“Us, the Living”: Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of 9-11

“Us, the living”: Why I won’t celebrate “Patriot Day” on 9-11

 

Every year, the prestigious academic school where I teach celebrates “Patriot Day” with a school assembly, replete with all the martial pageantry and grim remembrance one would expect. It is, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”

Yet every year, I am made uncomfortable by the ceremony. It has been difficult to articulate why. I love my country, and although I never served myself, I come from a family who has served. Among them is my father, who, outraged by the North Korean seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo in 1968, enlisted in the Navy, and spent some of the Vietnam years serving as an aid to an admiral in the Pentagon – one of the buildings hit by the 9-11 hijackers. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a marine in the Pacific during World War Two, and arrived at Pearl Harbor not long after the Japanese sneak attack. To say that I am proud to be the stock of these men would be considerable understatement.

It is I think because of – and not in spite of – their service and patriotism that I reject Patriot Day, or any commemoration of 9-11 that is limited to somber reflection.

My reason always returns me to that two-minute speech given on a field in Pennsylvania in 1863. “It is for us, the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Us, the living. Roosevelt, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, likewise harkened to the living, saying that “inevitable triumph” would come only “through the unbounding determination of our people.” What these men knew, and what seems absent from our cultural reflections on 9-11, is that it is not enough to reflect and to mourn the dead merely. In the past, when this nation has been beset by violent tragedy, that mourning has been coupled with – and possibly exceeded by – an unflinching resolve. The resolve has not simply been for revenge and remembrance, but for that most-American of all ideals, self-improvement.

Roosevelt’s speech mobilized the living. Americans turned a grossly outdated, outmatched and out-manned military, in four years, to the world’s supreme fighting force. Simultaneously, a struggling economy transformed virtually overnight into an economic and industrial powerhouse with an output that dwarfed that of any other nation. The war industry opened up a boom of middle-class jobs, which created a skyrocketing demand and implored even more hiring. Roosevelt reminded Americans that they did not just have to remember and reflect –they had to act. And they did.

Lincoln’s speech also called on the living. He implored Americans to resolve that their fellow citizens will not have died in vain and that America should instead undergo a “new birth of freedom.” The Emancipation Proclamation, issued earlier that year, provided just such a new birth of freedom to many of the 1 in 8 of our fellow citizens who had been held as slaves by their own countrymen. In his second inaugural address, he reminded the living of the founding fathers’ vision, forgotten in years of bitter internecine fighting: malice towards none, charity for all.  We owe it, he said, to the orphans and widows, to “achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace.”

Patriot Day is a fitting and proper lament for the dead. But the language of Public Law 107-89, designating 9-11 as Patriot Day, reminds us, the living, of the difference between past crises of American identity and our own crisis. “In the aftermath of the attacks,” the law says, “the people of the United States stood united in providing support for those in need.” The people “stood” together, in the “aftermath.” The visions of Roosevelt and Lincoln – and the Americas they oversaw – were not limited to the aftermath, nor were they limited to the past tense; instead, they were bound to the unlimited future.

When my reflections are limited to the past, then Patriot Day becomes a time for lament indeed. This year marks the tenth anniversary of those attacks. In that time, we have become a country that accepts torture as necessary and legal. We have become a country that accepts the contradictory illogic of the righteousness of initiating a war in self-defense. We have become a country willing, and sometimes eager, to sacrifice freedom for the illusion of security. We have become a nation which, contrary to our birth in the Age of Reason, disbelieves inconvenient science. We have become a nation so politically divided and unable to engage in civil disagreement that a speech by the President of the United States was interrupted, for the first time in history, by a member of congress. We have become a country without empathy, where the poor, unfortunate, and old are made to sacrifice for the benefits of a few, where social safety nets created to preserve the basic human dignity of unfortunate families are mistrusted and condemned as wasteful, their beneficiaries labeled lazy, or worse; where retirement benefits earned over the course of a lifetime by hard-working citizens are criticized as unfair, unaffordable privileges or “entitlements”; where, rather than charity for all, we have suspicion and sometimes malice for anyone different, whether that difference is political, economic, racial, sexual, religious, or something else.

This is not the America for which my father enlisted. Were he alive, my grandfather would be ashamed, confused, and embarrassed by so much of what has gone on here since 9-11. Yet for many, including most of my students, who were only four or five years old when the planes hit the towers, this has been the only America they have ever known. I think of that often.

This, to me, is the damnable part of Patriot Day. Where it should be an imperative for us, the living, to “take increased devotion” to the America that existed before 9-11, to commemorate those we lost with action toward preserving and improving the America in which they died, to rededicate ourselves to the ideals to which Lincoln so succinctly aspired, and which once made America unique in the history of the world, we are instead absolved of responsibility. We are instead told the lie that the world changed on 9-11. The world did not change. We did.

Since 9-11 we have suppressed what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. The strengths of America have ever been rooted in the hope, optimism, and compassion extended to others, whether they come from without or within our country. Once we welcomed, rather than scorned, the tired, poor, huddled masses, yearning to be free. And while certainly throughout our short history the promise of America has nearly always exceeded its reality, it is exactly that promise that set it apart from other nations. Until we regain sight of who we were before those senseless attacks, the dead of 9-11 will, as Lincoln feared for the dead of Gettysburg, have died in vain, regardless of what ceremonies we commit to their commemoration. Until we, the living, remember the words of Lincoln’s first inaugural – that “we are not enemies, but friends,” and that although “passion may have strained it must never break our bonds of affection” with each other and with others, Patriot Day will remain for me an empty gesture, a hollow platitude from the country in which I was born and raised, and yet today find myself a foreigner. And every Patriot Day, while most remember the Americans who were lost that day, I will remember the America who was lost, and wonder when we will be challenged to find it again.

Excpetion to the Rule

I dislike American Idol and all its ilk. Strongly. But this, if you haven’t yet seen it, is pretty cool.

Interview tomorrow. That is all.

Another Academic Knucklehead

Sometimes academics can be so smart, they’re stupid. Take for example Mr. Geoffrey K. Pullum, author of “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice” in the 19 April 2009 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Pullum rails against a book that has become a staple of English teachers at nearly all levels for the past 50 years — Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. He calls its authors (EB White, author of Charlotte’s Web, and his old Cornell English Professor, William Strunk, ”idiosyncratic bumblers.” His chief criticism is that “Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.”

Let’s start there. I’ve read and re-read the title, and I’m still fairly certain it’s not called Elements of Grammar. So if it’s being used to teach grammar, then shame on the teachers who are misusing it.

Point number two: It’s a friggin’ handbook. Any teacher worth his or her salt knows handbooks are not bibles — far from. They’re points of reference. The only exceptions are handbooks produced by organizations like the MLA or APA. All other handbooks are guides that compliment or supplement formal instruction. That means writing teachers frequently alter or even skip the lessons contained in the handbook. I’ve been teaching college composition for eight years at three different schools, and in that time I’ve probably used half a dozen different handbooks. From the handbooks, I assign *maybe* 30% of the grammar and style lessons — and I’m considered a hardass (a Grammar Nazi, as it is known in the business).

Pullum is likewise appalled that two non-grammarians would have the audacity to write a book that deals with issues of style and grammar. The book has sold millions since 1959, he writes.

This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian.

Woe is me. An English professor and a published author had the sheer nerve to publish a book on writing decades before the field became so ridiculously specialized that now people are discouraged from writing outside of their tiny niches. Certainly a book like Strunk and Whitecouldn’t be written today.  And that’s s a shame. Because unfortunately, the problem with having only grammarians write books of grammar is that these grammar books are only read by – you guessed it – grammarians. “I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life,” writes Pullum, “studying English grammar in a serious way.” At least we can all agree on that.

Is it possible then that Mr. Pullum has some type of ulterior motive? Hmm…let us peruse the bottom of his essay:

Geoffrey K. Pullum is head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Hmm…could it be possible that he would rather English Departments buy the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language? I wonder.

So lay off Strunk & White. It ain’t perfect, but I’ve yet to find a handbook that is. Any book of writing grammar and style that has survived 50 years and appealed to a mass audience deserves some recognition. Let’s keep using it for what it is — a guide to style. Not grammar.

It’s NOT Reality TV…Really…

As fas as I’m concerned, television died in May of 1993 when Quantum Leap went off the air (and I think I ‘m safe in saying Ziggy says there’s a 96.8% chance I’m right). I hate TV. I’m the guy who didn’t think Seinfeld was funny (and still doesn’t…if I had a nickle for every time someone “cleverly” recited a line from a famous episode and looked at me expectantly only to receive a blank stare, I’d be wealthy). I’m the guy who’s never finished an episode of Survivor or the Bachelor, and I’ve only watched American Idol when a figurative gun was held to my head by an old girlfriend.  

I can’t stand TV. And this isn’t just one of those pathetic counter-culture rebellions thrown by intellectuals. I know this because I still have exceptions. Family Guy makes me laugh, and I think American Dad, when it’s “on,” is one of the more clever satirical shows out there. I also like a lot of Discovery Channel fare, like Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs. But I don’t go out of my way to watch them. Really, if it wasn’t for sports and the Weather Channel, I’d have little use for TV.

Except for two shows. These are the only two programs I’ll go out of my way to watch. The first, of course, is The Office.  It’s funny and has good pathos, and it also just happens to perfectly depict an office I used to work in. The only other show I’ll go out of my way to watch is a seasonal show on (where else?) Discovery: Deadliest Catch. I friggin love watching those guys go after crab on the Bering Sea.

Part of the appeal of the show is it is reality…but it really isn’t. No one gets voted off the island, America doesn’t decide who the best one is, no one gets a rose at the end. But there’s no script. The drama and tension are driven by clever editing of God knows how many hours of footage, the danger of the job, and the personalities of the various captains and crew members. I don’t consider it reality TV…I consider it a serial documentary.

So Deadliest Catch begins another season this week, you know where I’ll be every Tuesday night: watching those guys harvest crab…and imagining having Mike Rowe following me around one day and narrating my life. What a cool voice.

And Then There Were Two (or maybe three)

As I suspected, the phone interview last week went well…so well that they’ve invited me for a campus interview in a couple weeks.

It’s a fairly involved process, consisting of an afternoon, or about four hours, I’ve been told. In that span, I will meet again with the “team” of English teachers who interviewed me on the phone, meet with the principal, and actually do a teaching demonstration to a class of students while being observed. I’m supposed to find out this week what I’ll be teaching.

What’s really exciting is that, out of what I assume were hundreds of initial applicants, they only phone interviewed seven people. Of those seven, only two of us have been invited for campus interviews. They told me they have a small batch of phone interviews left to try — maybe five at the most — from which they may select one more candidate. Still, being one of two or three is a whole hell of a lot more encouraging than being one of 500, as has been the case in this six-month job search process.

I don’t know if it’s normal procedure to tell a job candidate how many other interviewees there will be, or if it was a subtle way of trying to encourage me. They also told me that the teaching demo was less to show a mastery of the material (which by this point in the process they assume) than to see how I interact with the students — again, this may have been a little helpful guidance, or just a standard warning. I’m not sure.

If I get along with the team as well in person as I felt I did over the phone, and I continue to be impressed with the program there, this could be a very good couple of weeks. They said they hope to reach a decision by the end of the month.

If not, it will be a long way to fall. Hopes are high.

My Kind of Math

When I turned 30, I took up golf out of competitive necessity. Up until that age, I’d been able to get my competitive juices out through more traditional sports — basketball especially. But around 30, I started feeling self conscious running around the gym with a bunch of 19 year olds. And by “self conscious” I mean slow. And by “slow,” I mean not as good as them.

So my dad gave me an old set of irons that had been collecting dust in the attic when I turned 30, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Turns out golf is what guys my age are supposed to do to simultaneously (a) be competitive in a mature way, (b) get some fresh air, and (c) engage in a little masculine homosocial time.

(I’ve updated my clubs since then, of course. From my dad’s circa-1973 muscleback irons to a set of Nike NDS irons, an IC putter, and a Nike Sasquatch driver.)

But I’ve really taken a liking to the game. From the ridiculously complex and meticulous mechanics of the swing to the simple beauty of watching the midwestern seasons change around me on the course to the meditative solitude that playing by myself often brings, it has grown on me. Even the simple smell of freshly cut grass, or the sound of a nearby river keeps me coming back.

There are still a lot of things I hate about the game — etiquette here for example tends to be loose, which is cool, but when guys show up in cutoff jean shorts and dirty wifebeaters, I tend to draw the line. A simple tee shirt is fine, with a collar is stuffy, but also okay. And shorts with a hem add a touch of local class.

But every year, I buy a pass through my local park district . The pass enables me to pay a flat fee at the start of the year — $600 this year — for what amounts to unlimited golf on the two district courses.

The question every year is, Do I play enough to justify the cost? For me, $600 is almost half a month’s pay (I hear you laughing). So this year, I decided to ask the woman at the desk if her computer tracked how often I played last year.

The answer: 81 times. At one of the two courses. I didn’t ask about the other. Even assuming I had paid the minimum of $15 (for nine holes) on each of those 81 visits, that comes out to…let me see…carry the one…$1,215. If even a quarter of those visits were 18 hole visits, that ups it to around $1,415. And that still doesn’t include visits to the other course, which I’d estimate at about 25, for another $350.

So golf pass? Yeah, good investment.

“Wise Wendy from Watertown” is Whack

Want to know why some people don’t like academics? Today’s posting on “rate your students” will give you some idea. And yes, before I get started tearing this bonehead apart, I do have a link to the site on my blogroll; but that’s because the information there is usually either insightful or funny. Today’s is neither.

“Wise” Wendy, as the blog calls her, is on two (or TWO, as she puts it, to show how important she is) search committees at her college. Her department alone is hiring seven people. Yet everywhere she looks, she complains, she sees ”people whining about not getting jobs.”

This is the ivory tower mentality that people hate — even many of us that are trying to get into it. It’s the attitude that says “Everything here is fine, so it must be something wrong with all of you.” It ignores larger, documented trends, like hiring freezes or diminishing availability of tenure track positions. This is someone utterly insulated by tenure, and as a result, who is tone deaf to her own academic world.  

Make no mistake, folks, this rubbish is like an AIG executive writing an editorial that says “I’m tired of all this whining about the economy. Everyone I know got huge bonuses this year. All those laid off people need to quit leaching off the government and work for a living.”

Wendy continues with some advice:

My suggestion is to get there early and walk around without anyone knowing you are there. Talk to some students. Have a coffee on campus. Visit the library. Know something about us. Do something other than trying to impress us with your brilliance. Show us you actually care.

These are good tips, all. But when you’re writing a cover letter (which in my field, makes you one of 150-500 letters the committee will see), you don’t really have time or the expense account for campus visits to all the places you apply. We grad students don’t have tenure, Wendy. We don’t make much money, and what we do make, we have to work time-devouring adjunct positions to get. We don’t have a sweet 3-and-2 teaching load. I can’t be sipping lattes with undergrads at a school in Oregon when I have 50 research papers to grade by my 8 AM class on Monday in Illinois.

On top of that, most academic job listings could give a shit about you knowing their department or campus. Here’s a typical one (from a great school, no less), that I came across this morning:

The Department of English at the University of XXX invites applications for a one-year non-renewable lectureship in twentieth-century poetry and poetics, American or British and American. The lecturer will teach two courses each quarter in the 2009-2010 academic year, some at the graduate level. Applicants must have a Ph.D. We look for a strong teaching record, significant publication, and intellectual and professional ambition and inventiveness. Please submit a CV; an introductory letter on academic background, scholarly interests, and teaching experience; a dissertation or book abstract (where applicable); and three letters of recommendation. Applications received by May 11, 2009, will receive the fullest consideration. Address correspondence to XXX. XXX is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

Look at all the detail about the school! What can we divine from this information? That the school is an equal opportunity employer. I’ll be sure to mention in my cover letter that I work well with all cultures and ethnicities.

If knowing things about the campus isn’t important enough for you to include in your job listing, then you sort of lose your right to bitch about people not making an effort to know about it. If all you ask for is a lecturer in poetics, then why should an applicant think that visiting your campus library is going to make a goddamn bit of difference?

So congratulations, Wise Wendy from Watertown: You win today’s award for Dumbest Thing Written on the Internet.

A Good Day

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally had a good day. A great day. A fantastic one. Usually I have to watch an episode of Cheaters to feel good about myself, but not yesterday.

I just got back from a mini-vacation in Arizona for my brother’s wedding. It was a great time, although I’m pretty sure that most of my family likes the Amazing One more than they like me. And that’s okay. Yesterday didn’t start like anything special, though. In fact, it was quite typical, with a letter from a school in North Carolina stating

Our search process has been awaiting funding authorization. At this time, the College has determined that current economic conditions make it necessary to postpone filling vacancies wherever possible. This position is among those that will not be filled for 2009 – 2010.

Nice. Next envelope, this from my own university. Great, methinks. What did I forget to pay? Instead, a surprise:

As convener of the Graduate School’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship Committee, it is my pleasure to inform you that your application for a Dissertation Completion Fellowship has been approved by the Committee. You are to be congratulated for the success of your application in the keen competition for this award.

Well holy shit. A fellowship (translated for the non-academic world, it means I get a tuition waiver and monthly stipend for the next year, and in return, I don’t have to do anything). A sweet gig, and only the third one I can remember being given to a member of the English Department in the seven years I’ve been here. Takes some of the (un)employment pressure off for next year. Now I just have to write the paper.

Shortly after that, I had my phone interview. We won’t know for sure until next week, but I think I did really well. I had done a lot of preparatory work — using the old Internets to find commonly asked interview questions and organize some thoughts on them. It was one of those big phone conference calls — two men and two women on their end, and little old me on the other. But for all that, it wasn’t as awkward as some that I’ve been on.  I presented myself pretty well, which doesn’t mean I’ll get the job, but at least they have a pretty good idea of who I am and what I’m about if they turn me down. I had them laughing a couple of times, and there seemed to be a good level of interaction. I should know by about the middle of next week if I’ve made it to the next step of the interview process, so stay tuned.

If I have time (read: it’s too cold to golf), I’ll put together some better organized thoughts on how to handle the phone interview.

Until then, a good day. Take that, Joey Greco.

To be continued…

I have been bad lately at keeping up with this blog thing. It’s been a busy week — the Amazing One and I are heading out of town this weekend for my brother’s wedding, and we’ve been running around like proverbial chickens trying to squeeze two week’s worth of work in to three days.

So my apologies for the sporadic posting…regular posts will resume when I return, a week from today.

Cramer vs. Stewart

I caught the Jim Cramer interview last night on the Daily Show with John Stewart. Alright, it was less an interview than a Stewart rant, the thesis of which was that CNBC needs to be more…well, journalistic in its coverage of the markets, and less a mouthpiece for corporate talking points and lies. It was a fair argument and long overdue, and Cramer seemed appropriately humbled. Stewart asked Cramer who the audience for his show was — hard-working folks who are worried about their 401k’s, or the corporate cronies who plundered them.

One of the things Stewart did well was to support his claims with evidence — clips of Cramer talking where he seemed to be encouraging illegal or unethical actions. This bordered on the “gotcha” journalism that most people hate. It was certainly confrontational and, as Stewart pointed out at the end of the show, uncomfortable to watch. But it was also unique in that it demanded accountability of Cramer for his own words. If only our mainstream media had been doing that the last few years when our leaders were saying the United States doesn’t torture.

It will be interesting to see what change, if any, the Stewart-Cramer feud catalyzes. Maybe not much — the media coverage of this has been more of one of media talking heads in a dispute, a la The View. And this, of course, is something that’s wrong with the modern news media — they’re more interested in who “won” in the confrontation than in what was being said.

Still, Stewart has shown an ability to influence the media that is uncanny for a comedy show. A few years ago he appeared on CNN’s Crossfire and denounced it for what it was, a he-said she-said, Republican vs. Democrat, false dichotomy look at the issues of the day. The highlight for most of us, I think, was when he called Tucker Carlson a dick. The show didn’t last long past that interview, and since, the red-vs.-blue way of seeing the world has begun to fall out of favor (well, unless you’re a congressman). Hell, even Ann Coulter, the vampiric narcissistic hack of the right, has seen a decrease in book sales for her latest pile of garbage.

We’ll see if coverage of the financial markets changes now, and becomes a little more critical, and a little more responsible.