Now understand this: Toni has dedicated herself and her life to her art. Despite countless obstacles and difficulties of every kind — financial (LOTS of financial obstacles; this is the United States, after all, and she is an artist, who does not come from family money, and married a public school teacher, the poor misguided fool), personal, medical, emotional, cultural, and practical — she has always made art. Starting when she was a tiny child (Who looked pretty much like this:)
Toni has spent her life drawing and painting, observing, learning, practicing, training, hoping, dreaming, trying — and living –but mostly, drawing and painting. It is her favorite thing to do, her solace, her source of self. And she is absolutely incredible.
She set out to depict how animals are, despite their generally kind nature, slowly building up rage over how humans have treated them, and treated the Earth that we all share. In dozens of drawings like this one:
This was an Inktober sketch, one of 31 she did in the month of October: one ink sketch per day.
And paintings like this one:
This is Llombie. He is a llama zombie. I love him.
She has depicted animals in unusual ways, often exploring the interactions between humans and animals, the ways humans use animals, and particularly the ways animals reflect human ideas, and the way human ideas impact animals. Sometimes the humans and animals are friends:
Just a sketchbook page she posted, but I love the toad
And sometimes they are not:
Another Inktober sketch
A few years ago, that morphed into the Anarchy Animals: in drawings and sketches and paintings, animal portraits started suddenly including the anarchy sign, which she was using to show that animals were someday going to rise up and overthrow their oppressors. Worldwide anarchy. Led by such as these:
Anarchat
And this:
And this one, where the anger is growing more clear, and more dangerous:
Eventually, she decided to do a full series of paintings of animals in this theme, all inspired by creatures exploited and threatened by humans, creatures whom she would depict fighting back. That series, Animal Anarchy, led to these two paintings (The series is ongoing):
And when she happened upon a call for entries for a show that would focus on the theme of Animal Activism, she entered both of these paintings. And, of course, she won. The koala piece won First Place in the Painting category for all entries, and an Honorable Mention for Overall Best In Show; the ostrich piece won Honorable Mention in the Painting category.
And I just want to share with everyone how amazing and unbelievably talented and fiercely imaginative my wife is. And how proud I am of her. Because she is the best artist, and the best partner (but more importantly, the best artist), I have ever known or ever hope to know.
A Twitterer (Tweeter? Just Twit?) I follow posted an observation about English:
“Price” and “Worth” mean the same thing, yet “Priceless” and “Worthless” are opposites.
They followed this with the usual metatags, you know, #DeepThought, #Philosophizin, #MindBlown, the identifiers that are much more “tag” than “meta,” in the sense that they are markers used to track things, clunky lumps sutured to one’s ear out in the wild; or perhaps they are a children’s game that seems designed to frustrate all the players but one. But just as those tags are really more prosaic, more obvious, and more concrete and direct than they are meta, so this conundrum of English is not that difficult to untangle: it’s a paradox like any other in English, meaning it is only contradictory, only interesting, if seen from one particular angle. Change the angle and it becomes clear. The answer, I posted in a reply to this Twitterer, is that “price” and “worth” are not actually the same thing at all: “worth” is something’s inherent value, its qualities that make it precious and/or coveted; and “price” is a measurement of what someone is willing to pay to acquire that value. So “worth” is set by the thing itself, and by the perceptions of the owner or coveter; “price” is set by the market, and determined much more by one’s available assets and one’s eagerness to possess: the depth of one’s coveting, that is. “Worth” is internal (though externally perceived), and “Price” is external (Though to some extent internally determined). In recognition of this, we use the antonyms, priceless and worthless, to name two different qualities: one describes an object you would never sell, and the other describes an object you would never buy.
This is why I don’t have more followers on Twitter. Because my posts, while free for all, are not valued by many, and are not coveted by any. So I don’t earn much of the modern currency of social media: attention. I could, of course; I could post nothing but #HotTakes, and maybe some #FunnyJokes, and throw some #Shade at some #Influencer; that would earn me more currency, more attention, and that could eventually translate into value for me: especially insofar as I would be able to sell copies of my books, and raise my #Profile by #EngagementFarming — and I don’t mean to mock or belittle the people who do that, because they do, as I said, find value in it: usually through price, because they market their products successfully to their circle of engaged followers, but sometimes through genuine connections made with people who reach out to them personally and build relationships, which I would consider worthwhile. Either way, more power to them, whether they draw in attention currency through the worth of what they create, or through using the market to raise the price (The key to engagement farming is not only to capture attention, it is too demand attention and receive it; since attention is the currency of the social media market, when an engagement farmer [If you’re unfamiliar with the term, this means one of those accounts that posts things intentionally for likes and follows and responses of any kind: either platitudes or intentional irritation are the most common paths] demands more of your attention and receives it, they are raising the price of their product, and you, the consumer, are paying it.) of what they offer. Either way, it is creating value, and it’s a fine thing.
But it’s not my thing. I’m bad at price. You can tell because I am a fantasy author, married to an artist, and both of us are public school teachers: nowhere in there did we find a way to get rich. And we’re not, subsequently. The things I do with my time have a low price: at least partly because I love doing them. But that doesn’t mean, at all, that they have a low worth: my writing, my wife’s art, and both of our teaching, are extremely worthy pursuits, and ones that are generally valued in our society: just not by the market. This is because markets value scarcity, not worth. Which is why, again, the comparison of “price” and “worth” is not good: not only are they not equal, but they are almost unrelated in the modern world.
Not entirely: I make a living, a decent living, through teaching, and I have for more than 20 years; this last week, I went to speak to my principal about something, and as I was leaving after saying my piece, he stopped me because he wanted to ask why I hadn’t signed my contract for next year: he wanted to know if there was a problem, or if, in the worst case scenario for him, I hadn’t signed it because I was leaving. I am not leaving, I assured him: I had actually just signed the contract the day before, he just hadn’t seen the notice yet. (I hadn’t signed it earlier not because I refused to sign it, but because when I looked at the online document awaiting my signature, it said that the contract start date was — my salary. I don’t know when “63,810” is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this coming August, which is when I have to start teaching, so I thought I should double check that the contract was correct before I signed it. But when I went back to check again, it had resolved, and the correct start date was there, so I signed it. Or at least I typed my name into the text box and clicked on the blue button, a process that will never not be weird to me. At any rate, on hearing that I had signed and would be returning, my principal literally did this:
So that tells me my work has worth. Last week I Twitterered that I was struggling, on evening; I felt like my students didn’t value my teaching, and I didn’t want to stand in front of them and be ignored; it feels not only like a waste of my time and a waste of their opportunity, but also, it’s just damn insulting: first because my teaching is valuable, whether students recognize it or not; and second because their idea of value is so skewed that they would rather watch a video of someone falling down than listen to me teach them about reading and writing and literature. But one of my former students replied that I was her favorite teacher, the one who had the greatest impact on her; that I was damn good at teaching and she would always be grateful that she had been in my class. That, even more than my principal, tells me that my work has worth.
But it is not valued in our society as much as it is worth: and that is why my price is low, compared to, say, an engineer or a doctor or a professional athlete. When people talk about the teacher shortage, and how to fix it, this is how: we have to value teachers according to their worth; not according to their price. Teachers should not be paid at what the market will bear: partly because the market has intentionally been jiggered to keep all wages artificially low; and partly because teachers are generally passionate about our work, and therefore we are willing to do more work than we are paid to do. So we get exploited as workers, and we get exploited as people who care about children.
And then they call us indoctrinators. And fucking groomers.
And you wonder why there’s a teacher shortage.
There’s another issue going on today in our society regarding a disparity between value and worth; it’s inflation. Actually, it’s consumerism in general, but we’re seeing the making of the sausage right now, in a way we haven’t really seen for a long time: there’s been inflation, but not this much and not this quickly.
Inflation occurs when the worth of something is greater than its price: sometimes because of supply and demand, sometimes because of changes and innovation, but for whatever reason, if something is worth more than we are paying for it, as sure as sunshine in summer, that price is going to go up, until the price is equal to the value: which is generally above the worth. (By the way: I’m definitely not using the economics terms for these things correctly; but then, I’m not a trained economist. You can tell because I’m not evil.[#FMF]) It’s above the worth because we have always equated price with value: whenever something is expensive, we think it is a good thing, surely a better thing that that cheap knockoff, or that discount brand, or — God forbid — that used version. And so because expensive things automatically have more value, in order to increase both sales and profits, we mark up the high price even more: that draws more people in, and more people want to pay more for something they have to pay more for, even though it has no more value than it would if it were priced more reasonably. This is why there is premium gasoline. Or gasoline at all, for that matter.
The problem with inflation right now is that it is no longer being driven by the worth of the products being more than their price. It was initially: because during the pandemic, people needed something that could cheer us up. We also needed to adapt to our new circumstances. And we needed to stop putting things off for later, because we didn’t know if we would have a later. All of these things increased demand, which also increases the worth of something: if I need it more now than I would have last year, because I’m having an ongoing existential crisis right now, then the thing that will cheer my up out of my crisis is more valuable now than it would have been before, because it will have a better and more powerful impact on me. The same with equipment that will allow me to work from home, in a time when people are losing their jobs and their businesses left and right: I am more desperate to keep my job, and so I am more desperate for what I need to do my job in these trying times. In addition, as people lost jobs and businesses closed, the supply chain for our goods and services simply disintegrated. Which increased the scarcity of things we wanted just as we started really desperately wanting them. And although scarcity doesn’t actually increase worth, it does increase price, because people grow more desperate to get something they want when that thing is hard to get. (I suppose in some way it increases worth because if we want something very rare and we get it, then our satisfaction is greater than what we feel getting something common: but also, a root beer and a good tuna sandwich would make me happier than a limited edition copy of a novel by my favorite author.)
So when inflation started, it was because of that: people really, really wanted to buy stuff, and there was less stuff to buy: so prices went up. No, it was not the government giveaway of money: because prices went up around the world, and the US government only gave money to American households. U.S. inflation increased fourfold between 2020 and 2021, which put us — 19th out of the 44 most industrialized economies.
The problem since then has been that inflation has continued to rise: and there are two reasons for that. One is that the people who sell things to us very quickly realized that our desperation to buy things meant that they could charge us more, while the supply chain issues and the fanatical belief propelled by neoliberal economists that increases in the monetary supply are the only and inevitable cause of inflation (I mean, other than the many, many times this government has increased the money supply without affecting inflation; but those other times don’t count. This time was the one that proved their thesis. Certainly not the first stimulus checks that came to us in the middle of the quarantine shutdown, which affected inflation not at all. It was the other ones. You know: the Democrat ones. Damn those tax and spend Democrats. Totally their fault that a change in the monetary supply had a greater effect than any other similar change in the last four decades. Totally not other causes.) gave those companies cover. Because normally, if a company just raises prices because they can, there is a backlash: people get pissed that the stuff they want is more expensive now, and so they don’t buy it. This is why I don’t go to Starbucks any more, because their coffee is too damned expensive, without giving me any greater happiness from buying it.
But if companies are raising prices because they’re struggling, too, then it’s not their fault: and we grumble — but then we pay the higher prices. And somehow, we ignore the unbelievable increases in corporate profits for the last two years: and we just get madder and madder at — Joe Biden. (Please follow that link: not only is it a very reasonable explanation of what has actually driven inflation, but also it includes this AMAZING statement: “It is unlikely that either the extent of corporate greed or even the power of corporations generally has increased during the past two years. Instead, the already-excessive power of corporations has been channeled into raising prices rather than the more traditional form it has taken in recent decades: suppressing wages.” #DAMN.) So now, the price of goods and services is higher than the value we gain from them, and MUCH higher than the actual worth of those goods and services: which I’m going to say is lower than the value because the things we buy make us happy, which we need, but they aren’t actually making our lives better, which should be part of calculating something’s worth. Because the corporations and megacorporations that make the world economy move find value and worth in only one thing: money.
So okay: here we are, watching prices go up and up, and still paying them, partly because we are still in need of comfort (And it’s getting even worse as our financial positions get harder thanks to how expensive everything is now! DAMN JOE BIDEN!), and partly because we don’t want to deal with the difficulties that would arise if we went looking for alternatives. I’m not sure I want to encourage everyone to look for alternatives: because that seems to me like accepting the prices and the inflation and the reasons for the prices and inflation. That is what the Fed is doing: having accepted without comment that corporations had started gouging Americans, the Fed did the only thing they can do: raise interest rates, fuck up the economy, and throw people out of work. If enough people are poor enough, they stop buying things, and that should make prices stop going up. But since the prices are going up out of alignment with the actual situation, simply because corporations decided to take all the money they could, it’s nearly impossible to say when enough will be enough, and people will stop buying things. Take cars, for instance. At what price point do people stop buying cars? New car prices will easily drive people to buy used cars, of course; but when used car prices are nearly at new car prices? Will people stop driving?
Of course not: not only are cars necessary for productive work across this bigass car-centric nation, but we see our car as part of our identity: it’s not even about buying a car to make ourselves happy, it’s about being utterly miserable without one. Nobody could abide that. My students still see getting a license and a car as more important than getting an education, which is why they let their work and grades slip so they can get an afterschool job: so they can buy a car. And they, and their families, will go into deeper and deeper debt in order to get a car. And then, if the Fed keeps raising interest rates, those car loans will become unsustainable: and they will lose their cars, and have to buy older used cars, which they will still be barely able to afford, but won’t be able to live without. So they’ll have to cut back on other things, or they’ll have to get a second job in order to afford their car in order to get to their first job — and probably their second job.
Hey, isn’t it a blessing that we’ve moved into a gig economy? It’s so much easier to get a second job!
Now let’s talk about rent, shall we? It’s the same thing, but worse: at what point can people stop paying rent? They can’t. They have to get second jobs. They have to cut back on everything else. Or else they have to live on the street. Which, of course, people are doing. In record numbers. (That is to say: people are struggling with rent more, not necessarily becoming homeless more often. This report gives the current state of affairs, which isn’t all bad — veteran homelessness, teen homelessness, and family homelessness are all down. But the most chilling bullet point here? This one:
This stability belies more serious issues among those most at risk of falling into homelessness, at the time of the 2022 PIT Count roughly 50% of renters making less than $25,000 a year reported being behind on rent.
So what do we do?
Honestly, I came into this intending to say that we should stop trying to find comfort in the act of purchasing material things. And I do believe that: I want to encourage more people to read, because reading is comparatively free and can take up literally every free hour of your life. The same with taking walks, or playing games with friends and family. I think there are wonderful things we can all do that will make us happier, and which don’t cost money; and I think that our society would be better off if we did more of those things. Not only because we’d be happier — and for a longer time because the joy we get from shopping is ephemeral and superficial — but also because it would be better for our planet to stop consuming everything available, and better for our economy to simply stop paying the prices that corporations are demanding of us: because if we stop buying, they won’t stop selling: they’ll start selling for less. It will happen, it will work; the Fed is doing the same thing, just by coercion and with a whole lot less choice and a whole lot more pain in the bargain.
But. I don’t mean to sound like a Boomer telling millennials to stop buying lattes and avocado toast, because the real problem is the system, specifically the way it is intended and designed to reward greed. The whole point is to push the exploitation of the masses as far as they possibly can, because that is how they extract wealth from us. That’s how it is supposed to work: and it does. Here we are, being pushed farther than ever before, while the wealthy capitalists get richer faster than ever before. I think we should try to escape consumerist culture for our own well-being and the well-being of the planet: but for the plutocrats who are destroying not only our world, but also us, in their pursuit of ever greater wealth? The ones who would drive people to live on the streets? Who would exploit people’s joy, and expand and then exploit people’s suffering, for the sake of profits?
I have a different answer. And I think it will certainly improve our moods — and probably help to bring prices down, pretty damn quickly. Because it will increase the cost to those who would increase the prices without increasing the value: and who would discard our worth as human beings in the process. Because whatever worth we can find in consumer goods, and whatever worth we can find in non-consumer goods, and whatever value our exploiters find in the wealth they hoard, it is nothing to the worth of people, nothing compared to the cost of people suffering so that other people can have money.
Here it is. Ready?
Please be aware: this video is good because it shows the lyrics of the (honestly terrible) audio of this unfinished recording, but it also shows EXTREMELY graphic footage of protests, specifically suicidal self-immolations, in Vietnam and in Czechoslovakia.
With many layers. Like an onion. (I’d say “Or an ogre,” but I love Shrek and I won’t bring him down to this level. [Spoiler: I am absolutely going to bring Shrek down to my level. And then sit on him.] But here’s the clip anyway:)
Because everybody likes parfait.
I love Shrek because I relate to everything about him, from his introversion, to his grudging love of humanity, to his deep love for his wife, to his lack of self-esteem combined with an awareness of his strengths and abilities. I appreciate Shrek because he’s a Republican. Honestly. At least, he’s what Republicans should be. (And I don’t mean to ruin Shrek for anyone with this comment, but also, if more Republicans were like Shrek, we wouldn’t have the partisan problems we have now. But noooo, we get the other, uglier, eviler ogre. Ah, well. This isn’t the point.) Shrek is definitely a conservative: he dislikes and distrusts big government, he doesn’t like change, and he wants to be left alone. He’s the NIMBY in all of us. Though that should be NIMS, No’ In Ma Swamp, of course; and I mean that for all cases and circumstances (Though again, the other ogre has sort of ruined the rhetorical use of “swamp.” What an ass. He’s like the anti-Shrek. He doesn’t even have any layers.), because if I ever go to a city council meeting to object to them building a prison in my neighborhood, I’m definitely going to channel Shrek defending his swamp.
I also have to note that Shrek takes action when his home is invaded by refugees: but he doesn’t go after the refugees, he goes after the evil people who took their homes and drove them to his swamp, namely Lord Farquaad. See what I mean? Anti-Shrek.
But if anything is likely to turn me from a progressive into a Shrekian conservative (Definitely not going to become a Republican right now: the party is just too toxic. But also, if Shrek ran for office, I’d vote for him over most mainstream Democrats I know of.), it’s the layers in the sandwich of modern education. The layers in the onion.
Definitely not a parfait.
See, here’s the thing. I’m a teacher, right? We all know this by now; I talk about little else on this blog but books and teaching. But what does that mean, being a teacher? I’ve fulminated and pontificated over this many a time, because if there’s one thing that is clear about teaching, it is that it isn’t clear what teaching is; but the basic concept is pretty simple: it’s right there in the name. I teach stuff. I stand in front of a bunch of people who don’t know some stuff, and I help them learn that stuff. In my case, the stuff is literature, which is another complicated, amorphous concept that isn’t easy to define; but once more, the basic idea is really quite simple: written stuff, words and stuff. So basically, I help people who don’t know word stuff to learn more about word stuff.
Gonna need that on a business card, please.
(I bitch about it a lot, but right now? I thank all the gods there ever were for the internet. Because check this out. I made this on an instant business card generator on the internet, and I love it.)
Eighty or a hundred years ago, this could basically have been my card. It wouldn’t have had Shrek, so it would have been much less awesome, and the font would be much more calligraphic; but basically, it could have said this, and everyone would have nodded and doffed their bowler hats respectfully.
But then in the last fifty or sixty years, things started changing.
Obviously I am taking too broad a view of the history of pedagogy and education to be able to clearly identify causes and effects; there have been far too many influences and impacts on the education system in that time for any one to stand out. But I’m still speaking simply, broadly, in fundamental ways: and sometime over the last two to three generations, educators realized something: education wasn’t working for everyone. And also, that that was a problem.
So they tried to fix the problem.
It makes perfect sense: prior to about the WWII era, the problem was that not everyone had access to education; so the major push in the country was to build schools and hire teachers and buy books and such. But in the war years and the post-war boom, most of that got accomplished; and so the focus changed, from spreading education, to improving education.1954 saw the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision from the Supreme Court, and that threw into stark relief the clear truth that not all schools were equal, and also that people who did not have access to an equal education were in trouble. Title IX in 1972, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which then became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, along with the Americans with Disabilities Act, in 1990, helped to show that race was not the only reason why some people were denied equal access to education. And somewhere in there, we reached a point where everyone had access to school (Though obviously as this is still not true, particularly in rural areas and especially affecting indigenous and Native American children, I’m not covering the whole story: but I’m not covering the whole story.), and so at that point, where broadening inclusion into education became less of a concern, people started looking more at the quality of education that everyone in this country now had some sort of access to — part of that fight being the specific issues I have named, making sure that people of all races, genders, and abilities had equal access to education. Because once everyone gets something, which is always the first fight, then you try to make that thing better for everyone. Hence, reform.
In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read — and What You Can Do About It.
It was a bestseller for — no kidding — 37 weeks. In my own shallow understanding of the history of education in the U.S., I’m going to identify this as one of several flashpoints, points when people started looking seriously at the deficiencies in the education system, and started trying to plug the holes, fill the gaps, bandage the wounds. If you look at that image, you see one example of what I’m talking about: the top banner text there calls this “The classic book on phonics.” There: that’s one thing, one example of what I’m talking about. Not the first, I’m sure; if this isn’t the right era and the right flashpoint to identify, I should probably go back to John Dewey, who singlehandedly broke down and then rebuilt American education in the first half of the 20th century. But I think for quite a long time after that, people were still just — helping people who didn’t know word stuff to learn more word stuff. I don’t think they were doing as much to discover the gaps in some people’s learning of word stuff, and trying to figure out how to fill those gaps, or at least stop the wound from bleeding any more.
I’m using the wound metaphor because there’s a metaphor that I and all of my fellow teachers use all the time for this kind of stuff: bandaids. Which is actually where I came up with the metaphor that started this whole mess, this idea of layers, of a sandwich, or an onion. Or an ogre. (Sorry, Shrek.)
Not a parfait.
You see, the issue is, once someone identifies a problem, and then tries to diagnose it, and then proposes a solution to the problem, that leads to — repetition of the same process. Partly, I think, because most solutions proposed for most problems in education are bandaids only: they are a failure to understand the real underlying problem, along with two things: a refusal to admit that the underlying problem can’t be solved — and a refusal to throw up one’s hands and do nothing, since the problem has been identified. That last part is particularly insidious in education: because teachers, who are the ones most likely to become reformers, are used to attacking problems when we see them: and we’re also used to being right. (Look at me, spouting all this “history” without any source or evidence that my account is right. Forget about it: I know I’m right. Because I’m a teacher. So my idea for solving all of this is the right one. Now sit down and start taking notes.) So when we become aware of a problem, we immediately have a solution: and we are immediately going to put it into practice, even if we are running entirely on assumptions. I think that urge, to take action always, and that (generally misplaced — certainly true in my case) overconfidence in our abilities and ideas, means that education gets waaaaayyy more bandaids than other aspects of society that need fixing. Medicine, for instance (since I’m using the bandaid metaphor) is much more likely to investigate and analyze, using the scientific method to find real solutions, and to make change happen slowly, but effectively; schools are just like “That didn’t work? Oh well — here, I have another idea. No no, this is a good one!”
Flesch, an education theorist, had a pretty reasonable proposal here about reading instruction: having recognized that Dick and Jane books were a crap way to learn word stuff, he suggested an expansion of the use of phonics for reading instruction, rather than the “Look-Say” method that had been in common use prior to the publication of his book (Look at the word; now Say the word. “See Dick run. Run, Dick, run!”). Now, I haven’t read the book, but I’m confident that Flesch noted that there was a problem with literacy in this country, that too many people didn’t know how to read, or didn’t know how to read well enough. He identified that problem, and then after examining the education system, he diagnosed a cause for the problem, and suggested a solution. Phonics instead of Dick and Jane. Awesome.
And I bet it worked. Pretty well. In some cases. Maybe even a lot of cases. Which is wonderful, because it meant more students learned more word stuff, and of course that’s always good. Of course, it meant that teachers who had been teaching Dick and Jane for generations had to change: they had to learn better how to use phonics, how to teach phonics, how to explain to confused parents why their kids weren’t learning from Dick and Jane the way the parents had; but I bet it worked.
For a while.
But then they realized that people still didn’t know how to read. Not enough of them, or not well enough. Because then Flesch published this:
That one came out in 1981: because the problem persisted. And why did the problem persist, despite the gains that might have been made — that probably were made — in the area of child literacy, at least partly because of Flesch’s promotion of phonics, which is in truth a pretty good way to learn reading?
Because the problem wasn’t simply a lack of phonics training. It wasn’t just a problem with Dick and Jane. That was surely part of it — which I know because Dick and Jane are gone now, and have been gone for a long time; I don’t specifically recall learning to read with phonics, but I know I never read a Dick and Jane book when I was a child. And I was in 2nd grade in 1981; I could have been that kid on the cover of the sequel, with its “new look at the SCANDAL in our schools.”
I haven’t read this book, either, but I bet I know what the scandal was: it was that some people still couldn’t read, or couldn’t read well enough. And I bet this book has a new proposal for helping those people learn more and better word stuff; whole language instruction, maybe, which was one example of a backlash against phonics teaching. Flesch might have still been flogging phonics in this second book, but plenty of educational theorists have completely reversed their field and gone back on their own pedagogical theories when faced with new evidence that says their old theories were garbage. And that’s good, because you should be willing to change your ideas in the face of new contradictory evidence: but if you just make the same errors in trying to understand and address the problem, rushing ahead with your new idea (“No no, this one’s a good one! Seriously!”) you’re still not going to actually solve the problem, no matter how innovative the idea is you end up on: it’s just going to be a much more innovative bandaid, slapped on top of the other bandaid. And as bandaids are wont to do, it might slow the bleeding for a while: at least for as long as it takes for the blood to soak through the new bandaid just like it soaked through the last one.
But education gaps, and problems that real people face in trying to learn, are not like bleeding wounds, because problems in education don’t clot. They don’t have mechanisms to solve themselves. They do eventually disappear, but that’s because the people who have trouble learning leave school, and don’t show up on our graphs and charts any more. They are replaced by other people who have the same sorts of issues, often because of the same underlying problems.
But the people trying to fix education, trying to fill gaps and stop the bleeding — and also heal the wounds — never recognize the actual underlying cause of the gap, of the bleeding; or they recognize it, but can’t or won’t face the truth and try to at least name the problem, if not address it: which they avoid because they can’t address the problem. Teachers hate when we can’t fix the problem: and what we generally do is address the symptoms, just so we can do something. Like if students come to school hungry, rather than deal with whatever the home life issue is that leaves kids coming to school hungry — lots of teachers just buy and distribute snacks. So when education reformers, largely teachers and ex-teachers, can’t deal with the real issues, instead they find something else they can point to, and some other new bandaid program they can slap on top of the issue, to make it look like it’s going away.
Like this:
I mean, my first theory is that Johnny can’t write because Johnny can’t read.
And please notice that we’re still not really talking about why Johnny can’t read, beyond the idea of More Phonics Training: which is only trying to address one symptom, and ignoring entirely the underlying cause of the gaps in literacy in this country.
Then that leads to this:
Oof. That’s a big one. We still deal with this today. Still not well: I have many students with ADD or ADHD; many of them have had their issues addressed in a dozen different ways. But you know what?
They still have problems.
Because we’re not addressing the underlying issue. Just slapping on bandaids.
And that leads to this:
And eventually, to this.
And here we are, today. With conservative assholes like Sowell (Who, I must say, is clearly a brilliant man and an influential thinker and writer and teacher; but his mentor, when he studied economics at the University of Chicago, was Milton Friedman. The Fountainhead [In the Howard Roark sense] of assholes. And this quote here is an asshole quote.) making asshole pronouncements about what’s wrong with kids these days. And still not looking at the real, underlying problems. Just trying to find another way to slap a bandaid on the problem, and hope that it isn’t visible for a little while: long enough for the person who put forward the bandaid to get paid, or to win an award, or to get a cherry position in one thinktank or institution or another.
Okay: but I’ve strung this along too long without actually making my point. (There’s a reason for that.) So let me make the point, and then I’ll explain why I have done it this way — and also why I mentioned soup in the title of this post. (No, I haven’t forgotten that. It’s okay if you did. I know I am frequently confusing, and you kind people who read my nonsense are willing to put up with me, God bless you all.)
Again, I’m not versed enough on the history of education and education reform to have a strong argument about where this process I’m describing came from, how it got started, and how it came to dominate my profession. I just know what the actual answer is, which nobody ever seems willing to address: and because of that, for the last 23 years that I’ve been a teacher, I have had to deal with unending nonsense, while knowing it was nonsense. It is for this reason that I hate inservice: because I have to spend days being told how we are going to address the problems in education, and every single time, they don’t address the actual problem which is the cause of every difficulty in schools.
Here it is. Ready?
The actual answer is this: the problem is with school itself. And more broadly, with the human race.
You want to know why some people struggle in school? Because school is incapable of addressing everyone’s needs. The whole idea of it is to increase the efficiency of learning, through the use of specialization: that is, since I know a lot about word stuff, I can provide word stuff-centered learning to a large number of children, thereby sparing their parents or extended family members from having to teach their kids word stuff. In the past, those parents or family members did just fine, and better than me in a lot of cases, at teaching kids to read and write; but it’s more efficient if they can send their kids to school, and I can teach 100 or them at a time how to do word stuff. Or 200 at a time, at my last school. Those parents and family members of my 100-200 students can now spend their time and energy doing other things — in this country, mostly struggling to make ends meet while also providing a lavish lifestyle to the parasitic capitalist class who extract wealth from their labor. (I know a fair amount about Marxist stuff, too. I learned it in a class on word stuff in college. But since it was a word stuff class and not an economics stuff class, I can only give a basic overview of the economics stuff. You should find an expert in economics stuff to learn from instead of me. Specialization.)
Is this a better way to learn word stuff, in a classroom with several other students being taught by a word stuff expert? In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. Two of the best students I’ve ever taught were homeschooled up until 9th grade. But the advantage that public school has over homeschooling in whatever form is efficiency: parents can only teach their own kids, and that only at the cost of much of their time and energy. But I can teach a hundred kids all at once. See? Efficiency.
But the only way I can efficiently teach a whole bunch of people word stuff is if those people all learn word stuff in basically the same way, and all of them can learn it from me and the way I teach word stuff.
And of course they can’t.
Some of my students have obstacles to learning reading and writing, such as language disabilities, or simply language barriers because their first language isn’t English, which is the only language I teach word stuff in. I am an auditory learner, and an auditory teacher; and some of my students — many of my students, in fact — struggle with learning that way. But honestly, there isn’t a whole lot that can be done to help a kinesthetic learner, that is one who learns by moving and doing things, to learn word stuff, which is inherently a non-moving and non-doing kind of system. These days, the biggest obstacle to learning word stuff for my students? They don’t care about reading. They like watching videos and playing games. They like livestreams and YouTube and TikTok. They don’t see the point in reading and writing, which means they don’t want to learn word stuff.
What do I do with that?
Nothing, is the answer. It’s just going to get in the way of my students learning my specific subject. Which may not, of course, have any serious negative impact on their lives (Though I will always maintain that a person who cannot read well enough to enjoy reading is always going to be a disadvantage: doubly because they may never realize what they are missing); but it certainly creates a gap in their learning progress according to the measurements we use in this country, which focus on math and English. My students’ test scores will be lower than in past years, because these kids don’t really care. (Also, they don’t care about testing. Or grades, really. Or, well — education.) Also, because I have taught Fahrenheit 451 for decades, I have to restate the thesis of that book, which is: a society that doesn’t read is a society that doesn’t have empathy, and is therefore a dying society. There is truth there. Want to talk about the empathy crisis in this country? (I will write a whole post about this, I think. It will be depressing.)
Which leads me to the other half of the problem, as I stated above, that isn’t caused by the inherent nature of the school system: the human race in general. Not all of us want to learn. Not all of us can learn. That’s just the way we are: we are different, we have different capacities and interests, different wants and needs. When we, as educators ALWAYS do, act as though one size fits all, that one set of goals will work for every single individual and one system of achieving those goals is the best path for every single individual (Specifically, the one that I choose, as I am the expert here. Now sit down and take notes.), our measurements are always going to show gaps and holes and flaws and even bleeding wounds: because not everyone can learn. Not everyone wants to learn. Not everyone can learn or — here’s the big one — wants to learn from me, or from my fellow teachers, in a school setting.
And then there are the other problems that get in the way of people who can learn and want to learn, but can’t do it at a particular time in a particular set of circumstances, and so also show up on our measurements as an issue to be solved, a wound to be bandaged: problems like poverty. Hunger. Illness. Trauma. Abuse. A lack of physical safety or security. Institutional racism or other forms of discrimination. And on, and on.
All of which get in the way of someone’s learning. None of which can be addressed by increasing my use of phonics.
You can see, maybe, why people don’t want to talk about the real problems, or the real solutions to those problems: because often, the real problems don’t have solutions. At least not ones we can implement.
There are people we can’t help. There are people who don’t want help.
That is not to say we shouldn’t try to help. We should always try. If for no other reason, then simply to show people who need help that someone cares enough to try. To show people who don’t want help that, if their wants or their needs change, someone will care enough to try, and help might be available someday which will do some good.
But we have to accept that we can’t fix every problem, and especially not in education. There will always be disparities. There will always be gaps, and failures. It’s inevitable. That’s the truth.
So what’s the soup?
It’s the alphabet soup. Though as my title states, it’s not soup: it’s a sandwich. It’s not soup because the old layers don’t go away: we just slap a new layer on top of it. If it were soup, all the layers would mix together in one thick broth, and that’s not how it goes: the individual layers tend to have enough cohesion to avoid mixing with other layers. So, a sandwich. Or an onion. Or an ogre.
Not a parfait.
Though that is the reason I put that title above, and held off on explaining it until here and now: because now you have been through the layers. And maybe, if you have been confused by my wandering through half a dozen layers that touch on entirely different perspectives and different paradigms and different strategies about different aspects, maybe you will understand what it is like, as a teacher, to try to work through all of these layers — to try to master and implement all of these layers — when I just want to teach word stuff, man. That’s all I want. But they have all these layers stuck on top of that word stuff I want to teach. Layer on top of layer.
Those layers are often called “alphabet soup” because the snake oil salesmen who put them forward in an attempt to enrich themselves by treating symptoms instead of addressing the real underlying conditions are inordinately, eternally fond of acronyms. Everybody in education loves a good acronym: nobody more than the people who imagine they have created a brand-new system whereby schools can solve the problems in education.
See, that’s why I’m not just a teacher who helps people learn word stuff. Because snake oil salesmen are very good at convincing one particularly vulnerable group, who themselves don’t ever want to address the insoluble underlying conditions (Which, to be fair, are so large and so insoluble that it would be like a doctor saying, “Well, the problem is that you’re mortal, and so you’re going to die. Here’s your bill.” On some level it’s worth looking at treating the symptoms. But that’s not what the layers are about. That’s what teachers and other adults in schools trying to help is about. I don’t think it’s a bad idea for teachers to buy snacks and give them to hungry students. I do it, too.), that this new program that the snake oilers have cooked up is the best way to address the problems in education.
Those vulnerable people? Adminstrators.
It’s not their fault; they don’t know any better. They are simple people. They don’t understand. They just want to make a difference and fix things (And also improve their own reputation as people who get results), and when they hear about this new program, with its new acronym, which will treat these symptoms with these provable results as presented in this bar graph? Well hell, sign us up! they say. And here, take this large sum of money, which of course is not the administrators’ money; it’s taxpayer money. It’s so easy to spend taxpayers’ money. After all, we’re just trying to address these learning gaps, these holes in our data, and the blood that just keeps flowing out of them. (Like I said, if anything would ever drive me to become a conservative, it’s this. Bureaucrats spending taxpayer money for no good purpose, with no real understanding of what they’re doing or why: that’s enough to make any liberal go crazy. And here we go.)
So: I’m not just a teacher. I’m also an expert in PLCs (That’s Professional Learning Communities.). And in AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination — I’m going to a conference this summer to learn more about it!). And in PBIS (Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports — I was on the schoolwide committee for implementing that one.), which I insist on pronouncing “Peebis,” which makes everyone uncomfortable while it makes me laugh. And in SEL (Social-Emotional Learning). And in RTI, Response to Intervention. Naturally I’m an expert in ELA (English Language Arts) and in ELD (English Language Development — what used to be called ESL and then ESOL [English as a Second or Other Language]) and in SPED, which is now becoming ESS as SPecial EDucation becomes Exceptional Student Services (Which some places call ESE, Exceptional Student Education, but I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from saying “Orale, ese!” every time I thought about it. So it’s good my school uses ESS.). I won’t say I’m an expert in ADD and ADHD and ASD and ED (That’s Emotional Disturbance, not Erectile Dysfunction — these are kids, after all) and ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder — and while I’m not a Boomer bitching about how we used to walk to school through three miles of driving snow every day, I will say that when I was a kid, ODD was just called “Being an asshole.”), but I’ve been in enough IEPs and 504s and dealt with enough SLDs that I know as much about all of those as most, and more than many. Naturally I can’t get more specific, because I’ve been well trained in FERPA.
This is the result of all of this: I have been given so many additional duties, so many new processes to learn and programs to implement, that I don’t have enough time and energy left any longer to just — help people learn more word stuff. My specialization — the whole reason for a public school system — has been smothered under layers of new generalized knowledge that I have had to master and implement. Because people keep identifying problems, and then prescribing solutions that aren’t really solutions, but maybe have enough of an impact, or at least are convincing enough to make an administrator think the program will have an impact that they spend money on it and implement — which means telling me I have to become an expert in this, and I have to be trained in it and then implement it, and then follow up by collecting data to show how effective this new program is, in order to justify the administrator’s decision to implement it, and the money they spent on licensing it and hiring a trainer to teach me how to do it and a data processing firm to confirm how well it works: provided I can implement it with fidelity and then collect the data on implementation to show how effective that program is. And guess who gets blamed if I can’t do all that on my end: not the snake oil salesman who got my administrator to buy the program, and not the administrator who bought the program — and not the students who spend my whole class scrolling through TikTok.
And if I do manage to do all of that successfully, the snake oil salesman who sold it to my school will then use my example as proof of their program’s efficacy, and go on to sell it to a hundred more schools. And the administrator will either squat in their job for decades, buying new programs EVERY GODDAMN YEAR but never taking away the old ones, because it worked so well that one time and that success ensured the administrator’s retention in their position (Meanwhile my retention depends on my ability to keep up with each new year’s new layer on the onion…), or else the administrator will move up the ranks, and be replaced by a new administrator who will have to buy all new programs so they can make their own individual impact on the problems in school (Also, since most administrators are ex-teachers, they also believe they have diagnosed exactly what the problem is and how to solve it, with this new acronym they bought with taxpayer money).
And my students, and the students at all those other schools, will learn a little bit less word stuff. And other stuff. Which will just convince the students that school isn’t really useful, after all; they’d be better off learning how to make their own Twitch livestream and making a living off of that. Which means they won’t try as hard to succeed in school.
And there will be new learning gaps.
Fortunately, I just heard about this new program to address it.
This year, for the first time in my 23-year teaching career, I am teaching an elective.
I’ve taught required electives before; I teach one of those now, and have for several years — seven, I think? The required elective is one of those unique artifacts of the modern education system where the least important factor in making educational or pedagogical decisions is “What the student wants.” So when the school determines, as it is wont to do, what the student NEEDS, frequently those needs take precedence over students wants; and so College Readiness, a course designed to help students explore and apply for college, and (MUCH more important from the school’s point of view) also prepare for the high stakes tests that are sometimes (Less and less often these days) required for admission to competitive institutions, takes the place of one of the students’ “elective” courses. Willy-nilly. Hence, an elective that wasn’t chosen, but was rather imposed, but which only earns the student elective credit: so they still need to take four years of English, three years of science, three years of math, and so on. This hasn’t mattered all that much in past years, at my current school, because we don’t offer very many electives; students end up taking another computer class, or a second (or third or fourth) year of PE, or if they are seniors, they can take a reduced schedule of classes or become a TA. But if they are juniors, they take College Readiness. (In past years I have taught English Support, which did the same thing, parasitizing the students’ schedules because the school decided they needed more English in addition to the four years of required English. That was not a popular class. It was not fun to teach.)
This year, though? My elective is Fantasy and Science-Fiction. Which I chose to teach and suggested, and for which I get to pick everything we read and everything we do, with no limitations beyond what my students are willing to do; because the class isn’t even an English credit — it’s only an elective.
I took a similar class — mine was called Mythology, Folk Tales, and Science Fiction — in high school, and it was one of my very favorite classes. I’ve always been a fantasy/sci-fi nerd, as I’ve written about EXTENSIVELY in the past; I loved that I got to read books that I would have read on my own, except this time I got to discuss them in class, and get credit for doing homework about sci-fi novels. It rocked. I’ve wanted to teach this class for 20 years. This year, thanks to my new administration, I finally got the chance.
And if you think I let this opportunity pass without requiring students to read J.R.R. Tolkien, well. You haven’t noticed my first name.
It’s Theoden.
So because I am requiring my students to read The Hobbit, one of the two books most responsible for creating the modern fantasy genre (The other is The Lord of the Rings, and yes it’s one book, shut up), I got the school to buy me this annotated copy of this incredible work, so I could learn maximum nerdish trivia to share with my students. We just barely started reading the book in class before Spring Break came this week; so I was a little behind, because I only finished reading this yesterday.
The headline is that I’m glad I got it, and I would recommend it to big Tolkien fans or to others teaching The Hobbit, for one simple reason: Anderson includes all of the art he could find. Including these:
This is from the Russian translation. That’s Bilbo and Gandalf. Clearly baked out of their gourds.
This one’s from the Portuguese translation. Bilbo and the dwarves held captive by the goblins.
This one’s Czech, but… I don’t remember this scene…
The Slovak illustrations are gorgeous, though. Second favorite.
And, of course, the best ones: the Swedish translation, illustrated by Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins.
These are Jansson’s goblins and Wargs dancing happily as they burn down the trees where the dwarves are trapped. Love this. Very Moomin-y. I also really like how the light of the flames washes out the middle ground, just making empty space as it goes from highlighting the goblins to blocking out the trees.
I actually did not know that Tolkien had created all of the original illustrations for his book, and I loved seeing those even more than the kitschy and strange and intriguing international versions; Anderson includes far more of Tolkien’s art than is present in traditional editions of The Hobbit, because he includes sketches and different versions of the finished pieces, along with the usual images in both color and black-and-white. The art alone makes the book worth it, in my opinion.
This one was, according to Tolkien’s children, his favorite painting among the ones he did for The Hobbit.
Along with that, Anderson includes quite a few of Tolkien’s poems, published in other places and at other times than The Hobbit; those were also wonderful, though honestly the art and the poetry distracted me from the actual text, so I don’t know how successful it all was as an annotated edition of the novel. It does have quite a bit of info, some of it interesting, so that was valuable, as well. Anderson shows where Tolkien got the inspiration for his fantasy creatures, including their names; he includes several pieces of Tolkien’s letters that explain some of these factoids, and in other cases, he was able to extrapolate from works that Tolkien was known to have read and enjoyed, and sometimes said he was inspired by; I liked reading all of that, too.
What I really didn’t care for, and thought there was too much of, was the repeated attention paid to changes in the text from edition to edition. Some of it was somewhat interesting: because Tolkien wrote The Hobbit first, and only after it was published did he realize he needed to make this story work with The Lord of the Rings; so there was some need to change some details in The Hobbit, to reconcile them with the details in the subsequent work. The travel from The Shire to Rivendell, for instance, takes several days longer in The Hobbit than it does in The Fellowship of the Ring; that one stayed incongruous, but other details like the story of how Bilbo found the Ring and got it from Gollum, those were changed. But most of the notes that showed changes in the text? They were when Tolkien or one of his editors found a typo.
Let me be frank: JRR Tolkien is my hero. I love his books inordinately. I know I could never aspire to accomplish what he accomplished, but by god I will always admire and appreciate and laud what he did accomplish: and I could not care less that he missed a comma, or used “was” instead of “were” and then caught it only after the book was published. It humanizes him for me, to know that even Tolkien made mistakes — and then cared about them, and had them changed in future editions — but I don’t actually need to see what is inside the sausage, thank you very much.
Just show me all the Gollums.
Russian Gollum has even more severe scoliosis than I thought. And is weirdly…furry? Sawtoothed?
Japanese Gollum. He’s just rappin’ with that hobbit, giving him the lowdown, you dig?
Uhhhhhhhhh…. ribbit? Also, did you know that Bilbo was a leprechaun, apparently?!?
My man Smeagol be husky
Wait, Jansson — what the hell is this?? Gollum is like 20 feet tall, with a crown of leaves, and — a screaming hood for a head?? This is some Silent Hill stuff, right here.
Beyond the art, and the poetry, and the frequently interesting and useful trivia about Tolkien and the history of the novel, the most important thing in this book is: the story. I’m assuming at this point that most people are aware of the story of The Hobbit, but let me just take a moment to talk about it.
First, it isn’t what you see in the movie version. The Peter Jackson movies do half of it right, and half of it very wrong (They succeed with the epic end, but fail utterly with the fairy tale and the travel work — also, they left out Beorn, which is just lame as hell); the Rankin and Bass animated movie does a little bit of it right (Mostly Gollum and Bilbo, and I personally love the songs) and a whole lot of it wrong; and though they are going to be creating more Middle Earth movies and content, nobody is ever, ever going to capture what Tolkien was able to do with this novel. Second, please understand, if you’ve never read it before, that this book is not like other fantasy novels — not even The Lord of the Rings, which is pretty much the standard for epic fantasy, in my mind — and that there are no other books quite like The Hobbit. Part of that is me putting historical weight on this novel, because it was the only book of its kind when it was written, which is made clear by the annotations in this edition; but part of that is just the truth. Nobody will ever write like J.R.R. Tolkien. And not even Tolkien ever wrote anything else like The Hobbit. There was a unique alchemy in the creation of this work, and it will never be repeated.
Just figure it: the author was a man who grew up as a poor orphan, who became an Oxford don with a comfortable life and an idyllic family — his wife was the love of his life; they had four healthy kids; they never had any terrible crises, never really wanted for anything (Want to guess where the hobbits came from, with their love of peace and quiet and family and food and nature and so on?) — who studied and taught ancient tales in ancient languages, and so was an expert in mythology and folklore, and poetry, and language, and writing; who also had worked on the Oxford English Dictionary; who had been in the trenches of World War I, and so had an understanding of real suffering and the horrors of industrial destruction and violence. He started the tale as a bedtime story for his kids, but eventually turned it into his love letter to stories, creating a new genre in the process while also placing his work squarely in the ranks of two past genres: and the result is this book, which is a fairy tale set in an epic fantasy world, with a travel writer for a hero. Which was originally published as a children’s book.
C.S. Lewis, in reviewing his friend’s novel (anonymously, because friends review friends’ books like that), described it as beginning like a children’s book — and it does, you can see some of the standard tropes of children’s books, with the narrator as a storyteller coming into the story to explain not only what is going on, but also to offer his opinion of what is going on, that sort of “Now I don’t know if you think like I do, but I think this kind of breakfast sounds delightful,” that kind of commentary in the middle of the narration — but then saying, quite correctly, that it becomes more like the ancient epics with every passing chapter. I mean, this children’s book ends with a Battle of Five Armies, which gets pretty detailed with its slaughter, and which kills one of the book’s heroes in particularly epic fashion, before sending the main hero back home to find that all his stuff is being auctioned off. He never gets back his spoons, either, which is freaking criminal. But that’s not a fairy tale ending: that’s a Beowulf ending. A Gilgamesh ending. Of course it is: because that’s what Tolkien knew, as well as anyone on Earth in his time.
Do you see what I mean? It is a children’s book, a fairy tale, with wizards and dwarves and trolls who magically get turned to stone right in the nick of time; Bilbo gets a magic ring, which in this book has no down sides; it just enables him to be invisible whenever he wants to be, which is a very fairy-tale/children’s book thing. But a lot of the book is travel, as they go through every possible environment, through deep woods, through mountain ranges — both over and under — and down rivers; and all of it is beautifully described, with quite a lot of emphasis on food: because Bilbo is off on his Grand Tour, his life’s big adventure, his fully exciting experience; and though he is clearly in real danger several times, he is never really anywhere close to dying, mostly thanks to the Ring; and so he is able to focus on his pocket handkerchiefs. At the same time, this is a story of how dwarves take back their kingdom from a dragon, and how dwarves and elves and men fight off goblins and come to an arrangement that keeps the peace between all of the good races of the world. Also, you have a perfectly happy ending for Bilbo — which is not really an ending, and we know it — and a tragic ending, literally, for the dwarves and men and elves; so you have the epic mythology story with the dwarves, and the fairy tale with Bilbo, and the high fantasy story of the War of the Ring waiting in the wings.
There’s never going to be another book like this one. Not ever. There are other books as well written, of course; and other books as influential or more so. But there’s never going to be another book like this one. And if you haven’t read it, you need to read it. And if you’ve read it and loved it, you may want to find a copy of this edition and enjoy it, as I did.
I’m glad I got this book. And as always, I loved reading the actual story in Tolkien’s words. That, I heartily recommend.
I meant to do this sometime over this past week, but honestly? I was EXHAUSTED.
The Festival of Books was last weekend. I had a booth with my two wonderful partners and fellow authors, Lisa S. Watson and Amanda M. Cetas. Together we are:
This is our second year all together; Lisa and I shared a booth in 2019, as well, with the amazing book editor/writing coach Adriana King. This year, like last year, we had the very same booth, in the same spot (which is not really a corner, though we got a corner booth; but it’s okay, because the two open sides give all three of us room to display — and as you can see, Amanda has a LOT of stuff to show: two young adult historical novels, a teaching guide for them, an RPG sourcebook, and a fantastic illustrated children’s book about a troll who smells a bad smell. That’s a handmade knitted version of the troll, standing on the right side of Amanda’s display. Lisa’s display of poetry, short fiction, and one of her novels is visible in the group shot, on the left side of the table), and this year, like last year, went pretty damn well.
This year, like last year, was pretty anxiety-inducing, especially since I only sold nine books the first day. Nine books is wonderful, and I’m extremely happy when anyone just stops by the booth and lets me talk about Damnation Kane; but the booth and everything is pretty expensive, and nine books was not going to cover the cost. Fortunately I did better the second day — twice as well, in fact — and so the Festival was, once again, a success. Even if I hadn’t sold any books, it would be joyful to see so very many people who love books, all in one place; and the fact that I got to reconnect with a few people who had bought my books in the past — and one fellow pirate afficionado, the remarkable Jack McDowell, who created and personifies Captain Rat (Who will someday cross paths with Damnation Kane, I have no doubt) — and got to see friends and colleagues and students, both present and past, makes the whole thing an absolute blast.
But it’s tiring.
It started early, the wearing out: not least because this whole two-plus months of 2023 has been tough. But also, I tried to finish my third Damnation Kane book for this Festival, and didn’t get it done; and then I tried to publish my vampire novel Brute, and didn’t get that done either. And then I went to get bookmarks printed, with my name and website address on them, but when I went to pick them up Friday afternoon, the shop was closed. Turns out the hours posted on the web are not their actual hours. AND I tried to get my personal domain, theodenhumphrey.com, to point to this site, since this is going to be my main online hub for the foreseeable future — but doing so killed my email, which is hosted by the same company. So there was a bunch of crap to deal with before the Festival even started.
And then there was the Festival itself: standing by the booth all day, for eight hours a day, is not easy. (Also my pirate hat does not shield me from the sun: I got sunburned on both ears. On my ears! Ridiculous. And itchy.) Greeting people who approach, and trying to keep my energy up and be positive with them, even though my inner introvert is screaming the whole time, is even more not easy. (By the way: after three years of selling a pirate book at this Festival, I have learned this: older Caucasian men who approach because they see the cover image of the ship, and who take a minute to read my sign, do not want my book. They are often military veterans, and almost invariably looking for accurate historical maritime fiction. As soon as they see “Fantasy” and “Time travel” they walk away. No big deal, of course, but I don’t even try to talk to them beyond a polite greeting. [There are exceptions, which is always nice; I like people who like my story idea, whoever they are.]) Doing all this on a weekend in between two weeks of teaching?
Oof.
So while I meant to post this on Sunday last week, and then told myself to do it every day of the last seven days, I’m doing it now.
On the plus side, this is now Spring Break at my school, and so I plan to add another post over the week sometime, with a proper essay — and then another one next Sunday, so I can keep up with my posting rate, if not exactly my schedule.
Also, thanks to my incredible wife’s brilliant idea, I set out a mailing list signup, and I got people who signed up — which means as soon as I post this, I’m going to send out my very first author’s newsletter. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, please use the Contact link on this page, at the top just under Home and About. I’ll be happy to put your name on the list.
I will also state here, categorically, that Brute will be published soon; and that the third volume of The Adventures of Damnation Kane will be published as well, before another year passes. I swear it.
Thank you to everyone who bought a book, everyone who signed up for the mailing list, everyone who stopped to talk to me and complimented the idea of a time-traveling Irish pirate — and thank you to everyone who came out to celebrate books. And the biggest thank you of all to Lisa, the Poet, and Amanda, the Pilgrim, for sharing this whole experience with me.
See you next year!
We’re out of order: this is, from left to right, the Pirate, the Poet, and the Pilgrim.
I have a confession to make: I procrastinate my work.
Specifically, I procrastinate my grading. I procrastinate my paperwork, too; if I’m not the last one every year to get my self-evaluation done, I’m the runner-up. It’s almost a point of pride for me to refuse to turn in my Intent to Return paperwork until it is appallingly late; I dress it up as a sort of protest, because I hate the system — my school requires teachers in February to sign a letter of intent that says we do mean to return for the next school year, and listing the classes we would like to teach (There is also an option on there for “I would like to work for the school district, but I am willing to transfer schools” which I have never and will never check, because if anyone puts me into a middle school, I’m quitting on the spot and becoming a meter maid. Or maybe one of those guys who spin signs for tax preparers.), but then they don’t actually offer us a job, or tell us what we will be teaching, until JULY. I hate that we are supposed to commit to the school MONTHS before they have to commit to us — and in some cases, they don’t tell us the classes we are teaching until the school year starts: in 2021 I was teaching a full set of online classes, but I did not know until an administrator emailed me and asked “Hey, how do these students I have registered for your class sign into the Zoom?” ON THE FIRST DAY OF CLASSES. So yeah, the system pisses me off: but also, I do intend to return, and the people who need my signed letter — specifically my principal — are not the people who set up this obnoxious unbalanced system. So there’s no particular reason why I procrastinate signing the letter; I just do. Like with all of my paperwork. And all of my grading.
I don’t like admitting it, because I’m a teacher, and I’m supposed to set a good example for my students; I’m supposed to not only teach them that, in the real world, deadlines matter, and organization and a work ethic are important; but I’m supposed to enforce that learning by requiring them to hold to deadlines, to be organized, to develop a work ethic, so that they will be prepared for the real world. If I don’t prepare them for the real world, I’ve been told, then not only will I be setting them up for a rude awakening when they get fired from their jobs, but also I am tearing apart the foundations of our society by eliminating personal responsibility, which means that everything in this country will fall apart when this current generation gets out of school and goes into the real world.
Where have I been told this? On Twitter, of course. Where I was this morning when I should have been working.
Please don’t get me wrong: I have a strong work ethic. I take personal responsibility for the tasks that are required of me. If anything, I take too much responsibility, and work too hard; where I could just shrug cynically and say “Hey, if those rotten little punks don’t want to read the book, then they’ll fail and they’ll deserve it,” instead I say, “Maybe I should read it to them in class, so I can explain it and make it more interesting, and they can at least understand what’s in the book and what it means, even if they aren’t reading it on their own.” Does that require more of me? It does. Not only do I have to work harder in class, then, but also it means I can’t assign quiet independent work in class, and get my grading done while my students are working; that means I have to do my grading outside of class, which inevitably means I have to do it on the weekends.
Which causes a secondary problem: because I put so much effort into my daily classes, trying to run every lesson, keep every kid involved, cover every topic with them and make the information interesting, so I can be (at least somewhat) sure that they understand and are learning, I have little energy or motivation at the end of the week to do grading. And frankly, at the end of the week of work, I think I deserve a break: and I’m right. I do deserve a break. Teaching is a hard job, and I work very hard at it. It’s important to me: I recognize the value of education, and the value of an educated populace; I think of it as my most valuable contribution to a world that has been very generous to me in my life — and also, I’m good at it. And my students need to learn, and they need to have good teachers and good adults in their lives, and I am all of those things. So while I am at school, and after school, and during my lunch breaks, and so on, I work as hard as I can to do as much as I can for my students.
The result, then, is that on many weekends, I don’t do any grading. Even though I haven’t done it over the week at school, either. Because I’m tired, and because I deserve a break, and weekends are what I get.
The result is that it takes me too long to grade.
It’s a problem. It’s a problem for a lot of reasons: first because it’s bad teaching practice. Feedback should come quickly: students (like anyone) forget in short order what they did on an assignment or how they did it; if they get the assignment back with feedback within a few days, then they can take the feedback as constructive suggestions on how to improve. But if they get the work back two weeks later, or three weeks later, or four, five, six, seven, even eight weeks later — and yes, I have done that — then it’s useless. They don’t even remember doing the assignment. I have frequently handed back a paper to a class, and had them say “What is this? Oh man — I forgot all about this.” I cringe every time. And tell myself I’ll do better: I’ll spend more time grading, less time doing nothing at school or doing other things at home. The job is important, after all.
But then when the weekend comes, I can’t bring myself to do it. And there are all of the other things that I also need to do: I need to spend time with my wife, who is my whole world; and as important as my students are, and as important as teaching is, she is more important. Much more important. Orders of magnitude more important. Plus, spending time with her makes me happy: which does have the added benefit of helping me recover from the work week, which then gives me more energy to teach as well as I can in the next week. Which is also important: and maybe more important than getting those grades done. The same goes for spending time with my pets, and also working on my house, or going to the gym. All of them are important — the gym helps reduce my stress, and will keep me healthy, which will help me live longer (certainly something that teaching will not do for me…); working on my house makes me more comfortable, and also helps increase the value of the house, which means I will be more financially secure in the future — which not only reduces my stress, it also helps to ensure that I will be able to keep this important job in this underfunded, underpaying state of Arizona.
And so on. There are always reasons to do things other than grade: and I don’t mean bullshit reasons like “I just don’t really feel like it right now,” but valid reasons, genuine excuses: other important priorities that should come first. So I put them first. And so I don’t grade.
And then there are the feedback loops.
You see, because I know that I take too long to grade, and I give myself all the excuses I could ever want to keep allowing myself to do that, I can’t bear to make my students stick to hard grading deadlines. Even though it would be easier, because that way there would be less for me to grade. Even though it would be “teaching them about the real world and taking personal responsibility.” Even though it would make the work more meaningful when they did it, because when they come back weeks or months after an assignment was to be turned in and they complete it then, the chance that they are still able to learn from the lesson is almost nil. But I can’t do it. If I don’t stick to hard deadlines, how can I make them?
I mean, of course I could. We have unequal power in the class. I get to set their deadlines, and the consequences for missing those deadlines; and I get to decide when I complete my own work. I have the power to make these determinations.
But I can’t justify it. I can’t justify the time I take to do the grading, so I can’t justify holding my students to a short, hard deadline, and then taking weeks and weeks to give them back the grade on the assignment they turned in on time.
So I don’t hold them to deadlines. Which is how I contribute to the imminent collapse of our society, according to those Twitter pundits who told me that holding students to deadlines is critical for preparing them for the real world.
It’s also, I know, how I leave an opening for students to put themselves into a real bind. Because I don’t hold them to deadlines, and I don’t get mad and yell and get them in trouble and ruin their GPAs if they don’t get the work done for my class, I make it that much easier for them to procrastinate the work for my class. And, see, they have so many classes, and so much homework for all of them, and their math and science and history teachers all keep hard deadlines, and chew them out and shame them when they miss deadlines, and refuse to let them turn work in late, and therefore ruin their grades if they don’t get the work done — that they always choose to do the work on time for their math and science and history classes. They know they can take a little more time for Humphrey’s work. So they take it: because after a long day of sitting in classes and trying desperately to learn — and they are trying — even when it is boring, even when the teacher doesn’t communicate well, even when other things in their lives or in the classroom are distracting them, they are tired. And understandably so: it’s hard work trying to learn. Especially trying to learn complicated advanced concepts like how to write an essay. But that’s okay, they can put off Humphrey’s work; he doesn’t care.
Let me just set the record straight on that one, because it makes me mad every single time they say it.
Are you listening, kids? (Of course not.) Here it is anyway.
I care.
I care about how you act in my class. I care about whether or not you are paying attention to me. I care about whether you are looking at your phone or if you are reading. I care about whether or not you turn in the work on time. I care about your grades. I care about your test scores. I care about everything. All of it. Always. I care.
I just don’t have the energy to apply pressure on all of you, all the time. I can’t do it. I can’t make the lesson interesting and useful to all of you, while also fighting to make you listen to the lesson I have already put effort into to make it interesting and useful. I can’t stand to have to fight to make you listen to my interesting and useful lesson: you should just fucking listen. Okay? You want to talk about not caring? How about all of you little punks not caring about how much you annoy me when you don’t listen to me no matter what I do or say? Even after you say you like me and like my class? You still don’t listen, and you don’t care how much that hurts, and how frustrating that is. You make me fight you, make me make you follow the rules you know you have to follow already, and then when I ask you to follow the rules, you argue, and you fuss. So I have to fight harder.
Think of this: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, right? So if it takes a certain amount of time and effort to overcome your resistance to doing work in class any given day, and I have to be the one to overcome that resistance for you, then that means the effort put into my action to create the reaction in you that allows you to learn is just as hard for me as it is for you. So if you struggle to make yourself pay attention and try, I struggle just as hard to make you pay attention and try. The difference is, I have to struggle with 20 of you, every single period, every single day. And then once I have managed the struggle, and gotten you all to pay attention and try — then I have to teach you. And make it interesting and useful for you, so you can keep paying attention. And that takes effort, too.
So much of the time, even most of the time, I just can’t do it. I can’t put out that much effort in every class, every day, with every student. So I blow it off. I procrastinate. I just start teaching the lesson, knowing that not everyone is paying attention; hoping that somehow they will listen to me as I try to make it interesting and useful, and they will do the work themselves, and then I will be able to help them learn.
It never happens. Not with the whole class. Not with a whole unit.
So I have to let it go. And since I let it go, I can’t demand that they put out more effort than I’m willing to put out. To be clear, again: I could do that. Lots of teachers do that. The fact that I don’t do that is one of the reasons they like me. But because they like me, they feel more casual about my class, and it’s easier to blow off work for a class that is more casual, especially when the teacher is cool and doesn’t care about deadlines. (I. CARE.)
So the students blow off deadlines, and that creates more work for me. Because I need to try to track them down to get the work completed so I can grade it; or by the time they get around to it, they don’t remember how to do it, and I have to take some time to remind them of what the assignment was. Or they blow off some assignments, which lowers their grade, and then they need to make sure other assignments are perfect so they can bring their grades back up — and that means they need to check with me about what the expectations are, and what they need to do, and if the work they have so far is good enough or how they can change it to make it better and get a better grade. Which is freaking awesome: because it means they’re learning, and they want to learn, and they want me to help them get better, and that is the whole point of all of this —
And it takes more time and energy. Which I am happy to expend on students who ask for help, especially the ones who have been struggling and have low grades because they haven’t turned anything in, which always makes me worry that they don’t understand the assignment or the content at all; when they ask for help, and I help them, and they get it, then I feel like I won. And they turn the work in, very very late, and I grade it immediately because I’m so pleased they got it done, and then I am complimentary in their feedback because I want to encourage them to keep turning in work and showing improvement.
Which, of course, just encourages them to keep turning work in late, and getting extra individual attention, and getting nice feedback and so on.
But then I’m even more tired, and so I get even less done for the class as a whole. Which makes me feel bad, like a slacker, like a bad teacher. Sometimes I get so depressed I can’t stand to work at all. But of course, I keep doing it. Because I have to. Because the students need me. Even if they never act like it.
That’s what procrastination is.
I don’t know how or when or why we all forgot that, all got confused about it. Who told us that procrastination was being lazy? Nonsense: blowing off work entirely, never getting it done at all; sometimes that is due to laziness. (Rarely, I would argue. But sometimes.) Procrastinators do the work, we just do it late, or at the last minute, while also applying enormous pressure to ourselves mostly in the form of anxiety. So if you do the work a little at a time from Monday through Thursday, and I cram it all in on Thursday night, and we both turn the work in on Friday — or if I do all the work on Sunday and then turn the work in late on Monday — which of us has done more work? Nobody, of course, unless, as I said, you want to count the extra effort I expended on anxiety and guilt. (And maybe the extra effort you spent on organizing and managing your time and the project — but you loved doing that, and we all know it.) We all do the work. It is certainly true that waiting until the last minute frequently limits the amount of time we have to put into the work: but in my experience it does not at all limit the effort put into it. That is a separate decision, which lots of people make — and sometimes it is due to laziness, I agree. But procrastination is not lazy.
It’s prioritizing.
As I said, when I decide on Friday night that I would rather spend an evening with my wife than grade papers, that is a choice I am making based on what I think is most important: not what requires less effort. Okay, spending time with my wife does require less effort: but considering how much time I spend away from her doing work, it should be clear that I don’t always pick the easier path because it’s the easier path. I usually don’t. When I do choose to spend time with her, it is partly because I have spent all of the effort I can possibly spend, and now I need to do something that puts something good back into me: and an evening with the woman I love will do that. (Also I choose to spend time with her because she is the best and most important person in my world, and she deserves to have my time more than any of my students do.) The time I spend writing is time I could spend grading, and believe me, this is not any easier in terms of intellectual effort. I think it is more important, at least once a week, for my self-understanding and my identity. So I prioritize: I make a choice. And that choice means I have less effort and time to spend on the other tasks. I will still spend as much time and effort on them as I can: but sometimes — frequently — constantly — that effort is not my full effort. It just can’t be.
Because I have too much shit to do.
Want me to get all my work done? Reduce my student and class load, without reducing my pay (Because if I get paid less, I’ll need to go find a second job to cover my expenses, and I will not have more time.). Or even better, make all of my students do their part by having them pay attention to my lesson, to my whole lesson, every day, so I don’t have to fight to make them stay on task and learn the content. Though, to do that, you’ll need to lighten their load as well: because believe me, after being told all their lives that they need to learn everything and get good grades OR ELSE THEY WILL BE DOOMED TO A LIFE OF MISERY AND WASTE BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE ANY WORK ETHIC OR RESPONSIBILITY AND THEY WILL HAVE DISAPPOINTED EVERYONE AROUND THEM, they are also trying just as hard as they can: and it isn’t their fault they can’t do everything we demand of them any more than it is my fault.
We are simply demanding too much. And then calling it procrastination when everything doesn’t get done.
This is the point I want to make, and I want to make it twice. Because people on Twitter (Assuming they are people, and not malicious semi-sentient globs of slime) have repeatedly and vociferously claimed that teachers are lazy. We are not. We work as hard as any and harder than most. Of course there are lazy teachers, as there are lazy people in every group; but teaching as a profession takes all that we have, and demands even more. Students, like all children, are a bottomless hole of need: they always need something, and then they always need more. It’s fine; they are children, they’re not supposed to be self-sufficient. But there is never an end to their need. So we who provide care to children, of any kind, we have the full range of tasks required of us professionally — and then we have all those children. And all of their needs. It’s too much: and so I, like all of my colleagues, prioritize. Some of us choose to prioritize work over family, or over ourselves; some of us choose one aspect of work over others — I have colleagues who spend enormous amounts of time and energy making sure that their students are happy, even if the curriculum maybe doesn’t all get covered; I have others who make sure that the students are understanding all the work, even if that means they maybe don’t have the most fun and exciting classes; I try to make sure that my students find some interest in and affection for my subject, because I want, more than anything else, to get them to be readers: and thus lifelong learners, who will grow far beyond what I could ever impart to them. But the issue is, we all try to do all of those things, all at the same time, along with doing all the rest of our work; and it is too much to get done. So we do what we can, and procrastinate the rest, and when we finally run out of time — we say to ourselves that we’ll work on that next year.
And now let me make the same point twice: students need help. They need support. Not all of them need the same help in the same way, but all of them need something. All of them. Partly because they are children: and partly because everybody needs help; everybody, young or old, needs something. What students need more than anything else is grace. They need kindness. They need us to try to understand what each of them individually needs, and to try to provide that to them, as much as we can. We need to know where our boundaries are, when we run out of energy and the ability to give; because they can’t be expected to know how much is too much, and they will always need more than we can give. It’s fine: they are children. Children need support. And there are fortunate children who get most of what they need provided for them by their families and friends; those children don’t need much from their teachers and other caretakers. But they still need something: even if it’s only praise for a job well done, and a suggestion about where they could go next.
The other reason why students all need help and grace is because we demand too much from them. We give them limited time, limited resources, and the limited energy and support of their teachers, and expect them to accomplish — everything. Not only to learn all of the subjects which their teachers have spent our professional lives mastering, but also to learn everything else they need for adult life. And apparently — according to Twitter, at least — they need to learn it all NOW, before they get into the “real world” and discover that they are unprepared for the harsh realities of life. They need to learn to do their work, and do their best, all the time, no matter what they may have going on in their lives outside of school; because in the REAL WORLD, you don’t get to give excuses: you just get fired if you show up late or miss a day of work or miss a deadline or break the rules in any way.
Never mind that I have frequently been late turning in my work. Never mind that I have had colleagues and coworkers who show up late, or miss work, all the time. (I tend not to miss work, and I’m obsessive about being on time. But also, I let my classes get off topic at the drop of a hat, and waste all kinds of time arguing with students over silly subjects instead of pursuing curriculum. We all do the things our bosses don’t want us to do.) Never mind that I and several of my colleagues constantly disobey the dress code, or don’t clock in or out properly, or cuss in front of students, or spend time on our phones looking at social media when we’re supposed to be working. Or show up hungover to work. (I’ve never done that one, either. But I did get suspended because of things I posted online about my students. So I guess I never learned that “If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all” lesson in high school, huh? Must have missed that day. Probably hungover.)
No: we tell these children, who don’t know any different, don’t know any better, because they have only been in school, because we won’t let them leave, that they have no chance in life if they don’t learn everything we have to teach them RIGHT NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW. And then we give them far too much to learn, all at once. And tell them they not only have to learn all of it, but they have to get high grades, or else they are doomed, and we will be disappointed.
And then we are surprised when they procrastinate? When they blow work off sometimes? When they try to take a little bit of time and space for themselves, to do something they enjoy, after hours and days and weeks of doing work, for no tangible reward? We’re shocked when they sleep until noon on the weekends — and then we call them lazy?
How dare we?
No. Students are not lazy. They are doing their utmost to live up to our impossible standards, to our impossible expectations, even with their limited resources and their nonexistent experience, which means they have not mastered the same coping strategies that we have. They don’t know what to do other than — maybe not do some work. And then we get mad at them for not doing their work, and they feel bad, and they fear the consequences we give them right now so they can learn to avoid consequences later; and all of that adds pressure, which wears them down — and they need to take more time off, to escape from even more work. Just so they can survive.
Just like us.
The answer is: they need to work less. We all need to work less. And if we can’t, then the very least we can do for each other is, when we have the power and the opportunity — be nice. Be kind. Give someone a little grace. And take a little for yourself. Even if it looks to others like you’re procrastinating. It’s better to turn in the work too late, than to work until it is too late.
I hate getting my hair cut. I don’t like spending money, or making appointments and keeping them — actually, making appointments is no problem at all; I enjoy being flexible with my time, since I have few commitments that occur at determined dates and times, and I like feeling accomplished because I did an organizing thing. But I hate keeping them. And I hate small talk, which is almost inescapable with a hair stylist; fortunately they are incredibly nice people most of the time, but that just makes me feel guilty for not wanting to chat about my day, and not having a dozen insignificant topics to draw from. Hey, what can I say? I don’t watch sports, I don’t pay attention to awards shows or The Bachelorette, I don’t go out on the town, I don’t have children. Unless you want to talk about my dogs, or the annotated edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit which I am currently reading, I don’t want to talk about whatever you want to talk about.
Is it wrong to say that I like it when I find hairstylists who don’t like talking? It feels mean. I don’t mind the ones who like talking, because they tend to carry the conversation for me, and I can react to other people talking about their kids or their sports teams or what have you. But it’s nice when I can just be left to my own thoughts. It’s rare, though, which is part of why I don’t like getting my hair cut.
I used to have the perfect system: I had very long hair when I was young.
Me in high schoolwith my dad
Me in college with my iguana Carmalita. Who never kicked my ass at Gin Rummy like my father was doing in the above photo.
It was easy! I just never got my hair cut. If you look at the end of my ponytail in the second one, you can see all the split ends; but if you just don’t care about things like that, then you never have to worry about getting haircuts.
I used to get grief for the long hair, in high school when they used to call me a hippie, and in college when they used to call me Fabio; but it was worth it to avoid the haircuts. (Also, my hair was one of the things my wife noticed when she first spotted me, so it was part of the reason I found the love of my life — so there, all you long-hair-haters) But as I got older, and my hair got thinner on top, it started looking really bad when it got too long; so my perfect solution eventually stopped working.
I found another solution during the pandemic: I shaved my head.
I shaved my beard off this last summer; I like saying that I shaved the top half of my head in 2020, and the bottom half in 2022.
That also meant I didn’t have to get a haircut for quite a while; but on the other hand, shaving it was a pain — I also don’t particularly like shaving, though for different reasons; I don’t have to worry about small talk when it’s just me with a razor. Then again, I never worry about shedding blood when I go to a hairstylist, so. — and I decided there will come a day when I will have little choice but to shave my head, and I might as well enjoy my hair while I still have it. I do recognize that I am lucky to have most of my hair at 48, and that it is mostly still my original color and texture. All of which I like.
I originally started growing my hair long not actually for the sake of growing my hair long: but because I got a terrible haircut. (This is not a good comparison, but there’s a meme about people being complimented for their maturity, and they say “Oh, thanks, it was the trauma.” I did that not long ago, with one of my students who is very mature and extremely self-aware; after I complimented them on it, I realized that it was because of the severe anxiety they have always dealt with, which makes them hyperaware of their own emotional state, and the years of therapy they have gone through because of that anxiety, which has taught them coping mechanisms. I adjusted my compliment.) It was during 8th grade, when I had been growing my hair out somewhat intentionally because my friends had long hair and liked heavy metal music, as I did; but at the end of the school year I signed up for a class trip to Italy, led by my Italian language teacher, and my mom took me to get a haircut before my passport photo. The stylist she brought me to was an Italian-American man (Not unusual in Boston, of course), and when I mentioned during my awkward small talk that I was going on a trip to Italy, the stylist said, “Oh, well, Italian girls like short hair.” And he cut all my hair off. Even worse, he poofed it up in front, which was very much the style at the time — and very much not my style, ever. I went out to the car while my mom paid, and I looked in the mirror, and I actually cried.
I looked a little like this. Not as cool, though.
(By the way, if you’re hoping for a photo of Bad Pompadour Dusty, no such photo exists. The poof washed out of my hair, and I just had short hair in my passport photo. And a sad look in my eyes.)
So after that, I just stopped going to hairstylists. And as I said, it worked for me very well for almost twenty years. (I will also note that the last decade of those twenty years, my wife trimmed my hair for me when the split ends got too bad.) And now that I can’t do it any more, I’m a little sad; but also, I have a stylist I like a lot, and when my hair gets too long, as it is now, I make an appointment, and I go. I don’t want to, and I bitch about it — but I go.
Just like the dentist: though that didn’t work as well when I didn’t go to one during my first years of college. Now I go regularly, even though I hate it even more than getting haircuts: it’s even more money, and far more discomfort, and now somehow I am supposed to make small talk while my mouth is cranked open and filled with dental instruments and dental fingers. And sometimes, just as I dream of shaving my head permanently, maybe with lasers, so I never have to get another haircut, I dream of just pulling out all my teeth and getting dentures: so that when those teeth break, I can just order new ones without ever having to sit in one of those torturer’s chairs ever again.
This last week has been a bad week, so when I thought about this topic — when I remembered that I had an appointment this afternoon — I thought it would be nice to write about something superficial and simple, like hair, and how much I liked having long hair and how much I dislike having to get haircuts. I had been thinking about writing on an education-related topic — namely the argument I had on Twitter (The brief one; the long one is also vaguely education related, but much more bigotry-focused and education-adjacent, and that will get its own full length post, because the topic deserves it as hair does not) about how to address behavior problems in students at school. An education “pundit” named Daniel Buck — who is really just a troll who wants to make himself a name as a right-wing education pundit, and has succeeded to the extent that he’s already gotten a book published and been called in for at least one interview on Fox, where he repeated his talking points without offering a single scrap of evidence, as he is wont to do — commented about how good students prefer to be in classrooms where discipline is strictly maintained. Another person replied to his Tweet with the observation that 80% of misbehavior comes from 20% of students, and recommended expelling those students so the rest of the kids could learn and teachers could focus on teaching.
I have a lot to say about that. But I had trouble yesterday, when I generally sit down to write these posts, and then again this morning; I was much more tempted to just dash off something quick about how much I liked having long hair and how much I hate paying both money and time to get my hair cut short. It didn’t help that I went to the gym this morning — and came out to a flat tire on my bike, which made me have to walk home. I don’t mind walking, of course, and the travel either by foot or by bike is good cardio and cooldown regardless; which I definitely need because I have high blood pressure which ain’t gonna get any better the more I deal with student misbehavior (or arguments on Twitter) — but it did take longer to walk home, and at the end of it I was tired.
But somewhere on that walk, I realized: these are the same topic.
(That’s right, folks — I’ve trapped you into reading about education all this time with another long-winded analogy. Though the title of the post should have given it away. I will also note here that my first attempt at a title for this post was AnaloJollies, trying to make a funny portmanteau out of the word “analogy” that had a lighter tone to it; but seeing the word written out like that made me realize it had a whooooooole different impact based on what it looks like I would be talking about in a post titled that. I will not be writing THAT post.)
(At least not until I get my colonoscopy next summer.)
You see, the argument for expelling the 20% of students who are responsible for most misbehavior is flawed for a number of reasons. The first and most important is that the identification of those — let’s call them “troublemakers” for the sake of the argument — is fraught. Very fraught. Let’s start with the fact that the 20% responsible for 80% of misbehavior are dependent on the misbehaviors being measured: they are not the same students across the board. In other words, while 20% of students or so are responsible for 80% of tardies, and 20% of students are responsible for 80% of disrespectful defiance of teachers, those 20% of the students are not the same. It’s a Venn diagram: there is some crossover, some number of students who are mainly responsible for tardies and for defiance; but the slice is not the whole circle. So in determining which 20% of students we want to expel, we need to start by deciding which behavior is the one that deserves expulsion: and first, we need to realize that violent behavior, or drug use or sexual assault or theft or anything really severe, generally already results in expulsion; and second, we need to realize that expelling the 20% of students mainly responsible for defiance will not reduce tardies by 80%, but by some much smaller number — and so for the rest of the behaviors we don’t like.
Furthermore, identifying the behaviors that “disrupt learning” for the “good” kids is not so simple. If a student is habitually noisy, if they speak loudly and often out of turn during independent seatwork, if they ask constant irritating questions of the teacher — but also they are generally respectful of others, especially of teachers, and are never late to class or what have you — which misbehavior expulsion will catch that kid? Which expulsion net will remove the distraction of a kid who just likes to make loud noises with their mouths while they work? (This example, by the way, was brought to you by a middle school student I have been acquainted with, a straight-A student who could not be quiet for more than 30 seconds at a time. Very respectful. Very smart. Deeply fucking annoying. But I don’t think “This kid annoys the shit out of me” is reasonable grounds for expulsion, do you? Particularly not if our goal is to isolate the students who want to learn, because this kid very much wanted to learn. They just wanted to do it noisily.)
And lastly, the big issue here (Actually there are two, I’ll get to the other big issue in a sec) is the false assumption that misbehavior is static. That the 20% who are responsible for 80% of misbehaviors are always the same kids, and that once you remove them, the problem will be solved. Obviously that’s not true, simply because new students come to the school, to every school, with every new school year; but to this the supporters of 20% expulsion rates would simply say that we would need to identify the bad 20% in the new class and chuck them to the curb as quickly as possible. But even more than new students, the problem is this: nature abhors a vacuum — and so do students. If you remove a child who is disruptive of a learning environment, there will be others who will begin to act up in much the same way that the removed child did. I’ve seen it happen several times. Often the most disruptive student is intimidating to other students, who then feel free to act out when the #1 student is no longer there to intimidate them; even more often, at least in high school, students enjoy the disruption, even if they sometimes get mad about losing learning time, because school is boring, and watching a teacher get mad and a kid get in trouble is interesting. So if the #1 troublemaker vanishes, other students will likely fill in by becoming more disruptive, to break up the boredom, because then they will get the attention and even the admiration of their peers. Or, in an even more likely scenario, a student’s behavior will change over the school year: because misbehavior is not actually static, because kids act out for many reasons, very few of which are their immutable personal characteristics. Tardies are probably the best example of this: if you look at school-wide data, you will find that many tardies come from the same small group of students, who are frequently late to class because they walk slowly, or they hang out with their friends, or they avoid class for any one of a hundred reasons — but you will also find that many students are late only to one class, maybe because the two rooms are too far away from each other, or maybe because their ride to school won’t leave early enough to get them there on time. My freshman year of high school I had some obscene number of tardies — because my ride to school was my older brother, who didn’t give a shit about getting there on time. So I never got there on time. And you can see this behavior frequency change overnight, if a kid changes parent custody, or if they move farther away from school, or if there’s a sudden issue with a car, or a change in parent job status, and so on. And though it is a good example, it’s not just tardies: students often, if not usually, if not always, act out at school because of what’s going on at home. You can bet that, after you expel the troublemaking 20%, some other kid’s home life will fall apart due to divorce or a parent losing a job or some other unforeseeable circumstance, and that child will begin to act out in class.
The point is, you can expel the worst troublemakers, and you will still have trouble. Trouble is inevitable. It is school: they are children. Anybody who pretends there weren’t problems in the past exactly like the problems today is lying, or privileged. Sure, there were very few gang fights when I was in high school: but it’s not because the school expelled all the gangsters before they could start fights; it was because I went to a wealthy suburban high school where the student body was 90% White, and there were no gangs. And I can state for an absolute fact that we had the same number of students who were disruptive because they had ADHD, because I was friends with several of them; they were just undiagnosed, and frequently self-medicated with marijuana by the time they reached high school. When they were kids we called them “hyper,” and laughed at their antics in the classroom. Listen to the immortal George Carlin do his routine on being a class clown, in the 1940’s and 50’s in New York, and you will quickly recognize that young Mr. Carlin was bright, respectful — and deeply, constantly disruptive. Wouldn’t surprise me at all to hear that he had ADHD. I guarantee that Robin Williams did.
Listen closely around 7:45 when Carlin gets his audience to make one of the best group-based noises I’ve ever heard.
The other big problem here is the idea that expelling children from school is a good thing. The idea that the children you expel are deserving of expulsion — or that they are not deserving of an education. This is false, and it is a travesty. Again, while I recognize that some children are genuinely dangerous to their peers — I have been in public education for 23 years, after going through 13 years of public school myself; of course I realize that some children cannot be trusted to respect the safety or the rights of others — I expect that children who are actual threats to others will be expelled from school, and probably should be. But even those, even the worst troublemakers, even the ones who harm others: they are still children. And children both need and deserve an education. Some should not receive their education in the same place as other children; but accommodations can be made for that. Particularly now that we can offer many students the option of remote learning. Even if that weren’t an option, we should all realize that the best thing that could possibly be done for most students who have and cause trouble in school is — an education. If those students cause trouble because they are struggling, then finding a way to help them learn will eliminate the struggle and thus the misbehavior. If someone misbehaves because they are on a bad track, which may lead them to more serious issues in life, such as addiction or criminal behavior, then again, the best thing a school can do for them is help them gain an education and more positive and productive skills and knowledge. Expelling students does none of these things: it simply tells the student that they are less important and less valuable than the other students, less deserving of education and all the things that come with it; and that’s not going to help anybody get better at anything.
No: expulsion of problem students is not the answer. The answer has much more to do with all of the ideas that Mr. Buck and most right-wing edupundits find anathema: restorative justice and social services and educational supports for students in need, despite (or even because of) their disruptive behavior in class. As I have now said several times, students who are dangerous to others should be removed from a classroom of potential victims; but even there it is more useful to think of that process as isolating those students, while maintaining their status as students, as children with the right to an education, who will benefit from an education. We should remember that isolation does have negative impacts on the students who are isolated, but the basic goal of educating all members of our society is not lost with isolation, as it would be with expulsion. (I do realize, as well, that students who are expelled are given further opportunities to learn and improve; I support those systems. I’m just responding to the argument as it was presented to me: the final response was expulsion. The reason was to “save” the “good” students from having their learning “ruined” by the “bad” students.
(Here is where I bring it back to the analogy. That’s right: time to talk about cutting hair. It’s okay if you forgot.)
Expelling students to solve the problem of behavior is seeking a permanent solution to an ongoing problem. It is exactly like trying to fix one’s hair by yanking out the bad hair. In order to avoid the difficult work of handling students who misbehave, trying to find why they act as they do and then addressing the underlying issue, we simply remove the students: it’s like shaving your head to avoid having to get your hair cut. Or, I suppose, plucking out the long hairs, keeping the short ones. Though I suppose “long hair” is not the analogous problem; I should talk about hair that causes problems — you know, the hair in the cowlick, which won’t lay right no matter how you try to comb it; that one hair that curls around and tickles the inside of my ear, or pokes me in the eye. Those hairs should definitely be plucked. Doing so will solve the problem entirely. Then I can focus on the good hairs, and keeping them on track where I want them. And if any of those good hairs step out of line — I’ll pluck them, too.
Rather than seeking simple, permanent solutions to complicated problems like student misbehavior, we should think of addressing student misbehavior the way we think of maintaining hair, or working out, or doing anything that requires long term effort: the key is to build a routine. To find the right tools and resources, to recognize the roots of the issues (No pun intended), and to realize that long term, incremental changes are most likely to have positive effects. If one has high blood pressure, say, the answer is not to remove the angry blood causing the problems, as they would have in Shakespeare’s time (Which I hope we can agree was not a good system); and it is not necessarily to expunge all the causes of stress instantly and without consideration. I would have much less stress if I quit teaching: but the new situation I found myself in would cause me new problems, which would give me all new stress. If one has bad hair, one should look at one’s shampoo, one’s hair care routine, one’s hairstylist and relationship with one’s hairstylist, and try to work through all of those concerns to fix the bad hair — rather than just yanking out 20% of one’s hair and throwing it away to concentrate on the other 80%. The answer is also not to do what I did when I was young, and simply accept that bad behavior exists, like split ends, like cavities in teeth; the analogy falls apart here because an individual hair is not important, and an individual child is. But the prescription for all of these issues is the same: address the problem. Slowly. Carefully. But address it, don’t just ignore it or remove it and throw it all away.
If we want to address student misbehavior, the key is not to expel the “bad” students; it is to work, over the long haul, to turn “bad” students into “good” students. To help the problematic students to solve their problems, and to make progress instead of trouble.
I keep not doing this: but I need to do this. Now, because there are always other things which I can write about, which I want to write about; this week I got into an incredibly stupid argument on Twitter, which is crying out for me to write a full-length takedown of my opponent; also, we had parent conferences, which opens up a couple of good discussions about students in general; also, I agreed to go to an AVID conference this summer, which means I can talk about AVID and conferences and so on; also, we had to pay money in taxes this year AND IT’S MY SCHOOL’S FAULT —
So there’s a lot I could write about.
But I need to write about this.
I already wrote about the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” but I didn’t write about the whole piece. Intentionally, because my essay was already too long, and the place where I stopped is important enough and valuable enough to receive the final emphasis of closing that piece with it; but now we need to talk about the rest of the piece, not least because it is still brilliant, nor only because it is still relevant to our society today, and the discourses we have around race and prejudice and equality and so on. Also because I said I would do this: and I need to keep my word.
So here we go again.
(One quick note: I have put some jokes in here, particularly in a couple of the links; I hope that doesn’t come across as too irreverent. Dr. King is and will always be one of my most idolized heroes. I just think that a little humor helps to get through an essay this long, with this much heavy subject matter. But I do apologize if any of the jokes hit a sour note.)
So the section I covered there goes to the end of the second page; I wonder how much of that length is intentional in that it seems like a piece that long and no longer could easily be reprinted in newspapers, but I don’t know. It also builds beautifully as an argument, leading to that conclusion. In any case, the next paragraph opens a new line of argument — though it is related, of course. This link shows another iteration of the letter, this one with a clear transition at this point, which I like.
YOU express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”
Notice that Dr. King continues the same tone and structure of argument, even after he has had this incredible cri de coeur about the African-American experience in the U.S.: he states their objection, and then turns it around on them. Willingness to break laws is a concern, you say? By gum, you’re right! You all should obey the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools, shouldn’t you? But again, he offers this point about their hypocrisy in the politest possible way: by saying that it might be strange to see the civil rights activists doing the same apparently hypocritical thing, defending the law while breaking the law. But then he explains why the civil rights activists are not, in fact, doing anything hypocritical — and note that he uses “paradoxical” rather than the term “hypocritical:” because a paradox is only seemingly contradictory, generally from one perspective; there is another perspective by which it makes perfect sense (For instance, the paradox “To preserve peace, you must prepare for war.” It only seems like a contradiction; it actually makes perfect sense in a world where not everyone shares a desire for peace.): because there are two types of laws. King separates here the concept of “legal” from the concept of “just” — a distinction we point out again and again in our society.
And where does Dr. King get the justification for his distinction? Why from Saint Augustine: one of the most important and influential of all Christian thinkers. How you like them apples, Clergymen?
Continuing his explanation of the distinction between law and justice, Dr. King refers to the other most influential and important Christian thinker, St. Thomas Aquinas:
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an “I – it” relationship for the “I – thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.
And yes: he also referred to Paul Tillich, one of the most influential Christian philosophers of the 20th century; and to Martin Buber, “the great Jewish philosopher.” (How you like them apples, Rabbi?) Let me emphasize here, if I didn’t do it enough before, that Dr. King wrote this letter in jail: without reference materials. He just knew all this stuff. (I mean, he did have a doctorate in systematic theology; and his dissertation was partly about Tillich’s work, so.) The only way to improve an ethos argument this strong, with references to authorities this relevant to both your point and your audience, is to show that you yourself are an authority to be reckoned with.
The argument itself is remarkable. He provides three different definitions of his distinction between just and unjust laws: first, a religious one — just laws square with the law of God (and note he includes non-religious people by also calling it “the moral law”, and then brings it back to religion and Aquinas by referring to the idea of laws “not rooted in eternal and natural law”); second, a psychological definition, saying that just laws uplift human personality and unjust laws degrade it; and third, Buber’s philosophical concept of the “I-it” relationship replacing the “I-thou” relationship, turning people into objects. Into things. And look at the use of parallelism here: three reasons why segregation is unsound, followed by another way that it is wrong (and adding the idea that segregation is sinful”; three different ways that segregation is an expression of man’s evil; and a juxtaposition of two antithetical examples that match King’s categories: one just law, and one unjust law.
Then, if that isn’t enough ways to help his audience understand this concept , King gives us this next paragraph:
Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.
That’s right, a more concrete definition, with another simple summative way to understand it: difference made legal, and sameness made legal. He’s right: this is more concrete, and has none of the religious overtones of the last paragraph — but it makes just as much sense, and is just as sound. Have we got enough ways to understand this now? Of course we do.
And then he adds another one:
Let me give another explanation. An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured?
Here Dr. King brings in another issue: voting rights. How can a law be democratic when the people were not capable of opposing nor supporting its passage, because of the suppression of their rights and their franchise? The argument is so plain and irrefutable that he doesn’t even bother to answer his rhetorical question. Instead, perhaps feeling understandably bitter as he sits in a jail cell writing about justice and injustice, Dr. King moves to one other complexity in the distinction between legal and just: when the application of a law makes it unjust. And I say he might have been bitter because his example is once again his own, talking about the city of Birmingham’s use of a parade permit ordinance to remove the civil rights activists’ First Amendment rights.
These are just a few examples of unjust and just laws. There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I was arrested Friday on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong with an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade, but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust.
Then he goes on to compare Birmingham first to three villains from history, and himself and his allies to the heroes who were suppressed by the villains — and then Dr. King confirms Godwin’s Law (Within a different context), while breaking the corollary to Godwin’s Law. Because Dr. King brings up Adolf Hitler. And THEN he throws in Stalin and Communism: it’s like the perfect American argument, here. Note that the three villains and heroes he mentions before going to the Nazis are both religious and political: Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who tried to kill the three Jewish prophets Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (I’M SORRY DR. KING I HAVE TO) in the Old Testament; the Romans, who tried to suppress Christianity with various atrocities; and the elite of Athens, who executed Socrates for teaching the truth. Note also that all three villains lost these fights.
Which side is Dr. King’s? Which side would you rather be on?
Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.
We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.
Once again, Dr. King has made an argument so strong, so irrefutable at this point, after he has given so many different ways to understand it, and so many different reasons to accept it, that I really can’t fathom why people still don’t agree with this argument. Except for those who haven’t read it, of course.
The next part of King’s letter brings up the element that my brother, when I mentioned that I had written an essay about Dr. King, used to identify the Letter from Birmingham Jail as distinct from Dr. King’s other masterworks: “Ohhh,” he said to me on the phone when I was trying to tell him which piece I had analyzed, “is that the one with the white moderates?”
Yes it is.
I MUST make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
He confesses: and then he destroys us with his disappointment. This part of the essay I have trouble reading and teaching; not because it’s too complicated, or too upsetting in its language and images (as some of my students find the Perfect Sentence I wrote about in the first post) — but because it’s true, and it’s me. I am a White moderate. I mean, I’m pretty goddamn liberal — but also, I don’t act in order to achieve a more just society; I simply support the cause. It’s not entirely me, because I don’t object to the methods used by those who are more active in pursuing our common goal; but it’s me because I don’t participate in those methods.
King here juxtaposes this critique of people who support the cause but not enough, with those who oppose the cause though they claim to be understanding of it: the Clergymen. No White moderates, those Alabamians; they seem like pretty rock-ribbed conservatives, fitting perfectly into the mold of paternalistic White leaders whom King refers to above, as they compliment “their” [“our”] Negro community for keeping the peace, which is exactly what King is taking issue with. But he does it in such an incredible way:
In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical delvings precipitated the misguided popular mind to make him drink the hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because His unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to His will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see, as federal courts have consistently affirmed, that it is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.
That’s right: not only does King compare himself, for the third time, to Socrates — now he actually compares himself to Jesus. And, of course, he’s right: blaming the victims of oppression for inciting the violence of the oppressors is precisely like blaming Jesus for making the Romans crucify him. And who does that in the story of the Passion?
Why, this guy, of course.
(I know, this is probably the wrong thing to use for this reference. But I love rock opera. Please ignore the ridiculous whiteness of the Jews in the crowd, and especially of Jesus — but DON’T ignore the AMAZING homoeroticism of the flogging performed by what appears to be The Village People, while a sunburned Disco hedonist looks on and cackles.)
In the next paragraph, King jumps back to the White moderates, connecting the two not only with their half-hearted support or opposition to King’s cause, but with a parallel to the teachings and goals of the Church:
I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said, “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.
By putting these two groups, White moderates who say they support civil rights but oppose the methods used by the activists, and the Alabama clergymen who say they understand the desires of African-Americans for freedom but show they really would rather maintain the status quo of segregation and oppression, in such close parallel, switching back and forth with what almost seems a complete lack of connecting transitions between subjects, King achieves his goal: he shows that these groups are essentially the same. There is what they say, and then there is what they do: and their actions speak louder than their words. He is thus chastising both groups, by comparison to each other: the clergymen are no better than Northern White moderates, synonymous in the South with lying hypocrisy; and the White moderates are no better than White Southerners: synonymous with racist oppressors. Neither group is willing to be coworkers with God: they are the forces of social stagnation which the coworkers with God oppose.
(Okay, I don’t think that’s me any more. Though I still worry that I would disappoint Dr. King.)
Dr. King’s next argument has to do with “extremism.”
YOU spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodyness” that they have adjusted to segregation, and, on the other hand, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable devil. I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the do-nothingism of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest. I’m grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, I am convinced that by now many streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who are working through the channels of nonviolent direct action and refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare.
Specifically, King is replying to this sentence in the Statement: “We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.” (Blogger’s Note: Since I did that to them, I’m going to do this to Dr. King’s words: “We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.“) This line clearly pissed King off: but more important, it’s an idea that he can’t allow to shape the narrative. So as he does with so many other parts of the Statement’s argument, he smashes this again, and again, and again. He shows the two extremes in the African-American community: one extreme is those African-Americans who have been worn down by the oppression that has defined their lives; and the other is — Malcolm X. King doesn’t name the other man, with whom he was so often presented in juxtaposition as two opposites, the moderate and the extremist; but he doesn’t have to. Elijah Muhammad (Himself no moderate) and his Nation of Islam are synonymous with Malcolm X, and though King and X were a hell of a lot closer in a lot of ways than most people thought or said, it is exactly these kinds of people, these southern Clergymen, who would have used King as an example of a better leader, a more reasonable leader, than X, because King used non-violence while Malcolm X talked about violence. I suspect this comparison and the implication that King was softer and more accommodating to the oppressors’ status quo, made the man angry: and so the description at the end of this paragraph — a fine example of Dr. King showing that he did not believe that non-violence was the only way to achieve freedom: just that it was the best way, as it would not lead to “floods of blood.” If the warning is not clear, he reiterates it in the next paragraph:
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded him that he can gain it. Consciously and unconsciously, he has been swept in by what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, he is moving with a sense of cosmic urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. Recognizing this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand public demonstrations. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, “Get rid of your discontent.” But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized.
But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love? — “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice? — “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? — “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist?– “Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God.” Was not John Bunyan an extremist? — “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience.” Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? — “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?
(Note on the text: the iteration of the Letter I have been pulling from separates this into two paragraphs. This one doesn’t. I think it should be one paragraph.)
This is another of my favorite arguments, and not least because King again compares himself to Jesus Christ — and also to Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, along with the Jewish and Christian luminaries Amos, St. Paul, Martin Luther, and John Bunyan. (Also I love that he drops his namesake in there without even batting an eye — and don’t forget that the vast majority of Southern White Christian racists were of Protestant denominations). I also love the rapid-fire call-and-response of rhetorical questions with direct quotations that serve both as answers and as proof, while making use of all of the poetry in these various wonderful statements, and also showing off, again, King’s own erudition and understanding of the power of the right word at the right time for the right reason. And then those final rhetorical questions, with the explicit use of “we” inviting the audience — the White moderate, the White Southern clergyman, and every single person who ever reads this letter, including me and including you — to come up with our own perfect words, our own response to this call. What will we do? What kind of extremist will we be?
After this King closes his criticism of White moderates with the most terrible form of the guilt-imposing “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” position that he is using here: the “Maybe I expected too much of you.”
I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe I expected too much. I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent, and determined action.
Look at that. Look at it! “I guess I should have realized?” GodDAMN, sir. I would like to personally apologize for everyone and everything, ever. He does lighten the load slightly by naming a number of White activists, primarily reporters who had given fair or even favorable coverage to the Civil Rights movement, and thanking them for their contribution. Which makes me feel a tiny bit better because I’m writing this. But I’m still sorry, sir. I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox, the ones you were saving.
This next part, though? I got nothing but smiles for this. Because then he goes after the church.
Honestly, I’m going to skip over this, because this is not my area. I have not attended church since around about 1986, and my personal animus for religion would color my analysis of this too much. I want to pick out every single detail where King tells his fellow clergymen that the White church has let him down, and highlight every one, like some kind of manic hybrid of a mother-in-law and Vanna White, finding every single possible fault and holding it up for the audience to observe, while I smile from ear to ear. But I won’t do that. I will just point out that he specifically mentions one of the Eight Clergymen, Reverend Earl Stallings, for his action in allowing Black worshippers into his church without segregating them; this seems to me like a direct response and even challenge to the passive aggressive way the Clergymen never name Dr. King, even though EVERYBODY FUCKING KNOWS THAT’S WHO THEY MEANT. “Outside agitators,” my ass. I still recommend reading the entire letter, including this section; but here I’m just going to post his conclusion, because it’s so damn beautiful.
I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation — and yet out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.
“We were here.” I love that. “Our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America.” Just incredible.
At this point, having made all of his arguments, he’s almost — no, wait, he’s not done. He has one more thing to say.
I must close now. But before closing I am impelled to mention one other point in your statement that troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I don’t believe you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I don’t believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you would see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys, if you would observe them, as they did on two occasions, refusing to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I’m sorry that I can’t join you in your praise for the police department. It is true that they have been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators. In this sense they have been publicly “nonviolent.” But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
I wish you had commended the Negro demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” They will be young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’s sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.
He leaves this until the end. He knows that this is the one part of this letter most likely to anger his readers, because he is here criticizing the police — and even now, 60 years later (And please note that this April will be the 60th anniversary of this whole ordeal), I think we all know what happens to people who criticize the police. But he can’t not say this. He doesn’t have proof, not that the Clergymen or the White readership at large will accept — it is only the word of the arrested activists; nobody was there with a cell phone to record this scene — and you can see his bitter acknowledgement of the superficial truth of what the Clergymen said, that the police have been “rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators.” Though even there, look at the use of the phrase “rather disciplined,” instead of the words “calm” and “restraint” which the Clergymen used. Notice the emphasis on “public,” immediately contradicted by the word “handling,” with its implication of manhandling, echoed in the word “disciplined,” with its sense of harsh control and even physical punishment. But of course, because he is Dr. Martin Luther King, he immediately shows how this example is the precise opposite of the “nonviolent” label the police might claim: because they are pursuing immoral ends. And they are contrasted against the truly nonviolent protestors and pioneers, who use genuine nonviolence to promote moral ends of justice — “the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.” And since this comes here, at the very end, it has extra weight — I do think the overall length of this letter does make this seem more like a postscript than a strong conclusion; I think the passage I quoted above, at the end of the section about the church, is the real conclusion — but this is one final blow that is impossible to ignore. But of course, the police do not get the last word: that goes to the real heroes of the South, James Meredith, and Rosa Parks, and all of the people who fought alongside Dr. King for freedom. I, for one, would like to thank them all for their courage and their honor and their sacrifice.
Speaking of postscripts — and of too-lengthy writings, which need to finally be brought to a close — let me just end with the saltiest “Yours truly” in the history of letters:
If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.
Because in the end, even though the accusation that the civil rights movement and Dr. King were “impatient,” were “unwise and untimely,” was entirely false and absurd — it would be much, much worse if Dr. King were too patient.
And now, Dr. King’s actual “Yours truly,” which I would humbly like to echo myself, to everyone who reads this.
The Tucson Festival of Books is one month from now. Four weeks.
This week I ordered my copies of the two Damnation Kane books, 30 of Volume I and 20 of Volume II; I should have waited, but I got worried that I might not have anything to sell at the Festival, and I hated that idea, so now I can at least be sure that I will have 50 copies of books about pirates. So I just have to hope that everyone who comes by is new, and hasn’t already bought both of those books. (Since I brought and sold the same number last year, there are at least ten people who bought the first book and not the second; so hopefully if they come back, they’ll want Volume II.)
But once I had that set, I turned to the new book.
Which was a pain in the butt.
I hadn’t put a book together at Lulu.com, which does my printing and online sales for me, for, what, three years? I forgot the difficulties in making the text look the way it’s supposed to look for the paper book. I edited the whole thing — 128,000 words, it is — and then I thought I’d be able to just drop it into the template I downloaded from Lulu. So I Control-A, Control-C, and Control-V — and the template disappears, and the text is formatted like the original document, set up for 8.5×11 pages instead of the 6×9 trade paperback format. I tried it again, same thing. Downloaded a new template, tried it again — same thing.
So I had to drop the text into Notepad: which erases all formatting.
Which included all of the italics. In 128,000 words.
But at least the margins were right.
So I’ve been going through the text and putting all the italics back. It’s been good, actually: I caught a couple more mistakes, made a few changes I like; I think the book is a little stronger for the effort I’ve put in this week.
And then when I put this chapter into this post, I realized I missed an incongruity: I changed the timeline of the book a few years, for the sake of believability for a later important chapter (where characters needed to be a leeetle bit younger), and missed one of the references I made. So now I need to double check all the time references to make sure I didn’t miss any others.
Sigh.
It’s fine. The book may not be out in time for the Festival, but even if it isn’t, I will publish it — and anyone who is interested in purchasing a copy can get it directly from me. Signed, sealed, and even delivered, if you live in the Tucson area and don’t mind me dropping by your house, or you want to come to my school.
So in order to keep you all as excited about this new book as I am, here’s another sneak preview: this is the first chapter, which comes right after the Prologue I posted before. I hope you like it!
Chapter 1
I don’t remember dying.
You’d think I would, wouldn’t you? The narrowing of vision as everything faded to black, the tunnel of light, the sight of loved ones there waiting for me: Gramps, and Uncle Bill, and Oscar, my first dog. If my buddies in the Army counted as loved ones, there’s be a whole parade of faces at the end of that tunnel. Though they might not be so happy to see me. I’m sure a psychologist would call it survivor’s guilt, the idea that my friends who died would hate me for living, but what the hell does a shrink know? If it’d been me who’d gotten nailed, I would have been royally pissed at everyone who made it out, who made it back to the world. Hell, I am pissed at all of you. That’s why I eat you.
But I don’t remember any of it. The lack of memory might be because of the way of my dying: it could have been the booze, it might have been the smack, but whatever it was, whether it was cirrhosis or a heart attack or a stroke brought on by the abuse I put my body through in those last few years, I’m sure that at the time I was so wasted I didn’t feel a thing. I probably slept through my own death, which, I know, sounds peaceful and all – but I wish I could remember. I might even have been murdered, lying unconscious in an alley somewhere; I have scars I can’t account for, can’t remember where they came from – though there are plenty of ways I could have gotten those. I lived through my tour in ‘Nam, but I doubt that anyone came out of that without scars.
I remember ‘Nam. I remember the fear, and I remember the disgust; and I remember the anger that came out of them, and made it possible to pull that trigger. More than anything I remember being tired: just wanting to sleep, sleep for years. I remember other things, too, but I don’t look at those memories. They were what pushed me into the haze of alcohol and drugs that carried me like a sleeping baby into the darkness at the end.
I remember a few things from before the war: Mom and Dad, my sister Anne, my little brother Franklin, the farm in rural Iowa. I remember some things from after: San Francisco and the Haight, the few moments of lucidity in between stupors that could have lasted for weeks, months, or even years. I do remember a girl, kisses and whispers and silky movement under the moonlight, and for that memory, I’m grateful.
For the most part, though, those days blended together into a thick gray fog, without beginning or end, for so long that I lost track. I wouldn’t have any idea how old I was when I died, except that I know what year it is now, and I know how long it has been since I shuffled off this mortal coil, and awoke again to see that face looming over me, awash in the haze of red light that has tinted everything I have seen from that day to this. A little subtraction tells me the answer: I was 27 when I died 29 years ago. I’d be 56 now, if I was still alive.
But I’m not alive now, walking and talking notwithstanding. Those don’t count. You’re not alive if you don’t age: your years on this earth are nothing if there’s to be no end to them. The two absolutes are that everything must be born and everything must die; if one of those (or both) does not apply to you, then you are – nothing. My body may function, my eyes may still see, my ears hear; I may still think and feel, a little; but I’m dead. I killed myself in 1978, another delayed casualty of a war that nobody won.
I was not reborn on that night when the vampire brought me back. I was remade. No longer human, not quite a machine, but a combination of both living thing and automaton. I am a slave, and I may very well remain a slave until the sun goes out. Who knows? Even that may not be the end. My master is a creature of the night, after all; perhaps the perfect blackness of space would be his idea of Heaven.
Christ knows if there is a heaven like the one in the Bible, then he ain’t getting in. But then, neither am I.
I walked into the apartment and threw my keys on the table by the door. I was stripping off my clothes before the door even swung shut, dropping them on the floor in a line headed toward the shower. I had had to take a dip in the Bay, after, to wash all the blood off; I used the kid’s clothes to dry myself before getting dressed again. But then I had to bury him, along with his clothes, and that was a dirty business. Besides, you think the Bay smells bad to you? Try my nose on for size. Between the stink of sewage and rotting fish, the iron-scent of blood that lingered underneath, and the smells from his clothing, his sweat and soap and cologne, I felt like I would gag every time I caught a whiff of myself. The thought made me laugh. I could devour a human being with relish and pleasure, commit heinous and depraved acts at the whim of my master without batting an eye – but the smell of polluted water and body odor made me sick.
When I didn’t stink any more, I got out, toweled off, and walked out of the bathroom. I spotted my clothes lying where I had left them like scraps of scraped-off onion skin, and went to pick them up. I went to the kitchen and pulled a large plastic garbage bag off the roll on the counter, shoved the suit into it and tied the bag closed. I dumped it outside the door, in the hallway. My laundry was picked up and dropped off each day. If they were going to clean it anyway, what did wrinkles matter, right? Besides, I had a dozen more suits just like that one – my livery, so to speak.
I walked out into the main room of the apartment and looked around. The only furniture was the overstuffed, oversized armchair in front of the windows, the catch-all table by the door, and the stereo system that sat on the floor by one wall. I don’t have anything else because there’s nothing else I really need – not now.
I haven’t turned the stereo on more than half a dozen times in the last two years. I used to listen to it every waking moment. The apartment used to be filled with books, and there used to be art on the walls, and even, as God is my witness, a potted plant on the windowsill. But that was before. I realized that nothing I could put in this apartment would make it anything but a cage, a kennel for the dog. So I took everything out, threw it all away because I didn’t know anyone I could give it to and I couldn’t see myself holding a garage sale. I kept the stereo because – I don’t know why. I’ll get rid of it, too. Soon.
Suddenly I couldn’t stay in here any longer. I couldn’t smell the Bay, or the blood and sweat and the stink of humanity – but I could smell myself. Nothing in here but the stale smell of me, the hours – the years – I had spent sitting in that chair, watching the sun rise because it was the only rebellion I allowed myself, to look at what my master could not. I could smell every one of the days and weeks I had spent in this apartment, in some pathetic mockery of life; I could see it smeared on the walls and dripping from the ceiling. I had to get outside.
I went to my closet, donned a pair of pants and a dark shirt, shoved my feet into loafers without socks, and left, throwing on my overcoat as an afterthought on the way out the door. I left the door unlocked. Any thief could have whatever he could find in there. It was all trash.
***
I went downstairs and out onto the sidewalk, and I started walking. All I could think about with every step was how many times I had walked this way: how many times I had come up this street, gone through that door; how many times I had walked up the five flights of stairs to my apartment – no, that wasn’t right. Not my apartment: the apartment where they kept me. How many times I had washed blood from my skin and left a bag of stinking clothing in the hallway.
Almost thirty years. And I barely remembered the first ten.
Oh, they picked a good one when they found me, all right. Not that they knew my personality, of course, or the particular shape of the demons that drove their needles into my brain and dragged me down Skid Row to the morgue. They knew that I was young, that I had been in the military and thus had combat training, that I was big – a corn-fed Iowa farmboy – and that I had no family, proven by the fact that I died a derelict junkie on the streets of San Francisco, and my body then lay unclaimed in the morgue for a week. They might not even have cared about that last when they picked me out of the morgue drawer and laid me out for the ritual. I died young and left a good-looking corpse, and that was all they needed.
No. That’s not true, and I knew it. They did not want a zombie: they wanted a monster. That’s why they picked me. They knew exactly what my demons were: knew that I suffered from a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder, knew that I drank and drugged myself to death to escape the memories of what I had done. This made me even more attractive to them: it showed that I take orders well, that I would do what my superiors commanded even if I personally found it so horrifying that I would rather be dead than remember it. After all, I killed myself so that I could forget – but I did the things I wanted to forget in the first place, didn’t I? I was already a monster before I died. I was already a slave. The vampires just gave me sharper teeth.
But dying had done what I had wanted it to do: it had given me oblivion. At least for a while. For a long while, actually; for ten years, I hadn’t had a coherent, rational thought. I don’t know why that changed, not exactly. But it had: I had woken up, and my mind woke up with me; and once I started thinking again, I couldn’t stop. So I had tried to find a different way to live with what I was. That was when I decided that hedonism would make up for the fact that I was an undead monster.
It still makes sense, in a way. It seems to me that we all have to pay for what we’ve got. If you have a good life, you owe, and you have to pay. A debit for a credit – balance the books. If I have been given this eternal life – eternal barring a violent death, of course – then I have to do something to earn it, to be worthy of what I have.
And what makes us worthy of life? Living to our purpose. If, say, we are here to spread the word of God, then that’s what we need to do, and the happier and more enjoyable our lives are, the harder we have to work to earn that by spreading His word that much farther.
Of course, being an undead man-eating ghoul who hurts people for a crime syndicate run by a soulless monster pretty much eliminates “spreading the word of God” as my purpose, don’t you think? Yeah. Me too.
No, when I started thinking again for the first time in ten years, I decided that my purpose was more earthy, something simple and concrete. I figured that a creature as unnatural as me has to work as hard as possible to make life as natural as possible, and to enjoy the natural parts of life as much as I can. Thoreau would have sent me to Walden and told me to grow crops, but to me, the natural parts of life are all the things that make humans human. That set humans apart from animals. Good music. Art. Literature and philosophy and science, wisdom and knowledge and imagination.
After all those years living without thinking, I started spending all of my time doing just that: thinking. Learning. Reading, listening, seeing. I swam in a sea of beauty and truth, truth and beauty – and splashed as well through ugliness and lies and bloody, pointless deaths that put the cap on tawdry, shallow little lives. They were the twin currents that spun me, like a leaf in a stream, for almost twenty years. When I had a job to do for my master, or when I got hungry, I threw myself into the blood, into the pain and fear and death, and tried to revel in the animalistic slaughter. I tried to feel like the predator my rebirth had made me. When I didn’t have a job, when it was just me, then I read every book I could, I listened to as much music as I could, I saw every piece of art on display in San Francisco and as many other places as I could get to within my limitations.
And for most of that time, for most of eighteen years, it was fine – I was fine. I actually enjoyed it, enjoyed the passionate lives I glimpsed in the jazz clubs and the galleries, in the books and on the streets, sweating and loving and bleeding and crying and laughing and dying. I loved it, loved them. Loved life.
But the more I learned to love life, the worse it made me feel when I ended it for others. Every time I did it, every time I killed, I reduced a human being from the height of divine creation and earthly evolution to a mere bag of flesh and blood and bone. The more I learned to respect and cherish those lives and all that they were capable of, the more I hated myself for ending them, just so I could go on enjoying what they had made.
And so, when I couldn’t stand it any more, I stopped. Stopped learning, stopped living life to its fullest, because it wasn’t my life that I was living. I already threw away my life, with a little help from Uncle Sam and Jack Daniels. Enjoying my stolen life as much as possible didn’t make it any less stolen: it made it more so.
For the past two years, then, I have been trying to live like I did the first ten years after I was remade: without thought, without any connection to the world or events around me. Maybe I’m trying to atone for my life by not enjoying it now; I don’t know. I’m trying not to think that hard about why I do what I do, why I am what I am.
But it isn’t working. I can spend my time brooding instead of reading, hating myself and the world instead of enjoying it, but I can’t get rid of the sick feeling in my gut. I can’t seem to wash off the stink. I can’t go back to ignorance. I can’t go back to being dead.
I wish I could.
I looked up then and saw that I had walked quite a ways, from my apartment near Fisherman’s Wharf to Dogpatch, at the base of Potrero Hill. I realized my hands were in the pockets of my coat, and I felt my sunglasses; startled to find that I wasn’t wearing them, I hurriedly put them on. It made me notice the light in the air, that the sun would be rising soon. I needed to head back. I got my bearings, turned around – and stopped.
I knew that Hummer.
I dug around in my overcoat, and found what I needed in the inside pocket: a small notebook, one of those things you can pick up for a buck at any drugstore – one of those things that makes an old Iowa boy like me think, “Back in my day, we could buy that for a nickel!” I flipped through the pages, scanning the entries, glancing up now and again to check the license plate on the forest green Hummer that was parked with two wheels up on the sidewalk to accommodate the thing’s wide wheel base. And there it was: almost two months ago now, the note “tree grn Hum. 3AHN619. 2x hit.” And then, underlined twice: “FAT.”
I believe in karma. Maybe not the karma that a Hindu or a Buddhist would know; I believe in my own version of karma. It’s back to that balancing act I think we all have to do: something good to make up for something bad. There may be a power in the universe that takes care of that for us, but I don’t have enough patience to wait for it. I like to help out. It makes me feel useful. So I keep this little notebook, and when I see somebody do something that requires punishment, I write it down – and when I get a chance, sometime down the road a bit, I carry out that punishment. This notebook is my karma to-do list.
Here in San Francisco, I try to focus on the most common, most frustrating, and least punished offenders: bad parkers.
If you’ve never been to San Francisco, understand this: while every city has parking problems, good ol’ Frisco has the added bonus of being built on steep hills, with narrow, twisting streets, often one-way, often with a stop sign right at the peak. So not only is parking hard to find, but actually getting into a spot can be next to impossible. Naturally, not everyone handles this challenge well; naturally, when someone does it badly – or worse, rudely – it makes an already difficult situation into a melting pot of imminent murder.
My job, then, as the karma assistant, is to teach bad parkers a lesson, in the hopes that they will change their ways, and make every driver’s life a little easier.
This particular twit had, my note said, smashed into two cars while I watched – front and back – while trying to pull out of a space, and then driven off without even leaving a note. And because he drove a Hummer, his damage had been minimal, and all to the bottom of his massive black bumpers; but he had torn huge gashes in the hoods of both other cars. I had been hoping that I would have a chance at this one, and here it was. Just when I needed it most.
I glanced around quickly to see if anyone was watching; it wasn’t yet dawn, though it was close, and the streetlights were just flickering off. People would be moving around soon, but right now, they were still hitting the Snooze button or getting into the shower. I had a few minutes.
I moved around to the street side, the driver’s side, and lay down on my left side next to the mighty green beast. I reached under and took hold of the front axle, just behind the wheel, with both hands, and then I squeezed and twisted. Slowly and carefully, because I wanted to get it just right. Another little twist, and – there! The body of the car settled, just a little bit, but it held when I let go. I rolled over to my other side and turned around, and then did the same to the rear axle, crumpling the metal just enough to make the chassis sag maybe an inch, but no more. Then I slipped around to the sidewalk side and did the last two wheels.
My goal here was simple: I had observed that the driver of this Hummer was, shall we say, built proportionally to his grossly oversized vehicle – hence the subtle notation “FAT” in my notebook. If I did this right with the wheels, then he wouldn’t notice anything wrong with his car until he sat in it – when the axles would fail and the wheels would all fold, and the whole thing would come crashing down. He wouldn’t even be able to get the thing towed, not without on-the-spot repairs of some kind, or else a crane. Which served him right. Really: how hard is it to leave a note? You can afford a Hummer, but not the insurance bill? How about two new axles, pal: can you afford those?
I finished, and slid out from under the metal behemoth (which now rested on dainty girlish ankles, so to speak). I nearly queered the whole deal when I nudged it with my shoulder as I twisted my torso to get my hands under me; the metal groaned slightly and quivered, and I went absolutely still, holding my breath and waiting. It didn’t fall. I scooted a foot away and then came to my feet quickly, dusting myself off and checking for witnesses. None. I was clear.
I just hoped the owner moved quickly, too, and jumped in before he discovered what I had done to the Hummer. But even if he didn’t get to sit down harder than he expected, I still got to cross this one off my karma to-do list, and there’s nothing better than completing a to-do list. Maybe I should make myself a complete self-improvement list – you know, things like “Adjust to new lifestyle” and “Learn to accept adversity with a zen-like serenity.” Maybe even “Free self from magically enforced servitude.” But at any rate, I felt better now than I had when I left the apartment. My head felt clearer.
Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Caravaggio: a scoundrel and murderer. The artist, that is: Judith was a warrior fighting an oppressor. And a badass.
I had a difficult conversation with a student this week.
Actually, I had several: and yes, I still need to write about how teachers have too many expectations put on us, because I acted this week as a counselor and a confidante, a corrector and a — a conspirator is too strong; but “co-worker” is not strong enough. Ah, well. Even without the perfect alliteration, I still talked to a student about cheating, and to another student about old relationships, and another student about aging family, and another student about old relationships that won’t go away; and I discussed abortion with two different classes, and the dress code with three, and racism with my co-workers…
And then there was this difficult conversation that came up with one of my favorite students.
I start every day with “Has anyone got any questions or concerns or issues you’d like to raise to the class?” And in some of my classes, there are specific students who respond to that invitation every single day: two of them ask about me and how I’m doing, which is very sweet but also invites dishonesty, because I don’t usually want to start the class with “I’m terrible and right at this second talking to all of you people is the last thing on Earth I want to be doing;” so instead I say something more neutral, even though I don’t like lying. But that’s an acceptable lie, because the class isn’t about me, even though students are happy to delay work by discussing me and my life; my job is to move them into the learning, so I do that, and it’s not a big deal.
But I have this one student who always brings something up. It’s usually something philosophical: this young person is extremely bright, extraordinarily curious, and has a deep love of learning, and so all of his free time is spent learning things or discussing things that he has learned; and all of his time in class is spent — well, the same way, really. I have shown him that I’m also interested in philosophy and enjoy talking about topics both random and profound, and so he has grown more comfortable over the school year with talking about whatever happens to be on his mind.
For perspective, he responded to my invitation Friday morning by talking about the deep anxiety he feels when he thinks about death: because, as he said, swaying in his seat and throwing his arms and head about like a wild-eyed symphony conductor, leading the orchestra of his body in playing the song of his opinion (which is the way he always talks when he gets excited about something), he loves life so much, and wants to experience everything, and the human lifespan is just not long enough! And while I was trying to disagree with him, because I am of the opinion that years are actually very, very long, and while there is never enough time to do and see everything we want to do and see, there is so very much time to do and see most things, he explained that in a few months’ time he will have a birthday and at that point he will be older than his older brother: and that comment made some things very clear to me. This is why he knows, in his bones, that life can end, suddenly, without warning, and far too early; and so of course he is anxious about it, and of course it seems to him like it is far too short. Because sometimes it is: and he knows it much better than I.
And that wasn’t the difficult conversation we had.
No, the difficult conversation came on Thursday: when he asked if it is possible to separate the art from the artist, and enjoy content created by a person you could not personally enjoy, or agree with, or even abide. And if it is possible, how could it be done?
That’s a tough conversation.
It was made worse by the fact that we disagreed on at least one prominent example of this issue, the author J.K. Rowling; and then, as we were getting into the weeds with this, I realized that I was speaking only to this one student, while the rest of the class was off on their own; so I had to cut it off. I hate cutting conversations off: particularly when they are important, as this one is, and when they are meaningful to those involved, as this topic was both to me and to this young man. And to be clear, if this had been one of my English 10 classes, which are currently studying argument, or my AP Lang class, which is just about ready to move into argument, then I would have opened the discussion up to the whole class, formalized it into a specific topic with a specific claim, and then solicited points pro and con, and counterarguments to those points, and then spent the whole class period on this if necessary; but it was College Readiness, which never studies argument, and I needed to move on. I tried to write more of my opinions on this for the young man to read, while they were working on their application essays, because part of what I had said had hit him in the feelings; but I didn’t have the time or the mental acuity to make my point clear enough.
I knew I had to write about this for this week’s blog.
(Yes, I know I am again procrastinating the analysis of the rest of the Letter from Birmingham Jail. I’ll get there. But I asked my class if I should write about what I said I was going to, or if I should procrastinate that topic and write about the one that had captured my thoughts; and they all said I should procrastinate. Who am I to dispute with a class full of honors students? At least, when they say something I want to agree with anyway. So. Here goes.)
“Tehemana Has Many Parents” by Paul Gauguin, who abandoned his wife and children to move to Tahiti and make art. Amusingly, I got this image from a New York Times article titled “Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?”
So the question is, if something is created by somebody who has something terrible about them personally, can we enjoy the thing that terrible person created? Or is it tainted by the terribleness of the creator? Is it possible to separate entirely the art from the artist, and enjoy content from problematic people? This question is made more difficult, of course — particularly for my students’ generation, though also for all of us older more jaded people, too — by the recent rise of the social standard which says anything associated with, for lack of a better word, evil, is also evil, and taints everyone and everything who touches it. This is the standard by which people have been cancelled online — again, like J.K. Rowling.
And that’s where this gets complicated. Because I am a liberal, and I want to promote liberal ideas like equal rights and privileges for all, and a safe, supportive community for those who are marginalized and discriminated against. And because I am a white man, and I recognize that I am not a good judge of what is hateful and hurtful, as essentially none of the hate in the world is directed at me, and even that which is doesn’t have much impact on me, as white men like me have built a society that privileges and protects us, I know that I should listen to others who say the work is offensive more than I should dismiss those claims based on the useless fact that I was not offended by the work. But I am also an artist, and a teacher, and therefore a passionate believer in the value of art, and in the defiant opposition to what I see as the unforgivable act of censorship. So my liberal side wants to support those who tell me that artists with evil ideas or acts or intentions are harmful; and my artist/teacher/free speech side refuses to even consider the idea of cancelling anyone.
That is, at least in part, what we are talking about: cancel culture. But see, the second I type that, and start to think about opposing the idea of cancelling someone like J.K. Rowling, I start to sound like what I look like: a privileged middle aged white man who has never had to deal with oppression, and is therefore too quick to protect other such privileged white people, and maintain the status quo that continues the oppression and marginalization of people who don’t look or live like me. I start to sound like a Republican, and particularly like the worst of them. I sound like Trump.
Okay. Not really. I’ll never sound like Trump, not least because I can put together a goddamn sentence; much more because I’m not a heartless, shameless narcissist. But still: it’s uncomfortable to side with the bad guys. I want to stay on the side of the angels, as I see them.
But on this? The angels are kinda wrong.
Okay, so let’s lay out the basic premise. If an artist has a bias, it is likely, but not inevitable, for it to show up in their work. This is particularly true of artists from the past, because as time goes on, and society progresses away from the oppressive past, we recognize more about what we do and have done that is wrong — not least because we are finally paying attention to what marginalized and oppressed people have been saying all along. This means that the biases of past artists were not as obvious to them as they are to us, and were also frequently more socially acceptable. Shakespeare, for instance, was atrociously anti-semitic; but that’s partly because Edward I expelled all Jews from England in 1290, and the persecution of Jews continued through Shakespeare’s time: so for Shakespeare, he was likely unaware of how the stereotypes of Jews that he knew were false and offensive. For him, simply having the character of Shylock was very progressive; he wrote a caricature of Jews (And a nasty one — a bloodthirsty moneylender), because that’s all he knew; but then he gave that Jewish caricature an important role in the play — albeit as the antagonist — and a genuinely wonderful speech that argued eloquently for the essential humanity of Jews. And then, of course, he has Shylock saved at the end of The Merchant of Venice by converting to Christianity: so yeah, pretty gross. But my point is that Shakespeare wouldn’t have recognized that as offensive in the same way that we do: he likely would have seen it as open-minded. It’s the same, though on a different scale, with Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird: the work is consciously and intentionally anti-racist, with the portrayal of an African-American man, Tom Robinson, as an innocent victim of the corrupt Alabama courts and jails, who are clearly in the wrong; and with Atticus Finch’s insistence that people be judged by their actions and not their appearance or reputation. But at the same time, there aren’t many better examples of the “White savior complex,” the idea that African-Americans are incapable of fighting for their rights, defending their own against racism and racists, just generally incapable of solving their own problems — and thus in need of rescue by high-minded White heroes. Atticus rides in on his white horse to save the day, and the Black population of Maycomb are immensely grateful and also extremely deferential, standing for him as he passes from the courtroom, and even doing the same for his children when Scout and Jem go to Calpurnia’s church. The book centers the White experience of racism, with the Black characters serving as background. But again, considering the 1960 publication date, and the author’s upbringing in Alabama in the 1930’s, it’s a damn progressive novel — which we can now see is problematic. I hate reading the scene where the people at Calpurnia’s church line up and take off their hats for the kids, and though Atticus’s closing argument is one of my favorite speeches in all American literature, there’s a part there where Atticus offers something of an apologetic for Bob Ewell, the appalling villain of the book:
“…We do know in part what Mr. Ewell did; he did what any God-fearing, persevering, respectable white man would do under the circumstances—he swore out a warrant, no doubt signing it with his left hand, and Tom Robinson now sits before you, having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses—his right hand. “And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to ‘feel sorry’ for a white woman has had to put his word against two white people’s.”
Because yes, that line about “God-fearing, persevering, respectable white man” is sarcastic; but it’s sarcastic because Bob Ewell is none of those things other than a White man, and therefore it’s ironic and even absurd that he is playing the role of such a White man: but that argument relies on the idea that swearing out a warrant to arrest the innocent Black man, who was definitely not raping his daughter, is precisely what an actual God-fearing, persevering, respectable White man (Henceforth a GFPRWM) would in fact do. And that’s gross. As is Atticus’s complimentary description of Tom which focuses on him being “quiet” and “respectful,” rather than, say, dignified and respectable.
So in both of these cases, as in countless others, the bias of the artist is clearly and indelibly represented in the work. And that, I have no disagreement, degrades the work and takes away from any positive impact the work may have. The fact that neither author would necessarily have seen their art as racist or even insulting is beside the fact: we now recognize these works as such — and we’re right, because the authors were blinded by bias and cultural ignorance.
But does that bias, and that degradation it causes, mean that the work should be eliminated from our culture? Forgotten, put aside, replaced with something more current and aware?
Maybe. In some cases. In these two cases, no.
I think that, while the work shows bias and is offensive, these two examples (and others, like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) are also of such high quality and such important influence on our society, that the negative aspects do not entirely negate and disqualify the positive aspects. There are cases (like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is both deeply racist and also pretty dang stupid as a book, even though Twain’s writing craft is always brilliant) where the negative aspects do override the positive aspects, because the positive aspects are smaller, or the negative aspects are worse; another fine example would probably be Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, interesting for historical study but otherwise definitely worth being consigned to the ash heap of history. (Clarification: I’ve never read Mein Kampf. It may be better than how I am describing it. But I doubt it. And there the author is SO bad that even work of Shakespeare’s quality should probably be discarded. I mean, it’s Hitler.)
But the important point is this: the negative aspects of the author and the work do detract, yes. But the positive aspects of the author and the work should be seen as pushing the needle back the other way, weighing in on the good side and thus counterbalancing some or even all of the negative aspects. Which means that we can’t simply discard every work by every artist we disagree with, even if that would be easy and feel nice. These decisions need to be made, even though they are hard; there isn’t a simple, fast, obvious rule. Each case should be decided individually, on its own merits — and as individual pieces, not merely one decision about the artist’s entire body of work. I would argue that the work, and our society, gains something positive by the simple process of having those conversations, even if they are difficult.
This is where I part ways with many of my fellow liberals who participate in or support what is often called “cancel culture.” The label “cancel culture” is itself biased and offensive; it is a sarcastic label, applied by the right to people on the left, which has come to be taken seriously by those on the right without any sense of humor or proportion; saying that people were cancelled because of their misdeeds and misstatements and bad personal ideologies or habits was originally a joke, though a biting one that was sometimes serious; and it gained initial popularity on “Black Twitter” — though I’m sure that’s a coincidence, and the opposition to cancelling and cancel culture from the right is in no way related. (More detail here.)
Cancelling someone often means a total separation, a total refusal to have anything to do with the person or their work; and I don’t agree with that. As I said, I think artistic work has to be taken on its merits as well as its demerits: and it has to be done on a case-by-case basis. Because if a piece of work does not reflect the creator’s biases or negative ideologies, then the only reason to cancel or refuse to engage with that piece is a moralistic judgment of the person and a sort of self-righteous attempt to remain pure and untainted by association with the offender.
And that’s bullshit.
That is not to say that I support people who have nasty opinions or who are nasty people; and that is where this argument gets even more complicated — with the idea of support. If I subscribe to Andrew Tate’s How To Be A Manly Man videos (Again, I have never actually watched Tate’s content; and I ain’t gonna), then I’m giving him money and adding to his follower count. If I share or promote them, then I am extending his reach and influence. Though, if I subscribe because I want to make fun of him and have specific evidence of what makes him a cripplingly ridiculous shitnozzle, I tend to think that counterbalances the money and the notoriety I add in his favor. Mentioning his name in this here blog is in some ways promoting him, because now people may look him up out of curiosity (Word to the wise: don’t. That is, don’t watch his videos or subscribe to his content. Feel free to read about how Greta Thunberg broke his little man-heart.), but I don’t believe that I am going to gain him followers. I recognize there is some risk of this, because somebody who reads this may look him up out of curiosity, and end up being influenced by his worldview; but I don’t really think that people who read this blog are liable to fall in line with a toxically masculine fucksack like Andrew Tate. I think the same thing about the movement in recent years to never mention the name of a mass-murderer, because some of them have said that they carry out their massacres in order to achieve notoriety; first, I call bullshit on that, because murderous psychopaths are murderous psychopaths, and if you take away one motivation, they’ll find another one; and second, which murderous psychopaths are going to read this blog, or someone’s social media post, and then get a frisson of pleasure at seeing their name? Does that really happen? I don’t buy it.
On the other hand: there is not much lost which is positive if I use general epithets instead of a specific name, like if I mention the school shooter at Sandy Hook without naming him. I don’t lose anything; I guess the phrase “school shooter at Sandy Hook” is longer and a little more unwieldy than his actual name, and one could argue that a murderer who was an attention hound would get just as much pleasure from the notoriety of his actions even if his name weren’t actually included, so naming Sandy Hook takes away the point of leaving out his name (It was Adam Lanza, by the way, and he certainly can’t benefit from me writing his name since he is dead; and the argument that giving him notoriety might inspire other shooters is too unlikely for me to accept); but generally speaking, there isn’t much harm in not writing out a killer’s name. So even if I don’t think it matters, I’m willing to follow the trend there, because it doesn’t cost me anything other than a few extra keystrokes — and considering how many extra words I put in any particular post, well.
You’re a vile one, Dr. Seuss! You have termites in your smile! You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile, Dr. Seuss…
There is, however, a cost in discarding great art, and particularly in cancelling an artist and all of their work entirely. Dr. Seuss did indeed create a number of deeply racist cartoons when he was illustrating for magazines before becoming the world’s most famous (and in my opinion, best) children’s author and illustrator; and those things are genuinely bad, and do taint his legacy because they change our view of him. But Dr. Seuss’s books are an absolute wonder, and a gift to children as well as to the world. It is not worth losing all of Seuss in order to send a message about people being racist in the 1940s. Similarly, while Mahatma Gandhi was a terrible husband and father, the incredible influence he had on the world should not be thrown aside in order to avoid “promoting” bad behavior by talking about a man who committed such bad behavior. I don’t think simply speaking about a person promotes everything they ever said or did or thought: I think promoting those particular bad works, those bad actions, those bad words, specifically, maybe promotes those negative words and deeds and thoughts — though even then, the context matters, and how you speak of the artist’s work or the politician’s words or the historical figure’s personal life, matters.
As a teacher, I also think that presenting the issues of bias and offensive material in art honestly and fully, with an understanding of the context of the artist and the art, and a clear recognition of both positive and negative impacts of the work, helps to detract from the potential negative influence of art produced by nasty people. H.P. Lovecraft, who created the Cthulhu mythos and the genre of cosmic horror, was a disgusting racist, and you can see that bias in the fact that every one of his protagonists is a white-collar white man, like Lovecraft himself; and frequently in his books, the monstrous demon or god is summoned by a group of non-white people who are frequently described as “sub-human” and shit like that. Again, the author’s bias is clear, and present in his work, and it definitely detracts. But I think if I go in as a teacher of fantasy and science fiction, and choose a story that doesn’t have the same problems (Say, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” in which the evil human minions of the evil god are, in fact, not really human — and not because they are not white [they are white New Englanders, just like Lovecraft and the story’s protagonist], but because they are part fish [And another thing that might help to prevent Lovecraft from negatively influencing my students might be pointing out that while he hated non-white people, he actually hated fish even more, which is why so many of his monsters are subaquatic and have fishy characteristics like scales and tentacles and cold blood and slimy skin. He also hated and feared air conditioners. Just sayin’.]), and in teaching it I bring up and show the negative sides of Lovecraft in a negative light for my students — I think that makes the experience overall positive, and creates a positive influence for my students, even though I’d be talking about and teaching something from a racist.
Image by Matthew Childers: who may or may not be a bad person. Or an eldritch monster. Prints available here.
Which is why I teach To Kill a Mockingbird even though it shows the biases of its author; because despite those biases, there is not another work I know of which attacks the same issues with the same brilliant prose and the same ability to captivate teenagers, even 60 years after it was written. When I find a work which does that but without the problems that come with Harper Lee’s book, I will stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. But I still won’t tell people not to read it or say its author’s name.
The conversation with my student got difficult because he brought up J.K. Rowling, and also Lewis Carroll. (I’m not going to talk about Lewis Carroll here: because although he is another prime example of my argument, that the vile nature of the artist does not necessarily disqualify the full value of the art, the specifics with Carroll are too toxic and taboo to discuss fairly — because Carroll was a pedophile, which we understandably see as literally the worst kind of person. I understand my student’s point that the fact of Carroll’s attraction to the actual Alice, because it is so closely connected to the work, taints the reading experience for him; I respect that, though I don’t agree. Rowling’s example is better for my overall argument, even though her opinion is also vile.) J.K. Rowling is a TERF: a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. She believes that people who have lived their entire lives with the full biological apparatus of a female person, meaning a womb and ovaries and menstruation — and who have, therefore, suffered from living under an oppressive male patriarchy which commits violence against women without hesitation — are more deserving of the name “woman” than someone who is trans. (Read this for the whole story in detail.) There’s no question for me that this bias is terrible and wrong — because trans women are women, and while the experience of cis women and trans women is different and you can certainly discuss those differences, there’s no good reason at all to argue that one or the other is a “better” or “worse” experience, or more “deserving” of anything — and also that it is a strongly-held part of Rowling’s specific worldview; but I don’t believe that it is a bias which is reflected in the Harry Potter books. Gender, and especially transgenderism, are simply not anything that matters particularly in Harry Potter. The work reflects the author’s biases in that there are more male heroes and villains than female heroes and villains; the Headmaster of Hogwarts is apparently always a man, or an evil woman (Dolores Umbridge) who is fanatically loyal to a man despite the man’s incompetence. But there’s just nothing in there about transgenderism, neither positive nor negative. It’s not a factor. The closest I’ve seen to the issue being present in the works is the idea that Rowling’s prejudices make the books, which are about an outsider who faces constant rejection, but eventually finds a place where he belongs, less wonderful for those, such as people who are trans, who found inspiration in them; and I can see that, and sympathize with those who may feel that way about the books — but that is a subjective response, which may certainly make a person discard the books: but it doesn’t mean that everyone should discard the books.
I do not think we should discard the books. I am a fan and lover and teacher and author of fantasy literature: and in the history of fantasy literature, the most influential and significant author is Tolkien — and the second most influential and significant is Rowling. Her opinions are, to me, nasty and unreasonable; but the books are wonderful, and largely untainted by those disgusting opinions. I recognize the desire to refuse to support Rowling by buying her books, or paying to see movies or other content based on her characters, all of which makes her more money — but I have to call bullshit on the value of a boycott of Rowling: she is the richest goddamn woman in Britain, and one of the richest women in the world. No boycott is ever going to touch her. No boycott, therefore, is ever going to change her opinion. Part of the issue here is her pride, her arrogance, in refusing to back down over this argument; she’s decided this is the hill she will die on, and that’s it. So let her die on it: don’t think that you can starve her out. Now, the article I linked above says that her last two books, written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, are much more connected to the issues of transgenderism and social media; though I haven’t read them, I’ll bet those are much more tainted by Rowling’s biases: and so I’m fine with cancelling those.
But not Harry Potter. Not over this.
There have been a number of commentators on the internet, it seems, who have gone back and looked at Rowling’s masterwork in order to find problems with it; but I am going to call bullshit on those, too. My student, in trying to argue that Rowling was too toxic to accept Harry Potter in our culture, said that the books are anti-Semitic, because Rowling created a race of beings who are short, ugly, deformed, big-nosed, cruel, and deceptive, and who run the banks. No: she gave goblins, who have ALWAYS been all of the descriptors I listed, a place in her magical world. Not a good place, granted, but then goblins have always been evil, as well. Reading that as an intentional negative portrayal of Jewish stereotypes is nonsense. I’ll accept it as a biased depiction of goblins, but I don’t see that as much of a concern. (Also, Griphook, while not really good, shows that the goblins have many positive qualities, and are also deserving of dignity and respect and equal treatment by wizards even if we don’t like them. So for a bigoted screed, it sorta doesn’t hold up.) The next shot was at the House Elves, and how Hermione is seen as ridiculous and stupid for standing up for this enslaved race, while all of the other wizards are entirely fine with slavery; this was described (by my student, again, who probably saw a video explaining this issue, but I have not done the research into it and did not ask for more details during the conversation, so it may have a source I am unaware of.) as supportive of or promoting slavery of a specific race. Probably supposedly an apologetic for slavery, though again, I don’t have the primary source for this. This is also nonsense, because Hermione — who is not alone in her objection to the enslavement of house elves; Harry agrees with her and eventually frees and befriends Dobby — is clearly the one in the right here; the plotline about the house elves is a criticism of the wizard world, and all of the wizards who scoff at Hermione are the ones falling in line with their society’s biases rather than engaging with them and questioning them, even when prompted to by Hermione. And those biases are wrong: even if the house-elves enjoy their situation, as many of them do, they are not seen as in the right, they are not benefiting from their slavery, as actual slavery apologists have argued for centuries. Nobody in Harry Potter says that the elves are better off for being enslaved by the wizards. They, the wizards who support slavery (And let’s note that, other than the elves who work for Hogwarts, the only two family house elves we see directly are both owned by evil families, the Malfoys and the Blacks), are the ones being critiqued, just as Voldemort, who is expressly linked to Nazi ideas and paradigms including racial purity and fascist dictatorships, is certainly not putting forward ideas Rowling agrees with, at least not in the books’ depiction of them. Rowling is certainly not promoting the idea that enslaving the house elves is right: Dobby is one of the best characters in the series, and his death one of the saddest moments in the books.
Frankly, he makes all the other characters look bad.
This, for me, shows the problem with the argument for cancelling someone: people have to go looking for reasons to do it. If the argument for discarding someone entirely stands on its own merits — as I would argue that Hitler’s work as an artist can be discarded summarily and entirely — then you don’t have to go making up shit to make them look bad, or to make the books look bad. But in trying to find something new to say, in a world where a million voices are all shouting at once, people find bad reasons to criticize people who are perfectly deserving of honest criticisms, because the honest criticisms don’t make the people look bad enough for the desired conclusion, that nobody should ever again interact with anything those bad people create. (Or because the people who make up criticisms and pile onto someone who has been singled out for attack online want to say something unique and different to promote their own brand. I’m not in favor of that shit, either. Don’t make your name throwing shit at someone else’s.) And they do the same to the art: Harry Potter is certainly male-dominated, and certainly largely monocultural, owing to the cultural experiences and biases of the author; that’s a fair criticism.
But it ain’t anti-semitic. And it’s not transphobic, either.
What Harry Potter is, is one of the most important and wonderful pieces of art created in the last half century, which has spawned other wonderful pieces of art, like the movies. (Not as good as the books, but then, they never are; the Potter movies are still excellent.) And the value of that art, the fact that in my 23 years of teaching English I have never seen books that inspired readers like Harry Potter did and still does, the fact that these books transformed our culture and gave us a dozen touchstones we can all connect to (Muggles! Dumbledore! Hagrid! He Who Must Not Be Named! Expelliarmus! Avada Kedavra! And on and on and on,), shows that the value of the art far outweighs the failures of the artist.
At least in this case.
The last thing I have to say is to speak up for the value of the right to free speech. It’s become such a political football, tossed around to try to score points in the unending nonsense debates that we use as a way to keep from having to actually understand one another and work together, that it’s maybe hard to consider it honestly for what it is: but this is perhaps the most fundamental right that humans have. Because those are our most fundamental abilities. We are social animals; we are rational animals. We therefore have ideas: and we give life to those ideas by expressing them to others who can understand them. By giving life to our own individual ideas, we give life to ourselves: we give ourselves reason to live. While I don’t think that people whose ideas tend towards removing life, or reason, or freedom, from other people, should be allowed to put their ideas into practice, or to express their ideas without rebuttal, I do believe that they must have their right to try to express their awful thoughts protected; or else we will lose our ability to respond to those terrible ideas. And when only one person is speaking, their words become truth: and that’s when you get genocide. Not as a simple “If A, then B” cause and effect; but limiting freedom of thought and freedom of communication does lead pretty directly to oppressive regimes, which are the ones who actually destroy people and their lives. And there is no communication, no speech and expression, more at risk than art: because so much of our society believes we can always do without it. We can always buy a nice poster instead, of a kitten, maybe. We can always read the poem in a Hallmark card, if we can’t read the poem about oppression. People don’t like those troubling art works: and artists are not and have never been good advocates for themselves (ourselves) or for their work. But when we lose the art, the rest of our speech is not far behind: and with the loss of free speech goes everything else we should care about.
Art is precious. Art is what defines us as a species, along with truth. Art that speaks the truth, even if that truth is mixed with lies and false beliefs, is something we desperately need, always, and often. It can’t be separated from the artist, and it shouldn’t be; we should grapple with it, and with the flawed human who created it, even more closely when it can serve as a way to learn how to be better than we are.
That’s the best we can do.
Pablo Picasso was an arrogant, womanizing son of a bitch. Who created Guernica.
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Just Dusty 