Professional Ethics III

I'm reading with some concern the stories about Ashley Payne, the English teacher (it's always the English Teacher!) at Appalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia, who was forced to resign after posting vacation pictures on her FaceBook page. The CNN story says she put up a couple of pictures of herself drinking Guiness (while on a visit to the Guiness brewery in Dublin) and wine (in Paris). I've seen the pix and they're pretty tame. Then the reporter said her site also contained "the B-word."

I wonder what this word is. Bugger? Bitch? Blowjob? A-Bortion? Butt-fucking? Born Again? I'm wondering what words I might write on this or some other page that would get me fired. I wonder what word beginning with "B" her students never heard until she wrote it on FB. (Bukakke?) I invite anyone reading this to help me out here.

Actually, Payne wrote that she was going to "Bitches Bingo" a popular local event "with my bitches." She was called into the School District on the basis of one anonymous email. Maureen Downey believes, after an analysis of the grammar, vocabulary and inside-knowledge in the email, that it was written by another teacher wanting to damage Payne's career. Here's that story:

http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2009/11/13/barrow-teacher-done-in-by-anonymous-e-mail-with-perfect-punctuation/

But why would it matter to the Barrow County School District what she was doing on her Facebook? If you google "fired teacher facebook" you will be let in on what is becoming a national argument about the importance of monitoring teachers when they're off work. Lot's of people are getting fired from stuff they've put on Facebook, and I have even advised students of mine not to talk about their experiments with sex and drugs online if they're applying for jobs and graduate programs.

But the Georgia woman's problem brings me back to something I've posted about here before, namely, the public private lives of teachers. Five of the Top Ten people fired from Facebook postings listed on this site: http://www.thetechbrief.com/2008/01/16/top-10-lives-businesses-and-reputations-ruined-due-to-facebook/ are associated with institutions of learning, either as teachers, administrators or students. This profession has always carried a particular sort of vulnerability, brought on by what we call "the importance" of teaching and teachers.

Ashley Payne probably makes just over 30-grand a year. And for this she gets up at 5:30 every morning and stands on her feet for seven and a half hours. If she's anything like teachers here in Palm Beach County, Florida, she pays out of her own pocket for many of the materials used in her class. If she's anything like any other teacher anywhere in the country she is answerable to, and never satisfies, students, parents, administrators, associate principles, politicians, pastors, pundits, and now newscasters and the general public. Oh,and she does this to do a job most parents don't want to do: she raises their kids. That's right! I said it right here on LiveJournal: teachers are the new Mexicans! They do the work most American's won't -- they're cheap labor, reinforced with lots of lip service about how the children are our future and how teachers are "our heros"!

But all this is not enough! For her 30k a year, this young woman must also answer for her vacation time in Dublin and Paris. It's not like she put up pictures of herself with her dress over her head, or flipping the bird. It's not like she put up a video of herself painting a canvas with her bare buttocks. Teachers in the DC School district did this, according to an article in The Washington Post called "When Young Teachers Go Wild" (I know, I know!) on April 28, 2008. I can't quite imagine anybody, teacher or not, stupid enough to represent him or herself in public like that. But when teachers do it, we tent our fingers beneath our chins and hem and haw about ideals and role models. In this way Ashley Payne is like a politician who must keep people happy on all sides of the ideological spectrum. The Barrow County School Board knows perfectly well it isn't enforcing any sort of principle here: they canned Ashley Payne to avoid heat from the religious right in their state. They did it to look principled and dignified, at the expense of somebody way down the food chain.

The School District canned this teacher in order to present itself in a certain way. But what we hide in moments like this is much more important. What we hide when we surveil and humiliate our teachers is not just our contempt for them and the job they do; we hide also our sure knowledge that they do a job we won't do because, unlike us, they still believe it can be done. We all know from the numbers that education is failing, and rather than consider the deeper social and ideological causes of this we let our teachers take the fall for it.

Last year one of my nephews told Sue and me a long story about being called in with his father, my brother, to see an English teacher about his performance in high school. In the story, my brother and nephew suffered assorted indignities at the hands of this man: no do-overs, no extra credit, no late papers; in the telling of it they were nudging each other and passing the increasingly gloating narrative back and forth to build to the punchline when my nephew said this to his teacher:

"You're a fucking loser! And the proof of it is that you're only a fucking stupid high-school teacher!"

My brother and nephew chortled and looked expectantly at me and Sue. They wanted us to share the laugh. My nephew has inherited some considerable wealth (not from my family, but from his mother's), and drove to school in a car worth nearly this teacher's yearly salary. I pointed out to my nephew that he was talking to three teachers, Sue, me, and his girlfriend, who taught kindergarten. "Oh, yeah, " he said. But neither his contempt nor sense of his right to it were disguised.

I'll say more about all this soon. I'm teaching a course on the Boca Raton campus of my university next semester and am worried because a lot of the material in it is offensive. I teach literature and some of the literatures our culture produces and even honors are offensive. So, this episode has sent me into a bit of a meditation.

Teachers are the front line of our society's most important losing-battle. We browbeat and criticize them because we know their own optimism -- that idiot belief in somebody's future besides their own -- and their sense of commitment to some vision of a shared cultural space, shames the rest of us. I don't know Ashley Payne. But I'm gonna go deep here and bet that she knows more about her students, has given more to the people of her school district than have the people who terminated her. Her commitment, her very willingness -- and the willingness of teachers everywhere -- to do this job is the source of the contempt expressed by my nephew and by the people who fired her. Because just by showing up for work in the morning she willingly puts herself in all these institutional crosshairs, submitting in advance to personal attacks from every asshole who feels entitled to make one. Even the CNN newscaster led this story with a little sermon about how this teacher was unwise to post pictures of herself at the Guiness brewery. Teachers all submit to this, and to the entropy and cynicism of the whole system, just to stand in front of those rooms full of bored kids and try to make something out of them. We punish teachers because they believe what we say we believe, but don't. They make us liars, and that we cannot bear.

I seem to be creating a story with good guys and bad guys here. But it's more complicated. Like many of the systems in our world, the educational system is failing because it is collapsing under its own weight. There aren't really any personalities on the first line of this confrontation: just institutions, with their own life-forces and needs. But when we let the problem get thrown back onto teachers, everything gets personalized and made into a problem of character. Then, a bit salaciously it seems to me, we go looking for the bad characters who will give us the peace of mind we seek. Teachers fucking students; teachers doing drugs; teachers being inappropriate on Facebook.

For now, I'll say this to the Barrow County School District and the tax payers all over the country who fund the schools: If your teachers are so important that you have to surveil their personal lives, if what they do is so imortant that you have to fire them like you fired this young woman then pay them what they're worth!

I wish my colleague, Ashley Payne, good luck and God-speed in her lawsuit. The CNN story says she's suing to get her job back. I don't know why she would want it, but I'm grateful that she does.

Apocalypse. . . NOT!

Sunday night Sue, Enrique and I went to see 2012. We didn't get to go with Louis because he was at a church dinner. I was excited to see it with Enrique, since its all about a Mayan prophecy that interests him and since his own Mayan genes show up in his Mestizo features.

The movie has had bad reviews, has been bumped off the charts after only a week by those tanned and shirtless Vampires, and, yep, it most totally sucked. We watched it with our mouths agape, our eyes bulging, our fingers digging into the arm rests of the rocking-chair seats, but it sucked. You totally get your 10-bucks' worth with the special effects, but you come away wondering, "What the fuck happened?" In part, this seems to me to be due to the cowardice of the writers and producers, who were unwilling to make a movie with a real apocalyptic ending. By the end, billions have died horribly, but we don't really care because John Cusak has won back his family and they're going off like the family at the end of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto to "make a new life." or, as Gibson's Mayan puts it, "to make a world elsewhere." Yeah, yeah.

The "feel good" ending tacked on to this movie got me thinking about how we're imagining the end of humanity and mankind these days. The end of 2012 was actually a rerun of Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds, which took a big hit from the critics for shifting the horror of Wells's novel. At the end of the novel the human race is spared, but at terrible expense. In place of this, Spielberg gives us a family drama, so that the alien attack on earth and the human race is threaded through the story of how Tom Cruise has to reunite his alienated kids with their mom. Father and son learn to respect each other. By the end of both movies, we're, like, sad and stuff that most of us have died horribly, but we're still happy because the family has been healed and the American Spirit remains intact.


We have made some cult movies where the human race dies out, like Last Night, with its amazing performance by Sandra Oh, and the cult classic, Miracle Mile, which ends when the hero and his girlfriend and by implication the entire human race sink slowly into the La Brea Tar Pit in LA. But what struck me watching 2012 is that, like so many movies coming out these days -- Armageddon and Deep Impact, for example -- is that the human race not only survives, but it survives with all its technology and values intact. In The Day After Tomorrow, the world is pretty much destroyed, but we get an apology from the arrogant US vice-president who wouldn't listen to the scientist. There is a new ice age, and the US population has fled to Central and South America; but it's okay, because things will go on pretty much as they did before. Like with the Mayan apocalypse, this movie's feel-good punchline comes when -- Guess What! -- the scientist, Dennis Quaid, snow sleds from Washington to New York to reunite with his estranged son, Jake Gyllenhall (who, I'm happy to report, is in the process of consumating his love with girlfriend Emmy Rossum). So why save the family?

Mike Davis has written that the 9/11 events have pretty much shut down the possibility of beliving in American Exceptionalism and the notion that "it can't happen here." Wells also wrote about the bombardment of New York by dirgible, but, Davis claims, after the attacks in New York, it became harder to hang onto the idea of our invulnerability. So, maybe these films that have come out in the wake of 9/11 are a way of restoring the American "feel good": your eyes bulge, you grip the edges of your seat, and the world -- you along with it! -- is destroyed; but its okay because all the values that put you in that seat are alive and well. At the end of 2012 the man who has replaced Cusack in his family is sacrificed to save one of the escape ships trying to survive the new flood. He turned out to be a good guy, a worthy replacement for the estranged dad: but we're glad to see him go. The fat Russian prick has already died trying to get his kids onto the ship, an end that almost redeems him for being such a prick; and his young hottie drowns poetically while the ship struggles to close its doors against the flood. Cusack goes back into the water to fix the problem that is threatening the whole ship, and for just a second we think he also has been sacrificed. When, after a long wait, his head pops up from under the water, the audience I was in let go with a big cheer. Yay!

Faulkner famously declined to accept the end of man. But what would it take now to imagine it? And do these films flinch back from their own premises out of hubris or fear? Faulkner's line is from his Nobel Prize address, from the height of the cold war, a time that had its own apocalyptic obsessions. During these years, which also happened to be my childhood and early teen years, Americans built backyard "fallout shelters," and there was lots of talk about our family being the last survivors of a nuclear war. I remember my parents telling me they didn't want to build a shelter because, they said, "If everybody else is gone, I won't want to be here, either." The fallout shelter panic of the late-fifties and early-sixties is sent up in the comedy Blast from the Past, where Christopher Walken has kept his family underground for 30 years and now must believe that the world has ended. When he finally surfaces in present-day LA, he thinks the people living there are mutant survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Nevile Schute's 1957 novel On the Beach (film version,1959) is perhaps the most forceful of the anti-war sermonettes produced in the cold war, and it gets its power precisely because it ends with human extinction. After the awaited nuclear holocaust, the radioactive cloud is slowly covering the globe from North to South, while people in Australia wait helplessly. An American nuclear sub sets out to Seattle to answer an SOS call, but when they get there the call turns out to be coming from a coke bottle tied to a window shade and tapping out Morse Code on a radio left alive when everybody else is dead.

The novel's finish reminds me of Boccaccio's Introduction to his Decameron, which is an account of the world-ending event brought by the bubonic plague in Florence. Some people get religion, some get drunk, some run around and scream, some fuck each other: the captain of the American sub and his crew scuttle the ship at sea so an American warship won't be left behind. The last shot in the movie is a street in Sidney with newspaper blowing around. Boccaccio's remnant group retreats to a country estate and they begin telling each other stories. This, for a number of reasons, solaces them and restores them to a sense of community and hope.

Walker Percy writes in his book on language The Message in the Bottle, more or less a decade after Faulkner's speech, that "the real question facing us as a nation is not 'What will I do if the bomb goes off,' but 'What will I do if it doesn't.' " Percy goes on to imagine life-eternal in Burbank with Johnny Carson on the tube night after night. Percy is a Catholic and writes this line to remind us how precious our mortality is: that both life and death are the great gifts defining us from birth. Okay, I get that. But why edge up against the idea only to retreat from it?

I've always thought post-apocalypse movies of the Mad Max type, or slash movies set in our suburbs or vacation spots, reflected a death wish in our cultural unconscious. A wish for the materialist American dream to consume itself in a moment that would give it meaning. As the American suburban dream banishes death, sickness, and even age, I think the stalker-in-the-burbs movie longs for something beyond the comforts we enjoy. I tell my students the slash-horror film is the closest our culture comes to medieval literature, where death and life are versions of one another.The intrusion of a knive-wielding killer into the pristine American middle class would thus reflect a wish for something transcendent, something more than night after night with Johnnie or Jay. I get this wish.

But what about these most recent movies, where the world ends but the American family, American ideals, American technology, and American anxieties push to some sort of "beyond"? I wonder what we're wishing for now. In these movies the American family and the way of life it builds is not just pushed through the cataclysm to transcendence: the family, the father-son axis, IS transcendence itself; it is not the thing that survives, it is the meaning of all life on both sides of the catastrophe. Shortly after President Obama introduced himself as "a citizen of the United States and a proud citizen of The World," Newt Gingrich said at some banquet, "Let me be clear: I am NOT a citizen of The World." And why should he be, since as a few pop singers once put it, We Are The World.

The Mayans said the world will end in 2012. They didn't predict the strained survival of the American middle class. Fucking Mayans! After the movie, I told Enrique, "The World didn't even end! Mayans suck!"

Love me, Love my politics!

I've been away, I know. Here is a cross-post from a conversation I had today on my colleague Chris Ely's Facebook. I think the back story sort of tells itself. One of my interlocuters had said about Sarah Palin "There's no there there." And that just pissed me off! Okay, well it didn't, because I got what the guy was saying. But the colloquy was being pushed along by somebody who had hacked into Chris's FB and who seemed to me to be making a rather taunting and goading argument on behalf of conservative Palin politics.

Here is my comment:

I LOVE you guys!

Except for John Sivley! For your vicious and unfounded attack on my hometown! The "no there there" quip is something Gertrude Stein liked to say about my beloved Oakland (Go A's!). And, even though many of the street signs there are in Chinese and Spanish, the people of my fair city are, mostly, Americans who can tell fluff from stuff, and we reject your comparison of our town with. . . you know who.

Obama has talked about a "coarsening" of American political discourse. But it seems to me that it has always been coarse, lowest-common-denominator, emotionally-driven. Right now, Limbaugh and Beck are right now calling a female US senator a whore; but worse was said about Andrew Jackson's wife during his campaign. This is the political world we share. Norman Mailer said the Nixon/Agnew camp made its appeal to people who need to resolve all their problems with simple sentences. I'm not sure their opponents were any different. The trick to any democratic society is creating a language that bespeaks its true concerns.

I'm sure a lot of people support Obama without understanding any of issues. What I do not see in them or in the videos posted here is the anger, righteousness, and call to violence that I've been seeing in Town Hall Meetings and in the video Chris posted.

It would comfort me to imagine the Birthers, Deathers and Palin herself going the way of the Black Panthers. And in fact if they do it may be because they relied on a sort of gun-toting machismo rather than a serious political language. Thirty-five years ago I had a talk very similar to the one we're having here with Eldridge Cleaver, one of the party founders. He was in hiding in Paris and the Rothschild family had a birthday party for him. (Yes, those Rothschilds) I was hired to play the accordion. I told him I thought that when you twist language away from itself into slogans, like he had done in his book Soul on Ice, it will always come back and punish you. Cleaver's writings for years referred to the US as "Babylon," but after several years in Algeria and then Paris, he was calling it "back home." He ended his exile and his life completely compromised and lost, and I think the Panthers would have lived longer if they could have un-coarsened their political discourse a little bit.

The thing about cliches -- and the people in the video Chris posted were swimming in them, making the most important judgments of their lives based on them -- is that they don't feel like cliches to the people using them.