Mess

The world is a mess. Always has been. Always will be.

I can't claim this as an original insight. I read it long ago and have enjoyed recalling it whenever politics, economics, the weather, scandals, and outrages combine in a particularly nasty way. I've been thinking about the idea a lot lately.

The Euro is hovering at the edge of a precipice. If it goes, it will take the world's economy with it. The Republicans have assembled quite a circus of potential presidents and are trying them out. A couple of them look like fine people; the rest can only scare anyone with a brain, or, as one of them said in a debate, a heart. The Democratic nominee-apparent, the incumbent, did not prove up to much of the hope placed in him (and evoked deliberately by his most famous campaign poster). He was said to have been reading about fellow-Illinoisan Lincoln in the days leading up to his inauguration in 2009. He's tried Lincoln's ceaseless patience with his political foes, and ended up with some accomplishments to show for it. But he's as reviled as Lincoln at the low moments of the Civil War. He may end up remembered more like another Illinoisan, Ulysses Grant, who squandered his promise and came to be regarded as a horrible president, one of the worst in polls of historians.

Alabama, my home state and birth state, has embarrassed itself badly with an immigration statute designed to reverse the rise in its Hispanic population. Yesterday, a visiting German manager from Mercedes was arrested for not having his papers with him while driving (oh, historical irony, thank you for that good chuckle). The governor's office called nearly instantly to try to fix the problem. I'm betting no Guatemalans will be extended that courtesy.

I could go on and on about the banking system, the world's climate and population explosion, the stagnant American economy, the collection of thieves and ignoramuses elected to the U.S. House and Senate, and the even worse crew in Alabama's government (I speak in a truly bipartisan spirit: Democrats pillaged for decades in Alabama while they were a monopoly and became a machine whose sole purpose was keeping itself in power and skimming money off the top of tax receipts; it's simply the Republicans' turn now).

On an everyday level, it looks much different. This is our salvation, and maybe a lesson about what's truly important. While the world is a mess, many people in it are wonderful. True, they have their quirks, lies, skeletons, and selfish moments. Yet most of them, most of the time, are a pleasure to deal with or can, if we choose, be pitied for what they're suffering rather than hated for how their pain manifests itself as fear and anger toward others.

The "news" is always going to be mostly bad. It's created, commoditized, and distributed in order to make a profit. Bad stories about particular incidents grab far more eyes, and thus money, than good stories about general trends at the micro level. We won't read or view reports about how usually people are going about their lives showing at least a modicum of respect for each other and not deliberately trying to inflict harm in order to please the false gods of money, fame, or power. Maybe that's why the stories about politicians are so fascinating. Their behavior is so aberrant compared to anything we witness, would practice, or could get away with.

That such people rule and do harm from selfishness is not truly "news" -- how could it be when it's not at all new? We just can't predict who exactly will act in such ways while we less assertive sorts are going about our daily business. The "news" is therefore but a freak show skewing rather than uncovering reality. I'll likely continue to read and watch, fascinated as I am by the fixation on destruction exhibited by the allegedly powerful. You might say I have my own fixation, on the blind and predictable choices made by those who can't or won't develop a meaningful and helpful philosophy of life and a long-term view on events. I'll also know they will, as they always have, botch their jobs and push us repeatedly to the brink. I'd like to hope for better, but I haven't seen that humans are capable of it.

That's the way of the world and of people. I don't see the point in being upset about it. Do you?

Is Europe Burning?

Much of Europe is on fire and can do nothing about it -- long ago they used all their water for swimming pools. Germany has lots because it saved its water for just such a contingency. It's proud of the sacrifices, but resents the implication that it should sacrifice even more by retroactively saving those who could have saved themselves. But will the fire make this moral distinction upon reaching the German border?

Who will buy German goods if all of southern Europe defaults on its loans because the European Central Bank is tied to an anti-inflationary policy at German insistence?

I say, print extra money just this once, kick the offenders out of the Euro, and then give up on the notion of a close political union between peoples with thousands of years of distinct cultural development. Free trade is good; the Schengen agreement on unrestricted travel is important; and a shared labor market helps everyone. Some cross-border issues like the environment require uniform regulation. But we've learned that fiscal policies cannot be harmonized, and thus a single currency cannot work.

Sinite parvulos et nolite eos prohibere ad me venire

The revelations about Penn State's football program have stunned me as much as anyone. I can't understand how the chief witness, a 28-year-old member of the coaching staff, could have observed the rape of a child, done nothing to help, and then gone home to tell his father first and only then, the next day, speak with his boss/head coach rather than the police. How do you live with yourself for the next decade knowing that you didn't help that boy and that other boys may have subsequently been raped?

That being said...I seriously doubt pedophilia has increased as drastically in the last decades as the media would make it appear. It must have been far more prevalent when it could be hidden in a fog of shame and humiliation that authorities were reluctant to try to penetrate. Yet, as this clip by my favorite comedian, Bill Burr, makes plain, the cost is borne also by children to whom the rest of us may feel we can no longer be nice:




Women don't face this problem. A few years back, I saw what looked like a lost child in the hallway outside our classrooms. He (or she, I can't remember now) was just standing there by the window, a place where young children shouldn't have been loitering unsupervised. I wondered if the child was in trouble. Rather than approach myself, I asked one of my female co-workers to see if help was needed. It wasn't -- the child's parent had irresponsibly left him or her in the hallway while attending a class and had simply told the child to wait there. By then maybe I'd seen this riff by Burr, or perhaps I already knew the score: an unknown man approaching a child was likely to encounter from the child not the truth, but the stunned silence and averted gaze of one ingrained with the fear of stranger danger.

I like to think that I would have rushed into that shower to help that boy. Or called the police. Or both. It's too easy for me to ponder the issue when I didn't face it. Yet I do know for certain that I only rarely speak to children I don't know, and when I do, I usually encounter reflexive defensiveness rather than the curious wonder I think I always projected in my youth. I can't recall being warned often, or at all, about not talking to strangers. Maybe my parents gave me the standard talk about not going away with people I didn't know. If so, it had no impact on my view of adults. I think I was so flattered by their attention and so eager to learn from them that I wouldn't have recoiled if one spoke to me, rubbed my head, or gave me a smile.

I wouldn't want to grow up today.

Laudat venales qui vult extrudere merces

A good number of years ago I was part of a group making a hiring decision. The choice came down to a few applicants we interviewed in person. One we could scratch because his written application had fooled us; he was clueless in person. But we had a very difficult time choosing from the others. As I believe is bound to happen in these group decisions, each of our intuitions made our decisions for us. Only then the reasonable parts of our mind began to concoct a story to justify our intuitive reaction.

One of the people I liked most was distrusted by another of our group. She said this applicant had too often been vouching for his own integrity and honesty. At the time, this was a new one on me. I couldn't see a problem. All these years later, though, I know I would react just as my colleague did.

Unlike my colleague -- who carried her point in the discussion -- I hadn't been fooled enough yet by people who talked themselves up. The honest person knows how difficult it is to be honest. He or she realizes that dishonor and disgrace, at least in our own minds, are but a single moment's lapse away should we misbehave. Telling someone you're honest is to spout words you may quickly have to eat.

The dishonest person, the one who doesn't actively think about the fine line to be tread between right and wrong, has no problem constructing and narrating a story about his or her honesty. They'll fool people like the me of many years ago who never see through the deception, and they'll fool a lot of dishonest people in the bargain, because they're blind to their own problem. That leaves those of us who try hard, but sometimes fail, to be upright to watch out for themselves and those close to them. If you vouch for your character in front of me, don't be surprised if I put my hand on my wallet and start walking backwards, never taking my eye off you.

Nimium ne crede colori

I'm no more skilled at avoiding the deception of good looks than anyone else. Yet even as I've beheld thousands of people who appear physically attractive to me, I've come to feel sorry for them if they also seem equally attractive to everyone else. We've all heard how people who are perceived as good-looking get better jobs, faster promotions, more unsolicited offers of assistance, etc. No good-looking woman in search of a drink ever has to pay for it. No good-looking guy has to do more than say "hi" to pique the interest of someone he's interested in.

It's all unearned -- and that's the problem. They learn nothing from alleged successes that have required no work, no sacrifices, and no mistakes along the way. Think of the supermodel who claims that modeling is "hard work." How would she know? How would she fare if her looks vanished for some reason?

Bette Davis explored this dilemma in one of her lesser known films, "Mr. Skeffington." She obtained all she thought she wanted, and got away with mistreating everyone around her, because she was seen as ravishing. She hadn't understood her husband, a man she'd married only for his money, when he'd told her "A woman is beautiful when she's loved, and only then."

An illness destroys her good looks overnight, just as she's entering middle age, and she's abandoned by everyone who had sought her out solely to enjoy the aesthetic pleasure she radiated. I won't spoil the movie any further. I think it should be required viewing in high school: it gives a warning to the good-looking, and hope to the rest.

It's only natural to want to stare at something you perceive as beautiful. There must be a chemical signal in the brain rewarding us intensely, telling us that we want to mate with that (or at least benefit from being close to it). So I've begun to deliberately look away on some occasions, just for practice. I also want to do them a favor in any interaction by being a little more demanding than usual, so that they experience what it's like to have to use reason and empathy to guide their relations with the less aesthetically advantaged.

I know they must be terrified inside to consider what life will be like once the good looks fade and ultimately vanish. By not looking or by being a little brusque and businesslike, I'm giving them a foretaste so that they can realize it won't be all that bad to have to earn, minute by minute and success by success, everything they achieve.

I've seen the future, and it's ugly

An article in today's New York Times makes plain that Greece should have defaulted on its government debt long ago. Three things kept this from happening. (1) Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, refused to believe that a Euro state could be allowed to default. He was influenced toward his view by the increasing amount of Greek debt the ECB had purchased to stem the growing crisis. (2) Many European and American banks were holders of the debt, and in their still anemic state, might collapse if forced to write off most or all of the loans, leading to worldwide recession/depression. (3) Many of the loans were hedged (insured) using the infamous credit default swaps familiar to us from the mortgage debacle still underway. If Greece goes into a state of default without the permission of its creditors, the swaps are triggered. No one seems to know who all has sold the swaps, and who has bought them, with the result being fear of a panic if they're triggered and the solvency of major financial players is put into doubt. As in 2008, credit would stop, and our system, which depends on credit to continually roll over short-term debt, would collapse.

The only reasonable, if still painful solutions left are these: (1) The Euro states that can afford it buy a lot of the debt. This would be a political and moral disaster. Wealthier and more productive states that took difficult steps to rein in their debt years ago would have to bail out the Greeks, who lied repeatedly in order to keep the loans coming and not face the political consequences of reducing their borrowing. Or (2) the European Central Bank buys the debt by increasing the money supply ("printing money") in order to fund the purchases. It is currently forbidden to do this, so a rule would have to be changed or ignored. The price would be a drop in the Euro, inflation in Europe, and a transfer of wealth from those with assets denominated in Euros to those holding other forms of real wealth (land, real estate, stocks, etc.). 

This means either German taxpayers would pay quite openly and would likely rebel, or Europeans in general would pay with a bout of inflation. Such an inflation would also make it more difficult for non-Europeans to sell their goods in Europe, since the Euro would fall relative to other currencies, making European goods cheap elsewhere, and imports more costly.

Welcome to Our New World.

Lenior et melior fis, accedente senecta

Not too long ago, I reconceived my life so that it no longer had only two ages (young and old), but four. There was to be a prelude, which was my childhood and adolescence. Then Act 1, the first half of adulthood (18-48), the era of striving. Act 2 would be the era of wisdom (48-78). The postlude will be whatever time is left, assuming I make it that far in the first place.

It's hardly a coincidence that this decision came in my 48th year. For some time I'd been feeling better and better about being older and older. Yet I couldn't get my mind around the concept of all the wisdom and serenity being packed into such a tiny portion of my life. At some point I must have realized that I should no longer say that my entire life is well over half gone, but that my adult life has just entered into its second half. This presupposes that I'll live to be as old as my father, who recently died at 80. It's as good a number as any to plan with. That gives Act 1 thirty years, and Act 2 the same. It's as if I'm starting a new life in these very days, and the metaphor pleases me.

For a few years, I'd been realizing I was caring less or not at all about any number of things that used to motivate or interest me (for example: sports, movies, politics, pay raises, what other people thought about me). Books, Italian, writing, and my dog have supplanted them. It took a while, but my divorce transformed me into a profoundly happy man, and these four things make me happiest. I hope to pursue them in an atmosphere of serenity and joy. I'm making a good start, and beginning to feel certain of something I've long haltingly believed: it's not despite my living alone, it's because I live alone.

I had terrible "luck" dating after my divorce. I finally realized it wasn't luck, but my sabotaging the process by looking for the wrong person. This wrong person was very likely any person. It's not that I'm opposed to being around the same woman a lot. It's simply that the odds of her being someone I could stand and who could stand me are so long, and the trouble in finding her immense. It's much more peaceful and joyful to enjoy my freedom as it is rather than look for a way to change it dramatically. If it comes yet, fine. If not, finer.

Then there's also the matter of my bad hearing, which is combining with my introversion in a particularly powerful way to lead me to avoid any gatherings where more than one person speaks at a time. If you're going to do that, then you're going to be by yourself a lot. I went to two weddings last weekend, strained to hear at the receptions, and felt so bad about it that I left as early as I politely could. My specific kind of introversion isn't about shyness. On social occasions it has much more to do with being largely silent while trying with intense concentration to figure out second-by-second the person or people I'm with, a process which absorbs almost all my energy and attention. If I can't hear, it messes everything up. I leave feeling exhausted and defeated, at least until I reach the sanctuary of my car and drive off. Then everything's better, instantly. It's as if the quiet and solitude are themselves a source of energy.

Horace wrote, "You become milder and better as old age advances." While this is true for me, I'd add this: "And milder and better still if you can align your inner and outer lives harmoniously."

I've been very, very fortunate.

Error qui non resistitur approbatur

Any aspiring professor who could be shown the total mass of written work to be graded in succeeding decades would tremble. Some might turn away and never return. The piles of a single semester's midterms, term papers, and finals are such to make every other routine task (dishes, vacuuming, cleaning out the septic tank, brushing the dog's teeth) an urgent matter requiring immediate attention.

Some disciplines have it easier with grading, but perhaps harder in other ways. Subjects that use almost exclusively multiple-choice exams might, for example, face far more pressure to bring in external funding for research. So I'm not complaining about either how much, or what kind of tests I have to grade. I do get paid to do it, and I knew it was coming because they were the same kinds of tests I'd always had as an undergrad and grad student.

What was most difficult shortly after beginning my career, and then for a long time after, was knowing exactly what kind of issues on written work I wanted to grapple with and bring to the students' attention. Some instances were always clear-cut. I'd be shirking my duties, for instance, if I didn't point out errors of historical fact or the failure to provide enough specific evidence to support an essay's thesis. But every single spelling mistake? Unclear antecedents of pronouns? Run-on or comma-spliced sentences? Repeating the same noun or adjective three times in two sentences?

At first, if I erred, it was on the side of marking anything that I wouldn't have knowingly submitted in my own work. I've never forgotten the reaction of a student in the back of one of my earliest upper-level classes on the day I returned term papers. As he leafed through his paper, he asked a friend, loudly enough for me to hear, "is this an English class?" My not forgetting is a sign that somehow the sarcastic query wounded me. I have to admit I'd never had a class or any kind of instruction on what to mark and what not to bother with on history essays. I must have felt insecure, revealed as a fraud who didn't realize that in all other history classes students looking over their marked essays would never have seen such corrections as "the man that started the First World War" (I always insist on "who" in these cases). If the student got reasonably close to the spelling of Gavrilo Princip, then maybe I was supposed to keep my stylistic advice to myself.

My biggest insecurity, the one that led me to mark every error I perceived, of whatever nature, was being seen as someone who'd allowed a mistake to slip past him. My father, once a self-employed accountant and tax preparer, had hired me to check his work for precisely this reason: I loved catching others' mistakes and being seen as smarter for having found them out. Normally, my father hated it when I did that to him (although I'm certain it's a trait I copied from him). Yet he knew the consequences of making a mistake on a client's taxes were so high that his ego could no longer afford to overrule his good sense. Meanwhile, I'd work for the minimum wage of slightly over $3 an hour and the pleasure of an occasional triumph.

Potentially being viewed as slipshod, ignorant, or the dupe of a student who'd run a mistake right under my nose motivated me to keep my pen ready for action at every instant while I graded an essay. Even if my insecurities were groundless, there was the potential professional malfeasance of condoning a mistake or harmful stylistic quirk by failing to mark it. As the years wear on, it's this reason rather than any other that keeps me marking misspellings, who/whom confusions, sentence fragments, and other distractions from the flow of the paper. I'm now happy to allow students to believe they've put one over on me in many settings (well, usually). But I can't bring myself to approve their writing mistakes by passing them in hurried silence. They deserve to be taken seriously as long as they've put some effort into their writing. Pointing out that their words were read with care and found wanting in places, rather than being seen as officious meddling by a history professor, should actually be taken as a sign that the students were viewed as as a colleague while I was reading the essay, someone to whom I owed my fullest attention.

No, it's not an English class. But we like to understand you all the same.