Author: Peter Freilinger

The oral historian has been recording the life of my father, although it’s hit a bit of a scheduling snag recently.  Her daughter, two years old, has just started daycare and as a result is at that lovely stage where she’s transmitting every infant cold and flu virus to her mother that she can lick from her nursery mates’ toys and drinking utensils.  Plus she’s received a bit more actual oral history work, and the combination of the two makes both her energy level and her availability to complete my father’s oral history quite a bit less than it was during the summer.  Which isn’t the end of the world – my parents also seem to be upping their game for extracurricular activities on the weekends, which is a pleasure to see, and they now have a new dog friend to take care of when I’m out of town.  But it’s a bit disappointing as well, as my father had completed the conversational journey just up to the moment my parents moved to Maine and started their family.  In my sister’s words, Dad, we’re finally born, and now we can’t hear the rest of the story.

That’s not strictly speaking true; the story has been told to us, crafted in our presence, for all these forty five years.  We are the embodiment of a decent chunk of that story, but I share my sister’s craving for hearing him tell the rest of it, the bits that might have been hidden from the view of one’s children, but deserve to be remembered in the completeness of one’s life.  Moreover, I’m especially interested to hear the bits that come out which aren’t moments of triumph or warm recollection.  I’m interested in the failures, the losses, and the disappointments – the things you don’t normally advertise.

At the same rough moment that I was thinking about this, the first edition of The New York Review of Books to arrive at my house in Scarborough came in the mail, with an essay reviewing The Invention of Time, a recent book by Paul Kasmin.  The author of the essay, G.W. Bowersock, is usually worth reading, and in describing the book and its themes, he made an interesting observation: in essence, the ancient world lost its historical memory of the Hellenistic period – from the death of Alexander the Great to the final defeat of the successor dynasties by the Romans just before the start of the Roman imperial period – largely because the Roman successors were joined by the Greek-speaking Hellenistics in jointly establishing the cultural supremacy of imperial Rome.  The Greeks who created Roman culture were happy to ignore a period of long-term decline in political power and influence; the Romans were happy to have the best writers in the ancient world pulling together their copy.

It’s an old saw that history is written by the victors, but I think Bowersock is hinting at something more: those who sense that they are on the losing side of history actually lose their voice.  It isn’t just that the victors expunge the record, although often enough they do; those who are seeing their influence, their importance, their relevance drain away slowly but steadily put away their pens and their paper (or their quills and their papyrus) and start to wait for the victors to bring them something worth writing about again.  Bowersock references a Greek anthologist, Philostratus, in the 3rd century BCE, who describes the work of the great orators and authors of the Greek golden age, then skips ahead to authors of the 1st century BCE – when Greece had been fully assimilated into the Empire and Greek scholarship had resumed its place of cultural prominence.  The intervening years had, from his perspective, not happened – but Bowersock more or less implies that he wasn’t wrong.  Hellenistic authors had been quiescent during the long period where its political and military power was declining in the face of Rome.

The third element of this mental exercise came in reading another review, this time of The Capital by Robert Menasse, widely regarded as the first truly literary novel of the European Commission bureaucracy.  Menasse, an Austrian, draws heavily from another Austrian novel, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, about the imperial bureaucracy of Vienna in the waning years of Franz Josef’s reign before World War I.  Menasse is described as having a particular affinity for novels set in places that are about to collapse or encounter some transformation, which made me smile because I love that too; The Man Without Qualities is one of my favorite novels, and the genre of “fiction from worldviews that are about to die” is enormously rich: the Palace Walk trilogy set in Cairo in the 1920s and 1930s, anything from Soviet samizdat literature, the decadance and nostalgia and raw confusion of end-of-Raj British Indian literature.  Menasse’s new novel, writes the reviewer, Fintan O’Toole, is set in much the same mold – but the difference being, the transformation or collapse hasn’t happened yet.  But it will.  We all know it – we just don’t know who the victors will be.

In Brussels, the EU will be reshaped by Brexit and by the growing pressures of resurgent nationalism that the Union was meant to hold at bay.  Here in North America, I would argue, we’re dealing with the same thing (certainly in the US, although a week and a half after the Canadian election, it feels like nothing got solved north of the border either).  Trump’s upcoming impeachment, combined with the 2020 elections, weekly environmental catastrophes, and an economy humming along for reasons no one at all can explain as to why, make for an overarching feeling of being on a precipice – but not knowing at all whether you’ll fall, you’ll pull back, or jump off and fly.  The Man Without Qualities was written in the 1930s, when Musil knew how it all ended; we’re living in the same environment but we don’t know what happens next.

And with that, I would argue, we are entering into a period of silence much in the way that the Hellenistic world endured while the remains of Alexandrine conquests slowly wound down.  The noise from the internet – from the squabbles between far left and far right – are just that, white noise that no one will remember because no one seriously believes either side will “emerge victorious” so as to own the historical narrative.  But the center is dead and the “new new” is still over the horizon.  We don’t know if it’s a technological hell or a utopia, or if climate change will render all other discussions moot – we can and do have less confidence in what the world that my son will live in will look like than ever.  So serious thought and discourse has slowly, quietly, disappeared, with bureaucracy in the background, silently keeping the existing machine running, and all of us looking around us, trying to find the Romans in our midst.

In such a place, though, individuals continue to do their best.  Being aware of historical context and the crisis of the moment is actually a distraction for most people, and indeed doesn’t necessarily help us decide what to do on a personal or local level: where should my son go to middle school?  Should I take that new job, or move house, or buy a new car?  Should I stay in my marriage and work on it, stay and muddle on, or leave?  Should I muddle through a job or career going nowhere, but it pays the bills, or should I take a risk and pursue that dream of mine to be a veterinarian?  Who should I vote for for city council, or legislature, or parliament, or president?  Some decisions are mundane l, and will do little (not nothing, but not enough to care) to change the world.  Others have a greater impact but it will still be at a distance – my vote for city council will not change Seattle, even though the city councilor who is elected for District 6 may very well change it with his or her vote.  But the collection of those choices that define and describe my life mean something, both directly to the people whom I impact but also as a record for the future in understanding how their world came to be.

It’s that, I think, that has finally come together in my mind as to why I’m so fascinated by oral history and why I think it’s so noble.  It’s not a replacement for traditional, textual history as I learned it and practiced (or rather, still practice) it.  It’s an essential record of those who lose their voice in traditional history.  When I was being trained as a historian, oral history was often thought of as a way to capture historical information that otherwise would have been forgotten because the carriers of that information were either illiterate, or unable to gain access to publishing or recording due to class or race or other barriers. Historians could capture physical artefacts of the lives of such individuals or groups, but the ability to record their voice suddenly opened up the ability to record their thoughts in a way that, before Edison and his amazing recording and speaking machine, was the exclusive province of the educated elites.

Much early oral history – including the early work by the Works Progress Administration, in conjunction with photography work by Walker Evans and others recording the visual record of the dispossessed – focused on those who had, in essence, lost the game of life.  The winners wrote essays and stories and first person textual accounts and, in their jobs in government or the military or in finance or the arts, created what we’d call “primary source material” for traditional historians.  The losers, unable to write or excluded from the means of recording their thoughts by elites who didn’t care to hear them, were stuck until someone came along with a reel-to-reel and a microphone and asked them to tell their stories.

What I think, though, is that oral history has another role to play, particularly important in a space and at a time where everyone, I think, worldwide, has a strange but shared sense of being on the cusp of massive, radical change, but being unable to identify who or what the “winners” will be.  We’re all stuck; what we write and say feels contrived, feels pointless when we know there will be something much more relevant that will replace all of this in just a little while.  In the pejorative language of my instructors in regular history, we’re all losers now – and thus the natural ground for oral history.  But the oral historians – with their recording devices and microphones and with a fundamental respect for those who cannot write, be it because of lack of a ability or lack of will – can pierce that malaise of expression at every level.  They honor the individual in their own fundamental existence, as themselves, without demanding that the individual contextualize themselves.  Their voices and their lives are the information to be valued, not their output or their context or their impact.  Tell me about why you decided to change careers at age 30.  What was it like when you moved across the country.  How did it feel to be a single mom so unexpectedly.  Tell me what it was like to be you, while I press “record” here.

I don’t know how my father’s recorded story will be used in the future.  I hope my son will listen to it and get to know his grandfather in a new way, when my son is old enough, which will probably be long after my father is gone.  I know I’ll use it that way too, but I also have a sense that some time in the future, there will be people – or whatever happens on the other side of the transhuman divide – who will want to understand why homo sapiens did what they did just before the Great Upheaval.  And not just “why” they did whatever led up to the Great Upheaval, but what, really, they had done, day to day.  They’ll have an insane body of data, assuming the data farms survive, but if they don’t have the stories with voice, with cadence and rhythm, and with a record of the questions that inspired the stories to turn, they’ll have a gap that will be obvious and fatal to learning any real lessons.  Bowersock’s essay hints at that in a discussion of time: it will be as if there is a gap in time, and what emerges on the other side of the gap is so unrecognizable compared to what seemed to exist before the gap, that any sane person will say, the story has been lost.

In a strange way, the ancient Near Eastern people watching their societies wane had it easier, existentially speaking, than we do: they knew the Romans were the emerging power.  We don’t; the People’s Republic of China, arguably “the” emerging geopolitical force in the world today, seems just as fragile and susceptible to collapse as we do.  And while The Man Without Qualities described pre-war Vienna with a kind of irony, in that the author’s narrative voice clearly knows things aren’t going to go well for the Hapsburgs, even in that world, contemporary records generally thought that whatever happened, rich Europeans capitalists would continue to rule the world.  They got it wrong, but that’s part of the brilliance of the novel: they thought they knew the answer. We don’t even have that confidence today: no one (except crackpots) pretends to think there is a clear sense of what the future may hold.  Which should make the historical record of what it is to exist in a time of nearly cripplingly infinite potential future outcomes so interesting: how do people live in such an environment?  After it’s all settled out in 10 or 25 or 50 years, it will all seem so obvious – but it isn’t to us, and the record of how people who are faced with such uncertainty both live with it, create the change, and then react to the certainty when they have created it is, in fact, the baseline metastory that history seeks to tell.  Without our voices, it can’t tell that story.

Due to technological limitations, we will not be able to reconstruct an emotional or anthropologically valid picture of what it was like to live in the eastern Mediterranean during Hellenistic times, and thus we can’t really know why Rome emerged in the area the way that it did, collapsed eventually the way it did, and led to the world we have today.  But I have a sense that, between fiction that can sense immanence and oral history which can maintain the record, our successors in this world will be able to understand us better.  I’m hopeful that they’ll care, but even if they don’t, I think it’s good and appropriate to not erase these strange and curious times of ours from the record.

I am a bit curious as to what my dad will say.  If he and the the oral historian finally get some time on the calendar, it will be good to know that our collective consciouness and history will at least have one complete record.  Hopefully her daughter will let the oral historian get on with a few more.

A lot of people have been bemoaning my cynicism recently.  My typical, overused retort is that “I’m not cynical, I’m realistic.”  I say “realistic” because I believe people will act consistently over time, and furthermore, that in an inconceivably complex but still comprehensible world, people’s choices – and thus their tendency to make similar choices in the future – can be extrapolated from a sufficiently large set of observations of their current state.  But I’m also willing to learn, to change, and to be disproven.  That to me is realism – or pragmatism, to use the word favored by Charles Pierce and William James.  But it consists of two parts; which I think is misunderstood, at least with me.  That is, both the observations which lead to a given set to expectations about future behavior, and the separate but just as important willingness to continue to observe, make adjustments, and throw away prior expectations, are equally important.  Viewing me through the light of one without the other misses the point.

Continue reading “An earnest response”

I suppose I’ve always wanted to write a prose poem.  What I’ve been trying to write here, in all its all, is just that, but I know it’s lacking, even across time and space and in the spinning gyre that is my work.  A prose poem would evoke the autumn sky I see when I look out the window of my apartment, would capture the sing song pitch of my son as he interrupts my work, would find a way to bring the scent of bacon and overripe pear and coffee and gin to the page.  But I can’t write a prose poem.  I can only write.  And prepare the bath for my son, warm air rising as he yawns on the couch, trying to delay the inevitable, the sound of radio baseball and thunder outside.  My prose poems are long and wandering, and I can’t find the source.  I still want to write a prose poem.

My son has returned to school.  He’s now in second grade, with a new teacher, a different set of classmates, and a summer of experiences added to his emerging view of the world. He spent half of his summer in Seattle and half in Scarborough, in his father’s new home, along with a couple of side trips, one to San Antonio (where he spent a couple of days with the family of a friend and a reader of this site) and one to Pittsburgh (where he spent three days with his mother’s parents and hopefully absorbed as little as possible of their general air of angry disappointment).

Meanwhile, back in Seattle, his school got a new principal.  I don’t envy public elementary school principals in the least.  They are only mid-level administrators; their relationship to the teachers is governed by a union collective bargaining agreement over which they have no control (the district administration owns it), which ties their hand on making active personnel decisions.  Curriculum is similarly controlled at once by district standards and, subversively at the classroom level, by the actual teacher; the principal can only rule by hearsay and indirect pressure.  And yet parents, staff, and the district looks to them as “leaders” of their schools.  It’s perhaps the most difficult leadership role one could imagine: no discretion, no actual responsibility, but an almost avalanche of accountability.

The “clients” of the principal’s school, moreover, are by and large insane: parents.  As a parent who tries not to be a pain, but as a co-parent with someone who extends her own hypochondria to her child, I know I’m part of the problem, but I’ve been able to develop relationships with teachers and staff which reveal what is probably not a very interesting fact: most parents are either hypersensitive to any perception that their child is not special, is not perfect, is not getting 150% of the resources available to them, or else have ditched their child at the foot of public education and said “he’s yours now, I’m going back to working two jobs, or nursing my opioid addiction, or acting like a child myself.”  One special education teacher told my ex-wife and me that they wished every set of parents were as understanding and dedicated as we were; given my knowledge of our own situation, it made me freeze in terror in consideration of what other parents must be like.  And yet principals, one step behind the actual teacher, are viewed by parents as the focal point of accountability in the school.

The only levers principals have are their ability to communicate, their charm, and their ability to migrate or deflect blame so as to ensure the environment’s purpose – to nurture and teach small children on the small part of their lives’ adventure from toddlerhood to pre-pubescence, hopefully imparting some knowledge and developing their intelligence as well – is not disrupted by the external forces of politics, budgeting, and parental interference that could bring it crashing down.  Deflect blame for idiotic budgeting or standards or curriculum decisions to the district or state or federal authorities; communicate to staff and teachers the collective views of parent associations in a way which mitigates the flame of uninformed criticism most parents direct towards the educational process; shield the student body itself from the worst incivilities of the external forces of union representatives, from the district administrators and school boards with one eye on the election cycle and another on their careers, from their own parents’ worst behavior.

Being a principal is therefore a courageous endeavor, but it requires a kind of magically light touch.  And my son’s new principal has fists of ham.

My son came home from the first day of school and mentioned that the school lunch routine had been altered.  His school has six grades – K through 5 – and two grades at a time each have lunch at a given half hour slot; his second graders share it with the kindergarteners.  Last year, when first and fourth graders shared the half hour, the children were invited to mingle, the idea being that older kids could “mentor” the younger kids and younger kids could maintain the relationships they had in kindergarten.  Functionally, it meant that the kids found their friends and enjoyed their time together, building the easy familiarity of mealtimes with non-family members.  This year, though, each class – not grade, but class within each grade – has to eat at the same table.  My son didn’t like this.  I didn’t particularly care, but I found it odd that we had yet to get any communication from the principal that described her philosophy to running the school, to managing the day, blah blah blah.  I was, apparently, going to find out about how the school was administered via the helpful descriptions provided by a seven year old.  I thought to myself okay, I should probably meet his teacher and have a catch up with the office staff.  No biggie, but for a new principal, this felt like an opportunity lost.

Then what will become known as the Great Pledge of Allegiance Kerfuffle of 2019 erupted.

A word of background for our non-US readers who may not be aware of the Pledge of Allegiance: the Pledge is a brief “pledge” that school children have repeated for years at the beginning of the school day.  “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  The monotony of it, combined with the uses of concepts and words like republic, indivisible, liberty, justice, inspires parody amongst most schoolyard wits, and a vague sense of proto-fascism for anyone who worries about the dangers of rote with respect to political thinking.  Indeed, the Supreme Court ruling that established the right to dissent and refuse to repeat the Pledge by any child made one of those wonderful comments that make Supreme Court rulings the modern equivalent of the Nicomachaen Ethics:

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein”

How lovely.  How true.  Another wrinkle in all of this is that as originally conceived, the Pledge would involve children holding their right arms outstretched, palm down, slightly elevated, directed towards the flag in the front of the school room.  Picture a couple dozen kids with the Nazi salute towards the US flag in 1935 and you’ve got the right idea. That changed after the war, but still, the image probably does as much to me to indicate the brilliance of Justice Robert Jackson’s quote above as the words themselves.

Another bit of background: my son goes to school in Seattle, possibly the most left-wing major city in the US.  It has been for over a century; it was the only major city to have a Socialist mayor and city council (in the 1910s), and remains so left-wing it’s wrapping around the other side.  People compete to be more politically correct, to reject any notion of traditional politics.  Jeremy Corbyn would be viewed as mainstream here, or more likely as a bit suspicious simply by virtue of his age, skin color, and willingness to engage in party leadership.  Obama is viewed as a half-hearted sellout whose only real virtue was to be black – I’m sorry, I can’t actually mention that he’s black because that would be racist, only black people can mention race in Seattle, and while I can apologize for the apostasy, I can never be forgiven for the sin.  [Discuss: compare with the evangelical conception of pre-destination and French revolutionary concepts of the unforgiveability of dissention].  In such an environment, the Pledge of Allegiance in north Seattle is so passé as to be outside of the realm of consideration – and that is as obvious as oxygen.

And one last point: I did the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school from probably first grade til fifth or sixth grade, I can’t remember which – and possibly more but at that point it certainly didn’t register.  And I remember distinctly that no one cared.  By making it a non-event – by making it insignificant, by teachers and students running through the motions, by no one caring one iota except to get through it – we Mainers, we who are a fundamentally disdainful and inconsiderate people, ensured that there was not the least taint of fascism in what was an essentially fascist dogmata.  We ensured it was empty – neither true nor false, just a tedium, like the daily message from the principal over the PA system, which was to be endured so as to continue with the full meaning of life.

So we return to the Great Kerfuffle: while we didn’t get any thoughts on her intentions for the school, we did get a blast email from the principal just before the school year started, a form letter saying she was excited to be coming to the school, she’d been in education for 24 years, was a mother herself, the normal blather.  Again, no mention of any changes, indeed an overarching tone of “nothing to see hear, move along.”  A week into the year, we received an email:

As the new principal of [the school], I have structured our morning routine as I have for many years as a school principal: by having students come to my office to lead the Pledge of Allegiance.  The recital of the pledge is required by state law, RCW 28A.230.140, and School Board Policy 2333.  As a result, it is important we follow the law and equally important we follow the portion of the law which permits students to not participate.

I know in recent history the pledge was not done at our school. I understand that the pledge can be controversial, and I am aware of its history and know how it came into being.  Because of that, this change in routine surprised some of you and caused you to be concerned. I am sorry for surprising you with this change. I respect your concerns and want to assure you that I also respect the right of any student to not participate in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. However, as I must follow the law and district policy, we will continue to include the pledge in our morning routine.

Again, I apologize for surprising you with the change in routine. Thank you for your feedback – it is always encouraged to help us do our best work in support of your student’s education. Last, I look forward to working with you this year to have a GREAT year at [the school]!

Oddly, this is now becoming a regular occurrence in my life: receiving a surprising, out of left field email from a leader – a corporate CEO, a divisional executive, a principal – which at once violates so many rules of leadership that it seems almost calculated to offend.  In each case, the leader admits to making a change which is (a) made with no notice, (b) made with no concern for the impact or opinions of the affected population, (c) justified by some regulation which by their own admission appears to be interpretive at best, more likely discretionary, and certainly irrelevant or counterproductive in practice, and (d) is passed off pathetically with a chipper send-off, oozing with a cowardly hope that the controversy will all blow over and everything will be dandy tomorrow.

Making changes of any sort without notice is usually a bad idea.  Even if the change is essentially not a choice, it’s always a good idea to give the veneer of optionality to a change so as to make people think that they’ve been involved.  Often that’s just advance notice – hey folks, we’re doing something we haven’t done in the past, starting tomorrow, it’s the law so I can’t stop it but just wanted you to know – and that advance notice gives people the choice to prepare, to think about it.  If they show up and haven’t thought about it then it’s their fault; the choice, therefore, is to think about it.  But that’s a choice, at least, even if it’s a false one.  Psychologically, it makes things a bit easier.  Did the principal do this?  No.  Fists of ham.

Now, obviously, not every change in the school routine is going to be previewed with parents.  My son came home and mentioned that the end of day routine had also changed: instead of all kids taking the bus home going to the cafeteria, they now congregate in a single classroom for each grade, and then a teacher brings them to the bus zone.  That’s fine, and no one wants to be engaged at that level of change (although this being Seattle, someone will I’m sure have complained that her daughter’s inability to go to the cafeteria on her own is an implicit block to building her self-esteem and an example of the patriarchy limiting freedom of movement).  But the Pledge of Allegiance change is not the same thing as lining up for a bus.  In north Seattle, the Pledge was predictably going to be controversial.  It takes no particular knowledge to realize that it is fundamentally different than who kids sit with at lunch.  And yet the principal seemed to think that it was, given that she gave exactly the same weight to one change as the other in terms of expecting parental response.

As a leader, this means she either took no time to learn about the population of families who were being served by her school, or that she knew their political proclivities and didn’t care about their view, or that she knew their political proclivities and felt the best way to make things happen was to try to sneak one by them – despite the fact that she had possibly the worst co-conspirators in the world, children between the age of five and eleven, to rely upon to keep the secret.  Or even worse for a public elementary school principal, she thought she was dealing with a rational group of adults who would understand that there was an unenforced and ignored law and school district policy that had not been observed but obviously needed to be.  What?  Assume a group of parents would be rational?  That makes you insane because it is so obviously incorrect – and it now forces all of us to question whether she has any decent sense of judgment whatsoever.

Which brings us to the third failure: hiding behind rules.  The weakest of moral arguments is “I was just following orders,” but as legal arguments go, it generally passes muster – and as an administrative argument, it’s almost impeccable.  But that’s what makes it so pathetic as a leader: what passes as a bureaucratic necessity is morally empty.  Leadership isn’t about administration; it’s about morality, exhibiting the courage to do what is right, not what is dictated.  We admire leaders who are willing to discern this difference, and in fact, we end up being attracted to leaders who play-act this discernment despite our own judgments of right and wrong.  We do so because of the courage required to reject dictated requirements, and we presume that that courage is accompanied by a moral notion of what is right.  That is a fallacy – Nietzsche’s attempt to conflate “that which the courageous assert” with “that which is right” has been demonstrably proven false so many times that it’s tedious (if sometimes necessary) to remind us of it – but the willingness to believe in the fallacy only reveals the underlying truth.  “Following orders” is universally viewed as morally bankrupt, even as it retains its value in organizational constructs; “doing what is right” is universally viewed as good, even as organizations revile the sentiment behind it, that the organization is not universally good.

For the principal – caught in the vise between district administration, union represented staff, and fundamentally insane parent clients – falling back on bureaucratic necessity is particularly false.  Only the district will view it as valid – but given that they had turned a blind eye to ignoring the regulation and policy of the Pledge to date, it was clear that the principal in this case was invoking an empty administrative requirement.  She was, in other words, going to die on a hill that the district had already abandoned.  The union and the parents – both of Seattle, both therefore fundamentally antithetical to the Pledge and what it represents – were going to despise her for the act and even more so for invoking the bureaucrat’s last disputational resort.

This again reminded me of other settings in which I’ve found myself of late.  From work – in a workplace imbued in the habits of peacetime military obfuscation and false bureaucratic duty – to just the general engagement we all have with administration, at the town level, the state level, the federal level, the international level – the willingness to cowardly hide behind “this is the law and this is what I’ve been told to do” despite the glaring reality that The Law writ large is contradictory, and what one has been told to do is patently in contradiction to the mission and the reality of what one is supposed to do by the underlying principles of The Law, is rampant.  We do not live in a world of false news: we live in an era of false principles, and in an environment – much like the interwar era of Franz Kafka, and Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth; of John Dos Passos and H.L. Mencken; of the postwar era of Joseph Heller and Mordecai Richter – of absurdity and of a lazy willingness to accept the judgment and fundamental exhaustion of responsibility of the organization, at the expense of the intuition and individual accountability of the self.  My son’s principal, in her pathetic and strange first email to parents, embodied it all.

And to close it off with have a “GREAT year” at the school – despite hiding behind pathetic an unenforced regulations, despite ignoring the sensibilities of all the constituencies to whom she had some accountability, despite making what can only be seen as a significant change with no notice and thus without even a modicum of professional discretion – simply adds insult to injury.  Again, I compare it to my own professional experience – this is neither surprising nor unusual; rather it is boring, normal.  It’s what I’ve encountered at all the companies by which I’ve been employed; only rare individual leaders have bucked the trend.  Lately I’ve encountered fewer and fewer such leaders, and when I’ve tried to act as what I think of as a proper leader, not just an administrator, I’ve encountered the full force of what a bureaucratic culture can bring to bear.  But the life of a republic – the promise of both liberty and justice, in a world in which such concepts should be available to all, in a sense making us all indivisible as a human species, on a small world which is indivisible without our consequent destruction – demands that we continue to be courageous, that we continue to ignore administrative imperatives in the name of the good.  In other words, we can, Viktoria, have a robust argument about the nature of that Good – whether it is beauty, or truth, or justice – and whether there can ever be a singular good.

Oddly, though, the Great Kerfuffle of 2019 will probably produce something different.  This being north Seattle, the general reaction is to fragment.  My ex-wife is on a Facebook group site on which like-minded parents are trading stories of their own agony in facing the falsehoods behind the Pledge.  A Mexican parent sees current immigration policy as an affront; others recount their experiences as minorities and recoil from the implications of the homogeneity behind the Pledge’s founding principals.  Instead of uniting behind a message of “this administrator is incompetent,” the emerging theme is to fragment the community behind two opposing and equally false viewpoints.  One group views the Pledge as a fundamentally good thing, and those that don’t see it as being anti-American – even in north Seattle, there are a lot of “patriotic” Americans who see symbols as sacrosanct.  And the other views the Pledge as being symbolic of the vague fascism that comes with nationalism, that is willing to associate personal slights experienced as black / immigrant / LGBTQ people by mainstream society with one of the symbols of that mainstream.  Both therefore endow a symbol – a thirty-one word rote bad poem recited hand over heart to a piece of fabric – with meaning.  If we’re going to care about the Pledge, then the administrator has a kind of duty to pay attention to the regulations – if you don’t like it, change the law.  If we don’t care about it, though, the Pledge becomes meaningless and empty… but north Seattlites are too earnest to see that possibility.  So both sides harden, crystalize, and miss the point.

Both abdicate their ability to do what my classmates, teachers, administrators, and community did in the 80s, which is to render the symbol powerless via a collective will to ignore.  The principal at my son’s school wants to reinstate it?  The best way to render it powerless is to not care.  It’s to take the principal’s desire to “do something” as the ravings of a pathetic, powerless, and cowardly administrator with less leadership skill than my seven year old son.  The potential of a community is to make symbols, any symbol but especially the ones imposed by faceless institutions, meaningless through disdain – but by taking the administrators and their symbols seriously we lose that power.  We have lost the collective ability to ignore – and that may be the greatest danger we face as a liberal democratic civilization.  We need to be able to collectively not care.

Ironically, my company’s values includes “loyalty,” which I’ve thought about a lot lately.  I’ve come to realize that loyalty is the polar opposite of allegiance: loyalty is earned, every day, while allegiance can only be demanded and forced.  I learned loyalty to the republic, for the flag for which it stands, by inverting the notion of allegiance and coming to value the principles on which the republic was founded (even if the practical outcomes were imperfect, to say the least), the statements of the Supreme Court (well, most of them – Dred Scott is only one of many cringeworthy abominations), the best moments of liberty and justice that it can produce – and realizing that that loyalty required my ability to challenge the republic, to reject its falsehoods when they came about.  Loyalty is being true to what is right in a mission; it is not blind.  I hope my son learns the same.  And if the result is that he is a bit impudent, that he’s a bit iconoclastic, that he maybe crosses the line into disrespect: well, he’ll be his father’s son.  He’ll be loved no matter what.

 

I have a new dog.  Her name is Rosie – well, I call her Rosie anyway, her name when I adopted her was Rosa.  I first met her a month and a half ago online, pet adoption basically now mimicking dating conventions, but me being me, I avoided looking online as long as possible because my heart was open and it didn’t matter on some level who I met online, just as long as the spark was there and it was, Rosa was perfect, and while I also met Dwight at the same shelter, my heart went towards Rosa and then I had my mom, who’s going to be doing a lot of the surrogate help with her, meet her, and Rosa was the one.  No question.  She’s perfect.

She also is terrified of change, as almost all of us are, and she’s now embarking on massive change.  So she pees on the floor more than the “housetrained – check” indicator on the shelter website indicated, and she sometimes bolts out of the yard because she doesn’t know that it’s all okay, and she’s not like Gordy, she doesn’t have ten years of trust and treats and foie gras under her belt.

She also has to deal with my son, a seven year old, and Gordy didn’t have to deal with that when he and I bonded eleven years ago.  Gordy had to deal with the odd energy – lots of love, but also lots of confusion and pain, that marked my marriage at the time – but he didn’t have to deal with the utter chaos of a seven year old boy.  My son is lovely on every level but he possesses that explosive energy of boyhood – and having Rosie interact with other children I do realize that it is a Y-chomosome issue – and that makes it more confusing.  Also Rosie is female, and Gordy was male.  Gordy was a bit aloof with my son, but that made sense, or at least, now it makes sense, now that I can see a female dog interact with a young boy.

As I write this, though, I realize I’m generalizing about gender and age and specie, and all of it is wrong.  Rosie is a rescue – she was picked up at the side of the road in the rural bits of Birmingham, Alabama, estimated age of two when she was picked up in January, a botched spaying operation made more tragic by a kind of weird white supremacist tattoo by the site of the operation, a cropped tail which is never something you do to a puppy you actually love – and all of her story is unknown except for that data on the page.  Gordy, on the other hand, was apparently tied up with several other dogs on an abandoned puppy mill in eastern Washington.  Gordy’s emotional scars revealed themselves in a terror of other dogs except for the biggest breeds, Great Danes and Bernese mountain dogs, who I assume were the ones who protected him in bad times; he didn’t like other people, was fiercely protective of me, of my ex-wife, of my son, of the ex-girlfriend.  He also never left my side, except when tempted by chipmunks, and then he felt guilty about it.  Rosie wants to like other people, but needs to explore.  She’s roamed across the neighborhood several times, and tonight, she chased out of my range across a state highway.  She just wants to explore, although she always comes back.

I’ve spoken of recursion often on this site, and I do think recursion – the capacity for infinitely applying the logic of our own observations to ourselves – is what separates sentient beings from non-sentient beings.  Dogs apply the logic of their own experience to the experience they have now, but in my experience, it’s a one-step thing; although I’m sure some can go one step further, most don’t.  Gordy, I think, went one step further; Rosie, I think, doesn’t, although it’s premature for me to assess that.  In any event, human beings aren’t that different.  We observe the world and learn lessons, and then go through one or more – or maybe just one – level of recursion to assess how those lessons will apply at a second level, at the second derivative, as it were.  We can apply those lessons we learn by observing others to ourselves, but mostly we don’t.  Rosie doesn’t, or at least she didn’t this evening – hence I had to walk across three neighbors’ lawns, across a highway, and pick her up and bring her back to my house.  But also, I had to give my son a time out because, despite a set of questions about “are you sure you want to color that picture with a glass of lemonade in front of you”, he colored a picture with a glass of lemonade in front of him and inevitably it spilled over the picture, his clothes, and the couch he was sitting on.

My son will (hopefully) learn to apply questions recursively against the lived experience he has; my new dog will (hopefully) start to see roads, highways, and lawn boundaries as varying steps of safety.  All of us, though, are joined by a leap of faith which (hopefully) we won’t have need to question: we opened our hearts of love, we opened ourselves to joy and hope, and we became companions on this earth.  We will (hopefully) apply our ability – limited in some sense, unbounded in others – to think recursively about love, and we will see the perfection of being open to love from those who are also, simultaneously, open to love.  I ask nothing of Rosie.  I ask nothing of Alan.  Well, not wholly true – I need them to be safe.  But if they aren’t, if he tries difficult things with electricity or she ventures across Route 9 at rush hour, I still love them – in fact, I love them so much I overreact and demand that they understand how much I love them and how much their danger hurts me.  And honestly, I don’t feel they ask anything of me.  I give them food and shelter, and they want encouragement and affection from me, but really, what I sense from both of them is that they just want me.  Me all of me, me with flaws, me with my inability to be there all the time, me with my doubts and fears.  And I want them as they are.

Companions are not possessions.  And companions have to be voluntary, on both sides.  Pets are hard because we provide so much – but you have to listen to them and make sure you are being accepted.  If you aren’t, then you’re just an owner.  You still have tremendous power, but oddly, you have that over your children too.  But we accept the power we have over pets, while we deny the power we have over children, because they will (generally) outlive us, they’ll at least become bigger than us.  But the moment either of them come into our presence, we need to welcome them as companions on our shared journey.  And we need to ask them to welcome us.  We need to be worthy of their company.  I have no right to get a dog; I have no right to have a son.  But I can ask permission of each of them – my son, my new dog – to be part of their life.  I hope they find me worthy of their companionship.  I have to accept the idea that I might not be.  But I’ll do my best.