The Week in Review

Dave’s Been Awarded a Purple Heart

The latest breaking news is that my friend Dave Huntoon has been injured in combat and has been awarded a Purple Heart. Here’s his report:

My injuries are as follows: Two shrapnel wounds to my right rear flank. One piece of shrapnel is deep near my hip, and too small and deep for remove. One piece of shrapnel removed from my back tricep, straight through the arm. One piece of shrapnel that went in my back right shoulder and next to my lung, also too deep and small to remove. I guess I wasn't a pansy, and my doubts were wrong...every medical professional was absolutely right to get me out quickly, and knew something might be bad. My lung was bruised as well.

My body armor had saved my life (I still want to see what it looks like), and the shrapnel had only managed to penetrate me in the gap where my arm came out of the armor.

I’m deeply grateful that he’s alive and that the wounds are not serious. I’m very deeply aware that this happy result is by no means guaranteed. George Bush, meanwhile, is meditating on his post-presidency. Here’s a blurb right out of the Guardian:

“I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch,” he says. He also has big plans for making money. “I’ll give some speeches, to replenish the ol’ coffers,” says Mr Bush, who is already estimated to be worth $20m. “I don’t know what my dad gets - it’s more than 50-75 [thousand dollars a speech], and “Clinton’s making a lot of money”.

Swell guy, ain’t he? Bush, “feet up on his desk, munching on low-fat hotdogs, tells Draper of the loneliness of the US commander-in-chief.” What noble sacrifices our president makes on our behalf. How can I emulate such a worthy role-model? I know! I'll play more Civ!

Back in Civ World

My 1956 victory over China has left me in quite a bind. That bind goes by the name of Babylon. No, I’m not talking about the gay nightclub in Queer as Folk or the Texas town of phantom miners in Carnivale. I’m talking about the Babylonians, ruled by Hammurabi, depicted above in his striking post-modern attire. Usually, the Babylonians are no problem at all. They tend toward perfectionistic development and, as a result, lack a powerful military and can easily be annexed. But, if they are far enough away that I can’t deal with them early on and if they don’t have many hostile neighbors, then they can grow to be an economic and technological powerhouse with the military to match. They went nuclear in the mid-‘70s. It’s 1992, now and I’m just learning the secrets of fission. I’ve spent most of my time since the China war retooling my military to keep me from being vulnerable and trying to drag my new Chinese provinces out of the medieval age.

My situation is further complicated by Babylon’s recent completion of the United Nations. Whenever Hammurabi feels like it, he can call an election for Secretary General. Now, I’ve never broken a treaty and have sold lots of luxuries to the little AI nations. Knowing this, the minute the UN was completed, I started making gifts to everyone, including the remnants of China. So far, Hammurabi hasn’t called an election. My guess is the AI’s strategy is to go for a space race victory.

My northern ex-Zulu provinces are nearly industrialized now. The completion of my Forbidden Palace at Jugular Thrust Big Bear has guaranteed a highly productive north. I am fortunate that both the Chinese mainland—

—and the oilfields of New Beijing—

—are relatively near both of these capital cities, making possible, eventually, a moderate decline in their corruption. I don’t know how much that can really pay off in real terms, however. In fact, at the present, in an empire of 72 provinces, I am losing only 537 gold pieces a turn to corruption, out of a total income of 2,629 gold pieces a turn. Shockingly, a corruption rate of some twenty percent is actually negligible by Civ standards. In contrast, some 47 percent of all revenues are being funneled into research. I divert some 70 percent of actual tax revenues to research, paying for things like my military “off-budget” by selling luxuries to the decadent AI players. My little luxury tax on the AI pays out nearly 70% of the cost of my military, which is the second most powerful on the planet. I routinely deny such pricey exports to my own whiny people. Such pampering just makes them weak. Work and war are the only true salvation. Pass the low-fat hot dogs, please.

So, bearing all this in mind, do I annex Egypt? It’s a small, but choice territory and that bitch Cleopatra can get on my nerves with her laughable invasion attempts. It’s like dealing with pesky mosquitoes. Perhaps it’s time to demonstrate how to really invade someone else’s empire to her. It would be great fun to tutor her in war. On the other hand, the may make me unpopular enough to swing a UN vote to Hammurabi’s side. The Chinese already despise me and still, laughably, get to have a vote. I can’t be sure of the Vikings, but the Americans rather like me. Moreover, Hammurabi may be building spaceships while I fight. Egypt is too small to get me up to the 70% of the world I’d need to gain a domination victory. I don’t think I’d have time to conquer more in time for the end of the game.

On the other hand, I can make a last minute push for technology. The mainland has several fully industrialized cities. I can begin to divert their productive power to generating new revenues, which could allow me to increase my research prowess significantly. Perhaps I’m not too far behind Babylon to win the space race. That solution sounds to have a better chance of victory, but has none of the panache of annexing Egypt. If I’ve already lost the game to Babylon, shouldn’t I at least have the satisfaction of this brilliant new war? If I must lose, shouldn’t I lose with classic neo-conservative panache? Think of all the artificial men and women who can die at my whim. I need to get some low-fat hot dogs, damn it. How better to relish the loneliness of being emperor?

Football’s Back!

The Pack won yesterday, although it was a really ugly win that highlighted the fact that we have no offense. Our leading scorer this season is Mason Crosby, our new kicker. Ted Thompson, the Packers general manager did absolutely nothing to bolster the offense this season. Nothing, nada, the big zero. All evidence suggests that we’re going to suck this year. It’s kind of hard to make do without a running back.

So why doesn’t Ted Thompson give a shit about the offense? My theory is that he wants Brett Favre to go away. Some of you may recall Kirk’s analysis back in February of the Packers’ rebuilding situation. To quickly summarize his point: The Packers offense has much potential but needs about three years, after which it might well be a contender. Favre, in contrast, is declining and is going to continue to decline. Favre can’t run that show, because he’ll have delined too far when the team has peaked. But how much less will it be worthwhile to have a rookie Aaron Rodgers calling the shots three years from now? QB is among the hardest positions to learn. Rodgers needs experience now to be ready then. From Thompson’s viewpoint, Favre needs to get out and Rodgers needs to go in, or the Packers will have to acquire a QB via free agency. That will be pricey and Thompson isn’t really in the mood to shell out for talent. He seems pretty committed to growing it at home.

So Thompson wants Favre to retire. Problem: he can’t say so. Why? Because Thompson plans to keep on living in the state of Wisconsin. Everyone loves Favre in Wisconsin. So far, precious few love Ted Thompson. So Thompson can’t fire Favre. Indeed, firing Favre before Favre wiped Dan Marino’s name off the record books would be monstrously unjust in anyone’s eyes. So what does he do? He ignores the offense until Favre gets the picture and gets out of the picture on his own. We’ve all seen how well that’s been going. But I bet Favre retires at the end of this year. This year, maybe when Vernand Morency comes back, things might pick up a little. Maybe we don’t suck as badly as last season. I mean, we didn’t lose to the Bears 26-0 as our season opener this year. But the Packers will not trade for a running back, at least not until Favre retires.

See, Dinur? Ted Thompson is your hero. And George Bush the Younger is mine.

Not that I’m bitter about any of this, mind you. 'Cause we all know that I'm the paradigmatic example of detachment. I wonder if we have any low-fat hot dogs in the fridge?

Luckiest Guy in the World

Craig sent this to me on Friday. I'm the luckiest guy in the whole world!

Small Things With Great Love

Life on a daily basis, day in and day out, may seem trivial and unimportant. However, when I consider that I live each day with a great and profound love, then I'm reassured. Even the smallest portions of my existence are meaningful when founded in a great love.

I love you, you make my life great with love.

Craig

Hattar '56

There’s a classic Arabic movie called Nasser ’56, about Gamal `Abd an-Nasir’s miraculous triumph at the end of the 1956 British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt. He really didn’t do that much. Basically, President Eisenhower got pissed at the Brits and the French and told them to haul ass back to Europe. The Israelis got UNEF installed at Sharm al-Shaykh to keep the sea route to Eilat open, so they lost the least of the three adventurers. Nasir of course, became a god, until he blew it all in 1967.

Brian McGrath and Nasser ‘56

I’ve never seen the movie. Brian McGrath, my buddy in the State Department (well, my other buddy in the State Department—I have two now, but Sean is only civil service. I don’t know if that really counts—does it, Sean? What do your fun co-workers say?) and I have a funny story about that. Neither of us had seen this epic, and as students of the Arab world, this was disgraceful. Opportunities would come up and for one reason or another, we never got around to it, yadda, yadda, you know the drill…. So, one spring day, the Sackler, one of the many very cool museums in the Smithsonian (and one of my very favorite ones, to boot), was playing it for free. So we line up early, get our tickets, and we sit down. As we’re waiting for the show to begin, we’re shooting the shit. I was actually looking forward to the movie. Then suddenly and inexplicably, I shoot Brian a look and I say, “Hey, Brian? Wanna dump this and go get shitfaced at the 4Ps?”

Brian, my buddy the Irish Eagle Scout, smiled cheerfully and said, “Sure!” God bless all Irish Eagle Scouts. I’ve always been proud to be a good bad influence on Brian. And so we returned our tickets to see Nasser ’56 to the wizened old lady at the door and went to drink pints and quarts of whiskey and beer at our favorite pub, up on Connecticut Avenue. We used to pack it away, back then. God, I loved that pub! Brian and I had some swell times there. I can’t believe that they renamed the 4Ps. It just ain’t right. I also hear that it’s become a sorority girl hangout on the weekends now. Our Irish pub! The wand is broken, friends. Truly all our revels have ended.

I don’t know if Brian’s ever gotten around to seeing Nasser ‘56, but nearly a decade later, I still haven’t. I oughta rent it someday. Brian’s in Yemen, now. Unlike Nasir, he isn’t trying to get out. I think the political experience of conducting U.S. policy in Jerusalem would have made Yemen alluring to Brian, even without the marvels of San`a architecture. I wonder if he’s met `Ali `Abdullah Saleh, yet. It’s a small country, after all.

My Nasser ’56 Moment Playing Civ

In the spirit of the story, I have had my Nasir ’56 moment. It’s 1956 in Civ time and I have conquered mighty China, adding its cultural and genetic distinctness to my own. I’d already wiped out the Zulu by the late medieval period, uniting my continent beneath the banner of the Big Bear Empire. Shaka has had bad luck against me lately. But the continent is not particularly largish. Indeed, like Yertle the Turtle, I’ve realized that the continent I ruled was too small.

As a result, loathe as I always am to become a seafaring nation (boats are so pathetic in Civ), by the late 19^th century, it became apparent that I needed to float a grand army overseas if I was to build a respectable empire. In that first Chinese war, I had already taken China’s rich southern coast for my own. The choice was irresistible: Adam Smith’s Trading Company was in Xinjian, and I wanted it—free marketplaces, banks, stock exchanges, courthouses and harbors, i.e. free capitalism. I had to have it. So I took it. That was the 19^th century war.

But, the trouble is that you can’t just conquer limitlessly in these overseas adventures. Resupply is so much slower. You typically can get a good wave off and, then, you need time to digest, resupply and get ready for a new round. Having to ship everything by boat is a real bummer. By 1916, I was ready to go back to China and finish the job. But out of the blue, the fucking Vikings decide that they want to take me on. This frequently happens when you are prepping for a war. The machine forces you to fight a stupid war that you don’t want just before you can launch a brilliant assault on your prey. Well, Scandinavia is way further away than China. Not prime real estate. I’d hit that uppity bitch Cleopatra before I tried conquering the Vikings anyway. I like my empires to be as contiguous as possible. Moreover, China had something that I wanted: oil. Black gold. Texas tea. I didn’t have any. I was close to developing the technology for building tanks and would need the stuff when the time came. The Chinese have a colony with an oil well that’s on an island adjacent to my capital. The prize was too irresistible. Being near my capital, the conquered territory would be low-corruption with oil. I had to have it.

So how did I deal? Well, a few well-placed bribes allowed me the luxury of an alliance with the Babylonians and Americans against the Vikings. I had already buttered them up by allowing them to buy luxuries from me at outrageously high prices. The AI players, particularly the ones who are good at capitalism, will pay huge amounts for luxuries, far more than they’re actually worth (even up to forty gold a turn, and that’s an average price!). And they’re grateful, too, because they think you’re giving them a deal. This strategy allows me to pursue a “guns and butter” strategy, churning out cavalry unit after cavalry unit while still investing in new technologies (up to 70-80% of my budget, which is impressive any time after capitalism, as capitalism requires extensive infrastructural outlays). After I’ve emptied their coffers into my general revenue, the Babylonians and Vikings were so happy that for a few hundred gold pieces, they were more than happy to go to war for me.

So while the U.S. and Babylon went picknicking on the Vikings, I focused my attention on the Chinese. The lovely thing is the AI has very low standards for what constitutes an alliance. So long as I didn’t make a peace treaty with the Vikings before the Americans and Babylonians, I would still count as an ally in good standing. So I ignored the Viking war and found myself completely free to conquer the Chinese. The Vikings were quite busy dealing with the Americans and Babylonians, so busy that they really weren’t able to make any more of their petty raids into my territory. Pretty slick, eh? Fuckin’ stupid AI. I don’t know what those programmers were thinking.

My first priority was to secure the oil. I had built up a sizable fleet and deployed roughly twenty-four cavalry units to secure the island. This part of the war was short and sweet. The Chinese colonists gave way and, fortunately, they had already built a port at Yangchow. Perfect! A few minor popular uprisings suppressed and a few railway tracks added and I was pumping oil into the network within five turns. See? I’m so much better at this than Bush the Younger. And I reserve my gear for purely sexual purposes. I wouldn’t go traipsing around an aircraft carrier in fighter gear declaring, “Mission accomplished!” I have some dignity.

Because, of course, I knew better. The mainland war looked to be and, in fact, was far harsher. Canton fell fairly quickly, but I had serious supply problems. Navies are a pain in the fucking ass and not in that oh-so-sweet sort of way. You can’t put a boat on railroad tracks. Modern warfare in Civ rests on the railway, a mode of transport that allows instantaneous travel between any two points connected by your railway network. It’s like a transporter on Star Trek. You beam the units in, fight, and then whisk the damaged units back to recover and return in the next round. The perfect solution? Well not really.

This instantaneous transport and communication does nothing to reduce corruption in your empire. Remote cities are hopelessly corrupt and develop slowly, despite the fact that it takes no longer to get there than it does to the outer suburbs of your capital. My capital is in the south. So my north has few working factories that are equipped with ports. I make veteran boats in the south and the boats move a few squares at a time. I had plenty of caravels up north, but I couldn’t deploy them without ironclads to guard them. So I had to wait while the ironclads worked their way up from my military industrial complex in the south to be deployed in the mainland China invasion. One would like to be more impetuous in the style of Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, but I don’t like watching my troops sink to the bottom of the ocean. The process took a while, despite the fact that the troops to be loaded onto the damned boats could be moved up from the south instantaneously. It was irksome indeed.

Sadly, the Babylonians beat me by a turn in building Universal Suffrage, that fabulous popularizer of long, drawn-out wars. The people were really bitchy during the Second China War and required a great deal of placating. I conquered all of the Chinese mainland, however. Beijing fell in 1956—sort of a latter-day Budapest. All of mainland China was mine. With the declaration of peace, the people are rejoicing and I have put all those errant entertainers back to work. All that was left of their once mighty Chinese Empire are these loser little colonies. Imagine, going from fabulous empire to being a suburb of Dallas. The cultural humiliation must be unreal. I mean Chairman Mao Does Dallas? Ouch. What was he thinking?

The Dissertation

“So, Hattar,” I can hear you saying, “Do you ever fucking work? I mean at something meaningful. Not that bullshit at Group Health where you whore your mind out for money. Something like, say, your dissertation. What’s the fucking title this week?”

Yeah, I do fucking work, thank you. Look, all great intellectual breakthroughs are preceded by playing lots of Civ. It’s a fact. You could look it up. My dear friend Nelly Samoukova at the University of Chicago will back me up on this. We even trade techniques. She was the one who alerted me to the fact that you can often coax the AI into paying outrageous amounts for luxuries.

At any rate, the title this week is Pathologies of Identity and Violence: Palestinian Insurgency and Civil War in the Twentieth Century Levant, and my official rivals have been selected. The political science dissertation genre requires you to trash at least two other theories and show why the existing literature has got it wrong and why you are right. I’m going head to head with three rival theories. The first is Arend Lijphart’s theory of consociational democracy. He’s the easiest to pick on, as he really doesn’t have a theory. Here, read this review of his work. It’s a hoot. It also details the strategy by which he’s built his career. The marketing has been formidable, which, as Steve Hanson reminds me, is the reason I should keep working on my proposal skills. The second is Stuart Kaufman’s theory of “ethnic war.” He’s just won a $750k grant for the book, but it’s weak. He has an imagination and he’s into a lot of the same theory that I’m into, which makes him a rhetorical challenge. I have to fend him off without shooting myself in the foot. That will be tricky. His weakness is that he is not really good at disciplining his imagination and that’s where the knife goes in. The last theory is Fearon’s and Laitin’s theory of civil war. They, of course, are the scary ones. They’re kind of big in the IR world. They’re from Stanford. They publish a lot. And they aren’t sloppy.

We’re not dealing with AI knock-offs of Shaka and Mao anymore, brothers and sisters. These guys are the real thing. I’m scared shitless, so let’s hope I can pull the damned proposal together. Once more unto the breach…

The House

Pictures are coming, I swear. It’s looking pretty decent. My office is as the “usable” stage and I’m working on the garage tomorrow. Slowly but surely, it’s going to become my gym. I’ve been pricing weight benches and dumbbells on craigslist.com. The second-hand sports store sells hex dumbbells for 59¢/lb. So if I can’t beat that price, I’ll buy there. I also need an ellipsis machine. I’ll need to burn a few calories, too, and I do really well on those things. They burn the most calories for the least fatigue. For an MS patient, that’s a must.

Craig’s gotten the rest of the house quite charming. I like this place. I can’t recall the last time I liked where I lived. It’s kinda cool.

The only thing that’s undesirable is the large underground nest of yellowjackets I discovered while moving the lawn. I was stung ten times and let out what Craig calls “a war hoop” and had to hide under the shower to escape from the damned creatures. As the damned things followed me into the house, I later used a spray bottle to douse their wings with water and crush them one by one in vengeance. I’m Yertle the Turtle, damn it. No insect fucks with me!

The landlord sprayed the nest with some stuff, and sure enough, there don’t seem to be yellowjackets at the entrance of the nest anymore. But multiple sources confirm that those nests can be huge. I’m worried that all the stuff did is force them to close a door and now, they’ll open a window elsewhere. I need to spend some time watching that damned thing. We wanted to hire the boy scout next door to do the mowing, but the kid’s twelve. I don’t want him attacked.

And that’s sort of what’s going on. Hopefully I write a little more in the fall.

An Answer for Fiona

Fiona just posted a question to me that deserved a little detail for its answer. So, here goes.

I don't think love, sex, child-bearing or child-rearing is any different here than anywhere else. Life is all about finding a place where you can be yourself.

This is a decidedly modern viewpoint, one that I have to disagree with. Tradition is very inflexible. Child-rearing and child-bearing are markedly different from place to place.

The rules genuinely matter. Indeed, they are all that matters.

Finding a place where you can be yourself is a thing that has only very recently become possible for human beings. This is one of the gifts of capitalism.

If you can find someone to share it with, so much the better. It's a lot easier for me in that regard, and I'm not just talking about the red-necked homophobic tendencies here. I found love before I got here. Makes it a little easier than trying to find someone from scratch.

But you have a choice. This is a novel and precious thing, quite remarkable, and still not common in much of the world. Most of my cousins have had arranged marriages. I don’t think that anyone in my father’s family has been forced to marry someone they generally did not like, but this is nothing like finding someone and falling in love.

OK, I have to ask: What's wrong with dating Arabs? I ask out of pure ignorance, having never had the pleasure myself.

Not Arabs per se, as much as any male from a deeply traditional society. Traditional masculinity is a cumbersome and, yet, fragile façade. For a man to be powerful, so much rests on a woman’s obedience. Indeed, no one can emasculate a man as well and so easily, as the façade rests so entirely on a woman’s cooperation.

There’s a great movie in Arabic and Hebrew called A Wedding in Galilee. A Druze Palestinian family living under the occupation want to have a wedding for their son `Adil and his fiancé, Samiyya. Of course, free assembly is strictly governed by the Israelis and the family must apply to the local military governor for permission to host so large an event. `Adil’s father is the village mukhtar, a traditional mayoral title antedating the San Remo settlement in 1920. Being called mukhtar is still a token of respect. Anyway, Abu `Adil (Arab men are given a name after their eldest son, Abu `Adil means “Father of Adil”) goes to the military governor to ask for permission.

The Israeli governor thinks he’s going to be clever, and decides to tell Abu `Adil that they can hold the wedding if the Israeli military governor can attend. Abu `Adil is in a complete bind. The military governor is clearly his enemy, however, Abu `Adil is a traditional Arab. No true Arab refuses a request for hospitality. He naturally replies, “Please stay with me until the very end of the wedding.”

The Israeli military commander and his entourage attending this wedding is of course the central conflict in the very complicated plot. It’s a great movie (crappy production values, but great characters and plot). But `Adil, an ardent Palestinian nationalist, is outraged by his father’s decision to show hospitality to Israeli soldiers occupying their land. But he wants to get married (it’s not like you get any before marriage in the Arab world), so it’s a catch-22.

Well apparently, the Druze have a custom where the bride and groom consummate on the wedding night and the sheet with the blood stain from the woman’s hymen is displayed for all to see. No Muslim or Christian Arabs I’ve ever heard of have this custom, so I found it novel. At any rate, Abu `Adil needs to display the sheet. But `Adil is so choked up that he goes impotent. Dad is going berserk and cousin Khalid, the sensible one, tells his uncle, “Look. We’ll get a sheet, make a small cut on the cow, get a blood stain and show the people. Then tomorrow, we take `Adil to the doctor.” Dad will have none of this, so `Adil and Samiyya are stuck in the room and the people are beginning to talk. Samiyya says, “Look, clearly this isn’t happening tonight.” `Adil won’t come out, but, on the other hand, he’s not getting it up either.

Samiyya realizes that something has to be done to save male honor, so pressing the sheet into her vagina, she says, “I take my virginity with my own hand.” `Adil throws his face into her lap sobbing.

Masculinity, that kind of masculinity, is so fragile. It’s not just the Arabs. There’s a great gay movie called Wedding Banquet about a gay man from Hong Kong named Wai-Tung who is an immigrant success story in Manhattan. The catch is that he’s gay and has an American partner named Simon. His parents don’t know and are determined that he will marry. Wai-Tung and Simon have a mainland Chinese tenant, a starving artist named Wei-Wei. Wei-Wei is about to be deported. So they concoct the perfect solution. Wai-Tung marries Wei-Wei enabling her to stay in the country and allowing him to get his parents off his back. The comedy of errors begins.

But in both movies, the women make sacrifices for the men’s honor. Except in Wedding Banquet, Simon gets to be one of the women. I saw the movie early in the process of coming out and decided that I was not Simon. Hence, I never dated Arab men, not that there are that many to meet at your average gay bar.

Melancholy

Back in 1998, I read this passage at a meeting of the Sheikh Zubayr society:

LATE that night, refreshed and strengthened by a good dinner and much free laughter, Isaac Penn and Peter Lake sat in the small study, staring at the fire. The heat ran around half a dozen logs that had become red cylinders of flame, changing their colors until they looked like six suns in a black universe of firebrick. Their glow was an in­visible wind that irradiated the room and froze the two men in place—like deer in a forest which is burning all around them, who lift their heads to the highest and brightest flames and look into a tunnel of white light.

“The doctors told me,” said Isaac Penn, as if he were talking to himself, “that she would be dead in a few months. That was almost a year ago.” He glanced at an ice-covered window in which the moon had gone all astray, and listened to the wind coming off the Lake of the Coheeries as it could only there, on a midwinter night, like the roaring jet winds of Mars or Saturn. “It’s a mystery to me that she can sleep outside, in that. She wasn’t supposed to. In winter, she’s supposed to come in. But she refuses, even up here. I can never get used to thinking that my daughter is out there in that caldron of ice. And yet, in the mornings, she comes to breakfast revived after twelve hours in cold that would kill a strong healthy man. The wind and snow cover her, attack her. At first, I used to beg her to come in; but then I realized that doing what she does is what keeps her alive.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder,” said Peter Lake, aware that he was in a warm com­fortable place in a vast sea of snow and ice which maneuvered beyond the walls like a wild unopposed army. “I wonder about the others.”

“What others?”

“The thousands, the hundreds of thousands, like Beverly.”

“We’re all like Beverly. She’s early, that’s all.”

“But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“What way? Be clear.”

“The poor should not have to suffer, as they do, in their mil­lions, and die young.”

“The poor? Do you mean everyone? Certainly you mean every­one in New York, for in New York even the rich are poor. But is Beverly poor according to your definition? No. And yet, what’s the difference?”

“The difference,” said Peter Lake, “is that small children, their mothers, and their fathers, live and die like beasts. They don’t have special sleeping porches, a hundred pounds of down and sable, mar­ble baths as big as pools, ranks of doctors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, salvers of roast meat, hot drinks in silver vacuum bottles, and cheerful happy families. I want Beverly to have these things, and would die rather than see her go without them. But there is a differ­ence. The child I once saw in a hallway was barefoot, bareheaded, dressed in filthy rags, starving, blind, abandoned. He had no feather bed. He was near death. And he was standing, because he didn’t have a place to lie down and die.”

“I know this,” Isaac Penn asserted. “I’ve seen such things far more often than you have. You forget that I was a poorer man than you have ever been, for a longer time than you have yet lived. I had a father and a mother, and brothers and sisters, and they all died young, too soon. I know all these things. Do you think I’m a fool? In The Sun we bring injustices to the attention of the public, and suggest sensible means to correct inequities where they serve no pur­pose. I realize that there is too much needless and cruel suffering. But you, you don’t seem to understand that these people whom you profess to champion have, in their struggles, compensations.”

“What compensations?”

“Their movements, passions, emotions; their captured bodies and captured senses are directed with no less certainty than the mi­croscopic details of the seasons, or the infinitesimal components of the city’s great and single motion. They are, in their seemingly ran­dom actions, part of a plan. Don’t you know that?”

“I see no justice in that plan.”

“Who said,” lashed out Isaac Penn, “that you, a man, can al­ways perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to un­derstand—until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The de­sign of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.

“No choreographer, no architect, engineer, or painter could plan more thoroughly and subtly. Every action and every scene has its purpose. And the less power one has, the closer he is to the great waves that sweep through all things, patiently preparing them for the approach of a future signified not by simple human equity (a child could think of that), but by luminous and surprising connections that we have not imagined, by illustrations terrifying and benevolent—a golden age that will show not what we wish, but some bare awkward truth upon which rests everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery. We try to bring it about without knowing exactly what it is, and only touch upon it. No matter, for all the flames and sparks of justice throughout all time reach to invigorate unseen epochs—like engines whose power glides on hidden lines to upwell against the dark in distant cities unaware.”

“I don’t know,” said Peter Lake, confused. “I think of Beverly, and I’m not sure about the golden age of which you speak, which is beyond our lives, and which we will never see. Think of Beverly. How could it be?”

Isaac Penn got up from his chair to leave the room. At the door, he turned to Peter Lake, who felt cold and alone. Isaac Penn was an old man, and sometimes he became dreadfully grave, as if he were in the presence of a thousand tormenting spirits. His eyes reflected the fire. They seemed unnatural, like tunnels of flame into a soul grown so deep that it must soon leave life. “Have you not yet realized that Beverly has seen the golden age—not one that was, nor one that will be, but one that is here? Though I am an old man, I have not yet seen it. And she has. That is what has broken my heart.”

I have two friends who are sickeningly well read. One is Peter Hovde and the other is Garner Gollatz. It was Garner who pointed out that the writer, Mark Helprin, was a neo-con. I was embarrassed, because the text could be given a flat, vapid reading as some sort of support for laissez-faire capitalism, which certainly was not the interpretation I had made of the text. Moreover, I don’t know Helprin’s work well enough to really venture what his specific agenda in writing the piece was. I will interpret the text only to extricate a certain meaning that I find useful. Anything else, he may keep.

One of OED’s nicer definitions for melancholy is: tender, sentimental, or reflective sadness; sadness giving rise to or considered as a subject for poetry, sentimental reflection, etc., or as a source of aesthetic pleasure. This feeling is one that I am first conscious of having felt early in the summer of 1996 and it has been my frequent companion since then.

It was the very end of my Fulbright year in Jordan. A few days before I left the country, I had a small get-together at my Aunt Zakiyeh’s house. She lives on the top floor of a three story building in the village of Safut. Her small apartment does not take up the whole floor, so she has a very large open-air patio. In the evening, one can entertain under the stars quite splendidly. That night was an evening of extraordinary blessing in my life. It is hard to get everyone to get together in Jordan—the Arabs are a very spontaneous people and event planning is quite the challenge in Jordan. But everyone made it that night: Kholude, Norma, Maysa, Firas and even my Jesuit friend, Paul Heck. Later in the evening, Charlie and Elaine stopped by just before they were about to emigrate to Canada. We all talked and talked: politics, theology, you name it. We drank whiskey and `araq and had a royal meza. At the end of the evening, a shooting star streaked across the sky. The evening was perfect. If I’d had MS at the time, I’d have undoubtedly shed a tear. I never cried, back then. But it was beautiful. And I knew that we’d all be scattered to the wind, that I couldn’t hold the moment. That was sad, but it made the moment real. I was able to enjoy living in the moment fully, without the need to hold on. My heart was open, as were the heavens.

Melancholy is a powerful and strange emotion, so different from depression. Depression takes away your desire to live. Melancholy makes you sublimely aware of just how alive you are, of how exquisite life is. In the same breath, it reminds you that you are mortal, that you cannot capture the moment, that it will pass and, eventually, that you will die. Melancholy makes you especially present. This for me is a good thing. Like all those plagued by their imaginations, my soul’s chief passion has always been to become. Melancholy teaches me to be, to relish being, to be grateful for being, to be grateful for life.

The experience of melancholy teaches us to release irritation at the world’s persistent inability to meet up to our highest ideals and to replace this irritation with gratitude. It teaches us the importance of seeing the moment and living in it, of seeing what is good in every moment, in finding a way to let go of irritation. When I am clear-sighted (sadly, it isn’t often), I see that this is God’s plan for me. My life is an exercise in learning to understand the melancholy. If there is purpose in my life, I think it must be that.

God help me, for I’m not much good at it. But I want to be. I want to be. Help me, Lord.

Thinking About Ethical Neutrality in Teaching, Part I

Teaching went fairly well this term. The class design isn’t really where I want it to be quite yet, but it’s getting close. When you start applying for jobs, the vogue thing is to have a teaching philosophy. At some point I have to develop one of my own. It’s a while before I go on the market (there’ that nasty bit called the dissertation to finish first). But I’ve been pretty focused this term and so, I thought I would reward myself by allowing some philosophical musing. I’ve really scaled back on indulgences (like this blog) and I need to get cracking on cleaning the house and writing my oft-referred-to-seldom-seen research proposal. But some fun first.

The excerpt is from a play called History Boys, by Alan Bennett, the playwright who brought us, among other texts, The Madness of King George. Unlike most teacher stories, the teachers are very human. The play is a marvelously constructed study in different types of conflict The excerpt we’re going to read is the central intellectual conflict between the two leading characters, Mr. Hector and Mr. Irwin. Strangely, from my perspective, both are queer. Today, I'll do the exegesis and next time, I'll do the proper discussion.

HECTOR:	A romantic idealist who is obsessed with the ostensible purpose of education—that it help you live a good life. He is meaning, fleeing from the violence of being represented in a form. His self-image is that of a rebel who protects his students from, well, “mechanized petrification.” When Hector hits the boys, it’s typically with a rolled up paper and symbolic and not painful. The boys ham it up in response. They have a tender and deeply humorous relationship. Hector has a good deal of trouble with the problem that life cannot be lived entirely on the level of grand meaning. He has a reprehensible penchant for feeling up his male students’ crotches while taking them for rides on his motorcycle. His wife doesn’t know and apparently doesn’t care enough to find out. Hector is now stuck team teaching with Irwin because he got caught.
IRWIN:	A tremendously gifted rhetorician with an all-consuming obsession with controlling his image in the eyes of others, he nonetheless comes across as engaging, affable and charming. He is a very able teacher. While he lacks a moral compass, his need to control his image prevents him from falling into the sorts of difficulties that have essentially done Hector in. In the play, the character’s fate is to be bound to a wheelchair and to become deeply corrupt. In the movie, he’s on crutches for a few weeks and he becomes less corrupt.
DAKIN:	The best-looking boy in class and among the most clever in an exceptionally brainy class. He is already sleeping with the headmaster’s secretary. He is very aware of the queer characters’ sexual attraction to him. My guess is that he’s a Kinsey 2. Destined to be a lawyer, he is enormously attracted to Irwin, as Irwin offers him the power of becoming a player in the game. He has issues with Hector, although it doesn’t seem that getting felt up on a motorcycle is prominent among them. Ironically, he is the character who has the clearest view of Irwin’s immorality. Strangely, while I don’t think he shares that immorality, he does not seem disturbed by it.
POSNER:	The youngest boy, probably a Kinsey 6, he has a deep crush on Dakin, who, while not encouraging Posner, is not at all upset by the fact. Posner is the only student that Hector will not feel up. My gut instinct is that the reason this is the case is that Posner is the only one of the boys who might really want to feel back. I doubt Hector is really up to something like that. Posner is Hector’s best student, although not his favorite. Posner does, however, care very deeply for the ideals of truth and beauty. He is the sort of boy who is wounded by his education. This is the type of wound that never fully heals. In the play, he winds up isolated and a little insane. In the movie, he becomes a teacher with a deep understanding of melancholy.

It’s strange that Bennett should change the Irwin and Posner’s fate so dramatically for the film. Whether this is pandering to Hollywood or relenting mercy for his characters, I cannot tell. The other boys don’t need too much description to understand the scene.

Boys come in, followed by Hector. They sit glumly at their desks.

IRWIN	Would you like to start?
HECTOR	I don’t mind.
IRWIN	How do you normally start? It is your lesson. General Studies.
HECTOR	The boys decide. Ask them.
IRWIN	Anybody?

The boys don’t respond.

HECTOR	Come along, boys. Don’t sulk.
DAKIN	We don’t know who we are, sir. Your class or Mr Irwin’s.
IRWIN	Does it matter?
TIMMS	Oh yes, sir. It depends if you want us thoughtful. Or smart.

The first criticism of teaching, if you will. Students are aware of their instructors’ expectations and clearly put on a performance. An inevitable part of any relationship of power, yet I imagine one that is not consonant with Hector’s self-image. Hector wants to break through the scene to a moment that is “real.” Timms is the class smart aleck. His suggestion that all the world, including Mr. Hector’s class, is a play, doesn’t go over very well with Hector.

HECTOR	He wants you civil, you rancid little turd. (Hits him.)
TIMMS	Look, sir. You’re a witness. Hitting us, sir. He could be sacked.
IRWIN	Settle down. Settle down. I thought we might talk about the Holocaust.
HECTOR	Good gracious. Is that on the syllabus?

The opening of the rift begins here. A statement like “Good gracious. Is that on the syllabus?” is almost completely bizarre for Hector, a teacher who routinely ignores syllabi. For him to ask a question like “Is that on the syllabus?” is a clear admission of discomfort.

IRWIN	It has to be. The syllabus includes the Second World War.
HECTOR	I suppose it does.
IRWIN	Though in any case the scholarship questions aren’t limited to a particular curriculum.

Irwin has been hired by the headmaster to prepare the boys for scholarship examination to get into Oxford and Cambridge. A subject is a subject to him. He’s there to teach a technique.

HECTOR

But how can you teach the Holocaust?

An ethical question directed at Irwin. To Hector, a subject’s not just a subject. Moreover, the question is not asking for the proper technique. Hector clearly means that one cannot teach the Holocaust.

IRWIN

Well, that would do as a question. Can you ... should you ... teach the Holocaust? Anybody?

The question is neatly deflected. Presumably, from Hector’s perspective, this is a dilemma that is to be resolved by the instructor before class begins. But it’s always good form for a teacher to throw a hard question out to the room. Irwin is a master of form.

AKTHAR	It has origins. It has consequences. It’s a subject like any other.
SCRIPPS	Not like any other, surely. Not like any other at all.
AKTHAR	No, but it’s a topic.

Akhtar speaks in the voice of the scientist. Our methods do not change because of how we feel about the subject. If they do, we have clearly not practiced ethical neutrality.

HECTOR	They go on school trips nowadays, don’t they? Auschwitz. Dachau. What has always concerned me is where do they eat their sandwiches? Drink their Coke?
CROWTHER	The visitors’ centre. It’s like anywhere else.
HECTOR	Do they take pictures of each other there? Are they smiling? Do they hold hands? Nothing is appropriate. Just as questions on an examination paper are inappropriate. How can the boys scribble down an answer however well put that doesn’t demean the suffering involved? And putting it well demeans it as much as putting it badly.

Hector’s concern, then, is one of reverence—our reverence for the dead, for these dead who experienced and suffered “unspeakable” horror. To give a thing a name, to speak that name, makes the thing an object. It makes it subject to our power. The emotional impact of an object must, perforce, be less than that of an unfathomable source of awe. Objects are objects because they can be manipulated. Much like the name of God, Hector would not speak of the horror, for in his view we should not become desensitized to it. Such an awful thing should not lose its awe.

IRWIN	It’s a question of tone, surely. Tact.
HECTOR	Not tact. Decorum.

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

TACT:	Ready and delicate sense of what is fitting and proper in dealing with others, so as to avoid giving offence, or win good will; skill or judgement in dealing with men or negotiating difficult or delicate situations; the faculty of saying or doing the right thing at the right time.
DECORUM:	That which is proper, suitable, seemly, befitting, becoming; fitness, propriety, congruity, especially in dramatic, literary, or artistic composition: That which is proper to a personage, place, time, or subject in question, or to the nature, unity, or harmony of the composition; fitness, congruity, keeping.

Decorum refers to that which is appropriate to the object about which a person speaks. For Hector, to speak of this must be an act of reverence. Tact refers to what one says to win over the listener. To Irwin, what is central is understanding how to avoid the emotions that would prevent his point from being made. An object is an object. The key to dealing with objects is knowing how to use them. Whether the object is the subject of discussion or the subject who listens, an object is an object.

LOCKWOOD	What if you were to write that this was so far beyond one’s experience silence is the only proper response?
DAKIN	That would be your answer to lots of questions, though, wouldn’t it, sir?
HECTOR	Yes. Yes, Dakin, it would.
DAKIN	‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.’

Hector groans and puts his head in his hands.

That's right, isn't it, sir? Wittgenstein.

I have some pity here for Hector, although I feel Bennett is so good to him that I ought to be made of sterner stuff for the sake of justice. The hardest thing for a teacher to hear is that the point of his or her teaching, the point over which he or she has labored to persuade the student, has not sunk in at all. We try so hard to guide their attention to what we profess to be valuable. When we no longer occupy the stage of their mind however, it is shocking to see what they have instead taken from what we said. They’ve listened, but they have not taken the point. These moments of futility are the hardest ones for me to bear.

IRWIN	Yes. That's good.
HECTOR	No, it's not good. It's ... flip. It's ... glib. It's journalism.

OED tells us that, a journal is, among other things, “A record of public events or of a series of public transactions, noted down as they occur day by day or at successive dates, without historical discussion.” The word “journalism” is, of course, a round condemnation in this particular text. I can’t help thinking that the distinction of recording events without historical discussion is the reason why. Although, clearly, this attack is made on the historical discussion itself. I think the essence of the insult is that the historical discussion is not real and is, in some sense, a sensationalist fraud.

DAKIN	But it's you that taught us it.
HECTOR	I didn't teach you and Wittgenstein didn't screw it out of his very guts in order for you to turn it into a dinky formula. I thought that you of all people were bright enough to see that.
DAKIN	I do see it, sir. Only I don't agree with it. Not . . not any more.

Dakin, who perhaps for a time has been under Hector’s spell, is disenchanted. I don’t know if that disenchantment is with Hector’s ideals, with Hector himself, or both.

TIMMS	Sir.
HECTOR	(head in his hands) Yes?
TIMMS	You told us once. . . it was to do with the trenches, sir ... that one person's death tells you more than a thousand. When people are dying like flies, you said, that is what they are dying like.

For once, Timms isn’t making a wise crack. He’s beginning to make intuitive leaps between new material and other things he’s learned. He’s beginning to think. He’s not there yet, but he’s gaining on it.

POSNER

Except that these weren't just dying. They were being processed. What is different is the process.

There it is. The moment of insight.

IRWIN	Good.
HECTOR	No, not good. Posner is not making a point. He is speaking from the heart.

Irwin is praising Posner’s insight. What Hector objects to is not the praise, but the reason for the praise. Irwin is praising the technical performance, not the meaning of the statement. What offends Hector is the divorce of rationality from sacred meaning and its grafting onto a purely instrumental process in which the outcome is a simple and mundane victory or loss. He would not see sacred meaning fall into Irwin’s hands. The tools of the temple were never meant to be used for Irwin’s kind of work.

DAKIN	So? Supposing we get a question on Hitler and the Second War and we take your line, sir, that this is not a crazed lunatic but a statesman.
HECTOR	A statesman?
IRWIN	Not a statesman, Dakin, a politician. I wouldn't say statesman.
DAKIN	Politician, then, and one erratically perhaps, but still discernibly operating within the framework of traditional German foreign policy ...
IRWIN	Yes?
DAKIN	... and we go on to say, in accordance with this line, that the death camps have to be seen in the context of this policy.

Pause.

IRWIN	I think that would be ... inexpedient.
HECTOR	Inexpedient? Inexpedient?

Dakin is exulting in new-found power and using it to make a swipe at Hector. Irwin is focused on the work and probably doesn’t notice. Hector is outraged by the fact that Irwin is completely senseless to the meaning of what Dakin has just said.

IRWIN

I don't think it's true, for a start ...

This is Irwin’s genius. The argument isn’t tactful, so he calls it untrue. Don’t be the Devil’s Advocate unless you can win the case. The win-loss record is what makes the reputation.

SCRIPPS	But what has truth got to do with it? I thought that we'd already decided that for the purposes of this examination truth is, if not an irrelevance, then so relative as just to amount to another point of view.
HECTOR	Why can you not simply condemn the camps outright as an unprecedented horror?

The obvious, moral answer. Hector is upset because coming to this conclusion should not, in his view, take so much work. Notice that because of the timing of Hector's outburst, Irwin is freed from answering Scripps' very poignant question.

There is slight embarrassment.

LOCKWOOD	No point, sir. Everybody will do that. That's the stock answer, sir ... the camps an event unlike any other, the evil unprecedented, etc., etc.
HECTOR	No. Can't you see that even to say etcetera is monstrous? Etcetera is what the Nazis would have said, the dead reduced to a mere verbal abbreviation. What have we learned about language? Orwell. Orwell.

This is a link to Orwell’s essay, if you’re interested. Hector has lost the room. His attempt to sacrilize the method of reason and link it solely to the good has failed to win the class over. He has failed, like Plato before him. Unlike Plato, however, he was in the room to hear his students reject his teaching.

LOCKWOOD	All right, not etcetera. But given that the death camps are generally thought of as unique, wouldn't another approach be to show what precedents there were and put them ... well ... in proportion?
SCRIPPS	Proportion!
DAKIN	Not proportion then, but putting them in context.

Tact. Dakin’s getting the hang of it now.

POSNER

But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained then it can be explained away.

Posner sees Hector’s point more clearly than anyone else in the room. Indeed, we discover, a few lines later, the reason that he might be more inclined to. He alone in this room is living the argument. Recall that Hector’s argument is pedagogical. It is an argument about the proper values for teaching to follow, a protest of the tactical process that Irwin is teaching.

RUDGE

‘Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.’

Hector groans.

To understand all is to forgive all. What Hector is trying to say about why the Holocaust shouldn’t be taught has just become fodder for the process Irwin is teaching. This happened because Posner has learned that point by taking part in the debate sincerely. What Hector has tried to teach as a supreme value has become one more clever position, despite the fact that Posner is utterly sincere and not trying to be clever for the sake of cleverness. Irwin’s winning the game, the game that Hector refuses to let be a game. "He shoots, he scores!" Leave it to Rudge, the class jock, to see the puck slide in most clearly.

IRWIN	That’s good, Posner.
POSNER	It isn’t ‘good’. I mean it, sir.

And Posner did mean it, too. The irony, however, is that without the process that Irwin is championing, Posner would never had faced the dilemma and never formulated the position. Remember that Hector would never have let the dialogue happen, had he been given a choice.

DAKIN

But when we talk about putting them in context it’s only the same as the Dissolution of the Monasteries. After all, monasteries had been dissolved before Henry VIII, dozens of them.

Dakin is intoxicated. A world in which nothing is sacred is a world where everything is a potential object of power. What's whiskey compared to that?

POSNER	Yes, but the difference is, I didn’t lose any relatives in the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
IRWIN	Good point.
SCRIPPS	You keep saying, ‘Good point.’ Not good point, sir. True. To you the Holocaust is just another topic on which we may get a question.
IRWIN	No. But this is history. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don’t see it and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past and one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be ... even on the Holocaust.

The bell goes.

What’s sad here, is Irwin comes off really well. He comes off as a scientist should. I think the play shows us in other scenes that this isn’t what he truly believes. Yet, whatever Irwin's intentions, the awakening of Posner in the dialogue shows the power of the process.

IRWIN	I thought that went rather well.
HECTOR	Parrots. I thought I was lining their minds with some sort of literary insulation, proof against the primacy of fact. Instead back come my words like a Speak Your Weight Machine. ‘Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.’ Ugh.
IRWIN	I was rather encouraged. They’re getting the idea.
HECTOR	Do you know what the worst thing is? I wanted them to show off, to come up with the short answer, the handy quote. I wanted them to compete. It’s time I went.
IRWIN	Went where?
HECTOR	Oh, home. Home.

In a sense, Hector really isn’t alive to Irwin. Hector’s just a helpful object. Irwin scares me.

I’m Really Sick of Miikka Kiprusoff. And Dominik Hasek

Ted Kulfan of the Detroit News, opens this morning’s Wings article by saying, “Oh no, it can't be happening to the Red Wings again, can it?” He reports: “‘Unfortunately I didn’t keep my composure,’ Hasek said. ‘It was sort of stupid. They had a power play and we didn’t kill it. It’s my fault.’” Sort of stupid? Donna Spencer of CBC Sports notes, “Calgary netminder Miikka Kiprusoff had to make tougher saves than Detroit counterpart Dominik Hasek and stopped 33 of 35 shots. Hasek turned away 18 of 21 shots.” All of this is the perfect irritant for a Friday morning. Or how about this excerpt from the Kulfan piece:

Angry Hasek

Goalie Dominik Hasek was called for a costly penalty in the first period with the Wings already down a man.

Hasek threw out his stick in a slashing gesture toward Flames forward Jarome Iginla and was called for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Two men down, the Wings gave up a Daymond Langkow goal, giving Calgary a 1-0 lead.

“Unfortunately I didn’t keep my composure,” Hasek said. “It was sort of stupid. They had a power play and we didn’t kill it. It’s my fault.”

Babcock felt both Hasek and Iginla should have been penalized.

“He (Hasek) wasn’t trying to send a message, he was just reacting,” Babcock said. “Do I like what happened? No. Could he have have handled it differently? For sure. Yet I think there should have been a call on that play.”

Where’s Dom?

Did someone leave Hasek at the team hotel?

Hasek, who rarely misses a morning skate, was absent Thursday, hours before the Wings played the Flames in Game 4 of their Western Conference quarterfinal.

The reason?

"He chose not to (skate)," Babcock said.

Hasek took part in the optional practice Wednesday. Only eight players took part.

"When we talked to Dom yesterday, he wanted to go (practice) yesterday, and we felt we needed an optional (practice)," Babcock said. "Sometimes the individual's criteria doesn't work with the team's and that's the way it goes."

Goaltender coach Jim Bedard took Hasek's place during the morning skate, with Chris Osgood in the other net.

"You might find this hard to believe, but it wasn't my plan to have Jim Bedard (take Hasek's place), although he fits into (our team) age-wise," Babcock said.

I had to listen to the game on the radio again. I needed to upload my student’s exam question so they could prepare over the course of the weekend. It took me a while to draft the question. I only sort of like the result. I didn’t have time to call around and see if there was a sports bar that had Versus, the only channel carrying the Wings game. Even CBC wasn’t carrying it this time. Plus, it was a night game, so I’d have to go to a loud bar to watch it. Frankly, MS has turned me into an old man and I just can’t take the noise anymore. I hate saying that, but it’s the truth. So I settled.

Fog, Part II

It’s embarrassing how long it takes me to get back to things sometimes. I wrote “Fog, Part I” back in January. Part of it is just being slammed with work. But part of it is that often the first part of a piece comes quickly, but I can’t solve the problems in the second half. That’s been a problem here too. Who knows if I’ll ever get back to those Gilligan’s island pieces on Marx? That pisses me off. I had fun with Gilligan’s Island and Marx. I was going to talk about the meta-object field. I’m going to put that off one more time. Writing about my problems sorting and suppressing selected emotion really sets that up well. As always, figuring out the ideal order to attack a list is my central problem… Sigh.

Sorting

Sorting is a task that relies entirely on short-term memory. Say you have a list of things to do. Perhaps you can remember them without writing them down. I certainly cannot. Well, so what, you ask, lots of people are like that. But, if you are looking at that written list, most people, especially those with a gift for organization, can sort that list of tasks in their mind. They hold the items suspended in their memory and shift them around until they find a satisfactory order. I used to do this all the time and just assign numbers to each item on the list. I can’t do that anymore. I have to physically re-order the list, look at it, and decide how well it meets the sorting criteria. I now try to avoid making lists on paper. Re-writing the list takes forever by hand. I can cut and paste on computer. Still, even then, this is a difficult process. My lists have to be very specially crafted. If there are too many items on the list, I won’t be able to order them. It takes too much time—far more time than I did before. But the process is further impeded.

Suppressing selected emotion

We make all our decisions based on emotion. For those among us who like to view themselves as fundamentally rational (and until this illness I was most assuredly of their number), this assertion can provoke resistance. That resistance is utterly unfounded. If a human being experiences damage to their amygdyla, the part of their brain that provides emotion, they begin to make disastrous decisions, because decisions are made on the basis of emotion. The portions of their brain that dealing with reason can be completely untouched and they will still make disastrous decisions. Reason is not at stake in decision making.

Those of us who are fond of being “rational” use reason as a discipline. We take our problem and how we feel about it and we interrogate that problem and those emotions using reason. That critical process can indeed serve as a foundation for making decisions. That said, what the process actually does is change how we look at a situation and, hence, how we feel about it. That said, I’m sure most of us can recall times in which our rational process tells us we should do something, but our emotions overpower that process and we instead do something that, while it feels good at the moment, we know at some cognitive level is the wrong answer. This is because the process of rational inquiry is not a reflex, a fundamental part of our nature. It is a discipline. Discipline is a pattern of behavior that we internalize. The point of that process of internalization is in a sense to reprogram ourselves to feel some way that we would not naturally. That effort can fail.

The principal technique of discipline is the suppression of selected emotion. We use reason to “rationalize” the process in which we are engaged. We analyze the situation decide which of the emotions we feel are the “correct” ones that should be privileged in making our decision, and then we suppress the others. It is this last process that has been severely impaired.

For example, I cry at movies now. I rarely cried at movies before the year 2000. Now I cry all the time. But what is truly embarrassing is that I cry at sappy movies. It’s not that I don’t think the movies are sappy. On the contrary, I know they are sappy and simultaneously feel revulsion for that sappiness, and distress that I am crying over such an obviously sappy movie! However, emotions tend to be reflexive. This is most evident with shame. Shame is a reflex that is triggered when others confront us with having exceeded our proper bounds. It is a shrinking, a desire to disappear. A frequent male response to an individual implying that a person should feel shame is violent anger. This response, however, is not made in place of shame. Rather, it occurs because the individual feels shame as a reflex, thinks about it and realizes they have been forced to feel something they do not want to, or worse, something that they ought not to feel because they have not actually exceeded their bounds. It is this experience that converts the shame into anger and so often leads to violence. When a film “tugs at my heartstrings” now, I have no defense against this. When I was younger, I cried occasionally, but it took something genuinely moving to override my strong will to suppress emotions that I did not wish to feel. Now, I feel it all, all of the time.

Emotions in the organization of a regular object-field

When making and dealing with organization, this is an enormous liability. Let’s begin with one of the most ludicrous situations that I have dealt with since the onset of illness. Imagine it’s 9 am. I’ve woken up. I’m groggy, owing to the medicine I take that deepens my sleep so that it is actually restful and benefits me (the disease makes me sleep very lightly and without the drug, my fatigue is far, far worse). I’m hungry. The floor is cold and I’m only wearing socks. My hands and feet have always grown cold very quickly, ever since I was a child. I’m hungry. The sink is full of dishes. Everything is filthy (I suffer from chronic fatigue and am a graduate student. Dishes are a very low priority in my life). There is a proper response. That response is (1) go find and put on your slippers, (2) wash a bowl, a spoon, a mug and the dirty parts of the espresso machine, (3) take your morning meds, (4) make a cup of coffee, (5) pour yourself a bowl of cereal and eat a banana so that you have some fuel in you and (6) do the dishes. I can tell you this with very little cognitive work, even now.

Now, if you read “Fog, Part I” you know that I often forget what I am doing while I am doing it. Add morning grogginess and you really have a disorganized twit. Say I look for my slippers and can’t find them. I go back, but the floor is sucking all the heat out of my feet and they’re freezing. So maybe I impulsively forget that I can’t find them and search again. I eventually get the picture that I’m not going to find them while the house is a mess and I’m groggy and hungry. I need to take some of the emotions off the table. But I can’t suppress any of them. So I start washing the necessary dishes to get caffeine into my system to counteract the grogginess and eat to dispel the hunger. But the dishes are revolting, so maybe I can’t stop doing them. So I do half the dishes before my feet have gotten so cold that I can’t stand it and impulsively break away to search for my slippers again. I’ve spent a lot of energy without eating and I don’t have much energy, so maybe I then sit down. I rest a little and maybe cry (like a girl) because I’m frustrated and don’t know what to do. Well, I still desperately need fuel. Did I wish the proper elements in that big (yet still incomplete) washing of dishes so I can actually do this? If I’m lucky, I did. Maybe I didn’t, so I have to put off eating and drinking coffee yet again to wash them. And God help me if I wind up out of milk, coffee or cereal. By that point I may go down to Starbucks for coffee and a scone. That is, if I’m not also out of money.

All of that and I can still teach you the Arab-Israeli conflict, how to interpret motherfucking hard texts by German theorists, or how to speak Arabic. The humiliation can be unreal.

Since I can’t suppress emotions, I have to balance them against other emotions. Say you’re a student who wants a letter of recommendation. I can promise until the cows come home, but I can’t suppress the urge to procrastinate very well, and I’m forgetful as hell. Procrastinate once, I’m likely not to remember that I need to write a student a letter again for a week, especially if I’m busy. I now try to get the student to meet me and write the letter with them. Since they are physically there and spending their time with me, my feeling of obligation to them will then outweigh the desire to procrastinate. It sucks for the student that he or she has to sit there while I write in order to get his or her letter. But what I do is interview them for good fodder for the letter while I write. Then I let them see the letter and also explain my strategy is writing it. They not only get to know what they’re getting, they get to be asked questions that frequently ferret out thing about themselves they wouldn’t have written in their personal statement, but then realize is gold. They also get taught how to write a letter of recommendation. The students love it. But I’m still humiliated by not being able to keep my word. Instead, I have to learn not to give it and say, “No, I can’t write this letter unless you work with me on it. I’ll blow it and you off without meaning to and you’ll be screwed.” Admitting that I am not capable of being responsible humiliates me more than I can say. It sure makes a mockery of being that noble Nietzschean creature with the right to make promises.

Shame

As far as everyone who met me here in Seattle is concerned, I’ve always been a space cadet. Dealing with the shame associated with being unable to control the image people have of me with respect to my competence has been deeply humiliating. I was diagnosed in 2000 and I’m only beginning to come to terms with it this year. I choke far less often now, but I still have issues with it. Imagine taking a summer job with a variable schedule, forgetting to come in for a shift (welcome to short-term recall hell) and put off calling your boss for three days to explain because you are so ashamed that you can’t force yourself to face her. You must understand that I was the soul of responsibility before MS. The shame of fucking up is unreal. Moreover, I can’t suppress the shame. And shame makes you retreat from a situation. So I hide like a fucking ostrich with its goddamned head in the sand. People who do this are usually too stupid to realize that they will have to face it eventually. I know that I have to face it, but am powerless to suppress the emotion. It rules me. I am the slave of my fucking emotions. My only hope is to get really zen and okay with everything. Anyone who knows my personality realizes how difficult that is for me. I'm a pretty passionate guy. Detachment is not my strong suit.

Next time, the damned meta-object field. And music. I can’t handle music anymore either.