Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

A Year of Thursdays in the Bosque.

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 10:06:00 -0600

Ran into a friend in the Bosque, and we both remarked about how low the rio was, and I jokingly said, "I almost feel like I should take a picture of the river every week to sort of document it."

She said, "Yeah. That'd be interesting."

As she continued with her dog walk, I thought, "I should do that."

With rare exceptions, I walk my dog in the bosque every Thursday morning. And with rare exceptions, I walk the bosque behind the National Hispanic Cultural Center (sometimes parking at the NHCC and sometimes parking at the small pullout lot south off of 2nd Street).

My idea is to the take a picture in the same spot every Thursday for a year to get a photographic record of how much the river changes over time.

I understand a lot about this caged and managed river. Indeed, Reining in the Rio Grande is probably the first sort of scientific, historical, political book on the river I've ever read. That's not a genre I usually read.

Without further explanation here's Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

Volume 9 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 12:55:00 -0600

And then we reach 1980. It's been a decade since they broke up, and as the decade progressed there were more and more opportunities for them to collaborate. Ringo seemed to be the impetus for a lot of those collaborations including at least 3 songs that would've been released on his Stop And Smell The Roses release had Mark David Chapman not chosen to close off this chapter by murdering John Lennon.

With the exception of the songs from McCartney II, the albums these songs were pulled from were released after Lennon's death (Somewhere in England in May, Ringo's Stop And Smell the Roses in October, and Lennon's posthumous Milk and Honey in 1984).

Lennon was clearly settling into a new happy direction in his life and writing beautiful and personal songs that further highlight the tragedy of his death. John Lennon had always been the most direct and upfront in his songs, and the songs on Milk and Honey, with about half being Yoko Ono tunes, do just that.

It's unclear why Paul disbanded Wings, but McCartney II just features him and is certainly not a Wings album as it features some lo-fi choices and the prescient and entirely fabulous "Temporary Secretary"

George Harrison rewrote the lyrics to "All Those Years Ago," after Lenoon's assassination, but Somewhere in England is a middling one in my opinion. Yes, "All Those Years Ago" is a great tune. Even better Somewhere in England also features the beautiful "Life Itself" and a really good cover of Hoagy Carmichael's "Baltimore Oriole" (not included in this project), but the rest is just sort of so-so.

Volume 9-44 Minutes

Albums:

Milk and Honey
McCartney II
Somewhere In England
Stop And Smell The Roses

Songs:

Borrowed Time (JL)
Life Itself (GH)
One Of These Days (PM)
Nobody Told Me (JL)
Waterfalls (PM)
Sure To Fall (In Love With You) (RS)
Coming Up (PM)
Temporary Secretary (PM)
You Belong To ME (RS)
I'm Stepping Out (JL)
All Those Years Ago (GH)
Grow Old With Me (JL)

Volume 7 & 8 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Wed, 1 Sep 2021 21:45:00 -0600

With the commercial success of Band on the Run and Venus and Mars, Paul had all but erased the demon of being "merely" the cute Beatle. He had his own success, with Wings, and could stand his own compositions up next to what he did in the Beatles.

Wings at the Speed of Sound went to number one on the strength of "Let "Em In" and "Silly Love Songs," which I chose not to include because in this project the critique that lead to its creation may not have been an issue. Instead, I include his great, "With A Little Luck" that came out in 1978 on London Town and the great single "Mull of Kyntyre," which is so damn Scottish its easy to see why it was a hit in Great Britain but no where else.

I certainly don't agree with the contemporary critics who characterized George Harrison's Thirty Three and 1/3 as his "best release since All Things Must Pass." In fact I think the earlier releases of Living In The Material World and Dark Horse are much better. Such is the beauty of this project and I include two songs from Thirty Three and 1/3 regardless.

Ah Ringo! Ringo's Rotogravature features him working with all the Beatles (once with John, once with Paul, and once with George). Though, frankly, not that great they certainly hold up well to his work with them on various Beatles projects, so they obviously belong on this volume.

John Lennon's Rock 'n' Roll was his last release of the 1970's. Even that release was not original material and Lennon's absence is largely said to be because he was raising his son, Sean, who was born in 1975.

Volume 7-43 Minutes

Albums:

Wings At The Speed of Sound
Thirty Three and 1/3
Ringo's Rotogravure
London Town
Mull of Kyntyre (single)
Ringo the 4th

Songs:

Let 'Em In (PM)
This Song (GH)
Beware My Love (PM)
Crackerbox Palace (GH)
Cookin' (In The Kitchen Of Love) (RS)
Warm And Beautiful (PM)
Pure Gold (RS)
I'll Still Love You (RS)
With A Little Luck (PM)
Mull of Kyntyre (PM)
Can She Do It Like She Dances? (RS)

Though never a critical favorite, Paul was clearly the most commercially successful Beatle. With Band on the Run, Venus and Mars, and Wings at the Speed of Sound, he'd scored a series of three #1 albums over four years. But that streak wouldn't hold up with London Town (4 songs on Volume 7) and Back to the Egg (3 songs on Volume 8).

Though pop was fully in the throes of Disco, none of the Beatles seemed to dabble in it. In fact George Harrison's George Harrison, is entirely personal, albeit positive album that highlights his interest in formula one racing and his feelings on his newest relationship.

John Lennon, who'd taken almost four years off from recording to raise his son, Sean, also released a very personal, almost domestic, release in Double Fantasy. It's a great album, featuring many great songs.

And then there's Ringo. He is still, in my opinion, trying to figure out what exactly it means to be Ringo Starr and released an unheralded and flop of a release in Bad Boy.

Volume 8-45 Minutes

Album:

Double Fantasy
George Harrison
Back to the Egg
Bad Boy

Songs:

Watching the Wheels (JL)
Blow Away (GH)
Getting Closer (PM)
Who Needs a Heart (RS)
Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) (JL)
Faster (GH)
Lipstick Traces (On a Cigarette) (RS)
(Just Like) Starting Over (JL)
Arrow Through Me (PM)
If You Believe (GH)
Dark Sweet Lady (GH)
Not Guilty (GH)
Winter Rose/Love Awake (PM)

Volumes 5 & 6 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 11:37:00 -0600

Band on the Run was an extremely successful Wings release from Paul McCartney and easily eclipsed Lennon's Mind Games (still a gold record). Released in December of 1973, Band on the Run took some 4 months before it would take its place as the the number one album and then trade that spot for the next 2 months with John Denver, Chicago, the soundtrack to The Sting, and Gordon Lightfoot before descending from the lofty perch for good that year. Though when the year end charts were compiled, it popped up as the best selling album of the year.

Sandwiched between Band on the Run and 1975's Venus and Mars, John Lennon and George Harrison released Walls and Bridges and Dark Horse respectively. Both are really good releases and result in Volume 5 not including anything from Paul McCartney (Band On The Run, was released late in '73, so it pretty much belongs on '74 chronologically), or Ringo Starr.

Volume 5-41 Minutes

Albums:

Walls and Bridges
Dark Horse

Songs:

So Sad (GH)
Steel and Glass (JL)
Ding Dong, Ding Dong
What Ever Gets You Thru The Night (JL)
#9 Dream (JL)
Far East Man (GH)
Bless You (JL)
Nobody Loves You ((When You're Down And Out) (JL)
Dark Horse (GH)

While 1974 only featured releases from John Lennon and George Harrison, 1975 ushered in releases from all four of them again. John went back to his roots with some stripped down covers of pop hits from the 50's and 60's; Paul vaulted to the top of the charts again with Venus and Mars, though it didn't do as well as Band on the Run it has some familiar hits; George Harrison had an okay release with Extra Texture (Read All About It), which featured the surprising "This Guitar (Can't Keep From Crying); and Ringo collaborated with John Lennon on two songs on his Goodnight Vienna release.

Volume 6-47 Minutes

Albums:

Rock 'n' Roll
Venus And Mars
Extra Texture (Read All About It)
Goodnight Vienna

Songs:

Junior's Farm (PM)
You Can't Catch Me (JL)
Venus and Mars (PM)
Rock Show (PM)
You (GH)
Stand By Me (JL)
Goodnight Vienna (RS)
This Guitar (Can't Keep From Crying) (GH)
Letting Go (PM)
Only You (And You Alone) (RS)
Listen To What The Man Said (PM)
The Answer At The End (GH).

Volumes 3 & 4 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 18:21:00 -0600

Do you remember 1972-73? I don't. I know we were still embroiled in Vietnam. I was 7-8 years old, which meant when the year started I was living in Amarillo, TX and getting the nickname of "Motormouth" from my 2nd grade teacher.

By the Fall we'd relocated to Clarendon, TX where I started 3rd grade with Mrs. Lincoln (don't kinow why I remember her name).

But in Beatles lore, you have John Lennon and Paul McCartney putting out very mediocre if not actually bad releases in Sometime In New York City and Red Rose Speedway respectively while George Harrison and Ringo Starr produced what many people argue is their best work in Living In The Material World and Ringo respectively. Also though not included on the album Paul McCartney and Wings actually recorded the first James Bond title song to go to number one and the first "rock" James Bond song for a movie by the same name: "Live and Let Die," which I do include in Volume 3.

Volume 3-44 Minutes

Red Rose Speedway
Sometime In New York City
Living in the Material World
Ringo
Live and Let Die (Single)

Songs (in order)

Live And Let Die (PM)
Attica State (JL)
Photograph (RS)
Living In The Material World (GH)
Loup (1st Indian On The Moon) (PM)
Be Here Now (GH)
My Love (PM)
Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth) (GH)
John Sinclair (JL)
You're Sixteen (You're Beautiful And You're Mine) (RS)
Don't Let Me Wait Too Long (GH)
That Is All (GH)

The end of 1973 saw two releases that form a full volume by themselves: Paul McCartney's Band on the Run and John Lennon's Mind Games. Band on the Run is Paul's best album (yes, I think it's better than Ram) from this era and Lennon's Mind Games though arguably not as good as Imagine is a pretty solid release.

Volume 4-43 Minutes

Albums

Band on the Run
Mind Games

Songs.

Band on the Run (PM)
Jet (PM)
Mind Games (JL)
Out of the Blue (JL)
Mamunia (PM)
I Know (JL)
Let Me Roll It (PM)
One Day (At A Time) (JL)
Bring On The Lucie (Freda People) (JL)
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five (PM)

Volume 1 & 2 of the What if the Beatles never broke up?

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Sun, 22 Aug 2021 14:07:00 -0600

Everyday Chemistry

So, a friend asked if I'd ever heard Everyday Chemistry. I hadn't and dived into the story and read the article posted about it in Consequence of Sound, Basically it's a mashup that the "creator" claims is a released Beatles album from another dimension; a dimension where the Beatles never broke up. It's worth a listen.

But it is not what I am doing. It's a mash-up of an album worth of songs that are mixed together. You'll recognize some of the bits but they aren't really songs in my opinion and certainly wouldn't claim much space on the chart in any dimension while the volumes as I'm constructing them certainly had many songs that historically did just that.

What if the Beatles never broke up?

The last studio release from the Beatles is the entirely under appreciated Let It Be, which was released in May of 1970.  

Prior to that John Lennon had 3 different releases:  Unfinished Music No. 1:  Two Virgins, Unfinished Music No. 2:  Life With The Lions, and the Wedding Album; while Paul McCartney released McCartney, Ringo Starr released Sentimental Journey., and George Harrison had 2 different releases:  Wonderwall Music and Electronic Sound.  None of these are included in this project because they were released before the release of the Let It Be, though Paul's release may have contrtibuted to the band's eventual demise--at least the fans thought that.

In this thought experiment, however, we're going to argue that they didn't break up and instead went on to release the records as they did (just under the Beatles moniker and pretty much working like they did on The Beatles (aka as The White Album)).  So the above releases would've still happened and be solo releases while using my totally arbitrary rules the next 31 releases would be consolidated into 9 releases.

Right out of the gates we have Ringo Starr's Beaucoups of Blues  followed by what many consider to be the best solo release off all the Beatles, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, which being a triple album, I'm splitting across Volumes 1 and Volumes 2.  

Volume 1-40 Minutes

Albums 1970
All Things Must Pass.
Ram.
Plastic Ono Band.
Beaucoups of Blues

Songs (in order):
What is life (GH)
Too many people (PM)
Hold on (JL)
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey (PM)
Isolation (JL)
If not for you (GH)
Eat at home (PM)
Night and Day. (RS)
Working Class Hero (JL)
Woman of the Night (RS)
Another Day. (PM)
Love (JL)

Volume 2-43 Minutes  

Albums (1970-1971):
Imagine
Wild Life
All Things Must Pass
It Don't Come Easy (Single)

Songs:
Imagine (JL)
Some People Never Know (PM)
Jealous Guy (JL)
Gimme Some Truth (JL)
Crippled inside (JL)
It Don't Come Easy (RS)
My Sweet Lord (GH)
How do you sleep? (JL)
Dear Friend (PM)
All things must pass (GH)

What if? A Beatles Project

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Sat, 21 Aug 2021 10:08:00 -0600

So here's the game:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically by "The White Album," they were really just a brand. Each member was working on their own songs, sometimes even recording all the parts (I'm looking at you Paul), but often just asking another band member to come in and play the guitar parts (for example).

It made for a less cohesive album than "Abbey Road" or "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," but it still made for a really great album (some people actually think it's the best).

The problem, as I see it, is that their solo work (post break-up) is just too much of one voice. So what if the Beatles never broke? What if they continued to work but in the fashion that produced "The Beatles" aka "The White Album?"

What would that look like? Below is a table that roughly groups their solo releases by year. Some years they produced multiple albums, and some years one of them didn't produce any albums. Your job is to listen to their studio albums and identify what songs you'd include on their What if? album. I broke it into 8 volumes. Some things to keep in mind:

Of the 30 tracks on "The White Album," Ringo Starr wrote/sang on 1 and George Harrison wrote/sang on 4. That means that 25 of the tracks were Lennon/McCartney. Keep those proportions in mind when you start to create your Volumes?
I also (on the table) split George Harrison's "All Things Must Pass" into two different volumes since it was a double album.
You should aim to create an "album" of 10-12 songs.
There are three (?) solo releases that they produced before they broke up including Paul McCartney's first solo release that I am not including on this list. They hadn't broken up yet, though that may have contributed to their break up.

Father and Son

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 09:52:00 -0600

Father and Son

Another gray hair springs up on my head:

a dandelion in a suburban lawn.
I’m getting old.

I now strategize how I am going to pull myself off the floor,
which result in pushing,
but not too hard,
cause then my bum left wrist will act up,
sending pain messages:
"This is a test of the Emergency Alert System.
Sometime in the distant past you fucked up your wrist.
We don't know why, but it hurts so don't put much pressure on it.
This is only a test."
Oh, my, I’m getting old.

Taking a shit
is now a sort of study session,
where two hours later I reappear after finishing the latest double issue of Rolling Stone.
I'm debating moving a book shelf into the bathroom,
so I'm never forced to abort
because I finished what was at hand.
Yet, I'm peeing every 20 minutes
as if my prostate has swelled and now presses up against my bladder
like dancing with a drunk cowboy at a Country & Western Bar.
Oh, my God!
I'm getting old.

Oh, yes, I can tell you who I voted for in 1984-Reagan,
then switched over to Democrats every year after that,
have lived long enough to watch schools that I went to demolished,
parks paved over by interstates,
and what life was like when you had to use a rotary dial telephone and a party line.
Oh, my God, I'm getting old.

The other day I saw myself in a picture,
and despite what I thought,
I looked fucking pregnant.
It wasn't a joke.
I'm all toned legs, then arms
and then this medicine ball below my breast.
And I've aged,
but not like a fine wine or some cheese,
more like rotting meat or vegetables in a compost heap.
I may be good for some thing, some day,
but I ain't gonna look like this when that happens.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are indeed benefits.
I'm called Mister or Sir a lot,
people think my opinion really matters,

I’m not dismissed as young and inexperienced

and can actually look at women without the first thought automatically being,
"Sex!"
No, that thought is a little bit later,
after the one that starts out with,
"What the fuck is that shooting pain in my...."
or "Damn, I’ve got to stop drinking coffee."
or "Coffee. I need more coffee."

Oh my God!, I'm getting old.

Sunday morning and I've been trying to touch base with my father a bit more. But today, my wife is calling to wish my mom and early, “Happy birthday.” So after 20 minutes, my wife hands me the phone, and I'm talking to my mother.

[Gordon & Sue]

"So, what are you planning on doing for your birthday?"

She notes that she's probably not going to do anything, but hopes that they'll be able to go up to the mountains and celebrate her birthday as well as their anniversary (which is also in the same month).

[Cabin]

It's their 55th anniversary, which is long time to be with someone, she notes, "even if that someone is asleep in his chair with his mouth open."

I didn't think much of the comment at first. Now, however, I'm struck by how it didn't really surprise me that he'd be asleep in his chair.

[Retirement, the early years]

When my mother finally retired, my parents set out on the road. In a move that was a bit "disconcerting," they sold their house in Bailey, Colorado, dumped quite bit of the money into savings, and took the rest and bought a trailer--a 5th Wheel.

[5th Wheel]

For the next few years, they traveled from campground to campground. Sometimes they were the campground hosts; sometimes they just hung out. As they traveled they developed a recurring circle of stops. One such stop, which eventually became permanent, was Deming, New Mexico.

[Deming]

Deming is a small town near the Mexican border in western New Mexico. I'm not entirely sure what prompted its town founders into putting a town there, but "sleepy" is an apt description. Deming has brutal summers, but the winters are mild beyond belief.

Now, I'd like to downplay my parents' concern for my well being and ignore Deming's proximity to Albuquerque, about 3.5 hours, but their choosing Deming highlights the changes that would take place during their tenure there. Thus, not too long into my parents' retirement, my longtime girlfriend, Maria, and I broke up.

[Maria and Don]

To say that I was emotionally prepared to handle this break-up, however much I saw its necessity, is to downplay what certainly guided my parents' decision making. For much of that year, my parents split their time between Deming and a campground at the top of nine mile hill due west of ABQ.

I was lonely, depressed, rundown, and in way over my head. I was also operating on a plan that went something like this: get a teaching job, get out of the restaurant business, and start a family. But depressed, around Thanksgiving, a little voice inside my head said, "Instead of offing yourself, why don't you just quit teaching at semester?" Smart voice. So in the winter of '97, I quit teaching and went back to waiting tables.

This afforded my parents time again to travel and their retirement changed from a series of circles to out-and-backs. They'd travel in spring and summer and then come back to Deming to sit out the winters. My dad liked playing golf and the constant travel was beginning to wear thin. A few short years later, they bought a small house in Deming and parked the 5th wheel in the backyard.

Their days of traveling were over, and I was led to believe that they were just tired of the rootlessness of being an RVer. What I later learned was that the physical demands of having to get the trailer ready for every trip was just too much for my father. My mother never really adapted to driving with the trailer so their time on the road meant that he was behind the wheel the whole time as well.

Yet the house, at first, didn't offer much more than the 5th wheel, so my parents began a series of projects. With my father as lead project manager and chief laborer, they installed locks on the doors, tore out a brick planter in the front, replaced their casement windows, tiled the floors, remodeled the bathroom, knocked out a wall between the living room and carport and enclosed the carport greatly expanding the living room, built a brick fence around the front with gates, added a half bathroom, stuccoed the house, and installed a new door from the kitchen to the back patio. On the back patio they covered it with the awning.

The Awning

A being capable of anything:

long drives without bathroom breaks,

driving around me on the basketball court,

asking for the Phillips head, flathead, crescent wrench, socket set

as I stumbled through the basic fixes,

unable to summon the patience

to read directions, pay attention,

to think before I acted.

Now, in a year when I actually worked on my car and made it better not worse,

to think that I would be the missing variable

in the equation of his retirement awning.

I was the one who climbed up on the ladder,

who lifted the heavy, yet not unbearable weight above my head

and up and over and down the post,

the crossbeam resting on both sides in position for the washer, bolt, washer, nut.

I was the able body, the patient mind, the driving force.

In the afternoon, I knew he was tired,

wanted to call it quits and disappear into a cold shower,

the leaning rock of recliner,

but I insisted.

Let’s get as much done today as possible.

He plugged away, though watched me work more often than in the early morning hours.

And we did as much as we could with the materials at hand.

In a small town, 60 miles from the next bigger town,

we were stuck.

This suited him fine,

and I looked at the mass of wood, crossbeams, canopy pieces, bolts, hoists, joints, and nails,

and knew that I was strong.

I was the body that my brain could still abuse.

And my father, once capable of anything, was old.

[Prostate Cancer]

To be honest, I don't really know when my father got his diagnosis. As is common in our family, we just don't talk about those things, or, more than likely, it is just not something my parents shared with me. The whole notion of having to think about what my body is doing is, frankly, a little strange, so to think about what my father’s body is doing is even stranger. For example, I don't remember me and my father ever having "the talk." I know me and my mother talked about it when I was in late high school. From my cloudy recollection it went something like this.

My mom, "What is she doing in your room?"

Me, "Um....nothing. We're just hanging out."

"No. You cannot, under any circumstances, be alone with a girl in your room with the door shut."

"But...we were just talking."

"Right. How are you going to feel when you meet her sometime in the future and you've had sex with her but aren't with her anymore?"

So, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that I don't know when he was actually diagnosed. I do remember periodic updates on what his PSA count was and what steps they were taking. My parents have an aversion to taking pharmaceuticals and even with a prostate cancer diagnosis my father tried to supplement what his doctors required with avoiding certain foods, taking whatever miracle cure my mother researched, and vitamins, lots and lots of vitamins.

These attempts to manage the cancer came to a screeching halt in the winter of 2008. In a frantic set of phone calls and negotiations between me and my sisters, it was determined that I needed to get down to Deming and assess what had happened.

At first, they thought my father pulled a muscle working at the country club (he was helping out part-time so he could play golf for free), so he laid low for a little bit, got a massage, and loaded up on Tylenol hoping it would just go away. It didn't go away.

When I arrived, my father was "sleeping" in a chair in the living room because he was in too much pain to lie down. He couldn't feel his legs, but thought maybe it was just because he couldn't lie down. They'd go to the hospital, wait for the specialist to come out and see if the specialist called for further tests. By this time, my parents thought it was his gall bladder, but the doctor wasn't convinced because some of his complaints were asymptomatic; he was in constant pain and it didn't get noticeably worse when he ate fatty foods. So they'd been going to the hospital, waiting for the specialist, getting a test, then waiting for the results, then meeting with another specialist, all while my father was losing the ability to control his legs.

My God! Just last week they thought he'd pulled a muscled and now he couldn't even stand up on his own; he couldn't get up and down without help. He couldn't control his legs.

My father is not a small man. He's six foot three inches tall and, at this time, hovered around two hundred pounds. My mother is five foot five inches tall and maybe clocks in at one hundred and twenty. Having to help him get up and down, move about the house was a big undertaking for her. For me, it wasn't physically demanding, but emotionally I was a bit freaked.

Similar to what I did when my father laid out a year hoping his ruptured disc would heal in the early '80s, I poured myself into a role playing game. Then it was Dungeons & Dragons and I'd spend hours copying my character onto new and improved character sheets, designing dungeons, reading up on the monsters, etc. This time, I poured myself into World of Warcraft, spending hours playing the game to just distract me from my complicated and unpleasant emotions, and avoiding my real life role of son.

[WOW Screenshot]

Deming, a perfect town when they were healthy, was too far away from me and my sisters. What followed was a series of phone calls trying to determine the best course of action. My oldest sister, while agreeing that this was a big deal wasn't sure if my solution (moving them to Colorado) was actually the best idea.

Finally, things came to a head and we took my father to Las Cruces, the emergency room.

[Las Cruces]

We tried to do as much as we could in Deming, but the lack of any tangible results and the constant waiting was too much. Once removed, the pain would subside and he'd recover the feeling in his legs and be back on his feet in no time.

In the emergency room, they drugged him up, scheduled an MRI and checked him in. He was right; it was his gall bladder, but it was also something else.

At the Hospital

At 3:50 in the morning, the computer, asleep,

like I should be,

doesn’t wake fast enough.

Writing, I realize,

is all secretarial, taking dictation,

and it is only at 3:54.

and the words are coming faster than my finite motor skills can type them.

We are all so frail, fragile, complicated machines

that can do so many things.

Yet upon spending any time at all in a hospital

we make these silent pronouncements,

these proclamations,

“I will never pass this way.”

And, “I will not be such a burden.”

And, “I will not ask my family to do this and that.”

But in the end I realize that those words are hollow, meaningless.

I don’t have control of that either,

and when my machinery gives out,

I will ask a stranger, the nurse,

to help turn me over,

a family member to put a pillow behind my head,

stretch my foot (clad in tube sock and smaller, frailer than I thought it'd be).

Does dignity have meaning?

Are vows hot air?

My body, in its long slow decay, surrenders to mechanical failure.

That is my realization

not bitter betrayal.

Words forgotten.

Letters that couldn’t be typed fast enough,

and a period placed, then erased, then replaced

as the words (once so clear at 4:01 a.m.) just decay

and no longer betray the once clear thought.

that you transcribed this day.

The initial guess that the loss of feeling in his legs being due to not being able to lie down was wrong. His prostate cancer had metastasized and there was large tumor pressing on a nerve that ran down to his legs. They removed the tumor, but the damage had already been done and my father's days of playing golf were over.

[Golf]

It seems silly characterizing the complications and further damage as meaning nothing more than the end of a hobby, but golf was part and parcel of who my father was. He'd always played golf and sold me on Deming because he could play in the winter. With the question now being, "Is he ever going to walk again?" the question, "Why Deming?" was answered in new way. They were in Deming because he could play golf. And if he couldn't play golf, let alone walk, there was no reason to stay.

A few more phone calls and it was decided. My parents would move up to Greeley, a few blocks away from my oldest sister. My other two sisters were in Denver, about an hour away, so, to me, the move made perfect sense.

In time, some of his mobility would return, but he’d walk positively shaky. He'd never regain the balance he had before and certainly grew more dependent. The transformation was more than physical, for both my parents. Clearly, they need help now, and their independence, once prized, they shrugged off. Still gracious, but not so proud.

I find myself, upon visiting them, insisting that my mother give me a list of things they need done. Inevitably, it involves moving furniture, crawling under desks, scaling ladders, all those things that my father just can't do anymore. He's grateful, communicates what he wants, and doesn't seem to mind the shortcuts I inevitably take. It just seems like old age just suddenly caught up to them. Maybe old age catches us all?

[Rainbow]

[exeunt]

The Proximity Detector

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 10:00:00 -0600

The Proximity Detector

For the last year, my smart phone has a dumb, if not annoying, malfunction.

The malfunctioning part darkens the phone while the phone is next to my ear

But doesn’t lighten it when I pull it away to hang up, access the speaker, or use the keypad.

It’s broken.

The “proximity detector” is broken.

I didn’t even know that was thing when I started researching this problem,

And found that my particular brand seemed prone to this malfunction.

Oh well, I thought,

as I researched work arounds.

I can’t hang up, so one workaround was to leave messages,

which I almost always have to do, that tells people:

“Hi, long message, but the proximity detector on my phone is broken

so there is probably going to be a bit of silence on the end of this message.

I’ll tell you when I’m officially done leaving the message,

so you don’t have listen to a lot of silence.”

And then go on with the actual message.

Eventually, the voice mail will figure out that I’m not talking and disconnect.

II.

For the last year, my father has been in hospice.

A cancer survivor he’s stopped all the unpleasant treatments

And is just waiting for his prostate cancer to do its thing,

which is basically kill him.

Still lucid we’d talk weekly and brighten each others’ weeks.

As the pandemic started he took a turn for worse

And got sick a bit more, started experiencing a lot more pain

And just moved into the next phase

where his body would just slowly die.

A waiting game, I’ve traded text messages and emails with my mom and siblings,

And left messages on his phone.

III.

But today, I called and

seeing how he was supposed to wake up to take some pills,

got to talk to him a bit.

He was not very lucid and slurred his words a bit,

and I could tell he was really tired.

So I lied,

“I’m ready if you’re ready.”

I promised I’d check in with Mom,

then just said,

“Goodbye.”

Again.

But he was too out of it to hang up,

and I couldn’t,

so the line stayed open as I put the phone in my pocket and walked on.

IV.

Finally my sister picked up and asked if I was there,

I was and explained my phone and how the better part of the last year

My father and I have been unable to hang up,

say, “Goodbye,”

And even now with his death just days away,

We still just couldn’t hang up,

Just couldn’t say,

“Goodbye.”

April 22, 2020

The Trump Impeachment and Ukrainian Collusion

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Tue, 3 Dec 2019 13:40:00 -0700

Part 1:

"Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found."

Long complicated read...but from what I gathered most of it concerns Manafort's relationship with Putin ally, Yanukovitch, and his subsequent joining of the Trump campaign. They indeed helped Clinton, but they, from what I've read, didn't stoop to the same level as the Russians (trolling, bots, compromised accounts, false narratives), rather they just backed the wrong horse.

Here's the full article: Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire

Part 2:

And what happens after that Politico article (see prior post) gets picked up by conservatives.

"Alina Polyakova, a director and fellow at the Brookings Institute, told BuzzFeed News that the Politico piece was likely the beginning of the Ukrainian collusion narrative. “To me, this is the origin story of that narrative,” she said. “We've seen now Giuliani and people around him pull data points [from the piece] that in a conspiratorial mind look connected but aren't.”

For the record, the two reporters on the Politico article left Politico and now work at the NY Times (Vogel) and the Washington Post (Stern).

Yet this one source is spinning a narrative that is disputed. "The Ukrainian Embassy disputes Telizhenko’s version of events. And Chalupa wrote of the article on Facebook at the time, “The title and theme are nonsense.” She went on to say that, “In my experience, the Embassy of Ukraine was always very careful throughout the U.S. election to stay neutral and tried to engage both campaigns. They were always professional and upfront about not getting involved, even where Manafort was concerned.”

So he starts pushing the narrative, it gets picked up and is used to do what?

"It looks as if his efforts to curry favor with Trump’s inner circle by members of the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office were actually part of a larger plan to oust Marie Yovanovitch, the US ambassador to Ukraine and a vocal anti-corruption critic. The Trump administration recalled Yovanovitch in May."

The real questions then are if this is the origin story of Ukrainian interference, are there more sources to back up Telizhenko's story about DNC corruption? Even Politico suggests that their involvement, "...in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections."

Straining diplomatic protocol is not the same as interfering.

Part 3:

The question is, "what do they really want?"

"As Giuliani was pushing specious claims about Ukrainian wrongdoing, a group of businesspeople and Republican donors connected to him and Trump were working to install new management at the top of Ukraine’s massive state gas company, Naftogaz. According to an investigation by the Associated Press, a group of Americans — including US Energy Secretary Rick Perry — spent March through May trying to install new leadership at Naftogaz in hopes of steering lucrative contracts to companies controlled by Trump allies. Yovanovitch’s ouster was a key part of that plan, according to the Associated Press."

Seems to me that this is an argument for a President who reads, checks sources, doesn't just rely on his gut, and doesn't have a touch of paranoia, and only surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear.

Part 4:

My conclusions are that Republican operatives pushed a phony conspiracy plan to get Trump to remove an honorable Ambassador who was advocating for US interests that stood in their way. I want to know Perry, Giuliani, Trump, and Pompeo's interest in SigmaBleyzer and Aspect Holdings LLC.

In the process, Giuliani fed the President's natural inclinations (remember the birther phenomenon) and he used his powers (with no one in his staff to tell him it would be a bad idea) to hold up Congressionally mandated aid to get something out of the Ukrainians.

Giuliani convinced him of this plan by suggesting that he could get the Ukrainians to investigate the Bidens (he could've done that all of 2017 and 2018 but didn't), which would benefit him in the 2020 race by hamstringing what was, at the time, his strongest rival-Joe Biden.

The lesson for Trump from the Mueller report was not that he shouldn't get foreign help to win an election, but that as long as he didn't conspire to make it happen he'd be okay. That's why he wanted the Ukrainians to announce the investigations themselves-"they should want to do it."

Unfortunately, the whistle-blower and other ethical actors in the State Department didn't get the memo. Its the news cycle, not the investigations. Trump wants to use a similar tactic ("but what about her emails") to drive the election cycle again. Only this time, if Joe Biden is the nominee, it'll be (and probably still will be) what about Hunter Biden and Burisma? Trump politically doesn't really want Hunter and Burisma investigated. He just wants the cloud of investigation hanging over the entire election.

Now, setting aside the above, is what the President did impeachable?

Albuquerque Rapid Transit (ART) first impression

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Tue, 3 Dec 2019 13:32:00 -0700

The Map

Let's get this out there. It's cold tonight, but despite that we ventured out into the cold to check out A.R.T. I've been a vocal proponent of the project though critical of how the project was unrolled and implemented. But today was day one.

So we decided to hop on the nearest stop (Central & University) and head west to Sharky's Tacos. If you've never been, go. Simply the best fish tacos in town.

We waited about 5 minutes and got onto a very crowded bus that happened to be the bus that Councilor Ike Benton and Mayor Keller were riding. We said, "Hi." And rode through downtown without incident, and up to The Bluffs' station (Central & Yucca) on the westside. The tacos were great; the conversation was better. We didn't look at our phones because we'd managed to get caught up while we rode the bus.

After dinner, we got back on the bus, not full so we could sit down. We wrote in our seats as the bus zoomed along east bound this time. After switching from the 766 to the 777 we continued east. The 766 goes east until Louisiana and then turns and heads north to Uptown. The 777 heads east all the way to Tramway. We rode all the way to Tramway for a beer at Tractor Brewing-Four Hills in the shopping center where the bus stops.

We had a beer, watched as a patron let their puppy piss on the floor and then didn't bother to clean it. After our beers, ambled back out to the bus. The bus was scheduled to arrive in about 15 minutes, and it was going to be cold. But in actuality it arrived in about 8 minutes. The driver let us (two) plus another guy get on board while he took a break. It left on time, and we headed back down. It was mostly empty, but warm. We watched as two women got on and asked if the bus went to the Transit Center on the westside so they could get to the shelter. We watched as two people from a Thai restaurant got on with their leftovers. We watched as people got on then got off at the next stop (trying to stay warm was my guess).

The only incident was the driver pulling a little bit too close on one stop and not being able to close the doors right way. After a few tries, he got it and we got back to our stop and I came in to write this post.

It's cold out there and the bus was warm. It's cold out there and we rode fairly far west for tacos then back east for beer. The bus is free (until January) and we never got bogged down (other than a bit of a mishap with one station). We never waited more than 5 minutes for a bus, and the bus was clean and safe. Yes, people in my demographic are not particularly fond of buses. Yes, people in my demographic would prefer to take a train (but we don't have that yet) or hop in an Uber or Lyft. Yes, we have our own car, but the bus was damn convenient. It also offered a refuge for people who were trying to get out of the cold. Personally, I'd like to see it remain free for a bit longer (through winter), and I'd like to see what happens when students come back for Spring term. The bus was damn easy to navigate.

For the record, I've been riding the bus when I see shows downtown and quite often I am waiting for 20 minutes plus until it arrives. The reason? Simple, the bus gets caught in traffic and over a long day gets behind. I, also, quite often have to get a Lyft home cause I'm getting out after the last bus. And admittedly, I really love public transit.

They may not keep this frequency, but if you want to head downtown or to west Central or to Nob Hill or Coronado or the International District (Thai Food!) it might be easier than driving. And if you're afraid of riding the bus because it smells or the clinetele is a bit sketchy, let me know. I'll gladly pull up a seat next to you and head east or west. I'm going to do my part to make lemonade out of lemons.

How to Think

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 15:24:00 -0600

A Burkean Analysis

Act: Just off the bridge that crosses I-25, Clear Channel’s electrical billboard cycles through 4 (?) advertisements in span of thirty seconds (?). Visible from I-25 north bound it is visible to over 1.5 million cars per day.

Scene: As parts of the country still struggle to recover from the Great Recession, many scholars are noticing a downward trend in the number of births. As indicated by this trend birth rates begin declining in 2008. The billboard has a number of telling details: a young white girl and a motto: “Not what to think/How to think” that suggests a very specific audience.

Agent: Eleven years after the Great Recession, exclusive private schools are advertising to keep their enrollment constant. At around 20,000 dollars per year, Sandia is out of reach for many students and professes that

“…we will inspire our students to discover their purposes in the world by:

· Developing essential skills and intellectual potential through challenging academics;

· Cultivating a socially responsible environment of innovation and creativity; and

· Engaging as a vibrant community for the betterment of society.”

Agency: Though this is not an exact figure, but the rough range of an electronic billboard is from 3000 to 7000 dollars per month.

Purpose: On its surface the purpose of the advertisement is pretty straightforward. That purpose could be actualized with an increase in enrollment, but I think the messaging is a little bit more nuanced and speaking to the concerns of a certain population and ideology.

First, the picture of the little white girl suggests that they are marketing to white parents. In these times with the Bechdel Test , representation is an important consideration. If their purpose was to increase enrollment from underserved people than having a person of color be the face of your campaign might be a more effective choice (New Mexico is a minority-majority state), but since they also include, “Not what to think/How to think” as the catch phrase they are targeting a specific demographic.

The idea that schools are teaching students “what to think” is not new. In fact, many conservatives argue that schools are involved in an ongoing campaign of indoctrinating students with a liberal bias. So parsing out the difference between what to think versus how to think speaks directly to conservatives.

In essence Sandia Prep is saying that education can be done from an ideologically neutral perspective. While there are certainly subjects that strive to be ideologically neutral, it rarely is that simple. Education, by its nature, changes people. Indeed, one of the arguments for a public education states, “To educate is to prepare and train someone in the necessary skills to have the ability to participate in society as a full citizen.” While Sandia’s mission statement supports that argument, can education ever be ideologically neutral?

Take the following examples: 1) a biology teacher teaching Evolution as the prevailing theory for the complexity of life we see today and 2) a biology teacher arguing that all life was created by a higher power. The first would clearly be something that modern science supports and a competent teacher would also teach the scientific method as a way to continually test that hypothesis. At no point would the teacher expect their students to take their assertions on faith. Yet, if a biology teacher were to teach that all life was created by a higher power, that’s exactly what they would be asking, they would, in essence, be indoctrinating their students. If creation were to be taught in a science class, people arguably could say that it doesn’t belong and is not appropriate. Arguably, it could be seen as mere indoctrination since it can’t be proved using the scientific method. Now I’m not saying that teaching that life was created is beyond the scope of what a school should teach, but I do think it wouldn’t be appropriate to teach it in a science class. The rigor of science depends upon adhering to the scientific method, stating provable hypothesis, etc.

Likewise, since the vast majority of scientists agree that climate change has been caused by humans, it would be irresponsible to teach students that climate change does not exist. Yes, there are questions of the validity and reliability of the conclusions, and yes the system is very complex and it may not be possible to control for every variable, but teaching students what are our best understood facts and how we arrived at them is indeed a worthy project and a worthy education.

But in both cases neither viewpoint seems ideologically neutral. For a certain belief system, teaching Evolution or Anthropogenic Climate Change can be seen as ideological, as teaching students what to think. There is certainly room in both subjects for people to question the science but to suggest that the science is ideological and serves no other purpose than to indoctrinate students is, at best, dishonest.

And that is just the science curriculum. In the humanities the questions become even thornier. Yes, we can teach the traditional story of the founding of America, but would it be irresponsible to not teach about the Spanish exploration and conquest of Mexico as also contributing to our understanding of the history of America, especially in New Mexico? Should the French-Indian war be a part of understanding of how America was settled? And wouldn’t those areas of understanding leave a student to conclude that maybe America is not the “shining city on the hill”. That our history is, at best, complicated and paints a more nuanced and troubling view. Wouldn’t ignoring the facts and events of history of all Americans be another type of indoctrination?

What I’m arguing is that the message of the billboard is designed to appeal to a conservative, white consumer base. Statistically, whites are the main subset that could probably afford the tuition of Sandia Prep. Likewise, whites make up the majority of people who support the Republican Party, the conservative party. And while they may level the charge that education as currently structured is indoctrinating students, I’d argue that the students are drawing their own conclusions. If they are more critical of American history or capitalism or how democracy works or Christianity, it is not because they were indoctrinated by the liberal left but that they resisted the indoctrination of the conservative right. And to suggest that a school could teach a student “how to think” without engaging in some form of indoctrination is dishonest. As stated above, education is about creating students to engage in society and increasingly we are becoming a more diverse and varied society. And unless we are preparing students for interacting and respecting other viewpoints then we, as educators, are not doing our jobs.

September 23, 2019

Questioning Gender

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 11:46:00 -0600

Fact is that Mike started working in the center where I work as Melissa. As Melissa she presented as a woman, occasionally wore dresses or skirts (professional attire) and talked as if she was comfortable in her body (biologically woman).

I enjoyed talking with her. She was smart, cynical, a Star Wars fan, and well versed in nerd culture. That made her easy to work with even though I was not her direct supervisor. At the time, she reported to someone who was at the same level as I was but since we were a large center it meant that at times I was a shift supervisor and had to interact with all employees, direct reports or otherwise, as a boss. And in that role she didn’t present any problems. Sure every request was greeted with a snide response or sarcastic questioning, but it really didn’t bother me.

We got to know each other when we both ended up in a graduate class at the nearby university together. We both mocked the professor a bit privately, mocked the bureaucracy publicly, and worked together on projects diligently and managed to keep our work roles separate from our student roles with relative ease.

As I continued to follow my graduate program, she switched to an EMT program. I didn’t think much of it, but even as students EMTs wear a uniform: a blue polo shirt and khaki cargo pants.

A few months into her program, I got promoted and instead of being her supervisors’ colleague, I was now his boss. And thus, I was a rung up and in Melissa’s reporting chain. New reporting structure aside, I didn’t think much of it. I was not in the habit of micromanaging people who used to work with me and now worked for me. It wasn’t my style.

But in this new role, I noticed a sort of mental change on my part. Yes, the relationship with all the employees changed and what was once mostly cordial ribbing or in-on it joking transformed into my now being part of the problem. I was “the man” for all intents and purposes. Frankly, I was still not very far up the ladder and subject to the whims of a big bureaucracy, but my ability to turn the wheel or alter the trajectory of the path the wheel was taking was a bit more on me. Policies that I could pass off as the whims of the Director or the management team were now my policies. So there was a little bit of me getting used to my new role.

Yet, almost concurrently, Melissa’s supervisor came to me and announced. “Melissa wants to be called Mike now. We’re beginning the process of changing how he is identified in the system. He’s starting hormone therapy too.”

I don’t know if it was my new role or the change in gender identity or something else, but suddenly Mike’s cynicism and sarcasm really started to bug me. At first I chalked it up to my own sort of internal dismissiveness of women. As a man, I don’t feel threatened when women are angry, which really frustrates my wife a lot. When she gets angry, I can’t help but think it’s “cute.” (Yes, that’s shitty, I know). So my first read was that when Mike was Melissa I found his sarcasm and cynicism “cute” but now that he was “Mike” I found myself responding as I do when I encounter angry, sarcastic, and cynical men; I get annoyed. (There’s a lot here and a lot I don’t feel comfortable admitting, but I might as well “go there.”).

I’ve worked for a lot of women, and, generally, prefer to work with women. For some reason, I don’t react in fear when I work with or under a woman and she gets angry. The relatively few men I’ve worked for, however, don’t elicit that same response. In the past, when the men bosses have gotten angry at me, I generally want to run. Angry male bosses are not something I work well with. And as a boss in several different capacities I know how to work with angry male subordinates. Annoyed for sure when I my orders are ignored or dismissed when it’s done by a male and dismissive and patient when it’s done by a female. Basically, I’m sure I’m a bit more patronizing as a boss for women subordinates than I am for men. And suddenly, I was seeing how this dynamic played out because Mike really annoyed me.

Yet, I was trying to be a good boss and as a good boss, I invited our local transgender support organization to do a work shop for our group. Our customers came from a variety of backgrounds and increasingly more of them were transgender, so I wanted to make sure we were being welcoming and supportive when they came in and largely tried to break down what I perceived as fear of difference when meeting a transgender person. The presenter, who transitioned years before, was great. He was funny, engaging, approachable, and definitely passed as male. We had a professional relationship, and I knew how to interact with him and that way. Part of his job was to break down the stigma, the prejudice and get us to not just react out of fear. So I asked him about my reaction to Mike.

Interestingly, he was a bit easier on me. He responded that maybe my reaction wasn’t just some sort of internal socialization creating an internal conflict. Maybe Mike, who was going through hormone therapy, really was just more annoying? As he explained it, he said that when people go through hormone therapy they are in essence no different than teenagers going through puberty. Maybe Mike was just being a teenage boy hormonally and really was just, simply, more annoying?

This made sense as my father had been battling prostate cancer and one of the treatments was to give him Lupron, which suppressed his production of testosterone. As a result, my father was more emotional, more touchy-feely than the gruff man I grew up with. His lack of testosterone in essence meant that his more emotional (feminine) characteristics were highlighted.

I don’t know. The frustration was real regardless of the cause, our relationship became less cordial. I didn’t joke around as much with Mike. Of course, my role had changed so I didn’t joke around as much with anyone, but it felt pretty obvious to me that Mike and I didn’t have the same relationship.

Things went on and Mike continued his transition. I settled into my new role and was more comfortable interacting with the whole group as a boss. I was more serious now and didn’t have a casual relationship with anyone anymore.

But one day, after introducing a new employee to the staff, Mike caught me off to the side.

“You keep doing it?”

“Keep doing what?”

“You’ll introduce me as Mike but when you refer to me later, you’ll refer to me as “she.” You keep outing me.”

I was horrified. “Oh my. I’m so sorry. I didn’t even realize I was doing that.”

“It’s okay, but stop it.”

“I will,” I said, silently cursing myself because I couldn’t control my own vocabulary. How was I supposed to be a model leader if I couldn’t manage to use the right pronouns of people who reported me? Here I prided myself on being progressive and I kept slipping up. I mean, we were the first organization that brought in the transgender resource center for a presentation at the college. Instead of patting myself on the back for being welcoming, I was now part of the problem because I was oblivious to my own choice of words.

And I’m not sure why. Mike eventually graduated and moved away. I don’t know if I made that mistake again as he never addressed it again, but I can’t help but wonder why I made it in the first place. Intellectually, I supported his right to be who he felt he was and for society to recognize that. Intellectually, I want to use my words as a way to welcome people not force them into boxes that they didn’t create. Yet, when faced with that opportunity, I failed.

I’m still not sure why. Now I’m not Jordan Peterson and really don’t understand his insistence that society shouldn’t dictate (with laws) how we choose to interact with each other. But under the current climate, could I have gotten into trouble? What if Mike alleged that I was being discriminatory or creating a hostile work environment? I didn’t deny his claim, yet I didn’t remember actually doing what he said I did. How often do we go through the day not really aware of every word we say? And even if my intent was not malicious, are there other marginalized identities that I just bulldoze over just because I don’t want to watch my words? And how often do we offend and it is, perhaps, motivated by some sort of unconscious (passive aggressive) bias that we refuse to acknowledge?

And I was glad that he moved on? I would imagine that sometimes the best thing for people who are transitioning is to just relocate, change everything around them, so they don’t have to walk people through the switch that was society already makes really difficult?

It’s been a couple of years now and I don’t know if Mike is happier or how he is living his life. I’m assuming he is happier, but I also wonder if we make too much of gender identity? Would society be better off if we just didn’t have clearly defined gender roles? What if we could dress the way we wanted and it didn’t matter how people addressed us? Does having a clear marker (gender expression) of what (male or female) really make a difference? Should it make a difference? And how would we go about creating a society that didn’t assign certain roles based on gender? Is that even possible?

September 17^th, 2019

The Rhetorical Trap

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 11:44:00 -0600

Background:

I don’t talk about it much, but for a brief period during high school, I called myself “Born Again.” One of the benefits was that it was a safe space where I felt like I belonged. And with that, one summer Sunday evening, the memories of being molested by a man who worked for my father some six years before came back. Overwhelming me, I cried and tried to explain what had happened to my youth group leader. The sudden on-rush of shame and confusion was really overwhelming, and I struggled to understand it. In my memory, I felt I’d done something wrong.

I hadn’t. I’d been tricked, coerced into letting this man do things that no one, up to that time, had done. I was only twelve and a late bloomer, but somehow the fact that it happened was my fault (or so I thought). And in youth group, the memory of it, the shame of it came rushing back.

After telling my parents and listening to their sincere apology for putting me in that position (I’d spent the summer at a hot springs resort with my father and had very little parental supervision for most of it), I begin to kind of piece it together. This was the ‘70s, which was still a relatively innocent time, so it didn’t seem strange to my father that a grown man would show some sort of passing interest in me. And it wasn’t my fault.

But it was also in this Youth Group that I begin to understand the rhetorical trap that Christianity uses to keep its followers in check. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he states, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (13:13). On its face, there is nothing inherently problematic with that verse, but situating faith as one of the core tenets creates a bit of problem, a rhetorical trap.

As a young man questioning my faith, the reason I begin to doubt its truthfulness could be simply explained away with the “I just don’t have enough faith” trap. Even though I was having a hard time with my own dogma around Christianity, that doubt was evidence of my lack of faith. I was in a no-win situation.

And I lost. By the middle of my junior year, I was no longer attending youth group. I was hanging out with friends from work and no longer claimed being a Christian. If I didn’t have enough faith, I wasn’t going to accept any of it or use the label. It was a bit dogmatic, I admit, but I still don’t think you can just selectively believe and borrow doctrines from a religion that has such a well-established pedigree. Sure, some things can be emphasized of de-emphasized over time and leave a sort of modern or post-modern spin, but the core tenets: belief in the divinity of Jesus, belief in the imperfection of humanity (sin), and belief in Jesus being the only one who can account/redeem that imperfection, seems rather fixed. And ultimately, because I didn’t have enough faith, I didn’t belong. The rhetorical trap pushed me out of the religion to such a degree that now I have a hard time seeing any value in religion.

Situation:

A few months ago my wife begin an unstructured, fairly intensive deep dive into how her Jewishness fit into the narrative around privilege. In many contexts, especially in a geographic location where all fair skinned people are seen as white, she benefits from white privilege. Much like I do. The idea that we occupy a position and look at the world through that strikes me as rather uncontroversial.

Instead, what I want to look at is in what way has the narrative around white privilege used the same rhetorical trap that I saw Christianity use?

Yesterday, we were walking to a show and I was talking about some of my more nuanced views of White Privilege; she stopped me.

“I just have a question. Are the people you are reading white men?”

“Yes, mostly.”

The implication was a familiar one. Critiques of White (and male) Privilege from white males may not be as salient as other critiques because white males can’t escape their white privilege, and they also have the most to lose.

Yet I see that as a version of the rhetorical trap. I, ultimately, can’t help but look at the world from the standpoint as a white male thus my critiques of the way we talk about white privilege are suspect if not downright invalid.

I assured her that I was being diligent in my adopting these critiques and making sure I was not just being resistant because I didn’t want to change, wanted to hold on to my privilege. I get that; I really do.

Unlike when I was younger, I want to be able to understand and use the framework of white privilege as a way of seeing and understanding some of the problems but not have to accept that I can’t be critical of it because of my white privilege.

In other words, there has to be a way controlling for my standpoint. There has to be a way that people outside of our standing can understand, empathize with our experience without having to live our experience, or to borrow from feminist theory: Standpoint Epistemology.

Loosely, in Standpoint Epistemology, people who are situated within a category have claim to a certain privilege or authority within that category. Thus, because a person is a woman, an African-American, or a Trans-person, etc. it means they have a privileged authority on issues of being a woman, an African-American, or a Trans-person. And while I agree with that in principle, it doesn’t mean that someone who doesn’t occupy that standpoint can’t also be an authority. For example, there are many doctors who are of the opposite sex to their patients, yet we wouldn’t argue that all females should have only female doctors? That is not to say that we shouldn’t encourage more diversity in medicine because we should. But we aren’t going to stop treating illness and injury because we don’t have that diversity yet?

Taken to an extreme if we use standpoint as the most important qualifier, and the person who has it being the best authority then how are we going to live in community. Logically it leads to situation where no agreement can be reached because every conflict can be boiled down to springing from differing standpoints. If you only understood my standpoint you’d know why I did such and such and thus there’d be no right or wrong only standpoints. For example, (to use an extreme example) if you only knew what it was like to be an alcoholic you wouldn’t punish me for drinking to excess or driving drunk. If we aren’t able to take another person’s standpoint, then how can we possibly ever live in community? My living in community with a person of another viewpoint is dependent upon my ability to believe they can understand my position, perhaps even empathize with my position so that we can make decisions that mutually benefit us both?

Which brings us back to my wife’s question and why I’m still troubled by it several days later. While I agree that I need to look at my standpoint when viewing issues around white privilege, I don’t think because I have a lot of white privilege (and I do) it means that my critique isn’t valid. It does mean that I need to be very careful that my standpoint doesn’t shape or distort my critique. And my critique is that if we fall into the rhetorical trap of saying, for example, “Your white privilege means you can’t critique the concept of white privilege” then we are no better than the Christians who say, “You just need to have faith” and then follow whatever impossible facts or dictums their religion demands.

August 22, 2019

Looking for the Easy Fix

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 11:42:00 -0600

Looking for the Easy Fix

About a year ago, I embarked on a project to broaden my perspectives, to venture out of my ideological bubble to see if I could find some commonality with people who look like me, come from similar backgrounds as me, and yet don’t agree with me on many issues. Over the course of this experiment, I did indeed find many ideas that resonated with me, added nuance to my own thoughts as well as reinforced some of my core beliefs. While I noticed that many of the names and faces that appeared on my Youtube feed were indeed similar to the faces as documented by the NY Times, I also found people who challenged those faces and questioned those assumptions head-on. And I wanted to challenge many of the assumptions head-on too. I wanted to create a space in my head for dialogue and by understanding where others were coming from hoped that I could add a bit of civil discourse in my little corner of virtual space.

As noted here, it’s a rocky experiment and I’m not sure my original hypothesis can work, yet I keep trying. The more diehard supporters of Trump and the Alt-Lite seem pretty intractable. While they can certainly recognize Trump’s unorthodox style, they seem to forgive him and don’t have terribly high expectations of his ability to say what he really means and still largely support him.

They also seem to enjoy that Trump stirs the pot. He’s transgressive. It reminds me, as usual, of how we as a poetry community handled people who transgressed community norms at open mikes, which is to say we largely ignored them. Yet, it’s one thing to say that Trump is an internet troll, but he’s also the President, so we seem to always fixate on whatever blunder he’s done as if it has real significance. And sometimes it does, but can we keep it in perspective, can we stay on task and pay attention to the larger problems (immigration reform, the stupid, destructive gun culture, the climate and the role back of regulations to help alleviate it, etc.)? I’ve started looking at almost all his actions as some sort of transgressive/trollish maneuver just to keep himself in the spotlight.

So this morning (before meditation no less), I open my email and see that someone has responded to my post on a center-right forum in regards to believing in white privilege. I posted:

Yes, exactly. Heck you can even use the tool of intersectionality to tease out certain issues without going to negative extremes. And yes, you can also believe in white privilege without it necessarily being the root/end cause of every ill.

We need more nuanced conversations and discussions and [to] move away from sound bite/trolling responses to everything.

Thank you for your thoughtful article.

David the Optimist responded in regards to the above italicized section with, “If you’re a racist, you can do that. If you’re not a racist, you wouldn’t.”

My original post was July 30^th, this response came in just before I woke up. So David the Optimist argued that if I embrace the concept of white privilege than I’m being racist dug into the comments of this old article to call me a racist.

Now this is not the first time I’ve engaged with David the Optimist, but after futilely trying to explain how Nazism and Fascism is seen as an extreme of the political right, I’ve largely stopped. His comment this morning strikes me as entirely transgressive. He’s hoping that I’ll jump back on line and argue with him over how I am not a racist, maybe apologize for the error of my ways in acknowledging white privilege, which strikes me as entirely ludicrous. He’s arguing (I’m guessing) that because I believe that white privilege exists that I’m racist against white people.

As I type this I wonder if he knows how impossible that is? I could certainly be racist if, and only if, being prejudiced against white people can be defined as racist. Even then, the racism I’d be guilty of would be internalized racism because I’m white. Indeed to be the victim of internal racism means that you have to be a part of a sub-ordinated group, and I’m not a member of a sub-ordinated group. So not only can I not be racist against white people, I can’t be guilty of internalized racism because I’m white.

Likewise, I’m not sure his comments, however intend, fit in with the community standards:

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

· Name-calling

· Ad hominem attacks

· Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content

· Knee-jerk contradiction

Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

So, rather than respond I did as they suggested, “When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.” I’m not hopeful that David the Optimist, on this marginally politically right forum, will suddenly start posting reasoned arguments. If I’m being generous I’d say, he’s doing what he was doing when he tried to redefine fascism as a product of the left. He’s now trying to redefine “white privilege” as being racist.

I find this sort of argument, “I know you are but what am I?” entirely frustrating. We can’t even agree on a set of terms; a set of terms that have a history of being defined one way and now he is trying to redefine them. It’s like I’m trying to argue with people who speak a different language. I wonder if this is some sort of new tactic? If the words like “racism” are now being weaponized in a new way? I argued here that the frequency and ferocity of labeling every transgression was not having its intended impact and we might be better off trying other tactics. Now it seems that some want to turn that very tactic back at us by redefining the terms.

And I don’t have an easy fix. Other than just not responding I’m not sure what strategy would move conversations forward. I’m beginning to think that social media is creating the conditions where we can’t really wrestle with difficult conversations because we are all being driven to use a short hand to talk about things that require nuance and if people dispute the use of that short hand versus another then what? It’s maddening. I’m beginning to view social media much the way that Socrates viewed writing:

You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.

Only I’d change it to reflect social media. We’ve come to believe that the ability to talk to people in a virtual space with only the words on our screen mediating our response is a good thing. Social media has allowed us to connect with many people, people we may not even know in real life. Yet it has also exacerbated certain tendencies that are anathema to a civilized society. Social media doesn’t allow us to read body language, to understand the impact of what we’re saying, to be empathic towards others. It just zeroes us in on words and how they’re used and allows us to feel better about ourselves and not really understand that there are people at the other end of that fiber optic cable who may need to know more or need to better evaluate the impact of their words before they hit “Enter.”

Tribes

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 11:40:00 -0600

Tribes

My tribe came from struggling labor

Depression South Eastern Illinois

Just before the southern hills start

To roll toward the coal country

--Ed Dorn

In 2018, after finishing my graduate degree a year before, I found myself with needing more than my job to occupy my time. And like I had many years before, found myself drawn back into playing World of Warcraft (WOW). In the time since I’d left the game in 2011, a lot had changed. While still at the level I was when I left, they’d added three expansions, and were working on releasing another one that was released six months later. While my wife’s attitude toward my sitting and playing a video game as opposed to doing something creative was still there, I jumped back in and moved through the expansions to get to where the heart of the gameplay really was: the highest levels. Some of my feelings about the actual gameplay were basically the same: drawn from the gambling industry, WOW has incentives for people to log in regularly and wile away hours in their virtual world. In WOW, players band together with others to solve the more complex problems, and a solo player can spend days exploring this very detailed virtual world that draws heavily on the fantasy, horror, speculative, and science fiction, and as you play you are rewarded to make your gameplay a bit easier on subsequent plays. Through regular gameplay, you’d see the formation of loose communities that, at times, lead to real world friendship. Yet, now, we had the addition of services like Twitch and Discord that created a whole layer of additional communities that may not actually be in the game world at all but can watch someone else play it (Twitch) or talk to someone while they play it (Discord)[1]. In addition, YouTube has jumped in by creating yet another outlet where people can go to learn, discuss, watch, etc. about what is happening in the game world.

We now had a much expanded simulacra of a world that only exists virtually, and people are free to comment, suggest on its creation in real time. And they do. Blizzard is bombarded on their own forums with “suggestions” on ways they can improve, critiques on the direction the game is going, and the toxicity of social media is spreading into various pockets, where game developers are bombarded outside of their role while at work. People seem to be acting out their own tribal impulses in a virtual world and the shared interest in that world isn’t enough to keep the larger tribal instincts from infecting this world too.

Now it’s important to note that I am parsing and defining tribe and community as words that are similar but have specific differences. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, “Tribe… [is] a notional form of human social organization based on a set of smaller groups (known as bands), having temporary or permanent political integration, and defined by traditions of common descent, language, culture, and ideology.” Whereas, Community is similar but adds the wrinkle of being “quasi-voluntary” because the members often share the same geography or interests (but not always). So, while I think WOW had many elements you find in a community in 2011, I now think that that community has fractured into tribes. There are specific tribes that seem to be erupting in this virtual space, and this fracturing is being exacerbated by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites that seem to be sorting us and leading to conflict, really toxic conflict.

For example, “Austin” is a popular streamer (someone who streams their gameplay on Twitch), who sometimes uploads content to YouTube as well.

London is a popular YouTube personality, who streams on Twitch as well.

I think it’s fair to say that Austin has a larger following on Twitch while London has a larger following on YouTube.

So basically we’re dealing with different platforms but both personalities are playing WOW, and creating content around WOW.

Someone was watching London on Twitch and edited a section of the stream out and sent it to Austin.

Austin, whose content on YouTube is quite often just edited versions of what he does on Twitch, watched this edited version of London’s stream while he was streaming on Twitch.[2]

In the edited video, London accused Austin of “punching down” when he critiqued Lore (WOW’s Community Manager) and sent toxic trolls to fill up Lore’s personal social media.

From there things just seemed to go off the rails: Austin’s fans started hitting up London’s social media presence.

As could be predicted, there were some trolls who took the opportunity to threaten London, his wife, etc.

Other YouTube personalities weighed in on the controversy via Twitter.

In fact one person suggested that London was faking people threatening him to increase his viewership, which, in turn, meant making more money.

It boiled over for a couple of days and then, at least, three different YouTube personalities took up the controversy.

Many of them took issue with London’s insistence that as content creators they are also responsible for the behavior of their fans.

Austin, and a fair number of YouTube personalities, dispute that and think they are ultimately not responsible for the behavior of their fans.

Interesting. But the root of the conflict sort of ballooned, in my opinion, because it is all happening in a virtual space, and in that space the conflict pushed people into tribes. In a Tribe, one can’t tolerate any criticism of the leader and the positions that the leader takes. It’s about loyalty to the leader and destruction of other tribes. Now Tribe Austin wants nothing more than to kill London’s stream and lurks on his Twitch channel hoping he’ll violate the terms of service and get demonetized as a result (a gamer’s version of “cancel culture”), let alone the stress of having people threatening you online. The new conflict that seems to be brewing is to what degree are content creators responsible for the actions (virtual actions) of their fans?

Of course, these tactics are nothing new. In fact, the NYTimes has a series out now on the 5 year anniversary of “Gamergate.” And while they recognize that it “…emerged during the internet’s shift from a largely anonymous or pseudonymous culture to one centered around personality-driven influencers” and acknowledge that a whole new vocabulary was created: Trolls, SJWs, Cancel Culture, PC Master Race, Doxxing, Tweetstorm, etc. as a result. The tactics that only existed in dark corners of the internet have now become standard operating procedure. Having any sort of discussion with people on the internet runs the risk of becoming just a bunch of ad hominem attacks or refutations of historical definitions to fit a tribal narrative. For example, when I pointed out in comments to an online article that historically fascism has been identified as “right wing” I ended up getting a long response about how it really is “left wing” because the Nazi party demanded fealty from German businesses. Never mind that my contention really was that fascist is “right wing” because it argues for a “return” to “Traditional”’ society (which doesn’t include the other-namely Jews) while “left wing” isn’t about a “return” to Tradition but actually argues that Tradition (namely religion) is detrimental to human well-being. Instead, he cherry picked my definition and tried to redefine the terms because he didn’t like his “tribe” being aligned with fascists.

As we spend more time in virtual spaces, arguments over individuality, personal responsibility, and the power of discourse continue to shape perceptions and we find ourselves responding to what is happening virtually and seeing it in the evening news, linked and discussed on Facebook, Twitter, and splashed across the last vestiges of print journalism. In 2015, I wrote a paper for graduate school that examined how virtual communities functioned (or didn’t) as communities. I concluded that “…despite the work of some science fiction authors to convince us otherwise, we still live with people who may not think like we do. We have to get along.” Yet, since then we’ve watched these sort of monolithic communities (people who play videogames) fracture around personality, discard the things that brought them together in favor of supporting their chosen leader or spokesman. And when nuance is injected it seems to matter little as people sort of further entrench themselves in their beliefs because they’ve become skeptical of everything. It all means we aren’t getting along any better than before and it seems to be getting worse.

[1] Yes, the more advanced players were capable of communicating in game in 2011, and Blizzard had added a lot of that functionality into the game since, it wasn’t nearly as sophisticated then as it is now.

[2] Yes, it was a YouTube video of a guy streaming his gameplay at the same time as he watched someone else’s gameplay, another version of Baudrillard’s “Simulacra.”

It's a Publish or Perish World Revisited

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 09:25:00 -0600

Yesterday, I published my take on the Sokal Squared scandal on my page at Medium, and was surprised that it got a bump from the editors, “Our curators just read your story, It’s a Publish or Perish World, that you submitted for review. Based on its quality, they selected it to be recommended to readers interested in Education across our homepage, app, topic page, and emails.” While the recommendation immediately meant more people read my story than the one I posted a week before (six reads vs. none), what really caught me off guard was a related story I read this morning on The Daily Beast. While I didn’t specifically cite the Quillette story referenced, I did send the link to it to my wife as an example of my sense that the lefts’ obsession with identity was alienating people that should be politically aligned with our larger goals. Yet, in reading the Daily Beast article, I realized I’d been hoaxed (a direct response to the Sokal Story) as well. The story I linked to my wife was a hoax. The person was not who he said he was and the publication that diligently reported on the Sokal Squared scandal was guilty of what Peter Boghossian et al accused “grievance studies” journals of. It was this boomerang of people being blinded by ideology and not exercising due diligence before putting things out on the media.

Strangely, I’m still not sure this is really much of a story. My take is that if people want to be bad actors and submit articles to websites or journals, is it really a surprise that the editors’ bias might cause them to go full steam ahead with publication? Isn’t this what Post-Modernism (the Right’s favorite bug-a-boo) argues? Yes, these publications are “guilty” of not exercising due diligence before going to “press,” and maybe they really are “guilty” of publishing pieces that support their ideology. But the hoax, in both cases, doesn’t prove the second point, while it clearly proves the first point. It also proves a third point as well. If you are a bad actor and want to hoax or sting a publication, you can.

Using the ideology of the editors against them is really no different than a poet reading poems published in The New Yorker before submitting there. Creative writers know that you pick your submission based on what has been published there already. Why do we think it’d be any different in the non-fiction world? Do we still hold on to the idea that objectivity is a thing? And, yes, I know that many people argue that the Scientific Method and Research Ethics deliberately puts measures in place to control for bias. Ultimately though, aren’t we all taking some beliefs and actions based on faith or probability? Even the most controlled experiment “free” from bias and replicated many times, may not be all that applicable because out here beyond the confines of the lab we can’t control for every variable so things may not exactly work out like they’re supposed to.

I think we’ve reached a tipping point. We have to understand that sometimes we are taking positions and actions based on the best available data. Waiting for and controlling for every possible variable may mean we don’t take any action at all. Isn’t that what is motivating the US government from taking any real action on climate change? Oh my, there’s still not a hundred percent certainty that we’re experiencing human caused climate change so, therefore, let’s not do anything at all. We may never be able get to the “truth” but can’t we acknowledge that at the same time we say, “We need to take some action.” Why do we continue, to use a cliché, to make “the perfect the enemy of the good.” So to all the people who want to jump on this bandwagon or that bandwagon because their conclusions fit with what they believe why don’t we take a step back and say, “I could be wrong and you could be right, but let’s at least be open to what each other is saying so that we can work together on making things better.” It’s not that we don’t have enough facts or statistics to support one side or the other, it’s that we keep thinking that facts and statistics are the only thing that will win the argument. And they don’t.

Words Matter

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 09:23:00 -0600

Situation 1:

I was standing in line at Whole Foods with my food lined up behind me on the conveyor belt. A young black man got in line behind me and put his small handful of groceries behind mine. I noticed that he didn’t use the divider between his groceries and mine, and I didn’t say anything. Surely the clerk would notice?

A few minutes later, the clerk had gotten to the end of my groceries and looked down at his. “Is this yours?” she asked me.

I shook my head and then looked back at him. Snarkily, I said, “Almost got me to pay for your food. Almost.”

He laughed; I laughed; the clerk laughed.

But as I walking out to the car, I wondered, “Why did I say that? Why did I make that joke? Was it because he was a young black man or a young man?” I can’t help but think that maybe I was operating on some unconscious bias, some snap judgement on him being a young black man, and his trying to pull a fast one. It was a joke, yet it still haunts me to this day.

I didn’t get to talk to him afterwards, and I wanted to apologize. My intent was to make a joke. And, from his response, the clerk’s, and mine that intention came through. Yet, I wasn’t entirely sure. Was my intention really just to make a joke? And outside of the sort of half-hearted laugh we all shared, was there any other impact? For me, the situation left me thinking about my motivations; my willingness to make a joke at someone else’s expense. What was the impact on him? The clerk? I don’t know.

Situation 2:

On my way to my favorite bar, I walked by a young black man washing his car.

A couple of hours and beers later, I walked back home. It had rained while I was at the bar, and noticing that he was now sitting on his front porch with a friend, I said, “Thanks for bringing the rain.”

He got up. “What do you mean?”

I stammered, “You washed your car. It rained.”

“So. What are you trying to say?”

“I was just making a joke. You know…whenever someone washes their car it always rains.”

“I like my car.”

“You haven’t heard that joke?” Whether it was the beer or not, things seemed to be getting tense. He didn’t think I was joking.

“You need to move on,” he said.

“But…”

“No. Just go.”

I did. Yet, the walk home and my discussions with my wife afterwards, I kept asking. How had my intention of making a joke gone so horribly awry.

In a diverse neighborhood with a lot of short term renters, it wasn’t common that people talked to each other. I was a middle aged white man wearing a baseball cap, and while I didn’t say anything on the way to the bar, I was definitely looser and louder on the way home, and he didn’t know me.

“But it was just a joke,” I protested. “I was trying to be friendly. That was my intent.”

Intent vs. Impact:

After two White Privilege Conferences, I look at the world a little differently. Yet, in following the daily news and reading about the latest outrage committed by our President, I can’t help but wonder why the message of institutional racism has gotten so charged.

I know there are bad actors that will use whatever means necessary to hold on to their power. And I know that those same bad actors have made in-roads into painting “intersectionality,” “institutional racism,” and “systemic oppression” as partisan issues. But I can’t go through life thinking that all people who support the status quo are bad actors. Many of them have to want the world to improve and think of themselves as “good people” who want the same goals as many on the left but have been turned off in some way.

While it is important to recognize that fact, not everyone who argues that “identity politics” has gone too far really understands the issues nor how to effectively talk about them. I don’t understand the issues as well as I’d like, but I do think that how we talk about it is not serving our interests. Interestingly, I don’t think we have to reinvent or come up with a new language. I think we just need to take some the language from the field and apply it in discussions with people who may not understand the nuances around talking about identity.

To that end, this seems to be an adequate summary of what I think needs to happen: “After all, in the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us?” [italics mine]. From my perspective, there are many well meaning, liberal to centrist, white people who don’t understand the nuances of defining someone’s statements or actions as racist or misogynist or ableist. Likewise, when they bring up issues of “reverse racism” or “toxic masculinity” or “he’s crazy” as issues that need to be teased out and explicated, diversity educators (or anybody versed in this language and not afraid of the conversation) runs crashing into “white fragility,” being overly PC, or just too hypersensitive. Yes, these are learned responses, but people aren’t learning. They still use them frequently and even if, as I wrote about on another article the conversation (in particular race) doesn’t go anywhere. And yes, a lot of times the resistance to really understanding white supremacy or white privilege comes from white people, even some that haven’t experienced marginalization or oppression, yet that is exactly what they feel. They can still be impacted by how we talk about this even if they are not who we are talking about. So, how do we move forward?

My argument is that we have the tool, and we need to use it to police our own discourse. Yes, when we label someone as “racist” we are, quite often, not trying to suggest it is a permanent condition but a learned response and that their words and/or actions need to change because it is doing people harm. But the throwing the label at them is not having its intended impact. Our intent is to get people to be better, to look at their words and their actions and understand how that effects people around them. You only need to look at Evergreen College to know that hurling the label didn’t make the situation better. Instead we get push back that drives them (primarily white people) further away because they don’t have the nuanced understanding that we do. The impact does not match our intent. And we need to address that.

Calling someone a racist isn’t helping. When our friends remark that they “don’t see color” pointing that that is an impossibility doesn’t help unless we factor in the impact of doing just that. We’ve all been calling each other out in the simplest shorthand, and it is leading to less honest discussion or no discussion at all instead of more. We need to have more conversations, more nuanced, honest, and fearless conversations and unless we don ‘t look at our own intent by blasting people on social media with a shorthand that they may not understand, the impact is going to leave us with even less room to talk not more.

It's a Publish or Perish World

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 08:33:00 -0600

Disclaimer:

I’m not invested in securing tenure at a university, yet I do feel that my time working on my Master’s in Rhetoric was worthwhile. While my job as a mid-level manager at a community college doesn’t require that level of education, expending the effort to work full time and study was a way to stay engaged and keep my brain active.

Background:

I developed a sort of discipline that sitting in front of a computer most days rewards. I read a lot; I watch documentary films and various YouTube clips a lot. And as I sort of meandered my way through understanding the larger world as presented to me via the web, I, as predicted or delivered by the algorithm on YouTube, became exposed to a broader variety of opinions (Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, The Ruben Report, Bret Weinstein) than my online circle of poet and progressive friends held or posted about on other social media platforms. It lead me to the NYTimes piece on the Intellectual Dark Web.

From there it was a quick jump into reading articles posted on new-to-me web publications like Quillette and Medium. In fact, I stopped regularly engaging with Salon and the Daily Beast on a daily basis in search of writing that seemed to have more heft to support my increasingly nuanced world view. Yet, my progressive viewpoint is not something I was willing to disavow so, simultaneously, I was consuming the NY Times, and watching “liberal” YouTube (Peter Coffin, Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube, etc.). It all lead to a greater appreciation of the diversity of opinion and viewpoints that has flooded our media landscape.

Information Overload:

I can’t help but wonder that if I, a diligent reader schooled in the language of Rhetoric, was having difficulty sorting through it all, how much harder must it be for others who, frankly, don’t have my kind of time? And, as the lack of discussion that seems to have followed in the wake of Trump’s election suggests, people can find other people who support their viewpoint with the click of the mouse so there’s not much incentive to talk to people you disagree with. Why bother and take on the stress? I even went so far and tried to engage a friend from high school on what troubled me about Trump’s most recent tweets, which I wrote about on my account at Medium.Despite not receiving widespread traction, my conclusion that we need to find a way to talk to each other because the other options for resolving our differences lead to places I don’t really want to go. So I’m still looking for ways to talk to people who disagree with me.

The Perils of Publish or Perish:

And it was with a curious eye that I started watching videos and reading articles regarding what is being dubbed, “The Grievance Studies Scandal.” In it, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose embarked on a crash course in various disciplines that have “infiltrated” Academia since the ’90s. Under the pejorative banner of “Grievance Studies” they are: LGTBQ Studies, Race Studies, Women’s Studies, Fat Studies, etc. Boghossian et al set out to see if they could hoax “grievance studies” journals into publishing fake articles. Over a period of a couple of years they managed to get seven papers through peer review including a 3,000 word excerpt from Mein Kampf rewritten using language from Intersectionality theory. While a lot of the articles I was reading recognize that this is not a new undertaking referencing Alan Sokal’s similar tactic in 1996, he was arguing against the spread of post-modernist language and some staggering claims obscured by that language. While his project wasn’t overtly political, Boghossian’s et al project decidedly was. As James Lindsay argues,“Grievance Studies does not continue the work of the civil rights movements it corrupts it.” So while Sokal was making fun of the language and the obfuscation it created, Boghossian et al had staked a political position and went out to prove that it was true.

Under the guise of doing work to help academia, Lindsay alleges:

“No one tolerates this sort of corruption when they find out an industry is funding biased research to make itself look a certain way. The same scrutiny should apply to research when it pushes a political agenda and we have uncovered enough evidence to suggest that this corruption is pervasive among many disciplines…”

Pushing back against these disciplines is nothing new. Ever since their creation there have been claims that these studies are driven more by ideology than scholarship. Their critique is not a new critique.

Finally as I was trying to wrap my brain around the implications and concerns, a university, specifically the Ethics Review Board at Portland State University (PSU), weighed in. Boghossian is an assistant professor at PSU. Lindsay and Pluckrose do not work in academia. Boghossian was cited for an ethics violation. This, in turn, is creating a quite a bit of chatter as well. One article on Quillette argued, “The answer is that this field [research-ethics oversight] has drastically changed since its original conception seven decades ago. It once was about preventing harm. Now, it’s about protecting ideas.” Essentially, people were arguing that sanctioning him for an ethics violation was an ideological move as well, demonstrating the “rot” at the core of academia today.

Yes, the ethics review board did find that the methods were unethical, yet the vast majority of commenters seem to come down on the side of Boghossian et al for doing us all a favor by exposing “grievance studies” as the fraud it clearly is so his methodology didn’t really matter. This was not a study; it was a sting. This was not a research project; it was a journalism project. They even recognize that there was no way they would’ve gotten approval.

I was a bit perplexed. Didn’t the readers of Quillette value the great work that many universities using these very same protections had done through the years? These protections were put in place to protect people from dishonest actors, and Boghossian et al were being deliberately dishonest. In my estimation, he should’ve indeed been punished though it certainly doesn’t rise to the level of dismissal. Likewise, if he wanted to write a more telling critique of “grievance studies” and its supposed political bias, why not actually write something that is legitimate but doesn’t adhere to the ideology? Even if they never managed to publish anything wouldn’t that make essentially the same statement?

Finally, this latest “sting” also doesn’t take into account that this (nor Sokal’s earlier work) are not the only examples of this at work. In the STEM fields as well there have been numerous examples of academic journals publishing hoaxed papers let alone examples of shoddy research practices. It’s a non-story. What makes it a story is that it highlights the ideological Right’s problems with “grievance studies” and academia. Boghossian et al (Lindsay proclaims to be a traditional liberal) walked right into their trap and proceeded to generate a subsequent furor around it. Yet, as I see it, the problem isn’t with “grievance studies,” it’s with Academia. The whole concept of “publish or perish” is flawed and leads to the conditions that make this scandal possible.

Publish or Perish:

In my spare time, I’m also a poet. And as a poet, I’ve published, organized, and performed around the Albuquerque for years. With my name out there, I was asked to serve on the board of West End Press (WEP). WEP is a press that specializes in publishing women, minorities, and other under-published populations. Despite my own desires to get my work published by an established press, being a board member eliminated WEP as a publishing home let alone the fact that I wasn’t the demographic that they are interested in. While on the board, one of the poets on the press suggested that WEP run a “First Book Contest.” As argument for it, she said something to the effect of, “Many of these newly minted MFA’s have to publish a book for the job market. It doesn’t matter where they publish as long as they can put on their Curriculum Vitae that they won such-and-such a contest and got a book published as a result. Many of them have a budget just to enter contests. So we’d be doing them a favor by running a contest and the other entrants would fund the publication of the book.” It’s publish or perish, and as long as no one looks too deeply into the details it’ll be a line on the CV and help them worm their way into tenured positions at Universities. I was a bit flabbergasted, doubly so when the contest winner was not someone who matched the demographic that WEP served, but held my nose and argued that we shouldn’t do it again.

As I came to understand it, the system is a bit sleight of hand in all of academia. Newly minted PhD students need publications and conference presentations to make them stand out. Publishers and conference organizers know that many of them will go to extreme ends to get that credit and create a market for just that. In the area of social sciences there are “open access journals” and “pay to publish” journals. Some of them are tagged as fraudulent and prey on unsuspecting scholars, and some actually publish rigorous work. How many of them are actually read? How many of these journals are actually funded by the people who publish in them?

When faced with a society where increasingly more and more people are turning to colleges and universities for ways to use their advanced degree and more and more colleges and universities are admitting students into advanced programs to make up for the lack of funding that helps keep the college afloat is it any wonder that there are journals that publish “questionable” scholarship and conferences that invite panelists presenting papers just to pad their CVs?

So the bigger story that most of the commentary on this scandal miss is that we are increasingly demanding people go to college because it will net them better employment (and statistics does support this), but it also means that the competition for college level teaching positions and tenure track positions are more intense than ever before. And in the days of interview coaching, job market prep, and trying to find and weigh the differences between all the candidates or who should get tenure or who should be up for full professorship, there may not be a lot of ways that really differentiate candidates.

Likewise, quite often, the people who are charged with making these decisions are the same ones who may have to do more research or publish another manuscript, so that they can advance as well. Is it any wonder that there is a cottage industry around academia that exists partly to make the participants (writers, peer reviewers, conference presenters, etc.) look good and qualified?

Likewise there is a lot of competition for full professorships as well and for that they may have to start their own journal or host their own symposia, which means padding their accomplishments as well. Never mind if there is no real demand for what’s being discussed, they’ve got CVs to fill and programs to builds.

This is not to say that there aren’t good, ethical, conscientious people working in academia, because there are. And this is not to say that this is commonplace either, because I suspect it’s not. Fundamentally, we are relying on systems that can be easily gamed and relying on metrics that are hard to measure. And if we single out a group of disciplines without looking at the structure they operate under we are missing the bigger discussion.

August 8th, 2019.

Rhetoric is a Green House Gas

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 10:12:00 -0600

Reconstituting Public Opinion around the Exigence of Global Warming

Despite the cold east wind, the dark orange maple leaves cling tenaciously to the trees on the streetscape. The yellow mulberry leaves, however, dropped last week and have now been blown out my yard, across the street. Things don’t seem that different; this feels like November in Albuquerque. Fall is almost over and its last remaining days have finally killed the plants in my garden. Winter moves in as I chop firewood, change air filters on furnaces, dig out gloves and warmer clothes. This is November, not all that different from every November. Yes, we have seasons and sometimes it feels as if life will continue apace as it always has. Yet, just last week the World Meteorological Society stated that “… 2013 is currently on course to be among the top ten warmest years since modern records began in 1850” (WMO).

That is a not an illusion; things aren’t the same. As noted in the report the coldest years in the period between 2001 and 2010 were warmer than the hottest years before 1998 (WMO). Yet, we still pile in our cars, get wrapped up in national and regional politics, and argue over a misplaced comma, a definitive prediction proved wrong or just slightly off. All create a sense that the facts of Global Warming are still up for interpretation. Yet they aren’t: “Atmospheric concentrations… [have reached] unprecedented levels yet again in 2013. This means we are committed to a warmer future” (WMO).

We have reached the point where the exigence of Global Warming has never been more pressing, more demanding, more insistent on significant action. But yet we make small changes and the only weekly Presidential remarks that remotely resemble being about the environment are relegated to two sentences: “We decided to reverse our addiction to foreign oil. And today, we generate more renewable energy than ever, more natural gas than anybody, and for the first time in nearly 20 years, America now produces more oil than we buy from other countries” (White House). Yet, I don’t think the President or his administration would argue that Global Warming is not a concern. As outlined by the general focus of his administration, the economy, however, is the controlling exigence that is guiding his actions.

Likewise, The New York Times announced last January that it was “dismantling its special team—or “pod”—of seven reporters and two editors” reporting on Climate Change (Sullivan). Though not necessarily a lessening of concern with the issue, “Symbolically, this is bad news. And symbolism matters – it shows a commitment and an intensity of interest in a crucially important topic” (Sullivan). And a little less than a year later, Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor at the Times after interviewing Maxwell T. Boykoff, a professor who tracks media coverage on the environment, summarized his findings this way, “Overall U.S. news coverage of climate change has plummeted, he said, after peaks in 2007 and 2009.” So the question is how can we shift the discussion such that Anthropogenic Climate Change is the controlling exigence for guiding policy in the United States especially if entities that would help drive the discussion don’t see it as a priority? As the controlling exigence, it would give “definition and …[demarcate] the range of viable responses” (Hauser, 48).

It wasn’t always this way. Just a few short years ago, Al Gore, delivered a scathing speech in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and presided over a national “discussion” about Global Warming because his movie An Inconvenient Truth generated a palpable buzz. Yet, those changes that he argued for didn’t frame the debate or act as the controlling exigence for policy change. So the questions are: what happened and why not?

To answer that question, we need to first look at what the movie did do and how it functioned. The movie uses a mixture of film and presentation to establish Gore’s ethos around Global Warming and spell out its effects. The film uses a mixture of Al Gore’s presentation, known simply, as “the Slide Show” and voice over filmed sequences to create a sort of narrative arc for delivering roughly the same information that an audience member would get at the live presentation. For the film they had Gore deliver the presentation to a live audience in a small theater in Los Angeles (Golson). The producer, with Al Gore’s input, chose this method because:

…one of the huge differences between a live stage performance and a movie is that when you’re in the same room with a live person who’s on stage speaking — even if it’s me [laughs] — there’s an element of dramatic tension and human connection that keeps your attention. And in a movie, that element is just not present (Roberts).

Thus, under the guise of analyzing a movie (actually the only fully realized document), I’m going to look at sections of it rhetorically: as Gerard Hauser states, “Rhetoric, then, is concerned with the use of symbols to induce social action” (3). The movie because of its format reached a wider audience than the Slide Show even though he’s delivered the presentation, by his own estimation “over a 1,000 times” (An Inconvenient Truth). But before it became an award winning film, it was an engaging presentation.

In essence the presentation as shown is a staged presentation. Many of the graphical elements were created or enhanced for the film but it was Gore’s rhetorical delivery that engaged the film maker, “and when you see him do it…it makes you want to take action” (Golson). So, though I am experiencing the film, the producer has chosen to include a filming of the live presentation. This presentation is no different in content than what he has done before. The rhetorical situation is Al Gore, using a variety of multi-media, delivering a talk about the dangers of Global Warming. Overwhelmingly people spoke of the presentation as having a certain rhetorical power. As Hauser states, “Rhetorical communication can be used to foster or to inhibit participatory processes” (17). The effectiveness of the slide show is demonstrated in the producers’ statement, “Everyone comes out saying, “What can I do?” (Golson).

From what can be observed in the film, the presentation is delivered on a thrust stage with a small screen that he can look at and larger screen (70 ft. wide) that mirrors the small screen. There’s a laptop on a small table at the center of the stage. Gore generally stands center stage with a remote control in his hands to advance the slides on the screen. He is wearing a dark suit coat and tie and looks professional but not overly dressed up. The presentation is a mixture of still slides, animated shorts, and video shorts. Next to the screen is a construction dolly that he uses in one particular segment to drive up to the top of the screen.

Embedded in the presentation is a narrative about how Gore came to his interest in this topic. This narrative establishes Gore’s ethos and how this singular topic has motivated his choice of career and why he’s positioned to speak about it. As he states, “I’ve been trying to tell this story for a long time and I feel as if I’ve failed to get the message across” (An Inconvenient Truth).

Part of what also works to act as a sort of counterpoint to Gore’s facts and development of argument is his use of short animation sequences and jokes. For example, beginning with just the simple, “I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States. [Pause] I don’t find that particularly funny.” Right from the beginning he’s establishing his ethos as a public speaker. So we have two reasons to listen to him: 1) this topic is one he’s studied for much of his adult life, and 2) he’s a politician with a sizable constituency. While his being a former vice president and potential president doesn’t necessarily mean he is an expert on climate science, it does mean he has access to many of the leading researchers that will help inform his talk. Indeed, in one section the audience sees Al Gore standing outside of a nuclear submarine after it has just surfaced in the Artic. He admits that his position has allowed him to travel on a sub and admits that he convinced them to release data about the relative thickness of the ice since they can only surface if the ice is relatively thin. Admittedly, he has resources that many speakers wouldn’t have access to. Being able to access a sub and being able to use short animation sequence from the creators of The Simpsons is not something that a lot of public speakers would be able to do. While his political experience means he has the resources to mount a grand production, he also spells out that his understanding of the topic is shaped by his own interests.

His ethos means he can command attention on almost any topic. Gore states, “I was in politics for a long time. I’m proud of my service” (An Inconvenient Truth). Yet, the speech doesn’t only rely on his presence. He uses a bit of personal narrative: the near death of a child to establish the urgency of why he is doing this now and the connection he’s had with the natural environment through 3 generations of farming. He uses the iconic images of the Earth to sort of evoke a sense of emotional awe. Quite often he uses visual imagery (historic pictures of the size of glaciers in the past compared to their size now) to break up the logos of the recitation of facts. The pictures are pretty staggering and while they make a reasonable point, they also have a sort of “awe” appeal that is visceral and emotional.

In several of the reviews and responses to his presentation, many point to his experience as a candidate for President. Prior to this he was not known as a particularly effective rhetor. He was described as stiff, wooden, and robotic (Kimmel), yet many reviewers seem almost surprised by his commanding and endearing presence during this presentation.

What is different about this rhetorical situation than the many rhetorical situations he found himself in as a candidate? For one, he’s obviously well versed in the subject area. Two, he’s not campaigning for public office so he can clearly articulate and stake out a position while campaigning for votes may mean he has to phrase the urgency in non-partisan terms. And three the exigence of the situation we find ourselves at this historical moment suggests that action needs to be taken on a grand scale. In one particular example, he points out that President Bush’s science advisor was once a lobbyist for the petroleum industry. As the science advisor he edited an official document (revealed through slides) to show that there wasn’t a consensus on anthropogenic climate change. The advisor was subsequently released and Gore compares the counter claims as similar (to laughter) from the claims of the tobacco lobby after the Surgeon General’s report in 1964. The Al Gore of An Inconvenient Truth does not worry about the fossil fuel industry taking out political attack ads against him. By campaigning as himself, and in campaigning on an issue he’s passionate about he’s a much better speaker. The Al Gore of An Inconvenient Truth is freed from the constraints of the campaign trail at an exigence that he portrays as rather urgent.

When I chose to analyze this particular presentation, I was not only interested in looking at Al Gore’s transition from mainstream politician to environmental spokesperson but wanted to look at how he used different strategies to create his talk. In particular, I saw him employing a type of vernacular rhetoric that hopes to shape change outside of society. This rhetoric, the use of technology to supplement your message has found many avenues in academia and without. Most notably is the public lecture of a TED talk, which has been the main venue for two different follow-up talks since 2006. In his talk, and like many TED talks, he used a variety of resources to prompt a change that I find particularly compelling. While he, perhaps, could’ve given the very same talk without utilizing animated slides or film clips, I found the use of multi-media reinforced the urgency of taking action now. Yet, systemically or legally very little action has taken place.

In fact, one of the main hopes for doing something about Global Warming, the Kyoto Treaty, was never signed by the United States nor did the U.S. Senate pass Cap and Trade legislation in the summer of 2010. True, the issue never received bi-partisan support; even Conservatives were rejecting a market-based solution. Global Warming was not a priority in the same way that the economy, the deficit, and the healthcare system were a priority. Certainly more people are buying hybrids, electric cars, carpooling, biking, and trying to find clean sources of energy, yet we aren’t making the changes he argued for as quickly or as radically as he said was necessary. As Al Gore states in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step "ism."” So how do we re-kindle a desire for collective action around global warming such that action can happen? And, if the ethos of a near President isn’t enough to spur change what will be?

Part of the problem around the issue is that it became too associated with Al Gore and by extension too partisan. It is seen as a liberal/progressive issue. While the issue got a much needed boost from his celebrity, it also means he’s open to attack as well. We live in an age where the actions of “heroes” get “dissolved into a blur of environmental influences and internal maladjustments” (Boorstin, 52). Thus, the movie was not about Global Warming, but about Al Gore. Some comments on threads in regards to the film suggested that the whole film was a sort of paean or encomium to Al Gore. Yet, that seems to be the choice of the filmmakers. There is very little biographical information in the presentation as filmed. But because the filmmakers chose to personalize Al Gore as well as show clips from the Slide Show, the audience can’t separate the presentation from Al Gore. Yet, by including biographical information they were also, in a way, introducing Gore, to an audience that may only know him as a candidate for President. This new audience doesn’t know why he would be so concerned about environmental issues or why he’s an “expert,” so they had to establish his ethos and they chose to do it in a couple of ways: the long narrative about his studies with Roger Revelle (establishing himself as someone who studied with the expert) and the story about the near death of his child. In the film, the story of his child is told through images of Gore sitting next to a hospital bed with a voiceover that says, “It just turned my whole world around. How should I spend my time on this Earth?...The possibility of losing something that was precious to me” (An Inconvenient Truth).

But I agree with him. Yet, for someone who didn’t vote for Gore, who perceives him as yet “another politician” the film can look like it is nothing more than ego. He is seen as being an opportunist and thus is open to the charge of being hypocritical or political. Thus what helped established his ethos with one group may actually hurt his ethos with another. So if appeals to pathos (his children) don’t work than appeals to logos must. But, climate science is notoriously complicated and his conclusions were open to criticism. In fact, while many schools show the film, many people argue that the film is nothing more than political propaganda. For example, “The court [High Court of London] ruled that 1.) in order to show this movie to the children [sic] teachers must make clear that the film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument” (Climate Sanity).

Yet, the science is overwhelmingly on Gore’s side. In his rebuttal of their arguments, Gore characterized it from an interview in October, “…we’re all prone to kind of avoid thinking about something that seems painful to think about…especially if the solution looks like it’s going to require some significant changes in prevailing patterns” (Kimmel). Simply put the solution may not be as simple as buying an hybrid, driving less, etc. So the question now, some seven years after the film of a presentation he’s given over a 1,000 times, is what is the place of this presentation in the historical rhetoric regarding environmental issues? Is Al Gore going to be relegated as some sort of biblical prophet whose arcane warnings we either didn’t understand or just plain ignored? Is his film, and thus by extension his presentation, seen as something that helped the cause or hindered it because the story quickly became about him?

In fact, quite a few of the attacks attack him personally: how he manages his ranch in Tennessee, the type of car he drives, how many miles on jets he’s used to attack (as they see it) a political opponent who’s merely just trying to make a profit. Some other criticisms are that he drew conclusions that hadn’t been entirely vetted. There were still many scientists (at the time) that felt the conclusions were too extreme, too dire. Yet, as each year progresses with drought, wildfires, one thousand year floods, record temperatures, violent and destructive weather many scientists now see the doomsday scenario as increasingly probable. Indeed, while Gore’s presentation was characterized as sort of alarmist, it almost seems entirely prescient today, and right. According to Cosmos Magazine, we have around 30 years to save the planet, “Global warming is real, its effects can already be seen and felt, and we are the cause” (Crow).

If anything, the criticism I have of Gore’s presentation is that the filmmakers slicked it up a bit much. I found the use of animation, while cute, to be sort of belittling…taking serious science and framing it in terms that seem patently simple. The overall conclusions while maybe alarmist aren’t too far afield and perhaps, rhetorically, we needed to be alarmed to shake us out of our complacency? But we need to do more. If anything, we need to learn from Gore and try and reconstitute a discussion and a plan of action around climate change. We need to reinvent the rhetoric that will allow us to frame it as something other than this partisan issue championed by a partisan player. Rhetoric can and should play an active part. For example, we need “…the people in the audience [to]…be capable of mediating change. When people think they cannot influence the outcome, they are less likely to respond to messages” (Hauser, 49).

One possible way may be to look at how public opinion is constituted and shaped. For that, we need to examine some case histories. In Gerard Hauser’s Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, he looks as specific cases where a public sphere was created and how it was maintained. In Poland this meant that its “embrace of civil society made it possible for new culturally relevant narratives to emerge and for rhetoric to play a central role in its ongoing self-production” (Hauser, 159). They were able to do this because they were able to “build upon the resonance of its founding moments in public imagination” (Hauser, 159). Thus, to activate Americans we need to call upon Americans who did great things and use their example to spur change.

Quite often this is done by remembering the mobilization of earlier generations and the history of war. In fact, Gore does this in his Nobel Prize speech when he says, “We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war.” This is problematic because in war industrialization is often a force for good, a force that allows a mobilized populace to build better and faster, but in Anthropogenic Climate Change, industrialization is what got us here in the first place. So I suggest we choose a different history: a history of living at peace with the land. For that we need to draw on our history of pioneers, indigenous cultures, and subsistence farmers and recognize that America’s diversity is our greatest strength. We need to see the variety of cultures we come from as an asset that defines us as Americans: Native Americans, African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and White Americans. We need to remember we have a collective, diverse history that lays open the possibilities perhaps wider than any other place on Earth. We need to look beyond a time when we were consumers to a time where we lived within our means. And we need to get together and learn how it was done. We need, as Al Gore proposes in the film, “communicate this really clearly” (An Inconvenient Truth).

How did people live in the Rio Grande Valley before we mined the ground water? How did people live in the mountains in times of drought? And how can we do that now? Because we have already committed ourselves to a warmer future and unless we radically change, we may run out of time. Yes, this sounds alarmist; yes, “maybe it is just too big to do anything about” it. But as he states, “There are a lot of people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually doing something about the problem” (An Inconvenient Truth). Global warming and our actions to deal with it is partly a rhetorical problem, and it seems as if it may require all of us to engage in the fight rhetorically.

Work Cited

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage, 1961. Print.

"Climate Sanity." Climate Sanity. N.p., 21 Mar. 2008. Web. 26 Oct. 2013.

Crow, James Mitchell. "Just 30 Years to save the Planet." COSMOS Magazine. N.p., 25 Nov. 2013. Web.

08 Dec. 2013.

Golson, Blair. "Blair Golson: Lawrence Bender: The Truthdig Interview -Interviews

-Truthdig."Truthdig Main News. N.p., 26 May 2006. Web. 26 Oct. 2013.

Hauser, Gerard A. Introduction to Rhetorical Theory. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire: Harper & Row, 1986.

Print.

Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia: University of

South Carolina, 1999. Print.

Kimmel, Jimmy. "Jimmy Kimmel Live." Jimmy Kimmel Live. CBS. 23 Oct. 2013.

Television

Obama, Barack. "Weekly Address: Working with Both Parties to Keep the Economy Moving Forward.”

23 Nov. 2013. Web. 08 Dec. 2013

“Provisional Statement on Status of Climate in 2013: Continuing high temperatures globally and

many climate extremes worldwide.” World Meteorological Organization, 13 Nov. 2013. Web.

08 Dec. 2013.

Roberts, David. "An Interview with Accidental Movie Star Al Gore." Grist. N.p., 10

May 2006. Web. 26 Oct. 2013.

Sullivan, Margaret. "After Changes, How Green Is The Times?" The New York Times [New York City] 23

Nov. 2013: n. pag. The New York Times, 23 Nov. 2013. Web. 06 Dec. 2013. Sullivan, Margaret. "

Sullivan, Margaret. Public Editor's Journal Blog - NYTimes.com."Margaret Sullivan - Public Editor's

Journal Blog - NYTimes.com. The New York Times, 11 Jan. 2013. Web. 08 Dec. 2013.

Answering the Racist Question

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 09:00:00 -0600

A while back, I was reading an old friend’s Facebook (FB) post about how both political sides are corrupt and another old friend commented, “I'm going to disagree with you on that point. True people on the Right listen to the other side without putting the other side down and point to facts...The difficulty I have is that the left likes to use emotion and opinion for the disagreement and when you confront them on where they got their information it's MSN.”

I responded, “…your take is exactly what I experience in reverse, and when you ask them where they got their facts they'll point to Fox, which I don't think is reliable sourcing. Of course, social media has made it easier to get caught up in bubbles and tribalism and leads to only really hearing opinions that support our pre-existing opinions. I think this sorting has sort of lead to people not really talking "with" each other at all, rather talking "at" each other seems to be the norm…”

He agreed with my assertion, “Talk, listen and keep an open mind….” and that was the end of the discussion until a couple days ago.

Recently, President Trump posted a series of Tweets:

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly…..and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation [sic] on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the broke and crime infested places from which they came. [sic] Then come back and show us how…it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

This lead to a political firestorm and the House of Representative’s voting to condemn the Tweets as racist (mostly along party lines), but there were four republicans and one independent who also voted to condemn the Tweets.

So, I decided to call the five legislators and thank them for showing their outrage and posted about it, “…I think we need to encourage any Republican that bucks the party to vote their beliefs and values. It's this hyper-partisanship that seems to be tearing us apart and preventing us from really having discussion about the myriad of problems we need to solve.”

Most of the people who responded to my post were positive, but my old friend asked, “My question to them is what did the President say from their perspective that they found offensive.”

So I posted a variety of their statements and then responded with how “Go back to your country” is racist cliché. The statement has a long history of being used to demonize immigrant newly welcomed to America. In fact, many scholars trace the roots to as far back as 1798 and the Alien & Sedition Acts, which made it easier for authorities to remove immigrants who were critical of the government. It is almost exclusively used by white people to deride people who they think “don’t belong.” My congresswoman (one of two Native American women in Congress) weighed in on the controversy as well but from an indigenous perspective, “If anyone can say “go back,” it’s Native Americans… But indigenous people aren’t asking anyone to go back to where they came from.”

Ironically, after I visited the Isle of Lewis in Scotland (shortly before Trump’s election), where my grandfather came from, I signed up to receive job announcements from the University of the Highlands and declared that I’d go back in a heartbeat if I could find a job. Being in Scotland helped me understand that my grandfather did not feel like he had any choice but to emigrate. He couldn’t find work in Carloway, Scotland and was encouraged by his brother and the promise of stable work on the northern plains of Montana in the United States at the very beginning of the 20^th century.

Nevertheless at the end of the discussion, my old friend still didn’t see the tweets as racist and concluded, “Sorry but no, because he then said "come back and show us how you fixed it." If this was not in there then I would have to yield to your point.”

I’ve sat with that for a while now thinking that my perspective was that the original tweets were clearly racist and if you didn’t see that then 1) you didn’t understand the context and history, or 2) were willfully ignorant. I didn’t anticipate that he would question the predominant opinion about the tweets themselves, would question whether they were saying what the majority of opinion said they were saying.

Not wanting to be so quick to pass judgment, and as an exercise then, I’m going to break out the important information from the tweets and see if there is any other way to interpret them, a sort of critical interpretation.

Using italics to call attention to certain key phrases, here goes:

Trump starts with this statement, “So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all)…” While he doesn’t explicitly call out the legislators by name, the fact that he is referencing Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA), Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN), Rashida Tlaib (MN), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) has not been disputed thus far. These are four new democratic legislators; four outspoken women of color. The fact that three of them were actually born in the U.S. seems to not be a fact Trump knows.

So what countries is he referring to? If he knew that three of them had been born in the US then the countries may actually be only one (or is he labeling the US as having a government that is a “total catastrophe?”) Somalia. Rep. Omar is a refugee from Somalia (she immigrated to the US when she was 12) and is a naturalized US citizen.

But let’s continue, “…telling the people of the United States…how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the broke and crime infested places from which they came. [sic]. He is using the verb “to come” twice, so clearly he is referencing their countries of origin, “…originally came…[and] from which they came.” In grammatical terms, “which” is relative pronoun and is merely acting as a replacement for “country.” Indeed it would be a little wordy if he instead wrote, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the broke and crime infested places from the countries they originally came from.”

Another key phrase that signals that Trump does not recognize that they are American citizens or even legitimate legislators is, “…how our government is to be run.” As members of a co-equal branch of government that is exactly their job. They are duly elected members of “our government.”

To summarize, the key phrases thus far reads as follows: “So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe… now loudly…..and viciously telling the people of the United States…how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the broke and crime infested places from which they came. [sic] Then come back and show us how…it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”

But is it racist?

When my friend cited, “Then come back and show us how…it is done” he was arguing that Trump was, in essence, saying, “Why don’t you go back to your original countries, fix them, then come back and show us how it is done.” Thus, since he asked them to come back, the original statement cannot be an equivalent of “Go back to your country,” which he did not dispute was a racist statement.

But another interpretation is that he was actually not even referencing their original countries, but the actual districts they represent. That’s a pretty generous interpretation and doesn’t necessarily square with the facts, yet let’s examine that as well. Rep. Ayanna Pressley represents Massachusetts’ 7^th congressional district, which has a median income of over $60,000 (the US median income is roughly $30,000) and includes roughly three fourths of Boston. Boston is not crime infested, and its crime rate is equal to the national average. Rep. Ilhan Omar represents Minnesota’s 5^th congressional district, which has a median income of over $60,000 and includes the entire city of Minneapolis. Minneapolis is not crime infested either. Rep. Rashida Tlaib represents Michigan’s 13^th congressional district, which has a median income of just over $35,000. It includes portions of Detroit and all of Wayne County. It does have a crime rate higher than the national average. Finally Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents New York’s’ 14^th congressional district, which includes some of the eastern Bronx and the north-central Queens, which has a median income of a little over $58,000. New York City overall has one of the lowest crime rates of any major city in the U.S and is listed as the 10^th safest major city in the world. Donald Trump was also born in Queens, the 5^th Congressional District, and is represented by Greg Meeks, who voted to condemn the tweets as well. So clearly the “crime infested places from which they came” is not referencing their congressional districts.

The statement is clearly representing the countries they originally come from. In two of the legislators case that would mean: Omar’s Somalia and Tlaib’s Palestine (not an actual country). Pressley is African-American who was born in Cincinnati and raised in Chicago. Likewise, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez father and mother were both born in the US (New York and Puerto Rico respectively). So they have just as much of a claim to the US as President Trump, whose father was born in the US but whose mother was born in Scotland, and is part of the Macleod Clan (my family is part of the Mackenzie Clan) and calls the Isle of Lewis home too.

While suggesting that they “come back and show us how it is done” allows my friend to qualify Trump’s tweets as “not racist,” that opinion is not shared by most people and it doesn’t square with avowed white nationalist Richard Spencer, who said, “He gives us nothing outside of racist tweets. And by racist tweets, I mean tweets that are meaningless and cheap and express the kind of sentiments you might hear from your drunk uncles while he’s watching Hannity.” I’d stumbled across Richard Spenser’s response to Trump’s tweets and posted an admittedly snarky comment that if the most famous white nationalist thinks the tweets are racist, then they probably are.

He still wasn’t convinced and in quick succession on the next night posted a couple of examples of Trump working with African-Americans and even promoting an African-American general bragging he had more pictures to show me if I was interested. He clearly thought he’d “trumped” my point by posting a variation of the “How can he be racist if he has black friends and worked with black people?” response.

Of course, I was not surprised and it pointed out what I’d been saying as one of the biggest problems with how discussions about race are situated. From my take, whenever these episodes blow up, the offender displays a lot of umbrage and says (as Trump did) variations of the, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” This statement points out that people who really haven’t looked at, or had to look at, race in America don’t understand that the majority of people talking about race today (usually on the left) aren’t coming from the position that being labeled racist does not mean that the offender is always a racist. If the accuser is careful, which I was, they focus on the behavior, the actions, and the words and don’t label the offender as racist. Unlike the color of your skin, being racist is not a permanent condition. People can learn, can change. That Donald Trump, and my friend who supports him, so clearly demonstrates that he doesn’t get this means that we’re not even having the same conversation.

I tried to point that out and linked to the Ipsos poll that showed that the majority of Americans think Trump’s tweets were racist. And then he fell back to questioning whether they asked about this statement, "come back and show us how you fixed it." Is that a nuance that the polling firm missed? Did they not take that statement seriously? Was he conceding that asking the question in the first place was indeed a racist act?

I don’t know. But to hang your belief on that when almost no one else is strikes me as rather odd. And yet, I didn’t say, as Charles Blow did, “…if you still can’t bring yourself to do so [call Trump’s tweets racist]— you are part of the problem.”

Racism is a social construction. Humans aren’t born racist. They learn to be racist over time. And as such, Trump could change his ways, could learn from his mistakes, but for that he’d actually have to admit that the tweets in question were racist. And Trump doesn’t have “a racist bone in [his] body” and also doesn’t like to apologize. Not having a racist bone doesn’t mean you can’t say, write, tweet, post racist things. Rather than a skeletal metaphor, the correct one, as popularized by Jay Smooth, is one of having a little “racism stuck in your teeth” like telling someone that they have a piece of food stuck in their teeth or crumbs in their beard, etc. It’s not a defining characteristic of who they are rather it is something they can do something about. Namely brush off their beard, clean their teeth. So Trump’s statement about the “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen showed that he still has some racism in him. That is all I was saying.

Finally, so what do I do with my friend who doesn’t think the tweets are racist? This has been my challenge for the last three years. Every time I try and have a discussion with someone who is a Trump supporter it’s like they are living in a different world than I am. We can’t come to any agreement on our terms or the exact meaning of his phrases so we can’t reach any agreement. My friend and I can agree that the tweets were “unnecessary” but I don’t see “…Then come back and show us how…it is done” as scrubbing the earlier parts of the tweets of their historical racist messaging. If anything, I come from a place that is looking for Trump to make a bad statement, be indelicate, and not word things well. I don’t think Donald Trump is a good president and don’t agree with many of his policy positions nor enjoy watching or hearing him. I assume he has the worst of intentions. My friend, however, seems content to not assume the worst. It makes for frustrating conversations for sure. But given the option of talking with each other about our differences or using other tools to hash out our differences, I’ll take discussion every time.

Hollywood Southwest

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 07:49:00 -0600

FADE IN:

EXT. MUSEUM-DAY

A glass and brick building with sculptures made of bronze and metal arranged around a grassy lawn encircled by a sidewalk. A middle aged white guy with a baseball cap walks into the shot, up to large glass doors and steps into the building.

DISSOLVE TO:

A small sign with a graphic of a the iconic "Hollywood" and below it "Southwest" announces the exhibit behind the double doors.

Middle aged white guy is now standing in front of a movie poster for Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's 2016 Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, starring Tina Fey. He writes in a small notebook, "I was watching Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a movie based on reporter Kim Barker's time in Afghanistan, when I was jolted out of the moment with a landscape I knew. So as the credits rolled I kept reading until it confirmed that landscape that was standing in for Afghanistan was actually New Mexico."

DISSOLVE TO:

A wing in the exhibit. On a brown wall, written in letters is a four paragraph essay under the title "Cormac McCarthy."

Middle aged white guy writes in the same small notebook, "I was watching the Coen Brother's No Country for Old Men in a small dark theater. The scene was Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) character trying to find Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) in El Paso but discovering as he pulls into the parking lot that he's too late. The streetscape, the hotel, the parking lot all jolted me from the movie. I leaned over to my wife and said, "I thought this was supposed to be El Paso because that is clearly Albuquerque."

She shushed me and said, "It is El Paso in this movie. No one knows what Albuquerque looks like.""

DISSOLVE TO:

Another wing in the exhibit. A gate with the words "Bonanza Creek Ranch" written in bronze is mounted on the museum wall. Next to it is a small DVD display with the owner of Bonanza Creek Ranch playing.

Middle aged white guy writes in the same small notebook, "A friend of mine was trying to break into the Santa Fe movie business and her first job was as a producer in a small production company that was filming a training video for the New Mexico Department of Tourism. She hired me as her production assistant (PA) and basically I was to do anything she wanted me to do: pick up breakfast burritos for the crew, drive across town to pick up materials they needed, and one day drive from Bonanza Creek Ranch, a movie ranch that had been featured in numerous movies, to Albuquerque to pick up half a dozen orange cones. The highway department had been working on the southbound I-25 all week and turned my drive from Bonanza Creek Ranch to Albuquerque from an hour to a two hour plus ordeal, so driving back down to Albuquerque to pick up some orange cones wasn't my idea of fun.

Surprisingly the traffic in the middle of the day wasn't quite as bad, so I made it to Albuquerque in a little over an hour and I was tired. All week I'd been getting up at five to make it to Santa Fe by seven and then being the go-to PA for this training video until eight or nine at night.

So I picked up the half dozen cones and knowing I wasn't going to be expected back anytime went home and took a half hour nap."

DISSOLVE TO:

A museum wall with a poster of Brian Cranston (Walter White) standing in his underwear and a green buttoned down shirt with an RV in the background. He's holding a 9mm handgun in his right hand and just below his left hand is a gas mask. Written in green letters, slightly offset, is " Breaking Bad."

Middle aged white guy writes in the same small book, "I was buying a smattering of groceries from Smith's, or as we liked to call it, "Ghetto Smith's." In line in front of me buying some half and half and a head of broccoli was Aaron Paul (Jesse Pinkman). I watched him pay, smile at the cashier, and then leave. As I put my groceries down, the cashier said, "Yes, that was him."

DISSOLVE TO:

A cluttered living room with music playing from the stereo, a computer is set up on a small table in one corner. Sitting at the computer, middle aged white guy is typing, "Seeing the "Hollywood Southwest" exhibit is a bit like touring someone's obsession with movies in New Mexico. Most of the pieces in the exhibit come from UNM Professor Paul Andrew Hutton's personal collection and reflect a historians' curiosity of the southwest and how the west is portrayed in cinema. While there is also work outside the western genre, the real strength of the exhibit is seeing not only the films that have been shot here but understanding how the genre has transformed from the days of having Burt Lancaster play the titular character in a film called Apache to seeing the diversity in the cast that reflects how I see Albuquerque in Breaking Bad. It’s a living document to the influence of movies in New Mexico and well worth a visit. The exhibit runs until August 27th at the Albuquerque Museum and it only costs a whopping three dollars if you are from New Mexico."

FADE OUT:

The Cover Project

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Sat, 3 Jun 2017 10:07:00 -0600

Every other week, I host Afternoon Freeform on 89.9 KUNM. The idea behind the show is to highlight the connections in music across genres. While I'm not a musicologist and can't tell you why certain songs go together well, but I am a poet, and I approach the show as if I'm setting up a set (in performance) or a chapter (in books).

One thing I've been doing is playing a cover tune then a few songs later, playing the original in what I announce as "The cover project." No judgement one way or the other, not much commentary but to highlight what is the cover project.

The rules, as I layed out, is that I announce it as the cover project and play both versions. I also don't play them back to back. I usually try to build them into the flow of the set so as not make it seem like it doesn't fit in the show.

Here you'll find my take on how the covers rate in comparison.

John Denver's "Poems, Prayers, and Promises" covered by Rachel Halden.

This is not a bad cover, but John Denver's soft, plaintive tenor really steals the show. You can actually believe that John Denver is sitting around a fireplace in his Aspen, Colorado home trading stories and smoking pot with his friends. So, in a way, the cover doesn't catch the intimacy of Denver's rendition. Is the cover better? Absolutely not.

Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna" covered by the Old Crow Medicine Show.
There are a lot of Bob Dylan covers that are better than Dylan's versions. Even hard-core Dylan fans may reluctantly agree that Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower," or Jim James & Calexico's version of "Going to Acapulco" outshine the originals, and in Watchtower, Dylan's version is really a very good song. In light of the fact that Dylan is an acquired taste and in light of the fact we are comparing a live version to a studio version, I think Dylan's version wins if only because Dyland was still making records that mattered to him in the early '60s. If you were to pick a later cover, you could argue that Dylan had moved into a lazy, almost casual recording style that meant the quality varied from album to album (think post "Desire" Dylan), but this Blonde on Blonde, which almost everyone should have in their collection.

Sonny Rollins' "St. Thomas" covered by Ray Obiedo.
It's almost unfair to compare these two. Rollins' version is from his classic Saxophone Colossus while Obiedo is from his relatively obscure Latin Jazz Volume 1. Trade the tenor sax for a vibraphone and you have a tune that really belongs in the Caribbean. Is that enough to unseat the original. Nope.

The Band's "Acadian Driftwood" covered by Shawn Colvin.
This is hands down one of the more beautiful songs in a catalog of beautiful songs. And while Shawn Colvin does an admirable job, the Band's version wins. No discussion necessary.

The Animals' House of the Rising Sun covered by Patti Littlefield.
The song is technically not an Animals' original song though there version is probably the most well known. Apparently the song is loosely based on a 16th Century ballad called the Unfortunate Rake and other variants of broadside ballads. When approached by Patti to play her cover, it was in reference to highlight her show in town. She liked what they created on the demo and I decided to make it part of the Project. Besides her haunting vocals, the song works because Mark Weaver plays a didgeridoo, which make the track even more haunting. The Animals's version is pretty straightforward but iconic. So, depending on what you're looking for I'd give this a even match.

If you have a suggestion for a really good cover, drop me a note in the comments.

Generating Poetry the John Cage Way

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 13:12:00 -0700

In it's simplest form, the Haiku is explained as a 3 line poem with the first line being 5 syllables, the second line being 7 syllables, and the third line being 5 syllables, or, even simpler, a 17 syllable poem.

There is lots of discussion about whether just having the right amount of syllables makes it a haiku, and I'm not going to come down on whether what is going to follow is really creating haiku or not because I'm not trying to create intentional haiku.

No, I'm trying to create random haiku but limiting it to 3 words.

There are approximately 9,500 (5) syllable words, and 850 (7) syllable words in the English Language. Knowing that, it is possible to create 76,712,500,000 unique haiku.

If you want to see how this works click the below link.

3 Word Haikus

From there, I can open the spreadsheet and make it editable. On the top of column B (the blacked out column) I have my formula for randomizing. From there I can sort the data and it will populate a new 5 syllable word at the top of the page then I can navigate to the next sheet, follow the same process and get a random 7 syllable word, and finally (for the third line), I go back to the 5 syllable sheet and activate the formula.

Giving me a haiku that looks like this:

Organisation
Supersensitivity
Teleportation

If the 1st Amendment protects Free Speech, it also protects my deafness to it as well.

dbodinem@gmail.com (Don McIver) — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 14:36:00 -0700

The year was 1998 and I’d recently freed up my schedule so that I could go to this poetry open mike at a place just down the road called Best Price Books & Coffee. At the time there were a lot poets every week. We’d meet up before and write or talk and get to know each other and then the host would come in, set up the mike on the patio (during the warm weather) or inside in the back room of the coffee house. There’d be poets, musicians, comedians, random street people who’d stand up and ramble for a few minutes until the host would sort of shoo them off stage, but everyone got to speak if they wanted to.

The notion of hate speech was a relatively new one, and I didn’t really get all the nuances. I’m a white, cis-gendered male that comes from a middle class family so I have never experienced discrimination or been the victim of hate speech but I know that the people who I liked to listen to did not look like me or share my background. They spoke with a conviction and power that made me take notice. Occasionally, someone from a similar background would impress me as well, but, as a rule, I didn’t feel like they "needed" the open mike. Our voices and experiences had dominated for far too long, and I wanted to be a part of something that let the unheard voices speak and speak proudly.

That fall, we wrestled with free speech versus hate speech in a way I haven’t seen since. I remember both nights pretty clearly. The stable of regulars sat at the same tables, cheered each other on, encouraged the newer people to take more chances, etc. I was a part of a community of writers, and I felt like I belonged. Certainly there were ones that felt left out but most of that went away over time.

One of them, Johnny was older than I was and struck me as sort of bitter. He resisted our ovations to sit together and rarely commented on others' work. I took his bitterness as sort of a side effect of being dry. He'd made mention of it before, and it sort of struck me as bitterness being brought on by the fact that he could no longer do what he wanted, and what he wanted to do was drink. Yet, he also wanted attention and would push it any chance he got. On this night, Johnny got up and read his new poem. He said, “This one is dedicated to all the fat chicks….”

The air crackled with disgust and you could see the regular readers sort of close off and withdraw. At the end of the night, his was the poem we talked about, and his recitation was the one that prompted us to talk to the host.

The host was just as perplexed as we were. He didn’t know what to do. He'd tried to talk to him at the end of the night and Johnny wasn't open to it. He clearly wanted to ban Johnny, but this was an Open Mike. Some of the other hosts around town weighed in and argued that he could ban him for spewing “hate speech.” Just because it was the first amendment didn’t mean we had to protect his right to say what he wanted if it actually hurt people, and judging from the reactions of people in the room it was a pretty triggering episode. Poets went home hurt no longer feeling this was a safe space for them. Yet, the host, who didn’t get into this to police what people were going to say, didn’t feel like he could ban him. And that’s where we left it.

The next week we sat around the tables again as first the host came in and set up. Then Johnny walked in and without saying anything put his name down on the list. We looked at each other and as he went outside to smoke, one of the poets asked, “Do you think he’s going to read that poem again?”

“I hope not.”

Another one said, “Well, if he does I’m just going to walk out.”

That struck me as an entirely acceptable response. We weren‘t preventing him from exercising his first amendment rights, yet we didn’t have to listen to it. We had the option of leaving.

When Johnny’s turn came up, he stepped up to the microphone and said, “This one is dedicated to all the fat chicks.”

That was all it took and one by one we all got up and silently left the room. By the time Johnny finished his poem, he and the host were the only ones left. He glared at us as we all came back in. Ultimately, he left without saying “Good-bye.”

The next week Johnny wasn’t there and I haven’t seen him at a poetry reading since, yet I see him all the time. Johnny now works about 3 days a week holding up a sign for a local restaurant and blowing a whistle as he points to the restaurant. He wears a Mexican wrestling mask and points to the restaurant from the median. He’s never acknowledged me as I’ve walk by, nor have I reached out to him and wondered if he still writes poetry.

So, when UNM erupted in protests over the College Republicans inviting Milo Yiannopoulos to speak, I couldn’t help but think back to my younger days. There are a lot of good reasons that he should’ve not been invited, and there are a lot of responses that UNM could’ve taken but at the end of the day they let him speak regardless of the harm it would do to many people in the community.

But I’m curious as to what would’ve happened if people who disagreed with him would’ve gotten a sizable chunk of tickets, attended the event, and then upon hearing the first vile thing, just got up, en masse, and walked out? Maybe the crowd would’ve cheered? Maybe Milo would’ve made some sort of remark of good riddance? But it seems to me that the more reasonable we act the less reasonable Milo and people who support his viewpoint become. At the end of the day, maybe what they are craving is headlines and attention? And by boisterously opposing him speaking at every turn, we are giving him exactly what he wants. But what if he speaks and no one is willing to listen, what if silence speaks just as loudly as words?

I don’t know, but I’m not sure if I can take four years of screaming and gnashing of teeth every time this cadre does something I find offensive. What if we all took the opportunities we are going to have to write our congress members, donate to an organization that supports our values, and even attend rallies that help build solidarity? What if we focused on what makes us feel empowered and heard instead of getting in a sort of metaphorical shouting match with people who have no incentive to change? Let’s give them an incentive to change by asking them, simply, “Hey, come on in. We’d love for you to be a part of the community but understand that what you are saying is hurting us.”

January 31, 2017

Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

A Year of Thursdays in the Bosque.

Volume 9 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

Volume 7 & 8 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

Volumes 5 & 6 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

Volumes 3 & 4 of What if the Beatles never broke up?

Volume 1 & 2 of the What if the Beatles never broke up?

What if? A Beatles Project

Father and Son

The Proximity Detector

The Trump Impeachment and Ukrainian Collusion

Albuquerque Rapid Transit (ART) first impression

How to Think

Questioning Gender

The Rhetorical Trap

Background:

Situation:

Looking for the Easy Fix

Tribes

It's a Publish or Perish World Revisited

Words Matter

Situation 1:

Situation 2:

Intent vs. Impact:

It's a Publish or Perish World

Background:

Information Overload:

The Perils of Publish or Perish:

Publish or Perish:

Rhetoric is a Green House Gas

Answering the Racist Question

Hollywood Southwest

The Cover Project

Generating Poetry the John Cage Way

OrganisationSupersensitivityTeleportation

If the 1st Amendment protects Free Speech, it also protects my deafness to it as well.

Organisation
Supersensitivity
Teleportation