Dionysus Caught Reading

I didn’t spy Mayor Jerry Sanders in the audience Friday night at The Theatre Inc.’s ancient Greek twinning of Prometheus Bound and Cyclops. Would he have found it edifying?

This week, under the direction of Mr. Sanders, large city vehicles roved the beaches of San Diego, removing concrete fire pits and secreting them into an undisclosed storage location until some civic-minded (and deep-pocketed) person or group pays a Lindbergh-grade ransom—289k US dollars for 18 months cleaning and upkeep.

This is the latest development in an evolving littoral culture. A temporary alcohol ban on city beaches was made permanent by voters in November. The putative reasoning for the temporary ban: civic order. Now that the mob has grunted its approval, the rights of the few are permanently subordinated.

Cyclops is the only surviving satyr play. The satyrs are lusty, drunken followers of Dionysus and in this play they’re also cowards, though hardly more cowardly than mighty Odysseus, who tries, like any good general, to get someone else (in this case the satyrs) to fight the Cyclops for him. Friday night, this play began immediately after the first one ended, appending some jolliness and frivolity to the tragic meditation on torture, the anger of the Gods, and man’s unhappy fate—kind of the way you might go to the beach after a long day of soul-crushing work and go for a swim and then sip from your wineskin as the sun settles pacifically into the sky’s western hem.

But until now, if you couldn’t sip your wine, you could at least start yourself a fire when it got dark.

The tragic part of the program featured Prometheus, whose name means “forethought,” chained to a cliff in the Caucasus by Zeus, who wasn’t a fan of Prometheus’ decision to steal fire from Mount Olympus and give it to mankind. Prometheus also vouchsafed man the ability to plan and the creative arts such as writing, and for this he suffered greatly.

Amazingly, MJS also tried to close some of our libraries, but luckily the city council voted to keep them open temporarily. One of the books you might still find on a public shelf is Percy Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. The closet play Prometheus Unbound is Shelley’s attempt to close the gap between Aeschylus’s tragedy and what’s been lost in ensuing years (namely, the ending: only 1/3 of Aeschylus’s trilogy survives). His Jupiter (aka Zeus, the one who imprisoned and tortured Prometheus) understood well man’s cruel fate—that some gifts are burdens, and should be taken back. From on high, he intones:

Henceforth I am omnipotent.

All else has been subdued to me—alone

The soul of man, like unextinguished fire,

Yet burns towards Heavan with fierce reproach and doubt

And lamentation and reluctant prayer,

Hurling up insurrection, which might make

Our antique empire insecure, thought built

On eldest faith, and Hell’s coeval, fear.

 

Apocalyptic Occasion with a Curmudgeonly, Andy-Rooneyesque Beginning

Can you believe the newspaper?

Have a look at the last two graphs from a recent article in the business section detailing the long lines and general excitement associated with the release of the new Blackberry Storm:

Standing on line in San Francisco’s financial district, Fred Vassard, a systems administrator, said he owns both versions of iPhone but was dissatisfied with its phone capabilities. He wants Storm for work and personal use.

“It’s a touch-screen, so it has more real estate,” Vassard said. “The reviews were so-so, so I’m hoping I can find some positives in it. But the phone part will work better than iPhone.”

All around this gentleman, in surrounding articles, the daily litany marches on: frozen credit, foreclosures, layoffs, downsizing, debt deflation, recession. While the very sky falls, Mr. Vassard could join a clown troupe and juggle his PDA cellular phones, so many does he have. I’m not inclined to criticize him—in fact he may be heroic, an example of man’s ability to endure against seemingly insurmountable odds.

What a tableau – this man buying his 3^rd cell phone, apparently with no sense of irony whatsoever. I imagine his face as Sphinx-like, his voice even and matter-of-fact. His mention of “real estate” isn’t a conscious allusion—he’s just using the metaphor that best helps him make his point. His attitude is un- and anti-complex: “What do you want from me? All I can tell you is the truth as I see it.”

***

There’s a great character in Josef Skvorecky’s novel The Engineer of Human Souls called the green man. The green man served as a bombing raid lookout for the Reich, during which time he’d been blown out of his post several times, turned green (somehow), and witnessed all sorts of civilians’ bodies and houses destroyed. A man of many experiences, he’d also been subjected to tortures in boarding school (e.g. placed in a concrete room that slowly filled with water until he had to stand on tip toes and breathe through his nose for 12 hours), and forced to bury people alive as a gravedigger, then dig them up if it was suspected they had gnawed their way out of the casket (which they sometimes did, and then gnawed their way into other caskets, where they cannibalized the dead (or not yet dead), since, the green man noted, there was nothing else to eat down there).

The green man plays the role of scatological guru in the novel. The characters spend more and more time in the bathroom of a Nazi-controlled Czech Messerschmitt factory as the war progresses because the bosses become less interested in keeping the factory on schedule. Each time they return to the lavatory, there he is, describing some other horror he’d witnessed or endured: armies accidentally blowing themselves up, families obliterated at dinner time, pilots targeting birthday parties. The others scream at him in disbelief and call him names (often the names of animals—anaconda, buffalo, etc. Czech humor depends a good deal on zoology) but he just continues speaking. His trials rendered his face unable to take on any expression at all. His voice is without affect or modulation. And he’s green from head to foot.

The straight man infuriating those around him is the trademark of another Czech-lit character, Hasek’s Svejk, one of the really great and frighteningly relevant characters in 20th century literature, who humbly demonstrate that doing one’s duty in the midst of disaster is just silly enough to be quintessentially human.

***

But who has time for novels? What the Blackberry story compelled me to re-read was a very short story by the German writer Wolfgang Hildesheimer called “A World Ends.”

The story’s narrator briefly describes the background to his tale:

• gambling debts forced him to sell a bathtub in which a famous person had been murdered,
• the sale of this tub brought him in contact with the wealthy cultural elite, and
• he took to attending some functions, including an evening party which took place on the Marchesa Montetristo’s artificial island.

The main story concerns this party. The narrator encounters there all the expected stuffed shirtiness and self-absorbed patronizing pretense. He has several awkward conversations with the guests, who are eagerly anticipating the world premiere of two flute sonatas accompanied by the Marchesa herself. Alas, the party ends unexpectedly when the artificial island sinks into the sea! The narrator is the sole survivor, because he alone leaves before the end of the second sonata. Everyone else is too concerned with propriety and the mores of artistic society to save their own hides. The narrator tiptoes out, trying not to disturb those listening with rapt attention as puddles form on the floor. Herr von Perlhuln, one of the auditors, casts a “half-contemptuous, half-melancholy glance” in his direction.  Isn’t that Fred Vassard himself?

***

Yes, I can believe the newspaper, because I’ve been taught how to read it. It’s my green man, my Svejk, my Countess Marchesa. I yell; I laugh; I embrace. I sigh and quote out of context the last lines of one of Melville’s sad short stories: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”

 

Using the Broad Authority He’s Been Granted

Secretary Paulson, in written remarks delivered orally today, advocating a policy of “give away money first and ask questions later”:

“And to adequately reform our system, we must make sure we fully understand the nature of the problem which will not be possible until we are confident it is behind us.”

The implication in October, recall, was that “the market,” and life as we know it, would collapse if action wasn’t immediately taken. There was no time for deliberation because disaster was imminent.

If your small child, the analogy might go, was standing on the tracks in front of an oncoming train, absently nibbling her lower lip and oblivious to the danger at hand, would you call your spouse and discuss whether you had, as a parenting unit, set appropriate boundaries and sufficiently inculcated the dangers of standing in the way of moving vehicles, particularly those that can’t possibly swerve or stop in a timely fashion?

You’d do no such thing and waste no such time. Same for any child, right? Even ones you don’t personally know. You wouldn’t take time to speculate on how she got there; you’d move her to safety, then ask questions.

I submit that this is no child we’re saving, Mr. Paulson. It’s an already plummeting stock market, a prostitute masquerading as a maiden, a foundering economy, a boy who cries wolf, a overvalued credit-default-swap.  And there is no oncoming train. You would have all of us pile on the tracks in front of the train to save the child, and assess the mess when the smoke clears.

I understand I may be ignorant—perhaps more so than I even know. And my voice may be puny. Nevertheless, I hereby deny your statement. I do not accept it as necessary and proper. And I suspect I am not alone. I shall pursue those peaceful means I choose to express this to the wider world. One lonely citizen shaking his fist at a monument is not protected, in my view, by any first amendment. I don’t believe such a right is in your power, or anyone earthly else’s, to grant.

 

Christening a New Fallacy

If you’re a teacher of rhetoric, as I am, one of the skills you’d like your students to have is the ability to identify an argumentative fallacy so they can critique other arguments and also avoid fallacies in their own writing. There’s a standard list of fallacies you can use, and our culture seems to specialize in a few of them. It’s easy, for example, to show a youtube clip of Bill O’Reilly committing the ad hominem fallacy, or of the Shrub perpetrating a guilt by association fallacy (which he can do without evidence even of association). The consequences of such fallacies are dire—in some cases they lead to protracted, deadly, trillion dollar wars.

Others include begging the question, slippery slope, and hasty generalization. They all serve to divert the reader or listener’s attention away from the issue and make them focus on something else. Begging the question calls your attention to syntax; a slippery slope has you fearing what’s next; a hasty generalization lets you revel in the comfort of simple things.

In doing some tv-watching, strictly for research purposes, last night, I identified a new fallacy, and it seems to me the most pervasive one on cable TV news, but it rears its head regularly on NPR, talk radio, and even the New York Times.

I’d like to call it the donk-e-phant fallacy, in honor of the mascots for our two major political parties. As implied above, journalists commit this fallacy with frightening frequency by “reporting” an issue by: a) naming the issue b)explaining what the Republicans say about it and c) explaining what the Democrats say about it. b) and c) are sometimes reversed. The donk-e-phant fallacy precludes the idea that there might be some real investigating to do with respect to the issue and it also renders the journalist impotent—he or she can’t possibly point out that one group or the other is being disingenuous, deceptive, or is just plain wrong.

This would all be silly fun if the donk-e-phant fallacy didn’t lead to disastrous compromises such as the bailout, where both sides got what they wanted: increased spending combined with tax cuts. This policy stew only seems like compromise, and the fallacy helps it masquerade as such. Hopefully, it makes us sick enough to revisit some long-lasting problems.

Even though it’s against my very nature, I count myself among the hopefuls and quixotics who believe miscegenation has brought us a man who demands—deriving respect by commanding it—that we be better and neither support nor fall for the news outlets who perpetrate and perpetuate these fallacies.

 

A People’s History of Yoknapatawpha County – Part I

In Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America, Diana Kendall argues, among other things, that the poor and homeless are unfairly and incompletely represented in US media. She cites as evidence shows like ER and CSI (and other non-acronymatic shows such as Law and Order), where the homeless and poor are crazy wild-eyed folks in need of medical attention they won’t be able to pay for or decorative red-herrings for the intrepid modern-day Poirots, respectively. I myself can’t furnish enough examples of the media depicting the homeless or poor as actual people whose struggles and challenges matter to argue her point.

With all the televisual focus on hotel heiresses and talentless singers and earnest crime solvers intent on making the world safe for law-abiding white people, it’s easy to read statistics such as the following without flinching: 35 million Americans living in poverty in 2006 (poverty, officially, means making less than around $21k/year for a family of 4); 17% of children under 18 living in poverty—that’s about 1 in 6.

If you do spend time meditating on those figures, which, again, our culture encourages us not to do, I suspect you’d become disturbed. But even if you get beyond the lack of direct focus and patent frivolity of the media-tainment industry, there’s another layer of protection against thinking deeply about the poor: the blame game. From the comfort of your partisan couch, you can bitch about your chosen enemy: corporate power and unfair institutional biases on the one couch, maybe, and shiftlessness and the moral hazard of government handouts on the other.

This multi-layered, insulating sheath, along with the intrinsically inert mindset watching cultivates, precludes acts of the imagination. Maybe all these poor people result from a problem of policy, a lack of leadership, or their own deficiencies, but yes I do believe I think they’re the result of a lack of imagining.

Turn away, with me—especially if you’re reluctant to talk to and laugh and eat with the actual poor—because there exists an endlessly interesting, dynamic and variegated place where one can gain powerful access to penurious lives.

 

Can Obama channel Old Hickory?

“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves.”

Speaker – Andrew Jackson

Audience – Obvious

 

Teaching in America, Where Your Opinion Counts

Thesis (not a straw man, even if it seems so at first)

My students write several expository essays each semester and always ask, a few days before the first paper’s due, where would be a good place for them to put their opinions. I usually say it’d be a good idea to leave them right where they are, i.e. in their heads and off the page, because in this class I don’t care about their opinions, not one lick. This generates uncomfortable laughter and then combative questions as to how they’re supposed to make an argument or assess an argument without putting their opinions right there in the paper.

Displaying the steely fatalism most teachers learn to know too well, I pleasantly ask them to turn to the class notes they took on day #2 and read the definitions of claim (“an arguable assertion” – my department’s definition) and opinion (“a belief or conclusion held with confidence but not substantiated by proof” – The American Heritage Dictionary’s) and give examples of each.

They talk for a while.

Then I talk. I say again what I’ve already said: that in lay life, opinions matter because someone might care whether you believe, for example, that chocolate ice cream is delicious. But in here (motioning toward the floor of my own classroom) and out there (stabbing wildly toward the door to indicate the rest of campus), I say, the interest is in claims, not opinions. Claims we can discuss and argue about—that’s what we’re after. Opinions are unassailable and flit about unburdened by the obligations of argument. They’re insubstantial. Not worth our time. Save your opinions for your pitiful social networking blogs, I scowl, not quite old enough yet to play the cranky old professor, but trying.

Then I really let loose with a crankpot speech full of bluster and self-congratulation. Viz: Opinions are the nuclear weaponry of the uninformed and the uneducated and the furtive elephants, invisible only to the willfully blind, hidden in plain sight in our rhetoric and writing classroom: destructive, powerful, and all too real. Their mere existence can undermine all the pedagogy of peace time.

Gaining some momentum, I elect to widen my critique and roundly condemn basically everyone: The reasons that compel you students to put opinions in your papers are the same ones that compel many people to vote. You’re just banging away at your freedom button, which every American has installed somewhere in the area of his left breast. Having an opinion is liberating; it’s an affirmation of freedom. And we Americans love freedom. I myself, qua American, have a nice strong cup of freedom every chance I get; then I comment on whether that particular cup of freedom was, in my opinion, better or worse than the last one I had.

Then I figure I might as well finish up with a marriage of my clever metaphors: Democracy, is essentially mob rule, which ensures nuclear annihilation, sooner or later. This is why my classroom is an opinion-free autocracy—it’s safer for all involved, and no one gets drunk.

Antithesis (using a personal example)

I’m the proud owner of two famous (in certain circles) opinions that I’m happy to discuss with you now or at any other mutually convenient time. I believe these to be true but I can never prove them—nor do I have any desire to, because they’re already true. Here you go:

1. Tom Hanks is the worst actor of our, or any, generation.
   
2. Me and four of my college buddies could easily handle the women’s basketball NCAA national champion in a basketball game, indoors or out, half court or whole, under the lights or in plain view of the noon sun. None of us played basketball beyond high school, we’re all 6′ or shorter and we were not in fantastic physical condition when this was first proclaimed (in April 1997), nor are we now.
   

As for #1: Tom Hanks, pace the film academy and seemingly everyone else I’ve ever met, is a talentless hack. I wish him no harm, but folks should know the truth.

#2: People sometimes take special interest in that second claim, especially women, and I may even grant them, if I’m in a generous and idle-discussion-prone mood, that the “opinion” is at base sexist and sexist in an almost hostile and creepy way. But even so, I’d like to make clear here, that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I tend to get hostile and combative while defending these curious opinions (curious, by the way, doesn’t mean untrue). I pay close attention to the looks people give me while discussing them (it’s starting to sound as if I have a problem—and I do. I’m really daring people to disagree so I can affirm my own ability to disagree with them in a very undemocratic and irrational way, which is my prerogative, again, as an American, for whom more than just blood has been spilled defending my ability to act in this manner, even if it is irresponsible), and I notice the grandfatherly “you’ll come around,” the freaked out “Let’s change the subject,” and the solemn head nodding in somber agreement (full disclosure: this last is usually by one of my four buddies from college).

I’ve never written these opinions down on paper before. It feels good to affirm them in writing; it was fun to do.

But here I am going back and looking at them and reading them, and I’m starting to wonder. Are the “or any” and the “easily handle” going just a bit too far?

Wait a second…

I’ll just end this section right now.

Synthesis

More helpful advice to students, upon further consideration, when it comes to argumentative writing: Better to have opined and failed than never to have opined at all. For them, I mean this literally. This is good advice for everyone. At the very least, we will have a record of our quiddities.

 

National Garage Sale – Social Security, Bureaucrats, Other Valuable Merchandise Available

While most people believe that the $700 billion bailout actually represents a move toward the nationalization of banks and financial institutions, it actually is part of the grand privatization scheme of neo-cons and others that’s been in the works for many years.

Our president tried to let us do it the easy way. Remember a couple years ago when he travelled the country trying to sell us on the privatization of Social Security? (If it had worked, by the way, I’m not sure millions of 70-year-olds wouldn’t be storming the White House right now.) Thankfully, he failed, perhaps because he’d squandered too much political capital on the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

This—what we have now, and what’s coming—is the hard way. The government, deeply in debt, will have no choice but to sell the banks it bailed out, as well as other assets. Some private corporation will be perfectly willing to buy the shell-game that is Social Security and refashion its obligations and revenue streams in the capitalist mode. This will have us looking back fondly on the times when Bush was at least making it seem as if we had a choice.

 

A Vision

My face was three inches from his face, max. I couldn’t tell for sure on account of the darkness, it being night and we being lightless, an “oversight.” He was on his back; I on my side. He doesn’t get my puns—the light/oversight thing. I’d taught him the word breeze earlier, my euphemism for the frigid wind. He whispered it at intervals as the tent’s fly ruffled. Other sounds included the raspy murmur of leaves and pattering rain—but all this was kind of muffled by the fog.

The third story I created, needing nothing to create it but his ears, concerned a Dad and a little boy. The previous two had as well, but they were short—mere yarnlets compared to this one, which, with each new word, gained synechdochal energy and increasing contemporary relevance.

Was he listening or asleep? I didn’t know for sure.

A dad and a little boy rode to town in a pickup truck, and this was a nostalgic story where town and home were different, clearly delineated, almost as if by the passing of tens of years. The highways widened the further they got from home. The traffic increased, the confusing pace of the world encroached ever more closely, shrouding lives in a sort of urban fog.

And the theme of seeing: the boy seeing and noting the sullen drivers of other cars, their lack of interest in him, their business. Trucks? Of course trucks. All stripe of trucks. The boy looked at his father as he drove and noticed that he was not actually seeing but thinking—what mommy would call plotting.

The dad let the little boy press the elevator’s buttons and the boy said “bank” to himself, practicing. “The bank. Not like a cutbank. A money bank bank.” They couldn’t see; then they could see again. The boy grasped his dad’s hand and they walked. He heard the voice first and saw the shoes. The voice of his uncle and the shoes of someone else. Then, the voice stood up and it was his uncle, and his uncle’s shoes, and the boy’s father shook hands across the desk, holding his hat in his left hand, the one that hurt, all the while.

His uncle asked how was his mommy and the boy said fine.

No country man walks into a bank not expecting to walk out with every hair on his head mortgaged to the hilt, even if it is his own brother who’s president.

They started talking by not talking. And outside, far below, a city bustled.

“Our mommy would wear people out bragging on her son’s corner office, if she was around,” the dad said.

“Shoot,” the other said. Seems like he should take a toothpick out of his mouth for punctuation. Yeah, let’s say he does that. And then he said, “Mommy ain’t never wore nobody out but herself.”

You awake?

A reasonable silence. His mouth breathing inches from mine; I can hear it and even feel it.

“Pa, on t’other hand, had no need for bankers. If he’d a gone to school, he’d have liked Emerson: The world is in a state of bankruptcy; the world owes the world more than the world can pay.”

“Our Pa didn’t need no learning from school, and verily school didn’t need no learning off him.”

Then a voice ushers me back, for I’d forgotten about a character, and he noticed.

“Little boy?” he asked, not more than 3 inches from my face. The little boy looked out the bank’s window while his daddy and uncle talked, and while I described what he could see below, we fell asleep together.

 

Taxpayers Rejoice

The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, signed by none other than rascally leprechaun Bill Clinton himself, provided some curious incentives, as it turned out, that we might do well to remember. Coupled with the Balanced Budget Act, TRA of 1997 arguably helped to create the much heralded—and in many ways miraculous—federal budget surpluses starting in 2000. The surpluses quickly vanished under the leadership of a fiscal conservative.

But one of the provisions of the act was that profits on the sales of primary residences would be tax free up to $250,000 for single persons and $500,000 for couples filing jointly. You’d have to look long and hard for other ways to make half a million taxless dollars.

Surely, the promise of loot encouraged homeowners to take advantage of this. Along with the mortgage income tax credit and cheap money, the pot of gold at the end of every house sale rainbow begot more buying and selling. Which helped beget, well…this, didn’t it?

Interestingly enough, owning a house might not even be that great an investment, and those now waiting for pots of taxless gold will most likely wait some time.

One wonders what the intention was for a tax cut that encouraged people to move out of their houses.  Probably churn.  What a noisy spectacle it was: musical chairs with “cozy” condos, “quaint” Craftsmans, and “darling” Colonials.  Unfortunately, the music has stopped.