the existential humorist

            Two days ago, I knew I could be dead in an instant. I felt woozy after school. I went to my daughter’s elementary school basketball game. Lightheaded, ignoring my unsure footing on bleacher stairs, I cheered when she rebounded on the first play of the B team game, dribbled the length of the court, and missed a shot from the paint.

           I went to the restroom twice in the A-team second half. Something was wrong. In the parking lot afterwards, the cheese curls I ate as after school snacks came up with stomach acid, splattering my shoes a washed-out orange.

           I drove home with a quiet, internal anxiety, trying to talk to my daughter to distract myself. Physically, I felt off. At home, I cracked a Miller Lite, thinking that may help calm me, took a sip, sat down on the couch, and released the reclining arm so that my head moved horizontally quickly. The ceiling spun around. I bolted upright, announcing “something’s wrong with me.”

           I called my mother. No answer. I called my mother again. I texted her cell. I felt warm. I kept noticing how my chest felt. Is that normal? Is that tension I feel anxiety, or something else?

           Heart disease runs in my family. My dad and two of his brothers died of relatively early heart attacks. My dad had his first in his early 40s. I turned 40 this year. Of course the panic seems a bit silly now, but it might be understandable were you in the same spot. My mom, who drove me to the emergency room, was also worrying about a possible heart attack. We didn’t have to say so. It was understood. Of all 4 of her boys, I’m the one who most takes after her late husband. I’m the one with the anxiety disorder, the bipolarism. I’m the one who used to smoke. Like dad, before his first heart attack.

           Waiting alone in the e.r., I thought about what it would mean for my children were I to die at that moment. It felt like a horribly wrong thing that I was powerless to curtail. But I gathered myself. I checked my pulse. It didn’t seem weak. I mused that it might be a blood pressure problem.

           You might imagine my relief when the e.r. doctor said “it sounds like vertigo. Sounds just like vertigo,” but ordered bloodwork, an ekg, a cat scan, to rule out scarier possibilities. You might imagine the pleasure of letting go of thoughts of morbidity when the ekg showed everything normal with the heart.

           The understanding that I might die, right then, was not any less real until I was provided evidence that my heart was not poised to stop, even if the evidence proved I wasn’t in mortal danger all along. There’s a difference between intellectually contemplating the cessation of your life in this body, on this planet, and feeling viscerally in your chest that the moment could come now. Or now. Or at the next beat.

           Philip Larkin wrote “we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.”

           Given what has occurred the day after I didn’t die, when President-elect Trump was chosen by the will of a plurality of the people, let Larkin’s lines guide our treatment of each other daily, weekly, for the next four years. Forever. Let it be foremost in our minds.

I was raised Catholic. I don’t call myself Catholic anymore, but some programming is hard to shake. “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic” my mom used to sing-song, much to my annoyance, but it is true from a certain perspective. I don’t believe in transubstantiation, for example, but I do feel guilty when I admit to myself that I’ve done something bad. Yell at my kids. Treat a student with unnecessary harshness. Make it a habit, much too often, to leave the night dishes for the morning nanny to deal with. All these are occasions for recognizing my failure to be as good a person as I want to be. In this way, I’ll always be a Catholic, albeit a reluctant, ideologically-agnostic one.  Having the general distaste for the Church, it’s precepts, it’s dogma, it’s inexcusable covering up of rampant sexual abuse that I do, it surprised me to discover, while thinking it over, that the Catholics are right about original sin.

           Not in the Biblical literalist sense. As an occasionally rational, highly educated person, I’m incapable of talking myself into believing in the myth that there was one Adam and one Eve and the Tree of Knowledge and so on and so forth. No, I think all humans exhibit original sin in the sense that all humans, sometimes, to some significant degree, are assholes.

           A kinder way to put it is that we all have the capacity to do bad; we all behave in certain ways and make certain choices that are selfish rather than loving, rude rather than kind, mean-spirited rather than forgiving. Call these tendencies tendencies to sin, if you prefer. But these faults we have are not only possibilities. Some modicum of these in each of our lives is an inevitability. We were made, it seems, by God or What/Whoever, in order to make mistakes.

           It takes effort to be good and do good. It takes a conscious, deliberate choice. I recently wrote a poem in which I question if I’m very mindful at all, because it’s a huge difficulty just to remind myself to be mindful. To be nice to the people at home or at work or in our social lives is a matter of choice. I doubt most of us go a day without treating someone with less kindness than we could have. It’s much easier to be a dick and not care. It’s much easier to expect the world to give way before us so we can go out and conquer as all alpha humans do. It’s much easier to do a half-assed job at everything, be it schoolwork or tidying up the house. It is much easier, at the end of a long, difficult day, to let our tempers get the best of us, to take the family members nearest and dearest to us completely for granted.

           Most of these are sins of a social nature – poor choices in how we do unto others. Self-improvement for our own sake is a whole nother can of worms we could unseal. Personally, I resolve to do better at X or Y frequently, and I don’t know that I feel I get much better at X or Y, usually. Perhaps it’s hard to see, change usually coming incrementally and not overnight. Or perhaps there’s something within us, some human tendency toward selfishness and short-sightedness, that we must continually recommit to fending off if we are to be anywhere near as good as we’d like to be.

           People are naturally awful. That’s the premise of original sin. And isn’t the evidence of it everywhere? Do we have to look far in our communities, our states or provinces, our countries, our cultures, for evidence of people behaving poorly? It’s even more horrid, more awful, when we see so many people behaving so poorly, supposedly in the name of God. I’m looking at you, Mike Pence and Monica Boyer.

John Grochalski’s The Librarian (Six Gallery Press) finally turns on page 210 of a 222 page book. In an essay about her story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor says that every story needs to turn on a moment where something happens to the main character – something completely unexpected by the reader, but completely right for the moment. And it took damn near to the end of this book narrated by Rand Wyndam, the first in a pair of Wyndam tales by Grochalski (the second book, which I read first, is The Wine Clerk) for the book to finally do that thing you know you were reading and reading, tearing through the pages, liking this horribly pessimistic alcoholic narrator in spite of yourself, to do.

Rand is (it’s obvious) a riff on the Bukowskian drinker-hero, but Grochalski pulls it off in a way I almost never saw Bukowski acolytes pull it off in hordes of mediocre drinking-and-gambling poems sent to, and usually rejected by, Fight These Bastards, a magazine named for Bukowski’s last words to the great NYQ editor William Packard that I edited with my friends Oren Wagner and Don Winter. It’s the macabre, cutting, and penetratingly insightful sense of humor of Rand, his occasional moments of vulnerability, and Grochalski’s skill at turning sentences around that add up to a read I don’t want to put down. Wyndham just keeps fighting and losing, stupidly, negatively, without hope but without cessation, a punch drunk fighter who doesn’t know the meaning of throwing in the towel. There’s something charming and winning about Rand’s incredibly shitty attitude. It’s refreshing. One can read it, and say, finally, here’s a guy voicing our innermost disgust for the daily grind and the daily bullshit, with either the guts or the despair to never bother reforming himself. There’s no bullshit denouement. There’s no false redemption.

The one liners are spectacular. My favorite occurs early in the book, but there are many more. Here’s Rand trying to avoid telling someone at a temp agency how he lost his job in a New York Public Library: “I need to know” the woman says.            “‘I headbutted a fellow librarian’ [Rand] said.

‘Headbutted? Could you be more specific?’

‘Yeah. I took my head and slammed it into his head.’”

 In context, we feel Rand’s aggravation and pleasure at having to needlessly explain a headbutting to a hapless temp agency boss. It was one of several laugh-out-loud moments in the book. Everything, for Rand, becomes a rebuttal, a retort. A zinger. At times he fires them off so fast you’ve got to backtrack to keep up.

Because in some indefineable way, Rand is not defeated. He will not allow himself to be defeated. Not in the way the average working stiff, slogging their way to another paycheck in two week-cycles, does. And when the moment comes on page 210 – a moment treated with beautiful simplicity and subtlety by Grochalski, you’ll understand that this writer and this narrator haven’t taken us along on this ride for nothing.

‘

Remember like 10 years ago when writers started talking about how irony is ruining everything? Our attitudes, our art, our facial hair? David Foster Wallace might’ve said it first. At a reading in southern California, I heard Tony Hoagland reference it in connection to his own work and the work of his generation of poets. Water Witches may not be Alexander Fleming, but with the 2015 album Feathers, they’re definitely contributing to the cure.

There’s not one iota of irony on Feathers. It’s heartfelt and passionate indiepop, genuine through and through. These guys are in possession of the kind of authenticity that gave Lester Bangs wet dreams.  While I’m referencing dead artists I have no authority to invoke as endorsers of the Water Witches sound, let me say that Walt Whitman, John Lennon, and Mr. Rogers would’ve loved this record, too. That’s four dead white guys, I know, and it’s kind of passé, but hey, they’re just trying to turn you on to some cool shit.

Ethan Bartman is the lead voice among the hearts and brains of Water Witches. Bartman wrote the best essay I’ve ever received in 12 years teaching senior honors English, and that includes the years poetic wunderkind Kaveh Akbar was turning in essays, which is saying something. Like Kaveh (like me, too, come to think of it), Ethan would exit high school to engage in various stupidities over a number of years, but here he is coming into his own as an artist – having muscled down the path that’s always been open to him.

If “Sea More” doesn’t sound like a Velvet Underground song, except with a tuneful singalong chorus, then I don’t know what-is. And that one’s buried on Side B. If “Eagerness,” closing side A, doesn’t inspire you so much you hurl yourself out your front door and run down the street screaming in ecstasy, you must be dead inside. If the title track that opens side B doesn’t shake your butt at least a little bit, you may’ve been born without a soul. Water Witches are true artists in the sense that they’ve developed a sound; they’re distinct. I’ve got nothing else that sounds quite like them, through and through, in my vinyl collection, and I’ve got a lot of records for a single parent of four kids surviving on a public school teacher’s salary.

Find out for yourself. I find it hard to believe you’ll be disappointed, and if you are disappointed, don’t worry about it, relax, you’re just wrong. Find info and links to the album at http://waterwitchesmusic.com/music/. Happy listening.

         My first encounter with the ghost of Kurt came in a text from my oldest best friend, a high school partner in crime who felt compelled to give me a call and catch up. He’d heard a song off the Unplugged album that reminded him of me. Back then, we’d played that cassette through the crappy speakers of my mom’s old Ford Escort (dubbed “The Big Blue Shit”), singing along til we damn near wore out the tape.

           Then a poet friend in Missouri posted an Unplugged song on Facebook, and a thought occurred to me, so I commented: “you know, I think Unplugged is Nirvana’s true masterpiece.”

           That got me thinking of how, as a not very musically enlightened Kurt-worshipper of the early 90s (the kind of unsophisticated fanboy Cobain no doubt disdained, as Chuck Klosterman would later point out), I loved Unplugged the most. The lyrical genius, the vocalizing that does so much with such a very human baseline of pitch-imperfect talent, the collection of musicians that seemed assembled to boost Kurt’s voice, the cello and guitars and elegantly played drums lifting our cardigan-wearing hero like a wave. It had been a long time since I sought out copies of Nirvana’s music to intentionally play in my home, but I knew the local Karma Records had Unplugged on vinyl, so on Valentine’s Day, as a gift for my dateless self, I bought it.

           The first time I listened to the album straight through, singing along as if the words of Kurt and the artists he covered had never left my brain. At the climax of  Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” which the album closes on, I was overcome with emotion, and had to escape to the basement to cry before coming up to run one of my kids somewhere. Thoughts about the suicide of the mother of my children, and then thoughts of the ugly months of divorce that followed our marriage, filled my head as I quietly bawled.

           Days later, getting a beer with another friend who writes and teaches, I brought up Unplugged. I’d been playing it and singing along every day. Clayton said he’d been a huge Nirvana fan as a kid. He had bootlegs, all sorts of rare recordings, and he got rid of all of it when Kurt died. It was too painful. He hasn’t intentionally listened to Nirvana since.

           I’d entirely avoided it myself, too. The Unplugged album, in particular, being the one I loved most, I couldn’t bear to play. And certainly there were other adolescents, 16 or 17 or 18 years old in 1994, all of us seeking to emulate Kurt’s authenticity and perhaps too his creative genius, who took his death personally. I remember feeling embarrassed that I cried about it. And I remember feeling very angry that something, someone, so genuine, so gifted, such a powerful model and hero, had been taken from us.

           Two and a half years beyond the suicide of someone I was close to, if at the end distanced from, I feel like I can listen to my old hero with a different sense of the tragedy of his death. I think of Cobain himself, who had such a tough time in life, whose creative genius was probably forged and tempered by all the difficult things he’d been through as a child and as a young man – the songwriting and painting, the journal keeping, ways to keep afloat in rough waters. I’d like to think I feel for that guy, that human, a little more than I did before. That I no longer feel betrayed, just immensely sad that his life had to end so quickly, and ended the way it did.

           A teacher friend of mine once noted that when someone very close dies – a parent, a brother or sister – what we’re crying for at the funeral is ourselves. Crying that we can’t experience that person any more, every thought of them a memory, no place we can call to hear their voice. That friend holds to the notion that there is a heavenly afterlife, that souls do truly get to rest in peace. In her mind, her mother had been rewarded for her long human struggle to maintain. I don’t know if there’s a heaven for anyone – for Kurt or you or me, or the mother of my children. And I’m not going to support some pollyanna line that “they’re in a better place now” or “they no longer feel any pain.” I don’t know if our souls survive, if they’re rewarded, punished, reincarnated, or flung into limbo when our hearts stop beating. But I do know I can let go. I can let them be wherever they are. It’s okay to be at peace with it. I don’t have to think of the loss of someone close as a punishment they intended specifically for me.

Help Wanted

In my current state of spiritual torpor and moral malaise, I’ve decided what I probably need most is a good, swift, kick-in-the-ass. Ergo, I am currently taking applications for that special person who might be lucky enough, and capable enough, and kind enough, to give me just such a kick. Due to the seriousness of this endeavor, I’ve put together this handy collection of Frequently Asked Questions to help you decide if you may be the right person to give me a kick-in-the-ass.

Q: What should I wear to give you a good, swift, kick-in-the-ass?

A: leather boots and a riding crop might be a good look.

 Q: Am I going to be legally responsible if anything goes wrong? Are you insured? 

A: I am A-ssured, friend. Or Ass-sured, that this is what I need. Liability coverage will not be necessary. If that were even possible, I’d take out a large policy and sabotage the whole damn enterprise to pay out when my ass falls off, making my kids filthy rich.

 Q: Is this for real? Is this a real thing? What the hell is going on here anyway? 

A: If I knew the answer to that question, I wouldn’t be needing a good, healthy, swift, kick-in-the-ass, now would I?

Q: So, this is a metaphorical kick in the ass, right? What you want is a life coach?

A: Certainly not. I do not want a life coach, a counselor, or a Priest. I already have a Psychiatrist, and I’ve found if one retains the latter, the three former are of not much use. I’m not sure, honestly, if this is about motivation, or more in the lines of that 90s song that goes “I hurt myself today / to see if I still feel / blah blah blah, etc. / life is awful, and so on and so forth.” It’s probably a combo.

Q: Am I going to be held in any other way responsible?

A: How about cosmically responsible, tough guy. How about the Indifferent Forces of the Universe are going to hold you accountable for this decision for the rest of your life, like we all are, about all our decisions, all the time. How about you be ready to handle that. 

Q: Christ, you’re a dick.

A: And I hope, as you read through this, the need for this procedure is becoming more and more abundantly clear.

Q: Where do I sign up?

I’d be willing to bet there are many, many, many gun owners in the United States who are at core responsible and sane people. They don’t intend to hurt anyone. They may buy guns with safety or security in mind, but they don’t buy them with murder in mind. Yes, indeed. I think that is the case. But that is not a sufficient reason not to enact and enforce very strict gun laws in our nation.

A friend who is driving me crazy with oversimplification, as libertarians tend to do, argues that we can’t regulate people’s emotions, and we can’t regulate people who already feel they don’t need to follow the law, therefore we can’t regulate gun use or gun ownership in this country. As in, restricting access to guns will have no impact on the murderous freaks who’ve been shooting up classrooms-full and churches-full of children and students and teachers, and, in at least one recent case, members of a historically black church specifically because they are black.

If all Americans were as anarchistic and dismissive of government as libertarians, we’d indeed do no good by actually enacting and enforcing mental health checks for gun owners, or by closing loop holes that allow people to buy guns with no background check at gun shows and on the internet. But we don’t live in a libertarian world. We have government, and we have laws, and I hope to God we always will. Government and laws do some good in deterring people from awful behavior. They are not foolproof methods for dissuading people from murder, that is true, but they can do some good in dissuading those among us who are not entirely anarchic or psychotic . . . or libertarian.

Will some people go to herculean lengths to procure weapons to fire at classrooms full of elementary school children, at classrooms full of college students, at churches full of worshippers? I suppose that may be the case. Is it possible we may deter some of these people who harbor murderous impulses if they can’t buy guns without a background check and can’t order guns anonymously online, or if we discontinue allowing assault rifles to be sold or large magazines that allow them to shoot roomfuls of people in adjacent classrooms to be sold.

Well, maybe it’s not the best solution. Maybe we need to do more than that. But, for starters, it’s a hell of a lot better than “stuff happens.”

This afternoon I partook in my usual immediately-after-school activity of laying inert on the red couch with the footrest pulled out from the side. Our couch is like a double-recliner but less comfortable and not really visually aesthetically pleasing.

           Frannie, sitting across from me, said, “Dad, if you were an animal. You would be a cat. Which is weird. Because you’re allergic to cats.”

           “I would not,” I said.

           “You sit in the same place every day” she said. “You just lay there.”

           “That’s not cat-like,” I said.

           “You lick your paws and stretch,” she said.

           “You’re making that up.”

           “You scratch a lot,” she said. Which is true. At the moment, I was scratching my prodigious and moderately hairy belly.

           “This one time,” I said, “Before you were born, when we lived in the apartment near downtown, your mom shaved my belly. I let her shave my belly. I immediately regretted it.”

           Frannie goes, “… …”

           “It looked ridiculous,” I said. “Giant and white and hairless with a formidable innie.”

-         I’m going to write a blog post in a series of bullet points, because, let’s face it, the de-evolution of writing is already upon us, our dumberer dumberness is already dumberating the Universe.

-         I’m trying to figure out if I’m having a bad Wednesday, or if I’m just supertired. 

-         I’m starting to figure out that sometimes my default mode is a**hole. The more fatigued I am, the more likely this is to be the case.

-         I wrote a first draft of a poem today called “The Art of Not Caring.”  The first line reads, “This is a poem about the art of not caring.”  True story. Fascinating. I wouldn’t make this stuff up.

-         I started out playing around with the inherent comic potential of the notion of truly not caring. I ended the poem realizing that my default mode is a**hole.

-         Speaking of poems, there are a couple of writers I know, who are married, who write kickass stuff. One is named Dave Newman. The other is Lori Jakiela. They are married. They have recently written excellent books.

-         Dave Newman is a man who truly doesn’t care, and not in a pejorative sense. It’s the kind of not-caring that involves blunt honesty. Dave Newman doesn’t dress up the truth in finery. I love this about Dave Newman. I also just used the word “finery.”

-         I’ve recently read a pair of books by Mr. Newman. One is called The Slaughterhouse Poems. The other is fiction, Two Small Birds.

-         In both books, our intrepid narrator, most likely a fictionalized version of the author, works super crappy jobs, and writes poems about them, or, in the case of the fiction, is searching for a way to write true poems.

-         The narrator of “The Slaughterhouse Poems” is more likeable, as if that matters. He finds beauty in unlikely places, and he also tells the truth about situations that aren’t pretty.

-         I think maybe this is a thing one has to do to be a good poet: Tell the truth about situations that aren’t pretty.

-         The narrator of “Two Small Birds” gets completely used in an unusual way, and does truly awful things, but still has heart and soul. At one point, the narrator tells a girlfriend “I’m trying my best,” and she says something like, you know what? I believe you are . . . she says or insinuates that this is kind of sad. Like Newman’s character is fundamentally dysfunctional in some way that can’t be hidden.

-         This is why I like Newman’s narrator who does awful things so much. Because of his fundamental dysfunction. This seems to me to be a standard, broad, American category: the guy who tries when he doesn’t even know how to try.

-         I love the ending of Two Small Birds. It is so not cliché. Awesome.

-         Newman is also a character in his wife’s memoir, Belief is its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe. What a fantastic book by Lori Jakiela. I mean, holy cow. This husband and wife team! They are so superior to Sonny and Cher, we shouldn’t even laugh about it.

-         Jakiela’s book is a true story of her life as an adopted child, as a mother, as a wife, as a writer. It’s riveting. I couldn’t put it down.

-         Jakiela also does the honesty thing very well. She explores her feelings about various horrible circumstances she’s had to deal with. She doesn’t pretty it up when it’s ugly.

-         For example, there’s a scene where Jakiela imagines meeting her birth mother, who has been sending her awful, horrible messages via MySpace, and being a sort of calm, surgical, laser-brained bitch to her birth mother, who deserves it. This does not happen. It is enough for her to admit that she wants to do this.

-         Newman is a kind, patient, caring husband, for the most part, in Jakiela’s narrative, and I think it’s true, and I love that she paints him in realistic, favorable colors. They have a pair of kids. They have been married for a long time.

-         You’ve got to think of your spouse in glowing terms, or you ought to, or rather, it ought to come naturally to do so, to stay married for a long time. But it only works if it’s true. Because Jakiela and Newman both address not-pretty situations without flinching, I trust that when they describe pretty situations, they’re telling the truth.

-         That sounds like another writer tip. I am in full on fall semester teacher-mode, so I operate under the assumption that people want writer-tips from me. They may or may not want them. I offer them anyway.

-         Newman’s got a new book of poems coming out. I believe it is called The Poem Factory. I can’t wait. I flew through Slaughterhouse Poems like there was a hot date with a beautiful poet just around the next page. There wasn’t, but there were more poems from Newman, and there is more work out there by Jakiela, and they write beautiful books about flawed people, very good books that I like, and you should like them too.

The Party Line

Self Evaluation

I’m not racist but Nonwhite people tend to be inferior

I’m not sexist but Women, man, women . . . Women are pretty stupid

I’m not slutshaming but That effing slut should be ashamed of herself

I’m no homophobe but Gay marriage is a threat to Our Christian Democracy

I’m not angry but Just who in the hell do you think you are?

I’m not arguing but You’re absolutely wrong

I’m not a conspiracy theorist but The Freemasons, Illuminati, Opus Dei, blah blah blah

I’m not paranoid but I wish they’d quit following me

I’m not lonely but I miss her, man, I miss her so much

            If memory serves correctly, it was Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Indiana’s finest artist of any kind, who said that in writing, it is often the obvious thing that is not being said, that needs to be said, that constitutes good writing. I’m going to make an attempt at such an obvious statement in this brief blog post. It is past time for educators, for those of us who believe a good education ought to be a public right in a democracy and not an entitlement for those who can foot the bill, to speak up.

            In Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, academic and cultural critic Henry Giroux notes that “the United States could spend as much as a trillion dollars for a fleet of F-35 fighter planes. Each plane costs $90 million, and the military (here Giroux quotes a Reuters news service writer, writing in 2011) is ‘spending more on this plane that Australia’s entire GDP ($924 billion).’” It is worth noting here, as Giroux does, that military experts have urged the Pentagon to “ditch the project because of cost overruns and a series of technological problems that more recently have resulted in the Pentagon grounding all F-35s.”

            In other words, as a government of the people, by the people, for the people, we are spending a trillion dollars on implements of war that don’t work.

            That money could be spent on public education.

            Imagine the transformation that could occur if we were to funnel a trillion dollars into public education. Imagine the opportunities in the arts, the humanities, math, science, and so on and so forth, that we could pay for children across the country to experience. Imagine inner city and poor rural school districts with the ability to fund all sorts of school programs in the way that upper class, suburban, monied (and not often minority, and never poor) school districts can. Imagine the teachers we could train. Imagine the students we could inspire with access to science labs, musical instruments, art supplies, books, field trips, and on and on that they might not otherwise experience. Education funding, I contend, is the place where we can make the biggest difference for all children in America, regardless of what neighborhood they live in, regardless of who their parents are (I haven’t yet heard of a case of a student who got to pick his/her parents), and regardless of the often difficult circumstances and backgrounds they carry into the school campus with them.

            Public education, particularly here in Indiana where I teach high school English, is not broken. On the contrary, it is being starved. Public education ought to be a right for all young people in a democracy, not an entitlement or a privilege for those who can afford it, or for those who are born to wealthy parents. In our state, legislators cut funding to public schools and divert funding to private schools and charters in a deliberate attempt to privatize education. It’s not a secret and it’s not a conspiracy theory. Pay attention. Your children’s chance to learn to think critically, to engage in public life as citizens of a democracy, and to have a sense of agency as humans, inherently worthy of respect and decency, not to be treated as a “disposable population” (as Giroux puts it) is at stake.

As my 2.5 readers know, I usually reserve this blog for various prose pieces, but this seems appropriate for today.

Happy Birthday Lydia

  Lucy and Zaya horseback riding

with your mom today. Oren,

Netflix. Frannie outside plays.

I’d thought not much of you

until your sister’s lamentations

on Facebook today.

  I can’t recall my dad

too well. Once dead he grew

in stature but the truth is

he’d spent mostly 3 years, by then,

not there. I wonder what our kids

think of you now? Mom said

our sister had the deepest memory.

Perhaps Dad survived in thought

for her a little longer, a little more specifically.

I never did like to think about it.

  I want to hug our daughters

one by one by one today,

see your hurt in their solemn faces

of avoidance, tell them, remember,

remember. It’s allowed.

Remembering’s okay. Who knows

If you’ll be glad for it right now,

but in 23 years, maybe,

she’ll be more than trickles and blips,

more than faulty questions without answers,

a cell call cutting in and out indeterminantly,

          Good citizenship certainly does not consist of blind patriotism. Poorly reasoned protest, however, does damage at least as much, and at least as ignorantly, as the naïve and increasingly rare belief that our elected officials and the apparatus of our government function solely to serve the needs of the people, with no ulterior motive.

            If you don’t know them, look up the concept of logical fallacies. A fallacy is a flaw in an argument. It is a flaw in one’s thinking. To point out a fallacy is to point out a flaw in one’s reasoning. I present this position as a postulate. If one accepts that fallacious thinking represents poor reasoning, then one accepts that to point out a fallacy is to undermine the argument the fallacy supports.

            If you really want to look like an asshole on Facebook, like I sometimes do, call out someone’s argument in a post on a political issue. Your friend, for example, could post a picture of a chat conversation. The first person in the exchange could have stated “Who’s saying you can’t own a gun? It’s certain types of guns we want banned, not all. What part of that don’t you get?” The second person may have replied “Republicans aren’t saying you can’t get married, it’s certain types of marriage they want banned, not all. What part of that don’t you get? That is what it sounds like when you want to ban something.” And if you’re an asshole, like I am, and you teach English, like I do, and you believe your professional existence, your reason for going to work every day, is predicated on teaching students HOW to think well (notice I didn’t say WHAT to think), you might just post a comment on your pal’s status that amounts to “False Analogy. People and guns aren’t comparable.”

            Then a friend of your friend might say something like, “Good Analogy, pal! It’s not WHAT’S BANNED that’s being compared, it’s the BANNING.”

            It doesn’t take much to dismiss this argument. If the banning of one thing is equally as reprehensible as the banning of another, regardless of what is being banned, then all banning is equal. There would be no analogy made about banning that didn’t hold up. Banning child molestation would be the same as banning running red lights would be the same as banning alcohol sales on Sunday would be the same as banning the use of a book by Howard Zinn in IU and Purdue classrooms (good thing here in Indiana we don’t have college Presidents who think that way). It’s a ludicrous and nonsensical position – a logical fallacy.

            A better counterargument would attempt to justify the analogy. The right to bear arms, it would go, is similar to the right to marry. To ban one would be like banning the other. So, the argument would go, to deny two adults who are equipped with the same sexual plumbing the right to marry is quite similar to denying an adult citizen the right to keep an assault weapon, or five, or a whole arsenal’s worth, in their home. I’m not sure how this might be reasoned out. It doesn’t seem to make much sense. They seem to be two incomparable issues placed side by side in comparison, as if the invalidity of a gay marriage ban is equal to the invalidity of banning from American homes tools designed to kill people quickly, with lots of firepower.  It’s like, the analogy being made is . . . false. Or something.

                        I didn’t pursue my line of reasoning in the public forum of Facebook very far. In fact, as I typed and sent the comment, a sense of dread and foreboding washed over me – quite literally, I felt it in my gut, as real as any anxiety I’ve ever felt (though not as intense as the worst). Oh, geez, I thought. I’m asking for it. I shouldn’t do this. But I did. And then, I spent the time getting Oren out of the bath and getting Lucy ready for bed dreading the inevitable assault. I lay awake thinking about it. I avoided checking my phone. I knew I’d opened myself up to ridicule.

          And yet, it felt necessary to say something. Why is that? We’ve all been there, haven’t we? We’ve been angered or annoyed by someone’s political posts. We respond. Maybe we’re aggressive. Maybe we try to be conciliatory. Whether or not this comes through on whatever we post in reply, we may, as I do, get the adrenaline rush one would’ve felt 200,000 years ago if one’s status was challenged by another human in one’s peer group of hunter-gatherers. It’s not a pleasant feeling. I’m no fight-or-flight junkie.

          Is it worth it? Is arguing on Facebook worth feeling physically uncomfortable? Is it worth feeling mentally distressed? Ought we say anything at all? Or is the proper thing to do to only affirm the positions taken by our friends’ posts, to only respond when we are in agreement?

          Sometimes, in cases such as this one, I think there’s something to be said for posting a comment that disagrees, or that points out a flaw in your friend’s thinking, or their meme’s thinking, or whatever. The debate is worth having, irrespective of one’s position on gun rights or anything else. The debate is as worth the time of a libertarian as it is of a socialist. It is as necessary for the card-carrying conservative as it is for the card-carry liberal. Debates on pressing political issues need to happen publicly, and rationally, and often enough for as many of our citizens as possible to engage in them.

Watching Star Wars with Oren

            The ending of Babbitt troubles me. Spoiler alert: classic novel by a Nobel Prize winner to be discussed.

            Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt is a hypocritical, self-deluded family man, Booster, businessman, college graduate, and churchgoer.  In George F. Babbitt, Lewis seems to take great delight in skewering the quintessential American paradox and failure.  George is a real estate agent who deludes himself into thinking his backroom deals with local businessmen are honest and straightforward.  He is “in” with the power players in his community. He is a member of the Athletic Club, the second order of elitists in Zenith, where he lunches often, vows to quit cigars and never does so, and talks with his boys about the dangers of the Reds, the unions, nonChristians, people with loose morals (though George is known to drink, and later to consort with and make love, without consummation, to a widower he is not married to), and various dangerous elements of the modern, efficient, businesslike American city. George Babbitt is, by all accounts, a colossal boob. He is played by people with more power and money than him, and, as their stooge, he plays the people less powerful than he.

            His inability to think, and his ability to rationalize his poor behavior, are pervasive in the early parts of the novel. George’s moral compass is broken.  The people he knows are simply alliances to be made or broken, subject to the convenience of his efforts at social climbing.  Early in the novel, he longs to be a part of the elite of Zenith – of the old money who built the town and still pull the strings in the local world of business.  Things happen, though, and he changes. A series of situations chip away at George’s sure faith in what other people tell him the world ought to be about. 

Long used to adopting one position or another as a matter of convenience, then dropping that position when it proved to be economically untenable for his business, or sometimes when it got him thinking too much about what the hell he was doing with his life, for George, the veil finally, sort of, lifts.  For a time, with relative recklessness compared to his earlier fixation on social norms, George declares himself liberal, supports an educated lawyer who works on behalf of labor, claims the working man is as decent a fellow as the next guy (and not the dehumanized Commie that the moneyed folk of Zenith make him out to be).  George is disappointed in his marriage, and consorts with a loose crowd of libertines in an attempt, in his late 40s, to find himself.

Ultimately, via the aggressive graces of several prominent local leaders, George is forced back into the fold.  He willingly denounces his own heresies – he declares them heresies, in fact, where pages ago those heresies seemed like the beginning of an understanding of the hypocrisies of the American system.  He is welcomed back to the power players – on the second level, of course, where he was at the beginning of the novel. George reminds me of no character in literature so much as Orwell’s Parsons in 1984. Parsons, who swallows every lie the Party tells him, who swallows it eagerly, with a willingness to be convinced of the Party’s goodness. Parsons, who begs forgiveness from Big Brother at the revelation that he denounced the Party subconsciously, in his sleep. This is the position George is reduced to. His awakening is subverted. Under threat of ostracism, he willingly reprograms himself to think and do and believe as more esteemed men in the community would have him think and do and believe.

That such a social system is antithetical to the development of a democracy of thinking, autonomous citizens is so obvious, as one reads Babbitt, that although I feel it needs mentioning as the real issue in Lewis’s satire, I want to believe that no one of a modicum of intelligence who read the novel would fail to miss it.

In the end – here’s where you quit reading if you’re sufficiently piqued by my description of the work to go looking for it yourself (I’ve heard you can find it for free on Kindle, Nook and the like) – although George returns to the fold, there’s a seed of regret there. I thought, early on, that George was a colossal boob for 2/3rds of the novel, but when he began bucking social norms I began to root for him. The rebel is probably the quintessential American hero. We always root for the maverick, and it appears that George is turning himself into the maverick. Perhaps even that is subject to Lewis’s sharp satire, for at rebelling, George fails.

Then his son quits college, quits the plans George has laid for him to become a Respectable Citizen of the Community, elopes to marry his sweetheart, and plans to work as a factory mechanic – not the upstanding white collar job George imagined for him. And George does a very curious thing, and I do not know how I should feel about it. As George and his boy prepare to face the family – George’s wife, his in-laws, the parents of the neighbor girl who the boy married – George says, “Tell em to go to the devil! I’ll back you. Take your factory job, if you want to. Don’t be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I’ve been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!”

George tells his son to pursue the life he wishes to live.  He tells his son to live precisely in the way George was incapable of living.  And this is, in fact, a great moment for son and father, as George grants his son agency – tells him he will not tell him how to live his life, accepts and respects his ability to make way for himself. This is a profound idea that so few parents seem to develop about their children.

But the thing that bothers me about the ending is, what happens to George? He has granted agency to his son to live as he wishes. He has not granted that same agency to himself. I am reminded of a movie and I’m not going to look it up to get it right, I’m just going to describe it. Kevin Bacon plays an inmate who exposes the horrible abuses of a prison warden. In court, Bacons’ side wins. What becomes of his character? In the end, he is led back down to the hole, to endure God-knows-what fate the warden can inflict upon him before the case, on appeal, continues through the courts.  And what happens to Babbitt? Well, his life is already over.  He points the way for his son, but in all likelihood he will continue in the safety and moral bankruptcy of the system that made him.