Episode Two -- Karate Chopping My Balls

I won't be teaching this semester, it seems. I have said before that teaching is the only thing I've ever done for money that wasn't a complete waste of time. Teachers really get screwed in this country. I'm not talking about the pay, and I'm not really talking about high school and junior high and those who teach tots younger than that. I'm talking about college professors. I haven't lived in any country other than the United States, but I find it hard to believe that any other place in the world regards their professors with the disdain that this nation does. I write this and I mean it, but at the same time I will admit to rolling my eyes at many to most of the academics I have known. Will this be the point where I make a distinction between teachers and academics? No. I'm not an unkempt hipster who has bought into the blustery hoopla of an aging womanizer who teaches English because he thinks he's Hamlet. This Hamlet guy was, I think, a fundamentally decent man who produces essays and plays and cares deeply about his craft. He could also be narcissistic and grossly inappropriate in the classroom, and his lectures often degenerated into shtick designed to impress twenty year old girls. He needed to be desired. He also tended to mistake his theories for facts. This was, I think, a pattern that played itself out in phases. He had elaborate conjectures about war heroes and murdered children that in his mind solidified into facts upon which he built the structures of even more elaborate schema. His personality was a cross between Schneider the maintenance man on "One Day at a Time"and whatever psychopath Brando played in Last Tango in Paris. He was also a fantastic reader. He read everything under the sun, and when I was his student he seemed to give my essays and thesis (for which he was my second or third reader) the same care and consideration he gave to the big bad French theorists. He gave me careful notes, asked insightful questions, and made connections that I wouldn't have made in a hundred years of smoking the best pot on earth. He was a complicated guy, and in the year 2000 during the presidential campaign the candidate on the right made him so angry that every time our kind professor heard his name he would strike a karate pose and kick and punch.

So anyway, one time several years ago I was talking with a friend of mine. He and I had gone to the same high school and college. We spent little to no time together in college, which we were both more than okay with, but it was one of those strange things where when we went home for breaks we would spend our nights out in the same group. I think this particular conversation took place after we had graduated, and I was in a graduate program. I think he was cleaning carpets in Colorado and living with a morbidly obese Republican. His stepfather was an attorney and his mother might have been, too. He had it in his mind that he was going to go to law school. He never did, and he joined the marines when he was in his early thirties. He was sent to Iraq and the last I heard he was still doing fine, thriving even. Anyway, this one night I told him that I was interested in becoming a college professor, and he told me that his stepfather told him that those who can, do, and that those who can't, teach. That pissed me off. It pissed me off for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we had some similar experiences at home and at school. Specifically, both of our fathers were total assholes and did not treat us like human beings with thoughts and feelings and valid perspectives on the world. At college, we had the same major, and met the same professor, a wise old man who smoked cigars and talked and carried himself an awful lot like Jason Robards in Max Dugan Returns. We and everybody else who had taken one of his classes referred to him as Yahweh, and in a night of drunken revelry a bunch of us fantasized about the possibility of being near him when he died so that we could clutch his hand and have all of his knowledge pass into us. Yahweh was kind, and he took us seriously in ways that nobody in our families had. He was decent through and through, and lacked the inappropriateness, sexual and otherwise, that the aforementioned Hamlet basked in. Why this kid would say that about teachers was beyond me. Yahweh had been my first real role model, the first adult I had seen that I felt like I would be wise to emulate. And I have to the best of my ability.

There are many other instances of college professors (and instructors) not getting respect. And as I said, I find a lot of academics to be boobs -- a lot of intellectual masturbation about door knobs "othering" the handicapped and The Wizard of Oz being about gender roles. Yahweh himself had a lot of anger for this type of crackpottery, and types that I did not understand when I was his student. Much of this kind of thinking, that is, the door knobs and gender roles, probably comes from the push to publish. A lot of it probably also comes from mass education. If you're in a country that is going to send millions of children off to school every year, you're going to need a lot of teachers and they are not always going to be the sharpest and the brightest. College professors tend to be misfits, and this is the category that I myself fit most comfortably in. I read Hammer of the Gods in many study halls in high school, and I feel more comfortable reading books than I do interacting with most people. I feel ideas. They are palpable to me, and the intangible for me has always been real. I would have made a fantastic priest, but I do not believe in God. I despise and stink at small talk but I am good at drawing people out and getting them to think about and investigate issues that are important to them. My working philosophy is based on the idea that democracy entails making education available to as many people as humanly possible, but the challenge is to prevent that access from degenerating into mediocrity or worse. So my belief is in democratization while maintaining a vigilance for and in defense of standards. That's what I worked to bring to the classroom. So many professors I know have philosophies of their own. They can tell you with precision why they teach, what they want their students to take from their work, and how their efforts fit into the greater project that is society. I hated Tony Snow, and I think a good year is one in which both he and Tim Russert become worm food. I hated the latter for reasons that will likely come up later. I hated the former for many reasons, but especially one off the cuff remark he made when the host of the Fox Sunday morning political show. He was talking about somebody, I don't remember who it was, and Snow remarked that the person "had less common sense than a college professor." Of course, that remark is part of the cultural populism that has dominated right winged rhetoric over the course of the last forty years. Spiro Agnew, reading speeches conceived by Pat Buchanan and written by William Safire, spoke of the eastern elites and the unelected elites and the elites, the elites, the elites. Help. America this is quite serious. Of course Richard Hofstadter had already written about the paranoid style in American politics, and this paranoid style was and is at its core anti-intellectual. Fancy booklearn' is bad; the coasts, both east and west, are bad; taste is bad. Toby Keith recently said he was a Democrat and he praised Barack Obama and I don't know if this will lead to a seismic shift or not. Maybe Toby Keith will also come out in favor of college professors. As it is now, these red state kids come to college with the goal of getting a degree without having their minds corrupted, which is to say, opened. Their concept of college professors is fed to them by their daddies and Fox News and the kind of folks who didn't know that the Agnew watches were meant to be ironic. Their conception of college parties comes from Animal House and its school of imitators best summarized by the episode of "The Simpsons" when Homer goes to college and bases all he thinks he has to know on an afternoon movie called School of Hard Knockers. I'll be a campus hero indeed. I'll be the Secretary of Partying Down.

And the intellect is supposed to be effete. I always thought and suspected and came to know that the aforementioned Hamlet's problem was that he feared he was a fairy for loving poetry and drama. That was also, I'm certain, Ezra Pound's problem. Pound conceptualized the creative will as virtu, from the Latin vir, meaning man. See virile, virtue, and etcetera. The creative impulse is manly, even poetry. The critic, by contrast, is not. Mark Twain, who I love and respect, compared critics to eunuchs in the harem, saying, "They know how it's done, and see it done every day, but they can't do it themselves." Of course I'm conflating the critic and the professor, which is viable since there really is quite an overlap. Those who can, do, those who can't, become critics. With this thought so prevalent in the classroom I fear I have tended to carry a chip on my shoulder into the classroom. I felt like I would be a better teacher, certainly more respected, if I had several novels and volumes of short stories under my belt. I feel like I would have been a better teacher of film if I had actually made films. I felt secondary, of a lower caste. On an evaluation for a film class class I taught, a student wrote that the class would have been better if I had taught them about the process of making films. On an evaluation for a short story class I taught, similar critiques were made. In essence, they stated they wanted to know how it was done. The implication -- maybe it was overt, I don't care to reread them -- was that I could not do it and therefore could not pass it on. The creative writing major, which I actually had set out to write about in this post, is a joke. This is not to indict everybody in it, but broadly speaking it seems to be filled with the stupid and the shallow, turds who can't think and don't care about anything of substance. They want a key, a magic key, that they can buy -- scratch that, invest in -- so that they can make their money and live their awful lives. They don't care about ideas, they don't care about loss and what it means to actually articulate something nebulous and heretofore overwhelming. My job was not to teach people how to write books or produce films. My job was to teach people how to read books and how to watch films. My job was to teach people how to interpret, which literally means to give meaning to a work. My job was to show ways for students to realize what a work is really about, to read and see the parts that make it eternal, universal, and wholly human. Politically, I always thought that they would afterward be less prone to a demagogue. Creatively, I just don't understand how learning how to read and learning how to see, to learn to realize the symbolic level on which works actually function, wouldn't translate into learning how to create stories. God, people are stupid. Most people are stupid. "We don't wish to learn/but we hate what we don't understand."

This post is like my teaching career, I think. This isn't really the end. It's just stopping for a little while.