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Fear is so subjective. Three men, laughing loudly and jostling each other, walk towards you on a nighttime street–does it make you smile, make you nervous, make you cross to the other side? A kid brings an electronics project to school–do you applaud his initiative and skill or call the police? An armed group gathers in a department-store parking lot–do they make you feel safe or threatened?
because white men can’t
police their imagination
black men are dying–from Citizen, Claudia Rankine
When the people with the power and weapons are deeply afraid of you, your life is in danger. That’s why so many civilians are dying at the hands of police, isn’t it–because the police find them frightening? Isn’t fear the reason police perceive that there’s a “war on police” even though officer deaths are, thank goodness, steeply down this year?
If we can acknowledge that our perceptions are not always accurate, and start acting on reality rather than on our fears, then we can get closer to our ideal of the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Men armed with semiautomatic weapons in a Target parking lot, Irving, Texas, 2014. Irving is the Dallas suburb in which Ahmed Muhammad was detained yesterday after a teacher was afraid his electronics project was a bomb. Screen shot from KDAF-TV.
I haven’t seen nor read The Hunger Games–haven’t seen it because I haven’t read it, and it’s going to be tough to get it from the library until the movie furor dies down, so I don’t expect to do either for awhile. However, I gather it’s about a government that compels young people to fight each other to the death, even if they have no personal animus and might even respect and care for each other.
This does not sound like fiction to me. It sounds like real life. It sounds like war.
Well, that’s why I read scifi: to hold up a mirror to our world and maybe notice something there that hadn’t seemed as clear before. As Ursula LeGuin wrote (in her excellent introduction to the 1976 edition of her even more excellent novel, The Left Hand of Darkness), “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” If the Hunger Games trilogy suggests to the teenagers for whom it’s written that their government also threatens to conscript them into a fight they don’t want engage in and can’t win, no wonder it is so popular. I hope it gives them, and the rest of us, some ideas about how to change the situation.
The idea that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare is so completely unsupported by any evidence that you have to wonder why anyone still takes it seriously. It might make a good movie (or not–haven’t seen Anonymous, but there are some terrific actors in it, so maybe it would be a hoot) but as a theory, it’s ludicrous.
For example, three major pl
ays of Shakespeare were produced after Oxford died (1604): King Lear (c. 1606), The Tempest, (c. 1611), and Macbeth (c. 1603, when Oxford was alive but dying of plague). Could they have sat in a cupboard after their author’s death? Well, The Tempest and King Lear make reference to real-life recent events that happened well after Oxford had shuffled off this mortal coil, as he himself did not write. Lear talks about “these late eclipses,” referring to solar and lunar eclipses that happened in quick succession in 1605, causing great consternation. The Tempest draws heavily on a 1610 report of a major shipwreck in Bermuda, as is clear from the parallels between the play’s text and the report. It’s harder to prove that Macbeth was written in 1603 or later, but scholars have long thought it was timed to respond to the Scottish King James VI’s ascension to the English throne that year, so that someone who spent the year dying of plague was probably not its author.
While a theory may be sound even if it has been proposed for unsound reasons, it’s worth looking at why and when the “Oxford was ‘Shakespeare'” myth got started. It began in the 19th century, when theories that “eminence” correlated to intelligence were popularized and given supposedly scientific backing by such psychologists as J. M. Cattell. Shakespeare gave the lie to such theories. How could a tradesman’s son (his father was a glover) be so brilliant? Surely the greatest poetry and drama in the English language must have been written by someone with wealth, advanced formal education, and status–someone (hm!) like the scientists themselves.
This idea, which of course was applied not just to Shakespeare but to all of us, got a new boost in the 20th century, when Catherine Cox, working with her mentor Lewis Terman (developer of the IQ test), engineered a neat piece of circular reasoning by using social class, the education level of one’s parents, one’s own amount of formal schooling, etc. as part of the formula for intelligence. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote in The Mismeasure of Man, “In one case, however, Cox couldn’t bear to record the unpleasant result that her methods dictated. Shakespeare, of humble origin and unknown childhood, would have scored below 100 [i.e., subnormal]. So Cox simply left him out, even though she included others with equally inadequate childhood records.” (217) So much for a scientific approach.
The same arguments about intelligence and class were rewarmed and served up again in 1994, with a similar disdain for scientific rigor, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, a book that got far too much serious attention. The belief that the achievement gap between rich and poor (where it exists) has to do with inherent differences rather than the socially constructed inequities of opportunity and privilege is alive and well. We are looking for talent at Harvard, where the biggest affirmative action program is legacy admissions (that is, you get into Harvard because your dad went to Harvard), when it is just as likely to be found in places the aristocrats don’t hang out. As Gould wrote elsewhere, “I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” If we don’t shake the myth that people who share Shakespeare’s background are inherently unlikely (that is, even more unlikely than wealthier others) to share his genius, that’s where they’ll stay.
Sermons in Stones 
Distraction
December 11, 2016 in printmaking, social commentary | Leave a comment
A benefit of being in Mexico is that I don’t have my smartphone. My service wasn’t easily transferable to Mexico, and rather than sign up for something that would deliver data here, I just got a pay-as-you-go cheap phone with Telcel, a Mexican company. It lets me text and call, which is all I need, and frees me to look around and be more present. My smartphone is waiting out the six months in a drawer, but I recognize myself in the people all around who are doing this:
The only reason I’m not doing the same thing is that my phone doesn’t work.
I made the above piece under time pressure. I had to draw something for a lesson in silkscreening, since the project I had in mind didn’t fit the criteria of simple lines and three colors. So I drew what I’d been noticing, wincing a little at the preachiness of it. Silkscreening turned out to be fun and frustrating; of 30 prints, I didn’t get a single one that was in register (colors lined up properly) and lacked smudges and had a clear print of all three colors. Just the same, there is something very satisfying about lifting up the screen to see what the squeegee has accomplished.
Most of all I am glad I made this piece because it lodged a reproof firmly in my mind: the preachiness hit the mark it ought to, myself. When, last month, the munchkin and I spent a week in Maryland and Pennsylvania and I reactivated my phone, I remembered this just-finished print and managed to use the phone mostly for its important purposes–calling and GPS–and stay off it the rest of the time. But oh, the lure of Facebook! So much of what I’m seeking there is simply “We see you,” as Marc Maron says, in a statement illustrated devastatingly by Gavin Aung Than on Zen Pencils. It is a supremely ironic reason to ignore my friends and family. But the data access and other tools are very useful, so I’ll have to find a good site blocker when I’m back, to use them without giving in to addiction. And maybe I’ll post this print where I can see it often.
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