Tag satire

Justice

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Once again, I found myself faced with an opportunity to write an essay in response to a student. One of my AP Language students argued against the death penalty. The assignment asks someone in the class to respond with a different perspective, generally but not necessarily in direct opposition to the original argument — so in this case, someone needed to argue for the death penalty, in some way. Now this should not have been a hard one to get: there is a ton of evidence and resources out there on this subject, many of my students are in favor of the death penalty, and as I have told them many times, you don’t have to believe in an argument to present a case for it. But this time, no one volunteered.

So I wrote it.

Here it is.

The death penalty? 

That’s all? Just death? Weak sauce. Pathetic. Unimaginative. I bet you want it to be painless, too. Or, well — apparently painless. Like lethal injection, right? Give them a sedative first, so they don’t show their suffering and you can pretend it’s not cruel or unusual. Right?

Wrong.

That’s not justice.

Justice is giving serial killers what they deserve. We (Because we are the best people) all know what the worst people – the worst people –  in all of human history deserve: they deserve the worst suffering we can impose. Every time I talk about this subject, people have to suggest the most awful punishments they have been able to dream up, often apparently trying for extra style points awarded both for savagery and for originality. This, then, is clearly what we think serial killers deserve: to be the canvas on which we paint our very best, most aesthetic, most barbaric cruelty. 

You know. Justice.

I have heard that we should bring back hanging. Or the guillotine. Or the rack. A very kind-hearted friend of mine said they should be put, naked, into a full suit of metal plate armor, and then sent out to wander in the desert. I’ve heard that we should abandon murderers on a desert island so they can turn cannibal. Or that we should bring back the Colosseum and gladiator combat, or even better, the Hunger Games. A fine idea, I say. Murderers deserve it. They deserve to be raped and murdered and then brought back to life and raped and murdered again. They deserve to be tortured by a specialized cadre of CIA waterboarding experts (I’m confident we have these people working for the US government. We should be proud of that. We should make use of them.), deranged sadists personally descended from Spanish Inquisitors, who also learned from the torturers in the deepest dungeons of every brutal dictatorship in history how to cause the most inconceivable pain. MURDERERS DESERVE TO BE SLOWLY DIPPED INTO BOILING OIL AND THEN BREADED AND CUT INTO PIECES OF KENTUCKY FRIED MURDERER SO WE CAN EAT THEM AND THEN PUKE THEM BACK UP AND THEN RECONSTITUTE THEM AND REBREAD THEM AND REFRY THEM INTO MURDERER NUGGETS SO WE CAN FEED THEM TO OTHER MURDERERS WHO WILL THEN BE EXECUTED BECAUSE YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT AND THAT WAY THE FRIED NUGGET MURDERERS WILL BE EXECUTED AGAIN WHEN THE NUGGET-EATING MURDERERS ARE THEMSELVES DIPPED INTO BOILING OIL.

Because the goal of the justice system is justice. And we know what justice is: it’s vengeance. It’s blood. Rivers of blood pouring down our collective throats, and symphonies of screams, resounding in our collective ears. Slaking our thirst. Thrilling our nerves, raising goosebumps of rapture. We long to be filled with their suffering. We hunger for it. We need it: need to see them die, and to see them wracked with pain before they die, arching their backs until their spines snap, pulling with all their strength at their limbs, until they gnaw off their own hands and feet in a futile attempt to escape the pain that we inflict. We want them to feel it, and we want to see them feel it. And when we watch the spark fade from their eyes, we will laugh and laugh, for we will be righteous, and strong, and we will have won. We will have shown that we are better than them, because we are stronger, and so we don’t have to be afraid of them. They’ll be afraid of us.

That’s why it should be televised. Also performed live in front of a large audience. We should bring our children, and have picnics. That way, not only can we all shiver ecstatically as we watch the blood pour down – the red, red blood, so hot and sticky, so delicious – but also it can serve as a lesson to everyone else who would be a murderer, everyone else who wants to end a human life, everyone who wants to make someone suffer and die, that murder is wrong. The lesson will be clearest when we all cheer as their heads are at last lopped off and the blood inside them geysers out, heated by the boiling oil that they are immersed chest-deep in, a steaming blood fountain of vengeance and joy and savagery.

And justice, of course.

There are some people out there – weak people. Soft people. – who think that justice is “restoring balance.” Not imposing more suffering on a perpetrator in response to the suffering that perpetrator imposed on their victims: that moves us farther away from balance. These people actually think – if you can believe it – that the right thing to do is to reduce suffering: which, while it should definitely include some kind of reparation or restoration for the victims, including when society itself is the victim, will also most likely include some measure of restoration or reparation for the perpetrator: who is, most likely, also a victim of suffering, prior to their crime. Now, it is certainly clear to all of us that the first task of society is to ensure that the imbalance doesn’t continue and worsen, which means the perpetrator must be prevented from committing crimes again; which likely means something like incarceration: but if we consider the case of a drug addict, suffering from the disease of addiction and all of the terrible consequences of that disease, committing a crime, then while incarceration may prevent that addict from committing a crime in the short term, if the addiction is not addressed during that incarceration, then after the criminal’s release, they will almost certainly re-offend. Because the original source of the imbalance – the drug addiction – was not addressed. Address the source of the imbalance, and alleviate suffering on all sides, and not only will crime be actually reduced in the long term, but also, justice will be restored, because balance will be restored; and let’s also be clear that a former offender who has been made whole is very much the most likely to then feel remorse and to try to atone for their crimes, which may help to reduce the suffering and restore the balance for their former victims. 

There are people who think that is the best possible outcome of the criminal justice system, that a mindset of restoring balance and reducing suffering, reducing harm, will lead to a better outcome for all, and only requires a cool head not inflamed with ideas of payback and vengeance and just desserts examining the facts to arrive at this paradigm.

But that’s just ridiculous. That’s no way to show that we are tough on crime. Being tough on crime is the only way to prevent future crime. We know that because it’s always worked in the past. Back when the only penalty for pretty much any crime was death – back in the Middle Ages – there was no crime. It worked perfectly. QED.

Also, that “restoration of balance” stuff is hard. Payback is easy. It’s so much easier to think of someone “guilty” as “someone who deserves punishment.” Right? And there’s nothing wrong with us as regular, fallible, ignorant people deciding what someone deserves. Especially when we decide that someone deserves an irrevocable and terrible punishment. Surely we are qualified to decide that.

Because murderers definitely deserve it. Most murderers on death row are people who committed murder in combination with other crimes, like robbery, because that’s the most common “aggravating factor” to a murder, that it is committed in the process of committing another felony. In fact, 

Historically, the death penalty was widely used for rape, particularly against black defendants with white victims. When the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, the Supreme Court left open the possibility of imposing the death penalty for offenses other than murder, such as rape or even armed robbery…

Many states allow all those who participated in a felony in which a death occurred to be charged with murder and possibly face the death penalty, even though they may not have directly killed anyone. The case of unarmed accomplices in a bank robbery in which an employee is killed is a typical example of felony murder. Since the death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the “worst of the worst” cases, legislatures or the courts could restrict its use only to those who directly participated in killing the victim. Prisoners have also raised claims that the aggravating circumstances that make a crime eligible for the death penalty are too broad, with some state death-penalty laws encompassing nearly all murders, rather than reserving the death penalty for a small subset of murders.

(Death Penalty Information Center, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/crimes-punishable-by-death)

But we don’t talk about those cases: we talk about the famous ones. The most interesting ones, the ones whose crimes we make movies and books and TV shows and podcasts about, the ones we discuss endlessly, the ones who fascinate us: serial killers. Mass murderers. Psychopathic sexual sadists. There’s nothing we love more than examining their crimes in minute detail, looking at graphic photos, where you can see the blood, so you can imagine the screams…

Sorry, I got lost in my fantasies there. Oops — little drool. Excuse me. Where was I?

Anyway, surely the worst people imaginable in all of history – the ones who are portrayed by Zac Efron in Netflix movies (And definitely not cases like the Scottsboro Boys) – deserve to suffer as much as they made their victims suffer. It’s only fair, right? That’s sort of what justice is, isn’t it? Fairness? It sure feels like making the perpetrator suffer exactly what their victims suffered would be “fair.” And sure, the innocent victim of a serial killer experiences something unimaginable, something impossible to recreate (And maybe it’s true that the suffering caused by violent and terrible people should not ever be the model for our own behavior, that to do what they did requires us to be much too much like them); the victims of crime suffer fear and shock and regret, and a serial killer being bludgeoned to death by men wielding spiked clubs soaked in acid as part of a sentence imposed by the courts and carried out legally wouldn’t feel any of those same emotions, often because those serial killers are suffering from some form of psychopathy that limits or eliminates their ability to feel normal human emotions: but forget all that.  Emotions are hard. Hard to understand and hard to create. Pain, we can understand. We can see the pain on their faces. And we can see the blood. And the death. And we can understand the power inherent in watching another person die at our hands. We can experience that. We can enjoy it. We wants it. 

That’s how we get justice on serial killers: by becoming them. 

It’s totally different, of course. The victims of serial killers are innocent, and serial killers are guilty. Which is what makes it okay to make them suffer as much as possible: guilt. We are, of course, entirely confident in our determination of who is guilty and who is innocent. We know that people convicted of capital crimes are guilty. You just know, you know? You can just look at them, and you can see how guilty they are. Especially if there’s a documentary about their crimes. Sure, there have been hundreds of cases of people on Death Row who were innocent, and several executions in the modern era of people who were possibly innocent; and since the death penalty goes back for millennia, back to when humans were little more than animals clubbing each other to death so we could steal their food, there have been countless examples of innocent people killed by a judge and jury; but as long as we don’t talk about those, as long as we talk only about the most extreme, unusual outliers like serial killers, we won’t have to think about abstract ideas like “guilt” and “innocence” in “specific cases.” We can totally trust the justice system, which is in no way “prejudiced” nor “biased,” and never makes “mistakes.” We can just remember that someone who is on Death Row surely deserves the same punishment as the worst people in history: people who have been executed for crimes against the state. 

Like Jesus.

Hey, there’s a thought: crucifixion. 

But anyway, they deserve it because they are guilty. And we are righteous. Plus, this is how you prevent murder. You show everyone that you are the absolute worst murderer that will ever exist. Then you win. And that’s what justice means: winning. Killing them worse than they could ever kill any of us.

That’s what the death penalty is for. 

Justice.

Expectations

Dusty Leave a comment

[With deep gratitude to Judy Brady for her incredible essay, “I Want a Wife,” which was the model for this piece. You can read it here.]

Expectations

I am a part – a cog – in that machinery called education. I am a Teacher. And I am quite fond of some of the individuals whom I teach.

A friend of mine has just earned his Master’s in Education – online of course – and has immediately stepped from his third year as an elementary P.E. teacher into an administrative job with a large suburban high school. The school is respected, well-funded, and effective; so as you would expect, my friend is looking to improve the staff with some new teachers in order to earn his new administrative paycheck. He’s searching for brand new teachers, of course, some of those with fresh energy and inspirational idealism. He has asked me to help him in his search for a brand new teacher, and I am always happy to oblige.

So what are the expected qualifications of this brand new teacher?

The teacher will be required to teach the classes. The teacher will be expected to manage a classroom full of 35 students, students grouped according to their birthday and where they happen to live around the beginning of the school year, students who represent 35 different levels of ability and interest in any given subject. When around 10% of these students will move out of the class partway through the year, and be replaced by a similar number of new students arriving in the middle of units, the teacher will be expected to bring these newcomers up to speed and familiarize them with the new material and the new learning environment. The teacher must do this gently, of course, because new students are under quite a lot of stress. The teacher will be expected to handle between five and eight classes of 35 students apiece, every day (five classes would be if the new teacher is part-time, a decision that will be made at the start of the new school year, or within the first six weeks of instruction); though next year, my friend told me, the school will be moving to an A/B block system: four classes one day and the other four the next day, with all eight on a shifting schedule every ninth class day, the day when the school will occasionally have special schedules for pep assemblies and school-wide activities such as the science fair. The teacher will be required to design something science- or STEM-related for the science fair. And the project will need to correlate to the teacher’s own subject. And also the project must draw new students to the school, so the school can compete with those charter schools. The teacher will also be expected to participate in the pep assemblies, preferably in some sort of costume provided by the teacher and related to the school mascot, the Phalanx. But that’s next year: this year the school has an eight-period day, so the teacher will be obligated to prepare for every class, every school day. Some of the classes will be identical courses, but the student makeup in each case will be radically different, and the teacher will be expected to find a way to keep all of the identical courses on the same pace despite the need to differentiate instruction. The teacher will be expected to reteach subject matter to any classes that didn’t master it, and to give extra enrichment activities to the more advanced students who did achieve mastery. The teacher is expected to make the extra work, both the remedial practice and the advanced enrichment, particularly engaging and rewarding for the students, who will not wish to take on extra assignments on top of the required work. There are three minutes between classes, shortened to ensure maximum instructional time; the teacher will need to avail themselves of that time to give students assistance if they fall behind the rigorous pace. The teacher will, of course, be expected to teach bell to bell. Before the beginning of each class, the teacher will be expected to be standing outside their classroom, with a pleasant but formal demeanor, and to personally greet every student as they come into the classroom. The teacher will of course have to make sure they don’t drink too much fluid, as they won’t have a chance to go to the bathroom until lunch at the earliest. Fortunately, lunch is only four hours after school starts. Unless the new teacher is given an early morning class before the regular start time. The teacher will also be expected to spend the lunch period supervising a public area to make sure students are not littering nor using inappropriate language or touching; the teacher can use the between-class intervals for attending to personal needs.

The teacher will be expected to know the content. The teacher will be required to answer all questions correctly and completely, while also encouraging students to do further research on their own, and to offer the students an organized and vetted list of appropriate resources the students could use to find their own information. The teacher will be expected to stay current with the newest developments in the subject, to attend professional development trainings in their free time, to learn the latest methods and strategies, which the teacher will be expected to incorporate into their lesson plans. All lesson plans must be filed with the administration at the beginning of each quarter, and any last-minute modifications must be approved by administration at least one week before they are implemented. The teacher will be mandated to be open to suggestions from administrators, and to be eager to benefit from administrators’ cutting-edge pedagogical training. The teacher is expected to know how their subject matter connects to other areas of instruction and other subjects, and be able to coordinate thematically with other classes. The teacher will be required to control the pace of instruction to match that of other subjects so that no student falls behind and has to suffer through overwork in order to catch up.

In terms of the students’ work, the teacher will be expected to assess baseline abilities, to place students along a continuum, and to develop individual learning plans for each student so that they can receive optimum instruction for their ability level. The teacher will be obligated to provide easily-read charts and graphs of all student progress, both in aggregate for conferencing with administration and for each individual student for parent conferences. Where appropriate, the teacher will be required to coordinate student learning plans with the Exceptional Student Services department; all ESS clients’ learning plans must adhere to all applicable laws and policies, and must receive approval from the ESS department and the parents of the ESS students. The teacher will be expected to issue surveys and to conduct ice-breaking, team-building, trust-fostering, and getting-to-know-you activities, so that the teacher can assess the students’ interests, their cultural backgrounds and biases, their maturity level, and their relative mastery of the curriculum so that the teacher can find  materials that the students will find engaging, but which will neither be offensive nor beyond their current developmental stage or ability level. Once all of the students are assessed and plotted, the teacher will be able to start differentiating instruction in earnest, in order to personalize each student’s learning for maximum improvement, ensuring at all times that all instruction is drawn from the district-approved curriculum and adheres to research-based best practices.

Most importantly, the teacher will be expected to communicate with parents, both about grades and about interesting and important upcoming events. The teacher will need to plan interesting and important upcoming events so that parents can be informed about them. The communication should be professional, such as (but not limited to) a desktop-published newsletter or a website that offers updates through social media interaction. The teacher should note that district computers are not to be used for social media access. The teacher will be expected to encourage parent participation: invite them into the classroom, to help supervise the class (Though of course the parent volunteer cannot provide the instruction, not being a licensed teacher; the teacher will be obligated to make sure the parent volunteers have security clearance, have their fingerprints and background checked by the FBI and ensure the parent volunteers have had a TB test and proof of a recent MMR innoculation); the teacher will be asked to recognize that having a few extra adults to help supervise activities can be very beneficial for students, even high school students, as well as a great help to the teacher. The teacher will be expected to plan class activities which the parents as well as the students will find interesting and educational. The teacher will be required to provide the parent volunteers with an outline, an observation rubric, and a teacher script so they can follow along with the teacher through the lesson, and help observe and chart the students’ responses, especially that of their own child, so the parents can be involved in their child’s ongoing assessment. The parents probably won’t know all of the students in their child’s class, but the teacher will be able to make a printout of the seating chart with student ID photos with only seven or eight steps through the online attendance database. The teacher will be mandated to ensure that the volunteers aren’t given too much information about the students, and to collect the seating charts at the end of the day, so as not to violate confidentiality. The teacher will be expected to make valuable use of the parent volunteers.

The teacher will be expected to prepare students for their futures, to ready them for college, or for the workforce – though of course the school prefers that all students attend college, as that is one of the administration’s own evaluation criteria. The teacher will also, therefore, be expected to make sure students graduate, even if that means simplifying the material and curving their grades; that way they can also participate in sports and extracurricular activities, which are important because they inspire students to work harder in school. Those activities do tend to take time away from school work; but the parents prefer that teachers not assign too much homework anyway, as that causes the students stress. This means that the teacher will be required to arrange to give the student-athletes all of their work during the regular class period, so that academic progress can be maintained without impinging on extracurricular studies; this is a splendid opportunity for the teacher to differentiate instruction. The teacher will also be expected to adjust grades as necessary to maintain athletic eligibility for our top performers.

The teacher will be obligated to sacrifice, voluntarily, for the children. The school has limited resources, and everything must be focused, unalterably, on the children. The teacher will be asked to give up money, time, healthcare, benefits, retirement, tenure, and all aspects of an individual and satisfying future, for the children. The teacher will be required to agree that they did not get into this to get rich, that they teach because they want to make a difference. The teacher will be paid commensurately with their willingness to sacrifice for the children, though regardless of level of sacrifice, the compensation will not be enough. The teacher is expected to have expected this.

In the unlikely event, which has recently grown significantly more likely, of a school shooting, the teacher will be expected to carry a firearm (Firearm, a state-approved method of securing the firearm until needed, and sufficient training in its use to be provided by the teacher) and to end the threat to the children. The teacher will be required to be aware that the school shooter is likely to be one of their current or former students, and the teacher must not hesitate to pull the trigger and put the shooter down. Though of course, the teacher will be obligated to not do anything to put innocent lives in greater danger. If the teacher is troubled by this turn of events, the teacher should consider whether the teacher could have done more to prevent the crisis before it reached this danger point. Perhaps the teacher should have paid more attention, and done more to build trust. And also reported any suspicions they might have of students to the administration, so the school can follow up with law enforcement. If only the teacher had paid more attention. And if the teacher is unwilling or unable to use a firearm to defend the students, the teacher will be expected to shield the children with their own body, and die. For the children.

This is what is expected of this brand new teacher. The question is: who the hell would want the job?

Spring Break Book Review #5 (With bonus rant!): Anthem

Dusty 1 Comment

Image result for ayn rand anthem book cover

Anthem

by Ayn Rand

This one was interesting for me. Politically, at least, which is probably the only way that Ayn Rand can be interesting to most of us. I read The Fountainhead in high school, on my (overly intellectual) brother’s recommendation; I didn’t think a whole lot of it. That was it for me and Ayn Rand, other than seeing her name and ideas associated with various smug libertarians; I didn’t think a whole lot of them, either. But recently, I’ve been involved in more serious political discussions with a fellow who has opened my eyes in several ways (Though honestly, I don’t think a whole lot of him, any more), and he has recommended Ayn Rand as the philosopher, and her Objectivism as the philosophy, for the future of this country. And so I plan to re-read The Fountainhead, and add in Atlas Shrugged, and see if I want to go forward from there. And while I was cleaning out my classroom bookshelves, I came across a copy of Anthem, which, like Willa Cather’s O! Pioneers, I have seen taught to high school lit classes in the past, though I’ve never taught it or read it myself. But heck, I’m going to be reading Ayn Rand quite a bit, soon; and this one’s short, so let’s give it a try.

Okay, Ms. Rand. I get it. The perfect man, perfect in all ways – tall, strong, handsome, ever so Aryan, dominant and masterful, intelligent, courageous, and perfectly logical and rational – exists purely out of nature, regardless of upbringing or environment. In a dystopian future, a society degraded and debased by the horrors of COLLECTIVISM, there is no hope for the ennoblement of humanity: until a noble man is born. Once born, he cannot be restrained: he will discover his own perfection, he will stand up to the forces of evil and oppression; he will choose his mate – who will, of course, offer herself up in perfect submissive surrender to the perfect man’s perfectness, because who could resist that perfect man? – and then he will forge on into the wilderness and the chaos and conquer all that lays before him. This is his destiny.

That’s the book.

I’m being a tad too critical, however, so let me pull back. Anthem is the story of a future dystopia where everyone lives for the common will of mankind, and individuality in any form is forbidden and savagely squashed. One man is born different, and he struggles against what he is taught: that there is no truth other than what the collective holds to be true; that there is no good other than what the collective holds to be good; that the purpose of his life is to serve his brothers in all things. In his rebellion, he discovers first that there is a better way to live, one found through his own individual efforts, his own individual genius; he discovers an ancient subway tunnel, and in it he performs experiments on the forgotten relics of our own time, buried and intentionally suppressed as not for the benefit of the collective, who do not want life to be easy, as it is the purpose of man’s life to toil in service of his brethren. The individual man re-discovers electricity – because he’s a genius – and tries, in the most noble and altruistic way, to share his discovery with the collective so that life can be improved for his brethren. And he is mocked, and shunned, and driven out for his crime, for discovering things that are not known to all of the collective – and so therefore, they cannot be true.

I see the point here, I do; and it is worth thinking about. Much of our society relies on shared ideals, on shared standards of truth and goodness; we still believe things because “Everybody knows it’s true.” We do think that what is good for all is good for one, and that a person who lives purely for himself is selfish, and therefore sinful and bad and wrong. We don’t believe it to the extent portrayed in this book, but that’s the point of dystopian satire: to take our flaws and magnify them in order to draw attention to them now, before they reach that terrible future point. And living purely for a collective, which destroyed Ayn Rand’s native Russia under Stalin and the communists, can surely become a great evil. I get that. I do. I see where we should keep this in mind when we attack each other for not holding to the orthodox view: the need for liberal orthodoxy leads to the movement against GMOs, which almost certainly hold no harm in and of themselves; and from there it’s a short step to the anti-vaccination movement, which has taken the distrust of Western medicine and pharmaceutical corporations to such an extreme that now it has become a hazard to the health of us all. And we liberals, with our elitist snobbery and disdain for those who are “ignorant,” as we call them – mainly those who hold other views (and not, ironically, we liberals ourselves, even in those areas where we cannot explain our positions but merely cling to them because they are the orthodox dogma, despite our own ignorance) – we are to blame for this sort of thing, to the extent it is really happening. Ray Bradbury makes a similar point in Fahrenheit 451 when he points out that the desire to remove any and all offensive material leads to the destruction of all literature and art and creative thought; another slippery slope that liberals tend to ride down in our worst moments.

And all that’s fine: but this book is not. The warning is somewhat valid, but the solution offered, the belief that one single epic hero-man-god – Harrison Bergeron, if you will – can solve all problems through his own heroic efforts, is disproved by the story itself, no less than is the pure goodness of life for the collective. This dude doesn’t save the world by himself; he re-discovers what other men already knew, using their artifacts. He doesn’t run off into the wilderness by himself; he takes a mate with him, and even though he says the only happiness he has found is what he has discovered by himself, the most happy moment in the book is when he first kisses that woman he rescues – or rather, that woman who rescues herself, as she leaves the collective and tracks him down in the wilderness. And then she submits herself entirely to his will: and while he chooses a manly individual name for himself, he then gives a name to her – and it’s a name that keeps her in a subservient position, valuable only as breeding stock for the continuation of his manly genes, as he becomes Prometheus, the Fire-Bringer, and she is – Gaea. The Mother. Of the sons (not daughters) he plans to raise to be manly men just like him. And he doesn’t forge a new life with the strength of his own arms; he discovers a house built by other men, and books written by other men. And once he has built himself a mighty army of like-minded individualists, what does he plan to do? Go back into the collective society and save those of his brethren he happens to like and wish to help.

So the idea that a single man acting alone is the only source of all good things? Nope. The idea that happiness can only come from individual action, without reliance on other people? Still nope. The idea that every man must live only for himself, that no man should impose his will on another, that violence can only be used in self-defense? Nope: he uses his will to suppress the will of his Gaea, and intends to commit violence against the collective in the name of his fellow men.

In terms of the writing, meh. She had the clever idea to write the story in the first person, but without the singular, because the collective has eliminated the concept of “I,” allowing only “we.” Watching the narrative then twist itself into knots trying to describe single individuals while only calling those individuals by “we” or “they,” that was pretty interesting. Did a better job than the actual plot of showing how vital is the individual human ego. And I believe the individual is vital: but not because Ayn Rand convinced me of it.

I realize this is only a novella, and not one of Rand’s key works; but so far, all I can see is that her philosophy is self-defeating – though certainly attractive, in that if I follow her advice and refuse to allow my individual energy and accomplishment to be taken from me for the good of others, then I get to see myself as one of these perfect epic heroes who understand the truth, that only egotism is right and good. But apart from appealing to the selfish, so far it seems like a whole lot of hooey.

Didn’t like the book, would not recommend.

I’m With Stupid

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How I Became Stupid

by Martin Page

 

It’s a philosophical book, a “stinging satire,” a “modern Candide.”

Yeah, it’s okay.

I like the concept: Antoine, a 25-year-old Aramaic scholar living in Paris, realizes that the reason why he isn’t happy is because he is too smart. His intelligence prevents him from ignoring the problems and flaws in society today, keeps him from doing the things that bring pleasure because he thinks too much about the costs and implications and consequences, and of course ostracizes him from the general run of society, who can’t deal with him and can’t relate to him, just as he can’t connect to them. So he decides an unhappy life isn’t worth living, and so he will find a way to fix it.

His first plan is to become an alcoholic. There’s a great scene when Antoine goes to a bar and discusses the possibility with a drunkard he finds there, who eventually agrees to become his guru of alcoholism. But it doesn’t work. (I’ll avoid the spoiler and just let you read the book to find out why.)

Next, he decides to commit suicide. He joins a society that helps people to do it – it has a new instructor, as the last guy just recently succeeded in putting his theories into practice; he gets a warm round of applause from the newbie and all of the membership – but after sitting through a session on the reasons for and the best means of offing one’s self, he decides he can’t go through with it.

So Antoine decides to become stupid. He quits his job as a translator of and sometime lecturer on obscure ancient texts; gives away all of his books; alienates his intelligent friends; and becomes – a stockbroker. He starts taking antidepressants, makes a ton of money, buys himself a sports car he can’t drive, the whole bit.

That’s where the real satire comes in, though there are certainly elements of it before then. The indictment of the “normal” life and goals of the average man is pretty devastating, leaving none of the common accepted goals unskewered. Page mocks dating, employment, wealth, housing, fashion, fame – all of it.

But I guess my problem with the book was, none of those things are me. I don’t want oodles of money and a sports car; I don’t want to take anti-depressants or drink a whole lot of liquor; I don’t want to date hot women who are after my wallet. (I have a hot wife who likes my eyes and my smile and my sense of humor.) I thought Antoine’s original life sounded pretty dang good, other than the fact that he just won’t quit worrying about it. And since that does apply to me, I got that moral right away. But I kind of already knew that, so I suppose the book wasn’t really a revelation for me. I think it probably could be for some people, and since for me it was certainly a quick and easy read, with some truly interesting pieces – his friends, for instance, were great, and there was one that I took as a genuine warning that I should give up one of my worse habits, that of questioning and criticizing everything around me, including my friends; I also really enjoyed the ending, though I thought it was a little abrupt – I think it’s worth checking out. At worst, it will be fun; at best it really might be inspiring.