My first day as a clinical teacher went very well. Except: I’m exhausted!
Right now the coordinating teacher and I are together in the same classroom throughout the day. She’s running the reins, and I’m just observing, sitting at the side. Eventually I’ll be able to lead some activities. I’ve done that before when I’ve substituted for the same groups of students across a continuous week or so, but this would be more serious, especially as it’s long-term.
The day began quite early; my alarms blasted off at about 4:30am. I showered & got ready, and Wifely Kate cooked breakfast:
iPhone pic by me, public domain for you. Food by Kate!
How awesome is that? The coffee was ready and everything. I was able to write fiction for about an hour and fifteen minutes — quickly revising (line-editing) an older, completed story so I can re-submit it; didn’t quite finish, since I’m having to fact-check some details — and then I headed to campus, the lunch Kate packed me in tow. At noon-ish I discovered she’d left a note in my lunchbox. The note talked about how proud she is of me. I got teary-eyed!
The coordinating teacher uses a Promothean ActivBoard (I’m not sure if the link points to the exact same model) in some very effective ways. For one portion of the classes, she shows multiple-choice math questions on the ‘Board, then the students record their answers using controllers — all students have one on their desks. The coordinating teacher shows the results on the ‘Board — as a bar graph; looks like something off Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — and uses them not just to motivate the class (the students love the video game-y vibe), but also to hone in on the students’ misunderstandings of the material in order to explain it again. Good real-time assessment.
Weirdly, one of the few TV shows I really like
The ‘Board can even export the collected data, so at a later time, we can analyze the answer statistics more precisely to spot recurring troubles. Totally something out of a Tim O’Reilly project.
Since I was mostly only observing — catching up to speed on this campus’s schedule, rules, etc. — I focused on watching one student at a time. (I’ve blogged before about developing observationskills. As for characterization, can a writer quickly notice in real-life what makes another person absolutely unique?) I noticed a boy whom I think might need glasses. Squinting, tilting his head to see better, putting his face inches from his paper. There’s a school program to address vision issues, but I’m not sure how prompt it is. Watching how in need and at risk students are can be upsetting. I’ve seen it before, substituting.
This particular student is enthusiastic, often raising and waving his hand even before the teacher asks another question. His enthusiasm hasn’t been disruptive. He seems to be a bit in his own world — smiling to himself, thinking his own thoughts. Good kid.
After leaving the campus, I went to StayWired!Coffeehouse and Computer Service for two hours, where I’m helping out as a computer tech. After my two hours were up, I informally sat in on a meeting for Democrat CathyHirt‘s campaign for the Fort Worth mayor position. There, upon being asked, I talked a little about my experiences and observations working for the local public school system.
I have to confess I’m bewildered about the relationships between my roles as a writer, teacher, newbie activist, blogger, and tweep (Twitter person). For example, working as an activist differs from volunteering for a political campaign (as I did for Bill White), from working for one in an official capacity, from blogging reportage or opinion about it, from incorporating observations of a campaign into a fiction project, etc. It’s a bit unnerving when you’re sitting there with a few people talking local politics and you’re trying to figure out which hat you’re wearing, so to speak. I have no real idea how to resolve these mini-conflicts, and there’s no one right answer.
The convention for blogs to be frequently updated conflicts with my personal preference for long-form or at least mucho-revised writing; and, when I’ve tried to blog long-form writing in the past, it’s often come off as too complex (Latinate, twisted syntax…) and hasn’t been revised well enough — a bad compromise between careful long-form writing and a quick blog post. Really, if you’re blogging long-form pieces, you’re essentially writing e-books. Since I consider myself a non-commercial writer (i.e. my goal isn’t profit; that possibility is a fringe benefit; I don’t mean that I consider myself highbrow — I try not to think in those terms), I’m not against the idea of eventually releasing more of my creativewriting (fiction and otherwise) under CreativeCommons licenses, but I sense that right now, I still need the bigger bullhorns and reputation-build of established venues (i.e. magazines, publishing houses).
Vika covers Metallica’s Orion
The increasing online success of vkgoeswild (Vika Yermolyeva) has been a bit of an eye-opener for me. I thought she was cool before she joinedforces with Dresden Dolls drummer Brian Viglione (Hipstercultural capital snobby-stupid FTW! =p). Vika supports herself by receiving online tips and selling customized transcriptions online. Other artists and bloggers have figured out similar business models (search through Boing Boing for many examples and discussions). But for creative writing, I just don’t excel at the very short, very quickly written form, which seems to be necessary to any feasible online business model I can actually think up for right now.
Tomorrow I begin a 12-week placement as a clinical teacher within the Fort Worth ISD en route to earning a full-meal-deal schoolteaching certificate. Tonight I’m quite a bit nervous.
The campus is an elementary school. I’ve substituted a fair number of times in the middle and high school grades, as well as in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. I love kids and I love teaching. It requires patience, empathy, honesty, effective communication, a strict but fair approach, courage, an understanding of how people (young folk are people, too) need structure, a knack for facilitating group activity, good documentation skills, the ability to coordinate with coworkers…
So I’m confident in my abilities and experience. The anxiety comes from other causes. I’m not at all the best when it comes to crossing t’s and dotting i’s when time is of the essence, and that’s a necessary part of most work. I still don’t have many of the nitty-gritty details figured out (where do I park?), but I’ve always been able to improvise as a substitute. “Bring it on!” is my basic attitude, but everyone, including me, gets scared.
Wifely Kate has been so supportive and generous with her help. This weekend we did a lot of prep stuff, such as buying me more button-down dress shirts, cutting my hair (I still have a big ol’ shock of cowlick-y hair, which seems to be undefeatable). Marrying her has been the best thing that ever happened to me. And not just because she’s cooking breakfast and packing my lunch in the early, early morning as I get my creative writing in before driving to campus.
Schoolteaching is also scary because of possible political and work-world implications of online activity, online personal opinions. Working — at least as a substitute — has made me an official public servant. And there’s a lot of controversy over schoolteaching — for example, the Texastextbookcontroversy. What if something I tweet — such as this in favor of journalist Glenn Greenwald – bothers a parent or a supervisor? Oh well! I don’t really know how to handle that other than how I handle personal interaction in general, which is to try to be honest, fair, and diplomatic. I’m not one to stay quiet and keep my head down.
I’m ready. Again: Bring it on.
I need to make public something else soon, too, but I’ll leave that as a cliffhanger due to time constraints: I gotta get some sleep!
Today was so fun I failed to take any pictures of it, or manage any more than a piddling number of bloops and tweets and beeps. To serve our Hive Mind Overlord better I shall blog this. Post title refers to this story.
Right when Kate woke, she hurried me out of the house to help her get lumber for her square foot gardens. She and I found the lumber, then went to La Familia for lunch. As per their custom they set my margarita on fire. Word.
As she gardened I read Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, and the weather was warm enough to forgo layering. I could lie out there on the grass for hours with her.
We went downtown later, to the Flying Saucer, where I continued reading Franklin and she read Brian Stableford’s amazing story “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death,” a long-standing favorite of mine.
Back home we watched the first episode of HBO’s Rome series. Eventually Kate put on Rainbow Brite (see embed below), which caused our mind meld to come to an abrupt halt.
Ever notice how, often, when people are having a perfectly good time, and the time comes to a close, somebody’s got to go and spoil it? Takes a lot for some folks (such as myself) to be okay with having an ordinary, happy day. Ah, that’s a long story… But today was great, through and through.
Just a few days ago Republican John Boehner assumed Speakership of the House of Reps. Unfortunately. Boehner is of course a hard-corerightwinger whose views I find abhorrent. He’s also known for crying a lot, publicly, something many on the left have made fun of him for — a response that’s come into question.
I found myself strangely moved by the way John Boehner assumed the Speakership [...] his humility was touching. Including the tears. [...]
I am a heart-on-my-sleeve progressive who wants Obama to be re-elected and to move 60 degrees leftward. [...]
[But the] tears are real. Why wouldn’t they be? Essentially a poor nobody from Ohio, who pushed a broom to pay for college, [Boehner] is in awe of where he is today. [...]
Yes, I know that crying over one’s own miraculous career while voting to deny others a chance to succeed is hypocritical, worse than hypocritical. But [...] our guys are just as hypocritical as theirs. [...]
The Democrats are less bad than the Republicans and that is why I’m a Democrat. But that will not cause me to mock a Republican who actually seems like a human being. And I don’t think Democratic spokespeople should either.
Though admittedly I’ve encouraged some Boehner semi-mockery at least once (i.e., retweeting this), for a long time I’ve lived emphasizing empathy and tolerance for perspectives not my own — including to the point of empathizing with the emotions of political opponents. Two causes (among many) for my approach: 1) creative writing, like acting, requires stepping into others’ shoes and appreciating their complete personhood, 2) my Ayn Rand phase, though unfortunately way too long, thankfully left me able to realize just how radically something in life — whether it’s a principle or a skyline — is subject to interpretation. You live for years feeling a skyline symbolizes one thing, and that interpretation and similar ones consolidate into an entire personality. But then your life undergoes a sea change, and now the skyline means something else to you. Having changed so drastically yourself, you can understand how others, whose premises you now disagree with, experience genuine emotions that derive from their acceptance of their premises, just as your emotions once flowed genuinely from wrongheaded assumptions.
Back to Boehner. Rosenberg was referring to the tearing-up near the start of the embedded video above, which strikes me, as it does Rosenberg, as sincere. There’s interesting dissent, as with felicitymb at Rosenberg’s post with a comment:
Mr. Boehner’s tears are brought on by feeling evermore (and destined to grow) sorry for himself. It’s one of the marks of a narcissist. The unfortunate, for us, trait of the true narcissist is a complete lack of empathy. (We were exposed to, and suffered because of it, this trait in Mr. Cheney.)
So felicitymb thinks Boehner, here, is a self-indulgent crybaby; it doesn’t seem quite that way to me. And some anonymous nobodies rack the tears up to alcohol. I wouldn’t know, and that seems nothing more than a personal attack. Anyway this Pittsburgh Tribune-Review profile of Boehner seems to confirm Rosenberg’s sense of the Speaker.
On one hand (justice) I envision Boehner as a complete bad guy aware of the pernicious effects of his policies. In a USA where one in four kids eats off food stamps, the top 1% of income earners (something like 400 billionaries) — whom Republicans consistently assist — have more dough than the entire bottom 50% combined, and there’s no universal healthcare (yet), it’s hard for someone on the left not to see him this way. Boehner’s got to be informed, not just about the radical wealth inequality he apparently never mentions, etc., and so according to this perspective, his sentiments are all fraudulent, an act. He must know better.
On the other hand (mercy), which I try to believe … I envision that maybe Boehner, for the most part, actually believes his own premises. Maybe despite the actual effects of his agenda, he worries about the amount of kids on food stamps just as I do, but disagrees as to the causes and the solutions. (Unlike nuts such as, say, Republican Andre Bauer, who grew up on free- and reduced-price school lunches, and who then as an adult compares the public-sector feeding of the poor to feeding stray animals. A disgusting and disingenuous appeal to his rightwing constituency.)
So what’s the sound of these two hands clapping? I line up behind the nonviolent movements of the world, the idealism and the belief in compassion and forgiveness, whether it’s in real life, as with Dr. King, or in fiction, as with Jean Valjean or hell, Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker. I’ll leave Jesus to your idiosyncratic imaginations.
But isn’t there an argument to be made — I’m not making it — that too often, starry-eyed compassion winds up ineffective? That, for the most part, the compassionate play softball in a world where villains play hardball? That, make-believe Darth Vaders and Javerts aside, hardly any villains have any real interest in being converted by the compassionate, #bipartisanship or no?
Okay, well, assume for the sake of argument that such “realism” is true, assume softball is sufficiently useless against hardball. After all, the ending of Return of the Jedi is played such as to allow the audience to conveniently forget Darth Vader killed what, millions or billions of people on multiple planets — so then Vader throws a single elderly emperor into a pit and gets full(?) redemption? Is that right?
The problem with this hardball-realist approach, I think, is that it just terminates in more violence. If compassion is nothing but a weak tool in your toolkit, and you’re downtrodden, disenfranchised, etc., then why not bring out the more powerful tools? Because: violence begets violence. The line between the oppressor and the oppressed gets blurred. You take the high-road of compassion and nonviolence, and you’re in the clear.
Unless and until this quote from Christian theologian Herbert McCabe comes into play: “If you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.”
My good friend CynthiaShearer said something in a long-ago (long-ago in net years) blog post, a review of Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road, that has puzzled me for a while. Before I get all critical of a single phrase in her post, lemme say some positive stuff to block any negative feelings.
Her blog post’s awesome.
Cynthia’s awesome and her blog’s awesome.
Revolutionary Road and Richard Yates are awesome.
Thanks to Cynthia’s review, Wifely and I both read the novel, and we found it so worthwhile, the book has since become something of a touchstone in some of our conversations.
Now with the kindnesses out of the way, here’s my quarrel, or really, quibble jumping-off point. In the course of otherwise spot-on praise for Yates’ novel, Cynthia gives the following as a thought on the book:
The novel is flawlessly structured, three acts, and eminently filmable.
Confirming what I thought, my OS X dictionary gives the following definition for “eminently”:
used to emphasize the presence of a positive quality
Maybe Cynthia wasn’t using the word so specifically, but regardless of authorial intent…and setting aside commerce, writers upping their audience — i.e., considering aesthetics alone — why is it a positive (or a negative) quality for a book to be filmable? We don’t say: “That’s a great sculpture; after all, it’d make a fantastic piece of photography” or “That’s a great painting; after all, it’d make an excellent symphonic work.”
Connections between artistic content remixed into another art form can be worth pursuing and elaborating and evaluating, but I don’t see any basis for using as a criterion of aesthetic appraisal the ease with which an artistic piece can be remixed to another art form.
By the way, one of my favorite remixes of artistic subjects is Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem Isle of the Dead Op. 29, composed in the early 20th century and then recorded with Rachmaninoff himself conducting. And yes, it’s “beginner’s classical,” shut up. Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead inspired Rachmaninoff’s piece — apparently the black-and-white version:
Here’s the color version:
And the music, low-fi and split into two parts due to copyright and YouTube limitations:
Anyway, the (wrongheaded!) idea of using as a criterion of qualitative judgment an artwork’s capability to be transformed from one art form to another got me to thinking: what can a novel do that no other art form can do? The closest (non-textual) art forms are probably plays (in performance) and movies (“movies,” not “films”; I don’t screen films, I watch movies). What can novels do that those art forms can’t do? I’ll not consider plays, as I haven’t thought much about them. So: movies.
In my tentative answers I’m going to put aside style, too, since sentence-level quality, I think, is a) not obligatory for a novel to be good, and b) not inherently novelistic. So, my first tentative answer: maybe novels can represent time, the workings of memory, changing perspectives, and the inner experience of emotions and thoughts better than any other form. As an example of what I mean (UPDATE: screenhead.com’s list of the hardest novels to film), Theodore Sturgeon’s excellent short story The Man Who Lost the Sea (legal full text at link) — warning, spoiler in the third quoted paragraph:
Say you’re a kid, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look here, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away. [...]
His head isn’t working right. But he knows clearly that it isn’t working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn’t remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later . . . forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn’t stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did. . . . Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn’t want to bother the sick man with it now. [...]
Say you were that kid: say, instead, at last, that you are the sick man, for they are the same; surely then you can understand why of all things, even while shattered, shocked, sick with radiation calculated (leaving) radiation computed (arriving) and radiation past all bearing (lying in the wreckage of Delta) you would want to think of the sea. For no farmer who fingers the soil with love and knowledge, no poet who sings of it, artist, contractor, engineer, even child bursting into tears at the inexpressible beauty of a field of daffodils—none of these is as intimate with Earth as those who live on, live with, breathe and drift in its seas. So of these things you must think; with these you must dwell until you are less sick and more ready to face the truth.
(Oddly for a science fiction story originally published in a straight-up “genre” magazine — The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction — “The Man Who Lost the Sea” was selected for the 1960 edition of The Best American Short Stories.)
I’m not sure a play or a movie could represent the Sturgeon story, its workings of time, memory, changing perspectives, and inner experience as well and as concisely — or even at all. But that’s a huge disjunction: are plays and movies able to represent the Sturgeon story — just not concisely or well — or is there something inherent to the story that cannot be translated to another art form? I think that depends on how inherent an aspect of an artwork has to be for it to be considered inherent. ;-) And, how good does the movie have to be? The movie could voice-over or crawl tons of text to get closer to the original fiction format, but that (probably) would become annoying. You never know, however; artists are always figuring out new techniques. All the same, because representing time, memory, changing perspectives, and inner experience is at least a huge strength of fiction (and especially the novel), more and more I try to emphasize those qualities in my own writing.
I said first tentative answer, so how about this second one, which I can describe best in a metaphorical way? Novels are like multicharacter, revised, organized daydreams — or, imagine being a kid and playing with dolls or figurines, making up stories. That’s basically what novels are, I think, but not so much created daydreams worlds as the daydream-y experience of personal identity as a network of multiple narratives, comprised of images, emotions, etc., and stuck into the context of particular settings and social histories/influences and so forth. Sorta sounds like Bakhtin’s account of polyphony in Dostoevsky. But I haven’t read enough Bakhtin yet to say much; besides, his name sounds like Bactine.
Please don’t DMCA-takedown me, Bayer
This way of looking at what’s unique to novelistic form doesn’t seem to strongly entail the memory rumination or time aspects or changing perspectives I mentioned earlier, but yeah, I think fiction — especially when it avoids too much exposition and abstraction — stages a vehicle for experiencing a daydream related to identity and traveling in a specific historical or social context. Yet in “When Narrative Fails,” an article in May 2004′s Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, J. Melvin Woody makes an interesting case that other forms of art can do this, too:
“Why [...] should we limit our understanding of the constitution of the self to the narrative? Indeed, why limit ourselves to language? Do not music and dance often articulate our passions more eloquently than any literary form?”
Nevertheless I think my second answer is pretty strong, and pertinent to why reading fiction is not just another hobby or preference, but something people who have the ability and resources and time to read it really should do so.
For various reasons, some good, some bad, I don’t watch much TV at all. This is often to my detriment as there’s a lot of great stuff there, as you probably know better than I do. Probably it comes as no surprise that I don’t really get into Keeping Up With the Kardashians =p. However I’ve picked up enough of it secondhand from Wifely Kate‘s watching that I feel comfortable commenting, though I haven’t seen too terribly much of the show. For the uninitiated, here’s a benign-enough clip:
Keeping Up With the Kardashians has averaged 3.7 million viewers this year, double last season’s total, and was especially successful in the young, female and free-spending demographic coveted by advertisers. According to Nielsen, Kardashian viewers tend to be single, college-educated women with no children, white-collar jobs and annual salaries of more than $60,000. The show is the highest-rated series on cable among women between the ages of 18 to 34 and occasionally beats even the network shows in its time slot for those viewers.
According to the almighty Wikipedia, “Kimberly Noel ‘Kim’ Kardashian (born October 21, 1980) is an American celebutante, socialite, television personality, producer, actress, and model.”
When I ask, viewers of the show — yeah, yeah, a very limited sample size of them — often tell me vigorously that (in my words) when they watch they maintain emotional distance from the content and, basically, (sometimes) laugh at the (sometimes) immaturity of the people/characters. I suspect this is for the large part untrue.
I think the show’s attraction comes from a different source. Some of the attraction, obviously enough, is the vicarious experience of fantastic wealth, and some must be the feeling “At least I’m not doing as bad as these immature people.” Those feelings combined give compensatory/escapist relief. But I don’t think they alone can account for the show’s huge draw.
Actually I think viewers really identify with much of what the show’s characters are saying, doing, feeling. Some of what they’re saying (including from other episodes), loosely transcribed: “It’s really hard to express your feelings”; “You need to pay attention to your responsibilities”; and so on. None of that is particularly false, or different from what many say in private. But since the Kardashians is so jam-packed with such comments expressed in such loopy settings, the comments seem ridiculous enough that people feel safe identifying with them. (I mean, imagine footage of a President’s cabinet sitting around talking about such things. THAT would really trouble people.) With the truth spoken by Kardashian semi-fools, viewers can assure themselves aloud that they themselves don’t really assert such things, and simultaneously let themselves privately identify with such emotions. They can secretly, privately take refuge in the Kardashians expressing them; with them it can feel okay to feel the plight of the spoiled, to hear the parental advice, etc. I’m not sure this is a benign thing ultimately, but I think it’s what’s really going on.
There’s a useful lesson here for creative writers. Part of writing is realizing and admitting that it’s all true, the entire wide gamut of emotions and ideas and morals, inside each and every person. Evil tendencies of thought, lazy motives, good moments of charity and maturity, etc. Plausible characters should encompass all that, as we all do.
I’m going to compare the Kardashians with another I consider similar enough in some aspects, Bridezillas. A clip from that show (much less benign):
I can’t find good info on Bridezillas’ viewer demographics, but there’s this press release:
Available in over 76 million homes, WE tv’s programming offers viewers compelling perspectives on women’s lives ranging from the ordinary to the extraordinary, presented in a non-judgmental voice. The network’s popular original series include the signature show Bridezillas
There’s nothing in the show’s content to indicate it’s supposed to be taken one way or the other, either, and the above press release emphatically claims its representation of the individuals’ lives is “non-judgmental.” But sometimes viewers for this show tell me they watch it in some sort of “ironic” manner, meaning they say they don’t “really” invest in the individuals’ lives, but rather laugh at them, regard them with scorn.
Again, I don’t think their claim is true; I think it’s a smokescreen. I bet the show serves as a way for (many of) its viewers to get out (maybe as catharsis) those unacceptable emotions we all have. Wish there were some healthier way of doing it. Who knows, though? Maybe viewing the shows is as a-ok as anything else.
I don’t like, and can’t get behind, the actors serving as human guinea pigs, though, or as fodder for other people’s amusement or vicarious release of negative emotions.
Take all this with a grain of salt. I haven’t watched much of these shows, I haven’t read or thought much about them. But I do think much more is going on here than what is claimed or what meets the eye.
Looking through a Martha Stewart book, Kate got the idea to suspend baskets, cutting boards, and other cookware from the kitchen ceiling to save space and make the items more visible and accessible. We kept forgetting which pieces we had, and sometimes if we knew, we couldn’t find them. Thus: bring in the dexterous Tyler to construct a gear-storing station, better known as a kitchen rack.
Tyler the Handyman
The actual platform — the piece parallel to the ceiling — is a chainlink fence’s gate. At each of the four corners, Tyler used chains (he adjusted the lengths for leveling) to connect the gate to circle screws he’d driven into the ceiling. Some of the cookware rests atop the gate, and baskets hang from the gate by hooks or cut-off coat hanger tips that serve as hooks.
Kate the Cook
The task was no more complex than it looks, it cost only about $50-$60, but it did take a fair amount of time. However, not as much time as the indefatigable Martha spent in prison.
I think there’s a decent, though not great, argument to be made that USA governments* should periodically distribute copies of the Constitution (and/or other laws, such as city charters) to the citizenry for free (well, out of tax revenues).
We the People (really!)
Two lines of reasoning support this idea, and a zillion possibly fatal problems stand in the way.
My first line of reasoning works by analogy. Every year, the public school district (here, anyway) distributes print copies of the student disciplinary code to all students (okay, at least middle schoolers and up; not sure about elementary students: I presume, for them, the district gets copies to their families). With the disciplinary code booklet in hand, students to some extent are able to learn what rules they’re subject to and what rights they have. If you accept this policy for public schools, shouldn’t you accept that the same privilege should be handed to voters?
My second line of reasoning is more analytic. If you grant that successful democracy requires a decently educated citizenry, it seems to follow fairly easily that the citizenry needs to have good access to the laws, etc.
STOP! This whole idea is ridiculous; come off it, Mr. Writer, and consider these counter-arguments:
1) Cost.
2) The laws are already available; this is unnecessary.
3) It wouldn’t make a difference; maybe it’d raise some awareness, but that’s not our governments’ role.
4) The laws are already available; receiving them would be annoying, a hassle.
5) There wouldn’t be meaningful access.
6) This isn’t a priority.
My responses:
1) E-copies come to mind first as a solution to cost problems. But that requires net access for all voters, education as for how to use it, etc. Easier said than done, but in theory possible; Tim O’Reilly tweets about e-democracy, I think — go ask him. For print-copy solutions, I think the requisite nonprofits or whoever could easily predict what the price tag would actually be before we arm-chair about it. But assuming the price tag turned out to be high, what about requiring phonebook producers (or some other snailmail spammer) to insert the legal text into those directories they throw on our porches without our permission? In fact, don’t USA governments already require phonebook producers to include a section with government-related phone numbers? But, okay, in the absence of suitable e-copies, I could see cost as a fatal flaw to the idea.
2) The laws are already available, but that doesn’t necessarily imply giving people hard (or e-) copies isn’t worthwhile. After all, the school district makes the student disciplinary code available online, too, and still gives out hard copies. Just because the laws are available doesn’t mean everyone has access to them (physical or otherwise), and availability alone doesn’t help people pay attention to them.
3) The ‘Who’d care?’ counter-argument is interesting, but if the cost is sufficiently low (it might not be), the counter-argument could be irrelevant. Assuming the ‘Who’d care?’ argument counts, though, whether people cared probably could be measured with some degree of usefulness (though there are insurmountable barriers to perfectly measuring such things as that). Not sure the results would matter, though. What about (by analogy) services such as C-SPAN? I suspect C-SPAN primarily serves to raise awareness; it’s not entertainment, that’s for sure. I mean, don’t we want citizens engaged insofar as they can afford to be?
4) Complaining that this would all be a hassle seems unimportant to me; receiving an annual copy of the laws wouldn’t be any more difficult to trash than any of the other spam people receive. Now, maybe the hassle would create negative associations with activism, and thus the whole project would backfire. Doubt it; but, if so, maybe we’re too toast for any of this to have any effect.
5) Meaningful access could be mandated the same way parents have the right to be notified (in their native language) of their (public school student) childrens’ educational placements. Now, ensuring that meaningful access is totally a headache, but headaches didn’t stop us from putting people on the Moon. Easy for me to say, of course, but to answer the question of how to actually implement headache-solutions is why God gave us techies, bean-counters, and wonks. =)
6) Okay, you have me with this one; distributing copies of the laws probably isn’t a priority. But our governments can multi-task…
That’s all, folks; no more sketching out the blueprint for a just civil society, not tonight…
* It might be wise to replace the phrase “US government” with “USA governments” to counter both American Exceptionalism (so, “USA” instead of “US”) and the notion of the “gub’ment” as a single, monolithic, and usually evil, entity (so, “governments” and not “government”). Many governments co-ordinating (or not) make up the USA, some quite good, some not. On this note, there’s this distinction about terminology, pointed out recently in The Economist:
it’s important to distinguish between the government—the temporary, elected authors of national policy—and the state—the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government.
Note the new button below; through flattr you can tip specifically for this single post.
A frittata, for those of you who don’t know, is, apparently, a hand grenade.
FRITTATA ON YOUR FLOOR
Wikipedia says a frittata is “an egg-based dish similar to an omelette or quiche, either simple or enriched with additional ingredients such as meats, cheeses, vegetables or pasta. It may be flavored with herbs.” But, nope. It’s a bomb!
WELL, NO, NOT REALLY
Recipe for Fritatta Bomb
Procure a pie plate [sic].
Spray pie plate with PAM, or perhaps gasoline.
Within the pie plate, sautee garlic, onion, and peppers — as in pepper spray.
Put in additional food: celery, carrots, brussels sprouts, egg — maybe rat poison, too.
Take to detonation location, set on (portable) stove, cook.
This month CBSDFW.com, the website for KTVT, the CBS station in Dallas – Fort Worth (that’d be channel 11), published some ‘Best of’ pieces I wrote for ‘em. Here they are, with a tiny excerpt of each.
All Texans twenty-one-and-up need to have their own great margarita recipe, ideally, or at least know somebody — a bartender buddy, a sister-in-law, somebody close — who does. If a personal margarita can’t be made, however, there are plenty of places in Fort Worth on standby
At Ol’ South Pancake House, everyone — students pulling all-nighters, bikers, high-powered attorneys telling war stories, metalheads, cops — eats in the same few rooms together.
When it comes to alcohol, if you want to keep up with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and James Bond, you’ll have to learn how to enjoy one of their signature drinks: the martini cocktail.
With singers who desperately need surgery on their vocal cords, guitars that do their best to imitate sentient chainsaws, and lyrics straight out an illiterate criminal’s essay paper on “The Lord of the Rings,” heavy metal might not be music that you want to admit listening to.
Press the red button on your comfy chair’s tray and the staff will come take your order for wings, for a margarita, or for another margarita! After the show, be sure to sit out on the balcony — the view is fantastic — and debate the movie’s merits with your friends.
They were fun to write. I haven’t ever seemed to initiate discussion about any of my writing that’s been published, and I’m continuing that trend now. After publication, my primary role in a text’s life is basically done, save I guess for fixing typos or something in a theoretical reprint of whatever.
So: they were fun to write. Really! =D Hope you enjoy.
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