One has to wonder whatever happened to the Legion of Doom. A couple of years ago a lot of people got all het up over the decline and fall of LD—this was in the darkest hours of the pomo and CT influences—and banded together to attempt to cure the ills. Some of those ills were endemic problems that, needless to say, remain, but the Legion of Doom has, if not necessarily evaporated, at least disappeared from view. Despite my own agreement with their main themes of how LD should be operated, I always had to sort of wonder if we weren’t just going through the inevitable progress of the activity through the fashions of the day, given that I had previously seen other deadly fashions that we had managed to survive. My guess is that something new comes along, it takes over like mental weeds for a while, but then it goes away, leaving only a little of its genetic material behind, hopefully making for a better activity overall. (And I’m sorry for the confused metaphor, but you get my drift.) So back in the day pre-Legion, for instance, this decidedly philosophical activity got overwhelmed by practical evidence, and for a while it was a trend, and eventually it just became an improvement in LD overall, where people began backing their claims with, sometimes, meaningful warrants from reputable sources rather than their own imaginings. By the same token, the love affair with incomprehensible cultural studies types like the Old Baudleroo and Derrida has cooled, but the embracing of, say, Foucault remains, and that’s not a terrible thing at all, because MF’s view of things is applicable to a lot of situations, and worth considering. We may never shake the occasional Nietzschean fling, though, I’m afraid. Nietzsche is like this sly seducer who will say anything to anyone in order the make a score, and then the poor seduced (and quickly abandoned) soul has nothing left but a handful of aphorisms on which to base the entire promise of a future life, but that doesn’t keep that steady stream of left-at-the-altars from continuing to try. In a way, good old Freddie has become the Ayn Rand of 21st century LD, that one horrible voice destroying our youth by falsely empowering them. Oh, well. At least Freddie didn’t write any pulp novels (or at least any that I know about). Don’t get me wrong. I love Nietzsche. Where else can you find a writer who, sooner or later, contradicted literally everything he ever wrote? They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
Anyhow, for a while, the LDEP was out there proselytizing a fundamentalist approach to LD as a cure to all its evils (which went far beyond the pomo material), and now you never hear from them anymore. Hell, I think I’m on the board, and if I’m not hearing from them, I guess no one is. That’s not terrible, though. The creation of the rules of LD by the NFL provided the core material from which to work, and from a source much less peccable than the Legion of Doom. I mean, it’s pretty hard to dismiss the warrant of the core organization, as compared to dismissing a bunch of dinosaur sore sports like the Legion. So as I continue to proselytize for commitment to the NFL’s LD rules, I feel a little more secure than when I was speaking in aid of Legion ideas. This is nothing against the Legion, mind you, but maybe the NFL’s updated rules rendered the Legionnaires unnecessary. But we still have a problem. Despite the fact that LD has clear and specific rules, from its governing body, there is a vast population who believe that these rules carry no weight. We’ve already discussed how silly this is, and how you don’t get a comparable flouting of regulation in, say, table tennis (or any other competitive activity of which I am aware), but that doesn’t stop the flouters. The question becomes, how do you stop the flouters, then? If you believe in LD as described by the NFL, what are you supposed to do about it?
I guess that’s going to be my theme for a while. We’ve got rules. What do we do about them? And, I guess, why do we have to do anything about them at all? Chances are, most of what I’m going to be writing will either annoy the hell out of you or make you feel even more self-satisfied than usual, depending on your position on the whole business. But that’s what we do here a CL HQ. We either piss you off or pat you on the back. Occasionally we do both at once, if we’re really clicking on all burners and have a lot of extra arms to work with. By the way, this just happens to be post number 999. Which means two things. If you’re reading this upside down, it’s the Apocalypse, and if you’re reading it right side up, tomorrow will be our 1000th entry. Imagine that. Do you have any idea how much time you’ve wasted reading this blog? Couldn’t you have found anything better to do with your time? What’s wrong with you anyhow, you spalpeen! Jeesh. Get a life.
Showing posts with label Pomo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pomo. Show all posts
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Friday, October 24, 2008
The Steroid-User's Guide to Pumping Irony
Irony never works. Trust me on this.
The point of the previous entry was to juxtapose two concepts in the hopes that the expectations of the one would help inform the lack of expectations of the other. My commentator takes approach that the analogy was bogus, and that the framers (in this case the NFL) are not to be considered in the equation of what makes good or bad LD; this was my point exactly, that many debate judges disregard the “intent” of the activity. At tournaments we are all, alas, judicial activists.
As for my opinion of postmodernism, I doubt if I have been unclear over the years. I applaud any student studying these texts; this is a triumph of grit over incomprehensibility in many cases, and great entertainment in others. I very much enjoy Baudrillard as a social commentator, for instance, and would recommend him to anyone looking for that sort of reading. But educators (despite their being, in my commentator’s opinion, old and in the way) ought to start students on the canon, and the problem I see is that judges, who fill the educator role in rounds, are often college students whose personal taste overcomes their good sense, and who prefer to see rounds that are relevant to them, with material relevant to them, rather than rounds relevant to the high school students debating those rounds. Of course, it is a commonplace that students should feel that the canon is to be overcome rather than embraced and learned from: it has been ever thus. Teacher’s should be wiser than this. I do not claim that the canon is the end-all, be-all (note the correct usage of this phrase, unlike the usage by our illustrious in-coming Veep), but that its mastery is required before proceeding, much like knowledge of the scales is required before playing Mozart, or perhaps more relevantly, before becoming Thelonius Monk. If you don’t know where you’ve been, it is rather hard to plot a path to where you are going.
As for the use of the phrase pomo crap, I may have been overarching in that comment. Much of it is interesting, but little of it provides applicable ethical structure for debate rounds, and its days in academic circles seem to be coming to an end. Of course, the reason it is interesting, non-applicable and dying out is because most of it, if not nonsense, is incoherent, never a particularly strong value in the exegesis business. And when it is coherent, as with (most of) the Old Baudleroo, it is rather silly. One wants to stand with my favorite Frenchman in Hiroshima in 1945 and have him tell me how the use of nuclear weapons is impossible. Actually, I’ll stand somewhere in Kansas and he can write me a letter from Japan explaining it to me, if you get my drift. Or maybe he can send me a letter from the Mideast, where wars are not happening. That would be just as good. And remember, my favorite Onion headline of all time: Derrida “dead”
Oh well. You can’t please everybody. Onwards to Jake!
The point of the previous entry was to juxtapose two concepts in the hopes that the expectations of the one would help inform the lack of expectations of the other. My commentator takes approach that the analogy was bogus, and that the framers (in this case the NFL) are not to be considered in the equation of what makes good or bad LD; this was my point exactly, that many debate judges disregard the “intent” of the activity. At tournaments we are all, alas, judicial activists.
As for my opinion of postmodernism, I doubt if I have been unclear over the years. I applaud any student studying these texts; this is a triumph of grit over incomprehensibility in many cases, and great entertainment in others. I very much enjoy Baudrillard as a social commentator, for instance, and would recommend him to anyone looking for that sort of reading. But educators (despite their being, in my commentator’s opinion, old and in the way) ought to start students on the canon, and the problem I see is that judges, who fill the educator role in rounds, are often college students whose personal taste overcomes their good sense, and who prefer to see rounds that are relevant to them, with material relevant to them, rather than rounds relevant to the high school students debating those rounds. Of course, it is a commonplace that students should feel that the canon is to be overcome rather than embraced and learned from: it has been ever thus. Teacher’s should be wiser than this. I do not claim that the canon is the end-all, be-all (note the correct usage of this phrase, unlike the usage by our illustrious in-coming Veep), but that its mastery is required before proceeding, much like knowledge of the scales is required before playing Mozart, or perhaps more relevantly, before becoming Thelonius Monk. If you don’t know where you’ve been, it is rather hard to plot a path to where you are going.
As for the use of the phrase pomo crap, I may have been overarching in that comment. Much of it is interesting, but little of it provides applicable ethical structure for debate rounds, and its days in academic circles seem to be coming to an end. Of course, the reason it is interesting, non-applicable and dying out is because most of it, if not nonsense, is incoherent, never a particularly strong value in the exegesis business. And when it is coherent, as with (most of) the Old Baudleroo, it is rather silly. One wants to stand with my favorite Frenchman in Hiroshima in 1945 and have him tell me how the use of nuclear weapons is impossible. Actually, I’ll stand somewhere in Kansas and he can write me a letter from Japan explaining it to me, if you get my drift. Or maybe he can send me a letter from the Mideast, where wars are not happening. That would be just as good. And remember, my favorite Onion headline of all time: Derrida “dead”
Oh well. You can’t please everybody. Onwards to Jake!
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Will the stormy clouds chase / everyone from the place?
I have pulled my galoshes out of the closet for the Pups tomorrow. The weather sounds less than promising, at least for the ride up and much of Saturday. You’d think the Ivy League could do better in the meteorological department. I thought these guys were supposed to be smart, perfect SATs and all that. No doubt if I were to raise the issue they would simply blame noted alum G. W. Bush and move on. I know that’s what I would do. Anyhow, I’ve got the data on Little Elvis, although I didn’t sort out the judges yet; there’s all sorts of quibbling (“Can’t judge Round 47—appt with proctologist,” that sort of thing) that needs to be sorted out, but I figure I can do that tomorrow while registration is going on. If you’re going I would advise you to bring an umbrella.
So I was thinking about the evolution of LD, which isn’t really evolution at all, or at maybe more to the point, it’s not what you would call progress, even though it is change. Evolution isn’t progress either, of course; it too is just change. Some changes are good and lead to species prosperity, and some changes are not so good and lead to extinction. Witness the fact that most species that have existed on this planet are now extinct (well, I think it’s a fact, and it should be even if it isn’t). Teleology doesn’t seem to be the underlying operator, unless teleology includes planned obsolescence. Of course, some changes are progress neutral: they’re just changes. A lot of the changes to LD seem to be of the progress-neutral persuasion.
In the 90s we moved from the molding of arguments in what one might called Enlightenment-based philosophical constructs to a more research-based approach to resolutions. At first, one would have a card from John Locke, but then it was more likely a card from someone who was actually still alive discussing the actual topic from a real-world perspective. This was policy-influenced, of course; they had so many cards, and we had so few: Card Envy was the natural result. If policy was cool and LD wanted to be cool, it therefore should be more like policy. (I won’t comment on the logical fallacies inherent in that thinking.) More cards! More speed! A number of Sailors were notable leaders in this direction. Others bucked it. In any case, it lasted for a while, and even the topics started getting more specific and less philosophical. The market seemed to be following the consumers, an interesting idea when the consumers are students and the market is educators.
The next phase of change was the pomo-ization of content. Once again, what was cool in policy was to run kritiks and Foucault and things like that, and therefore if LD wanted to be cool… It is curious that this embracing of pomo and critical theory coincided with what seems to be the last serious gasp of this material at the university level. Academe needs to find new approaches to relatively static content: Moby-Dick doesn’t change from year to year, but the way academics teach and learn it change. (Yeah, I know, there may be a lot of assumptions in that last sentence that are intrinsically contrary to CT, but if you don’t like it, go read about Presidential politics on WTF. And I was really looking for the field report from East Westville North: “The South Will Rise Again Tuturial and Pancake Flip.”) CT and pomo came along and filled that what-do-we-do-next gap in the English departments, and the rest of us got our annual laugh reading the titles of the papers at the MLA. But all things, good or bad, come to an end, and for whatever reason (common sense?) this material isn’t so highly regarded anymore by mainstream (!) academe (which is the same as Nut City for many of us) and they’re on to newer (older) approaches, which means we won’t continue to be fed by college judges pushing this new-to-them stuff as the latest thing to the students they write cases for (or judge cases by). Another one bites the dust, in other words. And not a moment too soon.
But we are not left in the lurch. We do not have to argue the resolutions; we do not have to study the content and learn about the big issues that LD pretends to be about. Now we have “theory arguments.” Nowadays a case is constructed of, oh, 90% how to judge the round and what the burdens are and what the exceptions are. 90% of the case is devoted to explanations and more explanations, of the value and the criterion (if any, since sometimes such old-fashioned ideas are theoretic albatrosses). 90% of the way through a speech, a 1AC, you finally hear the words, “My first and only contention.” If you’re lucky, that is. Perish the thought that, in Sept-Oct, we argue the merits or lack thereof of utility or deontological beliefs. Perish the thought we consider whether we should ever in any situation allow ourselves to end the life of another human being, to question under what circumstances this may in fact not be the wrong thing to do, maybe to decide it is always wrong, or sometimes right. Perish the bloody thought that we care about right and wrong. What we need to care about is the burdens of the neg and why these burdens are unfair and therefore the neg should win not because neg argued a negative position on the content of the resolution but because neg argued that a negative position on the content, if neg had one, should win, while an affirmative position should not win. Not because of content, but because of structure. Of theory.
You know. It makes me want to read a couple of Derrida books, just to clear my head.
So I was thinking about the evolution of LD, which isn’t really evolution at all, or at maybe more to the point, it’s not what you would call progress, even though it is change. Evolution isn’t progress either, of course; it too is just change. Some changes are good and lead to species prosperity, and some changes are not so good and lead to extinction. Witness the fact that most species that have existed on this planet are now extinct (well, I think it’s a fact, and it should be even if it isn’t). Teleology doesn’t seem to be the underlying operator, unless teleology includes planned obsolescence. Of course, some changes are progress neutral: they’re just changes. A lot of the changes to LD seem to be of the progress-neutral persuasion.
In the 90s we moved from the molding of arguments in what one might called Enlightenment-based philosophical constructs to a more research-based approach to resolutions. At first, one would have a card from John Locke, but then it was more likely a card from someone who was actually still alive discussing the actual topic from a real-world perspective. This was policy-influenced, of course; they had so many cards, and we had so few: Card Envy was the natural result. If policy was cool and LD wanted to be cool, it therefore should be more like policy. (I won’t comment on the logical fallacies inherent in that thinking.) More cards! More speed! A number of Sailors were notable leaders in this direction. Others bucked it. In any case, it lasted for a while, and even the topics started getting more specific and less philosophical. The market seemed to be following the consumers, an interesting idea when the consumers are students and the market is educators.
The next phase of change was the pomo-ization of content. Once again, what was cool in policy was to run kritiks and Foucault and things like that, and therefore if LD wanted to be cool… It is curious that this embracing of pomo and critical theory coincided with what seems to be the last serious gasp of this material at the university level. Academe needs to find new approaches to relatively static content: Moby-Dick doesn’t change from year to year, but the way academics teach and learn it change. (Yeah, I know, there may be a lot of assumptions in that last sentence that are intrinsically contrary to CT, but if you don’t like it, go read about Presidential politics on WTF. And I was really looking for the field report from East Westville North: “The South Will Rise Again Tuturial and Pancake Flip.”) CT and pomo came along and filled that what-do-we-do-next gap in the English departments, and the rest of us got our annual laugh reading the titles of the papers at the MLA. But all things, good or bad, come to an end, and for whatever reason (common sense?) this material isn’t so highly regarded anymore by mainstream (!) academe (which is the same as Nut City for many of us) and they’re on to newer (older) approaches, which means we won’t continue to be fed by college judges pushing this new-to-them stuff as the latest thing to the students they write cases for (or judge cases by). Another one bites the dust, in other words. And not a moment too soon.
But we are not left in the lurch. We do not have to argue the resolutions; we do not have to study the content and learn about the big issues that LD pretends to be about. Now we have “theory arguments.” Nowadays a case is constructed of, oh, 90% how to judge the round and what the burdens are and what the exceptions are. 90% of the case is devoted to explanations and more explanations, of the value and the criterion (if any, since sometimes such old-fashioned ideas are theoretic albatrosses). 90% of the way through a speech, a 1AC, you finally hear the words, “My first and only contention.” If you’re lucky, that is. Perish the thought that, in Sept-Oct, we argue the merits or lack thereof of utility or deontological beliefs. Perish the thought we consider whether we should ever in any situation allow ourselves to end the life of another human being, to question under what circumstances this may in fact not be the wrong thing to do, maybe to decide it is always wrong, or sometimes right. Perish the bloody thought that we care about right and wrong. What we need to care about is the burdens of the neg and why these burdens are unfair and therefore the neg should win not because neg argued a negative position on the content of the resolution but because neg argued that a negative position on the content, if neg had one, should win, while an affirmative position should not win. Not because of content, but because of structure. Of theory.
You know. It makes me want to read a couple of Derrida books, just to clear my head.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
C-3PO down and out; Hillary Duff alive and well
I see that NCC-1701 and THX 1138 have broken in Duo. Or something like that. I’ve always liked T-1000 (although his teammate T-1003 used to dip the girls’ pigtails in the inkwell). HAL 9000 is my BFF. And as for 666, why, I even keep the number of the Beast as a cell phone speed dial. I find it soooooo useful that WTF is publishing these lists of random numbers. I don’t know about you, but I print them out and paste them on my bulletin board as keepsakes for all time.
Except, well, I don’t really print them out.
And I don’t have a bulletin board.
But you knew that.
Last night I began the updating of the Hillary Duff, which is one of my summer goals. I really haven’t looked at it in a while, and I always did like it. There will be a general editing, including better material on justice, plus a few imported famous French people. It’s interesting how styles of lesser lights change over time. The concepts set forth by Locke and Mill and Rawls remain essential ideas that one must master to understand basic social philosophy, but someone like Maslov, whose name used to pop up three times a day and twice on Sundays back in the 90s, hasn’t been heard from in years. He was never particularly enlightening, of course, except insofar as he easily exemplifies the rather banal nature of safety as a social value. I would say that Derrida is the Maslov of today, someone no one ever seriously reads (can you name a book you’ve read cover-to-cover by either; or, if that’s too hard, a book either of them wrote that you’ve even heard of?) but who comes up now and then in aid of…something. The Old Baudleroo also fits that limited context, but at least he’s fun to read, regardless of the fact that he’s full of bull-arkey. Anyhow, styles change, even though most people think that they’re serious diggers into the mother lode of brilliance rather than just fashionistas studying the latest mental hemline height. (Except, of course, your theory people are becoming pretty déclassé even in academic circles these days; $ircuit judges may be the last holdouts wearing these particular mental leisure suits.) And who am I to prevent people from keeping up with the times? So, a fresh coat of paint on the old HHLDPH, and thence to the Cur for a similar refresh.
Speaking of HAL 9000 (and we were, about 83 paragraphs ago), did you know that HAL is the NYSE symbol for Halliburton? Now there’s a useless piece of information for you. And THX is Thor Explorations Ltd, which I gather is some sort of mining company. NCC is National City Corporation, whatever that is; presumably they buy and sell cities. But forget all that; you’ve got to get a load of this: http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/index.html. Need I say more?
Except, well, I don’t really print them out.
And I don’t have a bulletin board.
But you knew that.
Last night I began the updating of the Hillary Duff, which is one of my summer goals. I really haven’t looked at it in a while, and I always did like it. There will be a general editing, including better material on justice, plus a few imported famous French people. It’s interesting how styles of lesser lights change over time. The concepts set forth by Locke and Mill and Rawls remain essential ideas that one must master to understand basic social philosophy, but someone like Maslov, whose name used to pop up three times a day and twice on Sundays back in the 90s, hasn’t been heard from in years. He was never particularly enlightening, of course, except insofar as he easily exemplifies the rather banal nature of safety as a social value. I would say that Derrida is the Maslov of today, someone no one ever seriously reads (can you name a book you’ve read cover-to-cover by either; or, if that’s too hard, a book either of them wrote that you’ve even heard of?) but who comes up now and then in aid of…something. The Old Baudleroo also fits that limited context, but at least he’s fun to read, regardless of the fact that he’s full of bull-arkey. Anyhow, styles change, even though most people think that they’re serious diggers into the mother lode of brilliance rather than just fashionistas studying the latest mental hemline height. (Except, of course, your theory people are becoming pretty déclassé even in academic circles these days; $ircuit judges may be the last holdouts wearing these particular mental leisure suits.) And who am I to prevent people from keeping up with the times? So, a fresh coat of paint on the old HHLDPH, and thence to the Cur for a similar refresh.
Speaking of HAL 9000 (and we were, about 83 paragraphs ago), did you know that HAL is the NYSE symbol for Halliburton? Now there’s a useless piece of information for you. And THX is Thor Explorations Ltd, which I gather is some sort of mining company. NCC is National City Corporation, whatever that is; presumably they buy and sell cities. But forget all that; you’ve got to get a load of this: http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/index.html. Need I say more?
Monday, April 28, 2008
Fortune-telling (with a WTF/TOC zing, various cultural references just to be cute, and O'C's obsession)
WTF has begun their countdown to the Tournament of Coffee. We here at CL will be battening down the hatches waiting for the storm to pass, confident in our belief that a balloon is only as big as the amount of hot air used to inflate it.
(Wow. That’s a really good metaphor, and I think I made it up all by my lonesome. I’m impressed.)
So, no TOCs here, bub. And my house is empty again, so I have no further Non-F stories to relate (much to the chagrin of Dan Cook’s father). And I have no interest in getting involved in discussing the self-immolation process known the Democratic Party primaries, not to mention that my recent comment on Miley Cyrus’s autobiography has preemptively used up my allowance of stories on that particular subject (thank God). So it would seem that I am excluded from the blogosphere completely. What else is there left to talk about?
You misunderestimate me, Mr. Bond. (Which reminds me of the best Bond exchange of all time, from Goldfinger. “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.”)
(But first of all, I awoke Saturday morning to a message from O’C that, while suffering from debate withdrawal, he had just purchased 7 new Star Wars figures. If you’re wondering, they were: Bubba Fett (football-playing clone), Brudda Fett (Hawaiian ukulele-playing clone), Bobo Fett (bourgeois bohemian clone), Bugger Fett (you-don’t-want-to-know-what-kind-of clone), Baba au Fett (rum-soaked clone), Feta Fett (Greek salad-eating clone), and Fetid Fett (debater-who-forgot-to-pack-clean-underwear clone). Needless to say, this knowledge made my day. We all handle debate withdrawal in our own fashion.)
I listened this morning to a Philosophy Bites interview with Thomas Pink. (If you Google him you first have to sort through a lot of haberdashery.) The subject was free will. An argument was proposed to prove the lack thereof by proving that all actions are predestined, and it goes something like this. All statements of fact are either true or false. The statement “You are going to take a walk this afternoon” is therefore either true or false. Your walk, or lack thereof, is a fait accompli before it takes place (or doesn’t take place). Your walk, or lack thereof, is therefore predestined. Now the only way you can attack this conclusion is, apparently, to attack the single premise, that all statements of fact are either true or false, but that is, needless to say, a mug’s game.
Of course, to me, this whole discussion is a mug’s game. Even though I can accept both the logic and the premise, I know that the conclusion is nonsense, and that the whole thing is mere wordplay. If I were a more sophisticated philosopher, perhaps I could successfully rebut the wordplay, but I can’t. And worse, as an unsophisticated post-contemporary philosopher, I find the entire exercise specious at best. Have these obviously intelligent people nothing to do with their brains than to waste them on conundrums? Were they out of Wii consoles at the local electronics shop that week? Because I see little difference between a video game and this kind of analysis, except that at least the Wii gives you a little pseudo-exercise to go along with your killing of time.
I know. My yabbo flag is now waving in all directions.
I equate much of the nonsense in pomo writing with this sort of thinking. One isolates an idea that makes sense if you squint at it just right, and then tear off and build a whole universe of conclusions based on that idea, and that entire universe of conclusions looks like pure idiocy to anyone who doesn’t buy into that particular brand of squinting. And those non-squinters tend to be the majority of the world at large. Not to suggest that the majority is right merely because they have the numbers, but that accepted processes of thought and analysis should be able to withstand all changes of thinker and analyst. Science is like that. Something is either a proven fact, or it is not. One can hypothesize till the cows come home on conclusions to be drawn from the proven fact, but until one’s hypotheses themselves become proven fact, by the same rigorous process that led to the original proven fact, they are not accepted as true. Wouldst that philosophy, or what passes for philosophy, worked the same way.
And if post-contemporary philosophy is correct, it does. The mind and body and the universe do not work one way for philosophers and some other way for physicists/biologists/psychologists. The former create metaphors for what the latter prove empirically. And some day in the distant future the two groups will no longer be disparate. Unfortunately, I doubt if any of us will live long enough to see that happen. [Sigh...]
(Wow. That’s a really good metaphor, and I think I made it up all by my lonesome. I’m impressed.)
So, no TOCs here, bub. And my house is empty again, so I have no further Non-F stories to relate (much to the chagrin of Dan Cook’s father). And I have no interest in getting involved in discussing the self-immolation process known the Democratic Party primaries, not to mention that my recent comment on Miley Cyrus’s autobiography has preemptively used up my allowance of stories on that particular subject (thank God). So it would seem that I am excluded from the blogosphere completely. What else is there left to talk about?
You misunderestimate me, Mr. Bond. (Which reminds me of the best Bond exchange of all time, from Goldfinger. “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.”)
(But first of all, I awoke Saturday morning to a message from O’C that, while suffering from debate withdrawal, he had just purchased 7 new Star Wars figures. If you’re wondering, they were: Bubba Fett (football-playing clone), Brudda Fett (Hawaiian ukulele-playing clone), Bobo Fett (bourgeois bohemian clone), Bugger Fett (you-don’t-want-to-know-what-kind-of clone), Baba au Fett (rum-soaked clone), Feta Fett (Greek salad-eating clone), and Fetid Fett (debater-who-forgot-to-pack-clean-underwear clone). Needless to say, this knowledge made my day. We all handle debate withdrawal in our own fashion.)
I listened this morning to a Philosophy Bites interview with Thomas Pink. (If you Google him you first have to sort through a lot of haberdashery.) The subject was free will. An argument was proposed to prove the lack thereof by proving that all actions are predestined, and it goes something like this. All statements of fact are either true or false. The statement “You are going to take a walk this afternoon” is therefore either true or false. Your walk, or lack thereof, is a fait accompli before it takes place (or doesn’t take place). Your walk, or lack thereof, is therefore predestined. Now the only way you can attack this conclusion is, apparently, to attack the single premise, that all statements of fact are either true or false, but that is, needless to say, a mug’s game.
Of course, to me, this whole discussion is a mug’s game. Even though I can accept both the logic and the premise, I know that the conclusion is nonsense, and that the whole thing is mere wordplay. If I were a more sophisticated philosopher, perhaps I could successfully rebut the wordplay, but I can’t. And worse, as an unsophisticated post-contemporary philosopher, I find the entire exercise specious at best. Have these obviously intelligent people nothing to do with their brains than to waste them on conundrums? Were they out of Wii consoles at the local electronics shop that week? Because I see little difference between a video game and this kind of analysis, except that at least the Wii gives you a little pseudo-exercise to go along with your killing of time.
I know. My yabbo flag is now waving in all directions.
I equate much of the nonsense in pomo writing with this sort of thinking. One isolates an idea that makes sense if you squint at it just right, and then tear off and build a whole universe of conclusions based on that idea, and that entire universe of conclusions looks like pure idiocy to anyone who doesn’t buy into that particular brand of squinting. And those non-squinters tend to be the majority of the world at large. Not to suggest that the majority is right merely because they have the numbers, but that accepted processes of thought and analysis should be able to withstand all changes of thinker and analyst. Science is like that. Something is either a proven fact, or it is not. One can hypothesize till the cows come home on conclusions to be drawn from the proven fact, but until one’s hypotheses themselves become proven fact, by the same rigorous process that led to the original proven fact, they are not accepted as true. Wouldst that philosophy, or what passes for philosophy, worked the same way.
And if post-contemporary philosophy is correct, it does. The mind and body and the universe do not work one way for philosophers and some other way for physicists/biologists/psychologists. The former create metaphors for what the latter prove empirically. And some day in the distant future the two groups will no longer be disparate. Unfortunately, I doubt if any of us will live long enough to see that happen. [Sigh...]
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
My understanding is that the only mammals used as feed at Disney's Animal Kingdom are mice. If the O.B. had only known...
I have just heard that Miley Cyrus is writing her memoirs. Obviously, our work here is done.
Of course, this is the sort of news I am pointedly not adding to the Coachean Feed. There you would most recently have read a think piece on the 8th Amendment (lots of that floating around these days), some internet privacy news, US immigration statistics, the happiness of gun owners (there’s another amendment for you), and a bit of this and that on education (for the CatNattians in the audience). In other words, the sort of stuff debaters need to have in their brains in general, all of it desirable rather than feeling like just more homework. My original goal as a coach was to civilize the adolescents with whom I came in contact. This proving to be beyond my capabilities, I have resorted to attempting to marginally educate them beyond their class work. So far results have been, well, comme ci, comme ca. You can test this yourself. Do you feel any smarter for your connection with me? No? Well, maybe our work here isn’t done yet after all.
I will point out one link on the feed that will baffle all but the most dedicated Coacheans: Disneyland has banned the taking of photographs in the parking lot! I’m not making this up. This may be the biggest setback for postmodernism since the release of The Matrix Revolutions.
Anyhow, the feed matures over time, becoming less newsy and more far-flung as I discover new blogs and websites through mostly serendipity (or, more likely, a willingness to follow wherever the hypertext takes me). Google does the rest, bless its little heart. I’m hoping that by next season it will be quite the little resource (the feed, that is, not Google). You, of course, can get in on the ground floor. Free! Act now! Our Prices are INSANE!!!
Last night I posted episode 71 of Nostrum, which strikes me as an awful lot of Nostrums. Not having a meeting did free up a little time, although I do still have a lot of debate chores before I run out of seasonal steam (not to mention getting “G.O.A.” ready for Minnesota, you betcha). I also have prep chores for my vacation in a couple of weeks. It’s coming up quicker than I expected, but I think most of it’s pinned down as much as it’s going to be. The goal will be to spend as few Euros as possible, given that each one is worth 172 American dollars plus your firstborn. What I should really be doing is traveling to somewhere the dollar still has some value. Do you think there is such a place, Toto? It’s not a place you can get to by a car, or through Expedia…
Of course, this is the sort of news I am pointedly not adding to the Coachean Feed. There you would most recently have read a think piece on the 8th Amendment (lots of that floating around these days), some internet privacy news, US immigration statistics, the happiness of gun owners (there’s another amendment for you), and a bit of this and that on education (for the CatNattians in the audience). In other words, the sort of stuff debaters need to have in their brains in general, all of it desirable rather than feeling like just more homework. My original goal as a coach was to civilize the adolescents with whom I came in contact. This proving to be beyond my capabilities, I have resorted to attempting to marginally educate them beyond their class work. So far results have been, well, comme ci, comme ca. You can test this yourself. Do you feel any smarter for your connection with me? No? Well, maybe our work here isn’t done yet after all.
I will point out one link on the feed that will baffle all but the most dedicated Coacheans: Disneyland has banned the taking of photographs in the parking lot! I’m not making this up. This may be the biggest setback for postmodernism since the release of The Matrix Revolutions.
Anyhow, the feed matures over time, becoming less newsy and more far-flung as I discover new blogs and websites through mostly serendipity (or, more likely, a willingness to follow wherever the hypertext takes me). Google does the rest, bless its little heart. I’m hoping that by next season it will be quite the little resource (the feed, that is, not Google). You, of course, can get in on the ground floor. Free! Act now! Our Prices are INSANE!!!
Last night I posted episode 71 of Nostrum, which strikes me as an awful lot of Nostrums. Not having a meeting did free up a little time, although I do still have a lot of debate chores before I run out of seasonal steam (not to mention getting “G.O.A.” ready for Minnesota, you betcha). I also have prep chores for my vacation in a couple of weeks. It’s coming up quicker than I expected, but I think most of it’s pinned down as much as it’s going to be. The goal will be to spend as few Euros as possible, given that each one is worth 172 American dollars plus your firstborn. What I should really be doing is traveling to somewhere the dollar still has some value. Do you think there is such a place, Toto? It’s not a place you can get to by a car, or through Expedia…
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Coachean Life Supplemental: Truth
Cabela's sporting goods catalogue offers archery equiment. The bows in here look like something from the Wookieepidia. But there's a pomo side to this worth noting.
The name of one of the bows is "The Truth 2." The description: "Last year, the engineers [designed] The Truth bow. This year, they just wanted to change a few things. The result: they changed everything."
That's the way with the truth, isn't it? You get it all figured out, and then they change it on you.
(By the way, you've got to love the other bow names: The Marquis, Black Ice, The Rock, Lights Out, Game Over. I'm especially fond of Game Over; obviously there's punsters in the deer-killing business. Not that I'm against killing deer, mind you, given that I'm happy to eat them when the occasion arises. But in my neighborhood, we don't need Lights Out to put out the lights of the local ungulates. The deer congregate in my yard like Scientologists at a movie studio, and you can walk right up to them and hit them over the head with a frying pan if you're so inclined. When I go out to the garage to my car in the morning I am fond of calling out, a la Disney's Bambi, "Man is in the driveway," but I barely get a rise out of the things. If you decide to visit the chez, feel free to bring your own frying pan along with you. And any venison recipes, if you have them.)
The name of one of the bows is "The Truth 2." The description: "Last year, the engineers [designed] The Truth bow. This year, they just wanted to change a few things. The result: they changed everything."
That's the way with the truth, isn't it? You get it all figured out, and then they change it on you.
(By the way, you've got to love the other bow names: The Marquis, Black Ice, The Rock, Lights Out, Game Over. I'm especially fond of Game Over; obviously there's punsters in the deer-killing business. Not that I'm against killing deer, mind you, given that I'm happy to eat them when the occasion arises. But in my neighborhood, we don't need Lights Out to put out the lights of the local ungulates. The deer congregate in my yard like Scientologists at a movie studio, and you can walk right up to them and hit them over the head with a frying pan if you're so inclined. When I go out to the garage to my car in the morning I am fond of calling out, a la Disney's Bambi, "Man is in the driveway," but I barely get a rise out of the things. If you decide to visit the chez, feel free to bring your own frying pan along with you. And any venison recipes, if you have them.)
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Apparation? Is that the word?; Frenchmen without cavemen; time to switch role models
For those who like aggravation (that doesn’t sound right), there is now an aggravated site of debate blogs: http://first.gaforensics.org/. You can, of course, RSS this RSS and aggravate yourself privately in the comfort of your own feeder, if such is your fancy. I still maintain that NFL ought to be doing this, but at least somebody is doing this, so until Ripon catches up with the rest of us…
Wait a minute. Aggregate. That’s the word I’m thinking of. Aggregate.
So I finished up a version of Geopolitics for the “If It Gets Me Out of the House, I’m There” Institute, and it’s a bit different from what I did here (same info, better and more thorough presentation, incorporating sovereignty), so I pulled the greatest hit version temporarily. I mean, why give away the ending? I’ll repost a revised version to greatest hits after the fact. (Speaking of greatest hits, everybody tells me they think Stump the Chump was funny. You think I’m funny? I make you laugh? I’m the most serious person I know. I’ll have you know that Stump the Chump was pulled directly from the WTF archives! Anyhow, I understand that O’C and his minions are presently reconstructing the great debates of the 1870s, and he’s found one round at Little Big Horn High where George Custer, Sitting Bull and B. B. Cody were all on the same double-octos panel; Custer, apparently, was the squirrel.) We’re now dickering over: 1) lecture two, which will probably be an overview of postmodernism derived from Caveman, and 2) whether I’ll judge a round. I need to look at the schedule of the event. I wasn’t planning on moving in, to tell you the truth. I was looking forward to getting out of the house as much as anyone, but only for the morning. O’C seems to think that I need to judge rounds. Of course, I’m fine with judging rounds, and I do it off and on when the need arises or the spirit moves me, but he’s pretty messianic about it, as if, were I to pick up a pen and flow pad, Jupiter would align with Mars, Bush would resign and we’d once again be allowed to eat fois gras in Chicago. Sigh.
Meanwhile, there’s this damned mainstream debate movie coming out, which will be the ruination of coaches everywhere. It used to be, we only had to aspire to be as good as, oh, Richard B. Sodikow. Now we’re going to have to aspire to be as good as Denzel Washington. Oh, the pressure. (And no offense, RBS, but you’re no Denzel.) If that’s not bad enough, the whole thing has Oprah Winfrey’s imprimatur on it, nay, her literal DNA all over it. What if I don’t like this movie? What if it’s another Howard the Duck? What if the debaters are animated by the same people who did Jar-Jar Binks? What if Robin Williams shows up in the middle of it as the warm and fuzzy albeit unorthodox professor who does everything he can to help the terminally ill children in the poverty ward of the orphanage? What if I figure out halfway through it that Denzel is his mother in the fruit cellar, Kaiser Soze and one of Haley Joel’s dead people, ruining all the suspense and making me wish for my ten bucks back? Will I be willing to admit it? Am I going to have to be the one to tell Oprah to stick to movies about Declamation and Speecho-Americans and to keep her mitts off debate?
Na’ah. We’ll let O’C do that. It will be a welcome change from the archeological expedition he’s planning. (He’s heading out to Machu Picchu, where apparently there’s been a discovery of pre-Columbian quarterfinals schematics they’ve asked him to verify.)
Wait a minute. Aggregate. That’s the word I’m thinking of. Aggregate.
So I finished up a version of Geopolitics for the “If It Gets Me Out of the House, I’m There” Institute, and it’s a bit different from what I did here (same info, better and more thorough presentation, incorporating sovereignty), so I pulled the greatest hit version temporarily. I mean, why give away the ending? I’ll repost a revised version to greatest hits after the fact. (Speaking of greatest hits, everybody tells me they think Stump the Chump was funny. You think I’m funny? I make you laugh? I’m the most serious person I know. I’ll have you know that Stump the Chump was pulled directly from the WTF archives! Anyhow, I understand that O’C and his minions are presently reconstructing the great debates of the 1870s, and he’s found one round at Little Big Horn High where George Custer, Sitting Bull and B. B. Cody were all on the same double-octos panel; Custer, apparently, was the squirrel.) We’re now dickering over: 1) lecture two, which will probably be an overview of postmodernism derived from Caveman, and 2) whether I’ll judge a round. I need to look at the schedule of the event. I wasn’t planning on moving in, to tell you the truth. I was looking forward to getting out of the house as much as anyone, but only for the morning. O’C seems to think that I need to judge rounds. Of course, I’m fine with judging rounds, and I do it off and on when the need arises or the spirit moves me, but he’s pretty messianic about it, as if, were I to pick up a pen and flow pad, Jupiter would align with Mars, Bush would resign and we’d once again be allowed to eat fois gras in Chicago. Sigh.
Meanwhile, there’s this damned mainstream debate movie coming out, which will be the ruination of coaches everywhere. It used to be, we only had to aspire to be as good as, oh, Richard B. Sodikow. Now we’re going to have to aspire to be as good as Denzel Washington. Oh, the pressure. (And no offense, RBS, but you’re no Denzel.) If that’s not bad enough, the whole thing has Oprah Winfrey’s imprimatur on it, nay, her literal DNA all over it. What if I don’t like this movie? What if it’s another Howard the Duck? What if the debaters are animated by the same people who did Jar-Jar Binks? What if Robin Williams shows up in the middle of it as the warm and fuzzy albeit unorthodox professor who does everything he can to help the terminally ill children in the poverty ward of the orphanage? What if I figure out halfway through it that Denzel is his mother in the fruit cellar, Kaiser Soze and one of Haley Joel’s dead people, ruining all the suspense and making me wish for my ten bucks back? Will I be willing to admit it? Am I going to have to be the one to tell Oprah to stick to movies about Declamation and Speecho-Americans and to keep her mitts off debate?
Na’ah. We’ll let O’C do that. It will be a welcome change from the archeological expedition he’s planning. (He’s heading out to Machu Picchu, where apparently there’s been a discovery of pre-Columbian quarterfinals schematics they’ve asked him to verify.)
Thursday, December 13, 2007
One less book to read, or, R. Mutt's ten minutes of fame
The Old Baudleroo’s The Conspiracy of Art is not on my recommended list. It’s a collection of essays and interviews and sweepings from the postmodern barbershop floor in aid of the thesis that contemporary art is a crock.
I wonder how much time he spent figuring that one out.
“Caveman” fans and the VCA in general know my opinion of piles of dirt on the museum floor. And I’ve even delved into intellectual analyses of piles of dirt on the museum floor. Aside from the fact that he obfuscates virtually every thought with vague language or neologisms when there’s a perfectly acceptable word already, or maybe simply aside from the fact that he happens to be French, a disease that has challenged modern civilization since at least as far back as Mark Twain, the Old B and I don’t necessarily disagree. We like the classical stuff. We see the arrival of Impressionism and the subsequent abstractionists as an evaluation of art as much as (and occasionally more than) the creation of art. The OB writes that Duchamp’s claim that a urinal was a piece of art because Duchamp, an artist, claimed it was a piece of art, has multiple meanings. First of all, it raises the question of if, in fact, art is simply what artists say it is, or is art what someone else (critics? the general public?) say it is. I certainly agree with that as a conundrum of modernity. Secondly, it makes the statement that, at least according to the OB, anything can be art, and that the boundary between art and reality no longer exists. Well, we all know how the OB feels about reality, but in fact, this thinking makes it a little more clear what his general theses are (e.g., Disneyland and reality). In any case, if art is supposed to be something special, connected to some aesthetic sense, transcendent, whatever, at the point where art becomes a toilet, or a toilet becomes art, that transcendence ain’t what it used to be. The real world has impinged/coopted the interior world.
The other great step in modern art, according to the OB, and again, this is standard enough thinking or at least a perfectly reasonable thesis, comes with Andy Warhol. Whereas Duchamp claimed real items were art, Warhol claimed that non artistic items were legitimate subjects of art. Specifically, a room filled with his perfect blown-up copies of Brillo boxes. Throw in Warhol’s mass production of art, and whereas with Duchamp any commodity in the world can become a piece of art, with Warhol any piece of art can become a commodity. Duchamp begins the process of reevaluating what art is on an intellectual level (as compared to the abstractionists reevaluating it on an artistic level) and Warhol completes that process.
The conspiracy of art, meanwhile, is the OB's analysis of what happens after this process is completed. Artists no longer need to have skill or talent, they only have to claim that they're artists, and we as consumers of art, or critics, or whoever, in accepting or validating this claim, are in cahoots with these yabbos. Art is dead, or at least it sucks, because we don't know what it is anymore (in the Kantian aesthetic sense, say, although the OB doesn't cite the Kantster). Art is what whoever is saying what art is is. (Is that a real sentence? Maybe I've become OBish!)
Anyhow, this book probably costs about twenty bucks. I have now summed it up for free, and saved you a lot of agony. Thank you notes are not necessary. I live to please.
I wonder how much time he spent figuring that one out.
“Caveman” fans and the VCA in general know my opinion of piles of dirt on the museum floor. And I’ve even delved into intellectual analyses of piles of dirt on the museum floor. Aside from the fact that he obfuscates virtually every thought with vague language or neologisms when there’s a perfectly acceptable word already, or maybe simply aside from the fact that he happens to be French, a disease that has challenged modern civilization since at least as far back as Mark Twain, the Old B and I don’t necessarily disagree. We like the classical stuff. We see the arrival of Impressionism and the subsequent abstractionists as an evaluation of art as much as (and occasionally more than) the creation of art. The OB writes that Duchamp’s claim that a urinal was a piece of art because Duchamp, an artist, claimed it was a piece of art, has multiple meanings. First of all, it raises the question of if, in fact, art is simply what artists say it is, or is art what someone else (critics? the general public?) say it is. I certainly agree with that as a conundrum of modernity. Secondly, it makes the statement that, at least according to the OB, anything can be art, and that the boundary between art and reality no longer exists. Well, we all know how the OB feels about reality, but in fact, this thinking makes it a little more clear what his general theses are (e.g., Disneyland and reality). In any case, if art is supposed to be something special, connected to some aesthetic sense, transcendent, whatever, at the point where art becomes a toilet, or a toilet becomes art, that transcendence ain’t what it used to be. The real world has impinged/coopted the interior world.
The other great step in modern art, according to the OB, and again, this is standard enough thinking or at least a perfectly reasonable thesis, comes with Andy Warhol. Whereas Duchamp claimed real items were art, Warhol claimed that non artistic items were legitimate subjects of art. Specifically, a room filled with his perfect blown-up copies of Brillo boxes. Throw in Warhol’s mass production of art, and whereas with Duchamp any commodity in the world can become a piece of art, with Warhol any piece of art can become a commodity. Duchamp begins the process of reevaluating what art is on an intellectual level (as compared to the abstractionists reevaluating it on an artistic level) and Warhol completes that process.
The conspiracy of art, meanwhile, is the OB's analysis of what happens after this process is completed. Artists no longer need to have skill or talent, they only have to claim that they're artists, and we as consumers of art, or critics, or whoever, in accepting or validating this claim, are in cahoots with these yabbos. Art is dead, or at least it sucks, because we don't know what it is anymore (in the Kantian aesthetic sense, say, although the OB doesn't cite the Kantster). Art is what whoever is saying what art is is. (Is that a real sentence? Maybe I've become OBish!)
Anyhow, this book probably costs about twenty bucks. I have now summed it up for free, and saved you a lot of agony. Thank you notes are not necessary. I live to please.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Part the First, Geopolitics; Part the Second, I Just Can't Stop Myself
So I settled in with my copy of The Conspiracy of Art last night, only to be immediately taken by the concept of pataphysics. I find it curious that, given my interest in the Old Baudleroo, I’ve either never come across this before, or else managed to circumvent it when I did. Anyhow, it’s the science of imaginary solutions. In Baudrillard’s case, of course, one would use pataphysics to solve problems that do not exist.
No wonder I wake up screaming in the middle of the night.
I decided to go with the OB because talking about him vis-Ã -vis nukes reminded me that this book was on the to-read pile, thanks to a recommendation from HoraceMan, TSWAS. The OB’s theory, in a nutshell, is that possession of nuclear arms negates their use, which I don’t necessarily agree with, but if there isn’t someone running the OB at least at, say, the Lex RR, then something’s wrong with the world.
One big issue of Jan-Feb is our general lack of accepted authority, or accepted ideas, on the geopolitical level, as compared to our abundance of rather accessible orthodoxy on the political level. That is, I start out the Plebes with Locke, and maybe a side order of Rousseau, and see no reason why they can’t go quickly from there to the readable parts of Rawls. Voila, an instant introduction to social theory via the social contract, the general will and fairness spread across an entire society. Throw in a little JSM “On Liberty,” and you’ve got one hell of a philosopher in the 9th grade. (There are those who sneer at such orthodoxy, but as I’ve discussed in the past, and will no doubt reprise in the future, one learns to play scales before one plays Liszt’s Sonata in B minor). These standard texts in fact inform most thinking on the nature of government and society, even when the thinking is in opposition. (That is, you can’t have Marx without Locke, or at least not Marx as he is. You can’t make claims that the individual is not the core unit of society if that has been the presumption so far, without knowing that you’re undermining that presumption.)
As far as I know, and I admit I’m no expert, there is no similar canon for geopolitics. I’m sure there are standard texts, and probably even a canon as such for the subject area, but not with this level of accessibility and acceptability. All the Founders of the US were familiar with Locke, in other words, but I wonder what all the members of the UN General Assembly are familiar with. Because of this lack of standard thinking, of a normative, if you will, we’re pretty much on our own when a subject is of a geopolitical nature. We cannot draw on shared knowledge, and shared expectations, to the degree that we can with issues concerning one single national polity. This is reflective, no doubt, of the reality of the planet on which we live. We have established various rules for managing our societies on a local level, and we mostly do that pretty well, but we have yet to establish accepted rules for managing our societies on a global level. We do not all play well with others, and our rather meager attempts to define rules and boundaries don’t stand very well. The US, for instance, defies the Geneva Convention with Guantanamo, so it’s not just some backwater nations thumbing their noses at what is considered international common law (except insofar as Mr. Bush has turned the US into a backwater). Some theorists, like Rawls if I’m not mistaken, have determined that for all practical purposes the various nations of the world are in a virtual state of nature with one another. Until we are willing to subsume national interests into overarching global interests (imagine there’s no countries) the way we subsume individual interests into overarching societal interests on the local level, this is probably not going to change. As a result, topics that we argue that cross national, sovereign borders require addressing the reality of the world in which we live, both from the perspective of what we ought to do (and maybe we ought to be a global village instead of a globe of villages) and what we have to do (survival in the global state of nature).
Which brings us to the big question: What, exactly, comprises justice on a global scale if we have no generally accepted standards of justice? Jan-Feb asks us to determine the justness of certain actions of a global nature, yet we have no normative scale for weighing those actions. What do we do?
Well, what I do is continue this line of thought in the next installment of this blog.
My friend Herman over at WTF has sent me an early copy of their new FAQ section, which I hereby share.
What did the Chump do before Star Wars came out?
Nothing.
The Chump takes great delight in victories of the Bronx Science team in the years before his arrival. Why is this?
There were no years before his arrival. The Chump has been at Bronx Science since the creation of their first debate team in 1927. He just looks different now.
Why does the Chump go to every tournament every weekend, even when his team stays home?
The Chump has a sworn responsibility to report on every debate round that takes place throughout the country, regardless of where, when, how or why. His credentials specifically allow him entry onto the grounds of any institution of learning where two people are not agreeing with each other, although he seldom wears his official “Debate Sheriff” badge in open view except in the deep South.
Where did the Chump debate before he became a debate coach?
The Chump represented The Long Island School For the Terminally Depraved for the years 1997-2001. He participated in Remedial Declamation, Extemp for the Home Handyman, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Lincoln-Douglas and Upholstering. During his years at the Donald Trump Virtual College of Really Kool Knowledge, the Chump majored in vestigial appendages with a minor in the gold rush, representing his school in Parli, barley and Farley Mowat. His win/loss record of 0/521 has never been equaled, much less surpassed.
Where did the Chump spend his junior year abroad?
A broad? Rumors of the Chump's sex change have been wildly exaggerated. Nevertheless, he does traditionally summer at Lake Titicaca. And yes, his favorite food is cockaleekie soup, and some day he hopes to live in Tuckahoe. Meanwhile, he's working on his W.C. Fields impression so that this paragraph will be a lot funnier when he says it than when you read it.
Where does the Chump get his vast supply of debate trivia?
At Vast Supply of Debate Trivia ‘R’ Us.
What does the Chump do with all the old schematics he collects?
The vast majority of the Chump’s old schematics are available for sale on eBay. The occasional rounds of special merit, where one schmoe the Chump has heard of was debating some other schmoe the Chump has heard of, are displayed on the wall of Chump Central, the Chump’s museum/domicile.
Does anyone read the Chump’s column who isn’t either insane or trying to butter him up before he judges their next round?
Not bloody likely.
Why is the Chump’s picture different on WTF and CL?
The picture on WTF is a pseudonym, while the one on CL is an alias.
Why is the Chump’s new computer called Herpes?
You might as well ask why a rock is called a rock. Don’t you know anything about linguistics?
Why does the Chump’s have such an affinity for Disney princesses?
Orphaned at birth due to a freak lawn bowling accident, the Chump was raised by a series of wicked stepparents, dwarfs, renegade nuns and the odd parish beadle. And we do mean odd. On his sixteenth birthday, while polishing the iron maiden in the basement of his current foster family, the Lecters, the Chump was visited by John Goodman, his fairy godmother. The Chump was told that the key to his freedom was hidden either in the vestle with the pestle, the chalice in the palace, or the flagon with the dragon. Unfamiliar with Danny Kaye movies, the Chump escaped captivity and ran away to the Bronx, also known as Prairie Dog City (Where the Grass is Green and the Girls are Pretty), where he was finally adopted by a now aging Cinderella and her husband, Prince Not So Charming Anymore But Still Marginally Acceptable, who had been unable to have children of their own due to sun spots and a steady diet of talking mice. It was at this point that the Chump swore his allegiance to Mama Sin, as he called her, and all the other Sins. He was officially inducted into Disney Princessia at the traditional Ceremony of the Boning Knives, conducted in Orlando in 2003. (NOTE: The ceremony was officially witnessed by the Celebration, Lake Highland and Nova debate teams, none of whom have ever recovered from the ordeal.)
Will the Chump ever run out of debate trivia for his five-a-day column?
We certainly hope not, because when we can’t think of anything to write ourselves, we need a source of inspiration.
Why do you refer to yourself as We?
We don’t.
No wonder I wake up screaming in the middle of the night.
I decided to go with the OB because talking about him vis-Ã -vis nukes reminded me that this book was on the to-read pile, thanks to a recommendation from HoraceMan, TSWAS. The OB’s theory, in a nutshell, is that possession of nuclear arms negates their use, which I don’t necessarily agree with, but if there isn’t someone running the OB at least at, say, the Lex RR, then something’s wrong with the world.
One big issue of Jan-Feb is our general lack of accepted authority, or accepted ideas, on the geopolitical level, as compared to our abundance of rather accessible orthodoxy on the political level. That is, I start out the Plebes with Locke, and maybe a side order of Rousseau, and see no reason why they can’t go quickly from there to the readable parts of Rawls. Voila, an instant introduction to social theory via the social contract, the general will and fairness spread across an entire society. Throw in a little JSM “On Liberty,” and you’ve got one hell of a philosopher in the 9th grade. (There are those who sneer at such orthodoxy, but as I’ve discussed in the past, and will no doubt reprise in the future, one learns to play scales before one plays Liszt’s Sonata in B minor). These standard texts in fact inform most thinking on the nature of government and society, even when the thinking is in opposition. (That is, you can’t have Marx without Locke, or at least not Marx as he is. You can’t make claims that the individual is not the core unit of society if that has been the presumption so far, without knowing that you’re undermining that presumption.)
As far as I know, and I admit I’m no expert, there is no similar canon for geopolitics. I’m sure there are standard texts, and probably even a canon as such for the subject area, but not with this level of accessibility and acceptability. All the Founders of the US were familiar with Locke, in other words, but I wonder what all the members of the UN General Assembly are familiar with. Because of this lack of standard thinking, of a normative, if you will, we’re pretty much on our own when a subject is of a geopolitical nature. We cannot draw on shared knowledge, and shared expectations, to the degree that we can with issues concerning one single national polity. This is reflective, no doubt, of the reality of the planet on which we live. We have established various rules for managing our societies on a local level, and we mostly do that pretty well, but we have yet to establish accepted rules for managing our societies on a global level. We do not all play well with others, and our rather meager attempts to define rules and boundaries don’t stand very well. The US, for instance, defies the Geneva Convention with Guantanamo, so it’s not just some backwater nations thumbing their noses at what is considered international common law (except insofar as Mr. Bush has turned the US into a backwater). Some theorists, like Rawls if I’m not mistaken, have determined that for all practical purposes the various nations of the world are in a virtual state of nature with one another. Until we are willing to subsume national interests into overarching global interests (imagine there’s no countries) the way we subsume individual interests into overarching societal interests on the local level, this is probably not going to change. As a result, topics that we argue that cross national, sovereign borders require addressing the reality of the world in which we live, both from the perspective of what we ought to do (and maybe we ought to be a global village instead of a globe of villages) and what we have to do (survival in the global state of nature).
Which brings us to the big question: What, exactly, comprises justice on a global scale if we have no generally accepted standards of justice? Jan-Feb asks us to determine the justness of certain actions of a global nature, yet we have no normative scale for weighing those actions. What do we do?
Well, what I do is continue this line of thought in the next installment of this blog.
Frequently Asked Stumpers: A Very Special Episode of Stump the Chump
My friend Herman over at WTF has sent me an early copy of their new FAQ section, which I hereby share.
What did the Chump do before Star Wars came out?
Nothing.
The Chump takes great delight in victories of the Bronx Science team in the years before his arrival. Why is this?
There were no years before his arrival. The Chump has been at Bronx Science since the creation of their first debate team in 1927. He just looks different now.
Why does the Chump go to every tournament every weekend, even when his team stays home?
The Chump has a sworn responsibility to report on every debate round that takes place throughout the country, regardless of where, when, how or why. His credentials specifically allow him entry onto the grounds of any institution of learning where two people are not agreeing with each other, although he seldom wears his official “Debate Sheriff” badge in open view except in the deep South.
Where did the Chump debate before he became a debate coach?
The Chump represented The Long Island School For the Terminally Depraved for the years 1997-2001. He participated in Remedial Declamation, Extemp for the Home Handyman, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Lincoln-Douglas and Upholstering. During his years at the Donald Trump Virtual College of Really Kool Knowledge, the Chump majored in vestigial appendages with a minor in the gold rush, representing his school in Parli, barley and Farley Mowat. His win/loss record of 0/521 has never been equaled, much less surpassed.
Where did the Chump spend his junior year abroad?
A broad? Rumors of the Chump's sex change have been wildly exaggerated. Nevertheless, he does traditionally summer at Lake Titicaca. And yes, his favorite food is cockaleekie soup, and some day he hopes to live in Tuckahoe. Meanwhile, he's working on his W.C. Fields impression so that this paragraph will be a lot funnier when he says it than when you read it.
Where does the Chump get his vast supply of debate trivia?
At Vast Supply of Debate Trivia ‘R’ Us.
What does the Chump do with all the old schematics he collects?
The vast majority of the Chump’s old schematics are available for sale on eBay. The occasional rounds of special merit, where one schmoe the Chump has heard of was debating some other schmoe the Chump has heard of, are displayed on the wall of Chump Central, the Chump’s museum/domicile.
Does anyone read the Chump’s column who isn’t either insane or trying to butter him up before he judges their next round?
Not bloody likely.
Why is the Chump’s picture different on WTF and CL?
The picture on WTF is a pseudonym, while the one on CL is an alias.
Why is the Chump’s new computer called Herpes?
You might as well ask why a rock is called a rock. Don’t you know anything about linguistics?
Why does the Chump’s have such an affinity for Disney princesses?
Orphaned at birth due to a freak lawn bowling accident, the Chump was raised by a series of wicked stepparents, dwarfs, renegade nuns and the odd parish beadle. And we do mean odd. On his sixteenth birthday, while polishing the iron maiden in the basement of his current foster family, the Lecters, the Chump was visited by John Goodman, his fairy godmother. The Chump was told that the key to his freedom was hidden either in the vestle with the pestle, the chalice in the palace, or the flagon with the dragon. Unfamiliar with Danny Kaye movies, the Chump escaped captivity and ran away to the Bronx, also known as Prairie Dog City (Where the Grass is Green and the Girls are Pretty), where he was finally adopted by a now aging Cinderella and her husband, Prince Not So Charming Anymore But Still Marginally Acceptable, who had been unable to have children of their own due to sun spots and a steady diet of talking mice. It was at this point that the Chump swore his allegiance to Mama Sin, as he called her, and all the other Sins. He was officially inducted into Disney Princessia at the traditional Ceremony of the Boning Knives, conducted in Orlando in 2003. (NOTE: The ceremony was officially witnessed by the Celebration, Lake Highland and Nova debate teams, none of whom have ever recovered from the ordeal.)
Will the Chump ever run out of debate trivia for his five-a-day column?
We certainly hope not, because when we can’t think of anything to write ourselves, we need a source of inspiration.
Why do you refer to yourself as We?
We don’t.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
False Narratives Part 6
So where are we going with all this?
Obviously to a great extent this is just noodling. I’ve been thinking about the narratives we create to explain ourselves, and one another. I’ve recently run into a situation in the day job where a legend had been built about my actions, and since I didn’t find it particularly true, I tracked it down a bit and did some analysis. The truth of the matter was rather dull in comparison to the legend that was being presented, and although there was a germ of reality at the core of the legend, the full truth was strongly contradictory to the full impact of the legend. The legend was probably fostered because it provided an excuse for actions by others that were of a dubious nature, but more to the point, made those others look good. The legend initially made me look bad, but then I realized that I could play the legend to my advantage, so I let it be. It’s a win-win situation, based on a false narrative. Strange.
There is a difference between a lie and the development of legend. A lie is knowingly contrary to the facts, told for whatever purpose. The development of legend starts with truth, and makes that truth a better story, often casting aside the truth as the story becomes more interesting or more important than the truth it is supposedly illuminating. There’s so many reasons for legend building that it mostly depends on what legend it is you’re talking about to know which ones apply. We’ve been talking about the West as a whole, and talked in a broad sense about the myth of the West. The legends of the West in many ways evolve insofar as they support the myth. That is, there is a central, underlying truth in the myth that spins the legends in a direction that supports or illuminates that underlying truth, setting aside the specific ostensive truth that the legends purport to be about.
If legends are simply narratives, than the best narrator will create the best legends. And by far, the best narrator I know of is the motion picture. The story-telling ability of film far exceeds any other medium. There is power, immediacy, drive, characters that, on the screen, are literally larger than life. Of course, films can be non-narrative, but when a film sets out to tell a story, and does so successfully, it can’t be beat. At least once upon a time films were limited by constraints of feasibility, but CGI has eliminated almost every conceivable barrier to our suspension of disbelief. Anything is possible in the movies. If it’s done well, we’ll buy it. Hollywood has had a lot of nicknames over the years; the Dream Factory is certainly not a bad one, from our perspective.
As we’ve said, the movies set about making westerns virtually from Day One of Hollywood. Which means that, from Day One, Hollywood was in the legend-making business. Movies had the ability to tell the stories, and as they told the stories, they had the history of the stories already told, and the polishing of the chestnuts, the retellings becoming ever more legendary and ever less historical. By the 50s, the idea of making a serious historical picture would be quite a novelty, as compared to the teens, when making a serious historical picture would exactly be the goal. Hollywood knew what it was doing. And The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is the perfect expression of it. By the early 60s, there was simply little question that most movies were about something other than the reality of the Old West. “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The particular legend being printed is about the pacific James Stewart character, a lawyer, bringing justice to the West by standing up to the bad guy Liberty Valence character, and, of course, shooting him. An act of incredible courage, a fulcrum moment in the switch of the West from Wild to Tame. As a result of the event, Stewart becomes a hero. And eventually a senator, all because of that event. Except, of course, it’s not true. It’s a false narrative. But the false narrative is better than the true narrative. We’re making a movie here. Print the legend.
In the end, we move from fact, which is non-narrative, to history, which is an attempt to organize facts in order to make some sense out of them (and which is, perhaps intrinsically, dishonest in its selection of which facts to organize), to legend, which is an attempt to organize the best narratives (at which point honesty is no longer relevant). Underlying it all might be myth, which can be considered one way to do the organization, that is, we select the narratives based on their metanarrative relevance.
So false narratives can serve a purpose, either personally or culturally. And since often the falsity of the narrative is not even a conscious aspect of the narrative, the morality of honesty versus dishonesty is theoretically irrelevant. All that’s left, in the end, is the narrative itself, and the narrative will be judged on its strengths as a narrative, not on its strengths as a vehicle for iteration of facts. And one of its strengths as a narrative will easily be how well it touches on any underlying inviolable truths.
When the fact becomes the legend, print the legend.
Obviously to a great extent this is just noodling. I’ve been thinking about the narratives we create to explain ourselves, and one another. I’ve recently run into a situation in the day job where a legend had been built about my actions, and since I didn’t find it particularly true, I tracked it down a bit and did some analysis. The truth of the matter was rather dull in comparison to the legend that was being presented, and although there was a germ of reality at the core of the legend, the full truth was strongly contradictory to the full impact of the legend. The legend was probably fostered because it provided an excuse for actions by others that were of a dubious nature, but more to the point, made those others look good. The legend initially made me look bad, but then I realized that I could play the legend to my advantage, so I let it be. It’s a win-win situation, based on a false narrative. Strange.
There is a difference between a lie and the development of legend. A lie is knowingly contrary to the facts, told for whatever purpose. The development of legend starts with truth, and makes that truth a better story, often casting aside the truth as the story becomes more interesting or more important than the truth it is supposedly illuminating. There’s so many reasons for legend building that it mostly depends on what legend it is you’re talking about to know which ones apply. We’ve been talking about the West as a whole, and talked in a broad sense about the myth of the West. The legends of the West in many ways evolve insofar as they support the myth. That is, there is a central, underlying truth in the myth that spins the legends in a direction that supports or illuminates that underlying truth, setting aside the specific ostensive truth that the legends purport to be about.
If legends are simply narratives, than the best narrator will create the best legends. And by far, the best narrator I know of is the motion picture. The story-telling ability of film far exceeds any other medium. There is power, immediacy, drive, characters that, on the screen, are literally larger than life. Of course, films can be non-narrative, but when a film sets out to tell a story, and does so successfully, it can’t be beat. At least once upon a time films were limited by constraints of feasibility, but CGI has eliminated almost every conceivable barrier to our suspension of disbelief. Anything is possible in the movies. If it’s done well, we’ll buy it. Hollywood has had a lot of nicknames over the years; the Dream Factory is certainly not a bad one, from our perspective.
As we’ve said, the movies set about making westerns virtually from Day One of Hollywood. Which means that, from Day One, Hollywood was in the legend-making business. Movies had the ability to tell the stories, and as they told the stories, they had the history of the stories already told, and the polishing of the chestnuts, the retellings becoming ever more legendary and ever less historical. By the 50s, the idea of making a serious historical picture would be quite a novelty, as compared to the teens, when making a serious historical picture would exactly be the goal. Hollywood knew what it was doing. And The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is the perfect expression of it. By the early 60s, there was simply little question that most movies were about something other than the reality of the Old West. “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The particular legend being printed is about the pacific James Stewart character, a lawyer, bringing justice to the West by standing up to the bad guy Liberty Valence character, and, of course, shooting him. An act of incredible courage, a fulcrum moment in the switch of the West from Wild to Tame. As a result of the event, Stewart becomes a hero. And eventually a senator, all because of that event. Except, of course, it’s not true. It’s a false narrative. But the false narrative is better than the true narrative. We’re making a movie here. Print the legend.
In the end, we move from fact, which is non-narrative, to history, which is an attempt to organize facts in order to make some sense out of them (and which is, perhaps intrinsically, dishonest in its selection of which facts to organize), to legend, which is an attempt to organize the best narratives (at which point honesty is no longer relevant). Underlying it all might be myth, which can be considered one way to do the organization, that is, we select the narratives based on their metanarrative relevance.
So false narratives can serve a purpose, either personally or culturally. And since often the falsity of the narrative is not even a conscious aspect of the narrative, the morality of honesty versus dishonesty is theoretically irrelevant. All that’s left, in the end, is the narrative itself, and the narrative will be judged on its strengths as a narrative, not on its strengths as a vehicle for iteration of facts. And one of its strengths as a narrative will easily be how well it touches on any underlying inviolable truths.
When the fact becomes the legend, print the legend.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
False Narratives, Part 5
There are times when the line between myth and legend disappears. Our usage of the word myth here is intended to encapsulate those aspects of the West that to a great extent defined the US as a culture. Myths in this context are more like values, in the LD sense, than the specifics of legends. The legends may entail certain mythic aspects, but their goal is not the telling of underlying myth. And the myths may derive from the legends, but whereas the legends are about themselves, and about their narrative, the myths are about what underlies the narratives. What underlies the narratives becomes the metanarrative. (Don’t you love tossing jargon like this around?)
The myth of the West begins with the idea of the frontier. It begins with the idea that, as we move west, there is absolute freedom. We can release ourselves from our lives and begin again. We can become or find ourselves. No one knows who we are out there, so we are free to be whoever we want to be. This freedom and this land may test us, but it will also better us. F. Scott Fitzgerald to the contrary notwithstanding, American lives had an explicit opportunity for second acts, and that was by hauling up stakes and moving west. I don’t know of any other cultural self-image that includes such movement. A Frenchman is a Frenchman, happy to be wherever he is in France; substitute most any other nationality and the statement remains true. Even unhappy countries would be happy if they could only overthrow their nasty leaders and be the Blankmen they are destined to be. Americans are restless. They keep moving. They need to conquer new frontiers. And keep in mind we’re talking image here, not necessarily reality. But that’s beside the point.
There’s a loner aspect to the myth of the West, which is seen in the collected legends. We see ourselves as standing tall but standing by ourselves. We draw on our own resources, some of which we may not have been aware we possessed. In fact, you might say that our myth of the West includes us as our own legends of the West. We are all Wyatt Earp or Kit Carson or John Wayne or Gary Cooper. If you know the movie The Fountainhead (the most inadvertently hilarious motion picture of all time) you know the shot at the end of the Coop as God at the top of the building. Make that a mountaintop, and you’ve got the Western conqueror in the nutshell (and it’s no great stretch to see Randian individualism as a part of it).
So the Myth of the West is the endless frontier and the individualist conqueror. This myth, as a part of our culture, feeds back to our image of ourselves beyond the West. As a culture we believe in the process of reinvention, and we believe that there is a place for us to go to undergo this process. The point that this is myth implies that there might be some flaw in it as a conception of reality. It is based on our desires and our perceptions and our personalization of the legends, and as truth it is seriously flawed (as are, the pomos would say, most if not all metanarratives). The conquering of the Indians leaves out the reality of the Native American situation. The taming of the land leaves out the reality of the abuses of the environment. Building the mighty railroads leaves out the reality of abusing the Chinese laborers. Creating a place of freedom excludes the reality of the lack of freedom for former slaves, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, etc., which is forever a problem with the American myth of liberty for all. I’m no Howard Zinn, but facts are facts, and my recommendation to anyone in America is, first and foremost, be white, upper-middle class if you really want to enjoy the place to the fullest.
So legends make for good stories, while myths make for good (hopefully) characters. Admittedly, as I’ve alluded, you could define these terms differently, but the result in the end would be roughly the same. And the end, for us, is the end of the West. At some point, there is no West in the mythic or legendary sense anymore. It’s all settled. It’s all conquered. There is no longer any frontier. At this point, we don’t have any reality anymore informing the myth, but just the myth itself (and, of course, history). The myth persists, even though it’s no longer part of anyone’s daily endeavor. We start studying the myth, and retelling the legends, at a remove from their actuality. We’re no longer studying the West, we’re studying what happens after there no longer is a West. Hence the literature and the films. And as our study moves further and further away from the reality into the representations of that reality, we become more ironic and convoluted and self-conscious—in other words, we take on all the attributes of the postmodern. We’re not studying the West, we’re studying the study of the West. We’re getting into the hermeneutics. We’re getting structural and post-structural and critical. The whole thing is becoming an academic exercise, subject to whatever pressures and trends are afoot in academia, rather than a cultural exercise. One wonders at what point the West as culturally formative/informative myth goes away, to be replaced by other culturally formative/informative myths. It does: there’s no question about that. It probably already has, otherwise there would be more Westerns at the multiplex this weekend.
to be continued…
The myth of the West begins with the idea of the frontier. It begins with the idea that, as we move west, there is absolute freedom. We can release ourselves from our lives and begin again. We can become or find ourselves. No one knows who we are out there, so we are free to be whoever we want to be. This freedom and this land may test us, but it will also better us. F. Scott Fitzgerald to the contrary notwithstanding, American lives had an explicit opportunity for second acts, and that was by hauling up stakes and moving west. I don’t know of any other cultural self-image that includes such movement. A Frenchman is a Frenchman, happy to be wherever he is in France; substitute most any other nationality and the statement remains true. Even unhappy countries would be happy if they could only overthrow their nasty leaders and be the Blankmen they are destined to be. Americans are restless. They keep moving. They need to conquer new frontiers. And keep in mind we’re talking image here, not necessarily reality. But that’s beside the point.
There’s a loner aspect to the myth of the West, which is seen in the collected legends. We see ourselves as standing tall but standing by ourselves. We draw on our own resources, some of which we may not have been aware we possessed. In fact, you might say that our myth of the West includes us as our own legends of the West. We are all Wyatt Earp or Kit Carson or John Wayne or Gary Cooper. If you know the movie The Fountainhead (the most inadvertently hilarious motion picture of all time) you know the shot at the end of the Coop as God at the top of the building. Make that a mountaintop, and you’ve got the Western conqueror in the nutshell (and it’s no great stretch to see Randian individualism as a part of it).
So the Myth of the West is the endless frontier and the individualist conqueror. This myth, as a part of our culture, feeds back to our image of ourselves beyond the West. As a culture we believe in the process of reinvention, and we believe that there is a place for us to go to undergo this process. The point that this is myth implies that there might be some flaw in it as a conception of reality. It is based on our desires and our perceptions and our personalization of the legends, and as truth it is seriously flawed (as are, the pomos would say, most if not all metanarratives). The conquering of the Indians leaves out the reality of the Native American situation. The taming of the land leaves out the reality of the abuses of the environment. Building the mighty railroads leaves out the reality of abusing the Chinese laborers. Creating a place of freedom excludes the reality of the lack of freedom for former slaves, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, etc., which is forever a problem with the American myth of liberty for all. I’m no Howard Zinn, but facts are facts, and my recommendation to anyone in America is, first and foremost, be white, upper-middle class if you really want to enjoy the place to the fullest.
So legends make for good stories, while myths make for good (hopefully) characters. Admittedly, as I’ve alluded, you could define these terms differently, but the result in the end would be roughly the same. And the end, for us, is the end of the West. At some point, there is no West in the mythic or legendary sense anymore. It’s all settled. It’s all conquered. There is no longer any frontier. At this point, we don’t have any reality anymore informing the myth, but just the myth itself (and, of course, history). The myth persists, even though it’s no longer part of anyone’s daily endeavor. We start studying the myth, and retelling the legends, at a remove from their actuality. We’re no longer studying the West, we’re studying what happens after there no longer is a West. Hence the literature and the films. And as our study moves further and further away from the reality into the representations of that reality, we become more ironic and convoluted and self-conscious—in other words, we take on all the attributes of the postmodern. We’re not studying the West, we’re studying the study of the West. We’re getting into the hermeneutics. We’re getting structural and post-structural and critical. The whole thing is becoming an academic exercise, subject to whatever pressures and trends are afoot in academia, rather than a cultural exercise. One wonders at what point the West as culturally formative/informative myth goes away, to be replaced by other culturally formative/informative myths. It does: there’s no question about that. It probably already has, otherwise there would be more Westerns at the multiplex this weekend.
to be continued…
Monday, June 25, 2007
False Narratives, Part 4
I’ve been very sloppy about usage of the words legend and myth, which are far from interchangeable. When we talk about the west, there are definitely myths, and there are definitely legends, and while sometimes they overlap, we should do our best to achieve some sort of clarity. So we should begin with definitions. Go look the words up. Anywhere. I’ll wait.
[Whistle, whistle… Shuffle, shuffle… Scratch the odd itch…]
Okay, you’re back, and you now have definitions. Good. If you’re still confused, let me help clarify. My romantic prowess is legendary. Your romantic prowess is a myth.
Or, let’s try another approach. Legends explain themselves, myths explain something else. A legend starts with a narrative of reality and, for whatever reason, makes that reality into a hyperreal narrative, something even better than reality, something even more real than the reality and which replaces the reality. A myth starts with something incomprehensible or complicated and attempts to make a narrative out of it. In other words, with a legend we have a preexisting narrative, and with a myth, we have phenomena we are trying to understand, which we do by creating a narrative of explanation. (Without specifically attempting to do so, Caveman does cover some of this material, but then again, Caveman covers everything ever, so that shouldn’t come as any surprise.)
What is legend about the West, and what is myth, is often hard to distinguish, and certainly open to interpretation, regardless of your definitions of myths and legends. You can pin down a few things though. There are certainly legends based on various individuals, or groups of individuals. The mountain men/trappers/trailblazers of the earliest years were real people. We think of someone like Kit Carson as heroic by nature, and the facts of his life don’t dispute this. Sacajawea strikes me as providing a transcendent narrative based on fact (she’s sort of the Ginger Rogers to Lewis and Clark’s Fred Astaire, doing the same thing but backwards and in heels). Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show (begun in 1883!) was in the legend-making business, actually hiring Sitting Bull to stage attacks on his show’s wagon trains, and (indirectly?) making Annie Oakley into an eponym for a free ticket. George Armstrong Custer is a legend (an unfortunate one, perhaps, the kind of general only a CIC like George W. Bush could love). Wyatt and Doc are legends. Tombstone is a legend. The wagon trains are legendary. The building of the railroads and the Golden Spike. The great cattle drives up from Texas. The hunting (to near extinction) of the buffalo, some of which was done from the windows of moving trains by British tourists—some sport, eh? The legendary cleaning up of outlaw towns, brought about by those legendary sheriffs and marshals but also by those legendary average people, the teachers and farmers and merchants and clerics trying to make lives for themselves in a new place.
It was the media that made these narratives into legends, that is, into those hyperreal narratives. The first medium to do this was the magazine, and its child, the dime novel. Western stories made good copy, with beginnings and middles and ends and clear-cut good guys and bad guys and lots of action. These stories lasted down through the pulps in the 20th century, and western novels are still an active genre. (For what it’s worth, one of my first publishing jobs was working on western material, inter alia, and I got quite a kick out of it. Met a lot of interesting people, learned a lot of interesting stuff. You may think I’m just blowing off mental exhaust but I have a history with this material, including editing at least one exhaustive book on western movies. In fact, I’m something of a legend myself in western writer circles. Mention of my name to the right people might get you a free Longhorn Beer, if you smile when you say it.) The most powerful medium to work the western narratives was, of course, movies, which, as we’ve said, started with westerns pretty much from day one. In fact, The Great Train Robbery is one of the earliest American movies (1903), filmed in that great western location also known as New Jersey. (Train robberies, by the way, may be a true pomo aside to explore: there were hardly any in the real-life west. Apparently they are a freestanding legend all their own, with more fictional than real examples.) By the 30s and 40s, Westerns are as big as they’ll ever get, with A movies and B movies and incredibly popular western stars looming large in the US imagination. And this overall popularity of the genre in film, as with the versions on the page, is based to a great extent on the presence of those beginnings and middles and ends and clear-cut good guys and bad guys and lots of action. That makes for good movies, insofar as old Hollywood defined good movies.
Westerns as vehicles for legend haven’t completely gone away, but their preeminence is long gone. There’s probably a variety of reasons for this. Any genre will use itself up after a while. You can tell the story of, say, the O.K. Corral just so many times before your audience is twenty-three kliks ahead of you and you’re still unreeling the credits. And sophistication of film per se passed by the simplistic good vs. bad via action formula on the adult level. And as the West drifted further and further into the past, its immediacy drifted along with it. We became too many generations away from it to care as much, so now instead of direct experience of the west all we had was direct experience of westerns, a classic opportunity for a postmodern approach to the genre on the one hand, and the diminution to a trickle of the genre in any approach. Who do you see (if anyone) when you think of Wyatt Earp: Henry Fonda? Kurt Russell? Kevin Costner? Hugh O’Brien? Whichever, you probably don’t see the real Wyatt Earp. Action defined as people shooting each other on horses isn’t as exciting as the action of people shooting each other from cars (and cars didn’t really explode in numbers until after WWII)(and for that matter, car chases have recently begun to lose their luster after fifty years of them). One generation’s personal history is another generation’s multiple-choice question on a history test. Move down enough generations, and it’s only relevant if it’s really relevant. That is, the Viet Nam war was relevant to everyone in the 70s. It wasn’t relevant to children born in the 90s except insofar as they were the children of those to whom it was relevant in the 70s. Children born today will judge its relevance based on whatever impact the war has on them, be it political (the lessons and direct impacts of the war, if any) or personal (lingering family ties to veterans). Add another 30 years, and who knows? A footnote to unrest at home, or maybe even that’s forgotten. A war as well known as the one from the halls of Montezuma or the one on shores of Tripoli? In our books, WWII holds out, and so do the Revolution and the Civil War. There’s room in any one mind, personal or cultural, for only so much history.
So we hold some of the legends of the west still, but almost of necessity it’s of the legends as legends. We remember the best stories because they were good stories and were therefore told over and over, usually with embellishment. Sometimes the truths behind these stories were shaken if not stirred, and their literalness is long lost to all but the most diligent historian. As we said at the beginning, “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”
But where’s the myth in all of this?
to be continued…
[Whistle, whistle… Shuffle, shuffle… Scratch the odd itch…]
Okay, you’re back, and you now have definitions. Good. If you’re still confused, let me help clarify. My romantic prowess is legendary. Your romantic prowess is a myth.
Or, let’s try another approach. Legends explain themselves, myths explain something else. A legend starts with a narrative of reality and, for whatever reason, makes that reality into a hyperreal narrative, something even better than reality, something even more real than the reality and which replaces the reality. A myth starts with something incomprehensible or complicated and attempts to make a narrative out of it. In other words, with a legend we have a preexisting narrative, and with a myth, we have phenomena we are trying to understand, which we do by creating a narrative of explanation. (Without specifically attempting to do so, Caveman does cover some of this material, but then again, Caveman covers everything ever, so that shouldn’t come as any surprise.)
What is legend about the West, and what is myth, is often hard to distinguish, and certainly open to interpretation, regardless of your definitions of myths and legends. You can pin down a few things though. There are certainly legends based on various individuals, or groups of individuals. The mountain men/trappers/trailblazers of the earliest years were real people. We think of someone like Kit Carson as heroic by nature, and the facts of his life don’t dispute this. Sacajawea strikes me as providing a transcendent narrative based on fact (she’s sort of the Ginger Rogers to Lewis and Clark’s Fred Astaire, doing the same thing but backwards and in heels). Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show (begun in 1883!) was in the legend-making business, actually hiring Sitting Bull to stage attacks on his show’s wagon trains, and (indirectly?) making Annie Oakley into an eponym for a free ticket. George Armstrong Custer is a legend (an unfortunate one, perhaps, the kind of general only a CIC like George W. Bush could love). Wyatt and Doc are legends. Tombstone is a legend. The wagon trains are legendary. The building of the railroads and the Golden Spike. The great cattle drives up from Texas. The hunting (to near extinction) of the buffalo, some of which was done from the windows of moving trains by British tourists—some sport, eh? The legendary cleaning up of outlaw towns, brought about by those legendary sheriffs and marshals but also by those legendary average people, the teachers and farmers and merchants and clerics trying to make lives for themselves in a new place.
It was the media that made these narratives into legends, that is, into those hyperreal narratives. The first medium to do this was the magazine, and its child, the dime novel. Western stories made good copy, with beginnings and middles and ends and clear-cut good guys and bad guys and lots of action. These stories lasted down through the pulps in the 20th century, and western novels are still an active genre. (For what it’s worth, one of my first publishing jobs was working on western material, inter alia, and I got quite a kick out of it. Met a lot of interesting people, learned a lot of interesting stuff. You may think I’m just blowing off mental exhaust but I have a history with this material, including editing at least one exhaustive book on western movies. In fact, I’m something of a legend myself in western writer circles. Mention of my name to the right people might get you a free Longhorn Beer, if you smile when you say it.) The most powerful medium to work the western narratives was, of course, movies, which, as we’ve said, started with westerns pretty much from day one. In fact, The Great Train Robbery is one of the earliest American movies (1903), filmed in that great western location also known as New Jersey. (Train robberies, by the way, may be a true pomo aside to explore: there were hardly any in the real-life west. Apparently they are a freestanding legend all their own, with more fictional than real examples.) By the 30s and 40s, Westerns are as big as they’ll ever get, with A movies and B movies and incredibly popular western stars looming large in the US imagination. And this overall popularity of the genre in film, as with the versions on the page, is based to a great extent on the presence of those beginnings and middles and ends and clear-cut good guys and bad guys and lots of action. That makes for good movies, insofar as old Hollywood defined good movies.
Westerns as vehicles for legend haven’t completely gone away, but their preeminence is long gone. There’s probably a variety of reasons for this. Any genre will use itself up after a while. You can tell the story of, say, the O.K. Corral just so many times before your audience is twenty-three kliks ahead of you and you’re still unreeling the credits. And sophistication of film per se passed by the simplistic good vs. bad via action formula on the adult level. And as the West drifted further and further into the past, its immediacy drifted along with it. We became too many generations away from it to care as much, so now instead of direct experience of the west all we had was direct experience of westerns, a classic opportunity for a postmodern approach to the genre on the one hand, and the diminution to a trickle of the genre in any approach. Who do you see (if anyone) when you think of Wyatt Earp: Henry Fonda? Kurt Russell? Kevin Costner? Hugh O’Brien? Whichever, you probably don’t see the real Wyatt Earp. Action defined as people shooting each other on horses isn’t as exciting as the action of people shooting each other from cars (and cars didn’t really explode in numbers until after WWII)(and for that matter, car chases have recently begun to lose their luster after fifty years of them). One generation’s personal history is another generation’s multiple-choice question on a history test. Move down enough generations, and it’s only relevant if it’s really relevant. That is, the Viet Nam war was relevant to everyone in the 70s. It wasn’t relevant to children born in the 90s except insofar as they were the children of those to whom it was relevant in the 70s. Children born today will judge its relevance based on whatever impact the war has on them, be it political (the lessons and direct impacts of the war, if any) or personal (lingering family ties to veterans). Add another 30 years, and who knows? A footnote to unrest at home, or maybe even that’s forgotten. A war as well known as the one from the halls of Montezuma or the one on shores of Tripoli? In our books, WWII holds out, and so do the Revolution and the Civil War. There’s room in any one mind, personal or cultural, for only so much history.
So we hold some of the legends of the west still, but almost of necessity it’s of the legends as legends. We remember the best stories because they were good stories and were therefore told over and over, usually with embellishment. Sometimes the truths behind these stories were shaken if not stirred, and their literalness is long lost to all but the most diligent historian. As we said at the beginning, “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”
But where’s the myth in all of this?
to be continued…
Friday, June 22, 2007
False Narratives, Part 3
The West as an American conception didn’t really exist until the Lousiana Purchase (although movement had begun away from the coasts—GW himself was a surveyor of the wilds of the Virginia back country, which is now Pennsylvania), but that event did not mark the beginning of a mass exodus. Little was known about this land originally, including how to get around in it. Also, it wasn’t exactly uninhabited, and from the beginning the relations of the Americans with the Indians had had their ups and downs, to put it mildly. And in this vast land without roads or trails, where exactly were the places to go? You would move west presumably to improve your lot; where would lot improvement best take place?
The first to venture forth in the early 1800s were loners and adventurers who, it seems, wanted as much as anything to get away from civilization. There was hunting and trapping to be done, and in the early years mountain men would learn the land and mix with the natives and haul in the beaver pelts and blaze trails. The Gold Rush of 1848 gave people a reason to go to California en masse (usually by boat, around the Cape). It’s only after the Civil War that the major expansion of the US truly begins, with serious waves of settlers heading forth. There’s west, of course, and there’s the West. Kansas was the West, although on my maps it looks like the middle. That’s where Wild Bill Hickok was marshall. And that’s where the cowboys ended up: cattle from Texas were herded up the Chisholm trail for shipment by rail to Chicago. The Wild West begins in Kansas.
Most of the westward-moving settlers were farmers, lured by cheap or free land. One big problem about that land was, of course, those other people already on it. Post Civil War, there were soldiers freed up to accommodate the settlers, and the various policies about the Indians were established, few of them to the benefit of the Indians. The nomadic tribes were used to roaming about unhampered, living off the land, and that wasn’t going to be possible anymore. There was much unhappiness and violence on both sides for years, until finally the Indians gave up where they weren’t defeated outright.
The fact that the west was uncivilized, compared to the east, meant that behavior was not always necessarily the most genteel. When there is literally no law, or at least no one to enforce any laws, sociopaths can thrive. Everyone of necessity is armed, and some of them are dangerous. There’s quite a difference between the local police force in Boston and the local sheriff in Tombstone. I would imagine that the rather Marquis of Queensbury fair-and-square shootout duel was a lot less common than the shoot ‘em in the back variety of rowdiness. Would you give Gary Cooper at fair chance at high noon if you could get the job done with more certainty under the cover of night? In any case, outlaws make for good stories, so we've probably overblown their number for the sake of those good stories, but there certainly was a measure of violence in the west that did not exist in the east. It's hard to imagine the Johnson Country range war taking place in, oh, Scarsdale.
If you look at the map, and understand that the West essentially begins in the middle of the country, than it’s easy to realize that half of our country is populated by people who, in 1950, had arrived in the very first post-War migration, or were their first generation descendents. They not only thought of themselves as Westerners, they had pretty good experience of the old West, or had heard about it from their parents. These people had pulled up their stakes and gone off to see the elephant. They had lived in the Wild West. Had broken the land. Had rushed into Oklahoma when the gun went off (or sooner, as the state nickname suggests). Had lived in a world where there were no cars, only horses. The myth of the west was no myth at all to them, it was their personal story, or their family story. It was real. It was their life.
There was also a measure of reality to the earliest western movies. Plenty of real cowboys played the parts of cowboys because they were readily available to do so, and more than capable of sitting a horse. The stars tended to be actors, but you could fill the screen with plenty of the real thing behind those greenhorns. As the western-making business grew, Hollywood easily acquired plenty of the real thing to populate the product. But what’s perhaps most interesting about the early westerns was that they were practically retelling current events. Wyatt Earp died in 1929; Buffalo Bill died in 1917; Geronimo died in 1909; Wounded Knee was 1890. It’s as if I were to make a movie about, say, Ronald Reagan: not exactly ancient history, no matter how you slice it.
The question remains, why were these films and this genre so popular, and the answer is probably the one that I’ve been dancing around, which is that the reality of the west was so important to so many people that they were happy to mythologize it. The cowboys, the outlaws, the Indians, the cavalries, sheriffs, the posses, the wagon trains, the iron horses—they all went from reality to stereotype. The so-called adult westerns of the fifties (which not incidentally saw a rise in all sorts of so-called adult content, to lure people away from TV and into the theaters) to a great extent sought to return to the truths behind the stereotypes, or to honestly study the stereotypes. And what, ultimately, did the West symbolize that everyone was so eager to commemorate? It was, I think, our hardiness. And our heart and strength. Our fairness. Our ingenuity. Our courage. We were the land of the free and the home of the brave and we did brave things with our freedom. While the Earp brothers were cleaning up Tombstone, the Impressionists were cleaning up in Paris (in fact, they were rather old hat), Wagner was putting the final touches on Parsifal, while Mark Twain had yet to pull Huck out of the drawer and finally finish it up.
Of course, the western movies also have intrinsic benefits like action and adventure that can’t be overlooked. If they were dull, no matter how crucial they are to our cultural self-image, they wouldn’t have gone very far. But they weren’t dull, and because of the diversity of the west, the western movies were diverse. There was something for everybody.
After fifty years or so of this material, including its dominance on early television, it was a part of the culture as much as the literal west had once been part of the culture. In fact, by the 1950s, we are getting to the point where the first generation is mostly died off, and all our contact with the west is secondhand, either as the children of settlers, or through our exposure to the genre on the big or small screen. But our image of ourselves, as empire builders within our own borders, remains. We conquered the land. We conquered the Indians. We conquered the outlaws. The problem was, we had reached the end of the continent, and there was no more west to go to. Whatever needed taming had been tamed. They were building drive-in movies where once the buffalo roamed. With the reality gone, all we had left was the myth. There are some who say that the space race of the 50s and 60s, although obviously fueled by Cold War politics, was also an extension of our passage west. We created a new frontier, up there. (Kennedy referred to his administration’s programs as the new frontier, so the idea that the old frontier was gone was manifest, although he wasn’t referring to the space program.) Maybe, but even if it did, it petered out soon enough. So no matter how you look at it, the winning of the West had happened. It was now all entirely history.
to be continued…
The first to venture forth in the early 1800s were loners and adventurers who, it seems, wanted as much as anything to get away from civilization. There was hunting and trapping to be done, and in the early years mountain men would learn the land and mix with the natives and haul in the beaver pelts and blaze trails. The Gold Rush of 1848 gave people a reason to go to California en masse (usually by boat, around the Cape). It’s only after the Civil War that the major expansion of the US truly begins, with serious waves of settlers heading forth. There’s west, of course, and there’s the West. Kansas was the West, although on my maps it looks like the middle. That’s where Wild Bill Hickok was marshall. And that’s where the cowboys ended up: cattle from Texas were herded up the Chisholm trail for shipment by rail to Chicago. The Wild West begins in Kansas.
Most of the westward-moving settlers were farmers, lured by cheap or free land. One big problem about that land was, of course, those other people already on it. Post Civil War, there were soldiers freed up to accommodate the settlers, and the various policies about the Indians were established, few of them to the benefit of the Indians. The nomadic tribes were used to roaming about unhampered, living off the land, and that wasn’t going to be possible anymore. There was much unhappiness and violence on both sides for years, until finally the Indians gave up where they weren’t defeated outright.
The fact that the west was uncivilized, compared to the east, meant that behavior was not always necessarily the most genteel. When there is literally no law, or at least no one to enforce any laws, sociopaths can thrive. Everyone of necessity is armed, and some of them are dangerous. There’s quite a difference between the local police force in Boston and the local sheriff in Tombstone. I would imagine that the rather Marquis of Queensbury fair-and-square shootout duel was a lot less common than the shoot ‘em in the back variety of rowdiness. Would you give Gary Cooper at fair chance at high noon if you could get the job done with more certainty under the cover of night? In any case, outlaws make for good stories, so we've probably overblown their number for the sake of those good stories, but there certainly was a measure of violence in the west that did not exist in the east. It's hard to imagine the Johnson Country range war taking place in, oh, Scarsdale.
If you look at the map, and understand that the West essentially begins in the middle of the country, than it’s easy to realize that half of our country is populated by people who, in 1950, had arrived in the very first post-War migration, or were their first generation descendents. They not only thought of themselves as Westerners, they had pretty good experience of the old West, or had heard about it from their parents. These people had pulled up their stakes and gone off to see the elephant. They had lived in the Wild West. Had broken the land. Had rushed into Oklahoma when the gun went off (or sooner, as the state nickname suggests). Had lived in a world where there were no cars, only horses. The myth of the west was no myth at all to them, it was their personal story, or their family story. It was real. It was their life.
There was also a measure of reality to the earliest western movies. Plenty of real cowboys played the parts of cowboys because they were readily available to do so, and more than capable of sitting a horse. The stars tended to be actors, but you could fill the screen with plenty of the real thing behind those greenhorns. As the western-making business grew, Hollywood easily acquired plenty of the real thing to populate the product. But what’s perhaps most interesting about the early westerns was that they were practically retelling current events. Wyatt Earp died in 1929; Buffalo Bill died in 1917; Geronimo died in 1909; Wounded Knee was 1890. It’s as if I were to make a movie about, say, Ronald Reagan: not exactly ancient history, no matter how you slice it.
The question remains, why were these films and this genre so popular, and the answer is probably the one that I’ve been dancing around, which is that the reality of the west was so important to so many people that they were happy to mythologize it. The cowboys, the outlaws, the Indians, the cavalries, sheriffs, the posses, the wagon trains, the iron horses—they all went from reality to stereotype. The so-called adult westerns of the fifties (which not incidentally saw a rise in all sorts of so-called adult content, to lure people away from TV and into the theaters) to a great extent sought to return to the truths behind the stereotypes, or to honestly study the stereotypes. And what, ultimately, did the West symbolize that everyone was so eager to commemorate? It was, I think, our hardiness. And our heart and strength. Our fairness. Our ingenuity. Our courage. We were the land of the free and the home of the brave and we did brave things with our freedom. While the Earp brothers were cleaning up Tombstone, the Impressionists were cleaning up in Paris (in fact, they were rather old hat), Wagner was putting the final touches on Parsifal, while Mark Twain had yet to pull Huck out of the drawer and finally finish it up.
Of course, the western movies also have intrinsic benefits like action and adventure that can’t be overlooked. If they were dull, no matter how crucial they are to our cultural self-image, they wouldn’t have gone very far. But they weren’t dull, and because of the diversity of the west, the western movies were diverse. There was something for everybody.
After fifty years or so of this material, including its dominance on early television, it was a part of the culture as much as the literal west had once been part of the culture. In fact, by the 1950s, we are getting to the point where the first generation is mostly died off, and all our contact with the west is secondhand, either as the children of settlers, or through our exposure to the genre on the big or small screen. But our image of ourselves, as empire builders within our own borders, remains. We conquered the land. We conquered the Indians. We conquered the outlaws. The problem was, we had reached the end of the continent, and there was no more west to go to. Whatever needed taming had been tamed. They were building drive-in movies where once the buffalo roamed. With the reality gone, all we had left was the myth. There are some who say that the space race of the 50s and 60s, although obviously fueled by Cold War politics, was also an extension of our passage west. We created a new frontier, up there. (Kennedy referred to his administration’s programs as the new frontier, so the idea that the old frontier was gone was manifest, although he wasn’t referring to the space program.) Maybe, but even if it did, it petered out soon enough. So no matter how you look at it, the winning of the West had happened. It was now all entirely history.
to be continued…
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
False Narratives, Part 2
I’ve always been amazed by the incredible courage of immigrants. To leave everything behind—every person you know, every aspect of the culture you were born into—and to venture to a new life is a remarkable endeavor. To do so in the 17th Century, to get on some tiny ship to cross an unimaginably vast ocean to move to a continent you know virtually nothing about, is beyond my grasp.
Coming to the New World (putting aside its initial settlers, whose role in the American narrative is an unfortunate one that underlines the idea that it is the victors who get to write the history) depended initially on where you came from. That is, the major original explorers had fairly different agendas. The British mostly wanted people to settle down and create colonies where they would live, the Spanish mostly wanted to find resources and ship them back home, and the French wanted to convert the savages. At least, that’s the simplistic way of understanding the differences in approach of the major players. Those British settlers started with the east coast of North America, originally finding the easiest places to land and inhabit. The French came in from the north, through Canada, coming down to the Mississippi and eventually out through New Orleans, claiming the Louisiana Territory. The Spanish mostly went south. (As an aside, the line of demarcation which separated Spanish lands from Portuguese lands, which was drawn by the Pope, is an interesting construct. That is, the Pope gets to say who gets what when it comes to claiming new lands, which means that new lands are eminently claimable. This line was early on, when only the Iberians were out and about on the ocean. The French and English when their time came said pooh-pooh to the Pope, and that was the end of that, although they happily stuck with the idea of claiming whatever land came their way that wasn’t already claimed by someone else—from Europe that is.)
So mostly our country, at least in the beginning, is settled by the British. That includes Scots and Irish. Our country at that time is this vast unknown place across the ocean. And it comprises land never particularly far from that ocean. But the first move is crossing that ocean, the immigrant experience. All Americans started out as immigrants for the longest time. Different waves from different places followed over the years, but in terms of our study of the myth of the West, let’s stick with the Brits. Immigration is a different subject altogether.
While initially there was certainly interest and curiosity about the rest of this vast continent that settlers were hugging the edges of, there wasn’t a sense that it was part of a nation to come. The original colonies were perceived by their inhabitants as countries, not states. Countries separate from the Mother Country of England, countries separate from each other, although loosely confederated horizontally and vertically. After the Revolution, much arguing took place about what, exactly, these colonies were supposed to be. A literal loose confederation of the states wasn’t working too well, and the more centralized federal idea took hold. In 1787 that federal idea was put on paper, and we became the United States of America. But it was still plural states. These united states, not the United States. At least not in all minds. More than a few souls maintained that their states were their primary polity. It took the Civil War to finally end that idea (although a few on today’s Supreme Court seem as states-rightist as your most rabid CSA politician).
But the sense of the continent, as a whole, belonging to the federated states was something else. States-rightist Thomas Jefferson, of all people, really got the ball rolling on this with the Louisiana Purchase. For a man in debt his whole life, I guess he knew a bargain when he saw one. And he was always partial to French things, and here was a chance for him to get his hands on a really big, really cheap, French thing. Suddenly the idea that we would start moving west became part of our national image. This idea became crystallized as Manifest Destiny, the concept that it was not merely our wish to take over the whole continent, but it was our fate, our destiny. It was what we had to do.
Lewis and Clark were the first serious western tourists. Sacajawea was the first serious tour guide. The pioneers would follow shortly.
to be continued…
Coming to the New World (putting aside its initial settlers, whose role in the American narrative is an unfortunate one that underlines the idea that it is the victors who get to write the history) depended initially on where you came from. That is, the major original explorers had fairly different agendas. The British mostly wanted people to settle down and create colonies where they would live, the Spanish mostly wanted to find resources and ship them back home, and the French wanted to convert the savages. At least, that’s the simplistic way of understanding the differences in approach of the major players. Those British settlers started with the east coast of North America, originally finding the easiest places to land and inhabit. The French came in from the north, through Canada, coming down to the Mississippi and eventually out through New Orleans, claiming the Louisiana Territory. The Spanish mostly went south. (As an aside, the line of demarcation which separated Spanish lands from Portuguese lands, which was drawn by the Pope, is an interesting construct. That is, the Pope gets to say who gets what when it comes to claiming new lands, which means that new lands are eminently claimable. This line was early on, when only the Iberians were out and about on the ocean. The French and English when their time came said pooh-pooh to the Pope, and that was the end of that, although they happily stuck with the idea of claiming whatever land came their way that wasn’t already claimed by someone else—from Europe that is.)
So mostly our country, at least in the beginning, is settled by the British. That includes Scots and Irish. Our country at that time is this vast unknown place across the ocean. And it comprises land never particularly far from that ocean. But the first move is crossing that ocean, the immigrant experience. All Americans started out as immigrants for the longest time. Different waves from different places followed over the years, but in terms of our study of the myth of the West, let’s stick with the Brits. Immigration is a different subject altogether.
While initially there was certainly interest and curiosity about the rest of this vast continent that settlers were hugging the edges of, there wasn’t a sense that it was part of a nation to come. The original colonies were perceived by their inhabitants as countries, not states. Countries separate from the Mother Country of England, countries separate from each other, although loosely confederated horizontally and vertically. After the Revolution, much arguing took place about what, exactly, these colonies were supposed to be. A literal loose confederation of the states wasn’t working too well, and the more centralized federal idea took hold. In 1787 that federal idea was put on paper, and we became the United States of America. But it was still plural states. These united states, not the United States. At least not in all minds. More than a few souls maintained that their states were their primary polity. It took the Civil War to finally end that idea (although a few on today’s Supreme Court seem as states-rightist as your most rabid CSA politician).
But the sense of the continent, as a whole, belonging to the federated states was something else. States-rightist Thomas Jefferson, of all people, really got the ball rolling on this with the Louisiana Purchase. For a man in debt his whole life, I guess he knew a bargain when he saw one. And he was always partial to French things, and here was a chance for him to get his hands on a really big, really cheap, French thing. Suddenly the idea that we would start moving west became part of our national image. This idea became crystallized as Manifest Destiny, the concept that it was not merely our wish to take over the whole continent, but it was our fate, our destiny. It was what we had to do.
Lewis and Clark were the first serious western tourists. Sacajawea was the first serious tour guide. The pioneers would follow shortly.
to be continued…
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
On the lost relevance of oaters, or, False Narratives Part 1
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
What I really want to talk about is false narratives, but it’s going to take a while to get there. The quote above comes from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, which is a movie I have little expectation that you’ve seen if you’re under the age of 30. On the other hand, if you’re a film buff, you may know it. It’s a John Ford picture, from 1962. John Kennedy was President. The Beatles had yet to release a record in the US. I was in high school.
The late 60s were the last gasp for the Western, marked in films by a string of progressively weaker John Wayne vehicles and a declining number of TV series and the rather postmodern series of spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone. Westerns had been a Hollywood staple since virtually day one, but that run was ending. You could say that The Shootist in 1976 was the true swansong of the genre, and it knew that it was the swansong of the genre. John Wayne, who was dying of cancer during the film’s production, plays a gunslinger (a shootist) who is dying of cancer. There have been a few Westerns since then, but they’ve been rare birds. The genre is, for all practical purposes, dead.
The Western wasn’t merely a type of entertainment. It was a much more transcendent genre. Kids played cowboys and Indians, or Davey Crocket, or whatever, as a matter of course. Cowboy stars were kid’s idols going back to the silent movies, and to the dime novels before that, and certainly up through 50s television. The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy and company were icons. The average kid knew the names of Tim McCoy’s horse and Roy Rogers horse and Gene Autry’s horse. Knowledge of who shot whom at the O.K. Corral was a given. But it wasn’t just kid stuff. Adults enjoyed westerns too. They read western novels, they went to so-called “adult” western movies, they watched Gunsmoke week after week on television for years, after having listened to it on the radio for years prior to that. And the westerns did develop an interior mythology of white hats and black hats, schoolmarms and tongue-tied cowpokes, sheriffs and marshals and and cattle drives and range wars and railroads and a whole range of Indians from the Rousseau noble savage to the base mindless killer. And all of it just went away. It died a death. It was a slow death, but a solid one. A kid born in the last twenty years might conceivably never watch a new western movie or a new western television show. Aside from statistical deviation (like the occasional Deadwood), the genre is gone. And it hasn’t been supplanted by something else. That is, another genre as meaningful has not come along to replace it. Unquestionably certain science fiction stories are nothing but westerns in fancy dress, but in no way have SF films replaced westerns in either media ubiquity or mythic significance. That mythic significance is, of course, the relationship of the West to the American narrative. Or, if you will, the myth of the West is a key factor in the American metanarrative, which is reflected in the genre. The myth of, oh, Luke Skywalker, while perhaps primal in the Joseph Campbell sense, is not particularly American. Far from it. But the narrative of the frontier is absolutely a defining characteristic of the American personality. Or at least it used to be. Maybe the frontier has been gone for so long we’ve forgotten it ever existed.
A metanarrative, of course, is the underlying story. In the case of a national, cultural metanarrative, it is the underlying story we tell ourselves about ourselves, although it does not necessarily have to be literally expressed. That is, we don’t have to sit around the campfire every night telling the tales for those tales to be a part of us. For your postmodernists, of course, we need to go beyond the metanarratives (or maybe it’s that the metanarratives break down—it’s hard to tell with these guys). But we’re not looking at this philosophically, but simply examining it on face. The belief in the West, in the frontier, is part of the American character because the West and the frontier were so much a part of the literal American story. One could suppose from the lack of Westerns in our lives anymore, we have moved past this story, or moved past the metanarrative. Perhaps. Others would say that, since there is no longer any frontier, and it’s been so long since there was one, the stories have lost their mythic relevance. Again, perhaps. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to examine this narrative, as a history lesson, and a cultural lesson, and a fairly long digression before I get to what I really wanted to talk about.
to be continued…
What I really want to talk about is false narratives, but it’s going to take a while to get there. The quote above comes from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, which is a movie I have little expectation that you’ve seen if you’re under the age of 30. On the other hand, if you’re a film buff, you may know it. It’s a John Ford picture, from 1962. John Kennedy was President. The Beatles had yet to release a record in the US. I was in high school.
The late 60s were the last gasp for the Western, marked in films by a string of progressively weaker John Wayne vehicles and a declining number of TV series and the rather postmodern series of spaghetti Westerns directed by Sergio Leone. Westerns had been a Hollywood staple since virtually day one, but that run was ending. You could say that The Shootist in 1976 was the true swansong of the genre, and it knew that it was the swansong of the genre. John Wayne, who was dying of cancer during the film’s production, plays a gunslinger (a shootist) who is dying of cancer. There have been a few Westerns since then, but they’ve been rare birds. The genre is, for all practical purposes, dead.
The Western wasn’t merely a type of entertainment. It was a much more transcendent genre. Kids played cowboys and Indians, or Davey Crocket, or whatever, as a matter of course. Cowboy stars were kid’s idols going back to the silent movies, and to the dime novels before that, and certainly up through 50s television. The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy and company were icons. The average kid knew the names of Tim McCoy’s horse and Roy Rogers horse and Gene Autry’s horse. Knowledge of who shot whom at the O.K. Corral was a given. But it wasn’t just kid stuff. Adults enjoyed westerns too. They read western novels, they went to so-called “adult” western movies, they watched Gunsmoke week after week on television for years, after having listened to it on the radio for years prior to that. And the westerns did develop an interior mythology of white hats and black hats, schoolmarms and tongue-tied cowpokes, sheriffs and marshals and and cattle drives and range wars and railroads and a whole range of Indians from the Rousseau noble savage to the base mindless killer. And all of it just went away. It died a death. It was a slow death, but a solid one. A kid born in the last twenty years might conceivably never watch a new western movie or a new western television show. Aside from statistical deviation (like the occasional Deadwood), the genre is gone. And it hasn’t been supplanted by something else. That is, another genre as meaningful has not come along to replace it. Unquestionably certain science fiction stories are nothing but westerns in fancy dress, but in no way have SF films replaced westerns in either media ubiquity or mythic significance. That mythic significance is, of course, the relationship of the West to the American narrative. Or, if you will, the myth of the West is a key factor in the American metanarrative, which is reflected in the genre. The myth of, oh, Luke Skywalker, while perhaps primal in the Joseph Campbell sense, is not particularly American. Far from it. But the narrative of the frontier is absolutely a defining characteristic of the American personality. Or at least it used to be. Maybe the frontier has been gone for so long we’ve forgotten it ever existed.
A metanarrative, of course, is the underlying story. In the case of a national, cultural metanarrative, it is the underlying story we tell ourselves about ourselves, although it does not necessarily have to be literally expressed. That is, we don’t have to sit around the campfire every night telling the tales for those tales to be a part of us. For your postmodernists, of course, we need to go beyond the metanarratives (or maybe it’s that the metanarratives break down—it’s hard to tell with these guys). But we’re not looking at this philosophically, but simply examining it on face. The belief in the West, in the frontier, is part of the American character because the West and the frontier were so much a part of the literal American story. One could suppose from the lack of Westerns in our lives anymore, we have moved past this story, or moved past the metanarrative. Perhaps. Others would say that, since there is no longer any frontier, and it’s been so long since there was one, the stories have lost their mythic relevance. Again, perhaps. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to examine this narrative, as a history lesson, and a cultural lesson, and a fairly long digression before I get to what I really wanted to talk about.
to be continued…
Monday, May 07, 2007
Think horizontally, act vertically
Today is sexually-complicated day in Bracketology Land. You’ll see what I mean when you give it a try.
TOC is winding up. One of the most common reports from first-time attendees is that, when all is said and done, it’s just another debate tournament. Precisely. One does wish that all debate tournaments were so lush, however: no rounds at night, plenty of classrooms, lunch restaurants within walking distance, enough experienced judges that most of them complain that they’ve got nothing to do. Quite a contrast to the usual locked-down high school with piped in debate ziti and one judge less than you really need to run the thing and it ends at three in the morning and then you’ve got a bus ride home in the middle of a blizzard. Actually, TOC Monday is a bit of a stretch on the lush-o-meter. First, there’s the Breakfast of Champions (price not included in the registration fee), which goes on for a couple of hours and there’s a lot of backslapping among people you don’t really know, and speeches over a sound system that only broadcasts every other word, and everybody is packed into the banquet room with just enough space to slurp your grits if you’re really careful and provided no one is left-handed on your side. Then there’s the distribution of the trophies, followed by the announcement of the breaks, which are in the bedrooms of people staying at the tournament hotel. I so love judging in bed; it’s my number two horizontal activity, right after ducking when Tik pronounced teek takes a flying leap at my head from the top of the bureau at three in the morning. When you’re not judging breaks, you’re hanging around waiting for your plane. TOC doesn’t really end, it just fades away, person by person. That’s why there’s such a brouhaha over final-round judges, not because of a desire to pick a great panel (although that desire is there) but because of a need to have any panel. When there’s no hired judges, and everybody has got a plane to catch, you need to isolate early on those whose planes are leaving late. It’s a strange situation.
Since I am not in the position this year to experience TOC firsthand, and have nothing in their place but the endless ravings of O’C, who spends almost all of his time at tournaments trying to figure out people’s records or, in situations like CatNats where it’s all in code, people’s names, I have put the bonus time to good use reading Foucault. Or bad use. Madness and Civilization will not be appearing on my reading list any time soon. It is not relevant to debate (unless, perhaps, you read the unabridged French version, where all the useful stuff is). It is exactly what it says it is, a history of madness. Near the end it does allude to the power of the doctors residing in their general wisdom and perception of having knowledge/power, and if you’re interested in the birth of Freudianism there’s relevant material on one-on-one philosophy, but how this gets applied to LD is beyond me. I mean, if the topic were, Resolved, the insane should be put in leper colonies, then maybe. Or for that matter, the $ircuit should be put in leper colonies, then I’m with you all the way. Still, I do love the idea of the Narrenschiff, the ship of fools, which has been replaced in modern times by the Disney cruise lines, if I’m not mistaken. And no doubt there is other Foucault reading that would address the issues with which I associate him, but life is short, and that new Chabon novel is just waving at me, saying, Come on, I’m yours for the asking. Chabon vs Foucault. Chabon, Foucault. Chab, Fou. No contest. Sorry, Paul-Michel. Fou-eee.
TOC is winding up. One of the most common reports from first-time attendees is that, when all is said and done, it’s just another debate tournament. Precisely. One does wish that all debate tournaments were so lush, however: no rounds at night, plenty of classrooms, lunch restaurants within walking distance, enough experienced judges that most of them complain that they’ve got nothing to do. Quite a contrast to the usual locked-down high school with piped in debate ziti and one judge less than you really need to run the thing and it ends at three in the morning and then you’ve got a bus ride home in the middle of a blizzard. Actually, TOC Monday is a bit of a stretch on the lush-o-meter. First, there’s the Breakfast of Champions (price not included in the registration fee), which goes on for a couple of hours and there’s a lot of backslapping among people you don’t really know, and speeches over a sound system that only broadcasts every other word, and everybody is packed into the banquet room with just enough space to slurp your grits if you’re really careful and provided no one is left-handed on your side. Then there’s the distribution of the trophies, followed by the announcement of the breaks, which are in the bedrooms of people staying at the tournament hotel. I so love judging in bed; it’s my number two horizontal activity, right after ducking when Tik pronounced teek takes a flying leap at my head from the top of the bureau at three in the morning. When you’re not judging breaks, you’re hanging around waiting for your plane. TOC doesn’t really end, it just fades away, person by person. That’s why there’s such a brouhaha over final-round judges, not because of a desire to pick a great panel (although that desire is there) but because of a need to have any panel. When there’s no hired judges, and everybody has got a plane to catch, you need to isolate early on those whose planes are leaving late. It’s a strange situation.
Since I am not in the position this year to experience TOC firsthand, and have nothing in their place but the endless ravings of O’C, who spends almost all of his time at tournaments trying to figure out people’s records or, in situations like CatNats where it’s all in code, people’s names, I have put the bonus time to good use reading Foucault. Or bad use. Madness and Civilization will not be appearing on my reading list any time soon. It is not relevant to debate (unless, perhaps, you read the unabridged French version, where all the useful stuff is). It is exactly what it says it is, a history of madness. Near the end it does allude to the power of the doctors residing in their general wisdom and perception of having knowledge/power, and if you’re interested in the birth of Freudianism there’s relevant material on one-on-one philosophy, but how this gets applied to LD is beyond me. I mean, if the topic were, Resolved, the insane should be put in leper colonies, then maybe. Or for that matter, the $ircuit should be put in leper colonies, then I’m with you all the way. Still, I do love the idea of the Narrenschiff, the ship of fools, which has been replaced in modern times by the Disney cruise lines, if I’m not mistaken. And no doubt there is other Foucault reading that would address the issues with which I associate him, but life is short, and that new Chabon novel is just waving at me, saying, Come on, I’m yours for the asking. Chabon vs Foucault. Chabon, Foucault. Chab, Fou. No contest. Sorry, Paul-Michel. Fou-eee.
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Thursday is feminism-free day! Men of the world, unite! We're going to burp, scratch, and generally enjoy ourselves, for once.
So last week I answer the phone in my office, and there’s a woman on the line who wants to get a book published. It’s about her visions of Jesus, she says. When I tell her that we don’t really publish original books, she adds that she also had a vision of Frank Sinatra, and that she was in California at the time, and he was in New York. My guess is that she suspected that somehow not only would Sinatra be the difference between your run-of-the-mill visions and the Big Chance, but the added attraction of a continent’s distance would be as awe inspiring to me as if, well, I were having a vision of Old Blue Eyes myself. I explained to her how to find a publisher for her book (there’s resources in local libraries) and wished her good luck, hanging up as quickly as I could before saying something I might regret. I’ve been mulling over the Jesus-Sinatra connection ever since. I have arrived so far at no particular insight.
Yesterday was, apparently, Crawl Out of the Woodwork Day for the VCA. I heard from Pajamas, O’C, and CPalmer, and I just opened my mailbox a minute ago and there’s now a comment from CLG. Only a couple of these are related to the feminism theme, and I’ll get to them probably tomorrow. I hadn’t really planned on going off on this particular toot, but I’ve found it interesting to work out various thoughts. As my thinking has congealed, shall we say, I realize that I’m actually starting to formulate a thesis of some sort, but I’m certainly coming at it ass backwards. I probably should read the latest literature, but my tolerance for pomo/CT, the home of said literature, is pretty slim. Chris sent me this link yesterday, and it’s me in a nutshell. http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html I’m especially fond of the chalice in the palace holds the brew that is true (or is it the vessel with the pestle)? Anyhow, I should probably sit down with O’C, feminist scholar that he is, and have him educate me a bit. I could use it. He’s been giving us the gift of his absence to take a little time off from debate, he says, and I understand the feeling, having occasionally gone off-line myself, completely ignoring the old email until getting back into the mood again. It’s nothing personal, just the grabbing of a moment or two of peace and quiet. A mini-vacation (as compared to a Mickey vacation, which is enough said on that subject for the moment, except to announce that yesterday I reserved the very very last dinner, at Emeril’s).
And speaking of off-line, yesterday marked the arrival of hardware and software for me to begin turning all my old cassettes into mp3s. I am reminded of the golden age lo these many years ago, when I turned all my LPs into cassettes; to a great extent, this is simply an extension of that, turning my cassettized LPs into mp3s without having to find where I put my turntable. I know there’s one in the house somewhere, but I dare you to find it. If the chez already weren’t upset enough, Juan, Kwan and the Stoners: The Next Generation, have been tearing up the place this week putting in a new septic system. Oh joy, oh rapture. There are few things you can purchase in life that are that expensive while being that unsatisfying in the consumerism sense. I’m especially taken by the look of pride on JKS:TNG’s face as they extend an arm over their handiwork and tell me to look on their wonders and marvel. Personally, I have a vision of a house with not JKS: TNG or TOS, but just me and Liz and the cats enjoying home ownership at its finest. Instead, if I can get my car into the driveway I see backhoes and gravel pits and mud flats and half-patios…
Then again, I could be seeing visions of Jesus and Sinatra. I’m hard-pressed to decide which would be preferable.
Yesterday was, apparently, Crawl Out of the Woodwork Day for the VCA. I heard from Pajamas, O’C, and CPalmer, and I just opened my mailbox a minute ago and there’s now a comment from CLG. Only a couple of these are related to the feminism theme, and I’ll get to them probably tomorrow. I hadn’t really planned on going off on this particular toot, but I’ve found it interesting to work out various thoughts. As my thinking has congealed, shall we say, I realize that I’m actually starting to formulate a thesis of some sort, but I’m certainly coming at it ass backwards. I probably should read the latest literature, but my tolerance for pomo/CT, the home of said literature, is pretty slim. Chris sent me this link yesterday, and it’s me in a nutshell. http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html I’m especially fond of the chalice in the palace holds the brew that is true (or is it the vessel with the pestle)? Anyhow, I should probably sit down with O’C, feminist scholar that he is, and have him educate me a bit. I could use it. He’s been giving us the gift of his absence to take a little time off from debate, he says, and I understand the feeling, having occasionally gone off-line myself, completely ignoring the old email until getting back into the mood again. It’s nothing personal, just the grabbing of a moment or two of peace and quiet. A mini-vacation (as compared to a Mickey vacation, which is enough said on that subject for the moment, except to announce that yesterday I reserved the very very last dinner, at Emeril’s).
And speaking of off-line, yesterday marked the arrival of hardware and software for me to begin turning all my old cassettes into mp3s. I am reminded of the golden age lo these many years ago, when I turned all my LPs into cassettes; to a great extent, this is simply an extension of that, turning my cassettized LPs into mp3s without having to find where I put my turntable. I know there’s one in the house somewhere, but I dare you to find it. If the chez already weren’t upset enough, Juan, Kwan and the Stoners: The Next Generation, have been tearing up the place this week putting in a new septic system. Oh joy, oh rapture. There are few things you can purchase in life that are that expensive while being that unsatisfying in the consumerism sense. I’m especially taken by the look of pride on JKS:TNG’s face as they extend an arm over their handiwork and tell me to look on their wonders and marvel. Personally, I have a vision of a house with not JKS: TNG or TOS, but just me and Liz and the cats enjoying home ownership at its finest. Instead, if I can get my car into the driveway I see backhoes and gravel pits and mud flats and half-patios…
Then again, I could be seeing visions of Jesus and Sinatra. I’m hard-pressed to decide which would be preferable.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Smilin' Through
Not surprisingly, the Smilin’ J interview on WTF has drawn a lot of response, virtually all of it negative. The Vatican News did an interview with Richard Dawkins that had much the same result… I only read the first handful of the SJ comments, and for all I know meaningful dialogue has since ensued, and maybe even a few supportive voices have been found. Both would be nice. Unlikely, but nice. In any case, I’ll provide my own take.
There are some issues worth discussing. First, SJ does tidily wrap up all sorts of critical thought —theory, in ironic quotes—into a nice neat bundle and tosses it on the compost, based on its content, which he finds lacking. My own mixed feelings on this material are well known to the VCA, but I’m more inclined to vilify based on the material’s incomprehensibility than its meritriciousness. I have honestly found interesting ideas in the slag heaps of some of this impenetrable prose, which does not excuse its impenetrability but does question how meretricious it might actually be. My objection to using the material in LD has mostly been that the material is not suitable for its high school audience, and that the vast unwashed of 15-year-olds being introduced to philosophy are better served with more traditional and accessible texts. This does not burden that traditional and accessible material with the value of being more true, which is another issue altogether; it simply admits the obvious that philosophy is a difficult subject, and if we seriously wish to engage young students in it, we need to do so in such a way that it will, indeed, engage them. This is not so much teaching scales before you teach Chopin, as it is reading Seuss before you read Shakespeare. Your enjoyment and appreciation skills improve as you move “up” a theoretical ladder of difficulty. It would be an iffy proposition to start high up on that ladder, without having yet developed those enjoyment and appreciation skills; growing into those skills means enjoyment and appreciation all along the way. This is hardly innovative pedagogy.
Of course, there are those who claim that the material is not “above” the best of the LDers, and should not be banned just because it is not populist. This is arguable on a number of counts, but even accepting that there might be high schoolers to whom Derrida is no more challenging than a Dagwood cartoon, there is still the question of engaging in a discourse that cannot be fully understood: I don’t think anyone claims that ALL high schoolers are capable of deconstructing the great deconstructer, for instance. A desire to win an argument should be premised on setting groundwork where the argument can, indeed, be won. Throwing a lot of material around that only one person in the room (possibly) understands doesn’t sound like much of a strategy for anything except obfuscation, which is obviously antithetical to education, even if it does “win” the round. Winning, in this situation, would have been all that it achieved. No brain cells would have been stirred in the process.
Frankly, I do not think that, until we all have read all the philosophy, past and modern, that JS has, we can engage him directly on the issue of truth in philosophy, at least on the academic level. I am from the school (the Menickites) that believes that ultimate truth in philosophy is, in fact, science. Or is in science fact, to be more precise. I talk about that a little in Caveman, and I’ll get around to it more directly at some future date. In any case, I have no intentions of becoming an academic philosopher, or a student of academic philosophy, as in knowing all about all the great (or stinky) philosophers of all time. So I really can’t address that aspect of SJ’s interview. In other words, I agree with him on the consequences of using this material, but I cannot engage him on what he claims are the causes. Although honestly, I doubt if he disagrees with my claims, and it’s just that he wasn’t making those claims himself in the interview.
The second interesting point of the interview, which Duby took SJ to task on, is the disdain for first- and second-year judges, and those same folks as assistant coaches without portfolio. Or, I guess, college coaches in general, if you wish to read a full menu from the implication. Since I am on record as placing assistant coaches on a par with the minor demons of Milton, I would seem to agree with SJ’s opinion here, but I don’t know if I do. What I am against is coaches who hire college students to provide positions if not complete cases to automata high schoolers, and then who send those “assistant” coaches into rounds to flow the competition, all in aid of a bigger trophy at the end of the day. I am also against college students attempting to achieve high school glory a little too late, who do so by finding malleable Trilbys on their own and feeding them material borrowed from their college courses, and then showing up week after week at debate tournaments (and on WTF) to push their theories of debate on the general public, molded in the hot forge of being a second-rate high schooler always on the brink of getting a TOC bid. Now, okay, this is a little cold, and stereotypical, and not completely true, but I have historically run up against the least resolutional arguments and the most erratic judging from college kids who were almost good high school debaters and who don’t seem to fit in at college now and prefer hanging around with high school people. The words “Grow up!” come to mind here, at least for this latter group. I would also direct those words to the adult coaches pulling the strings the the former group. Unlike SJ, I don’t believe these college students should be arrested on sight and banned from the back of the room, but I do feel that they need to be perceived as what they are. A balance of judges is required in the pool, and use of that balance in a neutral albeit meaningful way. My solution at Bump, of course, was to create community rankings of the judges, putting As into bubbles and mixing As and Bs equally in the outround pools. This seemed to satisfy the mob.
The idea of assistant coaches ruining LD seems to be a major theme of the Legion of Doom (which, SJ says, is far from rendered moot by the new NFL rules, but nonetheless seems to be as dormant as a dead bear in a blizzard), and it’s not one I really ever subscribed to. I certainly am against mutual judge preference, but that’s a different thing. SJ subscribes to this assistant coach vilification whole hog, and may in fact be its driving force. In my experience, there just aren’t that many of these people, of either of the stripes I’ve described above, to have that much of an influence except in one small corner of the $ircuit. And since lately I’ve been questioning the true influence of the $ircuit on LD, I’m not thinking it’s all that deadly. But one thing that is true is that these assistant coaches are not spending all their time and energy working with novices. There’s no glory in that, and therefore they’re not giving good educational value for their buck, whether you like them or not, because they’re only applying themselves to very specific competitive contexts. Education of debaters means educating 4 years worth of them, whether they are good, bad or indifferent in rounds. Chauffering a moneyed elite to major tournaments around the country, even in the most well-intentioned and ethical context, does not do that. So even if that’s not what SJ refers to, it is a part of the issue. But, mostly, I think he’s talking about something that just isn’t either that prevalent or that important.
Finally, there is the air of arrogance that is a little thick about the proceedings. Although no stranger to arrogance either in myself or others, I am surprised to see SJ express views that are unrelievedly so. Specifically, it is one thing not to flow rounds, and another thing altogether to claim that it is unnecessary. Those who do inevitably claim that they are more than capable of doing the math in their heads, so to speak, or like SJ that there is something intrinsically wrong with the round that precludes taking notes. I don’t buy it. Yeah, I’m smarter than the average teenager, and often I’m writing down stuff that is fairly unimportant in my assessment of win/loss, but giving off either odor in the round is offensive to the debaters, and if I accept the responsibility of judging then I am willing to accept the formula of proper behavior that accompanies that responsibility; it’s analogous to having debaters wear business suits. I am reminded of one of my more sketchy varsity debaters in his first judging gig, who called for a runner to take his ballot after the NC because, as he said to me in explanation, as far as he was concerned the round was over and the winner was clear. I did refrain from hitting him over the head with a frying pan, but only just. I would like to think that I wait to hear the whole round before making a decision, but if you’ve ever judged, you know as well as I do that there are cases where that is not necessary. But you owe it to the debaters to act as if that is the case. They’re doing a job of work up there, and as long as they’re seriously working at it, I need to at least appear to be seriously working at it on my end, even if my mind is already made up, although I will keep my mind open till the end, because you never know. It’s a matter of simple respect, like their wearing business clothes. I do my best to listen to everything, and heed everything, regardless of its content; I am here to judge that content, but I need to know what it is—all of it—first. I want the debaters to believe that happened, for their own self-respect, if nothing else. In those situations where last year’s TOC winner hits a novice who’s never won a round in a random pairing, that novice deserves a respectful round from both his opponent and from me, even though all three of us might know the result of that round the minute we read the schematic. For many debaters, the judge’s looking busy is important. A judge who doesn’t flow doesn’t look busy. Which means that the judge is not doing what the debater thinks is important. In this case, I think that thing—taking complete notes—is worth the debater thinking it’s important, and therefore worth the judge doing it. Even when he doesn’t really have to, because he’s smart enough to retain all the germane material in his head. It just goes with the territory.
Mostly, of course, I agree with SJ on LD, which is why I was for a short while the Legion’s poster boy. What he’s asking for is that people argue resolutions in rounds, looking for and supporting the truth of their side. This leads to constructive dialogue and great education. This is major. Where we disagree is in some of the smaller side business. But that side business, once it’s printed up, must be considered. For all practical purposes, SJ has now created the longest judge paradigm on record (unless you count this blog). So be it. If I were a debater, I would want him to be adjudicating the round. I just wish he were a little less…serious. It must come from not reading any pomo. Maybe we should all chip in and get him some Derrida for Valentine’s Day. That and some chocolate. That should do the trick.
There are some issues worth discussing. First, SJ does tidily wrap up all sorts of critical thought —theory, in ironic quotes—into a nice neat bundle and tosses it on the compost, based on its content, which he finds lacking. My own mixed feelings on this material are well known to the VCA, but I’m more inclined to vilify based on the material’s incomprehensibility than its meritriciousness. I have honestly found interesting ideas in the slag heaps of some of this impenetrable prose, which does not excuse its impenetrability but does question how meretricious it might actually be. My objection to using the material in LD has mostly been that the material is not suitable for its high school audience, and that the vast unwashed of 15-year-olds being introduced to philosophy are better served with more traditional and accessible texts. This does not burden that traditional and accessible material with the value of being more true, which is another issue altogether; it simply admits the obvious that philosophy is a difficult subject, and if we seriously wish to engage young students in it, we need to do so in such a way that it will, indeed, engage them. This is not so much teaching scales before you teach Chopin, as it is reading Seuss before you read Shakespeare. Your enjoyment and appreciation skills improve as you move “up” a theoretical ladder of difficulty. It would be an iffy proposition to start high up on that ladder, without having yet developed those enjoyment and appreciation skills; growing into those skills means enjoyment and appreciation all along the way. This is hardly innovative pedagogy.
Of course, there are those who claim that the material is not “above” the best of the LDers, and should not be banned just because it is not populist. This is arguable on a number of counts, but even accepting that there might be high schoolers to whom Derrida is no more challenging than a Dagwood cartoon, there is still the question of engaging in a discourse that cannot be fully understood: I don’t think anyone claims that ALL high schoolers are capable of deconstructing the great deconstructer, for instance. A desire to win an argument should be premised on setting groundwork where the argument can, indeed, be won. Throwing a lot of material around that only one person in the room (possibly) understands doesn’t sound like much of a strategy for anything except obfuscation, which is obviously antithetical to education, even if it does “win” the round. Winning, in this situation, would have been all that it achieved. No brain cells would have been stirred in the process.
Frankly, I do not think that, until we all have read all the philosophy, past and modern, that JS has, we can engage him directly on the issue of truth in philosophy, at least on the academic level. I am from the school (the Menickites) that believes that ultimate truth in philosophy is, in fact, science. Or is in science fact, to be more precise. I talk about that a little in Caveman, and I’ll get around to it more directly at some future date. In any case, I have no intentions of becoming an academic philosopher, or a student of academic philosophy, as in knowing all about all the great (or stinky) philosophers of all time. So I really can’t address that aspect of SJ’s interview. In other words, I agree with him on the consequences of using this material, but I cannot engage him on what he claims are the causes. Although honestly, I doubt if he disagrees with my claims, and it’s just that he wasn’t making those claims himself in the interview.
The second interesting point of the interview, which Duby took SJ to task on, is the disdain for first- and second-year judges, and those same folks as assistant coaches without portfolio. Or, I guess, college coaches in general, if you wish to read a full menu from the implication. Since I am on record as placing assistant coaches on a par with the minor demons of Milton, I would seem to agree with SJ’s opinion here, but I don’t know if I do. What I am against is coaches who hire college students to provide positions if not complete cases to automata high schoolers, and then who send those “assistant” coaches into rounds to flow the competition, all in aid of a bigger trophy at the end of the day. I am also against college students attempting to achieve high school glory a little too late, who do so by finding malleable Trilbys on their own and feeding them material borrowed from their college courses, and then showing up week after week at debate tournaments (and on WTF) to push their theories of debate on the general public, molded in the hot forge of being a second-rate high schooler always on the brink of getting a TOC bid. Now, okay, this is a little cold, and stereotypical, and not completely true, but I have historically run up against the least resolutional arguments and the most erratic judging from college kids who were almost good high school debaters and who don’t seem to fit in at college now and prefer hanging around with high school people. The words “Grow up!” come to mind here, at least for this latter group. I would also direct those words to the adult coaches pulling the strings the the former group. Unlike SJ, I don’t believe these college students should be arrested on sight and banned from the back of the room, but I do feel that they need to be perceived as what they are. A balance of judges is required in the pool, and use of that balance in a neutral albeit meaningful way. My solution at Bump, of course, was to create community rankings of the judges, putting As into bubbles and mixing As and Bs equally in the outround pools. This seemed to satisfy the mob.
The idea of assistant coaches ruining LD seems to be a major theme of the Legion of Doom (which, SJ says, is far from rendered moot by the new NFL rules, but nonetheless seems to be as dormant as a dead bear in a blizzard), and it’s not one I really ever subscribed to. I certainly am against mutual judge preference, but that’s a different thing. SJ subscribes to this assistant coach vilification whole hog, and may in fact be its driving force. In my experience, there just aren’t that many of these people, of either of the stripes I’ve described above, to have that much of an influence except in one small corner of the $ircuit. And since lately I’ve been questioning the true influence of the $ircuit on LD, I’m not thinking it’s all that deadly. But one thing that is true is that these assistant coaches are not spending all their time and energy working with novices. There’s no glory in that, and therefore they’re not giving good educational value for their buck, whether you like them or not, because they’re only applying themselves to very specific competitive contexts. Education of debaters means educating 4 years worth of them, whether they are good, bad or indifferent in rounds. Chauffering a moneyed elite to major tournaments around the country, even in the most well-intentioned and ethical context, does not do that. So even if that’s not what SJ refers to, it is a part of the issue. But, mostly, I think he’s talking about something that just isn’t either that prevalent or that important.
Finally, there is the air of arrogance that is a little thick about the proceedings. Although no stranger to arrogance either in myself or others, I am surprised to see SJ express views that are unrelievedly so. Specifically, it is one thing not to flow rounds, and another thing altogether to claim that it is unnecessary. Those who do inevitably claim that they are more than capable of doing the math in their heads, so to speak, or like SJ that there is something intrinsically wrong with the round that precludes taking notes. I don’t buy it. Yeah, I’m smarter than the average teenager, and often I’m writing down stuff that is fairly unimportant in my assessment of win/loss, but giving off either odor in the round is offensive to the debaters, and if I accept the responsibility of judging then I am willing to accept the formula of proper behavior that accompanies that responsibility; it’s analogous to having debaters wear business suits. I am reminded of one of my more sketchy varsity debaters in his first judging gig, who called for a runner to take his ballot after the NC because, as he said to me in explanation, as far as he was concerned the round was over and the winner was clear. I did refrain from hitting him over the head with a frying pan, but only just. I would like to think that I wait to hear the whole round before making a decision, but if you’ve ever judged, you know as well as I do that there are cases where that is not necessary. But you owe it to the debaters to act as if that is the case. They’re doing a job of work up there, and as long as they’re seriously working at it, I need to at least appear to be seriously working at it on my end, even if my mind is already made up, although I will keep my mind open till the end, because you never know. It’s a matter of simple respect, like their wearing business clothes. I do my best to listen to everything, and heed everything, regardless of its content; I am here to judge that content, but I need to know what it is—all of it—first. I want the debaters to believe that happened, for their own self-respect, if nothing else. In those situations where last year’s TOC winner hits a novice who’s never won a round in a random pairing, that novice deserves a respectful round from both his opponent and from me, even though all three of us might know the result of that round the minute we read the schematic. For many debaters, the judge’s looking busy is important. A judge who doesn’t flow doesn’t look busy. Which means that the judge is not doing what the debater thinks is important. In this case, I think that thing—taking complete notes—is worth the debater thinking it’s important, and therefore worth the judge doing it. Even when he doesn’t really have to, because he’s smart enough to retain all the germane material in his head. It just goes with the territory.
Mostly, of course, I agree with SJ on LD, which is why I was for a short while the Legion’s poster boy. What he’s asking for is that people argue resolutions in rounds, looking for and supporting the truth of their side. This leads to constructive dialogue and great education. This is major. Where we disagree is in some of the smaller side business. But that side business, once it’s printed up, must be considered. For all practical purposes, SJ has now created the longest judge paradigm on record (unless you count this blog). So be it. If I were a debater, I would want him to be adjudicating the round. I just wish he were a little less…serious. It must come from not reading any pomo. Maybe we should all chip in and get him some Derrida for Valentine’s Day. That and some chocolate. That should do the trick.
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