Commencement at Snowflake College

Time again for the annual commencement ceremony at Snowflake College.

It’s an informal affair, sans academic regalia.  The college president and several of the trustees are in attendance.  Dean Kimpossible officiates.  The venue is small, with students, families, and faculty crammed cheek to jowl in a few rows of folding chairs.  Mood music plays softly on the public address system.  The overall effect is a cross between a kindergarten graduation and a New Age encounter session.

Following perfunctory remarks from the president, Dean Kimpossible delivers an uplifting discourse on the limitless vistas greeting Snowflake’s graduates, her voice occasionally breaking with emotion: “You are extraordinary! You are the author of your life!” 

Concluding her stirring commentary on living and learning, Kimpossible introduces the class valedictorian.   He’s Kenyon Smith-Jones-Abramowitz, one of a large brood of siblings lately popping up in Snowflake’s classrooms.  Kenyon’s a double major in yoga and bead-stringing with a 4.0 average who, Kimpossible tells us, epitomizes the very sort of young person Snowflake College strives to produce.   

(Kenyon, an amiable oaf sporting a scraggly beard and sunglasses, shambles up to the podium. Shifting his weight from foot to foot like a five year old with a full bladder and periodically brushing his hair from his eyes, he addresses the audience.) 

“I gotta say, I had a hard time coming up with something to talk about.  When Kimpossible asked me to give the commencement speech, I was like, ‘No way!’  And she’s like, ‘Way!’  So, I came up with something.  Here it is…

“I was sitting at home the other night, and I got to wondering: How do they get toothpaste into the tube?  Cuz it’s like, sticky, y’know?  So, I called up a friend and asked him what he thought. 

“He didn’t know, either.  And I’m like, ‘D-u-u-d-e!’  And he’s like, ‘D-u-u-d-e!’  And I’m like, ‘I know!’

(Knowing laughter from the audience)

“Then, I posted the question on my Facebook page.   Half an hour later, one of my professors posted a reply.  And she’s, like, wondering the same thing.  How does the toothpaste get into the tube?

(More laughter)

“So, I guess what I’m saying is, like, it’s great to have professors who share your curiosity like the ones we have at Snowflake College.  Stay curious, okay?  Thanks!”    

(Enthusiastic cheering as Kenyon slouches back to his seat, flashing the peace sign to his classmates.  Deeply moved by the gravitas of his oration, Kimpossible smiles fawningly at Kenyon whilst brushing a small tear from the corner of her eye.)

“Thank you, Kenyon, for such a heartwarming example of how closely our faculty and students work together to answer life’s questions, big and small. 

“Now it’s time for our graduates to accept their diplomas.  As I call your name, please come forward.”

As they walk across the stage, Kimpossible says a few words about each student, punctuated by raucous audience approbation:

“Brytnye is graduating with a degree in graphic rock gardening.  She loves nature, so her post-graduation plan is to get an owl tattoo on her right shoulder!”

“Kessler is receiving his degree in canine hypnosis.  Kessler will spend this summer in Nepal meditating to unravel his bellybutton!”

“Josh is graduating with a certificate in frolf course management.  He’s going to snowboard the Matterhorn next month—let’s hope he catches serious air!”

“Danni has almost finished her associate’s in arboreal aesthetics.  Close enough!  You know we couldn’t let your friends graduate without you!”

“Peyton is receiving a diploma in freeform collage design.  Peyton and her life journey partner, Brad, will have their commitment ceremony in two weeks.  We’re so excited for them!”

And so on.  At the end of it all, Dean Kimpossible offers her closing benediction: “As you go forth today, remember this—On your diploma, if you read between the lines, are the words, ‘You are fabulous, and the world loves you!’”

And with that, another graduating class of Snowflake College is ushered into an eagerly awaiting world. 

   

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Adieu, Sarko

Nicolas Sarkozy steps down today as French president, to be replaced by socialist François Hollande.  Voters in one of Europe’s largest economies have rejected self-defeating austerity policies in favor of a program of growth. 

Equally heartening news comes from Germany: The governing CDU just suffered losses in the North Rhine-Westphalia state election, traditionally a bellwether for national political trends.  Now, if Greece can only form a new government without calling another election…

One Man, One Woman?

In response to the President’s statement in favor of same-sex marriage, Mitt Romney told a receptive audience of evangelicals this weekend he believes marriage should be between “one man and one woman.” A bit ironic considering the, ahem, lifestyle choices of Mr. Romney’s forebears…

May Day Greetings

I’d like to extend my best wishes to all on this International Workers’ Day.  May the coming year bring progress and solidarity for all workers.

Clubbed: Fun and Games as a Faculty Advisor

Wanting to do my part for Snowflake College, I volunteer to sponsor a campus club.  Not just any club, mind you, but the local branch of the Snowflake Student Association.      

Enthused, I tackle my new responsibilities.  The Student Association is supposed to fund campus life programs.  But, alas, our group has no funding to share—a true existential quandary.  At Snowflake’s Big Campus, revenues come from additional student fees. 

I try to explain the situation to Dean Kimpossible, who is visibly bored two sentences into my pitch and cuts me off telling me she won’t even consider raising fees at our small outpost.

Next, I seek counsel from Jim, my counterpart at Big Campus.  Jim’s a gangly fast talking fellow who seems never to have heard the adage that we each have one mouth and two ears and should use them proportionately.  He isn’t much help.  Oblivious, he asks me how we’re distributing our funds.  

I eventually give up trying to make anyone in charge see that without a steady, dedicated revenue stream the organization cannot possibly do its job.  For now, I remain undaunted.  Perhaps with enough car washes and bake sales we can keep the group afloat.

And so I lay out the fiscal situation at our weekly meeting and describe our options.  The group is small, well-intentioned, and ineffectual.  Most of them are typical college students, afflicted with learned helplessness, coddled by anxious, hovering soccer moms, their minds molded by No Child Left Behind era pedagogy.  Accustomed to structured social lives and curricula where the answers to the exam are fed to them in advance, they’ve come to expect the grownups in their lives to do the heavy lifting.  I shouldn’t complain, though.  At least they’re here.  If they need an occasional nudge to take the initiative, I’m all right with that.

The association president, who ascended to her lofty post by default because no one else wanted the job, is a lumpish, pasty faced young woman I’ll call Jessica.  Jessica is a business major whose stated career goal is to be an entrepreneur.  Whether she means “entrepreneur” in the prosaic sense of owning a small business or in the think-big sense of becoming a corporate gangster is something I haven’t been able to suss out.  Frankly, I’m afraid to ask.  

Jessica is an only child homeschooled by evangelical Christian parents, which means she has zero social skills and does not play well with others.  A vulgar self-promoter with more ambition than brains, she is narrow-minded, insolent, and frequently disrespectful toward me and her peers.  Jessica’s principal achievement as president has been to run off the two most knowledgeable group members, reentry students who did not cotton to a nineteen year old ordering them around.  Her leadership style relies heavily on delegation—meaning the group does the legwork while Jessica takes the credit, a practice that will undoubtedly serve her well in her chosen vocation.  In short, Jessica personifies everything I loathe and it’s all I can do to keep my patience with her.   

No sooner do I describe our predicament than Jessica, whose sole work experience to date has been bagging groceries at a supermarket, begins to lecture me on how I don’t understand business.  I cut in abruptly, leaving her agog at my effrontery.

“This is not a business, Jessica.  We’re not talking Fortune 500 here; this is a startup campus club.”

“But, Unassuming—’’  (It’s “Unassuming,” you see.  Not, “Mr. Scholar” or “Professor Scholar.”  Evidently one of the perks of being President—or being Jessica—is that you’re on a first name basis with your faculty advisor.)

“But, nothing, Jessica. You’re unnecessarily complicating the issue.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

My equanimity reaches its end.  I snap, “That’s enough, Jessica!”

Jessica looks stunned, as if she’s been slapped.  She’s silent a moment, then quavers, “You’re mean!”  It occurs to me this is undoubtedly the first time anyone has ever told her to shut the hell up.   The rest of the group stares awkwardly at their feet and says nothing.   

The meeting soon fizzles out with nothing resolved.  The next bake sale is on Monday.  If they’re lucky, maybe they’ll clear $35 or $40…

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Your Freedom or Your Life

A news item has made the rounds this week: A woman in Illinois was jailed for failing to pay a medical bill arising from cancer treatments.  The amount?  $280.

Since we’re bringing back debtors’ prisons, maybe we should dig up Charles Dickens while we’re at it…

Under Every Bed

I made a faux pas in class the other night. 

Discussing how news coverage affects perceptions of events, I compared headlines describing a Baghdad bombing attack.  One described the incident as Shiite on Sunni violence.  The other (from Fox News, naturally) merely said that terrorists had killed a number of people.  My point was that the American media tend to throw the T-word around indiscriminately, and that this inhibits our issue knowledge.

After class a group of students came up to me, a couple of them Iraq war veterans.  They took exception to what I had said.   Didn’t I know Iraq was the frontline of the war on terror?  Without waiting for an answer they walked off, muttering bitterly among themselves.

I suppose I should have explained myself better, but I don’t know how I could have.  Things have calmed down considerably from the collective paranoia immediately following 9/11, but I still can smell a whiff of latter day McCarthyism in the air.  One thing that hasn’t changed in our national debate over the war on terror is its proponents’ preference for mutually exclusive, either/or arguments, encapsulated in George W. Bush’s dictum, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”    

Deep down, I’ve always feared that Saul Bellow moment that would get me fired.  I don’t kid myself about where I stand with my students.  To them I’m just another service worker, a Starbucks barista minus espresso machine and tip jar.  That’s why they’re sometimes upset when I tell them things they don’t want to hear.  I’ve made a few genuine gaffes I’ve regretted, but I believe what I teach.  It is my responsibility to ensure my students at least know there are alternatives to the conventional wisdom, even if they choose not to accept them.

I’ve alluded before to our propensity to embrace policies wrapped in the flag.  We love freedom, which we define as sharing the same beliefs as everyone else and deferring to authority.  It’s hardly a surprise, then, that we have no problem with practices such as extraordinary rendition, drone killings, and the denial of habeas corpus and due process rights even when the suspects are U.S. citizens.  Because, you see, they’re terrorists, and we will never be safe as long as even one is left.  No real American would question the necessity of fighting them or the means.  Our leaders always know what’s right and it’s not your place to question them.

Many post-9/11 policies have been more symbolic than substantive.  A case in point: Driving to the airport where I live, approaching the passenger terminal there used to be a sign on a light post announcing the current “security advisory” level.  I never fully understood what this was supposed to mean.  Yes, I’d looked up the definitions of the various security advisory levels on the Department of Homeland Security website and understood what they meant in principle.  But really, what did level Yellow, or Red, or Mauve, mean to me or anyone else reading the sign driving by?   The truth is that someone in charge was trying to convince us that they were doing something so we would feel more secure.   

Are we more secure?  Maybe, maybe not.   There hasn’t been an attack on American soil since 2001, and you can make a case that this has been due to increased security measures.  But is this cause or correlation?  Only time will tell.  This is one situation where I actually hope I’m wrong, and that the security obsession has made us safer.  Because we’ve been down this road a couple of times already.

I came of age during the Cold War.  I grew up believing Communism and the Russians and Chinese were bad.  This is because that’s what I learned from my family, my teachers, and from what I saw and heard in the media.  On the whole, though, it was a mild, watered-down anticommunism I was exposed to.  The worst excesses of anti-Red hysteria happened before I was born.  The Smith Act, HUAC, loyalty oaths, blacklisting, and summary firings of so-called security risks were among the excesses of the time, and there is no credible evidence that any of these measures made the country safer.  Decades before that, the Palmer Raids, mass deportations of immigrants, and the Schenck decision after the First World War set the stage for the Cold War national security state whose legacy we live with today. 

I do not dispute that the Soviet Union and “Red” China posed a military threat to the United States in those days.  Nor do I dispute that there are in fact individuals, organizations, and countries that seek to do us real harm today.  What I question is our malleable definition of “terrorism.”  While I accept the general meaning of terrorism as violence meant to create fear in furtherance of political goals, I also know governments are apt to apply the label only to that political violence which works against them. 

Let’s consider some past examples.  South Africa imprisoned Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.  (He remained on the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2006.)  Rhodesia’s army used the recruiting slogan, “Terrorism Stops Here!”  The Germans summarily executed captured partisans as terrorists during World War II.  And the military regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil imprisoned hundreds of their opponents on terrorism charges in the 1970s.

Let’s consider a few more examples, along with the oft-disparaged cliché, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”  The Zionist groups Irgun and Haganah waged a campaign of bombing, kidnapping, and murder against the British authorities and Palestinian Arabs prior to the formation of Israel.  Were they terrorists or freedom fighters?  Anti-Castro exile Luis Posada Carriles and his associates planted a bomb on a Cubana airliner, causing it to crash with no survivors.  Was he a terrorist or a freedom fighter?  The Nicaraguan Contras killed judges, doctors, and labor leaders in their insurgency against the Sandinistas.  Terrorists or…?  You get the idea.

I’m not necessarily arguing moral equivalency here.  But the distinctions can get pretty blurry.  I’ll stipulate once more the definition of terrorism I gave above.  It’s a threat we have faced for several decades from a variety of sources.  The main difference is that since the Berlin Wall came down the Islamic terrorist has supplanted the communist as national bogeyman and all-purpose enemy.  Where we once faced an ideological foe, we now face a poorly differentiated set of religious militants.  Confronted with that fact, it’s a short leap to conflate the relatively small number of militants with hundreds of millions of their coreligionists.  In fact, popular support for the war on terror is largely rooted in anti-Muslim, anti-Middle Eastern bigotry.  Why bother telling Sunnis apart from Shiites, or Arabs from Persians, Turks, Kurds, et al., when you can just hang a single label on them and leave it at that? 

As Americans we have internalized fear and suspicion as our default approach to the rest of the world.  Coupled with our penchant for reductionist thinking, I wonder if it will be our own undoing.   Until we can consider our national security challenges rationally, we will continue to look for monsters under every bed.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar