Getting busted by Homeland Security
Yesterday I was walking with a friend through Quincy Market in Boston. We noticed a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk and almost immediately an oversized police SUV pulled up to arrest him.
Only it wasn’t the police: it was the feds. Stenciled on the SUV were the words “Department of Homeland Security.” Out stepped an enormous mesomorph––almost certainly on steroids––wearing a black uniform and sun-glasses. I watched him contemplate the homeless man as he slept, donning rubber gloves before waking him to arrest him.
On one level, this is a simple process of rationalization: Homeland Security has to protect “terrorist targets” and since the downtown Boston has historic value, it could conceivably be a terrorist target. (Just like all those roller rinks in the mid-west). But of course there are no terrorists and Homeland Security has to do something, so they begin acting as regular police. But it is still incredibly ironic that a stone’s throw from Paul Revere’s house there are federal officers patrolling the streets and arresting American citizens. My generation is the first in American history to see people being arrested by this so-called, “Department of Homeland Security.”
What would happen if this guy arrested me–say for jay-walking? Would I be put on some terror watch list? Maybe he would put my name in his computer and declare, “Oh, you’re anonymousrex. According to the MIAC report, you’re part of a terrorist hate-group.” Certainly if there were ever a real or imaginary crisis in Boston, this would be the guy making sure I evacuate my home to go to a FEMA camp.
Also near Quincy Market is a holocaust memorial with a famous quotation attributed to Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemoller. To paraphrase that quotation, “First they came for the homeless guy and I didn’t speak up––because I wasn’t a homeless guy. . . . Then they came for me.”
Of Taylor and Titanomachy
On Sunday, Marc C Taylor announced in The New York Times that graduate education is “the Detroit of higher learning.” Essentially he said what all graduate students know in their hearts but refuse to face: That we are being trained for jobs that do not exist and being exploited to keep university budgets low. This is nothing new. As a faculty brat, I have been hearing this since sometime in college. It’s the reason I got teaching certification. Taylor’s analysis is far less dour than an article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month entitled, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go.” All graduate student have seen The Simpsons clip where Marge explains, “Don’t make fun of graduate students, they just made terrible life choices.”
I found it very refreshing to see a chaired baby-boomer admit this injustice in The New York Times. Furthermore, Taylor proposes actual improvements! I have now seen the Taylor article posted on facebook almost a dozen times. This is partly because my colleagues mostly study religion and Taylor edited that ubiquitous orange theory book we all had to read. But I also saw a lot of my peers mocking Taylor’s ideas to “end the university as we know it.” I found this shocking for two reasons:
First, I simply cannot understand anyone in my position having loyalty to the academic system. It’s a system that’s universally condemned and yet hasn’t changed since the Middle-Ages. Think about that for a second: everyone hates it, but it never changes. The only thing that sustains it is the empty promise of a tenure track position. Tenure has become the opiate of the masses. As an inner city teacher, I saw literally dozens of angry youth that had every reason to be engaged in social reform. They didn’t because they were going to be rap stars. There is little difference between a graduate student aspiring to get tenure and a rap fan aspiring to be a rap star. I spoke to a college administrator recently who told me that many colleges now have 60% adjunct faculty. So once you have accepted that you will probably never get a tenure track job, how can you not rage against the system? Realistically, there is almost no change you could make to academia that would not benefit me. If Taylor said all universities need to be put on stilts, I would support it: I’m not scared of heights and maybe some of the baby-boomers are.
Second and more importantly, everyone mocking Taylor fails to recognize that dissertations, circumscribed disciplines, all of the things Taylor wants to jettison are totally arbitrary, culturally constructed marks of intellectual achievement. If you don’t believe me, think of all the moronic people with PhDs you’ve met. They managed to jump through the same hoops. Like paper currency, dissertations are worth whatever value we ascribe to them. And right now that value is pretty low.
I can support Taylor’s changes based on personal experience: I went to Hampshire, a college that has already implemented a lot of these ideas: there were only four departments, no majors, no tests, no grades, no tenure, and while a year long project was required it did not have to be a thesis. Now I’m in a position to observe undergraduates in a giant university and I am more convinced than ever that I got a better undergraduate education.
One thing I learned is that tenure isn’t really the issue. Hampshire didn’t have tenure but faculty that had been there more than ten years were completely confident that they would never be fired. Accordingly, some of them engaged in all the worst abuses associated with tenured faculty: sexually harassing teenage advisees, showing up to work drunk, refusing to grade assignments, etc. (Ever since high-school, I have had the strange fortune of seeing the underbelly of institutions.) Furthermore, tenure is not really a guarantee of academic freedom. This is the real reason that Larry Summers was driven out of Harvard: He was micromanaging every department and the faculty rebelled against him (but not before we lost Cornell West.)
Now let’s talk about projects. This seemed to be the one item on Taylor’s list that my peers were most skeptical of. Hampshire students must spend a year doing a “serious” project. While many students wrote a thesis (my undergraduate thesis was longer than some dissertations), some of the non-thesis projects were astounding. The campus has solar cells, a windmill, and a skywalk that were all built by students. Many graduates have gone on to publish, market, or patent their respective project. Of course there were flops: one student filled a room with slashed up teddy bears soaked in red paint. I thought that was pretty cool but it should not have taken an entire year. Then again, art isn’t my discipline. Maybe the teddy bear massacre was incredibly significant.
By any normal criteria these projects are far more valuable than a typical dissertation. Taylor is right: What is the point of spending two years of your life to write a boring dissertation that will never be published, printed, or read? Projects are better for three reasons: First, they tend to acquaint the student with the outside world, making it more likely the student will find a job they love outside of academia. Second, an impressive project is more likely to earn renown. And although no one would ever admit it, I believe renown is an asset in fighting for teaching jobs, especially if the college or department doing the hiring is trying to pull more students. If you were hiring a professor for a small college, would you want Sid Myers, the creator of Civilization, or someone you have never heard of who wrote a thesis on early uses of zinc? (Before you decide, the second guy’s letter of recommendation says this a very important contribution to the study of Anatolian bronze production.) Third, these projects will attract the attention of the community and break down these disgusting walls between “town” and “gown.” How is it we wonder at the surge of anti-intellectualism in this country when we ourselves hate academia? Projects might prove to the public (and ourselves) that we so-called experts can actually do something of value.
Finally, I want to defend Taylor’s idea of project-based programs instead of permanent departments. Everyone panned him for suggesting “a water program.” (Obviously he was thinking more of the hard sciences with that idea.) The two most rewarding things I have ever done in academia are working for the Pluralism Project and the PRSE––both groups that have a strong sense of mission. Not surprisingly, my involvement with these groups is also what most impresses people reading my resume. No, I wouldn’t sign up for a “water program.” But I would rather be in an interdisciplinary “meaning program” than where I am now.
Who knows. Maybe a swine-flu pandemic will decimate all my peers and there will be plenty of jobs. It worked in the Middle-Ages, why should we think of a better solution now?
Deathfest and Existentialism
I have just returned from my alma mater where I attended the latest iteration of “Deathfest.” There were, I was told, over 140 people in attendance all playing a single game of Dungeons and Dragons. The name “Deathfest” refers to the fact that of 140 odd characters, very few of them survive to the end of the game (last night only one). However prizes are also given out for myriad other acts of bravery, cowardice, brilliant decisions, and tremendous follies. This year’s festival also featured a beer garden with a delicious home-brewed stout and a corporate sponsor. One of Hampshire’s more venerable professors even attended with his wife. I am told they both died well. I am very proud of all the planners who have not only sustained this tradition, but taken it to heights that were unimaginable when I was an undergraduate.
This year I got to play a 250 year old religious studies scholar. I got to shout things like ‘I HAVE BECOME DEATH, DESTROYER OF WORLDS!” and “LET MY PEOPLE GO!” At one point, I even damaged an enemy, inflicting 3 points of damage. For my efforts, I was awarded a really spiffy hat and a sensation the next morning as if I had kitty litter in my throat. There is still an award known as the “Benjamin Scott-Hopkins Award for Creative Morality.” I was there in 1999 when Benjamin Scott-Hopkins aka “Funny Hat Ben” earned this award––however, the story had been lost and several organizers had begun to wonder what incredibly heinous act Ben must have committed. In January I ran into a current Deathfest organizer who asked me to retell the story. Deathfest has changed so much, I found that it took a great deal of context to explain what Ben had done and why it was so shocking. Thankfully, the story was retold last night with remarkable clarity.
The Benjamin Scott-Hopkins Award for Creative Morality has been described as “the douche-bag award” but this is not accurate. In fact, I recall one year in which a player won it for literally creating a set of morals––his character woke up in a priest’s habit and suffering from total amnesia, so he proceeded to arbitrarily write a divine law code during the course of the adventure and compiled a list of all of the character’s sins. In meditating on the case of Ben Scott-Hopkins, I realized that his act transformed Deathfest into what it is today––a collective act of existentialist myth production.
Let me back up.
Although the tradition of Deathfest goes back almost two decades, it had completely died out when I arrived at Hampshire College in the fall of 1998. In those days it was known as “The October Ravenloft Tournament.” Hamphire’s literature on student groups referenced the October Ravenloft Tournament and I was excited to play. But there was no tournament to be had. In those days, there were practically no gamers at Hampshire and no gamer culture. No G2. No middle-room. Excalibur––the ancient student club for gaming––existed in name only. They had not been given any funding and the lead signer was a rather depressed goth fellow. For that whole year Excalibur had only one function––they got together to watch the X-Files in Adelle Simmons Hall. It was a sad state of affairs.
I have a vague sense of what happened to the gamer culture before I arrived but it is mostly a guess––older Hampshire alum might be able to fill in the gaps. From what I could tell the previous crop had been a dark, angsty bunch. They wore a lot of black trench-coats and listened to the Sisters of Mercy. There was a copse of trees where the Eric Carlyle museum now stands where several of them had threatened to hang themselves. I heard one story from a non-gamer who tried to sneak into the gamer lounge to use their television: When she opened the door a knife flew her way and lodged itself in the door frame. When she began to complain, they cut her off:
“Of course someone is going to throw a knife at you if you come in here without knocking. What the hell were you thinking?”
The downfall of this group seems to have been a healthy dose of angst and paranoia. I also suspect that incest was a factor. Although the situation has improved exponentially, gamer populations have traditionally suffered from a lack of females. This disparity, coupled with teenage hormones often creates Camelot-like scenarios of betrayal. It’s one reason why I never dated other gamers.
So the other gamer-inclined first years and I put up with this for a whole year. Fall of 1999 brought in a fresh crop of gamers so we said, “Fuck it. We can do the October Ravenloft Tournament ourselves.” Now bear in mind, we had never seen the October Ravenloft Tournament and we didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. It seems silly in hindsight, but I was worried that the few remaining old-timers would show up and say, “You did this wrong. Now we’re all going to throw knives at you.”
We also had some serious inertia to overcome. For one, we had to get Excalibur’s funding restored. We also had to reserve classrooms to run the games in, purchase refreshments, put up posters on five different college campuses, and of course, design the tournament and create characters. While I was doing all of this I had this peanut gallery of older students––not gamers mind you––telling me that I had already fucked up. “They used to put up posters in September—not October. You’re not going to get any people.” (These were the same people who informed me that Hampshire Halloween sucked, and that only a first year who had never seen a proper Halloween would find the present adequate. They advised me not to have a good time, lest I display my ignorance and embarrass myself.)
I also remember one year some students who were not participating in Deathfest showed up, began collecting door-wedges from Franklin Patterson Hall, and tried to jam classroom doors closed trapping players inside. I confronted these people and made them leave. Security had specifically told me, “no running amok” but I really did want to beat the hell out of them. I cannot imagine something like that happening at Deathfest today. Inertia.
We knew we had to construct a three to four hour experience out of three words: October. Ravenloft. Tournament.
OCTOBER
Well, we were pretty sure we got that one right.
RAVENLOFT
“Ravenloft” is a Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting emphasizing “Gothic horror:” vampires, werewolves, gypsy curses, that sort of thing. So we assumed this had be horrific and macabre. That was fine, all of the DMs we lined up were good at that. We used the archetypal Ravenloft plot: A powerful vampire had awoken and unleashed an army of the undead that nearly destroyed a small village. One group was a party of slayers that had been tracking the vampire for some time and managed to infiltrate his castle. (This was Ben Scott-Hopkin’s group.) Another group had set out from the village to launch a direct assault. My group was a lynch mob: they had discovered that certain villagers had aided the vampire’s plans and were out for revenge. Curses are common in Ravenloft, and it turned out that everyone who had betrayed their village now had palms that were permanently wet with blood––making the lynch mob’s job pretty easy. The survivors of the three groups convened at the end for a final battle with the vampire. (Somewhere there is an audio-recording of one of these groups that was being used for a Div III project on psychology and role-playing.)
The last thing we wanted this to be was silly. We had appropriated a tradition from a bunch of angsty goths without permission and we were going to make this scary and fucking brutal. For example, one of the villagers targeted by my players was the town butcher. The butcher had created zombies using whatever was lying around his shop—so the party had to fight the animated corpses of their friends and loved ones mounted which were now mounted with hog heads.
OK so here’s where it gets interesting––if you have never attended Deathfest, you might think this would make for a gruesome encounter. You might even think I’m a sick person for coming up with it. But if you HAVE attended Deathfest, the last paragraph probably bored you. It’s a little like watching The Exorcist. In 1972 every theater that showed that film experienced people vomiting and fainting. But if you were born after 1980, you may not find it scary at all.
I also included an encounter where the party met an old widow with bloody palms. She explained that she had given the vampire information under the condition that her grandchildren be allowed to escape. She begged mercy. There were no consequences to this encounter––it didn’t matter whether the players decided to slaughter the helpless old lady or not. It was simply meant to add some anguish to their mission. (Again, if you have ever attended Deathfest, you know exactly what the party decided to do.)
When we designed characters, we did give out a lot of seemingly useless items. Most of my characters were armed with pitchforks and torches. There was also a character with a hook for a hand and another who wielded a sack full of doorknobs (This was a Simpson’s reference.) Many characters had seemingly random equipment like bags of marbles, flasks of lamp oil, kegs of beer, and so on. We didn’t really see this as silly, we saw it as being sadistic. The worse thing we did in that game was give someone a “potion of placebo.” He finally drank it and asked his DM what happened. Instead of saying, “Nothing,” he said, “You’re not sure. But you definitely have a cooling sensation in your throat. Maybe it will kick in next round.” This was really only funny to us, not the players. However, the bizarre character/bizarre equipment motif is now standard. Last night may have been the first Deathfest ever in which there was not a single conventional weapon: I saw phasers, mutation rays, human tesla coils, a Klingon batliff, etc. But not a single long sword or battle-axe. I predict a future Deathfest will have an entire group equipped only with a roll of duct-tape. It’s the only logical conclusion of this trend.
TOURNAMENT
OK, this was key. “Tournament” connotes competition, sport. When I was about thirteen I went to a gaming tournament at Texas A&M. (Military guys love Dungeons and Dragons.) The tournament meant different teams had the same characters and were going through the same adventure––if your team made it through the adventure in the quickest time you won a cash prize. There, if you screwed around and caused your team to lose, you might actually get beat up. I sort of assumed anything with the word “tournament” in it must work the same way. It was Ben Scott Hopkins who saved us from this thinking.
Here is the story to best of my recollection, but bear in mind I wasn’t actually there: I was one door down pretending to be an old widow begging for her life. Ben Scott-Hopkins was the party’s only priest and as such could both repel the undead and heal injured party members. These abilities were absolutely essential for the party’s success. However, Ben soon made it clear he had no intention of healing anyone. Round after round, when asked what his character was doing, Ben would declare, “I get drunk!” Eventually, Ben opened a door in the vampire’s castle.
The DM intoned: “On the otherside of the door is some sort of zombie. It stands over six feet tall and must have been a powerful man in life. It’s right hand has been modified and fitted with wicked scythe-like claws. Worst of all, is the flicker in the creature’s dead eyes that suggests both intelligence and an unspeakable malice.”
Ben responded: “Oh NO! I grab the nearest party member and shove him towards the monster!”
Dice were rolled and the party’s priest managed to save his own skin by overpowering a fellow adventurer and shoving him in with the zombie. But Ben wasn’t done. In addition to significant quantities of alcohol, he had also managed to acquire a hammer and some stakes––which he used to wedge the door closed sealing both zombie and victim inside. Once this was done, Ben turned to his astonished party, wiped his brow, and declared:
“Whew! That was close!”
There were only two prizes for the October Ravenloft Tournament. One was basically a Barbie head on a stick with pieces of duct-tape hanging off of it. I think that went to the survivor. The other was some generic plastic action figure which was sort of the precursor to “The Total Bad-Ass Award.” However, Erin Snyder decided to create the Benjamin Scott-Hopkins Award for Creative Morality. I can’t remember if there was an actual prize that year, but there definitely was the following year. That was the last October Ravenloft Tournament at Hampshire. The next Fall, Erin Snyder had the idea to call it “Deathfest.”
DEATHFEST
Now when we scheduled the first Deathfest in the fall of 2000, public safety called Erin Snyder and left a message on his answering machine, “Hi. I need to speak to you about. . . . Death. . . Fest? Call me back.” Incidentally, much of the first Deathfest was recorded as part of a Div II film called “Stairway to Hell.” Someone really needs to find that thing and digitize it.
All of the players had been summoned to a mad wizard’s castle in Hell. The legacy of Ben Scott-Hopkins was immediately evident. One of my player’s first actions was to begin making out with a statue. He proceeded to make out with that statue for next 30 minutes before trying to catch up with the party and getting devoured by trolls. Backstabbing other players was now the norm. In fact, the player who had been Scott-Hopkin’s victim the previous year now attempted to perform this maneuver on another player in my game. When my players met the boss of my game––an ogre mage––half of them prostrated themselves before it and begged to be its evil servants. The crescendo of this occurred in the second tier when the surviving players squared off against a demon played by Dan Neff. A mage tried to form an alliance with the demon, so the demon ordered him to slaughter other humans. That player used his last offensive spell to kill another player––that spell would have been enough to slay the demon.
So one year after Ben Scott-Hopkin’s threw his comrade in the closet to play seven-minutes in heaven with a ravenous zombie, Deathfest had been emptied of right and wrong, good and evil, winning and losing. The existentialist philosophy is that God is dead and that the universe is both meaningless and absurd. Deathfest ––particularly in its current form––is perhaps the starkest depiction of a reality that is meaningless and absurd. Not only is most of the plot incomprehensible to players and DMs alike, but it is essentially guaranteed that your character will suffer some grisly and meaningless death. Now if everyone can agree that Deathfest occurs in a moral universe where the players are heroes battling against evil, then the existentialist crisis can be averted. Yes, you will probably die but maybe your death can prevent the vampire from destroying another village. That’s what heroes do. Ben Scott-Hopkins was the voice calling out, “God is Dead!” that ushered in the existentialist crisis. This was not a battle between and good and evil, it was simply a battle. And the poor bastards conscripted to fight that battle may as well act however the wish.
For Existentialists like Sartre, the only meaning in the world is the meaning that we give it. Perhaps the real winner of Deathfest is the one who makes out with the most statues? This year’s Deathfest was especially existentialist because the winner received the ability to remake the world in their own image––literally, the world has no meaning except what the winner of Deathfest gives it. Interestingly, when the winner declared that in his world everyone else is dead, he received a standing ovation from the audience. I could not help but think of the scene in Heathers where the entire school has unknowingly signed a mass suicide note.
Now if you’ve somehow found your way to this blog, you probably think that Deathfest is a dark and fucked up event. You might even think that Hampshire is a dark and fucked up place. That’s what’s so ironic––the people who play Deathfest are nice people. The current organizers seem far more cheerful and pro-social than my cohort was, and my cohort was more cheerful and pro-social than the knife-chuckers that proceeded us. So what is the appeal of Deathfest? What were those 140 people there for? I have also noticed Deathfest taking on an increasingly dream-like aspect. For many years almost all antagonists came from the D&D Monster Manual. By contrast, players at this Deathfest battled against Transformers, A Giant Kool-Aid Man, Chuck Norris, and the boss––a giant mutated cat brain. A player hit the cat brain with a mutation beam, changing it into a giant dog brain. I realized that there was still a sort of logic to Deathfest, but it no longer the mathematical logic on which Dungeons and Dragons was based. No, this resembles the logic of myths and dreams or what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called “the savage mind.” This is what leads me to my theory of Deathfest’s appeal.
Levi-Strauss believed that myths expressed ideas that could not be expressed through words. Perhaps Deathfest gains popularity every year because it reflects the increasingly absurdity of the world outside of the game. We all toil away hoping for careers and success while the global economy crumbles all around us. It’s as absurd as. . . well it’s absurd as being murdered by a giant Kool-Aid Man. Deathfest imitates life and life imitates deathfest.
The Whedonverse Part II: Amazons to Echo
Joss Whedon has presented himself as a feminist and his characters are quite popular with women. I once heard a woman opine, “Buffy is totally female power.” I don’t know what “female power” means. I also don’t know what Joss Whedon means when he calls himself a feminist. What I do know is that I am highly suspicious of other men who claim the title of feminist. I think it is very odd that “female power” could be located within a long train of beautiful female warriors all of whom were invented and promoted by men.
I think I speak for most men of my generation when I confess that I find feminism a little bit frightening. In middle school I heard Rush Limbaugh declare that feminists were ruining the economy by getting jobs and devaluing labor. I knew immediately that this was insane: That it wasn’t true and that even if it was, it didn’t matter because working is a human right. What is frightening to men about feminism is the endless clashes between second-wave feminists, third wave feminists, and post-feminists: Camille Paglia compared Gloria Steinem to Joseph Stalin. Molly Ivans simply called Paglia, “an asshole.” As men, all we can do is throw up our hands and apologize for whatever it is that we did or neglected to do. I had a friend in high school who was taught to open doors for women. So, at age seven he opened the door for a woman at the mall. She slapped him and called him an oppressor. I think he cried. Feminism can be some scary shit.
I claim for myself the negative title of “not sexist” but I am sure some feminists would dispute this––particularly my views on the sex trade (see previous blogs.) Furthermore, most wife beaters and rapists also think of themselves as “not sexist.” This brings me to men who describe themselves as “feminist.” Most men I have met who declare themselves as “feminists” seem to be blissfully ignorant of the debate over what this term means. I strongly suspect that when men claim this title, they assume that this will make them more appealing to women. However, I have also noticed that these male feminists seem to have a preoccupation with beautiful warrior women portrayed by Angelina Jolie, Mila Jovovich, and Sarah Michelle Gellar. I think there is an idea among men of the sci-fi/geek persuasion that if you can somehow look past Buffy’s kick-boxing skills and medieval weaponry to her blonde hair and nubile body––that this makes you a feminist. That’s fucked up.
THE WARRIOR BABE TRADITION
Buffy is clearly indebted to a tradition of female super-heroes, and is referred to as a “super-hero” on the show. Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the matriarch from which all female super-heroes are descended. Wonder Woman is an amazon, which dates the warrior babe tradition back the ancient Greece. (In Buffy, Willow and Tara refer to themselves as Amazons.) Now there may have once been a culture––or more likely a military unit––on which the legend of the Amazons is based. But this is irrelevant. What matters is that the Greeks embraced this legend whole-heartedly. Achilles, Hercules, and Belleraphon all killed their share of Amazons. Greek art has numerous depictions of Amazonmachies––or battles against the Amazons. Notice in this picture how the Amazon’s mini-skirt highlights her pelvis gyrating against her steed.
Why were the Greeks so interested in Amazons? No one can be certain, but it should be remembered that Ancient Greece was one of the most misogynistic cultures in the world. Robert Meagher has suggested that the legend of the Amazons was not meant to empower women but to buttress a culture of misogyny. (One mural depicts Greek warriors dragging captured Amazons by their hair.) The defeat of Amazons seems strangely related to the suggestions of rape that appear throughout Buffy.
Now let’s look at Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist at Tufts. Marston believed in the educational power of comic books and described Wonder Woman as “psychological propaganda” promoting the new type of empowered woman–that Marston thought ought to rule the world. So Wonder Woman was, in a very literal way, a man’s prescription for how women ought to be. Can that be feminist? I’ll return to this question later.
The comic has been credited with bringing bondage into American popular culture. Wonder Woman, originally called Suprema, was clearly the product of Marston’s masochistic––arguably Oedipal––fantasies. Wonder Woman was a sort of maternal dominatrix causing the world to submit to world peace under the yoke of her golden lasso. Marston is quoted: “The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society. … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.” And elsewhere “Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!” Although the themes of bondage and domination have been toned down in Wonder Woman, I think male fans of the warrior babe tradition still harbor Marston’s fantasy of a dominatrix world order. What they call “feminism” seems to include an idealized concept of women as wiser and more moral than men. It also very telling that the Whedonverse is rife with bondage. The pilot of Dollhouse showed us glimpse of a naked Eliza Dushku lashing a man to bed. A detective mentions that the Dollhouse can produce, among other things, the perfect dominatrix. Why were these details included? What is the connection to Wonder Woman?
This brings us to the modern era of bad-ass beautiful women. I am thinking here specifically of Angelina Jolie in films like Tomb Raider and Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Mila Jovovich in The Fifth Element, Resident Evil, and Ultraviolet. It is odd that so many of these films are based on video games. This also seems to suggest that these warrior babes are being marketed to the geek feminist males. What is interesting about this new crop of warrior babes is that, unlike Amazons, they need the support of men. The traditional strengths of men and women have essentially been reversed: the women are the superior fighters and the men heal their wounds, encourage them when they’re down, and check their hubris. This dynamic is particularly strong in The Fifth Element where Bruce Willis is physically weaker but more mature emotionally than the film’s heroine. The modern warrior babes are strong and weak at the same time.
This brings me to Dollhouse, which seems to be the ultimate manifestation of the dependent warrior babe. The show is structured so that in each episode the heroine is given incredible skills and powers. (These powers are bestowed by a male technician, at the request of men.) Then, at the end of the episode, she is once again reduced to a helpless, mindless commodity. Dollhouse will either become the starkest expression of the warrior babe myth as something created by and for men––or it will evolve into a brilliant critique of this dynamic. In a final installment, I will attempt to look at how women have appropriated these warrior babes and try to figure out what it means for Buffy to personify “female power.”
The Whedonverse Part I: Rape
In a moment of boredom, I watched the pilot of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. Even if I hadn’t known this was a Joss Whedon project I would have immediately noticed certain Whedonesque elements––namely that kinky sex and rape were seamlessly and needlessly sublimated into the episode. This led me to ponder the Buffy phenomenon and to question Joss Whedon’s claim that he is a “feminist.” Let me back up: A reviewer of my forthcoming book excoriated me for not writing about Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. I was never opposed to Buffy, but I found the episodes utterly incomprehensible. (It also has nothing to do with my forthcoming book, but such is the guild.) So I did my duty as a researcher: I got a Netflix account and watched every single episode. It wasn’t a bad show, but I noticed that every teenager and vampire in Sunnydale seems to enjoy sado-masochistic sex. Even Willow appears in one episode as a vampire whose favorite activity is straddling a tied up Angel and throwing lit matches onto his bare chest.
I can also think of five episodes of Buffy in which the female characters are nearly raped. In the first season, Xander is possessed by a hyena spirit that fuels his animal instincts and gives him superhuman strength. So he does––what I assume Joss Whedon would do in this state––he tackles Buffy and begins pawing at her bra straps. At the end of the episode, Xander gets an exorcism and the incident is laughed off as “sexual assault.”
In season two, the swim coach is giving his team steroids that turn them into fish monsters. When Buffy finds out, he casts her into a flooded subterranean dungeon full of fish-men. He calls down to her, “I already fed them, but my boys have other needs.” Gang raped by fish monsters? This is what came on after Animaniacs?
In the first episode of season six, a gang of demons on motorcycles has taken over the town. The biker demons corner Buffy’s female companions in an alley and announce that they are going to gang rape them for hours and that this will be extremely painful because they have enormous demon penises that are covered with thorny spikes. This was stated through innuendo but the meaning was unmistakable.
Later in season six, a group of occult minded geeks known as “the trio” find a way to turn women into sex slaves. Their first target breaks the spell to find herself dressed as a French maid, kneeling in front of a geek’s crotch. She announces, “You guys think this is a big joke but it’s rape!” I screamed at my television, “THAT’S WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING!” I think this was actually the first use of the word “rape” in the series.
Then Spike attempts to date-rape Buffy. Now suddenly it’s a huge deal and all of the characters are outraged that Spike would do this. (Xander, who also attempted to rape Buffy is especially outraged.) Of course, date-rape is outrageous, but I would much rather be raped by a vampire I have already slept with than by a bunch of horny fish people. I have not covered here Sweet the musical demon, who attempts to abduct Buffy’s sister as “his queen” or Oz, who is coerced into sex against his will by a female werewolf, or the third episode of the series in which Xander is nearly raped and killed by a “She-Mantis.”
I have looked through several volumes of essays on Buffy and I have yet to encounter any analysis of rape. I’m sure it’s out there––dozens of essays on Buffy are written every year––but I think that fans may turn a blind eye to this seamy underbelly of the Whedonverse. What I find disturbing is that the first three episodes are not stories about the horrors of rape or overcoming an experience of rape––they seem to be fleeting chances to engage in fantasies of raping a super-heroine. The fact that Buffy always escapes being raped is irrelevant––it’s the threat of rape that is supposed to titillate the audience. This dynamic is more obvious in recent “torture porn” films like Hostel. The fact that the heroine ultimately escapes and slays her captors is meant to exonerate the audience for paying $9 to watch a woman being tortured.
This is enough for now. In a future installment I want to challenge the idea that female super-heroes are “feminist” and try to figure out what it means to watch a beautiful woman with super strength narrowly escape being raped by fish monsters.
The Obsolete Man
This clip is a synopsis of a Twilight Zone episode called “The Obsolete Man.” It was one of their best episodes and has been embraced by numerous individuals who find themselves at odds with their society. (This particular clip was posted by a Christian millennialist.) I think that everyone who has a stake in higher education must be shown The Obsolete Man. If you are reading this, e-mail it to the president and trustees of your college or university.
Let me preface this by saying that I recently learned that Harvard’s Program in Religion and Secondary Education has been put on hiatus due to funding issues. Granted, I have selfishly given up the fight as a teacher. But the PRSE was one of few entities in my life that I feel a sense of loyalty to. Everyone else at Harvard engaged in sparring and infighting, but not the PRSE—because we had a real fight and it lay outside of academia (I realize that my peers thought of this as “helping people” but for me, meaning and struggle are intimately linked.) So when I saw this notice posted on the PRSE website, I felt a little like Yoda watching the Jedi academy burn down.
Then last night I saw this New York Times article with the headline, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” (The article has been moved to archives, but subscribers can read it here.) Reading this made me angry and, after sleeping on it, I’m still angry. Whenever that happens I write. This article brought up a lot of long-standing issues I have with the myth of an American meritocracy, titanomachy, and my realization after college that I am what Charles Dickens called, “surplus population.” (See previous blog entry “If a Thousand People with Master’s Degrees Died.”)
I am going to take up the gauntlet of “justifying the worth” of humanities. But the fact that this must be done is an incredibly pathetic comment on our society. Imagine an anthropologist who asks a tribesman about their gods and sacred stories only to be told, “Oh I’m pretty sure we have lots of gods! And stories too! But I don’t know them because learning about them is foolish––anyone who doesn’t fish for sixteen hours a day is a fool.” The tribesman might then ask, “You not only learn your own stories but try to learn those of other tribes, also? Your tribe must be the weakest, laziest, most pathetic people in the world! We’ve been talking for five minutes now and you haven’t caught a single fish!” At the center of this tribal village, naturally, is a heaping pile of rotting fish.
We are rapidly becoming this tribe of demented fishermen. The humanities are under attack because of a misguided consumer model of education, failure on the part of educational institutions to defend their own principals, vague fears or losing our technocratic dominance, and a failure to understand the division of labor.
THE CONSUMER MODEL OF EDUCATION
The primary argument that humanities should not be taught comes from a market perspective on behalf of the students (and more importantly their parents). It goes like this: as consumers, students expect their education to result in a lucrative career. As producers, institutions are obligated to respond to consumer expectations or else the market will destroy them. Colleges that do not teach humanities will prosper: Those that do will have no enrollment and will perish from the earth.
There are so many things wrong with this argument I hardly no wear to start. While it is true that college graduates have higher average salaries, studying something “practical” is no guarantor of financial success. In 2001, I used my BA in religion to drift from temporary job to temporary job. But I stood in line with people who got their degrees in engineers and computer science. By the end of it, former Enron managers were interviewing for the same crappy office jobs as me. So nobody got a job, but at least I studied something interesting and had some wisdom to console me in my misery. The computer science majors didn’t even have that.
Furthermore, this is a country that prides itself on the success of its drop-outs. I once saw a CEO tell a room full of high school students that “the world is run by C students!” The people who praise Bill Gates for dropping out of Harvard to start his own company are the same people who expect college to guarantee financial success.
It actually may turn out that the higher salaries of college graduates are largely a result of networking while in college. Bill Gates did meet his future business partner Steve Ballmer before dropping out of Harvard. For many students, leaving their neighborhood and meeting people from around the country may be as much a boon to their careers as the education they receive.
It is also illogical for institutions to cater to this demand. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that whenever educators alter their curriculum to accommodate the demands of parents, the result is a watered down curriculum, a devalued degree, and dumber graduates. If the consumers of education really believed that college was simply about vocation, they would send their children to technical colleges, which are far cheaper. But they don’t.
I once met a girl at a party who had just graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. She asked me what my major was and when I said, “religion,” she answered, “Whoooah!” I found out that her major had been communications. I asked, “What exactly do you learn as a communications major?” She said, “You know . . . like how to make a PowerPoint presentation and stuff.”
I couldn’t believe it. PowerPoint was designed so that anyone can teach themselves how to use it. Charging to teach someone PowerPoint is like charging to teach someone how to pee. The state of Texas owes this girl several thousand dollars and an apology. Why did her family send her to a university to learn something she could have learned at a community college or from her 13 year old neighbor? Clearly her family wanted her to learn something “practical” and yet she probably went to UT for reasons that have nothing to do with education—possibly because they have a good football team.
The point is: if Americans were going to abandon the university model in favor of cheap, “practical” education they would have done this long ago. The fact that everyone does not attend a technical or community college proves that institutions do not need to cater to this perceived “market.”
THE ROLE OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
The point of education has NEVER been as a means to making money––this is at best a pleasant side effect. The desire to learn seems to be part of the human condition and there is no consensus as to the nature and purpose of education. Free public education was instituted in this country because it was seen as necessary to the survival of a republic. Socrates said that, “Education does what it does.” Educational institutions are aware of this and it is their duty to explain this debate to the American public. That they have capitulated towards a consumer model of education is cowardly, pathetic, and shameful.
If thousands of families were willing to save for a generation to send their students to a college that taught courses on the history of NASCAR––would Harvard rush to start a NASCAR program? Would Yale cut its English department to hire experts on stock cars? If institutions are really following the consumer model of education, then logically they would.
Institutions of higher learning are supposed to stave off barbarism, not cater to it. If Americans really don’t want their minds to be challenged, or to think about life’s larger questions, then colleges and universities rightfully should be destroyed. At least then they would die with honor. Better no university at all than a university that teaches only PowerPoint.
People still want to go to universities: maybe for the network, maybe for the football parties, maybe to get stoned and go to drum circles. Who knows what draws the masses? But as long as they are coming, institutions should defend their philosophy of education. Not to do so is to be guilt of huckstering.
This doesn’t mean that universities should continue to do what they have always done. The Ivory Tower has fueled this wave of anti-intellectualism. This is not defending humanities–this is taking a stand on the nature and purpose of education. Universities must produce and support public intellectuals and must emphasize that their work fosters a strong republic.
TECHNOCRATIC DOMINANCE
What I found most upsetting about the New York Times article was the suggestion that the humanities are a luxury that our country can no longer afford. This is a separate argument from the consumer argument but it is equally absurd.
Let me start with the article’s use of the phrase “technologically complex world.” The implication is that students trained in humanities will lack the technical skills to compete in the job market. This suggestion seems to come from the same school of thought that would charge thousands of dollars to teach someone PowerPoint.
It also implies that America’s technocratic superiority is a function of our number of science majors. This is a fallacy too. Technological breakthroughs are achieved by individuals with natural talent, intelligence, and creativity. In 1954, the federal government spent millions on math and science education in secondary schools. They spent this money because the Soviets had launched Sputnik and they wanted to train a generation of Tony Starkes––children that would build futuristic weapons to protect us from the Russians. But all this curriculum did was inundate students with tedious lab work that taught them to hate science. The result is that many graduate programs in the sciences have empty spaces. However, our military-industrial complex still manages to produce things like death rays and goats that make spider silk (see previous blogs). They can do this, because technological advances are still made by individuals––those few who loved science in spite of the tedious lab work. This emphasis on science over the humanities has brought this country to its current situation: a weak republic with devastating weapons.
OUR SURPLUS POPULATION
The national unemployment rate for January was 8.5%. However that number doesn’t factor in people who work only a part-time job that doesn’t pay the bills or people who have simply stopped looking for work. The actual number of unemployed people is probably over 10%. So 1 in 10 Americans isn’t going to work and we are supposed to think this has something to with the humanities? Does anyone actually believe that if these people had studied PowerPoint instead of Plato they would have jobs?
What these unemployment rates tell us is not that humanities are a luxury but that EVERYTHING is a luxury! We can fire millions of people and society still functions more or less the same. No one is essential, everyone is expendable. This really should not come as a surprise. Tibet was a technologically backwards country with absolutely terrible agricultural resources. And yet Tibetan farmers could support themselves as well as thousands of monks who––economically speaking––contributed nothing whatsoever. If Tibet could do that, how many useless philosophers could America support with our industrial farm equipment and our amber waves of grain?
We cling to the idea that our major in college will determine our financial success because we insist that this country is a meritocracy: The idea that all of our talents and training are ultimately useless and not needed by anyone terrifies us. But we cannot move forward as a society until we realize we have this surplus population and make logical solutions about what to do with it. What ought millions of unnecessary people do all day?
Traditionally, war has been the best way of getting rid of surplus population. In fact, ever since I graduated from college the military was the only entity that was always willing to take me. First they wanted me as a soldier, then as a chaplain. I always interpreted the army’s pitch as, “You are young and male, and we have too many young males. We want to kill you. You and all your brothers.” I have also noticed how many people from my high school are now lawyers. Maybe instead of wars we can simply occupy our surplus population with endless litigation.
Logically, the only thing to do in the face of this surplus population is to support as many bizarre and specialized pursuits as possible. If someone can read Latin and wants to spend their life reading old books––God bless them, that’s one less person you have to compete with for that PowerPoint job. This is the lesson of the Twilight Zone: The humanities professor, the president of the university, the engineers building the death-rays, the bankers who created this financial crisis, the journalists who report on it––they can all drop dead and the world will go on fine without them. We are all obsolete men and women.
Fascism on the B Line
MY MORNING
I live about two and a half miles from campus, but I typically leave about forty minutes early because I ride the B line. For those not familiar with this fair city, the B line is the rectum of Boston’s transportation system. You wait in the wind and rain at an unsheltered stop then you squeeze onto the train with several hundred of your closest friends. Sometimes the doors open only to show the people on the platform that there is no room, then close again. On the B line you aren’t lucky if you can get a seat, you’re lucky if you can get something to grab on to. One morning I counted 20 people surfing in the space between rear doors. Because of all the stops and red lights, it takes me an average of 15 minutes to get to campus. This means the train moves at about 10 miles/hour. I could run certainly two and half miles in fifteen minutes, but it would be tiring. A dispatcher somewhere randomly orders the B line to go “express” skipping ahead anywhere from three to ten stops. This is wonderful if your stop isn’t skipped. If it is, you have to get out and decide whether to walk to your destination or wait for another train. If you are riding with cash or have a cash card, well, MBTA just doubled the cost of your trip.
Only a few years ago, the B line was free above ground––probably because civic planners didn’t think anyone would actually pay for such wretched service. I say all of this so that non-Bostonians can understand why someone might not want to pay to ride the B line.
I get to the stop and already a dozen people are lined up. The train could be around the corner or it could be another twenty minutes. I wait ten minutes and another dozen people show up to stand on this little island of filth and garbage in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. A train comes. We all watch as it careens through the stop, slowing down just enough to show us the hundreds of passengers packed in like cattle. The B line often reminds of me of Shindler’s List. We continue to wait. When a train finally comes, we’re like pirates boarding a merchant vessel. I’m serious—watch an old pirate movie where a crew of angry corsairs has to get onto another ship as fast as they can using only two little boarding planks. The driver has no time for people to swipe cards: if you board in the front they wave you back as soon as you hold your card up. If you board in the back, you usually just hold your card so the driver could conceivably see it if he bothered to look in the rear-view mirror. Those who have cash are sort of like the Wildebeast with three legs you see on Animal Planet.
When the train starts to roll, this blond woman and an Asian man walk to the center of the train and whip out shiny badges on chains. Now having worked at a high school where we had several unconstitutional drug stings, I know what those badges mean. “Gosh,” I thought, “A drug bust on the B line. What an exciting way to start my morning. It’s a good thing I can’t be hurt by bullets.”
“EVERYBODY SHOW US YOUR PASSES!”
Are you fucking kidding me? I watch as they harass several people who didn’t hold their passes high enough when they boarded, before they issue tickets for “fare evasion” to two people. Fare evasion results in a $15 ticket and the offender’s name is put in a registry. A second offense is $100. Fortunately I purchase monthly passes, but I have evaded fares on the B line. Everyone in this city who rides the B line has ridden without paying––probably including these two undercover officers.
WHY THIS IS WRONG
Now I do not hate police officers. I’ve trained with many of them, even shared a beer with them. But what I saw today is morally wrong and damaging to a free society. I don’t believe that undercover officers should be used for any reason. The uniform symbolizes an open and honest relationship with the community. It is cowards, predators, criminals, and terrorists that try to blend in with the population. I think the war on drugs is fundamentally racist and a step down the road to fascism. In fact, in Naomi Wolf’s 10 steps to fascism, that’s step 4: create a network of police spies. Mussolini did it. Hitler did it. Now the MBTA is doing it.
But even if you think narcs are warranted to catch drug dealers, how can anyone defend using undercover officers to catch fare evaders? I didn’t break any laws today but now I will forever be paranoid that a fellow passenger might be a cop. A uniformed cop on the B line wouldn’t bother me––but a fascist spy definitely does. This creates a feeling of alienation from other Bostonians. I have to ride the B line everyday and now I will have a vague feeling of uneasiness. If I had more time, I could sue the city for emotional damages. I might not win, but I think there are serious grounds for a case and it would change the level of discourse about undercover police. Read: If you are unemployed and ride the B line, why not find a lawyer who works on commission and sue? Don’t you think sitting next to narcs everyday is stressful?
I also found a copy of one of these citations here. I don’t see a court date here. I find this extremely troubling. Even in a traffic ticket, you are given a day in court and the arresting officer has to show up. If anyone knows the legal apparatus surrounding these tickets please post it here.
Finally, let’s be clear: this is using police for the sole purpose of revenue collection. Traffic tickets are about revenue collection too, but there is at least the excuse that speeders cause traffic accidents (which they do.) But no one can claim that a public interest is served in stopping fare evasion or that fare evaders represent a threat to the populace. If MBTA wants more money, they should hire someone to collect fares in the back of the car. Lord knows there is no shortage of unemployed people in Boston. The job of the police is to protect the public, and they can’t do that if they are riding the B line looking for “fare evaders.”
WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT THIS
Historically, using increasingly violent methods to extract revenue from the populace has not played well in Boston. This is a moral issue and it will get worse unless moral citizens take steps to fight it. Here are some ideas I’ve had:
In the long run, Boston badly needs a strong citizen police-review board. Efforts to create such an entity began in 2004 when police SHOT VICTORIA SNELGROVE IN THE EYE with a pepper-spray pellet, killing her (Remember that?) The board was created but I couldn’t find any news about it after 2007. At that time, the BPDs Internal Affairs Department was required to turn over dismissed cases of police misconduct to a panel of citizens––but had refused to turn over a single case. Someone needs to find out what happened to that board and get it going again.
Here are some short-term solutions:
1) Write letters. Probably the most effective place to send letters is the Boston Globe. Writing mayor Menino probably won’t help, since he’s been mayor since 1993 and now seems comfortable doing whatever he feels like. Writing city council might be more productive.
2) Use Copwatch.com. This is the most active entity for reporting cases of police abuse. An undercover officer giving you a ticket is not abuse, but they resources for protestors.
3) Don’t carry ID on the B line. It is not a crime not to carry ID and it’s not like you need your driver’s license on the B line. Obviously lying about your identity is illegal. But if all fare evaders had to be trusted to give truthful information, MBTA might rethink their sting operations. Remember Gandhi burned registration cards in Africa.
4) Narc on the narcs. I think it would be really interesting to take a picture of arresting officers using camera phones and upload them onto a website. This is a gray area legally. My prediction is that a court would decide such a website violates officer safety. However, this could lead to a high profile case that would embarrass advocates of undercover police. Alternatively, you could just ask for the name and badge number of the arresting officer and put that up on a website. They should sign their name on the ticket anyway.
5) Chalk is a great tool for protest. Legally, chalk is not vandalism because it just washes away. What if every stop on the B line contained messages that MBTA is destroying civic polity by using fascist tactics to collect revenue? I have only recently moved back to Boston, but my experience today made me want to get involved in local politics.
I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on this. Maybe there are already campaigns underway that I don’t know about?
Do you know what a rhetorical question is?
This past semester was a strange experience: I have spent two years learning pedagogical theory, three years teaching in experimental high-schools, and now I found myself once again on the other side of the classroom. Almost daily I observe both an incredible anxiety over teaching from other graduate students and a general disregard from faculty for the fact that teaching is an art. This semester, sitting in a “discussion” with 50 undergraduates, it becomes increasingly obvious that most professors have no idea how to teach.
What follows is a short treatise on the types of questions teachers ask and what can be accomplished by asking them. The people I wish would read this––namely my current professors––never will. However, this may be of value to peers as they prepare for teaching fellowships and job interviews. (Local hiring committees *claim* they care a great deal about teaching ability.) Teachers frequently ask questions of their students. Generally students do not like being asked these questions and it makes them uncomfortable. The source of this discomfort is that neither the student nor the teacher knows what purpose the question serves. There is no pedagogical theory that informs these questions––it’s simply part of our Western culture of teaching: You got asked questions when you were a student, and now you have to do it too in order to “feel like a teacher.”
In fact, there is a fairly short list of what can be accomplished by asking questions to students. I have made taxonomy of four types of questions.
Questions you don’t know the answer to:
1. Asking students for information
2. The Socratic Method.
Questions you do know the answer to:
3. Rhetorical questions to assess knowledge.
4. Rhetorical questions to force engagement.
Of these four goals, the fourth motivates the overwhelming majority of teacher’s questions. This is also the sort of question that students most hate. In fact, the goals behind 3 and 4 can be better accomplished through a variety of creative solutions instead of with rhetorical questions.
1. Asking students for information
These are simple inquiries that you might ask a peer: What is your favorite Dostoyevsky novel? Did they teach you about Vietnam in high school? Students LOVE to be asked this sort of question––partly because there is no pressure to give a “correct” answer, but also because these questions break the power dynamic of the classroom. Instead of what Paul Friere called “the banking model,” now there is a two-way exchange of knowledge and information. Now here’s what few people realize: Asking these sorts of questions is ALSO a good way to encourage engagement from the students (Item 4 in the taxonomy).
In my experience, the more students get to talk about themselves, the more they will contribute to discussion, and the more they will like the teacher. The art of teaching is funneling that energy into the course material. Finally, these sorts of questions are quite relevant to many disciplines. I study religion, so it always useful and interesting to ask questions of students with different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Students who know a foreign language are also a source of useful information. This is not “an ice-breaker,” but can actually lead a richer classroom experience.
2. The Socratic Method
One of the biggest problems in education is that teachers themselves do not appreciate the difference between the Socratic method and rhetorical questions. Although it is a gross overgeneralization, I often muse that Western education is founded on Socrates and Asian education is founded on Confucius. The Greek philosophers believed that an individual should take credit for his ideas. Furthermore, the Socratic method is founded on the idea that student and teacher can produce new knowledge by working together in a dialectic. Confucius, although he had many brilliant insights, never took credit for any of them. He attributed all the knowledge in the universe to the ancestors. A Confucian scholar, was someone who dutifully collected and memorized all of the Classics. It was impossible to make a new discovery, but you could sometimes “rediscover” something through exegesis.
Today, Chinese and Korean students consistently memorize the entire GRE. (I know people at ETS who have investigated this.) To Americans, this seems impossible. But this is only because we are descendents of Socrates and not Confucius. I am by no means a Socrates expert, but I don’t think he would have approved of the GRE. Modern Western education is simultaneously jealous of China and perpetuating a badly perverted version of the Socratic method: Bascially, we want our children to test as well as the Chinese, and we try to accomplish this with a grueling barrage of rhetorical questions. This is insane.
If you are going to use the Socratic method––or you think that you might be using the Socratic method already, there are three things you have to consider.
A. Are you using the banking model?
B. How big is the class?
C. Do the students understand what you’re trying to do?
Some professors just want to lecture and could care less what the student knows or thinks. There is nothing wrong with this. One of my favorite classes is a history lecture: he talks, I listen, and he doesn’t stop the lecture to ask questions. Teachers should ask themselves if they have anything to learn from their students––if the answer is “no,” then you are in fundamental disagreement with Socrates and have no business using his method! Emulate Socrates or emulate Confucius, but don’t aim for mediocrity.
You can only do the Socratic method properly if you have 15 students of fewer. More than 20 and it becomes impossible. There are studies proving this. I could not believe the first week of the semester when a professor told us that our class of 50 would be having “discussions” and that we would be graded on participation. Madness.
If you have 50 people and want to have a discussion, you have to break the class up into a lecture and discussion sections. That goes without saying. In lieu of a proper discussion, there are other methods to gain student input in a large class. One such technique is called “the chalk talk.” (Secondary teachers have excellent teaching methods, but they all have dumb names.) If you want fifty people to answer a question like “How is Hegel relevant to anthropology?” (Yes, I witnessed this) have lots of chalk ready at the start of class and have take 10 minutes so that everyone can write a short answer on the board. This way everyone can provide input and the professor will have plenty of fodder to chew over with the class.
The average American student has spent over a decade in an environment where the hallmark of teaching is a series of rhetorical questions. Most teachers mix both Socratic questions with rhetorical questions. The students are often confused by this and even teachers sometimes don’t know why they are asking the question. I realized how bad this was when I was teaching high school history. We were studying Socrates and I asked my students, “What is evil?” Someone said, “Like killing people and stuff.” So I asked if it was evil to kill someone in war or in self-defense. This led a girl to demand, “Why don’t you just tell us what evil is?!” I explained that the point of the exercise is that I don’t know what evil is either and we are trying to figure it out together. But these students had sat through so many hours of teachers asking rhetorical questions for no reason, that they assumed I just toying with them.
So if you are going to initiate the Socratic method, you should begin by telling students that you don’t have all the answers and that you need their insights and opinions. It also helps to remind them that Socrates’ students weren’t getting a grade and had slaves bringing them copious amounts of wine. (My high school students agreed school would be more fun if we had wine.) Furthermore, you can say things like, “This isn’t a rhetorical question, someone tell me what think about . . .”
3: Rhetorical Questions to Assess Knowledge
This is one of the most common uses of questions, and it is also a fairly useless exercise. Teachers should be constantly assessing their students knowledge, but only so that they can modify their lesson accordingly. Rhetorical questions are a poor way to assess student knowledge and there is no point in making this assessment if you are unable or unwilling to act on the knowledge you acquire.
In this anthropology class I keep harking on, I watched the professor ask a series of rhetorical questions, trying to get the students to say a particular buzzword. When several answers failed to give him the buzzword he wanted, he actually started playing hangman on the blackboard. “It starts with an ‘h’ . . . . and it is has ‘t” in it. Sheer insanity. If you use three minutes of class time on something, it ought to serve some sort of purpose. What is the purpose of getting students to say a certain buzzword? (See, now this has me asking rhetorical questions.) Asking rhetorical questions can tell you if the smartest student in the class understands something. But that really is not a very useful piece of information for a teacher to have. Frequently, the smartest students in the class understand most things. Meanwhile, you have no idea what all the silent students know or don’t know.
Once you have this assessment, you still have to do something with it. When I first started teaching US History, I was supposed to start out teaching them Reconstruction. Then I found out my class didn’t know what the Civil War was. I asked a rhetorical question: “Why was the Civil War fought?” Someone answered, “Land?” So I threw out my lesson plan for the day and told them about the Civil War. Then I reworked all my lesson plans for the entire week so that we could catch up. Now some professors have the attitude that this is not their problem and that students who cannot keep up deserve to flunk. To each their own, but professors with this attitude have no business asking rhetorical questions. If you don’t feel you ought to reassess your lesson plans, than shouldn’t waste time grilling your class.
4. Rhetorical Questions to Force Engagement
I think that this is the actual reason why teachers ask questions and why our culture has such a strong association between teaching and asking. It’s emotional: the teacher desperately wants to make some kind of connection with the students. They want to know that they are being listened to, that they are communicating to fellow beings and not being observed like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. Asking questions is one way to do this. It is hard to understand this need for connection if you have never taught. The first class I ever taught I called “The Village of Damned.” It was an honors class and the kids all just sat up perfectly straight and stared at me. I would ask questions and they would continue to stare in silence, not being rude but also not being quite human.
But a grueling barrage of rhetorical questions is one of the worst ways to make this connection because it places pressure on the students. In a very real way, you are transferring your own performance anxiety onto the class.
Lorand Matori at Harvard had a much better way of making this connection: he simply asked the class, “Are you with me?” Matori is a professor of Afro-Atlantic religions and he may have been drawing on black preaching cultures, in which the congregation does not sit in silence but actively encourages the preacher. Students loved being asked “Are you with me?” There was no pressure and students who said, “We’re with you!” seemed to form an emotional bond with Matori. Furthermore, this gave the students the opportunity to say, “No, I’m confused.” You don’t get that opportunity from a rhetorical question.
Rhetorical questions are also used to enforce compliance with the syllabus and to shame students into doing the reading. Students should do the reading and, since most professors assign too much of it, students are always calculating what reading they can get away with skipping. I know I do. But once again, rhetorical questions are not the best way to go about this. Often students cannot answer these sorts of questions even if they have done the reading, because the questions are highly subjective or overly specific. I’ve seen questions like, “What is argument of this book?”
Kimberly Patton, who has published articles on pedagogy, had a better method of inferring compliance. At the start of class, she would simply ask each student to give an insight into the assigned reading. She would usually move in circle starting to her right. This created a sense of pressure in that you had to say something and didn’t want to appear foolish, but unlike the rhetorical question you didn’t have to be a mind-reader: any insight would do.
Alright that’s it. If you’ve read this far, you now know more about teaching then the average university professor or at the very least have some pretty banter to waggle at your next job interview. Remember: What is teaching? Hmmm. OK, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. Well it starts with an ‘A’ . . . No, not awesome, but thank you . . . It rhymes with “fart” . . . .
Obama to continue No Child Left Behind
I think Obama just fucked up on education. I knew this would happen. As soon as he got elected I saw all my friends facebook statuses all over the world light up with elation. But I couldn’t help thinking about that scene in the last Star Wars movie where Obi Won Kenobi tells Darth Vader, “You were supposed to be the chosen one! You were supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them!”
First of all, Obama is trying to “fix” No Child Left Behind––despite the fact that everyone in America hates it. I’ve taught in three states, both red and blue and I have yet to see anyone who likes No Child Left Behind. I agree with Republicans, who say it infringes on states’ rights to set their own educational priorities, and I agree with Democrats, who say it places too much emphasis on standardized testing. When all of America is united in hating a policy, you don’t “fix it,” you destroy it. Fixing No Child Left Behind is like trying to fix a policy of “kick every puppy.”
So today I look at the New York Times and I find this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/us/politics/16educ.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
Despite the fact that virtually every American has experienced American education, and many Americans have children who in American schools, I don’t think the average American can ask the right questions about this article.
“CREDENTIALS”
First of all, the article is quick to point out that Arne Duncan, the new secretary of education is a Harvard graduate. Even if he had a master’s from the Harvard School of Education, I wouldn’t be that impressed. The program isn’t all that great. But he has no graduate degree––just a B.A. in sociology. Further down, it states that he has no teaching experience at all. So at 28, I have more formal education and more teaching experience than the Secretary of Education. I say that to say this: is Arne Duncan really the best person in America for this job? Or is he just somebody who used to play basketball with Obama in Chicago? Gosh, who was that other president that just appointed his buddies from his home state?
I can’t make enough of the fact that he has no teaching experience. The whole article goes on to describe teacher’s unions, debates over how to punish and reward teachers, etc. And the man deciding all of this has never been a teacher. A corporate model wouldn’t approve of this: stockholders wouldn’t tolerate a CEO who had never been a company man before. How can you possibly think Duncan is qualified if he’s never been a teacher?
“ACHIEVEMENT”
If you’ve never been a teacher, then you don’t know to be suspicious of phrases like “raising achievement.” I mean, really, what is “achievement?” Does it mean we have created a stronger democracy? A more informed electorate? Does it mean students have a higher quality of life because their minds are able to grasp deeper issues? Does it even mean that more poor children are going to college? Of course not. “Achievement” means that they made every child in the school take some sort of test, their scores were averaged into a single number, and this number was higher than some previous number. That’s achievement.
Now let’s assume for a moment that this is a perfect standardized test and is reflective of everything the student needs to know. If you will read my previous blogs, you will see that educating students is the least efficient way to produce this sort of “achievement.” In the school where I worked, we simply kicked the dumb kids out of school. In fact, I received hit lists of students I was to pressure to leave school. Once they got the boot, the average went up and we rejoiced in our “achievement.”
Do I know for a fact that Arne Duncan is engaged in this sort of thing? No. But I have little reason to assume that he isn’t. Reading this article, it looks like he simply places tremendous pressure on administrators, forcing them to engage in dirty work or else loose their jobs and their schools. Again, you can’t see what’s really happening unless you’ve been working on the front lines as a teacher. American teachers are like soldiers being sent into Russia by Napoleon or Hitler: all of their letters that they have no supplies and the situation is hopeless are replied with, “Onward! For the Glory of the Empire!”
“TIRED EDUCATIONAL DEBATES”
“In his last major educational speech of the campaign, Mr. Obama said: “It’s been Democrat versus Republican, vouchers versus the status quo, more money versus more reform. There’s partisanship and there’s bickering, but no understanding that both sides have good ideas.””
What?! There has NEVER been a real debate about education in this country except for whether inner-city schools should be under-funded or miserably under-funded. We can’t even HAVE a real debate about education in America because no one knows what’s happening. The typical American only cares about the school their child is attending and could care less about the national picture.
What makes me angry about this Obama quote is it’s empty rhetoric. Not everything should be resolved through a compromise! Not every issue has good ideas on both sides! Bush could have easily justified the war in Afghanistan by saying, “Well, conservatives want to drop nuclear weapons on Afghanistan, and liberals want to use diplomacy. I’m tired of this partisan rhetoric and both sides have good points––you we’ll just use predator drones and cluster bombs.”
EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
No complaints. If you really want to close the racial achievement gap (which, by the way, is why No Child Left Behind was started in the first place) then this is where you start. The only problem is that this will not be done with additional funding: they will be taking money from remedial programs to fund early childhood education. I still think it’s a good idea, but we could spend a little more and fund both.
Obama will surely be better for education than McCain or Bush, but the continued existence of No Child Left Behind means that American education will still be in darkness or years to come. America has an educational dilemma like nowhere else in the world: we always compare ourselves to Scandinavia or China and worry that our test scores are too low. Those countries are racially and culturally homogenous! They don’t have ESL classes. They don’t have schools two miles apart stealing funding from one another over issues of race and class. We’re destined to loose if we insist on playing their game.
America needs to somehow find a way to turn our diversity into a strength instead of a weakness. This calls for a complete overhaul of what we think of as education: and finding a “sweet spot” between two imaginary partisan positions is not the way to achieve that.
On owning a rifle
For the first time in my life, I am considering owning a rifle. Despite being voted most likely to be a terrorist in high school, being an avid martial artist, and the owner of a several medieval weapons, I have never had any interest in owning a gun. In fact, I have fired a gun only once and found it somewhat tedious.
I do not need a firearm to protect myself from criminals. The criminal threat, like the terrorist threat, is almost entirely made up. Books like Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun have shown that most of the people killed by firearms in the inner city are––surprise––teenagers from the inner city. And Michael Moore has convinced me that gang members get many of their guns from the suburbs, where they were originally purchased for protection from inner city criminals. Don’t forget I educated both the victims and perpetrators of inner city violence for three years. At any rate, if I were afraid of criminals, I would purchase a pistol.
Alex Jones made the most compelling argument for gun ownership I have ever heard: and it had nothing to do with self defense. He said that throughout history, weapons were owned by free people and elites. It was the slaves who were deprived of weapons.
I want to own a rifle because I think that a new population of armed liberals may be the best defense against martial law, the end of our civil rights, and a tyrannical world government using the armies and weapons of a fascist America as its imperial hit man.
I arrived at this conclusion after reading The End of America by Rhode Scholar and third wave feminist Naomi Wolf. Like me, Wolf is from a demographic that strongly supports gun control. However, in researching her book, Wolf came to the painful conclusion that a well-armed militia was the only defense against a “jannisary” army that is loyal only to the executive.
Then Naomi Wolf went on the Alex Jones Show to talk about martial law. Naomi Wolf and Alex Jones should definitely NOT have anything to talk about. Jones is a college drop out who has lived in Texas his entire life, owns numerous guns, and is rapidly pro-life. Wolf is a Jew from San Francisco who legitimized the term “hooking up.” Only when martial law is a serious threat could this conversation have occurred.
Jones and Wolf both discussed the steps we have taken towards martial law, the need for an armed population, and the circumstances under which armed resistance would become necessary. Jones has been contacted by several people claiming they were hired by FEMA to install electricity and do other contracting work for large “camps” that FEMA has created around the country. One of them reported that FEMA had TRAIN CARS FITTED WITH SHACKLES for transporting populations to the camp. “That’s the line,” said Jones, “When the army comes to your house and says you have go to a FEMA camp, that’s the time for armed resistance.”
(Incidentally, there is evidence that FEMA is hiring thousands of preachers to help them in pacifying the population. These preachers are to cite Romans 13 to their congregations and instruct them to cooperate with the government.)
Apparently Wolf is not the only liberal to change her views on gun control. The owner of an Austin gun store called the show to say he had never seen so many strange people in his store stocking up on ammunition––many of them educated liberals. He reported a “grannie” purchasing an assault shotgun. When he asked why she needed it, she answered that she feared martial law.
The point of owning a rifle is not to use it. Even though I have already been put on every government watch list as of the fourth paragraph of this blog, I am not advocating a violent revolution. We should own rifles because the American people are already engaged in an unstated cold war with the American government.
It’s been two years since Blackwater was deployed on the streets of a US city where they killed American citizens. They “heard some gang-bangers” and fired in the direction of the noise. Remember, the good old days when all we had was police brutality? Blackwater are fucking mercenaries! The very people Thomas Jefferson said warranted a violent revolution in The Declaration of Independence!
According to the other Naomi––Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, it is part of Blackwater’s business plan that they will get jobs not in foreign countries but in American cities, quelling civil unrest.
In addition to mercenaries, the NorthCom brigade was set up shortly after September 11th as part of Homeland Security. This is a military unit whose sole purpose is to respond to threats within the United States––essentially to declare martial law. Such a unit would have originally been inconceivable under posse commitatus, but recent modifications to the Insurrection Act allow the president to deploy troops if there is a natural disaster, an epidemic, terrorism, or the catchall “conspiracy.”
Finally, let’s not forget all the high-tech “non-lethal weapons that have been prepared for use on the American people. I write this not far from Kenmore Square in Boston where I girl was shot in the eye and killed by police with rubber bullets. Last month I saw a riot cop guarding Bank of America with his ninja staff on proud display. I have already posted on this blog images of sonic weapons deployed in New York. Remember those microwave weapons? It’s now been admitted that they’re death-rays: that a dial can be turned so that the beam will kill you instead of just cooking your skin.
I wish Obama would simply make all this go away, but I have little hope of that. All of this power that the Bush administration has gathered to the executive is like Tolkien’s “one ring.” What president would willingly give that power up. All I’ve heard Obama talk about reversing is stem-cell research. As if stem-cells are what we’ve all been worried about for the last 8 years.
I have watched this escalation for seven years and what have I done? I’ve written some angry letters, supported some mainstream democrats, written some blogs. Have I done anything to really show outrage? Or to show that Americans will not tolerate the erosion of our civil rights? Have you? I think having a rifle in the basement would be a step towards matching the armies of mercenaries, and death rays arrayed against us.
