Category Archives: musing

The Trouble with Education

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
                                                          — H.L Mencken

 

I once heard a humanistic woman on the radio explain that the root of the word education is the Latin educare, “to bring forth from within.”  Let me check that for you almost instantly on these here Internets:  

Verb[edit]

present active ēdūcō, present infinitive ēdūcere, perfect active ēdūxī, supine ēductum

  1. I lead, draw or take out, forth or away.  [quotations ▼]
  2. I raise up; erect.

Etymology[edit]

From Latin educatus, past participle of educare (“to bring up (a child, physically or mentally), rear, educate, train (a person in learning or art), nourish, support, or produce (plants or animals)”), frequentive of educere, past participle eductus (“to bring up, rear (a child, usually with reference to bodily nurture or support, while educare refers more frequently to the mind)”), from e (“out”) + ducere (“to lead, draw”)

Whoops.  A little information, as always, a dangerous thing.  I prefer the simple, evocative definition offered by that humanist on the radio many years ago.   The word education, she said, is derived from the Latin, educare, which means, she said, “to bring forth from within”.  

Education includes a lot of things and is used more and more interchangeably, in our increasingly materialistic, profit-driven world, with training.   Making education a synonym for training reduces this wondrous exercise to its most mechanistic sense.  Therein lies a big part of the trouble we encounter when trying to have an intelligent discussion about education.  Defining our terms and framing a conversation go a long way toward understanding what we are actually talking about, and the defining itself is a great and perplexingly fraught undertaking.

Education, though we all know it when we are being properly educated, is as complex an idea as we can conjure. It is complicated further by being part of a partisan political debate driven by the love of money, and vindication of the philosophy of the “free market” and its propents’ relentless drive to prove the superiority of private entrepreneurial enterprise over public endeavor.   Education is entangled in politics, wrapped in the tentacles of ideology, market forces and institutionalized inequality.  

Discussing the proper aim of education, or even the proper meaning of the word proper, is difficult.  Education in the abstract is often simplified to mean a course of study leading to a lucrative and/or meaningful career and/or a productive life.  In this limited sense there are metrics that can be brought into play, data that can be massaged to support arguments and ideology.  Intelligently discussing education and its ultimate goals is not the work of a moment. Nonetheless, I will try to make it that now.

There are those, of which I am a starkly cautionary example, who believe that many people are born with potentials and passions they never become aware of and so never develop, enjoy, inspire others with.  The role of the teacher is to guide the student, to bring forth from within, to inspire a lifelong love of learning and self-development.  The old “give a man a fish” line from Maimonides springs to mind:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Maimonides

I didn’t know that quote was from my man Maimonides until just now.   Cool.   You can learn something every day!  And it is a pleasure, and a thrill.  And instilling that pleasure, and that thrill, is the enduring work of our most memorable teachers.

For many, my words would mean a lot more, resonate longer and more roundly, even result in a pay check and professional status as an opiner worth noting, perhaps, if I was writing them from my study in a nice home somewhere rather than from the crowded rent stabilized apartment I inhabit, more like a demented person’s overstuffed, out-spilling closet than the den of a thoughtful person.   That this is beyond the point is beyond the point.

I paint you a picture then, to make you think, and disappear into memory, like every good pedagogue should do.

A man is invited to create a showcase for the program kids come to after a day of school, where they take over a dingy public school classroom and turn it into a buzzing beehive of creativity.   He is invited to do this by the woman who has witnessed this transformation weekly and smiled on it each time.  The same kids who were wild and fussy during the school day are excited, focused, working together, planning, performing a variety of tasks related to a crude form of actual alchemy.   At the end of each session they watch on the computer screen what they’ve made with their own hands, chuckle, remark, pack their bags and head home.

Inexperienced at presenting his idea to an audience, the man creates a fairly shabby showcase for this workshop at the request of the woman who has hired him.   He muffles his written remarks, losing his place on the flapping pages each time he tries to make eye contact with his small audience of parents.  He has technical problems showing the examples of student work, fumbles, bumbles, mumbling excuses during each amateurish delay.  

By these failures he will learn exactly what to avoid next time, how to make this presentation effectively, but in the moment, to the people in the room, it is like watching a grown man struggle not to drown in a shallow puddle on the sidewalk.  At the end of his endless fifteen minute performance few in the room have any sense that this fellow is a teacher of a certain vision who has created a simple but ingenious program to make animation that the children themselves run.  

Then, after asking for comments and seeing none, he smiles and invites the parents to join their children in the creative workshop.   The children leap out of their seats as though shot from guns and deploy themselves in every part of the room.  Here a group draws and cuts things out, a kid works with clay, others arrange things under lights while others hover above and photograph the choreography frame by frame.  Children sit at the computer, inputting frames from the cameras and starting to edit.  Others put on headphones and animatedly listen back to a soundtrack they are working on.  

This little demonstration of purposeful autonomy by the kids is worth the price of admission.  It shows the thing itself in action, in its most elemental form.  “Show me, don’t tell me,” the writing instructor always says.   As for describing how the thing works, the best way is simply to show it in action.  Then, as the prosecutor says at the end of the presentation of evidence and witnesses at trial:  the People rest.

It should be noted that the man’s failures during his presentation are an object lesson in how people actually learn.  You learn by failing, as the cliche goes.  These embarrassing mistakes will not be forgotten or repeated the next time.

Swimming against the prevailing tides, beside the gigantic, ocean churning ships of wealthy and influential people like Bill Gates, the tired swimmer sputters and struggles for breath.   If he can manage to keep swimming there is every possibility of his making it to a desert island where he can show the thing in action– to a group of very interested and exotic birds.  Huzzah!

The Self

That voice, speaking up for your deepest beliefs, fondest hopes, telling your dreams.   In the noise of the noisy world you may sometimes have to listen carefully to hear it, but don’t stop listening for it.

Rationales versus Reasons

Now, admittedly, I am a foolish idealist.  I don’t say this to be cute, only to underscore that living in a world with concrete, monetizable values that override fairness, and what was once quaintly thought of as common decency, it seems foolish to me, over and over, to keep dreaming of a more merciful and equitable society.  It would be different, perhaps, if I had great wealth to hire a talented team to help me market my fond ideals, but that’s a pointless thought.

In the decade before the Civil War, an unprecedented carnage not eclipsed for more than fifty years, when machine guns, aerial assault and poison gas were added to the atrocities of trench warfare, our countrymen were poised to kill each other.   We are again now.    Violence is the default setting in our violent nation and when one people holds another under their dirty boot long enough the only answer becomes murder.  Justifiable homicide, each injured party believes righteously.   

We now have a culture where each side feels, once again, as though it has been held under the other’s dirty boot for long enough.  This feeling is amplified by the mass media, which does whatever it can to get people to tune in.   Billions of dollars hang in the balance and truth, a slippery thing in any case, is reconciled only in the corporate bottom line.

So instead of serious discussions, and an honest search for the real reasons for our problems and possible solutions, we get rationales and overheated partisan rhetoric.  Talented talking head pundits make millions of dollars to pontificate, deliver talking points and push a party line, their demographic choir lustily nodding their agreement, shuddering in disgust, pumping their fists.  My foolish idealism believes, like Anne Frank, before the Nazis killed her, that all people are basically good.  If they had the facts, and a bit of honesty, just a little….

Right, Dave.

I offer just two rationales, instead of reasons, that merely state a good enough excuse to do something truly inexcusable.  In fairness, let me qualify that.   The displacement of millions of people, the violent deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands– not necessarily inexcusable, fair enough.  But to be fair, and in the context of an unprovoked attack on a country ruled by a tyrant and massive destruction in the name of freeing them, it seems a bit hard to excuse.

Rationale for the war in Iraq: 

Why Iraq?  Because we and many others (Democrats too) thought he had WMD’s and because we could use a strong country in the Middle East that was sympathetic to us for their liberation.

This rationale leaves out the oft trumpeted connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, which turned out to be as false as the WMD rationale.   That the CIA and many foreign intelligence sources knew the reports of this connection and the WMDs were false was not seen as an impediment to the invasion of a country that would be sympathetic to us even if we inadvertently destroyed its infrastructure, displaced millions, killed many thousands, subjected it to more than a decade of mayhem, explosions, assassinations and so on, in the name of freedom and democracy… well, such are the costs of war, the price of freedom, one might rationalize.

And I am tortured by torture, as I keep saying.   It makes my skin crawl that so many Americans are so nonchalant about what our government has been doing in our names.  I was proud of John McCain for this speech.  Here is a rationale for torture, you will notice how different it is from a good reason to torture, something that, outside of doing it to inflict maximum pain on someone you hate, I have never heard:

I don’t justify torture…water boarding isn’t torture…it’s used in the training of our troops.  And we only water-boarded three people.  And the times then called for enhanced interrogation methods so that 9/11 could never happen again.

A person saying this, you might think, well, you, Sir, have set up a straw man to try to prove your point.   This is an actual answer to the question “how do you justify Americans torturing people?”.  It seems unfair to suggest that if we grabbed this woman, shoved a bag over her head, rushed her, shackled and diapered, to a dark, coffin-sized cell and locked her in there for a few weeks she would say the same thing at the end of her little adventure.  Even if we did not strip her naked, kept her cell at a comfortable temperature, left her in silence and never put a gag in her mouth, tilted her upside down on a board and poured water into the gag until the doctor monitoring the procedure told us we were about to accidentally kill her.

As for me, I just wish I had something productive to keep me busy enough not to think of these things.   I sometimes envy people I know who are running at high speed all day, far too busy to ponder, more than momentarily, things so sickening, and so futile and depressing to ponder.

Yemeni girl004

photograph from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is A Battlefield.

 

“Enhanced Interrogation” and framing the debate

The recent controversy over releasing details of the torture program, or even whether the brutal practices, as redefined in a secret legal memo, technically even constituted torture, is the most recent, grotesque, example of what has happened to dialogue in our winner-take-all and the rest of you fucking losers go home culture.  

One side argues that torture violates our values, however you slice it, rename it, justify it in secret memos, and that the best disinfectant is sunlight.  The other side argues that to call coercive interrogation “torture”, and reveal the secret details about how, where and when such tough but necessary things were done, weakens our great nation’s security and makes us more vulnerable to those intent on destroying us — people who deserve to be tortured, in any case.

Instead of discussion there are twitch reflexes conveyed in our black and white mass media and reflected back by the populace.  Opponents of torture argue that ten years after the worst abuses by the CIA, with nobody in the administration that engineered and enabled the program ever held accountable (except by lifetime tenure on the Federal Court, appointment to the faculty of a major university, lucrative book deals and speaking tours, etc.), it is long past time to reveal the hideous details to ensure an episode like this is never repeated.   On the other side, former Vice President Dick Cheney, architect and proponent of the program, goes on the air and defiantly dismisses the report as a “load of crap”, 500 pages of weak drivel that misses the point entirely, written by partisan wimps who don’t have the stomach to do what must be done.

Here’s the funny thing, though.  There is no news in this report.  Virtually everything of consequence that this subcommittee took years, and presumably millions of dollars, to compile, and which was released (525 pages of the 6,000 page report, 90% still highly classified) amidst such trepidation and controversy, has already been published, in 2008, in a New York Times best seller and finalist for the National Book Award, Jane Mayer’s chilling The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.*

Reading the book I was chilled to the bone at what was being done in my name.  I am chilled today, even as I learn, from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, that the CIA was replaced by the equally secretive JSOC (at the time Donald Rumsfeld’s elite secret force) as the masters of the interrogation and torture program fairly early on– meaning that this revealed CIA torture was the tip of the iceberg as far as torture goes.  

At the time this “enhanced interrogation” was going on, and the first public revelations of it were rippling across the media, I was at a concert in Town Hall enjoying David Bromberg’s music.  Toward the end of his show he usually does a meditative tune based on  the Rip Van Winkle story. The narrator wakes up after a 20 year sleep and doesn’t recognize his home, his town, his country.   Bromberg, a humanistic and probably progressive secular Jew from Tarrytown, NY, (where Rip Van Winkle author Washington Irving spent the last third of his celebrated life), improvises a commentary about disturbing current events, his guitar vamping behind him.  

As he began musing about the arguably unAmerican things the Bush Administration had been up to, a man in the audience angrily cut him off, shouting that he was there for music, not politics.  The disgruntled man, a couple of rows behind me, wore a military jacket.   Bromberg looked at him, nodded and shrugged.  

He said “we torture people?  Now it’s OK to torture people?” and began singing again.

 

 

*   The book became a best-seller in non-fiction hardcover in the United States, with its author Jane Mayer booked on various news programs for interviews. It later made the New York Times Book Review editors’ list of “10 Best Books of 2008”[2] and was nominated for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.[3] The book was a finalist for the National Book Awards.[4]

It also received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 29th annual book award in 2009, given to a novelist who “most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy’s purposes – his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.”[5]

footnote on Messianism

These days it is easy for a person with any scholarly inclination and an internet connection to almost instantly clarify shaky memory and insert a citation, as here:

The readiness of the Jews to believe the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi may largely be explained by the desperate state of European Jewry in the mid-17th century. The bloody pogroms of Bohdan Khmelnytsky had wiped out one third of Europe’s Jewish population and destroyed many centers of Jewish learning and communal life (Cohen 1948). There is no doubt that for most of the Jews of Europe there could not have been a more propitious moment for the messiah to deliver salvation than the moment Sabbetai Zevi made his appearance.

source

If you click on the Khmelnytsky link above you will learn, among other things, that a town less than 100 miles from Vyshnivets, where the families of my maternal grandparents were shot and left in a ravine, is named after the famous Ukrainian nationalist.   I had previously known Khmelnytsky only as an infamous murderer of Jews, though it turns out he did many other notable things in his life.  The killing of Jews, in the larger account of his notable life, can be relegated to a footnote.

I was tickled, if I might say, by the deadpan, almost New York Times-like, objectivity of the beginning of this description of the dim Jewish view of Cossack hero Bodhan Khmelnytsky, situated at the very end of the Wikipedia account of his distinguished life and career: 

Jewish history[edit]

Main article: Khmelnytsky Uprising § Jews

Jewish history‘s assessment of Khmelnytsky is overwhelmingly negative because he used Jews as scapegoats and sought to eradicate Jews from the Ukraine.  Between 1648–1656, Khmelnytsky’s rebels murdered tens of thousands of Jews.[29]  Atrocity stories about massacre victims who had been buried alive, cut to pieces or forced to kill one another spread throughout Europe and beyond.  The pogroms contributed to a revival of the ideas of Isaac Luria, who revered the Kabbalah, and the identification of Sabbatai Zevi as the Messiah.[30] Orest Subtelny writes:

Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.[31]

 and, speaking of footnotes:  

  1. Whether Khmelnytsky was or wasn’t a noble is still uncertain. He himself claimed nobility when it suited him, and it wasn’t often disputed by his contemporaries. Chmielnicki himself once wrote in the letter to King Jan Kazimierz that he was “born Chmielnicki”–however, that surname was never associated with the Abdank Coat of Arms hesed. His father, a noble himself, was married to a Cossack woman and according to the Polish Statute of 1505 that might have put Bohdan’s szlachta status under scrutiny. There are other theories: that his father or grandfather were stripped of their noble status or–perhaps most controversial–the theory of 19th-century Polish historian Tomasz Padura, who claimed (without giving sources) that Chmielnicki’s father was a Jewish convert to Catholicism.

 

Bummer

Forty years ago it was not uncommon for teenagers, in the shifting winds then blowing, to believe the miraculous was about to happen.  You didn’t need a weatherman, as the song said, to know which way the wind was blowing.   The world was changing for the better, many, young and old, believed, the proof of it seemingly at hand.  

Few gave a thought to, or even knew about, the many Jews in the mid 1600s, certain that the Messiah was among them, who’d sold all of their possessions and waited excitedly to be delivered to the World to Come.   The Messiah, a charismatic mystic named Shabbtai Tzvi, faced with a sword, chose forced conversion to Islam over completing his proclaimed mission, and so, instead of the blissful End of Times, the Jews endured hundreds more of years of persecution.  (footnote in following post).  Nobody in those heady days before the dream collapsed was dwelling on the death of idealism that so often follows the intoxicating flush of inspiration.

The reader will forgive, perhaps, the depressing digression. Such digressions were commonly forgiven at the time I am writing about, the very early 1970s, the days of excess we think of now as the 60s.  If you were to take a time machine looking for the sixties, you’d probably want to go to around 1970 to find those colorful days in full flower.  Set the machine to 1962, say, and you’d find most white males still had crew cuts.  The songs played on the radio in 1963 would provide another shock.  In 1964, to give but one example, you could still be killed for advocating integration in parts of the country that insisted they had the right to treat their Negroes as they saw fit and to hell with the Supreme Court and the so-called Department of Justice.   

Now we smile or smirk at the quaint beliefs that animated the hippies, the rejection of materialism, the belief in peace and love, the embrace of brotherhood.   When we want to mock people we speak of them sitting down with people who hate them to sing “Kumbaya”.  Back then, large groups of people sat around a singer with a guitar, their voices rising in a chorus to sing the African song of friendship and brotherhood.  We no longer speak of “brotherhood”, except ironically.  It’s a word from a bygone era, quaint as a windmill.

The bummer I am thinking of was a bad LSD trip I witnessed in around 1972.  The house was empty of parents, the trip had been planned out, the drug secured.   The acid was dropped.  The potential of this drug to open the doors of consciousness, to expand the mind, was well known and in those days many pursued it avidly.  Robert Crumb is among many who attribute their radical shift in consciousness to LSD.  Crumb reports that he ate it regularly in the late 60s and he describes it as fueling his mad creativity.  Jimi Hendrix is another who credited LSD with unlocking his consciousness.   Purple Haze was a love song to the psychedelic named for a popular form of LSD.  

The drug reputedly unlocked creative centers of the brain, disinhibited the mind in a way that led to amazing discoveries, revelations, enlightenment.  Of course, it had a famous downside: the bad trip, or bummer, hours of intensely painful suffering instead of a transcendent opening of the doors of perception.  The CIA had used this feature of the drug to derange the thoughts of people it suspected of being spies and more than one of these deranged suspects leaped through plate glass windows not caring whether they could fly or not. There was a tent at Woodstock where empathetic people quietly talked down people suffering from bad trips.  Bummer, a word still in common use, and with good reason, is a relic of those days.  

As this bummer I am thinking of progressed, the young man in hell, a hell as real as any, desperately turned on the TV and began staring at an insipid program.   He sat close to the screen and watched the show intently.  The insipidness of the program, and the desperation of watching it, were more than I could bear at the moment and I went over to flick the TV off. 

“No, please…” the young man bumming out said, reaching forward to cling to the television set.  “Please,” he said with an abjectness difficult to describe, “I need it.”  Nothing I said could persuade him otherwise.  I don’t recall how long he sat there, literally hugging the TV.  It may have been only moments, but in the memory of a man with a proneness to metaphor, it is a deeply seared metaphor.

We live in a culture narcotized by TV where drugs are now routinely prescribed to treat every ailment known to man, woman and child.  Higher consciousness is no longer a subject of discussion, except winkingly, in air quotes.  Literally millions of children are given drugs like Ritalin to make them calm the fuck down after a quick diagnosis of “pain in the ass”.   It is for their sake, and the common good, that they are medicated.  Some of them no doubt benefit from it.  Others, well, there will always be others.  We are no longer sitting around singing Kumbaya, my friend.

A final note on the bummer, the nature of our minds and our minds on drugs, from an address given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., physician father of the famous jurist.  The quote has been rattling around my mind as I wrote this entry, and I provide it here for the wise to ponder, although, of course, one is equally free to enjoy a childlike laugh over it:

Here is an extended excerpt from the 1870 lecture of Holmes which was published in 1879 [OHMT]:

I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.”

source

A Ridiculous Fear

“What exactly are you afraid of?” she asked with mostly hidden exasperation.

“They’ll turn me down for the study,” he said.  

“But you don’t want to be in the study.  Don’t you keep sending people copies of that great review of the books exposing the lucrative hoax of psycho-pharmacology?”  

He nodded.  “I do, and I believe, as the cited studies show, that the placebo is 84% as effective as the patent drugs they prescribe, to maximize ease and profits instead of the difficult probing for solutions to the person’s problems.”  

“And you have already been taking a placebo for months, and noticing it makes you feel slightly better once you down it every day.”  

“I have, yes,” he said.  

“So what exactly is your fear?” she asked.  

“I’m afraid I will not present as depressed enough to qualify for the medication study, and I’ll be stuck in this semi-depressive state forever,” he said.  

“You realize how ridiculous that is, I trust?  You are against the medications, but afraid you’re not depressed enough to qualify for the medications…”  She looked at him and he shrugged, noncommittal.   “I can tell you one thing– you are depressing enough to qualify me for the study.”

“What a mean thing to say to a depressed person,” he said.

“Well, gee,” she said, “I’m no psychiatrist or anything, but, scary as this will no doubt be to you, you seem to present just fine, making jokes, watching movies, following the news, showering every day, your weight staying the same– you could lose 15 pounds, you know, it wouldn’t hurt you– you’re not sleeping 3 hours a night, or ten.   You’re just…. how do I put this gently?”  

“This should be good,” he said.   

But he never got to hear it, the phone rang and she leaped nimbly off the hook to talk to a friend for an hour as he tapped the screen of his iPad, spelling words against the clock, losing badly, and playing again, badly, then again.

 

angell_1-062311.jpg

I Give Up Part 5

The buzzing from the chip was just wrong, as was the headache.   They had fine tuned the technology to the point that any annoyances were intended, and I resented it.

“You make a fair point,” said the supervisor, motioning to an unseen technician.  Abruptly the buzzing and headache stopped.  

“14,000,000 people ahead of me on the crucifixion priority list, you say?” I said.  

“Easily,” he said, “so many other things had a better chance of killing you before the state got around to rooting you out.”  

“I should have invested everything I had in lottery tickets,” I said.  

“Would a few million dollars have made things any different for you?” he asked.  

“I could have hired the people I needed to make this thing work,” I said.  A bird flew by, one of the last.  It cast a small, flickering shadow on the floor in front of me as it passed.  

“Tell me more about this thing,” he said.

“The wealth of our country was built by slave labor and the cheap labors of exploited people who were hungry and desperate in the countries they came from.  The people who collected the lion’s share of the wealth, the same ones in charge today, had as many qualms about taking what they wanted as a hungry lion has about eating a zebra.  The new theory of evolution was cited, ‘survival of the fittest’, much more flattering than ‘survival of the most ruthless’.  Sciences were conjured, measuring skulls and skeletons to demonstrate the innate inferiority of one race, why others were fit to subjugate them.  The science of race was invented, a laughably unfunny race to bolster racism by any means necessary.”  

“I did tell you to take your time, but I didn’t mean this,” the supervisor said, showing only a glint of impatience.

“If I had a million dollars I would hire a highly skilled business partner, after interviewing a dozen, or maybe fifty, to find one who can understand the idea and help me bring it into the world on a larger scale.  It’s a simple idea that proves hard to explain, market or justify: children in slums deserve to be listened to as much as the children of the well-to-do.  In an elite school you get an ear, in a slum school a barked command.  The child of the wealthy is nodded at with an indulgent smile, the child of the poor is told to get in line, fold their damned hands, shut the fuck up.”  

“And this is your problem why, exactly?” the supervisor asked, not without sympathy.  

My theoretical diagnosis in the DSM XIV draft suddenly appeared in my mind, like a hologram, turning itself to catch the light from different angles.  It actually looked beautiful, the light catching the grooves in the letters, playing across the serifs.  This is the world I will miss, I thought with a sudden pang, these ineffable little miracles of sensory experience.  The tiny rainbows shining through the prisms of light hushed me for a moment.  The supervisor watched this too, grateful for the break.  

“But all good things must come to an end,” I said to him.  I was thinking of Sim Kessel, a French Jewish middleweight who uttered this line to excellent effect in his wonderful, but now out of print, Hanged At Auschwitz.  The former French underground fighter had reached the point in Auschwitz where he became what they referred to, bizarrely, as a ‘Muslim’.  That was the point where the fight was finally gone, the will to live exhausted.  ‘Muslims’ stopped eating, lost weight, became glassy-eyed skeletons and died.  Kessel was many kilos below his fighting weight and had that glassy look, started giving away his moldy bread and weak, stinking soup.  

Somehow a friend with the power to help got him out of the mining brigade, where prisoners were marched many kilometers, in wooden shoes, to labor in mines so hot and airless that men drank their own urine to survive.  These Auschwitz prisoners were the ultimate workforce, they worked as though their lives depended on it and were completely disposable.  A capitalist’s dream, if you know what I’m saying.  

“Pick it up,” the supervisor said, making the old circular choo-choo train motion with his hand.

“Kessel got a job in the camp itself, cleaning the latrine ditches.  He was spared the long freezing marches he was too weak to survive, and spent the day scooping dysentery and other waste out of the ditches in buckets and carrying them to dump somewhere else.  Eventually he was….”

“I don’t really care about Sim Kessel,” said the supervisor.

“When he regained his strength they sent him back to the mines, and that’s when he said ‘all good things must come to an end.  And so I was sent back to the mines.'”

“Interesting,” said the supervisor without expression. “And now, please, the rest of the personal details.”

“You asked me why this brutally unfair arrangement is my problem.  I have no short answer.  I do not understand it myself, what drives me to try to help something far beyond my powers to help.  I imagined that if people saw the creativity, inventiveness and ingenuity of the children of poor people it might kindle some mercy in them.  I don’t know why I thought this.  The black eyed face of a little girl in Yemen, confronting a camera after her family was killed in a drone strike, tugs the heart the same way a boy surrendering to men with rifles in a ghetto does, is the look of a shocked Armenian girl in 1915 who has just seen her mother disemboweled by a Turk on a horse.”

“The point, Jesus Christ, the point!  Will you come to the goddamned point, man?” said the supervisor.

“Nobody can be expected to give a shit about anything that is not directly under their nose.  I was a blind idiot to think that anyone would be interested in and moved by the creativity of children being raised to become inmates of our privatized prisons.  People are preoccupied by a thousand other things, nobody can be expected to give a shit, unless, perhaps, it’s their own kid, doomed to early death or a long stretch in prison for the crime of being born in shit city.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  Just fucking crucify me, then, if you’re in such a fucking hurry.”

“I apologize,” said the supervisor. “I should not have snapped like that.  Very unprofessional, as well as discourteous.  I know this must be stressful to you.”

“Not at all,” I said, displaying another hallmark of my disease. “I came here to give up.  Like Sim Kessel giving away his rotten bread, I don’t care anymore.  I can’t explain why I cared in the first place.  You’re right, my mother’s right, I didn’t make the world.  I am not responsible for anybody’s misery but my own.”  

“Oh, but you are.  You are responsible,” said Gandhi, suddenly popping up like a jack-in-the-box.  His smile was very sad and serious.  “You think you can give up, let yourself be executed and be done with it?  You cannot.  Think about it, man.  Speaking to the man who will turn you over to the technicians of death, the last human in the chain, you are still trying to explain your responsibility.  If you take it up, it is your responsibility.”  

“Fucking great…” I thought, and through hidden speakers all around came my thought.

“Fucking great…” the speakers said in my voice, with a nice natural reverb that reminded me of playing my guitar in the resonant stairwells of public schools in the battered city where I grew up.  The voice emerged in surround sound, really clear and with great suppleness.  It actually sounded beautiful, in a weird way.

 

I Give Up Part 4

The chip, which can, of course, be used by the implanted citizen as an internal alarm, can also be activated by the network which can assign it various functions.  So I found myself instantly, alertly awake– with a splitting head ache.

“Ah, good to see you awake,” said the supervisor cheerfully, as I struggled to sit upright, slightly nauseated and unable to rub my aching head with my hands still shackled.  

“No need for the soft cuffs, officer,” said the man mildly, and the plastic restraints were snipped off my wrists.   I pushed myself upright and rubbed my head, neither of which helped the throbbing in my skull.

The supervisor, a thoughtful looking man, scanned my history from the chip. “You are not a bad person,” he told me reassuringly.  “There is no violence or criminality in your past, outside of some ill-advised verbal outbursts and the incendiary images you have committed to writing over the years– you know, those ironically intended things you write in high emotion that can be interpreted as actually, say, advocating the murder of various government officials.  You and I, and any person who looks at it for more than a moment, know you never actually advocated the killing of anyone.  Even those, as you have pointed out precisely and with great fairness of mind, are deserving of death.”  

His kindness disarmed me, as it was intended to.  I found myself almost tearful as I sat before him.  I tried to keep my mind blank, focused on his words alone.

“Unfortunately, nobody looks at these things for more than a few seconds, as you know.  And you are not here for those writings anyway, it’s much more subtle than that.  You are, in fact, a kind person with the best of intentions.  Anyone can see that.   Why don’t you tell me, for the record and also, as one human being to another, why you felt it necessary to surrender for crucifixion?   It appears you could have easily avoided it, you are probably about number 14,000,000 on the priority list for this special handling.”

“Sonderbehandlung,” I thought, the German term stamped on Jewish passports in the extermination years.  It meant “special handling”, Nazi code for “expedited for extermination”, one of the several German terms of art from those years I was familiar with: vernichtungslager, wir scheissen auf die freiheit, lebensunwertes leben, entartete kunst, arbeit macht frei — all similar in spirit.  

“Ah, the Nazis, always with the Nazis,” the supervisor said nodding with a sad smile.  “They did an indelible number on you and your family, didn’t they?   Not only shooting a whole bunch of them in the back of the head, virtually all of your mother’s side, leaving their bodies in a ravine in the Ukraine, not only disappearing your father’s side, and their entire lice-ridden shtetl in Belarus across a small river from Pinsk, wiped off the map without a trace, but invading your mind so thoroughly that to you all government authorities are capable of becoming mass murdering monsters, all populations their witting and unwitting accomplices.”  

He had a pretty good point, I had to give him that.  A society that is OK with millions of people dying so that others can have low cost slave labor?   A society that imprisons more people per capita than the most ruthless totalitarian states on the earth now?  A society that goes shopping for luxuries they don’t need as….

“….as millions of children go to bed hungry in a country that throws away countless hundred dollar a plate dinners in fine restaurants in the very cities where these kids eat paint chips to fill their bellies…. yes, the doomed children.  Always the doomed children, isn’t that what it is?  Tell me your plan, why you deserve to be crucified.  There’s nothing I can do to change your fate, you understand, but I’d like you to be able to get it all off your chest, as best you can.  There is no rush, take your time.”

And I began composing my thoughts, to tell him exactly what it was about my idealistic plan that marked me as a man worthy of the cruelest public execution a private contractor could perform for a government entity.

I Give Up Part 3

“Your messianic thoughts led you inexorably to this day,” said an articulate mercenary binding my hands with plastic cuffs, a bit tight for my taste.  

“Things will always be too tight for your taste,” he said, displaying an alarming clairvoyance.  I shook my head as it dawned on me: there was nothing supernatural involved, the chip was transmitting directly to the network and all he had to do was smile and repeat my thoughts aloud.  A parrot correctly outfitted could do it, although, in fairness to the mercenary, not develop those massive biceps.

We dream when we are young of freedom to attain the things we dream about.  There are higher impulses that it just seems right will prevail.  

“Right,” said the centurion, bored, pushing me forward now, “righty-Oh.”

I suddenly found myself thinking of terrible things few caring people care about, in a stream: the doomed children of the poor my mother correctly scolded me are an obsession of mine, unjustifiable state violence, thousands killed by secret American death squads in Viet Nam under the Phoenix Program, on suspicion of being enemies of democracy, circumvention of American law after 9/11 to blur the lines between covert and clandestine operations, eliminate the requirement to disclose covert assassinations to Congressional committees  and allow for new American death squads to operate secretly in as many countries as unaccountable persons appointed by the president deem necessary to protect our freedom here at home.  

I suddenly had the image of that young man in Ferguson, Missouri who had been shot to death back in 2014.  His large body, lying in the street for hours while they dug up evidence of why he deserved to be killed, shot so many times even though unarmed.  The National Guard was called in, anti-riot squads, tear gas, tanks, “we will control the angry crowds and protect private property by any means necessary,” vowed the governor, echoing Malcolm X grotesquely.  

“The governor didn’t say ‘by any means necessary’, jerk-off,” smirked my captor, nudging me forward.

A video of the large young man committing a misdemeanor, stealing cigars, shoving a tiny clerk, not long before the policeman confronted and killed him, was soon released and shown repeatedly on every TV station.  Perhaps, it was theorized, the unidentified cop knew he was dealing with a dangerous criminal, confirmed when the kid possibly used the f-word to the policeman, or even the explosively provocative n-word to a plainly white man.  No white man should ever be expected to abide being dismissed as a ‘nigger’, especially by a black kid.   Who could blame the large cop for his rage, for pursuing the wounded kid fifty yards, already shot, and making sure he was dead?

Why this image came into my head, I cannot say, but I saw the photos as they’d been shown on the news:  the white officer with his close cropped hair, the black teenager with a motor board on his head, a high school graduate who would never need to buy books for college.  

When a grand jury declined to prosecute the police officer, let all the facts come out in a trial, they seemed to have decided the peace officer had already suffered enough.  The riot squads were called back in, instead of 1,000 mediators, peace makers, a commitment from the government to demilitarize civil police forces, do something about the disproportionate police killing of young black men and find solutions to long-standing racial problems it pretends no longer exist.  

“Yes, I know,” said the mercenary, helping me along now with the muzzle of his gun, “we are a society that uses deadly violence to answer every question.  Given the choice between protecting human dignity and protecting private property we always choose the latter.  It’s sacred.  Do you have any more questions, sir?”  The expression on his face was so sincerely quizzical that I almost asked him about L. Paul Bremer.

“Nobody cares about L. Paul Bremer,” the soldier told me. “Yes, he fucked everything up in Iraq after the perfectly executed Shock and Awe campaign freed Iraq from a modern day Hitler.  His first idiotic error was Order 1, the de-Baathifcation.  Sure, it was stupid, in hindsight, or even with average foresight, to fire thousands of doctors, teachers, nurses, civil servants because they’d been forced, by Saddam, to be members of his political party as a condition of their employment.”  He looked at me thoughtfully, and I could see him further considering what I was thinking of asking.

“Order 2 was an even bigger disaster, I’ll grant you that.  Disband the Iraqi army making 450,000 trained soldiers suddenly unemployed and without pensions in a country where an occupying power was breaking down doors, taking people to be tortured in Saddam’s former torture prisons, where the power grid had been destroyed by American bombing, where hospitals for the masses of wounded and sick were understaffed as a result of Order 1 that fired the best doctors, nurses and administrators in Iraq?  Big fucking mistake, huge mistake, unless your aim was to create an insurgency.  I grant you all that, sir, now just keep moving.”  This time the muzzle of the gun pushed me a bit more emphatically.

“And was Bremer a complete asshole to issue this statement to the suffering people of the Iraq that he was busy anally violating in ways no less brutal than his predecessor, Saddam:  We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture, or if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order upon this country?  Granted, granted, granted: complete asshole.  But Bremer retired soon after to a lavish estate and hid what might have been, to a lesser man, his shameful failure at a variety of luxury properties he and his family owned.  I mean, hasn’t the man suffered enough?”

And, truly, why was I even thinking of these things as a cross was waiting for me across town?  To my left and right I could see others, already crucified, writhing as they tried to die.  Mercifully, their vocal cords had been severed to minimize their expressions of suffering.  If you lead a life that takes you, inexorably, to your execution, have the decency to at least…

The butt of a rifle, expertly deployed, made my chip fall silent.