What's in a Name?

I’m in my office, weeding my files after a long semester.  The phone rings.

It's Patti, the dean’s administrative assistant.  “Hi, Unassuming.  Glad I caught you before you left.  Please hold for Dr. Kimpossible.”

I tense involuntarily as I always do whenever I see, hear, or have to interact with the dean.  I choke down the bile rising in my throat.  A moment passes, and she’s on the line.

“Unassuming, I have a question about a student who received an incomplete in your Thursday evening section.”

“Yes?”

“Why (unintelligible) she get an incomplete when (unintelligible)?” 

“Kimpossible, I can’t understand what you’re saying.  Could you please take me off speakerphone?”

“No, I won’t!  You know (unintelligible) that I (unintelligible).  Now answer my question!”

“I’d love to.  What was your question?”

Kimpossible switches from speakerphone.  Bereft of the speakerphone echo to emphasize her authority she repeats, seemingly through clenched teeth, “Why did your student Michelle Johansen receive an incomplete grade?”

“Because until an hour ago, I had no idea who Michelle Johansen was.”

“She was in your class!  She says she earned an A!  How could you not know who she was?”

“Because Michelle Johansen’s ‘A’ was earned by Kyounghee Kim.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I just spent the better part of the morning on phone with Admissions & Records getting to the bottom of this.  Kyounghee was naturalized as a citizen a few months ago.  New citizens can adopt a name different from their birth name.” 

I breathe deeply, and continue, tired of reiterating facts I’d spent the first half of the day grappling with.

“So, Kyounghee became Michelle.  Unfortunately, she never told me.  She turned in all her work with the name Kyounghee Kim.  When I downloaded the grade roster I thought there was a database glitch and a mix-up of student ID numbers.  Kyounghee never responded to my emails or phone messages.  Since grades were due the next day and I didn't want to penalize the rest of the class by being late, I gave Michelle the Mystery Student an incomplete until I could sort things out.”

“You’re blaming A&R for your mistake?” Kimpossible snaps.

“What?  No, I’m saying the student should have told me to avoid confusion.”

“Now, you’re blaming the student!  Don’t you know anything about customer service?”

“Michelle is a student, not a cust—“

“Don’t contradict me! What are you doing to fix this?”

“I’ve already submitted a grade ch—“     

Click.  The line goes dead.  I hold the receiver to my ear for a moment longer, as if expecting it to suddenly crackle back to life in a buzz of misplaced recriminations and high dudgeon. 

I hang up.  Guess I should’ve left the office a minute or two sooner.  And there’s no point in hanging around waiting for the phone to ring again.  Especially since I’m already off contract and not getting paid. 

I snap shut my briefcase and head for the door.  Think I’ll celebrate the end of the semester with a couple of shots of Maker's Mark.  It’s a warm feeling to know I’m a free man…at least for the next thirty-two days. 

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

  

Looking On

In the opening scene of Haskell Wexler’s masterful 1969 film Medium Cool, two TV news cameramen are recording footage of a solo car accident.  Only after getting the material they need do they call an ambulance for the car’s badly injured, unconscious occupants.

Medium Cool is partly a commentary on the mass media’s fly-on-the-wall amorality in the face of violence, and it is as valid as criticism now as it was forty-three years ago.  In a broader sense, television news and other mass media give us front-row seats at society’s tragedies du jour.  Wexler’s damning commentary came to mind last week after the New York Post published a front page photo of the man pushed off a subway into the path of an oncoming train with the caption, “Doomed!” 

Yesterday’s school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and the public reaction to it, evoked another scene from Medium Cool.  In this sequence, the TV cameraman who is the main protagonist (Robert Forster) is riding through Washington, DC, as the city prepares for Robert Kennedy’s funeral.   He observes to his soundman (Peter Bonerz) that after the JFK and Martin Luther King funerals we had public mourning down to a scripted ritual.

So it has been with the Newtown massacre.  There have been candlelight vigils and wreaths and other tributes left at the scene of the tragedy.  The community is lauding the bravery of the teacher who led her students to safety.  Pundits of varying persuasions argue over gun rights and the state of mental health care in this country.  The shooter committed suicide, further intensifying the speculation over his motives as reporters and law enforcement pick apart every aspect of his life in search of clues.

Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, we are slogging through another round in our periodic, fruitless discourse over the nature of violence in American society.  Each incident is treated as a fresh shock, something seemingly unprecedented.   (A New York Times article from 2000 attempted to identify common patterns among spree killers but its conclusions differ little from current popular wisdom.)  We express our anxiety over the angry white males who so often, though not always, commit these terrible acts.  The passage of time has diminished popular memory, but the first of the contemporary run of school shooters, Brenda Spencer, was a 16-year-old girl.  That said, it was her father, a white and possibly angry male, who had given Brenda the .22 rifle she used as a gift…along with 500 rounds of ammunition. 

The recurring discussion leads me to a recurring point I’ve made in this space, which is that there are certain common threads in our culture which create a propensity for such incidents, a roiling anger bubbling just beneath the placid surface of daily existence which erupts suddenly and with terrifying ferocity in unexpected places at unexpected times.  The perpetrators may be outliers, but they are nonetheless emanations of our collective unconscious as increasingly isolated individuals contend with a hypercompetitive, celebrity obsessed, all-or-nothing, winner-take-all culture.   Bowling alone, to appropriate Robert Putnam’s metaphor for lack of community in American life, seems to have farther reaching consequences than a mere sense of disconnectedness with our neighbors.  Sometimes it can be fatal.

The 24-hour news cycle amplfies and indulges our morbid fascination with atrocity.   It’s hardly surprising that the attention lavished on spree killings grew in tandem with the rise of the cable news networks followed by the deluge of content afforded by the internet revolution.  Pop culture magnifies the deeds of famous murderers, shining a lurid spotlight on celeb antiheroes.   A favorite tune of mine in middle school was the Boomtown Rats song “I Hate Mondays,” not realizing then that the track was inspired by Brenda Spencer’s smartass explanation for her crime.  Even after more than a dozen years after their rampage, the public retains a fascination with Columbine murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that has been manifested in numerous TV documentaries and several film treatments of varying historical accuracy.   Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers came out as our national fixation on random violence was reaching its stride, a fitting bookend to Medium Cool not only in its reflection of the zeitgeist but also in its implicit critique of the media as omniscient voyeur.

The emotional remove we experience watching real-life events unfold on television and online desensitizes us to the suffering of others.  A few recent news items have asked whether a generation of youth weaned on electronic diversions is less empathetic than its predecessors.  I’m not so sure of this.  The so-called “bystander effect” has been implicated in the aftermath of tragedies ranging from the Kitty Genovese murder a half century ago to last week’s subway death of Ki-Suk Han.  It’s a cousin to the collective action problem in that each individual witnessing a crime or accident tends to assume that someone else will render aid.  Belonging to the global village Marshall McLuhan described provides immediacy without the intimacy one would have had in traditional society where every person was sure of his or her place and whose neighbors comprised an extended family.  In other words, the sense of unreality experienced through visual media is carried over into daily life so that when emergencies arise in public spaces we respond passively as if we were watching the events unfold on screen.     

It’s fitting, I suppose, sitting back and watching things unfold.  We’ve already been reduced to consumers and replaceable labor in our plastic corporate utopia.  Having been rendered spectators in our own lives, all that remains is to become spectators of the lives of others.  Being a bystander is really the only community we have left.   Perhaps whatever shred of sanity it is possible to grasp in these times resides in accommodating oneself to this fact.     

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar     

Payday!

An interesting morsel from today’s newsfeed…

The federal bankruptcy judge overseeing the liquidation of junk food purveyor Hostess has approved bonus payments for the company’s top execs.  This is after they ran the company into the ground for the second time in ten years.

It isn’t hard to see what’s next.  Over a hundred companies have made bids for the rights to Hostess’ brands and for the company’s production facilities.  It probably won’t be long before new owners are turning out Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and Ho-Hos to sate the American sweet tooth.  And they’ll do it with many of the same executives and without a unionized workforce.

The decision to pay the bonuses defies reason.  In the wake of the 2004 bankruptcy, Hostess’ union workers made wage and benefit concessions to save their jobs.  In 2012, management demanded further give-backs.  When the employees refused, management exercised the nuclear option and effectively killed the company.  Now they have been given leave to pick over the choice remains while the workforce is left out in the cold.

The Hostess case is the latest in a very long string of corporate failures where the executives are handsomely rewarded for poor performance.  The outrage, unfortunately, will inevitably be misdirected at the real victims—the workers.  No matter how egregious the evidence of corporate wrongdoing, Americans stubbornly cling to the just world hypothesis despite its faulty logic.  The workers are unemployed; clearly they suffer from deficient character.  The senior managers receive bonuses; this is proof of their superior virtue.      

The chains of ideology are stronger than any made of steel.  Perhaps the day will come when we can say capitalism died of a theory.  But looking at the political landscape in the aftermath of capitalism’s latest crisis and the American public’s everlasting willingness to believe the lie that the system benefits them, that day is too far off to inspire any glimmer of hope.

47% Redux

The election is three weeks in the past, and Republican strategists remain defiant in the face of loss.

Stuart Stevens, a Romney campaign advisor, said this week that while Barack Obama may have won a majority of the popular vote Mitt Romney received a majority of votes among those earning $50,000 or more a year.  Stevens claimed this was a victory for Romney, as it demonstrated that the Republican Party retains the support of the middle class.

Romney won the majority of voters making over $50,000, but lost the popular vote, so obviously the majority of Americans make less than $50,000.  What does that tell you?  Among other things, it shows that the American middle class of yore is shrinking in the face of a three-decade effort of conservatives to shift a greater share of the nation’s wealth into the hands of a few. 

Another inference one can make is that a good number of the fifty-grand-and-up club probably aren’t making too much more than that.  Ignoring the crass pronouncements of GOP bigwigs, Republican voters just a layoff away from falling into the bottom 47% or worse continue to quaff the Kool-Aid. 

It’s a matter of time before cognitive dissonance sets in.  On the other hand, perhaps not.  Americans rarely accept realities that do not comport with their worldview.  The conservative myth is seductive, entrancing even those who stand little or no chance of benefitting from its promises.

Until the electorate wakes up and votes in its true interests, we can’t expect anything besides more of the same.   

Them Ol' Midsemester Blues

They’re waiting outside the classroom, petulant at having been locked out.  I’m running late, arriving a couple minutes before the start of class.

“It’s cold out here in the hallway,” whines one of my young charges, anxiously rubbing her arms with exaggerated vigor to emphasize her distress.

“You know, you could have asked one of the custodians to let you in,” I offer.  “You don’t have to wait for me to open up.”

“But you’re supposed to be here, and you weren’t!”

I sigh resignedly and unlock the classroom door.  The students shuffle in listlessly and take their seats.  It’s getting toward late fall, and most are clad in snowpants, fleece tops, and Sherpa caps.  There’s a nice covering of snow outside, at least a foot after last weekend’s storm, and a few people stare longingly out the window.

Not bothering with the usual opening pleasantries, I read off the week’s announcements.

“All right, settle down, please.  The New Age Club will be selling dreamcatchers in the student lobby Thursday from 3:00 to 5:00, to raise money for their summer pilgrimage to the Sivanada Ashram.  Contact Karma Smith-Jones-Abramowitz for more information.

“As many of you know, Charisma Smith-Jones-Abramowitz twisted her ankle snowshoeing the day before yesterday.  Dr. Kimpossible has arranged grief counseling services for those of you affected in any way by this unfortunate incident.”

A disturbed murmur erupts.  “Charisma’s hurt? “  “Omigod!”  “You mean, you hadn’t heard?”  A couple of students abruptly grab their bookbags and hustle for the exit.

“Um, bye?” I venture, puzzled.

“We gotta go see Charisma!” explains the last one out over his shoulder, the door closing behind him.  I wait expectantly, figuring at least a couple more students will capitalize on the Charisma tragedy by leaving.  But for some fidgeting, however, the residuum of the class stays put.

My fears of an empty room allayed, I continue with the announcements.  “I guess I should add that the varsity Transcendental Meditation team will hold a candlelight vigil for Charisma tonight at 8:00 on the quad.” 

I tense momentarily, sensing this might trigger a second exodus.  No one moves.  After a pause, I ask for this week’s homework.  There are twenty-some students in the room.  Three hastily scrawled sheets of notebook paper eventually make their way to the front of the room.  I frown. 

“You were aware that your research paper outlines were due today?”  I am met with silence, broken by a couple of muffled coughs and the sound of bodies shifting in seats.

“Mr. Scholar?”  a thin, nasally voice calls tentatively.

“Yes, Mallory?”  Mallory is a slight young woman of about eighteen, maybe nineteen.  Mallory is articulate, perhaps even intelligent, and she speaks more frequently than anyone else in the class.  She represents a particular type of today’s college student, the kind raised by indulgent parents to treat her elders as equals.  The resulting air of adult self-assurance Mallory projects serves puerile ends, however.  Because for Mallory everything is up for negotiation, including her grades.  Especially her grades.  I’ve come to dread Mallory approaching me after class, knowing she’s seizing yet another opportunity to cadge a couple of extra points on an assignment or argue about her test scores.   

“Don’t you remember Dean Kimpossible’s new policy?  You know, the one that says we don’t have to turn in our work if we’re stressed?” 

Mallory hands me a preprinted card she’s filled out.  I groan inwardly…it’s a “stress card,” part of Kimpossible’s initiative to raise Snowflake College’s retention and graduation rates by creating a more nurturing environment.   If a student hands you a stress card you have to excuse him or her from an assignment, no questions asked.  And with no grade penalty, of course.   

“Any others?” I ask, knowing full well what’s coming next.  Thirty seconds later, I’m holding a stack of stress cards.

Undaunted, I move on to the day’s lecture.  True to form, they’re not having it.  My efforts to start a discussion are met with complete, cricket chirping apathy.

“…And so we find in the literature that…that…Oh, hell, I’m even boring myself!”  I pull down the projection screen over the whiteboard.  “Let’s watch a movie.”    

Now, that cheers them up.  For a moment or two, anyway.  The film is a documentary, not exactly something that would pique their interest.  But at least I can relax a while, knowing I won’t have to entertain the precious darlings for the rest of the period. 

The film ends, I turn up the lights.  Everyone rubs their eyes as they adjust.  “Okay, last order of business…I’ve got your midterms graded. 

“As a class, you did well.”  There’s an ironic inflection in my voice, which naturally goes unnoticed.  In the general spirit of safeguarding their fragile self-esteem, I’d allowed them to work on their exams in small groups.  This accounts for the high grades.  For the first time, their countenances lift.  They actually believe they all earned their “A”s.  And who am I to dissuade them?

I hand back the exams, and the class slowly disperses.  One last student hangs back.  It’s Ian, next to Mallory the most shameless grade-grubber in the group.  Ian hands me his test paper, a bubble-in form. 

“Hey, Mr. Scholar.  I got #23 wrong.  I answered “D.”  But, I meant to answer “B.”  I did—see, I erased “B” before I bubbled in “D.”  Can I get credit for answering right?”

Give ‘em an inch and they’ll want a mile, I remind myself.  I try not to show my annoyance as I reply. 

“I don’t think so.  I mean, you got to take your test with a group.  What more do you want?  Next time, make sure you’ve checked your work before handing it in.”

This is not the answer Ian expected to hear.  He turns on his heel, stalking away muttering, “Epic fail!”  I suspect he is referring to me.  Too bad the stress card rule wasn’t in place last week when I gave the exam.  I suppose it will make the final interesting.

Looking up at the clock, I see that I let the class go five minutes early.  Time was, not so long ago, I would go back to my office and catch up on my work.  But not today.  I congratulate myself on having gained a few minutes of free time and lock the classroom door as I leave.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Status Quo

The voters have decided and chosen the lesser evil.

The Obama victory last night, as with that of any major party presidential candidate, means very little in the long run for the American people and the world at large.  It is good news for us who care about preserving the remaining shreds of civil liberties we still possess or who wish to extend civil rights protections for women, same sex couples, and immigrants. 

But in every other social arena, particularly in the workplace, a second Obama administration will have the same impact as a Romney administration would have had.  The demands of the global capitalist economy, untethered to any bedrock of morality, presided over by sociopathic profit seekers, will continue to dictate U.S. policy as it has for the past generation.  Expect more of the same—more industry-funded union-busting efforts, more state right-to-work legislation, and the steady erosion of personal economic security as the American working class is sacrificed in the race to the bottom.    

If you find you’re worse off four years hence, don’t blame it on your vote.  The only option you ever had was the status quo. 

Vox Populi

Here is an interesting tidbit culled from YouTube.  It’s footage from a Romney campaign rally in Ohio this week.

There’s a saying that the voice of the people is the voice of God.  If that is the case, then God help God.