The Neighbor's Christmas Tree

Should We Blame Obama?

I wish President Obama actually were the fire-breathing socialist that Fox News and others on the right seem to think he is.  I suspect I will never see a US President as liberal as even most European conservative politicians, much less one with the radical socialist cojones of a South American president.  But in good conscience I cannot blame Obama for not being what he never claimed to be in the first place.  While campaigning he exhibited distressing signs of lukewarmness on hot-button issues (such as, for instance, gays) and, shortly after his inauguration, even more distressing signs of sympathizing with George W. Bush and his administration.  I voted for him twice--the primary and the election--on the basis that he seemed to be a man of intelligence and compassion, but, even then I would have had to admit, not much of a man of character.  Still, his two out of three beat his competition--and they still do.

So, no, I don't expect that the torture of detainees has stopped.  And I won't be surprised if America finds good reason (quite possibly many reasons, all too complicated to explain) to go to war with Iran.  And the fundamental Christianity of American democracy will be affirmed for many years to come, directly and indirectly.  And I would laugh in your face if you were to ask me whether Bush and his cohorts would ever be charged with war crimes.  And I would be genuinely surprised if we do not give trickle-down economics another nine or ten tries before giving up on it--if giving up on it is ever something we will do.

Like most politicians, especially Democratic ones, Obama likes to be liked and likes things to stay nice and calm and quiet.  Despite the wording of the title of one of his books, he lacks much of a stomach for "audacity," which means "fearless daring."  Besides, I am fairly sure he was being ironic when he chose the word.  I suspect he follows his approval ratings with the same anxious eagerness with which grade-grubbing students tally up their weighted averages from week to week.  Despite his reputation, on the right and on the left, he is not much of an idealist--he can say the words "hope" and "change," but then so can Sarah Palin.  They are distinctively American (and, more precisely, American political) words.  (I suspect "hope" and "change" were on the lips of the white settlers who drove the darker skinned natives onto reservations, too--what was "manifest destiny," if not a cry for hope and change?)

Obama is a great American politician.  He has (still has) the potential of being a great American, as well, but that remains to be seen.  He is being blamed for things that are not his fault: the Middle Eastern wars, which, once gotten into, were never going to be easy to get out of, not with a century of bad blood between the Arab nations and the United States, and it's certainly not Obama's fault that the US government (legislative, judicial, and executive branches, inclusive) became (with its twin sister, the mass media) the handmaid of Wall Street, banks, insurance companies, and other speculators.  President Eisenhower was warning us all about the military-industrial complex back when I was in second grade, and this complex was then already about eighty years old.  The things the right wing has blamed Obama for are equally unfair and shortsighted.  The economy has been tumbling in spurts for the past 120 years, most notably during the 1930s and, again, in the past twelve, and we have probably not seen the end of the decline, so that Republicans will indeed be able to say in 2012 and perhaps again in 2016, with some accuracy, that Obama has presided over America at its economic worst.  

For a while now I have felt that America is unsaveable.  Sorry for the negativism, folks.  I have never been much good at holding up my end of the optimism banner.  If it were just a matter that our leaders and our political system were corrupt, if only that, I might hold some hope ("hope" for "change"), but the problem is deeper--we are a corrupt culture, worse than corrupt:  silly, unserious, greedy, self-centered, hypocritical, shallow, cruel, obsessive-compulsive, repressed, divisive, ignorant (even worse, willfully ignorant), sentimental, vain, obsequious, fearful, impatient, dishonest, and tacky.  No President can change that state of things, even if we gave him eighteen terms in office.  

So I did not vote for Obama because I expected him to be our savior.  I stopped believing in saviors long ago.  I voted for him because he seemed like the kind of sensible and intelligent politician who could restore the American people's face in the world--and this much he has done, not that I think we actually deserve other nations' respect, but it is nice to have.  I believed that he could be the best President of my lifetime--and he may well be (such is the low esteem with which I hold other Presidents, perhaps, but I don't say this just to be smug).  

And I voted for him because I like the way he talks, I like the way he makes me feel when he talks, and I like that he has some wit about him.  He stirs my emotions--less so lately, but still--though he has never stirred me on any deeper level than my emotions.  He has not, for instance, stirred my desire to be a better person than I already am, and he has not stirred my sense of justice, equality, liberty, and life itself.  He may just be entertainment--good for laughs and tears and a few goosebumps--but he is quality entertainment, and right now, though that is certainly not enough, given the state of things, it is better than what our other options are.

"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way"--Albert Camus

This is being bold of me, I know, but I reserve the right to call stupidity stupid.  I do this in spite of the fact that I belong to the race of people who teach English, who are known far and wide for our insane tolerance for just about any cockamamie bullshit you can imagine as long as it doesn't involve comma splices.  I suspect it was one of our race who first coined the expression "There is no such thing as a stupid question."

Oh, yeah?  Since when?

For too long Americans have benignly ignored and intentionally mislabeled stupidity, possibly in the interest of a misguided concept of what the clause "all men are created equal" means or else polite deference to the feelings of stupid people.  As for the former, I'm pretty sure the statement of our founding fathers is not a denial of the existence of human stupidity.  And though recognizing and honoring the right to free speech most certainly ensures that stupid speech is constitutionally protected, it does not mean that the rest of us have to pretend stupidity is anything other than what it is.  And if stupid people are especially sensitive to their stupidity being so labeled and pointed out, I, for one, am no longer willing to consider the possibility that perhaps my plain-speaking even roughly equates to hate speech or bigotry.   To adapt a cliche dear to homophobes, I love the stupid but I hate the stupidity--though, in truth, I do not love the stupid either, because to love them would mean to enjoy their company and I do not, unless they are cute with well-defined muscles and easy to get in the sack, but I do at least see the necessity of having to live in peace among them, even the unsightly ones.

As for saving the feelings of stupid people, I am all for it up to a point, but clearly America's decades-long toleration of stupidity has encouraged deeper, darker strains of stupidity to emerge, fatally resistant to reason or good manners.  Stupidity is both meaner and more pervasive now than it's been at any time since the Enlightenment.  Stupidity has become even a selling point in entertainment, politics, and religion (where it is sometimes called "faith beyond reason")--and that, folks, is bad news for us as a nation, a culture, and a people.

Stupidity is now no longer content to sit quiet--it wants to be in school textbooks, as a viable alternative and counter-balance to "science" and "intelligence."  It wants to be called "common sense."  It wants to ban from the airwaves anything that cannot be comprehended by and processed into the world view of a typical third grader.  It wants its own political party.  It wants to speak out and malign the intelligent and then squawk about persecution and intolerance when reasonably smart people criticize it.  It even wants to categorize thoughtful, perceptive, and insightful speech as, de facto, elitist and tyrannical.

No, no doubt, the stupid are among us, and we must live with them.  We should seek ways of gently prodding them towards reason and fact-based perceptions of the world around them.  We should not lock them away as insane or criminal, unless those lines are actually crossed--in which case, we must hold to the truth that "ignorance is no excuse."  Being stupid is not a cultural difference to be protected in a diverse society.  It may at times be genetic, true, and in every instance we should act with compassion and understanding.  But understanding stupidity is not the same thing as ignoring its clear and unmistakable signs.

Here are the sure signs of stupidity--

1. opinions lacking sufficient support in concrete, verifiable details and beliefs based entirely on authority,

2.  jingoism, unqualified assertions, and high-sounding cant,

3.  impatience with the slow, rigorous processes of research, logic, and fair argument,

4.  and heated and defensive reaction to others' hesitation to swallow patent nonsense.

Any two of the four are certain evidence of stupidity, but, sad to say, folks, quadrilateral stupidity is already the order of the day.

So I am done with pretending that stupidity is just ignorance.  Simply not knowing something is very different from belligerent resistance to knowledge.  I am done with pretending that stupid beliefs bring people together, or that they bring comfort and happiness to many and so should be exempt from criticism or analysis.   I am done with letting stupidity slide.  I am beginning to see it for the intentional, manipulative, and uncannily effective tool that it is, and see it, too, as the tool of oppression, cruelty, and resistance to progress.

Dear Santa

What I suppose I want most of all this Christmas, Santa, is the end of the bullshit.  The bullshit I'm talking about encompasses the phony "War on Christmas" diatribes in the media (Really, folks?  You think "season's greetings" is something new?  Have you no memory whatsoever?) as well as Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, saving Bush-era tax cuts that crippled the nation's economy (There are worse things than taxes, namely a government entirely incapable of doing anything for its citizens beyond staging elections every two years--how many more Katrina aftermaths do we need?--and elections that are more suggestive than substantive of democracy).  The bullshit also includes the clamor on the left to let gays die in unjustifiable, preemptive wars in the Middle East and participate in a decadent institution like proprietary marriage, though, yes, I understand and heartily support the principle that people of all sexual orientations deserve the same rights and opportunities, especially when the scant services the government does provide its citizens are tied to the voluntary serfdoms of military service and monogamous matrimony.

I have little hope of getting what I want most this Christmas, so let me say what I'm happy about--friends whose generosity, intelligence, and kindness move me to tears sometimes, a job I love that is meaningful and important, another year with my dog Tom Ripley, and the Internet, by which I am still free to access all sorts of useful and scandalous information and imagery and sustain a workable illusion of influence, liberty, and power that counterchecks the dispiriting juggernaut of stupidity almost everywhere else in the American mass media, including a good 98% of the available web sites, which I can at least choose to ignore.

Thanks, Santa.  You are trying, and that's what really matters, I guess.

Beautiful Morning

This is a beautiful morning because the guy walking his black lab about a half block ahead of Ripley and me wears his tight black jeans and leather jacket well and Ripley has to pee so we never catch up with them so that way I am not disappointed.  And I say hello to Morgan or Sara whose names I get straight sometimes and sometimes do not and I ask her if she's going home, because then Ripley and I would walk with her on the way, but she says, no, they are heading to Virginia, because she means for the holiday, and I say I meant no home here and she says oh their walk is just beginning, her and her dog, whose name I also forget, and we say goodbye.  Then I wave at my neighbor in his truck but he doesn't see me because I am white and old and his neighbor anyway.  And the party is over and Laurie is still no older than she was a month ago.  And the icy air cuts through me like angels' knives and Ripley knows his way to the door all by himself.

Eight Teachers Who Left a Lasting Impression on Me

John I. McCollum, my dissertation adviser at University of Miami, struck me as the quintessential gentleman college professor, erudite, precise, even-tempered, with copious knowledge of the Metaphysical Poets (and the rest of the seventeenth century), which he was able to bring together and connect in startling fashion in a flash.  He had a reputation for severity, which was never apparent in his manners.  The semester before I took my first class with him, he had (reportedly) failed every student in the class--and this was in graduate school!  The challenge lured me (and my other classmates) in, which taught me that sometimes a large gesture is needed to attract the kinds of students one wants to teach (and can teach).  For a while I worked as his research assistant on a paper on Carpenter's Gothic churches in Florida, thus awakening my mind to architecture and local histories.  Based on a shorter paper I had written, he wanted me to write my dissertation on the 17th-century playwright Thomas Shadwell, and now I wish I had.  I wrote an arguably fine paper on John Bunyan instead--not even The Pilgrim's Progress, for which he is known, but Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which I thought and still do think is a more interesting book.  Professor McCollum was right, always, as close to intellectual infallibility as anyone I ever met, yet the most shining example of "gentilesse" I have ever met, too.  A model of nobility and a source of wisdom as well as knowledge and sound advice.  Sadly, he died the year after I got the PhD degree.

Laurence Donovan, my poetry professor at University of Miami, nominated me as the first ever (and, at the time, only) student member of the Snarks, a literary clique of  nine (as in "muses") exceptionally talented poets, artists, and academicians--drawing, from time to time, visitors like Pulitzer prizewinners Donald Justice and Gwendolyn Brooks--who met weekly to share and critique our poems.  I got an enormous amount of encouragement as a writer--Justice said that my poem on Noah's ark, which was basically just a rhythmic catalogue of the names of every animal I could think at the time of its writing, "works, although it shouldn't"--which sounded like rapturous praise to me back then.  Donovan was also a gifted etcher, as well as a Hart Crane-mad poet--I wish I could have afforded to buy at least some of his work to have hanging in my home now, particularly a gorgeous series of prints he based on the Tarot.

Robert Miller, my English teacher at Tennessee Temple College, encouraged me to go on to graduate school.  He was a witty teacher and a gifted pianist, who built his own house with his own hands (according to his own blueprints), and while as devout a Christian as everybody else at Tennessee Temple, he could roll his eyes at some of the excesses of fundamentalist evangelicalism.  He encouraged me in my writing and intellectual pursuits--and looked askance (rightly) at my attempts to "blend in."

Dutch Mehlenbacher, friend and colleague at University of South Carolina, Salkehatchie Campus, taught art and fencing and headed the campus foreign film showings, as well as the theater and special events calendar--before I had even met the guy, I was infatuated with him.  Then, getting to know him, I developed a crush on him, of which he reciprocated only the friendship part of it--though he expressed some interest in the details of my sex life.  He lived and painted in an abandoned church in the country, without a telephone, so that, annoyingly, as his closest friend, I received the phone calls from his folks in Nashville when he needed to be contacted immediately.  An avid fan of Ayn Rand, he was an indefatigable egoist and nearly won me over to objectivism.  He played drums (backing up Jeannie C. Riley on "Harper Valley PTA") and sailed a sloop, on which we spent many a drunken weekend.  When I left South Carolina, we agreed that we would shorten the long, dragged-out process of "losing touch," by amicably agreeing never to contact each other again, giving the close friendship a proper and definite closure, celebrated wildly the week before I moved to Pensacola.

William P. Sullivan, my thesis adviser at Marshall University, who, with an offhand note on a paper I had written on the novelist John Gardner, let me know that I belonged in graduate studies in literature.  He also encouraged my poetry writing, telling me that it was good enough for the Atlantic Monthly or Harper's (it wasn't).  I had never tackled anything as monumental as a 60-page thesis before, and he gave me and the project (on Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood) close and critical attention that taught me more about the writing process than I had known in my previous 17 years of education.

Maurice Hussey, Cambridge Chaucerian and visiting professor at Marshall University while I was there, is the reason I love Chaucer now.  In one semester I learned to read Middle English at least as well as I read French (not well, but doable) and gathered a sense of the world Chaucer had been a part of.  He taught in the old-fashioned style of elite British universities, reading lecture notes to the class and then asking open-ended Socratic questions.  When nobody responded, he said simply, "And so now we have one of those long embarrassing silences," and refused to say another word until somebody would at least attempt an answer to his question.  When he returned graded papers, he would not just hand the paper to its student author but deliver a short speech detailing (from memory) the strengths and (embarrassingly) the weaknesses in each paper's logic and grasp of the material.  It was an edifying and sometimes chastening experience.

Joan Adkins, who taught me the Romantic poets at Marshall University, had me when she blithely introduced herself to the class on Day 1:  "Hello, I'm Joan Adkins," without titles, degrees, or self-serving biographical details.  A small thing, but impressive to me at the time, and to this day, my first words at first class meetings are "Hello, I'm Joe Marohl."

Ardell Jacquot, my English teacher at Dade Christian School, made a huge impression on me as a teenager, despite some really bad advice along the way--mostly on the order of not to follow my dreams, but settle for the me everybody else expects me to be.  Advice I later (wisely) spurned.  Funny, colorful, and opinionated, he was a lot of students' favorite teacher.  Today, I may no longer worry about putting my hands on my hips (he told me it made me look effeminate), but, then, come to think of it, I seldom put my hands on my hips now, so maybe I do worry.  He did say one thing that sticks with me today as a teacher:  "If anybody is going to be bored in this class, it's going to be you students, and not me"--the response I now give to students who complain that their reading assignments are boring--though I do it with a certain gay bitchiness Jacquot could only envy.

Dog Years

This morning I woke up with my dog curled up on top of my body under the covers of my bed.  It's getting cold enough that we have come to depend on shared mutual body warmth to get us through the nights.  The dog weighs 28 pounds, yet I'm amazed how much heat he puts out--better than an electric blanket, I kid you not.

On Monday my dog Tom Ripley turns fourteen years old.  Even though I am not the type of person who considers his dog his child, I can't help but think that Ripley would be in ninth grade at school right now if he were a child.  Fourteen is old for a whippet--about 78 in human years, so his maturity stretched past mine some five years ago.  And in the past year or two we have had some touch-and-go days, where mentally I was preparing myself to see him off.  Lately, though, he has been fine--not the leaping marvel he was several years ago, but still a quietly active dog, who enjoys his treats and walks.

My dog years stretch from the day I picked him up at eight weeks old, early December of 1996 in Savannah, to the present, in Durham, North Carolina.  He was born almost exactly a year after my mother's death (that sad anniversary was yesterday), and I suspect my motivation for getting a dog then, some thirteen years after my last dog, was partly to fill the loneliness I felt after a parent's death, even a parent who was already mentally lost to Alzheimer's-like stroke symptoms some years before, and three years after the breakup of what was probably my most significant human relationship as an adult.

There's nothing objectively special about Ripley.  He's the mute companion that other dogs are to their masters, Ripley more mute than others, since he so seldom barks.  And like other dog owners, I can testify to the weird telepathy that develops between human and dog over years--a language the dog trains the master to recognize as the master trains the dog to recognize simple monosyllabic commands.  As a puppy, Ripley used to sit with his back to the door when he needed to go outside.  Over the years, that signal has been refined and pared down to just a certain barely detectable flicker of light in his eyes, which I cannot describe and which apparently few other people can see at all.  That is if "light" is the right word, since that "look" also has the power to wake me from a sound sleep.

In my imagination, Ripley represents not just himself but also all the friends, family, and lovers I will never see again, but whose images remain close because Ripley's eyes have seen them too.  That, of course, is my sentimentality carrying me away--but dog ownership is itself convicting proof of sentimentality in a man or woman, so there is no escaping the charge:  I am a sentimental guy.  Buried under my dry ironic pessimism and icy layers of asociability and indifference is a belief that my dog means something--this coming from a guy who is not convinced that all of human history means anything, given the immense scope of the cosmos.

And, yes, we will be celebrating Ripley's birthday on Monday.  I am a gay middle-aged man, after all.  Freeze-dried liver treats and beer.