Brummagem Review

A Cop Reviews a Cop Play

2012-01-30T15:42:00.000-08:00

It rained all night in Oklahoma City the night after Thanksgiving. This was bad news to me because my partner and I had agreed to do a ride-along for Ben Hall and Mike Waugh, two local actors performing in Carpenter Square's production of "A Steady Rain," a play about two Chicago cops. We regretfully warned Ben and Mike that rain usually slows us down. I had hoped we would spend the shift beating the bushes, talking to the prostitutes and pimps who frequent our sector, and looking into the dilapidated low-rent housing of the inner city (in neighborhoods remarkably similar to south Chicago). Along the way, I thought we would have plenty of time to tell Mike and Ben about the both the triumphs and the frustrations of big city police work. So I was disappointed that the rain threatened to derail that.

We did manage to show the guys a few things. Mike (who rode with me) got to talk to a couple of meth addicts and, through talking about then hearing reference to a notable ghetto figure called "Mama K," he got a picture of the interesting close-knit networking of the city's underbelly. He also watched a creative arrest. Perhaps most importantly, since the play takes place in a summer when it rained non-stop in Chicago, the guys got to think about what unrelenting rain might be like to guys who spend entire nights in a car.

I don't know how much the ride-alongs helped Ben and Mike. But I hope they were able to take away some lessons about how cops live, think, and act in a world defined by grey. I've always thought that the hallmark of inner-city police work is the often fuzzy lines between the good guys and bad guys, legal and illegal, aggressive and abusive. The officer's primary struggle comes in negotiating this grey. And whether one ends up as a good cop or a bad one depends in large part on where he ends up when he's passed through a grey deeper than the rainiest Chicago twilight.

It is capturing this grey that Keith Huff did so well in crafting this very rich script. Both characters, Joey and Denny, are both quite good and also very bad. As Linda McDonald, the director and my former teacher, mentor, and friend, explained to me after I saw the show last Friday, "both characters are likable in their own way. But one of them loses his soul and the other finds it."

Indeed, as a city cop myself (a good one, I hope), I saw myself in both these characters. I appreciated Joey's (Ben Hall) heart. He is a cop who wants to do it right, despite a crippling addiction. And when Denny (Mike Waugh) railed against the seemingly illogical unfairness of the police department, I found it hard to keep from shouting out loud, "damn right!" even when I knew that he had brought his situation on himself. These character were both good cops, and bad cops--they were also both incredibly human characters whose stories were tragic and heartfelt. Of course, as anyone would when watching a play about their profession, I thought the script got some things wrong. But it rose well above the typical cop-movie stereotypes that Huff intentionally subverts.

Mike and Ben handled these characters with remarkable aplomb. Ben's narrative delivery is often lyrical and always empathetic. Mike (who I had seen in The Goat: or Who is Sylvia) was superb playing Denny, a character who can be hateful, but who the audience must ultimately love. They work well together as well, a difficult task when one considers that they must play characters who have been "best friends since kindergarten."

I am a former professional actor, failed playwright, and professional police officer and, thus, likely the most difficult audience this play could have had. And I was very impressed. I empathized and commiserated with these characters, and I have spent the last three days since thinking about the script. And that's what I like in a play.

"A Steady Rain" runs at CST through February 4th. Go see it.

What Toothbrushes Taught Me About Ways of Seeing

2012-01-03T09:44:00.000-08:00

Since our boys were brand new, we have organized things by color in order to keep straight what belongs to which kid. The phrase "Blue is for Beckett," has been a mantra in our house for the last two and a half years. When they were newborns, we would dress Beckett in blue so that others knew which kid was which. Though we have pretty much dropped color coding their clothing (Beckett, as it turns out, likes much brighter colors), we still use this to organize items that they should not share.

Beckett's milk cup is still blue because Aodan needs lactose free milk, so the coloring helps us keep the two types of milk separate. We also keep their toothbrushes separated by color. Blue is for Beckett. But we recently learned that even this simple system is not fool-proof. Even something as seemingly straight forward as color scheme is, as it turns out, subject to interpretation.

I learned this when we were both in the bathroom at the same time while I was brushing the boys' teeth. Charissa said something like, "oh, you switched their tooth brushes. I guess it doesn't matter." Of course, I hadn't. I was using the blue toothbrush to brush Beckett's teeth, so I replied, "blue is for Beckett." I then learned that she thought the other toothbrush was the blue one. We had been using opposite toothbrushes the entire time we've had this set. She is not, by the way, color blind. Nor am I. But we saw these two toothbrushes very differently, obviously.

Every geeky kid with an existential streak will remember the moment when he began to wonder whether or not people really do see colors the same way. What if what I see as blue, you see as red? We would never know that what we saw was different because we would both always call what we were seeing blue. This is the kind of question that is interesting from a theoretical perspective but that really doesn't matter much. As long as we consistently call that color blue, it doesn't really matter what it looks like to us, we can still communicate about the color consistently. But what was happening here was something different.

When I asked Charissa what she saw when she looked at these toothbrushes, she said that the one on the left was a green toothbrush with blue trim, and the one on the right was a blue toothbrush with purple trim. This is because the bases and the very tops of these toothbrushes are green and blue, respectively.

But I see these completely differently. I see the long necks on these toothbrushes and the fats parts on the handles, so I see them as blue (on the left) and purple (on the right). So, though we both see the same colors, we define which color is predominant, and thus definitive, in different ways.

This hints at a fundamental difference in the way my wife and I see things. What I see as trim, or background noise, she sees as defining characteristics. From my perspective, it seems like she sees a negative image of the same world I see. What's unimportant to me, is definitive to her.

Of course, to what extent our way of seeing toothbrushes is analogous to our ways of seeing the rest of the world is not settled. But the lesson here is still an interesting one. My wife and I, despite sharing our lives together, and despite the fact that we agree on most things and have an extraordinary number of things in common, see the world through different eyes, and may perceive it completely differently.

And ultimately, we name things according to how we see them. We see things according to how we define their characteristics. So, which characteristics we see as important--as definitive--has everything to do with how we name the world.

This Thanksgiving, Are We Celebrating Cooperation or Genocide

2011-11-23T13:06:00.000-08:00

Anyone at least my age remembers participating in Thanksgiving Day pageants in elementary school. In these pageants, some of us would dress like pilgrims, some like Indians (always an inaccurate term, now a distasteful one too), and some would even dress as turkeys. We would sing songs and perform little skits which all designed reinforce the American mythos of a cooperative relationship between Native Americans and early settlers of the "New World." Though the holiday (which was made an official by Abraham Lincoln, undoubtedly for political purposes) had been intended to celebrate the cooperation between the Plymouth Colony and the Wapanoag tribe, the holiday was often connected to Christopher Columbus who we were always taught had "discovered" the New World. In fact, in Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the same day the U.S. celebrated Columbus Day.

Of course, this myth has come under fire in the past couple decades as well meaning folks have asked whether or not we ought to be celebrating the fact that an imperialist European force crossed an ocean and subdued a continent full of people. For this reason, I was surprised to see my sons come home from day care the other day with construction paper headdresses rather like the ones I remember making for our Thanksgiving pageants. Of course, I also noticed that the headdresses were altered from those that I remember, as if they were hiding what they were. Instead of cutouts of feathers, the headdresses were adorned with cutouts of hand prints in yellow, green, and blue. They combined feathers with our old technique of drawing turkeys.

These, along with the general spirit of the season got me thinking. How should well meaning people view Thanksgiving? How should we view our early history as a nation? Were we heroes in search of religious freedom, or wicked imperialists bent to grabbing as much land as we could, at the expense of those who already lived here? Is either of these views accurate or fair?

Certainly, the myths of my childhood are inadequate. It will not do for me to celebrate Columbus (since we have connected these events in our perception of cultural history) for discovering a "New World." How can this be when millions of people already lived here. To do so requires that we take a decidedly Euro-centric view of history. Only Europeans matter, and only their exploits are worthy of history.

But might the other extreme be lacking as well? Should I refuse to celebrate the crimes against humanity perpetrated by those Imperialist Europeans from whom I descended and who are ultimately responsible for my being here? I would argue that this view also involves assumptions that are both Euro-centric and inaccurate.

This view, in most of its forms, seems to assume a benevolent population of Native Americans who were bewildered by a European understanding of land ownership and who were ultimately overcome by superior force. This view positions European settlers as pirates (Vonnegut used this term explicitly) but it also seems to position Native Americans as romantically naive, almost childish people who lived off the land, to which they believed they belonged.

This view is every bit as racist as the first. It ignores the richly complex sociopolitical milieu of the Native American tribes living on the east coast in the seventeenth century. It ignores the complex relationship and the history of the relationship between early settlers and Native Americans, particularly the Wapanoags, the tribe if the "first" Thanksgiving.

A well nuanced explanation of the history of early settlers and their relationship to those people already living in the Massachusetts Bay area can be found in Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower. His book provides wonderful historical insight as to how the events we talk about at Thanksgiving actually occurred, who the people involved were, and what their relationship was like. Through this book, we gain a better sense of what we ought to regret, and what we ought to celebrate.

The first generations of settlers at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were far from being conquistadors looking for cities of gold. Instead, they were half-inept sailors sick and weary from a long voyage. They might have resembled illegal immigrants who have just crossed the Arizona desert more than a well armed force of confident Europeans. For their part, the Native Americans living in New England were certainly not romantic nomads quietly living off the land. Instead, they were farmers in permanent settlements. They lived on close proximity to other tribes and were thus politically savvy, engaging in land disputes and forging treaties, much like those is crowded Europe.

When colonists first arrived on Massachusetts Bay, they were hardly conquerors ready to subdue a bunch of disorganized natives. In fact, it seems likely that, had the Wapanoags wanted to, they could have pushed the settlers back into the sea. When fighting did begin to break out, it was localized. The first (and most important) major conflict came with King Philip's war, decades after the settling of Plymouth. Philbrick describes the ultimate cause of the war in this way:

By the midpoint of the seventeenth century. . .the attitudes of of many of the Indians and English had begun to change [from that of a spirit of cooperation and cohabitation]. . .Both sides had begun to envision a future that did not include the other.

This first war was much more evenly matched that one might assume. By this point, Native Americans had been able to acquire the same weapons as the settlers, and King Philip (the English name adopted by Metacomet, sachem of the Pokanokets) was well educated and often dressed in expensive clothing he bought in Boston. On the other side, one of the chief agitators (perhaps accidentally) of the war was a Harvard educated Native American Christian named John Sassamon.

The point is, The breakdown of diplomacy between early settlers and Native Americans was hardly a one sided affair, and it is hardly accurate to think of early settlers as marauding invaders sacking the villages of unsuspecting natives. Instead, two groups who had one lived in cooperation had begun to want to push the other out. So, with a more nuanced view of how things really were, how are we to think about and celebrate Thanksgiving?

Without a doubt, the policies of the young United States toward Native Americans was deplorable. The evils of the White Man's Burden, western expansion, and so on should not be minimized, and certainly should not be celebrated. And it may be impossible to separate entirely these travesties from our early history as settlers. But the spirit of cooperation between Native Americans and settlers which allowed Plymouth to survive can and should be remembered and celebrated. As Philbrick points out:

For a nation that that has come to recognize that one of its greatest strengths is its diversity, the first fifty years of Plymouth Colony stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning.

Without a doubt, much of the history that follows these first years is tragic and shameful. As greed and hatred are common to all mankind, tragedy and shame mar all of human history, not just that of this country. But this first generation of settlers shared with us the dream of a cooperative utopia, and though they were sick and poor, that dream was very nearly realized because two groups who did not know each other, could not speak the same language, and had no reason to trust one another nevertheless shared with one another. Thanksgiving, then, may and should still be celebrated as a picture of what could have been--a picture of what still may be.

Brecht, Alienation, Reality TV

2011-11-20T18:47:00.000-08:00

I wrote my first non-realistic play my senior year of college. The play was decidedly (in retrospect at least) a closet drama. The play contained all the things I loved about absurdist drama: blatant Marxism, Brechtian alienation, and so on. That is to say, it was way too European for American audiences.

When I got to graduate school and began looking closer at American and English non-realistic plays by writers like Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and so on, I realized that these writers had not been able to do what continental European writers like Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, Weiss, and other had considered crucial. They had been unable to banish subtext.

European Absurdists accepted Brecht's notion that an audience could never fully be convinced by characters in a play. They could never be convinced that the characters had cross motives, sexual desires, inner conflict, because they could never be convinced that the people they saw on stage were characters at all. The fact that they were spectators in a theatre would always break any illusion that an audience might have that these actors were real people or that their conflicts, problems, and relationships were genuine. Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief," then, is in fact impossible. The space alone precludes it.

Since this is the case, according to Brecht, the theatre must find a means outside of emotion to
communicate with an audience. For Brecht, this means was via the intellect, through what he called the "Epic theatre." He wrote

The essential point of the epic theatre is that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things.

The theatre, then, is didactic. It "must not believe that one can identify oneself with our world by empathy, nor must it want this." Instead, the theatre should ask the audience to think. In order to accomplish this, Brecht espoused a technique (or class of techniques) knows as "alienation." A play, rather than trying to bring the audience in, should continually remind an audience that it is apart from the action, that it is not invited into the world of the play, that there is, in fact, not a world of the play at all, but only actors on a stage reciting lines.

So, as I thought of Brecht's desire that the theatre should be didactic--that it should cause an audience to think about things--I wondered how the theatre might carry this out without the European burden of alienating the audience. American audiences expect to be emotionally involved and want to be drawn in, even if this is not fully possible. How does the American theatre accomplish Brecht's goals (a theatre that forces an audience to consider) when it cannot accept his methods?

I then thought of the ABC television show "What Would You Do." In this reality show, which combines the "happening" of the 1960's with Chris Hanson style investigative journalism, actors in public settings act out shocking scenarios in order to record the reactions of unwitting spectators. The idea is to conduct a social experiment investigating whether or not people will react ethically. "What Would You Do" represents an anti-Brechtian form of didactic theatre. That is, it attempts to perform a didactic role by asking the audience to consider how and whether they would act in these shocking situations. Yet it does so not by alienating the audience so that it is reminded that the spectacle isn't real, but by convincing the audience that the scene is real. In order to do so, it blurs the lines between the traditional theatrical relationships of actor, audience, and space.

Actor and Audience:
In "What Would You Do" the shocking situations that make up the dramatic conflict are scripted and performed by professional actors. And, obviously, the viewing audience represents a very traditional passive audience. But the show blurs the line between actor and audience by staging its scenes in public places full of unwitting people who just happen to be in the right place at the right time. By filming these people's reactions to events that they do not know are scripted, and by enticing them into action, the show turns audience members into actors.

Also, when these people do react and intercede into the scenes, they then take agency from the professional actors who had up until then been performing roles. These actors then, albeit briefly, become audience members. They must watch and listen to the intercessors in order to respond appropriately and continue the action, which has become improvised. Thus, the show subverts the roles of actor and audience, though both roles do still clearly exist.

Space:
The use of space in these performances is the most important reason these ruses work. What makes the willing suspension of disbelief ultimately impossible in traditional theatre is the space itself. An audience member at a traditional play can't help but to know he's in a theatre. After all, he has bought a ticket, he has probably dressed up, driven to the theatre, taken his wife out to eat before the show, read the program, sat down when the lights dimmed. And throughout the action of the play, he sits in an area lit very differently than the space the actors occupy, likely in a row of chairs physically separated from the actors. The space, then, is alienating in and of itself.

In "What Would You Do?" on the other hand, the space the audience member enters is a public place, likely one she frequents. The space is not the Orpheum Theatre, but rather it is the restaurant that she would have gone to on the way to the theatre. She has no ticket and no program. She sits among the actors and in fact cannot know which are actors and which are other audience members like herself. She does not even know she's in a theatrical space.

Un-Alienation
This use of space then allows the spectator to be convinced that what they are seeing is, in fact, real. There is no physical reminder that the actors are reciting a memorized script, thus the audience member can fully empathize with the actor, whom they regard as a real person. This use of space, then, un-alienates (admittedly, a clumsy term) the spectator by bringing him within the same physical space as the actor. They share the stage.

The show also brings the audience member into the play in a very literal way. The entire purpose of the script it to build and build the action until some audience member reacts and intrudes into the scene. The show thus un-alienates the spectator by making him an actual part of the play. Of course, the beauty is that the spectator does not know he has become an actor in a play. Instead, he is convinced that his actions and the actions of the professional actors are real. He has unwillingly suspended his disbelief.

In this way the audience member has, through the theatrical event, been forced not only to think about what she would do, but she has been put to the test. She has had to either act or refuse to act. Similarly, the viewing audience has been able to empathize with the duped unwitting accidental actor because he could just as easily be tricked the next time he is on the subway or at a bar. He, therefore, must think about what he would have done if this shocking scene had presented itself to him.

The show then is didactic and theatrical and it is so without alienating, but in fact by un-alienating, the audience. It has then done what Brecht asked the theatre to do (caused the audience to think about things) while maintaining the aesthetic demands of an American audience to be "moved."

The Hands-in-Pocket Revolution

2011-10-08T07:11:00.000-07:00

Last night, Charissa and I sent our boys off to their grandparents' for the weekend, so we spent a night on the town. We went downtown for chocolates and coffee then decided to take a stroll to see the OKC National Memorial because Charissa had never seen it at night. On the way, we were surprised to see a large group of people in a downtown park, which is usually home to a number of homeless. But this looked like a rally. Complete with a News 9 van. So seeing some Bricktown police officers I know, we went and asked what was going on.

Turns out, the Occupy Wall Street movement had come to Oklahoma City. So, in front of me were a group of well meaning revolutionaries wanting to voice their concern that the wealth of this country was in the hands of a very small percentage of the population.

This is a obviously not a new complaint, and it's a concern that I should be careful to note here that I share. I think it's appropriate to ask whether or not a democracy where so much power is held by so few can be a democracy at all. When small groups of people hold the money, and therefore the power to make their voices heard, the rest must either agree with them or be silenced. This is obviously a huge problem in a democracy, and one that I think is a political reality in our country. I think it's fair to ask if our democracy isn't something more like an oligarchy.

I also sympathize with the complaint that wealth is not spread more equitably. So few have so much, while so many have so little. This is and always has been a reality in our world. But the problem seems somehow more insidious in a country in which hard work is supposed to be the key to success, where our own national mythos holds that if one simply works as hard as one can, one can and will rise. Of course, for many, this is simply untrue. For the uneducated, the poor, the handicapped, and many others is positions of disadvantage, it is awfully hard in this country to rise much above one's stature no matter how hard one works. After all, if you go from being a fry cook to a shift leader, you haven't really gone so far after all. This is a sad and awful reality. One that compromises our democratic ideals. One that, perhaps, calls for revolution.

But what I saw in the park last night was not a revolution. It was not revolutionary. It was not even in touch with the real problem. The fact is, the whole "I am the 99%" line is a sham. I did not see the poor, the stricken, the underprivileged, the oppressed. I saw no minorities (though I did see one African American woman on the News 9 story), and in an interesting irony, I saw not one homeless person in a park where homeless people sleep every night. What I did see were a lot of upper-middle-class white people, many college students (one even carrying a sign with an OU logo printed on it), wearing interesting and expensive body art and piercings, taking pictures of each other with smart phones, and all-in-all having a jolly time.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with upper-middle-class white people noticing and speaking out about social inequities (I am, after all, all of these things). But as I listened to their speeches and watched their interviews, I became more and more aware that the people I was listening to didn't have a clue, and in fact had no compulsion to enact anything like the kind of social revolution that would change this country.

I found that I wanted to get up and speak myself (I didn't). I wanted to ask for a show of hands in answer to these questions: How many of you know what is at 800 W. California? What about 1335 W. Sheridan? How may of you have ever been to SW 8th and Rockwood? SW 15th and Westwood? NE 28th and Kelley?

These addresses describe the City Rescue Mission and the Jesus House. SW 8th and Rockwood is an intersection less than a mile from the opulence of the new Devon Building. The street at this intersection and for a few blocks on either side of it is in such disrepair that it is not even paved. Meanwhile the city that says it doesn't have money in the budget to fix the street is re-doing the Myriad Gardens--the front yard of the Devon building. These other intersections are the locations of large public housing projects in the inner city.

Then I wanted to ask them how many of them had been to Bricktown? To a Thunder game? To an OU-Texas party?

What I saw last night was not a collection of people dedicated to bringing about change. Instead, I saw a collection of college students who wanted to take part in something and leftovers from the 60's wanting to relive their own college years. Occupy OKC may as well have been a flash mob.

For those of us in the upper middle class, real change must begin with our admission that we are not victims in some class struggle between millionaires and thousandaires. We are suspects. We are people who demand to be heard but who blithely ignore the problems of people much less fortunate than ourselves--people who really are oppressed and poverty stricken. We complain that our student loan rates are unfair considering our sorry job prospects while we ignore the man working six days a week sweeping the street up after our protests. We don't even know that when we're sleeping in after a Saturday full of college football games and fun nights in the Paseo, he'll be getting up at 4:00 and walking to Labor Ready so he can be in line before all the good jobs are gone. We don't know about. We don't care about him. Yet we demand that something be done about him.

So, my complaint in this blog is against pretend revolutionaries. My exhortation, though, is for real ones--would be revolutionaries who don't know what to do. It's as simple as this:

Do Something!

Realize that standing in a park under the Sandridge building hoping Tom Ward will throw some money down does nothing to change the status quo. Get out of the park and into the community. I've often half-joked that I want a revolution led by Jesus Christ and Kurt Vonnegut. That's because these men both realized that change happens by getting among people and helping, eating with them, hearing their problems, being a voice for them. And doing these things (as Paulo Freire has suggested) not as patronizing liberators but as neighbors.

Sure, both these men took to the streets as protesters (Jesus was after all killed for the things he said), but they both understood that this in not where the real work is done. The real work is done by being kind to people. By living among them.

You want to see wealth redistributed? Start with your own. Feed and clothe people, even if it costs you your smart phone. Care for the sick, even if it costs you a semester or two of college. Go into foreign countries or even poor neighborhoods in your own country, even if you're uncomfortable. Use the privilege of your education to understand and voice the concerns of people who need an advocate. Put down your sign and pick up your shovel.

Love, the Self, and the Divine

2011-08-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

My friend and fellow writer and teacher Jessa Sexton once very flatteringly quoted me in a book. At some point, I told her that "you cannot love others until you learn to love yourself," or something like that. What I think I meant was that you cannot value others until you are able to value yourself, something that makes sense. As soon as Jessa told me that she wanted to quote me, I was embarrassed by this quote. Obviously, Jessa is my friend and I allowed her to quote me (I was pleased to have ever said anything that anyone found inspirational, especially someone as intelligent as my friend), but not without a little shame--mostly because the quote feels a bit cliched to me. But as I look at the quote now, I realize something else that I dislike about it. It assumes, I think, a kind of emotional state in which my ability to love others is dependent on my ability to feel good about myself. It's a matter of self esteem, a concept I've since come to see as dubious, fleeting, and perhaps even irrelevant.

At 32 years old, having been married now for ten years to a fantastic wife with whom I have had two sons, my thinking about love and what it is have changed dramatically. Love is, and this is every bit as cliched as my quote in Jessa's book, much more active than my original quote assumed. It is not a feeling one has, though feeling is certainly a part of it. Love is a stuff one does. It is service and sacrifice. It is treating others as if they have been made in God's image, an understanding of the value of individuals.

With that in mind, I'd like to revise my thinking in my old quote. In fact, I'd like to reverse it: I could not love myself until I learned to love others.

You see, despite my seemingly arrogant bravado, I am a very self-conscious person. I often doubt my intelligence, question my talent, and fail to see my own worth. Often, it seems to me that there's just not much to love about myself. But, rather in opposition to my old quote, it is when I love others that I begin to understand my place and consequently my own worth as a child of God.

My faith has taught me that God is, above any other aspect of his complex personality, defined by love. It is therefore no surprise that his most important commandment to the people he has declared to be created in his image is to love. My capacity to love, as God has loved, is one of the most important ways in which I am created in the image of God.

Therefore, it is when I love others--through service, through kindness, through grace, through sharing a meal or a kind word--that I most able to see God in me. And when I realize that God lives within me, that I am in essence a container for the divine, I am able to see and accept my own value. When I see others through God's eyes, I see myself through them as well.

Thus, in my love for others, I develop a purpose and a sense of self--and a love for what I am and what I am called to do.

Who's Kelly Dodson? One year after the Bed Intruder

2011-08-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

July 28th was the one year anniversary of the original airing of the WFF-Huntsville story that made Antoine Dodson a household name. The story itself became a viral notable. Then the story became a commercial success for Dodson when the Gregory Brothers auto-tuned the interview, creating the Bed Intruder Song. The song propelled both Dodson and the Gregory Brothers (who had been auto-tuning news clips for some time already) into Web 2.0 fame.

In the year since, I've shared both versions of the video on Facebook, talked about the Gregory Brothers remix in PhD level rhetoric and composition courses, shown the video to four sections of English Composition, read articles, papers, and blog posts about what the phenomenon means with regard to old notions of authorship/copyright/creativity and so on.

As interesting as the phenomenon has been as a student of rhetoric, there is one element of the story that has always troubled me--that is, the exploitative element of the story itself.

When the original story first became a meme, I was troubled by what I saw as an act of exploitation by WFF in its piece. I worried that what made the story so compelling, the reason it was being passed around the internet so much, and indeed the reason WFF edited the interviews in the way they did was that Antoine Dodson is so laughable. The troubling thing is that what makes Dodson so laughable is that he seems to fit into so many stereotypes. We instantly peg him as a ghetto-dwelling, Ebonics-speaking homosexual--proof that the inner city really is inhabited by the something-less-than-humans that middle class suburbanites think it is.

Of course, the part of me that was troubled by the fact that a news station would take advantage of these aspects of Dodson's persona was soon silenced by Dodson himself. It was quickly apparent that he was soaking up the attention, and loving it. And as soon as the Gregory Brothers song began selling on iTunes, he began to make money off the story as well. So, if the story was exploitative, it was at least co-exploitative. Dodson gained from it as much as WFF did.

But what gets lost in a discussion of whether or not Dodson was exploited is what is lost in the original story as well. That is: the victim, Kelly Dodson.

When the story first aired, I noticed the discrepancy in the amount of time the 2 minute, 3 second story devoted to Antoine Dodson (three clips for a total of 31 seconds) versus the time given to Kelly Dodson, his sister (two clips for a total of 7 seconds). So, the brother of the victim gets three times the air time as the victim herself. At the time, I took this as evidence that WFF was exploiting Antoine Dodson's compelling ghetto character at the expense of Kelly. I'm ashamed to say that it was not until much later that I considered whether or not this was a disservice to Kelly more than it was to Antoine. We know that Kelly must have had more than 7 seconds worth of stuff to say, because the story itself contains a clip of her talking and pointing, but this is dubbed over with the voice of the reporter. So, what of Kelly's story is edited out to make room for Antoine's ridiculous, self-aggrandizing rant?

I have little doubt that the story was edited the way it was to feature Antoine because Antoine was, frankly,more fun to watch--because he was so laughable. But the fact is, this was supposed to be a story about an attempted rape. A man violated the sanctity of Kelly Dodson's bedroom, in an attempt to violate her body as well. Such a crime is not and should not have ever been a joke.

The fact that it has become one is certainly an interesting academic phenomenon. But it also ought to trouble us. A news station may very well have robbed a woman of her story in order to amuse its viewers with the antics of her brother. And we lapped it up and laughed it up. Should we be okay with this?

Notes on Hedging and Introversion

2011-07-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

A friend recently pointed me (via Facebook, of course) to a Carl King blog in which he outlines ten "myths about introverts." He bases these on his reading of the book The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olson Laney and on his own experiences. As an introvert myself, the list struck a chord with me, but I was especially interested in his third myth. He says:

Myth #3 – Introverts are rude.
Introverts often don’t see a reason for beating around the bush with social pleasantries. They want everyone to just be real and honest. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable in most settings, so Introverts can feel a lot of pressure to fit in, which they find exhausting.

This one stands out to me because I am often thought of as rude, aloof, and any number of other horrible things. It's something about myself that I have hated and that I have made concerted efforts to change. But the fact is, I don't ever even know when I'm doing something that others think is rude. And I am, in fact, far from being aloof; I am actually extremely emotional, though I am completely out of my element when trying to figure out how to express emotion in a socially acceptable way (so, I simply don't).

With regard to my accidental rudeness, I recently had an experience that I found enlightening, as I figured out what my misstep was, and why one particular person thought I was being rude, when I in fact, had no intention of being so.

Recently, while on a call, a coworker with whom I rarely work approached and asked "do you need anything?" I was extremely busy: I was on the phone with my our crime information unit, I was having an IM conversation with my dispatcher, and I was talking on the radio to our helicopter all at the same time. None of this, however, was anything she could do for me, so I said simply "no." She said something I didn't really hear in a tone of voice that was clearly perturbed and she drove away quickly. She then sent me a message that said "sorry I asked."

She apparently found my very terse answer to be rude. Of course, I had not intended to be rude. I was very busy, so I answered her question as directly and as quickly as I could. As a student of rhetoric, I was instantly interested in why my intention has miscarried. The fact is, and this is something I had not thought much about until this incident, there is an awful lot of hedging in our day to day communication.

"Hedging" is the process through which we qualify our language in order to soften the points we make, or the things we say. Our modern American culture seems to prize hedging a great deal. We are expected to use softening expressions like, "in my opinion," "I think," "but thank you anyway," and so on. It's a linguistic cue that is designed to be somewhat self-effacing ("this is what I believe, but it's only my opinion"), and thus exalting the other interlocutor.

Of course, these are dense, unspoken (and arbitrary) conventions designed to provide communicative context, especially with regard to how the speaker positions himself relative to the listener. In other words, by softening one's language, one in essence shows that he is not aggressive. Hedging is the linguistic equivalent of a dog's refusal to look her owner in the eye, in order to show that she is passive. And in a culture that presumes everyone to be equal, it's very important to us that we show through these cues that we are not trying to be the big dog.

It is this sort of dense communicative rule that is often lost on introverted folks like me. Perhaps this is because we tend to be fiercely interior and thus it does not occur to us that we will not be interpreted by our language alone, but also by these linguistic and contextual cues that we don't quite get--because we don't quite get other people.

Of course, while it has been a fun intellectual exercise for me to think about the importance of hedging, I don't expect that I'll start doing more of it. That is because I will continually fail to realize that I'm not doing it already.

Fathers, Sons, and the Badge: Just in Time for Father's Day

2011-06-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

The truth is, though my close friends will already know this, I have very little in common with my father. He and my mother divorced when I was very young, my mother remarried, and I have basically been raised by my step-father, who I consider to be as legitimately titled as father as my "real" (my childhood term) dad. As a child, I spent weekends with him, as is the case in many divorced families, but as I got older and had more and more things going on, I saw less and less of my father. We are, therefore, very different in many ways.

But this never stopped me from idolizing my father any less than all sons do. So I was always impressed with my dad, the police officer, as a young boy. I was impressed with the uniform, with watching him work on his patrol car so he could go to work, and with the relatively mild stories he would bring home. I was in fact so impressed that I began "arresting" neighborhood kids. My dad tells a story about hearing a loud commotion in front of the house once, and coming outside to find that I had a row of young Hispanic kids "jacked up" against his take home car. It might not be surprise then that I would grow up to become an officer myself (the fact that my step-father is a firefighter also meant that I had my choice of hero jobs to follow. . .I chose the one I thought looked more fun).

Nearly eight years after becoming an officer myself, I sat with my father today on Father's Day, eating grilled brats and talking about the job. Of course, I've "talked shop" with my dad countless times since joining the department, but not until today did it occur to me how interesting an unique these conversations were.

I came to this today because my in-laws were over as well and, in the middle of my conversation with my father, I grew suddenly aware and concerned that they were totally left out of the conversation. I don't know if they felt that they were, and I'm sure that they must have found some of our stories at least entertaining. But the fact is, educated and open as my in-laws are, they could never be anything more than entertained outsiders in our conversation. Indeed, I forgot they were there entirely, and wasn't even thinking of them as an audience. I was too busy talking about the family business.

This made made me realize what a unique type of shared family experience these stories represent. Yet, as strange as this family dynamic must seem, it is one of the most often written about aspects of police families. Edward Conlon (a third-generation cop) writes about his conversations with his father, an FBI agent in his book, Blue Blood. Brian McDonald, author of My Father's Gun recounts watching his brother (also third generation) share stories with his father. The History Channel mini-series based on and named for his book references these conversations as well.

In the police family, all family gatherings become business lunches, group therapy sessions, water cooler talks, or any number of other things. Ultimately, though, these conversations represent an extraordinary and unique form of bonding. There are not very many sets of fathers and sons that work under the same incompetent structure, deal with the same types of "customers," and ultimately stare into the same abyss.

The police family is a rare type of family where father and son are also brothers--members of the same tight-knit fraternity. For me, my shared experiences with my father have given me much to talk about with a man who is otherwise hard to talk to, and with whom I might not have much to talk about. We've experienced the same kinds of fights, lonely midnight shifts, frustrations with a sometimes apathetic, sometimes critical public, we've experienced the same fears, and seen many of the same horrors.

This gives us a bond unique even among fathers and sons. Perhaps this bond, as well as the pride the job brings, is why so often police work becomes a family affair.

Bin Laden's Death and the Discursive Use of Scripture in Social Media

2011-05-02T07:44:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting things about being both a Christian and an academic, particularly one whose interests lie in digital rhetoric, is getting to watch the interesting discursive practices of lay Christians as they navigate life. For this reason, the conversations in response to the death of Osama Bin Laden have been particularly interesting to me. So, here, in the midst of the moment, I'm dropping in to make some notes about this rhetorical event even as it unfolds.

Because social media sites allow such instantaneous, unreflective, and unrevised communication, it's a prime site for watching the ways in which people react to and discuss events, like the death of our current greatest enemy. For this reason, I've been watching facebook posts from my Christian (and a few former-Christian) friends.

I've seen three different threads running my friend's facebook posts. They are:

1) God does not delight in death, even of evil men, so celebrating Bin Laden's death is inappropriate (Ez 18:23, for example).

2) In this, I'm including variations on one theme: God is just and therefore it is right that the evil should die, and the emotions attached to retributive justice are human and natural and therefore cannot be judged (Psalm 137:8-9)

3) People shouldn't be using the scripture to make these arguments, since we must, by definition, argue these scriptures out of context.

I'll address the first two by critiquing the third. The view that we should not be using scripture to back our thinking on this issue seems to rely on a couple of assumptions. First, that the authors of the status updates falling into the first two categories intend to use scripture as evidence that their view point is the correct view. And, second, that they shouldn't do so.

This first assumption may very well be correct. Certainly, I've been watching a lot of arguments and implications that the author sees his or her view as the correct one and that others must get on board. The authors of the first category seem to be the bigger offenders in this regard. Some (by no means all, and probably not even most) of these authors wish to prove that those who rejoice in Bin Laden's death do not show the love of Jesus, and that rejoicing over death, even of a man as evil as Bin Laden, is therefore sinful. Implicit in such arguments is the suggestion that because I do have this kind of love, my Christianity is superior to your's. Certainly, I understand the critique of this type of argument. Such presentations of Christian thought make us look narrow, and completely out of touch with human experience/emotion.

Authors of the second category often seem instantly defensive, expecting or responding to the arguments of the first category. I can likewise understand the objection to this category. Such presentations of ourselves may make us seem unrepentant, showing a lack of understanding for how bad people become bad, and perhaps downright hypocritical (I'm supposed to love my enemies after all).

So I understand the objections to people using scripture to justify their own feelings on what is an extremely important national event. But I do not share it. This is because I question assumption number two.

One colleague of mine noted that this is evidence of why people ought not use the Bible as evidence in an argument. She says this from the perspective of a composition teacher in the Bible belt, where we are constantly trying to convince our students that there are very few academic arguments that benefit from citing scripture. That's just not the way academic writing works.

Indeed, the Bible is not written in such a way that it can work for arguments of scientific (social or natural) proof. Instead, the Bible is about the stuff of life. This is why I critique authors in category three. Writers in this category understand that the the Bible cannot be used to decide which side is right and thus they argue that it should not be.

I, however, think that this is exactly what scripture is for. Scripture is not helpful in arguing objective truth; it is, however, designed to help us navigate the subjective experience of human life.

The reason writers in both categories are able to find scripture that seems to back up their own feelings is because the Bible does in fact support both views. Jesus was the prince of peace, but he also came to bring division. As one friend of mine wrote "The Bible says not to get drunk. It also says God makes wine to make the heart glad. The Bible says God hates divorce and also says God divorced Israel. Go Figure." The Bible contains such contradictions (and they are contradictions) because life itself is contradictory. The Bible is complex because people are complex.

The purpose of these scriptures, then, is to help us make sense of and discuss the often contradictory emotions we experience in these events. My colleague mentioned to me that half the posts she saw used the Bible to support the idea that we should rejoice and the other half were used to support the idea that we shouldn't. My response was that this is because both were correct.

This is why I applaud the open conversations taking place on this issue. By discussing these events, and by struggling with our experiences and with how scripture relates to them, we gain a picture of the complexity of life and the complexity of God. Some in category three have expressed that these types of public debates are dangerous because they make Christians seem divided. But I have often though that the church's role in a post-modern culture ought to be to show the world that we too are complex and disintegrated subjects. That we too struggle with how we ought to feel and act. That there is room for other people to struggle with us.

We ought to embrace our own multiplicities and wrestle with them. In this way we, like Jacob, wrestle with God.

Radiohead and Samuel Beckett

2011-03-29T20:21:00.000-07:00

In a paper I wrote during my MA, I argued that Samuel Beckett's writing career can be described as a process of deconstructing the theatre. Though I still have work to do to fully flesh out this claim (if I ever get around to it), Beckett's work suggests this to me because his work, especially toward the end of his career, becomes more and more minimalistic.

Through their repetitions, Beckett's early plays already subvert cherished theatrical conventions with regard to the plot model which requires rising action, climax, and falling action. Conflict is also a tricky concept in Beckett's plays. As his career progressed, however, he abandons more and more theatrical conventions. His plays get increasingly shorter and he begins to dissect his characters--rather literally.

In "Happy Days," Winnie is buried in a mound , without use of her legs. So body parts are disappearing in Beckett's plays. In "Not I," only a mouth is visible on an otherwise dark stage, and in "Breath" no character appears at all. There is only a stage covered in rubbish and the sound of breathing. At the end of his career, Beckett began writing radio plays in English, his characters finally completely disembodied and no longer physically present in the space of a theatre, existing only as sound waves.

Again, I'm not able to make the case fully that Beckett is trying to deconstruct the theatre in a linear and progressive way across his career. I'm not so sure the chronology of his plays allows this argument. But certainly his career trends this direction.

So this morning Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" hit stores, and I got to Best Buy thirty minutes after they opened to buy it (I still like CDs, or I could have bought it digitally on February 18th).

When I listened to it, I immediately thought of Samuel Beckett. It's perhaps a strange thing to compare a modernist playwright to a post-modern rock band. But I see Radiohead as doing to rock music what Beckett did to the theatre. As Radiohead moves forward in time, they are seemingly deconstructing rock music.

They began innocuously enough with their 1993 post-grunge "Pablo Honey" which some have taken to be a subversion of grunge music (using as evidence the eerie similarity between "My Iron Lung" and Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box.")

Thom York has expressed dissatisfaction with that first album and their albums since have gotten progressively more ethereal and less musically unified. Their last two albums, "In Rainbows" and now "The King of Limbs," are particularly deconstructive. One blogger even calls "The King of Limbs" Radiohead's "least accessible album to date."

In both these albums, the music has become more and more electronic, increasing the level of mediation between audience and artist. The songs are also almost completely without hooks, making it easy to get lost in the music, rather than to sing along with the songs. Finally, it often seems that the melody (where one is recognizable) and the rhythm section are in two different meters, creating a disjointed feeling, as if one can never quite catch up.

The wonderful thing about Radiohead's dissection of music is that it questions the genre and indeed music theory in general. Radiohead seems to be asking just how important our Western notions of aesthetic actually are? Can music that doesn't conform to this aesthetic succeed, especially in a genre as flippant as Rock?

What Radiohead is doing is extremely interesting, artistic, and intelligent. I hyperbolically predict that, if Radiohead continues to make albums, their music will eventually consist only of screeches, feedback, and disembodied sounds. And I'm looking forward to buying these.

Memoirs of Spruill, a Plagiarist

2011-03-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

In my composition classes, my students just read their rhetoric's chapters on plagiarism and how to avoid it. Of course, because of my own ideological perspectives, I have wanted to subvert common-sense, naturalized views of plagiarism and copyright as moral/ethical issues. So, my students are also researching the history of copyright and blogging about their thoughts.

Teaching these chapters and thinking about the issues from the perspective of an academic interested in new literacies (where issues of what constitutes plagiarism and copyright infringement are considered problematic) has made me recall the one time in my life that I myself plagiarized. What follows is my own confession along with a self-analysis of why I plagiarized.

As a sophomore at Moore High School, I was assigned a term paper in my Biology class. The way the assignment worked was as follows: the teacher had a list of possible topics which students were to sign up for, so that there were never more than one person talking about the same topic (probably to combat plagiarism, since students couldn't copy off of other students). I was one of the last students to get a chance to sign up, so I got stuck with the topic of Prostatitis.

The night before the assignment was due, I realized that I hadn't done a bit of research or writing. So, I sat down with an old medical reference book that my mother had bought second hand when I was a baby and she wanted to stop calling the pediatrician for everything. I performed the classical plagiarist move of copying the book but changing words that I didn't know so that they didn't seem out of place.

I was (and still am) the kind of kid who was scared to death to do anything bad, because I was always convinced that I would get caught. So when I got the paper back with the comment, "you should write for medical journals," I just knew that the teacher knew and that his response was a subtle way of saying "I know where you got this." But he didn't, and I got an A, both on the paper and in the class.

Now, years later, I am a writing teacher. So it's valuable to look back at my own crime and analyze why I did it. After all, I was not a lazy student. I was a very good student, which is actually probably at least partially what allowed me to get away with it. So, why do good students plagiarize? Obviously, I do not claim that my experience is representative, but here is what led me to commit plagiarism:

1) The topic. I was a good student, who loved to read. But this topic was a total dud. By the time I was able to pick a topic, I could only pick a topic in which I was not at all interested and a topic that was actually kind of creepy (high school boys do not want to think about or talk about inflammation of the prostate). This problem led to problem two.

2) I waited too long. Only hours before I was to turn the paper in, I still had not started. Many teachers agree that it is often the good students who plagiarize. This is a product of last minute pressure by students who are afraid of failing an assignment that they waited until the last minute to begin. So there is pressure on good students to perform well. For this reason, a good student will not want to turn in aomw have baked crap. And, for me, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that the assignment was a dud. I am and was a meticulous student, but and I am and was also a bit ADD. So, the fact that the assignment was not the least bit interesting to me made it awfully easy for me to neglect.

So what, then, are the implications of my story? How do we see to it that our assignments discourage, rather than encourage plagiarism? To finish off here, I will address what we can do to write assignments that will help to our students avoid the pitfalls that I fell into.

First, design assignment topics that tow the line between too open and too narrow. Allowing a students to simply write about anything may keep a student from straying beyond his comfort zone, and would make it easier for a student to hand in papers from the fraternity file. So an assignment should be specific enough and closed enough that the student must write his own material in order to fulfill the assignment.

But there must also be enough wiggle room in the assignment that the student does have at least some input into the topic. Freedom within boundaries is the goal. This allows the student to make the assignment her own in such a way that it will hold her interest, at least enough to get the assignment done.

Secondly, revision should be built into the assignment sequence. Though, by and large, we all except the importance of revision, a number of classes still do incorporate revision into the class. A teacher should be viewing, and commenting on multiple drafts of each paper. Doing so allows the teacher to watch the process of the student, which makes last minute plagiarism much more difficult. It also provides milestones for the student so that the student must work on the paper bit by bit, draft by draft. This negates the possibility that the student is waiting until the last second to begin a paper.

I don't intend to argue that these techniques will solve the plagiarism problem. Though these are cornerstones of the writing process in my classes, I still do face about one plagiarism case a semester. But these do a long way toward solving the problems that cause otherwise conscientious students to plagiarize.

Public Broadcasting, Democracy, and Market Economy

2011-02-15T13:59:00.001-08:00

Since Plato, our belief has been that a well ordered democracy requires a well-educated public. Part of the project of ensuring one in modern America has been public broadcasting. However, on Wednesday, House Republicans proposed a budget that would end funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives a tiny .0001% of the federal budget. When I posted a link on facebook to an online petition against the upcoming cut, I aroused the well-meaning and respectful ire of some of my conservative friends who believe that public broadcasting ought to be left to market forces. Their argument is, to wit: if people want the educational programming offered on PBS and NPR, advertisers will pay for it. Therefore, let the market bear it out.

The problem with such a view is that broadcasting paid for by advertising (thus, "the market") inevitably follows the ideological perspectives of the advertisers. Thus, large advertisers with lots of money quickly hold a monopoly of information.

To find evidence of the problems with this, I need look no further than my home in Oklahoma City. During the debate surrounding a recent tax extension the state's largest newspaper, according to a local republican campaign strategist, refused to report stories which held the tax proposal in a negative light because it's largest advertiser (the Chamber of Commerce) was in favor of the proposal. The most interesting thing about this situation is that the newspaper is unabashedly conservative. So, a conservative newspaper refused to publish arguments against a tax because its advertisers wanted it. In this way, the market was able to make a newspaper violate its own ideology, and effectively quash dissenting views. Thus, the supposedly fair and democratic marketplace, which was controlled by a powerful few, effectively censored the press. Public Broadcasting, which hands money to LOCAL stations, allows the stations to base their programming on what it's local viewers and producers feel is valuable, free from the pressure of the large advertiser who may not have the best interest of democracy at heart. (See this blog by Rep. Earl Blumenauer)

What's also true is that what the market wants and what the people need are not always the same thing. The public WANTS American Idol. So American Idol is what the market will bear, but it's hardly what is necessary to ensure a citizenry capable of voting on something other than which seventeen year old singer is the most dreamy.

The assumption that the "market" will always allow what's best to win out (which has oddly become the central tenant of the modern Republican party) is naive at best. This is because the market has constantly shown that it will, if it must, sacrifice the good of democracy for the strength of the bottom line. Though we insist on a system of checks and balances in the federal government, no such system is inherent in the market.

An extraordinary amount of our legislation exists to act as a check to this power. It has often been argued that the consumer serves as the check to the power of industry by choosing what to buy and what not to buy, but this is only partially true. Indeed, a very large percentage of my income is spent on things that I need. I have no choice but to buy them. I must put gas in my car to get home, and the industry that produces that product is controlled by a small handful of people who can and do exert extraordinary control. This is the power that comes with controlling a necessary commodity. So, though in theory, the market polices itself, in practice things happen differently. After all, if a handful of businessmen can do, on a national level, what the Chamber of Commerce did in OKC, what results is known as an oligarchy. Thus, a capitalist market has the same potential to become tyrannical as it does to remain democratic. This is why we write legislation to control business--to provide a check on the power of industry, just as congress checks the power of the president.

Public Broadcasting is a part of that tradition. It ensures that the people with the most money don't get to own information.

Finally, I find the connection between free market and democracy implicit in these arguments a little problematic. Capitalism is a market system; not a system of government. As I hope my earlier syllogistic demonstration of how capitalism can in fact promote tyranny and the anecdotal evidence of the OKC tax debate have shown, democracy and capitalism are not the same thing.

That being said, the institutions that are designed to protect democracy need not and ought not be judged according to their market value, but in their importance in promoting and supporting democracy (Can you imagine if we subjected the US military to market forces? It hasn't turned a profit since WWII). I think people probably assume that the public school system exists to prepare students for the workforce. However, the pioneers of the public school movement (most notably John Dewey) never connected schooling with the market--such a connection is actually a much more recent phenomenon. Instead, they saw education as necessary in a vital democracy. Thus, the public school system is designed for no other purpose than to ensure an educated voter pool. Public Broadcasting was developed as a modern extension of that same project. Public schools exist to foster preparation for democracy through education; public broadcasting exists to foster participation in democracy through education. And if eduation is indeed vital to democracy, it must be protected and supported regardless of its market value.

This debate ultimately stems from the notion that to be "conservative" means that one supports saving tax payer money while prodding the market. But the word itself suggests that to be conservative is to hold on to our past ideals, one of the oldest and most important of which is that a well-educated people can govern itself. Public broadcasting is part of that tradition. It exists to educate those who would self-govern and it thus helps to protect democracy. And I happen to think that protecting democracy is a much more conservative ideal than protecting the market.

Questioning Art: Who Gets to be Called Artist?

2011-02-12T12:54:00.001-08:00

Today was date day for Charissa and me, the gloriously rare day when we leave our kids somewhere and spend the day running around doing things. Not having gotten many chances to go since the boys were born, we decided on a trip to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, one of our favorite and most frequented places before the boys came.

The museum has re-arranged since we were there last as it has some new collections, and seeing some of the new items, along with my criticism of some of the old has led me to some of the open theoretical questions concerning art, what it is, and who gets to make it.

These are famous modern questions of which art students and critical consumers of art will already be familiar. Indeed, as I suggested in my recent post regarding Duchamp, much of the work of modern artists has been to ask these questions as a way of critiquing their own artistic traditions. This has been a modern and post-modern concern in all the arts. Theatre has Grotowski, Brecht, and Artaud who played with theatre conventions by disentegrating the fourth wall, deconstructing the spoken word, and aboloshing elaborate sets in favor wharehouses and street corners. Literature has Pynchon who broke the conventions of space-time, Vonnegut who destroyed any illusion of the death of the author, and Saporta who destroyed the convention of linearity altogether. And visual art had of course Duchamp, Pollock, and so on. So the questions that I ask here are not new, but I am asking them anyway, in response to my own confrontation with these questions in my little hometown museum.

The centerpiece of the OKC-MOA is it's large Dale Chihuly exhibit. Chihuly began his career in stained glass and accidentally discovered the ancient art of glass blowing while fooling around with some of his glass. Henceforth, he has become world renowned for his work in blown glass. The reason Chihuly fits into my questions here is that many years ago, just as his work was getting larger and more complex, he was involved in an accident which rendered him blind in one eye. Having lost his depth perception, he gave up entirely doing the hands-on work involved in creating his own work. Instead, his sculptures are actually formed by a large number of apprentices, based on rather abstract paintings that Chihuly paints. The paintings are not schematic at all, and therefore do not serve as any type of blueprint for the actual glass sculptures, Instead, they seem to act more as inspiration for the apprentices who will make the sculptures as Chihuly stands behind them pleasantly shouting orders.

For years I've thought of this as an interesting extension of the work of other 20th century artists. Modern artists have asked the question of "who is the artist" in interesting ways. Duchamp critiqued the notion of an inspired genius when he began arranging things found in everyday life and calling them found art sculptures. Others have done similar things in their art. But in each of these cases, artists put their hands on objects not typically considered artistic and asked, "does it make it art that I, an artist, touched it." Chihuly extends this questioning even further because he doesn't touch anything. Instead, in his work, he is not the artist because he crafted the actual piece, but because it came from his mind. The actual building of the sculptures is performed by apprentices who are, we pressume, craftsmen and not artists.

Of course, as I've grown more sympathetic to the Marxist complaint, this definition of the artist has come to bother me. Chihuly hires an extraordinary number of young artists, they create magnificent sculptures, and he gets to put his name on the work. And so, with little physical input of his own, he has grown to world renown on the backs of people we've never heard of. In this system, the artist is the one who gets credit as the "idea man," while his workers, the artistic proletariat if you will, languish in obscurity and in the heat of the glass kiln.

I continue this question of who gets to be called artist as I move on to the work of Alfonso Ossorio. His bizarre collage sculpture INXIT is the centerpiece of a new collection of his work at the OKC-MOA. The piece is a door and door frame with an extraordinary Hodge-podge of strange stuff glued to it including animal bones, plastic birds, and a human skull, all of it creepily encrusted with glass eyeballs. The interesting thing about it is that it looks like every road-side oddity created by any local crazy man who ever donned greasy overalls. Upon seeing this piece, I turned to Charissa and asked, "do you suppose that artists sometimes trick us by saying 'I'm going to throw some bull-crap together and you have to take it seriously because I have an MFA.'"

This theme continued when we watched a film introducing the MOA's temporary exhibit of the constructivist sculptures of Jill Downen. In the film, she discusses how she became obsessed with texture while being placed in time-out by her mother. She notice a crack on the wall and became so excited by it that her mother no longer used time out as a punishment, making her wash dishes instead. The film then goes on to show her walking around an empty New York apartment with a small video camera gushing over the textures of the interesting apartment. The film shows a clip of one of these videos, which she uses as inspiration. The shot is zoomed in unnaturally closely and the video is shaky, and the whole thing is dubbed over by Downen as she said odd, artsy things. It's strangely reminiscent of "the Blair Witch Project."

It occurred to me that, in both the cases of Downen and Ossorio, this art is being produced by people who, if they were anything but artists, would be taken as mentally ill. I told Charissa at this point that the only difference between an artist and a lunatic is which side of the river the person went to school. If she is studying at MIT, she is a maniac. If he is at Harvard, he is an artist.

This is, of course, a joke, but it makes a serious point. That is, the label of "artist" is perhaps a great deal more arbitrary than we have often assumed. The difference between Ossorio and the goofball in Memphis who painted his house pink and glued bizarre stuff to it is a Harvard degree. The difference between Downen and a troubled kid with a penchant for taking strange videos is a Danforth Scholarship at Washington. In the case of Duchamp's "Fountaine," the difference between a urinal and a sculpture is where in the art gallery is stands.

This is not to say that these are not talented artists. They are, without a doubt. This is to say that who gets to become an artist and who goes unnoticed forever has as much to do with the relatively arbitrary forces of access and educational opportunity as it does with artistic "genius." It bears repeating here that this idea is not new to me. Many artists themselves feel this tension and play with these concerns in their own work. But, having been confronted with these truths, I had to make something of them.

Writing Students (and teachers) Take Heart; What we're asking you to do is really hard

2011-02-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

Writing terrifies students.

Many of us who have been writing for a long time, or are "talented" writers, see writing as a relatively natural process. It's only putting language down on paper, after all. Yet our students shriek, shake, and cry with fear when we give them even "simple" writing assignments. Indeed, the act of writing paralyzes our students.

Flower and Hayes have explained the cognitive processes involved in the writing of actual written language, and their explanation helps to explain why the act of writing so befuddles our students. They explain that "the information generated in planning may be represented in a variety of symbol systems other than language." The ideas that generate writing often come in the form of images, sense memory, emotions and "even when the planning process represents one's thought in words, that representation is unlikely to be in the elaborate sytax of written English" (1981). The act of writing, to Flower and Hayes, is an act of translating ideas (which are non-linear and jumbled) into linear written English.

Writing, therefore, is an extememly complex cognitive process which requires our students to produce formal written English for discourses with which they are still infamiliar out of the jumbled mess of human cognition.

It's no wonder then that many of our students are overwhelmed by the task of writing. What we are asking them to do is difficult stuff--difficult stuff that we ourselves have often taken for granted. This is something to remember when we are frustrated that our students "just aren't getting it." We are asking them to lift heavy weights.

Since this is true, we must be careful not to assume that good writing just is. Instead, good writing is a carefully developed skill. We should see ourselves less as gurus or shamans, guiding them through the spiritual and mysterious process of writing, hoping that their exposure to our gods will magically enlighten them. Instead we should see ourselves as physical trainers, helping them learn to isolate their writing muscles. Though the act of writing is complex and recursive, the processes that make up this complex act can be isolated and trained. If we can help our students do this, then the act becomes easier and more natural (as it is for us) when they must put these processes back together to complete acts of meaningful writing.

But this requires careful work and patience on the part of both the teacher and the writer. So take heart, if it seems like this stuff is really hard, that's because it is. But just as you wouldn't give up working out the first time your muscles are sore, so you must not give up the first time your brain hurts. This includes both you students and you teachers.

The Right Hand is High School English; The Left Hand is College Composition

2011-02-01T12:20:00.001-08:00

My freshmen often express disillusionment in their transition from high school English to college composition. Many of them feel (and I agree) that their high school English classes have left them unprepared for college writing in general, and my composition classes in particular. As a teacher, it is easy for me to suggest that such culture shock is a natural part of the learning process. As students advance both educationally and cognitively, it makes sense that the pedagogies upon which they once relied and within which they once thrived will seem inadequate. My students, on the other hand, have no such benign perspective. Many of them feel cheated or even led astray by high school teachers who would often justify hard or tedious assignments by claiming that they were "preparing them for college."

Thus, when my teaching points out the inadequacies of the five paragraph essay, or when I challenge often overly-pedantic views of first person writing and so on, my students respond bitterly about a secondary education that was supposed to "prepare them for college" but that has failed to do so. My students often hyperbolically express their desire to injure, maim, or kill their high school teachers for their false teaching. In fact, a student once told me that when he had gone home for a visit, he ran into his high school English teacher at Wal-Mart and he told her, right there in the store, that she owed him an apology.

On one hand, our students' feelings are natural to the educational experience and we need not worry about them; I remember having these same feelings as an undergraduate who had excelled in my high school English classes and had tested out of Composition I. But there is also a real and legitimate criticism couched in the responses of my students. At least from my perspective as a composition teacher, there is little curricular alignment between high school English programs and the college English departments their students are entering. There are, unfortunately, some unavoidable reasons for this.

Most high school English programs combine both the teaching of writing and of literature. And because most English teachers enter the field because of their love for literature, teaching about the history and interpretation of literature becomes the primary focus of the class. In fact, writing instruction in most high school English classes takes place while students are writing about the literary works they are reading. Thus, even in the English classroom, writing is treated as more of a skill set necessary for but peripheral to the real subject of the class. Writing is an activity that supports the teaching of literature, rather than being a subject of its own.

More significantly, though, is that high school and college teachers don’t seem to know what the other is actually doing. This should not be particularly surprising. Many high school teachers do not have the educational credentials and few have the time to teach as adjuncts in college composition programs. At the same time, only a few of the composition teachers I know have taught in secondary English programs. Though it’s an ever-present mantra in high school English classes to say that the class is “preparing students for college,” teachers of high school English know very little about what we actually do in the composition classroom.

To our shame, many first year writing programs have done little in the way of supporting secondary English programs. There are many researchers in the universities who are studying the writing habits, rhetorical prowess, and language usage of high school writers and proposing pedagogies based on their findings. But the lessons we are learning from this research seem too often to be getting lost in the ether. High school teachers aren’t reading our journals, and we’re not visiting their classrooms.

It is my admittedly un-researched argument here that there is a palpable disconnect between first-year composition programs and secondary English programs. It is also my assertion that this is a problem that we ought to work toward fixing. Without a doubt, true curriculum alignment will not be possible. The two enterprises are different enough to prevent this. Though high schools do indeed make it their goal to prepare students for higher education, they also have the burden of universal education. So it is also their goal to prepare students who will not and, perhaps, cannot go to college. Furthermore, high schools do not simply send students to the nearest state university, but instead send students to the four winds. Therefore, high schools cannot hope to account for the numerous pedagogical approaches at different institutions.

But even without some form of specific curriculum alignment, we can improve our teaching in both high school and college by fostering better communication between college English departments and high schools programs. We can help high school teachers better prepare their students for us by making clearer what we do, and what types of writing we privilege. We can also find ways to make sure that the research we do about their students gets back to them, so that the latest research a teacher has won’t be what they learned in their English education program while they themselves were in college. Furthermore, if we hate the five paragraph essay, we ought to be searching for and implementing new techniques to teach organization and invention. We are, after all, the research wing of the educational enterprise. And if teachers need these forms that we so hate because they work, it falls upon us to find something else that works and that isn’t antithetical to what we teach.

Ultimately, we must recognize that we are not involved in mutually exclusive projects, but rather we are indeed colleagues whose work can and should influence one another’s practices.

Duchamp: Post-Modern Forerunner; Practical Jokester

2011-01-27T18:40:00.000-08:00

In 1917, while in New York, French artist Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal from an iron works company, signed it "R. Mutt" and called it "Fountain." The piece (if indeed it is one) has been considered a practical joke, but has also been taken quite seriously. Duchamp added the piece to his collection of found art objects which he had titled "Readymades." In 1915, Duchamp began displaying every day objects in artful ways in order to critique the adoration of art and the artist. Though there is as much playfulness in his movement as there is philosophy, his concept of found art, and his statements behind it pre-figured important post-modern ideas, a few decades before post-modernism became all the rage in Europe.

With his found art movement, Duchamp intended to question what defines art. Where does craftsmanship or utility end and where does art begin? What makes one piece of white earthenware featuring graceful geometric curves art, and what makes another a urinal?

Duchamp, who was critical of artist worship, played with the notion that by signing something and putting it in a gallery, one elevates it as art. This is particularly true if the signature is that of a well-respected artist. In fact, what allowed many 20th century artists to experiment with deconstructive styles was that they were already accomplished artists. Picasso's cubism might never have been accepted if not for his more traditional early work, his almost Classical Rose Period, and the aesthetically pleasing Blue Period. But, because he was who he was, he was able to experiment. People would expect the sometimes childish looking work of cubism because it had his name on it.

Duchamp seemed to recognize this ability, and he purposefully questioned this by simply signing every day objects, and placing them in galleries, knowing that folks would therefore call this work art.

This suggests then that the label "art" is arbitrary. The fact that "Fountain" was critically received as art (it was, in fact, named the most influential art work of the 20th century in 2004), suggests this. It's acclaim clearly had nothing to do with the graceful, arching lines of the urinal, or the pure white color, or the perfect classical geometry of its shape. If this were so, it would have been the original craftsman who made the first of these who would deserve credit as "artist." Instead, Duchamp signed a pseudonym on it, included it in a gallery show, and it was art, simply because the right person (Duchamp) put it in the right place (a gallery).

This attack on the arbitrary nature of art is decidedly post-modern. Duchamp questions to what extent art is art because it has some intrinsic quality, or to what extent is art art simply because someone decided that it was. In this way Duchamp is, in 1917, already doing what post-modern thought would do just after World War II, decades later.

What's So Great About the BC Clark Jingle

2010-11-30T12:03:00.000-08:00

As anyone from Oklahoma call tell you, the holiday season hasn't started until we begin hearing the ubiquitous, seemingly timeless BC Clark Anniversary Sale jingle. Indeed (and this is no news to anyone in the Sooner State) the jingle is a legitimate Christmas Carol in Oklahoma. A simple YouTube search leads to videos of people singing the song in the mall (this clip, I was surprised to discover, contains a very short clip of a high school girlfriend of mine), elementary school students, and a college chorus from OCU singing the song in concerts, Okie celebrity Megan Mullally singing the jingle on Jay Leno's show, and Oklahoma Baptist University students singing the song in chapel. The fact that this is not our state's official Christmas carol can only be seen as an oversight by our state legislature.

It might be easy to look at this phenomenon as a sign that Christmas is indeed an over-commercial holiday, or that even our holiday memories are commodified. One might say, "hey, their favorite Christmas carol is a jingle for an incredibly expensive jewelry store. That says everything I need to know about this rotten X-mas stuff. Bah, humbug." But I see it rather differently.

When I was at Harding, Christmas-time would roll around and, separated from home, we would begin to walk around the campus singing the jingle. Invariably, we would do this in a group of people from all over the country singing Christmas carols, and the song would make an appearance. As those of us from Oklahoma chimed in, folks from other parts would look at us askant as we skipped through the well trodden 32 seconds of the Okie classic. And, for those of us longing for home, the song was a way to connect.

The song was, in fact, how we found one another. You always knew the Oklahomans by the jingle. With admitted hyperbole, I would compare our singing of the song to ancient Christians meeting one another in the streets and asking "are you of the Way?" When you heard the song, you knew you were among brethren.

The point is, and this what makes the jingle so great, in a world where so much is becoming homogenized and where regionalism is dying, the jingle and the tradition it has spawned are profoundly local. A 32 second TV spot in the 45th largest TV market has somehow managed to become a social glue. Knowing and singing the song gives those of us from Oklahoma a sense of inclusion, and ties us to the history of our people. It is what, in a strangely cohesive way, seperates Us from Them. No matter where in the country we run into another Okie, we can sing the song and we can know that we are neighbors; we are "of the way."

Brown in Oklahoma: the Frightening Social Statement of the 2010 Elections

2010-11-03T00:52:00.000-07:00

With this year's election having ended, it is time for the post-mortem to begin. I have little doubt that some who read this post will take it as evidence that I have finally slipped to the left. I will be especially pleased when one of you accuses me of pulling the "race card." I have been extremely vocal about the state questions and political platforms in this year's campaigns that I see as obtusely closed-minded and transparently racist. And to my chagrin, though not to my surprise, I have seen all of these measures and people win. So, in this post I will look at these measures, what they mean, and what this election should teach us about who we are as a people and as a state.

SQ 751: English-Only

This is the question that, as a Composition and Rhetoric student with a devout interest in literacy, I have been most interested in and vocal about. State Question 751, which passed by a margin of basically 75% to 25%, makes English the official language for state business transactions. By law all state documents will now be printed only in English.

It's important here to note that I spend four days a week surrounded by language experts - English experts at that. And yet, I do not know of one of us who thinks that anything like SQ 751 is a good idea. Of course, no one thought to ask the experts about this. If they had, we could have told them all about the practical dangers of such a law. As literacy experts, we could have explained to them that speaking a language and writing a language are distinctly separate, even if related, processes. Doing one does not guarantee the ability to do the other. What this means from a practical standpoint is that legal immigrants with perfectly sufficient spoken English may not be able to read it a bit. So SQ 751 has put legal and tax-paying Oklahoma residents in a situation in which they may not be able to fill out Oklahoma Student Loan Authority forms, Sooner Care forms and applications, Driver's license tests and other state documents. Thus, we've blocked access to opportunities and services that spur the upward mobility that we pretend to privilege in what we mythologize as an open and free society.

We could have told them these things, but they never asked us. That's because the actual issue of language was never the point anyway. Instead, this has been yet another example of what John Trimbur has called the discourse of literacy crisis. This is the populist belief that the English language is in crisis and that the result, if not remedied, will be cultural dissolution as well. As a recent case in point, News 9 broadcaster Kelly Ogle, in his consistently asinine segment "My Two Cents" asserts that, "the English language is the common thread that will keep this country from fragmenting into competing ethnic communities" (Ogle). I should add here that he is responding (and disagreeing with) a woman who is angry that her child should learn the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. . .in a Spanish class.

Of course, such an argument assumes that 1) we're not currently fragmented into ethnic communities, and 2) that English- only legislation has anything whatsoever to do with cultural unity. Both of these are highly dubious claims. The persistent narrative that allowing a multiplicity of languages will lead to linguistic chaos, which will lead to cultural and political chaos is, rather than an actual realizable fear, according to Trimbur a displacement of real fears about middle class loss of status. In her article "When I close my Eyes, I like to Hear English" Amy Dayton-Wood, citing linguist Jane Hill points out that the "lack of specific, technical features of language. . .reaffirms the view that language itself does not motivate these crises." Instead, as Trimbur says, "the threat is not that of linguistic chaos but of blurring the lines between 'us' and 'them'" (Trimbur 279). So these crises and the policies that grow out of them re-assert a cultural hegemony that privileges those of us safely in the middle class at the expense of those who came here believing in our cultural myth of America as "Land of Opportunity." It instead becomes the Land-of-Opportunity for those of us who already possess the right language. And so SQ 751, and policies like it are really about protecting "us" by shutting "them" out.

Arizona Law as Oklahoma Platform

If SQ 751 had the unstated goal of shutting "them" out, this goal became explicit among politicians who campaigned by expressing their support of the Arizona Immigration Law. On the surface, it may seem odd that Oklahoma politicians should take a public stand on an Arizona issue, until one realizes that the implication is that, if elected, these politicians would enact similar legislation here in Oklahoma.

I'm a bit more sympathetic to those who place importance on protecting standing immigration laws than I am to SQ 751. Despite thinking that our immigration laws are bad laws in need of liberalization, I can appreciate the view that these laws are still the law of the land, and should therefore be enforced. However, the way some politicians handled this issue is troubling and telling.

One radio ad in particular, funded by the Senate Majority Fund invokes highly charged language, asserting that "Oklahoma is being invaded," and is "endangered by an outside force," dangerous criminals who are "threatening our citizens” (SMF). Such rhetorical moves function by characterizing immigrants as an invading army. They treat an issue of law enforcement as one of war. Thus, the impoverished itinerate farmers, seasonal roofers, and service employees who cross our border are spoken of as if they were enemy combatants - clever Athenians who may build our houses only to hide in the attic waiting for us to fall asleep.

An Aside in 755

It may seem like a digression that at this point I will bring up SQ 755 which, by a 70-30 margin made it illegal for state courts to consider Sharia law or international law in state court decisions, but I will bring it around to make my final conclusions. Kurt Hochenauer, on the online version of the Oklahoma Gazette's opinion section rightfully criticized this law as being "pointless." This is because it is a basic legal principal in our legal system that court decisions are based on state law and the jurisprudence of past court decisions. Neither if these would allow consideration for Sharia law. Justification for the need for this law was the Great Britian has, in some instances, considered Sharia law and international law when prosecuting Islamic prisoners. Of course, since we broke ties with the UK's legal system more that 230 years ago (and 141 years before Oklahoma became a state), what they've done in their courts is totally irrelevant to Oklahoma state law. SQ 755 is a non-law that did nothing except to re-affirm that we don't like Muslims or their law and we don't want to be pushed around by the U.N.

Conclusion: Hatred in the "Bible Belt"

The common thread in these laws is that in effect (and, I would argue, in design) they delineate the state's official stance on who we dislike: Mexicans, Arabs, and Outsiders.

I find it sadly ironic that in the states most proud of their religiosity there also exist laws so specifically designed to express hate. Of course, we justify these laws with arguments about practicality. We simply can't allow this flood of immigrants; how can we support them all? I've also lately seen a lot of the common false claims that immigrants are bankrupting our society by taking advantage of free schools, and hospitals, and that illegal immigrants are receiving welfare, all claims that the National Center for Policy Analysis soundly disproves. The common line of reasoning, especially among people who begin their sentences with platitudes like “I’m all for legal immigration,” or “some of my best friends are Mexicans but. . .) is that "we would love to have an open society, we just can't afford to." Thus, we close ourselves off, we refuse to fulfill the promise of our nation, and we say "you're just not welcome here," despite our founding as a free and open society that would say “send us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. And worse than our failure to live up to our founding principles is that we do so even as we drive around in brand new extremely expensive cars with "Visit Church this Month" bumper stickers pasted to the back.

Cited:

Dayton-Wood, Amy. “When I Close My Eyes, I Like to Hear English: English Only and the Discourse of Crisis.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. 10 Aug 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Hochenauer, Kurt. “What’s the Point.” OKGazette.com. Oklahoma Gazette. 6 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

“Immigrants, Welfare, and Work.” NCPA. National Center for Policy Awareness. 24 Jun 2002. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Ogle, Kelly. “My 2 Cents: Mother Angry Over Spanish Pledge of Allegiance Assignment.” News9.com. KWTV, 28 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010

“Senate Majority Fund.” YouTube.com. 26 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Trimbur, John. “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis.” The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed John Trimbur and Richard Bullock. Portsmith, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1996.

Where Does a Burger Go When it Dies?

2010-10-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

Apparently, it has become the cool thing to collect McDonald's hamburgers, leave them out, and document the progress (or lack thereof) as the burgers [fail to] decompose. The Daily Mail reports a story about artist Sallie Davies and her photo journal of a cheeseburger and fries meal that has lasted six months. And this Youtube video tells the story of a man who began collecting McDonald's burgers in 1989 to watch their lack of change. His story was featured in Morgan Spurlock's Eat This Book, which prompted Len Foley to start his very own "Burger Museum," and to create the Youtube video linked above (which climaxes with a list of trillions [an exaggeration] of chemicals implied to be inside McDonald's meals. . .but in an asterisked comment, Foley says that this is a list of pesticide residues from an FDA report).

It seems that many others are interested in performing similar experiments since Foley gives instructions on how to make your own burger museum and YouTube is flooded with videos of dry, shriveled burgers. But each of these share a similar methodology. Put a value meal on the kitchen counter (Foley warns at-home scientists not to put it in an air tight container because the moisture needs to be allowed to escape, one assumes so that it doesn't mold. Interestingly, for Davies, lack of mold is part of the evidence that something is wrong with these burgers) and wait. The fact that these burgers do not decompose, mold, or change form at all is, it seems, supposed to prove that this food is horribly dangerous. It is so full of chemicals, pesticides, and preservatives that even decomposers won't eat it.

Yet, there is one glaring problem with this evidence. One that is indeed so important that it makes this evidence, well, not evidence at all.

You see, when one eats a hamburger, it does not then sit on a counter top inside your stomach. Instead, you chew it, after which it is squeezed under fairly intense pressure down your esophagus and into a chamber filled with hydrochloric acid, potassium chloride, sodium chloride, and special enzymes. These chemicals work to dissolve the burger as the powerful muscles of the stomach mashs it into chyme, a process that in no way resembles sitting on a counter top.

So, in order to collect more valid results, I have performed an experiment which more closely replicates the conditions actually present in the body. Namely, instead of placing a value meal on the counter top, I placed it into a bucket of muriatic acid, a commercially available hydrochloric acid solution. I didn't design any way to replicate the process of muscular contractions that break down the food in an actual stomach. The little stirring that I did while trying to find pieces of the dissolving burger will have to suffice as a very under-stated simulation for that process.

In addition to achieving more valid result from my experiment, it (I am pleased to report) also took far less effort. Davies has had to take a photograph a day for 170 days, all the while having an aging hamburger stinking up her kitchen. I only took 12 pictures over the course of just over three hours. You can see my results on flikr. In short, the acid made quick work of the meal. . .and so does your body.

Placing a hamburger on a counter top and watching it [fail to] decompose proves exactly nothing, because it's not at all a valid representation of how your body works to dispose of food. The fact that this burger survived on a counter top does not mean that our body will likewise be unable to handle it. In fact, I didn't think about chucking a piece of counter top in there with the burger, but if I had, and if I had left it in there long enough, I bet it would have taken care of that too. Marvelous thing, the human body. We are wonderfully and fearfully made.

I'm not saying that we should all go out and start eating an all McD's diet. After all, Super Size Me alerted us to the dangers of that. Besides, it is fattening, it's high in sodium, and it tastes like what your body turns it into. What I am saying is that we must be more critical when we look at what people use as evidence. The fact that some phenomena is shocking to us does not mean that it proves anything. What we see in these blogs and websites and photo galleries is a fallacious (perhaps even unethical) use of pathos appeal. Because these stories and pictures elicit revulsion, they are used to support arguments that these items really can't support. Perhaps (well, almost undoubtedly) we should change our eating habits. But if we change based on this evidence, we have been duped.

Cavemen and Kindergartners: A Literacy Narrative

2010-08-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

In response to research by literacy expert and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Deborah Brandt, our literacy class was asked to tell our story of how we became literate. I already had my story in mind because, having also been inspired by this research, I had just assigned a similar assignment to my freshmen. I'm writing here because I thought that the story I came up with would be fun to share, and to analyze.

First of all, allow me to qualify this story by saying that my memory is very imperfect, as the event in this post happened when I was only five years old. I have only a cloudy memory that has no doubt been colored by my also cloudy memory of being told the story later by my mother. She may be able to, but should not necessarily feel obliged to, correct any erroneous details. With my disclaimer out of the way, here is my first memory of performing a literate act.

I actually do not remember learning to read (I remember learning to love reading, but that's another post). My earliest memory of the act of writing comes from when I was in kindergarten (I think) and I was quite excited at having learned to write. I parked myself under my baby sister's crib, which must have seemed like a suitable hiding place, and wrote on her walls. In my memory, the writing was very colorful but I have no memory of what I wrote or what I used to write with. I only know, and I may only know this because of my mother telling the story, that I wrote my own name.

When my mother discovered the writing, I told her that it had not been me. Furthermore, I very logically told her that, since the writing was on my sister's walls, it must have been she who had committed this crime of literacy. Against this claim, my mother offered three pieces of evidence. The first was that Tina was not even a year old; she couldn't write. Of course, this proved only that it had not been Tina. It did not prove that it had been me. My mother pointed out that I was the only one of her three kids that had learned to write. Her final piece of evidence was ultimately the death knell of my story. I had written my name on the wall.

What's interesting about this story to me now is how well it fits into what Deborah Brandt has discovered, quite accidentally, in her research. She found that, while reading tends to be a very communal act where our earliest memories of reading are almost always centered around the family, early memories of writing often involve writing which is subversive or proscribed, and solitary (almost every literate person remembers having been read to by family members, but almost no one remembers writing with family members). It's interesting to me that it seems that I must have known that this type of writing would get me into trouble. After all, I chose to write under the crib, a place that seemed safe and cave-like to me. So, in an act strangely reminiscent of prehistoric cave art, I went to a lonely and secret place and wrote, what else, my name.

And this is the very curious thing about the way I chose to write. My act of writing was assertive because it was subversive; I broke the rules. Furthermore, it was my name that I wrote. Such an act seems to be a form of existential genesis. It was as if, by asserting my name, I was saying, "I exist. I have a name." And yet, I wrote it in a place where I thought it would be hidden from view, again, like a caveman who hides his art.

This is the curious irony of writing. It is an act of assertiveness, almost violence even - "here is what I am writing and you must read it. You cannot deny my name" And yet, it is an act of extraordinary solitude, and often loneliness.

Why You Never Research a Preacher's Story

2010-07-05T21:43:00.000-07:00

As the son-in-law of a career preacher, and a regular church attendee, and as someone who teaches research, I know that preacher's stories aren't all they're cracked up to be. In fact, anyone who's spent any time in church knows that preachers' stories are illustrative fish tales. As literary texts, they belong structurally to the genre of myth. I don't mean "myth" in the popular sense of meaning "false." I mean that as narrative constructs, preacher tales work in the same way as other mythical works such as old parables, nursery rhymes, and (dare I say) the Bible. Myths are texts use common archetypal tropes in order to teach the hearer and they put their emphasis, not necessarily on the historical and chronological accuracy of the story, but on the message. In other words, myths privilege truth over facts.

So, having foregrounded this post with that, I should say that I don't particularly expect preachers' tales to pass the muster of rigorous research. Nevertheless, when I tried to find a quote from a preacher's story I recently heard (because I wanted to use it on facebook), I got a first hand look at just how shifty and shaky the literary form of the sermon illustration is. So today, just for fun, I will present to you a dubious sermon illustration followed by my own research and finally a bit of speculative questioning as to how a story (actually, more correctly, stories as we shall see) goes from half true anecdote to sermon illustration.

First, the story itself, from the best of my memory, as I heard it from the pulpit:

Harmon Killebrew, the baseball great, once told a story from his childhood about his father. Harmon was the youngest of four brothers, and his father used to play catch with his boys in the front yard. One day, a neighbor, who was known for his well-manicured lawns walked by and said to Harmon's father, "You'll never grow any grass if you keep playing on it like that." Harmon's father looked at the man and replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass; I'm trying to grow boys."

Here is the actual quote from Killebrew (which is quoted to death all over the inter-webz):

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass." "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys."

The best context I can find for Killebrew's quote, without doing the kind of serious actual research for which I may have to log into EBSCO, is from a 2004 interview in with Killebrew in Baseball Digest in which he says:

"Dad used to work with my brother and me on different things that were important in all sports--football, basketball, baseball. One evening we were out in the front yard, and my mother came out on the porch and said to my father, "Clay, the boys are digging holes in the yard, tearing up the grass." And my father went over to my mother and very sternly said: "Kate, we're not raising grass here. We're raising boys."

Though it doesn't particularly diminish the quality of the quote, the elements of the preacher's story are markedly different. Where is the idyllic scene of playing catch in the yard? Where is the turf-vain neighbor who acts as something of a villain, and who we can imagine flaunts his "Yard of the Month" sign and yells at neighbor kids who stray into his grass? Can this story have gone this wrong?

First of all, yes, of course it could. If one has ever played the game in which several people sit in a circle passing a message around to see how much it changes before it gets back to the message's originator, than one can understand how these tales get so out of control. One preacher hears a story in a father's day sermon and decides he likes it. The next year, when preparing his own father's day sermon, he says to himself, "self, we sure did like that story we heard last year. Now what was it again?" and he does the best he can from his memory of a sermon he half listened to a year before. The youth-intern from the nearby Christian college hears his sermon and sacks it away for a few years later when he'll be the pulpit minister for the kind small congregation that hires brand new grads. And so on the story goes.

Of course, with this story, there is something else, an element of the story which lets Reverend Preacher off the hook a little. And that is this fact: this story is not original (or at least not singular) with Killebrew. Instead, there is another version of this story that involves college football great Amos Alonzo Stagg.

In 1965, just before Stagg's death, the football coaching great and champion of the cause of amateur sports had a bunch of kids playing football on his front lawn. A neighbor told Stagg that if he allowed the kids to play "the grass with never grow that way." Stagg replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass. I'm trying to grow kids."

So Stagg's story fills in the missing elements from the Killebrew story. In Stagg's story, we see the neighbor presented as a character instead of the father's own wife being used as the foil, and the quote is a bit more direct (substitute "boys" for "kids" and it's exact.) What I can't yet be sure if is what these stories have to do with one another. Did the preacher's story grow out of an accidental combination of the two, as if one of the preachers in the archetypal chain heard both stories and confused them? Did in fact one of these men (Staggs and Killebrew) steal the saying from the other? Reportedly, Staggs made his remark shortly before his death in 1965, by which time Harmon Sr. had been dead for twelve years. But I don't know when Killebrew started telling his version of the story. So did Staggs borrow from Killebrew's language when he made his remark to his neighbor, or did Killebrew borrow from Stagg's language when he began telling his own childhood story about his father sternly replying to his mother's concern about the yard? Or did in fact both men make remarkably similar statements, allowing for later preacher story confusion? I can't say for certain, as it is 0034 hrs and I'm tired of researching something that will be of no use to me in my dissertation. More on this controversy as I get bored enough to pick the research back up.

Thoughts on State Sponsored Death and Old Testament Law

2010-07-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows my politics knows of my ambivalence toward the death penalty. On one hand, I do not doubt the justice of it. If a man kills another, it is fitting that he should be killed. One need only look back to the Noahic Covenant: "Whoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood me shed" (Gen 9.6) (of course, I'm not sure that this verse is a command for the state to kill murderers so much as it is a karmic statement like "live by the sword, die by the sword"). Also, as a man who has been face to face with horrific personal tragedy caused by another's crime, I feel a deep longing for justice. When I here about the nine year old child who had been killed in a drive-by, or I talk to the woman who has been raped, or see the body of a brutally murdered man whose only crime was to become addicted, I cry out for something to be done. There are some crimes for which only death can atone.

So it is not the justice of the death penalty that I question. Rather, it is the state's competence in deciding who should live and die. When people bring up the jurisprudence of the Bible as support for a state sponsored death penalty, I am quick to remind them that the Old Testament nation of Israel was a theocracy. Therefore, at least within the narrative context of the Bible, God himself was the appeals process. It was God who ultimately decided who lived and who died. From a historical perspective, it may be optimistic to say that God's oversight prevented the killing of the falsely accused, but it's not out of the question to say that this would be the Bible's perspective. In our own imperfect and secular legal system, on the other hand, we can make no claim to the ultimate oversight of God himself (although some probably would).

When one looks at our system, one must consider the examples of Willie Francis, whose story is told by Gilbert King in his book, The Execution of Willie Francis. Willie was a seventeen year old African-American sentenced to death for the murder of a Louisiana pharmacist. He was convicted on evidence so lousy that, today, he would not have even been charged. He was sent to the electric chair twice when the intoxicated jail trustee entrusted to electrocute him the first time botched the wiring, sending Willie enough electricity to torture him, but not to kill him. One must consider the cases of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz who were sentenced to death and to life in prison respectively for a murder they did not commit and who spent thirteen years in prison until DNA evidence exonerated them. Consider the men sent to death row on the false testimony of Joyce Gilchrist whose testimony helped lead to the execution of eleven men (we may never know if some of these were innocent), and who was willing to trade men's lives for her own career ambitions.

I don't use these examples to say that our criminal justice system is irreversibly corrupt. Indeed, I don't believe that such is the case. By and large, our system is dominated by men and women who are trying to do the right thing, and I truly believe that our system gets it right almost every time. But the cost of failure is so high. Get it wrong, even once, and you've killed an innocent person. And killing an innocent person makes you a murderer. And so, while I long for the justice that seems to come with the death penalty, I find that I can't quite support it either. And this is the view that for a couple of years I have stuck with.

Then, a few days ago, I listened to stories about serial rapists and listened to a few interrogations in which these men talked about their crimes. Many of these men spoke flippantly about actions that had forever changed the lives of their victims. Some of them masturbated while speaking to detectives or even while listening to their victims' testimony in open court. It is easy to see the unmitigated evil in the hearts of these men.

This got me thinking about the reasons the Old Testament supported the killing of their worst criminals. Proponents of our death penalty will often argue one or all of the following points: 1) putting these criminals to death insures that they will never hurt another innocent person, 2) putting criminals to death sends a message to other would-be criminals that they too will be killed if they commit these crimes and 3) putting criminals to death saves on the cost of feeding and sheltering these criminals for life. Each of these arguments is easily defeated. Argument 1 is easily countered by saying, "so does putting them in prison for life," (and retort usually countered with argument 3). Argument 2, a logical anecdotal argument, seems to be invalidated by crime stats. Though we are the only developed Western nation that still has a death penalty, we are also the nation among these with the highest rates of violent crime. The fear of death seems to have done little to stem violent crime in our country. Thus, the commission of these crimes seems to have little, if any, correlation to the severity of punishment possible. Finally, argument 3 is just flat false. It costs more money to put a criminal to death than it does to feed them for life because of the expense of the appeals process. Even a wealthy defendant will become indigent after his first trial. This is because, in most cases, whatever he does not spend on his defense, will be seized for victim's compensation funds. Thus, his appeals will all be tax-payer funded. It could be (and often is) argued here that the appeals process could be expedited so that is is less expensive, but the types of injustices that I have already pointed out show the danger in that; If Dennis Fritz's appeals process had been expedited, he would have been executed.

Interestingly, you see no arguments like these in the Old Testament Law. I think this is explained by the differences in the way we see crime and punishment. Modern Americans see the law from a very individual perspective; what needs to happen to this individual for this crime. Hebrews, on the other hand, thought of crime and punishment as communal acts how does this person's crimes relate to us as a people. I don't mean this in the same sense as when we ask, "what is the danger to the public if we allow this person to remain at large." But rather, I think their question may have been, "what have we, as a people, done through this person." Hebrews saw a type of connectivity between people and other people and indeed through people and creation that we do not. Thus, scripture explains its use of the death penalty thus, "If anyone kills a person, the murderer shall be put to death at the evidence of witnesses. . .So you shall not pollute the land in which you are" (Num 36.30-33). As anyone who is even a little familiar with the Bible knows, there are many other offenses in the OT for which one should either be put to death or expelled from the country. Interestingly, in all these statutes, the idea of punishment is never really about stopping the crime from occurring again, sending an example to the people, or even about punishment at all. Instead, the OT is obsessed with cleansing the land (and the people) of evil. The Hebrew people killed their offenders, not because they deserved it (though they may have), but because they believed that the evil in one person remained in the community as a whole. I don't mean to say that they knew that if they allowed an evil person to remain that the person would continue to do evil to others and thus he had to be stopped. Rather, because the evil person belonged to our community, so did the evil within him. And the people of God simply cannot abide evil.

These thoughts do not necessarily change my mind about our death penalty today. After all, God no longer exists within a particular state as he did with Israel, but among a people, not defined by an earthly government. So I don't see OT Law as jurisprudence for our own secular law. Instead, these thoughts make me wonder how we, as a people, are effected by the presence of evil among us. Does the evil within one of the rapists I listened to the other day remain, at least in part, within me as well? Does it pollute not just our society but indeed creation as a whole that we abide evil? And if so, what do we, as a people, do about it?

The Thunder in Context: What do basketball and April 19th have to do with one another,

2010-04-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

Scott Howard-Cooper wrote a very touching blog for nba.com in which he compares the resiliency of the OKC Thunder to that of the city to which it belongs. If you have not read it, click the link above and do so. Then read this letter I wrote to Scott in response.

Scott,

This is a short note to thank you for your wonderful piece about the the Thunder's conection to Oklahoma City on nba.com. I have lived in Oklahoma City most of my life and your article, I am not ashamed to say brought tears to my eyes.

My father is a retired OCPD Crime Scene Detective and my step father is an OKC firefighter. They both spent a full month after the bombing sifting through the wreckage to recover victims. Years later, they both carry the scars from that month. Indeed the entire city has grieved together all these years. We have hurt together and cried with one another as we attend memorials every year around the city and cry together with people we may have never met.

In light of this, your article is a wonderfully beautiful expression of the power of sports. Just as we have cried together so many years, with the arrival of the Thunder and with their surprising success this year, we have also been able to come together to CHEER about something. Your article brought to my mind images of the President's memorial service just after the bombing in a dilapidated old arena here in Oklahoma City. The idea that the same crowd that cried together in that arena now celebrates together in the Ford Center is moving and profound. What we needed in Oklahoma City was something to cheer about. Something that would allow us to show people how proud we are. I don't know that it is appropriate to say that the arrival of the Thunder has completed our healing, but it's not a stretch at all to say that it has helped.

Sports are not just frivilous pass-times. Rather, because they connect a community, because they give a community something to be proud of, and because they bring a community into one common goal and one common voice, sports are in fact profound, transformative and, as anyone in Oklahoma City can tell you, healing.

Again, thank you for your writing.

Sincerely,
Jeffery Spruill

If Maps Fails, We'll All Die!

2009-12-07T13:19:00.000-08:00

This is just a reminder to everyone of how vitally important to the health and well being of this city that it is that we all go out and vote "Yes" for MAPS 3. In order to demonstrate the importance of this issue, I have pointed out all that we will get with MAPS 3, and I have outlined the dangers that we as a city face if it fails. What we'll get:

1) A world class Convention Center. Though we already have two civic convention centers and dozens of hotels with convention space, and though convention business is dropping steadily across the nation, I choose to believe a fictional novel when it says "If you build it, they will come." I know that other cities who've built convention centers in the past several years have all seen convention business decline and leave them holding the bills for an unused building, but OKC has one thing these other cities don't have: year round bad weather.

2) A new park: It will be complete with water features that will also serve as free bath tubs for the homeless community that will be displaced when the Salvation Army Social Services Center is torn down to make room for the park. And because it will be protected by a dangerously understaffed police department with an average response time to high priority calls of just over nine minutes, park goers can be sure that they will have an exciting time after dark. Who doesn't like excitement? And though MAPS contains money to build these projects but not to mantain them, the park can be mantained for a mere $3 million dollars (about the salary and benefits for two police officers or firemen for an entire career) a year!

3) A new light rail system: Imagine all the middle class riders that will now only have to pay for parking once in Bricktown and who won't have to walk at all when visiting downtown! And, since the city will surely end its habit of ignoring underserved parts of the city, the rail system will provide a foundation to build a rail system off of that which would actually stretch into inner city neighborhoods so people can come from the projects to work at the convention center. After all, that's the purpose of mass transit anyway, and the city's sterling record of providing quality mass transit speaks for itself.

4) Sidewalks and Trails: Assuming someone picks up the $250 Million dollars of the convention center cost that MAPS 3 does not budget for, money will be left to add much needed sidewalks and trails that will help people lose the weight that they will gain because they don't have to walk around downtown thanks to the light rail system. And what a bargain at only $143,000 a mile!

5) Senior Wellness Centers: because someone has to drive those pesky non-profits like the YMCA out of business!

So, you can see that we have much to gain from MAPS 3, but what will happen to us if we fail to pass MAPS? Our progress as a city will instantly stop! Our investment in Bricktown ended in 2001 when the MAPS tax transferred to the MAPS for kids tax. Nothing has been built in Bricktown after 2001. And just look at neighborhoods that didn't see any MAPS money. None of them have thrived, except maybe Midtown, the Paseo Arts District , the Downtown Arts District, the Plaza District, the Asian District, and the hospital district. Okay, so a few have, but those were accidents of a good economy, while MAPS projects thrived only because we raised the money for them.

If you need an example of how much difference MAPS money makes, just look what MAPS for Kids did. Every school in the Oklahoma City Public Schools has received much-needed money for improvements and upgrades. Now everyone wants to put their kids in OKCPS. No one tries to move to other districts like Yukon, Moore, Edmond, and Putnam City. After all, if you could choose between Edmond Memorial and John Marshall, why wouldn't you choose John Marshall, aside from the gang problem, the under performing scores, and the low graduation rate?

Finally, a "no" vote on December 8th threatens the progress we have made in our city. If MAPS does not pass, the Bricktown Ballpark will be torn down. The Ford Center will crumble. The Oklahoma City native that owns the OKC Thunder will move the team to Las Vegas, and the canal will be filled in with dirt, on top of which will be built a pot-hole filled road. Don't let Oklahoma City move backward! Don't tell the city that you would rather them to invest your money in uselss things like firemen who are just going to slow traffic during the MDA drive or police officers who do nothing but write you tickets anyway.

Vote "Yes" on December 8th.

Who MAPS Forgot

2009-11-18T11:24:00.000-08:00

The Oklahoma Gazette published in yesterday's paper a letter I wrote about the MAPS 3 proposal. They kept it pretty much in tact, about which I was surprised and appreciative but, as with any newspaper op-ed, they cut chunks out to save copy space. So here is the complete version:

A couple of years ago, I assigned a class of college freshman writers a chapter of Mike Davis’s book City of Quartz which discusses a crime prevention program in the city of Los Angeles involving the construction of concrete roadblocks in certain parts of the city, supposedly for the purpose of hindering drug traffic between drug infested neighborhoods and neighboring middle class areas. But the roadblocks also had the effect of holding undesirables in certain parts of the city, separating them from better policed, more affluent parts of the city, thereby creating privileged spaces where the upper-middle class didn’t have to fear, or even see, LA’s urban blight.

I asked my students if Oklahoma City has such privileged spaces and, after considering the question, they inevitably mentioned Bricktown, but they seemed to feel a sense of superiority over LA, since we at least didn’t have concrete barriers. But when we looked at a map of Bricktown, we stumbled across borders just as real as any barrier in LA. To the east, I-235 nicely separates our middle class playground from the long neglected, racially segregated lower east side. On the south, the renamed “Oklahoma River” provides a natural barrier from the poverty stricken south east side, and to the west, the elevated railroad tracks are a literal wall between Bricktown and the transient infested downtown area (of course, with the arrival of the Thunder, we should perhaps move that boundary to the Greyhound station).

To protect this privileged space from the urban blight which surrounds it on all sides, the City of Oklahoma City built a brand new, fully-staffed police station responsible for the five or so square blocks that Bricktown encompasses, leaving four stations to protect the other 664 square miles of Oklahoma City. In a recent radio interview, Fraternal Order of Police President Gil Hensley said that, in order to staff the Bricktown station, officers were pulled from districts serving the rest of the city. While Bricktown has added interest and vitality to the downtown area, it has also increased the workload of the OCPD, and it has not hired more officers to help support this workload. President Henley’s counterpart in the Fire Department’s employee group, Phil Sipe has seen a similar increase in workload and has actually had nearly fifty positions cut from his department so that OCFD now has two empty fire stations. So, while it can certainly be argued that the Bricktown development has greatly benefitted our city, it has done so at the expense of the citizens who live in underserved, less affluent areas of the city.

Now the mayor would like the people of Oklahoma City to pass MAPS 3, an extension of the Maps tax already in place, which has already been extended once with MAPS for Kids. The new MAPS tax will build a third convention center downtown, a downtown trolley system, and a downtown park. So who is left out of this new MAPS? With no funding in the plan for new police, fire, or roads, the manpower needed to protect and maintain these new projects will have to come from somewhere. Likely, it will come from already underserved areas of the city. The projects will be paid for, not just by the Edmond, Norman, and Moore residents who come to the city to enjoy these amenities, but by those citizens who will never be able to afford the ticket prices to the new convention center, the bills in Bricktown restaurants and so on. They will not be able to come into downtown to ride the trolley because the famously bad Metro Transit Authority will not see a cent to improve its slow routes and unreliable service.

Thus, the people who are left out of the new MAPS improvements are the people who are most in need. Those of us in the upper middle class will have another nice party destination and we will no doubt feel safe and protected by the platoons of public servants we will see inside our barricaded safe-haven. But people who live just outside our barricades will continue to live with such dilapidated roads that they cannot drive a car down their street, such as those who live just blocks from downtown in the 2200 block of SW 8th, whose street cannot even be called paved. People in the rural areas of the southeast side will still have no fire hydrants, and the police station that serves them will still be twenty miles away. People who live in less desirable neighborhoods in the city will see the police and firemen transferred away to fill the needs of visitors downtown, leaving them unprotected, because the tax that built these new downtown projects didn’t provide for the manpower needed to protect them. Without a doubt, the new projects proposed in the new MAPS are worthwhile projects, but if the primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens, then the new MAPS neglects its primary responsibility. It neglects those who most need protection. It robs the poor to give to the rich.

Why You Should [Loudly] Support Your Local Police

2009-07-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

As any of you who have followed my writing lately know, I have very closely watched the Gates case in Cambridge, MA. I am intensely interested in the case because 1) my grandfather grew up in Cambridge and I still have family there so I have spent much time there and the city is close to my heart, 2) I was once a big fan of Professor Gates and assigned his writing to the freshman I taught at UCO and 3) I have an obvious professional interest.

As I have followed the story in the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, one of the things that has pleasantly surprised me has been the incredible outpouring of support for the Cambridge Police Department by people commenting on the websites of both these papers. Over the past several days, I have seen hundreds of comments that support the police in general and the involved sergeant specifically, but almost none condemning them. People have hung signs of protest in Professor Gates's front yard, yet Sgt. Crowley's yard has gone untouched. This, to me, has been an impressive -and rare- show of public support.

Many officers today feel under attack. I think it's safe to say that, across the country, morale on our police departments is extremely low. Officers feel unsupported, and unprotected. They feel that people are slow to act on their own, but quick to criticize, eager to sue, and indefatigable at second-guessing. Officers, I think, feel like they are constantly placed in no-win situations. After all, don't ask for an ID, and later you'll find out that the person you had contact with was a burglar. Ask for ID, and you'll get accused of racism by the homeowner that arrogantly thinks you should know him. Because of situations like these, many officers feel that they work to protect a public that doesn't appreciate, and perhaps even hates them.

Of course, I honestly believe that this is not the case, and I think that the support from the Boston community following the Gates debacle shows that. I think, by and large, an overwhelming majority of citizens appreciate and respect police officers and the sacrifices they make. But they are not called the silent majority for nothing. Arrestees and malcontents call police departments and send letters all the time railing about what officers have done wrong, but very few ever call in or write in to say thank you to the officers who served them or to congratulate officers on a job well done. Officers routinely find themselves being investigated after a formal complain, but rarely get to stand in lineup to hear a letter of appreciation about them being read in front of their peers. Instead, officers only hear complaints and accusations. But officers deserve to, and need to, hear audible public support.

And if there's any doubt that officers deserve praise, consider this: since September 11, 2001, 667 American soldiers have been killed in the war in Afghanistan. In that time, 1,157 police officers have been killed on the streets of America. Officers are giving their lives in a war that is being waged all around you. Yet, though it would be unthinkable to accuse an American soldier returning from Afghanistan of going to war only because he hated Arabs, we give an open ear to people who accuse officers of racism without a stitch of evidence to support the claim. When a convicted felon accuses an officer of excessive force, we drag his name through the mud on the nightly news. I'm not suggesting that we turn a blind eye on actual police malfeasance, but we owe to men who are sacrificing their lives at least the same benefit of doubt that we allow to felony suspects - the assumption of innocence until proven guilty.

And it isn't just their lives that officers are sacrificing. If most people were to watch a person aspirate on their own blood until they die, were to see a thirteen year old child floating dead in a swimming pool, or to see children who have been given cigarette burns by their mother's boyfriend, the person would be effected and haunted by these sights for the rest of their lives. Yet these are all things that officers can to expect to see numerous times through the course of a twenty five year career. After each of these events, the officer will not be offered psychological treatment, or days off to process the event. Instead, he will write a detailed report and go back in service, the event being added to a bank of such mentally destructive memories. The officer can't arrive on the scene of a brutal murder and fall into the street sobbing the way the witnesses around him are. Instead, he must somehow cope with what he is seeing and perform the work his profession requires.

Officers subject themselves to these sights so that the citizen will not have to. He runs into situations that others run away from. He doesn't do these things so that he can harass those he hates, or so that he can get the power and force the respect he didn't get in high school. These rewards would not be worth the sacrifices. And, because you pay his salary, you know he doesn't do these things for the meager pay.

So, when you are being stopped by an officer, and you find yourself quick to think that he's a jerk, remember that he may have just helped pull the lifeless body of a kid from a swimming pool, or he might have been called a racist by someone he was trying to help. So, if it seems that he's having a bad day, remember that a bad day for you means getting lectured by your boss for not getting your TPS reports in on time. A bad day for him involves being bitten by a mentally ill homeless man with god knows what diseases. Instead of telling your officer that he has better things to do than pull you over, say "sorry sir; I'll pay better attention next time." When you see an officer in a restaurant, take the time to go by and say, "thank you." And when a rich man with a home on Martha's Vineyard calls a good officer a racist, respond with a resounding and public, "shut up."

Why Gates is off My Reading List.

2009-07-23T09:36:00.000-07:00

As a former university English instructor, I have always been an admirer of Henry Louis Gates's work. He has produced some of the most enlightening scholarship into African American literature and the African American experience. However, as a current police officer, I am very disappointed in Professor Gates's actions regarding his arrest.

Every police officer has experienced countless situations in which a person of a race different than the officer has accused him of taking enforcement action against him based on his race. However, I expect better of Professor Gates. Professor Gates fails to see that what he has done to officers of the Cambridge PD is exactly what he has been preaching against his entire career. He assumed immediately upon meeting these officers that he knew what they were and what they were about. Since they were police officers, Gates seems to think, they must be racists. This is the exact type of rush to judgment that racism is made of.

These officers did not see a black man walking down the street and jump out on him. They were called to this address. The only thing officers did to provoke Professor Gates was to ask him to identify himself, something that the courts have been clear officers have the right to do, and something that officers routinely do to most everyone they contact, no matter what race. If Gates would have produced an ID, something he no doubt has, this matter would have ended immediately. Officers would have seen his address on his ID and gone back into service (we are, after all, a bit lazy and love calls that last two minutes instead of the two hours it takes to book someone into jail). Instead, Professor Gates unleashed a string of tired accusations of racism and self-important language cops hear everyday. Perhaps Professor Gates should consider what would have happened had someone really broken in.

Would Dr. Gates have wanted the officers to have checked the burglars ID, or would he have liked them to take for granted that they were telling the truth when they said they lived in this home? Did Dr. Gates feel that the officers should have known who he was, as if police officers routinely keep abreast of preeminent literary scholars?

Gates has claimed that he did not behave in a disorderly manner, as police reports by two seperate officers claim, and that he was unfairly arrested at his own house. But a picture published by the Boston Globe on boston.com shows Gates with his mouth wide open, looking suspiciously like he is yelling at a police officer who is walking in front of him. Additionally, the photo shows him handcuffed with his hands in front of him, a courtesy that is against nearly every department's policies, as this is considered unsafe for officers. So, not only does it not appear that he was treated poorly, it appears that he was in fact treated preferentially. Professor Gates is now talking about filming a documentary on racial profiling. Perhaps he should first learn a proper definition of that term. If Gates had been stopped by police walking down his own street after police had driven right by a white person a block down the road, his claims of "racial profiling" might have some legitimacy, but officers were only at Gates's house because they were called.

Whether Professor Gates really believes all cops are racist, or whether he is arrogantly offended that people outside of academia don't know who he is, much of what Gates has taught me has been undermined by his behavior. He teaches racial equality, but he seems to be asking for preferential treatment.

Update: The Plot Thickens

I once had a gay bar owner accuse me of responding slowly to a call to his bar because he was gay, a hilarious supposition to anyone who knows anything about my career background and politics. I love that Gates seems to have also chosen the wrong guy about whom to make racist allegations.

Clandestine Cool OKC

2009-04-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid growing up in Moore, I thought that being from Moore meant that I was from Oklahoma City. And, since I knew that there was nothing to do in Moore, that meant that there was nothing to do in Oklahoma City. But when I moved back from Memphis, I actually moved into the city (we're now the stuck-up Northsiders we were supposed to hate).

Since moving back, we have travelled a lot, but we have also occasionally stuck around for in-town vacations. If you have never pretended to be a tourist in your own town, no matter how big or small it may be, I suggest that you do so. Go all out. Get a hotel room in a nice hotel, carry a camera around, and go to the places you see on the free tourist maps you get in Bricktown.

Since coming home and getting out and visiting my own town, I have discovered how cool home is. Today we went into midtown. In OKC, midtown includes the area around St. Anthony Hospital, Automobile Alley (NW 10th/Broadway area), an the Mesta Park neighborhood. We ate at McNellie's Pub in Crown Plaza (a historic three sided building that sits on one of the city's few roundabouts). We sat at a table with a view of downtown, ate traditional Irish dishes, and had a pint of Guinness (well, Charissa didn't). We then walked across the roundabout and had a gigantic banana split at the Grateful Bean Cafe which inhabits the old, classic Kaiser's Ice Cream building, just down the street from St. Anthony's.

And this was just one example of decidedly cool, big city afternoons we've had here. No more am I the teenager who thinks there's "nothing to do" here. I've lived in Memphis, spent considerable time in Boston, and visited most of the major cities in the U.S. and I've finally discovered that OKC belongs among any of these cities.

We've stayed in the Skirvin Hotel, walked around in the underground (a part of this city many residents don't even know about), hung out in the wonderfully strange Paseo Arts District (NW 3oth and Dewey), and eaten every kind of ethnic food.

I've patrolled districts that are primarily Mexican where all the businesses have signs in Spanish, and another that is primarily Vietnamese where all the signs are in their language. I've eaten in Mediterranean restaurants owned by Iranians and pizza parlors owned by New York Italian-Americans. I even have a German Deli (significant to me) a mile from my house.

Okies, this place is cool! And the secret is getting out. If you haven't noticed, then get out of Moore, get a room in the Skirvin and become a tourist in your own town for a couple of days. It just may change your mind about our clandestine cool city.

Officers Down

2009-04-08T14:56:00.000-07:00

If it seems like there have been a lot of police officer killings in the news lately, it's because there have been. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page thirty-four officers have been killed in the line of duty so far this year. That number is equal to the number killed through the end of April last year, so we are only slightly ahead of where we were to date one year ago. The staggering numbers, however, are the number of officers killed in the last two months. After a slower start to the year (ten this January compared to fifteen in 2008, and seven in February compared to seven in 2008), March and April have been extremely deadly. Twelve officers were killed nationwide in March -up from five in March of 2008, and six have been killed through the first seven days of April. Four were killed in the entire month of April last year.

I have heard pop-sociologists blaming economic conditions for the recent upswing in violence in the US (the AP reports that 57 have been killed in mass shootings in the last month). I have even wondered (along with others who have always wondered this) if news reports about violence in fact perpetuate violence. Whatever the case, my brothers, now is a time to be extra-vigilant. Watch out for each other.

Goodbye Robert

2008-09-29T15:20:00.000-07:00

From the Officer Down Memorial Page:

Sergeant Robert Douglas succumbed to injuries sustained in a motorcycle
accident five years earlier.His police motorcycle was struck by a car and he was
then thrown into the path of oncoming truck. He had remained in a coma from the
time of the accident until succumbing to his injuries.Sergeant Douglas is
survived by his wife and 6-year-old son.

Retraction

2008-09-06T06:33:00.000-07:00

RE: My last Blog

Once again, Theo Epstein, you have proven that you are smarter than me. The Bay/ Manny trade has proven about even as far as actual performance, but the collateral effects have been shocking. The Red Sox are playing inspired baseball and Pedroia has picked up the slack big time, going eight for eight with two walks in the first two games against the evil empire. He is only slightly slackened since that run. I don't know that getting rid of Manny has had anything to do with the performance of the rest of the team, but whatever distraction he ma have cause has clearly gone with him.

I'm a man. When I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong.

An Open Letter to the Boston Red Sox

2008-07-31T21:35:00.000-07:00

To the Management,

Thank you for seeing to it that I will have plenty of time to grade papers in October.

Yours,

Jeff

P.S. You're idiots.

Welcome? The OKC SuperSonics

2008-07-05T22:31:00.000-07:00

This is a blog response I made at SupersonicSoul, a fan blog by understandably angry Seattle fans. I thought i'd put it here for my two readers.

I came here to issue a heartfelt apology for what Clay Bennett did to you in the name of the people of Oklahoma City. You can surely understand that, naturally, we in Oklahoma have long wanted a major league franchise (we built the Ford Center for the NHL team that became the Nashville Predators). Many feel that having a big league franchise would help to alleviate the view that much of the country (including many of the commenters on this blog) has about Oklahomans as provincial, “Slag off c**ts, f**knuts, hicks, rednexx [sic], thieves, flatlanders, horse f**kers” (whiskeychainsaw) who need their “daily crystal meth fix” (Ryan). We’re naturally tired of hearing about our “market size” when we live in a city with a larger population than Atlanta, New Orleans, Cleveland, Kansas City, Oakland, Miami, and Minneapolis (Census Bureau 2005 estimate), all of which have major league franchises, many of which with stars much bigger than KD. So we wanted –even needed- the recognition that comes from having a team.

Yet, admittedly, it feels empty. I wonder how easy it will be for me to root for a team owned by Judas and his thirty pieces of silver. It’s a little embarrassing that people here are so excited to have gotten the team so early and that Bennett is a local hero. Frankly, if Bennett had stayed until the lease was out then left, I wouldn’t feel too bad. It would be easy to say, “that’s what Seattle gets for putting six Starbucks stores within a mile of my house to steal my money.” But that’s not how I feel. I feel dirty. We are good people here, but I am afraid our desire to get something we wanted has blinded us to what it has cost others. It’s unfortunate that this is such a constant human trait. After all, even Seattle was stolen from Native Americans by the Denny party after they landed at Alki Point.

Workplace

2008-04-02T22:48:00.000-07:00

Mick got an idea from somebody to post picture of his workspace and tag other people to do the same. I don't really know what it means to tag someone, but here's a picture of my workspace.

Bad Good Rating

2008-03-02T11:44:00.000-08:00

Every now and then, I go onto RateMyProfessors.com to laugh at my ratings. Some people will tell you that you should never look at these sites because they are misleading. This is because, generally, only malcontents will take the time to get on to a website to "rate" their professors. But I find that, if you realize this is true and you don't care what eighteen year olds think anyway, it is fin to get on and check them out.

Strangely, the rating that I most hate is a good rating. This student liked me, gave me great ratings. If it is who I think it is, I liked him to. But, bearing in mind that I teach in the English department, and that I teach writing, you can understand why I found this troubling:

thhis is a real great prof. he really helps you. he always shows a funny
you tube video during class. you should really chose this prof. yu are only
allowed to miss class 4 times before your grade is affected. you write 4
papers during the year.

Why the "Silence of the Scriptures" Argument Just Doesn't Cut It.

2008-02-09T13:20:00.000-08:00

The Quail Springs church of Christ has made news in conservative Oklahoma City yet again. Last time, it was because they were “yoked with unbelievers” when they , shame of all shames, held a forth of July fellowship with the Baptist church with whom they share a parking lot.

But now they have committed an even worse crime. They have decided to begin an instrumental service on Sunday morning. They will retain a traditional, a cappella service but will also have a service in which a small band will accompany the music service. This has, of course, kicked off a rash of embarrassing public debate between churches of Christ in the area. These arguments range from the tired old arguments to the strange ones that even over-educated guys like me can’t understand.

The most common argument against the use of instruments in the worship service stem from a method of biblical interpretation based on close examination of the Bible’s text (in English) and the text alone. It is a method that stresses an exclusion from consideration any non-textual theology. This argument also comes from the belief that the institution of the New Testament abolished all legal value of the Old. Because the New Testament does not explicitly command the use of musical instruments, Church of Christ thinkers have argued that instruments are in fact forbidden. Thus the “silence of the scriptures” on the issue is in fact a proscription. My favorite explanation of this is one that I was once given: “If I tell you to go to the store and buy bread, that does not mean that you are to buy bread AND butter. In the same way, we are told in the New Testament to sing. We are not told to sing AND play instruments.

The problem with the “silence of the scriptures” argument is that it fails to consider the culture that the bible was written in. Dr. Neale Pryor, one of my favorite professors at Harding University, used to tell his students, “Remember, the Bible was written FOR you. It was not written TO you.” The difference is subtle but important. I should note that Dr. Pryor wasn't talking about this issue when he said this, but what Dr. Pryor suggests is that, in order to understand and properly interpret scripture, it is important to consider the people that the scripture was written to. This means that the type of close textual-study that the C of C has valued so highly may be a very irresponsible way to come to a clear and complete understanding of scripture. We must, instead, look very carefully at the history of culture as well as extra-Biblical source material to truly understand the text. With that in mind, it might be helpful to look at Christian hymnology in the first century in order to interpret the New Testament’s silence on this issue.

Let’s consider things that we know about the first-century church and their attitudes toward instrumental worship. The oldest Christian hymns in existence date from the early second century. Interestingly, they contain instrumental interludes. This means that by the early second century, instruments were clearly in use in Christian churches, not just as accompaniment, but as featured soloists. It’s reasonable to assume that this practice did not grow full fledged after the end of the first century.
We also know that Jewish Christians patterned their worship after the synagogues, which saw the use of instruments as mandatory. We must assume that the Jewish churches would have retained the use of instruments in worship as well. In fact, there was a great variety of worship styles in the synagogues and presumably in early churches as well. Temple worship included expensive, melodic instruments while the poorer synagogues often used only tambourines and cheap drums. But it is clear that they used at least these small instruments. This fact, more than any other, complicates the “silence of the scriptures” argument. This is because the New Testament writers are constantly chiding the Jewish churches for elements of the old law that they kept that were either no longer acceptable or no longer required in the new Christian church. However, they never corrected the Jewish church’s use of musical instruments. Instead, it seems that the practice was allowed to continue. The leaders of the early church clearly do not proscribe the use of instruments. If anything, then, the New Testament’s silence on the issue supports, rather than restricts, the use of instruments in the worship service. Knowing that the practice was going on, the apostles (Jewish Christians all) remained conspicuously silent on the issue. Our best educated guess is that many first century churches remained a cappella for financial reasons if for no other, while others would have carried on using instruments of different varieties depending on the individual congregation. We know for certain that worship in the first century was infinitely varied and the apostles saw no need to homogenize them. Instead, with few and important exceptions, churches carried on worshiping as they saw fit.

At the least, the silence of the scriptures suggests that the issue is totally unimportant. This possibility is almost as frightening as the last. This is because, if the issue is not as completely pivotal as we think it is, I have this horrible fear that before the judgment seat of God, my savior may say to me, “What have you done? People were dying all around you and I was begging you to go to them. But you were too busy arguing over trivialities.”

Jeff Sees a Legend

2007-11-12T19:42:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I went to OCU and heard a lecture by Edward Albee. For those of you lug-heads who don't know who Edward Albee is, here's his Wikipedia entry. Mr Albee is the winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, two Tony awards, and was one of two playwrites ever to receive a special lifetime achievement Tony (the other was Arthur Miller). Tonights lecture was suppoed to be comething about the Creative Proces and Imagination or something but he never got to any of that. The lecture was brilliant any way, and I thought you might like to hear some of the nuggets of wisdom from one of our greatest writers.

Albee on his background:
He said that he began writing poetry when he was eight and never got good at it. He wrote two novels as a teenager that he said, "I like to think that these are the worst novels a teenager cold have written." He also tried his hand at the short story. He wrote a first line which he thinks os w wonderful line. It was, "Everything in Rome is uphill." He then said that, unfortunately, everything after that in the story went downhill.

Mr. Albee told us that he had written a sex farce at thirteen which his adopted mother had thrown away. He called her, "my first critic." About his ineffectiveness in writing the poem he said:

"My knowledge of farce was academic; my knowledge of sex, singular."

He told us, and I had not known this before, that "Zoo Story," his first sucessful play, had its world premier in Berlin and it was performed in German. He went to Germany to see it and, though he couldn't even understand it, he watched the audience react and knew that he was a playwrite.

About the power of theatre in society he said:

Theatre is and always has been an active aggression against the status quo...If
you don't like what you see, change.

And further:

In a democracy, we can have anything we want but, in a democracy, we get exactly
what we deserve.

I have very few answers about anything, but I have a great many questions about
many things.

Creativity is merely the need to do something about the experience

And this is my favorite 1) because it's great and 2) because Edward Albee autographed the page of my notes on which it is written:

I like to go to universities because there are young people there, and I
like to corrupt the young.

Revision Problem of the Day

2007-11-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

This is the first sentence of a news story from TMZ.com:

"Just last week Marie Osmond infamously fainted during a live broadcast last month..."

Freaky Smart People

2007-10-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

So, I'm writing this from Murfreesboro, TN where I am sitting in my room at the Double Tree full of knowledge and free wine. All this is because I am at the Conference on John Milton where I got to present a paper on Wycliffe's possible influence on the prose writing of John Milton.

What's really cool about conferences like these are that you are sitting around with all the people you reference in your own papers. I got to speak to Michael Lieb about my paper, who told me that I was "on solid theoretical ground," which made me feel good for a second. I met John Shawcross, a seventeenth-century scholar whose work I very much admire. Then when I ran into him in the hallway this morning, he said, "Good morning Jeff," and I thought, holy-cow, John Shawcross knows my name. He's a tiny old man who is still completely brilliant and who walks around during a party because he doesn't want to sit. All these people are extremely generous people who really want to bring young scholars along in the field.

But alas, Sunday night I will be home which, on one hand is really good because I miss my wife, but I am also terrified because I have to go back to my own desk where I have a two foot stack of student papers to grade.

The Writer and Their Only Gender Neutral Option

2007-10-04T21:52:00.000-07:00

A contemporary trend in composition textbooks is the view that academic writers should be on guard against the accidentally sexist use of pronouns. By this I am referring to sentences such as, "the writer should pay attention to the pronouns he chooses to use." The use of the pronoun, while not necessarily sexist, is certainly sexually exclusive. This presents a problem in modern English, a language that must now accommodate a more egalitarian concept of readerly/writerly identity. While English is fortunate not to have gender specific adjectives like those of the Latinate languages, English, like so many languages that derived their system of logic from Latin, has no gender neutral pronouns. While I am not concerned with political correctness, actual correctness should be something for which we strive, should it not? And if we are to be factually correct in our use of language, we must address the gendered pronoun issue. Of course, the long accepted solution has been to use the phrase, "he or she" but any reader will tell you, this device becomes very monotonous, very quickly. The style problem caused by this phrase is compounded by the fact that there is also no gender neutral possessive. Thus he or she must own his or her whatever he or she owns. Clearly an alternate solution is needed. Here are my solutions. They're actually solutions arrived at by writers struggling with the issue who have un-dogmatically invented solutions as needed. I am simply setting them forth in attempt to codify them.

1) Assign gender based on the writer's identity. It seems to me that when a writer is referring to an unspecific subject, the writer is generally and unconsciously being autobiographical. That is to say that when the writer of a composition textbook says, "the writer should never assume that his audience will naturalize his assumptions," the ambiguous "he" to which the writer refers is the writer himself. This is true because what the writer is giving you as a lesson in how to write is a rule that has worked for him. He is therefore thinking of himself as the writer and bidding the reader to do what he does. Therefore, I propose that the writer use his or her own sex, as I have done here.

2) Accept "They" and "their" as gender neutral pronouns. "They" and its possessive "their" are English's only gender neutral pronouns. The problem is, of course, that they are plural. It is therefore technically incorrect to say, "the writer [singular] must sharpen their [plural] pencil." The use of they and their as singular pronoun is already in common practice, yet if any student uses the word in this way, he or she is likely to have it graded as "wrong." There is, on one hand, a fallacy in grading here. Since language is based on common use, the fact that using "their" as a gender neutral pronoun has been in common use for some time makes it correct, whether English departments want to accept it or not. Plus, with the absense of better gender neutral words, these are our language's only single word alternatives. I have already committed to myself not to judge these pronouns as incorrect in my own students' papers, though I will need to remind them that others will.

My personal preference is for the first choice. I like it better for stylistic reasons; "they" and "their" still sound incorrect. I also like the ethos that is added by the linguistic reminder that the writer is present. If the reader knew that the writer would be sexing his argument based on his own identity, every time the reader came across a gendered word, it would remind the reader that the writer is indeed real. In this way, the writer is constantly reasserting his humanity; the speaker is a person, not a system of scribbles on a page.

Champs!

2007-09-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

I know I never write on here anymore but school keeps me so busy. I'm on here now just to celebrate the Red Sox first division championship in 12 years after nine years of Yankee dominance in the AL East. The tyrant is deposed!!!

Beat Picture of the Week

2007-08-13T15:17:00.003-07:00

A vandalized car with a punched column...but not reported stolen.

Our Final Baseball Trip (for the year)

2007-07-25T13:04:00.001-07:00

When we went to Texas for the Sox series, the first game was delayed one hour for rain. For our inconvenience, we were given two free tickets for upper-deck seats. On game three, we were given four vouchers for seats of @25 or less as part of a giveaway. We redeemed all these tickets over the past weekend in what turned out to be a trip of ups and downs.

We left on Thursday and hit Fort Worth just in time for rush hour traffic. It took us two and a half hours to get from OKC to Forth Worth then one hour to get from Fort Worth to our motel in Arlington.

We had a room in the Days Inn on Collins in Arlington. I knew we were in for a treat when we pulled in to the lot and found that the motel shares a lot with the Afrika Food Mart and a loud Mexican bar. Butting up to the lot was what we cops commonly refer to as a "turd complex" which is an apartment complex that accepts Section 8. The employees of the hotel were unfriendly and the room was lousy. The coffee maker sit in the bathroom (it can't be moved because it's tied to the wall). The bed was extremely small and low to the ground and the bed spread looked faded with age. To top it all off, the entire place was full of teenagers. We usually pamper ourselves on this trip by staying in the Wyndam hotel, which we planned on staying at Sunday and Monday nights. While traveling to the park from the motel, we learned that out hotel had been sold to Sheraton. We kept our reservations but lost all our free stuff that we get there for being part of Wyndam's rewards program. But more on that later.

Game one was against the Indians, a great ball club, who had C.C. Sabathia on the hill. It was a great game but we were surrounded by weird people. Don't ever eat the pizza in Rangers Ballpark. It's just frozen pizza like you can get at Walmart.

After the first game, we drove down to Rockdale to stay with Charissa's parents. It's a great community and a cute little town but it's far away and really boring and I'm glad they're moving to the Tulsa area so we don't have to drive to Rockdale anymore. While in Rockdale, we drove to Round Rock to catch a minor league game between the Express and our own Oklahoma Redhawks. The Redhawks lost but we did get to see Freddy Guzman (my favorite minor leaguer) steal home on Round Rock's pitcher.

Sunday night we went back to Dallas, this time with Bill and Saphronia, and stayed in the newly renamed Sheraton, where we learned that the Seattle Mariners were also staying. We had rooms on the fourteenth (thirteenth) floor overlooking the ballpark. I LOVE this hotel and was so glad to be back in it after staying at the crappy Days Inn and the comfortable but boring spare bedroom of my in-laws house. We had a great omelet man who Bill has become friends with.

On game day II, we took a tour of the ballpark and ate in the restaurant attached to the park. At the game, we got to see a Sammy Sosa home run in an explosive fifth inning which saw five runs on five hits (two were home runs: Sosa and Wilkerson). The Rangers took an 8-7 victory and have taken the first three in their four game series against the strong Mariners lineup.

The final down came when we arrived home and learned that our friend who we had left to watch our animals had forgotten completely and our dog and cat had been five days without food or water. Both of them were okay but Cooper (the dog) had an abrasion on his nose where it looks like he kept trying to get the door of his house open. Chloe (the cat) had found a box of dog biscuits and was keeping herself fed on those. We took the dog to the vet just to be sure and he was given a clean bill of health. I felt horrible all day over it.

Thus rounds up our final baseball trip of the summer.

Go Sox!

Caroline's Lucky Night

2007-07-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

Oklahoma is a state of thieves. We steal. It's what we do. The Sooners were a group of criminals that sneaked over the lines early before the land-runs, essentially stealing lands. The Myriad Gardens, designed in the 60's but not built until 1988 (just in time for the land-run centennial), was copied from the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark. When the city wanted to revitalize Bricktown, they copied San Antonio's river walk, creating a river flowing through Bricktown. We tried to steal the Hornets from New Orleans and will very likely steal the Supersonics from Seattle.

But now we've gone too far. This season, OKC's triple-A baseball team, the Redhawks, has been stealing the dubious Red Sox tradition of playing (and singing supposedly) Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline." This Thursday, the organization will make the theft complete when they hold "Neil Diamond Night" at the park, during which any person named "Caroline" will get in for free.

Perhaps this wouldn't seem so ridiculous if the song, or Neil Diamond, had anything to do with baseball. What makes it silly is the fact that the Red Sox tradition of singing the song (which they do before the 8th inning) is something of a fluke. The park started playing the song, the fans started singing along, the tradition stuck. No one really seems to know how it happened or why New England even tolerates Neil Diamond being played in their most holy sanctuary of Fenway Park (in fact, many die-hard fans simply refuse to sing along...But I kinda like it). The tradition belongs exclusively to Boston and no other Major League city. But that won't stop OKC from stealing it, just like they stole the Fenway Dog (which isn't even very good).

Oklahoma, when will we get our own traditions? When will we, a city larger than Cleveland, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Kansas City MO, Oakland, and Miami become a major league city in our own right?

Attention Hackers!

2007-07-04T11:41:00.001-07:00

Please do something about these guys.

Reflecting on "Falling Man"

2007-06-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

I'm reading the novel "Falling Man," which is the new novel by Don DeLillo, who is one of my favorite authors. The book follows the life of a 9/11 survivor and his family just after the attacks. I read a scene this evening which I found particularly poignant. In this scene, Keith, the main character is watching the news with his wife as they play the World Trade Center videos.

He said, "It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this
distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I'm standing here thinking
it's an accident."Because it has to be.""It has to be," he said."The way the
camera sort of shows surprise.""But only the first one.""Only the first," she
said."The second plane, by the time the second plane appears," he said, "we're
all a little older and wiser." (135)

This scene is so profound because it is so ubiquitous. This is exactly everybody's experience. Perhaps you remember and it felt the same for you. You were sitting in a student center on a college campus and the first tower was burning and you thought, it's an accident. It's happened before. A B-17 hit the Empire State building. This is the same type of thing. And you wondered how, with our modern technology, an accident like this could happen. But it's an accident of course. It has to be. But then you see the second plane, and it happens so fast but you are thinking fast too, so before you even see the planes you think, Oh God, it's not an accident. And as you see the flames you know that every thing has changed forever. And isn't it fitting that in the twenty-first century we should die in real time on cable news.

Isn't this your experience too? Isn't this the cultural work of great literature, to put into words our collective experience. This book isn't as well done as some of DeLillo's others but this is where it is successful. You read the book and you feel...consoled somehow, because you're glad to know that you're not the only one.

The Writing on the Wall

2007-06-12T15:22:00.000-07:00

Because I am unrealistically optimistic about the state of education in our universities, I am always amazed and saddened by the fact that adult men in a university setting scratch crap in bathroom stalls. But since they do, I might as well read and criticize them. I went into a stall today and did some leisurely reading and now I ma going to give both my readers my favorite messages from today. Remember, these were written on the walls of a bathroom stall in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Oklahoma...the ivory halls of academia.

"Collage is for the week"
-It's true, only pansies would cut pictures and glue them together to create art.

"Today's poop is brought to you by the leter H."

"Writing on the walls is for dumb ass's"
-Speaking of...

What Time Is It?

2007-06-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

Not 4:30 (Spin Doctors Fans) but...

Dice-K, Make My Day, or How Sweep it Is

2007-05-27T16:39:00.001-07:00

So Charissa has been going to the wall on the third base side for the last three days trying to get autographs. We got Kyle Snyder on Friday but no luck yesterday. Today we get there at noon and go in as soon as the gates open. Charissa goes down to the wall in one of the aisles and she is a little back in line. The pitchers are playing catch along the third base line in shallow outfield. They finish up and I realize that Daisuke Matsuzaka is walking towards Charissa's line. He begins signing and she is getting closer and closer. I think that she had looked pretty close to the front but now she seems miles away from Dice-K as people push and shove to get to the front. Then he takes Charissa's ball. He signs it (or as she says it, "his $103 million hand touched me) and she says thank you. He bows to her and she bows back; then she turns to walk away. as she goes up the aisle past the people who are still in line and I'm thinking, 'stop talking to people. Look disappointed,' because I can just see someone snatching the ball out of her hands and running. I come towards her and I can see that her hands are trembling. She hands me the ball and there it is, a big "D' with some scribbly crap after it and the number 18.

Tavarez and Loe are the Sox and Rangers number five pitchers, respectively. Both of them had fairly good outings. Tavarez: 5.2 IP, 4R 4ER, 6H, 1BB, 1HB, 6k. Loe 6IP, 3R, 3ER, 7H, 1BB, 0HB, 2K.

Varitek hit a three run home run in the fourth in support of Tavarez but Tavarez got no decision after giving up a three run upper-decker to Teixeira and an RBI single to Ian Kinsler. Piniero got the win for the Sox after Otsuka blew the save for the Rangers, allowing two runs on three hits in the eighth and Gagne gave up a lead off homer to Pedroia.

Okajima came in to save the game for Piniero and had to make it close for us. He gave up one run on an RBI single by Teixeira (who wouldn't go away) allowing the Rangers to come withing one. Then, Sammy Sosa came up to bat. He hit a long two-strike fly ball which Crisp caught, ending the game and securing the sweep.

In the Wake of our Curse; Curse No More

2007-05-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

We thought we were bad luck. Every time we have come to Arlington, we have scene Wakefield pitch. Every time, the Sox have lost. In fact, it was our Wakefield woes that convinced us that we needed to come to a whole series instead of just one game. Our luck has changed.

Before the game, we took a tour of the park. We got to go into the Rangers' dugout and ride the bench and stand on the top step. Then the Allen's came to have dinner with us and watch the game.

Wakefield pitched seven innings, allowing four tuns on four hits. He struck out four while walking only one. The fifth inning was a little scary, as it looked like Wake was going to let us down again but Sox hitters supported him with a huge sixth inning which saw five runs on four hits. Two pitchers had to pitch to ELEVEN Red Sox batters to get the three outs in the sixth.

Manny seems to be coming out of his slump. He was four for four and lacked only a home run to bat the cycle.

Sox win 7-4 and climb to 11.5 ahead of the Yankees, who are now in fourth place in the east! We are trying to decide whether or not to bring brooms to tomorrow's game in preparation for a sweep.

Dispatch from the 16th Floor

2007-05-25T23:13:00.000-07:00

I write to you now from the sixteenth floor of the Arlington Wyndham Hotel where we are staying in a Suite after getting a free upgrade. We have a kitchenette and a living area with a sofa; all so we can relax between baseball games.

We walked to the park extremely early today so that we could go to the Legends museum. The picture above is of a jersey and a bat that belonged to Ted Williams. Unfortunately, his head is still in a freezer. That's what I'd really like to see. So, to the game.

The game didn't begin until 9:00 due to a rain delay. By that time, we'd been at the park almost six hours. The good part of all this time is that Charissa was able to get an autograph from Sox reliever Kyle Snyder (who would pitch an entire two thirds of an inning: .2 1 0 0 0 1). Rangers starter Brandon McCarthy went only two innings allowing four runs on only one hit with four walks. Matsuzaka cruised for the first three innings but then he began feeling nauseous and allowed five runs in the fourth inning (he had allowed five runs in his last three starts...combined). He left after a strong fifth, just long enough to get the win after the Sox scored two more in the fifth. The Sox then t-ed off on Frank Francisco who allowed four more runs on four hits in one third of an inning. Sox win 10-6, incidentally, the same score that the Yankees lost to the Angels with which moves the Sox to 10.5 ahead of the second place Yankees in the AL East.

By the way, I gave Sammy Sosa an error in the second allowing Lugo to reach. Sosa then through Pedroia out who had remained close to first so that he could tag. The home town score keeper saw it differently and spared Sosa the error, calling the play a fielder's choice. It remains an error on my score card and I refuse to change it.

All Set

2007-05-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

We leave for four days in Dallas tomorrow to see a full series of the Red Sox at the Rangers. Here's how it looks:

Friday:
Matsuzaka (6-2, 4.06) vs. McCarthy (4-4, 5.82)

Saturday:
Wakefield (4-5, 3.14) vs. Padilla (2-5, 5.52)

Sunday:
Tavarez (3-4, 5.27) vs. Loe (1-4, 6.38)

The matchups promise a good series. With Tavarez pitching on Sunday, I have chosen that as the day I will wear a Rangers hat, especially since I like Kameron Loe. I will give dispatches from D-Town and pictures when I return.

GO SOX!

Beat Picture of the Week

2007-05-19T02:38:00.000-07:00

A Picture from my beat:
In case you cannot tell what this is, this is a glass door at a "church" which awaits the overthrow of white people. This door lists the 12 tribes of Israel with their modern descendants.

1) Judah: The Negroes
2) Benjamin: West Indians
3) Levi [the Priestly tribe, I'd like to point out]: Haitians
4) Simeon: Dominicans
5) Zebulun: Guatemala to Panama
6) Ephriam: Puerto Ricans
7) Manasseh: Cubans
8) Gad: Amer. Indians
9) Rueben: Seminole Indians [which are apparently different than American Indians]
10) Nephtali: Argentine to Chile
11) Asher: Colombia to Uruguay
12) Issachar: Mexicans

Still Going Strong

2007-05-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

My grades for Spring:

Writing the Short Story A
Restoration and 18th Century A
American Lit 1800-1865 A

It Would Bee My Luck

2007-05-08T02:04:00.000-07:00

I woke up this afternoon and went outside to see several bees hanging around the front of the house. I though, "yikes. The bees like my house. I might have to get some poison." Charissa came home and we went out to eat with her parents, which kept us away from the house for about an hour and a half. When we returned, the several bees had turned into a bee hive full of thousands of bees hanging below the overhang between out first and second floor, about six feet from our front door. Now we have to use the back door and I'm desperately afraid that the bees will find a way into the house. I guy from a bee farm is supposed to come in the morning "about seven or maybe a couple hours later." Please, please, be there at 7:00. In the meantime, Charissa has gone to stay with the Landrums, just in case, and I have gone home a couple times just to check out the situation.

Update:
The bee farm guy is hindered from coming by the torrential downpour outside. Apparently, they can do nothing in the rain so he can't come out until it stops. Plus, there's no way to get around town without coming across roads closed by water. After a three year drought. Mother Nature is attacking me.

Congrats to My Old Man

2007-05-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

Lat night I got to watch my dad accept a Medal for Meritorious Service for his work in solving two cold case homicides in smaller jurisdictions at the request of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations. Congratulations to my daddy on an award that he has deserved for a long time. My old man is truly one of the best officers on our police department.

On the Legality of the Iraq War

2007-04-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

There has been a murmuring among Bush critics (of whom I am occasionally a part)
that the Iraq was must end because it is an illegal war. I have been having to look at the bumper stickers saying "impeach Bush" and "Bush is a war criminal" so long and so often that I could gag. Their line of reasoning is that Congress has never declared war on Iraq (not withstandign the 2002 Resolution authorizing the use of Military force) and therefore Bush has no legal authority to remain there. Not one to trust the media who makes things up or party pundits who spin for their own agenda, I decided to do the unthinkable among the hoi polloi: I actually looked the laws up myself!

The real question is: is the formal declaration of war an antiquated concept? Legally, it would seem so. Congress's "vote of confidence" in the form of it's 2002 Joint Resolution for the Use of Military force in Iraq" is legal authority enough under the War Powers Act of 1973. Don't believe me? Here is a portion if the text:

Section 5: (b) Within sixty calendar days after a report is submitted or is
required to be submitted pursuant to section 4(a)(1), whichever is earlier, the
President shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces with respect to
which such report was submitted (or required to be submitted), unless the
Congress (1) has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization [italics mine]for such use of United States Armed Forces

It goes on to say:

Notwithstanding subsection (b), at any time that United States Armed Forces are
engaged in hostilities outside the territory of the United States, its
possessions and territories without [italics mine] a
declaration of war or specific statutory authorization, such forces shall be
removed by the President if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution.

The "without" is the important word, as Congess did in fact give the President authorization to go to war. Furthermore, The law gives congress no authority to revoke its authorization once it has given it. The preseident is therefore not obligated to remove troops at the behest of the whims of a majority changing Congress. Please, look it up for yourself. The truth is, whether you like it or not, the President is the Constitutionally authorized and he may commit troops wherever in the world he wants to. Take it up with the Founding Fathers. That being said, whether you agree with the war or not, Bush is not a war criminal so put up the bumper stickers, unless you like driving around advertising your failure to research the topic you pretend to care about.

Proud Owner

2007-04-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

I like to collect old books in the areas of my interests. I already own a couple really good ones including: The Study of Aesthetics published in 1856 and A History of English Dramatic Literature, published in 1899. I tried to get a first edition British copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin from 1851 but, alas, it went for almost $300 while I was at a ball game. I did manage to pick up Abraham Lincoln: His Life and Public Service by Mrs. P.A. Hanaford, the author of Our Martyred President. The "record of his stainless life and martyr's death" is inscribed to "The Loyal Men and Women, North and South, East and West; the the Union Army and Navy; and especially to the Long-Oppressed Race for whom President Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation" I can't wait to read and digest this account from just after his death from an obviously sympathetic New England writer!

Another Graduate Bibliography

2007-04-25T00:26:00.000-07:00

The first version was annotated!

Works Cited:
Aristotle. “Poetics.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed.
David Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1998. 42-64.
Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland, or the Transformation. New York: Prometheus
Books, 1997.
---. “Wieland, or the Transformation. An American Tale.” The American
Review and Literary Journal 1 (1801): 333-37.
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New
York: Oxford UP, 1986.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Goddu, Teresa A. Approaches to Teaching Gothis Fiction: the British and American
Traditions. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003.
Harris, Jennifer. “At One with the Land: The Domestic Remove-Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Matters of National Belonging.” Canadian Review of
American Studies 33.3 (2003): 189-210.
Kramnick, Isaac, ed. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. New York: Penguin Books,
1995.
Kutchen, Larry. “The ‘Vulgar Thread of Canvass’ Revoluction and the Picturesque in
Ann Eliza Bleeker, Crevecoeur, and Charles Brockden Brown.” Early American Literature 63.3 (2001): 395-425.
Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government. Ed. Thomas P Pearson. New York:
The Liberal Arts Press, 1952.
---. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Vol I. Ed. Alexander Cambell Fraser.
New York: Dover Publications, 1959.
Schneck, Peter. “Wieland’s Testimony; Charles Brockden Brown and the Rhetoric of
Evidence.” The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 18 (2002): 167-213.
Sutherland, Helen. “Varieties of Protestant Experience: Religion and the Doppelganger in Hogg, Brown, and Hawthorne.” Studies in Hogg and His World 16 (2005): 71-85
Tomkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 40-61.

Works Consulted:
Amfreville, Marc. “Charles Brockden Brown’s Cultural Paradox.” Letterature d’America
24 (2004): 5-21.
Basu, Biman. “Reading the Techno-Ethnic Other in DeLillo’s White Noise.” Arizona Quarterly 61.2 (2005): 87-111
Bradshaw, Charles C. “New England Illuminati: Conspiracy and Causality in Charles
Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” The New England Quarterly 76 (Sept 2003): 356- 77.
Dill, Elizabeth. “The Republican Stepmother: Revolution and Sensibility in Charles
Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” The Eighteenth Century Novel 2 (2002): 273-303.

Grabo, Norman. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill, NC: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 3-29.
Hsu, Hsuan L. “Democratic Expansionism is ‘Memoirs of Carwin’.” Early American
Literature 35 (2000):137-156.
Norwood, Lisa West. “‘I may be a Stranger to the Ground of Your Belief’ Constructing
Sense of Place in Wieland.” Early American Literature 38.1 (2003): 89-122.
Williams, Daniel E. “Writing under the Influence: An Examination of Wieland’s ‘Well
Authenticated Facts’ and the Depiction of Murderous Fathers in Post- Revolutionary Print Culture.” Eighteenth Century Fiction 15 (2003): 643-68

Don't Blame Us if We Evah' Doubt Ya'

2007-04-23T05:52:00.000-07:00

After a sweep of the Yankees capped off by this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAGTfFJFsfA the picture looks like this:

Boston 12 5 .706 -
Baltimore 11 7 .611 1.5
New York 8 9 .471 4.0
Toronto 8 10 .444 4.5
Tampa Bay 7 11 .389 5.5

Goodbye Hornets, Goodbye Kurt Vonnegut, Goodbye Don Imus

2007-04-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

Everything about this Friday the Thirteenth lived up to the reputation. It was rainy and cold, which delayed the Redhawks home opener (to which we had tickets). we had thunder, while the panhandle is getting snow, possibly up to nine inches by tomorrow.

In the midst of all of it, the Hornets played their final game in Oklahoma City. They will now go back to New Orleans where they will have decidedly less fan support. The lost in heart breaking fashion to the Denver Nuggets in the very last seconds. Just like that, we're a minor league town again.

Kurt Vonnegut, one of the finest author's of the last generation, died Wednesday night after struggling with a brain injury caused when he fell down. He was the Author of "The Slaughterhouse-Five" "Cat's Cradle" and most recently "The Man Without a Country." He was one of the few anti-war activists who had ethos, having seen war himself. I had a self-revelatory moment when it occurred to me that some people get upset when Anna Nichole Smith died. I got upset to hear about Kurt Vonnegut. Jeez, I'm a nerd.

Goodbye Don Imus. I never liked you. I'm glad you're gone. The only thing is, will we as a society now censure those in pop culture who make millions by denigrating women and projecting racial stereotypes (is rappers)? My fear is that we will not. In fact, I'm almost positive we will not. America has proven again and again that it tolerates double standard.

And back on the subject of my rained out ball game, we will be taking in a double header on Sunday.

When Work Intrudes Into Your Personal Life

2007-04-08T15:43:00.000-07:00

I would just like to thank the Tuttle officer that gave my personal cell phone number out so that someone has called to ask about her stolen car when I was 1) sleeping and 2) in Tulsa with the kids that I coached. I appreciate it, buddy.

Robyn Can't Get Service...

2007-04-05T03:04:00.000-07:00

But Dunkin' Donuts need not fear.

My partners ensure that Dunkin' is the safest place in earth and that the stereotype lives.

I am a god (little g) of Research

2007-03-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

I have to take a break from the paper I'm working on before I proof it, print it, and turn it in. I think that you should have to feel my pain and here's how I'll try to make you. Remember your bibliographies in college (or high school for that matter)? Here's what one looks like in Grad school. This is actually a shorter one for me with it's twelve entries (I'm still missing one; a video of which I can't find the info). This is for my paper "Order and Disorder in Dryden's Conquest of Granada."

Armistead, Jack M. “The Higher Magic in Dryden’s Conquest of Granada.” Papers on
Language and Literature 26.4 (1990): 478-88.

Brockett, Oscar. History of the Theatre. 8th ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon,
1999

Coltharp, Duane. “Radical Royalism: Strategy and Ambivalence in Dryden’s
Tragicomedies.” Philological Quarterly 78.4 (1999): 417-37.

Davis, Paul. “Dryden and the Invention of Augustan Culture.” He Cambridge Companion
to John Dryden. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 75-91.

Dryden, John. The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 11. Ed. H. T. Swedenberg jr. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978

Ebbs, John Dale. The Principle of Poetic Justice Illustrated in Restoration Tragedy.
Saltzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1973.

Kropf, C.R. “Political Theory and Dryden’s Heroic Tragedies.” Essays in Theatre 3.2
(1985): 125-138.

Mathew, George. “Sexism in Dryden’s Criticism; From Text to Context.” CIEFL Bulletin
14.1-2 (2004): 93-112.

Reinert, Thomas. “Theatre and Civility in Dryden’s ‘Essay’.” ELH 65.4 (1998): 857-76.

Thompson, James. “Dryden’s Conquest of Granada and the Dutch Wars.” Eighteenth
Century: Theory and Interpretation 31.3 (1990): 211-26).

Warren, Victoria. “From Restoration to Hollywood: John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada
and James Cameron’s Terminator Films.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary
Culture, 1660-1700 27.2 (2003): 17-40.

Welcome Freshmen

2007-03-27T18:29:00.000-07:00

I learned today that I will have been given a teaching assistantship for next year. I will be teaching a section of Freshman English Composition. So if you know any high school seniors who will be coming to UCO next year, warn them now.

Entertainer Number XII

2007-03-26T10:25:00.000-07:00

I am giving you some more of my entertaining primary research of eighteenth-century junk. The following appeared in the 12th issue of "The Entertainer" on January 22, 1718. It is purportedly a letter form the President of a Mug House in the city [of London] to the President of the Constitution Club at Oxford. It is obviously a fake made to demonize a certain class of people but it is fun to read, nonetheless.

Sir,
As we are embark'd in one common design, I thought I could do
no less than congratulate you upon your late advancement. And, believe me,
that
the majority of voices you gain'd it by, is a greater honour that all the
Liberal Sciences in that place [Oxford] can confer. THere seems to be in this
distinction between your CLUB and ours; yours is a constitution of CAPS, and
ours is a constitution of CLUBS. I am order'd by our society to propose to you a conprehension; that the
same rights, priviliges, and immunities may be in common to
either society; and that a coalition may be more confirm'd, we demand the
privilege of being admitted ad eundem.

We doubt not but we cab
pass our examinations, and shan't disgrace your
society; we love mischief
for mischief's sake, and can bend like a blade, can
swear and forswear to
every point of the compass, insult magistracy, drink
damnation on
Alphabetically, break windows, demolish lanterns, knock down old
women,
purloin swords, steal hats, and MOHOCK the Tories.

We are as great
heroes in evil as your selves; like masked miffes [misses?: f and s
were used interchangeably in
18th century], we
own our selves children of darkness.
When danger is remote, we are commonly
boldest.

I, and four more of our gang bravely beat a boy of seven
years old, and our
Vice President held a quarter of an hour's skirmish with
a blind basket-woman of threescore and
ten [seventy years], and had like
to come off victorious.

Litany of Woe

2007-03-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

I am a veritable collection of complaints! And I know that neither of my readers is interested n my problems but it makes me feel better and it fills copy space to get it all out there. Yesterday I went to my doctor to have a sebacious cyst removed from my shoulder. It was not a big deal at all but it was unsightly and can become infected so is is best to have them removed. Since a three cm in diameter chunk of my body was removed, I was stitched up and placed on Amoxicillin to prevent infection to the wound. It might help to not that I NEVER go to the doctor so I NEVER take prescription medication. That means that my body is totally unprepared and so I get to suffer side effects. So I have spent the last 24 hours with my stomach tied in knots and a splitting headache (headache is not listed as side affect so apparently it is just bad timing.)

Oh yeah, and I am spending my spring break writing a paper and catching up on reading... while all the under-grads are in Florida spending their parents' money.

The Dog Days of March

2007-03-10T15:49:00.000-08:00

The season hasn't even started, but Gary Sheffield (formerly of the Yankees, now of the Tigers) is already clearing benches. Well actually, it was Todd Jones and Sox third base coach DeMarlo Hale. But it all started from Sheffield.

GO SOX!

The Fable of the Cannibal Moraliz'd

2007-03-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

One of the most tedious and most rewarding things about graduate school is Primary Research. That means pouring over rare books on microfilm. That's what I spent an entire day doing today. I found an 1801 article probably by Charles Brockden Brown reviewing his own book Wieland, as well as his critique of a sermon given by William Brown over the evils of the whims of French enlightenment thinking, a tabloid from 1718, and a literary periodical from 1756 with review of an article about venereal disease where the writers say, "We may without ceremony venture to pronounce this performance a nauseous composition of most wretched trash, wrapt in the vilest language imaginable."

Also of note was something I found with no use to me but to entertain, which I thought I would share with my reader. It is entitled "The Fable of the Cannibal Moraliz'd" and was printed in the magazine Memoirs for the Curious in 1701. I'm giving it to you in its entirety with emphasis and spelling intact, exceot where I have substituted the modern "s" where the text had "f."

THE fable is this. A certain English ship, passing by the
coast of Madagascar, toward the end of last summer; some of the Ships
Crew, taht were sent on Shoar to take in Fresh Water, make Report of a man of a
Prodigious Size, and all over hairy like to a Satyr, which they saw upon the
Land coming to Drink. THe Name of the Vessal must be called the Tempest, and the master of it is Mr. Goodman: But as for the
Man-Monster, because no Name could fit him, he must be Content to pass without
one. However to distinguish him, the Crew do call him the CANNIBAL; for
Reasons that are pretty Obvious. They say, he Lives by Blood.: and that
his greatest Delicacy to Feed , is Human Flesh. Now, there was no
Attempting to Seize on Him by main Strength; his Force being almost as
Prodigious, as was his Bulk; which was so great, that Goliah was hardly
Worthy to be his Squire: Wherefore, Circumventing him by a Stratagem, they left
him a Strong and Sweet Spanish Potion to swallow, by which means, both his Head
and Heels turn'd Giddy. And thus was he Bound, by the Direction of Mr. Goodman, and by his Crew, led in Chains Triumphantly. So he that
appear'd before as a Mighty walking Oak, is himself now tied to the Mast of a
Ship: And is a spectacle as much of Horrour, as he was before of
Admiration. So for the Fable: being Believ'd by many Thousands, about the
end of this last Month for a Reality.
The MORAL
Success often makes men Drunk. And Policy, is to be Preferr'd before all the Strength in the
World, be it never to Prodigious.

The Eighteenth-Century has Created a Dramaturgical Nightmare!

2007-02-28T17:27:00.000-08:00

It's paper time again, people. This stack of books is about half (maybe a third) of the sources I will use for one of my three major papers this semester. For this paper, which I am writing for my Restoration and Eighteenth Century class, I am writing on the tragedies of John Dryden. The reason I chose this study is because the study of Restoration Tragedy is sorely neglected. The truth is, there was so much bawdy sex humor being written that the more "serious" dramatic works have been overlooked.

Interestingly, the comic works aren't very strong dramatically speaking (though they are awful funny). For this reason, theatre schools consider very few plays of the period to be canonized. In fact, the term "Restoration Drama" as it is termed in theatre departments is a misnomer, since the primary works given this label are those by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, both of whom wrote a full one hundred years after the Restoration of the British Monarchy.

That being said, the actual plays of the Restoration have largely been overlooked, save for endless anthologizing (it seems that archiving and anthologizing are favorite British pastimes). This is evidenced by the fact that a few of the book in the above pictured stack have not been checked out of UCO's library since 1978. Those that have have still only been checked out a few times since their printings, years and years ago.

Also in the works is a paper/presentation on Samuel Johnson's Dictionary and something on Gothicism.

Just When You Thought Spring Was Coming

2007-02-15T12:16:00.000-08:00

Cooper sure is loving it. He thinks I am going to come out and play with him. He is mistaken.

At least though, this is little snow that falls for a little while and melts. Plus, it's so cold that the snow can't stick to the concrete so it just blows around. That's the kind of snow I like.

Star Struck

2007-01-30T10:51:00.000-08:00

My dad called me this morning to tell me that he had recieved a surprise visitor in hid office last light. Holly Hunter, star of stage and screen, came into his office to view a presentation he gives when he teaches. She is researching for a role in TNT's upcoming series "Grace" in which she plays an Oklahoma City Police detective who kills someone in a car wreck. She has been spending her time with Detective Chris Cunningham, one of our very outstanding female detectives who brought her on a crime scene then to my old man's office. She interviewed him about all things police such as office pranks, women in police work, etc and watched about 3/4 of his presentation "Waking the Dead," a gruesome and gory presentation that she handles well "for a civilian."

It will be interesting to see what they do to my department on TNT.

Thawing...For Now

2007-01-18T11:12:00.000-08:00

As you can see by the signs of water moving, we are beginning to thaw. But not so fast Evel Knievel. The three inches of ice on everything is melting slowly, which means that it's going to refreeze tonight. Plus, there is a 100% chance of snow on Saturday, with some snow possible Friday evening. Round three. Plus more may be on the way next weekend! Will it ever end?

Cops in a Snow Storm II

2007-01-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

If you drink and drive and try to do donuts around a snow plow, you may end up like this... in a very deep ditch with no hope of rescuse until firemen come to lift you out with a rope.

And then you'll end up with a line of policemen who have come to laugh at you. And with slurred speech you'll ask, "okay, who's supposed to arrest me?"

Frozen Armeggedon

2007-01-13T15:49:00.000-08:00

Ice isn't like snow. I think in places where it snows, they don't understand this. I think this because they're always saying stupid crap like, "we get 7,000 feet of snow a year. You guys get one inch and it shuts your whole state down."

In an ice storm, no inch is left untouched. All the rock salt in the world does nothing because the ice just melts only to instantly refreeze. And the ground isn't covered with a soft, pure white blanket, but rather a close, hard layer of gray. Ice makes everything the same color. The ground is gray, the trees are gray, the sky is gray. And at night, the lights of civilization bounce back and forth between the clouds and the ice, making the nighttime the same color as the day. Last night brought to mind a scene from Beckett's Endgame.

C: Never seen anything like that.
H: What? A sail, a fin? Smoke?
C: The light is sunk.
H: Pah! We all knew that.
C: There was a little bit left.
H: The base?
C: Yes.
H: And now?
C: All gone.
...
H: And the sun?
C: Zero.
H:But it should be sinking. Look again.
C: Damn the sun!
H: Is it night already then?
C: No.
H: Well what is it?
C: Gray.

Stay With Chicken Little. We'll Keep You Advised

2007-01-11T21:55:00.000-08:00

Mention Ice and this is what Walmart looks like. It's time to run out and horde people! Charissa took this picture with her cell phone. She said that there was no milk, juice, apples, sandwich bread, lunch meat, or twinkies! Oh Help us! No Twinkies!!!

Murder-Rapture: A Play Written in Four Days

2007-01-07T17:48:00.000-08:00

As a writing experiment, I have cloistered myself in my house for the better part of four days to see if I could compose a full length play by January 15th. It is of note that I have written many many plays but have yet to actually complete a full one (a play is considered full length at 90-110 pages).

This was a two part experiment 1) To see if the shirt time span would make it easier to actually complete the thing without running out of gas and 2) To see what the shirt time span would do with the stream of conscience within the play itself. These two things are difficult to analyze because in the case of the first, I don't really know if the time span had anything to do with being able to complete the play, or if I finally found the right combination of plot elements to keep a play alive for two hours. The second is difficult because a writer must be removed from a play before he can objectively analyze it or he must have a trusted person who knows what they are talking about analyze it for him.

Since you don't care about the logistics of playwriting, I'll just tell you what it's about. Two men stumble into becoming the most prolific serial killers in history. Then one of them falls in love. Dark hilarity ensues. By the final scene, there are so many bodies stashed in the basement of this house that they are overflowing onto the stage floor and the audience learns that there is no life left in the whole town where the play takes place.

I am going to enter the play into Jewel Box's play contest, even if it is still need of revision by the 15th... just to see what happens. I desperately want to accept the award at their banquet and say, "thank you so much. I wrote this in four days." The prize money would also pay for nearly half a semester's tuition.

I am the Biggest Nerd Ever!

2007-01-04T10:57:00.000-08:00

My nerdiness is clear in the marvelous Christmas I had this year. Among my gifts were the entire Beckett in Film series (the nineteen plays of Samuel Beckett all on film), An Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, An Interlinear Greek/Hebrew/English Bible, and a seemingly endless supply of Barnes and Noble gift cards. One present, however, didn't arrive in time for Christmas so I got only a picture of it wrapped in a box. Today, finally, I received via US Postal Service, the Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology.

It's nerdy enough that I know what the word "Etymology" means. It's even more nerdy that I can spell it without looking it up. But what's nerdiest of all was the excitement I expressed when I finally got it in the mail. Knowing what it was, I tore it open with no regard for the box in which it came. I threw the packing peanuts all over the house, took the book out, and ran through the living room shouting, "Woo Hoo!"

I then hung my head in shame. How have I come to this? I watch baseball and lift weights. I am a tough, mean cop. How can I be such an awful nerd. Oh well, the shame has passed, I will now sit down and enjoy my 916 pages of the origins of American English.

Happy New Year

2006-12-29T17:23:00.000-08:00

Auld Lang Syne
Robert Burns

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot and days of
auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

We twa hae run aboot the braes
And pou'd the gowans fine;
we've wander'd mony a weary foot
Sin' auld lang syne

We two hae paidled i' the burn,
Frae mornin' sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin' auld lang syne

And here's a hand, my trusty friend,
And gie's a hand o' thine;
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

Changes!

2006-12-28T05:36:00.000-08:00

As you can see, I have changed the look of the blog. As a result, all my links and things have been lost so I have to redo them. The links will be back to normal soon. It may have been time for some house cleaning anyway. Chris and Christina, you haven't updated in so long, I am likely to cut your links. If you still read this crap, now would be the time to let me know so that I don't axe you.

I Finally Get to Play the Smart Kid

2006-12-20T16:39:00.000-08:00

My pie-in-the-sky goal for my Graduate program is to graduate with honors. In Grad school (at least at UCO) that requires a 4.0 grade average the entire program. I'm off to a good start. Here are my fall grades:

Shakespeare's Comedies: A

Playwriting: A

Heroes and Heroines of the Bible: A

Working full time and taking a full time graduate course load has convinced me of what I have suspected all along: I NEED pressure to thrive.

He'd Better Be Worth It

2006-12-15T17:53:00.000-08:00

I Will Read for Pleasure.

2006-12-15T00:51:00.000-08:00

I finished the last two of my finals today, which means that I am done for the fall semester and one forth of the way to my MA. With the much deserved and needed three weeks before the spring semester I plan to read at least one Samuel Beckett novel, get back into my lately lax work out routine, and delve into my mission to learn Hebrew for real.

Grades forthcoming...

Air Conditioner Monster Caught!

2006-12-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

The tree huggers at opossum.org claim:

They are exceptionally non-aggressive and non-destructive. They will not dig up your lawn, chew wood or wires, or create burrows.

After $1,100 worth of repairs to our air ducts, I disagree with them (though I must admit that I think a raccoon did the biggest part of the damage). Either way, this AC monster is caught and will quickly be disposed of in some fashion by the exterminators.

UPDATE:

Well, we have more than one. We have another opossum in another vent...and who knows how big the family is. It is to the point now where I am requesting prayers!

"Since 1892"

2006-12-07T21:48:00.000-08:00

I may have been in college before it really occurred to me that this was not a Christmas carol.

When the B. C. Clark Christmas Jingle first aired, certainly no one could have predicted that over the years it would become the Oklahoma tradition that it is today. Intended to promote B. C. Clark’s annual Anniversary Sale, it has evolved over time into Oklahoma’s own Christmas carol.

The Jingle was first written and produced in 1956, and soon it developed a life of its own. The public made that clear in 1961 when B. C. Clark produced a new jingle thinking the original one was dated and had run its course. It was replaced with the old familiar one within hours, after a barrage of complaints

I Think It's Time for a Treatise to The Public

2006-12-02T16:57:00.000-08:00

From the AP:

NEW YORK - The man gunned down in a spray of 50 police bullets on his wedding day was buried Saturday as hundreds of angry demonstrators honored him with a moment of silence before going jaw-to-jaw with police in a bitter confrontation outside a Queens precinct house.

The demonstrators taunted police, standing just inches away from a row of officers and daring the police to lay a hand on them. Some in the crowd held signs reading "Death to the pigs" and "Shoot back."

Perhaps it's time for the major Police unions to come together an issue a proclamation to the public reading something to this affect:

Whereas you the public have decided that we are the bad guys and;
Whereas to nonregardance you have cast our lives in favor of the lives of criminals and;
Whereas you have proven that you are totally ungrateful for the sacrifices of our brothers and the pain our families have felt and;
Whereas you believe that you are better able to interpret and enforce the law than we

We hereby resign our commissions as your protectors and agree only to the following job description:
1)When someone burglarizes your homes and your cars, we will respond and take a report.
2) When someone assaults you and robs you, we will respond and take a report.
3) When someone murders your children, we will respond and take a report.

Here are the acts that we will no longer do, as you have made it clear that you do not want us to:
1) We will no longer enforce traffic ordinances in attempt to make the roadways safe.
2)We will no longer patrol the streets of your neighborhoods.
3)We will no longer do active surveillance on known drug dealers.
4) We will no longer actively search for or pursue fugitives.
5)We will no longer respond to calls in which we may place ourselves in danger or, worse yet, endanger the lives of your valuable citizens.

In short, we will no longer risk our lives or the lives of our friends to assist a citizenry that has proven that it would rather not have us.

If after a sufficient period of time our absence proves to have been worse than is our presence and if at that time our citizens have adjusted their opinion of our value, we will be prepared to re-negotiate our terms with society.

Signed,
The Police Officers of the United States

Cops in a snowstorm

2006-12-01T05:19:00.000-08:00

Since we had to get our cars out of this stuff just to go to work... (at the time our shift started, our division had seven cars stuck in ditches and snow banks)

We spent most of the night doing this,

And we did a little of this,

Until it was time to come home to this.

Ahhhhhhhh. What a day.

Shalom El'ehem!

2006-11-29T21:31:00.000-08:00

I notice that it has been a while since I've written anything so I thought I'd better get it out of my system. We are having our first winter storm of the year. As I write, ice falls from the sky blanketing the roads with class cancelling frozen death. Luckily, I had inservice training today so I am not out sliding around in the police car.

I'm getting out of classes tomorrow. It's nearing the end of the semester and I am super busy. I recently turned in a 16 page paper for my playwriting class. I spent the better part of the semester working on it (the bibliography had 18 entries). I was to turn in a ten page character study of the Biblical character of Jaconb tomorrow. It's typed and ready but classes are cancelled. Next week I turn in another paper for the same class; six pages on monologue in the Old Testament. I have the rough draft for almost one half of my thesis play.

And, just because I love to punish myself (and also because it is cold so I won't be running around much anyway) I have started learning Hebrew, which has been one of my goals since I finished college. I am still in lesson one, so I only know two complete sentences. The title of this post means, "The peace (good wishes) of God with you." I don't actually know how the accepted manner of transliterating the words so I'm doing the best I can. I also know the famous Shamah, which is: Shamah Is'rael! Adonai El'ohenu. Adonai 'had. (Note: What is spoken "Adonai" is written YHWH.) That is, "Hear Israel! The LORD our God, the LORD is one."

-Shalom!

If You Love The Red Sox or Hate Cancer

2006-11-13T07:04:00.000-08:00

Check out The Lester Project, a new fundraiser for the Jimmy Fund. Here is the official description:

an official fundraiser for the Jimmy Fund! Upon learning about Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester's diagnosis, a group of four Boston-area college students/self proclaimed Red Sox fanatics from Northeastern, Suffolk University, Emmanuel College and Fisher College got together and decided to create silicone awareness bracelets (similar to the "LiveStrong" bracelets) and donate all of the proceeds to the Jimmy Fund, in Lester's name. What started off as a small project to be shared among friends has grown into a huge undertaking, thanks to the support of Red Sox Nation!

The Official Christmas List.

2006-11-11T09:58:00.000-08:00

Here is my Christmas list for this year. (Bill and Saphronia have already given their gift so they are excluded. Thanks Willy and Phrony.

Bowler hat (like the one worn by Charlie Chaplin).

A Dictonary of Etymology. Needs not be specifically this one.

Beckett on Film series.

Barnardine's Pardon

2006-10-30T15:17:00.000-08:00

In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure the character Barnardine is a convicted murderer sentenced to death. When his time comes to die, the executioner and the Duke (dressed as a friar) come to lead him to the gallows. Barnardine refuses to be hanged because he is drunk. They argue with him but he is resolute. He will not die. He finally goes back to his cell unchallenged. This is my creative response to the play for my Shakespeare class. In my play, he is pardoned but refuses to leave.

At lights up: inside the Vienna Prison. BARNARDINE sits on a bench with a beer stein. ABHORSON enters.

ABHORSON
Rise Barnardine. I have news.

BARNARDINE tries to stand but is so drunk, he cannot and he falls back onto the bench.

BARNARDINE
I cannot stand. I'm drunk. As you can see.

ABHORSON
Why are you constantly drunk?

BARNARDINE
Because I constantly drink.

ABHORSON
Well, stay seated then. I have news.

BARNARDINE
What news?

ABHORSON
You are to be set free.

BARNARDINE stands and comes forward. He catches himself on the bars.

BARNARDINE
What?

ABHORSON
It's true. The Duke, on the occasion of his return from abroad, has granted a general pardon to all the murderers, thieves and sex maniacs in Vienna.

BARNARDINE
That's amazing.

ABHORSON
Yes it is.

BARNARDINE
And I won't allow it.

ABHORSON
It's what?

BARNARDINE
Why should I go?

ABHORSON
Sir, you've been pardoned...from a sentence of death.

BARNARDINE
Did I ask to be pardoned? I tell you I will not accept.

ABHORSON
I'm afraid you have no choice. You must come out of the prison and walk away a free man.

BARNARDINE
I have been drinking all night. I'm not fit to walk away.

ABHORSON
But you must.

BARNARDINE
I won't. Do not return to me until you are ready to hang me.

ABHORSON
Sir, you are not to be hanged. You have been pardoned.

BARNARDINE
I tell you, I will be hanged and I will not leave here except with an undertaker.

ABHORSON
But sir...

BARNARDINE
This matter is closed. If you have any further news, I'll be on my bench, awaiting my hanging.

BARNARDINE stumbles back to his bench and lies down.

Lights down.

The Language of Policing

2006-10-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

In 1066 AD, the British government fell to the French Speaking William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. For the next three hundred years, the ruling class on the British Isles spoke French. Generally in world history, when a people is conquered, they will begin to speak the language of the ruling authority, as the Hellenistic Mediterranean has done before. The English working class however, simply refused. They would not speak or even learn French. Eventually, the French speaking gentry learned that if they wanted to sway their houses, they would have to learn the lingua franca and so a linguistic revolution occurred. For the first time ever, the rulers of a country had to start speaking the language of the ruled. Finally, with Charles II, the English once again had an English speaking ruler. Their nation had survived, in no small part because of the common person's refusal to accept the language (and thereby the nationality) of the conquering power.

What I am saying is; language is an important aspect of our identity. In an e-mail conversation with Christina, I mentioned that I would like someone to write a book on the grammar and language of the Police Department. You see, police officers have their own language. We have ways of talking to each other that the public does not understand. Ways of saying and writing things that take on a life of their own, based on our own needs in working together.

For example, we have a written language in our correspondence to one another via the MDC (mobile data computer, the thing that looks like a laptop in our cars). Here is a common conversation between my partner and I:

Me: 20?

Him: 23/Penn

Me: R/V?

Him: NRT.

Here is the translation:

Me: Where are you?

Him: NW 23rd and Pennsylvania.

Me: Would you like to meet at the convienence store at Reno and Villa?

Him: En route, which of course means, on my way.

It's a language based on common knowledge. When I ask "20?" he knows that it is an abbreviation of 10-20, the 10 code for "what is your location." When I ask "R/V?" he knows that I mean Reno and Villa because meeting there is a common experience for both of us. The brevity of our language comes from necessity. We are typing and driving at the same time (by which I mean that we are pulling over to type messages per departmental policy and best safe driving practices.)

The language that we have becomes part of our identity as police officers. It becomes part of our brotherhood, one more thing that sets us apart from society and makes us our own culture. Is it any wonder we take care of our own? Is it any wonder cops tend to have only cop friends and cop relationships and cop hang outs?

New York Still Waiting for Parade

2006-10-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

I found a Sporting News magazine from 2004 in which Sprting News Radio host Arnie Spanier made the easy prediction that the Yankees would be the 2004 World Champions. This was, of course, the historic year of the Boston Red Sox. In celebration of another failed Yankees campaign, I am giving you my favorite passages, along with some gentle commentary.

Asking why the Yankees will win the World Series is like asking why Britney Spears is sexy.

Turns out neither one was accurate.

With Tom Gordon to help them to the ninth and Mariano Rivera to shut the door, they shouldn't have much trouble.

As we now know, it was Rivera's monumental blown save in game four that kept the Yankees from sweeping the Sox, and eventually from winning the Series.

Maybe the more important question is this: If not the Yankees then who? No A.L. team comes close to matching them.

I guess now we know. Of course, we should have known then that someone was atleast close. The Sox were I think, three games back (in 2005 the teams ended the season with an exact tie, the division went to the Yankess because they have beat the Sox one more time than the Sox had beat them...but back to '04). THe Yenks were hardly untouchable. Sfter all, the lost to the Indians 22-0 the last day of August in '04.

Nope, this is an easy one. Yankees fans, start planning the parade route!

No parade in '04. No parade in '05. No parade in '06. The payroll goes up, the result is the same. Good riddance Yanks.

And by the Way...Go Mets!

2006-10-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

In way of expressing my loyalty for this playoff run: