PunkIsrael

How to Write a Political Chain Email

Ever wanted to start a popular email forward, one that would cross the continent several times, be printed and posted approvingly in offices, and yield a crop of happy responses from like-minded folk? It's easy! Here's how:

1) Analyze your target audience. If you are targeting right-wing Republicans, mention abortion, taxes, and the war in Iraq. A lot. If you can work (Protestant) religion into it somewhere, all the better. If you are targeting liberal democrats, mention abortion, welfare, and the war in Iraq. A lot. Leave religion out of it. If you are targeting libertarians, don't bother; they won't read email forwards.

2) Now, start with a commonplace. You know, something everyone in your target audience can agree on. For instance:

• Go to church every now and then.
• Don't kill puppies.
• Don't take money from old ladies.
• Be polite to soldiers.
• Try not to be a jerk.

Then, work this commonplace into your email wherever it's logical (on second thought, just wherever).

3) You've got 'em warmed up, and you haven't even had to advance an argument. Good. Time for some good old ad hominem attacks. This is where you subtly (or not so subtly) attack the character of your candidate's opponent. Do this by:

• Comparing him or her to public enemy #1 (Before 9/11, that would be Hitler. Now, guess who?)
• Referring to rumors about his or her pre-political life (a drunk, a homosexual, a Muslim, etc)
• Taking any quote out of context (Off-the-cuff remarks are great for this, especially if you can make it sound like an ex cathedra statement)
• Suggesting that the candidate in question might not go to church, might kill puppies, take money from old ladies, be impolite to soldiers, or might simply be a jerk)

4) You've dealt with the present and the past now. Time to focus on the future. For this one, we'll rely on that old standby: the slippery-slope argument. Here's how it works.

• Take an idea or action that your opponent has espoused or done. It should be one you stringently disagree with.
• Now, multiply it by a thousand and project it 4 years into the future. Strip the candidate of all restraint and common sense (actually, this should have been done in the previous step)
• Example: the candidate suggests taking in a stray kitten when you see one. What if, you ask, everyone took in every stray kitten they possibly saw? We would be overrun with kittens! Vets would make so much money, they would become more powerful than politicians! We would have a country run by veterinarians!

5) Finally, end with an appeal to justice, loyalty, or common sense, and tack those things firmly to the candidate of your choice.

6) Add a few blinking gifs of flags, scripture, and animals to the bottom. Perhaps a plea to keep the chain intact. Now, send it to your favorite email zealot, and wait.

God bless America, save the puppies, and shoot the Muslims!

For God so loved the world that he had the faith of a mustard seed, and rendered to Caesar the things that are Caesar's!

Becoming Un-Ironic, Appended

You said that irony was the shackles of youth... (REM)

If modernism is characterized by a rigid handling of Truth, postmodernism dissolves all truth claims in the solvent of irony. It makes sense. If all truth claims are merely perspectival, or worse, wills to power (ala Foucault), what is left but a playful collage of little truths that can be cleverly manipulated but never taken seriously?

I like irony. I'm a writer; irony is a tool. I think irony is occasionally really funny. But I'm afraid of it, too.

Do we use irony because we fear committing to any kind of truth claim?

Metanarrative

Reading Tim Keller's new book, I was especially struck by his simple yet penetrating critique of Foucault: he points out that Foucault's central thesis (all truth is will to power) is itself a power claim. Despite Foucault's constant efforts to demote his own thesis, to enter the discourse without exercise of power, the thesis re-emerges, which leads me to believe that even postmodern culture, with its "suspicion of metanarrative" cannot entirely avoid metanarrative.

We cannot avoid synthesizing our experience into overarching claims to truth. For instance:

Marx: "All truth emerges in the midst of class struggle"
Science: "Rational inquiry will lead us to greater truth"
Secularism: "Truth emerges from justice and education"

If Foucault's reluctant thesis is subject to its own critique, then it occurs to me that metanarrative claims are subject to their own critique. This may sound elementary to some, and I freely admit I'm a slow study when it comes to philosophy. But it opens some interesting doors.

Marx: "All truth emerges in the midst of class struggle"--itself is a class-based claim, available only through education and the ability to critically analyze culture.

Science: "Rational inquiry will lead us to greater truth"--depends on a rationalistic idea of rational inquiry. Rationality begs the question, "what is rational?"

Secularism: "Truth emerges from justice and education"--like Marxism, depends on education. But at what point did education become available?

These are preliminary thoughts, and not fully-orbed critiques, so please be gentle. But I had a seminary professor who used to say, "all arguments are ultimately circular."

I'm beginning to understand what he meant.

Gossip

Sitting in the library this morning with my students, I overheard one distinctly say, "this is stupid. This class is a joke. I'm glad he's not going to be here next year."

My first impulse was to call her out in front of the class, say something like, "you need to work on your sotto voce, my friend." But I realized that wouldn't be professional, so I bit my tongue.

It's pretty easy, as a student, to sit in a class and critique the professor, the assignments, the class, the school, the world. It's far harder to partipate in it, to try to create instead of critique.

I hope she has that opportunity someday.

Becoming Un-Ironic

I started a band in St. Louis called Barefoot Jones. We played originals, and a lot of cover songs from the 60's and 70's: Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, John Prine. Barefoot, I still believe, was a good band, and as far as I know, still is. But while some people my age liked us, mostly we appealed to the older generation. Probably we would have done better if we had dressed in tie dye, blacklights, the whole bit. We did nothing to signal irony. We were regular guys playing our parents' music.

The point is, we weren't trying to be ironic. We just truly liked this music. I remember arguing with a guy my age about playing "Sweet Jane." To him, it was some sort of travesty to play the song if you weren't the Velvet
Underground. Like retiring a great ball player's jersey, the song should be retired.

But no one is the Velvet Underground anymore, not even Lou Reed, and I would say that songs are meant to be sung and played and resung. It's easy to be arch about great music, but there's unintentional irony even in that. What I mean is that the postmodern condition rests on a lack of distinction between high and low culture: the Velvets exist alongside Mozart in an endless buffet of aesthetically neutral options. And yet, ironically, postmoderns want to take pop cultural artifacts and elevate them to a new "high culture" where you can play Mozart on kazoo, but woe unto you if you play the Velvet Underground un-ironically.

So I'm trying to become un-ironic. We'll see how it goes.

Excuses for Ignorance are Dwindling

Not everyone can afford college. It's expensive and time-consuming, and many become immersed in the workaday world before the traditional college-entering time, and find themselves unable to embark. Many drink and party away their first couple of years, and find themselves expelled. Some just simply do not make the cut academically.

I respect working people, and although I'm a teacher, I don't think that a college education is the only path to success. Many, many people have become extraordinarily successful without the "piece of paper" that signals that they've sat through a certain number of credit-hours. But most of these people have one thing in common: a curiousity about the world that makes them willing to educate themselves.

More and more colleges, even Ivy League ones, are offering online courses for free. And while these courses are not for credit, they represent unprecedented opportunities to sit under the foremost scholars and teachers of the Western world. For nothing. All it takes is time and a little interest, and anyone can have a comparable education to Yale and MIT students.

The information age is upon us, and knowledge is cheaper and more plentiful than ever before. But what will we do with it? Will we take advantage of the opportunity, or choose YouTube over Yale?

Links:

Open Courses at MIT

Open Courses at Yale

Open Coursework Consortium

Open Courses at Covenant Seminary

Perspective

Friend's Son: Mr. David?

Me: Yes, John?

Friend's Son: What do you do for a living?

Me: I'm a teacher. I teach college.

Friend's Son: Oh. What do you teach?

Me: I teach English and communication.

Friend's Son: What's communication?

Me: It's what we're doing right now. You and I are communicating.

Friend's Son: Oh, but that's easy. How do you have enough to teach?

Me: There have been whole books written on the subject, believe it or not.

Friend's Son: Dad, can I go watch football?

Dear Students: We Don't Want to Fail You

It's grade time, which means inevitably, some students don't make the cut. Instead of receiving the A, B, or even C that says "job well done," these students will be in for an unpleasant surprise: a failure.

Failing classes wouldn't be so bad if there weren't any consequences, but there are. Some will lose scholarships. Some will not be able to play sports. All will lose time and money. Some might even lose their ability to attend college. Professors are aware of this, and so far, I haven't met a single one who wants to fail a student.

But fail them we must, and will. College, despite popular rhetoric, is not a consumable commodity. Students are not owed A's simply for ponying-up the tuition money and showing up for class occasionally. They are not likely to receive excellent grades simply for doing the bare minimum. Money + time doesn't always equal a degree. There are other components, like effort, and unfortunately, ability. Professors have to assess whether a student can successfully continue to the next level. If not, we are complicit in wasting the student's time and money. And, unfortunately, not everyone is college material. Some do not have the material, chronological or intellectual resources. This is the unpleasant reality of higher education.

Sometime next week, the emails will start arriving. Students who slept through 95% of my classes will suddenly become brilliant cross-examiners, protesting their hard work and good intentions. They will question my methodology. They will insist they turned in assignments that never materialized. They will express their utter bafflement at such an unfair response to their hard and consistent work. I failed two classes in my higher ed career, and tried all of these tactics myself. Thankfully, they didn't work, and I had to face the consequences of my actions.

And in the end, most of them will fail anyway, and the system will continue to trundle forward in its tarnished glory. Is it perfect? No. Is it always fair? Probably not. But in general, in college, just like in life, hard work gets rewarded, and indifference gets its just desserts. And cross-examining only gets us so far. In the end, we all have to reap what we sow.

Fear Not the Compass

My mother sent me this excellent review of the new fantasy movie The Golden Compass. The review is fair, balanced, cool-headed, and avoids the anxious modernism that so often infects Christian discourse. (When I say anxious modernism, I mean the anxiety that if we can't prove something, it is disproven, or that if we can't disprove something, it is proven. I believe it effectively makes us the arbitrers of reality. Lousy job!)

I hope to post my own review of the movie after I see it.

This Boring Old Lady

I teach literature and writing, and yesterday students gave oral author reports. The point of the assignment was to generate curiousity and interest about writers they weren't familiar with. Each student had an author (usually famous; mostly Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners) to talk about.

Toward the end of the second class period, one student spoke on Zora Neal Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God). The student evaluated Hurston's life in one dismissive sentence: she was a boring old lady.

Students, in their practically biological resistance to literature, seem to have two main adjectives at their disposal: old and boring. They apply each fairly indiscriminately. Old means that the events in the story, or the writer herself, existed in a time that no longer means anything to them. It's a version of the fallacy that says "nothing of interest or value occurred before my generation." Boring usually means that the student didn't take the time to try to understand the context and events of the story and concluded it had no real craft or value.

Mostly. Some literature really is boring.

But I think what bothers me is the hubris of these statements. These kids, these 18-20 year old kids who have had little if any life experience, presume to dismissively evaluate the great writers of the Western tradition. I could blame television. I could blame postmodernism. I could blame myself. But mostly I worry, because this culture of non-examination--of either passive, ironic acceptance of any new idea, or reactive resistance--if unchecked, promises to produce dull, intellectually passive adults.

I have an old Persian proverb in my office. It's one of my favorite quotes:

He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool; shun him.
He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a student; teach him.
He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep; wake him.
He who knows and knows that he knows is wise; follow him.

Equally good is something my father's people used to say, down in rural Alabama: it ain't just that he don't know nothing. He don't even suspect nothing.

If I can teach my students to suspect something, I'll feel like I've done some good.