Every season on American Idol, one of the heavy favorites goes home way too early. Chris Daughtry, for example, was sent packing even though he was apparently far more popular than the three contestants who survived him (including the winner, and subsequent flop, Taylor Hicks). So shocking have the departures been that the show instituted a “judges save” to allow the judges to overrule the numb idiots in the electorate (nobody says outright that they’re numb idiots, but the message is palpable). Additionally, the Idol judges regularly repeat the obvious message that “you have to get out and vote for your favorites if you don’t want them to go home.” The Idol example, silly though it may seem, is instructive for thinking about last night’s presidential debate.
For anyone listening to the debate analysis, Romney wiped the floor with President Obama. I’ve heard commentators announce that Romney “destroyed,” “obliterated,” and “dominated” Obama. On the Diane Rehm Show, the three guests, ostensibly representing the entire spectrum of American political belief, agree that “this format isn’t really Obama’s strong suit.” On MSNBC, Obama’s liberal supporters are like howler monkeys, shrieking about the President’s failure to “show up” and “get the job done.” As on the teevee, there is widespread disbelief and dismay across the liberal social media landscape. And as if that all wasn’t enough, Obama and his team are apparently so demoralized that his handlers barely showed up to spin the debate last night (one Twitter commenter noted 17 Romney surrogates to only 5 Obamanites talking to the press after the debate), and the Obama campaign has been all but silent this morning. Surely, it seems, last night’s debate was a catastrophic blow to the Obama campaign.
But, I think we forget too quickly the American Idol lesson.
For the past several weeks, Obama has looked insurmountable following a series of devastating gaffes on Romney’s part. The most prominent one, of course, is the secretly recorded video of Romney calling 47% of the country leeches and victims that has been making the rounds for the past few weeks. The election forecasters InTrade and FiveThirtyEight blog have had Obama at a huge advantage to win both the electoral and popular votes (not much has changed since last night as that’s concerned, by the way—FiveThirtyEight still gives Obama better than an 80% chance of winning the election.). While this seems like a good thing for the President’s chance at a second term, Chris Daughtry can tell you that there’s nothing worse for turning out voters than a sure thing. In fact, the more certain the President’s chances are, the more he has to worry that voters will lose their motivation to turn out on November 6th.
This put(s) the President in a tough position as a debater. Does he, as Chris Matthews and Ed Shultz suggested, crush his opponent on stage to show that he’s the big man on campus? Or does he soft-pedal into the debate, hoping to convince his supporters that the race is still a tight one and he needs their energy, their fervor, or at least their begrudging support come election day? I think we got a pretty good idea of which path Obama decided was the smarter one. It was no surprise, then, when Senior Advisor to the Obama campaign, David Plouffe, said in an interview on MSNBC that Obama thinks that “in the long run” voters will recognize who the best leader is. Anyone who watched Al Gore’s dominating performance against George W. Bush in 2000, and then watched the electorate revolt against the incumbent because mean old Mr. Gore hurt poor Bushie Wushie’s feelings might recognize the genius of this strategy. I assume it was strategic, for what it’s worth, because, while debates might not be Obama’s greatest platform, there is no evidence that I can see that he or his advisors have ever been anything but masterful at campaigning (whether or not you agree that he’s been great at actually governing). The absence of “messaging” or “spin” following the debates reinforced my sense that Obama’s team made a strategic choice that was far removed from winning last night’s debacle.
As I’ve watched the debate analysis over the past 12 hours or so, it appears the strategy is working. Liberals and Democrats (which are not, by the way, always the same thing) have spent lots of hours and energy rehashing and reasserting Obama’s accomplishments as Commander-in-Chief. Obama’s weakness last night has provided an impetus for renewed energy and commitment on the part of his voting base, in no small part because they’re being reminded (ad nauseum) of his accomplishments over the past four years. On the other hand, conservatives and Republicans (again, not necessarily coterminous) have spent much of the same time lauding Romney’s debate bona fides. For Romney, I can’t help but wonder about whether his push to the middle on things like tax cuts, Medicare, and even Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act (“I’ll get rid of Obamacare and replace it with Romney Care on a state-by-state basis?) will re-energize his voting base or de-energize them. I doubt they’ll be rushing to change teams, but there wasn’t a lot of what the pundits call “red meat” for his supporters to get them excited about casting a ballot in his favor. For people whose minds were made up prior to the debates, nothing that happened last night is likely to change their minds, but much happened that might have changed their motivation. For those who have yet to make up their minds, I imagine this event (and all the energy surrounding it) will inform their eventual decision, but only mildly given the inevitable intensity of the next 5 weeks of campaigning.
Which brings me to my final thought, only tangentially related to what I’ve already said. As I surfed Fizzborg, the Twitter, and other haunts of the political commentariat last night and this morning, a theme kept surfacing: these debates were nothing but political theater, and therefore a waste of time. I find this assertion somewhat distressing for a number of reasons, but I will restrain my observation to just two of them here. First, a large number of people claiming the irrelevance of last night’s debates are also, in other circumstances, wont to claim that they’re troubled by Americans’ widespread disconnection from politics and aversion to democratic civic engagement. This is especially the case among academics, and yet, the sort of abdication I saw repeatedly in regards to the debate made me wonder: If we, the people who are supposed to be professionally critically engaged in this type of civic event, can’t get invested, how can be surprised when our fellow Americans don’t engage either? In tuning out, it seems to me, we risk performing the failure of our own beliefs.
Which leads to my second point. The fact is, a lot happened last night, and the baying of the pundit class was as much a part of what happened as were the lunge-and-parry onstage. The debaters said little and meant even less, but to dismiss it as meaningless theater is a tremendous mistake. This is the political environment in which we live—strategy, messaging, and manipulation are (and have always been) fundamental parts of the process. We act surprised and dismayed, but that’s because we’re playing at being willfully naïve, not because there’s anything so surprising. In fact, there was nothing, and I mean nothing that was truly surprising last night. In the absence of some astonishing revelation, it is easy to dismiss the debates as meaningless. But it is exactly the absence of revelation that invites us, and every potential voter along with us, to consider more deeply the “meaning” of a series of debates that seem absent of any meaning. A tremendous amount of time, energy, and emotion was invested in last night’s event, and to pretend that it was wasted because (1) the debaters weren’t honest or forthcoming enough or (2) the exchange didn’t provide enough revelatory fireworks, is to become the numb, mindless sheep that each party is fond of accusing the other party of catering to.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
Conservatives: Hanging Tough?
In the last few years, at least in the 8 years between 2000 and 2008, Americans got a good look at many forms of conservatism. One fundamental tenet of modern conservatism, especially if you recognize the views of people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Joe the Plumber as representative of modern conservatism, is that conservatives are tough. They're tough on crime, tough on terrorism, tough on foreign policy. They support rugged individualism, hard work, and making tough choices. They supported the war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, and the war on terror. They support a strong military, tough border policies, and guns for everyone. Conservatives would have you believe that they are the only people standing between Americans and those that would massacre them.
In contrast, liberals are supposedly soft, weak-willed naifs. If Republicans are the party of strong national security, Democrats are the party of cut-and-run and surrender. According to conservatives, liberals only care about making everyone feel good with politically correct language, affirmative action policies, and massive government spending. As Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly and Beck are all too happy to announce, liberalism (also called "socialism," "fascism," and "communism" by voices of the conservative movement) is going to result in America's fall from grace.
If all you listened to was the way the two sides talked about themselves, it would be easy to fall into the trap of believing that conservatives are hardened, realistic defenders of American values and liberals are gentle, vulnerable, sentimental weenies.
And yet, conservatism is, at least in its current incarnation, nothing less than the fear of nearly everything. American conservatives' entire platform is based on the fear of something: terrorist attacks, government bankruptcy, higher taxes, divine retribution, the weakening of traditional marriages, feminists, the siege of illegal immigrants, Muslim infiltration, watering down of the 2nd Amendment, and on and on and on. I'm not saying they're wrong to be worried about some of these things, but for tough guys, they spend a lot of time cowering in fear of every shadow on the wall and breath of wind in the trees. On the other hand, those sad-sack, weakling libruls are getting pepper sprayed for protesting Wall Street abuse and getting their asses kicked in support of free speech.
Just as I'm not saying all conservative fears are misguided, I'm not saying all liberal demonstrations are justified. I'm simply pointing out that from where I'm standing, the "tough guys" look like a bunch of fraidy cats, and the supposed fraidy cats are standing tough for what they believe.
So I'm left wondering, how did conservatives get the reputation for toughness, again?
Saturday, July 21, 2012
What Really Scares Me About Evil, Deranged Lunatics
In the last 36 hours or so, Americans have been collectively weighing the shooting of 71 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There are already volumes of commentary on the pertinent issues, a healthy dose of which I’ve wallowed in since I saw the first headline yesterday morning. Although there are many troubling aspects of this event, I’ve been struck by the insistence of most people to brand the shooter “evil” (Mitt Romney and Barack Obama), “deranged” (Anderson Cooper), and “a lunatic” (EJ Dionne). One thing people across political, religious, and news network lines agree on is that the man was crazy. I understand, and even agree, that these characterizations of the shooter may be true, but I’m troubled by what they seem to me to imply about where responsibility lies.
Certainly, the lion’s share of responsibility must be laid at the shooter’s door—hell, he shot 71 unsuspecting people. It’s both inconceivable and horrific, and there’s no excusing his actions.
What concerns me, however, is that the characterizations of the shooter as evil, crazy, deranged, disturbed, unbalanced, etc. leave ALL responsibility on his doorstep. He was solely, individually, and unstoppably responsible for his actions. You can’t stop evil, after all, you simply must resist it where possible and heal when evil manifests. I heard one commentator, David Brooks, make this point on the radio yesterday—he essentially said, you’ll never be able to prevent a psycho from wounding innocent people if they’re determined to do so. He implied, "So why even try?" The commonplace acceptance of the shooter’s “insanity” reflects our real understanding of what makes a person randomly open fire on a crowd of strangers, but it also indicates that we believe his craziness made us helpless to stop him. We have no responsibility because you can't prevent evil, so why even try?
If we’re talking about stopping him once he made the decision to arm himself and rampage, I suppose I agree. But to a significant degree, I think that dismissing this shooter (and all the others, at least since Charles Whitman shot up UT Austin in 1966) as “crazy” is a cop out that allows the rest of us—the "normal" people—to excuse ourselves from thinking or worrying about our own involvement in this kind of violence. Calling the shooter "crazy" and "evil" excuses his actions by pretending they couldn’t have been prevented with better mental health care in America, stronger gun control laws, less general romance attached to violence, more social support for students, and on and on. If the perpetrator was "evil," we don't have to bother talking about these things—not really, not for any longer than it takes for the news cycle to pick up something else worth repeating over and over again. Because again, there's nothing we can do.
I’m not, necessarily, advocating better mental health care, gun control, etc., though it shouldn’t be hard to see where I stand on these issues. What I am advocating is a realization that Americans' naïve idealization of individualism, personal responsibility, and social insularity are intimately involved in this shooter’s actions. We are, at least partly, responsible for his actions because we are, at least partly, responsible for the conditions that allowed him to act. The political, religious, and cultural decisions we make collectively create the conditions for these kinds of horrific mass shootings. This should be clear in the shooter's actions—he didn't set out to hurt an individual; he set out to hurt society, presumably because he felt that society hurt him. There's no other reason to attack a theater full of strangers.
While a good deal of time is being and will be spent on determining who's to "blame" for the shooting in Colorado, I submit that we all are in some way because of decisions we make collectively. When we vote to defund mental health institutions in order to save ourselves the tax burden, as was done in California in the 1980s and in several places since, we collectively accept the responsibility for turning people with mental health challenges out of hospitals and into the streets, prisons, and our neighborhoods. When we devise and accept movie ratings that punish moviemakers with strict ratings for sexual content but don’t punish moviemakers with equally strict ratings for violent content, we accept that we will be continually exposed to depictions of graphic violence, as will our children. When we advocate education systems that equate “rigor” to over-working and under-supporting students—where students earn their stripes by surviving the gauntlet—we accept that students' mental and physical health will be tested, and sometimes broken, in the service of “weeding out the weak.” (Incidentally, this happens at every level of the education system, not just at the highest levels of graduate education.) When we claim, as Texas Representative Louis Gohmert and others have, that mass shootings are some sort of divine retribution, we reaffirm the attitude that only "good" people who think like us and believe what we believe deserve our support and care. We also reaffirm the romanticized American attitude that tells people they’re on their own because no one cares about anyone else unless they’re legally or economically obligated to be.
Defining the "evil" people in the world lets us imagine they're not us, and we therefore have no responsibility to them or for them. When we spend our time defining who the good people are, who the bad people are, and who the people are that just aren’t worth our time and money, we accept that some people will be left to struggle and suffer on their own. We accept that some of them will be estranged, and we ultimately accept that some of them will become violent against "us" because we've cast them aside. Perhaps that’s inevitable in a world shared by 7 billion people, but it’s something I think we should do better to try to prevent because it ultimately ends up hurting us all.
To reiterate, the political, religious, and cultural choices that we make collectively create the conditions for the evil, deranged, lunatic actions of people like the shooter in Colorado. If we genuinely want to stop them, we need to collectively decide that “every man for himself” is not the best way to live together. But such decisions take serious dialogue, and they take the realization that “evil” isn’t something that exists beyond the responsibility of “normal people.” Maybe if we’d collectively take more responsibility, instead of writing these kinds of horrific acts off as “crazy,” we’d be better able to have conversations that reach beyond what's good for everybody individually. We'd be able to talk about what we can and should do for ourselves as a collective—a group of people who live together and need to be responsible to and for everyone else, not just the people who agree with us. Or to put it another way, instead of waiting for an evil, deranged lunatic to shoot up a movie theater, college campus, or summer camp to bring us all closer together, maybe we try and get our collective goals together before tragedy happens. Maybe, if we take a little more responsibility for one another, we even end up preventing it.
Certainly, the lion’s share of responsibility must be laid at the shooter’s door—hell, he shot 71 unsuspecting people. It’s both inconceivable and horrific, and there’s no excusing his actions.
What concerns me, however, is that the characterizations of the shooter as evil, crazy, deranged, disturbed, unbalanced, etc. leave ALL responsibility on his doorstep. He was solely, individually, and unstoppably responsible for his actions. You can’t stop evil, after all, you simply must resist it where possible and heal when evil manifests. I heard one commentator, David Brooks, make this point on the radio yesterday—he essentially said, you’ll never be able to prevent a psycho from wounding innocent people if they’re determined to do so. He implied, "So why even try?" The commonplace acceptance of the shooter’s “insanity” reflects our real understanding of what makes a person randomly open fire on a crowd of strangers, but it also indicates that we believe his craziness made us helpless to stop him. We have no responsibility because you can't prevent evil, so why even try?
If we’re talking about stopping him once he made the decision to arm himself and rampage, I suppose I agree. But to a significant degree, I think that dismissing this shooter (and all the others, at least since Charles Whitman shot up UT Austin in 1966) as “crazy” is a cop out that allows the rest of us—the "normal" people—to excuse ourselves from thinking or worrying about our own involvement in this kind of violence. Calling the shooter "crazy" and "evil" excuses his actions by pretending they couldn’t have been prevented with better mental health care in America, stronger gun control laws, less general romance attached to violence, more social support for students, and on and on. If the perpetrator was "evil," we don't have to bother talking about these things—not really, not for any longer than it takes for the news cycle to pick up something else worth repeating over and over again. Because again, there's nothing we can do.
I’m not, necessarily, advocating better mental health care, gun control, etc., though it shouldn’t be hard to see where I stand on these issues. What I am advocating is a realization that Americans' naïve idealization of individualism, personal responsibility, and social insularity are intimately involved in this shooter’s actions. We are, at least partly, responsible for his actions because we are, at least partly, responsible for the conditions that allowed him to act. The political, religious, and cultural decisions we make collectively create the conditions for these kinds of horrific mass shootings. This should be clear in the shooter's actions—he didn't set out to hurt an individual; he set out to hurt society, presumably because he felt that society hurt him. There's no other reason to attack a theater full of strangers.
While a good deal of time is being and will be spent on determining who's to "blame" for the shooting in Colorado, I submit that we all are in some way because of decisions we make collectively. When we vote to defund mental health institutions in order to save ourselves the tax burden, as was done in California in the 1980s and in several places since, we collectively accept the responsibility for turning people with mental health challenges out of hospitals and into the streets, prisons, and our neighborhoods. When we devise and accept movie ratings that punish moviemakers with strict ratings for sexual content but don’t punish moviemakers with equally strict ratings for violent content, we accept that we will be continually exposed to depictions of graphic violence, as will our children. When we advocate education systems that equate “rigor” to over-working and under-supporting students—where students earn their stripes by surviving the gauntlet—we accept that students' mental and physical health will be tested, and sometimes broken, in the service of “weeding out the weak.” (Incidentally, this happens at every level of the education system, not just at the highest levels of graduate education.) When we claim, as Texas Representative Louis Gohmert and others have, that mass shootings are some sort of divine retribution, we reaffirm the attitude that only "good" people who think like us and believe what we believe deserve our support and care. We also reaffirm the romanticized American attitude that tells people they’re on their own because no one cares about anyone else unless they’re legally or economically obligated to be.
Defining the "evil" people in the world lets us imagine they're not us, and we therefore have no responsibility to them or for them. When we spend our time defining who the good people are, who the bad people are, and who the people are that just aren’t worth our time and money, we accept that some people will be left to struggle and suffer on their own. We accept that some of them will be estranged, and we ultimately accept that some of them will become violent against "us" because we've cast them aside. Perhaps that’s inevitable in a world shared by 7 billion people, but it’s something I think we should do better to try to prevent because it ultimately ends up hurting us all.
To reiterate, the political, religious, and cultural choices that we make collectively create the conditions for the evil, deranged, lunatic actions of people like the shooter in Colorado. If we genuinely want to stop them, we need to collectively decide that “every man for himself” is not the best way to live together. But such decisions take serious dialogue, and they take the realization that “evil” isn’t something that exists beyond the responsibility of “normal people.” Maybe if we’d collectively take more responsibility, instead of writing these kinds of horrific acts off as “crazy,” we’d be better able to have conversations that reach beyond what's good for everybody individually. We'd be able to talk about what we can and should do for ourselves as a collective—a group of people who live together and need to be responsible to and for everyone else, not just the people who agree with us. Or to put it another way, instead of waiting for an evil, deranged lunatic to shoot up a movie theater, college campus, or summer camp to bring us all closer together, maybe we try and get our collective goals together before tragedy happens. Maybe, if we take a little more responsibility for one another, we even end up preventing it.
Monday, November 14, 2011
"Where Have You Gone, Joe Paterno?"
In the week or so since Jerry Sandusky was arrested for violations that don't need rehearsing here, Penn State officials have been under the microscope. In particular, Joe Paterno, the revered coach of Penn State's football team and apparent icon of moral righteousness, has been castigated for his inaction after learning in 2002 that an assistant coach witnessed Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State locker room showers. Paterno claims that he “referred the matter to university administrators,” but he didn't call the police, he didn't follow up with the people to whom he reported the matter, and he seems to have put the whole sordid situation out of his mind. This week, he paid for his inaction by being unceremoniously relieved of his position after 46 years as head coach.
A common refrain among commentators in the past week has been, "How could they let this happen?" The answer that seems to be emerging, especially in light of what looks like widespread covering up of Sandusky's crimes, is that Penn State officials and others were determined to protect the power and prestige of the school and its football program at the cost of failing to protect Sandusky's victims. In a number of commentaries, Paterno is painted as a power-monger, a back-room politician, an arrogant egotist, interested only in keeping his iron-grip on the football program. It is suggested that he knew Sandusky was raping children and simply cared more about his program than he did about children. Why else, asks ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, "didn't Paterno contact the police when first informed in 2002 by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary of an alleged locker room incident involving Sandusky and a young boy?"
Wojciechowski's question invites a more thoughtful answer than much of the torch-and-pitchfork analysis of the past week has allowed. I want to state unequivocally here that I have no intention of excusing Paterno's behavior or inaction. He owed everyone, especially the victims, better. And I'm not interested in arguing that his firing was wrong--honestly, I have no skin in that game. But, I have been really rather disturbed by the reaction I’ve witnessed because of the anger directed at Paterno. Not that he’s without blame, but I’ve heard far more anger directed at Paterno than I have at Sandusky. Sandusky, it seems, is just some pathetic pervert, while Paterno is the real villain.
I want to grant Paterno a modicum of humanity. However arrogant and egotistical Paterno may be, and whatever power he exercised at Penn State, (Wojciechowski says "often vast and overpowering") I imagine that Paterno must also have experienced an awful lot of fear when he learned of Sandusky's violations. Nothing that I’ve read has been willing to grant Paterno that fear in any kind of real way, and I think it’s worth considering.
The fear that I'm talking about may well include the fear of damage to the football program. After all, Paterno was Penn State football. Penn State football was his identity, and as any rhetorician worth their salt can tell you, there is an incredible, often irrational, kind of fear that accompanies any threat to a person's identity. That's why people often hold tight to ideological commitments even after they've been logically and empirically disproved. But even beyond the fear of damaging the football program, Paterno had an awful lot to be fearful of. For one, I'm sure he feared losing Sandusky's friendship. Paterno had known Sandusky for at least 39 years by 2002. They'd worked together as coaches for more than 30. It may sound stupid to fear losing a child rapist's friendship, and rationally it is. But when you've known someone, especially someone you consider a close friend, for decades, it's hard to turn on that person, even in the face of horrible, disgusting acts. You don't want to see your friends humiliated and punished, even when you know they deserve to be.
The loss of Sandusky's friendship is just the tip of the iceberg. If Paterno thought consciously about things he feared, he probably thought about losing his own job. By 2002, they'd coached for 33 years together. Certainly questions that have come up this week would have come up then. Among them, "How could Paterno not know Sandusky was a predator after working with the man for 33 years?" After all, how can you be intimately involved in everything having to do with Penn State football and not know that your assistant coach and heir apparent is a pederast? If Paterno was in the considering mood, he would have considered the possibility that he'd face serious scrutiny from university officials and the public that might have cost him his job.
Paterno might also have feared misrepresenting, and thereby ruining, Sandusky. After all, allegations of sexual misconduct can ruin a person's life, even if that person is innocent (The McCuan-Kniffen case from the 1980s is one of the more famous and sensational examples). I imagine for someone in Paterno's position, there is always the fear, probably rarely acknowledged aloud, that a disgruntled student or colleague will level false accusations about sexual misconduct as a way to get even for some perceived slight. That fear, I might add, is fairly common among men who hold positions of power, even when that power is relatively minimal. It may very well be irrational, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And I'm sure it crossed Paterno's mind that his actions could contribute to just such a situation.
What seems most likely to me, however, is that Paterno experienced a deep and abiding fear that was both indeterminate and inchoate. The kind of fear that small children feel when they're lying in bed at night. Something unnamed, but very-deeply felt. Except unlike the fear of a bogey monster, the fear I imagine Paterno felt was that everything he knew about his life and believed about himself would be slowly (or quickly) unraveled.
None of these fears justifies doing nothing. But the strain of moral damnation in newspaper articles and blog posts that elicited Paterno's removal suggests that he was malicious and uncaring, driven only by power and prestige. I don't doubt that there was an element of unacceptable self-preservation involved in his decision to “refer the matter to university administrators,” but we would have to accept that he's a monster on par with, even perhaps worse than, Sandusky to accept the characterization of Paterno as full-aware and still completely callous. The fact that he reported it up the chain of command weakens this reading, even if it doesn’t completely undercut it.
If you're still with me, you might be worried that I want here to let Old JoePa off the hook because he looked fear in the face and took some action. He may not have done enough; but he didn't exactly do nothing. I don't want to let him off the hook. But I do want to consider that his fear is indicative of a systematic failure as much as it is a personal one. To put it a different way, whether or not Paterno actually experienced the fears I introduced above, it's not hard to imagine that he did. Fear is indicative of the culture we live in, particularly where there are entrenched systems of power. Indiscretions (or crimes) are routinely covered up for financial and political gain. The examples are too copious to begin naming. Confronting those systems, most of which sustain the lives we live, the jobs we have, and the communities of which we're a part, is to risk being exiled by family, friends, and employers.
It's hard enough when the accuser is also a victim because of how injury is heaped on injury. To take a prominent example, in a recent “news” story about one of Herman Cain's accusers, the "journalist" speculated about the fact that this woman had filed sexual harassment charges at another job she'd held. The unstated verdict: gold digger. Suddenly, she's under as much scrutiny as Cain. This is not an isolated example. Bill O'Reilly famously noted that abductee, Shawn Hornbeck, found things to like about his imprisonment by Michael Devlin. When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of harassment, she was all but accused of being a whore. And, rape victims are routinely accused of "asking for it" by the authorities to whom they report, especially when the alleged rapist is rich, famous, or both. It is no surprise that many victims of one kind of abuse or another choose never to report it. But victims who do report can at least draw from their personal experience to help steel them in the arduous pursuit of justice.
For whistle blowers who aren't victims, like Paterno, the choice is much different. They generally do not have to live with the pain of having been victimized. As a result, their choice is whether to keep quiet or to subject oneself to the kind of pressures that accusers seem inevitably to face. Take for example, Thomas Tamm. He was a Department of Justice lawyer who reported NSA wiretapping during the Bush Administration. For his troubles, Tamm was subjected to a six-year FBI investigation, which continued even after it was widely acknowledged that the program was illegal. During that period, he spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, lost his job at the Department of Justice, and faced imprisonment at the hands of the government.
For people like Paterno and Tamm, the moral decision is clear. You report the crimes because it is the right thing to do. But faced with the available options, it's not hard to imagine that saving the football program is only a small part of the calculation involved in making such a decision. Paterno's silence, while shameful and immoral, is not entirely incomprehensible. His decision to keep his report in-house seems like an attempt to balance the two options available to him. He followed protocol and contented himself that he'd done the right thing and saved himself in the process. It turns out he was wrong on all counts.
All this points to an incredibly complicated situation that raises many more questions than it answers: How should we hold people accountable for turning in possible criminals? How do we begin to reconcile our moral duties with the fears of complete undoing? What does it mean to fulfill ones responsibilities when the people to whom you report are at liberty to forgo their own? In a culture that values everything (and I mean everything) as a potential asset, how do we protect children, and other people, from being coveted as things to “have”? How do we begin to unravel the unacceptable relationship between economic success and silence in the face of sickening crimes? There aren't easy answers to these questions, but they need to be asked, along with many other complicated ones. The real danger is in not asking these questions to begin with and being content with the punishments that have been, and will be, meted out.
Which brings me back to Paterno's ouster. I suppose what I find most disturbing about Paterno’s dismissal is the level of contentedness it seems to grant people. Paterno's dismissal (coupled with Sandusky's arrest) allows people to go back to believing that, now that the cancer has been excised from Happy Valley, things can return to normal. The evil has been purified from the system, the monster has been chased out of town. Except it hasn't. Sandusky's actions aren't the result of football; the cover-up isn't a failing that can be localized to central Pennsylvania; and JoePa's forced retirement doesn't solve a thing other than to soothe the seething mobs (with the exception of the rioters who turned out to support Paterno by destroying their beloved campus--they were apparently not soothed). Paterno is gone, Sandusky will most certainly end up in jail, but the system will roll on until the next shocking abuse of the system and the revelation of its cover-up demands that more heads roll (Even as I type this, I am reading an article about the Catholic Church’s lead investigator into child sex scandals being arrested for possessing troves of child pornography images). The Penn State tragedy isn't just that kids were harmed and the violator was protected; it's also that what happened in Penn State is part of our culture in a way that the tarring-and-feathering of all involved can't touch, much less solve.
A common refrain among commentators in the past week has been, "How could they let this happen?" The answer that seems to be emerging, especially in light of what looks like widespread covering up of Sandusky's crimes, is that Penn State officials and others were determined to protect the power and prestige of the school and its football program at the cost of failing to protect Sandusky's victims. In a number of commentaries, Paterno is painted as a power-monger, a back-room politician, an arrogant egotist, interested only in keeping his iron-grip on the football program. It is suggested that he knew Sandusky was raping children and simply cared more about his program than he did about children. Why else, asks ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, "didn't Paterno contact the police when first informed in 2002 by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary of an alleged locker room incident involving Sandusky and a young boy?"
Wojciechowski's question invites a more thoughtful answer than much of the torch-and-pitchfork analysis of the past week has allowed. I want to state unequivocally here that I have no intention of excusing Paterno's behavior or inaction. He owed everyone, especially the victims, better. And I'm not interested in arguing that his firing was wrong--honestly, I have no skin in that game. But, I have been really rather disturbed by the reaction I’ve witnessed because of the anger directed at Paterno. Not that he’s without blame, but I’ve heard far more anger directed at Paterno than I have at Sandusky. Sandusky, it seems, is just some pathetic pervert, while Paterno is the real villain.
I want to grant Paterno a modicum of humanity. However arrogant and egotistical Paterno may be, and whatever power he exercised at Penn State, (Wojciechowski says "often vast and overpowering") I imagine that Paterno must also have experienced an awful lot of fear when he learned of Sandusky's violations. Nothing that I’ve read has been willing to grant Paterno that fear in any kind of real way, and I think it’s worth considering.
The fear that I'm talking about may well include the fear of damage to the football program. After all, Paterno was Penn State football. Penn State football was his identity, and as any rhetorician worth their salt can tell you, there is an incredible, often irrational, kind of fear that accompanies any threat to a person's identity. That's why people often hold tight to ideological commitments even after they've been logically and empirically disproved. But even beyond the fear of damaging the football program, Paterno had an awful lot to be fearful of. For one, I'm sure he feared losing Sandusky's friendship. Paterno had known Sandusky for at least 39 years by 2002. They'd worked together as coaches for more than 30. It may sound stupid to fear losing a child rapist's friendship, and rationally it is. But when you've known someone, especially someone you consider a close friend, for decades, it's hard to turn on that person, even in the face of horrible, disgusting acts. You don't want to see your friends humiliated and punished, even when you know they deserve to be.
The loss of Sandusky's friendship is just the tip of the iceberg. If Paterno thought consciously about things he feared, he probably thought about losing his own job. By 2002, they'd coached for 33 years together. Certainly questions that have come up this week would have come up then. Among them, "How could Paterno not know Sandusky was a predator after working with the man for 33 years?" After all, how can you be intimately involved in everything having to do with Penn State football and not know that your assistant coach and heir apparent is a pederast? If Paterno was in the considering mood, he would have considered the possibility that he'd face serious scrutiny from university officials and the public that might have cost him his job.
Paterno might also have feared misrepresenting, and thereby ruining, Sandusky. After all, allegations of sexual misconduct can ruin a person's life, even if that person is innocent (The McCuan-Kniffen case from the 1980s is one of the more famous and sensational examples). I imagine for someone in Paterno's position, there is always the fear, probably rarely acknowledged aloud, that a disgruntled student or colleague will level false accusations about sexual misconduct as a way to get even for some perceived slight. That fear, I might add, is fairly common among men who hold positions of power, even when that power is relatively minimal. It may very well be irrational, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And I'm sure it crossed Paterno's mind that his actions could contribute to just such a situation.
What seems most likely to me, however, is that Paterno experienced a deep and abiding fear that was both indeterminate and inchoate. The kind of fear that small children feel when they're lying in bed at night. Something unnamed, but very-deeply felt. Except unlike the fear of a bogey monster, the fear I imagine Paterno felt was that everything he knew about his life and believed about himself would be slowly (or quickly) unraveled.
None of these fears justifies doing nothing. But the strain of moral damnation in newspaper articles and blog posts that elicited Paterno's removal suggests that he was malicious and uncaring, driven only by power and prestige. I don't doubt that there was an element of unacceptable self-preservation involved in his decision to “refer the matter to university administrators,” but we would have to accept that he's a monster on par with, even perhaps worse than, Sandusky to accept the characterization of Paterno as full-aware and still completely callous. The fact that he reported it up the chain of command weakens this reading, even if it doesn’t completely undercut it.
If you're still with me, you might be worried that I want here to let Old JoePa off the hook because he looked fear in the face and took some action. He may not have done enough; but he didn't exactly do nothing. I don't want to let him off the hook. But I do want to consider that his fear is indicative of a systematic failure as much as it is a personal one. To put it a different way, whether or not Paterno actually experienced the fears I introduced above, it's not hard to imagine that he did. Fear is indicative of the culture we live in, particularly where there are entrenched systems of power. Indiscretions (or crimes) are routinely covered up for financial and political gain. The examples are too copious to begin naming. Confronting those systems, most of which sustain the lives we live, the jobs we have, and the communities of which we're a part, is to risk being exiled by family, friends, and employers.
It's hard enough when the accuser is also a victim because of how injury is heaped on injury. To take a prominent example, in a recent “news” story about one of Herman Cain's accusers, the "journalist" speculated about the fact that this woman had filed sexual harassment charges at another job she'd held. The unstated verdict: gold digger. Suddenly, she's under as much scrutiny as Cain. This is not an isolated example. Bill O'Reilly famously noted that abductee, Shawn Hornbeck, found things to like about his imprisonment by Michael Devlin. When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of harassment, she was all but accused of being a whore. And, rape victims are routinely accused of "asking for it" by the authorities to whom they report, especially when the alleged rapist is rich, famous, or both. It is no surprise that many victims of one kind of abuse or another choose never to report it. But victims who do report can at least draw from their personal experience to help steel them in the arduous pursuit of justice.
For whistle blowers who aren't victims, like Paterno, the choice is much different. They generally do not have to live with the pain of having been victimized. As a result, their choice is whether to keep quiet or to subject oneself to the kind of pressures that accusers seem inevitably to face. Take for example, Thomas Tamm. He was a Department of Justice lawyer who reported NSA wiretapping during the Bush Administration. For his troubles, Tamm was subjected to a six-year FBI investigation, which continued even after it was widely acknowledged that the program was illegal. During that period, he spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, lost his job at the Department of Justice, and faced imprisonment at the hands of the government.
For people like Paterno and Tamm, the moral decision is clear. You report the crimes because it is the right thing to do. But faced with the available options, it's not hard to imagine that saving the football program is only a small part of the calculation involved in making such a decision. Paterno's silence, while shameful and immoral, is not entirely incomprehensible. His decision to keep his report in-house seems like an attempt to balance the two options available to him. He followed protocol and contented himself that he'd done the right thing and saved himself in the process. It turns out he was wrong on all counts.
All this points to an incredibly complicated situation that raises many more questions than it answers: How should we hold people accountable for turning in possible criminals? How do we begin to reconcile our moral duties with the fears of complete undoing? What does it mean to fulfill ones responsibilities when the people to whom you report are at liberty to forgo their own? In a culture that values everything (and I mean everything) as a potential asset, how do we protect children, and other people, from being coveted as things to “have”? How do we begin to unravel the unacceptable relationship between economic success and silence in the face of sickening crimes? There aren't easy answers to these questions, but they need to be asked, along with many other complicated ones. The real danger is in not asking these questions to begin with and being content with the punishments that have been, and will be, meted out.
Which brings me back to Paterno's ouster. I suppose what I find most disturbing about Paterno’s dismissal is the level of contentedness it seems to grant people. Paterno's dismissal (coupled with Sandusky's arrest) allows people to go back to believing that, now that the cancer has been excised from Happy Valley, things can return to normal. The evil has been purified from the system, the monster has been chased out of town. Except it hasn't. Sandusky's actions aren't the result of football; the cover-up isn't a failing that can be localized to central Pennsylvania; and JoePa's forced retirement doesn't solve a thing other than to soothe the seething mobs (with the exception of the rioters who turned out to support Paterno by destroying their beloved campus--they were apparently not soothed). Paterno is gone, Sandusky will most certainly end up in jail, but the system will roll on until the next shocking abuse of the system and the revelation of its cover-up demands that more heads roll (Even as I type this, I am reading an article about the Catholic Church’s lead investigator into child sex scandals being arrested for possessing troves of child pornography images). The Penn State tragedy isn't just that kids were harmed and the violator was protected; it's also that what happened in Penn State is part of our culture in a way that the tarring-and-feathering of all involved can't touch, much less solve.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
The End of Books
I just finished reading an article by Urusula Le Guin in Harpers about the precipitous decline of book reading over the past few years. Le Guin, herself a novelist, is not particularly worried about the decline of book reading. (She notes, for example, that the polls surveying people's reading only accepted "literary" works as valid. Non-fiction books apparently don't count as books.) After, all, people have only really read novels regularly for a few hundred years, at best. Rather, she's concerned that the corporate mentaility of booksellers and publishers compromises the quality of the books that are published.
Like Le Guin, I'm weary of the doomsayers who claim that the decline of book reading is a sign of the apocalypse. There are ample sources claiming that literacy and reading comprehension are declining, but in my experience, the people writing those sources generally define reading, literacy, and decline in really limited ways. The polls that Le Guin's critiques which don't accept anything but "literature" as books are a great example. Another of my favorite examples comes from Mark Bauerlein, who argues that young people are "the dumbest generation" because they don't engage information as their forbears did. Bauerlein denies that social networking is literate work because it's self-involved and lazy. His evidence? Kids don't pass standardized tests the way the once did. The list of doomsayers is long with polemicists.
What seems always to be ignored by doomsayers, though, is that literacy as the ability to read and write is higher than it's ever been. For the majority of human history, the majority of humans couldn't read or write anything. Less than 200 years ago, Americans were actively preventing slaves and many women from learning to read or write. And as Le Guin points out, literacy has always been rationed by the ruling classes as a way to maintain class privilege. In 2009, more people read and write more kinds of language than our "brilliant" forbears could have even imagined 30 years ago. For example, the Senate passed a resolution designating October 20 the "National Day on Writing" in recognition of the way writing shapes our world, and the National Council of Teachers of English sponsored the National Gallery of Writing to showcase a small fraction of the important (and not-so-important) writing that people are doing--people including all those dumb, illiterate young kids that worry Bauerlein and his friends.
I'm not going to claim that all the things people read and write today are better or worse than anything written or read in the past, but in a country that continues to support arguments about everything from health care to drinking water on the twin pillars of choice and competition, it seems a little silly to think that everyone needs to read The Brothers Karamazov to be considered intelligent people, much less contributing citizens. The landscape of new literacies in our digitized, globalized world gives people lots of choices and gives books lots of competition. And people are choosing. They're reading (this blog, hopefully), and they're writing (not this blog, hopefully). Books, contrary to popular belief, are no more moral than any of the choices competing with them for people's literate attentions. To sum up, boo to doomsayers, yay to Le Guin, and three cheers to rampant reading and writing, even if it isn't in the form of language accepted by the doomsayers as valuable.
Like Le Guin, I'm weary of the doomsayers who claim that the decline of book reading is a sign of the apocalypse. There are ample sources claiming that literacy and reading comprehension are declining, but in my experience, the people writing those sources generally define reading, literacy, and decline in really limited ways. The polls that Le Guin's critiques which don't accept anything but "literature" as books are a great example. Another of my favorite examples comes from Mark Bauerlein, who argues that young people are "the dumbest generation" because they don't engage information as their forbears did. Bauerlein denies that social networking is literate work because it's self-involved and lazy. His evidence? Kids don't pass standardized tests the way the once did. The list of doomsayers is long with polemicists.
What seems always to be ignored by doomsayers, though, is that literacy as the ability to read and write is higher than it's ever been. For the majority of human history, the majority of humans couldn't read or write anything. Less than 200 years ago, Americans were actively preventing slaves and many women from learning to read or write. And as Le Guin points out, literacy has always been rationed by the ruling classes as a way to maintain class privilege. In 2009, more people read and write more kinds of language than our "brilliant" forbears could have even imagined 30 years ago. For example, the Senate passed a resolution designating October 20 the "National Day on Writing" in recognition of the way writing shapes our world, and the National Council of Teachers of English sponsored the National Gallery of Writing to showcase a small fraction of the important (and not-so-important) writing that people are doing--people including all those dumb, illiterate young kids that worry Bauerlein and his friends.
I'm not going to claim that all the things people read and write today are better or worse than anything written or read in the past, but in a country that continues to support arguments about everything from health care to drinking water on the twin pillars of choice and competition, it seems a little silly to think that everyone needs to read The Brothers Karamazov to be considered intelligent people, much less contributing citizens. The landscape of new literacies in our digitized, globalized world gives people lots of choices and gives books lots of competition. And people are choosing. They're reading (this blog, hopefully), and they're writing (not this blog, hopefully). Books, contrary to popular belief, are no more moral than any of the choices competing with them for people's literate attentions. To sum up, boo to doomsayers, yay to Le Guin, and three cheers to rampant reading and writing, even if it isn't in the form of language accepted by the doomsayers as valuable.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Up from Gum
As someone who is professionally interested in language, I’m always on the look-out for ways to reconceive of or update old clichés. A common, and now much overused, cliché that I think could use a good revival is also the title of Tupac Shakur’s 1999 book of poetry: The Rose that Grew from Concrete. A rose from concrete is a direct descendent of the once popular (and sometimes still popular), “up by your bootstraps” theme. Recently, I was walking from my car to my office, and I wandered across a chance to update this oldie-but-goodie.
On my commute, I almost stepped on a sprout that was growing in the cracks of the pavement. This industrious little weed fought through the concrete, as weeds are wont to do, but it had also grown up through a piece of chewing gum that had been idly discarded to melt into the sidewalk crack. Lots of weeds grow out of the concrete cracks, no matter how successfully we think we’ve tamed nature with infrastructure, but to grow through gum seems to me a real accomplishment. Taking nutrients from the sticky, abandoned confection, this assiduously deciduous sproutling overcame all odds to rise out of the dirt, through the concrete, and finally—in what is sure to become a widely adopted analogy for succeeding against seemingly insurmountable odds—up from gum.
On my commute, I almost stepped on a sprout that was growing in the cracks of the pavement. This industrious little weed fought through the concrete, as weeds are wont to do, but it had also grown up through a piece of chewing gum that had been idly discarded to melt into the sidewalk crack. Lots of weeds grow out of the concrete cracks, no matter how successfully we think we’ve tamed nature with infrastructure, but to grow through gum seems to me a real accomplishment. Taking nutrients from the sticky, abandoned confection, this assiduously deciduous sproutling overcame all odds to rise out of the dirt, through the concrete, and finally—in what is sure to become a widely adopted analogy for succeeding against seemingly insurmountable odds—up from gum.
Friday, July 24, 2009
How Shakespeare and His Ilk Are Ruining Kids Today
Mark Bauerlein thinks technology is responsible for making today's youth the "dumbest generation" because social media only gets kids to talk to one another. Although there is some irony (and narcissism) in an grown-up academic arguing in a book to other grown-ups about the blight of kids talking only to one another, I think we can take his critique to fun extremes.
When literature scholars, one of which Bauerlein considers himself, talk about "The Classics," The Odyssey, The Iliad, Shakespeare's plays, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales immediately come to mind. These texts are, by all accounts, great. But they have something else in common. Homer wrote The Odyssey and The Iliad in dactylic hexameter. Shakespeare's plays were in iambic pentameter. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was heroic couplets (an ancestor of iambic pentameter).
In other words, "The Classics" all conform to some form of poetic meter. Know what else does? Popular music. That's right. A detailed historical analysis of meter would no doubt reveal a direct line from "Hamlet" to Brit-brit's "Baby Hit Me One More Time." For shame, Mr. Shakespeare. Without your insidious influence, our kids would be smarter and better able to focus on other literary texts that aren't constrainted by meter.
Oh, but it gets worse. Dactylic hexameter, iambic pentameter, trimeter, and heroic couplets all have another thing in common. Users are forced by the constraints of meter to limit what they say to a predetermined number of syllables. Sure, you can write several heroic couplets and string them together, but in order to conform to the heroic form, two lines of various meter must be self-contained. No matter what meter you use, you have to say all you need to say in an abbreviated amount of words and syllables.
If you're with me at this point, you know that poetic meter must be the direct ancestor of the single most dangerous phenomenon for our children: Twitter. Twitter, as we all know, and as Bauerlein is wont to tell us, stunts kids intellectual development and makes them dumb. Twitter and other technological "developments" undermine children's ability to concentrate and focus. They undermine children's ability to appreciate important works of literature and philosophical thought. In short, poetic meter (pioneered by Homer, refined by Chaucer, and perfected by Shakespeare) are directly responsible for dumbing down America's current generation of students.
The only solution as I see it is this: we must go back...back before Homer had the opportunity to stupify countless generations of Western civilization. Back to rudimentary shelters and mammoth hunts. Back to cave drawings, glacial melts, and land bridges. Only by delivering ourselves and our children to a time before poetic meter can we hope for a smarter generation.
When literature scholars, one of which Bauerlein considers himself, talk about "The Classics," The Odyssey, The Iliad, Shakespeare's plays, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales immediately come to mind. These texts are, by all accounts, great. But they have something else in common. Homer wrote The Odyssey and The Iliad in dactylic hexameter. Shakespeare's plays were in iambic pentameter. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was heroic couplets (an ancestor of iambic pentameter).
In other words, "The Classics" all conform to some form of poetic meter. Know what else does? Popular music. That's right. A detailed historical analysis of meter would no doubt reveal a direct line from "Hamlet" to Brit-brit's "Baby Hit Me One More Time." For shame, Mr. Shakespeare. Without your insidious influence, our kids would be smarter and better able to focus on other literary texts that aren't constrainted by meter.
Oh, but it gets worse. Dactylic hexameter, iambic pentameter, trimeter, and heroic couplets all have another thing in common. Users are forced by the constraints of meter to limit what they say to a predetermined number of syllables. Sure, you can write several heroic couplets and string them together, but in order to conform to the heroic form, two lines of various meter must be self-contained. No matter what meter you use, you have to say all you need to say in an abbreviated amount of words and syllables.
If you're with me at this point, you know that poetic meter must be the direct ancestor of the single most dangerous phenomenon for our children: Twitter. Twitter, as we all know, and as Bauerlein is wont to tell us, stunts kids intellectual development and makes them dumb. Twitter and other technological "developments" undermine children's ability to concentrate and focus. They undermine children's ability to appreciate important works of literature and philosophical thought. In short, poetic meter (pioneered by Homer, refined by Chaucer, and perfected by Shakespeare) are directly responsible for dumbing down America's current generation of students.
The only solution as I see it is this: we must go back...back before Homer had the opportunity to stupify countless generations of Western civilization. Back to rudimentary shelters and mammoth hunts. Back to cave drawings, glacial melts, and land bridges. Only by delivering ourselves and our children to a time before poetic meter can we hope for a smarter generation.
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