe a little more torture will have made us safer. Maybe “Voodoo Economics” will suddenly start to work. Maybe a society needs some people to starve to death or die from lack of basic health care in order to motivate everyone else to work hard. I could be wrong about all those things. Or maybe my grandkids will be living in bubble cities under the ocean due to massive sea level increases because I’m insufficiently alarmed about global warming. I just hope, when they look back, they are willing to make their decisions based on the best possible data, and when confronted with numbers that don’t fit their preconceived notions, they are willing to change their minds.

Best of OWP: Total Eclipse: The Literary Merit of the Burger King Whopper

2010-08-16T22:02:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd post the pieces of my portfolio for the Oregon Writing Project Summer Institute at Willamette University here. I hope someone enjoys these, gets a flavor for just how valuable the Oregon Writing Project was for me, and decides to check out their own local chapter of the National Writing Project. We were assigned to write an essay, and this was what, er, came out.

Total Eclipse: The Literary Merit of the Burger King Whopper

Walk into any Burger King, and you’ll be drowned in a tsunami of images from the new movie Eclipse, the third part in the Twilight series. To say this is unappetizing is a wild understatement. However, the association with fast food is all too apt. I read Stephanie Meyer’s whole series, and it ran through me much as a Burger King Whopper might.

The series was recommended to me in the highest terms. My students loved it. My colleagues loved it. Like the Whopper, it was ubiquitous, and like Burger King’s advertising, it was pervasive. The marketing barrage was the literary world’s equivalent of a fast food ad campaign. Pundits for the industry were talking about the series as the next Harry Potter, the next savior sent from heaven to stave off the imminent death of reading. “Look at all these kids reading,” they said. “Any reading is good reading,” they said. Imagine a PR ad wherein the Burger King, complete with his creepy, fixed-grin plastic head, came riding through the sky, swinging from the cables carrying giant crates of Whoppers, airlifted and then dropped into the barren fields of some famine stricken African nation. Because all Whoppers is better than no Whoppers, right?

But I bought it. I picked up the first book, tore through it, and enjoyed the pure speed of it. I’d purchased a Whopper, and, sure enough, it had come to the counter still heat-lamp-hot in less than thirty seconds. Twilight recreated that regret I often feel right after buying a burger and forgetting to tell them to hold the mayo. The first portion revolved mostly around romance, which just isn’t my thing, but I recognize that reasonable people can disagree about the virtues of mayonnaise. Sure, I can make a reasonable argument against mayonnaise (it spoils quickly, it can carry salmonella, it looks remarkably like puss) but it’s just a condiment. Short of a localized disease outbreak or contributing to the national obesity epidemic, romance literature poses no social ills either. Twilight was a vampire story, and some measure of whipped up, possibly infectious, puss-filled romance is to be expected in such stories. Still, I like vampires for what their stories can tell us about; the dangers of forbidden love, the curse of immortality, the Faustian bargain of power for soul. It seemed Twilight might have some things to say about these dilemmas re-set in an American high school, with all its issues, and I thought that might be interesting.

Like the Whopper, it tasted pretty good at the time. The second book introduced werewolves, predictably, but then, much about a Whopper is predictable, too. No avocado or pineapple or gruyere cheese hiding between buns made of some strange, organic whole grain. A Whopper is what you expect, and New Moon followed the same path, complete with the vampire pretending to dump the girl in order to protect her from himself. Sometimes you might belch while eating your Whopper, and this kind of schmaltzy melancholy plot twist is the hint of nausea one expects.

By the time the beef is gone and you’re wrapping up that last bite of bun and American cheese in the wax paper, you start to wonder why you bought the Whopper in the first place, and by Eclipse I was realizing the same regret. The werewolves and vampires had fought which was the event I’d come for, and I should have stopped there. But at this point I was invested. The Whopper was mostly in my gullet, though the lack of development of Bella’s character stuck in my throat like a bit of that smooshed, dry bun. I had to swallow the rest and hope for the best.

And I did. I read Breaking Dawn, desperate to know how Meyer would resolve the story (down, damned Whopper, down! Settle!) all the while hating every plot twist. I can spoil the story for you here because, like a Whopper, you’ll forget that it’s an unpleasant experience and revisit the books in a moment of weakness. To summarize, Bella, the protagonist, has been begging to be turned into a vampire by her boyfriend, but he wants to abstain until marriage, so she marries him when she’s just turned 18, she gets knocked-up on the honeymoon, and then she gets super-mom powers that save the day.

At that point the Whopper was mostly only giving me indigestion. I could feel a gurgling in my gut because of what had been done to one of my favorite myths; dangerous creatures of the nights defanged and turned into morose, whining adolescents who can’t walk around in the daylight, not because it would turn them into piles of ash, but because their skin would sparkle in the sun like they rolled around in body glitter. And the werewolves can change at will and aren’t cursed by the full moon! I tried to remind myself that myths, like Whoppers, are made to order each time they’re retold. But I also remembered that one Whopper is often one too many.

As the Whopper proceeded through its journey, the experience got worse. The further I got from that Burger King, the more I regretted my choice to enter in the first place. Sure, the vampire community had a right to be pissed about the way they were depicted in the books, but I became more and more concerned with the messages the books sent to my young female students. I hesitate to even mention the word “diarrhea”. There’s just no mature way to discuss “the runs”. Maturity is expressed in our culture by refraining from discussing diarrhea above all else. But Whoppers can have a stool-softening effect, and Stephanie Meyer’s series was a Whopper that sat under the heat lamp just a little too long. Bella, the protagonist, begins by describing herself as perpetually klutzy, and throughout the series she always requires rescuing. In fact, her first meeting with Edward, her vampire love interest, is the occasion of her first rescue when she walks across a parking lot without paying attention to oncoming traffic. From then on, she’s being saved, and not just from cars, enemy vampires, out of control werewolves, and her boyfriend’s own dangerous passions. More than anything, Bella needs to be saved from herself. For every admirable thing she does, she makes three boneheaded decisions, fails to communicate openly and honestly with the people who care about her and can help her, and stumbles into life-threatening danger because she’s swooning about a boy. But the biggest danger of all, we’re told, is Bella’s own sexual desire. Sex is simultaneously represented by the metaphor of a vampire bite and by sex itself, and Bella wants both. While some might say it’s a kind of progress to depict a girl who wants sex, this is always presented as negative in that it’s life-threatening. If Bella gets her boyfriend too turned on, he’ll kill her. Luckily, she’s rescued from this by his strength of will. She’s found a boyfriend who will say no to a hot girl begging to have sex. This might be a fantasy of a particular kind of religious, conservative girl, but I would bet good money that girl will find a vampire before she finds a human boy with such restraint.

Of course, if abstinence is the real conflict, then marriage is the resolution, and when Bella gets married the danger of her sexual desire disappears. Now sex is the vehicle by which she can find satisfaction, right? Ha! She gets laid once. Once! Then she’s knocked up and… wait for it… her pregnancy is really dangerous. I wonder how Bella will pass through that danger. Oh yeah, she’ll be rescued, once again, by her husband.

And then she’s a mom, and since motherhood is the measure of a woman’s worth, she gets super-powers and saves the day. Yea.

If you aren’t sympathizing with the burning sensation yet, check this out: The boyfriend who keeps saving Bella from herself because he loves her so much is 87 years older than she is. That’s right, girls, if you want to find a nice guy who will protect you from your own sluttiness, make an honest woman out of you, and then give you the baby and super-powers deluxe package, just keep your eye out for the town pedophile.

Now those clever marketing guys in Hollywood know that it’s important to keep the Twilight films dribbling out just slowly enough that you can’t quite get off the toilet before the next wave hits. So here I am, still on the pot, my elbows propped on my knees for so long I’ll have bruises. But I’m over-analyzing the situation, you yell through the door. Why can’t you just enjoy it? I’ll tell you why. In the long run, the Whopper is generally not the pleasurable experience we’re told to expect. And Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series really chaps my hide.

Best of OWP: "Self-Portrait Across the Street from the Art Museum"

2010-08-15T22:56:00.000-07:00

Best of OWP: "Grandpa's Ring"

2010-08-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd post the pieces of my portfolio for the Oregon Writing Project Summer Institute at Willamette University here, one piece per day. I hope someone enjoys these, gets a flavor for just how valuable the Oregon Writing Project was for me, and decides to check out their own local chapter of the National Writing Project.

Grandpa’s Ring

His ring was very thin by the end.
The gold wore down
As he moved around the world
Did amazing things
Lived a life too unbelievably full for fiction.
When he was gone
My mother wanted me to have it.
We put two white-gold bands on either side.
I slid it on my finger on my wedding day
Twisting it over my knuckle.
Talismans skip a generation.
My parents own their objects of power.
I have mine because Mom gave me her father’s.
The ring cannot fit over my knuckle.
My son will not wear it while I am alive.
After I am gone
Will a grandchild carry my grandfather
To far away places
And take me along too?