I finally get it

According to the New York Times, Gen. John P. Abizaid has said that if we pull out our troops we can expect increases in sectarian violence in Iraq.

And I care why?

Is that it? Is that the underlying bullshit that no one has ever bothered to mention? Is this the point of the culture wars here in the U.S.? The way it's said, it's like it's a given: we in the U.S. should care whether or not Iraq erupts in civil war. We should care enough to put our lines on the line to stop civil war in Iraq.


That's why we're there. That's why we can't pull out.

So, let me just comment. On behalf of what I can only assume is the majority of Americans: I don't give a shit about whether or not the people of Iraq kill each other. Seriously. It wouldn't even be an after thought in my day if I heard that they were all lined up toe to toe ready to duke it out. Now, I know that some people support Israel and I guess I can respect that (though I don't really agree), but whether or not Iraq goes into civil war really will have no effect on Israel. Seriously. Or maybe some people think we're there to prevent further terrorist attacks. Fine. But I'm pretty sure the sectarian violence will occupy the terrorist's attention for awhile, and when its over, ahem... less terrorists.

So, now that Gen. John P. Abizaid's warning has finally revealed the misunderstanding under which our country has sufferred these last few years, how's about we just clear the air, admit that we couldn't give a shit about Iraq, pull out, and let them kill each other. Can I get bipartisan agreement on that.

An Interesting Conversation

One of the students in the back of the room shouts out, "what if we never have interesting conversations." The other women in the class, which is the entire class because it is a women's college, agree either vocally or through nods of their heads. They are vehement about this. One of these women, a girl from the streets who has made it into college on a scholarship based on her merit (I imagine) peers out from beneath her kerchief and hooded sweater to say, "shit, me and my friends only talk about sex and drugs." A women in the front of the room, a friend of the kerchiefed women makes a face like this is the Def Comedy Jam or Rikki Lake. I expect her to shout out, 'oh no you din't,' but she doesn't. The kerchiefed woman shouts back, "she know what I'm talking about." Hilarity ensues.

I do not believe that the kerchiefed women would appreciate being called the kerchiefed woman. Clearly, she is not trying to look like an old Russian grandmother, the kind one imagines inventing fairy tales for the brothers Grimm--the mean ones where children are decapitated and hot stones are fed to reluctant fathers--but that's exactly what she does look like: an old Russian grandmother. I try to imagine her with a college diploma, one day thanking me from whatever electric chair the future holds for her.

Some of the women in the back of the classroom are obviously outraged that they have to be in the same classroom as Kerchief, and I'm outraged as well. One writes at an eighth grade level and can't get a comma to work to save her life, she has no idea that there is a difference between the words "weather" and "whether," and in her previous essay she decided to talk about metal detectors, school councilors, the grade schools of her grandparents, the expectations of teachers, the laziness of students, her home town, her parents, home life, various psychological theories about raising children, etc.. It was a raucous page and a half. The essay was supposed to be three pages. One wonders why she couldn't have typed the thing in sixteen point font...like everyone else.

Kerchief can write. That's probably how she got the scholarship, I imagine.

I tell her that maybe she should do her paper on the legalizing of drugs.

The fact that she's doing the Arsinio "whoop" suggests immediately to me that she likes the idea. I say, "interviews! You need to ask a crack head what he or she thinks about legalizing drugs."

"I have to...," hesitancy, "ask a crack head."

No sense of humor in these people. Her friend in the front, mad that I've derailed the conversation before she can get her "swerve on"-esque comment in. Shouts out, "field work!"

Actually, she doesn't shout out "field work." That's something I'm saying now, trying to remember what dumb-assed thing she actually did say, but the effect is the same. I've asked them to do a homework assignment, they're talking about smoking pot. The rest of the class is sort of embarrassed, but mainly because they're upper crust morons, and not these poor schleps in here on a scholarship who only barely avoided getting pregnant at 16. Well, well, well. Don't think that I have any extra love for the people silently feeling above all this in that class, after all they agreed when Kerchief mentioned that she didn't have interesting conversations.

"What do you mean, you don't have interesting conversations?"

"We don't."

"We go to school, we don't want to talk about it."

The idea for the assignment is, by the way, simple. They are to write a research paper on anything they please as long as they're is an argument involved, and as long as they take a side in the argument. That shouldn't be too hard.

Of course, the whole thing is a sort of existentialist dilemma, right? I mean, with that much choice, how do you choose. The same is true here: if you attempt to sift through your experiences to find something of interest to you, it will prove elusive. Thus, I've built up a few questions to help center the process.

My theory is this: if you are angry about something, you will enjoy writing about it. Writing comes from passion. Thus, all that needs to be done is to remind the writer of a time when they were passionate about something...anything.

I ask, "when was the last time you heard someone say something that a lot of people agreed with and that you knew was wrong?"

But that's question three. That's a high level amount of interest or outrage. You have to believe that someone is disseminating false information. It follows question two which is, "what is one thing that you are good at that other people might like to know about?" Again, kind of high level....or higher at any rate. Question one is very simple: what was the last interesting conversation you had. Answer it for yourself right now, if you like. It should take you all of about a minute.

No one in the class has had an interesting conversation--maybe ever. A colleague of mine used to take these moments to become the dark English professor that every under grad English major remembers. He'd say, "You're playing stupid because you figure if you don't think too hard, you'll never have to realize that you're going to die one day, but let me tell you that this little act, it's too much. It says everything about the terror you're trying to avoid. You're not fooling anyone."

I'd give that speech. I made him repeat it when he told me about it just in case it would ever come in handy for me. So far, no luck.

This is not that situation for two reasons. First of all, the women in the class (or one of them, who knows which) has already complained to my boss's boss about my giving a huge lecture on the unacceptable mistakes in the class's grammar, sentence structure, writing style, etc.. They had sentences like: "When the dogs are popes barking in town, and that's why parents should raise children's test scores." Wait...no comma. These sentences would pepper essays--essays with main arguments like going to school is necessary for good grades.

One can only think of the thesis of Martin Luther for such unrivaled risk taking involving the written word.

The other reason, I don't give the speech is that it's a lie. These women are not avoiding some fear of their own mortality as they hide behind their masks of abject stupidity--they really are that stupid. I have no trouble at all believing that they've never had an interesting conversation. Earlier this semester, one of them asked me, "how do I have an opinion?" Ponder that question. Not, "how do I confirm my opinion," "how do I explore my opinion?": "how do I have an opinion."

In my dreams, I prime alarm clocks next to their ears and scream, "WAKE UP!" What other answer is there.

Dream deferred

Q tuned me in to Keith Olberman's commentary about John Kerry's joke, and while I think a thing like that is sadly old news in this state of things, it is very good. My problem here is always the same. Actually, it's a number of problems.

Let us begin by saying that this blog was intended to be a place where I discussed the various books I'd read. You see, I remember that Montaigne used to write on the last page of a book what he thought about it so that he could go back and review his notes, so to speak, and I thought, why not let the wonderful world of the internet do the job for me. This would have multiple possibilities because, if a future job prospect tried to find my blog, they would be met with an unending cycle of books that I'd read, and cowed by that proliferation, they would hire me immediately in an Ivy League tenure track position, which I would take unless it was Harvard because I f'ing hate Harvard (it's a long story--no, I didn't go there).

This was my point from the beginning, to write out...say...little essays concerning my thoughts on Beckett's Endgame, or Kafka's The Trial.

This would also, I'd hoped, elicit lively discussion concerning these texts from the literati of the United States until such time as my blog would become what Penny Arcade is for hard core video game players. Do you see what I'm getting at?

I would say, for instance, "Cavell's promise of sense for Endgame is premature as he suggests, rightly I think, that if we are sure of one thing with this arsenal of Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell, we are sure that they are a family, and then that must be what this work is about. Cavell's presumption are only slightly tempered, however, by questions of sexual identity. Is it not odd that this play seems completely peopled with men, and that the only female in the play dies halfway through? Surely, what is being suggested by all this talk of progenitors and the recitation of various fables is that the world inside this limited space is homo-social in nature. A society of men exploring the limits of manhood, and especially the relationship between father and son, which may be mirrored in friendship, love, and of course, the most confusing feature of the play, the interplay between Father and Son/God and Jesus/Testaments Old and New. Thus we are met with a cenobite's knowledge of holy scrit, mixed in with horrible sexual innuendo and we can't tell which is meant to be out of place."

...And yet, I have never written a single blog in this fashion. Have I? No. I think I came kind of close when I began analyzing Gravity's Rainbow's connection to the Tarot, but I stopped after two cards of the Upper Arcana, and then I was done.

The reason for this disillusionment isn't so hard to figure. Begin with the knowledge that such a coalescence of intellectual reserve takes some time to...coalescence. Until that time, I'm writing long drawn out essays on texts that few people read while citing various sociological and linguistic theories of people whom few know even exist. And even those people in the know are unlikely to read such diatribes. After all, one reads those kinds of essays from important authors and not from poor schmo grad students who really want to talk about Beckett with someone.

Who really would use that kind of blog? Plagiarists, I assume. And since I'm not looking to give my ideas out for free, I do not write that blog. I have three readers, let us remember, and I don't imagine any of them want to read my analysis of the Pentecost as it relates to the 49 of The Crying of Lot 49. There you have it.

So, what then, do I blog about? Sadly, I end up blogging about two things. First: my life. Mostly the outrageous moments when I notice interesting facts about the people from Massachusetts, and also reasons why every last one of them, young and old, should be punched. Just once, mind you. I'm not a violent man.

The second thing I blog about is politics which is something I find, strangely, uninteresting. I know what you're thinking, 'but that's what you write about.' Yeah, I know, but I don't really care. It angers me for the moment and comes to me from three news sources, not to mention my wife who also has her news sources and so its ample material to write about the silliness of our political system and its corresponding jack asses but I really don't fucking care at all.

Let me try that another way. I think that the people in power right now, and I'm speaking of the people who we see on the news all the time (in this case, it is the Republicans) are vile. That's what I care about. The fact that people like this exist--that they are supposedly educated and that, one would suppose, are supported by people who are equally as educated, and that despite any/all of this education, these people still live in a perpetual dream world of ridiculousness from which they will never emerge. My honest to God political view is that we should take any one who voted for Bush in the last election and deport them. They are unable to live up to the responsibility of educating themselves to such a degree that they can responsibly take part in a democracy. That is, honestly, what I believe.

Perhaps I go too far. That's fine. Take away their right to vote.

But, you may ask, doesn't that mean that we're not a democracy really any more...

First of all, no it doesn't. Believe me, you'd still have a two party system. We would have assurances, however, that the people who would voting in that system would have, through the process of elimination, the ability to detect bullshit.

Which brings me back to my original point. You see, part of the structure of my belief is that the reason people voted for George W. Bush was their complete inability to analyze anything. They are so out of touch with the simple processes of thinking that what they do is a kind of information tropism. Like plants that involuntarily turn towards the sun, these people involuntarily move towards anything that sounds like intelligent thought, but intelligent thought can be faked. That's the point of propaganda. One must have the ability to tell the difference between well structured argument and absolute bullshit, humbug, pipe dream, etc.. Well, where does one learn to analyze situations like that? Where does one hear stories and have to make the distinction between propaganda and actual cause for concern? Well, I'm studying to be a professor of literature, so that's where my loyalties lie.

It might also have been this blog, but it isn't. I just couldn't see enough light at the end of the tunnel to even start that ball rolling. There just aren't rewards offered for that kind of thinking anymore, and sure as can be, no one is likely to take part in such a bold experiment under the premise that it might only make them a better citizen and/or human being. They haven't the time; they must figure out how to program the ringtone on their cell phones lest they be alone with their god awful ignorance for a few minutes. People who understand that Bush is an idiot are rewarded with perturbation at having the buffoon as our president. People who reason that Mark Foley is a child molester must consider also a world wherein countless senators know about the sexual impropriety and are okay with it. In the end, Keith Olberman's commentary runs four pages long. It is not something that the obtuse Bush voter can follow. These are people who can't follow a simple thought out from its inception to its conclusion, such as: we attacked Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction; they don't have weapons of mass destruction, therefore....

And in the end, I like Oberman's analysis of the joke. He gave it a lot of thought, but he's wrong. The truth is that if you don't do well in school, if you don't learn to distinguish between the things that are truly important and the lies told to you by such sources as Rush Limbaugh, the terror index, and Fox news, well then... you really don't have much sense at all. I'm sorry that these people didn't learn such things. They were supposed to, but they didn't. Blame the American school system if you like, but let's face it, the school is only as good as its funding, and in a time of war funding goes elsewhere. This is efficient in a way, because less money to schools means less people able to question the decision to join the army.

Well...maybe if they'd read Beckett.