Beyond School

[Update: A fuller discussion of Peak Oil and the A Crude Awakening documentary is taking place at Crooks and Liars. Skeptics and believers are listening and debating there.]

I wonder if Cassandra, as the Greeks approached Troy, got more silent indifference from those she tried to warn, or instead argumentation and debate? My guess is the former.

I wonder how people in education - the institution that holds the minds and characters of the next generation captive for 12+ years of molding - react to Cassandras like the international scientific community about global warming.

And about its cousin, the Oil Crash.

Curriculum as usual, anyone?

Or is anyone designing inquiry-based learning into the claims of these experts? I’m no expert, but I’ve got ears that Apollo hasn’t plugged. Seems we should give these warnings a listen now. And free our students to listen to them too, and hone their info-literacy skills on something, oh, maybe a bit relevant.

And remember: the tragedy was, Cassandra was right. But Trojans were bewitched (call it consensus trance) - and Troy fell.

I’m in Korea, and so out of the loop about much of American culture. Maybe you’ve already heard about the Yes Men, but they’re new to me - and they’ve blown me away.

If you’re a regular reader, you may know that I’m a huge fan of satire, especially that of Jonathan Swift and Voltaire. Both of these masters, if they were alive today, would surely marvel at what the Yes Men are doing with satire, identity, websites, YouTube, filmmaking, and the mainstream media. They’ve fooled Exxon, the BBC, the WTO, Dow Chemical, and more. Unbelievable.

Here’s how YouTube describes them in its blurb about the following clip from a Bill Moyers interview:

Bill Moyers interview with Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, two impersonators who use satire to make serious points about media consolidation, journalism, business ethics and separating fact from fiction in a world of spin.

And here’s the video itself:

Here’s part 2:

The full interview is at Moyers’ site. And don’t miss the Yes Men’s own website, with links to some of their wizardry.

Yes, it opens up all sorts of ethics questions. But so do the targets of their assaults - which are never themselves questioned by the mainstream news.

Fascinating. I’m seeing some adaptations for a satire unit this year in my classroom.

Cooler still - in reality, these guys are both, you guessed it: teachers.

I’ll probably get another B+ for this. Teacher loves this novel, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This student disagrees. ‘-) And for you “English-y types” from the last post, thanks for your feedback. I try to clarify things here.

More homework from my AP Lit workshop. I worked harder on the style and ideas for this one. It’s my summing-up after finishing the blasted thing.

The grass was wet with dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague notion of . . . giving him a drubbing. . . .I had some imbecilic thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair.

Not your most pointed example of European “darkness,” but I liked it all the more for that. All this blood, rapine, and devastation implicates even our grannies (and yes, English teachers, the allusion to Clotho and Lachesis, the Greek Fates, didn’t escape us. Pretty obvious, really, isn’t it? The denotative suggestion is more interesting here. The old lady is living off her country’s profits from Kurtz and his ilk. It’s the same today in the developed world. We just use the WTO and IMF.).

We could multiply more obvious examples. No point, though. They’re obvious.

What’s maybe not so obvious is one last piece of trickery that furthers my judgment of Conrad, not Marlowe, as one sorry world traveler - a yokel abroad.

It has to do with that Buddha image that opens and closes the novella. It’s easy to throw allusions in, as Conrad apparently understands to excess. It keeps the English teachers and literati happy, gives them something to gush about. (Reminds me of Joyce saying about either Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake, I forget which, “I put enough symbols and allusions in there to keep the professors working for centuries,” or something to that effect. He knew the game.)

But it’s harder to intellectually justify your allusion-play with your ideas. Conrad fails here. His Buddha allusion, like so much else of his novel, is shabby, exploiting (as usual) obscurantism to suggest a depth that’s not there.

My evidence? Marlowe, when he finally encounters Kurtz, suddenly shifts the balance of his diction toward the old-time religion of his homeland. Examples (italics added):

“[Kurtz's] soul was mad.” (There’s no “soul” in Buddhism. Self and identity are illusions. Enlightenment is knowing precisely that fact.)

“I had - for my sins, I suppose - to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself.” (”Sin” is a Judeo-Christian-Islamic - an Abrahamic - notion. The closest Buddhism comes to this idea is fear and desire as the causes of suffering, and the Noble Eightfold Path as an ethical, not a metaphysical, set of guidelines to reduce suffering and lead to Enlightenment and Nirvana.)

“I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.” (Buddha warns against “faith” - again, a theistic notion bound most closely to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - and teaches the opposite: to not believe his (Buddha’s) teachings without confirming them through one’s own experience of their truth, through practice. Buddhism is based on Knowledge, not Faith.)

“[T]he deep murmers of the [African] crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany.” (There is no “god” of evil, or god period, in Buddhism. There is Mara, the “demon” of “fear and desire,” but this is a psychological reality, not a metaphysical one - an explicit metaphor for our own mental habits that cause us and others to suffer. As for condemning other religions, Buddha was too civilized for that. He is said to have taught, instead, “Don’t mistake the finger for the moon” - all religions being the “fingers”, attempts to point to Truth(s) beyond words, “the moon.” He would have seen the African religion as yet one more finger among the handsful of the world.)

So for all Conrad’s mumbo-jumbo about Buddhism through a couple of cheap allusions, we see, when Marlowe finally gets off the boat and actually joins an “Other” culture - instead of yammering about it incessantly from the safety of his boat - that he carries the full baggage of his hometown biases with him. He’s a provincial traveler, a traveler in body, not mind.

He’s not a Buddha. With all his praise of deliverance through mechanical work, he’s more of what I can’t help but call a “Calvinist Ulysses.”

Too bad he couldn’t read Weber’s On the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

But I guess describing Marlowe as sitting in the posture of Calvin wouldn’t have sounded so “deep” and mysterious.

There are better books - more enjoyable, clearer style, leaner prose, less confused and racist - to use for colonial literature. Gulliver’s Travels is brilliant, if we’d only read it without visions of Disney in our heads, and damns colonialism with a sharper moral vision, a more savage punch, a better plot, and best of all, a barrel of laughs. A Passage to India fits the bill for a rough contemporary of Conrad. And again, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian will win him a future Nobel, if that body’s worth its salt.

Unfortunately, Conrad’s turgid work will probably survive in the canon. Teachers were told it’s great when they were students, so they’ll assign it when they’re teachers. It’s short, too, which helps us in our unnatural “factory schedule” schools.

It’s a shame, though. Because worse than anything else, it probably makes most students think a) literature has to be migraine-difficult to decode; and b) Conrad’s style is good writing.

(For the record: yes, Conrad has some fine stylistic moments in the novella. When you strain like a constipated hourglass on every page to produce such moments, of course you’ll squeeze out a winner occasionally.)

Restock your aspirin for some purple student prose for the year after they read this work.

IraqBodyCount.org reports between 68,000 and 79,000 confirmed civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. By “confirmed” they mean reported by two independent journalistic sources.

JustForeignPolicy.org and the Lancet estimate that, based on the confirmed numbers above, Iraqi deaths due to the invasion are at 15,000 short of 1 million dead Iraqis. In four years.

For the record: I served in the US Army for five and half years. I was an Arabic linguist in military intelligence. I sympathize with the troops there. But I sympathize as much with the Iraqi people themselves. Some of my Arabic teachers were Iraqi. They have family and loved ones there.

I hope they’re safe there - all of them. That’s all.

[Update 2 AUG 07: A follow-up post on HOD here.l

A little light summer reading: Joseph Conrad's "classic" Heart of Darkness. Skip it unless you want to defend its merit. I loved it in my 20s, but now it seems such a joke. Anybody want to show me what I'm mising?Here's my homework for my lovely AP Lit workshop:

"The Horror": Conrad's Smoke and Mirrors?

I just finished the famous last words: "The horror! The horror!"

For the life of me, the only specific images of Kurtz's life that I see don't stack up to the hype (is hype related to hypnotism?).

What are those specifics, when we clear away all Conrad's mystifications?

Kurtz:
1. had an African mate
2. "raided" neighboring areas for ivory
3. killed "rebels"
4. ruled as a chief or something like a king
5. converted to a set of magico-ritualistic beliefs different from those of Europe.

The rest of the Kurtz mystique, I argue, is Conrad's smoke and mirrors with adjectives. So how "dark" is Kurtz? Re: 1-5 above:

1. Only a racist would fault him for having an African mistress (and a hypocrite or puritan for having a mistress at all - if adultery makes us "devils," devils are pretty common things).

2-3. Only a hypocrite would make a special case for Kurtz's wars of conquest for profit. Iraq's oil and the close to one million Iraqi dead since 2003 [update: fact-check at Iraq Body Count: confirmed Iraqi deaths: 75,000; estimated Iraqi deaths: 985,000] is more horrible than Kurtz’s little ivory raids. And Saddam’s YouTube head in the noose is one of a million parallels we can make to Kurtz’s impaled rebel heads. Need another? The CIA cut off Che Guevara’s hands after executing him in Bolivia in 1967, and mailed them to Fidel Castro in a box. Abu Ghraib and secret torture prisons, anyone? “The horror?”

4. Ruling as king? Nothing unusual there either, and certainly nothing specifically “African” or primitive.

5. African religion used antelope horns and feathers and “midnight fires”? How, in any rational way, are they any different from the religious rites and magic of the West, based as they are, as historians and philosophers of religion have noted countless times, on rituals and beliefs based on human sacrifice and cannibalism? “The horror?”

So I don’t buy this novella. I don’t see the “darkness.”

Maybe that’s because Conrad never shows it to us. Instead, he just chants us into an adjectival stupor.

Worse yet, the majority of those adjectives are empty of content because they’re of the negating variety.

The remainder appeal to our own European stereotypes of “evil” and “satanism” that strike me as childish. Marlowe’s/Conrad’s characterization of all Africans as “brutes” and “savages” is ridiculous. Reminds me of my reaction to the Noah/Flood and Plagues of Egypt myths: “Really? Everybody was so ‘ee-vil’ they deserved to be wiped out? A whole world or city? So every single farmer and mother of newborn - every child - was ‘ee-vil’? Makes no sense. Most people are too busy with the necessities of daily living to be such cartoonishly ‘evil’ folks.”

How Conrad expects us to fall for such a caricature of individual husbands and wives, parents and children in villages along the Congo is beyond me. I kept rolling my eyes at his breathless attempts to make me go, “Wow, they’re sooo savage.” Okay, they dance. They dress less in the heat. They use different weapons. They have different moral codes and languages and skin color. They don’t have engines and machines. They live naturally. This doesn’t qualify them as “brute savages.”

I heard “godless Communists” chanted at me from parents, preachers, teachers, teevees and politicians from birth to 30. Then I lived with these “godless” people in China for five years and discovered that, by and large, their civilization was superior to my own. It’s 3,000 years older - and unbroken by any period of Dark Ages, unlike ours - and its religions are based on philosophy rather than magic (ever notice there are no Buddhist terrorists or Crusaders?). Its diet is healthier, its families closer-knit. We should be so lucky.

Conrad traveled the world, didn’t he? Didn’t he notice, as I did with the Chinese and Vietnamese and Arabs, that they’re every bit as normal, and full of good or bad eggs, within their own frameworks, as we are within ours?

If he did, how come Marlowe comes off as such a yokel? Calling African religion “satanic.” Give me a break.

Show me what I’m missing, specifically.