423. The Force to Go to War: Proposal of a Precise Measurement

Nothing, I think, would be more useful to historians than a precise measurement of the force that will make or let a president go to war.  I propose a scale in which the force on December 8, 1941 is 1.0.  I remember feeling that force around me. "You sneaky guys just killed thousands of my fellow Americans.  You see us Americans quarreling with each other and think we won't stick together, or last the long haul.  You think we're soft and stuck on making money.  Well stand by, you dirty bastards, here we come.  For whatever it takes for as long as it takes."  That's the top.  A president who resists a force like this will be removed from office.

All right, abbreviate the unit and you've got a convenient notation for force on the morning of 9-12-01, say .9PH.  And ahead of you are decimals for every date on which a president proposes war.  Say .6PH for the date of declaration of the Spanish-American War, .8PH for the Civil War, .4PH for the Mexican War, and .5PH for the First Iraq War.  Those are my numbers; the system will be just as useful to those who disagree and want to argue it out. 

In fact, the biggest payoff may be in discussion and argument.  Did Bush Sr. have to war against Saddam Hussein after he entered Kuwait?  "Of course.  Saddam's thumb would be on the world's oil artery in one more move.  Americans knew that.  Bush had .8PH on him."

As with any numerical scale this one needs empirical illustration.  Like "scattered whitecaps" for Force 3 (Gentle Breeze) on the Beaufort Scale. A conference on this would be illuminating.  What would be the political equivalent of a Fresh Breeze ("5, many whitecaps, some spray")?  a Gale? ("8, foam blown in streaks, twigs breaking off trees") a Hurricane? ("12, air filled with foam, sea completely white").  Would the political equivalent of a hurricane be streets filled with demonstrators, rioters, clamoring for military action?  If so, when a president  said, "I couldn't stand up against it"?" we could look out the window, take in the storm, and say to him (or her), "We understand.  We're with you."  He'd know history was going to be with him.

PH is not rigidly fixed.  Being, or being seen as, the nation attacked adds to it.  I'd say .2PH, on average.  Leaders knew this before they had an exact measurement, of course, and we see it in the common efforts to present the other side as the aggressor.  Even Hitler, invading Poland, made an attempt at it, putting bodies in Polish uniforms on the German side of the border, to be "discovered" before his troops crossed it.  It gained him only a very small PH, say .05, and that only with his own people, but it shows leaders' discomfort, and need to calculate such things.

I can hear PH in conversations among advisers.  Tune in Hitler's, pre-Poland, 1939: "Man, we don't need extra PH.  With the Versailles Treaty stoking such outrage and the Jewish commies taking over Hamburg and the Brits still riding high on their horse we've got all we need."

"Yeah, but the Boss, you know, he hates to throw away PH, even if it's only .05."

"OK, OK.  So get some bodies, dress 'em right, and we'll take the .05."

Starting a war you go with the PH you've got but during a war you've got to make adjustments.  Are your atrocities getting more play than the enemy's?  Get your PR people working on it.  Get your troops, if they can't reduce the savagery (ha, during what is essential savagery?), to at least try to hide it better.  Consider who's watching before they torture or demean a prisoner.  The PH differential can go as high here as .15 in favor of the side that does the better job.

Between wars your analysis can go deeper.  PH is so constantly either desired or bucked by leaders that we have a hard time thinking of it as separate from them.  But at some times and in some places we have a PH wind blowing and nobody to take advantage of it.  As in France now, with such big crowds clamoring for a change in government.  But no leader.  Nobody to take advantage of the wind and sail to a goal, and make his or her name.

Maybe the wind there is not strong enough to be worth the risk.  For a really strong, untapped force look to what's left over after the invasion of Afghanistan released the main charge ("Get those bastards who did this") provided by 9-11.  It wasn't like WW2, where we knocked the Japanese and the Germans flat, clearly getting the bastards.  We hadn't really gotten the bastards who destroyed the Twin Towers.  So George W. Bush has a high percentage of the force of 9-11 to call on. 

I can't think of a president with a comparable wind at his back.  His meter probably has it at .7PH.  And, remember, we're measuring mass emotion, never discriminating in its release.  It's OK to drive in the right general direction.  Your choice is an easy sell.

Bush chose to invade Iraq.  A once impossible sell made possible now by high PH and low information.  Other people with impossible sells weren't blind to what was happening.  There were the idealists in the liberal press keen to spread American values.  The glow of Thomas Friedman's vision of a country in the center of the Middle East demonstrating the power of democracy brightened by the day, and was fixed by recognition of his authority — Times columnist, author of a solid book on the region.  There were the Zionists thinking of what a nearby American army would do for their security.  There were the evangelicals sharing that thought, maybe, but clearly aroused by the chance to fight evil (now in the person of Saddam Hussein).  And there were the usual gang of males just eager to fight.  Mostly neocons here.  "Jump on, fellows.  This our chance."

If you doubt the presence and potency of the force I am talking about here you might try picturing these parties trying to sell the invasion of Iraq without it.  No leftover 9-11 PH to take advantage of.  Say it's 9-10.  "I propose that we invade Iraq in order to strengthen democracy in the Middle East."  "Let us invade Iraq in order to protect Israel."  "Let us invade Iraq and make some gains against evil."  Introduce the gale that failed to blow over the 9-11 bastards, put it behind your president, and you've got an invasion of Iraq backed by a majority of the American people, including many you counted on for caution and thought.  All complicit in what now, by consensus of the reflective center, is the dumbest thing America ever did.  (See Foreign Policy, 3-10-12.)

422. Poem: Anne Sexton's father

the poor bastard up on the roof playing Santa Claus little knowing he was going to wind up in the book as a Nazi yeah a dead Nazi he says (he heard me!) if I don't catch that gutter in time jesus what am I doing up here the kids can't even hear me stomp stomp ho ho louder Ralph louder yells Mary HO HO HO did you remember to ring the sleigh bells Mair christ there goes Ken no it's Barbie herself should have tied the fucking bag come on give me more bells HO HO HO STOMP STOMP STOMP.

421. Poem: The History Major

Drunk with poetry I urged a friend into the streets quoting the flaming words but he said no that's only half the story and another friend said here's the other half and another friend flaming said no here's the other half and another said right but here's at least a sixth of it you've got to fit in and we were all drunk and fighting like the Irish slamming with words until Pete got the idea of slamming with facts no one fact a small fact just enough to wipe the satisfied look off Arnold's face so he takes it to Victor the history major and Victor says to Arnold no it wasn't the way you say here not in this part of the story and Pete says see but Victor says no it wasn't your way either not quite not here and both say to Victor godalmighty how the hell was it and Victor says complicated too complicated for a poem and seeing their falling faces he says complicated but simple enough in places for me to tell you how it definitely wasn't and Arnold says well that's something and Pete says enough I hope for you to check with Victor before you go shooting off your mouth and Arnold says you too buddy.

420. Poem: Sorry, kid, I'm going gentle.

No matter what you hear rage rage from the crazy Irishman your English prof loves no matter what you hear around caskets oh he was a fighter no matter how many expressions of man's indomitable spirit are held up to you in anthologies Ahab that idiot taking a whale's natural slash personally even cosmically while the instructed hearts of the students go pitty-pat over a man a mere man but our man standing up against a hostile universe while the instructor pale but young and so far from the last intravenous drip beams at the even younger fellows of his noble species I say OK it's a battle and what does a sensible human being do when he contemplates battle a general or a country he figures his chances and if they are very much against him he doesn't fight and what are his chances here zero kid zero so do you expect your old man to fight and go down like an idiot?

419. Post-Hearing Wish List

I wish Christine Blasey Ford had not read "I am terrified" from a script.

I wish Brett Kavanaugh had showed everybody how courts had to look at such a case, seeing it, after all  the convincing, heart-wrenching testimony, after all the coincidence with the great cause of abused women and the tawdry cause of Trump Republicans, as still a she-said-he-said problem, even-steven until somebody could produce corroborating testimony.

I wish that Brett Kavanaugh, if he had to go into his emotional plea, would have waited until after he had ended his judicial analysis with a demonstration that there was no corroborating testimony — to the deed, not to anyone's feelings.

I wish that the prosecutor had held to the one relevant line of questioning, "Does it corroborate or give outside support in any way?"  If, for example, Ford had remembered who the driver was of the car that took her home after she had run down the stairs in distress, that person could have given support to her story  — "Yes, she was in a distressed state."

418. Ian Buruma and the Closing of the American Ear

Jian Ghomeshi, the publication of whose article got the editor of the New York Review of Books fired, agrees with his critics that he was "a world-class prick."  I want to listen to what a world class prick says about his prickhood.  Just as I wanted to hear what a world class pedophile, Humbert Humbert, said about his pedophilia.  I am a grown-up, educated person.

But no, if the moral bullies now riding the crest of feminism have their way, I won't have the chance.  Editors giving me the chance will get fired.  As the editor of the leading feminist journal nearly did for publishing a contrarian article.

What did my open ears hear that might have endangered the cause of sexually harassed and abused women, as good a cause as ever was voiced?  I heard words that showed me how a privileged male thinks, and words that showed me how that very wrong male (as wrong in his eyes as in any) gets wrenched right.  I learned what he does in his shame (curls up in a ball in the dark and contemplates suicide).  I learned how much to trust his words.

Ian Buruma, the fired editor, thought that learning would be good for me, that it would contribute to my, and any educated reader's, always expanding education.  But no, a strong hand covered my ears and a strong arm threw out speakers who might educate me into doubt.

Leaving me one gift: a perfect illustration of Hebraism, the elevation of doing right over seeing clearly.  Buruma paid the price for trying to further Hellenism, elevation of clear-sightedness, in Hebraic times.  It's not often that the meaning of Matthew Arnold's terms is exemplified so clearly.

417. Things Well-Meaning People Have to Avoid Meaning

No, no, Nike, think about what you're putting on the defiant Kaepernick poster.  "Believe in something.  Even if it means sacrificing everything."  Something.  Any damn thing?  Come on. 

Your statement covers the guy who believes that a God who loves him guides his stock market choices.  He sacrifices his savings, his car, his house.   He's under your tent, Nike.

You're like the well-meaning preacher who so believed that "we should love people who are different from us" that she had us rejecting Paul in the Bible.  He made money-making soothsayers, people who had to be distinguished from true prophets, as unlovable as he could.  Made them demons who had to be cast out in Jesus name (Acts 16-19).  But no, said the well-meaning preacher, the demons had to be loved.  They came under the tent of "difference."  (See Post 207.)

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416. Gratitude for Memory

I remember this:

    a maid tipped out water for their hands

from a golden pitcher into a silver bowl,

and set a polished table near at hand;

the larder mistress with her tray of loaves

and savories came, dispensing all her best.

I am looking at this:

young women from the college moving from table to table bringing cake, then ice cream, setting pink punch at the side, and water, "if you want it," bending to hear our feeble answers.

I remember that those serving maids served also their masters' beds, which, if they betrayed, brought death on them from the master, as witness the returned Odysseus's ready noose.

I am looking at women working for degrees in social work or geriatrics, getting a part-time job to help with the tuition, glad to get one that fits their ambition and their instinct to care for the weak

I am remembering where the maids who served Homer's men came from: possession by other men or upbringing in the household after their mothers' possession by other men, the transfer, the post-battle transfer, rendered, for once, from the woman's point of view, the woman bent grieving over the preceding man, feeling "the spear, prodding her back and shoulders."  You're mine now.

I am looking at women who have, or have not, at their choice, taken a lover.

I am remembering a John Manifold poem I loved for another reason, the calm Australian's acceptance of his fate as, with his platoon marching toward their troopship, he sees a girl:

She ran down the stair
A twelve-year-old darling
And laughing and calling
She tossed her bright hair;
Then silent to stare
At the men flowing past her —
There were all she could master
Adoring her there.

It's seldom I'll see
A sweeter or prettier,
I doubt we'll forget her
In two years or three,
And lucky he'll be
She takes for a lover
While we are far over
The treacherous sea.

             

She'll choose the lover.  Not be presented with one determined by her parents (recent past) or by battle (distant past).  Matter-of-factly assumed here, but not noticed until the memory takes in a larger swath of history and literature.  Women's years of being able to choose are so few, so recent!  Seeing that takes a while.  Not many are allowed enough years.

415. Confusion About the National Anthem

When we show respect for the anthem and the flag we are not showing respect for people we are showing respect for laws, the system that protects, among many other things, our right to protest, to peaceably assemble and speak out — as NFL players are doing.

They do this without the risk of being thrown in jail, as in other systems they might.  Here it's just a matter of etiquette where they are legally free not to stand and I am legally free to call it bad manners and confused thinking.

It's a deep kind of confusion with a long history.  Socrates' friends were confused when they wanted him to escape prison because the people who put him there were so wrong.  Socrates won't do it because it would break, and therefore injure, the laws of Athens, which he has enjoyed the benefits of.  Those who convicted him wronged him, made him a victim, as many of our juries do to people, but they were acting within the law, as our juries are.  Socrates patiently shows his friends that he is "not a victim of laws but of men."

As many rightfully aggrieved blacks in our day are.  As, to my understanding, the blacks in Jefferson were.  The laws about police behavior were OK; the still-white police force in a majority black community simply hadn't caught up to them.    

It would be much easier to avoid confusion if the victimized  would avoid the expression "institutionalized racism."  That's a big charge (it takes in our laws), it's much harder to nail down (I have yet to see that done), and it shouldn't be made without specifying the institution and showing how it is racist. Leave it vague and you let careless readers think their victimization is much deeper than it is.  And much harder to end.

414. Places where everybody is a meritocrat.

It's taken me decades but now I know exactly where I want to stand with respect to social constructionists of knowledge — you know, people who believe that "there is no neutral or objective rationality but rather what is understood as knowledge is a socially contingent result of prevailing power dynamics" (Wikipedia, describing critical race theorist Gary Peller's beliefs).  This rules out any objectively determined meritocracy.  I want to stand with Gilbert and Sullivan's all-powerful Mikado as he chooses the eternal repetitions in hell that will exactly fit each crime. 

For social constructionists I will seek out the places where they will cry for someone who they're sure knows what he's doing, like from their backs on an operating table, or standing on the top of a fourteener not knowing how to get down, or on the bridge of a destroyer where if you read the flags wrong you get cut in half by an aircraft carrier.

  I will put them there and then laugh as the Mikado does, on and on, at people like the proud pool shark, who must play forever "on a cloth untrue/ With a twisted cue/And elliptical billiard balls."  Ah-ha-ha-Ah-ha-ha-Ah-ha-ha louder and louder until you can't help joining in seeing the poor bastard lining up a shot and then another and thinking of the poor constructionist bastard on the table yelling, "Prevailing power dynamics my ass, do you have an MD? a certification in residency? did you show superior merit with the scalpel?  Oh my poor rupturing appendix."

Like the Mikado I realize I am letting my sadism show so I pretend that each of these prisoners in hell is presented only as "A source of innocent merriment!/ Of innocent merriment!"   Ah-ha-ha-ah.

I'd feel sorrier if there weren't such a serious point to be made here: that life is full of real hazards, and we need each others' help, and some people know the hazards better than others.  People who dismiss that knowledge deserve the laughter they get.  They are a danger.  

Are there such people?  No, they've been pretty well laughed off the stage.  Only in academia, only up the Ivory Tower, will you find them.  That's the only place where people can still get so far from the real world that they can't hear its laughter.

413. Another Last Nail in the Coffin of Cultural Relativism

So, Brazil's National Museum is burning, firefighters arrive, hook up their hoses to fire hydrants, and lo, the hydrants don't work.

Making sure that fire hydrants work is a cultural thing.  You know that when you start guessing the chances of a fire hydrant not working in Germany or Sweden or Scotland or — I won't go on; start in the north and work south, then go to other continents.  Some functionary at the bottom of the hierarchy feels miserable if he doesn't make his semi-annual check.  That's part of certain cultures, making functionaries feel miserable and guilty to the point of ulcers and complexes and national lamentations over what we're doing to our sweet children.  Oh the twisted psyches.  For what?

For museums standing with their precious contents on display for students to learn from and love.  For a population that can govern itself, and hold together, and get things done long-term.  That takes guilt and probably ulcers and turns the carefree children of the warm south into such an attractive alternative — until their governments fall apart and their museums burn down.

412. Poem: Louie and the Academic Tradition

I need to tell you that though both Louie and I still think in street-fight language (since we were both Chicago street fighters) Louie sometimes speaks it and you never know when it's going to come out like yesterday at the faculty-training session this vice-president tells us not to say “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” because it could be offensive and Louie right next to me jumps up and says, "WHA-A-A-T?  Are you out of your..." and he came as close to saying "fucking mind" as I ever saw a full professor come at a provost's meeting all he got was as far as the fricative and then he just said after a hitch "mind" and all of us who were thinking "fucking mind" said "whew" but it wasn't over because Louie who though he was like me just a GI Bill nouveau he had absorbed his Robert Hutchins (one of us Chicago guys) and believed in Great Books and Western Civilization as passionately as any of those New York guys those nouveaus (Jews) like Lionel Trilling so when this vice president who had gotten a Ph.D in academic administration learning how to do advanced group dynamics with profs says don't give voice to this belief Louie says you don't know who the hell you are talking to brother (some thought he said buster) and then I mean you don't know what you are telling me you are telling me that I can't argue out an important issue with Pete and Margaret I can't lay out my belief and they can't attack it and that's what we academics do in the tradition that's come down from Socrates brother (some were sure he said buster here) and it's called the academic tradition and I saw the vice-president turning white and Louie turning red and I thought oh-oh here we go and I started pulling on his pants but I couldn't stop him he said academic tradition academic tradition you don't understand it but maybe you can understand this and he slammed his finger at him with each word YOU...KEEP...YOUR...HANDS...OFF...WHAT WE'RE DOING...and it might have been OK if he had stopped there and maybe still OK if he had stopped after saying YOU'RE ITS GODDAM SERVANT NOT ITS BOSS even with the goddam but no not Louie he has to go on calling him a servant of pussycats, gah dam pussycats (who I want to know is going to pick up the Thurber reference?) pussycats with a chance to be bullies, while I'm damn near pulling his pants off but we don't get him in his seat until Fred gets a hand on him and then when he calms down what does Louie do he looks around like he expects applause like from his buddies in the alley what are you going to do with a prof like that?

411. Pornography, Demagoguery, and a College Education

Note: The following piece is, along with the preceding post, from the third article in a series that began with "Herbert Feigl: Philosopher for the English Composition Teacher" (Philosophical Forum, Fall, 2017) and "Academic Freedom, Tenure, and the Unclouded Mind," (Philosophical Forum, Summer, 2018).  The article was declined by Philosophical Forum.  The two parts are published here as posts to complete the series.

Pornography, Demagoguery, and a College Education

I

Those currently concerned over pornography and its online influence sometimes speak of a "victory" over it.  Wrong word.  There's no hope of a victory over porn.  Every species over-energizes the male libido (so it can be sure to energize) and our species, with its imaginative brain and ranging consciousness, flips and tickles it a thousand ways.  As witness the variety of porn sites.  Keep the human hand off the roving mouse?  You might as well try keeping the hand off the genitals.

So if  I use the word here I will mean only "stopping the advance."  And only in our developed society, taking "developed" to include in its meaning "offering human powers (like that of the imagination) a wider field to exercise themselves in," the offering varying with the particular society. 

For our developed society a very good word now is the coinage "pornified."  I don't know who came up with it but if we sense a significant, troubling difference between our society and others I think "pornification" well labels it.  And that's good because we have, I think, a fair chance of stopping pornification.

I know of no better illustration of pornification than the progress of Playboy.  From racy extensions of Esquire tickle, stylized long-leggedness, eyes in the distance, to full-front spread-leggedness, eyes right on you, here it is baby.  That's porn.  The pornification of society is in the seepage into the wrapping, the surrounding disquisitions on foreign policy or the media, or interviews with Martin Luther King or Joyce Carol Oates.  See the centerfold once and you sense it coming, even as you ponder race relations.

The process of pornification is open to test.  Read, say, what Jimmy Carter has to say about foreign policy.  Turn the page to the open body with come-hither eyes.  If you don't blink you're pornified — that is, acculturated, at home in what your society accepts.  If you blink you're behind your society.  If  you say, "My God, somebody's 18-year-old is showing every man in the country what she shows her gynecologist!" you haven't started yet.

The wrapping is important to the publisher trying to sell porn in a market unused to it.  He wants it to speak weight, respectability, "class."  Hefner's target audience can be identified, accurately enough, as "middle-brow."  Taking in millions.  I take his success with them to have powered his move to high brow, in editorials, which put the label "Playboy philosophy" on what was behind the full-front views.  A play for the full range of brows.  Pornification top to bottom.

Our aim is to hold our own against that.  Our hope is in the person we have been calling "well-educated."  That person, saying "Screw brows," will look inside the barrel labeled "Playboy philosophy" and find himself looking through the eyes of a fraternity (Animal House) pledge.  The correct label for the philosophy, he will tell us, is "juvenile male hedonism."  That Hefner could get away with his fancier label shows how poorly educated the American public is.  When Americans elect Donald Trump they show everybody their poverty and us what porn-acceptance and demagogue-acceptance have in common: stopping short of understanding.  Failing to look in the barrel, failing to see what the label really refers to.  For them the cross-over, the Moment of Understanding, still lies ahead.  Anybody whose understanding of words has been deepened at all in the way done fully in poetry class and partially in every humanities course, will blow Hefner and Trump away.

"Deepened," if I may add another glance into the philosophical past, "in the way logical empiricists did not consider essential.  Neither they — who classed it under 'the emotional aspect of words' — nor their followers."

So, though we express it differently, we're agreed on what went wrong: we college teachers failed to deepen our students' understanding of the words they used and listened to before we certified them as "educated."

"Good enough.  Now we've got to show Thomas Jefferson what we're going to do to set things right.  I suggest we each produce a plan and then come together to draw out the best.  Take a week."

Let's make it a month.

II

All right, Mr. Jefferson is waiting.  How do we set things right?  You go first.

"With I'm afraid, a big surprise for you.  I have nothing to say about your development and protection of the imagination.  I bailed out of that as soon as I realized that we already had our answer.  All that fussing around with poetry was unnecessary.  Philosophers, especially analytic philosophers, had already dealt with this problem with what we have to call success.  Their spokesmen to freshmen and sophomores explained so fully what "critical thinking" is, and had given such striking examples of "uncritical thinking," that any doubts about what failure and success were, and what's needed to change one into the other, should be long removed.  Think of Thouless's Thinking Straight and Cohen and Nagel's Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method, the Phil 101 texts of our day.  Require the course, and you have nearly all you need."

Nearly?

"Yes.  The course in critical thinking, to have lasting success, needs the support of courses around it.  If the student goes from Phil 101 to Poly Sci 101 the next hour, and to a history course the next, he or she should again and again be required to think critically.  That's strong support for critical thinking."

As long as it's about what I call the big ideas.  Bigger than the benzine ring.  Ideas about the hazards of democracy and the consequences of needing to be a "great power"  are big; the arrangement of benzine atoms is little.

"Yes.  Discussions of hazards to democracy are where Phil 101 pays off."

That's liberal-arts courses, bundles of payoffs for Phil 101.

"I'd say gyms where you go to strengthen what you acquired in Phil 101."

Yes.  Necessary to the success of its program for thinking.  That's better.

"So you'll join me in telling Jefferson that we're going to require these courses for all degrees that get people called well-educated'?  At 'Drain that swamp' we will look forward to nothing but frowns, and a happy Jefferson."

No, I won't join you.  Because I see a big weakness in your plan.  You don't account for the great number of people in our society who won't be able to meet your requirement.  Get down in the world and you'll see so many tasks that need to be done — bridges built, diseases treated, books balanced, airplanes flown — and so many people with limited time and money eager to qualify for those tasks, that to require them to set aside their training in engineering or medicine or accounting or aeronautics in favor of a lot of liberal arts courses is unreasonable and will be successfully  resisted.  It would be like requiring them to inform themselves about every candidate running for office and every issue at stake on the ballot.  The multitude in any democracy is going to be far too busy at the daily work of life to become the critical-thinking voters you picture

"I see.  I stepped backwards.  The default position for an old philosopher, they say, is the one he held in his youth.  Which here is distance from the problem.  Forgive the relapse."

So we go back to the development and protection of the imagination, meaning the power to deepen the meaning of marks on the page or sounds in the ear.  A return, I think, we were bound to make anyway, since the success of any other program will be measured by its success.

"I'm more solidly with you than ever.  Fail to add meaning and your most brilliantly connected barrels, in the most extensive network, will weigh nothing on the scales of knowledge.  If the imagination fails nothing else succeeds.  So on to our task, the development and protection of the imagination."

Two tasks.  And about the first one I have to tell you that the development of the imagination is pretty much of a mystery to me.  I prepare a bunch of exercises and get a class I'm proud of and some new kid comes in and shows everybody, including me, how much we missed in a Frost poem.  Kids spend so much time expanding their imaginations themselves, sitting alone and reading a book, or getting to know people and going through stuff.  About developing the imagination I'm reduced to humble silence.  About protecting the imagination I do have something to say, though it's only  about the imagination teachers develop.

"That's plenty for me.  Go ahead, humble teacher."

OK.  I go back to the one thing I am sure of, the Wow Moment in reading.  The Wow is forced out by an act of the imagination.  After the teacher has prepared the student for it.  How do successful teachers, the ones that consistently get a Wow, protect that moment and the preparation for it?  Listen to them.  Listen to yourself.  I hear, "Administrators, get out of the way; colleagues, don't intrude; public, be patient."  Administrators (meaning government, all the way up) get in the way by imposing standardized tests, and overloading classes, and demanding paper work eating preparation time as the need to publish eats it.  Colleagues intrude by pressing their fellows to prepare for something other than understanding — furtherance of a cause, righting of an injustice, promotion of an equality.  The public intrudes by forcing us (with good reason, usually) to economize.

"Fine, but you know what this is adding up to?  One damn lame report to Jefferson.  'Well, Founding Father, we just can't lay out a program that will give you the educated electorate you want.   All we can tell you is how to gamble for it.  It's not a very good gamble, in fact the odds are near the vanishing point, but we don't know what else to do.'"

A disappointment to Jefferson, yes, but I know professors who will tell us he deserves the lame report he's going to get.  All that broad praise of  "freedom."  So broad it included freedom of the smart to take advantage of the dumb.  We work like hell to expand the imaginations of the uneducated, and get them educated, and forget how many people, smart people, politicians and porn merchants, are working like hell to keep the imagination closed and the multitude uneducated.  Did we expect nobody to notice that there was money to be made, hits to be multiplied, votes to be gained, if people remained juveniles?  Marketers have a stake in juvenility, even retardation.

"You're making me sore at Jefferson.  And if I didn't know that fascists and monarchists and a lot of others interested in an authoritarian system are cheering me on I'd make a few complaints about him and his common man.  As it is I think I'll just keep my mouth shut in front of him."

What about our commitment to show him how we were going to educate his common man?

"What am I going to say?  With all the obstacles and difficulties we piled up the odds of doing that were already in the single digits.  After what you've just said I think they're down to zero.  So, what do I do?  Put on a Power Point showing all the new moves we're going to make and add, 'PS, they're not going to work and I don't know what else to do.'?"

But you must know something else to do.  If I remember the pragmatic side of your logical empiricism you'll go to the Next Best Thing.

"What a memory you have!  But you're ahead of me.  You've got something in mind.  There you are, convinced as I am that you'll never get a majority of the American multitude educated, but you're not in despair.   I'm waiting breathlessly to hear what you think the Next Best Thing might be."

OK, I'll state it bluntly: the next best thing to an educated multitude is a multitude that respects the educated. 

"Respect" is the pivot word.  What do you mean by it?"

"Respect" is what I felt for the classmates who, in the conversation about the causes of World War I, showed me that they knew what they were talking about.  I take that conversation as a model.  I was one of the uneducated multitude.  I became educated.  I was made to recognize, through blows in the ring, that their ways of thinking, their ways of taking words, were superior to mine.  I could not think that I was their equal, that my ways of thinking were as good as anybody's, that I did not have to listen to them.

"I see control of demagogues in your model."

I see that and more.  I see the absolute necessity of conversations like that, in which I see the necessity of companions like those, in whom I find the ground for hope that, despite the odds, there will be enough education and respect for education in the American electorate to keep the old democracy going.

"And Jefferson from blowing his brains out.  You've got to tell him about these conversations before he does anything rash."

Oh, I'm loaded, I'm loaded.  Talk that tests ideas, talk that shows up ignorance, smooth-tongued ignorance, high-achieving, prize-winning ignorance.

"Commercially successful ignorance, election-winning ignorance.  Talk that embarrasses the demagogue. Talk that shows students that if they are to avoid embarrassment they've got to attend carefully to the meaning of the words they use and hear."

Attend to the interior of the barrel.

"Attend to the roots in experience."

Oh the talk our country needs.  Oh precious college conversations, precious to the student and to the nation.  Blessed be the teachers who set up and monitor such conversations.  Blessed be the colleges and high schools that ease their way.  Blessed be the media that ease such conversations before the public.  Blessed be the participants who try to put the ways of their college conversations to public use.

"Blessed?"

A carryover from the Christianity barrel.  Jefferson will know what I mean.  It's his blessing we want, isn't it?

"And that's all we'll present in order to get it?  There's so much left hanging.   Jefferson is both a real-world president and a theorizing philosopher.  He'll pick over the bundle you give him."

We'll give him what we have and tell him that all that's left hanging will be handled in those wonderful conversations, in schools, in the media, in legislatures, that he and his philosopher-colleagues provided for in their founding documents.  Careful self-correction, that's what they were most careful to allow for, isn't it?  That's the strength of their system, isn't it?  Isn't it?