Hell is other people: On the meaning of marriage

I am currently taking a class in qualitative methods for  research. We are doing a study on graduate students’ conceptions of marriage.  I have interviewed two people and spent time formulating my own answers to the same interview questions. I have taken this data and constructed a poetic response to the interviews. It is mostly tongue and cheek, but I think there is something to the sarcasm. These are my interpretations of the data. I don’t make any claims to the objectivity of the statements.

Hell is other people:

If you ask what makes a good marriage?
The obvious answers come first:

Communication.
Respect.
Selflessness.

We want to keep things simple.

Distill profound essences
into single words.

But these words mean
different things for
different People.

And the reality is:

There is no such thing
as a “good marriage”.
They say divorce
is up to 50%.

All this talk
of eternal love,
devotion and
till death do us part

is over-shadowed
by the cold numerology
of coin flips
and dice rolls.

Do you feel lucky?

So let’s keep it simple:
It’s always the little things,
in the end, that break us down.

Tooth paste not rolled from the bottom of the tube.

Dishes not cleaned after a night’s meal.

He didn’t put his shoes in the closet and left them out in the hallway.
One shoe by the door,
the other by the bathroom.
He’s so disorganized.

She spends to long getting ready in the morning and he’s always late for work.
He hates being late.

He keeps forgetting she doesn’t like cream in her coffee.
And she complains about it
even when he tries to be nice
and surprise her with a cup and pastry at work.

She finds the way he chews his food disgusting and barbaric.
He hates how long it takes her to peck through her food.

He doesn’t fold his clothes the way she learned from her mother.
He likes to bundle his socks in the drawer
without matching them to a pair.

He leaves toilette seats up
and doesn’t clean the urine dribbles
left on the floor.
“It’s just urine,” he says.

She spends too long deciding between
a blue blouse
or a green blouse
and often wonders aloud
“am I too fat”
or “does this make my complexion run?”
When he doesn’t care,
he likes her the way she is.
And both blouses look good on her.
She rolls her eyes when he says,
“yes baby buy the green one, it looks nice.”
But can’t give a reason why “it’s nice”.

She doesn’t like to cook
but she doesn’t like the food he makes either.

He reads too much,
she sleeps too much,
he drinks too much,
she smokes too much,
he likes to play video games,
she likes to watch the Home and Garden network,
he’s  a cat person,
she’s a dog person,
he’s into slasher flicks,
she’s into chick flicks,
he hates going to church,
she’s there every Sunday,
he forgets to take out the trash,
she forgets to throw away her nails when she cuts them,
he forgets to let the dog out,
she forgets to feed the cat,
he hates folding laundry,
she hates washing clothes,
she only eats free-trade chocolate,
he’ll eat whatever is cheapest,
she likes red wine,
he likes white wine.

He never uses lip balm, his lips are always chapped.
She uses it too much and her lips always taste like medication.

He doesn’t like to be interrupted when he works,
she likes to talk while she works.

He likes rainy day,
she likes sunny days.

He likes.
She likes.
He wants.
She wants.

The list could go on and on.

It’s really not about communication,
or respect
or selflessness.

These behaviors are buried deep.
Years and years of psychological baggage and conditioning.

But mostly, it comes down to the tooth paste.

He doesn’t put the cap back on
and the fluoride dries and encrusts the nozzle
and that just disgusts
the living hell
out of her.

An immodest proposal: The cannibalistic core of American public education. A reponse to Tyack’s “The One Best System”.

Collected notes from a paper I wrote last fall. It is a bit “jumpy” thematically.  The core discussion was influenced by Tyack’s and Zimmerman’s work in History of Urban Education.

Of course: the primary influence is directly from Jonathan Swift’s “Immodest Proposal”  a la Adult Swim’s internet flash game “Orphan Feast”. The game can can be found here: http://games.adultswim.com/orphan-feast-adventure-online-game.html.

Despite the figurative language. Swift’s social criticism is mostly spot on.

Introduction: A Best System?

It may be overly obvious to state the following:  public education throughout American history has served a certain Native White Protestant bias and has historically relegated the poor, the immigrant and the emancipated slave to a role of ‘servant’ of this overly powerful minority. But it needs be said, constantly. History has a way of forgetting its past mistakes. Turning the tragedy of history into a farce or at least a passionless comedy.  Urbanization and modernization were used as a tool to ‘intertwine’ corporate-bureaucratic interests with the Native White Protestant ideology to build a foundation for cultural consolidation through education across the entirety of the country. According to Tyack (see Tyacks The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education for an expanded account of the history of “social efficiency” models in urban education) , this ‘one best system’ has ill-served the pluralistic character of America and has failed to systematically reflect the goal of ‘equal education for all’.  But it is not obvious how public education, despite this innate hegemonic bias, has actually and successfully served the polyglot under-privileged or if it has, in fact, served them at all.

Building the Education Meat-grinder

It is hard to imagine  the explosive transformation of a rural and agrarian society to a massive, industrial urban complex would not warrant some sort of educational reform.  The urban environment became a pluralistic archipelago of ideology, religion and morality—most of which were opposed, on some level, to the Native Protestant way of thinking.  Individualistic and independent, the growing American city was fractious and decentralized.  The economic interests of the privileged and powerful fueling the industrial machine required centralized efficiency.  As politics moved the cities away from the pluralistic Ward Archipelago to the central authority of city halls, the same principles of social efficiency were applied to education.  Something, as they say, had to be done with the children.

The general organizational reforms in education were a natural outgrowth of the industrial apparatus and the inherent desire to emphasize efficiency and maximize production. This move to bureaucratize education opposed the local scale with the cosmopolitan, replacing layman educator with the ‘professional’ ruled by progressive administrators, removing the rural social identity with ‘the creeping menace of unification’. The rapid urban growth created a vacuum of insecurity among the middling class and social elite. In order to promote an efficient and well oiled industrial future, steps were taken to use public education to socialize and commodify these poor and wayward youth to newer, more industrial modes of production. Attuning them to the social hierarchy. Ultimately, the goal was to transform students into future cogs of a modernized economy. The public school was used to enculturate children into the ‘factory model’ in order to minimize any class-consciousness or group-think that would pose a threat to the Native Protestant social order.  Therefore, any notion of public education as ‘serving’ the under-privileged should be taken in the literal, Twilight Zone sense of the word.[1] The minority privileged Native White Protestant hegemony used a properly utopian core of ‘American values’ as a meat grinder with education reforms ‘serving’ the now processed poor to the industrialized machine.

Mint Julep Curriculum

Zimmerman (See Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools) suggests the ‘culture wars’ for control of curriculum in public schools is unavoidable, social groups will ‘promote their own opinions rather than a discussion of competing ones’. When a small fraction of a rapidly expanding society controls a preponderance of the political capital and agency, ‘almost always’ they will use such power to ‘serve’ their own ends.

Education became a ‘bland affirmation’ of freedom, democracy and the meritocratic myth of the ‘American Dream’, with any ‘alternative narratives’ tacked-on to save face value. A sort of historical anti-depressant to gloss over the systemic state of exception of actual history: the bitterness, oppression, slavery and violence indicative of the actual Native Protestant narrative.[2] While a mechanism and agency allowed minorities and marginalized under-privileged to obtain some form of control of curriculum, Zimmerman has proposed that this widening of the ethnic lens bred a concomitant narrowing of the critical lens. As long as no violence was done to the ‘core’ history of American democratic destiny, these changes were tolerated.  History wrapped in candy coating serves only those who have something to gain—namely the ruling minority—by denying students and future citizens the mechanisms to wrestle and negotiate with these historical ‘states of exception’.[3] Without the light of criticism to guide our way, the very individualism we may seek to promote and venerate is inhibited, ‘serving’ to protect the ‘pragmatic standards’ of the Native Protestant ideology at the expense of our truly natural resource: our own plurality.

The Cannibalistic Core of American Public Education

The growth of the industrial-economic apparatus was used by those in power as a justification for ‘control’ and ‘management’ of children through public education. Overtly or not, the ruling classes sought to indoctrinate future citizens by stratifying privilege through ability and IQ testing, using these tools to ‘diagnose’ and ‘prescribe’ the most adequate fit for each individual in the massive machinery of industry. Under the aegis of ‘meritocracy’ and suiting the needs of the student for the future,  these high stakes assessments sought only to pigeon hole the under-privileged into education tracts suited for the ‘dirty’ and ‘dead end’ occupations of the factory system. These problems were pronounced among African-Americans who were generally pushed towards unskilled labor in jobs ‘no one else wanted’. Considering this, we cannot ask ‘who does education serve’ without implying the figurative cannibalism inherent with ‘serving’ poor as fodder to future industry. But how do we break this food chain? Zimmerman proposes in order to truly use education as ‘service-for-others’ and not ‘service-of-others’ we need to widen the lens of criticism and challenge these rosy colored narrative ‘myths’, emphasizing inquiry and investigation over ‘efficiency’, ‘control’ and ‘management’.[4] Effective education reform, according to Tyack, will also require a critical reassessment of these ‘cherished convictions’ and the ‘familiar patterns of power and authority’ that have governed the growth and development of the public school. Otherwise, we are all guilty of cultural cannibalism in the name of ‘efficiency’ and the ‘American dream’: a dream that is not truly a dream, but rather a frightful nightmare, a nightmare that will haunt us throughout this rosy colored history.

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[1] Rod Serling. “To Serve Man”, The Twilight Zone. Season 3, Episode 89. Sorry the example is just too evocative to pass up. This notion is not new. Take Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal for instance and his tongue and cheek idea that the poor Irish would easily assuage their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the wealthy British gentry.

[2] Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised. Vintage, New York: 1979. This is an apt metaphor, historical inclusion as ‘happy pill’. 

[3] See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Standford University Press: 1998.  Our marginalized voices find themselves submitted to the ‘sovereign’s’ state of exception, and while the marginalized are human and therefore deserving of human rights, they instead are treated as Homo sacer, a human with no political significance.

[4] ‘Service-for-others’ and ‘Service-of-others’ being, of course, my words used to describe the theoretical distinction.

Madness and the Desert of the Real: Quoting The Savage Detectives.

The abyss of madness stalks the deserts of Northern Mexico.  Roberto Bolaño’s The Savages Detectives represents a literary/oedipal quest for the eternal mother.  A vagabond world of poets, pimps and provocateurs . A world where art has been rendered absurd and poetry doubly so.  Bolaño writes with an unhinged insanity that speaks more “truth” than the cold empiricism of the contemporary “scientific moment”.  When the “Real” of human nature unfolds, the only remainder are discarded corpses, wayward hipsters and mumbling sociopaths.  The Savages Detectives, in its round about way, chronicles the end of literature  as a metaphor for the pure apocalyptic moment of “being human”.  Roberto Bolaño’s writing inspires madness and conspiracy while concurrently renewing our position in the precarious incertitude of daily life. We are a fickle, savage species. A wounded species. A fragile species.

There is  beauty in his pages. But with all true works of literature, it requires an investment both mentally and emotionally. A mutual act of diablerie. A blood pact between author and reader, the author bleeds for his art, and the reader feasts at this unholy communion of words. The process of reading Bolaño is a process of morbid change. His writing changes you, the words rupture your sense of space, time, morality. The world of knowing is left a barren and vacuous desert that somehow strengthens our human desire for life. Or at least opens the asylum doors and welcomes the madness, insanity and conspiracy into the day-to-day normalcy of “just being” human.  We are savage. We are fragile.

Notable quotes:

I like to write notable passages down. It exposes my mental state as reader vis-a-vis the act of reading. Why of all the words in a work of this length and substance did these few passages speak to me?

Pg.114: “The problem with literature, like life, is that in the end people always turn into bastards”

Pg. 314: “Ah, what a relief to come into the light, even when it’s a shadowy half-light, what a relief to come where it’s clear.”

Pg. 355: “Stop moping, all poets get lost at some point or another”

Pg. 400: “Freedom is like a prime number.”

Pg. 420: “…the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it’s purposeful, we can fight it, it’s hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less.  If it’s random, on the other hand, we’re fucked, and we’ll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. “

Pg. 421: “If that woman had told me that a piece of her shit wrapped in a shopping bag was a poem I would have believed it.”

Pg. 451: “Poets are dazzled by the spectacle of wealth.”

Pg. 466: “Someone has to defend the murderers, the crooks, the men who want divorces and aren’t prepared to surrender all their money to their wives; someone has to defend them.”

Pg. 488: “The search for a place to live and a place to work  [is] the common fate of all mankind”.

Pg. 500: “I felt like the Nude Descending a Staircase, although I wasn’t descending any staircase, not that I recall.”

Pg. 503: “But then I thought that life (or the specter of life) is constantly challenging us for acts we’ve never committed, and sometimes for acts we never even thought of committing.”

Pg. 627: “Measuring time is as meaningless as measuring eternity.”