Papers and Blog Posts and Rants, Oh My!

As is readily apparent to friends and strangers who have read my Debblog posts, I’ve taken a summer vacation. 

Reasons?  First, it’s summer (duh!) – time for hiatuses from workaday activities (particularly if one’s yearly schedule is predicated on an academic schedule, and even if such schedule-bound activities are now completely self-generated).  Second, writing about Donald Trump, week after week, is debilitating. I’ve done that for a year. Although there are always new permutations on the madness that is the Trump campaign, my vocabulary for reacting to the gilded yeti’s stupifications is pretty much exhausted.  Third, I’ve discovered that short-short commentary (my weekday cocktail hour rants) satisfy my urge to weigh in on what’s happening now. 

As if department:  if Trump actually read anything, it would be easier to comment about/confute him. But he’s an information-free candidate, which makes it harder to write anything more trenchant than ‘he’s an idiot – a dangerous idiot.’

What have I learned from substituting week-daily rants for more extensive blogs?  For one thing, many ideas that I could have spun into longer (equivalent of, say, four typed pages) commentaries can be addressed adequately in a generous paragraph. (This is a general observation/argument I floated many years ago, suggesting that bloated M.A. theses serve little purpose and that a single, publishable article would be more useful.)

For another thing, and one that’s a bit surprising to me: what I miss most on retiring from academia is writing papers, proposals, chapters, articles, books.  I LIKE spinning an inchoate idea into a more precise, longer-form argument or condensing it into a proposal.  I really thought I’d most miss students and teaching. But I’ve been lucky enough to maintain fantastic friendships with many former students, and honestly, my last couple years as a professor were rather discouraging, as class members increasingly relied on quick and shoddy googling, if not downright plagiarism from the internet, rather than honest (even if maladroit) wrestling with ideas and texts.

Yet writing per se remains a pure pleasure.  Having a reaction to a book, or a political speech, or an artwork, or a family story – and grappling with how to convey that reaction in words, and often in research-informed words – is so damned fun.

Percy Bysshe Shelley ruminating on – himself? – in the Baths of Caracella.

I’ve never subscribed to the Romantic myth of the suffering, alienated writer.  Most writers are engaged with the world, and happily interact with others’ words and ideas and, yes, requests.  I started writing professionally as an ad writer (when I was seventeen); there’s no better schooling that writing is not ‘all about you,’ that it’s about your audience, your clients, your publishers (plus you, and your pleasure in plying your craft as deftly as you can). 

Thus I keep writing, in a variety of forms, some of which in a way now mimic academic writing tasks (as in:  a proposal for an interesting-to-attend conference is due in two days, so come up with something pronto = you’ve committed, to yourself, to write a thoughtful blog post every week [or a daily rant], so come up with something pronto). 

Re other motivations, and family stories: my mother would refer to ‘Beta baths’ as a quick wash up of armpits and private parts.  For decades, my sister and I thought the phrase referred to prostitutes’ hasty ablutions, but it actually referred to the Beta Theta Pi fraternity’s (c. early 1940s) reputation for personal slovenliness.

There are other motivations for writing, of course.  Some of what I write concerns family history, addressed because it’s good to have an accessible record of the stories that oral transmission may not capture in any permanent sense.  Other things are mere bagatelles, written for amusement (of readers and, perhaps more honestly, of myself).  Maybe some blogs or rants are just solipsistic demonstrations that I still have (I hope) the mental acuity to write something comprehensible and interesting, about whatever topic presents itself.

Risking redunduncy for for the sake of emphasis, I’ll keep writing, in one form or another (look for blogs to resume after Labor Day). You actual or would-be writers out there: write!

Learning to Drive with Dad

Back in the Stone Age, when I was a teenager, it was customary for dads to teach their children to drive.  After all, Dad was the official family driver and custodian of the family car.  Mom might or might not have a driver’s license, but she only used it for daytime domestic errands, like grocery shopping or hair appointments.

Such was the case in my family.  When I turned sixteen, Dad designated himself as my driving teacher . . . with non-optimal results.

Our family car when I was growing up: an ugly but ‘respectable’ clotted-cream-colored Ford Fairlane 500.  When I approached driver’s license eligibility, it had just become ‘Mom’s car,’ was seldom used, and was even more infrequently treated to routine maintenance.

In almost all respects, Dad was a wonderful guy and an excellent father.  He was not, however, a particularly patient man.  Nor was he a gifted explainer – he was more given to being a charming raconteur and an opinionated discussant.  These traits did not bode well for the role of driving instructor.

By the time I was of driving age, my family’s financial situation had improved to the point of our owning two cars: Mom’s creaky, neglected Ford Fairlane 500 and Dad’s newly purchased, middle-aged-male-fantasy Thunderbird.  Guess which one was the designated learn-to-drive vehicle?

It could have been worse. The Fairlane replaced our previous family car, a 1951 Nash Rambler convertible so rusty that it leaked up, through the floorboards, as well as down through the rotting canvas roof. The model looks cute in this picture; our actual car was not cute at all.

The Fairlane had a stick shift, a balky, hard-to-budge one at that.  Plus it was equipped with a clutch that required a jackhammer to engage properly.  As sixteen-year-old me kept trying to stomp on the clutch and dislodge the stick from its apparently petrified position, my dad’s small reservoirs of explanatory patience would run out.  “Just step on the clutch and shift,” he’d yell. “That’s what I’m doing,” I’d yell back. “For chrissake, you’re not even listening,” he’d elaborate helpfully.  “I would if you were telling me anything useful about how to drive this thing,” I’d reply respectfully.

The Ford Fairlane 500 would not move out of our driveway.

“Dad, couldn’t I practice on the Thunderbird?  It has automatic . . .” 

Dad’s T-bird was a (turquoise?  sky-blue?) 1966 convertible – a virtual twin to the snazzy getaway vehicle in Thelma & Louise. 

My father was not illogical, but he was caught between the reality of teaching his daughter to drive and the reality that she might damage his dream set of wheels. (A justified fear, as at one point I took his keys and tried to back the T-bird out of the garage, subsequently ripping off the driver’s side door).  Impasse.  He enrolled me in a driver’s ed class during my senior year in high school.

Driver’s Ed didn’t work either – not because I failed the class, but because ‘not getting your driver’s license’ became the punishment of choice for violating my unreasonable (yes, I still think they were unreasonable) curfews.  After I was grounded (the previous punishment of choice) for about three lifetimes, the driver’s license ban was the new sanction.  One that didn’t matter much, as I was off to college (where I couldn’t have a car anyway).

.  Why my parents insisted on purchasing convertibles when we lived in Northern Wisconsin escapes me.  Further, they couldn’t figure out how to retract the tops, so we didn’t even enjoy convertible cruising during the six weeks between melting snow and falling snow that pass as an Upper Midwest summer.

I did get a driver’s license at some point – I think after I was married.  I still can’t manipulate a stick shift, but I have a pristine driving record (knock on wood). Unfortunately, Dad (who was given to speeding on occasion) ultimately became unable to drive due to illness and had to put up with Mom or me at the wheel.  

Which he accepted with the good grace that characterized almost everything he did (except trying to teach me to operate a hard-to-operate car).

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.  I so wish you were still here, so I could take you and Mom on a pleasant drive before cocktail hour.

[Thanks to my sister Alison for correctively fact-checking make, model, and color of our family cars.  She has a great memory reservoir of things automotive.  Me, not so much – but I could tell you about the wallpaper or paint colors of almost every room in the houses we lived in.]

Rage Multipliers: Orlando

Less than twenty-four hours after the Orlando massacre, people are struggling to understand what in the hell happened (and to whom – the heart-wrenching job of identifying the dead and notifying their families evidently is not yet complete).  The murderer has been identified.  His motives have not, although the leading candidates are homophobia (the shooting occurred at a gay nightclub) and radical Islam (with which the killer apparently has some connections, and/or sympathies).

One thing is clear, however.  He was fueled by rage.

Rage is a complex phenomenon. It’s usually seeded by anger, but full-blown rage is actually a physical state, characterized by a huge spike in adrenalin that manifests itself corporeally in hallucinations, feelings of burning and excruciating contortions, negation of cause-and-effect reasoning ability, manic gestures (and, unfortunately, bigger actions, particularly when rage-enabling weapons are available), even unusual feats of strength or pain-negation.  In other words, rage is acted out through the body, and the body’s destructive actions to itself or to others.  The Sanskrit root for the word “rage” is rabhas (violence) – surviving today in the Spanish word rabia, the Italian word rabbia, and the English word ‘rabies’ (all from the post-Sanskrit Latin: anger, or fury).

Personification of rage: detail from Church of Ste. Madeleine, Vezelay, France, c. 1130. Note the physical contortions and the flame-like hair.

What causes anger (which almost all of us feel at times) to mutate into rage?  My guess is that there need to be multiple motivators, additional factors that justify and magnify anger, causing it to morph from the emotional to the somatic.  In the case of the Orlando mass murderer, his family says that he was upset at seeing public gay affection; the FBI says he was already (vaguely) on the radar for pro-ISIS sentiments and perhaps connections.  It’s unknown, at this time, whether homophobia or westernculturephobia came first.  Either way, though, both sources of anger seem to have melded to produce horrendously lethal rage. Similarly, the Charleston church shootings of a year ago appear to be a deadly amalgam of personal anger and a White Supremacist ideology that provided cover and fuel. Or San Bernardino: an amalgam of workplace resentment and militant-Islamicist rationalization.

The illustration heading this hastily-written commentary is 'Rage,' from the Tacuinum Sanitatus (“Maintenance of Health,” Lombardy, 14^th century), a translation of an 11^th-century Iraqi medical treatise.  That this tractate was reproduced in multiple versions in Lombardy, at that time in history, is telling.  Lombardy was a nexus of competing cultures -- German, Italian, Islamic, growing 'global' mercantile – that harnessed traditional learning to its self-aggrandizing cause.  Also notable is the manuscript’s choice of a furiously distraught woman (rending her own garments) to represent ‘rage.’  ‘Rage’ is ultimately an emotion/action belonging to ‘the (lesser) other,’ particularly endemic in a time of cultural conflict -- but that can bring about the end of days.

                                                         Hieronymous Bosch, Dies Irae

(Days of Wrath, detail), c. 1500

In Medieval times, Christian and Islamic theology consigned ‘rage’ to the register of deadly sins or to the destructive devices of Shaitan.  At the same time, theologians lauded ‘righteous’ anger/wrath/rage – patterned on the thundering punishments of an infuriated supreme deity and the corollary excoriations of a purity-upholding theocratic establishment. 

So . . . today.  Punitive (and, to some, righteous) Christian rage exists mainly rhetorically, in screeds against gays and abortionists and and and.  Punitive (and, to some, righteous) Islamic rage does the same thing, in screeds and fatwas against apostates, homosexuals and and and.  But actively odious Christian rage does not have a semi-legitimate ‘state’ to ratify its agendum.  Actively odious Islamic rage does – in the influential social media ISIS presence and in the fragile and minoritarian ‘Caliphate,’ which nonetheless stages public executions of homosexuals.

In Afghanistan,Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, homosexual activity carries the death penalty.

Back to the Orlando tragedy.  We don’t know, yet, what really motivated the murderer.  We do know, however, that it was a devastatingly deadly rage . . . and I suspect a complicated, multi-sourced rage.  This rage is not only shaped by Islamic and Christian ‘ethical’ teachings, of course.  It is also buttressed by current political discourse in the United States – a vilifying-of-the-other insultfest that does nothing except make acceptable the raging calumny, or annihilation, of people one doesn’t agree with.  And by the easy accessibility of rage-fulfilling instruments.  All of which makes me (and, I suspect, many of you) really angry.

Righteous anger, however. is not the same as ‘righteous rage.’  We need to mobilize the former to combat the latter.

Trump’s Gish Gallop

Duane Gish was an outspoken, publicity-loving creationist who happened to be a trained scientist.  For years, he milked the lecture circuit, often in ersatz ‘debates’ with practicing scientists who defended evolution (and who put an easy buck and fringy fame before self-respect, rather like the Stanley Fish/Dinesh D’Souza travelling dog-and-pony show of the same era).  Gish also wrote ‘books,’ the selling of which was a prime motivator for his live events.

People who paid attention to such sideshows noticed that Gish’s performances had both a distinct script and a distinct rhetorical strategy.  Actually, the strategy was the script.  Gish would talk non-stop, lobbing unsubstantiated ‘fact’ after outright lie (scientifically speaking), changing topics rapidly to avoid answering arguments or questions, repeating pet examples and catch phrases, sprinkling his patter with ad hominem attacks.  Neither his debate opponents nor journalists exiled into covering Gish could keep up.  Before one spurious assertion could be refuted, seven others would be raised. 

This strategy became known as ‘the Gish Gallop.’ 

Duane Gish, evolution opponent, 1921-2013.

For months, I’ve been wondering how Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump gets away with his barrages of lies, overstatements, evasions, insults, and contradictions . . . why interviewers don’t call him on his prevarications and why opponents don’t fight back effectively.  The answer?  Trump has perfected the Gish Gallop.  Moreover, he has adapted it to social media through incessant tweeting and retweeting of anything he finds useful, hurtful, controversial, or outrageous enough to yet again dominate a news cycle, of which there may be three or four per day. 

One reason Duane Gish’s strategy worked, years ago, was that he did have a simple core message: Evolution is a hoax/lie/calumny on the human race.  His rhetorical chumming deflected counter-arguments and sent opponents scurrying to refute the tangential points he would toss out willy-nilly.  It’s harder to identify Donald Trump’s core message.  Despite the stupid and expensive seed hats, it seems to be less ‘Make America Great Again’ than ‘I’ll Make America Great Again Because I’m Great.’ 

Chumming: the practice of throwing morcelized baitfish or innards into the water to attract (and then catch) big fish.  Trump does this by tossing tasty, ratings-raising bait-bites to the press, thus distracting and catching them and dominating yet another news cycle.

As far as I know, Trump has no position on evolution (although, as a self-professed Bible-toting Presbyterian, he should follow that denomination’s acceptance of evolution as consistent with belief in God).  He does, however, deny climate change and believe that autism is caused by vaccines; during the Ebola epidemic, he advocated stopping all flights from Africa and not allowing any infected U.S. citizens to receive treatment here.  One concludes that although Trump may not (yet) be onboard with Gish’s signature issue, he’s a fellow traveler in the netherworld of consensus-science denial.

And a happy camper in other netherworlds.  Such as wingnut conspiracy theory-land.  And white-supremacist grievance territory.  And America-firsterismopolis.  Mix in a childishly Manichean worldview in which people and institutions and policies are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on whether or not they are ‘nice’ to Trump (one supposes ‘nice’ means supporting or flattering or agreeing with) or ‘unfair’ (which evidently means disagreeing or asking hard questions or most terribly, making fun of him).  Add a generous helping of cartoonish 1980s morality in which wealth and ‘winning’ equal virtue, and it’s ‘being authentic’ to do or say whatever offers momentary gratification. And you’ve got galloping Trump, 2016 edition.

And just plain bizarre conflation, like blaming the Chinese for global warming, I guess.  Thanks Obama.

Unlike hamstrung Duane Gish, who had to keep navigating self-generated flak to return to his evolution-bashing agendum, Trump – by not having clearly-defined issues -- can charge through interviews and press conferences, kicking up obfuscatory shitstorms because he has so many steaming piles of shit to kick. 

As we plod through the summer and autumn, be prepared for Trump’s Gish Gallop to reach Triple Crown proportions.  It’s up to us, (and, yes, the media, some members of which seem hesitantly ready to step up to the plate) to identify, counter, avoid, resist – better yet, just stop – the stampede.  Or the deadly elephant walk (see upcoming blog!).