The Classroom Conservative

Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

It is hard not to be sympathetic to the thesis of Susan Jacoby's latest book: if you pick up a magazine, if you surf the internet, if you turn on the television, you will feel inevitably that American ambition seems limited to acquisition and consumption. If the United States is not a dumber place, it is not as intellectually ambitious as, intuitively, it should be. While this blog seeks to problematize the word "conservative," of course, Jacoby abandons it entirely, preferring to call herself a "cultural conservationist." But in, for example, the unease she feels towards the trendy disciplines at universities, I feel a strong kinship with her and sympathy towards her analysis.

What is surprising is that Jacoby does not read these foreboding signs, wholly, as a recent phenomenon. She sees "social darwinism" as an early example of junk thought, a hyper-individualism that betrays the ideal of self-reliance and leads to civic indifference. Ultimately, American leaders do not inspire citizens' better natures, preferring to play to the lowest common denominator amongst the "folks." In this regard, The Age of American Unreason serves as a timely excoriation of the administration of George W. Bush, demonstrating how a historical value placed upon self-improvement, the desire to teach and better ourselves, has become a skepticism towards formal education that is most felt today as a turning away from science. What is less evident is the influence of the 1960s. Jacoby is an apologist for the various movements that defined the decade, but it is hard to believe that none of our current problems are rooted in the disoriented jumble of ideologies rooted in that time.

Jacoby's final chapter does not offer the sorts of solutions we are used to reading in similar social indictments. If there is a practical way forward, even a modest one, it might be simply to watch less television. Having earlier debunked the claim that television can be educational, Jacoby concludes that a limited amount of visual entertainment - say, perhaps, half of what we are currently ingesting - might be healthier for us. But the reader cannot help but conclude that Susan Jacoby believes many Americans are simply beyond help.

Can We Really Blame It All On Mr. Blandings?

I do not care for Are We Done Yet? and The Money Pit is mediocre. But the original version of this film, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), is a movie classic. Cary Grant is lured to Connecticut in order to escape, with his wife and two daughters, a Manhattan apartment grown too small for the average American family. The Blandings fall in love with an old house on a windy plot, and in the end the house proves uninhabitable. Having pulled the old structure down, the family designs the home of its dreams - and Mr. Blandings watches the bills pile up.

From the perspective of sixty years, the Blandings' ambitions represent the beginning of a civilization losing its way. The family's move to the suburbs led to sprawl. An inconvenient train journey for Mr. Blandings would become, over the subsequent decades, an automobile commute over a tangle of interstate highways. At the end of the film, in fact, Mr. Blandings wonders whether the dream of owning a home was already out of reach for average Americans, as the flurry of real estate activity instigated by the family inflated prices.

But Mr. Blandings got one thing right that we get wrong: he was very concerned about debt. An advertising executive, Mr. Blandings made $15,000 a year, roughly equal to a salary of $135,000 today. He hoped, originally, to keep construction costs below the equivalent of $90,000 today, and when they balloon to more than $300,000, he is beside himself. Imagine, Mr. Blandings is uncomfortable with paying twice his annual salary on his dream home, a structure his wife hopes to pass along to their children. In the midst of the sub-prime loan crisis, how many people in the United States were financing homes at ten times their annual salary?

In my lifetime, I can remember when qualifying for a loan was a big deal. For awhile there, everyone was getting one. I hope the banks have drawn in their horns and we might, as a people, be a little more cautious ourselves about borrowing.

Do Not Let Volatility Breed Complacency

It has been painful, and it continues to be so. But gasoline prices have slowed a little on their inevitable climb to $1.50 and beyond, and weakness in oil futures have people asking when we are going to get a break at the pump.

Now is not the time to get complacent.

It is inevitable that as demand drives petroleum prices higher, some pressure will be eased as people are priced out of the market. The governments of some of the countries whose entry into the easy energy bonanza helped oil break through $100 cannot afford to pay $130, let alone subsidize gasoline for its citizens. There are people in this country who cannot pay even $1.25 a liter and people in the States who cannot chase fuel above $4 a gallon. By taking their feet off the pedals, they have given us a brief respite.

The truth is that on the other side of Hubbard's Peak, the high point of oil production, there will be some rocky ups and downs, even as we stay a long way from pumping the last ounce out of the Alberta oilsands. I do not think we are going back to 50 cents a liter, but I am afraid that any welcomed break will encourage us to abandon some of the hard-earned lessons of the past year. If, like us, you have bought the most fuel efficient car in its class, how much of a (temporary) drop in the price of gasoline would it take for you to eye another gas guzzler? If you combine tasks and are very wary of unnecessary car trips, how much of a (temporary) drop in the price of gasoline would it take for you start taking the Hummer to the cornerstore, again, and leave it idling in the parking lot? If North American cities are really thinking about huge reinvestment in public transportation because of unprecedented demand, how much of a (temporary) drop in the price of gasoline would it take for you to stop riding the buses and trains?

Cheap energy made us lazy. Enjoy any savings that might come from relief fueled by downturns in demand, but maintain your vigilance. If you have developed some good habits, keep them up. We will need to do more in the future, and we should let our new awareness about energy be a starting point.

Lazy Storylines At The British Open

I enjoy watching British sporting events on television. You can catch them in the mountain time zone before lunch, and then you can get on with your day.

But I nearly choked on my oatmeal this morning: golfer Greg Norman had no sooner teed off at Royal Birkdale when the ABC announcers began pursuing the "Norman flop" storyline. For those of you who do not follow professional golf, Mr. Norman entered the final round of the 1996 Masters Tournament with a six-shot lead on a field that had done little to distinguish itself over the first fifty-four holes. But by shooting a seventy-eight, Mr. Norman lost by five strokes his best shot at a green jacket.

This morning, after not having played in the British Open since 2006, he found himself leading by two strokes. But he started off with three bogeys and surrendered his lead to defending champion, and eventual repeat winner, Padraig Harrington. This time around, Mr. Norman was years beyond his prime, playing in gale force winds. Had he been able to win, it would have been nothing less than the biggest story in golf this year - bigger, even, than Tiger Woods' injury. Did falling prey to the elements really warrant disinterring a image a dozen years old? Were there not other angles to take in discussing a man whose fifty-three-year-old contemporaries are using long putters and golf carts, a man who has played fewer rounds of competitive golf this year than the amateurs seeking to emulate his many achievements?

By this afternoon, Sports Illustrated had posted online a story that put all these matters into perspective, past flops included, but for those first few minutes this morning it sure felt like the journalistic establishment preferred the easy story to the right one.

Where Are The Targets Of The New Yorker's So-Called Satire?

I am not an art critic, and I am not an expert on satire. I write art history, and I have published a scholarly article about the New Yorker magazine. But you do not need a doctorate to be offended by the venerable magazine's cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office, Mr. Obama in Muslim garb and his wife dressed as a militant anarchist. While the American flag burns beneath a portrait of Osama Bin-Laden, the Obamas bump fists in celebration.

The New Yorker defends this outrageous illustration by claiming that it is satire. "We are poking fun at the scare tactics and misinformation that some have employed to derail Obama's campaign," it wrote in an email to CNN. If you must explain your irony to other people, you might well question its effectiveness. Indeed, the problem with the explanation offered by the magazine is that the sort of criticism it references usually invokes directly its target. The most oft-quoted example of satire is probably "A Modest Proposal," an essay published in 1729 in which Jonathan Swift argues, in part, that the children of Ireland's poor might best be sold for their flesh. "I grant this food will be somehwhat dear," Dr. Swift writes, "and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children." It is clear to readers of "A Modest Proposal" that its author does not blame the children for their plight, and passages like the one quoted above indict the Irish establishment for its indifference.  Satire is a conservative gesture -- conservative in the sense that I use the term -- a way to chide people for losing sight of the values on which their societies were founded.

Where are the "some" at whom the New Yorker pokes fun, then? Would the magazine's purposes not have been better served by an illustration showing Mr. and Mrs. Obama in the Oval Office while a sketch artist misrepresents them on a pad? Should the cover have invoked in some fashion a Republican Party that stands to benefit from the ignorance of a large percentage of Americans who believe the Obamas are, in fact, enemies of the state?

I do not think that the New Yorker is carrying the can for John McCain. If you are familiar with the cartoons run in the magazine, you know that visual satire is decidedly hit-and-miss. But during this most important election campaign, with so much at stake, the New Yorker has the responsibility to get it right. And, this time, the magazine clearly did not.

Charming Anachronism: Cup Holders In Your Glove Compartment

The next time you open the "glove box" in your car, we called them "glove compartments" when I was growing up, see if there are two cup holders on the face of the hatch. I can tell you that I have never in my life used this utility. If you look closely, you will see that they appear designed to hold little styrofoam cups, and the nests are so shallow that they could surely cradle these cups only when the car is parked.

Were these intended to accommodate small drinks at the drive-in theatre, I wonder? They seem a charming anachronism in an age of half-liter gulps and cup holders between the seats that are designed to hold drinks, keys, and iPods.

A Library Is No Way To Do Business... And It Is A Good Thing, Too

I spent Tuesday in the McKimmie Library at the University of Calgary. It is an old-fashioned wonder: institutional windows and furnishings, metal stacks with pressboard features. The books are lined up on the floor.

What is not to love?

I was finishing research on a commissioned article about the Double Dealer, a New Orleans magazine, and there were some things I had to consult that just could not circulate: some reference books and some periodicals. As soon as I made my way into the stacks, I was reminded again how wonderful it is to browse amongst the books. The Bodleian at Oxford is a great place; it has everything. But there is no admission to the stacks, and you need to know for what you are looking before you file your request. In "open stacks," you can wander. I was searching for an essay written by H. L. Mencken about the American South, and I grabbed a volume of his essays. Three books down, I found some other essays not right for me but right for something on which my graduate student is working. This is how it goes. But as I thumbed through these old tomes, I started looking at their backs. Some of them had not been signed out for twenty-five years!

A library could never run as a business, and I hope we never expect it to do so.

I recall that, in my retail days, if we did not sell a catalog title in six months, it got shipped back. Imagine expecting a store to hold a title for a quarter-century, on the off chance that some visiting scholar might want to pick it up and photocopy a page or two? Imagine, for that matter, keeping floors and floors and floors full of books heated or cooled, in an environment with perfect humidity, cataloged and (sometimes) dusted, even though those floors can go days and days with hardly a visitor.

What an enterprise!

Some people say that libraries are black holes. No matter how big their budgets, they can never buy everything, and the problems with managing a collection are legion. But in these buildings you find the sum of what we have been, and in these buildings generations and generations of young men and women piece together what they will be, one book at a time. I have been blessed to have spent the best years of my life associated with them -- good and bad -- and my advice would be to think, the next time you pass one by, just what is held inside.

When All Cars Become Luxury Items

Before the age of twenty-three, I undertook exactly one journey by air. Over the past fifteen years, I have surely flown more than one hundred times. There are many people out there like me, people who remember when flying was an extravagance. The last ticket I bought to London cost exactly as much, adjusted for inflation, as the first ticket I bought so that I might start Michaelmas Term 1994 at Oxford University. It has taken this decade-and-a-half, punctuated at the end by inflation and astronomical fuel prices, for the cost of flying to return to where it was when I began taking to the skies. Air Canada and their competitors are going back to the stone age, but while this will certainly be inconvenient there will be only a small cohort of twentysomethings who will be unable to remember what it was like to have to save for an airline ticket, only a small cohort of twentysomethings who will be unable to remember a time when you could not simply jump on a cheap flight and go almost anywhere. No one will stand on the ground, look to the skies, and shake a fist in covetous anger.

This will not be the case for the end of travel by car.

You will find today on the streets of Lethbridge, Alberta luxury automobiles driven by men and women who like cars and who can afford to buy them. But, in a climate not prone to rust, a lot of old beaters can also be found, rolling metal cans taking their (often) lone inhabitants from point to point. In the Canadian way, most of us are in the mushy middle, still trading a little too high a percentage of our monthly household budget for the illusion of freedom. We do not have to wait for anyone; we do not have to share with anyone. We can go... Now. The car has been the great democratizer. For while some can drive in style, almost all have been able to afford to drive. When someone passes me in a car I covet, it does not fill me with class rage. As a matter of fact, knowing that we will both get to the mall at the same time, I might even disparage the gas mileage that person's car is likely to get while getting there. Under these arrangements, there has been class detente: both the rich and the poor have been willing to see their tax dollars go to building and maintaining roads to the suburbs. Even if some people cannot live there, even if some people cannot afford to drive much, we all expect that we might some day use more of the transportation infrastructure. And, anyway, those are the roads WalMart and Home Depot use to ship in the stuff we all need, right?

I believe we are at the great precipice: the point at which some people will be unable to afford to operate a car. It might be neighborly to car-pool, and it might be healthier to walk. It might even be environmentally prudent to combine trips. But when people who have spent their whole lives taking for granted the ability to jump in a car and drive an hour down the road can no longer do so, I fear that they might not take kindly towards those people who still can. And they may take even less kindly towards people who persist in rolling their own personal tanks down the middle of the city thoroughfares. Such a gesture might be seen as the provocative maneuver it was in many earlier iterations of motoring. And if we get to the point where rigs are parked and goods go back on the train or are produced and used more locally, how will those folks feel about public works projects that, seemingly, connect only country club with country club?

You can find any number of apocalyptic visions of the future all over the internet today. The most thoughtful of these sites find no future for a way of life organized around the automobile. This may be so. I would, myself, certainly go so far as to oppose any highway expansion project that imagines we are going to drive in the future as many cars as many kilometers (or miles) as we did, say, three or four years ago. But if you cannot, now, rip up the back lawn and grow potatoes, if you cannot move within walking distance of work, what can our leaders do for us? Well, I would suggest that they stop treating each liter (or gallon) of fuel as equal. They are not. It is not like the government is not already deeply invested in the regulation and distribution of petroleum products. It is not like I am suggesting a wholly new bureaucracy. But I cannot see why the existing system cannot be tilted to bring modest relief to commuters and truckers, and enforce a prohibitive toll on discretionary use. Whether it is a retail mechanism as I suggest, or some other brighter idea, our leaders are going to have to engineer for us a gradual retreat from our addiction to automobiles because a crash, as we know, means havoc on the roads.

Anti-Capitalism, And Other Narrow Thinking, In The Classroom

A report commissioned by the French Education Minister has concluded, in part, that high schools in France are rife with anti-capitalist ideas.

This is only, in part, a "left-right" issue.

It has been well-established that the growth in education in the 1960s as the baby boomers came of age filled our schools with generations of teachers steeped in or influenced by progressive radicalism. Most educators I know are interested in presenting their students with a range of ideas, but it is difficult to hire for diversity of thought. The best you can do is hire broad thinkers and honest brokers of ideas, hoping in this way to discourage ideological stagnation.

But, as the French reports suggests, the real issue here is the difficulty we have introducing different points of view to the classroom. Not all ideas are equal, but many deserve an airing. Our schools should be places in which dominant ideas are challenged, but this does not mean that these other ideas should be seen as viable alternatives. In the cases cited in France, the drawbacks of the market system are being emphasized to students, as teachers are unwilling or unable to explain how a capitalist system with such obvious flaws could also benefit hundreds of millions of people. We need to be able to take the lessons learned by rampant personal debt and use them to improve capitalism. Instead, because so many people have had their houses foreclosed upon, teachers now feel justified in just handing out Che Guevara tee-shirts.

Multidisciplinary study is at the foundation of liberal education. To teach social history properly, you need to know something about economics. But if your liberal education is just a buffet of subjects, your servings may be too thin to realize the true benefits.

How do I know that this is not, primarily, a "left-right" issue? How do I know that the right does not always represent an establishment that we should challenge, but one which we do not challenge responsibly? Well, we do as poor a job challenging the establishment positions now rooted on the political left. No one can tell me that people who support the teaching of intelligent design in schools are properly articulating how it is a minority position that may, or may not, provide a beneficial position to critique and improve our understanding of Darwinism. People who want intelligent design in schools want it presented as a viable alternative, and this represents the same shortsightedness demonstrated by teachers of radical economic theory in France.

To Whom Do We Turn For Information?

When I was a kid and cable television came to Newfoundland, I was bemused by the occasional "test of the emergency broadcast system" that would ring over commercial spots for thirty seconds at a time. It was the 1980s, and we were still worried that, in its last gasps, the soviet empire would lob a big one at Ronald Reagan as a parting shot of sorts. I am not sure that the American government would have ever broken in to tell the residents of St. John's to cower in anticipation of an explosion in Michigan, but it seemed like a reassuring possibility.

We had a real emergency in Lethbridge today, and there was no one to tell us anything.

It has not rained, really rained in about three weeks. But in a little over two hours today, it rained more than forty millimetres. Water was gushing out of downspouts as if pumped, and we had standing water by house foundations for at least an hour before the dry ground could, mercifully, absorb it. I was born in Newfoundland, went to school in Oxford, England, and lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I know rain, and this was rain. Serious rain.

About three hours beyond the height of the storm, at the beginning of the five o'clock Calgary news, we were told that the City of Lethbridge had, in fact, declared a state of emergency. The storm and sewer systems were overwhelmed, and a couple of the main thoroughfares were flooded. An hour later, another Calgary newscast had some relevant interviews. Thanks to our friends to the north, we knew not to flush the toilet, run water, or -- as one official suggested -- leave the house.

It is common, on holidays, for local newscasts to power down and broadcast the Calgary news, instead. Unfortunately, I can only assume that the people who might have interrupted regular programming with crucial, local information had the day off. Cable television was useless: the Weather Network was still forecasting a forty per cent chance of one millimetre of rain, even as I nearly drowned while extending our downspouts. Radio comes in solid, prepackaged blocks. There were no newspapers, but they could not have helped. How about the websites of these local media outlets, then? No updates, either. But they should not feel bad: the city, those folks who wanted us to stop flushing our toilets, did not update their website, either.

Checking our answering machine earlier tonight, we got a message from some friends across town, offering to help out if we had any water in our basement. I think we need to keep in touch with our neighbors, don't you? While our various media outlets, new and old, have hourly updates on whether or not Angelina Jolie has given birth, I think our neighbors are probably the people who really have our back. Thanks, Greens: Happy Canada Day. You know what community is all about.