The Classroom Conservative

W.

With a little more than two months remaining in the presidency of George W. Bush, Oliver Stone is quick off the mark to offer what will surely be but the first in a long line of post mortem analyzes. The surprising result is a movie that avoids a number of consistent weaknesses across Stone's oeuvre, but it is also one that fails to deliver some of the best things we have come to expect from an Oliver Stone film.

The enduring strength of W. is the performance of Josh Brolin, of course. Although he does appear to be the world's oldest Yale freshman in flashback scenes, and although he slips into caricature during the dramatization of a press conference that is supposed to act as the film's climax, he carries admirably a film in which he appears in virtually every scene. That is no small achievement. But the best part of W. for me is the examination of George W. Bush's relationship with his demanding father. James Cromwell's portrayal of the first President Bush is careful to avoid any caricature. He never slips into Dana-Carvey-like "didn't wanna do it" folksiness, and the viewer comes away with a new respect for the steadiness of Bush pere. Cromwell's performance contrasts with that of, say, Thandie Newton as Condie Rice, an impersonation that could have been pasted in from an SNL sketch. The desire to mimic historical figures is never so pronounced elsewhere, but it does occasionally infect much of the rest of the cast from time to time. Luckily, they seem able to shake it off before the whole drama slips into parody.

Oliver Stone has never before been so hamstrung by a self-consciously ironic soundtrack, by an inability to frame his story properly. Although I am thankful that he resisted giving this story the epic treatment, it clearly suffers from the exclusion of Bush's second term. But building on the construction of a family dynamic so often lacking on his broadest canvases, Stone is able to interrogate the empty ideology of Karl Rove, shown as the "genius boy" who makes Bush fils by narrowing his message and keeping him on it. I can accept that Rove is the political Al Davis - "just win, baby!" - but, unfortunately, Stone is less able to communicate the geopolitical strategy of true believers like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. It is simplistic to suggest that these men thought only that seizing oil in the middle east would reestablish American power for a century, and yet this is partisan conclusion drawn from interminable scenes of cabinet room debate. I much prefer the subtlety of the scene showing W. in Crawford, Texas, leading his cabinet through the brush in a shot eerily similar to that of Death leading the actors away at the end of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

If George W. Bush led his people astray, it has surely not been as a result of his misunderstanding the politics of oil. More interestingly, and not fully considered in spite of all the bluster, is the question of W.'s faith. One gets the sense here, as one does from the last eight years, that Bush fils feels his faith profoundly. Undoubtedly, he is surrounded by some people who feel similarly, but he is also surrounded by others who see religion as a wedge issue, something Mr. Rove could fashion and refashion in order to manipulate the media. The United States and the world at large has suffered religion under George W. Bush's presidency, and our collective inability to cherry pick the best of faith in the face of heightened religious intolerance should, I suspect, have played a larger part in Mr. Stone's analysis.

How Many Exceptions Make The Rule?

Registration for the National Do-Not-Call List has now been available for a period of time sufficient enough so that logging into their website does not automatically crash your computer. I am finally registered, and so all we have to do is sit back for thirty-one days and wait for the sound of silence! I am not optimistic. Our phone rings through the evening with suitors revealed on our call display only by the names of various provinces or states. My favourite frequent caller rings me from 000-000-0000. I know, I know. Things are tough all over, and people need to make a living. I used to live next to a call centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I would see these perfectly reasonable citizens huddling outside for smokes on their breaks. I am sure they are fine people. But I do not want to buy anything over the telephone, and I would never donate money without first getting information through the mail. Their time is wasted on me. The only two things I ever bought over the television were duds, and I have my list of charities and political organizations to which I give. I am a no go: leave me alone. I pick up the phone and say nothing, hoping, somehow, that someone will be charged for the call and be thus discouraged. But market forces work against me. If one lonely citizen listens to the pitch, I am sure this pays for a thousand conscientious objectors like me.

I gather that if I have ever bought anything from a would-be suitor, that company can still contact me. American companies calling from the United States cannot be governed by the rules that support this initiative. I read, this morning, that political candidates who are not members of political parties might soon be exempted, too. C'mon in, Janie Independent: the water is fine!

This is not an original thought, but how about a National Call List? We will tell you if we want you to call us, and then our evenings will be interrupted only by family, friends, and the occasional wrong number.

Technology Outside The Classroom

The classroom cradles with some unease the technological wonders of the twenty-first century. The ubiquitous powerpoint lecture, a model of clarity and ease, discourages students from coming to class, as they prefer instead to "get the slides" from other students and, sometimes, their professors, complicit in their passivity. As the inevitable backlash gathers momentum, students complain of being taught in darkened rooms where voices lead them, dispassionately, through an electronic form of their textbook. Tests can be generated, randomly and on-demand, from huge databases, and their results communicated immediately. Evaluations lose their standing as "events," and students are put at ease, but inevitably they lose sight of the fact that not everything in the university, or in their world, can be patterned around their individual schedules.

And, so it goes. Luddite professors complain; cyborg professors complain; students complain. All the while, we try valiantly to pick from amongst the electronic flotsam and jetsam those things that we believe, genuinely, to improve the educational experience. We stagger ahead.

But while huge investments in time and money go into course delivery, service expectations outside the classroom continue to grow. Anyone older than twenty-five remembers when retail patterns were determined by what stores could, and would, hold in inventory. The proliferation of e-commerce has changed this for us all, and it has given rise to a generation of people for whom their every desire is as close as a click and a credit card number.

For the most part, distracted as we have been by the challenges of e-delivery, we have ignored the demands for e-service. There may soon come a day when students can log into a university website and secure everything from class registration through books to tutoring services with their mouse. Undoubtedly, there are some schools that do some or most of this. I am not concerned about technology killing off my beloved "chalk and talk." After all, while iTunes may have changed the way we distribute music, it has not changed the way it is made. Some people would argue that in the age of the internet, the live concert is more vital than it ever was before. But amazon.com lost a fortune before it figured out how, in this brave new world, they could best serve people who just wanted to buy a good, old fashioned book. Are we better off because of their pains? I believe we are, and I do not begrudge them their profits now. I hope they are still making some. But my point is that universities do not have millions or tens of millions of dollars to lose figuring out how to cater to a consumer who does most of her or his business over the internet. I hope we can learn from the mistakes of the e-merchants. I think we will find that marrying technology with the classroom will be less of a challenge than will be transforming the university storefront to match the standards of the internet age.

Gambling On Sadness

As I write this, I am in an American casino. No, it is has not come to that. I am attending a conference that happens, this year, to be held at a resort. It is also snowing here, but let us not complain about the weather. There are folks wandering around with slots tokens bumping into people with academic scripts. Strange bedfellows.

I have no experience with casinos, and I do not want to dump on anyone's hobby, especially when I do not really know what I am talking about. But as I pass rows and rows of people in front of gaudy, lighted machines, I do not see a lot of happiness in these difficult times. While the advertisements suggest that I should be surrounded by beautiful people in the full bloom of youth, the clientele seems to be much older, despairing. The slots, as you probably know, are simple video games, the sort of things these people surely once disparaged when their kids were parked in front of the television. But now they are wasting more than just time. On walls and walls of television screens, you can see your favorite sports superimposed over the latest odds; you can play bingo in your room.

About the only thing that makes any sense are the more "social" activities: the big tables of people engaged in poker or craps. But even tables packed with people playing blackjack are contrasted by those with one lonely gambler trying, alone, to beat the house.

Why is it that people are so obsessed with having things handed to them, getting something for nothing? Why would the noise and the thrill of long odds arouse something in them that they cannot find elsewhere? This huge concrete silo, like the others that surround it, is plunked in the middle of a decayed downtown, crawling with homeless people, peppered with pawnshops.

Surely this is all some indication of how far we have strayed from some ideal.

Cheaters For Hire On The Internet

I have written in this space about the responsibility professors bear when it comes to cheating and plagiarism. If you cannot be bothered to invigilate your own examinations, or at least arrange to have them supervised in a responsible fashion, the result will not be a surprise. Similarly, if you trot out the same term paper questions each year, or if these are boilerplate queries that generate a lot of google hits, you will be checking for plagiarism for the rest of the term.

But the proliferation of "essay mills" and their scientific equivalents on the internet trouble me more. I may spend days and days scouring the library for a quotation from a letter on which to hang a unique question and then, for my trouble, have my student solicit electronically someone to fashion a unique response. Thanks to e-bidding wars, a student can sometimes secure a purpose-made essay on the cheap. It used to be that there was always a trenchcoated graduate school dropout skulking in the library who could, on a limited basis, provide such a service. Now there are, potentially, a thousand, ten thousand such people networked throughout the world.

Can we entrap students who use these services? Can we win these auctions and submit to them answers with a poisoned pill? I do not think so. And from what I have seen, the web sites that host what they claim to be "legitimate" operations will not help us, either. But what I do tell students is that they are relying on third and sometimes fourth parties to help them meet strict deadlines, and while we cannot know who is seeking this service, the students cannot really know who is providing it. If the person providing the answers stitches you up, intentionally or otherwise, there will be no one to help you. And, really, who is comfortable having that little control?

Anecdotal Evidence of a Slowdown in Alberta?

We had a surreal experience in a couple of furniture stores yesterday afternoon: no shortage of sales staff. If you have seen any of those zombie movies where the appearance of a real human being attracts the attention of the undead, you will understand what I am describing. Upon entering the store, three or four sales associates poked their head above the furniture upon which they were reclining. After discerning that we were, in fact, potential customers, they began ambling towards us, stiffly. Luckily, they required no head trauma to repel them. "We're just poking around," I said, as I do.

There were only two stores with "help wanted" signs: the appliance store and the coffee joint.

The real evidence of a slowdown might be how easy it is to get a tradesperson to the house. There is still no evidence that this is possible. If credit is tighter, it seems still to be available for home improvement.