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Some Thoughts on Slaughterhouse-Five

September 15, 2010

Some Thoughts on Slaughterhouse-Five

Like Billy Pilgrim, the hapless protagonist in his great anti-war novel Slaughterhous-Five, Kurt Vonnegut survived “the greatest massacre in European history” (101). Vonnegut and several other American prisoners of war were spared incineration during the Allied firebombing of Dresden because they were quartered in an underground slaughterhouse. When Vonnegut and his compatriots emerged after the night of pyrotechnics, they discovered a moonscapes containing the charred remains of “one hundred and thirty thousand people” (165). In the novel Billy Pilgrim tells actress Montana Wildhack that the “little logs” he saw “lying around” Dresden after the attack were actually “people who had been caught in the fire storm” (179).

Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about time, space, fate, extraterrestrial creatures, irony, violence, verisimilitude, greed, revenge, and grace. But mostly it’s about war, “the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more” (106).

War is always failure: A failure of imagination; a failure of compassion; a failure of communication; a failure of restraint. Kurt Vonnegut is repulsed when Americans celibrate the ugliest and stupidest thing human beings do by having parades and singing songs like “Glory, Glory Hallelujah.” He suggests a more fitting tribute:

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns” (Cat’s Cradle).

Americans emerged from World War II with a hard-won sense of pride that our soldiers and citizens had endured many hardships in order to destroy great evil. This is true, of course, but life is never this simple. There is always much bad accompanying even the greatest good. For example, the defeat of Nazism would not have been possible without the immeasurable sacrifice of the people of the Soviet Union. So in order to destroy Hitler, America had to support Stalin’s equally putrid regime, which would continue to enslave much of the world for decades. We also found it necessary to incinerate hundreds of thousand of civilians in Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima (not a complete list).

Determining the rightness of actions which caused so much death, suffering and despair is beyond the capabilities of any human, so I cannot say with certainty that WWII had to be fought. However, Kurt Vonnegut is willing to concede that America’s role in WWII was necessary, although it left us with some unfortunate legacies:

One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It’s been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we’re always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of.

The “success” of the raid on Dresden is largely omitted from the official narrative of WWII (191). Even today, Americans are smugly self-congratulatory when we speak about WWII, as if the entire world should be perpetually thanking us. But as Vonnegut notes, it’s never right to feel good about war.

“I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time” (116).

So what can we learn from a book about the ugliest and stupidest things that human beings do? Kurt Vonnegut doesn’t offer any easy answers. Slaughterhouse-Five “is short and jumbled and jangled” in content and narrative “because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre” (19).

The greatest wisdom in Slaughterhouse-Five is offered by the Tralfamadorians, a race of extraterrestrial beings who abduct Billy Pilgrim in order to study earthlings. The Tralfamadorians, who function in four dimensions, are able to see a person’s entire life span at once. From this perspective

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber (86).

Slaughterhouse-Five is not the feel good Oprah Book of the Month. There is no Secret, and this is all the advice you get:

“one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones” (117).

When Kurt Vonnegut was writing Slaughterhouse-Five, he told movie producer Harrison Starr that he was working on an anti-war novel:

“Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?” Starr asked (3).

Vonnegut agreed with Starr on the futility of his project: “What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too” (3).

Since that time (1968), however, humanity has made considerable progress in the War on Glaciers. This thought might have aroused a chuckle from Vonnegut, but I doubt it would have heartened him much.

One final thought from Robert Browning


In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force–
Gold, of course.
Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth’s returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Essay, Kurt Vonnegut, Morsel | 3 Comments »

Some Thoughts on On Writing

August 30, 2010

Tabitha and Stephen King

Some Thoughts on On Writing

I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin, that’s all. If you disapprove, I only shrug my shoulders. It’s what I have.

—Stephen King (158)

Kurt Vonnegut joked that critics often mistake the Science Fiction genre for a urinal. But Science Fiction is certainly several notches above Horror in the Hierarchy of Serious Literature. Science Fiction writers such as H. G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin and Ray Bradbury are taken seriously by Serious Literary Types. With the notable exception of Edgar Alan Poe, however, Horror writers rarely receive such literary love.

Stephen King is the undisputed master of a genre which barely elicits as much respect as Romance Novels in the Academy and among Serious Critics. Although we wouldn’t expect someone who has enough money to buy up and pulp every edition of every negative review he has ever received to worry about such things, Stephen King is obviously irked by critics who look down their noses at a particular type of literature. (King is also irked by inelegant adverbs, and he would probably deem that “obviously” superfluous.)

King’s passionate defense of Raymond Chandler’s hard boiled mysteries tells us a lot about how he sees his own detractors:

a good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it. Raymond Chandler may be recognized now as an important figure in twentieth-century American literature, an early voice describing the anomie of urban life in the years after World War II, but there are plenty of critics who will reject such a judgement out of hand. He’s a hack! they cry indignantly. A hack with pretensions! The worst kind! The kind who thinks he can pass for one of us (143).

When King was in eighth grade, he wrote, published and sold his first bestseller, a novelization of the Roger Corman movie The Pit and the Pendulum. King made the mistake of selling his work at school. The book was confiscated and Stephen was brought before the authorities, his principal Miss Hisler, who accused the young writer of wasting his talent by writing “junk.” This left a wound which took years to heal, if it ever really did:

I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since–too many, I think–being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it (50).

Knowing how much Americans love a good Horatio Alger Story, King is quick to point out his humble origins. He explains how he and his brother

lived an odd, herky-jerky childhood, raised by a single parent who moved around a lot in my earliest years….Perhaps she was only chasing our father, who piled up all sorts of bills and then did a runout when I was two and my brother David was four (17).

On Writing is a testament to the virtues of hard work. Before achieving astounding success with his first published novel Carrie, King worked various demanding manual labor jobs, including a stint at an industrial laundry where “maggots would try to crawl up your arms as you loaded the washers” (68). King’s commitment to the American Work Ethic was already evident in his teenage years:

During my final weeks at Lisbon High, my schedule looked like this: up at seven, off to school at seven thirty, last bell at two o’clock, punch in on the third floor at Worumbo at 2:58, bag loose fabric for eight hours, punch out at 11:02, get home around at quarter to twelve, eat a bowl of cereal, fall into bed, get up the next morning, do it all again (59).

King suggests that the good work habits he developed in order to surmount his humble origins have served him well as a writer because

while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one (142).

Above all, On Writing is a Love Story. When asked how he was able to achieve such a remarkable output–forty-nine novels, including such tomes as IT, which is suitable for bench pressing–King says that the two keys were staying healthy (up until he had an accident which actually occrred while he was writing this memoir) and maintaining “a stable relationship with a self-reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible”(155).

Steven King met his wife Tabitha when they were undergraduates at the University of Maine. As King sees it

“Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough”(74).

In addition to being his life partner and “ideal reader,” Tabitha was also responsible for the major break of King’s career when she rescued the first draft of the novel Carrie from a wastebasket and convinced him to finish the story:

Tabby had the pages. She’d spied them while emptying my wastebasket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out, and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on with it, she said. She wanted to know the rest of the story” (77).

The rest, as they say, is publishing History.

Love literally saved King’s life when his wife and children decided they could no longer tolerate his ferocious addictions. So they staged an intervention wherein Tabby unloaded:

a trashbag full of stuff from my office out on the rug: beercans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic Baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash (97).

King’s stubbornly succumbed only when the mother of his children laid down the law: “Tabby said I had my choice: I could get help at the rehab or I could get the hell out of the house” (97).

The bottle (and other addictions) has done damage to an extremely high percentage of American writers. But King recognizes that “Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around” (101). King wisely (another superfluous adverb) refutiates what he calls the Hemingway Defense, which some employ in order to justify the ways if the dipsomaniacal scrivener:

I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give into their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can (94).

(As usual, I left out so much. Particularly the author’s witty and clever musings on the craft of writing which alone are worth the price of admission.)

I’ll leave the last word to Mr. King, describing his feelings for Tabitha:

Our marriage has outlasted all of the world’s leaders except Castro, and if we keep talking, arguing, making love, and dancing to the Romones–gabba-gabba-hey–it’ll probably keep working (61).

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Essay, Morsel, Steven King | 3 Comments »

Some Thoughts on Washington Rules

August 17, 2010

John Quincy Adams

Some Thoughts on Washington Rules

[America] is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only to her own.

–President John Quincy Adam (232)

The Muslim masses just need to be shown that it’s possible to set themselves free.

–President George W. Bush Max Boot(184)

We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else.

–President Lyndon Baines Johnson (247)

What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?

–Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to General Colin Powell (142)

We have to be forward deployed in Europe and in Asia in order to shape people’s opinions about us in ways that are favorable to us. To shape events that will affect our livelihood and our security. And we can do that when people see us, they see our power, they see our professionalism, they see our patriotism, and they say that’s a country we want to be with. So we are shaping events on a daily basis in ways that are favorable to our interests. You can only do that if you’re forward deployed.

–Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen (148)

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

–President Dwight David Eisenhower (225)

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations–to make them richer and happier and wiser, to make them, that is, in its own shining image.

–Senator J. William Fulbright (111)

Words uttered in Washington command less respect than once was the case. Americans can ill afford to indulge any longer in dreams of saving the world, much less remaking it in our own image. The curtain is now falling on the American Century

–Soldier and Historian Andrew J. Bacevich (16)

In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, the few thinking Americans who refused to submit to War Fever were prone to feeling the effects of Marilyn Munster Syndrome (MMS). Everyone around us was acting weird, yet we were the ones who were generally regarded as freaks. People who should have known better were saying all kinds of ridiculous things on television. For example, the absurd proposition that Saddam Hussein (or anyone else, for that matter) would go to all of the trouble of developing nuclear weapons and then just give them away to people who thought he was a heretic (thereby relinquishing all the advantages of having such weapons while receiving no strategic advantage) was rarely challenged in world of Serious Washington Punditry.

Enter Andrew Bacevich, paleoconservative soldier and historian who had the wit, wherewithal and wisdom to see through George W. Bush’s harebrained scheme designed to usher in a NeoWilsonian age of perpetual paradise on earth.

Unlike so many commenters, however, Bacevich refuses to pretend that the belligerent foreign policy conducted by the Bush administration represents a substantial departure from policies of every president since Truman. Yes, Bush’s absurdly named and pitifully executed Global War on Terror has become a punchline, “redolent with deception, stupidity, and monumental waste,” but the predilection to seek simple military fixes to complex diplomatic problems has been a feature of every postwar administration (166). (Ford had the Mayaguez Incident and Carter had the failed hostage rescue mission.)

According to Bacevich, America finds herself caught up in two wars without any palatable exit strategy not simply because “the Bush administration had blundered into an immense cul-de-sac, from which it could not extricate itself” (180-181). Rather, a postwar political consensus (which Bacevich dubs the Washington Rules) has created a climate wherein the use of force is our first and favored response to conducting international relations. Thus we find ourselves in a situation where our

reliance on military might creates excuses for the United States to avoid serious engagement: Confidence in American arms has made it unnecessary to attend to what others might think or to consider how their aspirations might differ from our own (17).

Although the “standard story line, promulgated by journalists and indulged by scholars, depicts that history as a succession of presidential administrations,” Bacevich believes that “when it comes to assessing reality, slicing the past into neat four- or eight- year-long intervals conceals and distorts at least as much as it illuminates” (30, 31). The colossal stupidity and incompetence of the most recent Bush administration notwithstanding, there is overwhelming continuity in the conduct of American foreign policy. Bacevich’s Washington Rules represent a “consensus [which] has remained in tact” for almost the entire postwar era, spanning “[f]rom the era of Harry Truman to the age of Barack Obama” (15).

For most of our history, America has validated our founders’ distrust of Standing Armies by quickly demobilizing after war. But since Harry Truman decided that he needed to “scare hell out of the American people” in order to justify the creation of a permanent military establishment which would be large enough to challenge the Soviet Union for global domination, presidents have demanded a greater and greater arsenal in order to project American power. (Alleged doves like Carter and Kennedy actually expanded military budgets. Kennedy’s military outlays rose 15 during his first year in office (63). This departure from the sensible American tendency to eschew excessive foreign entanglements does not bode well for the future of the American Experiment. This new American ethos is a tradition which

has emphasized activism over example, hard power over soft, and coercion (often styled “negotiation from a place of strength”) over suasion. Above all, the exercise of global leadership as prescribed by the credo obliges the United States to maintain military capabilities staggeringly in excess of those required for self-defense. Prior to WWII, Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In the wake of WWII, that changed. An affinity for military might emerged as central to the American identity (13).

Today America finds herself in a truly distressing situation. Embroiled in two major wars, our soldiers are pursuing a “pipe dream” as they are forced to attempt “social work with guns,” a misbegotten undertaking under any circumstances (204, 201). In Iraq our senseless quest for security has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of noncombatants and the displacement of millions more. And we continue to charge headlong into a quagmire in Afghanistan, ten years of war in search of a justification. Yet,

Whether or not Afghans wished to be saved and exactly how they viewed salvation were matters that attracted scant attention (183).

The greatest and most enduring culprit in this sad, sad, sordid tale is the American defense establishment, a suppurating wound on the body politic which has already spewed trillions of corrupt dollars like so much pus.

This money lubricates American politics, filling campaign coffers and providing a source of largess–jobs and contracts–for distribution to constituents (228).

Sadly, there is little hope that America is prepared confront reality any time soon. Despite promising hope and change, President Obama “forfeited his opportunity to undertake a serious reassessment of the basic approach to national security formulated of the course of the preceding six decades” (220).

America is going down the tubes yet no one has been able to explain “why fixing Helmand Province should take precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit” (220).

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Andrew Bacevich, Essay, Morsel | 2 Comments »

Some Thoughts on The Glass House

August 2, 2010

Allan Seager

Theodore Roethke

Some Thoughts on The Glass House

I’m naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.

–from Open House by Theodore Roethke, Collected Poems (3)

Theodore Roethke and his biographer Allan Seager had a lot in common. Although they were not particularly close, the two writers were one year apart as undergraduates at the University of Michigan and they were later colleagues at Bennington College and sometime drinking buddies. Their respective literary reputations, however, are far from equal: Despite achieving a certain amount of critical acclaim during his lifetime, Allan Seager’s fiction is rarely read today; Theodore Roethke, a poet who garnered a copious collection of prizes and honors in his time, is one of the titans of American Letters. But Seager was uniquely qualified to chronicle Roethke’s life in The Glass House, as fine a biography of a literary figure as one is likely to encounter.

Allan Seager was a heavy drinker who suffered with tuberculosis and finally succumbed to lung cancer in 1968. He had just completed The Glass House, which turned out to be his most enduring work. A Rhodes Scholar and champion swimmer in his early years, Seager wrote novels and short fiction which “never won general recognition,” yet his work was “highly praised ” by such esteemed critics as Hugh Kenner, James Dickey, and Robert Penn Warren (x). In his illuminating introduction to The Glass House, Donald Hall asserts that Seager’s real strength was constructing “stories and sentences–maybe sentences more than stories,” which is confirmed by the book’s many marvelous words, beautifully collocated (xii).

Any book tells us at least as much about its creator as it does about its subject. And The Glass House is particularly revealing when it comes to Seager’s feelings about what it felt like for a young man with an artistic temperament to grow up in a small-town Michigan about a century ago. (Seager was born in Adrian which is near Lansing; Roethke was reared in the more rural and remote city of Saginaw.) Seager’s Michigan was hardly a hotbed of artistic activity:

It is hard to convey how strange, how foreign the willful making of a poem would have been in a society like his, the inert weight of custom that not only did not have room for any original work in the arts but feared and hated it (46).

And we can only wonder to what extent Seager is speaking about himself when he notes how a poetic temperament was evident in Roethke from an early age:

his despair seems to prove that he already had the prime requisites of a poet, a tingling sensitivity as if he lacked an outer layer of skin, and some sort of compulsion to elevate his life, his emotions into words (28).

As any reader of Roethke would immediately surmise, the glass house of the title refers to his family’s floral farm in Saginaw as well as the poet’s delicate ego. When Ted was fourteen, feuding between his father Otto and his Uncle Charlie, Otto’s brother, led to breakup of the family business and the sale of the beloved greenhouse. Soon thereafter, Uncle Charlie committed suicide. And then Otto, a monumental figure in young Ted’s world, died from intestinal disease. “In the space of three months, the greenhouse was gone, his uncle was gone, his father was gone” (43).

This fateful period in Roethke’s life “must have been a hell of bright awareness” because “he had suffered deprivations greater and keener than he was going to suffer again” (55). Thus, the first fourteen years of his life were “burned into his memory” and, as a poet, Roethke would continue to revisit his bucolic childhood for the rest of his life:

what he writes about are always himself, his father, his mother, more rarely his sister, the greenhouse and its flowers and its working people, the field behind it, the fishing trips with his father, and his own rambles in the game preserve and along the rivers. Instinctively he remembers the period and the area that has been charged with his deepest emotions (163).

Forever collapsing back into his early years, Roethke built one of the most remarkable careers in American Literature. According to the poet Stanley Kunitz, a great friend and supporter of Roethke, “[t]his florist’s son never really departed from the moist, fecund world of his father’s greenhouse in Saginaw” (New York Review, 1963). Ultimately, a writer has only himself to work with, and he must “use himself as a mine, to dig out, to identify, and make images of his emotions” (105). Roethke’s keen reflections of a lost youth stoked his artistic furnace for decades.

Although he would later travel extensively throughout Europe, the greatest journey for Roethke was always inward. He had little interest in sightseeing.

“Churches, galleries, the Colosseum meant nothing to him and he simply refused to see them. It was people he liked to see”(211).

Seager relates that “Stanley Kunitz says he was not a really close observer, and, of course, he did not need to be since everything around him was useful to him only as signatures of himself” (123).

Roethke, who told his students that he never voted, was not someone who kept up with current affairs (50). He read voraciously but not systematically. As Roethke’s good friend W. H. Auden explains, “Ted had hardly any general ideas at all” (67). Seager explains that Roethke was “always reading–and it was not to acquire a fund of general knowledge. Rather, like most writers, he abstracted and kept only what concerned him and let the rest slide out of his memory” (110). At any rate, somehow the multitude of words that went into his head would later recombine in marvelous combinations in his poems.

Seager concedes that Roethke’s greatest artistic asset, a near total disregard for what was happening outside his own psyche, has been seen as a liability by some critics:

Ted’s work has been criticized for the narrowness of its range, for his constant concentration on the fluctuation of the state of his own soul, with the implication that he either selfishly or helplessly limited his vision or deliberately turned it inward, using his images of the nature outside himself merely as barometric signals of internal pressures, as if he found nothing worth writing about in the world around him or was blindly unaware of it (222).

At this point, however, Roethke’s high rank in the literary cannon is very secure.

In Allan Seager’s estimation, Theodore Roethke’s life was a smashing success:

It takes determination and luck for an artist to surmount the variety of obstacles which society–and he himself with unwitting inadvertence–can throw in the way of a period when he can work effectively, eat well enough, have friends to drink with, and be bothered by only petty everyday worries. But Ted managed it (189).

(An entire post about Theodore Roethke that doesn’t mention his renowned prowess as a teacher, his mental illness, the University of Washington, the incessant self-aggrandizing lies he would tell, nor his relationships with women. Wow.)

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Essay, Morsel, Theodore Roethke | 3 Comments »

Some Thoughts on Primates and Philosophers

July 20, 2010
Frans de Waal

Frans de Waal

Some Thoughts on Primates and Philosophers

Morality is a human concept devoid of cosmic origin.

All of our notions of morality are predicated on the fact that human beings are mortal social organisms living in a world of finite resources. If there were only one immortal and indestructible being living in a land of unlimited resources, and none of her actions or decisions could negatively impact herself or others, she would require no rules. But human beings are not the only animals which require social conventions in order to ensure social cohesion. Thus, the laws and cultures we have developed are a “direct outgrowth of the social instincts that we share with other animals” (6).

Human beings have developed elaborate rules and rituals in order to function as members of a group. This makes sense because “Evolution favors animals that assist each other if by doing so they achieve long-term benefits of greater value than the benefits derived from going it alone and competing with others” (13).

Despite the obvious fact that human beings are hardly the only social organisms, biologists have been extremely stingy about acknowledging the possibility that other species are capable of making conscious moral decisions. Scientists with the temerity to suggest that even the most mentally developed non-humans such as primates, dolphins and elephants might be more than simple automatons are often accused of lacking objectivity due to their alleged sin of anthropomorphizing their subjects.

Enter Frans de Waal, the eloquent and outspoken primatologist who argues that morality is not the sole domain of human beings. He makes a convincing case that the same factors which have allowed human beings to develop ethical thinking exist in the higher primates. De Waal argues that continuity is the norm between evolving species in all manner of development, physical, emotional and moral. Therefore, the burden of proof should rest with those who argue that human beings are radically different from even our closest cousins when it comes to behavior and decision-making: “If we normally do not propose different causes for the same behavior in, say, dogs and wolves, why should we do so for humans and chimpanzees?” he asks (62).

In Primates and Philosophers (some brief essays from de Waal along with commentary from Josiah Ober, Stephen Macedo, Robert Wright, Christine M. Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher and Peter Singer) de Waal blames the “behaviorists” (a group for whom he harbors unconcealed contempt) for the widespread antipathy to biologists who credit animals with anthropomorphic tendencies:

“The behaviorists’ opposition to anthropomorphism probably came about because no sane person would take seriously their claim that internal mental operations in OUR species are a figment of the imagination” (66).

Decades of close observation have convinced de Waal that certain higher primates possess all the prerequisites necessary to act upon ethical precepts. Despite being at odds with a substantial proportion of the scientific community, de Waal has an influential ally in his belief that humans possess “continuity with animals even in the moral domain”—Charles Darwin (14). Unlike many “Darwinists,” Darwin argued that:

Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man (14).

If, as the Apostle Paul wrote, There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, then humans are not the only beings capable of such devotion. Famed primatologist Dame Jane Goodall believes that, on occasion, chimpanzees will deliberately risk their lives to save a member of their species. Although they cannot swim, Goodall has often observed them making

“heroic efforts to save companions from drowning–and [they] were sometimes successful. One adult male lost his life as he tried to rescue a small infant whose incompetent mother had allowed it to fall in the water” (33).

De Waal notes that “it is hard to accept as coincidental that scientists who have watched these animals [he’s including dolphins and elephants along with the certain primates] for any length of time have numerous such stories” to tell (33).

De Waal believes that in addition to possessing altruism, some primates have developed a concept of fairness. In a groundbreaking study capuchin monkeys would eventually reject a treat when another capuchin within view was given a preferable reward for performing the identical task. (See Brosnan and de Waal, 44-49)

It is clear that human beings are not the only creatures on earth which demonstrate highly complex mental states (and perhaps even in some cases, a Theory of Mind, 69-73). For example, de Waal is convinced that chimpanzees in captivity like to have a good laugh by playing practical jokes on their human masters:

Often, when human visitors walk up to the chimpanzees at the Yerkes Field Station, an adult female named Georgia hurries to the spigot to collect a mouthful of water before they arrive. She then casually mingles with the rest of the colony behind the mesh fence of their outdoor compound, and not even the best observer will notice anything unusual about her. If necessary, Georgia will wait ten minutes with closed lips until the visitors come near. Then there will be shrieks, laughs, jumps, and sometimes falls, when she suddenly sprays them. (59)

It is difficult to disagree with de Waal’s conclusion regarding the question of whether or not anthropomorphizing certain animals is a “dangerous” tendency for biologists:

There is a symmetry between anthropomorphism and anthropodenial, and since each has its strengths and weaknesses, there is no simple answer. But from an evolutionary perspective, Georgia’s mischief is most parsimoniously explained in the same way we explain our own behavior–as the result of a complex, and familiar, inner life (67).

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Frans de Waal, Morsel | 3 Comments »

Some Thoughts on American on Purpose

July 9, 2010

content

Some Thoughts on American on Purpose

There are only about five million Scots, which is amazing when we stop to consider Scotland’s capacious record of supplying the world with brilliant and industrious citizens. This minuscule divisor makes Scotland, on a per capita basis, the second greatest contributor to what is often referred to as Western Civilization.* (I figured this all out with a slide rule. It was actually a statistical dead heat between Scotland and Greece, but Scotland won the tiebreaker–fashion. Kilts beat togas.)

But despite the fact that they have provided us with so many outstanding writers, thinkers, engineers, industrialists and explorers, the Scottish people are often portrayed as a bunch of brassy, belligerent, bibulous, bargain-hunters.

In his memoir American on Purpose, the immensely gifted actor, comedian, writer and late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson asserts that, Scrooge McDuck notwithstanding, the inhabitants of his native land “are very generous” (46). Otherwise, he does little to dispel the dominant stereotypes about Scottish people.

For Ferguson, the most dreary and oppressive institution in Scotland was the public school system where teachers were extremely liberal with the lash. Ferguson realized that he wanted out of the “redbrick gulag” on his first day (31). And strap-happy teachers weren’t the only threat. Ferguson soon discovered that “what was especially perilous to do at school was to stand out in any way” (22). School was a scalding hot cauldron of anger and resentment where “if you were noticed, you got hit” (67). (Ferguson recalls his brief teenage sojourn to America with this stunning observation: “And nobody wanted a fight. Not once.”) (40)

But this is not a bitter memoir, and Ferguson isn’t one to blame others for his problems. He is extremely honest and reflective about how his innate sense of seclusion contributed not only to his profound feelings of alienation at school but also provided a fertile ground for his burgeoning addictions:

it seems to me that this profound sense of isolation, resentment, misanthropy, and fear in a prepubescent child is an extraordinarily ominous portent. I should have put my name down for rehab then (23).

Ferguson first tried marijuana at a concert when he was just thirteen-years-old, and it was love at first puff:

From this moment on I would dedicate my life to rock and roll and take as many drugs as possible.
What could possibly go wrong? (42)

Despite blacking out the first time he drank as a teenager, Ferguson was soon off and running on a binge that lasted for over a decade. His motto is, “Between safety and adventure, I choose adventure” (196). And Ferguson was a true daredevil in pursuit of a buzz, eventually adding cocaine (the “wonder drug”) and even heroin to his repertoire (114). But this adventure story eventually transmogrified in a horror show: “More shame brought on by behavior instigated by alcohol, which only fueled the need for more alcohol, and on and fucking on” (160). The vicious downward cycle eventually led Ferguson to contemplate suicide. In a fit of total desperation Ferguson contacted his friend Jimmy Mulville, a television producer and recovering alcoholic, and confessed, “I can’t drink and I can’t not drink. I’m too sick to live and too chickenshit to die” (174)

I’m a sucker for a story with a happy ending, and American on Purpose is full of them, particularly the birth of Ferguson’s son Milo, his successful endeavor to become American citizen and his third marriage to Megan Wallace Cunningham:

She makes me feel like I’m lucky, and I know because I have her that I am. I’m happy to be her husband, and I can absolutely positively categorically swear that this marriage is definitely-and-without-doubt-I’m-not-kidding-you-I-really-mean-it the last one for me (262)

Despite being hard on his homeland at times, Ferguson acknowledges that “Scotland made me what I am and America let me be it” (268).

American on Purpose is an enlightening and entertaining memoir.

* You’re not necessarily an anti-Semite if you have to ask which group has made the greatest per capita contribution to Western Civilization, but the answer is pretty freaking obvious.

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Essay, Morsel | 1 Comment »

Some Thoughts on The New American Militarism

June 29, 2010

Andrew J. Bacevich

Some Thoughts on The New American Militarism

Why quit our own to stand on foreign ground?

—George Washington (214)

I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

—Kurt Vonnegut

More than America’s matchless material abundance or even the effusions of pop culture, the nation’s arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for.

—Andrew J. Bacevich (1)

We do not deserve these people. They are so much better than the country…they are fighting for.

—Thomas Friedman (29)

From what I’ve seen of these men and I have to agree with you that the people I’ve met in the military are astonishingly capable and superior. There is a feeling of calm that comes over you when you really get to know the men and women that are serving.

—Jon Stewart speaking with JCS Chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen, Jan. 6, 2010

The striking thing about that final quotation is that it sounds like something Ronald Reagan might have said. But when the closest thing we have to an Official Spokesman for the Counterculture feels the need to preface his gingerly-worded questions to the man in charge of so much mindless carnage with a paean to the competence of our troops, it’s obvious that we’ve come a long way since the 1970s when war was generally regarded to be a bad thing. (The results of the Afghanistan War are at least as bad as anything, say, Jim Cramer ever did, but Stewart wasn’t about to admonish his guest: “Ten Years of senseless war and no end in sight! WTF, Admiral?”)

The problem with fetishizing our young men and women in uniform like this is that it tempts us to send them out into the mad, bad, dangerous world in search dragons to slay instead of thoughtfully addressing our problems and carefully negotiating our place among nations. For the past three decades, we have ignored a plethora of real problems at home–a massive trade imbalance, the hollowing out of our industrial capacity, growing economic inequality, and the collapse of our infrastructure, to name a few. And a pathetic brand of military triumphalism often seems to be all we have left. As historian (and West Point graduate) Andrew J. Bacevich notes in The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, we have come to a sad state of affairs when “military might–rather than, say, the trade balance, income distribution, voter turnout, or the percentage of children being raised in two-parent families–become the preferred measure for gauging the nation’s strength” (109).

Unlike many commenters, Bacevich does not simply credit George W. Bush and his hapless cohorts for turning our nation into a brainless war machine. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Ever since we elected a president in 1980 who offered simple, painless solutions to all our problems, Americans have chosen to live with our heads planted firmly in the sand. (Why struggle to solve our energy problems by working to find new, cleaner sources of energy when we can just send more soldiers to the Persian Gulf?)

Despite getting over 200 of our marines blown up in a foolhardy mission in Lebanon, Reagan was able to tap into a national appetite for greatness via flowery rhetoric:

“Showering soldiers with praise and celebrating soldierly values provided a neat device for deflecting attention from blunders directly attributable to the White House. Reagan understood the political utility of this device and exploited it to the hilt” (110-111).

But promoting the New American Militarism was not strictly a governmental enterprise. Bacevich demonstrates how an influential group of thinkers broadly categorized as “neocons” played a decisive role in creating the climate which allowed such reckless American militarism. Bacevich adroitly explains how the neocons utilized think tanks and publications like the Weekly Standard as well as groups like The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) to sow the seeds war. A major player in this effort was Robert Kagan, a man afflicted with perfervid dreams of military possibilities.

For neoconservatives like Kagan, the purpose of the Defense Department was no longer to defend the United States or deter would-be aggressors but to transform the international order by transforming its constituent parts….For the younger generation of neoconservatives, instructing others on how to organize their countries–employing coercion if need be–was not evidence of arrogant stupidity, it was America’s job (85).

One indication of the macabre times in which we live: despite his perpetual endeavor to discover new nations for America to bomb, the bloodthirsty Kagan remains on the board of the Carnegie Endowment for International PEACE.

After our debacle in Vietnam, Americans again learned the lessons of WWI: War is “inherently poisonous” and it should only be considered as a last resort (15). However, subsequent presidents have bamboozled the American people into war by “contriv[ing] a sentimentalized version of the American military experience and an idealized image of the American soldier” (97).

Such schoolboy dreams of warfare have devastating consequences when played out in the real world. The countless people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been displaced and killed by the fever dreams of a nation which wishes to see its president as an Action Hero are not the only casualties. Our very survival as a democracy is at stake. As James Madison warned: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare” (7)

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Andrew Bacevich, Essay, Morsel | 2 Comments »

nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH

May 27, 2010

Archibald MacLeish

nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH

The poem’s meaning is evoked by the structure of words-as-sounds rather than by the structure of words-as-meanings. And the enhanced meaning, which we feel in any true poems, is a product, therefore, of the structure of the sounds.

–Poetry and Experience by Archibald MacLeish (23)

Scansion records units of rhythm, not units of sense

–All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing by Timothy Steele (530)

Vocabulary

Meter: The basic rhythmic structure of written and uttered words (not simply poetry)

Iamb: A unit of language consisting of an unstressed syllable and a stressed syllable, in that order.

I once began a lesson on meter to a group of eighth-graders by exaggerating (both verbally and bodily) the inherent iambic rhythms of the following lines of poetry:

“I cannot go to school today,”
Said little Pegg-y Ann McKay
I have the measles and the mumps
A gash, a rash and purple bumps*

A girl in the class looked at me in utter recognition and blurted out,
“I get it:

nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH
nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH”

I was happy that this student immediately picked up on the main point of my lesson, but I was really thrilled because her description of iambic poetry was, in my opinion, superior to the one that is commonly offered in textbooks, a depiction with a musical correlation which mimics a snare drum:

ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum
ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum

Here are some examples of iambic meter:

Iambic Monometer–One Beat (nuh-NUH)

Upon His Departure Hence by Robert Herrick

Thus I
Passe by
And die:
As one,
Unknown,
And gone:
I’m made
A shade,
And laid
I’th’grave:
There have
My cave.
Where tell
I dwell,
Farewell.

Iambic Dimeter–Two Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH)

The Robin by Thomas Hardy

When up aloft
I fly and fly,
I see in pools
The shining sky

Iambic Trimeter–Three Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH)

Touring a Past by Dick Davis

There is no boat to cross
From that ill-favored shore
To where the clashing reeds
Complete the works of war
Together with the grass,
And nesting birds, and weeds.

Iambic Tetrameter–Four Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH,
nuh-NUH)

Now I lay me Down to Sleep

If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take

Iambic Pentameter–Five Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH,
nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH)

Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born a-gain
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

One Final Thought


…”scanning” a line is not a dramatic, or poetic reading of a line. Scanning a line is reading it in a special, more or less forced, way, to bring out the meter and any definite derivations or substitutions. Scanning will not bring out the other parts of the tension; it will tend to iron them out. On the other hand, a good dramatic, or poetic, reading will tend to bring out the tensions–but note well that in order to do this it must be careful not to override and completely kill the meter. When that is done, the tensions vanish. (Another reason why the meter must be observed is, of course, that if a line is truly metrical, a reading which actually destroys the meter can only be an incorrect reading–by dictionary and rhetorical standards.) A good dramatic reading is a much more delicate, difficult, and rewarding than a mere scanning. Yet the scanning has its justification, its use. We would argue that a good dramatic reading is possible only by a person who can also perform a scansion.


The Concept of Meter by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley
from The Structure of Verse, Edited by Harvey Gross (163-164)

Suggested Further Reading:

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Fry

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky

Versification: A Short Introduction by James McAuley

by Richard W. Bray

* Sick by Shel Silverstein

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Posted in Education, Language, Lesson Plans, Morsel, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Hardy | 3 Comments »

More Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

May 13, 2010

More Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted.

—Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (34)

The most toxic flaw in NCLB was its legislative command that all students in every school must be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. By that magical date, every single student must achieve proficiency, including students with special needs, students whose native language is not English, students who are homeless and lacking in any societal advantage, and student with every societal advantage but are not interested in their schoolwork

—Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (102)

After 9-11, too many of us were just too damn scared to even entertain the notion that our nation was being run by a couple of incompetent poltroons. We are still paying for this in treasure and in lives. Oddly, the same people who would call Barack Obama a socialist for mandating PRIVATE insurance had little problem with a complete federal takeover of the educational system, which has historically been a state and local issue. (The federal government is barely a seven percent stakeholder in education)

Under ordinary circumstances, Republicans would have opposed the bill’s broad expansion of federal power over local schools, and Democrats would have opposed its heavy emphasis on testing. But after September 1, 2001, Congress wanted to demonstrate unity, and education legislation sailed through (94).

NCLB passed in the Senate 87-10 and 381-41 in the House despite the fact that “No one truly expects that all students will be proficient by the year 2014, although NCLBs most fervent supporters often claimed it was feasible” (103).

Today many critics of what they consider invasive federal involvement in the healthcare industry would sue the federal government in the name of the basically moribund (since the Civil War) Ninth and Tenth Amendments. But when George W. Bush was president, instead of standing up to a draconian law which demands the surreal goal of universal success, Republicans as well as Democrats overwhelmingly preferred to toe the line and “[m]ost states devised ways to pretend to meet the impossible goal”(16).

Ravitch does a masterful job of laying out how school administrators across the country were forced to engage in deceptive practices or risk losing their jobs in her chapter entitled, The Trouble with Accountability. She draws on the work of Daniel Koretz and Richard Rothstein and other sober-minded thinkers who are wise enough to eschew a harebrained law which delivered us unto a macabre world where students now “master test-taking methods, but not the subject itself” (159).

Sadly, the Magical Thinking which infects our nation continues to thrive in education. President Obama supports policies which have been proven ineffective and he has appointed a Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, whose record as superintendent of Chicago schools was dismal if not downright fraudulent:

In 2009, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago released a study demonstrating that the city’s claims of dramatic test score gains were exaggerated….The Study concluded, however, that “these huge increases reflect changes in the tests and testing procedures—not real student improvement” (158).

by Richard W. Bray

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Some Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

May 4, 2010

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Some Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Our society is just beginning to recover from a long spell of Magical Thinking. Instead of confronting our problems and dealing with them, Americans spent the better part of a decade hoping that great men on horses would ride into to town bearing sanctified sidearms which fire magic bullets—instead we got George W. Bush in a flightsuit. But after 9/11, most of us we’re too scared to acknowledge or even see The Emperor’s Clothes. We just pretended that there were new, bold serious solutions that would preternaturally eliminate serious issues. Decisive Federal Action would fix public education just as it would defeat Islamo-facism and unfetter the Titans of Finance. Those were some heady times.

Today, our institutions are just beginning to recover from the febrile dreams which have infected (and continue to threaten the very existence of) our body politic. Sadly, no one is yet bowing in obeisance to the heroes who were banished from the Punditocracy for the crime of premature wisdom (i.e., Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield and Robert Sheer). Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the people who advocated these asinine and self-destructive policies over the last decade are still running this country and they’re not about to begin pointing fingers at one another.

That’s why Diane Ravitch should be praised for speaking up about her recent recovery from Hedda Payness Disease:

I too was captivated by these ideas. They promised to end bureaucracy, to ensure that poor children were not neglected, to empower poor parents, to enable poor children to escape failing schools, and to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. Testing would shine a spotlight on low-performing schools and choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for better schools. All of this seemed to make sense, but there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope(3-4).

I remember seeing a documentary years ago about how hospital administrators in the Soviet Union (who obviously knew nothing about how hospitals actually work) used to do surprise inspections in hospitals in which they would randomly swab the walls looking for evidence of bacteria. Consequently, the medical staff wasted a good deal of time scrubbing the walls with bleach. Funny thing about big bureaucracies, they tend to replicate such madness:

Measure, then punish or reward. No education experience needed to administer such a program. Anyone who loved data could do it. The strategy produced fear and obedience among educators; it often generated higher test scores. But it had nothing to do with education (16).

In our age of Magical Thinking, even really smart guys (because we all know that the billionaires are the best among us) like to dream of a simple world with simple solutions. For example, Bill Gates was blissfully “unaware of the disadvantages” of promoting smaller highs schools as a one-size-fits-all panacea for American education:

It was never obvious why the Gates Foundation decided that schools size was the one critical reform most needed to improve American education. Both state and national tests showed that large numbers of students were starting high schools without having mastered basic skills…the root cause of poor achievement lie not in the high schools, but in the earlier grades (205).

After pissing away a couple of billion bucks, the Foundation wised up, but it wasn’t about to admit any mistakes:

In late 2008 the Gates Foundation announced that it was changing course. The $2 billion investment in new small high schools had not been especially successful (although it was careful not to come right out and say it was unsuccessful) (211).

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Diane Ravitch, Education, Essay, Morsel | 3 Comments »

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