The Dilettante's Dilemma

Mothers as “Designated Worriers”

Posted on May 11, 2015 by hessd

It’s Mother’s Day today. Or Mothers’ Day. An addition to a chalked sign I saw today said, “…and to all nurturers.” Mother’s Day is so hard these days.

There are ways I think it is hard and needs to be. We just need to get some things worked out among ourselves. And then there are some ways it needn’t be hard…but is, anyway.

I think everyone agrees that a man and a woman who want to have a child should not be forbidden. But when it comes to celebrating people who have had children—parous women—from those who have not (nulliparous women), it gets harder. [1] Who should be forbidden is a pretty easy question. Who should be celebrated is much more difficult. I am a veteran of the 1970s when there was a brave but short-lived attempt to celebrate Non-mother’s Day (on the same day), validating the choice women had made to refuse to bring yet more offspring into an already overpopulated world.

And then too, no one really thinks that it is the fact of motherhood for which women should be celebrated. We think of GOOD motherhood. All the selfless and nurturing acts women commit for benefit of their children. But we all know really awful mothers. These are women who are distorting their children’s lives so badly that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to recover from it. So we celebrate a tacitly constrained “motherhood”—some, but not others—under the guise of celebrating parity generally. And how else could it be, really?

Everything is worse for Father’s Day (Fathers’ Day) and I don’t even want to get into that.

My wife—the mother of our children—and I once tried a dodge of our own back in the 1970s. We thought we could get away with it because we were going to apply it only in our own family. Why is it, we said, that women are treated as if they are the sole source of nurture in the family and men as if they were the sole source of guidance or direction? How silly, we said. What we all know is that the husband and the wife—the father and the mother—both offer nurture and that both offer guidance and direction. Each in our own way, of course.

So the obvious solution was to celebrate Nurturer’s Day on which the nurturing each of us did would be noted and celebrated and then, several weeks later, Leadership Day, in which the direction each of us provided to the children would be celebrated. The kids were mortified. I wonder whether they will even remember the event. They ridiculed the whole idea to us and God only knows what they said to their friends. We refused, that first year, to say that we knew when we were beaten and we resolved to do it again next year, but we never did it again. And so promising, too.

So those two things continue to bedevil us. First is the separation into meritorious and non-meritorious camps of women who have or who have not given birth to children. Second is the implicit celebration of “motherhood as such,” when what we are really trying to celebrate is successful motherhood—Hallmark card-style motherhood. So we will have those problems no matter what.

Other problems are self-inflicted. I got to thinking along these lines when I scanned through an article in today’s New York Times (see it here) called “Mom: The Designated Worrier.” Scattered throughout the column in the paper copy (not the electronic copy) were little hints about what the article said. [2]

Here’s one: “So long as women talk about men ‘helping out,’ we have not attained equality. Helping isn’t sharing.”

Here’s another: “Moms don’t necessarily do everything, but they make sure that everything gets done.”

I’d like to come at that from another side. I’d like to look first at how and by whom the tasks to be done were organized. Then I’d like to look at the emotional style to be celebrated. Those seem pretty straightforward on Mother’s Day, but I think what seems straightforward has been bent backward.

Often, it’s a help to start with the truly ridiculous and work back. [3] Imagine a bachelor whose passion for tidiness has caused him to hire a maid service to clean his apartment for him. The maid starts doing a sloppy job of what should be a simple task. Dust the National League posters on the first and third weeks of the month and the American League posters on the second and fourth weeks. She dusts Cleveland and Cincinnati on the same week. “Oh no,” he says, “you aren’t helping when you do that.” After several repetitions, she replies, “You know, this is the stupidest organization of a simple job I have ever seen!” And she huffs out because she is, after all, the maid. What if the guy were a husband instead of a bachelor and the woman was his wife instead of a maid for hire? Who decided on that National/American split?

Let’s just drive that peg in the ground and walk away a short distance.

If the work is planned together (when, how often, how clean, determined by what method, etc.) the man and woman are equally responsible for the accomplishment of the work. They are partners. Very often, they don’t have equal amounts of “off of work time,” but that would be taken into account in the planning. If “the work” is the private property of the woman of the house, then “equality” can never be achieved because there is only one planner. The husband is just hired help even if he does more of the execution than she does. If there is no parity in the planning (just kidding about the “parity”), then everything following it is…um…below par.

No one would call this standard “helping out.” “We have planned the work to meet our standards (even if that required some compromise) and now we will be responsible to do what we decided. Who’s helping out?

Besides, it isn’t factory work. When you are having a hard week—an accountant near the end of the tax year, for instance—I pitch in and do work that under normal circumstances, you would have done. And I do it to the standards you have established. It wouldn’t be any help otherwise. And I do it with a friendly spirit because I remember with gratitude how you filled in for me during finals week. The meaning of “partners” isn’t some rigid definition of work to be done, no matter how collegially it was first planned. “Partners” includes the adjustments we make as life happens.

Everything is harder if we are talking about helping the kids grow up and not something relatively more simple like keeping the house clean. Kids, for instance, know which parent to appeal to for what immediate goal. They work the parents in ways that household tasks don’t. [4]

Let’s come back and look briefly at the “designated worrier” role. That’s how it appears in the title. But down in the article, it is called “making sure everything gets done.” Does that sound like the same thing to you?

Worrying is a style of management. [5] It is currently the fashionable style, but it is only one among many. The value of worrying in this system is that it keeps everything active—while you are worrying about it, you are thinking about it—and makes it less likely that you will forget things that are related to the task. On the other hand, attention span being variable but still finite, it makes it more likely that you will forget things unrelated to the task. The worrier’s spouse, for example.

And as the standards for child-rearing continue to escalate, the anxiety about meeting those standards increases. That doesn’t make worrying a more effective strategy, of course, but worrying is the cheap form of concerned engagement, just as guilt feelings are the cheap form of behavior change. Everything is more complicated than it really needs to be, don’t you agree?

So long as worry is prized for its own sake, there is really no solution to the designated worrier problem. If that is the problem. More often, I think, it is the “default worrier” that needs to be dealt with. If, for instance, the moral requirement is that one of us needs to be worrying and you are not worrying, then it falls to me to do it. I have not been “designated.” That would be a much better arrangement. I have volunteered.

The solution lies in the same direction as the “share the planning, share the work” standard. Let’s agree on what has to be done and then let’s keep at it until WE are finished. Now there is no real need for worry. If you want to worry as a recreational matter or if the worrying reflex is left over from a previous administration, then we can safely let it be. Maybe a counselor could help, but it isn’t an issue between the partners any more.

Again, the standards will need to be negotiated. If they are not, the parent who wants more to be done and who cannot convince her or his partner of the value of it, will very likely take on the worrying at whatever cost to them both. If, on the other hand, the person with the higher standard is not willing to compromise with the partner with the lower (more…um…flexible) standard, then we need to ask why compromise is so hard to reach. Maybe reflexive maternal worrying isn’t really the problem here. Maybe it’s worse.

Mother’s Day thoughts. I’ve been a father since 1960 and a stepfather since 1979. I don’t approach these issues as if I don’t know they are hard to deal with. I just think we could, maybe, be a little gentler with them.

[1] Some dictionaries give parous as a word, meaning “having given birth,” while others consider it only a suffix. There is no question about the legitimacy of nulliparous, so it is possible that parous is a back-formation. The form of the word as a noun is much clearer, so far as language goes, but much less clear as a social attribution. It should be possible to say of women who have successfully given birth that they have “achieved parity.” But that would require some notion of the Latin verb parere = “to bear,” rather than the Latin paritas = equal. The fact that both words, spelled the same as nouns, are part of our language makes it possible to look at headlines like “Women have achieved parity in the workplace” and to turn silently aside to watch sports or something
[2] I haven’t actually read it and I won’t until I’ve finished this post.
[3] Celebrating, as always, Maxwell Smart’s offer (from the TV show Get Smart), “What would you believe, chief? Let’s start there and work our way back.”
[4] Not that household tasks can’t be used the same way. On the week when I take over tasks you would normally do, I could do then to my standard rather than the one we agreed to and then I could show it to you and say, “There. Now that look better (than when you do it)?” Everything is more complicated than it would have to be.
[5] English has the expression “a dog worrying a bone.” In that expression, the dog is doing the worrying, so to speak, but it is a transitive verb, so it is the bone that is being worried. And if it is “being worried,” then in “is” worried. A lot of worrying could be left for the bones to do, while the dogs go off to happier pursuits.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged evaluating as partners, helping out, mothers, planning as partners, worrying | Leave a comment

NCIS

Posted on May 9, 2015 by hessd

At the end of the show—the first episode of the first season of NCIS—Gibbs gets into a convertible driven by a redhead and is whisked away. Why?

The best response I can imagine is, “Who cares?” And the best rejoinder I can manage comes from Salmon Fishing in the Yemen’s Dr. Frederick Jones, who says, “Well…strangely enough…I do.”

Also, there is my identity as a dilettante to consider. If you look at the title of my page, above, you will see that the tagline is: “delight is the heart of the dilettante.” [1] As an operating principle, that means that I wind up writing about whatever snags and holds on to my interest for a time. My interest, it turns out, is easily snagged.

Which brings us back to NCIS, the most popular television show in America. The show is about Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs. That’s my own judgment. You could say it is about the Marines. [2] You could say it is about the team of agents Gibbs leads. You could say it is about “justice,” on the grounds that “the bad guy(s)” get killed or jailed at the end of (nearly) every episode.

I say it is about Gibbs. Let’s go back to the redhead who picks him up in the car at the end of Episode 1. They never say who she is. They never say what relationship she has to Gibbs, if any. [3] She just shows up, acquires Gibbs, and heads off. Why the redhead? Because they want to say something about Gibbs. The show is “about” Gibbs.

The redhead is not a hooker. That’s not what they want to say about Gibbs. She is not notably younger than Gibbs—maybe a little. She has short hair. I think Belisario decided that a woman with long red hair would fit nicely into viewer speculations about who she was, so she has short hair. She drives a silver Mercedes convertible. Gibbs gets into the car without greeting her and they drive away. It’s not about the redhead. It’s about Gibbs.

Gibbs has had three wives by the time the show debuts. He needs to be “single,” a word meaning that the affairs he keeps having can’t evolve in the direction of marriage, so that he can be solitary at all times. [4] He is alone when he is at work. People come to him, cases come to him, whoever the director of the agency is at the time summons him. He goes “home” and goes straight to the basement, where he is perpetually working on a boat with hand tools. [5]

So, since he can’t be married and since he has to be perpetually attractive to women and since being attractive to women who are regulars on the show creates problems for the writers, what we really need is a completely unexplained attractive age-appropriate redhead. That says what needs to be said about Gibbs’s sex appeal and it doesn’t complicate the plot.

Gibbs really needs some kind of understandable appeal because he is “god-like” in all the worst senses of the word, in other respects. It would be tempting to say that he is “unaffected” by people,” but that isn’t really true. He is unaffected by people who are trying to affect him. He relates freely and warmly to people—children, damsels in distress—who need him. “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” (Exodus 33) is the short version. [6]

He knows things he really couldn’t know and the show has no interest in explaining why that is. The team eventually just takes it for granted that Gibbs is going to know about “it,” whatever it is, and he always does. That isn’t divine omniscience in any thoroughgoing sense, but it is close enough for network television.

He is not really confined by space the way the rest of us are. He just “shows up.” He doesn’t “come into the room.” He just “is” in the room and he is standing right behind whoever is doing something he or she shouldn’t be doing. It’s not omnipresence, really, but since you can’t ever be sure when it will happen, it winds up being close enough for network television.

Gibbs isn’t funny. That gives everyone around him a chance to be funny and we get to enjoy all that repartee, but it doesn’t affect Gibbs. Gibbs has access to irony on occasion, but he doesn’t laugh when everybody else laughs. Why?

Well…it’s like the mysterious redhead. [7] The show is about Gibbs. Gibbs is whoever he needs to be to set up the show. If you are going to have all that godlikeness, you really need a mysterious redhead in a Mercedes.

Do you watch NCIS? Bette and I do. It’s about Gibbs.

[1] It is, actually. The English word dilettante derives from the Latin delectare, “to delight.”
[2] Donald Bellisario, the creator of the series, was a marine himself and is relentlessly positive about the corp’s virtues.
[3 NCIS is a show that relishes inside jokes. Although no one knows who “the redhead” is on the show, everyone knows who she is in real life. She is Vivienne Belarisario, the fourth wife of the show’s creator and she is Sean Murray’s mother. Murray plays Agent Timothy McGee on the show.
[4] That’s Gibbs. Mark Harmon, on the other hand, has been married for a long time to Pam Dawber, whom you will remember, if you are old enough, as “Mindy,” who starred with Robin Williams on Mork and Mindy.
[5] Mark Harmon, who plays Gibbs, does, in fact, make furniture using hand tools. That explains why Agent Gibbs seems to know what he is doing
[6] He also has a firm-but-fair collegial relationship with other male members of the team. More “coach-like” than godlike.
[7] In, I should say, a show stocked with redheads. Some of the redheads have been his boss. Some have been flings. One I can think of has been both.

Posted in Living My Life | Tagged cop shows, Donald Belisario, justice, Mark Harmon, NCIS, redheads | Leave a comment

A Listening Silence

Posted on May 1, 2015 by hessd

I want to think today about how we listen to each other.

This is not going to be a lament that we don’t listen to each other any more, but back in the old days, whenever you were a child, people really did listen. I think that’s probably true, by the way; there were so few things to “listen to” back then that listening to people was a much more common activity than it is now.

This is going to be about therapeutic listening.

Not listening by therapists or to therapists. There is a healing that comes just from being heard and one step on the road to being heard is being listened to. There is another step, but I want to share a couple lines of text before I go on to talk about that one—a couple of lines and the story that goes with it.

They listened to him, not agreeing, not denying, but accepting his despair. His words went into their listening silence, and rested there for days, and came back to him changed. [1]

To grasp this text more fully we will need to know a few more things, like “they” and “him” and “his words” and we will get to all that. For now, I want you to notice that it is the words that change. You could argue that words don’t actually change. That is my own very solid empiricist tradition, in fact, but this text is from Ursula LeGuin to whom I have given my heart many years ago and it takes place in her Earthsea, which is not really as rich as Middle Earth, but which is a place I am at home. And LeGuin does this. It is a pattern in her fiction. She has “it” act while we watch. [2]

So notice, first, that “the words came back to him.” And when they came back, they were changed. In a little bit, we will need to know what those words were, but for now, let’s look where they went because that is what I really want to talk about.

The words went into “their listening silence.” The words came out of Medra [3] and they went somewhere. They went into a listening silence.” Now a listening silence isn’t like a black hole or an acoustical dead zone. A listening silence is created and maintained as an act of caring. It is a place where words can be changed, words can take other forms, and return to be newly heard by the speaker.

So Medra, who spoke the words, could mean by them only what he meant. The words he chose expressed perfectly how he really felt, but after he had said them, they went away and were changed and came back to him meaning something else. The words now meant something he had been unable to say and unable to mean before. Here’s what he said.

“Trust;’ the young man said, “Yes. But against— against them?— Gelluk’s [an evil wizard] gone. Maybe Losen [an evil king] will fall now. Will it make any difference? Will the slaves go free? Will beggars eat? Will justice be done? [5] I think there’s an evil in us, in humankind, Trust denies it. Leaps across it. Leaps the chasm. But it’s there, And everything we do finally serves evil, because that’s what we are, Greed and cruelty. I look at the world, at the forests and the mountain here, the sky, and it’s all right, as it should be, But we aren’t, People aren’t, We’re wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.”

OK, that’s a rant. It might have been hard to hear and both the women who heard this knew it was true. But they knew something else; they knew it didn’t lead anywhere. And that is what happened to Medra’s words during their time in “the listening silence.” They were changed into something that actually did lead somewhere. Roke Island, the home of all magic is the purple dot right in the center of the map, south of Havnor

Let me take a small professional break from the story. I am a political psychologist by training and, if I were still being paid for it, by trade as well. I look at how people explain things to themselves and at what value the particular explanations they choose have for them. These explanations are called “causal attributions” in the end of the pool where I swim and Medra’s causal attributions go nowhere. If Medra is right about how things are and must be, then his despair is fully justified and he might just as well lie down and die. What I teach is how to make causal attributions that help you get up and do something. It’s a really good causal attribution—it meets one of the two criteria—if it does that.[5]

The women did that for Medra. What women?

Anieb died while he [Medra] held her, her ruined face against his arm. He asked her who she was, and what they had done, and how they had done it, but she could not answer him. Her mother Ayo and her mother’s sister Mead were wise women. They healed [Medra] as best they could with warm oils and massage, herbs and chants, They talked to him and listened when he talked.

That is part of who these women were. They were “wise women.” Medra did everything he could to save the life of Ayo’s daughter Anieb and failed. He was broken in body and spirit by what he and Anieb had been through together and Ayo and Mead nursed his body back to health. That’s what the warm oils and the massage and the herbs and chants did. But they also talked to him and listened to him and that enabled him to deliver the rant we heard him give.

We have seen that the women were healers and they were wise. We see now that they were also political subversives. They were part of a loosely strung web called “the women of the Hand.” Women, and a few men, who had no power but who trusted each other and who wanted, to borrow a few phrases from Medra’s rant “the slaves to go free and the beggars to eat and justice to be done.” They were known to each other by a sign.

She [Mead, Ayo’s sister] held- up her first finger; raised the other fingers, and clenched them together into a fist; then slowly turned her wrist and opened her hand palm out, as if in offering. He had seen Anieb make that gesture. It was not a spell, he thought, watching intently, but a sign.

It was, in fact, a sign. It said, “I am of the women of the Hand” and by telling you this, I am putting my life in your hands. So it wasn’t just the listening that Ayo and Mead gave to Medra. Making the place—it wasn’t just the “listening silence,” into which Medra’s angry words could go and could return to him changed—required that they be who they were. They were wise women and dangerous women. They wanted freedom and justice and they were part of a subversive group who refused to want something less.

Here’s what Medra said when the words returned to him out of the listening silence that Ayo and Mead held in place for him.

We can’t do anything without each other;’ he said. “But it’s the greedy ones, the cruel ones who hold together and strengthen each other, And those who won’t join them stand each alone.

Medra began at “Everything we do finally serves evil, because that’s who we are.” In his anger and despair, Medra talks about the nature of human beings and the nature of society. He talks about things that cannot be changed. Those words went into the listening silence held in place by the strength and the compassion of the wise women and when they came back to Medra, they were no longer about who we are and must be; they were about what we can do together.

What they could do and did do is what the rest of the novella is about, but the story would have gone nowhere without the wise women. Medra would have let his pain and guilt destroy him. Or he would have let his anger take him into self-destructive acts of resistance. But because his words came back to him changed, he became one of the men who served with “the women of the hand” and long afterward, he discovered the Book of Naming in the house of a poor woman on the island of Pody, where the mage Ath had hidden it many years before.

How did he find it? First, he went looking for it. But…he also had help. This is what that looked like.

I won’t be so bold as to ask for a kiss, said Medra [posing as a peddler of trinkets], but an open hand, maybe?” He made the sign; she looked at him for a moment. “That’s easy, she said softly, and made the sign in return, “but not always safe among strangers.”

And she took him to the house of the poor woman where the priceless Book of Names had been hidden and took it to Roke Island, where it became to basis of all resistance to tyranny.

I look around at the place where I live and at the people with whom I live and at myself as well and I wonder what could happen if we could hold in place a “listening silence”—a place from which words could return, changed, to the speakers. The words would return changed and they would change the speakers, perhaps as Medra was changed, from hopelessness or anger—we don’t know which way he would have gone—to trust and subversion.

[1] This is Ursula LeGuin at her best. It is what I like best, at any rate, about her. These few lines, and the story that gives them their meaning, are in her Tales of Earthsea, this one from a story called “The Finder.”
[2] In The Dispossessed, the protagonist, Shevek, watches his greatest theoretical breakthrough running away, laughing, and he knows he will always remember what it is.
[3] In Earthsea, everyone has a “true name” and a “use name.” Because he lives the kind of life he does, Medra has two use names, Tern and Otter, but we will stay with his one name, his true name.
[4] Anyone else hear Amos ranting there against the evils of Israel or James against the rich of his congregations. See chapter 5 of each of those books, Amos in the Old Testament, James in the New, for and account that sounds amazingly like Medra.
[5] The other is authenticity—effectiveness alone doesn’t cut it—but that will have to wait for another blog.

Posted in Books, Political Psychology, ways of knowing | Tagged EarthSea, listening, political subversion, rehabilitation, silence, Ursula LeGuin, wise women | Leave a comment

Foul-mouthed and Free

Posted on April 28, 2015 by hessd

I heard a story yesterday that was unlike any I remember having heard before. Today, I’m going to tell it to you, cutting back a little on the narrative and expanding a little on the theoretical implications. It is…sigh…what I do.

The story comes from Marv Mitchell, who runs Julia West House, where a number of valuable services are provided by the First Presbyterian Church of Portland, Oregon (hereafter, “my church.”) The service Marv was talking about yesterday involved providing food, coffee, and a place to get out of the rain for a group of Portland’s homeless, mostly men. [1’] These are the people Marv calls “our guests.”

This story could be started at a lot of places, but I want to start it at the staff meeting where Marv said that the language being used at Julia West was coarse, foul, and abusive and it had to stop. There were two kinds of objections to his proposal, both of which made a great deal of sense to me.

The first was that foul language was the language these people had chosen. It was authentic; it was their chosen mode of communication. Someone may have hinted, Marv didn’t say this, that he was being just a little bit paternalistic. That kind of language wasn’t his choice, of course, but it was their choice and Julia West House should honor the dignity of their guests by allowing them to “be who they are.”

The second was that nothing Julia West staff did was going to work anyway. These people made a lifestyle out of being intractable and resisting any attempts by authorities to constrain them. That’s why a lot of them were on the street in the first place. You start to put the hand on them and they will just go somewhere else.

Actually, that’s not what happened. Marv continued to believe that change in a good direction was possible and in the face of the advice he got, he started going around among the guests, saying, “We don’t allow that kind of language here,” or whatever he said. Whatever it was, it wound up eventually on the Julia West homepage (www.juliawest.org) like this:

We have expectations of mutual respect and appropriate behavior. We do not tolerate language or behavior that is racist, sexist, misogynistic, abusive or violent. [2]

Nothing in this story so far was surprising. I have seen people making Marv’s point derided and defeated many times over the years and have, on occasion, played that role myself. That isn’t what happened this time.

The first thing that happened is that Marv successfully talked down one angry man after another. He didn’t say how. Marv isn’t big and menacing. The second thing that happened is that people started to shush one another: “Hey, you better knock off that language or Marv is going to come over here.” That response is the first sign of a change in culture, which I like to represent as “We don’t do that here.”

And that’s really the end of the story Marv told. Currently, at Julia West, the guests really don’t talk to each other like that. But then a couple of things happened after the story and they are what made me think the story was worth telling.

One thing that happened is that everybody at Julia West on a given day began to get some warning that something bad was starting to happen. The reduced prominence of bad language and the reduced din of angry language provided a space where you could tell that something was starting to go the wrong way. You can hear the first angry voice at a meeting and maybe even deal with it. When everyone is already yelling and shaking fists, the early signs of serious trouble are going to be really hard to spot. When things were quieter, people got a chance to catch trouble that was just starting.

Another thing that happened is that “good manners started by break out.” That’s Marv’s phrasing. Being the social scientist, I began to wonder why that would be. My first guess—that’s really as far as I have gotten so far—is that polite words and polite behavior are a unit. They are one thing; something like a “mode” or a “gear.” They have always “belonged together” and when one is enforced, it cues the other.

I’m prepared to believe that, in any case, because I am a veteran of public elementary schools and high schools at a time when the administrations thought it would be good to have a “casual Friday.” Casual Friday was awful. “Casual” got to be “edgy” and then “provocative” or combative and a lot of behavior we spent time trying to prevent came right along with it. We had more talking during class; more fights on the playground (elementary) or in the parking lot (high school). We had more smoking in the restrooms and more enforced trips to the principal’s office. Why? As I was looking at it, I concluded that the clothes cued the language, which cued the behavior. That’s what I thought of first when Marv said that “good manners broke out.” Of course they did, I thought.
Finally, and most surprising of all to me, guests of Julia West House began to come up to Marv and thank him for making and enforcing the rule. Here’s what they said. “This is the one place where we don’t have to talk like that.”

Did you catch that? We don’t have to. We are not compelled, here, to represent ourselves as foul-mouthed angry men and women. We are free, here,[3] to choose to represent ourselves otherwise. “We are free to,” is language that suggests to me that the person who said that had been wanting to present himself otherwise—as soft-spoken, perhaps, or gentle. Possibly even as a nurturing person. But he knew he didn’t dare show that part of himself because it would be taken badly. It could have been taken as a criticism of the others. “Oh…listen to Chauncey! I think we’ve hurt his feelings!” It could be taken as volunteering to be the butt of the jokes and later, outside, as the one who had volunteered to be abused.

He wanted to present himself that way and knew he didn’t dare. That’s the way I read “This is the one place where we don’t have to talk like that.” That was the most surprising new way of thinking about street people. It was the most surprising part of Marv’s story to me.

I don’t know what you will make of it. I’m not sure yet, what I will make of it. But I’ve heard it now, so I’m going to have to think about it.
[1] We don’t provide food anymore. It turns that there are lots of places in Portland where people living on the streets can get food. Since the time when this story is set, Julia West has concentrated on other things, such as the skills and the clothes necessary to get jobs.
[2]Whenever I see language like this, I wonder why misogyny is forbidden but misandry is not. One of the burdens someone carries who has an eye for symmetry and has read a lot of words over the course of his life.
[3] This is where the title “Foul-mouthed and Free” comes from. I didn’t think I dared to title it “Foul-mouthed OR Free.

Posted in Living My Life, sociability, Uncategorized, Words | Tagged authentic words, foul language, lifestyles of the poor, the dignity of each person | Leave a comment

Accountability and Trust

Posted on April 21, 2015 by hessd

I am going to say a few words in favor of accountability here. Nearly everyone I know who is a fan of “accountability” will be disappointed by what I have to say and some will feel betrayed. I don’t think they should. Stay with me and let’s see.

It will not surprise you that accountability once meant, and sometimes still means, “able to give a [satisfactory] account.” A lot of social structure goes into that simple statement. I may ask anyone who is accountable to me to give me an account of her[1] behavior. I may also ask, if I wish, that people who are not accountable to me give me such an account. The rejections on the quiet side include, “Why would I do that?” On the more boisterous side, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

So even from the beginning, accountability means “accountable—owing an account—to someone in particular”.[2] Imagine that I am a manager’s boss and I stop by her desk and ask why productivity is down. I’m her boss; she owes me an account. She is accountable to me. She says, “There are new people in shipping and it’s taking them some time to get up to speed. We’ll be back to normal by next week.”

Being able to give a satisfactory account to the people to whom you owe it is a good thing. On the other hand, I asked a pretty good question. What sort of question do you think President Truman had in mind when he said, “The buck stops here.”[3] H accountability 1 ad he been asked why he dropped a second atomic bomb only three days after the first, he could have given an answer. It was a question he answered often, in fact, and he answered it by giving the reasons he thought it was a good idea. I raise that particular question in order to wonder who President Truman was accountable to in that instance. The Congress? Any reporter with a microphone? The American people? General MacArthur?

And it is questions like that that make me wonder. Would we say that a committee handling sensitive information was “accountable” to anyone who wanted access to that information? Let’s say it was personnel information, which is often highly protected. I ask for the information to be given to me and when I am refused, I say that the personnel committee (agency, bureau, office) is “unaccountable.”

That is the way I would say it because it sounds most credible that way. I would not say “unaccountable to me” because someone might ask if I had the right to demand an account. I would not say that they were accountable to the government that protected personnel information and which declared that leaking it is a crime. It is their accountability to me that I want to highlight and not the fact that very often a manager is accountable to different people for different reasons all at the same time. “Accountability has now become “able to give an account, to whom, about what, by when.”

It gets worse.

Demanding that an account be given is like a tax. It costs to give an account when it is asked for. I might want my employee to use her resources to do the job rather than to give an account of how well she is doing the job. If there is reason to question how well she’s doing, then I should ask and she should give me her account. If there is no reason to ask, I am just taking resources that would be better used elsewhere and diverting them to deal with my own curiosity.

And it gets worse.

The more I supervise, the less able I think my subordinates are. Here’s a study by Lloyd H. Strickland, which, if I may be candid this far into the essay, is what started me thinking about accountability.[4] Strickland ran an experiment in which supervisors did or did not have information about one particular aspect of their subordinates. Since Strickland controlled all the information, he was able to have highly interventionist bosses and clearly laissez faire bosses. Some bosses, in other words, hovered over their workers and cajoled and corrected and exhorted them. Other bosses, who were also responsible for the output of their workers, were denied any information about how things were going.

What Strickland was actually studying was the traits the bosses attributed to the workers and to do that, he had to be sure that exactly the same amount of work got done in each setting. You see immediately that one kind of boss could not argue that his style of management produced “superior results,” because the results were all alike. All you could do was to account for the work done on the basis of the character of the workers.

Here’s what Strickland found. The bossy bosses concluded that their workers were lazy louts who needed constant harassment or they would not work. The laissez faire bosses—bosses who were denied any access at all to their workers—concluded that their workers were honest, hardworking types who did good work on their own.

It is all artificial, of course. This is all happening in a social psychology lab at the University of North Carolina. But notice that each set of bosses chose the explanation that satisfied their own needs as bosses. If I can’t affect my workers, the least stressful thing for me to do is assume that they will work just fine on their own. If I can affect my workers, the least stressful thing for me to do is to assume that what I am doing– all the surveillance and all the exhortation– must be having some effect. They would not, in other words, have done that work had I not been in their faces all the time. Would these kids have gotten on the bus safely? Just asking.

Let’s stop just briefly to remind ourselves that these “differences” are completely illusory. There were no differences at all—the experiment required that—between the workers who labored under surveillance and criticism and those who were protected from surveillance and criticism. But the differences in the supervisors were substantial.

Let us now move to the “complete surveillance society,” which is where we are headed. Following the implications of Strickland’s work, we would expect the trust that supervisors have in their subordinates will go down. If police are required to wear cameras that record their every move, we would expect the trust the chief of police has in them would go down. If a child is under surveillance by a parent, we would expect the trust the parent has in the child to go down.

We have moved a long way, notice, from “accountability” as the ability to give an account should one be required. In these examples, “accountability” and “surveillance” are very nearly synonyms. And the trust which was once thought to lubricate social relations and “make society possible,” as sociologists like to say, has been replaced by knowledge—knowledge in principle, of course.[5]

When I say, “I don’t need to trust you. I can know for sure what your work is like,” we pass over the changes in me that are produced by my access to your work. My role in making your work grows ever larger and your role grows ever smaller. I am trustworthy by definition because I am relying on myself, but you are less trustworthy because I am no longer relying on who you are, but only on what I can verify. The manager is affected, in other words, by the surveillance. Your view is distorted.

Stop a minute and think. Does anyone really think that if I strapped a “fidelity cam” on my wife that I would become more and more convinced that she is worthy of my trust? Really?

So here is where the accountability X total surveillance movement has brought us. Everyone is under scrutiny. A record is being kept of every keystroke I make as I type this sentence. The more “information” there is—information is what all the surveillance produces—the less need there is for trust. Also, the more surveillance there is, the more you can expand and affirm your role in my productivity by making sure you know what I am doing and by offering “helpful hints.” The more you do that, the better you feel about yourself and the worse you feel about me.

You see the cyclical nature, right? What is going to get us off this merry-go-round?

[1] There are so many prominent women CEOs these days. Let’s just stay with feminine pronouns.

[2] Simpler and more communal societies have an accountability to broad groups. I have heard it called “echelon authority.” In such societies, “an adult,” any adult, might ask a school age child, “Why aren’t you in school?” and expect to receive an answer. We don’t do it that way.
[3] According to the Truman Library, the saying “the buck stops here” derives from the slang expression “pass the buck” which means passing the responsibility on to someone else. The latter expression is said to have originated with the game of poker, in which a marker or counter, frequently in frontier days a knife with a buckhorn handle, was used to indicate the person whose turn it was to deal. If the player did not wish to deal he could pass the responsibility by passing the “buck,” as the counter came to be called, to the next player.
[4] L. Strickland, “Surveillance and Trust, ,”Journal of Personality, 1958, Vol 26, no. 2, pp. 200—215.
[5] Even if everyone is under unrelenting surveillance, someone is going to have to look at the visual record and establish the meaning of what was recorded. We tend, carelessly, to call the visual record “data,” but “data” is the end product of a Latin verb meaning “to give.” Data are, in the old empiricist tradition, “what is given.” But everyone knows that meaning is not “given.” Meaning is constructed. Who is going to do all that? At what cost? Will the records be kept forever? Will they be hacked? Will they be meaningful?

Posted in Politics, sociability, Society, Sustainability | Tagged accountability, copcams, fidelity, total surveillance, trust | Leave a comment

My Victory Lap

Posted on April 18, 2015 by hessd

Long before I began to think of my life as a mile (= four laps) run, I knew the popular version of a saying from Psalm 90: “the days of a man are three score and ten or by reason of strength, four score.”

There was a good deal wrong with my memory, apparently. The King James Version, which I was pretty sure was being quoted, actually says, “”The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” Psalm 90:10

So the point of the verse is that it is soon over and we “fly away.” [1] I never got beyond three score and ten. Also, I never really liked the way the translation scanned in English; too many syllables. “Or by REA-son of STRENGTH four SCORE,” places an emphasis on every other syllable and I like it better that way. And it isn’t “of a man,” as I recalled, but “the days of our years.” Oh well.

I started running seriously in 1968, the year I first visited the University of Oregon. The people I saw running there took my breath away long before I started running myself and discovered that that takes your breath away, too.

Then I noticed that I was twenty years old or so when I first married and forty years or so when that marriage ended and sixty years or so when my second wife died and I got to wondering what was going to happen when I was eighty years or so old. Partly for that reason—it wasn’t just the symmetry of the design—I decided to propose that Bette (third wife) and I move to a senior center in 2017, when I would be eighty years old. This picture is from that same era and I did remember to take a victory lap around the track at the University of Oregon when they granted me a Ph. D. The kids all ran with me.

That’s the timing part. Now comes the part where I have to apologize to my children, all of whom are in their 50s by now so they are more likely to forgive me this flight than when they were in their teens. In 1976, I began a project to “celebrate” the bicentennial of our country. The project was simplicity itself. We were to run one thousand, seven hundred, seventy-six miles between the fourth of July 1976 and the fourth of July 1977. That’s less than six miles a day for each of six days a week for a year. No problem. I was still in my 30s, with relatively fresh knees and something to prove. But…things happen in a year’s time and I showed up in March of 1977 about 280 miles behind the pace. So that’s roughly 36 miles a week built into the schedule PLUS somehow those extra 280 miles.

At that point I began to resort to mind games of one kind or another. One of them is the “victory lap,” which is the subject of today’s reflection. We lived on what was called “new faculty circle” in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where I taught at Westminster College. The “circle” was half a mile and I made it a practice to run that little extra loop every time I came in from a run. What the heck; it’s another half mile added to the total. I was desperate. I did it, though. Here is 39 year-old Dale running the last of the 1776 miles.

But then something really interesting happened. I noticed that running that extra half mile didn’t feel at all like running the ten or fifteen or twenty before it. If I had been having blister problems, for instance, they stopped bothering me on the “victory lap.” The strong task orientation I felt, especially on longer runs that really tested my body, seemed to go away on the victory lap. I was reflective and peaceful on the victory lap. I looked back on what I had done with a willingness to celebrate.

At that point, I began to think of the victory lap as a metaphor and I thought about those sets of double decades as the laps of a race and I thought how really terrific it would be if, when I finished the race, after my fourth lap, I could run a little longer with that reflective and celebrative cast of mind. It all sounded good to me.

It did not sound good to my kids, who were 16, 14, and 12 at the time. The “end of the race” didn’t mean beginning of a post-run celebration; it meant dying. They didn’t want me to die and they didn’t want me to think about dying. And if I did think about it, they wanted me not to talk about it. And I have mostly not talked about it, at least not to them.

But now it appeals to me more and more strongly. I’m not sure I can do it, to tell the truth. It appears to require skills I have not yet mastered and have only, in fact, caught sight of every now and then. I thought I might treat my retirement from the Oregon Higher Education System like that, but I didn’t. I signed up to teach in a doctoral program at Portland State and I worked at it like a sonofobitch!

As I think about it, there really was no way to do a bad job of the victory lap. All that still confronted me was a hot soak for my feet and a cold beer for the rest of me and then taking on the rest of the day. But there are a thousand ways of teaching badly and I hate each and every one of them.

After leaving Portland State, I took on a year-long Bible study class at First Presbyterian church, here in Portland. For an odd mix of reasons, I worked the course pretty hard. We were supposed to become “a community,” in the process of reading the entire Bible in 34 weeks. That takes some emailing and some phoning and some coffee drinking and some visiting and, in our case, some praying as well. Also, I had been thinking I knew a fair amount about the Bible because I keep reading the parts of it I like best. You don’t do that with a class, so I read a lot of things I hadn’t read in years and that I had never understood at all. I worked it pretty hard, but not like the doctoral studies. I’m prepared to call that an improvement.

Leaving our house in the West Hills of Portland is easier—so far. It’s still a year or two out, but already I am experiencing some of the victory lap feelings. [2] I remember when we planted the Austrian Pine that has gotten so big now. I remember years of “bagel parties,” each different; each a pleasure. [3] I remember the pleasures—sometimes the sorrows, but mostly the pleasures—of living here with my second wife and doing the little things that helped her die more comfortably and brimming with family. I remember with pleasure the mess I made of rototilling the back yard.

All that is victory lap stuff. It isn’t how long the lap is. It is what the lap is for. It is tacking on an extra half mile, all the while remembering the run with pleasure and not feeling the discomfort, discomfort that was undeniably apparent ten minutes ago, but has gone somewhere during the victory lap.

My idea of ending a phase of my life is like closing a long-running and highly successful Broadway play. There are no tears of sadness; there is no lamenting. Everyone celebrates what a glorious run the play had, how many people saw and enjoyed it, how many careers got their start on that cast, and so on. No one complains that its “run” on Broadway is over.

In December of 2017, I will turn 80 unless something unforeseen intervenes. By then, I hope to have thought through and named and practiced the crucial victory lap skills. I want to be good at them because I really don’t want to have to work very hard at them and I really don’t like doing it wrong.

[1] The actual meaning of the verse was, in other words, entirely opposed to the reason I remembered it. In a long life of biblical scholarship—reading it, not producing it—I have found that to be distressingly common.

[2] “Victory lap skills” would be a great deal better than “victory lap feelings” but be begin where we are able and progress as means, motive, and opportunity enable us.

[3] We really do make and eat bagels at a “bagel party,” but I put the term in quotation marks because of the way we do it. We divide the group into teams of four and each takes a turn shaping the bagels and leaving them to rise. They group one returns to “their bagels”—the ones they claim to remember having made or, failing that, the best-shaped bagels on the table—to boil them and bake them. The boiling is carried out with completely unnecessary precision; there is an official timer; there is a bagel-flipper, etc. Then each remaining group does the same until Group 1’s bagels come out of the oven and the “eating phase” begins. THAT’S a bagel party.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life | Tagged celebrating everything, getting old, hardly working, playing nicely with others, working hard | Leave a comment

Hillary’s last chance to prepare for 2020

Posted on April 17, 2015 by hessd

2016 could be a really interesting election. Or not.

If the R’s nominate a right-wing flame thrower, Hillary Clinton (hereafter “Hillary,” meaning no disrespect) the Democratic Nominee Presumptive (hereafter DNP) can just coast to the middle of the spectrum and pick up the votes of Republicans who have been nervous since 1964, when Barry Goldwater spooked them. If I were her campaign manager and cared about nothing except her victory margin, that’s what I would do and I would put on my resumé, “guided the candidate to a clear victory.” [1]

That would provide no basis at all for her to govern, however. She would do what she could in her first term and then she would settle in to apologize to the American people that they were still working way too hard and were still poor. And the American people would still refuse to listen to anything she says because she has not yet apologized to then for her failure to “fix the economy. [2] Below is a piece I wrote in March 2014 about the forthcoming electoral disaster for Democrats. I am citing it today because that is just where President Hillary Clinton will be in March 2019 if she runs the kind of campaign I have described above.

My view is that the economy we have now is the kind of economy we are going to have for the foreseeable future…So think about this. You’re President Obama and you want to talk about some important things. You might want to talk about raising the minimum wage, so people can afford to buy things again. You might want to talk about penalties for companies that outsource their labor force—“shipping American jobs overseas,” is the way President Obama puts it. You might want to talk about the cost to ordinary workers of the obscene levels of executive compensation CEOs are granted. You might want to talk about the strength of labor unions as the only way to guarantee that contractual obligations will be met by employers.
Or you might want to talk about something else. You might want to talk about the deplorable state of our transportation infrastructure or the unenforced environmental regulations that result in polluted air sheds and watersheds. You might want to talk about sustainable levels of energy use and securing those levels from non-polluting sources.
And let’s say the American people agree with your positions on everything that is named in the last two paragraphs. It doesn’t matter! Why? Because the American voters have not yet put in their hearing aids. They will hear no reasons—other than your own culpability, which is assumed—why the economy is what it is and why it will continue to be that way. They will engage in no other conversations, no matter how urgent those conversations might be because they can’t hear what you are saying. They want you to apologize first and that means fixing the economy.

That mess—the mess President Obama was in by March 2014 and will be in until the end of his presidency—is the mess Hillary will be in as the person who presides over this economy which is rich and robust at the top and thin and brittle from the middle on down. The 2016 campaign is Hillary’s only chance to make her presidency about something else. The “something else” is the way the economy works. and whether the America people understand how the economy works.
What do the American people understand at the moment? Here are two relevant measures from a January 2015 Gallup Poll.

“…dissatisfaction is relatively high with the way income and wealth are distributed in the country today, indicating that the public’s concern is focused more on the inequality of results as the system plays out, rather than on the chances people have of improving their lot within the system. These attitudes are not new. Gallup polling over the decades has consistently shown that Americans believe money and wealth should be distributed more equally in U.S. society, and have consistently supported higher taxes on the rich to help achieve that aim.”

Hillary could build her campaign on this dissatisfaction if she wanted to. It is consistent “over the decades” as Gallup says and two thirds of the American people is a lot of people. Notice that it is a systemic measure, not an individual measure. The reason to take this as a campaign theme would be that it will mobilize a lot of people and get her elected and bring that issue front and center in her first term.

The reason not to take this as a campaign theme is that the difficulties will still be there in 2019 and any Congressman or Senator running for office in 2020 would have a lot of reason to distance himself/herself from President Clinton.

If the economic difficulties are, as I argued in the Obama post, “the new normal,” then they will still be there in 2020. The difference is that by 2020, they will be President Clinton’s fault because she has “presided” [2] over the continuation of failed U. S. policies.

There is another way to go. It doesn’t make anything better, but it does change the explanation for why things are still bad from a systemic explanation to a personal explanation. In this campaign approach, “the richest 1%” are not just the beneficiaries of the way the economy works; they are they reason it works that way. “It” is their fault!

In the expression “it” is their fault, what is “it?” American businesses have adapted to modern methods of production and to global opportunities for consumption. They are using very low cost workers—some robotic, some just underpaid [3]—and, in the absence of an American middle class to sell the products to, they are selling them to the middle classes of the BRIC nations, as they are called: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

They are satisfied with the way they produce and the way consumers consume because they make a lot of money that way. Nothing is going to change that. Very large amounts, from what they make by running their businesses that way, show up as “executive compensation.” These executives are “fat cats,” a name chosen to show their availability as villains. [4] Hillary could blame these executives for the plight of the middle class. The plight of the middle class is that they are working harder than ever and are continuing to fall behind economically. If that’s a system effect—that’s the way business is these days—it is politically inert. If it results from the greed of the fat cats, who manipulate the process to enrich themselves and to impoverish the rest of us, it is not inert. It is, in fact, a call for a politics of retribution. It is the kind of political action embedded in the Robin Hood stories.

Hillary is going to have to go one way or the other. If she campaigns on making things better for “those who follow the rules and work hard”—the Obama mantra—the voters will be after her blood by 2019. She promised systemic improvements and I am still poor. Off with her head! If she campaigns successfully—a major question [5], to be sure—she will not have changed the system, but she will have changed who is to blame for the system.

If that’s all she does, Hillary will have changed the conversation for four years. If she wrings a great deal more money out of the companies—the ones who impoverish American workers so they can sell competitively to the middle classes of the BRIC countries—she can put in place a substantial safety net. That won’t make people less poor, not in the spending money sense—but it will provide at public expense a lot of the services—high quality child care, for instance— that now require out of pocket expenditures by workers who are receiving poverty level wages.

Frankly, I don’t see her chances of making that transition successfully even if she wanted that more than anything else and I don’t think she does want it that much. Elizabeth Warren might, but Hillary doesn’t.

Therefore, I predict that Hillary will confront plummeting popularity in 2019 as more and more people blame her for “how things are,” even if they would have been exactly like that if her R competitor has been elected.

Hillary needs to solve the problem. She can’t do that. The problem is global and endemic. It is, as Gov. Brown (CA) [6] said of California’s desiccation, “the new normal.” She can blame the fat cats for the problem, setting off a wave of retributive voting and possibly even legislation. The fat cats will outlast her; they might accept a little bit of regulation and taxation. Not much. Or she can accept the system in its general terms, tax the rich and establish Sweden-style buffers for the poor.

“Sweden-style”buffers—it’s awkward, but I don’t have to call them “socialist” if I call them “Sweden-style”—will require a fundamental change of heart among Americans. According to that same Gallup poll, 60% of Americans are “satisfied with the opportunity for a person in this nation to get ahead by working hard.” Apparently “getting ahead” is what they want. They don’t want their poverty to hurt less and that is what President Clinton would be offering them—in the best of the three scenarios.

The foundation for Hillary’s popularity in 2019 is being laid right now. Good luck, Hillary.

[1] In the one case when I had the chance, that is what I did do. In 1982, my candidate took out an incumbent county official ih a race that I, as the manager, affected not one whit and I put on my resumé that I had “guided the candidate….”
[2] You have to apologize first. Then they’ll listen. But it only works for a few times.
[3] That is, after all, what Preside-ents do
[4] “Under” in “underpaid really should require a measure of what they should be paid. Marx argued that they should be paid the value they have added to the product. Many labor economists have argued that they “should” be paid whatever they contract to work for, provided that it is within the law and poverty-level wages are eminently legal.
[5] President Franklin Roosevelt called them “malefactors of great wealth.” In the campaign I managed, a campaign very Republican in tone although the office we were seeking was a nonpartisan office, they were called “heavy hitters.”
[6] The top 1% are very adroit in adapting to challenges of this kind. They will defeat the message if they can. The R’s will call it “class warfare.” They will defeat the messenger if they can unless it means electing a Tea Party candidate. Failing those, they will adapt to the new demands in ways that will allow them to keep most of their earnings, but take a well-publicized step in the direction of “reform.”
[7] It’s like “Miami of Ohio.” Oregon has a “Governor Brown” now too, so Jerry Brown is (CA).

Posted in Politics | Tagged class warfare, Hillary, safety net, Tea Party, the new normal, where the money is | Leave a comment

Stanley Victor Freberg, the master of his craft

Posted on April 9, 2015 by hessd

Stan Freberg died this Tuesday at the age of 88. He was one of the funniest men I had ever heard. He was known for his satire, but it wasn’t nasty satire. Mostly, he was just able to look at things from a different angle. And he was a master.

In my favorite of all the Freberg productions, Stan Freberg Modestly Presents the United States of America, Volume I, he stages a confrontation on the beach with “an Indian.”

Columbus: Hello there, hello there. We white men–other side of ocean. My name Christopher Columbus.

Native: Oh? You over here on a Fulbright?

Columbus: Huh? Uh, no,no, I’m over here on an Isabella, as a matter of fact. Which reminds me, I want to take a few of you guys back on the boat with me to prove I discovered you.

Native: What you mean, you discover us? We discover you.

Columbus: You discovered us?

Native: Certainly. We discover you on beach here. Is all how you look at it.

It’s always that way. Freberg was able to imagine it from the other side. Freberg’s “Abominable Snowman” complained that he never like that word “abominable” that much but it was the closest they could get to the original abominuyamao, which means “the hairy one with the big feet.”

I started teaching eighth grade students in 1960. The various classes I was to have during the day would shuttle into my classroom for American history or English and on the first day, I would play Freberg’s History of the United States for them. It was the best class evaluation tool I ever found. Some classes snickered when Richard Rodgers, the songwriter, called on the telephone in the middle of the sale of Manhattan Island to a Dutch merchant. A telephone? Other classes listened right by that one, but would laugh at a reference to Leonardo da Vinci as “Lenny.” When we were done with that day, I knew pretty much what I had to work with that year in each class.

On Tuesday, James Ward said, in a comment about Freberg’s death. “I raised my family on Stan Freberg’s United States of America.” I had been thinking of using that as an opening line myself, but Ward got there first. It’s true for my kids, certainly. A reference to anyone who talks too much might be garnished with Benjamin Franklin’s dismissal of George Washington. “Oh yeah. That’s George for ya. Talks up a storm with those wooden teeth. Can’t shut him up. But when it comes time to put the name on the old parchment-o-rooney, try and find him.”

A thanksgiving feast seldom passes without the Puritan lament, “Whaddaya mean you cooked the turkey, Charlie?” Followed by, “And all of us had our mouths set for roast eagle with all the trimmings.”

It gets so bad in my family sometimes that different words entirely, if they have a characteristic intonation from a Freberg skit, will get the next line as a reply. A complaint about anything, if the tonality is just so, will get:

What are you so surly about today?

Surly to bed and surly to rise…

OK, let’s knock off the one line jokes and sign the petition, huh?

That little exchange is from “Tom Jefferson’s” attempt to get “Ben Franklin” to sign, “this little petition I’ve been circulating around the neighborhood.” The “little petition” is the Declaration of Independence, of course, from which Franklin reads, in apparent bafflement, the line…”life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff?”

Because he was a parodist by temperament, Freberg parodied things. And the things he parodied were often things that irked him. He was no fan of what, today, we call “political correctness.” He does a wonderful skit with Daws Butler as Mr. Tweedlie. Tweedlie represents “the Citizen’s Radio Committee” and his job is to stop Freberg’s performance of “Old Man River” whenever he hears something the Committee might object to. By that process, we get lines like, “Elderly man river/That elderly man river/he must know something but the doesn’t say anything/ He just keeps rollin’…uh, rolling…he just keeps rolling along.”

In this picture, Freberg (right), June Foray (center), and Daws Butler (right) are recording “St. George and the Dragonet” June Foray did a lot of work with Freberg, but my favorite line of hers opens the skit on the sale of Manhattan Island. It is a loud lament with a “voice crying in the wilderness” tone to it. “Too many moons we live here, White Cloud. Time to unload this crummy island.”

Everybody knows what “that’s about the size of it” means. Unless, of course, it doesn’t. In an early Dragnet spoof, “St. George and the Dragonet” (Butler is the dragon) we get:

Dragon I see you got one of those new .45 caliber swords.

St. George That’s about the size of it.

One of the things Freberg didn’t like about the popular music of his day was the incessant repetitive piano background; what his fictional piano accompanist called “that clink clink clink jazz.” The pianist takes off on a lovely little jazz riff when Freberg, the singer, says, “Oh yes you will play that clink clink clink jazz or you won’t get paid tonight.” Then, after a pause of exactly the right length, the piano part starts up again. Clink, clink, clink.

He parodied the commercialization of Christmas in his wistful little “Green Chri$tma$.” He plays Mr. Scrooge, the head of the Advertising Council. Daws Butler plays Bob Cratchet, who “owns a little spice company in East Orange, New Jersey. The argument between the two is carried on in words and then in music with no possible confusion about what is being said. Scrooge wins. The last sound is a coin rolling around in the drawer of a cash register well after the last sound of a Christmas hymn has faded.

He was surely the kind of kid that always got in trouble in school. There are a lot of those, but not many of them take just that knack for trouble and turn it into decades of innovative comedy.

Posted in Living My Life, Words | Tagged Daws Butler, Green Christmas, Preacher's Kid funny, radio satire, Stan Freberg | Leave a comment

Heroes

Posted on April 9, 2015 by hessd

Everyone who has served in the Armed Forces of the United States is a hero.

Have you heard that? First I heard it as part of the ads for the armed services. Now it is commonplace in the patter of the sports commentators and very often a feature of the opening ceremonies as well. I am starting to hear casual references to it—to the taken for granted fact of it—on the bus or at a coffee shop. It’s so “true” in these settings that no case needs to be made; it just needs to be referred to.

There are so many things I don’t like about it that it’s hard to know where to start. Let me start with three and I’ll stop then and see if three is really enough.

I call the first one “bracket creep.” You might have thought “bracket creep” has to do only with tax categories, but I treat it as a much more general phenomenon. If there were a formal designation for hero, we wouldn’t have this problem. “Winners of Purple Hearts” could be designated as heroes. That would go like this.

“See that guy? He’s having a lot of trouble walking now, but he’s a hero.

Really, when was he awarded the Purple Heart?

In 1972. It was an amazing ceremony. I had never seen one before.”

From a language point of view, this is a very satisfying exchange. Information is exchanged. Understanding is clear. “Hero” means “having been awarded the Purple Heart.”

And it wouldn’t have to be a Purple Heart. It could be any official designation; any commendation for bravery under difficult circumstances. If hero means “has received an official recognition for heroic actions taken” then we are saved from bracket creep so long as the awarding body keeps the same criteria.

That’s not where we are. “Having been employed by the Army [or any other branch of the military] for a period of time” is now the equivalent of the Purple Heart I referred to above. That’s “bracket creep.”

Difficulties run off in every direction. If every soldier is a hero, what designation should be give the soldiers who have received special commendations for courage under fire? Superhero? Won’t work.

You really can’t make everyone think of people who were employed by the U. S. government to be part of our national defense (our national offense too, of course) as a hero. It can’t be done.

What you can do is destroy the word.

Words are kindly things. They accept a lot of abuse without complaint. They are puffed up and then shrunk down and still they hang around in hopes of being useful. But the level of abuse they are able to withstand is still finite. You can destroy them.

I saw “disability” ruined right before my eyes at a state legislative hearing. The proponents of a bill had apparently agreed among themselves that “differently abled” was the right thing to say. They all said it themselves. They interrupted legislators who were asking questions but who did not say the right word. The legislators sensed—all the good ones have a kind of Spidey sense about offending do-gooders in public—that refusing to use “differently abled” would not be well received. So they said “differently abled” and rolled their eyes. They put “air-quotes” around it. They got together in the hallway afterwards and plotted revenge. They were not happy.

This is a difficulty the military will have to find a way to deal with because if everyone is a hero, no one is a hero. This use of a word works because it swoops down on a category and chooses some but not others, for a special distinction. The military really needs heroes. They can’t be happy to watch the category become meaningless. They will have to do something. Good luck, guys.

The second one is subjectivization. As in all these matters, the -zation part refers to something that has been done to hero 1 a word or concept. It was A and then the -zation process happened and it is now B. It was objective (A) and now it is subjective (B). Is the oldest person in this picture a hero?

Subjective language is a wonderful thing. We would all be poorer without it. But we count on some things to be objectively true. The #1 Tri-Met bus picks riders up at the Southwest Fitness Center and takes them downtown. There is no value is saying, “To me, it always takes people shopping at Lloyd Center.” But when you get off the #1 bus, you will be downtown.

We can subjectivize “hero.” We can give up on the word’s having a common public meaning and rely on the meaning each of us gives to it. Here’s an example from the movie While You Were Sleeping.

Lucy You are a hero too. Every day, you give your seat on the train to an old woman.

Peter But that’s not really heroic.

Lucy It is to the woman who gets to sit down.

From a language standpoint, Peter’s case is better. In giving up his seat, he is doing something generous. Lucy is in the booth collecting fares, so she sees whatever happens on the train from some distance a hero 2 way. We don’t know how the old woman feels. The designation of hero shows how Lucy feels about Peter, or possibly about generosity. Is the oldest person in this picture a hero?

Or you could just grant the subjectivity of it. “That seems heroic to me,” someone might say. Or “He’s a hero to me.” Or “She’s a hero to me,” since no one seems to say heroine any more.

So subjectivization “solves” the hero problem by making the word refer to how I feel about an act or about a person. It removes it from the public conflict about its meaning by removing it from the pubic vocabulary.

But—third difficulty— there are cultural problems to deal with as well as language problems. Just as we create problems for ourselves when we choose some acts as meritorious and not others, so we create problems when we choose some kinds of contributions to the national welfare as meritorious and not others.

Language Digression: One feature of language in America is that we like to drop “unnecessary” words. If a given verb is always used in combination with a given noun, we just drop the noun. Baseball announcers who used to say that Terwilliger “reached first base” or “reached base” in the third inning, now say that Terwilliger “reached” in the “third.” After a little while, it stops sounding odd because the range of possible meanings is so small that everyone knows what he means. In basketball, point guards once “created scoring opportunities.” Now they just “create.” They need teammates, so they don’t really create ex nihilo—theologians everywhere breathe a sigh of relief.

So the third difficulty is that when we choose some general category as “heroic,” we distinguish the people from the people in other categories, who are now “non-heroic.” So who are our true heroes? The people who “serve” in the armed forces. Are hero 3 there “un-armed forces?” Is that kind of conflation of “service” and “force” something we want to support? Is military service really the only category we want to value as a category? Are we really no more than Sparta? Didn’t we once aspire to be Athens?

Are firefighters heroes? Medics? Teachers who work miracles no one else could with children everyone else has already given up on? Peace Corps? Women who hold together communities that would othewise lose any sense of belonging? How about these guys? Heroes? Why?

Is “putting yourself in harm’s way” a crucial ingredient? OK. The Peace Corps volunteer comes home with malaria. The public service teacher, exposed to the daily catastrophes of inner city life give up hope and never recovers it. The women who hold communities together burn our after years of trying, during which time they have put their own families and very possibly their husbands is second or third place.

You want damage done to persons who are serving the public good? There it is. Nothing in any of those jobs is going to get those people a chance to board a flight early or get a free drink on board or to submit to the pro forma thanks of people who have been instructed to thank them for their sacrifice. How about her?

So “hero” as a shorthand expression for members of any of the armed services, is not a good use of the word. It has at least the three difficulties I referred to above and many many more. And the difficulties it causes are systemic. You can’t ask people to solve them be “being more understanding.” And a really good word has its features scrubbed off and is filed on the shelf in the warehouse along with other words that once meant something.

Posted in Society, Words | Tagged good words, heroes, serving in the unarmed forces, the subjective dodge, valorization | Leave a comment

Clean and Sober

Posted on April 6, 2015 by hessd

I look at it as a goal. It’s the thirteenth step of my 12 Step Program.

In the expression “clean and sober,” clean is supposed to refer to the absence of drugs in your system and so clean and sober 5 ber to the absence of alcohol. Drugs and alcohol are not my problem. My problem is continuing to read the gospels the way I learned to as a child—and continued until nearly middle age—even though it is an approach that I have consciously rejected for at least two decades. I just don’t seem to be able to stop.

Here are the steps I go through. These are what NOT being clean and sober look like for me. I’ll read a passage literally that simply cannot be read literally. There is a discrepancy and normally, my mind is attracted to discrepancies. If the hero’s hair is described as brown on page 39 and as blonde on page 132, it is common for me to stop and say, “Wait a minute. Wasn’t his hair brown at the beginning?” If it’s a gospel account, I don’t do that.

Why not? Well, I have already learned to read it the other way. and I simply don’t notice the discrepancies. Matthew says that Jesus came riding into Jerusalem (see Matthew 21:5) on two donkeys. Two. I am long past the place where I care whether there was one or more than one; I am past caring about how the prophet Zechariah (9:9) phrased it and why Matthew kept each half of the parallel rather than combining them. What I care about is why I didn’t notice.

Today, I don’t notice because I have learned not to notice. I read it the way I read it because I have always read it that way. So, in the second stage, right after noticing the problem, I read that passage and say, “Wait. That can’t be right.” Then I move right away to being embarrassed. I have actually stopped reading and looked over my shoulder to see whether anyone noticed the mistake I had been making all my life. When I catch myself looking to see whether anyone noticed the thought I had just had, I laugh and get back to work, so it’s not as bad as you might think.

So then, in stage three, I pick my attention up in both hands and put it back on the trail it is supposed to be following. Why did Matthew use the Zechariah passage? What did he have in mind? What was he trying to say about Jesus? What does it mean for my understanding of Jesus that Matthew represents this episode the way he does?

Now that little sequence—the three little steps—could be read as a success story and in a small way, it is. And if it signaled a broad and lasting transition to this new way of appreciating the text, it would be. But I really really don’t want to have to go through those three steps all the time.

What I really want to do is to take my current view of gospel texts—they are associations of symbols, not of events—and read in that mode naturally. I don’t want to go through long periods where I ignore discrepancies I would have been attracted to in any other field of study. I don’t want to twist my brain into odd shapes trying to account for X on the one hand and Y on the other before finally remembering that I really don’t have to accommodate X or Y or vice versa.

Maybe it’s time for another example. In John’s account, they put a sponge soaked with sour wine on some hyssop and gave it to Jesus. This is what hyssop looks like. It doesn’t look like the kind of thing you would choose to put a sponge on. Mark and Matthew both say they put the sponge on “a reed,” which at least implies something long and rigid.

Eventually, I get to thinking about how you put put a sponge on a fern. Think for a minute how much better it would be if I would just say, “Hyssop. Hmm. Why hyssop?” A little rummaging around in my memory would produce this text.

And then I would think of the blood of the lamb, which saves all those Israelites who obey God and put the blood on the door posts and I would see what imagery John is drawing from. The account John is giving us is rich with symbolism; it says about Jesus exactly what John wants us to hear. And…it doesn’t require sticking a sponge on a fern and lifting it up in the air.

That’s what I want. I want to say, “Hm. Hyssop. Why hyssop, I wonder.” I don’t want to wander down those alleys that lead to how strong hyssop stalks are or how toxic the digestive juices in a whale are (Jonah) or whether the ark would really have been big enough to add male and female unicorns to the menagerie (Noah).

I want to get clean and sober and stay clean and sober.

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged factual accounts, gospel accounts, hyssop, symbolic meanings, the triumphal entry | 4 Comments