Tag truth

The Trump Doctrine: Bullshit, and Fling Shit

Dusty Leave a comment

Okay. Let’s talk. Honestly. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

The truth.

I’m trying to get my Freshman English students to do that. To talk honestly. They don’t – ever – but I think it’s mostly because they don’t know how.

See, what we have done in education over the last ten or twenty years is reward lying. Reward cheating. To a certain extent that is not new: I lied constantly when I was a teenager, especially to my teachers and my parents, and I would guess that most teenagers had similar experiences. And for the same reason: schools reward lying and cheating. For as long as schools have been product-focused, rather than process-focused, we have given students an opportunity to achieve all the rewards of school (All the apparent ones, at least) without doing the difficult parts. My grade in my classes was based on the work I turned in: which means that if I can find a way to cheat on those assignments, then I get the exact same grade I would if I did the work myself, the hard way. And sure, we also try to stop students from choosing to cheat, through threats of dire consequences if they get caught; but that “if” in what I just wrote is a humming, glowing, throbbing beacon of glorious light. Because teenagers are dumb: we think that we can get away with anything, even while we are actively not getting away with it. The very first time I caught students cheating – and they were cheating on a small, simple, easy assignment, a set of study questions that came after a reading, which they did with the reading in hand, in class – I realized while I was reading their responses that three young women, all friends, had given identical, word-for-word answers. They had copied. And the giveaway was they had used the word “oasis” completely out of context – something like “and the oasis of the story was the courage the characters had.” One of them – the one who had done the work and given it to the other two, the source student – had written “basis,” in cursive, and the other two had misread it. So I gave them all zeroes for copying, two for doing it and one for letting them, and when I handed the work back, I told them they had gotten zeroes. But instead of confessing, they argued with me. Vociferously. Angrily. Denying that they had ever done such a thing. I hadn’t handed back their papers, choosing to keep them as evidence, and just informed them of their grades; when they demanded I show them the evidence, I realized I had left the papers in my other classroom (Like many first-year teachers, I got the crappiest job assignment, so I floated between three different classrooms and taught two different remedial classes), and they insisted on coming with me to see the evidence; they yelled at me the whole way across campus, about how dare I accuse them, and they would never do that, and it was not fair, and so on. We got to my other classroom, I showed them their papers, pointed at where they wrote “oasis” and said, “Explain that.”

And they actually tried. They tried to come up with some bullshit on the spot about how “oasis” was meant to represent the safe space that had been created in the story by the characters… the girl who was talking trailed off in the middle of the sentence. I just shook my head and said, “No.” And they left. Grumbling. Still denying that they had done what they couldn’t actually prove that they hadn’t done – because they had done it.

But what happened? The student who had done the work had her mother complain to the administration, and I had a meeting with one of the vice principals and this mother. Who told us that her daughter was under a lot of stress, and after all, she had done the work, and then had made the poor choice to let her friends copy because they all just wanted so badly to do well. That’s not really bad, is it?? So, as per the decision my administrator made, that girl got the grade. The other two had a chance to make up the work and get a grade. They got a warning.

A few days later, one of the boys in the class told me that he had actually let the first girl, the source girl – the one who got the grade – copy his work.

So. This is the structure we have built for students. Cheating is overlooked; copying is standard; getting “help” with the answers is encouraged. Because the product is what matters, not the process by which you create that product. (It’s the perfect conceptual framework for a life cut short by working yourself to death in order to get the company more profit. But surely that’s just a coincidence…) And onto that structure we have added the internet, with all of its access to perfect information and perfect writing; and now AI, the same perfect information and perfect writing, but now both customizable – and untraceable. And we still grade students on product, not process. We still assign homework, so they can complete the assignments in privacy, without supervision, with full access to resources like AI and Google. We use the same assignments year after year, so students can pass on work they did to the next year’s class. And we tell them that what really matters in school is getting good grades, so you can get into good college, so you can have a good job and make money. Oh, we tell them they need to learn, they need to master the skills; but that’s just talking. Every single reward in school is derived directly from product. (With the exceptions of PE, the arts [which sometimes reward product, but not always – my wife’s Life Drawing class is graded only on process, her AP Art class graded largely on process… though in that last case that’s because if she graded their art work as she would grade a college student’s work, they’d all fail. She has high standards. And we don’t work at an art school.] and a few classes like foreign language, where students are graded on their conversation and pronunciation and so on: performance metrics.) And almost every product can be completed with some kind of corrupting assistance, whether it is copying from a friend, getting help from a family member, or using the online resources they have available. Even just using the excuse of “Oh no, my paper didn’t upload!” to get extra time to complete it and turn it in, with permission, a second time. Because after all, I can’t blame a student if the WiFi went down, right?

Right.

So I’m trying to get my freshmen to think about lying, and whether it is good or bad. They all, without exception, think it is good in the right circumstances, which are always two: to spare someone’s feelings – the classic “Do I look good in this outfit?” conundrum – and to save yourself from getting in trouble. They do usually offer a third circumstance: when someone threatens to kill you if you don’t tell them something, like where you hid the money, then it is acceptable to lie to save your life. Thank you for including that hypothetical, children; surely an important one. But it’s that middle one, the lying-to-get-out-of-trouble, that I want them to think about. Actually, the first one, too, because I gave them the counterargument: if you tell someone they look great when they look terrible, then you’re telling that person to walk around proudly, while they look terrible, and don’t know it. They didn’t have an answer to that. They’re not ready to admit what I think is the answer, that honesty really is the best policy, and the key to getting along is knowing how to speak truth without being harsh and insulting – you don’t have to say “Damn, you look terrible!” when someone looks terrible in an outfit, but you should not lie and say they look perfect when they look terrible – and the key to not getting in trouble is… not doing things you shouldn’t do. I don’t think they’ll all come over to my side, but I want them to think about it, because they lie to me constantly, and I’m sick of it.

But then, last night, I watched our President stand up in front of Congress, his words broadcast to the whole world, and tell lie after lie after lie. After lie. After lie. For ninety minutes. And the whole time, without exception, the Republican majority clapped and cheered for his lies. The two grinning dolts behind him, Mike Johnson and J.D. Vance, grinned and laughed – because Donald Trump didn’t just lie, he was also needlessly, gleefully cruel, and appallingly stupid, again and again and again, and clearly that stupid cruelty was even more popular than his lies. Because the cruelty won’t even get the apathetic next day fact-checking that his bullshit has gotten today; the cruelty we just let go, maybe frowning a little at how our President doesn’t show the same decorum we enjoyed so much from President Obama (When he wasn’t bombing people in the Middle East or deporting families from the US), who was always polite and well-spoken and never overtly cruel and bullying like this guy, with his goddamn shit-eating grin when he tells some joke about innocent people he’s going to harm, because it will save money, or because it will win him points with his equally cruel, stupid, bullying base. But he won’t have to suffer any consequences for his lies or his stupidity or his cruelty; he did all the same things last time, and we elected him again. Because eggs were too expensive.

(Please understand – and know that I am in the middle of writing a piece about that, about grocery prices and inflation and Trump’s broken promises regarding the issue, but I had to address this absolute horror show of a “speech” – that I recognize the genuine damage and stress that inflation and high prices inflict on those of us who are on the edge of not having enough. I am a high school teacher: I can’t afford eggs. I am also a partial vegetarian: eggs are one of my primary sources of protein. So I get it. I only mock the idea of egg prices as a reason to vote for Trump because even if we do see that as a valid reason to elect a president – and I will argue all day that presidents just don’t have that much control over prices in our system – it ignores SO MANY other things about Donald Trump. I get the need for relief from the cost of living: but that’s not the only thing that matters. That’s why I say it. If you disagree with me about the right priorities to focus on for a vote, then so be it. We’ll discuss this more another time.)

For now, let’s start with talking about what Donald Trump lied about last night in his address. This is easy to find, of course – here’s a good source FactChecking Trump’s Address to Congress – FactCheck.org, that gives a clear list followed by more careful analysis – but while they do include some of the things that sometimes slip past fact checkers, like that Trump ignored the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on creating the economic situation that the Biden administration dealt with, they focused on the specific lies Trump told in the speech: and that means they don’t talk about the lies he has used as the justifications for his actions thus far, which he then discussed in the speech. And that’s where I want to focus.

But let me also list out, if you are not interested in following the link – if you believe, as many people do, that fact checkers are unreliable, that only independent media sources are believable, which means you have not thought a whole heck of a lot about why “independent” is more important than “part of an organization whose business model relies on truthful reporting rather than garnering attention” – some of the more egregious falsehoods that Trump spouted.

First, the savings he and Elon Musk have found through the “work” of “DOGE.” They have not found hundreds of billions in waste: they have “saved” about $20 billion, claimed $105 billion, and proved that exactly none of it was savings from eliminating fraud. It’s all “savings” from firing employees. Which, sure, that saves money – but it also eliminates work and productivity. If you have three people working for you and you fire one, you save one-third of your payroll costs – AND YOU LOSE ONE-THIRD OF YOUR PRODUCTION. Seems like this would be already known by two guys who run such huge and successful companies, but maybe not. They do both seem to believe that they personally do the work which is actually done by their employees, so, maybe they’re unclear on the concept.

Or maybe the only fraud here is the one being perpetrated by Trump and Musk and DOGE.

Kabosu, Dog Behind Famous 'Doge' Meme, Dead at 18

Next: Social Security. Trump went on and on and on about the MILLIONS of people who Social Security “believes” are over a hundred years old, including some that he said were older than the United States. So let’s be clear on this: when we say that “Social Security” “believes” these people are impossibly old… who are we talking about? Is Social Security the name of the person in charge of the organization? Is it the hive mind of all the bureaucrats who work there? Is it the AI who runs the database? Is Social Security here in the room with us now?

No: social security is the much-beloved system whereby we ensure that senior citizens don’t have to starve to death in shantytowns after they stop working. And it is also the biggest “entitlement” in the Federal budget: and therefore it is the one the Republicans most want to cut. But since so many of their voters are senior citizens, they can’t cut it without facing the wrath of their voters: so they try to turn their voters against social security. By talking about it like it’s the Avatar of bureaucrats, and that it’s stupid enough to “believe” that there are impossibly ancient people still getting social security checks.

Here’s the truth: the social security database is enormous. Tens of millions of people receive checks every month; hundreds of millions of people make payments into the fund for those checks every month. When people pass away, there is a form that one’s survivors are supposed to fill out and file with SS to let them know that someone on the roll has passed and no longer need checks. But: people don’t consider that to be an important job, especially while grieving, so they don’t always do it. Also lots of people don’t have loved ones to file the form. I would guess millions of people, over the years. The ancient people in the database are not people that Social Security “believes” are alive, they are people who were on the rolls as alive, and who have never been confirmed to be dead. See the difference?

Trump doesn’t. Well: he does, he just lied about it, and pretended these two different things are the same. They’re not. If you want to see this as a moment when Trump is monumentally stupid instead of a liar, I’m fine with that. And yes, it’s monumentally stupid: if someone told me there were people on the SS database who were over 120 years old, I would assume there was a mistake in the data, not that Social Security “believed” there were Americans living over 120 years old. Especially not the millions whom Trump gobbled about.

And while thousands of those people – thousands out of the millions, which is fractions of a percentage point – may still get checks, and some of them get checks because living people are using the name of a dead person to collect social security (Frank Gallagher does this with his dead mother in Shameless.), which is fraud, the rest of the millions of unconfirmed-dead people on the roll are just – on the roll. In the database. They don’t get checks. Money is not wasted on them, and it would not be saved by cleaning up the database. Of course cleaning up the database would be a good idea, but how many man-hours would it take to confirm that millions of people are actually dead? And if you decide to remove everyone who is over, say, 100 years old, there will be at least 80,000 people who will want to have a word with you.

Centenarian, older adult population change by state | Northwell Health

Several of Trump’s other lies were of a less serious nature: claiming that 38,000 Americans were killed during the construction of the Panama Canal (5,600 workers died during construction, mostly from diseases like malaria and yellow fever. Not all of them were American. Special Wonders of the Canal – PMC), that Biden inherited a great economy and Trump inherited a terrible one twice, that Europe has given less than the US to the Ukraine and that the US has given $350 billion – these are just bad facts; they’re definitely lies, but they are small, because none of them change people’s minds, and none of them serve as the primary justification for Trump’s bad policies: he wants to take us to war over the Canal because China has an influence there, not because some number of Americans died during construction; he constantly lies about his accomplishments and, especially last night, about Biden’s failures, but that doesn’t change anyone’s opinion about either man; Trump is going to give as much of the Ukraine to Russia as he can, because he wants to be allies with Putin, not because of how much Ukraine costs to defend. And he doesn’t want to be allies with Putin to save money, it is to make himself into a strongman, in appearance if not in fact. (Though I have to note here that when I said last night that Trump wanted to be Putin, my wife’s immediate response was “Trump will never look that good with his shirt off.” Savage, she is. But: she ain’t lyin’.)

But the lies I really want to get to with Trump’s speech are the ones about people who are disenfranchised in this country. Such as people who are described, by that shit-flinging gibbon and his handlers, as representatives of DEI: like General C.Q. Brown, whom Trump fired from his position as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and whose fucking resume looks like this:

EDUCATION
1984 Bachelor of Science, Civil Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock
1991 U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons School, Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
1992 Squadron Officer School, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
1994 Master of Aeronautical Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Fla.
1997 Distinguished graduate, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2000 Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2004 National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va.
2008 Air Force Senior Leadership Course, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, N.C.
2012 Joint Force Air Component Commander Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2014 Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
2015 Pinnacle Course, National Defense University, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C.
2017 Leadership at the Peak, Center for Creative Leadership, Colorado Springs, Colo.

ASSIGNMENTS
1. May 1985 – April 1986, Student, undergraduate Pilot training, 82nd Student Squadron, Williams Air Force Base, Ariz.
2. May 1986 – July 1986, Student, lead-in fighter training, 434th Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, Holloman AFB, N.M.
3. August 1986 – March 1987, Student, F-16 training, 62nd Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, MacDill AFB, Fla.
4. April 1987 – October 1988, F-16 Pilot, 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Kunsan Air Base, South Korea
5. November 1988 – April 1991, F-16 Instructor Pilot, wing electronic combat officer, and wing standardization and evaluation flight examiner, 307th and 308th Tactical Fighter Squadrons, Homestead AFB, Fla.
6. April 1991 – August 1991, Student, U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons Instructor Course, Nellis AFB, Nev.
7. August 1991 – August 1992, F-16 Squadron Weapons Officer and Flight Commander, 307th Fighter Squadron, Homestead AFB, Fla.
8. September 1992 – October 1994, Weapons School Instructor, and standardization and evaluation flight examiner, F-16 Division, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, Nellis AFB, Nev.
9. October 1994 – July 1996, Aide-de-Camp to the Chief of Staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va.
10. August 1996 – June 1997, Student, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala.
11. June 1997 – September 1997, Student, Armed Forces Staff College, National Defense University, Norfolk, Va.
12. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla.
13. November 1999 – June 2003, F-16CJ Instructor Pilot and assistant operations officer, 79th Fighter Squadron; Weapons and Training Flight Commander, 20th Operations Support Squadron; Operations Officer, 55th Fighter Squadron; and Commander, 78th Fighter Squadron, Shaw AFB, S.C.
14. July 2003 – June 2004, National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va.
15. June 2004 – June 2005, Deputy Chief, Program Integration Division, Directorate of Programs, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va.
16. July 2005 – May 2007, Commandant, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, 57th Wing, Nellis AFB, Nev.
17. May 2007 – May 2008, Commander, 8th Fighter Wing, Kunsan AB, South Korea
18. June 2008 – May 2009, Director, Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff Executive Action Group, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va.
19. June 2009 – April 2011, Commander, 31st Fighter Wing, Aviano AB, Italy
20. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla.
21. April 2013 – February 2014, Deputy Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command; Deputy, Combined Force Air Component Commander, U.S. Central Command, Southwest Asia
22. March 2014 – June 2015, Director, Operations, Strategic Deterrence, and Nuclear Integration, Headquarters U.S. Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa, Ramstein AB, Germany
23. June 2015 – July 2016, Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command, Air Combat Command, Southwest Asia
24. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla.
25. July 2018 – July 2020, Commander, Pacific Air Forces; Air Component Commander for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; and Executive Director, Pacific Air Combat Operations Staff, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii
26. August 2020 – September 2023, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, the Pentagon, Arlington, Va.
27. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

SUMMARY OF JOINT ASSIGNMENTS
1. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a major
2. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a brigadier general
3. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a lieutenant general
4. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

FLIGHT INFORMATION
Rating: command pilot
Flight hours: more than 3,100 including 130 combat hours
Aircraft flown: F-16A/B/C/D and 20 additional fixed and rotary-wing aircraft

MAJOR AWARDS AND DECORATIONS
Defense Distinguished Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters
Distinguished Service Medal
Defense Superior Service Medal
Legion of Merit with three oak leaf clusters
Bronze Star Medal
Defense Meritorious Service Medal
Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters
Aerial Achievement Medal
Joint Service Commendation Medal
Air and Space Commendation Medal with two oak leaf clusters
Combat Readiness Medal
National Defense Service Medal with bronze star
Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal
Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal
Global War on Terrorism Service Medal
Korea Defense Service Medal
Nuclear Deterrence Operations Service Medal
NATO Medal
Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Tongil Medal)
Republic of Singapore Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Tentera) Meritorious Service Medal
Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Samil Medal)
Brazilian Order of Aeronautical Merit (Degree of Grand Officer)

PUBLICATIONS
“Developing Doctrine for the Future Joint Force: Creating Synergy and Minimizing Seams,” Air University Press, September 2005 “No Longer the Outlier: Updating the Air Component Structure” Air University Press, Spring 2016

Yeah. That guy was a DEI hire.

People who are endangered by the anti-vaccine movement that Trump supports and promoted last night – which is all of us, but is especially those who can’t work in close proximity to others, for any of a thousand reasons (permanent disability, mental illness, inability to travel, along with being immunocompromised, again for a thousand potential reasons), but who do work, and who who now have to return to work because Trump is a cruel idiot and a liar who claims that “not coming IN to work” is evidence of laziness or fraud. It is not clear to me whether the real goal here is just to fire valuable workers for a reason that Trump’s base can stand behind, so that Trump and Musk can channel the money “saved” from payroll into tax breaks for billionaires, or if it is to undermine the very idea that a person who cannot come into an office can nonetheless, in this day of complete interconnectedness online, still be a productive worker because that idea is, I dunno, woke or some shit. Either way, it is a stupid lie that is cruel to those who need the accommodation of remote work – and also cruel to those who just like it better, because what the hell is wrong with working from home if you can do the work?

Trump is going after people with neurodivergence, in addition to attacking those who need to live in a vaccinated world, by lying about the history of autism diagnoses, in conjunction with his comments about naming the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a post for which he is not only unqualified, but entirely unfit. It is not true that “not long ago” 1 in 10,000 children had autism; it is true that 50 YEARS AGO we did not understand autism nor how to diagnose the entire spectrum of conditions associated with the term. It is also emphatically not true that autism is a disability that would justify removing or changing the vaccine schedule, as Trump was implying. The entire argument that parents would rather risk their children dying of measles than “becoming” autistic because of the MMR vaccine is disgusting, along with being a thoroughly debunked and incredible lie. Even where autism does present as disabling, ask a parent of an autistic child whether they would rather have their child living or dead – and then duck, before they quite rightly punch you in the face. Though I’d be really happy if all of those theoretical punches landed on Elon Musk, and also on whoever suggested that Elon’s Nazi salute was a sign of Musk’s own autism. Remember: “Always Punch Nazis” includes punching those who argue that being autistic explains away Nazism.

But I will admit that, despite all of the terrible and cruel and stupid things that Trump said in that speech, the lies that actually bothered me personally the most were the transphobic ones. Maybe because they got the loudest cheers. Maybe because he seemed proudest of his anti-trans policies like the declaration that there are only two genders in the U.S. – which is both a lie, and a cruel and stupid statement. Or his executive order keeping men from playing women’s sports, which, HOLY GOD THAT I DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN CAN WE STOP? Can we just stop? Can we just agree to never again allow anyone to repeat the absolute and utter nonsense and poppycock that there are “men” playing “women’s” sports? There are women playing women’s sports. Nothing more. And 99.99% of those women are those who were assigned female at birth. And also, this is fucking sports we are talking about. Not something important. Sports are entertainment. They are inconsequential. They don’t matter. They matter plenty to the people who play them, both professionally and passionately, and therefore they are worth consideration for the sake of those people; but the idea that a national policy, as a focus of what is essentially a state of the union address, would make such a deal of opposing the existence of trans people, particularly in relation to sport? What the hell are we doing here?

The answer is simple: we, and by “we” I mean that orange-tinted shit-flinging gibbon and his flying monkeys and most definitely not me, are attacking and belittling and trying to destroy and torment and kill anyone whose destruction would make the stupid, cruel base of the Republican party feel stronger and meaner, which is how they want to feel. Trans people are not the danger, regardless of what nonsense some goddamn volleyball player claims (Want to know how many volleyball players get hurt every year? About 35,000. Volleyball Related Injuries in Adolescents: A Decade of Data | Published in Orthopedic Reviews How many of those injuries were caused by trans athletes? Conversely, how many trans athletes suffer injury and abuse and death because of the way they are objectified and demonized and ostracized and assaulted in every way by the entire Republican establishment of this country? I bet it’s more than the one injury Trump claimed was caused by a trans athlete.)

I don’t know why this one upsets me more than the other loathsome false accusations and attacks that Trump launched at everyone who is morally and ethically and humanistically better than he is himself. But it does. I suppose it doesn’t matter why it bothers me, any more than it matters why the base and the Republicans and the shit-flinging gibbon himself chose trans people to try to destroy: it’s just that they found someone they can harm, and I have found someone – millions of someones – whom I want to help protect from that harm, in whatever way I can assist. I don’t really need to justify which fight I choose to take on: I just need to be aware of who my real target is.

It’s not just Trump. Just like Adolf Hitler, who was a uniquely effective figurehead for the Nazi party and the apparatus that rose during the Third Reich, but neither the brains behind that apparatus nor the one in control of it, Trump himself is not the cause of the problem, he is simply the most visible pimple on the very wide flabby ass of the MAGA movement. It is possible that, after Trump is gone (Hopefully before the end of his term, though personally I’m hoping for impeachment and jail rather than the death that many others think he deserves), JD Vance or one of the other flying monkeys will take over as the chief shit-flinger; and that might even be worse. It’s not even the billionaires who back Trump and who are taking advantage of the distraction he is because of the shit he flings – shit that is flung like no one has ever seen before – because the wealthy have always been there, trying to control things, trying to take advantage of every opportunity to have wealth and power, without being in the spotlight themselves. I know it’s not Elon Musk: there’s a reason why the real power brokers don’t ever do what he is doing, and put themselves out front. It’s because when people get mad enough to pick up the torches and pitchforks – and the more effective Musk is, the sooner that will happen, as it always does when inequality gets too extreme – they look for an obvious target for their anger. We all know who Elon Musk is. Who the hell is Rebekah Mercer?

(Is it wrong of me to point out that, were she to become known to those with torches and pitchforks — or, let’s say, were she to get targeted by the next Luigi Mangione — nobody would miss the ENORMOUS target that is her head?)

Natural History Museum Curators Revolt Against Trustee Rebekah Mercer for Funding Climate Change Deniers | Artnet News
Now we know what Megamind’s mom looked like

What I oppose is what Trump represents and distills. It is stupidity, chosen because it is easier than learning, and more comfortable than truth – because stupidity lies to us, even as we lie to the stupid. It is cruelty, because cruelty, also for the sake of ease and comfort, brings the displaced self-hatred of the stupid crashing down on the innocent; and not only do we then have that many more victims, some of whom will lash out at other disempowered people, but we also have those among the stupid who now cannot face enlightenment because then they would have to admit what they did to people who never deserved anything but the kindness and empathy due every one of our fellow human beings, and so those angry, cruel, stupid people will be even more incapable of changing what they are doing, no matter what truth is put before them and no matter what pleas for mercy they hear and ignore.

The worse we act, the less likely we are to stop acting badly. That’s why Donald Trump is the way he is: because he’s always been this way, he’s just been getting worse, for his entire life. And he’s an old, evil, man, now.

And everything he says is bullshit.

The Truth

Dusty Leave a comment
Me (far right) as a janitor
Me as a high school English teacher. Which one looks happier?

I have been a high school teacher for a very long time. Too long, in some ways, because I have watched education change enough in that time to make me very nearly obsolete, and if you stay in a job until your job doesn’t exist any more, that’s too long. I fear that the day is coming when English teachers will not exist: and possibly the day when teachers will not exist.

I’m here today to try to forestall that day. Not for myself – if I reach a point where I cannot teach, I will move into janitorial work, and be quite happy; probably happier than I have been as a teacher. After 25 years of cleaning up student writing, I would rather clean up public restrooms. It’s less work.

But it’s also less important work. Not unimportant work, it’s incredibly important because janitors keep our world working, and keep it livable – but for me, as someone who works in education, that work is more important. I’m just saying custodial work is a good backup for me. I worked in maintenance for five years before I became a teacher, and I liked it. In some ways more than teaching.

So if I liked being a janitor more, you may be thinking, why am I a teacher? And why do I still like and sometimes love being a teacher, despite the issues in education that I deal with every day?

It’s because I love humanity. I think we are incredible. I believe we have infinite potential for goodness, and infinite capacity for wonder. What we have achieved as a race is miraculous – and also sometimes terrible – and despite our almost limitless ability to dream and imagine, we can’t imagine how many more miracles we can achieve. And, hopefully, how many terrors we can avoid, or even eliminate, in the future.

And the key to that, the key to unlocking our potential and achieving progress and positive growth, and to actually making miracles real, is education.

That’s why I’m a teacher. Because my faith, my zeal, my heartfelt belief, is this: the best thing about all of us is that we are human, and the most important thing one can do is help us all become better humans. That’s what I try to do as a teacher. And that’s why I’m here today, speaking to all of you about school. Because I want to help you all to learn something about which you have been deceived – or at least misled. I don’t think any of you really understand what school is or should be – and what you think it is, what you have been told the purpose of school is? That’s a lie.

The lie is that school is about money. All of you students have been told that the purpose of school, the reason you are here and the reason you should try hard and do all of your work, is because that way you can get into a good college, get a good job, and make good money. You’ve been told that all along – though in elementary school it may not have been stated explicitly; but back then you were certainly told, with absolute sincerity, that the purpose of your schooling was to prepare you for the next step, which would be harder, and would matter more: 2nd grade is meant to get you ready for the rigors of 3rd grade, 3rd grade gets you ready for 4th; all of elementary school is preparation for middle school, which is preparation for high school. And all the way along, more often the farther you get in your thirteen years of compulsory schooling, you have been told that the goal of high school is to get you ready to go to college. So that you can get a degree, so you can get a good job, so you can make good money. And since schools also tell you that the next stage is always more important than the current one – “When you get to high school, things get serious, that’s when grades really matter” – the clear implication is that the final goal is the one that really, really matters: college, degree, money. Did you absorb the message in 2nd grade that everything then was intended to prepare you for college and a job and good money? Maybe not, but the cumulative effect of all of this is the same: the goal of school is – money.

Teachers, and especially administrators, you have said this. You have said it to all of your students, probably with certainty, certainly with absolute sincerity. All of you have lied. All of you have misled all of your students. Don’t feel bad: it’s what you were taught, what you were told, what the whole apparatus and engine of the educational system forced on you. So you didn’t know, you couldn’t even think, that it might be a lie. This is some of the power of education: it can influence our beliefs, and therefore our behavior, in pernicious ways as well as positive ones. As always, the pernicious influence is easier. The idea that school is intended to help students make more money is a pernicious lie, and I need to convince you to stop saying it, to stop thinking it.

Don’t take this as a personal attack, either, teachers: I’ve said this too. With certainty. With absolute sincerity. Because it’s what I thought, and it’s what I was taught. But luckily for me, I had an extra advantage that most teachers don’t have, something that helped me realize the truth: I’m an artist. And I’m married to an artist.

My wife and I both went to college to study art. And though I ended up studying education – one of the more useless endeavors of my life – I earned my degree in art, specifically in literature. My wife, who is stronger and braver and smarter and better than I am, stayed with art all the way through. And she had one of the most difficult undergraduate programs I’ve ever heard of; harder than any pre-law or pre-med program, I would be willing to wager, and with far less prestige.

And here’s the thing, the magic secret: she didn’t do it for the money. Neither did I – though I did sell out and become a teacher. Actually, it’s not the becoming a teacher that was selling out; I still reflect and promote the ideas of my art in my teaching, and I am proud of the career I have had, because it is a noble vocation, when it is done right. But I should have kept studying art while I was in school. I hate to think of the potential I lost, the opportunities I walked away from by switching from literature to education. And it’s funny: just as my time in public school didn’t prepare me successfully for college, my college education didn’t prepare me successfully for my career in public school education. The time I spent studying art was far more useful to my teaching than my training in how to be a teacher.

It was in teacher training that I was first trained in the Big Lie, though of course I heard it in some form or other all the way through my own K-12 schooling: the idea that the purpose of school is to get students higher incomes than they would get without it. I was shown the statistics, the data, the graphs, that argue that college graduates make more money, on the average, than non-college graduates. I was shown this, and told to use it on my students, because it’s one of the most effective ways to get students to take school seriously, to work hard and therefore (incidentally) to learn. I assume that’s why all trained educators in this country have been shown the same data: because scaring children with threats about their future is effective. It’s cruel, essentially abusive, and it has some quite severe secondary and unintended consequences, as we are now discovering; but it’s effective. It makes those lazy little punks – that’s you, students – work harder and try more. At least some of them. At least some of the time.

Look: you can’t blame us. Teaching is hard. Everything about it is hard. Organizing curriculum is hard, planning lessons is hard, finding and adapting materials is hard. It’s hard to stand in front of a room and command attention, let alone respect. It’s hard to manage a room full of individual people and get them all to focus, together, on one thing. It’s hard to communicate clearly, and hard to understand children who haven’t yet learned to communicate clearly.

(Let me just say one thing to all the students here: speak up. I’m old; I’ve lost some of my hearing. I cannot understand you when you whisper, when you mumble. Whatever you have to say to me: speak up, please.

(And I’ll try to talk slower.)

And then, after completing all of those difficult tasks, teachers run into the biggest difficulty of all, the one that feels insurmountable: getting the students to do the work. We create this curriculum, design these lessons to deliver it, gather the materials, summon all of our strength, invent positive energy from somewhere, and teach our hearts out: and then all of you students, just – don’t do it. There are many individual reasons why you don’t do it, but in a large number of instances, maybe more common than any other, the reason you don’t do the work is just because you don’t want to. You don’t feel like it. You don’t see the point. You don’t think it matters. You don’t care.

Confronted with that, over and over in student after student, day after week after month after year, teachers have reacted understandably: we try to MAKE you care, dammit! Sometimes we do it angrily, resentfully, with hurt feelings; because we care. And when you care, it hurts to try so hard and have somebody just say, “Nah.” That’s why teachers then try to scare students, that’s why we threaten.

“Your boss won’t accept this kind of work when you have a job.”

“Your college professor won’t care about you, so they won’t make exceptions for you: they won’t even know your name.”

“You think you can act like that out in the real world? Think again!”

Hurt people lash out. We may tell ourselves we’re doing it to be helpful, but we’re doing it because we’re hurt. It makes it easier for us to tell the lie, because the lie is hurtful, where the truth is just difficult – and we’re lashing out at those who hurt us. We shouldn’t do that, but also, maybe all you students should stop hurting your teachers. When a student comes to my class and says something like “This is boring. Can we do something fun instead?” to my face, every day, I definitely want to snap at them about how their attitude won’t be acceptable in the future. Because it’s just not right to insult someone’s passion the way students insult mine.

So it makes sense that teachers have done this, that we’ve told this lie. It makes sense that we’ve structured school, and thought about how we can teach our subjects, and explained this whole endeavor to students, on the basis of this fundamental assumption, this base falsehood, that the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world, specifically for college, so they can get good jobs and make good money. It makes sense – though, teachers, I won’t take us off the hook entirely, because we really should have recognized the falsehood in this, and seen the hypocrites we make of ourselves, when we tell our students they should study hard specifically so they can make more money: because we are all so very well-educated, and worked so hard to become so, and we are so poorly paid for that effort and education. Did you all go to school, do all that work, and then take this very hard job, for the money?

Neither did I. (Though also, I expect and deserve and demand that I get paid what I am worth. So should we all.)

I do need to point out that we make this claim about the purpose of school in more ways than just talking about money. We do also talk about getting a “good” job, by which we mean a job you like and find fulfilling, a job that you feel has value, to yourself or to society or both. Teaching is all of those things for me, as it is for many of my colleagues; and the money has been generally sufficient, if not actually good, or representative of what I’m worth. We do also talk about getting our students prepared, with skills and knowledge, for the real world, beyond and apart from college. I think we do that, a little. Not enough, though also, here we run into a question of how much someone can be prepared, in school, for the world outside of school, and also how much someone should be prepared in advance of actually living. But regardless: our efforts to prepare students for the real world, as we call it, are founded on the same principle: we try to get them ready for their jobs. We want them to have work skills, and know how to find a job, apply for and interview for a job, succeed in a job. When we talk about our students’ future – other than some basic insincere lip service to the worn cliches “You can be anything you want to be!” and “You can do anything you want to do,” – it’s always the same basic idea. It’s all about the money.

Okay. So those are the lies. Now: are you ready for the truth?

Deep breath.

The truth is, you can not be anything you want to be. You can only be yourself.

The truth is, you cannot do anything you want to do: there are limitations on all of us, some internal, most external.

The truth is school does not prepare you for college or for work. Only you can do that, and no matter how well you do manage to prepare yourself, you will still be surprised, and sometimes unprepared and overwhelmed; and to some greater or lesser extent, you will fail.

The truth is, school is not preparing you for the real world: you are already in the real world, and you always have been. And no, it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t get easier.

The truth – the big truth, the last truth – is that the purpose of education is not, cannot be, and should not be stated as, helping students to get a good job or to make more money.

The purpose of education is to create more life.

***

Okay, that was a lot of truth. Take another deep breath, and then I’ll soften it up some, make it easier to swallow and to digest.

By the way: we absolutely should teach our students how to breathe. There’s nothing more important. Literally.

Okay: now for the softer side of the truth.

While it is true that you can only be yourself, that is also the very best thing you could ever be. Because every single one of you, of us, is as good and valuable and worthy as every one else; and there is also no other person you could be as successfully as you can be yourself. It’s also true that figuring out who exactly you are is incredibly difficult and complex, and the work we do on that project in schools is good work. You get to explore your self and your society and your skills and interests, even while we are barking at you that you need to master proper MLA format for your resume.

While it is true that there are limitations on all of us, which keep us from doing anything we want to do, limitations can be overcome. Muggsy Bogues played a full career in the NBA despite being only 5’3” tall. Also – and this may be even more important – a lot of things we think we want to do are actually really bad ideas. When I was 6, I wanted to be a stage actor, a fireman, and an astronaut. All bad careers for me, for the person I became – especially all at the same time.

The truth is that school does not prepare you completely for college or work: but the truth also is, it helps. We will, as I said, always fail, in college and career and life; but no failure needs to be total, or permanent. Failure always precedes growth. And – heh – school can prepare you for failure.

Unfortunately, the truth – and I cannot soften it – is still that school does not prepare you for the real world. But that’s because you’re in the real world, right now, while you are in school, and there’s no preparing for it, for any of us. There is only living it. Experiencing it. Learning from it. That’s all we ever do, whether in school or not. I do think it’s important that we teachers stop telling students there is some distinction between school and the real world, especially with the implication that the real world is somehow worse, harsher or harder, colder or crueller. People who really think that do not remember what it was like to be in middle school or high school. Or they do not understand the situations that many students, many children, live through. As I said: it doesn’t get better and it doesn’t get easier; but you will get better. And then, if you can, you will make your life better. And that process will continue for as long as you keep trying to learn and improve: always in the real world.

Last one – and, because I know my persuasive rhetoric, this is the important one. This is the point. This is what education is for.

Our world has, I believe, an objective reality. It’s not just in my mind, or in the Matrix. The world would – will – still be here when I am not here to perceive it; it will still be the same world when all of us are gone from it. Although it will be quieter, and less messy. No matter how I imagine the world to be, whether I think the Earth is round or flat, 6,000 years old or 4.5 billion, floating in space or resting on four elephants who are standing on a turtle – there is a truth, a real situation that I don’t change through my perception of it.

However: my perception of the world shapes my world, changes how I experience it, more fundamentally than I think we realize – certainly more than we think about very often. How we see determines what we see. We cannot perceive things that we cannot imagine existing; sometimes we cannot perceive them intentionally, consciously. Take the flat Earth example. If I believe, absolutely, that the world is flat, then there are things I will not do, places I will not go, because of my belief, because of my perception. I will not get on a plane that I think would fly off the edge of the world. I will not go to the world’s edge, let alone beyond it – so I will never see that there is no edge. So even though the world is in fact round, I will never perceive the world as round, because I will avoid – or more simply, deny – anything that would prove to me that the world is round. So for me, functionally, the world would be flat. And I will miss out on any experience associated with the round Earth. My world, shaped by my perception, would be less full: only two-dimensional.

Let’s take a more realistic and more common example. If I were a racist, and hated, let’s say, plaid people, then I would avoid, or dismiss as unworthy of my time, any and all plaid people. They would essentially not exist in my world except as an amorphous abstraction for me to hate and fear and blame. I would never get to know, never get to appreciate, never get to love, anyone who is plaid. And therefore my world, my life, would be smaller.

Because plaid people are some of the finest people there are.

And if you don’t know any plaid people – or, even more shocking, you somehow think that they don’t exist – I think you need to open your eyes and pay more attention. America’s no place for plaid-deniers.

But in all seriousness, this fact, that perception shapes reality, is true in all ways: things that we can’t understand, we avoid; things that we can’t conceive of, we don’t even perceive. And in contrast, when we have heightened understanding, we have heightened perception: my wife’s experience of an art museum is much richer, much fuller, than mine, because her knowledge of art, and her experience with creating art and the deep understanding of the artist’s craft she has thereby, lets her see the works on display in more ways than I can, who makes art only with words. My experience of literature is similarly fuller than most people’s. My dog’s experience of the world of smells is many thousands of times more complex and interesting than my experience of smells: which is why he chooses to sniff cat poop, which I simply avoid. Because he finds it interesting, and I just think it smells gross. But I have to assume that if I could smell what he can smell, I would interact with cat poop the same way he does: my nose would be riveted to every turd. Think how much more enjoyable it would be to live with cats, then. Having the litter box in the house would be a benefit. Maybe we’d put the box on the coffee table. Make it a conversation piece.

I know that sounds bizarre and insane. It sounds that way to me, too. But understand: it only sounds that way because of how we perceive cat poop. Or rather, how we don’t perceive it. How our experience of the world is limited by our range of perception.

Education can change that (Maybe not with cat poop.), because education can introduce us to things, and show us how to perceive them. I wasn’t born reading literature the way I do; I learned that. Because I learned it, my experience of reading is better than most people’s. My world of books is larger, more vibrant, more diverse, more entertaining, more inspiring, more challenging, than most people’s book world. Not because I’m better than other people, not because I’m just built different: because I have been educated. Because I learned. Because I learned how to read and understand what I read to an unusually high degree, I have a larger world to live in. It means I can find greater pleasure and fulfillment in the world of books. I will never get tired of reading books. I will never be bored, not as long as I can get my hands and my eyes on books. I can still perceive all the non-book things as well as all the rest of you can – though some people perceive individual pieces of non-book-reality better than I can, because I don’t know much about cars or sports or calculus, or about being a parent, or about traveling to other places or into other cultures – but in the areas where I learned well, my world is larger than the world of people who didn’t learn as well. In all the areas where I am not ignorant, my life is larger than the world of ignorant people. I live a larger life, in a larger world, than someone with less education with me.

That’s why I’m a teacher. Because I love humanity. Because I want to help people to live larger, fuller, richer lives. To have more chances to be human, to be more human. To make miracles. What else could I possibly do that would be as valuable, as important?

But, you see, my work has, of late, become less valuable. Less effective, and therefore less important.
Because my students are less willing to work with me, to listen to me. They are less willing to learn.

But that’s our fault, teachers, parents, adults in general: because we’ve been lying to them. And they have caught on. These are the unintended consequences of our choice to use the threat of future poverty and failure to scare our students into obedience. Rather than explain the real value of education, even though the idea is complicated, even though it is hard to accept, we have chosen to use the simple lie that the entire point of education is to prepare students for future work. We still tell them, as we have for years, that going to college is the best way, even the only way, to get a good job and make good money, and the point of compulsory public education is to prepare them for college and for jobs – and that’s it. It’s not all we think education is for, but when we are frustrated with difficult and disobedient students, we don’t usually talk about the wonderful benefits of education: we just threaten them. “If you drop out, or get expelled, how will you get a good job? You’ll be flipping burgers for your whole life!”

But, see, we have now gone through a pandemic, and more than one recession; today’s students are in the world of social media, which gives them access to people’s lives and internal thoughts. So they’ve seen behind the curtain, they’ve torn down the veil. They know that there are countless people who have good jobs without ever having finished college, and countless people with lots of education who have miserable jobs. And now college is so absurdly expensive that even those who would want a college-level job – for whom a job that required a college degree would be a “good” job – are not willing to accrue the debt to get that job, and so they’re looking for different jobs, ones that are easier to get, that have fewer requirements. Or, more often than I think we educators realize, they have come to the conclusion that life is not, and should not be, defined by a job: and so what job they end up with simply doesn’t matter to them, as long as they make enough to survive and do what they want to do. What they want to think about and plan for is all the non-job parts of life.

So here you are, students. You’ve been hearing for years, again and again, that school is necessary for getting into college and getting a good job. And you don’t want that. And you know that we are lying to you, that you don’t need college for many good jobs. You also know that life shouldn’t be only about a job.

What, then, is the value of this education we offer and demand, for a student who doesn’t want what we have claimed is the main and even the only goal of that education?

There isn’t any. So you don’t want it. Of course not.

And the more we try to threaten, and cajole, and cozen you into doing the difficult work of education anyway, the more you resist. Of course: you don’t like being lied to, and you don’t like having your time wasted. Wasting time is wasting life, and we all want all the life we can get.

So you ignore and evade and escape education that is nothing for you but life-draining, time-wasting oppression.

And therefore you remain more ignorant than you could be. Not totally ignorant, of course, because you learn on your own. But school could teach you so much more than you can easily learn on your own; and without putting effort into school, you will absolutely know less than you would if you could really do this the way it should be done.

And since you will know less, therefore you will have less life.

***

It has to stop. We need to stop telling students that school equals college equals job equals money. We need to stop focusing on money. I don’t teach literature because it makes money, either for me or for the students – or even for the authors, who I do think deserve money for their work; but that’s not why I want the book, and it’s not why I want to teach the book. I do it because literature expands and improves my experience of being human: and I want that larger life. And I want other people to have what I have. Especially now: because the world kinda sucks. And especially the kids I teach: because being in middle school and high school kinda sucks.

Teachers: we need to tell our students the truth: school sucks, but education will make your life suck less. It will give you more life, and a better life, because it will let you understand more, and therefore do more, and perceive more. And we need to believe this when we say it, and we need to want that for our students.

Otherwise we should all just give up and become janitors.

At least then the world would be cleaner.

Justice Is Served

Dusty Leave a comment
Opinion | Trump guilty on all counts: Breaking down the media coverage of the historic trial | Editor and Publisher
My favorite bit is that “Trump appeared to look blankly forward as jurors exited.”

Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts. Class E felonies, sure — but that’s still 34 more felonies than I’ve ever been convicted of, 34 more than anyone in my family has been convicted of, 34 more than Joe Biden has been convicted of.

So that’s that, right? Surely no one would want to vote for a convicted felon.

Except of course they will.

Donald Trump poll: Half of Americans say Trump guilty verdict was correct, should end 2024 election bid, ABC News/Ipsos poll shows - ABC7 Chicago
Notice how it isn’t “100% Trump should end campaign.” Which 50% of the population do you think said that he should end it?
Guilty or not guilty, Trump verdict won ...
Notice this number is higher than 50%: which means a good number of people who would vote for him still will even though he has been found guilty.
WANTED OUTLAW PRESIDENT MUGSHOT T-Shirt
I really wish this said “Rootin Tootin” somewhere

This one is amazing. Though I wish I could make out those tattoos. Think there’s a swastika in there somewhere?

I just think he should have gone a little lighter on those eye-bags.

And speaking of going a little lighter… ain’t nobody got hair that yellow.

My Outlaw President #trump #biden #outlaw #badass #MAGA | TikTok

I just want to know: who looks at these images and thinks, “Yes. That is a perfect depiction of how I see this man. This captures my feelings exactly.” I don’t doubt a lot of the images are intended mainly to troll the left, but also, there is literally no sense of irony in MAGA world, and since many of these kinds of images get shared mainly or exclusively in MAGA world, there are actually people there who are encouraged by them. Who nod and think, “Hell yeah!” Seriously.

I can’t imagine feeling that on the other side, not really. I mean, this stuff is insane:

Dark Brandon On the Throne" Art Board Print for Sale by Based Creations | Redbubble

(I do appreciate the strong Dr. Manhattan vibes in that image. Even more than the AR-15 Iron Throne.)

Dark Brandon" Canvas Print for Sale by hypershirts | Redbubble
How does that even look like Biden??

I actually like this one, though.

Because they didn’t try to change his appearance. At all. It’s like an old man spontaneously combusting and really confused about it. Hilarious.

But it’s still not going to make me vote for Biden.

No, I’m voting for Joe Biden because I think he’s a decent man who’s done a decent job as president. I’ve talked about it in other posts, I will talk about it more (Now that school is out and my brain has had a chance to recover — this was a really bad year, y’all.), but that’s the reason. Full stop. Not because he’s a Socialist — he’s not, though I wish he were — and not because I fucking hate Trump that much — I do, but that’s not a good enough reason to vote for Biden — but because he’s a decent man who’s done a decent job. Do I wish Biden would step aside with dignity and let somebody else be the Democratic nominee? I do. Do I think that any decent Democratic candidate — who had reasonable credentials on reproductive rights — would kick Trump’s ass in the election? I do, especially now that Trump’s a convicted felon whom most independents already didn’t like. But Biden is worth voting for. That’s my position.

On the other hand, we have this position:

A friend of mine on Facebook shared this meme. (Actually several did; this one was popular.)

And a mutual acquaintance of ours commented thusly:

As much as I dislike both of them I think that whole court case was a crock of shit and shows how people with political power can weaponize the judicial system. That judge on this case was about as corrupt as they get smfh.

So notice how this comment starts by bringing in Joe Biden (Am I presuming too much in saying Joe Biden is the other in “both of them?” I am not. I knew his position, and he confirms it in later comments.), even though the meme had nothing to do with Biden, as the trial had nothing to do with Biden: this was a New York case, brought by the Manhattan DA, about events that happened in 2006 and 2015-2016, and were revealed to the public in 2018. Nothing here to do with Biden’s campaign against Trump. Notice how this makes some pretty extreme accusations — the whole case was a “crock of shit,” people with political power can weaponize the judicial system, the judge was “about as corrupt as they get” — but provides no evidence at all.

This is not unique, of course. This is how American political discourse usually goes. We are all inside our little tents, holding up the collapsing tent poles, ignoring the canvas (or nylon? I honestly don’t know anything about tents, I haven’t been camping since I was 14. Imma go with canvas because I think the metaphor should be circus tents. Don’t you? Uh… circus tents are canvas, right?) falling all around us, completely cutting us off from the outside world, while we yell at people in the other tents that their tent is bad and stupid and they should really be in OUR tent.

To be clear: the Democratic tent is bad, but the Republican party tent has currently been taken over by a proto-fascist cult of personality worshipping a convicted felon. (Love how that last part rolls off the tongue. No, I’m not fucking objective. There are not fine people on both sides. There are formerly fine people in the Republican party who decided to give up on being fine people in order to support the proto-fascist cult of personality worshipping a convicted felon. They don’t get to be fine so long as they are in that tent. If they come out they can be fine people again — even very fine people. There are fine people in the other tents — though not the Libertarians. Libertarians are assholes. But that’s just a joke. The Trump tent comment is not.) They are not the same party, they are not in the same situation. They are not equal, not in any way. I’m just recognizing that a lot of Democrats are blind to reality, too. Including Joe Biden, in some ways. He really should step aside. It would be better for the country.

My first response was fully inside my tent. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it was irate. (I will also say I have a history with this fellow; while he is in some ways reasonable and open-minded, in other ways he is a lot of things I dislike. Even hate. Hence my knee-jerk reaction was not the right one.) It started with “What in the Fox News are you talking about?” (Okay, I admit I’m including that mostly because I’m proud of the phrase, and I want to remember it to use it some other time for real.) I said that there was no political weaponization of the judicial system, the judge was not corrupt, the case was not a crock of shit. I used more words, but that was all I said. And then I hit Post.

I did not provide evidence. I did not explain my arguments. I did not provide context. I just said “NO!” a lot.

It was not a useful contribution to an argument.

So I thought about it. Part of me did not really want to engage in this debate: because I know that there are people who are not worth engaging with because they will not listen and they will not take conversation seriously, they will only take the opportunity provided by disagreement to mock and yell and crow and scoff, which just makes me mad and spreads more distrust and disinformation. That’s what happened the last time I got into an argument with a Trumper (Note: this fellow is not a Trumper, as he hinted and as he said in more detail later), and I specifically didn’t engage with said Trumper because I knew he wouldn’t be an honest participant in a discussion. I said so. He got quite exercised in insulting me and lying about the state of this country — in that case, it was about immigration, because he was also a racist. Shocking, I know.

But part of me knows that this fellow, while he has said things and done things which I dislike and even hate, is also sometimes open-minded, and also sometimes rational, and also sometimes kind.

And more importantly, there is the person I am when I am irritated or angry, and there is the person I think I need to be in order to do what I can to help our society to heal.

So I deleted that comment (Not fast enough, because he was already replying to it, and noted that I had changed my comment; I apologized and invited him to bring up anything from my comment which he wanted to challenge me on. Because I want to be the person I think I need to be.) and replaced it with two questions:

What makes you say the judge was corrupt? And which people with political power weaponized the justice system?

Because I realized something in the last year or two. When I am teaching, I ask questions. All the time. It’s pretty much all I do when my students make comments or observations in discussion. Either I recognize them for their point, and thank them/compliment them/build off of what they said to continue the discussion — or I ask a question. “Why?” is my favorite, of course, though I mostly have to add more words to that — “Why do you think that?” or “Why do you think that character acts that way,” etc. — but I ask other questions, too, all kinds of them, one after another. I rarely make statements, I rarely agree or disagree with them: that isn’t my job. My job is to make them think. And the questions do that quite well. So I realized that I should ask more questions in my political discussions, rather than simply making statements or trying to disprove or deconstruct my opponents’ opinions or ideas. Usually because the positions I oppose do not have internal logic or consistency, and simply asking someone questions about their positions will frequently show the flaws in those positions, without me ever having to get into a fight about what is true and what is not.

And here’s the response I got in this instance, from this fellow. (Partly this was in response to my original combative tone, because he was replying to my first comment, not my questions; I’m not trying to cover up that I reacted badly, just trying to show that I know I did it the wrong way, and my two questions were what I think was the right way. [I will also note that while I am writing this, I am also arguing with a dude who thinks there should be a Heterosexual Pride Day because discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people is mostly gone, and in fact LGBTQIA+ people are now the real bullies, and they are picking on heterosexuals. And I am not simply asking him questions. I am being as polite as I can be, but I am also making declarative statements that he is simply wrong. So I guess I’m not perfect yet. But also — FUCKIN REALLY?!?!?!?!?!])

Theoden Humphrey a NYC DA who campaigned on the sole fact he was gonna find and convict Donald Trump of a crime. Whose campaign was also funded by none other than now ex-WEF leader George Soros.

The trial took place in an 87% Democrat county.

The judge who is a major Biden campaign donor. Also the judge’s daughter works with Leticia James who also has a hard on for convicting Trump.

Evidence of a crime that exceeds the statute of limitation since 2019 but upgraded what is normally a misdemeanor to a class E felony due to other crimes not mentioned being committed.

Corrupt judge tells jury that they do not need to agree on verdict unanimously they just have to agree that Trump committed some kind of crime. Which is a first.

And 34 counts yes. However, they will only sentence him on 1 because all 34 are considered the same 1 “crime”

I just think that this is political persecution to suppress a political opponent. And I’m not really on the Trump train any more. I really enjoy what robert f Kennedy has to offer and think that he better represents the middle isle American who supports the constitution and has left and right leaning views. He’s pro choice and pro 2A I like both those things.

Let’s be real. Biden and Trump are both equally pieces of wealthy filth and we need a big change from what we are being spoon fed. We are stuck with two dog shit choices. Either far left or far fuckin right. All the two parties we have to chose from are doing is further driving a wedge of division in this country.

If Trump is truly guilty throw his ass in prison for 4 years for committing a class E felony. But they should also go after every single politician left and right wing who’s paid out hush money and done exactly what the pos orange man did. I’m just as sick of hearing trumps bullshit as you are too. I’m also sick of genocide joe not giving a single shit about you and I. Neither of them represent us fairly.

I just think that this whole court case crap is only going to fuel the fire of his supporters. Also think it’s coincidental that the sentencing hearing is 4 days before the RNC. Honestly they should have done this 4 years ago when he left office instead of confidently waiting until 6 months before the election. And again I’m not stroking trumps ego on this but I think it’s just in time that now the biden campaign can put ads out talking about how Trump is a convicted felon etc etc.

We are all tired of both biden and trumps shit. And we the people have absolutely no say in a third party member being elected. Here in November 2024 we get two shit ass choice like we have for the last 2 decades. You get to pick corrupt left wing or corrupt right wing. And really your vote don’t mean shit anyways. If you’re a Democrat living in a red state your state is not representing your beliefs same with if your republican living in a blue state.

It’s all a crock of shit Humphrey. Can we atleast agree on that ?

My response to this comment was this:

No, we can’t agree that it’s all a crock of shit. There’s a lot of shit in the mix, absolutely: but there are things here that matter. Things like democracy and the rule of law. Truth. Simple human decency. They matter so much that I believe it’s worth digging through all that shit and wiping it away.

You’ve done something here that we shouldn’t do. That’s not an accusation; I did it too — this was my second reply on your comment, I deleted the first one, because sure I did what you’ve done here: I made statements without evidence, without even fully explaining my point; arguing only by innuendo and implication. I deleted that bad argument, and now I’m going to challenge you on yours. I hope you’ll reach across and work with me on this: because this, too, is important: communication and understanding.

Start with your first point: Alvin Bragg. How do you know he campaigned on going after Trump? And if he did, what would that show about him or what happened in this case? Did he lie? Fake evidence? Bribe the judge? Suborn the jury? Intimidate the witnesses? Same questions about Soros: how do you know he funded Bragg’s campaign? What would it mean if he did? Does that mean Bragg obeys his commands? What is Soros’s goal?

Okay: and here, though it has taken me my customary WAY TOO LONG to get to the point of this, is why I wanted to write about this. I’m not trying to embarrass or criticize my — let’s call him my interlocutor, the fellow I was having the discussion with — and I’m not really trying to argue with him; if I were, I would have continued on Facebook with him. He did post another comment (which I may turn into another post) and when I challenged him on that one, he replied to that challenge and said that he had been writing a long response with the evidence I was asking for, but it had gotten deleted; he then, quite rationally, moved on with his damn life, and the FB debate ended there.

And now here I am, continuing it.

Here’s why. I think there is a ton of misinformation out there in our world. I think a lot of it is spread in exactly this way, in comments on social media posts, which are presented as fact without any support or explanation, as both I and my interlocutor did. I think most of us do not have reliable news sources which we consult regularly, or sources of real information that explain what’s actually going on in our political world. That, I think, is why most of us have opinions that do not change according to new facts or new events: first because, frequently, we are unaware of new facts and new events; and second, because our opinions never were based on facts. I’m not really sure that mine are, either, and so I struggle, every time I write about politics, with the position I should take: should I be neutral and objective? Should I only talk about things I have researched extensively, things I can be considered an authority on? If I just share my opinions, which are not based on facts, how am I different from everyone else?

When I call Trump a fascist, for instance: what is the basis for that statement? Have I studied the history of fascism? Do I know specific instances of actions and positions taken by Trump that align with historical fascism? I have certainly read some history of fascism, and some political analysis of Trump and his GOP supporters that shows him to be aligned with fascism, so I feel fairly comfortable making the accusation: but I surely know that there is room for me to be wrong there, and I surely recognize that I could do more research and more fact-finding to support the opinion.

But the real question is: should I present the opinion? Or should I only present information that is proven to be true, that is purely factual and objective?

Okay, let’s be real. I’m a damn English teacher. And a fantasy/horror writer who likes pirates a lot. My opinions are not the ones that should be taken as proven objective facts.

But what I can offer, what I hope to offer, is what I asked my interlocutor for on Facebook, which he started to provide but then didn’t have time for — and which I now have time for — evidence. Explanation. Enough to show what we are actually talking about, and why we should or should not take it seriously.

So that’s what I want to do here. I want to engage with these talking points, and try to figure out if there is anything behind them. Not disprove them, not show that the fellow who posted this was wrong or bad in any way; but I want to explore these statements a little, and try to see if they are worth considering. If this seems valuable, then I will probably do it again with his second long comment, which I am not including here because this post is already too wordy. But, that’s how we roll here on Just Dusty, so I’m not going to apologize for my verbosity. Just gonna do my thingy.

Here we go.

First: Alvin Bragg. Manhattan District Attorney, who, allegedly, “campaigned on the sole fact he was gonna find and convict Donald Trump of a crime. Whose campaign was also funded by none other than now ex-WEF leader George Soros.”

The first part of that is not true, though the fellow did adjust his statement to say that Bragg made speeches about prosecuting Trump, which is true. But Bragg did not campaign solely on convicting Donald Trump. (It is also meaningful to me that the investigation was opened by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance.)

But here’s the thing: does this matter? Is it wrong if a man running for DA, in a district that is, as was pointed out in the next statement, 87% Democratic, says he will go after the (at the time) current Republican president, who is one of the most hated politicians, especially in Democratic circles, of the past, say, twenty years? Does that show prejudice? We can certainly argue that maybe district attorneys shouldn’t campaign on going after political figures, but the question that has to be addressed is: is that respect for the separation of politics and justice, or is it suppression of justice for the sake of the appearance of respect for the separation of politics and justice? That is: if Trump was actually guilty (or could reasonably be accused, since we’re talking about decisions regarding bringing a case, not the verdict) of crimes, should the man running for DA say that he will prosecute Trump? Or should he back off because Trump is a politician?

Obviously we know what Trump would want in this case. But just as obviously, Trump’s position on this — and the same positions parroted by all of his supporters — are not about the respect for the separation of powers and the political process, because that same former President (now convicted felon) and his supporters said that Hillary Clinton should be locked up, and they’ve never stopped going after Joe and Hunter Biden with claims regarding criminality and the justice system.

Honestly, I can see the point in terms of, say, a judge, or a jury member. They need to have both the appearance of objectivity, as well as approaching as close to actual objectivity as they can. But the DA is not supposed to be unbiased. In fact, to do his or her job well, it seem reasonable that a DA should be as biased as possible: it would motivate them to work hard to find all of the evidence to prove their case in court, to prepare and formulate all the arguments and all the strategy needed to convict their target, to “Get their man.” So long as they can remain rational and uncorrupted in their prosecution, so long as they don’t intimidate witnesses, or bribe the judge, or falsify evidence, or try to suppress information or corrupt the jury, or any of the other ways that a DA could corrupt a criminal trial.

Does evidence of bias against Trump provide evidence of corruption or wrongdoing on the part of the DA?

It does not.

The same with Bragg receiving funding in his campaign from George Soros. My immediate question is: what is the impact of that funding? Did Soros call the man up and say “Here’s what I want in exchange for my money: someday — and that day may never come — I may ask you to do a service for me.” Or does his money buy access? Is there an assumption of what Bragg might have to do to maintain that level of funding in the future? Any or all of those would be a concern. (Though none of them would necessarily show that Bragg did anything corrupt in prosecuting Trump.)

But, actually, now that I think about it, my first question is, Is that even true? What evidence do we have that Soros funded Alvin Bragg’s campaign?

The answer? It’s kinda true.

This is Mary Louise Kelly, from NPR, interviewing Emily Tamkin, a spokesperson from Soros’s organization.

KELLY: Let’s start with a basic fact check. What exactly is the connection between George Soros or his foundations and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg?

TAMKIN: So in this case, Soros gave money to a group called Color of Change, which is a social justice civil rights group that in turn gave some money to the campaign of District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Right, okay. So in fact George Soros did not give money directly to Alvin Bragg, which pretty much shows that none of the immediate thoughts on possible corruption would be true. They might happen at one remove — Soros pressures Color of Change, and Color of Change pressures Bragg — but that disconnect makes it harder to believe that Soros had any real influence on Bragg. It does raise a question which Tamkin brought up in the NPR interview, while responding to the important question from Kelly:

KELLY: Yeah. I mean, is there any evidence that Soros got something for this money in the case of Alvin Bragg, that his money bought influence in some way?

TAMKIN: No, there’s no evidence of that. And just more broadly, there are critiques to be made – right? – about a billionaire philanthropist who gives money to prosecutors’ campaigns, right? We could have a conversation about money in politics, the power of billionaires in American society. All of that is fair game, right? But that’s not really what this is. This is over-assigning the influence of Soros over Bragg and also dramatically overstating the agency that Soros has over this case.

We could definitely have a conversation about money in politics, the power of billionaires in American society. We could talk about the billionaires who bought the Supreme Court. We could talk about Trump offering policy to oil companies in exchange for a billion dollars. Hell, we could talk about all the billionaires who gave to both Trump and Biden — and Biden had both more donors, and more money from them, in this graph from Forbes. (And yes: Soros is on it.)

But how does the existence of George Soros giving money to a PAC which then gave money to Alvin Bragg show that Soros corrupted the case against Donald Trump as prosecuted by Alvin Bragg? And by the way, where is our understanding of what Soros wants which is corrupt in the first place?

It does not show that the case against Trump was corrupted. And the fact that no one that I have ever heard or seen bring up George Soros’s name can also offer a credible explanation of how he wants to corrupt American politics shows that this use of George Soros’s name to taint one’s political opponents by association is nothing but hot air. (I’m going to leave the description of how people usually go after Soros for another time, another place. Because it’s ugly. And completely off the point here.)

So what is the point here? The point is that the argument, the accusation, being made exists only because so much of it is left out, is unsaid. The argument leaves our imaginations to fill in the gaps. Alvin Bragg campaigned on getting Donald Trump: okay… and? This was why I asked for specific evidence of specific corrupt actions that my interlocutor was accusing Bragg of, and if he had made specific claims, I would have asked for evidence. As it stands, there’s not even really an accusation. He never said “George Soros commanded Bragg, in exchange for his political donation of X dollars, to frame Trump so that Biden could defeat Trump in the election because Biden is trying to create a Socialist state and that’s what Soros wants, so Bragg tampered with evidence and intimidated witnesses to get them to lie about Trump on the stand.” See how that specific kind of claim just screams for evidence? “How do you know all of that?” would be the only thought in my head if I were to read all of that. Which is why that claim wasn’t made: because of course there isn’t evidence for that claim, because it is not true. All this fellow said was “Bragg was funded by Soros.” Never even gave the specifics about how that funding was provided (I’m sure he didn’t know), and neither of us have provided how much funding there was; he didn’t say that only Soros funded Bragg’s campaign, which of course is also not true, but that’s implied in the wording.

This is what I’m talking about. This is argument by innuendo, by hints and implications, accusations left unsaid because we all know what’s really going on here. But what’s really going on here is bad argument, bad discussion: misinformation. We are all doing it, all the time.

We need to stop.

Okay. Moving on.

Next: the case took place in an 87% Democratic county. (Not even sure if that’s true: this website shows it, but — it’s BestPlaces, a real estate website, so not the most reliable source of political information; and the info on this page alone seems to contradict that 87% figure a couple of times, so — I dunno. I’ll stipulate it. [Which is what Trump should have done with his affair with Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels, who therefore wouldn’t have had to testify in open court about how she spanked his ass, how she rejected his pathetic attempt to Hugh Hefner her, how he didn’t use a condom — all the salacious details which embarrassed Trump, which his lawyers claimed prejudiced the jury and tainted the verdict, all could have been avoided if they had stipulated the affair had happened; but Trump wanted to pretend he never had sex with Ms. Clifford. So here we are, with Trump hoist on his own petard. But I digress.])

The main question is: does this fact, that 87% of Manhattan voted Democrat, show bias against Trump in the potential jury pool?

You bet your ass it does. Any poll — every poll — shows that Democrats pretty roundly and universally and virulently hate Donald Trump. I certainly do, for all kinds of rational and irrational reasons, which I would be happy to list except I already have so just read this if you want.

But.

Two questions: one cynical but important, and one much more to the point.

The cynical question is: yes, and? How is this jury pool different from any other? It’s Donald freaking Trump: what else would you expect? Of course Democrats hate this guy. Just as, of course, Republicans love him (and I’m going to resist the temptation here to point out that they SHOULD NOT, and just accept that they do); it seems clear that any Republican district would have just as much potential bias in the jury pool, it would just have the opposite polarity, so to speak. Of course Trump would like to move the trial to a Republican district; he likes that bias better. But is there anywhere the trial could be moved that would lead to an unbiased jury pool? Everyone is biased when it comes to the 45th President of the U.S. of A. Do we really think there are a dozen people in any locale in these United States who don’t already have a strong opinion of Donald Trump? And here’s the cynical part: there is, therefore, no possible way to find an unbiased jury, if — if — we think that political affiliation and voting record are prejudicial in terms of a juror’s ability to come to a fair verdict beyond a reasonable doubt. Which is where Trump wants to take this argument: to the conclusion that, if there is no way to find an unbiased jury — he should simply never be tried for his crimes. He should be allowed to act with impunity, because any jury would be biased, and therefore incapable of rendering a fair verdict.

I don’t think I need to say that I would not want that situation to happen. I do not want anyone to be above the law. Especially not Donald Trump.

And now we get to the question that really comes to the point. Do we believe that people who voted Democratic in 2016 or 2020, or at any time in the last fifty years, are incapable of setting aside those political views in order to serve as a juror in a criminal case regarding the President as a private citizen campaigning for political office?

Do we really believe that any opinion, one way or another, means that people cannot be fair? Really? Because then we’re going to have to set aside all judgment in all cases, forever and ever. I mean all cases: which parent could fairly judge their child? Don’t parents have opinions about their children? What teacher could grade an assignment? We all have opinions about our students.

Shall I point out here that my interlocutor is a former student?

Look: this is important, but we all know it’s important, so it is already a carefully considered factor. People knowing about something does not mean they are necessarily incapable of fairly judging an event or person associated with that thing. People having connections to a person, or a party, or an experience of any kind, does not necessarily mean that person is incapable of being objective and judging fairly. But because we recognize that it could, that a previous opinion could create an unfair bias, the entire justice system is designed to get around that fact.

I mean: ALL of it. Twelve jurors, selected randomly, then vetted by the judge and by both sides’ attorneys. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Unanimous verdict. The right to appeal. Every bit of it, and a hundred other things I didn’t mention — rules of evidence, and admissibility in court, and having statements removed from the record, and jury instructions, and alternative jurors, and jury sequestration, and on and on — is intended to address the problem of jurors’ possible prejudice.

To dismiss that simply because someone voted a particular party at some point in the past — no, not even that; because the people who lived in an area voted for a particular party in the past, which does not include all the people in the area because in addition to the 14% or so who didn’t vote Democrat, there are the 50% or so who didn’t vote, and the people who moved into the area since then — and every single person who voted for Democrats and also voted for one Donald J. Trump.

Like this fucking guy.

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Donald Trump registered as a Republican in Manhattan in 1987; since that time, he has changed his party affiliation five times. In 1999, Trump changed his party affiliation to the Independence Party of New York. In August 2001, Trump changed his party affiliation to Democratic. In September 2009, Trump changed his party affiliation back to the Republican Party. In December 2011, Trump changed to “no party affiliation” (independent). In April 2012, Trump again returned to the Republican Party. (From Wikipedia, emphasis added)

To dismiss every precaution built into the system, every application of judgment about someone’s potential bias, every possibility that someone could look beyond their bias and be a fair juror — that’s not cynical. It’s downright absurd. It’s bullshit.

I have thought to myself, since the trial started, that I could be a juror. I would never pass the voir dire, because they looked at past social media posts, and I’ve been pretty clear that I have strong opinions about Trump; his lawyers would strike me in a hot minute. And they’d be right to do so, because no matter how much I flatter myself that I could be impartial, I would not have the appearance of impartiality (and, honestly, probably not the fact of it either), and my presence on the jury would undermine confidence in the verdict. So even though I think I could be impartial, I wouldn’t be on the jury. Not because I have voted for Democrats, but because I have railed against Trump more times than I could count. I said in this very post that I hate the fucking guy, and I do. So, biased.

(I still kinda think I could be impartial because I do not like all of my students, but I treat them all fairly and grade them all as impartially as I can. But also, a grade on an essay is not a criminal verdict, and none of my students are as hateable as the Nazi Cheeto.)

There’s a process, a system, for finding the most impartial jury possible, and getting those twelve people to overcome any biases they come in with. It’s an imperfect system. But it’s a good system. It deserves our trust. A whole lot more than Donald Trump does.

I’m going to put the next claim, that Judge Merchan was a “major Biden donor” into the same category here; either we trust that someone can put aside their political affiliations in order to serve as a judge in a criminal case — or else we should TAKE THE GODDAMN MAR-A-LAGO DOCUMENTS CASE AWAY FROM EILEEN CANNON.

But I digress.

(Oh also — the claim that Judge Merchan’s daughter worked for Letitia James, who also “has a hard on for convicting Trump” is not true. My interlocutor is mixing up his false claims here. Laura Loomer, an idiot who pushes pro-Trump messaging on the internet, claimed that Merchan’s wife worked for Letitia James, and since it was Loomer who said it, it’s probably not true at all, and if it is it doesn’t show that Mrs. Merchan is biased in favor of AG James; I have worked for a lot of people, and most of them, I DID NOT LIKE, not even if they were as badass as Letitia James — who, if I may say, is the Attorney General of the state of New York, and the first woman and the first African-American elected to hold that post, which means she is amazing on a scale well beyond what this discussion can capture — while Merchan’s daughter is the president and partner of a consulting firm that works for all kinds of big name political clients, including Vice President Kamala Harris. So I’m not sure that any of this claim holds water at all. But if it does? Absolutely none of this shows any particular unfair corrupting bias on the part of Judge Merchan, so we’re just going to leave this one alone. Now, if the judge’s wife had raised a “FUCK TRUMP” flag over the judge’s house during the trial…)

Okay. Phew. I can see why people prefer to argue without explanations and evidence: this is hard. And time-consuming.

But this is how it needs to be: we need to actually show what the hell we are talking about, using resources from other than our own memory or imagination, and we need to actually explain the claims we make. It’s not enough to just be like “THE JUDGE GAVE MONEY TO BIDEN!” You have to go the next step: tell me how this fact (which you also would need to provide evidence for) shows unfair bias on the judge’s part, which was shown in this specific statement or action.

And if that means we might talk less and raise fewer, better points in our arguments? Well, all I can say is I know how long this post is.

But long or not, let me provide some evidence, in the shape of one quick example: Judge Webster Thayer presided over the trial of Niccolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two Italian immigrants and anarchists who were convicted and executed for the murder of two guards during the robbery of a payroll in 1920. Here’s Thayer’s bias, which did indeed have an impact on the conviction and execution of these two (probably innocent) men:

Thayer’s behavior both on and off the bench during the trial drew criticism. A Boston Globe reporter, Frank Sibley, who had covered the trial, wrote a letter of protest to the Massachusetts attorney general condemning Thayer’s bias. Others noted the frequency with which Thayer denied defense motions and the way he addressed defense attorney Fred H. Moore. Thayer defended his rulings to reporters saying, “No long-haired anarchist from California can run this court!” According to onlookers who later swore affidavits, in private discussion Thayer called Sacco and Vanzetti “Bolsheviki!” and said he would “get them good and proper”. In 1924, referring to his denial of motions for a new trial, Thayer confronted a Massachusetts lawyer: “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?” the judge said. “I guess that will hold them for a while! Let them go and see now what they can get out of the Supreme Court!” The outburst remained a secret until 1927 when its release fueled the arguments of Sacco and Vanzetti’s defenders. The New York World attacked Thayer as “an agitated little man looking for publicity and utterly impervious to the ethical standards one has the right to expect of a man presiding in a capital case.”[1] From Wikipedia

So. Get me audio of Judge Merchan saying, “Did you see what I did to that fascist orange motherfucker last month?” and I’ll say he was unfairly biased. Let him deny motions for an appeal or a new trial and then say “I guess that will hold those shitheads for a while! Let them see what they can get out of the Supreme Court!*” and then I’ll say Merchan’s actions were unfair based on his prejudices. Drop some innuendo based on the assumption that political affiliation is a universal source of unconquerable prejudice? I will simply point out that oftentimes an accusation is a confession.

*Also, what they could get from the Supreme Court is: probably any fucking thing they want, because the SCOTUS is, in my opinion, both corrupt and unethical, and also unfairly biased and prejudiced in their judgments connected to Donald Trump. But I digress.

Okay: now we get to the issues regarding the actual case, rather than the people involved. There are three presented.

Evidence of a crime that exceeds the statute of limitation since 2019 but upgraded what is normally a misdemeanor to a class E felony due to other crimes not mentioned being committed.

Corrupt judge tells jury that they do not need to agree on verdict unanimously they just have to agree that Trump committed some kind of crime. Which is a first.

And 34 counts yes. However, they will only sentence him on 1 because all 34 are considered the same 1 “crime”

First: past the statute of limitations? No. From an AP fact-checking article:

CLAIM: “They missed the statute of limitations by a lot because this was very old. They could have brought this seven years ago instead of bringing it right in the middle of the election.”

THE FACTS: Judge Merchan in February denied a request from Trump’s legal team to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that the statute of limitations had passed, according to court documents.

In his decision, Merchan cited pandemic-era executive orders issued in March 2020 and April 2021 by former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that extended the limit on filing criminal charges.

New York’s statute of limitations for most felonies is five years. The earliest charge in Trump’s felony indictment was described as occurring on Feb. 14, 2017, while the indictment was filed on March 30, 2023.

(And just in case someone disagrees with this: okay, show me the evidence that this statute of limitations claim is valid.)

The misdemeanor being raised to a felony is something that should be considered; but there is a reasonable argument for the felony: the crime was committed in pursuance of committing another crime, which makes the offense more serious. Reasonably: because someone who will commit one crime in order to commit a second crime is more likely to commit a third crime. Right? So that increases the severity of the initial crime being tried here, the falsification of business records. Alone, it’s a misdemeanor; in conjunction with another crime, it’s a class E felony — which is not far away from a misdemeanor, honestly. We can and should question the step the DA took to try this as an felony, but we can see that choice as reflecting the facts of the case, and thereby necessitating a trial — because if this was only a misdemeanor there’s no way we have this trial — or we can see it as a biased DA corrupting the law in order to go after Trump.

If you think it’s the second one? Prove it.

I think it’s the first one. Not least because the jury, whom I will trust because I trust the system, in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, convicted Trump of the felonies, which at least implies, post facto, that there was validity in the argument. But let’s get into the details a little more.

Let me include the next claim, that Judge Merchan (who is, in the absence of any specific evidence, definitely not corrupt) instructed the jury that they did not need to be unanimous on the verdict, they just needed to agree that Trump committed some kind of crime.

False. Or at least unclearly stated to such an extent that it becomes false.

From a CBS News article about the trial

Why were the charges a felony?

Under New York law, falsification of business records is a crime when the records are altered with an intent to defraud. To be charged as a felony, prosecutors must also show that the offender intended to “commit another crime” or “aid or conceal” another crime when falsifying records.

In Trump’s case, prosecutors said that other crime was a violation of a New York election law that makes it illegal for “any two or more persons” to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means,” as Justice Juan Merchan explained in his instructions to the jury.

What exactly those “unlawful means” were in this case was up to the jury to decide. Prosecutors put forth three areas that they could consider: a violation of federal campaign finance laws, falsification of other business records or a violation of tax laws. 

Jurors did not need to agree on what the underlying “unlawful means” were. But they did have to unanimously conclude that Trump caused the business records to be falsified, and that he “did so with intent to defraud that included an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” 

So the crime, the falsification of business records, was well and fully proven by the prosecution; it was what they found him guilty of. 34 times. They also proved guilt in the secondary crime which the falsification was in pursuance of, conspiracy to promote the election of one Donald J. Trump ; that was why they used David Pecker of the National Enquirer as their first star witness.

What they did not need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt was which specific law was violated in the “unlawful means” used to promote the election of Trump. It could have been any of three crimes, all of which had evidence in support provided during the trial; they did not need to prove, and the jury did not need to agree, on which unlawful means were used — or rather, on why specifically those means were unlawful — because that was not the matter being tried here; the jury’s opinion of it was enough for the sake of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump committed the crime of falsification in pursuance of another crime, fraud to promote the election of a specific person. So that’s the answer to the objection: this is part of how the system works. And I should point out that, contrary to the claim that this was unprecedented, this happens all the time: every plea deal involves changing charges up or down the scale of severity, even if the charge that results is not entirely apropos. And every case involving a difficult-to-try person involves crimes that can be proven, which stand in for crimes that can’t be proven but definitely happened; just ask Al Capone. So really, if we don’t like this, we don’t like the thousands of other times it happens in our justice system daily.

I will also say that, honestly, I don’t like that they did this. I have heard legal commentators on NPR saying they think this specific element may lead to a successful appeal of the verdict, and I don’t like that.

But the point here is that I don’t really understand the legal maneuver that the DA used in this case. Not that it was bad, or that it made the verdict bad; just that I don’t understand it, and therefore I don’t like it. Using the same gut-feeling level of decision making, I will say that I believe in my gut that Trump absolutely committed this crime; maybe he shouldn’t have been convicted of it, and maybe he shouldn’t have been convicted in this way — but if he got away with this, that would be a miscarriage of justice.

And we’ll leave this for the Court of Appeals to decide.

Also, not that I want to descend into whataboutism, but if we’re talking about miscarriages of justice? Trump should be on trial in three other court rooms, with stronger evidence of more serious crimes. The fact that he is not, and maybe never will be, shows a miscarriage of justice that FAR outweighs any issue about the misdemeanor felonies and the unlawful means.

Moving on again.

The last one, that Trump was convicted of 34 crimes that were all one crime and so will only be sentenced for one crime — I mean, sure, and that’s why Judge Merchan will probably not sentence him to 34 penalties. This is an area of the justice system that is quite rightly left up to judges to decide in sentencing: sometimes it matters that a crime was committed 34 times, even if it was the same crime. If someone murdered 34 people, that’s different than one murder. If someone raped the same victim 34 times, that is not one crime.

In this case, does the minor nature and the repetitiveness of all 34 counts mean we shouldn’t keep emphasizing that Trump was convicted of 34 felonies?

Sure, maybe. But also: it’s fun to say it. And I’m not going to apologize for, nor draw back, my shit-talking about Donald Trump. This is one case where I will gleefully say “Fuck your feelings.” Karma’s a bitch.

Okay: now we get to the general commentary at the end of the list of factual concerns regarding Trump’s trial and conviction.

First is this: “I just think that this is political persecution to suppress a political opponent.”

Not one thing in all of this so far connected Joe Biden to this trial. Not one thing. Okay: George Soros, and the fact that both Alvin Bragg and Joe Biden — and Judge Merchan, and most Manhattan voters — are Democrats. But man, if everything every Democrat does is in service of and part of a conspiracy involving Joe Biden, then I need to stop writing this blog: I am clearly committing political persecution of Donald J. Trump, at the behest of Joe Biden.

Now, is it convenient for Biden that Trump was tried and convicted? Sure — but let me grab another statement that was made a few sentences later.

I just think that this whole court case crap is only going to fuel the fire of his supporters.

And you’re right. I started out by saying that the verdict doesn’t change very many votes , either way. So why would Biden go after Trump in this way in hopes of changing the election? Doesn’t this show the opposite, that Biden probably didn’t try to do this in order to suppress a political opponent, because this clearly didn’t work, and polls have been showing for months that a conviction wouldn’t swing the election? And I think we all know that a felony conviction doesn’t disqualify anyone from running for president, or from serving if they win. Biden and his advisors knew that. So unless we assume that Biden and all of his political advisors are so completely out of touch or so thoroughly stupid that they didn’t know that Trump’s voters would not change their vote because of the verdict, it’s not reasonable to assume, in the absence of evidence, that Biden masterminded this whole thing. And that Biden and his team were too dumb to recognize the futility is a very poor assumption: after all, whatever else we may think of Joe Biden, the man won election to the highest office in the country. Clearly he knows what the fuck he is doing politically. Especially when it comes to beating Donald Trump, which he also did.

Going on:

Also think it’s coincidental that the sentencing hearing is 4 days before the RNC. Honestly they should have done this 4 years ago when he left office instead of confidently waiting until 6 months before the election. And again I’m not stroking trumps ego on this but I think it’s just in time that now the biden campaign can put ads out talking about how Trump is a convicted felon etc etc.

The sentencing was decided by Judge Merchan. And what exactly will it do when it happens four days before the Republican National Convention? Will they fail to nominate Trump? Will this ruin his run to the November election?

When's John going to appear publicly?” : r/JohnMulaney

No, seriously: why not point out that it is a week after the Fourth of July? Or on John Quincy Adams’s birthday — and also Giorgio Armani’s? This is another attempt at argument just by unclear innuendo. I don’t know what Trump’s sentencing is supposed to do to affect the RNC, but my best guess is that it will rile them all up and they’ll spend three days screaming about a witch hunt while falling in line behind DJT as the GOP nominee.

In terms of the case going to trial four years ago: Cyrus Vance had to sue Donald Trump to get his tax returns. Twice. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And then Trumps’ lawyers delayed this in every possible way — and it was delayed quite a bit by the fact that the COVID pandemic backlogged all of the courts for years. (PRETTY CONVENIENT THAT DONALD TRUMP DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO STOP THE PANDEMIC AND IT DELAYED HIS TRIAL, HUH??? See? I can argue by innuendo too.) That’s why it took so long. I’m sure they would have loved to try it in 2019 — except for the fact that would have meant trying a sitting president, and honestly, maybe that would have been kinda bad.

Is Biden going to make hay out of Trump being a convicted felon? Absolutely. But you know who else is capitalizing on it?

This fucking guy.

He always makes money off his persecution complex.

And there’s another factor here, which connects to all of these points about the timing and how Biden will use this conviction, and so on. Sure: it may be convenient when your opponent’s crimes or scandals or whatever show up — but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. Your opponent’s mistakes or wrongdoings are certainly good for you, but that in no way shows that you made them up: it only shows that you took advantage of circumstances, or your opponent’s failures, as anyone would and should in a competition. Do we think the tortoise made the hare take a nap? No: it’s not your fault if your opponent fucks up. It doesn’t mean you made those scandals happen, or drummed up false charges for those crimes. It doesn’t mean the opponent was framed. Not even if you personally have the power to persecute someone, and falsely accuse them of crimes. To show that that happened, someone would need actual evidence that Trump was not guilty of doing what he was accused of.

And did you notice? The one claim that was missing from all of these arguments about this trial?

That Trump was innocent. That he didn’t do anything.

We all know he did it. We all know it was criminal. It’s just a question of whether he should pay, and how much he should pay.

The first answer is emphatically, categorically, YES.

The second question is more to be debated and determined. But it should be determined using facts, using reason, not innuendo and implication and misinformation and lies.

Then we can have something that is not a crock of shit.

We can have justice.

Served up 34 times.

Yummy.

What A Piece Of Work

Dusty 1 Comment
Meeting Alien Astronaut On Mysterious Planet Stock Illustration 1796849164 | Shutterstock

So every year, I teach a class called College Readiness. It is intended, among other things, to help students apply to college and win admission; since I am an English teacher, that means helping them write application essays. I generally use the Common App prompts — which I recommend, if you’re looking for college admission essay topics — and they write several drafts over the year, with revisions and feedback about how to make their essays more interesting and more effective.

And then, for their last essay draft of the year, I have them pick one of the topics from the University of Chicago’s list of topics. They have two essay questions for their applicants: the first is a very standard, straightforward essay, about why you want to attend UChicago and what you are looking for there; and then the second — well.

They asked prior students and graduates for ideas for essay topics. And those students and alumni delivered.

You should go take a look at them — but here are some highlights.

Essay Option 1

Exponents and square roots, pencils and erasers, beta decay and electron capture. Name two things that undo each other and explain why both are necessary.
– Inspired by Emmett Cho, Class of 2027

Essay Option 2

“Where have all the flowers gone?” – Pete Seeger. Pick a question from a song title or lyric and give it your best answer.
– Inspired by Ryan Murphy, AB’21

Essay Option 3

“Vlog,” “Labradoodle,” and “Fauxmage.” Language is filled with portmanteaus. Create a new portmanteau and explain why those two things are a “patch” (perfect match).
– Inspired by Garrett Chalfin, Class of 2027

Essay Option 4

A jellyfish is not a fish. Cat burglars don’t burgle cats. Rhode Island is not an island. Write an essay about some other misnomer, and either come up with and defend a new name for it or explain why its inaccurate name should be kept.
– Inspired by Sonia Chang, Class of 2025, and Mirabella Blair, Class of 2027

Essay Option 5

Despite their origins in the Gupta Empire of India or Ancient Egypt, games like chess or bowling remain widely enjoyed today. What modern game do you believe will withstand the test of time, and why?
– Inspired by Adam Heiba, Class of 2027

Essay Option 6

There are unwritten rules that everyone follows or has heard at least once in their life. But of course, some rules should be broken or updated. What is an unwritten rule that you wish didn’t exist? (Our custom is to have five new prompts each year, but this year we decided to break with tradition. Enjoy!)
– Inspired by Maryam Abdella, Class of 2026

Essay Option 7

And, as always… the classic choose your own adventure option! In the spirit of adventurous inquiry, choose one of our past prompts (or create a question of your own). Be original, creative, thought provoking. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk, and have fun!

So I require my students to choose one of the topics — there are over 40 others after these six — and write an essay on it. And I ask them if there is one topic they would like me to write an essay about.

This was their choice for this year:

You are on an expedition to found a colony on Mars, when from a nearby crater, a group of Martians suddenly emerges. They seem eager to communicate, but they’re the impatient kind and demand you represent the human race in one song, image, memory, proof, or other idea. What do you share with them to show that humanity is worth their time?

And here is my response.

Okay look. There are a bunch of assumptions in this question. First it assumes that I want to communicate with the Martians, when in reality I might just want to atomize them with my Blastotron 5,000,0000X Destructothunderation Disintegratorianator. And that does seem like a poor assumption since I am an American, after all. When have we ever talked first and slaughtered after? Then it assumes – even more strangely – that the Martians have the same senses we do, and would be able to appreciate something I could present to them at all, let alone having the same aesthetic senses or interest in what I would have to present. It assumes that I would have this thing on me at the moment I met them, or access to it (which probably shows an assumption based on the existence and ubiquity of smartphones, which is fine, I would no doubt have my phone with me on the Martian surface – but also, I bet the wifi signal there sucks.), and that I wouldn’t just be limited to what I would normally be able to produce on the spot – which now relies on my performance skills. (Which are, I grant, stellar. Out of this world, even. Especially my punnery.)

And worst of all: the question assumes I believe humanity is worth the Martians’ time. 

So, considering all these considerations, I have several answers, the specific choice between being reliant on the specific situation. 

First, I would not immediately blast the Martians, because of course it would be better to lull them into complacency and then carry out a sneak attack later, preferably on their home territory; that’s the proper American way.

Second, we’ll take it as a given that the Martians would have at least similar senses to mine – though I will say, if they do have a different set of senses, I would absolutely play to that, because a society focused on smell would be far more impressed by our greatest olfactory achievements than any symphony or art work or whatever I could present. (And in that case, the smell would be a Thanksgiving feast: the scents of turkey and gravy, fresh bread, and apple pie, with a delicate touch of the smell of candle wax burning, hickory wood burning in the fireplace, and a whiff of my wife’s perfume.) But for the sake of argument, we’ll accept that they would use primarily sight and sound to interact with their environment, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to communicate their intentions to me, and if they just came at me waving their tentacles or whatever, it’s Blastotron time. On sight.

So what would I show them to prove that humanity is worthwhile – or, in a more moralistic sense, that we are good? See, now we get into questions of aesthetics, for art, or into questions of values in general, and it becomes almost impossible to answer. I recognize that the goal of the prompt is to examine my aesthetics, my values, to find out what I think is the highest achievement of humanity; but since my area of interest and expertise is actually rhetoric, and that means I choose my communication with my audience in mind, I know better than to decide something like this only using my own criteria and nothing else. If you seriously just want me to pick the best thing in the world according to me with no other considerations at all, I’m going to go with the poetry of ee cummings, particularly “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” But see, much of the beauty in that poem comes from understanding both human society and the history of human poetry, and it wouldn’t translate quickly enough to the Martians; so that can’t be my answer.

If we imagine that the Martians have been watching us through Martioscopes for centuries – and why wouldn’t they? Don’t we watch fail videos constantly on YouTube? And what is human history if not one giant fail video? – then the background knowledge necessary to understand the context could actually be assumed; and in that case, I might go with something like cummings’s poetry. Or for visual art, I would probably select Michelangelo’s Pieta, or the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Or, for the sake of including multiple senses in my appeal for the value of humanity, I might go with a performance of an opera or a musical, because that can include singing, dancing, music and literature, all at once. In that case I would pick Hamilton, which I think is utterly brilliant  dramatically, musically, and poetically — though that thought process does lead me to consider movies as a way to include visual and auditory art, and to include many different kinds of aesthetic appeal: and in that case I would choose either Pleasantville, partly because it includes quite a bit of very beautiful art; or Fantasia, because it includes so much beautiful music.

But this all assumes that art is the highest achievement of humanity. I think there is an argument for that, because what is important for humanity, specifically, has to be the things that are unique to humanity; and the only things I believe are unique to humanity are the search for truth, and the creation of beauty, both for no reason apart from the intrinsic value of truth, and of beauty. Other creatures seek and discover truth – the best way to pull termites out of a mound, for instance – but they do it in pursuit of survival, not for the joy of discovery and the goal of understanding. Not that survival is less valuable than art for art’s sake and truth for understanding’s sake; but survival for survival’s sake is less human. So I do think that beauty is one of the crowning achievements of humanity: but I would have a much more difficult time arguing that it is the only, or the best, achievement of humanity, rather than truth.

So I have to also consider: what is our greatest truth?

Is it science? Perhaps; but the creation of the scientific method as a formula is pretty well associated with only one man – and I have a hard time accepting that a dude who died trying to freeze chicken is literally the one best person in the history of humanity. Especially when his name was Francis Bacon. But then, if it’s not science, what is it? What is the one greatest truth that humanity has ever known, which I could then speak to an alien race and show them what we have accomplished?

I can’t think of one. (Take it as a given that it is not math.) Mainly because so much of our truth-seeking has to do with ourselves: and we still don’t know jack about ourselves, not really. I could go with “The only thing that I know is that I know nothing,” from Socrates, or “Existence is suffering, and suffering is caused by desire” from the Buddha; but honestly, I think “All you need is love” by Sir Paul McCartney is just about as profound and valuable as either of those. 

That’s why I turn to art. But that’s not fair: because I’m biased. So my biased answer suits the intent of the essay prompt, as my choice says something about me; but it wouldn’t actually present the pinnacle of human achievement unless I assume that I am qualified to judge that – which implies that I am the pinnacle of human judgment. And I’m not: I ate Peeps dipped in salsa. That was not sound judgment on my part. This, of course, also implies that I should not be choosing the pinnacle of human artistic achievement (though I sure did that without hesitation, didn’t I?), as that too requires judgment.

So I think the best answer is this: I would not choose.

Because I know nothing, because I have great respect for humanity (And much respect for myself, don’t get me wrong; but more for humanity), and because I don’t actually accept the premise of this question, I think that what I would choose to present to show the worth of humanity is – humanity. 

All of it. All of us. Because part of the glory of humanity is how incredibly different we all are, how various, how multifarious; and yet at the same time, how similar: because my mom is nothing like your mom, and yet somehow, the way my mother used to kiss my head when she tucked me in is exactly how your mother kissed you when she tucked you in. Or maybe how your father did, or your grandparent. The way I look up into warm raindrops and smile is exactly the same way you do it, when we are dancing in the rain. The incredible pride I feel when I finish the project I’ve been working on – whether it’s a novel about vampires or pirates, or a bookshelf I built, or the successful sale of my mother-in-law’s house after her husband died – is the same as the incredible pride you feel when you finish what you’ve been working on, whether that is a sales presentation, a complete re-watch of every episode of Supernatural, or helping your child master their dance for the Christmas recital. And yet how much does your child’s dance recital routine resemble my pirate novel?

It depends: does your kid dance the hornpipe?

If I want to show humanity’s greatest achievement, I think I have to show humanity’s greatest strength: our diversity, our individuality, and our unique and personal ability to take almost anything and turn it into a work of art, a magnificent accomplishment, just because one human being – and often, no one else on the whole damn planet – saw that activity, that pursuit, that project, that idea, as worth all of one human being’s time and energy and focus: and thus that one human being accomplished something incredible.

Now, this would likely encounter some resistance from the Martians. Because, as the prompt says, these beings are impatient: they are the ones who asked me for one single piece of work to present to them to represent all of humanity.

But really? That’s just a request for a sales pitch. They’re asking me to convince them that one thing is the best thing in all of human history. (I would prove this by asking them to show me, first, the one thing that represents all of Martian culture. And by the way, if they could do so, then I would have an excellent idea of what their aesthetics or values are, and I could think of one wonderful example to show them in return. But I bet I’m right: because this seems like an absurd request with any race. I mean, show me the best cat of all time. The best horse. The greatest star. You see? There are too many criteria, too many options, in almost any collection of items as large as everything accomplished in an entire race’s history.) So I would first show them this:

And then express that here we have an example of nearly perfect writing, combined with – I wouldn’t necessarily call it nearly perfect acting, because I don’t want to judge; but it’s not only one artist, you see? The words have to be brought to life by the actor, and the end result – is that the accomplishment of one human? Or two? Or many, since directors and acting coaches and everyone else who contributed to these performances also participated in the creation of this moment. And since there are so many interpretations and versions of this particular speech written by William Shakespeare, it’s hard to say if this one is the best version of it – or maybe this one.

Or this one.

Or no. It’s this one.

(Actually, I can’t find a clip of my favorite version of this speech, which was my first encounter with it: when Nick Nolte gives the monologue in the movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Other than that one, I think I actually like Cumberbatch the best out of these.)

But the point is, I would argue, that because of the individual ability of humans to interpret reality, and to translate it, inculcating our own ideas and feelings into what we take in, blending what we learn with what we are – to understand one great accomplishment of one human, one also has to appreciate the other versions of the same idea, the same art, the same achievement. When I was young, I was deeply impressed by Thomas Edison – and then when I learned about Nikola Tesla, I was even more impressed by him, because of what I had felt about Edison; and then, honestly, I was once again impressed by Edison (Though I know that isn’t the popular interpretation, as the memes nowadays would have us believe that Tesla was all of the genius and Edison only stole it: but no, Edison was more than that. But this isn’t the argument I want to have with these Martians.).

If I got them listening with my versions of this speech as presented by different actors, I would then point out that every one of Shakespeare’s plays was based on a story written by someone else. That the Bard himself, whom I still consider the greatest wordsmith in the history of the English language, wrote adapted rather than original screenplays – and who knows, maybe the Boccaccio version was better. 

(Okay, that pun might be the greatest accomplishment of humanity. But probably not.)

So then, once I had them on the hook with this idea that different humans can create different versions of the same masterpiece and make it into entirely new and different masterpieces – then I would show them all of humanity that they could ever want to see.

I would show them the internet.

I would hand over my phone, and starting with the items that I have mentioned here – the poetry of ee cummings, and the art of Michelangelo, and the work of Shakespeare and of Lin-Manuel Miranda, and of Pleasantville and Fantasia, and also Mozart’s Requiem and the album In the Court of the Crimson King and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and everything else that is perfect – I would show them everything that can be found on the internet that shows what humanity is and what humanity can do.

Including the wars. And the genocides. The atrocities and the errors and the destructions. The atomic bombs. The Holocaust. The history of holy wars around the world. Because those, the perfect masterpieces of evil that we have created: those are humanity too.

And the Martians should have some warning, at least.

And then, once they were all completely riveted by what they saw on the screen?

Blastotron.

It’s Not Soup, It’s a Sandwich.

Dusty 1 Comment

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:

Why Johnny Still Can't Read by Rudolf Flesch | Goodreads

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:

Writing in a Nation of Testing: Why Johnny Can't Write

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:

Why Johnny Can't Sit Still: Straight Talk about Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Amazon.com: Books

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:

Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong | Book by William Kilpatrick | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

And eventually, to this.

Thomas Sowell quote: The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't...

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.

75 Inspiring and Eye-Opening Truth Quotes | Reader's Digest

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.

It’s called GET OUT OF MA SWAMP.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about art.

These thoughts were inspired by a book I just finished reading, Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art; I’ll be reviewing it later, (Sneak peek: IT SUCKS.) though after  yesterday’s post I’ve decided to keep the book reviews and This Morning separate. This Morning is what I think a blog should be, and what I haven’t been doing well despite my years of keeping a site for my writing: it should be a Web-log, a recounting of events, thoughts, feelings, etc. Part of me says “Then why the hell would anyone want to read it?” But that takes me to what art is.

Art is one of the two pursuits, ambitions, goals, that make humanity what we are, that set us apart. We share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and everything we have — tools, technology, society, language, family, war — is echoed in the animal world. The only two things that make us unique (And they may not actually make us unique, as there may be other creatures on Earth with the same pursuits) are art, and truth. We  pursue truth for the sake of truth, and art for the sake of art, and I think there are no other creatures that can definitively be said to do the same. The argument could be made for birdsong and whale song, and for the way some animals play, and the way some animals dance; but I think all of those can be identified as survival traits in one way or another.

I think art  and truth can be seen as survival traits for humanity, as well, but the connection is more tenuous, more distant. Art and truth can be paths to personal success, financial or social, in society, and thus are they survival strategies; they can create pleasure in the individual, which makes us more likely to do other things that help us survive that we tend to do when we’re happy, and also helps us deal with the stress that kills us; they can be used to achieve pragmatic and temporal goals and to transmit and influence culture, which are all part of the survival strategies of the social animals that we are.

But the thing is, there are a lot of us who pursue art and truth despite those pursuits taking away from everything that would be seen as beneficial to Darwinian survival strategies. My art cuts me off from other people. It often makes me sad. It takes time away from the things that earn me money, that earn me social success. Art kills quite a few of us: Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, David Foster Wallace, among others, by suicide; James Joyce and Jack London and Dylan Thomas, among others, by alcoholism. (I’m oversimplifying: they all suffered from various conditions that surely contributed to their deaths, particularly, in the case of the suicides, severe depression; but if you don’t think that the life of an artist was a factor as well, then you don’t do enough art. You should try to do more. I promise it won’t make you suicidal. Well, I don’t think it will.) Truth does a lot of the same things to scientists and mathematicians and philosophers, and where it has been used to have a direct impact on society, then sometimes lots of people die, particularly the one who speaks truth: this category, I would argue, includes Dr. Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther and Karl Marx. Also J. Robert Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project, and Werner von Braun.

So art and truth are not, or not only, survival strategies; in some cases they are hazards — and yet we continue to pursue them. Because there is value in them, for society and for the individual, beyond survival, beyond life and death. That’s what art is: value beyond life and death. It’s something worthwhile even if we can’t say precisely why it is; we know it is. There are as many reasons why as there are people, but I think that for all of us, there is a reason why art is worthwhile beyond life and death. That’s not to say that we should die for art, nor that we should want to; it means the value of art is nothing to do with living or dying.

(I will say I think there is a biological evolutionary explanation for the pursuits of art and truth: I think our giant complicated brains evolved in order to keep us alive despite our essentially incompetent bodies, but then our brains got a jump on survival pressures when we created society, and gave ourselves an enormous lead in the race for survival — so strong a lead, in fact, that we’re probably going to kill ourselves off with the very things that help us survive, like the food we eat and the technology we create and the standard of living we uphold and the population  we sustain. But another aspect of this oversuccess is that we don’t actually need all of our brains in order to live; so we turn that excess energy into a pursuit that consumes brain power, and offers us some kind of valuable reward, but that doesn’t contribute to survival. Art. And truth.)

The difference between these two is the distinction between heart and mind, emotion and thought. Truth is thought, and art is emotion. That’s too glib and simplistic, of course; they almost always blend and combine and lead from one to the other and back. But one of my favorite quotes, from Vladimir Nabokov, is, “To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.” The goal of fiction, which is Nabokov’s subject there, is not to depict the world, but to interpret the world; the same should be true for pictorial art, and for music, and for anything else that isn’t trying to capture and explain the world; that is the realm of truth-seekers, not artists.

When I think of the pursuit of truth, by the way, I think of my father. My father is a retired particle physicist, and for years, since before he retired, he’s been working on a physics problem in his free time. I can’t explain it; it has something to do with reconciling Newtonian physics with quantum mechanics. He had an inspiration years ago, and he’s been searching for the math to make it work ever since. He does this without expectation of reward; the best he can hope for is publishing an article in a physics journal, which would lead to no tangible reward. He has hit many stumbling blocks: he has had to look for math texts that can give him a formula or a method that he thinks he needs, and those are often dead ends. He has come close, only to find a flaw in his own math, which means he needs to start over again. He’s still working on it. He does it late at night when he can’t sleep, because simply working on it gives him peace. That’s the pursuit of truth, because all of those things would apply to someone, say, writing a novel, except my father is looking for an answer. That’s his goal even more than publication: he thinks this idea will work, and he wants to assure himself that it will. He is his own audience.

That, with the goal of capturing or creating a feeling, is art.

(To be continued. Because the pursuit of art never ends.)

Truth

Dusty Leave a comment

It seems to me there are three ways to come at this essay about the different kinds of truth. The first and most obvious – to me, at least – is to quote the diabolical Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons, who, when on the witness stand and told that the court wants the truth, scoffs, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth! No truth-handler you! Bah, I deride your truth-handling abilities!”

The second (and only slightly less amusing) is to make reference to the classic Dwight Schrute meme where Dwight points out the problem with a statement – here, if I may indulge in a visual, is one of my favorites:

Image result for dwight schrute false meme

But I believe I will select the introductory quote about truth that is nearest to my own heart: Dan Rather, the former anchor for the CBS Evening News, said, “The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called ‘truth.’”

I would like to poke you with a sharp stick called ‘Truth.’

This would seem, at first, a fruitless enterprise. After all, truth is truth; how can there be kinds of truth? But in fact there are, simply because we are flawed creatures, we humans; we cannot know everything, and so we cannot know absolutes: there may be circumstances and conditions under which anything we think to be true may in fact not be. Therefore there are at least two levels of truth: truth we can know, and truth we cannot because it is absolute and thus requires omniscience. Or more simply, truth we can know and truth we cannot know, but which is nonetheless truth. The key here is to accept that knowing truth changes its truth-value, which is the concept I hope to prove in this essay; the upper limit is truth which requires omniscience to know, but there are degrees leading up to that limit, and recognizable categories, which I will attempt to explicate.

By the way: because I wrote out that Sideshow Bob quote, now my word processor wants to autocomplete “truth” into “truth-hand” every time I write it. This is both wonderful and annoying.

Like truth.

Let us begin with a basic understanding of truth. Truth is perhaps best defined through defining its opposite, falsehood; I would argue that there are essentially two kinds of falsehood, which are one, untruths, and two, lies. Untruths are things – ideas, statements, assumptions – that are not truth because when one attempts to verify them objectively, one finds reality does not match the untruth. If I were to believe it is raining outside because I am in a room with no windows, I can look out through the door and discover whether my belief is true, or untrue: if it is raining then the belief is true, and if it is not raining, then the belief is untrue. This is the first point in arguing that knowing truth changes the truth-value: because the belief that “It is raining outside” is objectively true somewhere, presumably at every possible instant that one could believe it – especially if one broadens the concept of “rain” to include liquid precipitation on other planets and celestial bodies. So sure, it is always raining SOMEWHERE – but unless it is raining where I personally can verify it through my senses, then it doesn’t really matter to the truth-value of my belief; if I were to step outside into a sunny afternoon and say “It’s raining,” someone’s response would likely be

Image result for dwight schrute false

The second kind of falsehood is a lie: this is when the truth, objectively verifiable through the senses, is known, and an idea is put forward that is known to be counter to that truth. This is when I am in a room with windows, looking out at the sun, and I say, “It is raining.” The advantage for our purpose here is that it doesn’t matter which kind of falsehood it is, the truth is always the same: objectively verifiable through the senses.

But there is a difficulty there. Because there are truths that we have discovered, truths that we know, that are not verifiable through the senses, that are not objective. A strict prescriptivist of truth would argue that these truths are therefore not true, because only objectively verifiable facts can be true. To those people I say: talk to Heisenberg. (And this is funny, because it’s mostly science-y people who would say that, and Heisenberg is about as science-y as you can get. Take that, science!) The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tells us that when a particle has two complementary properties, such as position and momentum, we cannot know both properties at the same time. If we know precisely where the particle is at a given moment, then we have frozen that particle in time, which means at that instant, to us, it has no momentum: picture it as a snapshot of the particle, showing us where it is, but in that snapshot, it is not moving. Alternatively, we could know the particle’s momentum, its velocity and direction; but we can only measure that by tracking its movement – which means that, over the time period when we re tracking its movement, we cannot say precisely where it was: only give a range, somewhere between Point A and Point B.

The real point is, that particle has both momentum and position, and both of those properties have objective truth, both are definite, verifiable facts – but we can only know one at a time. Knowing one makes it impossible to know the other, but it doesn’t change its truthiness.

Therefore we must add a word to our definition of truth: truth is an idea that is potentially objectively verifiable through the senses. If we had world enough and time, we could verify it; therefore it is true. But I hope we can all see that a truth that is objectively verifiable through the senses has more impact, more weight – more gravity, let us say – than a truth that is only potentially verifiable. If I suspect that the rain falling outside my room is in fact acidic, but I don’t have the instruments to test, then I may want to respond as if it were acidic, and act to protect my plants, let us say; but in the process I will undeniably encounter the verifiable truth of the rain itself: I will get wet. I am more likely to respond to the fact of wetness than to the theory of acid; that truth, then, has more weight, more potential to change my thoughts and actions. That truth has more gravity.

As I was saying, then, the lowest level of truth is one that is only potentially verifiable, but cannot be objectively verified. In fact there is one level of truth lower than that, based on knowledge – or rather, on ignorance; because if knowing a fact gives it more weight, then not knowing gives less. So the lowest kind of truth is truth we don’t know. It’s true, but for us, it is meaningless; because of our ignorance, this is equivalent to the absolute truths we can’t know. In either case, we can’t act on it, or change our thought process or paradigm because of it; it has no impact on us. For us, it might as well not be true, and so it has only the barest sliver of truth. That bottom level is the fact of rain outside a room with no windows and no doors. Or whether or not the worm currently crawling through the earth beneath me is depressed. I don’t know, and so cannot act on it. That’s the lowest kind of truth—and I apologize for using an underground worm’s depression as an example; I really didn’t think about the pun there.

As for truth that could be verifiable but can’t be objectively verified, let’s use as an example the infinite nature of the universe. Is the universe infinite? No idea. We’ll never know. In theory one could find a mathematical proof of it, if we could find the existence of the multiverse and the mechanism whereby new universes are created, but we can’t ever know it for sure. The only thing this kind of truth can do for us is give us a headache: it feels like we could know, but we can’t actually know. This kind of truth is a tease. At best a Zen koan.

Just above that level is an idea that I think is true, but I don’t know why I think it’s true. This kind of truth has the potential of being objectively verifiable, but I as the knower don’t know how to do that, and therefore could never verify it. This is where most racist ideas live. Why do racists think white skin is better than brown skin? They don’t know, but they think it’s true. There are quite a number of outright lies at this level, because people might be able to figure out how to verify their beliefs, but they don’t want to, because the truth will likely be the opposite of what they believe it is. That, in my opinion, is a lie: when I say it’s raining outside, but I refuse to open the door and look because I think it is probably sunny – but I won’t admit that.

The next level up is something that I am sure is true, and that I have evidence for, but which is not clearly objectively verifiable based on my evidence. This is where superstitions are found: Michael Jordan believed that his lucky shorts were one of the reasons for his success, and he wore them for every game he played. He won six NBA championships and three MVP awards wearing those shorts; so there is some evidence that the shorts were lucky. Just not verifiable evidence, because “luck” can’t be tested for – but just like (Okay, not just like) the uncertainty principle, if we were to create a laboratory experiment to confirm that the shorts were not lucky, the element of luck in the form of blind chance or influences on the experiment that we could not control would ruin the results: if we had Michael Jordan play half the time with his lucky shorts and half the time with “control shorts” (Which makes him sound like he has bladder control issues, which is just sad), that doesn’t mean we can make his teammates play the same in both games, or his opponents play the same, or even control all the other factors that go into Michael Jordan playing well or poorly. We can’t prove the shorts are or are not lucky, but there’s objective evidence in the form of success that says they are. And that’s why luck still exists as a concept, and why Jordan wore the same pair of shorts every game for almost fifteen years.

Oh – he did wash them, by the way. After every game.

The next level is one I don’t want to include, but I have to because of the parameters I have set forth. If someone knowing a thing makes it more true than something that nobody knows, then if a lot of people know a thing, it has to be more true than if only one person knows it. Because a known fact has more weight, more gravity, and that is an element of the fact’s truth-value. So the next level up is a thing that is known, with evidence but without objective verification (but still potentially objectively verifiable – have I broken your brains yet?), by a lot of people. I hate this because I don’t want to say that the popularity of an idea has any bearing on its truth, but in fact, if we want to include a truth’s potential to change someone’s mind or behavior – and I do, because otherwise there is no point to speaking about truth at all – then I have to make this a separate and higher level, because something that a lot of people believe to be true has a much greater chance of changing their behavior. This is something like this statement: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server makes her a poorer candidate for president (Meaning she would have been a worse president than someone otherwise identical but who didn’t use a private email server; the statement that the private email server made her less likely to win is objectively verifiable truth, because: well, look.). A lot of people believed that Clinton’s private email server made her less trustworthy, and therefore a bad candidate for the Presidency. And because a lot of people believed it, with evidence (Because that’s an untrustworthy act) but not objectively verified (Because she never became president and so we can’t see how untrustworthy she would have been in the Oval Office), it had more weight: it had more impact. It changed enough votes that it, along with other factors, changed the outcome of the election. That truth had more value, more gravity, because more people thought it was true.

Are we having fun yet?

The next level is something that is true not because it is objectively verified but because it cannot be disproven. This is sort of an offshoot from the last level, because there isn’t objective verification, but there is somewhat more weight to these ideas because there is an argument to be made for them, that nobody can disprove the idea, that makes it more likely that people will accept it as truth, which increases the truth-value or gravity of the idea. (Don’t worry: we’re almost at the top. Almost at simple truth. But not quite.) This is the level where God lives. The existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, non-material personal deity is impossible to disprove: there is no observation I can make that would prove that God doesn’t exist. According to science, this makes the god-hypothesis false, because it is unfalsifiable; but I’m not talking about science, I’m talking about impact on humans through the intersection of objective reality and knowledge. There are quite a few people who know God’s existence is real, and since God cannot be disproven, that gives the idea more weight than Michael Jordan’s lucky shorts. (You have to be an atheist to make that statement with a straight face. Okay, I was smiling a little when I wrote it.) It moves the truth of religion to a higher level, how’s that? Not objectively proven, but not objectively disproven, either.

But now, at last, after ignorance and belief and faith and falsifiability and religion and – Lord help us – even sports, we come to the simplest level, and nearly the top. This is where we find: the truth. Simple truth. Facts, with known evidence, which are objectively verifiable: I can look out my door and see that it is or is not raining, and I can actually test it to make sure that it is rain. I can step outside, and I will get wet. Truth. Simple truth.

Of course, even this level isn’t that simple, because the evidence of our senses is, sadly, not necessarily reflective of objective reality; all my senses could verify that it is in fact raining, but I could be mad, or in the Matrix. But that moves us over into the question of absolute truth, and since I can’t know absolute truth, it doesn’t matter to me: absolute truth is actually down at that bottom level, truth I don’t know. (There’s no way out of Descartes’ labyrinth here, by the way. In the Matrix, it is possible to know that the Matrix is not real – but then, the second movie shows us that there is another level of truth, that Neo is the sixth version of the One, and the other characters did not know that truth; and then past that there is another level – because the character Neo, like the character of the Architect who makes him, who made the Matrix, don’t know that they’re actually in a fictional movie. The only truth we can ever know is what our senses tell us. Period. Cogito ergo sum.) We take our reality as just that, as reality, and that is all we know, and all we need to know. That is truth.

One level left: that is the important truth. The weighty truth, the truth that is both objectively verified and also able to change thoughts and actions of humans; the kind of truth that makes a paradigm shift, that combines both science and popularity, and therefore moves mountains and changes continents. Proven facts that also have gravity. This is, for example, the truth that every living thing dies.

The truth that love conquers all.

The truth that money makes the world go ’round.

The truth that man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

The truth that art is humanity’s highest calling.

The truth that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The truth that evolution through natural selection is sufficient to explain all complexity in the biosphere.

The truth that we’ll never know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

My last truth is this: we can handle the truth. We can. We do.

Just not enough.

I Suck.

Dusty Leave a comment

I want to be honest. Want to clear the air.

We have a new president. And he may have many good qualities — though hope for that is fading fast — but there are a number of things about him that are highly disturbing. Perhaps the worst are that he is narcissistic, and indifferent to truth, facts, and transparency. And I don’t mean that as a cheap insult, a dig at him based on his political difference from me or even his appalling personality; I mean quite literally that he appears to be a true narcissist, in love only and always with himself; he really doesn’t seem to care what the truth is so long as he can spin it to reflect well on himself. So extreme arrogance, and dishonesty, are the fundamental issues here — though again, that may only be the scum on top of the cesspool. There may be worse stuff lower down. But for now, these will do.

I just got chewed out, a couple of days ago, by a former friend on Facebook for some of my bad habits. And it hurt, but only because he was right, and I have been fooling myself about those bad habits, pretending they aren’t as bad as they are, or that other people wouldn’t even notice them. Not true. I was lying to myself, in order to protect my ego.

I was like President Stump.*

(*I refuse to type his actual name on this blog. Here’s why.)

Okay. Not that bad.

The guy who tore me up is, let it be known, arrogant on a scale I can’t match, and also a manipulative, obnoxious fuckbiscuit. But that doesn’t matter: that’s for him to deal with, not me. I have to deal with me.

See, the thing is, I spend a lot of time on this blog, and in my fiction books, saying what I think is right. And that is an essentially arrogant stance to take. It is worse for me because I base my authority merely on my opinion of myself, and my ability with language. Which is nice and all, being able to string words together, but it certainly doesn’t make me right all the time: the words reflect thoughts, and to be really right words, they have to come from right thoughts.

However, as I was telling my class today, the only thing a writer can ever be sure of is his own opinion of his work. While writers should consider their audience, we can’t really know what people think of our words and our ideas (Which is why comments are always welcome and appreciated! Even critical ones, because then I know when to pull back on the stick.), we can only know what we think. I think my stories are interesting, which is why I write them. I think my insights are insightful, which is why I share them. It’s the only reason I can ever have to share what I write: I think it’s the right thing to say.

I don’t have a problem with that truth. I can accept that my interests are my best subjects, and that if I think something sincerely, then I will write about it better than something I pick because I think other people will like it. I don’t mind at all that other people don’t always like what I like. I accept the basic egotism of being an artist. But I don’t want anyone thinking that I see myself the way President Rump sees himself. I don’t want people to believe that, just because I act like I’m all that and a bag of chips with a philosophy degree, that I, too, am a fuckbiscuit. I’m not.

So here’s the truth.

I’m arrogant. I think of myself as more intelligent than most people out there. I recognize that other people have knowledge and abilities that I don’t, and I know there are things I know nothing about, and could not learn; but I also think those things aren’t as important as what I know and what I’m good at. I have no valid reason for this belief; I just think it because it makes me more awesome. I think fast and I talk fast and I write fast, and voluminously, excessively, mind-numbingly, all three. Too much. All three. What I don’t do enough of is — listen. Read. Learn. If true wisdom is knowing what you don’t know, then I’m an idiot: because I think I’m a genius.

I argue this way. I don’t read carefully enough what my opponent has to say, I just — and this hurts to say, because I tell my students they should never do this — I find a flaw in the argument and then I attack it. I don’t pay attention to the rest of the argument, as long as I have my weak spot to stab at. I elevate my diction in order to seem objective, but really, it’s a cheap dodge to cover the basic flaw of most of my arguments, which is this: I’m making it up on the spot. I don’t have a whole lot of basis for a lot of my opinions. I think they make sense, and I strive to make them make sense, but there’s not a lot of foundation underneath the surface. I am logically shallow, just good at poking at weak points, and also talking really fast and saying a whole lot that doesn’t have much substance behind it. Sounds good, though. Well — to me.

I teach this way. I do not prepare very much, because I know I can entertain a class, and give them at least a veneer of insight that I come up with pretty much off the cuff. But I don’t read literary analysis, nor pedagogy textbooks, and I don’t try to improve what I do on a fundamental level. I change around what the classes read, and when I remember an insight from a past class (I do have a good memory, which helps) I add it in; but the aspects of my teaching style that don’t work very well stay in place because I don’t do the work necessary to change them. Largely because I think that my system is just fine. Because it’s my system. And I’m arrogant.

I write this way. I don’t edit much, or do a whole lot of drafts; I haven’t studied writing other than studying literature. I know there are flaws in my writing — I talk too much, mainly — but I don’t try to fix them. Because the way I write is fine, because it’s the way I write, and surely that’s good enough. My lack of tangible success is a reflection of the world not seeing my genius; not any reason why I need to change.

Along with arrogance is this: I am lazy. I am damned lazy. I know about my bad habits, but I don’t change them, because it would require effort. I thought about doing my exercises tonight, but I just had Cheez-its, instead. I planned to read much more this year, but so far, I’ve mostly spent time playing mindless video games. My usual habit is this: I recognize a problem with my arguing or teaching or writing, or with myself and my lifestyle; I castigate myself for a little while, until I feel like I’ve suffered enough angst for the flaw — and then I tell myself that I can’t change who I am. Then I start building rationalizations, false justifications for just staying the way I am. Not because I think my flaws are good — but because I don’t want to put in the work to change them. I don’t want to edit my writing. That’s hard. I’d rather just bang out a single draft and call it good. Well, really, I’d rather play mindless video games and listen to Hamilton.

I think the best word for me is glib. I react quickly and perhaps wittily, but without a whole lot behind it. I don’t think about things for very long, and I don’t spend time trying to learn what I don’t know. I am facile, and perhaps charming, and so I get encouragement from the people around me, which confirms for me how cool I am. Though I don’t really need that: because I know I’m cool. And my opinion is enough. Anybody who thinks less of me is clearly wrong and probably a jerk.

There’s more: I have a pretty serious temper, and I tend to cover it until I blow, usually without warning, and then I yell and curse a lot, pitch a fit, and then withdraw to feel put-upon and pouty. I can genuinely hurt people when I blow — I have scared students by yelling loudly; I have hurt the feelings of those I love: I have said terrible things to my wife, to my friends, and to my brother and my parents. I have yelled at and terrified my pets, throwing things and hitting things to make loud noises. I’m sarcastic, and often insulting, particularly in argument. For a guy who wants to be honest and usually claims to be fundamentally honest, I sure lie a lot. Mostly to students. Sometimes it’s even justified. And, obviously, I’m a hypocrite: I criticize other people for not being open-minded, for not trying to learn and improve, and then I sit back on my steadily widening ass and eat more Cheez-its. I talk about the importance of deep thought, and of honesty, and of valid, genuine argument. And then I do all the shit I do.

I am sorely tempted to finish this up by talking about my good qualities. But I think for once I will stop myself from going on. This is what I wanted to say: in a lot of ways, a lot of really important ways, I suck.

Just thought you should know.

A last postscript: it is — I don’t know, probably? Definitely? Surely? — true that the fuckbiscuit isn’t really that arrogant. It’s just that he had the gall to point out my flaws, and be right. (He basically said I talk faster and more than I think, get snotty to cover up my own confusion which is caused by my tendency not to take my time and think things through, and that I insult my opponents and then act put-upon and pissy when they call me on my own bullshit. And that I do this so I can stroke my ego, not so I can actually learn or improve myself or my opinions, which is why I claim to argue. So, I’m a liar, too. All true.) And I don’t like the way he did it, but then, it was effective, and I’m not sure that another approach would have been. So if he is manipulative, it might have been, really, for my own good.

Though I’m not taking back the “fuckbiscuit” part.

 

Further postscript: I recognize that this post seems like a confession that puts the lie to what I’m confessing — I can’t be that arrogant if I talk about how much I suck! I can’t be a liar if I can be this honest! — but this is one step back from years of these bad habits. I don’t think it balances the scales. I really am all of these bad things; this post is just an anomaly. I want to say that I’m working on these things, and maybe I am. But maybe I’m just going to eat more Cheez-its.

This is a test. It is only a test.

Dusty Leave a comment

(How perfectly ironic is it that the above clip was preceded by an advertisement by HP that runs on the tagline “Every student learns differently.” Now let me talk about standardized testing of those different-learning individuals, shall I?)

 

It’s testing season again.

If only that meant we could shoot them.

I have been reluctant to write about testing from a teacher’s perspective, because it feels so obvious: of course we hate tests. Of course we do. Everybody knows it, right?

But in the last week I’ve been asked by two different people – one a current high school student, not one of mine but one who presumably knew I’d be good for a rant; the other an auditor for the state of Oregon, who sent me (and presumably thousands of others – but wouldn’t it be funny if it was just me? If some random number generator landed on my Roulette-wheel slot, and my answers were the only ones that mattered?) a link to a survey looking for feedback – about standardized testing. And I’ve had to give standardized tests to my students, and I am working to prepare my AP students for standardized tests that are coming up soon and that are freaking them out; and in my discussions of those tests with those students, I have been sending mixed messages. And presumably thousands of other teachers have done exactly the same.

So there is a reason to write about this. Because maybe it’s not so obvious that teachers hate standardized tests.

But it should be.

I know I’ve written about standardized tests before in terms of grades and evaluation, and that criticism holds true: we put too much weight on test scores only because they are easy to understand. We feel like knowing that someone scored a 1500 on their SATs, and a 142 on their IQ test, tells us something about that person’s capacity and ability and potential. But think of it this way: if I tell you that I scored a 92 on my driver’s test, does that tell you how well I drive? Of course not: it tells you how well I drive when there’s a DMV employee with a clipboard in the car watching my every move. The situation is artificial, and therefore the results are not representative of my genuine abilities or normal performance. And the testing people would say yes: we create a situation of artificial intensity in order to put someone to the test; that’s what a test is, a crucible that melts away the impurities and discovers someone’s purest essence, so to speak. My driving abilities under pressure should represent my best driving abilities, right?

But they’re not, are they? As I drive around town, I will not be driving the same way I did when I drove for the clipboard-man. I will not be as alert, and I will not be as cautious, and I will not be as scrupulous in following the rules. And because of that, I will not drive as well. I will not be using my full driving capacity because I won’t feel the pressure. And so which is my purest essence: the things I can do in an artificial high-pressure situation, or the things I do on a daily basis? Which is my verbal language ability: the 720 I scored on my SATs, or the successes and failures in my day-to-day reading and writing, my failure to comprehend reading material that I didn’t pay much attention to, my failure to make someone else understand my point in an email or a letter or a memo? Wouldn’t it be the latter? Will Durant wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do.” (Often attributed to Aristotle, because Durant was writing about and paraphrasing Aristotle when he wrote it. But Durant was the one who actually said that.) So I would argue that it is our daily practice that shows our actual skill level, not the level we can force ourselves to when put on the spot: that reveals much more about our ability to handle pressure. Even that is flawed: because test pressure is different from actual crisis pressure, because tests are expected and planned, and we can prepare for them, study hard, psych ourselves up, have a good breakfast, bring extra #2 pencils; whereas crises happen without foreknowledge and with infinitely more chaos. What does my ability to handle clipboard-man pressure reveal about my ability to drive in a haboob?

(Note to non-Arizonans: a haboob is a sudden and intense sandstorm or duststorm. It is one of the hazards that Arizona drivers face. But I only included that because I wanted to write “haboob.”)

Nothing at all. And that’s what tests give us in terms of useful information: nothing at all. The nice thing, I suppose, is that now the test companies aren’t even pretending to give useful information; because teachers don’t get to see the test questions.

That’s right. Standardized tests are, like all tests, supposed to tell us how well a student is doing, right? To show us where the student is struggling, so we can focus our instruction on that area and help the student improve? Right: except standardized tests don’t do that any more, because they don’t reveal their questions, nor do they show a student’s right and wrong answers. The scores on standardized tests are also becoming more obtuse: test companies wish to preserve their market, and so they make their score reports esoteric, in order to ensure that people require the company’s services to interpret the test scores. Students don’t get a 70%, a 95%, or an A; they get a number without any context at all. Either a percentile rank, which tells you how well you did in comparison with other students, or you get a raw score that means essentially nothing. When I taught in Oregon and pushed my students through the proprietary Oregon reading test, the OAKS (Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, isn’t that clever; if test companies and others who sell education materials excel at anything, it is generating semi-clever acronyms.), they got their score automatically at the end of the 54-question multiple choice test. The highest score I ever saw was a 274. The lowest score I ever saw was a 206. So you tell me what that means. Sure, 274 is higher than 206. But does the 206 mean that the student got nothing right? Did the 274 student get everything right? Does that mean the 274 needs no further instruction in reading? Does the 206 kid go back to elementary school? Who knows: the range of scores is wider than the number of questions on the test. It’s not even a matter of multiple points, or partial credit; it’s a multiple choice test. And even if I could know how many questions a student got right or wrong, I don’t get to see the questions, because of fears about test security, because the testing company doesn’t want to have to create entirely new tests every year because that’s expensive. So all I as the teacher know is: the student got a low score on the reading test. Tell me how I plan instruction to help that student improve.

Which brings us, I suppose, to the real problem with standardized tests: students don’t care. It was extremely rare for the students who got the lowest scores to be the ones who actually have the most trouble with reading. Those students, aware of their troubles with the subject, tried harder than anyone else, because they wanted to do well, they wanted to improve, they wanted to succeed. In almost every case, the lowest scores came from those who simply didn’t try on the test, who clicked through the screens guessing randomly rather than paying attention to the (hideously boring) reading passages, because they didn’t think the tests mattered. And they were right: even when I attached a grade in my class to the test scores, it was only one grade, and it didn’t ever change much in the grand scheme of things. Besides, how many of my students really cared about their grades? Cared so much, that is, that they would take two hours to complete a test they could zip through in about twelve minutes? The students who did well were those who wanted to do well on the test; the students who scored the highest generally weren’t my very best students in terms of language ability, but rather my very best students in terms of diligence. What a shock: standardized tests reveal the best standardized students, the ones who respond best to the usual motivators, the ones who can put forth the most consistent effort on the most tedious tasks. The ones who can work without passion and never feel the lack. Essentially, the ones who are the best at not caring: because they can not care, and still complete the task.

Tests do not find the smartest people; they find the best cubicle monkeys, the best worker drones. And perhaps that’s what schools are for: we have surrendered the idea that education builds a meritocracy, that the cream rises to the top, that the very best students at the very best schools are the ones who should be in charge or our companies or our country; no, we’d rather have the guy who swills beer and watches football, the guy who goes to church, the regular Joe as our president, and we’d rather have the guy who shows results in charge of the company – tangible results. Increased profits. Higher test scores.

This is the real value of standardized tests. They allow people who profit thereby to manipulate the system. The new politician, the new superintendent, the new principal, they come in, they point to the low test scores; because no matter how successful a school is, there will be low test scores. Especially when test scores are reported as percentile ranks; because that means there has to be a bottom rank as well as a top rank – even if everyone who took the test scored 95% and above, percentile ranks simply compare those students to each other, so the ones who scored the 95% now get placed in the bottom rank of students, because other students scored 96% and above. So the new hired gun points at the low test score and says, “This is unacceptable. I will change this.” Then they do a few obvious things: maybe they dedicate more computer labs to the tests, or longer testing periods. Maybe they offer prizes, like pizza parties, to the students if they do well. Maybe they force the teachers to provide free after-school tutoring to students who are struggling. Maybe they buy a test-prep program – conveniently provided by the same company who runs the testing, because why wouldn’t you use them? They make the tests, of course they can tell you how to pass the tests! And then the scores go up. The new principal or superintendent or politician points to that raised score, they claim success, they collect huzzahs; then they parlay that result into a better position, moving higher up the ladder, lifted skyward by their new reputation as an Education Reformer.

Tests are very good at that. They are also very good at making profits for the companies that make the tests – mostly the College Board, which runs the SATs and the AP and ACT tests, and Pearson Testing, which makes pretty much every state assessment for public schools – who make billions off of their purported ability to reveal important information about a student’s learning, and about a school’s success in teaching, when they actually reveal nothing of the kind. At least the College Board releases their test questions after the fact. But they take a three-hour test, following a year’s intensive study, and boil it down to a number between 1 and 5. Then they return their test scores attached to advertisements for products, books and seminars and training and websites, that will absolutely no question guaranteed raise those 1’s to 3’s, and those 3’s to 5’s.

Teach those students more? Help them to learn? Pssh. Why would we do that? We can raise their scores. What else matters?

This matters: every minute, every consultant, every dollar dedicated to test prep is time and money and effort and people taken away from actual education. When students are learning how to succeed on tests, they are not learning how to read and write and think and calculate and plan and analyze and evaluate and hypothesize and create. They’re not even learning how to play dodgeball.

I’d rather they spent the same amount of time playing dodgeball. At least they’d have some fun and get some exercise. And when it’s a question of my tax dollars going to buy tests, or going to buy those big red rubber balls, I’d rather subsidize Wham-o than Pearson any day.

It’s just like health care, and the military. We spend more money on education than most other countries, and yet we don’t get good results.

In 2011, the United States spent $11,841 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, an amount 35 percent higher than the OECD average of $8,789. At the postsecondary level, U.S. expenditures per FTE student were $26,021, almost twice as high as the OECD average of $13,619. Source

Why? Because this is capitalism. Our money funds profit. It funds profit for the companies that make the tests, and for the administrators and politicians who come in, raise scores, and then move on, without having actually improved anything, without having had any effect on education itself. I have no doubt there are teachers who do the same thing: who swoop in to low-performing schools, teach their students a good trick or two, bribe them with donuts on test day, and then reap benefits in the form of a reputation as a reformer, and maybe even merit pay bonuses. I myself have profited from my predecessor’s low test scores, because the fact that mine (and when I say “mine,” I mean “The scores earned by students I’ve taught”) are higher helps to ensure my job security. But the difference is, I actually teach. And I’ve never earned merit pay.

But I have helped to create this problem. I have told my students, in all sincerity, taking advantage of my reputation as a trustworthy authority figure with their best interests in mind, that tests are important and they should try their hardest. I have attached grades in my class to test scores that I can’t predict, that I can’t really improve, and that I can’t even see, in some cases; I have given students grades in my class based on their effort on the state tests, based largely on how long they took to complete it while I watched. I have shook my head and gotten annoyed, and I have even lectured my students, when they blow off the tests as unimportant. Right now I have students who are paying almost $100 apiece and who knows how much in stress and anxiety to take the AP test simply because I have decided that those who take the AP test get an automatic 100% on the final exam in my class – and some of them have told me straight out that they’re doing it to buy the grade from me. I have taken money to fix grades, and I haven’t even gotten the profit myself. I should ask College Board for a bonus.

I have told parents that test scores matter. I have offered ways for students to improve their test scores. I have even given out those atrocious, terrible test prep books from Princeton Review and Kaplan and the like, and told people they can use them for practice in order to master the tests. Not the material: the tests. I have sat through meetings about test scores and discussed the reasons why they’re low, and ways to raise them. So has every other teacher I know, and presumably every teacher across this country.

When put to the test, the real test of understanding and caring about education, I and my fellow teachers have failed.

In his Letter From Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., said this:

“[T]here are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

“Now, what is the difference between the two? […] 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.”

Is there any better description of how test scores make us feel? A false sense of superiority and inferiority? A segregation between the haves and the have-nots?

“Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, 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. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.”

So: students. Who, when it comes to having any real say in their own education, have been left behind.

 

I agree with Dr. King’s argument. I think he’s right, that we have a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws – and unjust policies – when we know them for what they are. And so I would like to call on my fellow educators to join me in finding ways to resist, non-violently, of course, the invasion of standardized testing in American schools. Let me quote Dr. King again:

“I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

Or, in this case, the highest respect for actual education. I believe that we must defend education against the tests: we should begin simply, by telling the truth, by calling the tests what they are: a sham and a fraud. Useless. A waste of time and money and resources. A drain on students and teachers and schools and the entire country, perpetuated only for the profit of a select few. Say it. Say it in public, say it to your students, say it to their parents, say it to administrators, say it to your fellow teachers, and help them to start saying it, too.

We are teachers: we must be the leaders in this fight. We won’t have to risk jail, not for refusing to pretend the tests have value. We may risk our jobs, but there are ways to counter that, particularly if we are good enough teachers to help students learn and therefore improve, with or without test scores.

If I may end by quoting a less august source, but one no less poetic and no less accurate than Dr. King:

It has to start somewhere.

It has to start sometime.

What better place than here?

What better time than now?

All Hell can’t stop us now.

 

The Truth About Beauty

Dusty Leave a comment

“[V]erse is ‘made.’ But the word ‘make’ is unsufficient for a true poem. ‘Create’ is unsufficient. All words are insufficient. Because of this. The poem exists before it is written.”

That, I didn’t get. “Where?”

“T.S. Eliot expresses it so – the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art” – she put another cigarette in her mouth, and this time I was ready with her dragon lighter – “fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty. Even if its themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, clichés of cheese, poison beauty. The amateur thinks his words, his paints, his notes, makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master knows he does not know what beauty is. Test this. Attempt a definition now. What is beauty?”

(From Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell)

I read this to my class the other day. And then I stopped and challenged them as Madame Crommelynck, the aged Belgian artiste, challenges her protegé Jason, the 13-year-old would-be poet: define beauty.

Here’s how I picture Madame.

My students couldn’t do it either. They did try, and they were annoyed with me when I disagreed with their assertions, but their answers didn’t work, not entirely. One said, “Every thing is beautiful,” because someone, somewhere, perceives it as such. I asked her if murder could be beautiful, and she said it could, to someone. But I beg to differ: I think anyone who considers murder “beautiful” is also murdering the word “beauty,” making it entirely meaningless. The same goes for any other extreme example: if we broaden the meaning of the word so much that it includes everything, then it means nothing. One argued that beauty is the “absorption of enjoyment.” I took that, like the previous attempt, to be too broad, too all-inclusive; I said, “Have you ever REALLY had to pee? When you finally get to go, isn’t that experience enjoyable?” He nodded. “But it isn’t beautiful,” I argued, though he continued to defend his definition, using enjoyable now as a synonym.

There’s nothing beautiful about that.

He was smart: he used a turkey sandwich as his example, saying that eating a turkey sandwich when you were craving one is a beautiful experience; in the right moment – around 1:00 in the afternoon on the Saturday after Thanksgiving when you have leftover turkey and some good bread – I would indeed take that as proof, and have my answer. But I don’t believe enjoyable is the same thing as beautiful. Enjoyment is too simple to include all of beauty; it’s like saying that life is breathing. Sure, that’s part of it, and an important part; but it is unsufficient.

turkey-sandwich

I give you the ‘Murrican turkey sandwich.

 

 

Several of my students gave some permutation of Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, arguing that there is no intrinsic quality of beauty, but only what we construct through our individual subjective perceptions. I agree with that, but it is also true that there are certain sights, certain experiences, that are considered beautiful by many people, even people that have otherwise nothing at all in common: the night sky, a lullaby, love. There is such a thing as beauty, and we respond to it not as individuals with unique subjective perceptions, but as human beings with a shared consciousness and universal experiences: because we are all alive in the same sense, with the same five senses in the same universe. Madame Crommelynck agrees:

“When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one’s new lover in an old cafe, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.”

Beautiful?

But Madame and I differ on this: she also tells Jason that beauty is immune to definition. I disagree. She gets into Platonic forms, saying that the potter that has made a beautiful vase has made the vase where beauty resides, but not the beauty itself; that’s true, but unfair, because the beautiful object has captured beauty, it reflects and contains beauty, and that is as much as human creation can ever do. It’s not our fault that the universe existed before us, and so too did whatever ideal that we call beauty. When we make a piece of beauty, something that echoes in its limited physical or experiential form the immortal beauty that resides in the inarticulate – the beauty that is – then our efforts, too, echo the first creation of existence, the coming into being of beauty as a potential quality. It is fair to say that we have made beauty if it is fair to say we make anything.

Our disagreement on this is easy to explain, though: she is speaking to a student. Teachers have to lie to students. When my math teacher told me that you can’t take a big number away from a small number, she was lying, because it wasn’t time for us to study negative numbers yet. When teachers tell students they cannot use the word “I” in a formal essay, it isn’t actually because one cannot use the word “I” in a formal essay, it is because there are various bad habits that writers have (The tendency to rely too much on subjective opinion rather than on evidence, for example; something that I do all the time. But it’s much harder to say “This is true because I think it is” when one cannot say “I;” the line “This is true because one thinks it is” or “Some people believe this is true” doesn’t have nearly the same pizzazz. Not nearly the same beauty.) that can frequently be eliminated by this rule; and if teachers set the rule like the word from on high, carved in stone by a burning bush, then they don’t have to get into the explanations about the bad habits. It’s simpler and keeps the teacher from losing too much time arguing with the students. Madame Crommelynck wants Jason to stop trying so hard to make his poems beautiful; she tells him, “A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous.” And then, more beautifully put, “You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. […] Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue.” She doesn’t want to explain precisely what beauty is, how we can identify it, what it means; she just wants him to stop thinking about it. So she tells him an absolute rule: beauty cannot be defined.

Well, Madame, I don’t believe in absolute rules (Except when I do.). I tell my students they can use “I” in an essay, and they can start sentences with “and” and “but” and “because,” and they can take big numbers away from small numbers, dammit!

And we can define beauty. Even if the words may be unsufficient.

Here we go.

Let’s start with basic principles. Beauty is abstract, but like love and unlike cliche, it can be experienced concretely: it is detected by the senses, most frequently but not exclusively sight for we humans. This means there is a biological, physical element to it. Just as love is, on some level, a chemical reaction in the brain that offers a survival advantage, so is beauty, at least when applied to another of one’s own species. A beautiful shrew, to another shrew, is one that represents a survival advantage; it is an advantage for the survival of one’s genes, not one’s own precious self, but the instincts are all about that DNA.

Now that’s a beautiful shrew.

So beauty in a Darwinian sense is a list of physical attributes (physical because concrete, detectable by senses) that represent a good breeding partner: symmetry of form and features, traits that connote health, traits that represent child-rearing strengths. Marilyn Monroe was beautiful because she was symmetrical, had healthy skin and hair and teeth and eyes, and had curves that showed good baby-making potential.

Plus, if I may quote Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job: “I mean, [she] got the badonkadonk out back and some fine bajoopbadangs up front, know what I’m sayin’, dog? Buss a rock wid a playa?” Word, Mr. Moore. Word.

See? Look how symmetrical.

Beauty is more than that, though. Because sunsets and symphonies and the smell of rain have nothing to do with child-rearing.

I’m going to take this as the point where humans and animals diverge. Not because I can say with any surety that animals don’t enjoy the sunset for the sake of the colors and the patterns in the sky, but because without language, I can’t be sure that they do, nor why they do. My dog loves to chase the innumerable tiny lizards that scatter across the desert where we live, but is he appreciating their coloration, the quickness and grace of their movements? Or is he thinking about how good they’d taste on a cracker?

And if he is, is that not beauty? The turkey sandwich argument speaks to this: deliciousness is a form of beauty detected by taste rather than sight, isn’t it? So there must be some element of beauty in a turkey sandwich, in a delicious lizard-on-Ritz hors d’oeuvre?

I would say so, but again, I think that it is the simple, animal form of beauty, the survival beauty, in most cases. I’ve eaten a lot of turkey sandwiches, and generally speaking, they are more often satisfying than beautiful. The potential for beauty-beyond-survival is there, certainly, but in the sense I want to explore now, it usually is not.

The abstraction of beauty is, so far as we can know, an exclusively human concept. It is difficult, because we are merely bald apes, to mark clearly the line between humans and animals, but one of the best lines is abstraction. Animals tend not to imagine things separate from their immediate circumstances (though some of them do, it seems) and humans do. The reasons why we do can be simple survival strategies; because imagination makes humans better hunters and gatherers than other animals, thereby justifying our oversized noggins and the weak, ungainly bodies attached to them. But to create abstract ideas, for abstract reasons? That, so far as we can know, is uniquely human.

For years now, I have associated this activity of abstraction for the sake of abstraction with two names: truth and beauty. Humans, I have said, are the only living things that seek truth and beauty for their own sake. We wish to discover new truths, not because they offer a practical survival advantage, but simply because we wish to know truth; we create beautiful things, and seek beautiful experiences, simply for the desire to experience them. I think of this as art, because I am an artist married to an artist, though others may call it science or faith or love or whatever entirely human abstraction you wish; there are many other ways to name the pursuit of abstraction. Regardless, I would argue – I have argued – they all come back to truth and beauty. Those are our defining ideals, we humans.

But now I think that these two ideals are really one and the same. “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” as Keats said to his Grecian urn. (And now I have to include the Simpsons reference: when the family goes to visit the military academy where they will be sending Bart for disciplinary reasons, Lisa observes a cadet in a class reciting that line as if responding to a drill sergeant – “BEAUTY IS TRUTH, AND TRUTH BEAUTY, SIR!” She gasps in joy at the thought of actually discussing poetry, something that never happens back at ol’ Springfield Elementary; but then the instructor, sounding and looking just like a drill sergeant, shouts in the cadet’s face, “But sometimes the truth can be harsh and disturbing! How can THAT be beautiful?!?” After which Marge comments, “Well, he sucked the life right out of that.”)

“Gentlemen, welcome to flavor country.”

The two ideas, truth and beauty, have always been closely linked. In science and math, a good solution, a true theorem, must have elegance to be considered worthwhile; in art, a beautiful piece must have some reflection of truth, of reality, of genuine human experience. This is because they are, I would argue, one and the same experience; two sides of the same coin, with the only distinction being how they are taken into the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his “On Self-Reliance,” described the experience of truth as “that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.” He described a sensation of instant awareness of genuine truth, the vibrating of a heart to an iron string. He was talking about epiphany, the moment of clarity, what teachers (rather unfortunately) call the “Aha! moment.” There is a sense of rightness about truth that marks it as such, because a truth is echoed and repeated in everyone’s human experience, and all the truth does is give a name to what we already know. Home is where the heart is. The love of money is the root of all evil. Haters gonna hate. These truths don’t need to come with examples, because every single one of us can supply them from our own memories. That is the ring of truth, the gleam of light that Emerson talks about: when we make a connection between the statement of truth and our own personal subjective knowledge, and recognize both that the thoughts and experiences of others are actually relevant to our own lives, despite the appearance of perfect isolation that comes with being a human soul trapped inside a cage of flesh and bone, and also that our lives make sense, have reason and symmetry to them: that we are as true to life as others are to us. There is a greater world, and we are part of it; that is the truth, and what we recognize when we come across actual truth, and know it for what it is.

But here’s the thing: that’s what beauty is, too. That same ring, that same jolt, that moment of clarity and recognition, that awe: that is the experience of beauty. Think of what you felt when you first looked out of an airplane window and saw a mountain wreathed in clouds.

Think of what you felt when you first heard Pachelbel’s Canon.

When you smelled your favorite perfume, or let fine chocolate melt down your tongue. Think of a time when you genuinely hugged or kissed someone you love. This is what beauty feels like: when you feel your connection to the greater world, to all of the people before you who felt what you feel right now. You feel as big as the sky, as ancient as the stars: you can feel your heart expand to contain all of the other hearts that have felt what you feel, that are feeling what you feel, across all of time and space. You know that what you are feeling is right, and that it makes sense: you know that this feeling is true.

I would put it like this: truth is an intellectual recognition of one’s place in the order of existence; beauty is the emotional recognition of the same. Beauty is the truth of the heart.