The Classroom Conservative

In The Cross-Hairs Of A Surveyor’s Symbol

My graduate student defended her thesis this week.  It was about censorship in the American northeast at the end of the nineteenth century, but as I sat at the defense it was impossible for me not to think about the recent shootings in Arizona.  Anthony Comstock, a crusader against vice, restricted access to the mails and harassed authors and publishers of books he believed might lead children astray.  Comstock was engaged in a fin de siècle culture war, and his battles also turned violent.  People ruined by his activities killed themselves; Comstock scuffled with his opponents.  Ideas must often be reinforced by actions, but we should all this week deplore the use of weapons raised in pursuit of cultural aims.

I do not in any way wish to legitimize the insane ramblings of Jared Loughner.  We spent much of my student’s defense talking about whether or not the written word should ever be restricted for the public good, and we acknowledged that both sides of that debate have been incited to violence.  This cause has absolutely nothing in common with a troubled young man’s ideas about health care, or immigration, or currency, or the Constitution of the United States.  But we are fooling ourselves if we do not see in Loughner the very manifestation of the furthest extent of the heated rhetoric prevalent in contemporary American culture wars.

I do not recognize in the United States today the country I began examining in my first American Studies class twenty years ago.  In any dispassionate analysis, billions of dollars are now wasted by people just inches to the left or right of centre, uncompromising men and women who seek to convince their fellow citizens that failure to eradicate opposing points of view will mean cultural cataclysm.  A cynical mind might conclude that the culture war is about nothing more than one group ensuring that its friends stay in charge in order to secure the lucre of the establishment.

Like many other commentators, I believe that too many people involved in American political discourse enjoy ratcheting up the rhetoric.  Their adherents respond only to that degree of hyperbole.  But, as Loughner’s behavior demonstrates, sick minds are not nimble enough to sort through the extremes of exaggeration.  Cross-hairs, or surveyor’s symbols, might signify only metaphorical targets, but “second-amendment remedies,” sadly, can only look like the Safeway parking lot in Tucson.

I am not so naïve to believe that this rhetoric can be cooled: this tragedy is likely only to add to it.  So, we rely on the expansion of approaches like those taken against Loughner by the administration of his community college.  They protected their students and staff, but they could not protect the rest of us.  And while it would not have helped a sick mind, the kind of training provided by higher education, the ability to navigate ones way through the white hot media maelstrom we all endure, is the only salve for what ails the national conversation.

The English Professor’s Pet Peeve: They Went On To Win

Sports journalism has been the cause of so much mangling of the English language.  It was on the radio, after all, that I first heard “efforting” used for “trying” or “attempting.”

One annoying thing I have noticed recently has to do with time and tense.  When teams go into overtime, whether it is in football or in hockey, or in the home half of an extra-inning baseball game, we find ourselves in the overly-dramatic “sudden death” situation.  Any score will result in the immediate end of the game.  But how often have you seen, in voiceover that accompanies the highlight package, an understatement of the drama of this occurrence?  (I know, I know: who would accuse sports announcers of not being dramatic?)

Imagine this scenario: in the midst of a football overtime period, the Giants set up to kick a field goal against the Cowboys.  The moment that ball clears the goalposts, the game is over; that is the nature of “sudden death.”  But I often hear this reported, thus: “Lawrence Tynes kicks a 38-yard field goal in overtime, and New York goes on to beat Dallas, 23-20.”

I beg to differ.  If Mr. Tynes kicks a 38-yard field goal, New York beats Dallas.  Right there.  Then.

Imagine, if you will, how this would affect a description of one of the most significant sporting victories in recent Canadian sporting history: “Ladies and gentlemen, as we approached the 7:40 mark in overtime of the gold medal game, Jerome Iginla pushed the puck to Sidney Crosby, who wristed it between the legs of American goalie Ryan Miller.  Canada went on to win the gold medal.”

That is not exactly how I remember it.  How about you?  Medals did not appear magically around the necks of Canadian players, but the game definitely ended with that shot.  No one had to go on to do anything.

I think part of the confusion has been caused by overtime situations that are not “sudden death.”  If the Blue Jays, visiting the Bronx, score the go-ahead run in the top of the twelfth, they go on to win the game by holding off the Yankees in the bottom of the inning.  If, in a hockey shootout, one team scores an unmatched goal on their first attempt, they go on to win as their goaltender sets out to make three stops.

But let us not let a mangling of the language detract from the excitement of an event that decides a contest immediately.

Humbug To A Forced Philanthropy

My wife wants me to be careful not to sound like Scrooge.  What is the matter with Scrooge, anyway?  Does Dickens not tell us, at the end of A Christmas Carol , that his protagonist “knew how to keep Christmas well”?  There was all that humbug stuff originally, of course, and all that stuff with the ghosts and the repenting, but it all worked out well in the end, did it not?  So, I guess I am a little like Scrooge.  For years, with long student holidays, I took the season for granted; now, as I am likely to be processing grades until the late afternoon on Christmas Eve, I treasure every Christmas-y moment I can find in December.

What still fills me with humbug, though, is all the forced philanthropy at this time of year.  CBC Radio treads a fine line between raising funds and turning into one long radiothon for Calgary charities.  I wonder if the hard sell results from the setting of ever-more-ambitious goals for their (and our) goodwill?

I absolutely accept that people need to be reminded to give.  Moreover, they need to be provided with good opportunities for giving.  But at what point does the asking and the showing actually interfere with the season?  I was raised in the evangelical tradition, and I write the Salvation Army a big cheque at the beginning of each holiday season.  (I was heartened to hear that the Lethbridge Sally Ann, unlike the church in Calgary, is not imposing restrictions on what kinds of toys it will accept this year.)  Still, I do not mind that volunteers with their kettles keep shaking their bells and tambourines at me for the following six weeks.  That kind of asking has, itself, become part of our Christmas tradition.  I very much doubt that we will ever have the same warm feeling for media coverage of how much money an oil company has given to the food bank.

There are, of course, limits to the efficacy of sponsored giving.  I remember a couple of years ago when I responded to a program, advocated by the media in Southern Alberta, that was designed to secure presents for the homeless.  Having logged in and pledged a specific present for a specific person, I discovered that I would have to drive to Calgary and deliver the gift myself; there was absolutely no facility for people from a distance to pledge money to this program.  On the other hand, my parents discovered this year, in a woman responding to their classified ad selling household items, an individual in their own community who could make use of their quiet, private goodwill.

So, I do not mean to pick on the CBC.  As I said, while their canvassing will not replace a brass band in my affections, they obviously make an effort not to overwhelm us while trying to do good.  The same cannot be said for Shaw Communications, who had to abandon quickly the idea to charge a pay-for-view fee for their holiday fireplace programming and donate that money to charity.  The goal may have been noble, but it ended up commodifying a relatively recent Christmas tradition.  Who knew that the kitschy thrill of watching a burning log is worth ninety-nine cents an hour?  And who knows how many families, likely to benefit from the money raised from this scheme, would have been unable to afford to pay to watch the program, themselves?

You will forgive me if I add something to the common refrain to do something nice instead of getting caught up in the commercialization of Christmas.  I think it will be okay to do something nice instead of getting caught up too much, or perhaps exclusively, in the nice philanthropic programs designed by others.  Scrooge, after all, having had his epiphany, did not summon the charity canvassers thrown out of his office the day before.

We Always Waste A Crisis

Have you started to forget about him yet?

Last week, the Canadian media was filled with the details of the crimes of Russell Williams, the disgraced serviceman convicted of the murder of two women and of more than eighty other crimes related to his criminal compulsions.  If you live outside Canada, you might not have seen the pictures of him dressed in the frilly underwear he took from Ontario homes, you might not have read about the last words of his rape victims as they pleaded for their lives.

I cannot forget about him.

In the late summer of 1982, my friends and I talked an adult into taking us to Friday The 13th, Part 3, the first horror movie I ever saw.  I could not sleep for a week; I could not get the images out of my mind.  For the past thirty years, I have had all the horrible experiences associated with adulthood; I have been exposed to the worst that the media has to offer.  And yet, for the past week, I have tossed and turned through most nights.  I have nightmares.  It is like I am a thirteen year-old boy again, confronted with things that I really did not believe could exist.

There are two lessons here for me.  First, I am not sure that I believe in violence desensitization as I once did.  Second, I realize that, once again, we as a culture know how to waste a crisis.

I will not compare even the most brutal, humiliating murders of two women with the deaths of three thousand people on 9/11.  But do you remember how, in the wake of that tragedy, there developed a resolve amongst us all, a determination squandered, largely, in the pursuit of misguided foreign policy?  Well, in the midst of the outrage over Williams, last week, the media trotted out a long line of people to tell us that the killer is an aberration, he represents nothing, no one could have done more to prevent him or stop him.

I have no answers.  I simply observe that most of us have started to go back to normal.  I expect soon to start sleeping again.  But having heard, as a country, about this monster living amongst us, leading us, it would have been nice if we had stood up, as we stood up before, and demanded something, demanded a crime initiative, a mental health initiative, an initiative to address violence against women.

Instead, as we seem always to do, we found it easier to turn the page.

Not Bear The Knife Myself

As I was in August, I am still thinking a great deal about unpopular speech. Back then, a graduate student here posted a distasteful YouTube video about Christopher Hitchens' cancer, and I concluded that the most important thing was that the fellow did not misrepresent his credentials and that his speech was framed in such a manner to allow challenge.

Well, things have moved on a bit.

In the service of 9/11 conspiracy theories, the tactic is now to question campus visitors, public figures, about how their action (or inaction) has assisted in a broad cover-up. These confrontations inevitably end up on-line. The latest target was CBC National News anchor Peter Mansbridge, who gave a talk to our students on Tuesday. I was at the event, attended by seven hundred people, and I squirmed through the uncomfortable five minutes. All I could think of was Macbeth.

Why Macbeth, you might ask?

Well, in the play, he is troubled in plotting his assassination of Duncan. He is supposed to be a loyal ally, after all. But Macbeth is also troubled about killing the king when Duncan is a guest in his home.

... But in these cases/ We still have judgment here; that we but teach/ Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return/ To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice/ Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice/ To our own lips. He's here in double trust;/ First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,/ Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,/ Who should against his murderer shut the door,/ Not bear the knife myself. (I, 7)

Like Macbeth, we have a responsibility to treat our guests well, defend them, in fact, and not wait with a camera to shout them down. Mr. Mansbridge did well against this questioning on Tuesday, as you might expect, and the audience applauded his dismantling of his interrogator. But I still cannot get past the basic lack of civility he had to endure. I hear a lot of talk about academic freedom and responsibility. The folks with whom we are dealing here see "responsibility" as their duty to bring every conversation back to 9/11. I see responsibility another way: knowing when not to abuse our academic freedom by always picking a fight.

I do not suggest that we cannot ask campus visitors difficult questions. But we should play by rules of fairness. Instead of making multiple enquiries, shouting down our guests as they attempt to answer, we should follow something approximating Robert’s Rules of Order, even in such a forum. Robert’s allows us to speak once, one at a time: get our answer and move on. Public fora also have their rules: seek acknowledgment, approach the microphone, ask one question, wait for an answer, ask a follow-up, and then withdraw.

I know how hard it is to battle apathy.  I would not advocate any procedures that further discourage public debate.  Indeed, that is my point: bullying tactics in the town square just further scare people away.

I cannot imagine how it must feel to believe that an unacknowledged fact rests beneath our history, how great powers shape our reality without ever being called to account. It must anger people to think that we are all complicit in perpetuating this evil.

However, if that view cannot be aired without betraying our basic civility, I believe the cause to have already been lost.

A Minority View Of The So-Called Liberal Media

With Countdown With Keith Olbermann and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart screening regularly in our household, there are many things about these liberal programs that I see as quite conservative. When Mr. Olbermann takes a stand for the separation of church and state or reads from the works of James Thurber, when Mr. Stewart underlines the hypocrisy of heavily-edited interview clips on opinion-shaping news programs or laments the end of bipartisan politics, both men draw on fundamental values that are today under attack in the United States. This kind of distinction is wholly consistent with this blog's larger program: to problematize left/right dichotomies and to justify a reliance on tradition when seeking to move forward. We should never forget that satire is, itself, a conservative gesture, a lament for an ideal that has somehow been betrayed. Only the most radical progressive thinks "forward" ignores the past.

Obviously, then, I reject any lazy discussion of a liberal media that does the bidding of the left. At the national and international level, what I see most often is a contrarian media that refutes an establishment of which it is part. I do not find myself convinced by press briefings from the White House or talking points from our PMO, so I do not always need someone to point out the shortcomings of the most powerful. I also reject the idea that opposing political platforms are mutually exclusive. I suspect that in Canada, at least, the best way forward is some thoughtful combination of ideas gathered from our Conservative, Green, Liberal, and New Democratic parties. And, yet, I open the newspaper or turn on the television and am fed a steady diet of discursive excoriation of our national governing party. I notice this particularly in the letters to the editor printed in the Globe and Mail: childish personal attacks on Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In some ways, I do not feel like I have a horse in this race. I have already decided that I could not possibly support the Conservative government in the next election, and so I can observe the Canadian media with some detachment. But when the administration of George W. Bush was receiving its deserved lumps at the end of the last decade, I subscribed to Fox News to try to determine what a supporting position might be; similarly, I gravitate now to MSNBC, as the United States is overcome, once more, by a mood to "kick the bums out." I am disappointed at how easy big media finds it to simply refute the path we tread, left or right.

The exception here can be found at the local level, where there is less talent and even fewer resources. For as much as our national media is thoughtlessly contrarian, our local media kowtows to governments whose public advertising helps keep it afloat. The very best we can expect is silence on important municipal and provincial initiatives, where there is little critical legacy on which to rely. I am not sure about the answer here. It is not as if the resources used to discuss the census or the gun registry in Canada could be reallocated to an analysis of Alberta energy policy or Lethbridge property taxation. But until that happens, we can hope only that the impotent rage of Fox or the Toronto Star inspires a little more inquisitiveness in our towns and cities.

Typo Sensitivity

So, I got my hand smacked today. It's okay: I'm a big boy, and I had it coming. Emboldened by the experience of reading The Great Typo Hunt, I tried to introduce a moment of levity into a rather sombre exchange of emails amongst a group of people by lamenting the use of an apostrophe to form a plural.

I got told off.

Now, first things first. I did not raise the error in a sniffy way. I remember, for example, a student once telling me after class that she had no respect for any English professor who said "different than" instead of "different from." Instead, I joked about the apostrophe in a "with all this going on, now we have this misused apostrophe" kind of way. But that never justifies the action if someone gets hurt feelings, and so I immediately apologized when presented with my mistake. And, to my credit, it was not one of those "I am sorry if you are sensitive" kind of apologies. (Have you noticed how prevalent those are?) I apologized without qualification for an awkward attempt at humor. Because, after all, what other kinds are there with me?

So, now, having established without equivocation that I was wrong to joke about a typo, I would like to muse, aloud, about why people are so sensitive about these kinds of errors when, in the electronic age, we are so cavalier about others. Let me give you an example. How often do you receive an email from someone that promises a phantom attachment. Cue the flurry of emails: "opening air, here," or "and where's the real email?" No offense taken, right?

I think it is that people still have a fear that typos will be mistaken for a genuine lack of knowledge.  I suppose that I should be gratified when people still care about language precision in the age of twitter, but does the issue have to evoke such raw emotion? The individual who misused the apostrophe clearly knew the difference, but -- oh -- those fingers do move quickly across the keyboard. More serious is my pathological inability to differentiate between words that end in "-ance" and words that end in "-ence." More serious are those people who use "their" for "there" not knowing that their mistake is even there to be seen. People who know the difference and slip up are like those people who put on a t-shirt inside out but fear being taken for a nudist.

More than being emboldened by the experience of Jeff Deck and Ben Herson, traveling around correcting errors in public signage, I think I was lulled by how benign their exchanges often could be. Sure, they were occasionally thrown out of places, and they were even threatened in Niagara Falls, Ontario, but I found myself marveling at how often pointing out and correcting errors became a celebration of human foibles.

Impulse Book Buying: So Now I Am That Guy?

I am reading two books at the moment: Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Great Typo Hunt. There is nothing unusual about that, other than that one of my concurrent reads is usually a novel. What is unusual is that both books were impulse buys, and both books I was lucky enough to buy from brick and mortar bookstores.

At a dinner I attended last week, one of the individuals there mentioned that he picked up Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft at an airport and found it a compelling argument for trades education. It sounded to me that there must be more than that to the thesis, and because I had a follow-up dinner with the same group upcoming, I wanted to get the book as quickly as possible. We were in Great Falls, Montana last weekend where they had three copies in the Philosophy section at Barnes and Noble. (Unfortunately, I could not find it at Hastings.) Crawford's book does, indeed, argue for more trades education, from high school shop to college programs, but it is a more comprehensive argument for working with your hands, or at least for the value of work with immediate, tangible results.

The Globe and Mail ran a story on Tuesday morning on the roadtrip taken by Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, retold in The Great Typo Hunt. How angry does it make you when you find mistakes on public signs? What? Just me? Well, it does drive me crazy, and it drove Deck and Herson to travel about in a bid to fix them where they were encountered. We were in Calgary on Tuesday afternoon, and while I could not get to Pages in Kensington, the most southerly Chapters has two copies among their Dictionaries, Language, Etc. holdings.

Under normal circumstances, I will read of or otherwise hear about a book through my scholarship or through the New York Times Book Review (and podcast) and place it on my Chapters wish list. From there, I will have a look at the various options -- brick and mortar, amazon.ca and .com, bn.com, chapters.ca, abebooks.com, bookcloseouts.com -- to secure the best price. It is remarkable, for example, at the difference in price between online vendors. What no longer surprises me is how little luck I have at the local Chapters. But where Chapters online has started to differentiate itself from amazon.ca is in stock and shipping times. There have been many, many times where I have gone with chapters.ca because the book I want is "In Stock" while amazon.ca shows "Usually Ships In 11 to 14 Days." The latter is the kiss of death. For many of those items I have waited much, much longer.

At this stage in the evolution of the book trade, the recommendation of booksellers is almost irrelevant. I know that Heather Reisman still chooses titles for us in search of a mass-market winner, but her brick and mortar stores cannot be counted on to employ thoughtful clerks whose written recommendations adorn shelf displays. I still see these displays at independents, but the love of a good independent bookstore is for me an unrequited dream, of course. Internet recommendations are divorced from the on-line vendors themselves, and that it probably a good thing for objective assessment. But the two recent tips I got, one from a person and one from an "old" media source, demanded, from me at least, a more immediate reaction. And if I had not been travelling, I do not know if I could have acted with such immediacy on my impulse. I paid more than I had to pay, but I got my books right away.

I wonder if this, the urgency of a download, more than the snazzy displays of the e-readers themselves, will soon make the e-book essential? Think about it. On a recent NPR All Songs Considered podcast, Bob Boilen played music from April Smith and the Great Picture Show's Songs For A Sinking Ship. An independent artist with American distribution through amazon.com, Smith's material is best ordered by Canadians through her website. Which I did because I still like having the CD. And I am still waiting. I could have bought the download for half the price and had it ten days ago.

Unpopular Speech

A graduate student at the University of Lethbridge posted a blog entry last week that got picked up, and derided, by a national newspaper. As a result, other bloggers began to comment on the integrity of the student's ideas and, by association, the integrity of the university. This reaction got me thinking about unpopular speech.

The nature of that original blog post is not the issue here. I disagreed with it entirely. I found it distasteful. But could its existence really be an indictment of an academic program, or of a collection of hundreds of scholars working on a wide variety of subjects?

Of course not, and it is also not fair to suggest that a university administration has a responsibility to limit speech simply because it is unpopular.

What then do we expect of writers when we encounter unpopular speech?

First and foremost, I think that writers should always be forthright about their credentials. I am an English professor and a university administrator, and so I believe that I can speak with some authority on matters related to those fields. But I also have informed opinions about other matters, and I believe that I have the right to share them. As a result, over the three years I have written in this space, I have discussed matters of economics, public policy, and music. But at no time have I led anyone to believe that I am an economist, a bureaucrat, or a practicing musician.

Secondly, I think that writers should be transparent in their use of references. Whose data has been used? Whose opinions have been built upon? If one is simply speculating, citing anecdotal evidence, this should be very clear.

Finally, I think that the forum for unpopular speech should be one that invites challenge. If your blog advocates for closed borders (or open borders, for that matter), turn on the comments. And if your venue is a university classroom or a seminar presentation, welcome dissenting views.

That really is the advantage of the university, is it not? That is what critics from the blogosphere seem to have missed. A university should represent a range of opinions, and I notice that people who complain about what they hear from universities seldom ask for other points of view to be heard: they most often ask for the opinion with which they disagree to be suppressed.

I have voted for every major political party in Canada. I subscribe to both national newspapers. I like to hear a range of views on every matter. And, for me, unpopular speech helps determine the limits of reasonable thought. I accept that some unpopular speech rises to the level of shouting fire in a theater. But why do we jump to that conclusion? Why are we so quick to apply that label? The advantage of the internet is that it admits to the discourse so many different voices. And, yet, a great many of us recoil from those sounds. It is so much simpler to listen to people who confirm what we already believe, after all.

Culture Bought, Sold, and Borrowed

I read an article last week about the best movie twists of the past twenty years. One of the films discussed was Jacob's Ladder (1990), the early Tim Robbins vehicle. It has been about twenty years since I saw it. If I wanted to do so this week, what could I do?

Until recently, of course, I could go to the video store and rent it. Buried along dusty shelves were catalogue titles that were barely touched. New releases kept these stores open, but there was something quaint about the collection of older films, available for a week for a couple of dollars. It is bad enough that everyone started downloading new releases or renting them through the mail, but distributors began selling through retail outlets enough catalogue items for five bucks to hobble every rental outlet on the continent.

The video store business model is broken. It was never the greatest undertaking, of course. Everyone who comes in the door wants the same title in its first week of release, and the rest of the stock gets picked over slowly over months or years. But it has provided a valuable service. I am old enough to remember when, in a three-channel universe (or even a twenty-channel universe), the scheduled airing of an old movie was an event. On-demand expectations have changed that reality for many people and left other people behind.

Netflix, the American operation that got started in the mail-order rental niche occupied in this country by Zip, is coming to Canada to expand online services. If, today, I do not want to download Jacob's Ladder, tomorrow I will be able to stream it. But astute observers have already commented on how moving in this direction will require us all to upgrade our computer hardware and buy the capacity to access more content online. How will ISPs who also provide movie content deal with its customers who want more capacity in order to buy services from their competitors? And, as is the case with everything from digitized archives to online retailing, who is asking questions about putting our culture, with increasing exclusivity, into the hands of fewer and fewer for-profit media conglomerates?

I am not suggesting that our culture was in safer hands when copies of its artifacts were in corner stores. But through those years I, at least, chuckled at libraries collecting CDs and VHS tapes, believing it nothing more than a sop to potential library patrons that had no interest in books. Now, with our physical artifacts no longer surrounding us, I have a new respect for the archival function of multimedia libraries.