Suffer The Little Children

21/08/202322/08/2023Dusty Leave a comment

Fostering a Better Community for Children and Youth | City of Boulder

On Children

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
     And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
https://poets.org/poem/children-1

[Content warning: because people accuse liberals/teachers/LGBTQ+ people of committing sexual assault against children, I talk about that issue and those accusations.]

They keep saying it’s for the children. That’s why.

That’s why they’re censoring books, and harassing librarians, and persecuting teachers, and trying to outlaw the teaching of specific ideas and topics.

Because they want to protect the children.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it on the dumpster fire that used to be called Twitter and is now (sort of) called X: some conservative putz of a commentator says something like “You know, I didn’t really care about [CRT or racial equity/LGBTQ people/sex education] UNTIL THEY STARTED COMING AFTER OUR CHILDREN. BUT THEN I HAD TO SAY ‘HELL NAW!’” See, that’s where we liberals crossed the line, they say: we went after their children.

And they want to protect the children. So they say. Over and over and over again, generally growing louder every time.

Now, I understand this. I want to protect children too: I want children to be free to exist as themselves without being hated or abused or ostracized. I want children to be happy. I want to help them create opportunities to achieve their goals in life, to be who they want to be; that’s most of the reason why I became a teacher and why I still do it, even after 23 years, even despite the ways that others (mostly conservatives) have tried to stop me from teaching. I want children to live: I won’t say that I would put my life on the line to save a child’s life, because I also want to live; but I would fight to save a child’s life. And I am a pacifist: I wouldn’t otherwise fight for anything. But I’d fight to protect a kid.

(Also I would fight to protect my wife or our pets. I’d lose, but I’d fight. Just sayin’.)

The truth is that liberals, along with schools, and Democrats, and LGBTQ+ people, are not “after” their children. Inasmuch as most of those groups of people want to help educate children, we are actually seeking to make children happier and stronger: not to take them, and not to harm them. Personally, I REALLY don’t want to take anyone’s children: I don’t want children. Not at my house.

But I’m being disingenuous here. They don’t think I’m after their children because I intend to kidnap them and take them home with me; that would be absurd. No: they think — at least they say, and yell, and scream — that I and everyone on the left, in schools, involved in LGBTQ+ issues, or even just someone in drag reading stories to their kids, are sexual predators. Pedophiles, who are grooming their children by exposing them to inappropriate material.

Let me be very, very clear here. Democrats and liberals and schools and LGBTQ+ people and those who fight for racial equity and all the rest are not in any way groomers or pedophiles. Of course there are pedophiles and abusers among every group, but there’s no particular reason to claim that they are more common on the left, and to say that any teacher who talks about gender or sex is grooming children in order to rape them means that I will punch you in the fucking face. Even though I’m a pacifist. Because fuck you if you think that, or you make that accusation. How fucking dare you? The one time I got a conservative to agree with me immediately was when, during a Twitter argument about something in education, some asshat called me a groomer and I blocked him; another conservative commenter asked, as conservatives are wont to do, why I had blocked him, saying something about how I was hiding from the argument; I said “No, I’ll argue with anyone all day about these issues — but if you break out that disgusting fucking pedophile/groomer slander about me, you can fuck right off forever.” He liked the comment and let the subject drop. Because fuck you if you actually think that. And I expect that rational people would see my point on this.

I recognize, of course, that all of you reading this are rational people who see my point on this. None of you reading this think that I or teachers in general are groomers; none of you reading this believe that, because I teach novels and short stories that relate to sexual activity or gender identity or anything along those lines, I am intending to make the students in my class easier to rape; but the whole disgusting fucking slander makes me just foam at the mouth with rage. I hope that’s understandable. That is, naturally, the goal; it’s hard to debate the issues when someone is accusing you of raping children, and it’s harder when their evidence is a gross and appalling and absurd misinterpretation — an intentional misinterpretation — of what you actually do. Because then I feel like I have to start justifying the things I do, like teaching a book that might have a sex scene in it or might talk about gender roles, to show unequivocally how wrong they are: as if there’s any justice in claiming, for instance, that To Kill a Mockingbird (which does have a “romantic” [actually it’s sexual assault] scene involving sexual touching, and also accusations of rape and hints of incestuous sexual abuse, and does question gender roles pretty extensively through the character of the ‘tomboy’ Scout) is actually intended as a way to make it easier to rape children; and it’s even harder to walk away and refuse to dignify their slander with a response, which is the right thing to do, but then that fucking asshole is back there still calling me a groomer and I have to ignore him rather than punching him in the fucking face.

But their goal is to make me lose the argument, or even better, walk away, leaving them alone on the soapbox, because I’m so pissed off about what they said to me that I can no longer address the argument they are making. And it’s effective: because here I am dignifying this bullshit with a response, and speaking to people who know better. But I can’t help it. It upsets me.

It’s upsetting to be someone who spends so much of my time and energy, so much of my life, trying to help and also protect children, and then to have people, generally for crass political gain, use my own dedication against me by claiming that my very desire to help children implies that I want to rape them. And for them to justify these attacks, these various attempts to take apart our democracy and our education system, along with that disgusting slander, by saying they are — protecting the children.

It’s been happening a lot. It’s very upsetting to me.

So I wanted to talk about it some. Because I don’t want to leave conservatives alone talking on the issues here because I’m too mad to speak.

(Another caveat: I do know that not all conservatives support these arguments, and certainly not all conservatives make those disgusting accusations. All I can say is: it sucks to be stereotyped, doesn’t it?)

But let’s focus for now on the actual arguments.

So first, the argument that CRT and similar (intentionally misinterpreted) ideas are taught in schools and that this is damaging to children hearing about these ideas. We all know, I hope, that CRT, Critical Race Theory, which is a framework used to describe TO LAW STUDENTS IN GRAD SCHOOL how the historical institutions of racism in this country have made it harder for equitable outcomes to exist in the modern era, is not taught in any K-12 public school in this country. But that’s not the main point, just like arguing over whether the AR in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle” is not the main point in a gun control debate, is only in fact a red herring. (By the way, if you ever are arguing about gun control with someone who cares about this particular nonsense, it stands for Armalite Rifle. ArmaLite was the company that originally designed the weapon.)

The real objection is not to CRT, it is to teaching the idea that the US is a racist nation, and that historical racism has impacts on the world today. Conservatives don’t like hearing people say that this nation is a bad place, or that it has done bad things to people, or especially that it continues to do bad things to people. They think that we are united in our love for our country, and that’s how it should be.

But the problem is, we’re not united in our love for our country, we are united in our love for the ideals our country represents for us. And we should all be appalled by the corruption of those ideals in our country’s actual actions and impact on the world. We are supposed to be a country that stands for liberty: and instead we promote the oppression of billions of people around the world, in various ways — from subsidizing economic slavery in every poor nation that makes our shoes and electronics, to allowing climate change to devastate people’s homes and livelihoods because we won’t fucking stop driving Ram 35000s, to directly overthrowing democratic governments because they stand in the way of our economic exploitation, or because they are, in our sordid little fanatic-minds, associated with the greatest enemy of the corruption of our actual ideals: Communism/Marxism/socialism.

Speaking of red herrings. This one is the reddest: and it has thrown us completely off the rails for coming up on a century now. We have, literally, assassinated political leaders, and overthrown governments, and blocked democratic elections, because we thought they would create a stable Communist/Marxist/socialist state, and for some goddamn reason, we can’t let that happen. We’re supposed to be about liberty? Us? We’re supposed to believe in free expression, and live and let live, and the free marketplace of ideas — and yet we have to stamp out Communism/Marxism/socialism wherever it exists, both in our “free” nation and in other nations? Somehow that became our most important ideal, around the world: the nation that supposedly stands for liberty actually stands for taking it away from anyone who uses that liberty to freely choose Communism/Marxism/socialism. And why? Because we don’t defend liberty: we defend capitalism.

Sorry: I got off the topic of racial equality, and historical racism and institutional racism. So feel free to go back over everything I just said, and wherever I talked about Communism/Marxism/socialism, go ahead and replace those words with “racial equity,” and the word “capitalism” at the end with “institutional racism.” All still true. We have contributed to the oppression of free people, and overthrown governments, and blocked democratic elections, and assassinated leaders, because those situations and people promoted racial equity in some form; and this country defends institutional racism, and always has. Almost every evil and disgusting thing we have ever done as a nation also has a racist element to it.

One of the more amazing examples I know of how appalling and unrepentant we are about our racist culture is the running argument in modern partisan bullshit about which political party is more racist: is it the Republicans, who support racist policies? Or the Democrats, who used to support even more overt racist policies? Or both parties, who participate in institutional racism even while either decrying it or claiming it doesn’t exist?

You know what? FUCK WHO IS MORE RACIST, LET’S JUST STOP BEING RACIST! What do you say? How would that be? And you know who that would help?

The children. Who really shouldn’t have to grow up in a racist world, and who shouldn’t be taught to believe racist ideas. Like the idea that the United States, which is unequivocally guilty of countless racist acts including multiple genocides, is not actually a racist nation. Do we not see how pretending that this country is innocent of harm is one of the most harmful racist things we could do? That that pretense not only allows the harm to continue, but also states clearly that the past harms don’t matter? Which could only be true if the people who were harmed did not matter?

The problem with trying not to teach these ideas in school — that the US is a nation with racist institutions that came from a historically racist past and foundation — means we can’t teach the truth. And as Fox Mulder (not the Fox News Channel; Mulder is the reliable one) told us, the truth is out there: which means kids are going to learn it eventually. And that’s when they’ll realize that not only has this country been racist in the past, it still is now: because the people now tried to cover up that racist past.

Trust me. I had that experience. I grew up in Newton, a wealthy suburb of Boston; and not until college did I learn that Boston was where the last and worst riots — actual fucking riots, that is — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis] over desegregation of schools occurred in the 1970s. 40 riots. Carried out by white people, in the place where I grew up.

Gee, I wonder if they were as bad as the BLM riots of 2020. They certainly were not precipitated by the police murder of an innocent man like the BLM riots were. They were caused by a bunch of racist people who didn’t want people of other races in their kids’ schools.

Nobody in my schools told me that. Which is — let’s use the word “interesting,” because a lot of my teachers had been teaching, in Newton, for 20 or 30 or 40 years. I graduated in 1992, which means my teachers? They were there. Not all of them, of course, but some of them were. And nobody told me about it. So when I learned about the Boston bussing riots, how do you think I felt about my teachers?

I lost faith in them, a little. I realized that some of them were racists.

Shall I mention here that nobody in my high school was LGBTQ+? 1600 students, and not a one of them was gay or bisexual.

To be clear, literally hundreds of them were gay or bisexual or in some way queer; but none of them were out, none of them were open about it: because they would have had the shit beaten out of them, if they were not actually murdered. My hometown was not welcoming to LGBTQ+ people. I wasn’t, either: one of my most distasteful moments is when, in the middle of the hilarious and silly home movies my friends and I made in high school, we burst casually into multiple homophobic slurs and jokes. Just a stream of them, many coming directly from my mouth. I hate it.

But that’s how I was raised: not thinking that any of these issues were real, that the people who lived them were real people; or at least that they didn’t involve ME or MY town or the people I knew. All of that was, y’know, somewhere else, and in the past, racism in the South before the 60s and homosexuality and so on in San Francisco.

Never heard of Stonewall, either. Not until after college, even. And before I lived in Newton, I lived on Long Island. A suburb of New York City. Though of course, I wouldn’t have heard about the Stonewall riots then; I moved when I was in 3rd grade, and you can’t tell a 3rd grader about race riots.

You sure can tell him about war, though. The Shot Heard Round the World, and the Minutemen plugging away at the Redcoats. Cowboys shooting Indians. Allies fighting the Nazis. Cops fighting robbers. Pretty sure I heard about some of that before I was 8.

So the point is, when you conceal the truth, you open yourself up to the righteous and deserved accusation of — being someone who lies to hide the truth. And what reason could you have for hiding the truth other than — something nefarious that probably includes a continuation of the problem that led to the truth you concealed? Only racists would want to hide the truth about racism, because they want to minimize the reality in order to maintain it, or because they think the victims are not deserving of consideration — which is a racist idea. I never heard about the Japanese internment during World War II, either.

I mean, maybe my high school education just kinda sucked. I admit I didn’t pay all that much attention.

But the point is that I did learn the truth later, and it made me lose faith. And rightfully so.

But on the other hand: my dad told me, when I was a kid, that his mother, my grandmother, had been an alcoholic, and it had caused my father a lot of pain and a lot of problems in his life. He told me that he was attending AlAnon meetings — actually they were mainly meetings of a group called Adult Children of Alcoholics, which was the heart of the issue; but he had also, at one point, gotten concerned about his own drinking, so he went to some AlAnon meetings, too. And he told me about it. Which gave me great and abiding faith in my father: in his honesty, in his courage, in his respect and concern for me, for our family, for himself. I was inspired by his willingness to tell me the truth of the problems that he faced, and by his willingness to try to address them. I still am.

The same goes for issues not of race, but of sexuality: and here, as with race, let me point out that many children have an experience I did not have, which is recognizing that they themselves are the secret that is being concealed, that is being ignored. I learned that my nation’s history was concealed from me — or whitewashed; I graduated in the same year as the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, in a city that has strong Italian roots, and so as you may imagine, my understanding of Columbus was… incomplete — but I never had to recognize that the person telling me that racism wasn’t really an issue was ignoring my own lived experience of racism, or that the person telling me that men should only love women was denying my own right to exist and be myself. But the larger point is the same: if we pretend that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist, or that they are somehow less real than cis-het people (because queerness is contagious, is taught, is socially constructed and influenced; not like the “natural” and “normal” sexuality of the dominant paradigm [NB: I am writing bullshit to represent what other people think; that statement I just wrote is not true.]), then the LGBTQ+ people who are listening — anywhere between 3% and 10%, or up to 20% if you recognize the more different aspects of sexuality we have been recognizing and learning about for the last few decades, which means in my high school of 1600 people there were anywhere between 50 and 300+ people who were LGBTQ+, only in one year of the four I was there — will recognize that we are lying. And the only reason why we would lie is because we want to do LGBTQ+ people harm, or we deny their right to know the truth about themselves and their world. And both of those are, to be clear, very, very, bad. Telling people they don’t exist or don’t matter is not how you protect the children. Lying to children in order to convince them that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist: that’s where I’m not sure how we can even conceive that we are protecting them. What exactly is the danger to children in the existence of LGBTQ+ people?

And here, exactly right here, is where we get to that disgusting fucking slander: because they have to invent a danger in order to conceal the truth: that there is no danger to protect children from, it’s just that the people who don’t want children to learn about gender or sexuality are bigots and homophobes, and they want to continue and promote their hate. That’s all.

By the way: my school, 1600 students? I think about 20 of them were Black. They all rode a bus to Newton North from Boston. I never heard about why. I just remember thinking that they were being given an opportunity for a better education in the rich white school in the rich white suburb. A thought I never confronted or analyzed. Because my racist environment tried to put racist ideas into me. I am thankful that my parents were not racist, and so did not encourage the growth of those ideas in me, and that I was later educated in a more open-minded and free environment, where I did learn the truth.

You know what’s another thought that bothers me, now? My parents unquestionably chose a town to live in because it had a good school district, and good property values, and a low crime rate, and all of the other proxies by which people in this country choose predominantly white-skinned, white-collar neighborhoods. And though I don’t for a moment think they thought about sticking with a white community, I don’t think they confronted or analyzed those thoughts, or the reasons why that town was the safest and richest and best educated. They just picked Newton, even though my dad’s job which brought us to Massachusetts from Long Island (Also an extremely white enclave on the edge of a more racially diverse city) was based in Cambridge.

To be fair, Cambridge is pretty close to Newton. I’m just saying: they fitted us comfortably into a privileged environment, and that’s how I grew up. Oblivious to the truth. Sheltered. Safe. And, if I had not learned the truth, I suspect I would have ended up racist. I surely had enough bigoted ideas and behaviors when I lived in Newton.

So. Keeping these issues, these truths, out of schools is not about protecting the children: it is about protecting racism. I’m not saying that people who try to protect children are aware of what they are doing to protect and promote racism, any more than my parents were aware of the consequences of putting me in such a sheltered white enclave; but the proof is in the pudding, so to speak: the result of these policies is bigotry, not safer children. As proven, I hope, by the fact that people have to invent slanderous attacks on teachers in order to justify their crusade.

The same is true of all the other crusades that are ostensibly taken on to protect children: the attempt to eliminate gender-affirming health care, which helps save the lives of trans children, and the concurrent attempt to deny the existence of trans children by keeping them from playing games with other children (Because calling those games “sports” doesn’t make them not games. They are children’s games. And people in this country are trying as hard as they can to stop some children from playing the game. Because that’s how much we suck. And then we crow about being the land of the free? And the home of the brave? Where we’re afraid of a trans kid?), are not intended to protect children, and they do not protect children: they help to destroy children, their happiness and their complete understanding of themselves and their world, if not their actual lives. The attempt to keep children from getting free lunch, which isn’t even supposed to help children other than the vague “protect them from drowning in debt” while we continue to pay nearly a trillion dollars a year for the military that is not currently fighting any wars, and we cut taxes for billionaires and subsidize toxic industries, while we ignore climate change and don’t talk about how that will lead to the world’s children literally drowning in rising ocean waters, is not even deserving of refutation. The attempt to keep parents in absolute control of their children’s education is not actually protecting children either: it is protecting those parents from having children who might disagree with them, or who might ask questions the parents don’t want to answer. And it is creating the danger for those children of living in a country that is less safe and less open, because it would be less educated — since “school choice” is just the choice to choose worse schools. If you want to make schools better, then make schools better: don’t make it easier to leave them and go somewhere else. I work for a charter school. It isn’t better than a traditional public school. Trust me.

And then there’s the big one: the most important and dominant wedge issue, the one that has made people pick sides, and plot and plan and center their entire lives, political and otherwise, around this one single topic: abortion. Because conservatives want to ban abortion, in all cases, whatever compromise they may temporarily accept about the life of the mother or cases of rape or incest; whatever lies they tell about states’ rights and judicial activism while they try to impose federal , national, judicial injunctions on birth control and chemical abortifacients — and they say they are doing it to protect the children. The children who their mothers murder, they say. Innocent children. It’s all for the children.

Except it’s not.

Never mind the points that have been raised for fifty years, about how the same conservatives who argue for saving children’s lives by banning abortion, also argue against those children having free lunch at school, or even a school to have a free lunch at. Never mind the very clear truth that the best way — the only way — to lower abortion rates is to improve both sex education and access to birth control, both of which conservatives oppose because they think, somehow, by keeping children from a knowledge of sex, they will stop those kids from having sex. Which doesn’t work any better than protecting children by keeping them shielded from knowing the truth about history, or about sexuality and gender, and which does just as much harm as all such lies do. Personally I am grateful that my mother, saying clearly, “Well, I don’t want to tell you about that stuff, so I’m glad they will” while signing my permission form to get sex ed in my elementary school, understood that I needed to learn about sex, even though she didn’t want to talk to me about it; if she hadn’t done that, I might have been left with the knowledge of how sex worked which I gained from my friend Benjy when we were 9 — and suffice it to say, Benjy did not have the straight dope about how sex worked. I will also say, that several years later when I understood how sex worked physically but not the harm it could do emotionally, it was a story my mother shared about her past experiences that showed me why I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing — so even though she was uncomfortable with it, my mother had the honesty and the honor to tell me the truth, and the courage, as well; and that gave me even greater respect for my mother.

But never mind all of that. Here is how we know it is not about the children. Because when Judge James Ho wrote his opinion in the recent Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision regarding the limitation of mifepristone, he showed us that the abortion arguments of the right are not about the children. We always knew they were not about the women, not about the mothers, that the entire argument showed a callous and wanton disregard for the rights, the sovereignty, the simple human value of the women whom conservatives want to force to bear those precious children to term: but Judge Ho showed us that it’s really all about — the men.

Judge James Ho, who was sworn into office by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow’s library in 2018 (Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz was also there), wrote his own opinion in the case in order to expand on what he sees as “the historical pedigree of Plaintiffs’ conscience injury, and to explore how Plaintiffs suffer aesthetic injury as well.”

Antiabortion doctors suffer a moral injury when they are forced to help patients who have complications from the use of mifepristone, Ho wrote, because they are forced to participate in an abortion against their principles.

Those doctors also experience an aesthetic injury when patients choose abortion because, as one said, “When my patients have chemical abortions, I lose the opportunity…to care for the woman and child through pregnancy and bring about a successful delivery of new life.” Indeed, Ho wrote, “It’s well established that, if a plaintiff has ‘concrete plans’ to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff suffers aesthetic injury when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal.”

In cases where the government “approved some action—such as developing land or using pesticides—that threatens to destroy…animal or plant life that plaintiffs wish to enjoy,” that injury “is redressable by a court order holding unlawful and setting aside the agency approval. And so too here. The FDA has approved the use of a drug that threatens to destroy the unborn children in whom Plaintiffs [that is, the antiabortion doctors] have an interest.”

“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” Ho wrote. “Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients—and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-16-2023

So. Now we know. Conservatives don’t want to protect the children. They want to protect their right to possess those children. To treat them as spectacles, as attractions; as something that exists for the adults to admire, to appreciate, to enjoy. To use. To own.

That’s what all of this is about. Control: treating children as the property of their parents, of the conservative leaders. I’ve seen the point made, in regards to the abortion debate, that the unborn are the perfect special interest to fight for: because they have literally no demands, no requirements, no arguments of their own: they don’t even exist as separate human beings. Conservatives never have to confront them, never have to talk to them, never have to treat them as their own people who might disagree with the politicians who work so hard to “protect” them. Using children, conservatives can promote their own agenda, and always, always, claim the moral high ground — because they are protecting children. Closing down and militarizing the border isn’t because we are racist and want to deny entry to people who aren’t white; we’re protecting children from fentanyl. Shutting down schools isn’t because we recognize that educated people tend to lean liberal politically (almost as if the truth pushes people in that direction); it’s because we’re protecting the children. Destroying the lives of women isn’t because we are essentially misogynist and supremacist: it’s because we want to protect — okay, actually, that one really is all about us; it’s because we like seeing the little pink babies. We think they’re cute. And so we feel that women should be enslaved in order to produce more of them for us to make goo-goo noises at.

So say the conservatives. And again, I realize and admit that not all conservatives feel this way — but those who don’t agree with the policies and arguments I have described here, also don’t separate themselves from those policies and arguments. Do they?

And me?

I make my job much, much harder than it has to be because I honestly do not like telling children what to do. It might be different if I taught the younger children: but the children I teach are nearly adults. I know that they have minds of their own, and wills of their own, and desires and dreams of their own: because they tell me about those things, they show them to me, on a daily basis. And I cannot stand the thought that I would take away any of that, their dreams or their abilities or their thoughts or their wills, simply to replicate my own thoughts or my own desires through them. I hate that thought. Even when it would be a good idea, I hate it.

Because they are not my children. They are themselves.

That is the message I want to give to conservatives, in the end. You do not own children. You can try to protect them — preferably from actual threats — but you cannot control them. They are not yours to do with as you will, not even when you want to guide and shape and mold them into people you think they should be. It is not up to you who they should be. It is up to them. If they cannot decide for themselves now, then you still do not have a right to decide for them: all you can and should do is help them get to the stage where they can decide for themselves. You cannot, and should not, keep the future decision hidden from them, even if you hold back all the details until they are ready for them.

And you know who decides when they are ready to hear all the details? They do.

Your children are not your children. They are their own.

Treat them with respect.

The Essay Of Hate

14/08/202315/08/2023Dusty Leave a comment

So! Just as with last week, when I presented the essay I wrote during my AP Literature class, followed by the essay I wish I had written instead; here is the essay I wrote during my AP Language class; and tomorrow I hope to post the essay I should have written instead of this one. (I may need a little extra time to finish the rewrite on this one, because it requires some research, and this has been a busy weekend.)

This essay is the Synthesis Prompt. The concept here is entering into a debate: the students are given six sources of information, which divide mostly evenly into two groups, one on either side of a controversial issue of some kind. The students are to synthesize information from these sources and present the two sides of the debate, and their own opinion on the topic — which can be on both sides, either side, or neither side.

The topic this year was urban rewilding, which is the practice of taking back some developed areas in a city and turning them into natural ecosystems, planting native plants and trying to encourage wildlife to live in the area, as well. This can take the form of anything from a rooftop or a vertical garden, to reclaiming vacant lots or empty buildings and turning them into natural green spaces. And while in most years, the topics don’t have a definitely “correct” or “incorrect” side — two years ago the question was about whether schools should teach cursive, which, good grief, who cares — this topic had such a clearly correct side that even the sources weren’t really on both sides: four of them were correct, and two of them were, well, sort of weaseling.

To be clear: the correct side is in favor of urban rewilding. The concrete tombs that we call cities are in desperate need of greenery, and our world is in desperate need of plants that can capture and sequester and convert more carbon dioxide, and the natural world needs not to be driven into extinction by our destruction of habitat.

And that was my problem: as I was reading the sources, I was looking for the two sides, and I just couldn’t find one of them. Not that I would argue against urban rewilding no matter what, but I couldn’t even take that side seriously. So by the end of reading the sources, I came to a decision: I was going to argue for neither side, with the appearance of arguing for the wrong one.

I don’t know that this is a bad argument, but it is not the argument I would like to make. It was fun to write, though, so here it is. Enjoy. If I can get my research done, I will write an argument stating why we should clearly, obviously, promote urban rewilding everywhere we can.

Urban rewilding is an effort to restore natural ecological processes and habitats in city environments. Many cities around the world have embraced rewilding as part of larger movements to promote ecological conservation and environmentally friendly design. Now, a movement to promote urban rewilding is beginning to take shape in the United States as well.

Carefully read the six sources, including the introductory information for each source. Write an essay that synthesizes materials from at least three of the sources and develops your position on the extent to which rewilding initiatives are worthwhile for urban communities to pursue.

Urban rewilding is an effort to restore natural ecological processes and habitats in city environments. It’s becoming more popular, and so the debate is heating up: is it worth putting effort into this? It seems like a positive concept, a valuable endeavor — but is it worth the effort? Would it be prohibitively expensive? Worse: could it be that this is only window dressing?

The answer is something else entirely. Urban rewilding is evil. It promotes precisely the wrong goal, by trying to bypass the actual issue. The actual issue is humanity. We are a blight upon the Earth, and we should be destroyed. Then and only then — when the last living human has returned to earth and dust — should our cancerous pustules, the monstrous toxic boils we call cities, be “rewilded” by the natural processes that will devour our waste as they devour our worthless corpses. [I am terribly disappointed in myself that I didn’t finish the “boils” metaphor by talking about lancing and draining the pus. Ah, well. Next time!]

“More than 70% [of] projected extinctions of plants and animals would be counteracted by restoring only 30% of priority areas,” the infographic in Source A tells us. Sure, that seems like a wonderful trade-off — but it still includes the extinction of 30% of the species projected to die by our actions. You know what would preserve 100% of species that would otherwise go extinct thanks to human action? The extinction of the human race. Come on now: if 70% of species are worth saving by limiting humans, aren’t 100% of species worth saving by eliminating humans? Wouldn’t we trade 100% of species for the loss of only one? Of the worst one? This trolley problem isn’t even a problem.

Source B, I think, shows the heart of the issue: we are the most short-sighted, selfish, superficial beings imaginable. The idea here is to grow more life, more nature, inside our dark, dingy, dangerous, disgusting urban sprawls — and yet this policy brief feels it must sell this concept to the public. “Rewilding is a powerful new term in conservation,” it says. “This may be because it combines a sense of passion and feeling for nature with advances in ecological science. The term resonates. Rewilding is exciting, engaging, and challenging.” Look at that: saving the planet, living in a natural setting, respecting our fellow beings by not slaughtering them wholesale so we can build another goddamn Walmart: those appeals are not enough! Noooo, we need to market the brand, we need to sell it, we need to convince people. How disgusting is that? How disgusting are we?

Source C continues this. It presents a delightful scene of a friendly scientist helping the audience think back to their childhood: before they became polluters and exploiters of the natural world, when they were innocent (if we ever truly have been) and actually loved nature. Because, the TV host says, “if [we] don’t spend any time outside, why are [we] going to care about [our] local places let alone the national parks in the distance?”

WHY ARE WE GOING TO CARE?! Because this is not our world! Nature does not belong to us, we belong to nature! We need nature, it doesn’t need us! The graph in Source E shows it: more nature means less depression, less stress. Even we are happier when we don’t live in the world we are building. We destroy everything in order to benefit ourselves, and in so doing? We destroy ourselves. Even our attempts to remedy this, like Dr. Scott’s presentation in Source C, are performances given on television: they are artificial. Attempts to trick people into associating SAVING THE PLANET with some happy childhood memory of climbing a damn tree. Because without that emotional manipulation, without that chicanery, we would be far more likely to simply wipe out all life: including ourselves.

Well. We should skip the middle step, and jump straight to the end game. If all humanity were reduced to windblown ash, then the rest of the natural world — the healthy part, the good part — could flourish, once more. Urban rewinding is clearly not the answer: even at its best, as presented in Source F, it can only create 600 hectares of parkland in Madrid, one of the biggest cities in Europe; or 300 km of park connectors in Singapore, one of the greatest sprawls in the world of human filth. Is it worth pointing out that even those attempts at rehabilitating the human virus focus primarily on the wealthy? That Toronto’s Beltway features “farmers’ markets, performance spaces, and a children’s garden,” but not a single breath of fresh air and a flash of green life for the poorest slums in the city?

No. It doesn’t matter. We are not worth saving, if we have to think this hard about saving our planet. I just hope that we are the first to go, so everything else can go on without us. To that end, let’s forget about urban rewilding: let’s just build ourselves to death.

The Essay That Is

08/08/202309/08/2023Dusty Leave a comment

Here you go, the answer I should have written for the prompt I gave my AP Lit students this week.

Maybe.

AP English Literature and Composition 2023 Free Response Question #3:

Many works of literature feature a rebel character who changes or disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or political affairs in the text. They may break social norms, challenge long-held values, subvert expectations, or participate in other forms of resistance. The character’s motivation for this rebellious behavior is often complex.

Either from your reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which a character changes or disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or political affairs. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the complex motivation of the rebel contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole.

How does one become a rebel?

It seems like a simple question, but I don’t think it is. There is one obvious way that one could become a rebel: one could be made into a rebel by the sudden appearance or dominance of an authority that takes away the freedom or the lifestyle that one was familiar and comfortable with; if another country invaded this one and overthrew my government and imposed Draconian laws on me, I would rebel against that invader. But first, that seems uncommon; though there have certainly been such invasions and takeovers in the past, they are not the norm; and second, “rebel” implies that there is an established authority, an accepted norm, which the rebel then fights back against — if there is an invasion and a conqueror, then really one who fought that would be a freedom fighter, not a rebel. The invading conqueror would call you a rebel, sure, but only because they want to pretend their power grab was legitimate; and that’s just propaganda.

If you are not conquered by an outside force, then either you were born a rebel, and had to grow up under the established authority, which would make it hard to stay rebellious as they would pressure you, all the time, from all sides, to conform to what is accepted; or the oppressive regime had to grow slowly, over time, getting worse and worse — and then the question becomes, what would be the final straw? What would push you, at the last, from grumbling about the government, to fighting back against the government? Sometimes there may be a sudden shift, a surprise attack that would move the needle well beyond what was acceptable all of a sudden; but I think most authority doesn’t work that way — and surely social conventions do not. The American Revolution was motivated by a long serious of usurpations and abuses, according to the Declaration of Independence; though the American Civil War kicked off after Abraham Lincoln was elected president, there were a hundred smaller elements of the conflict before that. So why was one of the earlier actions of the authority not the one that set off the rebellion? Why was it not a later one? What makes the last straw the last straw?

Those, I think, are not easy questions to answer. But I surely would like to know, not least because I am an authority figure in a classroom full of naturally rebellious people; and not least because I live in a country that at times seems to be sliding slowly into tyranny, one which I will not accept — but where will I draw the line? What is the right place to draw the line?

In the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the protagonist Guy Montag becomes a rebel. But he does not start that way. In fact, Montag lives his entire life, until 30 years of age, not only accepting the norms and authorities that control him, but actively participating, encouraging, defending those norms and that authority: Montag is a fireman in a society where firemen, formerly rescuers, are now tasked with eliminating the possibility of rebellion, by destroying free thought and free thinkers. In the novel, the society — an American society set some number of centuries in the future — uses the particular oppressive mechanism of ignorance: they have banned, and now routinely destroy, all books. Montag burns books. It is the first thing that happens in the story, and even more, we immediately know that Montag loves it: the first line of the book is “It was a pleasure to burn.” Even later, when he has changed and is working against the oppressive society that raised him, he still loves burning, he still loves destruction; he still turns to it as a solution to his problems, even though he knows it doesn’t work. But old habits die hard: and that’s my point about rebellion. If a rebel, like Montag, grew up in the oppressive regime, how would they maintain their will to fight back, for their whole lives? Montag has the seed of rebellion in him even before the events of the book bring it to fruition: he steals books that he is supposed to burn, and keeps them; he has been doing this for a year before the novel’s plot begins, and has twenty or so illicit books inside his house. He also fails to report a book reader he meets in a park, simply keeping his name and address in his own personal files, even though in the encounter he knew the old man had a book of poetry in his pocket. So even before the book starts, Montag is not entirely conformist, not completely comfortable with who he is and the world that has made him this way: but he does not at first rebel against it. He does end up subverting expectations, by turning on the very society he helps prop up; but before that, he had to conform to the expectations before he could subvert them. And which act is more significant? If I spend ten years kicking your ankles, and then one day get you an ice pack for your bruises — and I now the good guy? Is Montag?

Clarisse, on the other hand, has always been a rebel: we are told that this young woman, Montag’s neighbor, has always been different, has never fit in. And we can see the cost of that: she is being watched carefully, along with her whole family, by the government, Fire Captain Beatty reveals to us; Clarisse tells us that she has been often kept out of school and has to report to a psychiatrist to make her act “right.” She says that she doesn’t really have any friends among her peers, because children her age scare her: bereft of the empathy and broader perspective that reading books can provide, along with the other results of living under an oppressive tyranny, the young people in this world are savage and violent, killing people for fun. Clarisse is different, and her difference has an effect on Montag: when she speaks to him, in a way that is not any longer an accepted and conventional way of speaking to people, she inspires in him a curiosity that drives him to try to learn things he didn’t know before. This is certainly part of what makes Montag a rebel: but it is also probably part of what kills Clarisse, who vanishes early on in the book, never to return; we are told she was killed in a car accident, which is probable, considering how the people act and how they drive; but also, maybe the government removed a threat to their control over the people.

So why isn’t that done to Montag?

It makes sense that he would be driven to fight back once he realizes that Clarisse had shown him how terrible his world is; but why does he realize that? He responds more honestly and openly to Clarisse when she starts speaking to him; she comments on it. But wouldn’t that imply he was willing to speak to the “crazy” people like Clarisse before, and just never got caught at it? Why didn’t he get caught? Captain Beatty knows right away that Montag has been speaking to Clarisse. It’s one of the great things about this novel: the ruling power structure is not stupid, and are more than capable of discovering and eliminating threats to their hold on power. 1984 makes the same point, even more effectively, because in that book, Big Brother wins — which raises the question of just how rebellious is Winston Smith?

How rebellious is Montag? Are you rebellious if you fail?

Clarisse was rebellious in following her passions and her curiosity, exploring her world, speaking to people as she wanted to, rejecting the mind numbing activities and schooling that keeps all of her peers asleep in their own lives; in all of that, she rebels, and is successful at it. But she never even thinks about attacking the power structure: she just wants to stay alive. That makes sense to me. Faber, too, the old man in the park with a poetry book whom Montag did not turn in, is somewhat rebellious in mind and heart: he has considered ways that the power structure could be fought, mostly eliminating impossibilities — which shows how existing effective power structures become incredibly adept at preventing rebellion — but keeping a couple of tricks up his sleeve; when Montag comes to him looking for help and advice, Faber is able to give Montag at least a little bit. But he doesn’t actually help. He advises Montag against taking action. He refuses to do anything more than talk to Montag while Montag takes all the risks. I don’t know how rebellious that is, though Faber is rebel-adjacent, at least.

But that only occurs because Montag refused, on a whim, to turn Faber in when he should have, and now Montag has a desire to rebel — and no idea how he should actually do it.

So what pushed Montag to rebellion?

He mentions a few experiences: Clarisse’s death, after her friendship with Montag, is certainly one. Another is that Mildred, his wife of ten years, overdoses on pills right at the beginning of the book; the clear depiction of this in the novel is that overdoses like hers are incredibly common — the hospital doesn’t admit her, instead sending technicians to her home to pump her stomach and filter her blood, and when Montag asks why there isn’t a doctor there to help her, they laugh and say that’s not necessary, all they need is the machines and two plumbers. And they do treat her like a broken toilet, for whom they don’t care one way or another: because Mildred is nothing special, just like all the other people who live or die in this world. So Montag recognizes the heartlessness of his society, separate from Clarisse’s example. But also, when the firemen talk about how they use the Mechanical Hound, a robot who tracks fugitives by smell and kills them with a massive overdose of opiates, to alleviate boredom by setting it to kill one of a small group of animals released in a closed space, betting on which one will get caught and killed, Montag mentions how he stopped participating in that practice some time ago. So did he have empathy before? How? If it was strong enough to affect him, how did he not get caught showing unseemly feelings for his fellow men, or even just for the cats the firemen set the Mechanical Hound to kill?

Did he hide his non-conforming attitudes and behaviors? How? He’s not really an actor: when he does try to pretend that everything is fine, he is in a constant state of near-panic, and Captain Beatty always knows it — though Beatty doesn’t always comment on it. Beatty knows how to keep secrets.

Want to know one secret Beatty kept? He has read books. Lots of books. The clear implication is that Beatty was once a reader and lover of reading, but then was convinced to join the forces of darkness and oppression, and he does it, gladly and whole-heartedly. It’s another question which could (and should) be explored: why do rebels sometimes stop rebelling, and swing all the other way to become enforcers of the status quo?

One more influence that seems to help drive Montag to rebellion is the woman on Elm St. — my personal hero in this book — who, when the firemen show up at her house to burn her books, and threaten to burn her, beats them to the punch, setting her own house and her own self ablaze. Montag is strongly affected by it, which again shows that he may be different, that he may care more when people die horribly; but the other firemen are silent, as well, as they drive away. So they seem to be affected by this, just like Montag. So why does he resist, and the others do not?

To return to the main question, then: what drives Montag to rebel? Because he does, finally, rebel: he reads the books he stole, and then when Mildred brings her vacuous friends over to watch TV with her, he reads a poem from a book at them — Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” about the slow loss of faith in the world and the terrible emptiness that remains when all hope and goodness are lost. And maybe that poem represents why Montag fights back against his society; but also, in the poem, Arnold doesn’t fight against the loss of faith, he simply asks for true love to protect himself and his new wife from the terrible darkness and the dangers all around them. Like Faber, he accepts the loss of a good world, and tries to survive if he can. Not so Montag, who then goes on to fight more openly and aggressively: when Beatty tries to arrest Montag, knowing that he has stolen a book and read it (Montag is reported for the Dover Beach incident, though that’s not the only way Beatty knows about Montag’s defiance of their norms), Montag instead murders Beatty, assaults two other firemen, destroys the Mechanical Hound, and goes on the run. On the way out of town, he also stops and plants his own ill-gotten books in the home of another fireman, calling in the alarm himself so that the fireman will lose his home and suffer suspicion that he won’t deserve. Is that rebellion? In a way, certainly, because he’s breaking the rules and harming an enforcer of the tyrannical government; but also, that fireman is no more guilty of oppressing society than is Montag himself.

Is it rebellious if you remove yourself as an enforcer of norms and conventions? If you simply refuse to participate in making other people toe the line, are you a rebel? Doesn’t feel like enough. Imagine if George Washington had just — not collected the Stamp Tax. So if pulling himself out of the ranks of enforcers isn’t enough to make Montag really a rebel, then why would it be enough to ruin one other guy’s life? Just one more drone removed from the ranks; what is the point of that? There are always more drones.

Then again: if Clarisse was the catalyst for Montag’s rebellion, then maybe losing their home to an unfair raid by the firemen would be enough to change the views of Mr. and Mrs. Black.

In the end, it is not really clear why Montag rebels. He doesn’t plan it out, he doesn’t think about it; he just does it — and he doesn’t know what he’s doing or why while he is actually doing it, in most cases. When he steals a book from the home of the woman on Elm St., he watches his hands tuck the book inside his jacket, and he describes them as someone else’s hands, not his, nothing to do with him; clearly that isn’t true, but it shows his understanding of his actions at the time — or rather, his almost total lack of understanding. He wonders, repeatedly, why Clarisse affected him so much; he also asks where she came from, how someone like her could exist. And we don’t know. Her family is different: but why are they allowed to exist? We know why Faber exists and lives in this society that is everything he hates: he is a coward, self-professed, and cannot bear the thought of fighting; even when he joins Montag, Faber actually does nothing active or practical to fight against the government that has taken everything away from him, over the course of decades. He helps a rebel, but he isn’t one.

This is the final message of Bradbury’s book, and of his characterization of Montag as the protagonist and main rebel against this dystopian regime: Montag doesn’t have any special reason to rebel. Montag is not in any way special. He’s just a guy. He’s not particularly smart, he’s not particularly brave, he doesn’t really have any insights; within his circumstances, the things that happen to him are not that extraordinary. But for some reason, they affect Montag just a little bit differently, just a little bit more, than they might affect another person — and so everything changes.

That’s the point. Regimes like this dystopian nightmare are doomed: because nobody can predict what would make someone rebel. The totalitarian tyranny would naturally seek to eliminate all questions, all threats, all non-conformity; and they would probably do so very effectively. But it doesn’t take much to make someone take action. Sometimes, all it takes is one friend: gaining one friend, and losing one friend. Sometimes all it takes is realizing the answer to one simple question: Are you happy? Montag realizes he is not: and that’s what makes him fight to change his world.

But Bradbury’s book, unlike the film versions that have been made based on it, is also not that hopeful: because in the end of Bradbury’s novel, the result of Montag’s rebellion is — nothing. He has no impact whatsoever. The tyrannical government collapses on itself through its own actions, not because Montag saved the day. So while the government’s attempt to prevent rebels like Montag from existing is hopeless, because the motivation, the driving force behind those rebels is mysterious and will always remain so; the rebellion of people like Montag is equally hopeless: because while the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can start a hurricane on the other side of the world, it can’t save human society.

Because it can’t make people want to read books.

However: that isn’t the end of this. Because Bradbury’s book is not just about people reading books, nor is it simply about a dystopian world with a totalitarian state; it is not only about Montag and his futile (though well-meaning and justified) rebellion. After Montag kills and escapes the servants of the state, he returns to Faber: who takes action and helps Montag to escape. And then Faber takes further action, leaving the city to seek out a printer he knew, so they can begin printing books once again — unquestionably rebellious, and also a more effective form of rebellion than Montag’s plan of planting book in all the firemen’s houses. Faber also tells Montag to leave the city and seek out a group of people who live on the outskirts of civilization, which Montag does: and those people, former professors and scholars and readers, and still current thinkers, show Montag (and us) the hope Bradbury sees even in his dystopian vision. It is learning. Granger, the leader of this group, describes for Montag how humanity seems to always destroy itself, and then rebuild itself out of the ashes — but the difference is that humanity learns from its mistakes. We recognize the damn stupid thing we just did, he says, and we learn not to make the same mistake. Sure, we go ahead and make a new mistake, and destroy ourselves again — but we don’t do it the same way twice. Which means, eventually, we may learn not to destroy ourselves any more.

That’s the hope. And it runs throughout this novel: because the point of this is that change, and improvement, are slow and incremental. Exactly as I described the slow degradation into tyranny and the slow rise of rebelliousness at the outset of this essay. Things don’t tend to happen quickly in our society: but they do happen. Montag doesn’t overthrow the government — but he tries. He changes. He changes because Clarisse talked to him, asked him a question, treated him as a friend; little things, but they were enough to influence Montag. Montag changed Faber, not much, but a little, just as Faber was changing Montag, giving him direction, giving him support. Granger changed Montag, and is changed by him in return: because at the very end of the book, Granger lets Montag take the lead, stepping aside for him. Just as they are walking: but for a small change, it is symbolic.

Like Montag’s rebellion. It comes in small steps, comparatively, and it has small impacts: but so does everything we do. And as this book shows, just the right small impacts in just the right places at just the right times — it can set the world on fire.

Or put it out.

The Essay That Should Have Been

07/08/202309/08/2023Dusty Leave a comment

Every year I make my AP students write an essay in the first week.

I started doing this because when I moved to Arizona and started teaching AP, I went to a summer seminar in how to teach AP, and the instructor — a very smart man who had been teaching AP for 30 years, and whom I respected quite a lot — told us that we should start hard, in a way: give them a practice test, one of the essay questions from an actual past AP exam, right at the beginning and grade it as you would an AP test — no mercy. It shows the students what the test is like, both through the use of an old question and the AP’s generally high standards, and through the use of fairly intense pressure on them to perform; this will motivate them, he said, to work hard in order to be more prepared for the actual test. So I do that: and it works quite well, most of the time. A number of my AP students are the most successful, and the most lauded, students at the school, and I like giving them a test that they don’t automatically ace, as they usually do in their other classes; it puts them off balance, which is usually where they need to be to learn and grow. Also, while I have a well-earned reputation as a generally easy-going sort of cat, I want them to know that the AP is not easy, and so in academic terms, I am not an “easy” teacher.

So, an AP essay, in the first week.

One of the things I do to try to mitigate that difficult assignment is to take the test with them. I know it doesn’t make it any easier if I’m writing an essay while they are writing an essay, but I think it does two things: one, it shows that I am teaching something that I really know how to do, in a practical, everyday sense, and maybe even something I like doing (It is. I like writing essays. I think they just generally don’t believe that I do.); and two, it shows them that I’m not giving them assignments just to torture them, I think they are valuable — valuable enough to do them myself.

Now, most years, this is not very hard for me: I’ve written a lot of essays, I’ve read a lot of literature, I analyze everything all the time. But this year, man. I don’t quite know what it was, but I struggled with both essays, the synthesis essay I gave my AP Lang students, and the open response question I gave my AP Lit class. Okay, I know some of what it was: in the case of the Lang essay, I had trouble with the topic as it was presented in the packet of information (The synthesis prompt asks the students to read six sources which represent two sides of a debate, and then to “join the conversation.” They need to present their own opinion on the issue, using at least three of the sources as references to place their opinion in relation to the rest of the debate.), because one side was clearly right, but also really badly argued, which left me the unfortunate options of choosing the wrong side, or using bad arguments to support the right side; and then in the case of the Lit essay, I asked my students to use the book they chose to read over the summer to answer the question if they could, and so I used the book I read as potential new material for the class — and I didn’t (and don’t) have a good enough grasp of that work to use it well for the essay. Basically I picked a bad topic for Lang, and a bad answer for Lit.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to use this blog to write the essays I should have written for these two prompts. Partly as a way to vindicate myself as an essayist (Though to be clear, I showed my Lit class today the essay I struggled with, so they could see that I struggle too; and I’ll do the same with my Lang class tomorrow, because I don’t think everything I write has to be perfect), because I should have written better essays; but mainly just because I think these are two genuinely good topics for essays, and I want to do the subject matter justice.

This week I’m going to do the Lit essay. I will also be including the bad one I wrote, which isn’t terrible; but there’s a better answer I could have given, which I’m going to write now.

(Also I don’t think I’ll get this done tonight, Monday, so this week’s will almost certainly be posted tomorrow and maybe even Wednesday. Sorry. School, man. It takes up your time.)

You know what? I’m going to make it a thing. I’m going to type (because my handwriting is atrocious, especially when I’m trying to stick to a time limit with my students) the bad essay I wrote in class and post it tonight, and tomorrow I will come back and finish the good essay. And do the same thing next week, with the other one.

So here we go: the response I wrote in class to the AP Literature Free Response prompt. (As you’ll see, this essay gives a thematic statement, and asks the students to apply it to any full-length work they have read, using the theme given to analyze the work. The perfect work to answer this question with happens to be the book I have read more than any other, and know better than any other; but that’s not the one I wrote about.)

Also, here is the test in my handwriting, so you will understand why I am typing this.

Okay? So here we go.

First, the question:

AP English Literature and Composition 2023 Free Response Question #3:

Many works of literature feature a rebel character who changes or disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or political affairs in the text. They may break social norms, challenge long-held values, subvert expectations, or participate in other forms of resistance. The character’s motivation for this rebellious behavior is often complex.

Either from your reading or from the list below [Side note: Ummmm, if you haven’t read the book you select to write about, you’re pretty well boned on this essay. So it really should just be the rest of this direction:], choose a work of fiction in which a character changes or disrupts the existing state of societal, familial, or political affairs. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how the complex motivation of the rebel contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole.

So the best work I know (though there are several good ones on the provided list of suggestions, including Antigone, Invisible Man, Kindred, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Paradise Lost) to answer this question is Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. The work I used to answer it was Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, which musical film buffs will know as the original version of My Fair Lady.

Here is the essay, complete with the part where I just started cursing because I wasn’t sure exactly how to write this, and then the title I came up with (because of the cursing, so let me tell you, that’s some effective brainstorming) and the rest of the essay.

You know what? Fuck this. Fuck this prompt, fuck this test — and fuck you.

“FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME.”

— Zack de la Rocha

Language is one of the primary determining factors for a number of society’s categories. How we talk shows, or even determines, who we are and how we get treated. I talk about this every year, when I teach diction: how formal language and the use of specialized jargon helps to present me as a teacher, as a person worthy of (but frequently denied) respect. Casual diction, featuring the use of contractions, and slang, and even profanity or “inappropriate” language shows me as — something else.

But does it make me a rebel?

Zack de la Rocha, lead singer and lyricist of the band Rage Against the Machine, is in many ways a rebel. When the band performed their timeless classic “Killing in the Name Of” on the BBC, de la Rocha was asked to leave out a key word in the final refrain, which I used to title this piece. Clearly, asking him to change that particular statement was rather foolish: de la Rocha not only clearly enunciated the entire refrain, he flipped off the camera while he responded to the BBC’s attempted censorship. Violating rules by itself is not rebellious: but when you violate rules as a means of resisting the oppressive power structures that dominate our society, it is certainly rebellious.

Zack de la Rocha’s motivations for this rebellious act are really quite simple (though his motivations in forming the band, writing and singing the songs he does, are not), but more often, rebellious motives are complex. In the play “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw, all of the main characters (Except for poor, pitiful Freddy) are rebellious in one way or another. Professor Higgins and the Colonel [Note: I could not remember the Colonel’s name, so I just used his title throughout. It’s Pickering. Colonel Pickering.] both defy the social order of Great Britain, as does Eliza Doolittle; Eliza also defies the misogyny and elitism which her two “benefactors” partake in unthinkingly, especially Higgins. Mrs. Higgins defies expectation in taking Eliza’s side over her son’s — thus also defying her class role in becoming a partisan for the flower girl — and Mr. Doolittle breaks stereotypes, social order, and all expectations by becoming an accepted member of the upper class, and by not being a dick despite the twin facts of his alcoholism and his neglect of his daughter. However, while they are all rebellious, not all of their motivations are complex, though some are.

Higgins’s motivations may be the simplest among the upper class characters: he wants to prove that he is smarter and better than everyone else. We can see this in his every scene, from his initial appearance when he shows off, and insults everyone at the market, to his final argument with Eliza when he is somehow simultaneously offended and offensive in telling Eliza he loves her but will never love her and love is stupid anyway. All he wants is to be the best, to be the possessor of the most respected and respectable opinion. Fuck him.

The Colonel’s motives are more confusing. He doesn’t want to be the best, nor does he want to prove that Henry is the best; he doesn’t really want to win his bet, he seemed genuinely curious as to whether or not it could be accomplished. Then as time goes on, and he fosters a paternal love for Eliza, his goal seems to be helping her — though in the third act he, like Higgins completely disregards Eliza and her accomplishments by focusing exclusively on the result of the bet with Higgins. Is that because he is comfortable with the elitism that motivates the bet? Is it because he is a kind man who wants to meet Higgins on his own ground? If we are seeing this play as a feminist or Marxist critique of the patriarchy or the class structure, then clearly the Colonel, for all his attempts at being genuine and kind, is simple one of those who work forces.

The same who burn crosses.

[Note: These last two sentences are lines from the Rage Against the Machine song, which is about how police and other soldiers of the power structure are racist and bigoted and attack marginalized people under the guise of enforcing state power. I’m just saying that the Colonel is part of the problem, in ignoring Eliza as her own person with abilities and accomplishments, treating her only as the product of Higgins’s abilities and accomplishments. And if you got that, I apologize for teachersplaining — but it occurs to me as I type this that the audience who would be that familiar with both Rage Against the Machine and Pygmalion is vanishingly small. It didn’t even include me until a week ago.]

Mrs. Higgins seems to be in the same category as the Colonel: generally a solid pillar of the oppressive social order, encouraging her son to act properly and to marry, frowning on but never actually opposing the exploitation of Eliza; but then towards the end, when the Colonel slips, it is Mrs. Higgins who steps up to help Eliza. But while this makes her, like the Colonel, likable and sympathetic, it’s clear that the underlying allegiance to the power structure remains as Mrs. Higgins wants to protect Eliza: rather than empowering her to take control of her own life. This makes both Mrs. Higgins and the Colonel complicit, rather than rebellious, because they see Eliza as an especial exception, rather than just one instance of a whole oppressed class, and by making an exception of her, they prove the rule.

Eliza’s case is more interesting. She participates in the experiment as part of a rebellion against the social order, not merely to prove her superiority, but because she finds fault in the order — why should she be any less than the toffs? She also breaks the misogynistic stereotypes by going to Higgins’s house, intending to hire him, and then continuing to live there in violation of the sexually oppressive morals of Edwardian society, again as an act of rebellion. But it’s no surprise that her acts are more clearly — and cleanly — rebellious, as she is the victim of the power structures she pushes back against. Her motivation is, naturally, selfish, therefore not rebellious — but she also displays a strong sense of justice, all the way from the beginning when she bewails her treatment at the market by all the wealthy people who treat her as an object. She does at that time use the oppressive patriarchal norms as a shield — you can’t treat me this way, I’m just a poor girl (Nobody loves me); but by the end, she objects to her exploitation by Higgins and the Colonel, as well.

And this idea leads to the most rebellious figure within the play, with the most complex motivations: Shaw himself. The playwright, in adapting the Greek myth to an Edwardian England setting, is attacking the mythology of the society he is depicting: because the man who crafts the perfect woman is not only the villain — he is indifferent to his creation, where Pygmalion fell in love with his Galatea. Shaw may be saying there is no love in England that the patriarchal egotism and contempt for the other leaves no room for love of any but the self. He also breaks down the norms of the theater for which he is writing, because where a comedy is traditionally to end in a marriage, and a tragedy in the hero’s fall, this play ends in the heroine’s rise — but without a marriage. What’s more, we are treated to a discussion of why the tale should not end in a marriage, why it is better without a marriage (because Higgins insists he is more honest and honorable for treating everyone badly) — and that’s how it ends, so either Higgins is right, or he has imposed his views on the audience as he imposed them on Eliza.

But then in the additional narration added to the play, Shaw does give us a marriage, though seemingly one that is only economic in character and theme. Thus breaking his own thematic conclusion, as well as his society’s.

Perhaps the most critical rebellion here is Shaw fighting against himself. In using language to criticize language by breaking it down to meaningless idiosyncrasies and stereotypes even as he breaks Eliza’s speech into meaningless phonetics; in using drama to criticize drama, by creating a comedy that rebels against comedy and a myth that rebels against mythology, Shaw undercuts his own authority, even his own argument. He rebels against himself, and like Higgins, rejects any connection to his own creation — and thus, perhaps, personifies God, the Devil, and Cain, who is not his brother’s keeper. nWhen Shaw looks up, flips the middle finger, and says “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” he is not speaking to the BBC, he is speaking to himself. And the only result is paradox.

Good stuff, right?

Well no.

Though actually, as I read through all of this, I realize that there are some genuinely interesting ideas here: I was just limited by, first, the time frame, and secondly, by the fact I couldn’t use the text to look up specific details, or the internet to look up general concepts and ideas. Give me a couple more hours and my usual resources, and I could have made this into something actually interesting.

I would want to change the thesis, first of all because the one I have here is terribly awkward. “In the play “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw, all of the main characters (Except for poor, pitiful Freddy) are rebellious in one way or another. Professor Higgins and the Colonel both defy the social order of Great Britain, as does Eliza Doolittle; Eliza also defies the misogyny and elitism which her two “benefactors” partake in unthinkingly, especially Higgins. Mrs. Higgins defies expectation in taking Eliza’s side over her son’s — thus also defying her class role in becoming a partisan for the flower girl — and Mr. Doolittle breaks stereotypes, social order, and all expectations by becoming an accepted member of the upper class, and by not being a dick despite the twin facts of his alcoholism and his neglect of his daughter. However, while they are all rebellious, not all of their motivations are complex, though some are.” I hate that last sentence, which was the result of me trying to include the prompt’s demand for complex motivations, clashing with the fact that not all of the characters have complex motivations: Higgins, the phonetics professor who helps Eliza Doolittle learn to speak like an upper class Englishwoman, really is just an arrogant twerp who wants to be right all the time; and I never should have brought up Eliza’s father, who is not a useful character, just a moment of comic relief. And if I was going to bring him up, I shouldn’t have called him a dick (or “not a dick.” Not better.)

But also, this thesis says that all of the characters are rebellious: and that’s not true. Higgins does try to break the social order of England by helping Eliza, from the lower class, to become superficially part of the upper class; but he’s bending the rules of that social class, not trying to break them, not least because he doesn’t actually want Eliza to join the upper class: he just wants to trick everyone into thinking she is part of the upper class once he teaches her to speak in a certain way. That’s not rebelling against the social class, that is using the exception to prove the rule, showing that without Higgins’s own genius, the social classes would continue to correctly segregate the lower from the upper classes based on their patterns of speech. Colonel Pickering is the same, and Mrs Higgins does sort of defy family by protecting Eliza — which I would keep, because it is interesting — but again, it’s not like she changes the situation in the long run, or questions the values that put Higgins and Eliza at odds. She just feels sorry for the poor girl and thinks her son is a cad, which he is.

I also don’t like how I moved from Eliza to Shaw by saying that this idea brings us to the biggest rebel of them all: and that’s not true, because there’s no particular reason why Eliza would link us to Shaw. It’s just that I was running out of time and I was tired of analyzing how these characters are or are not rebels; I wanted to get to Shaw and wrap the whole thing up. That idea, that the real rebel is Shaw himself, was the best way I could think of to resolve the difficulty I had (and still have) in figuring out the ending of the play, which seems to ruin every message the play itself could have: Eliza does not join the upper class; Higgins does not soften his misanthropy; British society does not break down its bigotry. The play just sort of ends with this “So that was a thing that happened, 23-skiddoo, let’s go have a drink!” I find it very frustrating. But I pretty much hate my ending more, because I was just starting to open up new ideas about what Shaw’s choices mean, when I just had to stop, because time was running out. So I did the thing I tell students never to do: I brought up new information in the conclusion, and didn’t explore it enough, even though there is a lot to explore there.

But that’s also the good part of this: because the end of this play is a genuinely confusing choice on the part of the playwright, and those choices are absolutely the best things to analyze and figure out. I don’t know if Shaw was really echoing (or prefiguring, since he wrote his almost a century before de la Rocha) Rage Against the Machine, but it’s an interesting thought. If language breaks down, and the norms of literature break down, then the standards of society that oppress Eliza both as a poor speaker of low-class British English, and as a woman, can also break down, because they are just as arbitrary as the other standards. That’s an interesting possibility, one I would like to explore. Did Shaw make Higgins into such a prick because he was trying to criticize all the arrogant middle aged white British men who were surely watching the play? Yeah, maybe; that would be interesting to think about and talk about. I wish I had. Maybe, when my class reads the play, we’ll talk about all of this; and as my students often do, maybe this class will help me figure this out. If they do, I may rewrite this and make it good.

But for now, I’m just going to write on this same prompt using the work I definitely should have used: Fahrenheit 451. I will post that essay tomorrow.

For now, enjoy this song, which I love, but which I forgot entirely was from My Fair Lady. I associate it with a pair of raccoons singing about a La-Z-Boy. And as always in movies like this, please enjoy the absurdity that is a film trying to make Audrey freaking Hepburn seem unattractive if she has dirt on her face. Sure, guys. Sure. Dirty-face-Audrey is super ugly. You bet.