Samson speaks several languages and has made appearances in which she talks about opera. She is also a wine maker, and owns a wine company called Savannah Samson Wines, and is respected in the field for her palate and her knowledge of varietals. She was way wrong for Beck. About three minutes into the interview, as Samson was talking about the elements of her choice to enter the Adult Video Field, Beck suddenly burst into the middle of her sentence:
"Your parents must be so proud!"
Samson registered the remark and kept talking. There was another flurry of questions and long smart answers, and Beck said again:
"Your parents must be Sooooo Proud!"
This time, Samson stopped talking, looked at Beck, waited a beat, and then went on. In many ways it was a perfect emblem of Beck's appeal and of the rim-shot rhetoric that has made his career since. He couldn't keep up with this hot pornstar across the desk, and so, to take a line from Emeril, he kicked it down a notch. He hasn't stopped since then.
I've been thinking about this moment on Beck's CNN show because today I wrote a former student that if she took even one course with me and is a Beck fan, I have failed to do my job.
At Gold's Gym I work out with people who are Beck and Rush fans. Fox News is pretty much always on in the men's locker room. There is a "Second Rule of Fight Club" rule in play in the gym and we respect one another by not talking politics. Once, a guy my age, a Viet Nam Vet, gave me a long look over a Hammer Strength Chest Press machine and said, "I think Jane Fonda outta be shot!"
"Um. . . ? Ohhh -Kay?" He meant of course Fonda's infamous visit to North Viet Nam during the war, something that still pisses off a lot of Vets. There is a lot to say about that visit. Like the fact that most of what is said about it these years later -- that Fonda turned in American POWs who tried to slip her notes, for example -- has been made up. But we don't do this in the weight room.
I don't much care what people say about politics in the weight room. But my students and former students, that's a different thing. I have had the privilege of an insanely expensive education that makes me a little different sort of interlocuter, in and out of the gym. My students, also, are the beneficiaries of a similar privilege, the expense of which is usually carried by their parents or the Florida taxpayers.
The student wrote me back rather testily that my job was to "teach English Literature." But this is not really the case. I teach English Literature to English Majors and students of literature (imagine a former student telling me what my job is!). This student and I did a College Writing course, and my job there is to teach students thesis writing and the elements of argumentation. This student dropped out of my college, but I bet she can still tell you that A Thesis is An Argument For Which There Can Be Created a Cogent and Sustained Counter-Argument. And she should have learned that all arguments, whether they're made by Liberals or Conservatives, have to follow the same rules. "Your parents must be so proud!" is not an argument. Like Rush and O'Reilly, and many others, Beck does not argue for or against anything. You watch Beck for the satisfaction of the rim-shot and for the pleasure of settling into an ideological position with which you already agree. Okay, fine. But if you've had a course with me, you have to know the difference between this and. . . you know. . . thinking.
College Writing courses are being eroded and pushed aside with the rest of the Humanities curriculum. Part of the cost to the res-publica as a whole will be a voting public that can't tell the difference between entertainment and political argumentation. It's like living in Mike Judge's Idiocracy. Teachers are not supposed to make their students liberal or conservative; they're supposed to give them the discursive tools to make this determination for themselves. Knowledge and opinion have form and structure, even if their content is not pre-determined. But knowledge and the knowable are coming up for grabs, at least in the popular imagination. If I really really really want to believe that cavemen rode saddleback on dinosaurs, does that make it true?
The former president of my university once said he thought it would be a good idea to teach intelligent design, to "let the students decide for themselves." But if opinion, personal desire or caprice, religious faith, or TV fandom can create knowlege or can pass as arguments, I've not only failed to do my job. . . there is no job left for me to do.
