“And Such Small Portions…”

Obama wants to lengthen the school year and the school day. Probably the school week is the next target. Like the educational experts who have been suggesting all this extra time for the last twenty years, he has several different rationales. First, of course, the original school year was set up for an agrarian society in which the kids had to be home during the summer to tend to the crops. That’s quite true, and makes the classic June-through-August vacation an anachronism. Moreover, the data are pretty clear that such a long time out between school terms really does cause most kids to lose some of the learning they had accomplished the previous spring by the time they come back in the fall. So the longer school year has some solid facts behind it.

But, as the AP article points out (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090927/ap_on_re_us/us_mor), a longer school year doesn’t have to mean a longer school day: “Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).” And AP isn’t even looking at European nations that start kids in school later (in Denmark and Sweden, as late as age 7), or with shorter school days than ours (in France, 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM with a 2-hour lunch break until age 11), that still have better literacy and graduation rates than we do. Whatever it is that American schools are doing in the classroom, it is not at all clear that more of it would be helpful to the students. It sounds too much like the irate restaurant patron who complains that the food is terrible and the portions are too small.

In fact, anyone who has worked with adult literacy programs can verify that it shouldn’t and usually doesn’t take anywhere near 12 years—even with current summer vacation and school day schedules–to teach what most high school graduates come out knowing. Note also that summer vacation has already suffered considerable abbreviation in many school districts. The whole idea of Labor Day as the last long weekend of summer (meaning, presumably, children’s summer vacation) now makes no sense at all. Almost all public schools start up around the middle of August these days, and many don’t shut down for the summer until nearly the end of June. (Which is a good argument for moving Memorial Day into late June and Labor Day into early August, but I digress.)
Compressing the school year even more than we are already doing may make sense, but lengthening the school day really doesn’t.

In fact, the justifications for a longer school day are entirely different, and a lot less plausible, than those for a longer school year. Obama (and most of the other people one hears declaiming on the subject) are mostly concerned, not about education, but about safety. “Those hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are times of high anxiety for parents,” [Secretary of Education Arne] Duncan sa[ys]. “They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table.”

Yes, those safety concerns are valid. But what do they have to do with school? Why should professionally-educated adults who should be home grading today’s papers and preparing tomorrow’s lessons have to function as baby-sitters to keep Johnny from getting shot? That’s the job of recreation directors and supervisors, or at worst, of cops. And even more to the point, why should kids have to be on task and programmed for 8 hours a day, just because their parents are? At that point, the arguments against child labor start to fade into insignificance. When do the kids get to just “chill with their friends”? Or have we already accepted the premise that an unsupervised, unprogrammed child is a child at risk of crime, sex, drugs, or obesity, and that the only way to save our children from these dread fates is to subject them to the same scheduling that has already shredded the emotional and physical health of their parents and destroyed the family life that used to keep the children safe?

But, now that we have decided that all more or less able-bodied adults must spend at least 40 hours a week being paid to work for somebody else, we have also decided that anybody who looks after children has to be paid. For more recent data, see:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5intayNnUex0u2p2aPfl95SZitE9QD9B15QLO0 and

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8277378.stm

And, no, none of this has anything to do with feminism. It is mainly connected to stagnant wages and rising fixed living costs such as housing, health care, transportation, and education. Most stay-at-home mothers don’t view themselves as having chosen to stay home. See: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-census-momsoct02,0,3742466.story for why most stay-at-home mothers are younger, less educated, and have more children than the rest of the female population, so that their prospective earnings are lower and their child care costs would be higher.

I mention these stories because they have all hit the Web in the last 24 hours. But they do a lot to prove my point that the main reason we really want our kids to spend more time in school is that it’s the cheapest way to free parents to put in 40+ hours a week earning money. Once cryogenics has been perfected, we can keep our kids in a deep freeze until a couple of years before they are old enough to work. We can spend the intervening time teaching them what today’s high school graduates know, and go on from there. O brave new world, that hath such people in it!

CynThesis

Things the Bible Would Have Said if the Author Had a Better Quote Book

Warning: this is yet another rant from Jane Grey on people who cite the Bible without bothering to read it.  If you’re not in the mood, go buy some popcorn.

That Other Blog Over There just attributed “hate the sin but love the sinner” to Jesus.  The Other Blogger Over There is usually much more biblically literate than that.  A swift resort to Google tells us that nobody knows who really said it first, but everyone who bothered to check it out reports that it is not to be found anywhere in the Bible.  Which is consistent with my own research.

“God helps those who help themselves,” OTOH, is definitely Ben Franklin.  “To thine own self be true” is definitely Shakespeare.  “With malice toward none, with charity to all” is definitely Lincoln. All of them have, at one time or another, been attributed to the Bible.

The Bible, similarly, says absolutely nothing about abortion, and nothing directly about same-sex marriage.  And everything it says about homosexuality, it says in paragraphs adjacent to pronouncements about adultery, for which it recommends essentially the same punishments (except for the Sodom and Gomorrah story, which can be read several different ways, and which Jews and Christians in fact do read very differently.  The traditional Jewish reading of the story sees the Sin of Sodom as powerful people doing it to powerless people, rather than men doing it with men.)

The finer points of modern textual criticism enable us to determine that, even if all that stuff about wives submitting to their husbands is in the Bible, it wasn’t really Saint Paul who said it, but some cheap knockoff, which is kind of nice.  And, while ignoring Revelation may be easy for us Jews, we don’t get off that easily from looking at Daniel, which was in fact one of the sources of Revelation.  (Arguably, Revelation is a cheap knockoff of Daniel, in fact.)

But then, one of my dearest friends, of blessed memory, once talked a Jehovah’s Witness missionary off his doorstep by quoting scripture at him in English and Hebrew until the poor guy gave up.  Let’s hear it for a little learning (not, BTW, a little knowledge.  See Pope’s “Essay on Man.”  Not the Bible.)

Jane Grey

More About Health Care, or Grist for the Ill

First of all, some senator, whose name now escapes me, says the “death panels” are a bad thing because doctors shouldn’t be doing end-of-life counseling anyway, that’s the job of Jesus Christ and your minister.  Well, aside from the fact that there ARE no “death panels,” and that many Americans are not Christian and therefore do not look to Jesus Christ for anything connected to the end of their lives, he actually has a point.  We SHOULD be making these decisions in conjunction with our imam, rabbi, high priestess, or pastor, if at all possible.  These guys may not know exactly what kind of life-extending treatment is available, but they certainly know their way through an ethical conundrum. That’s what they DO.  My father, of blessed memory, wrote a living will with the help of his pastor, who witnessed the document.  I relied on it during Dad’s final illness.  Despite the intrinsic sadness of the situation, I was enormously glad to have the document in front of me while dealing with the hospital.  Dad was, admittedly, much better than most people at advance planning in all areas of his life, which made life a whole lot easier for me and my brother.  But note that he didn’t ask his doctor about this stuff; he asked his pastor. And the pastor, relying on the “no heroic measures” language of the pre-Vatican II Catholic church, advised no resuscitation and no artificial ventilation, more than twenty years ago, long before it was a hot topic in political circles.

I think ALL religious organizations should be educating their clergy (and laity, for that matter) about their particular views on end-of-life care, and encouraging people to consult their clergy about these issues.  If they’re not good for that, whatthefrack ARE they good for?

Jane Grey

Dear Sir or Madman

Yesterday’s Yahoo news carried a piece on avoiding typos in one’s resume and cover letter to prospective employers, pointing out that the recipient would probably dump the offending documents in the nearest recycle bin upon catching the first such typo.  As a former English teacher, I can certainly sympathize with that response.  On the other hand, I suspect that most prospective employers are themselves ignorant of alot of such typo’s, and mere HR staffers would be even moreso.  Indeed, between you and I, many such solecisms were originally the fault of misguided English teachers to begin with (such as my son-in-law’s 4th grade teacher, whom he swears taught him never to use “and me”) and are therefore much more likely to be committed by people who really care about proper usage.

Of course, the corrolary to this rule is that many job applications may land in the circular file, not because of they’re poor grasp of English usage, but because of the recipients.

Jane Grey

The More Things Change…

Mr. Wired and I are spending a lazy summer Sunday afternoon listening to NPR, while Krista Tippett interviews an expert on children’s play, who tells us, wonder of wonders, that play is good for children.  Mr. Wired finds it annoying that Stuart Brown, the expert in question, is claiming credit for this discovery, when it was a commonplace while we were growing up.

Actually, it was a commonplace long before that. Froebel, the first official child psychologist, coined the phrase “Play is the child’s work” in the early 1800s.  Two hundred years earlier, John Commenius said some of the same things.  And Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which quotes both of them, was published when Mr. Wired and I were in grade school.

That bothers Mr. Wired more than it bothers me.  Yes, it’s true that academic scholarship is supposed to be dedicated to giving credit where credit is due, rather than claiming three-hundred-year-old ideas as one’s own.  The rabbinic tradition says, BTW, that teaching something in the name of the person from whom one learned it hastens the redemption of the world.  I take this seriously, to the point where I publish all my blogging under Talmudic copyright—use my stuff as much as you like, just mention my name (or at least one of my pseudonyms) when you do.

But these days, we don’t want to know where good ideas came from originally.  The people who promulgate good ideas now want to be able to claim credit for them, at least if the only other contenders are safely dead or in the public domain and therefore not likely to sue.  If a scholar can’t take credit for passing on somebody else’s good idea, s/he won’t bother publishing it in the first place.  [In the case of the value of children’s play, that means a lot of young first-time parents won’t have access to that useful information and their children will be stuck in preschool 8 hours a day, without recess, learning their letters and colors and shapes beginning at age 3 and then popped in front of a TV set for the rest of the day.]  Scholarly ego, in short, serves the same sort of evolutionary purpose as the peacock’s display plumage, or the self-interest of Adam Smith’s pin manufacturer.  By allowing the scholar to promote himself, we allow him to promote ideas we all need to hear about.  Okay, we have a copy of Homo Ludens somewhere on our shelves, left over from my grad school years.  Our neighbors upstairs, raising a four-year-old and a toddler, don’t.  They need to hear these ideas somewhere. Their kids need them to hear those ideas even more.  Feeding a pseudo-scholar’s fraudulent ego is a small price to pay for that.

Jane Grey

The Mirrored Curtain

A few years ago, some beleaguered scholar of geography characterized Americans below the age of 50 as a “lost generation,” in the sense of not knowing where they were physically located in relation to the rest of the world. He was responding to some test given to a selected sample of Americans, in which they were shown a map of the world, at a considerable level of detail, but with the names of the countries (and the states in the U.S.) omitted. A horrendous percentage of respondents could not find England, France, the USSR (as it was then), Mexico, or Canada. A significant number could not even find the United States. Many could not identify the state in which they lived.

At the time, I half-seriously suggested that this appalling ignorance could legitimately be blamed on the Sexual Revolution. Playboy, I pointed out, had provided more recent generations of male adolescents with someplace other than the National Geographic to look for pictures of nekkid wimmen. (That hypothesis, of course, provides us with no illumination whatever about the geographic ignorance of the younger generation of women.)

The study in question dealt only with physical geography of the most rudimentary kind. It did not even mention the ignorance of Americans about how people live in places other than the U.S., which is in practice a much more important issue than whether Paraguay lies north or south of Bolivia. It would be hard even to design a survey tool to measure that variety of ignorance. Today, perhaps the most important ways the U.S. differs from the rest of the world have to do with crime, poverty, welfare, and education. Not coincidentally, these are hot topics in the news in this country. Most reasonably educated Americans are aware that Europeans generally regard the U.S. as barbaric because, unlike most European countries, we have the death penalty and no gun control. Some really sophisticated Americans know that the only countries in the world with higher rates of execution, imprisonment, and violent crime than ours are all in the Third World. Some of us know that the Brits think we’re barbarians because we have the death penalty, and that the Saudis think we’re sissies because we don’t implement it in the public square with a sword.  But the only Americans who have any real sense of what it is like to live in countries outside the US are those who have done it.

Since we are a nation of immigrants, we do have a fair-sized population of people who know firsthand what life is like in Mexico and Central America, India, Pakistan, the Middle East, and many other countries with lower pay-scales, higher crime rates, and wider gaps between rich and poor than the U.S. Those immigrants have no problem colluding in the propagation of the Great American Myth that this is the richest and greatest country in the world–it is certainly the richest and greatest country they have ever lived in. Which is precisely why they are here in the first place.

What we don’t have is a sizeable population of people who have lived in Western Europe and Japan over the last twenty years. Most of the natives of those countries don’t move here, because they find life over there more comfortable. And most Americans can’t move there because, given present-day currency rates, it’s too expensive for people who get paid in dollars. Living outside the U.S. might even require an American to learn some language other than English. And learning languages, of course, is boring. In addition, most Western European countries don’t welcome middle-class immigrants. They have more than enough educated citizens of their own to fill local white-collar jobs. They certainly don’t need people who don’t speak the local language and may not be educated up to local standards–except for menial jobs for which Europe gets its own share of Third World immigrants. While Mexicans and Asians are enduring unbelievable and sometimes life-threatening hardships to flock to our gates because their culture is full of our artefacts and their villages are full of people who have relatives writing home from the U.S. about the luxury of having a home of one’s own and two cars, Americans are not willing to save their dollars or work out deals with overseas employers because we don’t know anything about life over there. And the corpocracy that runs the U.S. economy, polity, and culture is happy to keep it that way.

What they are especially happy to maintain is American ignorance of other systems of government and economics. As long as American voters can imagine only decadent communism, free-market capitalism, and Third World mismanagement, they will of course stick with capitalism. Who wouldn’t? The voters will spend every election splitting hairs over just how much license and subsidization to give the corpos this time, and then wonder why politics is so boring and seems to make so little difference. And those few Americans who might like to imagine some fourth alternative have to make it up out of whole cloth, and create it from nothing, because, so far as they know, nothing like it has ever even been tried, much less succeeded. That is, ultimately, the Sisyphean tragedy of the American Left. Once we’ve said, “No, of course we don’t want communism, there has to be something better,” what more can we say?

Well, we could say, “Mixed economies and democratic socialism have been tried, with considerable success, in Western Europe and Japan, where the average blue-collar worker lives a lot better than his or her American counterpart,” and then start describing a day in the life of the Swedish car mechanic, or the German secretary, or the French shop clerk, or even the British steelworker on unemployment. Why don’t we? Because we don’t even know where to find out how they live. If I were to do a web search on the subject, which of course is the first step in any halfway-serious research project these days, I would not even know what to use for a search term. “France?” That would get me airlines and travel services and tourist sites. It might get me academic programs. It would get me all the information necessary about how to be a stranger in another country. It would get me nothing at all about the experience of being a person who lived there. Even the progressive publications we rely on for something more truthful and meaningful than Time, Newsweek, and U.S.A. Today won’t give us that information. Maybe because the Progressive, In These Times, and The Nation can’t afford to keep correspondents overseas, given the currency rates. But more likely because even Americans who think of themselves as intellectuals, or at least as thoughtful people, have been brainwashed into thinking that geography is boring. Even Americans who know how exciting history can be are likely to be bored by geography.

When I was a kid, we read geography textbooks, mostly horribly out of date, about the lives of children in some other countries. We got to learn what they ate, what they wore, what kind of schools they went to, what kind of houses they lived in, and what the weather was like. All of the information except the weather was long-since obsolete even at the time, of course. And there was no mention at all of politics or economics (except for those poor kids behind the Iron Curtain, living two families to a room and having to report their parents to the police for saying the Rosary or listening to Radio Free Europe.) But we still ended up knowing more about the world beyond our borders than most Americans educated since then.

When I was a kid, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were ever-present facts of our lives. We heard about the brave Poles and Czechs and Hungarians who risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to listen to Radio Free Europe and find out The Truth about the world outside, which they knew their communist masters were not telling them. Our corporate masters here don’t need to tell us that learning about life in other countries is forbidden and dangerous. They just have to tell us it’s boring. We don’t need an Iron Curtain. What we have instead is a curtain that we cannot even see, because all it does is reflect back at us an idealized, thoroughly retouched picture of ourselves, so that we have no way to imagine that there is any world out there that does not look like our own. A mirrored curtain, so to speak.

So I would like to pose a challenge to the progressive media in the U.S. If each progressive media outlet–The Progressive, The Nation, In These Times, Ms., Pacifica Radio, NPR, Utne (online and dead-tree versions), Tikkun, and so on–would commit itself to presenting at least one story per issue on a day in the life of an ordinary working person in some industrialized country other than the U.S., a lot of the other rock-pushing those outlets have to do in terms of telling people, “Yes, there is an alternative to free-market capitalism, and it isn’t communism,” could be avoided. Y’all could devote some of the space you now have to use for abstract, hypothetical political theory to cartoons and comic strips and poetry. All you have to do, guys, is tell enough people, show enough people, “We have seen the present and it works.”

Red Emma

High Noon in DC

The Inauguration was impressive, even on the left-hand half of my computer monitor. High points: the John Williams piece (not quite as good as Copeland on the same theme, but good, and very well-performed. Nice to watch Yitzhak Perlman’s grin.) Lowery’s prayer (basically, Isaiah’s greatest hits. Stealing from the best.) Gene Robinson’s prayer, which I really liked. The crowd, all one million plus of them, not counting the poor guys who had tickets but never made it onto the Mall. The First Kids—the older one with her omnipresent camera (obviously it never occurred to her that now anybody in the world would send her an autographed picture if she asked for it), the younger one with her thumbs-up as First Dad went to do the oath.

Human-but-not-high points: the presidential oath, which the Chief Justice and Obama between them finally got right. The poem (YMMV, obviously.) The address—from Obama we have come to expect real barn-burners, and this was not one of those. It hit all the right notes, as if written to a checklist, which it probably was. Mr. Wired says he should have let his star writers do it, instead of insisting on doing it himself. But apparently the writers did at least have a hand in it. It wasn’t Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, which is probably the best of its kind ever. But it wasn’t bad. Rick Warren’s prayer.

What I liked most of all was something a lot of people probably missed altogether. Last night at one of the broadcasts from the various Balls, Beyoncé, after doing a quite creditable version of “At Last” for the First Couple to dance to, tried to relate her emotions to an interviewer backstage without utterly dissolving into tears, and, in one of her attempts, said, “He makes me want to be smarter.”

HE MAKES ME WANT TO BE SMARTER.

Sidney Harris, the late columnist, once said that, while he had heard lots of people say they would like to be better-looking or richer or in better physical shape or healthier, he had never heard anybody say they would like to be more intelligent. I pointed out in a response which I don’t know that he ever saw, that religious Jews pray for more intelligence every morning. But that was pretty esoteric, compared with Beyoncé saying, on national TV, coast to coast before untold millions of viewers, that Obama, and his inauguration, make her want to be smarter. I am overwhelmed with delight and hope at this. After decades of very smart politicians diligently hiding their IQ under very large bushel baskets rather than intimidate the presumably dumb but sensitive average voter, it is finally okay to be intelligent, and to value intelligence. I have absolutely no idea how smart Beyoncé already is, which tells you something right there. But I wish her well in her pursuit of more smarts, and hope she continues to encourage the rest of us in sharing that pursuit.

Jane Grey

THE ONE-MINUTE LAWYER

Northwestern University School of Law, here in Chicago, has just announced that it will be offering students a chance to get a law degree in two years instead of the traditional three. Let’s look at the history of this. Back in the Good Old Days, you didn’t have to go to law school at all to become a lawyer. Nor did you have to go to college first. You apprenticed as clerk to a practicing lawyer. That’s how Abe Lincoln started out. There were law schools, but they were for the upper classes. There are still places where you can get admitted to the Bar without a law degree today, though it’s pretty hard to arrange, and not many people do it. A Chicago attorney who passed away only a couple of years ago was the last person I know of personally who did it. He was pretty good at what he did, too.

Then came the American Bar Association, which in its wisdom decided about 100 years ago that the profession was too open to the riffraff. So it encouraged state bar communities to require a law degree, or at least make that the preferred track into the profession. Back then, getting a law degree took—gasp!—two years. Back then, BTW, many law schools did not require a college degree for entrance.

Somewhere around the same time, law schools started permitting night study for people who had to work while getting their degrees. That, reasonably enough, took three years.

I’m not sure precisely when the third/fourth year of law school was added, though I think some schools were still holding out as late as the 1960s, but the point of it was to enable the student to take more specialized courses. As a practical matter, the last year of law school has, ever since, been regarded with barely-tolerant amusement by most students. The axiom among law students is, “The first year, they scare you to death. The second year, they work you to death. The third year, they bore you to death.” I’m not sure what useful purpose the last year ever served. But I’m really skeptical about the rationale now being used for dropping it.

Well, not exactly dropping it. What they’re actually doing is compressing it. Pretty much what I did with my own legal education, actually—I went to night school, while working full-time. Normally that should have taken four years. I did it in three and a half, by taking classes through the summers. But Northwestern is proposing that day students, who would normally finish in three years, take classes through the summers and “mini-classes” between semesters, thereby finishing in two years. They are also shifting the emphasis in course requirements, to teach skills such as “accounting, teamwork, and project management,” and modeling the degree program more closely on the business school pattern. Presumably that means that some other courses are being dropped, but nobody is saying which ones. All of this is explicitly designed to make the future employers of the next generation of lawyers happy with their more practical, business-oriented approach.

Which makes me really nervous. If all NU wanted was to shorten the time required to get a law degree, I wouldn’t be all that bothered by their dropping or shortening the third/fourth year. But making the students work harder and with less time between terms, and come out looking more like MBAs, scares the flippen daylights out of me.

Law has been for a long time the last refuge of the liberally educated professional, the last place where you can get props for knowing things outside your specialty. Roughly half of my law school class had advanced degrees in something else before starting law school. The point of being a lawyer is to be able to think critically and analytically, to balance competing interests and ethical imperatives, to be able to break down a situation into ponderable parts and weigh them against the applicable law. [And, not incidentally, to learn how to spell habeas corpus.]

The lawyer’s job is to be, not a Minuteman, but a Wait-a-Minuteman, somebody who can tell the client, “Not so fast. You can’t do what you want to do here.” Clients don’t much like that function of the legal professions, and would vastly prefer to hire MBA-like robots who will simply map out the shortest apparently legal distance between here and where the client wants to go, and “make it happen.” We have been witnessing, over the last ten or fifteen years, a large number of accountants and MBAs getting indicted, and often imprisoned, for taking just this approach. A few lawyers have already gone this way as well. Does NU really want to send an entire generation of new lawyers in the same direction?

What’s the rush, anyway? I can understand people who try to finish college in three years—it can actually save money, if planned properly. The NU administration claims not to have decided whether its two-year program will cost the same $42,000 total tuition as the current program, but I would bet it will. It’s hard to imagine that faculty members drafted to teach the new summer and mini-courses won’t demand some kind of extra pay for doing it. The proposed program would require entering students to have spent at least two years working in some other field, which many of them would anyway. But the fact is, we’re all living longer these days, and lawyers never retire. [One of my colleagues, who was still practicing last I heard, just celebrated his 100^th birthday. Another, who I know is still practicing, was admitted to the Bar the year I was born.] So starting one’s professional career a year earlier or later is pretty insignificant in the long run. If anything, the legal profession needs to slow down a bit more, and get back into the habit of thinking things through before making a recommendation. And one of the recommendations most in need of thinking through, obviously, is Northwestern’s two-year program.

Jane Grey

 

Blessed is S/He Who is Not Offended

As some of you are aware, I am a regular on another blogsite, which shall remain nameless, amid posters and bloggers from left, right, and around the block. A great many of the comments from self-labelled conservatives on that site start out complaining about:

“condescension from [partisans of] the left, who are … self-defined as more “enlightened,” and

“Massachusetts, where one is likely to be labelled “stupid,” “idiotic,” “conservative, or “Fascist,” not to mention “fundamentalist,” “evangelical,” a “redneck,” a “cracker,” “podunk” or “white trash” if one strays inadvertently one inch, one centimeter, to the right of wherever the line in the sand has been drawn on that particular day by the tolerant and open-minded people of that great state,”

before stating their own beliefs.

Every now and then, one also sees leftists proclaiming:

“The fact is that many Bush-bots bought the notion that Kerry was a commie pinko rather than a bona fide Vietnam war hero, actually confirmed by the military. Bush didn’t even show up to all his reserve unit duty. Republicans are suckers for ‘Rambo’ type talk and the rest of us pay a price,” or,

“When I discuss politics [in Texas] with Americans who may be on their way to no longer being my friends, I hear things like “stupid,” “idiotic,” “liberal,” or “Communist” in reply to what I consider simply a different set of observations and experiences which do not embody absolute truth.”

What all this comes down to is that we have all become a whole lot more touchy about politics lately. By which I don’t mean that we take politics seriously. I mean we take it personally. No, not in the sense that “the personal is the political.” In the sense of “tell me what you believe and I will tell you who you are and whether I will let my kids play with your kids.” My own vantage point is pretty much leftist, so that’s what I’m mainly talking about for the moment. Whenever I, or somebody whose opinion I share, disagrees with a conservative, the response is almost always sure to include stuff like, “I know you despise people like me, and you think we’re stupid, but…” usually ending with “…so you’re an arrogant elitist snob.”

Generally, I and many of my colleagues on the left are pretty respectful when talking to conservatives, or at least we sure feel as if we’re being respectful, and deserve all kinds of moral points for not saying, “I despise you and I think you’re stupid.” So we are especially annoyed at not even getting credit for not saying what we went out of our way not to say. I suspect that Obama’s comments about “bitter” working-class voters were made in very much that spirit.

And of course, the nastiest thing you can do to a liberal, who wishes to be a brother/sister to all of the wretched of the earth, is to accuse him/her of being an arrogant elitist snob. Compared with that, vague accusations of moral corruption and omnifutuance are small potatoes, if not an outright source of bragging rights.

So we are operating in a universe of discourse in which conservatives feel insecure about their intelligence and liberals feel insecure about their humanitarianism. Each tends to take offense from those respective vantage points at whatever anybody on the other side says about almost anything.

In the process, we tend to ignore all sorts of other dimensions of each other’s discourse. For instance, even though liberals tend to get branded as overly tolerant of immorality, we actually tolerate only specific (mostly sexual) varieties thereof. We yield to no one in our intolerance of financial hanky-panky, violence, and environmental trashiness. And on the other hand, while conservatives may talk a good game of judging other people’s sins, on the personal level they are often a lot nicer than liberals—even to those they disagree with. If I were stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire, I think I would be more likely to be assisted by somebody with a “God, Guts, and Guns” bumper sticker than by the guy driving a hybrid with a Darwin fish on it.

Part of the problem is just that we all read, or digest pre-read byproducts of, sociology. Which tells us that liberals have more education and more money and more refined tastes in food, art, and decoration, and less religiosity, than conservatives. I’m not actually sure of the validity of those data anyway, and I used to be a sociologist. But I do know for a fact that lots of liberals have less money than lots of conservatives—even after discounting Black and Hispanic voters. I also know that lots of liberals are religious, and that some are even evangelical. Maybe this is because I am broke, religious, and liberal, so a lot of my friends are too.

Aside from that, even where the generalizations are based on valid data, they are based on old data. A new age is coming. A lot of people whose parents were middle-class are working-class now. A lot of people who went to college may have trouble getting their kids through the BA. Many of today’s adults could not afford to buy the houses in which they grew up, or live in the same neighborhoods. Even those who were raised to prefer croissants to Twinkies™ often can’t afford the croissants any more. We are all finding ourselves spending more time bagging peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to work and cooking rice and beans at home, no matter whether we used to prefer eating out at McDonald’s or La Maison de Quiche Raffinée. Mobility is not what it used to be. I can tell, because I can’t remember whether that accent aigu is supposed to go over the first or the second e.

So anyway, guys, can’t we all—at least those of us who frequent the same sorts of blogspace and care about the same kinds of issues—get along? Can’t we assume a certain amount of good will on the part of anyone we are discoursing with who hasn’t actually come out and said,“I despise you and I think you’re stupid,” or “You are a morally corrupt pinko”? If we did, maybe we could actually exchange ideas and come up with a few useful new ones that could help all of us out of the mess we are all, whether in the right, left, or center lane, heading straight into.

Red Emma

 

Biblical Illiteralism

Back when I was an English teacher, I had a list of things that I told my students would automatically get an assignment an F.  (Of course, I almost never actually carried out the flunk threat. It was purely a mechanism to get the students’ attention, and it was fairly effective.) Miscopying printed text that was in front of the student when s/he was writing (like the assigned topic) was a biggie.  So was “between you and I.”  Provable plagiarism, of course.  As time went on, the list got longer.  The last few years I taught composition, I finally put “the Bible says” on the list (unless it was followed by chapter and verse.)

 

Some of my students undoubtedly concluded I was some kind of firebrand infidel, and I rarely bothered to correct the misimpression.  But in fact I was reacting to the increasing number of students who cited “the Bible” (without chapter and verse) as saying things like, “to thine own self be true,” “God helps those who help themselves,” and “all men are created equal” (actually quoting, respectively, Hamlet, Ben Franklin, and the Declaration of Independence.) 

 

The students who could in fact provide chapter and verse were fine with my edict, and I was fine with them.  Accurately cited scripture is proof that the student can read and quote sources in a way that is useful to the reader, a valuable and increasingly rare skill in college English classes.  I may object to a particular student’s interpretation of a particular passage of scripture, but not to the point of quibbling about it in my grading of a composition assignment.  In fact, I really like students who can use biblical sources in a useful way.  I am always pleased to have a Jehovah’s Witness in my class, because they tend to have great study habits. 

 

But what gives me the terminal twitches is people who cite or quote or allude to the Bible without having read it thoroughly and meaningfully.  People who call themselves biblical literalists and obviously haven’t read the Book in any sort of substantial way, but just quote whatever the pastor says.  People, for instance, who claim that “the Bible” forbids abortion.  I ran into this one, oddly enough, on a Quaker e-list, and when I posted back, honestly curious to think I might have missed something, the reply I got was that “I cannot believe that a God who revealed the Scripture to us would not have made the fetus a human soul from conception.”  (So much for George Fox’s  “You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say?”)

 

Or the self-labeled bible-believing parents in Kentucky who assailed the local school board for requiring their kids to read textbooks that depicted men and boys cooking, as “unbiblical.”  Looking up “cooking” in a concordance will reveal that all but one of the first 25 references to cooking in the Bible attribute it primarily to men, mostly priests but also Abraham, Jacob, and Esau. A cynic or a feminist might suggest that in these instances, men took the credit for work actually done by women.  But no self-respecting biblical literalist would dare to engage in such a feat of sleight of interpretation.  The Bible not only depicts men cooking, it apparently endorses the practice. Apart from Rebecca’s deceptive preparation of the goat stew that tasted like venison (hardly an endorsement), I think the first depiction of women cooking may be St. Peter’s mother-in-law.

 

Am I nitpicking?  Not with people who call themselves biblical literalists, I’m not.  A literalist is somebody who reads a text from cover to cover and then follows it word for word.  These days, most of the people who call themselves biblical literalists follow nothing word for word except the edicts of their particular pastors, who may or may not be real biblical literalists.  I certainly don’t consider myself a literalist, but four years of divinity school and forty years of Torah study at least enable me to spot a fake when I see one.

 

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit to having passed a religion exam in high school with a fabricated quotation from a fabricated book of the Bible (Hezekiah.) But I have become more respectful of the Book since then, and wish other people were too, particularly the ones who claim to shape their lives and their thinking on it.

 

Jane Grey