From the Empirical Archives: My Thoughts Exactly

My Thoughts Exactly

Jennifer Hanno

Adirondack's Rainbow Falls, Au Sable, NY PHOTO: Florin Chelaru

Originally published in the September 2012 issue of Empirical

Twelve. That was my year of living sarcastically. I had had my suspicions all along, but recent events had just proven beyond a doubt that it was not just wealth that had been distributed unevenly in this world. What follows is a list of the top ten reasons why being twelve was a less than fulfilling experience:

1. I was turning out to be nothing like my sister. Beautiful and fun, she resembled a dark-haired Marcia Brady.
2. I was one of those girls who “developed early.” Let’s just say my cup runneth over. I believe I may have passed right by the A and B cup stage and became the only C cup in the 7th grade. I remember sobbing to my mother, insisting that “boys don’t like girls with big breasts.” I was not comforted by her suggestion that I just wait and see about that.
3. Beth Conandario loomed always before me, a stark reminder of all that I was not. Apparently, Beth never got the memo that stated no one should look good in 7th grade. Her perfect hair and athletic build mocked me daily. I was still harboring bitter resentment over the fact that she got the role of the Virgin Mary in our 3rd grade Christmas Pageant. I was a sheep with a bad attitude who sat there hating her. Yes, I hated the Virgin Mary.
4. My baby sister, once so cute and angelic, was developing into quite a handful. Unfortunately, any trouble Maura got herself into was somehow blamed on what was considered my inadequate supervision. Remember those inflatable balls with a handle, designed for kids to bounce on? Well, she thought it would be a fine idea to ride it down the stairs. In her mind, I am sure it was going to happen very differently than it did. She was a testament to the belief that it was better to be cute than clever.
5. My father was laid off again. His daytime presence did not concern me, although we could hear the tense arguments that took place behind their closed bedroom door. I was more concerned with lunch. School lunches cost only fifty cents, but my frugal mother packed our lunches every day. I stared with envy at my friends who bought the school lunch or brought lunches filled with processed food we could not afford. Grumbling, I would take out the sandwich and cookies homemade by my mother with loving care and yearn bitterly for a Ho Ho. 
6. Humiliation awaited me around every corner. When a well-meaning neighbor brought over some hand-me down clothes, I discovered a pair of purple, wide wale corduroy bell-bottom hipsters. I don’t want to brag, but I looked pretty good in them. I swiveled around the house, then decided to go for a spin on my bike … you know, the banana seat bike with the high handlebars and flower-laden basket? … Unfortunately, bell bottoms and bikes are not a good combination. My pant leg got sucked so far into the bike chain that I had to limp home, the bike still attached to my leg, both my beloved pants and my dignity in shreds.
7. I had recently realized that the man I loved was married. A few years before, my best friend and I had developed a pact. She would marry Starsky and I would marry Hutch in a double wedding ceremony to which we would invite Beth Conandario. Of course, Starsky was the more overtly sexy one of the crime fighting duo, but I seemed to sense even at that age the merits of the number two slot. I like to think I was drawn to his sensitivity; I was one of only about twenty people who bought his album, featuring his poignant song, “Don’t Give Up on Us.” I thought he was sending me a secret message. But alas, the twotimer was married. This was a pattern to repeat itself with others: Sean Cassidy, Bo Duke from the Dukes of Hazard … a bunch of users, all of them. 
8. I decided to try sports. I am still convinced it might have been a success had it not been for Aunt Roberta. She was the embarrassing family member assigned to take me to my games. An over-protective woman, her fear of being mugged was exceeded only by her fear of melanoma. The temperature was 85 degrees, and she would arrive dressed head to toe in a white, long sleeve shirt buttoned to the cuffs and secured tightly around her neck. Then she would open up her trunk which was filled with sun hats, select the most obnoxious one for herself, and then insist that I, too, should choose a sombrero. Though she did concede that I could not wear one on the soccer field, she felt it was perfectly appropriate to wear one while I was waiting on the bench.
9. I seemed to be on the verge of pretty, but could never quite get there. My features were coming into their own, but my hair was determined to overpower them. Even in an age when big hair was in, mine was too big. Contact lenses and anti-frizz serum and better bras were in my future, but I did not know that then. And finally, the last reason….
10. We were moving. My father had been contacted by an old friend and was offered a job. As a result, our family was heading to a small town in the Adirondacks. I would leave behind my best friend, Kelly, the home where I had spent my childhood, my grandparents, and even sombrero-loving Aunt Roberta. It filled me with anxiety, but also, a little bit of excitement. I was excited for a new start. Because, you see, where we were going … no one knew of that embarrassing bike/bellbottom incident.

So, there was hope.

PHOTO: Allen MacGregor

*

You know hope can lead you down some pretty strange roads. Our journey to our new home in Northern New York occurred during the famous Blizzard of ’77. We crawled through winding roads, blinded by white, our fates in the hands of a pissed-off Mother Nature. My younger sister traveled with my mother and father while my older sister and I followed behind in our other car. I imagined my mother in the car ahead glancing nervously in the rearview mirror, searching through the whiteness for our headlights while my little sister continued a never ending chorus of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

Chrissy seemed oblivious to the lack of visibility. Relaxed and beautiful as ever in her torn jeans, she kept one hand on the wheel while she switched through endless radio stations. Now, I am a planner, and since this was a new start for me, I felt it important to begin on the right step, so to speak. More than anything, I wanted to be popular. Boys were a mystery to me, but I wanted one. Or maybe I just wanted to be wanted by one. Of course, boys were always falling all over Chrissy, though she returned their attention with cool indifference. She was indifferent to me as well, but we were trapped in a car together and she was a captive audience. I really needed her advice.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, shoot.”

Now that she had agreed to enter into a conversation with me, I felt a little panic. I cleared my throat.

“Well, I was wondering how to get a boy to notice me.”

She blinked in surprise. “You’re only twelve.”

I huffed at the implication that twelve-year olds were only children. I wear a bigger bra size than you, I thought, and turned to stare angrily out the window.

“Look, Bobbi, I am just not sure I can be that much help. When you get a little older, I am sure the boys will be all over you.”

“I am almost a teenager!” I protested.

“Don’t worry about it!”

“Easy for you to say … Boys always like you.”

We rode in silence for a few miles, then I ventured into dangerous territory.

“Why didn’t you want to go out with Tommy Clark?” Tommy was the most popular boy at Lime Rock High and he was crazy about her. One time, he brought her flowers to school and she hid them in the trunk of her car.

She laughed a little and just said, “Not my type.”

I couldn’t understand her. If I looked like her, I’d be keeping a list of potential guys and just work my way through the alphabet.

“I wonder if things will be different there….” I wondered out loud.

“I hope so,” she whispered as we followed our parents’ headlights and our destiny into the unknowable sea of white.

*

Well, things were different in some ways, but the same in others. My enrollment into Lowville’s Junior High caused an initial stir in the social scene, but I was neither besieged by attention nor offers of friendship. Chrissy, on the other hand, was admired by the girls and sought after by the boys. No change there.

My dad was in a better mood now that he was back at work and was determined that our family should be friends with the family of the man who had saved us, Tony Mancuso. By spring, he had made some headway. They had three children, as well, and they were the same ages as us. They had a five-year-old little girl for Maura and a sixteen-year-old girl for Chrissy. Unfortunately, my counterpart was a skinny, bespectacled redhead named Andy. He quickly became someone I tried to avoid.

“Hey, baby,” he said one evening as we were getting ready for a barbeque.

“I’m not your baby,” I said.

“Not yet. But you will be.”

He gave me a wink that made me shudder.

PHOTO: Gillaume Paumier

When we sat down to eat, I tried to wedge myself between Chrissy and her new friend Lisa, but Chrissy would have none of it. Andy quickly filled the empty spot on my left and I feigned intense fascination with my potato salad.

“That’s just the problem,” Mr. Mancuso was saying. “I’m telling you, it’s unnatural.”

“I totally agree,” my dad said with more enthusiasm than I was used to seeing from him. “There is a reason why it takes a male and a female to reproduce.”

That got my attention and I tried to follow the conversation. Beside me, Chrissy’s face was red with embarrassment and I assumed our parents were humiliating her again. Not wanting to reveal my ignorance, I did not ask any questions, but tried to follow the conversation.

Mr. Mancuso sneered in disgust. “Right here in our very school. And a teacher, no less. Don’t they screen these teachers these days? Who knows what kind of things he might have taught our kids? I tell you, if one of my kids turns gay, I am suing that school….”

Gay? I was not familiar with that term, and I glanced with confusion at Chrissy, then at Alex. My mother was yelling at my dad with her eyes, telling him to be careful what he said in front of the children. This only fed the flame of my curiosity more.

“What’s gay?” I whispered to Chrissy, but she shook her head tensely.

I turned to Alex. “Do you know what they are talking about?”

“Homos,” he said as he shoved almost an entire hamburger into his mouth.

“What’s that?”

He grinned the grin of a boy who knows more than a girl. His chest puffed out with the beginnings of testosterone. “It’s when a man and a man … you know.”

I didn’t. I sat there looking stupidly at him.

“Instead of a man and a woman … it’s a man and a man.”

My eyes grew wide in shock. We had only recently seen “the movie” and had the sex talk in 6th grade. They had not mentioned this little piece of news. I was still puzzling over the anatomy of conventional mating and now this.

“There was a teacher in the high school that was gay, but they found out about it and got rid of him,” Andy continued in explanation.

The mothers had succeeded in turning the conversation into a different direction, but I was lost in the knowledge that this type of thing existed. My fascination with this was temporary, though. It didn’t affect me; as far as I could tell, these people existed far from my world. I gathered I should avoid them, and I added them to the list. Right after Andy.

Later that night, Chrissy and I crossed paths in the bathroom. She was taking a bath and I had to brush my teeth, so she conceded I could enter. She had the curtain drawn and I could only see her tanned, slender leg hanging over the side, her perfect toe nails made even more perfect by baby pink nail polish.

“So, it looks like you have quite a fan in Andy,” she teased.

I groaned. “I can’t stand him.”

“Well, you said you wanted a boy to like you….”

“Not a boy like him.” No, I had my heart set on Jeremy Weaver, who sat next to me in math class. He reminded me of a young Bay City Roller and I would know, since I followed the progress of my favorite band through my faithful subscription to Tiger Beat magazine. Jeremy had long, sandy hair and doodled guitars on his unfinished math homework. Clearly, he was a musician, an artist who had no use for the trappings of the public school system. We’d never really spoken, but I felt a connection and I had a plan. By giving him all the answers, I could establish a relationship with him. Hey, it was a start. I just had to get up the nerve to say something to him. Until then, I spoke to him with my eyes.

“Well, Andy sure likes you.”

Chrissy had climbed out of the tub and emerged from behind the curtain with a towel wrapped around her. She was so perfectly beautiful, it made me sad. I would never be like that. I was pretty sure I could do better than Andy, though, and I told her this.

“Don’t be too hard on him, Bobbie. Sometimes you can’t help who you like.” She sat on the edge of the tub and inspected her fingernails. Something in the way she said it made me take notice.

“Do you like someone?” I asked her.

She gave me a shy smile and I knew she did.

Excited, I sat next to her.

“Who is it? Tell me!” I begged.

“Shhh,” she hissed, then she looked friendly again. “I don’t want anyone to know because it is no one mom and dad would approve of.”

Maybe he was a bad boy? A rebel without a cause? Of course he was. He probably smoked and wore a leather jacket. My jealousy of her surged, and I was desperate to learn more.

But though she seemed willing to talk about her feelings, she would not tell me a name. Regardless, I was encouraged by her confidence in me and went to bed dreaming of romantic entanglements and star-crossed lovers.

It was the first of many conversations we would have as we became less like strangers and more like friends. She was so happy; it made me yearn for what she had. But as she seemed to blossom with even more natural beauty, I was going the other way. Dominating my days was a desperate battle with acne, and I was not winning.

PHOTO: Wonderlane

Things were so much more complicated now that I was no longer a kid. I ruminated over the comforting simplicity of childhood as I watched Maura awkwardly climb the cherry tree in our backyard, encumbered by a large box. It took me a few minutes to understand what she was up to. When the neighborhood chihuahua sniffed his way to a spot underneath the tree, I saw her plan. Maura had set up a trap for him. Once he was in position, she deftly dropped the box on the poor dog and swung gleefully down from the tree.

I strolled over.

“I caught him!” she shouted with joy.

We lay down on the grass on our bellies and lifted the edge of the box slightly to examine her quarry. It took our eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark interior of the box, but soon we were able to make out his trembling form. There he was, his huge chihuahua eyes wide with terror and all eight pounds of him shaking like Aunt Roberta when she was off her “medication.” My heart sunk; I had thought it would be funny.

“He looks scared,” Maura said softly.

“What did you expect?” I asked. “He was walking along and a box dropped on his head. You’re lucky he didn’t have a heart attack.”

Maura looked remorseful as she raised the box further and we watched the dog streak across our lawn. It should have been a lesson for me about my own attempts at entrapment, but I could see no connection at the time. I would have dropped a box on Jeremy if I could have found one big enough.

Sometimes, Chrissy would help me tame my wild hair or pick out outfits for me, but I made no progress in my quest to get him to like me. After a few weeks, Chrissy gently suggested that maybe he wasn’t the one for me.

Oh, no, he was the one for me, alright. I redoubled my efforts.

The days ran into one another until summer vacation glimmered just around the corner. While I tried to explain to Maura why you do not put kittens in the Easy Bake oven, my mother was waging a campaign to get Chrissy to go to the prom, and was bitterly disappointed in her steadfast refusal. On prom night, I was on the verge of sleep when I sensed Chrissy moving around. She was getting dressed.

“Where are you going?” I murmured.

“Shh. Go back to sleep. I have to meet somebody.” She had arranged her bedding to look like she was buried under her covers. Through sleepy eyes, I watched her sneak stealthily out the door and cursed my dull existence. I fell asleep wondering if my life would ever start.

It seemed only moments later when I awoke to the sounds of my father’s anger. I sat upright and feared the worst. Chrissy had been discovered, her hidden love exposed. I was more excited than concerned. After all, books and movies had reinforced to me that star-crossed lovers always face opposition from the parents, but you can’t stop love.

PHOTO: Mike Baird, flickr.bairdphotos.com

Dad’s anger was excessive though. Words we were never supposed to hear were being tossed around without regard to my tender ears. Eventually, Chrissy came into our bedroom, sobs wracking her slender frame.

“Chrissy?”

“Go back to sleep, Bobbie,” she whispered.

“I can’t. Did he find out?” She didn’t answer, so I continued. “It’s ok. He’ll understand, eventually. Remember, he told us that Grandpa didn’t like him for a long time….”

Chrissy let out a half sob, half laugh and sat down beside me on the bed.

“You don’t understand,” she told me.

“Well, then tell me. It can’t be that bad. If you love him, you will be together. He’s probably just some boy that…”

“Bobbie,” she interrupted.

I waited.

“It’s not a boy.”

I blinked in confusion, wondering if I was still asleep. What did she mean? All this time, she had been telling me she was in love and … I froze and looked at her.

“It’s Lisa.”

I felt my body tense in fear. This was not possible. Andy hadn’t said it happened with girls, too. And my sister? She was so beautiful, she could have any boy she wanted. No, it couldn’t be that.

“I love her,” Chrissy wiped more tears from her eyes. “How could you ever understand? It’s just … you can’t control where your heart goes.”

I thought of Jeremy and Andy. My twelve-year-old heart wanted Jeremy and Andy’s wanted me. There was no controlling that, and suddenly, I felt very sad about love.

“Does she love you back?” I asked.

“Yes,” Chrissy whispered. “She makes me feel like I belong.”

I knew then that our family would never be the same, that this fight would be the first of many, that it would eventually drive Chrissy from us. She had that haunting, terrified look of a chihuahua who had just found what he wanted when a dark trap descended on him. I felt tears forming in my eyes.

“Then that’s the important thing,” I told her.

She looked at me with such gratitude that I was glad I’d said it, even though the thought of it all frightened me, even repelled me. I didn’t know if I would ever understand. But this was Chrissy. She was my sister. And nothing could change that.

“You’ll find someone someday and you will understand,” she told me.

I doubted it. I was in way over my head in this world of romance. What other things existed that I didn’t even know about? One thing seemed certain–Jeremy would never love me. I was beginning to understand the way things worked. Why? Why did it have to be this way? Why couldn’t the ones we love just love us back?

Suddenly, I had a thought.

“Chrissy,” I said, sitting up in excitement. “Do you think Jeremy is gay?”

Chrissy’s eyes widened and her lips twitched. I could see her eyes twinkle beneath the tears. “You know,” she said slowly. “That would explain a lot.”

My thoughts exactly.

She lay down beside me and I felt the warmth of her grief begin to dissipate. We laid there for a long time, pretending we were asleep. Before me, the night stretched out with the same uncertainty I had come to associate with growing up. It was more than I had bargained for. I was going to need a better plan.

So, I started a list.

Adirondacks, NY
PHOTO: George Foster

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Picktures and Pieces 14: A Giant Leap

A Giant Leap

by Randall Auxier

There was no internet, needless to say. That gave the US government a kind of control over images that we can barely imagine today. No one fully understood the power back then. I like watching the characters in Mad Men as they gradually discover what images can do when disseminated throughout an affluent mass culture. The government seems to have had some early inklings of the power invested in these media, but not enough to keep it off television when Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses were turned on the children of Birmingham. And they failed to understand the likely effects on young people of watching a war on television, the war they would be expected to fight. They didn't understand that by 1968 Walter Cronkite was more credible than any government.

But when it came to the moon shot, the government got the memo. They knew what message they wanted to send. Here is Neil Armstrong, American pioneer. He was carefully chosen by his government to exemplify everything noble, decent, brave, brilliant, adventurous, and most of all independent in the “American spirit.” He was chosen because he knew how to keep his mouth shut, too. He managed to do that until he was near the end of his life, when he really felt he had to speak out against President Obama’s plan to privatize the space program. No one ever doubted Armstrong was a Republican, but to have the American Right criticizing the Left for privatizing a government program is ironic, to say the least. Pictured also, looming upper left, is our technological achievement, and center stage, bathed in pure white light, is the flag. It looks interestingly windblown considering the complete absence of wind on the moon--an indication of foresight more likely than fraud, I think; they must have consulted Don Draper on this point.

The space programs of the super-powers struck fear into the hearts of everyone, pretty much, but the fear was tinged with hope and awe. Apart from the military advantages that are too scary to think about, there was the race to see whether the “loyalty of free men” or “Soviet class consciousness” would prevail in this greatest of all races –the race for the meaning of freedom. Nothing in human history comes close to this contest for the meaning of freedom. That, friends and neighbors, was the giant leap. Any sensible person knows that winning or losing the space race isn’t proof that one form of government is superior to another, but there is something inexorable in the symbol above, something that cannot be reasoned away. Ecce homo. It is a fact. Either that picture would exist or a different one with a very different meaning, featuring a different flag. I don’t know how the Soviet Union would have chosen to present the moment, but I’m sure they thought about it. A lot. They might even have gotten the windblown effect, although I'm guessing not. That seems like an American touch to me.

No one disagreed with the Soviets about the meaning of freedom more profoundly than Barry Goldwater. He prophesied their downfall in his famous acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964, saying: “I can see and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the whole world of Europe unified and free, trading openly across its borders, communicating openly across the world.” That seems to have happened. But Goldwater added: “This is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot.”

Hmmm. Is it?

I was a kid and too young to understand all this when it was happening, but memory is a tricky companion in the best of us. It seems to me now that the moon shot won the Cold War, not in fact but in the more important arena of hearts and minds. The rest was not easy, but the Soviet image, and hence also its social philosophy, never recovered from this picture. It is so visceral and powerful that it portends, indeed, partly causes one course of history instead of another. The moon shot was the symbol of the giant leap, but it was not the leap itself. Goldwater missed this one. I think about how much Goldwater and JFK really had in common and I don't wonder that the rest of the world cannot distinguish our Democrats from our Republicans. Goldwater criticized the war in Viet Nam that night, which had not been formally declared and hadn’t had a chance to become entrenched in the conservative mind. He blamed all of our wars on Democrats, which, up until Nixon bombed Cambodia, seems to have been supported by all of history. The story is rather different now, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s hands are clean.

Some people say that Goldwater lost the election that night and also initiated our present culture wars. Others say that Bill Moyers famous TV ad showing a little girl who is about to be vaporized by a nuclear explosion is what defeated him. Some say it was his association with segregationists. I think Crispin Sartwell makes an interesting point when he suggests that Goldwater knew the nation would not accept a third president in the space of one year. Kennedy’s assassination made it impossible for anyone but Johnson to win that election. Seeing this as the reality of things, Goldwater decided to do what he really wanted to do, which was speak his mind as fully as completely as he could.

Sartwell, an anarchist of the libertarian stripe, admits that he admires Goldwater’s “integrity,” and by this he means that we (the public) could believe that Goldwater believed what he was saying, whether we agreed with him or not. And he may have been the last politician on the national stage about whom we could feel certain of that. Somehow, after the 1964 election, things changed. Maybe the Bill Moyers ad was the turning point, the moment when the parties realized that persuading people to vote against the candidate they feared was better strategy than appealing to hopes, aspirations, or dreams of the MLK fabric.

There was an old fashioned sense of integrity: we stick with who we are, with what we know, with our own experience, learning, roots and convictions, even if it costs us friends, elections, money, or even our freedom and our lives. That idea of integrity seems completely absent from public and civic life today. It may be dying in private life too. I have been disappointed, as I have aged, at the willingness of people I thought were good to put self-interest ahead of truth, or simply to be unable to see the difference.

Today, integrity seems to be defined by the fear that we will be “called out” about who we really are, that the world may learn the truth about us. Integrity today only means that our enemies can’t dig up any dirt on us and the stuff they fabricate doesn’t stick. No one seems to believe that anyone would hold to truth if it means great sacrifice. But the fear of being “called out” is a pretty flimsy line of defense for one’s character. If we are morally decent because we fear the censure of others, can anyone’s character survive the fickleness of collective emotion? Most of all, whose character can hold up when mass fear is driving opinion? If anyone can hold firm, it won’t be due to the new-fangled sort of integrity. I want to look next at the issue of civil rights from this pivotal moment in US history. So much of what we face today was set in motion between October of 1962 and November of 1964.

From the Empirical Archives: Labor Day Confession of a Lapsed Economist by Michael Perelman

Labor Day Confession of a Lapsed Economist

Michael Perelman

PHOTO: David Roseborough

Originally published in the September 2012 issue of Empirical

Many children are familiar with the way that repeating a word over and over eventually makes the word sound nonsensical. Some words, however, are nonsensical to begin with. 

Training in economics bears some similarity to this exercise. Students first learn about economic concepts in spoken language (albeit contaminated with some jargon), then as they advance they see the same ideas represented in diagrams, and then finally they learn to work with the same ideas with complex mathematics.

What was missing in this prolonged education in economics was a connection with the actual economy. Economists attempt to emulate science by presenting their ideas in the form of increasingly sophisticated mathematics or by applying new statistical techniques. The problem is that the subject matter is incomprehensibly complex because the basic building blocks of the economy largely consist in human behavior.

Simplification is necessary to subdue complexity. For example, basic theorems of economics rely on the assumption that people are completely rational. One might expect that the degree of rationality might be higher where everybody can depend upon a simple measure. Money seems ideally suitable in that respect. Accordingly, economists might seem to be on more solid ground when they look at the way that the economy functions in terms of monetary transactions. Of course, marketing specialists have made manipulation of the way people spend their money into something of a science. Their efforts seem more successful than those of my fellow economists.

What does all this have to do with Labor Day? In economics, the treatment of labor is embarrassingly nonsensical. Insofar as economics is concerned, we see the worker deciding whether or not to accept a wage bargain. In effect, workers are seen as merchants, who decide whether the going price for their product is acceptable or not. Their product is their leisure. What happens next disappears from economic analysis. Only later do we see the worker exiting the workplace with a paycheck. Except for this transaction, work, workers, and working conditions are more or less absent from economic thinking.

Some economists specialize in labor economics, but that specialty does not have much to do with work, workers, and working conditions. Instead, labor economists tend to analyze large databases to see what they can learn. They may take into account factors, such as education, race, gender, or even where the individual subject resides. The working experience generally escapes notice.

This treatment of the wage bargain skews reality in another respect. In effect, economics presents an uneducated single mother sitting down and bargaining with a major corporation over the terms of employment as if they were meeting as equals.

Dissatisfied with this kind of analysis, I recently wrote a book entitled The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers.

The book has several main themes. First, economists, in general, developed their analysis as an intellectual bulwark for laissez-faire. In doing so, they did a great disservice. The false scientific veneer of economics created an illusion of market infallibility. Business leaders, who were the supposed agents of this perfect market could not help but attribute some of this infallibility to their own abilities, while minimizing the contribution of those whom they managed. This unwarranted self-confidence was an essential ingredient of the recent crisis.

To make matters worse, by avoiding the specifics of work, workers, and working conditions, economists covered up the way a strong economy depends upon the talents and creativity of the people who do the work. By contributing to the failure to nurture those talents and creativity, economists have severely crippled the economy. Worst of all, the kind of treatment that workers experience in the environment that economists helped to shape has done incalculable harm. The neglect of the potential talent and creativity of the masses of workers who make the economy run has probably done far more damage than the current economic crisis.

Happy Labor Day.

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Picktures and Pieces 13: Culture Wars, Old and New

Culture Wars, Old and New

by Randall Auxier

I lived in Oklahoma for some years, and learned to be suspicious of pictures like this one. Friends there helped me begin to grasp the depths of my own unconscious racism. One day I was walking with a colleague and our Dean to the lunchroom. We were discussing campus politics and I made the remark “it’s time to circle up the wagons.” After a pause, my colleague, a member of the Choctaw tribe, remarked, with a half smile, “yes, there must be some wild savages out there.” I wanted to crawl under a rock.

This stoic looking fellow was named Charlie Potato. The picture was taken in 1938 by Barry Goldwater. Yes, that Barry Goldwater. He was a very good photographer–as my friend Crispin Sartwell says, he’s no Ansel Adams, but he’s very good. You should visit his photography site. When you do, you will see that Goldwater regarded this as one of the most successful of his photographs, and it is certainly the most famous. The photo is now called “The Navajo,” but it was originally called “Charlie Potato.” The subject himself wanted the title changed. Goldwater obliged. I like the original title better, and so did Goldwater, who didn’t like stereotypes. Speaking of an equally rugged looking photo of a Mexican friend, he said: “There is no more typical Mexican face than there is a typical face of any other people.”

Whatever Goldwater was doing here, it wasn’t supposed to be about the “Noble Savage” or the “Stoic Indian.” He was sensitive to that side of the question, but, like my thoughtless remark about the wagons, perhaps he overlooked some crucial unintended information conveyed by his image. Of Charlie Potato he wrote: “the dignity of the ancient citizens of Arizona shows clearly in the features of this man.” That seems to contradict what he said above, but there is a difference. It isn’t the face as an example of the race or the tribe, it is the dignity of a group of citizens that Goldwater sees in his features. Is he referring to bone structure and cranial capacity? I don’t think so. Goldwater intends us to see, and himself only sees, a citizen who has worked all his life, someone who is representative of the dignity of others who work in the heat for their living.

That is a thin line, isn’t it? The racial generalization compared with the intended meaning. The racial generalization might be defended by some, since some generalizations may not be automatically racist. We are hyper-sensitive to it these days. It's the culture wars. Try to forget, if you can, who took the picture and attempted to convey his intention. It is the very same man who initiated the present culture wars. “Extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice; moderation in defense of justice is no virtue.” That’s what he said. But what he meant in practice is that government shall not be used to protect this man’s civil rights, because given the authority to do that, government will also have the authority to deprive him of those rights.

In my last post I pointed out that Victor Hugo, and indeed, the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, have more in common with Goldwater than with radicals of Emma Goldman’s stripe. Unlike her, these strange bedfellows believe, with heart, mind, soul and strength, that the individual is both the most basic unit of social reality and that its liberation is the meaning of history. And they are all willing to kill (and die) for that idea. Goldwater looks at Charlie Potato and sees an individual he can respect, and a citizen, and a person whose work is etched into his physiognomy. It is a powerful story, quite appealing when defended by de Cleyre, based on unselfishness rather than narcissism (Barry and Victor needed a few hours with de Cleyre).

But they are not conscious of everything they could learn. I am not sure what my Choctaw friend would say about this image (and I may get a chance to learn, if he sees this post), but I think it is good to balance this image against the sobering reminder of the troubled history between the Navajo and the Hopi. I don’t dare recount the story as if I had scholarly understanding, let alone genuine cultural understanding. I have read that the Hopi have always been agrarian. The Navajo have always been herders. These are incompatible ways of life. The story of the Navajo and the Hopi looks a good deal like the Bible, wherever Canaanites and Hebrews had land disputes, and with similar results (it doesn't pay to be a Canaanite). The history of the range wars in the US recapitulates this same history, except the herders eventually lost. It has happened ten thousand times in ten thousand places over the last ten thousand years. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel devotes fair attention to it.

This is the primal culture war. Until recently the agrarians almost never prevailed. Prior to modern times, agrarians were physically smaller and did not usually cultivate the arts of war. They defended themselves when necessary, but determined invaders almost always won. Agrarians are not mobile and they need a lot of land--too much to defend. Herders are mobile. The politics, religion, ethos and outlook of these two groups are profoundly incompatible. Agrarians tend to be communitarian and to favor customs over formal organization. Their religions are about fertility and the earth. Herding peoples tend to have very strict rules that lead to frequent and violent conflicts within and without the group. One result of the herding ethos has been, over several millennia, the creation of individuality. Their God is an individual with a powerful will and, generally speaking, a plan.

Barry Goldwater was no agrarian. But he respected hard work, and this is something that good people from both cultures generally agree upon. The ground of dignity is hard work. If Goldwater, Charlie Potato, and the communal Hopis have something in common, it probably grows from hard work. But Goldwater could not and would not recognize that the communists and socialists he despised also believed in hard work, at least as ardently as he did. They do disagree on what motivates people to work hard. For Goldwater, it is only the lash and the lure, the ignominy of failure and the rewards that go with success. For his opponents, what makes work dignified is precisely because we choose it freely. Those who will not work do not respect themselves, according to Goldwater, but for his communitarian counterparts, those who will not work fail to respect anyone.

If you were expecting a suggested resolution to these culture wars in a blog post, then you are of a hopeful nature. The individual and the community may always exist in tension. My own moral feelings are agrarian. I merely tolerate individualism, at the visceral level. I do not know how that sort of thing happens, since my family, like most I think, has both temperaments within it. But I will say that if ever I saw “the individual” romanticized, I see it more in this picture of Neil Armstrong than the one of Charlie Potato. I want to talk about this next.

From the Empirical Archives: A New Class Consciousness

A New Class Consciousness:

Labor Strife and the Future of the University

Randall Auxier

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale PHOTO: Michael Steinbach

Originally published in the September 2012 issue of Empirical

They don’t make bosses like they used to. Back in the day, you could at least count on your boss to know what was in his own interest. As the USA unionized, from the 1870s to the 1930s, the class of people who fought against the unions was a 1% of self-made millionaires, savvy and ruthless. They believed (and not without reason) that nature favored them for a fitting survival, and that, in turn, entitled them to wield power. Were they anti-democratic? Not in the least. As they understood it, democracy meant that those who excel by wit and sweat are rewarded with, well, whatever they want. A visit to the vacation homes they built in places like Newport provides a sense of what they wanted. They all wanted to be country squires who dressed for dinner.

Fast forward a hundred years and so much has changed. The corporate shark of century number twenty-one is no captain of industry. And as much as it might seem otherwise, government is not nearly as much in the thrall of corporations as it was when, for example, J.P. Morgan personally financed our national debt to prevent default (1893) and bailed out Wall Street (1907). Moving in the circles of privilege then really did involve smoky backrooms and unmarked envelopes. Today’s rise to power is only partly a matter of access and pedigree. There is also a mind-numbing conformity of speech and dress, along with a willingness to force top-down thinking on the little people. Anyone with those characteristics and a “plan” for re-organizing the business to cut labor costs can succeed.

Back when Americans actually manufactured products for markets, the result of an “innovation” was more palpable: quality was maintained while costs were cut, resulting in lower prices and a competitive edge. But when the “product” is a service, as it is today, it isn’t easy to determine right away whether quality has been maintained, and prices can rise even when costs are cut. Education in the US is an example of one such service, and public sector services in general is the category that came to national attention due to the draconian decrees of Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker. The strife in Wisconsin is symbolic of a full-court press on labor, whether organized or not, that is happening nation-wide, led by Walker and Governors Snyder of Michigan, Corbett of Pennsylvania, and Brewer of Arizona. In these cases, the “industry” is service and the “captain” is a Governor. This is new territory for labor. They don’t send Pinkertons with clubs, they just send pink-slips.

Protest in Carbondale, Illinois PHOTO: Aaron Veenstra

In a quiet little corner of rural Illinois, a community got a chance to explore this new territory last year. I should alert you that the community is mine and that I was no detached observer. I cannot bring you an account that is “fair and balanced,” any more than can the network whose slogan I mock. I have been a negotiator for my union for a half-dozen years. But my union isn’t your classic Hoffa-headbusting closed shop. It is the Faculty Association of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Membership is voluntary and hovers around 50% of those eligible to join, but we do see spikes when the administration is being especially naughty. In November of 2011, the faculty was driven to strike for the first time. I was on the inside of all that. I don’t want to tell you what that was like, but rather what I think I know now that I didn’t know before.

First, there are forces that were beyond anyone’s control. The baby boomers have been unwilling to pay for the higher education system their parents and grand-parents built. That is true all over the country, and in all fairness, perhaps the idea has run its course. My story is typical. My own grandparents never finished high school but vowed that their children would. They did, and the younger ones, with help from elder siblings and scholarships, managed to go to college. Then, my parents’ generation provided for every need and most wants for their children, the boomers, and happily poured their considerable taxes into creating a system of higher education unequaled in the world, and indeed, in the history of the world. Those lucky kids partook and became the best, most widely, most highly educated generation of all times and peoples. We had ours. But, perhaps we have not appreciated the sacrifices that made that possible.

Such a service provided to so many isn’t cheap. The collective will no longer exists to pay for it. Smart public universities, like the University of Colorado in Boulder or Grand Valley State in western Michigan began to wean themselves from the public dole long ago, when the writing was on the wall but few were willing to read it. When things later crashed in Michigan and the public sector was squeezed until it bled, GVSU was creating new positions and hiring to serve its growing enrollment. At the time of the 2008 crash, Boulder’s total support from state budget was only about 8% of its annual revenues. When funding from the state was cut in half, it was a relatively minor and temporary annoyance. Compare that to Governor Corbett’s 2010 budget that slashed state funding to public universities in Pennsylvania by half, leading to layoffs and rumors of layoffs in places like East Stroudsberg and West Chester, and Kutztown, Altoona, Slippery Rock, and two dozen other towns.

My university did not have the foresight to take the reins of its own financial destiny, and actually very few public universities did. We remained dependent on tax money, which meant we were beholden to the good offices of the people of Illinois, and to their increasingly conservative baby- boomer representatives. As belts tightened around the country, and as academic leadership came increasingly to be drawn from semi-mindless climbers of the growing corporate culture (a sickness that had been seeping into the universities since the Reagan era), confrontation between the teachers and their masters became inevitable. There will be more of this in the near future, not less. But many teachers, especially college professors, have some difficulty seeing themselves as “labor,” even when they have no trouble in recognizing their administrators, school boards, and varying boards of regents and trustees as classic examples of management. What solidarity can we claim with people who, well, work for a living?

Many have been shocked in recent weeks as news became public about discussions within the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia as they salivated at the potential savings in labor costs from having UVa students simply complete free on-line and distance courses offered by Harvard and M.I.T., retaining only those programs characteristic of UVa and the handful of professors who teach them. The context of their deliberations was an article in the Wall Street Journal, the essence of which is contained in the following lines:

[C]olleges and universities, whatever their status, do not need to put a professor in every classroom. One Nobel laureate can literally teach a million students, Protest in Carbondale, Illinois and for a very reasonable tuition price. Online education will lead to the substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive)—as has happened in every other industry—making schools much more productive. (“Chubb and Moe: Higher Education’s Online Revolution,” May 30, 2012)

University of Virginia PHOTO: Phil Roeder

Finding UVa’s President, Teresa Sullivan, unwilling to comply with plans to have the students of that elite school take their classes on-line, the Board of Visitors ousted her. According to the Washington Post ( Jenna Johnson, Susan Svrluga and Laura Vozzella, June 21, 2012), board chair Helen Dragas said that “she and her supporters on the board were concerned that Sullivan lacked a long-range plan to find new revenue to supplant lost state subsidies.” Dragas gave ten reasons for the decision, most of which were factually false, according to the Post article. The firing of a sensible defender of public higher education triggered widespread protests, and the Board of Visitors backed down after two weeks of chaos and recriminations on campus. 

In the end, the dispute came down to what was described in the Post (Jenna Johnson, Anita Kumar and Daniel de Vise, June 26, 2012) as a “philosophical difference.” Sullivan sought to bring change to the university from the ground up, through a process of building consensus and empowering individual academic units. Dragas and her allies thought Sullivan was moving far too slowly in an economic climate that demanded swift and decisive action.

Unhappily though, the Board of Visitors is not wrong about what is happening to higher education, and they are not wrong to demand that UVa should be on the cutting edge of it. The enthusiasm for these changes is also defensible. As they said in the now infamous editorial, some parts of an elite education will now be available globally, and they faithfully report that the sponsoring institutions (Harvard, M.I.T, and Stanford) are currently uncertain of how their free programs will generate revenues, but then, no one was sure of how Google or YouTube would be viable businesses either, but these things have a way of being progressively worked out, especially by young people, who have the ingenuity to find the way through. It seems clear to me that advertising will eventually be sold somewhere, by someone. Where the Board of Visitors erred was in underestimating how old-fashioned its students and employees were.

But here is an uncomfortable fact: libraries are no longer book depositories, classrooms are no longer intimate spaces of communication mediated by only slate and chalk, and education is no more a hallowed human endeavor for those fortunate enough to get it. The mercenary and mass-market character of contemporary education is the natural expression of the values of our global society. The teacher is, therefore, not a professional, but a kind of technical laborer whose job is to move information from the databases into the skillsets of the students. There is precious little demand for non-technical thinking, and factual knowledge is available to anyone who can use Google. A teacher does not need to carry around a great body of knowledge in the coming world. This is where we are, whether we like it or not. This is what we built. It was our choice. The question it begs: “Is this really what we want?” The resounding answer from our baby-boomers is “yes, that is what we want.” President Teresa Sullivan didn’t get the memo, but she will land on her feet. If the UVa Board doesn’t come around to her way of thinking, some other old-fashioned southern university will quickly snap her up.

Because UVa is an important institution in American higher education and my own institution is a third-tier also-ran, our labor struggles at SIUC have gone under the national radar (and it didn’t help that our strike occurred at the same time the ugly and sensational story broke about child molester Jerry Sandusky from Penn State). Our labor troubles have a long history, beginning when a previous SIUC administration outright fired over a hundred cantankerous (liberal) faculty members in the early 1970s. Subsequent lawsuits led to their reinstatement. The story is well told in Richard Russo’s thinly fictionalized novel Straight Man. Russo was the chair of the English Department at SIUC when that meltdown occurred, and labor relations never really recovered.

University of Oregon PHOTO: Jeff Ozvold

I see SIUC as a coal mine canary when it comes to these matters. If something stupid is being tried in higher education, it is almost certain to come early to our campus, and to end in a major debacle. We have, for example, outsourced everything that can be outsourced, have suffered the consequences of that perverse economic arrangement, and found ourselves no longer able to provide in-house services when our corporate relationships soured. After all, once an outsourcing contract has been signed, it is in the service provider’s corporate interest to give as little service as possible to fulfill the letter of the contract, and to offer improvements only as the time approaches for renewal. Like the US military, then, we have had to settle for whatever quality of service the corporations are willing to provide, given what we can afford to pay. If you have been out of school for a while, you may not realize how corporate your own alma mater has become. In the same way that our labor strife at SIUC has a long and distinguished history that ran decades ahead of the curve,

I believe that our recent strike portends a sea change in higher education. After years of mismanagement and mistreatment, the tenured and tenure-track faculty (reluctantly) unionized in 1996. Instability in top leadership (eight chancellors and nine provosts have been named since 2000, each less competent and more corporate than the last) led to the further unionization of the part-time and non-tenure track faculty, and finally even the graduate assistants unionized in 2006. The problem was that with every new administration we had a “new sheriff in town,” each with a personal ambition to move from SIUC to some more prestigious institution, and this meant implementing policies that would look like growth and flourishing for about five years. That is how corporate success works. They all failed, however, dashed on the rocks of labor strife. SIUC is where administrative careers go to die.

We painfully attempted to negotiate for months with our current oligarchy of corporate yes-persons, but our administration demanded the “flexibility” to implement wage reductions whenever it “deemed them necessary,” and to lay off the faculty members it selected with thirty days notice, without specified cause, and with no clear right of recall. If you read between the lines, the first flexible bit eliminates collective bargaining and the second eliminates tenure, in effect. And third, they wanted the authority to assign distance-education sections to faculty members, without any recourse for faculty to decline. They also wanted the authority to beam our classes anywhere and to beam in classes from other places so that SIUC students could get SIUC credit for classes taught by non-SIUC faculty. That will sound familiar to the faculty of UVa. The faculty at SIUC was not asking for raises, and indeed, we were mainly trying to fend off those three demands. Nothing less would have motivated an actual strike.

Contract negotiations have been a nightmare from the beginning of our union. What is it like to sit in a room with management and labor negotiators? My experience with this must surely top a thousand hours by now, and it is not what most people imagine. People do not sit around yelling and making demands. It is more like a courtroom minus the judge, with every word choice carefully noted as the two sides attempt to discover what the other really wants and is willing to do to get it. Things do sometimes get testy, of course, and this time around our management had a large man with a big voice whose evident role in negotiations was to yell at us once or twice a week. We quickly learned to relax when he began, to ignore him until he wound down, to ask politely “are you finished?” and to resume the dialogue wherever it left off.

But our negotiations failed. I can speculate with some sense of confidence that the administration seems to have miscalculated the willingness and ability of the union to carry off a strike. Had they left either tenure or collective bargaining of wages intact, they might have prevailed over a faculty that, honestly speaking, lacked class consciousness and solidarity. But with all three of those major issues at stake, and assisted by a number of public relations blunders on the part of our administration, the faculty was just barely able to cobble together a successful strike. About 200 of the 650 tenured and tenure-track faculty did actually strike, and the administration was unable to cover the classes of a few indispensable departments, especially math and history (where solidarity was admirable and scab labor unavailable in such a rural setting).

Illinois has favorable labor law, if you happen to be on the side of labor, and our strike was entirely protected by law. Such is not the case in most states where public employees are concerned, but in Illinois, there are very strict rules about what management can and cannot do during a strike. To shorten the story, mistakes were made, and the students became increasingly agitated as the administration treated them like children, censoring their social media and ordering them around like bad parents do. Having sacrificed its credibility with the students, the size of student protests on behalf of the faculty steadily increased for five consecutive days until their emotions were beginning to auger a loss of control on campus. Occupy Carbondale was running the student protests according to its standard practices and the smallish band of faculty could not oversee or maintain what was starting to happen. The combination of riotous students, unhappy parents, nervous local leaders, and apparently a miffed governor (this has come out later), led to a resolution after five days. The faculty gained almost nothing except to maintain the autonomy and role in university governance it already possessed. In short, the effort to corporatize SIUC failed, this time.

Microsoft Campus, Redmond, Washington PHOTO: Wonderlane

Those of us who negotiated were aware that we were canaries. If this bumbling lot of corporate wannabes could succeed on our campus–a bastion of the radical left, unionized, in a blue state with arguably the best labor law in America–what will happen when they want to do this stuff at the University of Oklahoma, or South Carolina, or some other good university in a deeply benighted state? It felt a bit like defending the Alamo, but with the advantage of a modern air force. No one knew we were down here fighting, but at least the corporate raiders were charging uphill over open ground. We had advantages our compadres in Texas couldn’t imagine. But it was not our solidarity or our organizing that saved us. Nor was it our labor law or our governor. It was the students. And that would never have happened if our administration hadn’t unwisely angered them.

SIUC students, like students at other also-ran public universities, are not inclined to take sides in the troubles between faculty and administration. They like their teachers, but they know nothing about how universities are run or funded, apart from what they pay, which is always too much as far as they are concerned. They do not know that the graduate students who teach them are trying to survive on a thousand dollars a month, minus fees and taxes. They do not know that many of their teachers are parttime employees who get $1500 a semester to teach a class of forty, no benefits. Why should students know about such things, or care? They go to college only once and the aim is just to get the ticket punched.

Many young people nowadays are reckoning and recognizing that the outlay for a university degree does not warrant the promised return, and they are making other than traditional educational choices. A Microsoft certification is cheaper and worth more in practical terms than a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and Microsoft does a very rigorous job of preparing and testing those whom it certifies. Other proprietary schools, some accredited, some not, are forging ahead into the business of education, while the University of Phoenix does reach the masses. The proprietary schools squeeze traditional education from one side, while Harvard and M.I.T. now squeeze us from the other side. What place is there for a non-elite institution in the future? What value does its degree carry?

The answer many schools have adopted is to specialize. Why pay professors to repeat the generic education (the core curriculum) found everywhere when that can be had for free? The trick is to identify your strengths and co-ordinate those to your market niche. Then one must create and sell an image, recruit the targeted demographic, and “retain” them (that is corporate-speak meaning “give them the grades they paid for”). There is no need and no room for tenure or benefits in such a system, and the high pay must be reserved for those teachers who could command a high salary in the realm of the free market. This is certainly the future of the mass education market, and it is not only not far away it is already here. The question is whether anything ought to be done about it, and if so, who will do it?

PHOTO: Dell's Official Flickr Page

I am a realist about things like this, and a pragmatist in about the sense William James and John Dewey were. The key to a democratic future is to work with the habits people already have, to grasp what they bring to the table, and to turn those habits in the directions they already value. Throughout the endless hours of negotiation at SIUC, even during the actual strike (when everyone felt under siege), it was not hard for me to remember that everybody in the room wanted what was best for the university and for our students. We simply could not rise above our fears that if the other side got its way, the place would be wrecked.

The faculty admittedly wants the old-fashioned university, the place where professors are secure, well-paid, autonomous, and respected leaders of a campus community in which the adventure of learning is its own reward, the intrinsically valuable humanization of our wards. We want administrators who are drawn from the best of our peers and who accept their posts reluctantly, hating to leave the classroom and their research, and doing so only to take a turn at steering the ship. That sort of institution really only existed for about fifty years, following the Second World War and riding on the coattails of a public-minded and prosperous generation that was deeply concerned to educate its young people and to preserve democracy as the viable middle ground between communism and fascism. There was no vaunted golden age of enlightened devotion to the liberal arts, there was a Holocaust, a Cold War and an arms race, and since the liberal arts were already in place in our colleges, they got a hell of a ride into the present on a jet rocket called science and technology.

Professional administrators, for all their dullness, do grasp who pays the freight and how. It isn’t the traditional liberal arts and it never was. There will always be at least a small market for traditional liberal education, as a niche for old-fashioned people. Frankly, the University of Virginia is in a fine position to dominate that market, which its Board of Visitors might want to consider. But the pragmatist in me says we should look at what is redeemable or even good (God help me) in our habit of corporatizing ourselves. Is there not something here that can be directed to the betterment of all? Is this trend wholly corrupt? My emotional inclinations are to condemn it with no room for compromise, but teachers do not become teachers by following their feelings uncritically. There must be something at the heart of this struggle that points to a path forward.

Here are a few things to consider as we all attempt to cope with the massive transformation that is underway. First, our young people are every bit as curious, inventive, hard-working, and brilliant as any kids any generation was ever blessed with. They are also hell bent on thinking for themselves (nothing new there), and unlike their current generation of parents, they have a pretty good sense about whether to believe what they see on television or read on the internet. These kids do not write well or read books (that has become a specialty for those with the inclination), but they are very sophisticated about communication, and they manipulate and interpret images with a skill and daring that is awe-inspiring. When they create, they move from the image to the word, not from the word to the image. They cannot remember assignments they read, but they can recount the plots of movies and Facebook threads with remarkable accuracy. These kids are sharp, but they didn’t get this from their primary and secondary schools, and they definitely didn’t learn it in college.

Has no one noticed that today’s “students” are educating one another, largely outside of school? How long can it possibly be until it dawns on them that the stamps of approval offered by our traditional institutions are unnecessary? It is already a widespread fact of their consciousness. It is true that a Harvard degree is still worth the price, but a college degree isn’t. On the other side, when historians a thousand years hence comment upon the civilization that the Americans helped to build, one thing they are sure to notice is the brief period during which an astonishing university system was created to raise the educational attainment of the masses, and how its very own scientific and technological achievements made those institutions redundant after about a century. The institutions fulfilled their purpose and then were not needed.

I am a union activist mainly by circumstance. The teachers’ unions probably need to adapt themselves to the genuine prospects for public and traditional private education in the coming years. We are not here to protect the economic interests or job security of the teachers. There is only one thing we do that is not made redundant by the changes that the information age has wrought. We do know how to humanize our students, how to elevate their thinking, but even that has changed. In all the ages of humankind, the teachers taught in virtue of superior knowledge and lengthier experience. The rate of change in the last 25 years has set the old formula on its head, and I find myself being educated by the adaptability of my own students, by their willingness to continue to seek their humanity and to show me that I do not have the answers to their questions, but am only in possession of older ways of asking them. I belong to the last generation of traditional teachers.

If today’s teachers could imitate the culture of mutual peer education that our students have created, we might be able to shed the habit of seeing ourselves as little repositories of specialized knowledge that professionals have customarily been. In the age to come, the lawyer is not the one with the law degree, it is the one who knows how to use the law for the chosen ends; the doctor is not the one with the medical degree, but the one who understands how to preserve and heal the body; and the teacher is not the one with a degree attesting to the mastery of a traditional discipline, but the one who knows how to learn and to model learning in the presence of others for their freely chosen imitation and variation. The next generation of teachers will do this more easily. But the next 25 years involves getting dinosaurs like me to adapt and to pitch in to make the changes more smoothly. I think that those who can model the habits of learning will always be able to make a living, but I doubt whether special institutions that gather such people into one place will always be necessary.

Traditional educational institutions in America are not inherently democratic, but are only contingently so, and only in some cases. Their common reliance upon a revenue stream is now all too obvious, and the reduction of tax support has led them to corporatize on one side and to unionize in response. This is a dialectical tension that wastes everyone’s energy, destroys communities, and leads nowhere. By contrast, the democratic purpose of education is the creation of responsible citizens and communities, and that can be accomplished in many ways, as the Occupy movements have so well demonstrated.

The standard enemies of the good society are always among us: greed, narrow self-interest, weakness of the will, fear of the unknown, incomprehension of our own weaknesses, and hubris. These must be resisted in every society, but a society that aspires to be democratic has a peculiar enemy, and that is ignorance, writ large. I mean not the passing ignorance of geography or history or math. I mean ignorance of our interconnections and interdependencies as communities and communities of communities. The good news is, from my point of view, that I see less of that sort of ignorance among my students than among my peers. Now if only the faculty and administration in Carbondale could overcome its utterly false sense of its place in the present. Our struggle last year may have been a successful symbol of resistance to corporatization, but if our ideas about a path to the future involve only the continued delivery of an outmoded education, then we might have done better to lose and get it over with.

Occupy Portland PHOTO: Bart Howard Everts

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From the Empirical Archives: Here by Robert Balun

PHOTO: Luio Argerich

Here

Robert Balun

Originally published in the September 2012 issue of Empirical

There will always be glaciers worth cursing,

drifting off and out,

and this will always be for the waterless sea,

for the moments we were married at the spine of the world,

feeling the nervous system,

then scattered like electrons

to the swamp where we ate fishbones in the reeds,

with magnolias leering beauty from leather escarpments.

I send smoke signals

to the other mountain

between the state line,

where you are cast away in ancient places,

and covered with green and creeping stillness,

only seeing night stitched across the fenceposts.

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