Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

Invisible Women

I’m taking time out (already) from all the rewriting I have to do to complain and restate a principle.

Here’s a lovely little bit of misogyny.

Read the article? A newspaper took the photograph of the ready room where Obama and his cabinet received the news of Bin Ladin’s death and photoshopped out the women present. For reasons of “modesty” they claimed. They then apologized but asserted they have a First Amendment right to have done this.

Inadvertently—and I am sure they didn’t think about this when they did it—they gave Bin Ladin a small cultural victory out of his own death. The religious view Bin Ladin asserted, supported, and fought for includes the return of women to second class status, to the status of property. By doctoring that photograph, the editors of Di Tzeitung tacitly approved this idea.

Modesty. Really? They erased Hilary Clinton and a staffer in the background. You look at the photograph in question:

Is there any way to look at that and perceive immodesty in the way we usually use the term? I don’t see any scanty clothing or alluring, over-the-shoulder glances at the camera. No legs, no cleavage, no hint of sexualization, which is what is normally meant by use of the term, even—especially—within the context of religious censure. This sort of attitude is intended as a guard against titillation and “impure thoughts”, but I’m having a hard time seeing anything like that here.

In fact, this has made clear what the real problem is and has been all along. Rules about “modesty” have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power. Secretary of State Clinton—the Secretary of State of the United States of America, the most powerful nation on Earth, is a woman!—is a female in a position of power. She is the boss of many men. She is instrumental in setting policy, which affects many more men, men she doesn’t know and will never know. She wields power and that is what is feared by these—I’ll say it because I’m pissed about this—these small-minded bigots.

And in their effort to make sure their daughters never grow up with the idea that they can have power or any kind, not even in the say over what to do with their lives (because they don’t even have any say over how they dress, who they can talk to, where they can go, what they can aspire to), these “proper” gentlemen handed Osama Bin Ladin a final supportive fist bump of solidarity. “Yeah, brother, we hated the fact that you blew people up, but we really gotta keep these females in their Place.”

Cultural relativism be damned. I’m one hundred percent with Sam Harris on this. Subjugating half the population to some idea of propriety and in so doing strip them of everything they have even while hiding them head to toe and keeping them out of the public gaze is categorically evil. The fact that this is resisted so much by otherwise intelligent people—on both sides of the issue, those who perpetrate it and those who refuse to outright condemn it for fear of being seen as cultural imperialists—is as shameful as the defenders of slavery 150 years ago.

Now, at least, they’ve made it hard to miss. This wasn’t a photograph of some beauty pageant or a spread in Playboy or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue; this wasn’t a still from the red carpet runway at the Golden Globes or the lurid front page of a Fleet Street tabloid. No, this was a photograph of powerful people doing serious work and two of them do not have a penis. This is the issue—power. Women the world over have no say in their lives. They are wives, concubines, prostitutes, slaves. If they wish to change the way they live, they are forbidden, sometimes killed for their ambition. In many places still their daughters have their sex organs mutilated so they won’t ever fully experience sexual pleasure and, theoretically, never want to stray from the men who own them. They are denied the vote, denied a voice, denied even the courtesy of Presence in life. They are made background, wallpaper, accoutrements for the men who are set against yielding even a token of consideration toward the idea that “their women” are people.

People who happen to be women. People.

I am sick of this crap. I am sick of people who don’t understand the issue. I am sick of the tepid response among people who should see this as an unmitigated evil who won’t speak up to condemn it outright. By their reluctance to condemn they allow this sickness to grow in their own backyard. There are groups in this country who but for a few “inconvenient” laws would—and in some cases do—treat women exactly the same way. I am sick of the constant onslaught on family planning services and the idea that women should not be in command of their own bodies. I am sick of the feckless insecurity of outwardly bold and inwardly timid males who are afraid of the women around them, that if these women actually had some choices they would leave. I am sick of men who can find no better use for their hands than to beat women, no better use for their minds than to boast of their manliness, and no better use for their penises than to keep score. I am sick of women who are made to appear at fault for their own rapes because of the way they dress or walk or talk or because they thought, just like real people, they had a right to go anywhere they chose, free of fear. I am sick of seeing the human waste of unrealized potential based on genital arrangement and the granting of undeserved rights and authority based on the same thing. I am sick of being told by people who obviously haven’t stepped outside of their own navels that this is what god wants because some preacher or imam or shaman told them and they like the idea that there is someone who can’t say no to them no matter how abusive or failed they are as human beings. I am sick of seeing women pay the cost of men deciding for them what they should be.

For those of you who read this and agree, excuse the rant. Shove it in the faces of anyone who gives even lip service to the idea that women are somehow other than and less than males and that maybe a little “modesty” would be a good thing. Modesty in this context is code for invisibility.

Back now to our regularly scheduled Wednesday.

May 11, 2011
My Obligatory Piece About Ayn Rand

From time to time, here and there, someone brings Ayn Rand up as some kind of role model. Lately it’s even in the national news, thanks to the Tea Party and an apparently not very good film of Rand’s seminal masterwork, Atlas Shrugged. The uber conservatives now crowding reason out of the halls of congress with their bizarro legislation and their lectures from the floor and on committees about how their toilets don’t flush right so why should regulations on light bulbs be passed are the children of the Dragon’s Teeth cast randomly by Ms. Rand and her philosophical cult followers. It amazes how people who profess to believe in a philosophy of independent thought can sublimate themselves so thoroughly to the dogmas of that philosophy and claim with a straight face that they are free thinkers on any level. The phrase “more Catholic than the pope” comes to mind sometimes when crossing verbal swords with these folks, who seem perfectly blind to the contradictions inherent in their own efforts. Rand laid out a My Way or the Highway ethic that demanded of her followers that they be true to themselves—as long as they did as she directed.

Ayn Rand’s novels, of which there were three (plus a novella/parable I don’t intend to discuss here), moved by giant leaps from promising to fanciful to pathetic. There are some paragraphs in any one of them that are just fine. Occasionally a secondary character is nicely drawn (Eddie Willers is possibly her most sympathetic and true-to-life creation) and from time to time there is even a moment of genuine drama. But such bits are embedded in tar pits of philosophically over-determined panegyric that drowns any art there might be.

But then, her devoted fans never read them for the art.

What Rand delivers in both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is a balm to the misunderstood and underappreciated Great Man buried in the shambling, inarticulate assemblage that is disaffected high I.Q. youth.

The give-aways in both novels involve laughter. The opening scene in The Fountainhead characterizes Howard Roark for the entire novel, prefiguring the final scene in the novel, which translated to film perfectly in the weird 1947 Gary Cooper thing.

Howard Roark laughed.

He stood naked at the edge of a cliff….He laughed at the thing which had happened to him that morning and at the things which now lay ahead.

Of course, the thing that had happened to him that morning was his expulsion from university for not completing his assignments. You can pretty it up with philosophical dross, but basically he didn’t do what he was required to do, instead opting for self-expression in the face of everything else. Hence the misunderstood genius aspect, the wholly-formed sense of mission, the conviction of personal rightness, and the adolescent disdain for authority no matter what.

But his reaction? To laugh.

Any other kid in the same situation generally goes skulking off, bitter and resentful, harboring ill thoughts and maybe an “I’ll show you” attitude that may or may not lead to anything useful.

But not a Rand character. They laugh. It’s Byronic in its isolated disdain for rules or logic or anything casually human. It’s a statement of separation.

It’s also just a bit psychotic.

The other scene is from Atlas Shrugged in which Dagny Taggart falls into bed with Henry Reardon. Both are depicted as mental giants, geniuses, and industrial rebels. They are self-contained polymaths who make their own rules. And one of the rules they now make for themselves is that adultery is the only sensible choice for two such kindred beings.

And as they’re tumbling into an embrace?

When he threw her down on the bed, their bodies met like the two sounds that broke against each other in the air of the room: the sound of his tortured moan and of her laughter.

Of course, this most poignant moment is preceded by a long paragraph of Dagny explaining to Hank Reardon that she was going to sleep with him because it would be her proudest moment, because she had earned it. It’s really rather ridiculous. It’s the kind of thing that, if done at all, would most likely occur at the end of an affair, when both parties are trying to justify what they’d done, which is basically commit adultery because, you know, they wanted to.

But it’s the laughter that characterizes these two people in these moments. Crossroads for them both, turning points, and what do they do? They laugh. You can’t help but read contempt into it, no matter how much explanation Rand attempts to depict them as somehow above it all. For her it’s the laughter of victory, but in neither case is there any kind of victory, but a surrender.

Later in Atlas Shrugged Reardon gives her a bracelet made of his miracle metal and upon snapping it closed on her wrist, she kisses his hand, and it is nothing short of a moment from Gor. Dagny gets traded around through the novel until she ends up with John Galt, and no matter how much Rand tries to explain it, the scenarios she sets up for each transition turn Dagny into a groupie. She becomes by the end of the novel the prize each of them men gets when they’ve done a particularly impressive trick.

Rand attempts to portray their interactions (if you can call them that—really, they’re more contract negotiations, which means Rand owes an implicit debt to Rousseau) as strenuously righteous achievements. No one just has a conversation if they’re a Rand hero, they declaim, they negotiate, the issue position statements. They are continually setting ground rules for the experience at hand, and while maybe there’s something to this (we all indulge this sort of thing, from earliest childhood on, but if we tried to do it with the kind of self-conscious clarity of these people nothing would ever happen), it serves to isolate them further. They are the antithesis of John Donne’s assertion and by personal fiat.

Only it isn’t really like that.

The problem with being a nerd is that certain social interactions appear alien and impenetrable and the nerd feels inexplicably on the outside of every desirable interpersonal contact. People like Rand attempt to portray the group to which the nerd feels isolated from as deliberately antagonistic to the nerd because they sense the nerd’s innate superiority. This is overcomplicating what’s really going on and doing so in an artificially philosophical way which Rand pretends is an outgrowth of a natural condition. The messiness of living is something she seeks to tame by virtue of imposing a kind of corporate paradigm in which all the worthwhile people are CEOs.

As I said, it’s attractive to certain disaffected adolescent mindset.

But it ain’t real life.

I have intentionally neglected the third novel, which was her first one—We The Living. I find this book interesting on a number of levels, one of the most fascinating being that among the hardcore Randites it is almost never mentioned, and often not read. The reasons for this are many, but I suspect the chief one being that it doesn’t fit easily with the two iconic tomes. Mainly because it’s a tragedy.

We The Living is about Kira Argounova, a teenager from a family of minor nobility who comes back to Moscow after the Revolution with the intention of going to the new “classless” university and becoming an engineer. She wants to build things and she knows that now is her chance. Prior to the revolution, she would never have been allowed by her family or social convention—her destiny was to have been married off. That’s gone now. We never really learn what has become of the rest of her family, but we can guess. And Kira is intent on pursuing her dream.

But she can’t. Because she is from minor nobility, she soon runs afoul of the self-appointed guardians of the Revolution, who oust her from the university just because.

She ends up a prostitute, then a black market dealer. She becomes the lover of an NKVD agent and uses him. She is already the lover of a wannabe counter-revolutionary who can’t get his game on and ends up in self-immolation. The NKVD agent self-destructs because of the contradictions she forces him to see in the new state and Kira goes from bad to worse and finally makes an attempt to escape Russia itself and ends up shot by a hapless border guard at the Finnish border. She dies just inside Finland.

It is a strikingly different kind of novel and it offers a glimpse of where Rand might have gone had she stuck to this path. Sure, you can see some of the seeds of her later pedantry and polemic, but the bulk of the novel is heartfelt, an honest portrayal of the tragedy of dreams caught in systemic ambivalence.

One can understand the source of Rand’s fanatic love of the United States—she grew up under the early Soviets, and there’s no denying that this was a dreadful system for a bright, talented, intellectually-bent young woman—or anyone else, for that matter—to endure. The freedom of the United States must have been narcotic to her.

But she fundamentally misunderstood the American landscape and identified with the glitzy, large-scale, and rather despotic “captains of industry” aspect rather than the common citizens, the groundseed of cooperation and generosity and familial observance and openness that her chosen idols took advantage of rather than provided for. She drew the wrong lessons and over time, ensconced within her own air-born castles, she became obsessively convinced that the world was her enemy and The People were irredeemable.

Sad, really. Sadder still that so many people bought into her lopsided philosophy.

She made the mistake so many people seem to make in not understanding that capitalism is not a natural system but an artifice, a tool. It is not a state of being but a set of applications for a purpose. It should serve, not dictate. She set out a playbook which gave capitalism the kind of quasi-legitimate gloss of a religion and we are suffering the consequences of its acolytes.

However, it would seem the only antidote to it is to let people grow out of it. There’s a point in life where this is attractive—I read all these novels when I was 15 and 16 and I was convinced of my own misunderstood specialness. But like the adolescent conviction that rock’n’roll is the only music worth listening to and that the right clothes are more important than the content of your mind, we grow out of it.

Some don’t, though. And occasionally they achieve their goals. Alan Greenspan, for instance.

And even he has now admitted that he was wrong. Too bad he didn’t realize that when he was 21.

April 24, 2011
Between

I completed a massive rewrite the other day and sent it out. When I say massive, I mean big, a whole novel. There’s a lot riding on this and I find myself fidgety and on edge in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time. It was an older book, one I thought (mistakenly, as it turned out) was done, complete, just fine. What I found was proof that I need a good editor.

But the work is done and it’s out the door and all I can do now is wait for the yea or the nay. Not sure what I’ll do if the answer is…

Everytime I get to the end of a major project, I find myself at sixes and sevens, loose ends need chasing down, and I don’t quite know what to do with myself. Formerly, some of this time and excess energy was spent by going to a job. That’s not an option now. I used to go through a frenzy of cleaning house as well and I will likely do some of that today. But later. This morning, after breakfast, I opened Photoshop and noodled with a few images. Having multiple creative streams is a good thing when you’re in a situation like this. The above image is one result and I’ve decided to sandwich this post between two pictures.

Not to be melodramatic, but in some ways I’m facing a turning point. I have to do Something. Almost 30 years ago I set my goal to become a published writer. Much to my amazement, I succeeded, but the effort birthed the desire to do this as my main work, which means I have to keep publishing. Whether we like it or not, we need money to live, otherwise I could quite contentedly (I think, I tell myself) write for my own pleasure and use this medium or others to put the work out and not worry about income streams. But it’s not just the income and anyone who writes for a living knows very well that this is true. After a five year spurt of publishing intensity, things have ground to a virtual halt. There are a number of reasons for this, some of them entirely my fault. But I have to turn it around and soon or walk away.

I’m not at all sure I can and remain whole.

Of course I have this older art, photography. I can, with some difficulty, get a freelance business up and running. There’s music, too, although I am years from the kind of proficiency that would adequately supplement my income. Tomorrow I’ll be playing guitar at the anniversary party of the business of a friend. An hour or so of my ideosyncratic “stylings” as a favor. For fun.

These spans of dry time between projects require distraction lest I tumble into a tangle of self-pity and despair. It never lasts, I’m not so stoically romantic that I can sustain the dark time of the soul connected to artists denied their opportunity. For better or worse, I seek happiness and am constitutionally incapable of living long in depression. If not today, then by Monday I’ll be at work on something new or a new twist on something old and I’ll be trying again.

And for the time being I feel like the rewrite just finished is pretty good. I have confidence in it. I will let you all know if the news is…

Well, whatever it is.

Have a good weekend.

April 22, 2011
Post Manuscript Depression

Sort of. I have just completed a marathon session (about four weeks straight) of disassembling and revising a novel I thought I’d completed years ago. The rewrite came at a request. I may have news, but not now. That’s for later.

I don’t know about others, but when I finish a big project like that, I tend to have a day or two of complete confusion. I don’t know what to do with myself. For several years, I cleaned house afterward, which occupied the time I might spend brooding, used whatever left-over energy from the writing process, and performed a domestically useful job. But I’ve been home now for almost two years, the house is fairly clean as a matter of course, which leaves only major jobs to do (my office ceiling needs repair, I have to build new bookshelves again, and the garage still requires attention) and I frankly don’t want to do any of that.

After the work is done, I tend to feel depressed. Not gloomy, just enervated. This morning I straightened out my desk, cleaned up some unused files on the computer, and puttered. I have to walk the dog yet and see about lunch. Much of the day will be spent waiting.

Waiting for what? Good question. There are phone calls I’m waiting for, but none specifically for today. Emails as well. I came close, I think, to botching something yesterday of some importance because I got tired of waiting. Waiting requires a state of mind I do not possess. I can act like I possess it, play-act the role of the calm, confident individual to whom things will, by dint of zen gravitas, inevitably come. But that’s not me, not really, not ever.

I have a model kit that has been waiting for me to build it for several years now. Yes, I said years. I acquired it because I had it as a kid and really liked it—the H.M.S. Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship—but I didn’t build it then.

There were three model kits I clearly remember having as a child that I did not assemble. My dad did. There was a balsa wood and paper bi-plane that actually flew (a Jennie, if I recall correctly); a beautiful 1933 Mercedes Benz touring car; and the Victory. I didn’t build them because my dad wanted to see them “done right.” So he built them while I watched.

Well, watched some of the time.

Admittedly, he did an amazing job on all three. When he finished, they were spectacular. He even did the rigging on the Victory with black thread (the kit at the time did not include the rigging, but he found a guide for how it should look). I really liked that ship. So I always thought I’d someday get that kit and build it myself. Just to say I’d done it.

I’m a sloppy craftsman. I admit it. I have no patience for fine, meticulous detail work. And model kits used to puzzle me no end because I have never found joy in the actual building, which is what you’re supposed to discover. The “purpose” of such things is to teach the appreciation of assemblage, of patience, of doing a job of some duration and doing it well.

Screw that, I wanted the finished product. I would probably have been happier if I could have bought the damn things already completed. But they didn’t come that way, so…

My models were always characterized by poor joins, glue runs, and, if I painted them, bad finish. But I was happy—I had the thing itself!

So why am I a writer? (Or a photographer, for that matter?)

Because I want the finished product and I want it to be just so. I have to do it myself. I have forced my natural lack of patience into a straitjacket of control that occasionally slips, but which I yearly gain in competence. Because ultimately the only way to get what I want is to practice something for which I have no natural affinity.

Which leads me to my current depression. What I ought to do is sit down and carefully consider my next project. My impulse is to just open a file and start banging away on a new story. But I don’t have one that appeals to me just now and I have all this other stuff that needs doing.

And I know that, although this rewrite is “finished,” there will likely be corrections once Donna gets through the manuscript.

It might be a good time to start that model kit. But I have no place just now to work on it. I need to clean a space for that. Bother. Might as well just walk the dog and eat lunch.

April 13, 2011
Poised…

April 10, 2011
A Short Bit About School

There’s a scene from that marvelous film, The Dead Poets Society, in which Robin Williams playing teacher John Keating has a brief conversation with Mr. Nolan, the headmaster of the school played by Norman Lloyd, about the purpose of his job.

“I thought my job was to teach them to think,” says Keating.

“Not on your life,” Mr. Nolan snaps back. “They can learn that in college.”

Or something like that. You get the point, anyway.

I just finished reading John Taylor Gatto’s thick, data-packed screed on American public schools, The Underground History of American Education. Gatto taught in New York City for 30 years and the year he achieved teacher-of-the-year status, both citywide and statewide, he resigned, fed up finally with fighting a losing battle against a system he declares page after page in this book to be fundamentally malign.

Not that the people who either set it up or run it are bad people—they did what they did and do what they do because they believe in it. And, Gatto stresses, like all true believers, their vision supersedes the reality in which they find themselves.

I found a lot in this book with which to disagree. Gatto’s history is right on the borderlands of conspiracy theory. He mentions the masons a few times and once at least accompanied the reference with a suggestive “I wonder what that is all about” line. But he insists this was never done with ill-intent in mind.

Ill intent or not, the result was a system that does not educate, by and large, except by accident. It is a system that chews up idealistic teachers and students on a daily basis because neither realize what exactly it is they are there to do. The system knows, has it built into its basic make-up, and after a century and a half of accrued inertia, the system cannot change. Not easily and not effectively. Those who charge the windmill get tossed thoughtlessly and sometimes crushed. He details instances where perfectly fine teachers have been summarily fired or forced to resign because they elected to do what they thought they were supposed to do instead of what was required of them and the further infuriating instances of teachers and administrators who resignedly continue doing things they know won’t work because they want their pension and sinecure.

So what is it that he suggests schools do?

To my surprise, it turns out to be what I’ve been suggesting for decades.

I’ve written about this before, but in this context it’s worth repeating. I hated school. Loathed it. Practically from the first year on. And it was a weird hatred because I would return every fall determined to like it, to get something out of it. This is something my parents likely would not believe, since from their point of view I wasted my time in school. But I showed up every year hoping something good would happen. It did, occasionally. One or two of my teachers were actually pretty good. But in toto the 12 years was a dreary, mind-numbing, frustrating experience…and I didn’t know why!

Learning was never a problem for me. I picked things up quickly. Once learned, however, I wanted to move on. The class, however, stayed stuck making me prove over and over again that I knew what I already did—and then occasionally making me feel like I really didn’t know it. Homework completely dismayed me. Some of it, true, I wasn’t very adept at—I didn’t do well in arithmetic (although I can do percentages in my head, as well as multiply and do some rudimentary fractions—a career in photography is impossible without some math skills, at least the way I practiced it)—but other things, once the teacher said I knew it, I was ready for the next thing. Which didn’t happen.

I was reading ahead of my grade practically from the beginning (I entered kindergarten knowing how to read, albeit my main reading was comic books) and that often was met with the kind of disapproval from my teachers that’s hard to pin down. I knew by their attitude and sometimes their actions that I was doing something wrong, but I for the life of me couldn’t understand what.

And then of course there was the social aspect. I was bullied from 1st grade to 8th. There was, I soon learned, nothing that would be done about it by the teachers.

Looking back on it now, I can characterize it handily—school was a prison. I had to be there, locked in a room with other prisoners who didn’t like being there, and the sociology of the playground was in its much milder way the sociology of the prison yard. Students had no power except over other students and it was exercised in cruel but, once the circumstances are clear, perfectly understandable ways. This also explained why there was such antagonism toward “good students”—they were seen as suck-ups, people who were trying to curry favor with the bosses and make an escape “for good behavior.”

Some schools were worse than others. There were public schools in my childhood everyone knew were bad places to go. No learning of any worth took place in them and the main requirement was to be tough.

My experience in school is consistent with Mr. Gatto’s diagnosis—public schools are not intended to educate but to socialize. They were established to take kids out of the home and turn them into “useful citizens.” Useful to whom and for what changes from time to time, but when you recognize the immense contributions of men like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie to the establishment of modern public schooling, you start to get a hint. When I went to Roosevelt High School I was told that it was a traditional “blue collar” school—which meant it was there to turn out factory workers for local St. Louis industries. Some of the class selections made by the older counselors on behalf of students—who by then didn’t care all that much, school was school, what difference did it make what they had to take—reflected this idea.

Although at the time it made little real sense because the culture at large had changed during the Sixties and most of this was done by rote, because it had always been done, and wasn’t leading the students anywhere useful, even by the questionable standards of the early 20th Century.

One of the most telling statements in Gatto’s book concerns the era of court mandated overhauls and their many failures. “The problem [I’m paraphrasing] is not that all the money failed to fix the system, but that no one realized that the system wasn’t broken, not by its own metrics. it did what it did very well and all that money just gave it more to do the same with.”

In those places and schools where someone realized that the way things were being run was fundamentally flawed, real change happened. But these instances are rare.

You have to ask a basic question: in the instance of a situation like Garfield High School in East L.A. where a dedicate educator, Jaime Escalante, took dead-end kids and taught them to do calculus, why can’t this happen everywhere? Escalante proved that it wasn’t a lack of intelligence on the part of the students. If anything, they were brighter than their better-off counterparts, possibly because just surviving require a raw intelligence honed to a sharper edge. So what is it?

Kids know instinctively when they’re being handed a bad deal. After three years in many schools, the light is said to go out in many kids’ eyes. By then they realize that it was all a game—they aren’t there to learn, they are there to be turned into consumers. Maybe they can’t describe it that way, but they know they’re being handed a bill of goods. So the system becomes a nanny system, designed to get them to adulthood pliant and cooperative.

Gatto goes much farther. I am not so convinced as he is of the precision of the process. And the fact is, real learning does happen here and there, even within this cockamamie system.

What did I do? I paid little attention in class unless something was going on that interested me. I took charge of my own education, and believe me that was not the best idea. But no one stopped me. I ended up my senior year cutting two and three days a week. Most of those days I spent in the local library, a few blocks up the street from school, reading for five or six hours. It was a wholly unguided regimen, haphazard and chaotic—but I read a lot of good books. Gradually over time I was fortunate enough to find people who, all unknowingly, helped build a framework inside which all that reading turned into something coherent.

I agree the public school system as it stands in many places today probably ought to go away. It does not serve the people attending. But I have a profound antipathy for the current political cries for its demise—they have nothing to recommend to put in its place and because the system is not what we need doesn’t mean we don’t need one.

April 8, 2011
On Being Fooled

Okay, it’s April 1st. We all know what that means. I have myself played an occasional prank in years past, but tend not to as a matter of principle.

See, I don’t care much for being teased. Lots of reasons, but a big one has to do with having been not particularly cool for a very significant part of my childhood, which meant not being “in” on a lot of the current really important stuff that all my peers thought was the basis of timeless significance. So I was an easy mark when it came to being tagged in pranks and April Fool’s Day was a big one for being made to feel, well, stupid.

Fast forward. I still don’t care for being teased. As a result, I usually don’t tease other people. Can’t take it, don’t dish it out, even though I recognize that it actually isn’t a big deal anymore and in many instances it is a demonstration of affection. I’ve learned to accept it in small doses, but there comes a point past which I start to bristle and…

Well, it’s been likewise a long time since I was taken in by an April Fool’s hoax, and this morning I bought a good one, hook-line-and-sinker fashion, and then compounded it by letting everyone know.

Arrogance being far worse than humility, we should all be gracious about being reminded how not sharp we often are. You take your humility where you can get it and let it be a lesson, etc etc etc. Happy April Fool’s Day, everyone, and may it all end with a laugh and better assessment of where we are with ourselves.

Oh, the prank? This one here.

April 1, 2011
First Image

I’ve been dutifully reading the manuals for the new camera, even though in some cases it is high order calculus to my primitive mind. Still, I wanted to show something for the expense and the effort, so…here is the first image, from Saturday evening.

Whenever possible, I like to start with something DRAMATIC!

March 28, 2011
Biting Bullets

Okay, so today was the day. The Day. After procrastinating for many reasons, both rational and just perverse, Donna and I plunked down our plastic and walked out of ye olde camera emporium with my new camera. I’ve been talking to people, some of them extremely knowledgeable (internet wave to Jennifer—“Thank You!”), and reading blogs and consumer reports and websites and agonizing and today it culminated in A Purchase.

Was a time, mind you, that this would have been the cause of a couple of days of decision-making. I used to be one of the Go-To people about matters photographic. If I needed a new piece of equipment, the only question was, could I afford it this week or did I have to wait a few more weeks.

But this was a chunk of change, an issue of moment, and on something of which I am less than qualified. After having dipped into as much printed material as I could stand, I ultimately had to go talk to a real live salesperson and Make A Decision.

Rob at Schiller’s Camera was very helpful a couple of weeks back. Salesman after my own heart. He answer my questions, didn’t push, took out camera after camera for comparison, and new his stuff. After a couple hours, we’d narrowed the field to two, and after going over all the relevant stuff afterward, I made my choice.

A Canon EOS 60D. My new machine. I’ve spent most of today reading the owner’s manual and playing with it. It will take a long time to master all the stuff this thing will do, but I can already take a photograph with it and this will only improve. (I’m an intuitive kind of guy when it comes to this sort of thing. Take it out and road test it, carry it as an extension of my limbs and eyes for months on end, snap away thousands of frames, learn the mechanism until I can make the necessary adjustments reflexively. Just there’s a lot more to learn on this than I’m used to—and it will make movies.)

I haven’t put up any new images on the Zenfolio site in a bit. It will still be a while before I do—I have to download the new software for the file transfers, get used to how these files work in Photoshop, and actually, you know, take some new pictures I think worth showing The World. But the next new gallery will be from this beauty. It’s an impressive camera. It feels right. I think it’s the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

March 26, 2011
“I do not like Home School and Ham…”

Ken Ham is the head of Answers In Genesis, an organization that promotes and perpetuates the Creationist view that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, that homo sapiens sapien trod the same ground at the same time as dinosaurs, the the story of Noah is literally true, and that evolution is All Wrong. He’s an Australian and a biblical literalist. He built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in 2007. Check the link for an overview by an (admittedly) biased source, but for simple clarity is hard to beat. It is a fraud of research, flagrantly anti-science, and laughable in its assertions (in my opinion).

Ken Ham is one of the more public figures in our current national spasm of extreme religiosity. He’s attempting to have built another show-piece in Kentucky, a theme park based on Noah and the Flood. The problem with this, however, is that tax dollars are being used in its construction and it is a blatantly religious enterprise.

In the meantime, Ken Ham and Answers In Genesis have recently been disinvited from a conference on homeschooling. There are multiple ironies in this, especially since, on the face of it, Ham and these particular homeschoolers would seem to be sympatico on the issues.

Be that as it may, it prompted me to make a couple of observations regarding this whole phenomenon. According to the Home School Legal Defense Fund, homeschooling is a growing practice.

it is estimated that the annual rate of growth of the number of children being homeschooled in the U.S. is between 7% to 15%. Reports from 1999 determined that approximately 850,000 American children were being home schooled by at least one parent. This number increased again in 2003, to over one million children, according to the National Center for Education Statistics National Household Education (NHES). NHES compiled data showing that in 2007, over 1.5 million children in the U.S. were home schooled.

There are several reasons for this, but the most stated are:

Religious or moral instruction 36%

School environment 21%

Academic instruction 17%

Other 26%

Questions of violence, socialization, academic standards, and related issues play into these decisions. Not all homeschooling is, as is popularly thought, conducted for religious reasons, but certainly religious homeschooling gets the lion’s share of the publicity.

I have the same reservations about homeschooling as I have with special private schools that seek to isolate students from the wider community. Despite the problems with “the world” to put an informational barrier between a child and that world can put that child at a disadvantage later. But I can’t argue with the sentiment that many public schools are dysfunctional and do a disservice to students. The 17% of the sample opting for homeschooling for academic reasons probably have concerns with which I’d agree.

The more people pull their children out of public education, though, the less incentive there is to fix that system.

I’m torn on this. I’m largely self-educated. But the foundation of my education was laid in public schools (K through 4th in public school, second half of 4th through 8th in parochial school, 9 through 12 in public high school). I had many problems with school when I was in it, and later, upon review, some of those issues I decided were justified. I certainly felt at the time better read than my English teachers. (This was a false impression based entirely on the syllabus they were allowed to teach. I was certainly better read than the syllabus.) There were distortions in all my history classes, some of which I took issue with at the time. The administrative side was annoying and the classes I would have desired to take were either truncated or unavailable. I got most of my education from books read on my own initiative.

But that doesn’t mean this is in any way a recommended program for most students. Part of the academic experience is and must be socialization (although I firmly believe most of the problems we have with public education today stem from the fact that in America the primary purpose of school has always been socialization, often at the expense of academics, and we’re paying for this unacknowledged fact today).

What profoundly disturbs me about the 36% of those who homeschool for religious reasons is precisely the problem presented by people like Ken Ham. Parents who reject science as an enemy to their religious beliefs do neither their children nor this country any good by isolating their children and inculcating the distorted views presented in the name of some sort of spiritual decontamination. What these parents wish to tell their kids at home is their business—but there is also a vast pool of legitimate knowledge about the world which needs to be taught if these kids are to have any chance at being able as adults to make reasoned and rational choices, for themselves and for their own children and for the society in which they live and work. Few parents have either the time or the training to do this, at least in my opinion, whether they are certified or not, simply because they are only one voice. Much education happens in the crossfire of ideas under examination by many. The debate that happens in a vibrant classroom setting is vital to the growth of one’s ability to think, to analyze, and to reason. The by-play that will likely not happen between dissenting viewpoints or between different apprehensions of a topic won’t happen in isolation.

Ken Ham tends to bar outside viewpoints when he can. He has a history of banning people from the Creation Museum when he knows they are antagonistic to his viewpoint. In the face of overwhelming evidence, he tries to assert a reality that has long since been shown to be inaccurate. That he was barred from a conference of folks who will then educate their children in those same inaccuracies is an irony of epic proportions. But, as they say, what goes around, comes around.

March 25, 2011