“What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing - with a rather shaky hand - a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again.
I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.” –Michel Foucault

Feb 20, 2013

The Job of Thinking people




This statement is profound because the victims change but the process of scapegoating which makes the holocaust possible is always the same. I've never regretted the considerable amount of time I spent learning as much as I could about Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Popular Enlightenment, and the role Goebbels played in bringing Hitler to power and making the holocaust possible by carefully crafting the public opinion that demanded the final solution. I can’t recommend The War That Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign by Robert E. Herzstein too highly. If you want to understand FOX, Karl Rove, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell or the Southern Baptist Convention, this is the book to read.
I lived this. I grew up in a Southern Baptist Convention family and attended Ashford Academy, a religious school where the curriculum was hate and we prayed to a vengeful monster every morning that everyone who was not a Southern Baptist would burn in hell forever. To this day, I am as impressed by ordination through the Southern Baptist Convention as I am by the gaudy robes of the Klu Klux Klan, and impressed in exactly the same way. 

Muslim terrorists learn to worship this same vengeful monster in their Madrasa and go forth to serve god by blowing up buildings and shooting young girls who seek an education that teaches something other than how to serve a vengeful monster. The products of Christian Madrasas all over the south go forth filed with all the same hatred and with the same fervor for atrocity. We called our vengeful monster Jesus and they call theirs Allah. The name does not matter. Both worship a thing that would better deserve to be called a devil if it existed at all and both are transformed into devils through their worship. 

I attended a meeting of the Lake County, Florida School Board last Monday. It was not a Klan rally or a Nazi rally only because two hundred or so decent people were so offended by the hatefulness of a change in policy to be voted on by the board that we felt the need to come forth and make our disgust known. Many in the crowd were Christians, real Christians, decent people who do not think that children should be bullied to death or excluded from anything because they are different, because they are the wrong color or the wrong anything else according to the bigots who are always among us, spewing their venom and attacking their scapegoat of the moment. We were there in support of a very brave young lady named Bayli Silberstein. Bayli is 14, openly bisexual and wished to start a club called the GSA (Gay-Straight-Alliance) at Carver Middle School in Leesburg. This club would be a resource for GLBT students, a safe space for them to gather and to receive help and information from organizations like PFLAG and GLTSN. These organizations are made up of the parents of GLBT students and of educators who have come together to try to do something a little more constructive than attending the funerals of children who have been bullied right into the grave by hateful bigots.

Some of these hateful bigots are still children themselves. Others are adults like the principal who turned down Bayli’s original request based on the idea that having a club for GLBT children who were being bullied would just focus more attention on the victims and make the bullying worse. What is a woman who thinks that children should keep quiet about bullying in order not to be bullied even more doing in charge of a public school, a school supposedly open to everyone and supported by taxes under the assumption that it is a place where children will be treated with kindness and respect and learn to be good citizens and decent people who treat others with kindness and respect? Children are dying not because of the hateful bigotry of other children, but because of the callow indifference of adults like this principal. If she could not bring herself to look the other way but felt compelled to act, those of us who are too decent to stand by and do nothing would not come together at endless funerals asking ourselves why and asking ourselves what we can do to save the next child from the adult bigots who target children they would never admit to hating themselves for abuse. They do so by looking the other way while other children, the children they probably think of as the good kids, act out the values of the adults in charge. The children who are bullied to death are the children that the adults in charge can’t see as being worthy of respect or protection. Then the people who love them come together at one more funeral and ask why again and wonder as they pray over their dead what kind of god the kind of person who could just look the other way and do nothing could possibly worship. 

The Equal Access Act of federal law exists to assure that public schools provide open forum access to a broad spectrum of ideas and facilitate the expression of all points of view prevalent in the community served by the school. It is the provision that prevents a principal from allowing a Young Republican’s club to organize and meet on campus but not the Young Democrats or a Southern Heritage club helped along by the Daughters of the Confederacy but no Black History club. The Lake County Board has now realized that they are in violation of federal law. They cannot discriminate against students who want to form clubs based on their own prejudices and preferences but they are in refusing Bayli’s request to form a GSA. I don’t know if the board collectively is not bright enough to figure out that they also face civil liability the next time there is a funeral or if they are in collective denial or just don’t care how much they cost the taxpayer. Originally, all five board members publicly supported eliminating all non-academic clubs; this would keep at-risk GLBT students from getting access to the resources they need to survive bullying at the expense of killing all the other extracurricular activities enjoyed by students; it is a measure of the hateful bigotry of the current school board that it seems reasonable to them to deny all students the benefit of extracurricular activities as the price to be paid for seeing to it that one group of children who are being viciously abused in the schools they control continue to be viciously abused without access to the resources that might make this abuse less damaging. 

I find this sickening. I find it sickening as a person and, as a teacher, can’t see how anyone who does not find it sickening belongs in the classroom or on a school board. I showed up on Monday not sure what I would find there or what exactly I was going there to do or say. When I arrived, I found a huge crowd standing outside the meeting place waiting to be let in. Most of them were wearing red shirts. Most of them were there to say that bigotry was wrong, that god did not hate any child and that no child should ever be told not to speak up about bullying or learn not to expect help from the adults who are supposedly there to nurture and support them if they are bullied. I did not know about the red shirts when I walked up. I did not know that I was going there that day to join anything bigger or more substantial than my own deep sense that those who are being hurt should be helped and that calling yourself a teacher ought to mean calling ignorance hateful enough to kill a child the devil’s work.

I have a red shirt now. The good people, the decent people, gave me that to wear the way some people wear a cross or Star of David. I know who my people are and I know hateful lies when I hear them. I know the words intended to justify murder or sitting quietly in your room until the screaming stops. I know the simple truth that it is not Bill Mathias and the other bigots on the Lake County School Board who are being bullied by the ACLU but Mathias and his hateful kind who are allowing punk kids to do their dirty work in the schools they control. The good people, including the ACLU, are trying to stop this. If this feels like bullying to a simpering sissy like Bill Mathias, then that just shows again what everyone knows; bullies are cowards. Bullies will always try to change the subject when they are called on being the odious little vermin that they are by anyone who is more than half their size. Real adults, like the ACLU, like the people in the red shirts, have to protect children and anyone else who is vulnerable for whatever reason from deviants like Bill Mathias.

As I said before, I’ve lived this. I got called a nigger-lover by the good Christians back at the segregation academy because I did not use the word nigger to describe anyone at all. More of the people who graduated with me went to prison than went to college. More guys graduated than girls because so many of the girls got knocked-up and dropped out. I went to school with the son of the local Klan leader and the president of the Ambassadors; that’s the main Baptist youth group for those of you who are lucky enough not to be Baptist by background. I started believing in a just god with a sense of humor when both of them turned out to be Gay. The desegregation of the public schools in the south had an unintended benefit that is not commonly recognized but ought to be more widely appreciated. It got the hard-core bigots out of the public school. This left the public school system to those of either race who cared more about learning to read than calling anyone a nigger or praying every morning that most of the world fry in hell. What can we do to get the hard-core bigots out of the public schools in Lake County, Florida? What can we do to get the hard-core bigots off the school board in Lake County, Florida?

Feb 16, 2013

Time Management



I find it hard to even think in terms of good time management skills as opposed to bad time management skills. It seems to me that we all have our own stable way of being in a world structured by time. Some people’s worlds are time-structured in ways that are very similar to the way mine is structured whereas other people experience time very differently. I can’t reduce this to having a better or worse sense of time or capacity to manage time because whether my style or anyone else’s is better or worse all depends on the specific demands of the particular task at hand. 

For example, I do things quickly but I can only do one thing at a time. I cannot multi-task at all. When I am forced to try, the result is extreme disorientation leading to an anxiety state so pronounce as to qualify as a variety of panic attack. I am very easily distracted because do not filter background input well enough to, for example, stay focused on a conversation I am having if there is a TV on at the same time. Yet, I can isolate myself in a quiet place and stay intensely focused on a very demanding task for several hours at a time. Under ideal conditions, my span of attention is freakishly long and my capacity to follow and further develop a very complex chain of abstract thought is so far above average that it is not an exaggeration to say that I can do things most people would find impossible. My way of experiencing time and paying attention, including the conditions I need to stay focused at all, is either a crippling disability or a rare gift just depending on what exactly I am being asked to do. 
 
There are so many tasks that are either easy or impossible depending on how exactly one naturally experiences time and focuses attention that I can’t think in terms of good time management skills or the lack of good time management skills but only of a goodness of fit between how time is experienced and the task at hand that makes that task easy or a lack of fit that makes the task feel about the way being forced to try to sing must feel to a pig.

Feb 15, 2013

And If You Go Chasing Rabbits”””””””””””



Ashford, Alabama was still a small town in the rural south when my mom and I moved there when I was four. It was a place where farmers and their families came to buy groceries, clothing and anything else they needed. My mom worked at a cotton gin that also sold pesticide and fertilizer. My grandfather owned a machine shop that existed to repair farm equipment and build peanut trailers and such other things as farmers needed. Every business in town was kept in business by the farmers. These farmers were self-employed. They had to be jack of all trades and worked doing what needed to be done without regard to 9 to 5 schedules or any schedule more exact than getting it all done. They were always busy doing things that had to get done but seldom had appointments to keep at an exact time. 

Everyone else sold something or provided some service to the farmers and needed to be at their place of business ready to do business when the farmers needed something and dropped by to get it. For example, I worked for my grandfather every summer at the machine shop. I never saw hours posted. We were typically there by 9 am and where almost always there by ten but there were exceptions.  We were all on farmer time, which is not 9 to 5 or tightly scheduled by exact time appointments but is more about being there to do your business so many more times than not when the farmer drops by that the farmer feels safe just dropping by and will be surprised and disappointed not to find you there. The occasional surprise is expected and accepted as long as you are there so routinely that not being there is a real surprise and so unusual that the farmer will still expect you to be there the next time he drops by.
I always walked fast enough in relation to other people during my adolescent years to amuse others with my obvious frustration at the way almost everyone else ambled and eased along. I could never stay with the flow of traffic, either in the halls at school or anywhere else and constantly felt that everyone else was in my way. It was not that I was in a hurry to get anyplace. I knew where I wanted to go but almost never had an appointment to keep or even any strong sense of what time it was according to the clock. It just felt to me as if everyone else just naturally oozed through the day at a pace that was totally unnatural to me. 

Later, when my life changed and I had appointments with various people at definite times, I would, at first, often simply forget to show up. I was never aware of the ticking of the clock even as I was intensely aware of how much more slowly most of the people around me moved than the pace that felt natural to me. I later learned to compensate by wearing a wrist watch and looking at it often as a symptom of my low-level frustration at being out of synch with most of the people who flowed through their own lives around me as I moved through my own at a frustrated crawl from my perspective but break-neck speed from theirs. I always remind myself of the white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s work and often describe myself that way to others as a form of self-depreciating humor intended to signal my awareness of looking silly and my lack of offense at the amusement others find in my constant, mad dash to wherever it is I happen to be going at any given time.

Feb 12, 2013

Grandfatherly Advice to a Young Woman trying to get Laid on OKCupid



The part about being "more old-fashioned" than most is off-putting but, other than that, you seem like the slutty grand-daughter I never had. I might be able to find a use for you in my life if you are at all interested. If not, take the ***** rating as an Ebert review from an old fart who finds you much more interesting than you find him. This happens a lot whenever I get in a "hope springs eternal" sort of mood and contact a breasted-life-form under the age of 30. Believe it or not, I was Cougar-bait back when I was your age. It never occurred to me as I basked in the splendor in those golden, unproductive years to ask myself what I was going to do once all the women old enough to be my mom were either dead or so afraid of death that they had found Jesus and/or lost permanent control of their bladders. Have a nice day. If you feel the need for grandfatherly advice, try to always save string and never eat anything bigger than your head. Following these simple rules have not always kept my life happy but at least I'm not dead yet and still have control over my bladder even with my asymmetrical prostrate and all. In the long run, it’s the little things that matter.

Feb 11, 2013

Marble Tit

I spent the first four years of my life living in a house in rural south Alabama that sat right next to my father’s cotton field. I was an only child so there were no older siblings around to notice if the baby crawled away out of the house. I’ve told this story before and don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the only child part. It’s there on this occasion because I’m trying to make this telling of the story a response of sorts, at least in some loose sense, to Alfred Adler’s ideas, one of which was about the importance of birth order.  So Alfred Adler is now part of this childhood memory, at least in the loose sense that the narrative is fixed in meaning by his frame of reference even though Adler was not anywhere in the frame of reference of the toddler whose memory this is or, at least, will be once that toddler gets to be your humble narrator.
I was not planned and my mom was only 17 when I was born. Everything I know about my mom would tell me that she did not want children. I know that she did not want to be my father’s wife. They were divorced when I was four. I don’t know when my mom began having an affair with her employer but this went on all through my childhood until I went away to college. My mother is so hateful and so dishonest that I will not allow her any place in my humbly narrated life except to curse the lessons she taught in making the wisdom of this current now as bitter and empty of comfort as suckling on a marble tit.
Looking back at anything, we look back from where we are, knowing and thinking what we think we know now. The past is not fixed and unchanging; it changes constantly in a pattern that keeps it current as a revisionist history of where we are now and who we think we are today. Previous versions of the past are seem as delusion, as error overcome, by each significantly different version of me that looks back from any one of a long string of successive nows that connect in loose continuity the story of our progress from cradle to grave.
I started crawling away from my mother before I could walk, much less run or muster enough words to say what I was running from or where I thought I was going. I made it to the tall cotton often and I had this dog that looked like Lassie but was named Poochie instead who would disappear into the tall cotton with me and I would think I had escaped to peaceful obscurity lost in the tall cotton just the way poor guys who just wanted to dis-attach from parole officers or alimony payments disappeared into the forgiving arms of the cannery biz up in Alaska.
Then mom would call Poochie and the literal bitch would go running right to her as if the two were in it together playing good cop/bad cop against my infant innocence and my position would be targeted. I learned early not to trust even my supposed best friend and that life was about being securely attached to everything really awful forever in spite of your own best effort; this was mostly due to the inevitable betrayal of any critter that claimed to love you and stuck close by trying to help. I always came out of that tall cotton covered with a thick dusting of DDT. Only later was DDT banned as a threat to all life on earth. I don’t remember a second head or any operations but I do have this scar on my left shoulder. I remember it all very clearly. It happened just this way and always will until my mind gets changed by life again.