121. Power Sucks

The trouble with power is that as soon as people know you have it they're running to you to settle their quarrels. You arrive in a nice valley full of farmers, kill the big man in the castle, and right away you've got a bunch of farmers in your courtyard boo-hooing about other farmers.

Say you want to be a big man in the Old Testament. You beat up on this tribe and that tribe and take all the crescents off the necks of their camels. You've done more with the sword than any Hebrew hero in years. And where do they put your story? In the book of Judges. You're a damned quarrel-settler.

Go beyond your valley or your county and it gets worse. Build the biggest navy in the world, bombard your way into a few continents for their minerals, and what do you get? Not just minerals. Not just an empire. You get countries running to you to for quarrel-settlement. You decide on boundaries, you make rules, you prescribe systems. When the world's geography needs ordering you give it latitude and longitude.

I know, the assignment is inevitable. People go to the big power because no matter what judgment they get from the little power it can be overturned, smack, by the big power. So even if he's just a dumb jock (like Samson) the big man has to put on the robes, do the assizes, be the judge.

"But isn't being the big world power worth it? Getting all those minerals? Getting to make your place zero longitude?"

Only if you can stand all the names people call you. "Imperialist." "Aggressor." Besides, the payoff in minerals changes. In the old days you could just march in and take somebody's oil. Now there's a world organization with a court and a publicity system. You'd have the whole universe yelling at you. That's what it is to be the big power now. All quarrel-settling and damn few minerals.

"I think if I had the power I'd just sit there and not use it. Except for my own safety. At least I'd have nobody yelling at me."

A lot you know. People know you have the power. They know you can smack anybody you want to. And they don't care how dumb a jock you are. They'll want you to come in and settle quarrels a genius couldn't figure out.

"You mean it takes a genius to see that innocent people are dying, that a dictator is making war on his own people, that death by gas is horrible?"

No, it's easy to see those horrors. So easy that you can't help seeing them on both sides. That's where it gets tough.  Which side is committing the most horrors?  The worst?  How much worse to count against how many close-to-worst?  Suppose you have thirty pretty bad horrors and two downright awful.  Sometimes you've got to be a genius. You're not a genius, you don't go in to end the horrors, and everybody calls you bad names.  "Inhumane."  "Immoral." You're in as much pain not using your power as you were when you used it and got called "an imperialist."

"Sounds like the only way to avoid pain is to give up power. But then you'd never have the satisfaction of seeing a success, a nation with its own quarrel-settling system, democracy, set up and functioning. That will never happen unless you go in."

Don't talk to me about satisfaction. I may not be smart but I've lived. I know you can set up a democratic system that finally, after centuries, gives a people the power their majority calls for and then, if they're like the Iraqi Shi'ites, they'll throw their shoes at you. If satisfaction depends on gratitude, forget it.

"So you'll never use your power to help any Middle Eastern nation set up a democratic government?"

Not unless I get a lot smarter. Smart enough, anyway, to tell which side in a quarrel has a chance of doing democracy long term. Smart enough to see a semi- revolution, rather than a revolution, coming up. The trouble with revolutions, as Robert Frost pointed out, is that they bring the same kind of people back on top. The trouble with going in and helping revolutionaries is that you don't know how far they're going to revolve.

"And if you don't get that smart you'll what? Give up power? Go back to farming?"

No, I'll go for the power of example. The greater success our people have in managing their own quarrels the more the quarreling people of the world will be moved to the same kind of management in their countries. The power to invade isn't the only kind of power the United States can use. Think of the number of countries we didn't invade that became democracies.

120. English Composition über alles.

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Why do you want to squash German Romanticism?

"Because it's behind postmodernism and the flatter we squash postmodernism the better life in American universities will be."

What do you mean, "squash"? You're in a university. You're supposed to "refute."   And you don't refute isms, you refute arguments.

"I know, ism-talk isn't our thing.  And refutation is our big thing.  But postmodernists don't do or say things you can take down by refutation. There it is, right in Wikipedia: 'Postmodernism is not a method of doing philosophy, but rather a way of approaching traditional ideas and practices in non-traditional ways.' So. You go after their relativism and you run into Barbara Herrnstein Smith: 'The relativism exhibited by this study is not a 'position,' not a 'conviction,' not a set of 'claims' about how certain things — reality, truth, meaning, reason, value and so forth — really are. It is, rather, a general conceptual style or taste.' All you can say about a taste is that it's bad. All you can do about the tastemakers is squash them."

But those tastemakers were academics. Surely you could argue with them.

"Believe me, I tried. The visiting postmodernist said, 'I don't recognize your categories.' Another visitor (we had to be instructed in the new theories) denied that there was even a relative objectivity. He (Stephen Mailloux) must have believed that there was no difference between 'You are fat' and 'You weigh 310 pounds.' I gave up."

I sympathize, but how is German Romanticism responsible?

"By reacting against the Enlightenment so successfully. The Enlightenment, as Isaiah Berlin described it for my generation, stood for rationality, universality, and empiricism. That is, it stood for reason, epitomized for us in the scientific method, universal values, epitomized in the Declaration of Independence (all men are created equal, with inalienable rights), and experience-based knowledge, epitomized in the work of primarily British philosophers (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume). The German Romantics doubted reason, universal truth, and, if not experience itself, the claim that it was the base for all knowledge. In the end (to take a liberty) their opposition to the Enlightenment gave us Martin Heidegger and all those French intellectuals and American professors who brought about the revolution in English departments in the 80s and 90s."

Sounds like a big philosophical enterprise, squashing all that.

"Yes, and 25 years ago that's what I thought it would take. Now I know there was a simple alternative. All I had to do was take my course in English Composition, the course nearly everybody had to teach one section of, with philosophical seriousness. What did my textbook tell students to do when they were writing an argumentative essay? 'Cite evidence.' That is, appeal to experience. 'Anticipate objections.' Yes, test, probe, look for counter-examples, respect the law of non-contradiction — just as in the scientific method. 'Watch out for absolute generalizations, beware of catch-all explanations, don't evade the question.' Yes, reason well. 'Don't sneer.' Yes, keep attitude out. Remain objective. When I explain these things to students I'm promoting care in establishing belief, just as those trying to free themselves from medieval superstition did. Just as scientists now do, though much more systematically. The more thoroughly I explain the more deeply I commit myself to the values of the Enlightenment.

"That's what English Composition teaches the teacher. Learn its lessons and you'll see that you can't be a postmodernist any place but in your office, writing articles. Go to your Parking Committee meeting. Try to decide which department has the better claim to a lot. You're stuck with the need for facts and logic. Do you believe in academic freedom? You're stuck with the need to be objective. Professorial objectivity was a condition of its recognition in the 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges. Do you want tenure? Your main argument for it (made by your representatives) is that it's necessary to preserve academic freedom.

"One great thing about Composition is that it shows you (as you show your students) what sticks you with what. Fling down a general statement and you're stuck with its implications. Roll out a beautiful first paragraph and you're stuck with the expectations it raises. All must fit together. And the glue (which you learn to use in argument essays) is logic. The other great thing about Composition is that it pulls you into the practical world, the one the people you're trying to inform or influence live in.

"All right, you learn that in your classroom and then you go back to your office and what do you find? That you're as stuck with reason, universal truth, and experience-based knowledge (the heart of the epistemology that Stanley Fish said was "lying in ruins around us") as your students were with their own topic sentence. You are stuck with the rationality required in the practical world. You were stuck as soon as you described the course in the catalog.

"Finally, after you follow all that your practice implies, you get to your theoretical foundations, the ones your feet are really stuck in. You see that nobody, no German Romantic, no Heidegger, no Derrida, has kicked them away, nor, as long as you're crossing the hall to teach those freshmen, can they kick them away."

As long as the glue holds. If logic is relative — and it's going to be for those who let pi itself be relative — then the structure falls apart, the implications of practice for theory fail to hold, and the postmodernist can remain comfortably in his office.

"I know. That's why I say 'squash' instead of 'argue.' I hope to make him uncomfortable there."

Note: When I speak of "universal truth" above I have in mind only what the 19th century mathematician William Kingdon Clifford had in mind when he said, "It is wrong, always, everywhere and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

119. Please, no more "up to"

On Sunday New York Times reporters told me again that "private creditors will take voluntary losses of up to 70 percent of Greek debt." Up to, up to, what does that tell me? For all I know one private creditor could have gone to 70 and the rest could still be at 50. The average could be 52.5.

A weatherman on television will use "up to" when he's describing a storm. "Up to 18 inches of snow fell." How little that tells me about the storm. One freak train of squalls off a lake can drop 18 inches of snow on one hill. What about the state and its cities? How deeply were they covered?

The television pitchman uses it. "Lose up to 30 percent more fat." I have no idea what that means.

If I hadn't been educated about storms, or taught to listen critically to pitchmen, I'd have been saying, "Wow, some storm, some diet program. Those are big numbers." And I, if uneducated, would have responded similarly to the Times statement. "Wow, what a generous offer. That's a big number."

It's pretty obvious that the pitchman is selling his diet plan and the weatherman his weather. "Isn't our storm, our news, exciting? More exciting than the Fox news?" Is the reporter trying to sell me on the generosity of Greece's creditors?

I doubt it. It's probably an accident. But even accidental words can trigger dangerous trains of thought. I see an uneducated mind going from generous creditors to unreasonable borrowers to all the stereotypes: prudent, hardworking Northerners, lazy profligate Southerners, grasshoppers, ants. The question is not whether the stereotype fits; it's whether a newspaper is going to contribute to it.

Maybe it's not an accident. The editors have let "up to 70 percent" through four times already. And it's catching on. A lot of papers follow the Times's lead. I know that excuses a scolding (always fun when it's the great NYT) but I'll settle for a warning: If you keep doing this, Gray Lady, up to 100% of the educated readers in every American household are going to be very disappointed in you.

118. Angry Young Men

 

They say there's plenty of anger left in Sam Gold's new version of John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" but apparently not much of it is political anger. According to the reviews most of the lines raging at England's postwar governing classes — the lines that made Osborne "a poster boy for the notion of the Angry Young Men" (New Yorker) — have been removed. We're down to domestic bitterness now. And that, luckily, still makes wonderful theater.

How often this happens with political plays! It's a caution to those of us who are aroused by them. I remember being so excited by Maxwell Anderson's Winterset that I worked the anarchist Vanzetti's prison statement into my first freshman composition class. On the first day! My first day of college teaching, ever. 1946. "If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life talking on street corners to scorning men...” I cast about for an excuse to use it. Ah yes, "See, you don't have to have perfect grammar to write eloquent English."

Now I look at Winterset and it's "yeah, yeah." And the world is with me.

The shelf life of political anger shortens as people, including the angry, learn more about the world, which has been full of angry men. They read history and make comparisons. There were angry Young Turks. When you find out that they lived under a Sultan who violently suppressed his political opponents, massacred ethnic minorities, and resisted all liberal reform you have to adjust your anger meter.  Measured against this the British anger looks like petulance.

Nor, you discover, does political anger travel well. Take the British anger to its contemporary in Eastern Europe (the "Bloodlands") and have it, on a stage, look back at twenty years of life under Stalin and Hitler and you make another adjustment. Bring one of those angry Poles back to Britain and let him see that Osborne has put AYM (Angry Young Man) on his license plate and you do a complete re-scale.

You don't have to be a Pole to have a laugh. Just be an ordinary adult in the getting-ahead game and you're ready for some of those Anglophone Angries. "A world I never made." Sure, sure, the rest of us all made ours, right there in the womb — all the playing fields level, all the judges just, all the rewards fair. There it was, as soon as we came out.

If I feel moral indignation — which is what political anger is — on the playground or in my house I can find out (or be told) fairly easily how far my indignation is justified. I see a blow, get angry, and then learn that "he hit him first." Oh, it's more complicated than I thought. And maybe there will be more complications, but they're not too hard to learn.

If a poem or a play or a novel ignites my anger at something being done in the larger world it's much harder to find out how far my anger is justified. It's a denser world with a far more complicated history. Yet, if I'm serious about justification, I have to learn it. A novelist or playwright can make my job easier, of course, by thickening his work with the world's complications, but this is very difficult and few go very far with it. Some don't even try.

Poets hardly ever try. It's too much for them. Shelley gave up completely, specifying nothing whatever about the object of his anger and despair:

Sad storm whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main,—
Wail, for the world's wrong!

The price you pay for a general "Wail" is to be told by people like T. E. Hulme to "end your moan and come away." He'll blame you and your fellow Romantics for making us all believe that "a poem isn't a poem unless it's moaning or whining about something."

If poets are bad at density how about television news? There we're pretty well down to one-blow reporting. "Here we are on the playground. Look at that smack. Oh the blood. Oh the poor boy."

Nope, television news and lyrical poems are no help to you if you want to justify your political anger. Novels and plays do better, but they are pretty limited too — even though they can, like All the King's Men, teach you a lot about the people who do the politics. The plain fact is, for moral judgment on any political conflict your helper just has to have room to weigh both sides. (Both sides? All sixteen sides. Think of the Balkan conflicts. Jeez.) And for that he's got to have a lot of space and a form that arouses no expectations about length. He's got to be writing a history book—or maybe a political science or a philosophy book.  And then it's tough.

117. Are you still bothered by "sucks"?

Well, you shouldn't be. Six years ago, according to Seth Stevenson in Slate (slate.com), sucks was growing "less obscene by the minute" and even then it was "completely divorced from any past reference it may have made to a certain sex act." People who had fellatio "popping up in their brains" were simply "obsessing over the word's origins."

Stevenson rebuked bothered readers not only for their Victorian prurience but for their linguistic naïveté: "Language moves on, and the sucks-haters are living in the past." And, judging by current quotes in the Times (the reporters never use it), Stevenson's rebuke is justified. The minute-by-minute gains have added up to a smashing victory for "sucks."

Not that the sucks-haters couldn't have seen it coming. Even in 2005, church communication professionals at Church Marketing Sucks (churchmarketing.com) were worrying more about "marketing" being taken as a dirty word than they were about "sucks."

Stevenson loves "sucks," right down to the "k" it ends with. The "sticky consonants" (k,q,x,z) turn him on. And apparently his love is widely shared. The concision, the punchiness, the sassiness — who could resist it? Reading Stevenson now I'm ready to climb on the bandwagon myself. The word is so great for gutty understatement. A fellow with the deadly nerve disorder CMT is interviewed by a Times reporter. What does he say about it? "It sucks." My plucky daughter has her first child. What does she say? "Labor sucks."

It's clear that a lot of people are bothered by "sucks" for the wrong reasons: that it's misplaced raunch, or it's a misused verb. They don't see how much raunch is at home nearly everyplace now, and they haven't yet seen that intransitive verbs really can express merit or its opposite.

Not that the latter is easy to see. Older people who hear that exams, or bridesmaids' dresses, or braking systems suck, are bound to have a sense of misuse. They just haven't seen many intransitive verbs do that kind of evaluation. But they're there for them to see, and Stevenson is right on the mark when he points them out. "Kate Winslet rocks." If Kate Winslet can rock Anne Coulter can suck.

Those still bothered by "sucks" need to ask themselves, "Is it the word that's bothering me or is it the judgment the word is making?" I once heard a student, talking to another about our Bible as Literature course, say, "OK, OK, the Old Testament is pretty good — but the New Testament sucks." If he had used the word "stinks" (the one sucks-haters most often want to substitute) I don't think my reaction would have been much different. I think that what is true of the Bible is true of many serious things. We don't like to hear young people kissing them off.

So, I pretty well agree with Stevenson. But I think there's still something about "sucks" worth worrying about. It's those images that usage is supposed to have buried. Are they really dead? When you first run through the quotes in last month's Times — Mitt Romney's latest attack ad sucks, Americanized Thai food sucks, the groundhog feature sucks — you just can't imagine sexual activity. Those things are so far from being capable of it. But then, the same week, you hear, "Tim Tebow sucks." You have to ask, "Are my image-producing neurons as dead as they were when Thai food was sucking?" If not, if sexual images can rise from the grave, there's definitely a problem.

The problem is disruption of our own purpose in using the language. We want to say "Her boyfriend is no good" and we say "Her boyfriend sucks" and some percentage (who knows what?) of our listeners are distracted by the totally irrelevant sexual image. That gets in the way of what we want to say about the boyfriend, or Tebow. Our statement loses some punch. (Here's where the geezers say, "See. Wouldn't happen if you'd said, 'Her boyfriend stinks.'")

What most complicates our problem with the pop-up images, though, is that sometimes we want them. Authors want us to have them. English teachers want their students to have them. When my students came to the word "pitched" in Yeats's lines, "But Love has pitched his mansion in/ the place of excrement," I wanted the image of a thick, dark, sticky substance to pop into their minds. That image came from the past, and went with a meaning much older (pitch, from Latin pix) than the meaning that suppressed it (to set up — as to pitch a tent). I would have been sorry if they had missed that, Eros blackening his own home, the grossness we're all stuck with.

Maybe sexual images are like matches: you want to save them for what's really worth heating up. If I were a reader in the seventeenth century I'd hate to have used so many of my matches on everyday things that I didn't have any left for the things John Donne talks about. Like his wife's soul when he comes home after a long trip. It "grows erect." A soul. An immaterial thing. And this is a woman's soul. Everything — logic, primary meaning, dominant culture — is against the inflammatory image. And yet today's English teacher (with, I can't help seeing, Donne behind him) is going to be cheering for it. "Go! Go! Add physical desire. Open the door to the image. Light up the house." That's partly a cheer for good reading, what English teachers teach. Readers who enrich a line with pop-up images are better readers than those who don't.

About "sucks" we have to say that sometimes it furthers and enriches and sometimes it obstructs and impoverishes. Does widespread impoverishment ruin it for enrichment? Not necessarily. Word-effects are not zero-sum. The comparison to matches is not perfect.

What would we lose if we lost "sucks"? Some pretty good play, I must admit. Maybe even geezers can forgive a word when it makes for cute clues in a crossword puzzle. The Wordplay Blog recently noticed this one for "vampire bat": "It really sucks."

116. Defective Sayings: "The opera ain't over 'til the fat lady sings."

"The opera ain't over 'til the fat lady sings." It means "there's still time to win" and it is a really cool thing to say if you, like Dan Cook, are in an American broadcasting booth and your city's team is behind in the series. Everybody gets a little tickle along with the boost in their spirits.

I feel sure the speaker gets a tickle. Don't you feel it? There you are, an ordinary Texas guy, but hey, you know opera. And you aren't intimidated by it. No siree, you'll call an overweight woman a fat lady no matter where you see her.

Not that you can't slip up. Like some of the guys that followed Dan, but said "isn't over." Fell right into UT language. You've got to stay A&M.

But actually Dan Cook isn't first with the singing fat lady. Ralph Carpenter, over at Texas Tech, got in there two years ahead of him when his Aggies were in a close one. There it is in the Dallas Morning News, 10 March 1976: "The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings."

Well, the "opera" was dropped and by our century it was pretty much "it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings," with the origins accordingly broadened. Some said Kate Smith's regular singing of "God Bless America" before Philadelphia Flyers' hockey games in the fifties got it going, since she was very fat and very famous. Some made it one of the many things Yogi Berra said, or almost said, for New York sports writers. And some said it came out of the South, where hefty choir ladies brought forth, "Church ain't out 'til the fat lady sings."

I have no doubt about the tickle the expression gives, since I feel it myself. That voice from the lower ranks, speaking with confidence, that knowing sassiness — I've been in higher education too long not to be tickled. And then there's the image it gives: jocks grappling desperately in the mud, waiting for a circus lady to waddle to the mike. That's an image that won't fade. I'm ready to put Dan Cook in Red Barber's league: "He went for that pitch like a country hog goin' for city garbage."

But no, a schoolteacher just can't do that. Close inspection shows that Cook's image doesn't really fit the situation. He's got people waiting for the sign that all is over. But in the singing-lady image there's no such sign, certainly none that works the ballgame way. Brunnhilde in Wagner's Gotterdamerung, the only lady opera singer who, because she has a fifteen-minute final aria, comes close to signaling the end, has several other arias, one in the first act. A fan can say, "Ah, fat lady just sang; I'm going home." Take away the Wagnerian sopranos and Cook's out of ladies. If his listeners picture Kate Smith they've got a song before the game starts, as Phrase Finder has pointed out. If they picture a Southern church service they've got the preacher's prayer coming at the end, not a soloist's performance.

I know. That's another schoolteacher pooping a good redneck party. But jeez, these Aggies, with that image, presented with that flourish, have put themselves in a league with Red Barber and Francis Schmidt. They're contending for the pennant. Do they know who they're going up against? In 1934 Schmidt's Ohio State football team was looking at a Michigan team that had won national championships twice in the preceding four years. But he, picking up what Lon Warneke had said two years earlier about the Yankees, said, "they put their pants on one leg at a time just like everybody else." The ridiculousness of the image of the alternative, Michigan players jumping into their pants, made any fear of them as supermen ridiculous. Good fit, zero defects.

But not the great fit Barber had. Think of that situation. He's looking at an eager rookie phenom at the plate, a cagy old Yankee pitcher on the mound. Picture one of those veterans so good at throwing junk it didn't matter that he'd lost his fastball. The pitcher wastes a couple of his fastballs outside and then throws him a fat change-up down the middle. "He went for that pitch like a country hog goin' for city garbage."

Perfect. Free of defects. Zips right past the schoolteacher. That's how pennants are won up in the Big-time Sayings League.