Monthly Archives: November 2013

It is difficult not to write satire

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Media and Washington, part I

A short reminiscence: soon after first moving to the D.C. area, in 1982-83, I happened to read a piece in the Style section of the Washington Post that puzzles me to this day. I can’t remember who wrote it–just as well–but a key line was  something about being “at a [Washington-area] dinner party and finding that you’re sitting next to an English professor.” Being new to the region, and heavily under the influence of All the President’s Men and books about journalism by authors such as David Halberstam, I read the Post appreciatively. I was also a recent English professor myself, relocated to do research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I was a reader. (I still have my Folger reader’s card but now do research mainly at the Library of Congress, for a book I am writing.)

Years later, I still do not see what’s wrong with being seated next to an English professor. Not that there isn’t the occasional prof rudeness, of course. At an academic dinner party years ago, after winning an essay contest and delivering a talk to an audience of psychoanalysts, I was seated next to a professor who refrained from speaking to me throughout dinner.

Oedipus and Apollonius

He was prominent, and senior, and I was a very non-senior and non-prominent member of the extreme opposite sex, as Dave Barry once put it; those were the operative factors, so far as I know, since I had not wronged the man or offered provocation. Other people in the party, including his wife, compensated for him, without saying anything overt, and anyway that kind of thing does not crush me. Unlike the Bushes, my family actually was from Texas, and doing that stuff to me is like the old joke about “Have you got the wrong vampire.” Professor Deborah Tannen might find it an example of electric-blanket conversation (or non-conversation). Still, for my money, that’s the kind of English professor you’d rather not be seated next to, and admittedly it is ironic when conservatives, status-ridden individuals, and others of purported refinement and blahblahblah engage in the kind of conduct satirized by the greatest writers in the traditional literary canon–Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Bronte–but that’s an aside. The thrust of the Style piece, whoever wrote it, was not to satirize solipsistic arrogance, snobbishness, and rudeness but to imply that there’s nobody more devoid of status than an English prof. (Sad to say, some English professors of the old school probably felt the same way about journalists.)

On the 'electric blanket'

Water under the bridge by now, of course–except that the Style attitude pretty much reflected that of the national political press, going far to explain why the national political press missed every significant national story from before the Iraq invasion to after the mortgage-derivatives debacle. At the moment, the nyah-nyah-nyah crowd is hot on the web site for the Affordable Care Act, bypassing the development that the U.S. is at last on the threshold of entering the twenty-first century. More on that later. For now, suffice it to say that some self-conceived intellectuals are in unholy alliance with those who greet every bit of bad news about the president with ugly smiles. I have seen those smiles elsewhere–not only in the South–in contexts unrelated to health insurance.

Some of this is temporary. As said, more later.

Back to the topic of lizard-brain behavior. I was not brought up to it, nor were my close friends. When it crops out intensely in a group of well-educated people, or nominally well-educated people, it does seem to be a sign of highly insecure times for the world of letters.

Academic job market

There is a peculiar sting in our present situation–by ‘our’ I mean the present situation of humanity, including Americans. All our lives, most of us have been told of an overlap between education and employment. The lesson is still being taught–do well in school, and you will do well in life. I love education. Doing well in school means learning to appreciate the inestimable privilege of reading and writing. It boosts the immune system. It means enjoying a work and play experience, an opportunity, and a window onto a larger world that millions of people around the globe can hardly dream of. Every reliable statistic also shows a correlation between education and income, between education and employment, and between education and financial stability–up to a point. The rub comes when that point is reached, and I am not referring either to the fact that most billionaires and millionaires lack post-professional degrees, or to the fact that most PhDs are not millionaires. I refer to the fact that education, even good education, is not a guarantee of ‘success’. Many well-educated people have to struggle daily, or at least yearly, to stay in the middle class. We have seen the phenomenon in college teaching and in writing for years (decades), particularly in the humanities; we also see it in more tech-oriented occupations that involve knowledge–particularly the kinds of knowledge found in outsource destinations in India. (Simply eschewing the humanities is a palliative, not a cure.)

One reason why education sometimes seems to succeed best in the classroom is that in the classroom there is an operative principle of fairness. All people are fallible, including teachers, but in the classroom the operative model is that students (people) get their fair share of time and attention, they get an equitable share of resources including books, and at least according to theory, they get the grade they earn. In the classroom model, furthermore, everyone gets to hear the rules, including the guidelines on how to do the work and thus how to earn the grade. You might call it training and supervision–the very activities, ironically, not required of ‘management’ in Wall-Street-oriented corporate rewards or reinforcement. (N.b. the classroom model of fairness, i.e. getting the grade you earn in the class, is exactly the model under assault by the corporate product of externally imposed standardized testing and test-prepping.)

No wonder a certain breed of politico eagerly disparages the ‘nanny party’. The good shepherd is the figure who keeps some individuals from imposing on others.

 

Corporate culture

Looking at the bigger picture from another perspective, the reason the fairness model is used in the classroom is that it works. It conduces to learning, keeps students (people) alive and well, and keeps them engaged. So much the worse when well-educated people, or nominally educated people, jettison it when they leave the classroom or when they graduate from college or graduate school. Lizard-brain behavior inside the world of learning does the world of learning no good.

Lizard brain model

On a related topic, consider the study below re-posted by Daily Kos:

  • “Demographics: National Journal has compiled some interesting data on how intensely clustered well-educated people are becoming. In 1970, 24.6 percent of the nation’s people with bachelor’s degrees were clustered in 20 major metropolitan areas… but in 2010, 43.4 percent of the nation’s people with bachelor’s degrees were clustered in those same 20 major metropolitan areas.

That has large economic implications (as the trend toward “two Americas” continues apace), but also political ones, with even further clustering of likely Democratic voters into fewer places (which is fine from the presidential level, but bad when thinking about Congress). The accompanying interactive graphic shows clearly the link between increasing share of college-educated people and overall local economic health… and, though the graph doesn’t specifically address it, also a pretty clear relationship with which areas are trending toward and away from the Democrats. (David Jarman)”

To the couple of lines of thought expressed here, that the study has economic and political implications, add a third: there are too few jobs for educated people, any more, outside the 20 major metropolitan areas. This simplification contains more than a grain of truth. Outside major metropolitan areas, good jobs for educated people have shrunk. Teachers, college teachers, attorneys–and a glut of attorneys on the market has already forced law school enrollment down–physicians and dentists, yes; but do journalists or chemists, engineers and architects, make a living working full-time at their occupation in small towns or small cities? When they do make a living, working full-time in their chosen field, do they also have the option of another job in the same town, should they need to find one?

Not new, but recommended: As written elsewhere, one illuminating book on the enormous changes in the U.S. since 1973 is Wallace Peterson’s Silent Depression. Its title makes it sound like a psychology tome, but it’s not; the subtitle is Twenty-Five Years of Wage Squeeze and Middle-Class Decline. (Note that Mr. Peterson also knows how to hyphenate correctly.) It reads like an autobiography for college graduates from 1968 through 1988.

Veterans Day, 2013

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Veterans Day, 2013

 

It would feel strange to wish someone “Happy Veterans Day.” Not that I don’t think of the veterans I know best on Veterans Day, but I think of them on many other days. My father was in the Army for almost five years, in World War II; his older brother was in the Navy; his younger brother was in the Air Force, or rather the Army Air Corps (17th Bomb Group, 34th Squadron). Land, sea, air. My grandparents were exceptionally lucky: all their sons and sons-in-law served in World War II, and all came back safe, setting aside the bout of malaria my father contracted in a New Guinea jungle. He came home weighing 130 pounds, at almost six feet, but he and my uncles were not critically wounded.

New Guinea

Funny the little misconceptions we can grow up with. For years, I thought my late father had dashed out to enlist after Pearl Harbor, as I said to friends, and wrote. Actually he dashed out to enlist before Pearl Harbor. His East Texas family followed the news, followed world events as well as they could, and had a strong interest in history. His parents later owned and operated a little newspaper in their tiny hometown. My father himself owned one for a year–something I did not realize until much later, since I was four years old at the time. I do remember my mother saying, maybe literally, that his linotype operator made more than he did. He believed in paying employees.

 

FDR by radio

In any case, the family followed the news on the radio, in newspapers, and in the community, in the era of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the New Deal. They were civic-minded;  my dad’s pet cat, when he was growing up, was named Enum, as in the old voter rolls (enum.). They were pretty well aware, or as aware as reporting permitted, of events stirring in Europe.

Britain and France formally declared war on Germany September 3, 1939–the day my father turned seventeen. His is not one of those stories about a kid falsifying his age in order to enlist, like fellow Texan Audie Murphy, but he surely felt that his mission was in the cards, and having been double-promoted, he graduated from high school early, going on to a term or two of college before joining up, once he was legal.* He was put into Third Radio Intelligence Company, U.S. Army Signal Corps.

The company was pretty new at the time. Major J. S. Harley, author of Reading the Enemy’s Mail, says that

“In October 1939 the Third Radio Intelligence Company, one of the first tactically oriented radio intelligence units, was activated at Fort Monmouth. A cadre of eleven men, plus one recruit and an officer, formed the nucleus of the company. By November the company reached full strength and began an intensive four week training program. The problems the unit faced in training would beset new units throughout the war.”

A year later, by the time my father joined, the presumably full-strength unit was at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. My parents’ old papers contain printed menus for a special Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas dinner celebrated by the company at Fort Sam Houston, bound with embossed covers, tied cords, and a frontispiece-type tissue over the menu page. My father’s name is on the guest list for Christmas dinner in 1940, between Jack J. Bridwell and Darrell J. Cagle, under Oliver L. Blumberg and above Leon C. Calley, with several other Johns and Jacks. His name is not on the list for Thanksgiving that year (November 21); he may have entered the company after the menu went to print. Thanksgiving dinner began with shrimp cocktail and oyster stew and went on to turkey and ham, followed by fruit cake, pies, punch, ice cream, fruit, and cigarettes (included on the menu). Christmas dinner was less extensive, though it again began with oyster stew and ended with cigarettes. Those may have been the best meals they ate for five years, those who survived the next five years. The menus themselves were probably the dressiest documents owned by most of the young guys in the company, aside from their recent high school diplomas.

 

Nazi movement

Beyond any doubt, John W. Burns joined the army to fight fascism. Although he did not talk about bloody war experiences to his children, his views on fascism and Nazi Germany were abundantly clear. However, the anecdotes he shared with immediate family, in front of the children, were the non-grisly experiences. There was the time on a stop somewhere in Europe when the troops were privileged to hear a great opera singer. As my father told it, the story was that the troops had been promised entertainment, and when the singer appeared–an older woman, not glamorous, not a pin-up girl–there was some disappointment, maybe a little cat-calling and sarcastic wolf-whistling. But when she opened her mouth, as my father put it, the most ignorant guy in the place knew that this was the greatest voice he had ever heard, and when she finished, they gave her a standing ovation.

The Susan Boyle experience, sixty years earlier.

Then there was the time some of the guys, by that time in the Pacific and on shore in Sydney or another Australian city, decided to go horseback riding. Where the horses came from I do not know, but the short story is that the horse my father got on–with his scant riding experience, drawn from farmland in East Texas, not a ranch in West Texas–turned out to be a retired steeplechaser. So the horse galloped off, jumping fences and ditches, careening down the streets, and some local called out, British-style, “Stop that animal!” with my father thinking something along the lines of I wish I could.

I also remember my father saying he learned to play chess in the army. As he put it, a Jewish guy from New York, in his unit, noticed that he was smart, and ‘made him’ learn to play chess so he would have somebody to play with. (Spread the pronouns around, divide them up, and distribute them equitably.) He was pretty good, especially for someone who did not play regularly (good enough so that when he happened to walk through the living room where my child and I were playing chess, years ago, he quickly gave my son enough tips to beat me).

Only at the time of the funeral, and from his brothers, did I hear the other anecdotes.

As the chances of war went, my father was not sent to Germany; he was sent to the Far East (this is the Army). One stint was in the Philippines, on which his perspective was that the Filipinos loved American soldiers, who would give them things–a penny, a cigarette, a stick of gum–but detested the British, who would try to force them to shine their shoes or do odd jobs, in a final reductio ad absurdum of waning colonialism. The view may have been a bit idealistic, but setting aside the natural chauvinism, he appreciated the Filipinos’ desire for independence and their trust in America.

Philippines today

There was the stop-over in Australia en route, including the horse outing. He spent long months in New Guinea, with a lot of time spent by the troops wondering when they would get to go home, and whether they would get medals, or promotions, or pay hikes, as they heard other troops did. At some point the troops received a big crate of books, sent by kind souls back home, and my father later said with pardonable hyperbole that he read every great book ever written, in six months, in the army. He mentioned specifically Huck Finn, and Dostoevsky’s passage about how even a man stranded alone on a narrow mountain ledge, in miserable conditions, would cling to life. (The passage may have struck a chord.) There was still enough to do, and to witness. One day–according to my uncle–my father was walking through the jungle, by himself, and rather suddenly walked out into a clearing. At the same moment, a Japanese soldier entered the clearing from another direction. The Japanese soldier gave a single horrified look at the young American, pulled out a grenade, and blew himself up with it.

I do not know exactly which year the incident occurred. My impression is that it was close to the end of the war. I do know that it was not dinner-table conversation. My father may have told his parents, after he got home, and certainly told his brothers, but neither he nor anyone else dwelt on it aloud.

 

In memoriam: John Wilson Burns (September 3, 1939 – July 7, 1997)

*Added Nov. 12:

His Honorable Discharge paper shows “date of enlistment” to be 5 Sep. 1940, two days after his eighteenth birthday.

“Decorations and citations”: Asiatic Pacific with Bronze Star; Distinguished Unit Badge.