Back in the Saddle Again

The semester is over. The Christmas break back east with family and friends is in the past. The car is unpacked, the laundry is spinning, and somehow there must be meals not prepared by others.

It’s good to be back.

No matter how much fun a trip is, no matter how great it is to see family and friends, it is always good to return home, to sleep in your own bed and be surrounded by your own stuff.

David is happy.

Did David just go third person on you? Yes, yes he did. That is how happy David is to be home.

And it will be nice to be blogging again, after a semester’s absence. I have any number of subjects all lined up and ready to write about. I’ve got projects that will no doubt bleed over into here. And it’s an election year – the gift that keeps on giving to us bloggers, especially with the collection of losers, whackmobiles and cardboard cutouts currently vying for the nomination of a once-proud party. It’s going to be a fun semester around here.

It’s good to be back.

Boop!

I am not ticklish.

This was something of a social disadvantage in high school, as there were several of my friends who would have dearly loved it if I were and whom I would have been rather okay with their continuing in that vein, but alas, t’was not to be.

Lauren, on the other hand, is very ticklish.

Today was one of those days where Tabitha had to stay after school for one reason or another – as she continues to zoom through middle school and into high school, those days will only increase – so after I picked up Lauren we had about forty minutes to kill. So we zipped on over to the local minimart to buy some sticky candy, in the hopes that it would finally pull out the loose tooth that has been dangling just above her lip for a month now, and then we pulled into our spot by Mighty Clever Guy Middle School to wait.

This is our time together, and it’s fun. We talk about school, we play games, and sometimes we get homework done.

Today for some reason, Lauren decided she would try to tickle me. But, as noted earlier, I am not ticklish. This meant, of course, that she had no recourse when I was obliged to tickle her back.

Eventually I discovered that I didn’t even have to touch her – that Lauren is ticklish at a range of up to twelve inches from her body. All I had to do was poke anywhere in that range.

Well, no. That wasn’t all I had to do.

Apparently this is audio-triggered. It doesn’t work if you just do the phantom poke thing. You have to do the phantom poke thing while at the same time saying, “Boop!”

Boop!

Boop! Boop! Boop!

Boop!

You know, this knowledge could be dangerous in the wrong hands. Such as, say … mine.

Boop!

How to Improve the Holiday

Sweet dancing monkeys on a stick, it’s nearly Christmas.

This is one of the things that has sort of snuck up on me this year, more than most years, and as I emerge out of my semester-long immersion into ancient world history (want to know about Mansa Musa? Go ahead – ask me anything…) the fact that the Yuletide season is here is sort of hitting me all at once. There’s been no lead-in time this year. One minute it was mid-November and I was vaguely thinking about Thanksgiving and wondering what had happened to the Halloween candy, and the next: Fa-la-la-la-la up to my ai-ai-ai-ai-eyeballs.

Now, Christmas has long been one of my favorite holidays. But the old story about the boiled frog is definitely in play this year – I’ve had not time to get used to the season gradually, so a lot of things that normally just float by me unnoticed are a bit more front and center.

And some of them, frankly, have got to go.

So here are a few things that I think the Christmas season would be better off without. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

1. Commercials where grown men try to sound like elves.

I don’t know why this happens every year, but for some reason advertisers – especially local advertisers – seem to feel that if you put things in elfin terms people will be more likely to buy them. Of course the big local example this year is a car dealership trying to get you to purchase the latest M-1 Abrams SUV (“Complete with its own zip code!”), which sort of makes me question the wisdom of the whole “elf” motif, but there you go. Remember, folks – grown men trying to sound like elves is not cute. It’s creepy. Go easy on the helium, lay off the psychedelics, and hire better writers.

2. Similarly, any commercial that pads its soundtrack with incessant jingling.

Seriously. It’s not festive. It just sounds like you’re playing with your keys too much, and I’m not about to shake hands on a deal with someone who spends that much time with their hands in their pockets.

3. Country/western Christmas carols about how new shoes are a sign of God’s love.

I’m fairly sure this isn’t in the Bible anywhere. I’m also fairly sure that gift-giving – while intensely fun and certainly nothing I will ever complain about (too much) – is not the center of the season. Dressing it up in 4/4 time and a smothering string arrangement is schmaltz, not sentiment, and the irony of that is just way too much for me right now.

4. NBA basketball

Am I the only person in America who was sort of disappointed that the NBA decided not to cancel their season? I’ve never really understood the appeal of a game where you’re not allowed to play defense and teams routinely score over a hundred points in increments of two so I’m probably not their target market anyway, but somehow the knowledge that oddly elongated men are out there bouncing a ball around on Christmas Day does not make me feel merrier. Oddly enough, though, football games do. I’m not sure why.

5. White men in blue suits pretending they’re fighting a beleaguered defense of what is, after all, the most popular holiday in America, in some personal fantasy world they call “The War On Christmas.”

First of all, these guys need to get a life. Wars involve bloodshed, chaos and no small amount of personal courage, and mouthing snarky, demonstrably false talking points from comfortably appointed newsdesks hardly qualifies. You want to fight a war in defense of Christmas? Go to North Korea and see what you can do. You won’t even have to start a new war, since the Korean War is still technically ongoing.

Second, the only people in what is now the United States who have ever seriously argued for making Christmas illegal – and who actually succeeded in doing so – were Puritans, who felt that the celebration was an ungodly travesty of true faith. Given that the 17th-century Puritans lived their Christianity in a way that modern Americans can’t even conceive, let alone match, I see no reason why I should have to put up with blowhards trying to score political points with idiots by pretending to defend my holiday. Christmas doesn’t need you, gents. Now crawl back under your rocks and leave the rest of us alone.

It Is Finished

Well.

It has been a very long semester, here in Baja Canada. But yesterday was my last class at Not Quite So Far Away Campus, and there will be no further 2am, “frantically whomping up a lecture on a topic I had never heard of prior to last week” nights, at least for the foreseeable future.

My US2 class has also been put to bed as far as lectures go. I last taught that one in 2008 and my entire understanding of the underlying dynamics of recent American history has changed since then, so somehow I managed to transfer all of those lectures out of my handwritten notes and into typed form while revising them as I went, mostly. There’s still some work to be done on that class, but I got the broad outlines of my current thinking into them.

Of course, by the time I get to teach it again I’m sure I will have moved onto new interpretations. And there will be new material to cover, as time seems to march on regardless of my schedule.

If I ever have to teach my World History Prior to 1500 class again, there will also be wholesale revisions. The first unit will need to be gutted and reconstructed from the ground up, for example, but at least I have a good handle on how I would want to do that now.

All that is left now are finals. And finals are the easiest exams from the professor’s point of view, because I don’t have to hand them back. Which means I don’t have to put comments on them. The majority of my time spent grading exams is devoted to putting enough comments on them so as to a) explain to the students how they can do better and b) head off any complaints about how they did this time. Grading finals is so much less time consuming.

I spent most of the last few days trying very hard not to be sick, as I was pretty worn out by the beginning of the month and teaching is not like normal jobs where you can miss a day and not really worry about it. It’s all on you – substitutes don’t work at the college level – and it all has to happen on time.

But now it’s all good. The classes are done. I’m feeling reasonably well, having slept a bit. And I spent today doing non-academic things – running errands, getting my hair cut, having lunch with the 3rd-graders at Not Bad President Elementary (at Lauren’s request) which of course meant many iterations of The Evil Laugh.

I’m hoping to get back to blogging again, too. I’ve missed it.

Faces of Lauren, 2011

Every year at this time Kim and I sit down to try to pick a photograph that we can put on our Christmas card. And every year we are confronted with one simple fact: Lauren has a future in vaudeville.

So here is this year’s version of the Faces of Lauren.  Click on the photos to embiggen.

Go get ‘em, kiddo.

 

(look carefully - she's in there)

Thoughts on the State of the Union

“Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.” (Lemony Snickett)

One of the most difficult ideas to get across to my students in my US history classes is the simple fact that there is nothing inevitable or logically necessary about the United States of America.

Most Americans don’t believe that. They look at the map, which clearly shows the US filling up all of the space between the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel, and it never occurs to them that this didn’t have to happen, or that at any number of junctions it could have turned out very differently.

Powhattan might well have decided that the English colonists in Jamestown were a threat to his confederacy rather than potential allies to be folded into his empire, and wiped them out. He could have, you know – it wouldn’t have even required any action on his part, just simple inattention. The Jamestown colonists would have died out on their own. That would have been three straight failures for the English colonists – Roanoake, Sagadahoc, and then Jamestown. Whether the English would have bothered with a fourth try would have been an interesting question.

The French might have displayed a little more financial sense, just enough to overcome their desire for revenge after the Seven Years’ War, and not bothered taking up the case of thirteen ragtag colonies clinging to the Atlantic shore of the New World thumbing their collective nose at the largest military and economic power on earth at the time. It would have pulled the plug on our Revolution fairly quickly, and might well have spared the French theirs.

We might have lost our Second War of Independence in 1812 rather than fought the distracted and divided British to a draw. There’s a reason we wrapped up the war as quickly as we could once the Napoleonic Wars had drawn to a close and it has nothing to do with sympathy for the French. Even with that distraction the British still managed to burn the President’s Mansion and operate largely at will across American territory. The War of 1812 was the death knell of the theory that a citizen militia could meet a professional military on equal terms, a rude awakening that few Americans these days care to acknowledge, and we very nearly returned to the colonial fold because of it. Or, if the British didn’t want us back, they could just have shattered the American Union and moved on.

The federal government might have manifested a backbone more rigid than a soup noodle and not caved in to the demands of Southern slaveholders in the 1830s and 40s, which would have meant not forcibly removing the northern third of Mexico and incorporating it into the US. It always tickles me to know that the first illegal immigrants into Texas were white Americans sneaking across the border into Mexico.

The North might have lost the Civil War.

Well, no.

There was no way the North was going to lose the Civil War. The North had morality, manpower, transportation networks, diplomatic leverage, industrial production and most of the guns, powder, salt, and food on its side in the struggle to eradicate the treason of the slavery-defending South, and the only reason the war went on as long as it did was because the South had the better generals for the first part of it. As long as the North remained determined to eradicate treason with fire, nothing the South did was going to make the war end in their favor once it came to combat.

Of course, the North could well have said, “Good riddance to bad rubbish” at any point after secession and let the bastards go, and that would have had the same effect as a Southern victory. There were certainly calls for them to do so, and it might have spared the North a lot of aggravation and subversion later if they had.

And on and on. I haven’t even touched on Alaska or Hawaii, two remarkably contingent additions to the Union.

The idea here is simply that it didn’t have to work out the way it did, and if you were to start the clock rolling over from the beginning I doubt it would again.

More to the point, the fact that we have the country we have is not a given going forward either. Just because it did happen to work out to this point is no guarantee that it will continue to work out next year or next decade or next century. Just as there was nothing inevitable or logically necessary about the development of the United States to this point, so to is there nothing inevitable or logically necessary about the continued existence of the United States in the future.

It takes energy to keep a country together and moving forward. It takes vision. It takes people willing to do the hard work of making sure that the nation is there when the sun goes down and still there when it comes back up.

One of the great lessons of my childhood was watching the annual Fourth of July parade down at the local firehouse, where my father – and eventually I – was a volunteer firefighter. It took a lot of work to get that parade moving, which came as a surprise to me as a kid. It is a sign of childish thinking to assume that good things just happen automatically, and a mark of maturity to recognize that this is not so. I hit that mark at that parade. My dad saw that look on my face, took me aside and said simply, “Nothing good happens on its own.”

Parades, nations, it’s all the same.

There are a lot of people in this country willing to put in the energy, time and effort to make that happen, however. I see them out there. I’d like to think I’m one of them. That’s not the part I worry about.

The thing that scares me currently is that, more than anything else, keeping a nation going forward takes a recognition that there are an awful lot of people in it, and their concerns had better figure into yours if you want it to stay together.

This, more than anything else, we have lost.

I have watched the general collapse of the American political system over the last decade with increasing worry, as one party – and, for those of you about to make a profoundly ill-observed point, yes it is entirely one party and not a case of “everybody’s doing it;” please make a note of that and start paying attention from now on – has repeatedly placed its own interests above those of the nation. This is new, something that only became standard in the last couple of years, even in that party. It really isn’t something the Democrats have done and, until the last four or five years, it really wasn’t something the Republicans did either. But pushed to the lunatic fringe by the far-right-wing extremists who have taken over a once-proud and constructive organization, the Republican Party has made it clear that if it cannot have everything entirely its way all the time without exception, opposition, or hesitation, it is prepared to burn this country down and piss on the ashes. It very nearly did so last summer, and it looks ready to do it again soon. There is a term for this, and “patriot” isn’t it.

I have watched the general collapse of the American middle class over the last several decades with equal worry. The statistics are overwhelmingly clear and disturbingly specific, and at this point I could simply fill my entire allotment of space on Blogger’s servers with graphs and charts demonstrating them if I so chose. Fortunately for you, I will skip them. The point remains, however.

We live in an age where it is considered a sign of righteousness to seek a pre-modern distribution of wealth, with a few elites and a vast sea of peasantry and nothing much in between. That’s not what has been the driving force behind American prosperity since the colonial period, but I see few if any people at the top or on the right who see it as anything other than their mission in life to achieve this sorry state of affairs. What left there is in this country makes sympathetic noises but offers no constructive agenda toward reversing this trend.

I do see a groundswell of opposition to that coming up from below, though. The OWS protesters have been arrested, assaulted, pepper-sprayed, kicked, gassed and generally treated as invasive pests, when all they have been trying to do is point out that the situation in America has gotten out of hand, and for that alone they deserve recognition as Jeremiahs, shouting in the concrete wilderness about the sins of the nation. I’m not sure the OWS protesters really have any actual notion of how to solve any of the problems they’ve identified – the ideas I’ve seen attributed to them certainly don’t inspire a whole lot of confidence – but only a fool would say that they haven’t correctly identified the most pressing crisis of recent American history. People are now discussing what had previously been deliberately ignored, and even if the OWS movement achieves nothing else in its existence it will still have done this nation a service.

Perhaps most worryingly, for all this, I’ve seen the folks at the top, in their shiny impressive buildings, taunting and mocking. I see them and the politicians they own blaming the people at the bottom for not being wealthy, and I see them advocating positions that would have been considered barbaric by Gilded Age Robber Barons, who at least had the Gospel of Wealth to make them feel bad about their rapaciousness.

That’s not going to end well. Historically it never has.

It can happen here. There is nothing inevitable or logically necessary about the continued existence of the United States. When push comes to shove the only thing that is guaranteed is that there will be a whole lot of pushing and shoving going on. At that point the whole thing may well come crashing down. Greater empires have collapsed over less.

And something else may well fill the space between the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel.

All that will be left to do is mourn the lost promise of what was once a thriving, prosperous, powerful and – most painfully, in the loss column – hopeful nation, one that at least for a while and in some very clear ways actually did serve as a beacon to the world as to how it could be done. Not in every way, no, not at all. But in enough ways to make its self-imposed destruction that much more bittersweet.

Nothing good happens on its own. But catastrophes? They’re pretty much autopilot.

Fashion Is Our Middle Name

We went to see Hugo on Wednesday.

For those of you who have not read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, well, what is your problem? It’s a big book, granted, but since most of it consists of atmospheric charcoal drawings it flies right by. And the story it tells, of an orphan living in a train station in 1930s Paris, the automaton he restores, and the tale that unfolds from that point, is a wonder to behold, especially if you know or appreciate early 20th century films. 

When Tabitha and I read through it the first time, she was curious about some of the old cinematic references – the Harold Lloyd scene where he’s hanging off the clock face, for example, and the oldest science fiction film in the world, where the rocket ship lands in the eye of the moon. And you know what? We live in an age of wonders. We went to the computer, fired up Teh Intarweebs, and there on YouTube were both films. It was fun to see her make those connections, and fun to see the movies. All books should come with side adventures like that.

So we were anxious to see the movie version. It’s a very cinematic book, after all.

Wednesday was its opening night and I can’t say I was all that surprised to find out that it was not playing here in Our Little Town, which is more of a Rambo XLIII sort of venue. Eventually we tracked it down to a theater in the Rather Larger City 35 miles south of us and – in a move that I would have found incomprehensible prior to moving to the midwest – we drove all the way down there to see it.

The theater was lavish in a way that I didn’t think movie theaters were anymore, but which fit the subject of the night quite well. And the seats were actually comfortable, with arms that folded up out of the way so you could actually spread out a bit and get cozy. Plus the guy behind me was also an Eagles fan, and we have to stick together these days.

The movie is in 3D, which meant that we all got yet another pair of those BCD-style glasses that they hand out. We’ve amassed quite a collection of them over the last few years, much to my dismay - to be honest if I can see a movie in 2D instead I generally will. But this seemed worth it. Mostly we recycle the glasses in those big blue boxes after these movies, but this time the girls asked if we could hang on to them.

Apparently it is now the style at both Mighty Clever Guy Middle School and Not Bad President Elementary to pop the lenses from these glasses and decorate the frames with glitter, paint and assorted other tinsel, and the girls spent much of our rather quiet Thanksgiving at home turning these utilitarian movie glasses into works of art.

Now they look like a cross between Buddy Holly and Hello Kitty.

Hugo: the gift that keeps on giving.