What's the Point?!
Teaching skepticism, Stephen Colbert and the Grammies

I had some kind of watershed moment in class today when I asked my students to tell me why they were doing their assignment, in this case a response to an article they'd read. I asked them where they might read or write a "response essay" in the real world (which is understood as anywhere but school without me having to explain it).

They said--

letters to the editor,
book, movie, music reviews,
editorials,
legal opinions and dissents,
reports on proposals at work,
scientific review of science reports,
on and on.

What I've been trying to get at this semester in Comp II is that writing is largely a process of call and response. Someone calls--through an article, book, movie, song, editorial, legal argument, proposal or report--and we respond, often in writing. It's all one big conversation, and learning to be a better writer is learning to be more effective in that conversation.

Now, today, we were talking about why your response essay should probably respond to more than one point in the original article, more than simply the idea of the original article, for the response to have any real integrity. I said "probably" because the writing itself can pay off even if the response is misguided.

I used Stephen Colbert as an example. Since most of my students don't watch the show (a majority of college students today share no such pop culture common denominators), I explained that Colbert's comedy largely revolves around the fact that he doesn't bother reading the news, he just reacts to headlines that he may not even understand. In this spoof of political punditry, he encourages his viewers not to read either so that they can be happy together in their self righteous ignorance. He calls his audience "the heroes" and he tells them "you get it," and so he makes the audience feel good about themselves and they worship him in return.

That's the joke in a nutshell. One of the wonderful happy accidents of the show is that occasionally he can actually get something right because he's just dancing in the dark anyway. But the usefulness of the example for my class was to talk about how we ain't gonna make it with the smart readers with this kind of an approach. Colbert assumes we know that and makes use of it to satirize all the talk idiocy that all but wags the dog in politics today.

When I could see my students and I were on the same page with this. (We were talking; I wasn't just spouting off the way I am here.) I said that's why I wanted them to respond to more than one point in the original article, not because I say so. And my point was, really, "think skeptically about my class and make your choices only when they make sense to you. You may not have this freedom in every class, but you need to do it in here to make this class work."

And I mean that. I want them to get the point if they're going to do something. If the point's not clear, I want them to argue with me. Otherwise, I can't do my job.

Maybe that's why I was so frustrated by so much of the Grammies last night. I didn't know what was causing this vague dissatisfaction that went on all evening--with a handful of exceptions--but it has become more clear to me today....

I rarely got the point.

A) What's the point of giving a series of lifetime achievement awards if you are going to do it so thoughtlessly that each one feels like a snub?

B) What's the point of "honoring" Sly Stone with a bunch of musicians who seem incapable of coming together as any sort of family, much less a family stone, and what's the point of dragging Sly out in the light and then not checking his mics so he didn't appear incompetent? (see A.)

C) What's the point of "honoring" one of the greatest record makers of all time, Richard Pryor, with an awkward, accidental silence and then cutting the spot altogether for the sake of time constraints or whatever? (see A)

D) What's the point of cobbling a tribute to New Orleans with a tribute to Wilson Pickett and not giving enough time for either? (see A)

E) What's the point of giving half a dozen more awards to U2? (I can't say anything about the Atomic Bomb album because I haven't heard a song that makes me want to get it yet, but I get why Kanye West's "Late Registration" matters and matters deeply and hasn't left my CD player for long since it came out in the summer.)

F) What's the point of honoring Green Day again for the same music Green Day won for last year?

G) What's the point of having Madonna dance with Gorillaz' ugly animated cartoons?

H) What's the point of having Mary J. Blige come out to sing "One" with you and then being so unresponsive to her that the Twoness of the evening felt more pronounced than before the song started, on an evening when the gulf (more class than race) felt wider than I ever remember it feeling before.

What did seem to have a point was Jay-Z with a John Lennon t-shirt on, as my brother pointed out, referencing Danger Mouse, which was then made complete with Paul's presence in the Linkin Park set. (The point of using "Yesterday" for that, of all songs, "Yesterday," was .... uh .... more obscure.)

What had a point was Paul choosing to play "Helter Skelter" just to show that song in a new context and to show himself in a half forgotten light.

What had a point was Kanye's reworking of "Gold Digger" around rival marching bands, if only because it was so damn fun but also because it provoked thought about the cultural resonance of everything playing across the stage all night.

What had a point was having Sam Moore and Allan Toussaint featured on that stage (could have used more of that).

What had a point was Bruce Springsteen stepping aside to let Katrina survivor Irma Thomas take the mic during the Wilson Pickett tribute.

Bruce scored a double by focusing the audience on Iraq for three minutes and punctuating that with "Bring 'em home!"

What had a point was Alicia Keyes and Stevie Wonder breaking into "Higher Ground" to celebrate the King vision of possibility.

If ever a night needed such a focus....

"Think -- Let your mind go, let yourself be free"

--Aretha Franklin

This message from my friend Lee Ballinger (pasted below) helps explain some of what can be most difficult about teaching in our society. This is particularly vivid in the job I do, teaching writing, which is--more or less--problem solving with words. Too often, my students have been trained to offer "correct" answers that don't reflect much thinking.

It shouldn't be surprising that once enthusiastic learners (every pre-school age child) come out of twelve years of school turned off by the idea of education. And our politics--which limit our thoughts of alternatives to one mind-numbing lesser of two evils scenario after another--is a turn off for the same reason. Neither system encourages real thought because the basis for the entire system discourages critical thinking about why things are the way they are and how much different they might be.

I feel like a lot of my job is to help people unlock their potential as writers by encouraging them to think about the mixed messages that are inhibiting them. What he shows here (accurately, I think) is that this tendency to discourage real thought is built into the DNA of this country, justifying slave labor in the name of freedom. To my ears, that's exactly what Aretha's song is about. DA

Ballinger writes--

In the new book At Canaan's Edge, Taylor Branch describes how the rise of slavery, especially in the United States, led to an explosion of pseudoscientific attempts to explain the status of kidnapped Africans as due to their being part of a different species (smaller brain size, different forehead angles, etc. etc.).

"The brain of the Negro," Louis Agassiz told the Charleston Literary and Philosophic Society in 1845, "is that of the imperfect brain of a 7 month old infant in the womb of a White." Agassiz, a Swiss native, went on to become one of the founders of organized scientific inquiry in the U.S. He drew huge crowds for his lectures in both the North and South, married the first president of Radcliffe, and a special endowment was created for him by industrialist Abbott Lawrence to fund a Harvard professorship. Agassiz went on to found both the National Academy of Sciences and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Biology.

As the twig is bent, so grows the tree...

In 1966, the tobacco industry gave the American Medical Association $20 million and the AMA dutifully produced a study claiming that smoking was not a health hazard. This was followed by a Nobel laureate's assertion that smoking dramatically increases intelligence. The tobacco industry was and is linked to slavery not only in its origins but in the way it continues to help fund and maintain our Southern-dominated political system and all that that implies (e.g. the 2000 Presidential election).
*****
In 2006 this is the whirlwind we have reaped--the reduction of science to the self-interested gibberish of powerful elites. And science isn't merely lab experiments, it also includes being able to look at the world as it actually is. With the blinders we have inherited from slavery's apologists, that's often very hard to do.

For instance, even though just a casual investigation confirms that modern technology has created the resources to house, feed, educate, and keep healthy everyone on earth, we accept the totally unscientific premise that only some of the world's population can eat, be healthy, or go to school.

To see the boundless possibilities which now exist for the human race requires only that we shed the intellectual straitjacket fashioned by slaveowners to hold us in check. Of course, to act on that fact means rejecting all those whose vision is at best limited to a few more crumbs for a few more people. That includes the Democratic Party and the vast network of pseudoscientific opportunists they are linked to--the poverty pimps, the profitable non-profits, the NGO charlatans. They cannot survive a mass embrace of science, an acceptance by our friends and neighbors of the world as it actually is. We should welcome this, remembering Jimi Hendrix's gleeful refrain: "Fall mountains, fall."

The truth shall set you free. LB

Synchronicity or Synchronized Swimming?

A Look At This Week's Headlines

Headline #1

Monday, April 23, 2006--USA Today

Ford will cut 25,000 to 30,000 jobs, close 14 plants

From the article, "Ford's earnings marked the third straight year of profitability. But the $2 billion, or $1.04 per share, in net income was still down 42% from $3.5 billion, or $1.73 a share, in 2004."

Headline #2

Monday, April 23, 2006--Time Magazine hits newstands

On the Cover: Bill Ford Has Big Ideas About How to Save His Company--and the Endangered U.S. Auto Industry. How He's Trying to Give Motown Back It's Mojo!

Inside Headline: CAN THIS MAN SAVE THE AMERICAN AUTO INDUSTRY? PART REBEL, PART PRINCE, BILL FORD, BELIEVES A GREEN REVOLUTION CAN FIX HIS FAMILY'S TROUBLED COMPANY. BUT CAN HE MAKE CARS YOU'LL CRAVE??

Blogger note: I waited all week to hear someone comment on Time's puff piece, but I've waited in vain. If you've heard any commentary, let me know. This is a good illustration of the nature of the system--if a company's not busy growing, it's busy dying, and that's the real factor at work here that explains much more than greed.

Meanwhile, today from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute:

"Within the top fifth of families, the wealthiest families enjoyed the highest income growth over the past two decades. In the 11 states that are large enough to permit this calculation, the incomes of the top 5 percent of families rose between 66 percent and 132 percent during this period. This is faster than the income growth among the top fifth of families as a whole in these states— and much faster than the income growth among the bottom fifth of families in these states, which ranged from 11 percent to 24 percent."

Time knows where its bread is buttered.

I Know You Got Soul

Even though I'm a music writer who teaches writing, I don't use a lot of music lyrics in the classroom. For one thing, I don't think lyrics are meant to stand alone. For another, music is a very personal thing, for both myself and many of my students. I know the music I'm in dialogue with and the music my students are in dialogue with are not just different, but distinctly varied from student to student. So rather than try to shove my own personal discoveries in their faces (my passion suggesting that what I like is better than what they like in some way), I either talk about music they bring up, or I talk about it more in the aggregate. It's a part of my class, by analogy and anecdote, but I kind of keep my own fave raves to myself.

But the other day, as I was on my way in to talk to my Comp 1 students for the first time about writing, I thought about my old friend Billy Chin who turned me onto Eric B & Rakim, the duo that changed the way I heard rap more dramatically than anyone else. They were definitely a duo, and those were Eric B's well placed beats and scratches that gave the music its seductive grooves and vibrant edge, a sound that holds up against any rap to this day, almost 19 years later.

It was Rakim Billy Chin raved about that night, talking about the single "I Know You Got Soul" and these lines where the rapper describes himself getting trapped between the lines he writes. It goes like this:

"I start to think and then I sink/Into the paper like I was ink/When I'm writing, I'm trapped in between the lines/I escape when I finish the rhyme...I got soul."

My students had come into class the other day with various quotes from writers describing the difficulties of writing and their insights into how to overcome them. My gut instinct was that this Rakim lyric spoke to what they were saying, so I started the class by putting it on the board. I think only one student in each class knew who Rakim was--and that mainly because 50 Cent and Fat Joe check him in recent hits--but that was probably a good thing because they didn't come at it with any preconceptions.

They really responded better to the lyric than I could have expected because it spoke to almost everything we needed to talk about. It spoke to why so many of my young women students write long frustrated letters to those significant others who don't seem to listen to them, and, in the process of getting trapped between the lines, they make some rhyme of it, in a sense, and find some peace--most of the time tearing up that letter and throwing it away because all they needed was to take that journey into the lines, to sink into the ink and find some way to escape. Once they've found their way out, they're whole again--as Rakim says, "I got soul."

Those lines spoke to their anxieties about writing, the frustrations in actually trying to sort through their thoughts, the longing to do nothing more than get out of it once they get deeply enough into it, but, at the same time, the reason it's all worth it--to find that soul again.