Remembering RBG

Our country has had a lot of bad weeks lately, but this probably ranks as one of the worst. The development that affects me most is Donald Trump creating the 1776 Commission by executive order, aimed at shifting public schools curriculum towards thoughtless jingoism and directly opposing the anti-racist 1619 Project (and it doesn’t take an English major to decipher what anti-anti-racism is). So far it seems mostly aimed at history curriculums, but there’s a potential leakage into English as well, and as a soon-to-be English teacher who hopes to give my students an honest and accurate education, this has me worried.

But honestly, that’s probably the week’s smallest disaster. News also broke this week that immigrant women in detention centers are being systematically sterilized. So far we only have an anonymous whistleblower account, but given how close our country has already come to eugenics, that’s enough to be terrified and ashamed.

And then there’s the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When I found out, I was at a socially distanced dinner with some teachers I’ve been working with. One of them got a notification on his phone, said he had some bad news, but then fell silent for a while. During that silence, I was certain that he’d gotten an email from the principal saying that there was a COVID outbreak at our school and we had all been exposed. As it turned out, though it wasn’t the immediate crisis I feared, the news was worse.

When we all found out, there was a little while when we shared the shocked silence, then we said a little about how much she’d done and what a tragedy her death was. But it didn’t take us long to get into the immediate implications. Could the Democrats convince enough moderate Republicans to hold off the vote until after the election? Would Joe Biden take the nuclear option and expand the Supreme Court? Would the Supreme Court stay reasonable enough to hold back the worst case scenarios? Though we didn’t answer any of these questions, anyone offering a hopeful take did so with a shakiness in their voice, and anyone assuming the worst had a grim certainty.

Pretty much every take I’ve seen, online or off, Democrat or Republican, has followed a similar pattern. There’s a respectful moment at the start to mourn her passing, and then an fast shift into what we can or should do about it. Even Donald Trump spent a tweet on her memory before gloating about how quickly he’d replace her, and even if others are more authentic in their grief, remembering her is still always a transition into what her death means politically. There’s something about that feels a little perverse to me. Especially after seeing the documentary RBG a few years ago, I’ve deeply admired Justice Ginsburg, and want to take a little time just to remember all that she’s done and mourn her passing. I want to treat her like any other public figure who led a heroic life, to linger on her memory before moving on.

But I can’t blame anyone else for zipping through the normal rituals because I do it too. I have to; we all do. That’s the problem with representative democracy: we get attached to our favorite leaders. We learn about their personalities, their histories, their families. We feel like we know them. But if they die before they’ve left office, we have to face the fact that who they were as a person matters less to the world than what they had the power to accomplish or prevent. The death of Justice Ginsburg is a tragedy, but only a single life. The threat her open seat poses to reproductive rights, to LGBT rights, to the rights of immigrants, and to so many other issues I can’t name, all go beyond any single life. I know that I’m falling for a fallacy whenever I think that her life was more important than all the lives that depended on her, that we should all slow down and mourn. I know that my desire to slow down comes from a place of privilege too, since I’m one of the least likely citizens to be put at immediate threat in her absence. Still, it’s hard to shake that feeling.

But I’ve found a bit of solace in the increasingly common responses to her death that don’t move from memory to action, but who honor her memory through action. Action is necessary in her death, there’s no doubt, but then again, she defined herself by action. She was a person who dedicated her life to protecting and uplifting the oppressed; doing the same in her name is the most fitting kind of mourning that there can be. It’s a good strategy too, since using her name might be the only way we can shame Republicans into following their own precedent and holding off on a new appointee until after the election. But most of all, I think this kind of remembrance is important because it shows that the attachment we have to our leaders isn’t a one-way street. We aren’t stuck admiring people we’ll never meet and moving on once they die. We can act in their names too, even after they’re gone. 

Geek Salvation

 

For the first few days of student teaching, I was routinely shocked by how student-like the teachers were. When no one below the age of eighteen is in the room, they swear and call each other by their first names and gossip and procrastinate. Maybe those aren’t distinctly student-like behaviors, though; they’re traits so common you’d find them in nearly any profession. Aside from my parents, teachers were the only grown-ups I interacted with daily, so I grew up subconsciously expecting that everyone grew into the kind of baseline formality that even the most open teacher has around students. Now that I’m grown up enough, I’m constantly surprised to see that it was an act all along. I’d heard that adults were human from countless sources, but I’d never really believed it.

With all these thoughts of teachers and high school and growing up, I keep returning to this one scene in the last episode of Freaks and Geeks, where the AV club teacher breaks down how growing up works to all the nerds. First he graphs the lives of their popular classmates with his hand: sports heroism and friends build to a high point around senior year, then wobble and crash once their charisma and strength can’t cover up their bad work ethics any longer. Next he graphs the years of isolation and sadness that the geeks will endure, all turning around in college where their intelligence wins them wealth and admiration. The dialogue, the score, and the subtle choreography of the teacher’s mimed graphs all make the scene intensely satisfying and hard to disbelieve.

Because it was set in the place and era when they went to high school, my parents waived their usual censorship and let my sister and I watch Freaks and Geeks in elementary school. I don’t remember much of that first watch-through and probably didn’t understand much to begin with, since I quickly gave up trying to decipher all the innuendos and archaic references embedded in the dialogue. But I understood every word of that scene one scene with the AV club, and took it as creed, because it put something to words that I’d been noticing throughout all sorts of my favorite stories: that the heroes were always despised and forgotten, and they always won everything in the end. Ergo, if I wanted to be the hero or win anything, the best place to start out was to be as miserable as possible.

I had a great childhood, but if you’d asked me about it at the time, I would’ve responded with loads of self-pity. Sometimes I passed the time just mentally repeating all the unfairnesses of my life: being the least popular kid in my class (not that it says much in a class of seven), being a weak and skinny boy (not that I had any interest in sports outside running), being bullied (which mostly meant being excluded from activities I didn’t really want to do anyway). And I would feel so joyful thinking this, because to me all this misery was proof that I’d have anything I ever wanted someday.

There’s an oddly religious tone to this idea of childhood suffering equaling adult happiness, a lot of it likely inspired by misinterpretations of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. What’s meant to be a comfort to sufferers becomes a celebration of suffering in this warped perspective, and salvation becomes adulthood. Which is stupid, both because adulthood is never certain and because the people who follow this train of logic usually don’t suffer much to begin with. Your stereotypical nerd is unpopular and unattractive, maybe, but also male, white, and either wealthy or well-educated enough to be wealthy soon. Despite all my self-pity, I had a loving family, a stable home, and more opportunities than I’d ever appreciate. From what I’ve seen, people who really suffer have either more dismal outlooks on the future or more active plans than just waiting for fate to take its course and even the scales.

The real irony is that I’m pretty sure the Freaks and Geeks scene that started it all is meant to be ironic. The teacher who tells them all this isn’t the fortune-five-hundred CEO that he guarantees they’ll all be. All we know about him, actually, is that he has a serious smoking addiction. The entire episode is actually about them learning to sympathize with burnout Daniel Disario, who believes he has no future to look forward to.

All this is to say that I’m starting to take a bit of a longer view on life. The freshmen I teach talk about college in hushed and awed tones. Maybe, if I find a chance to bring it up, I’ll point out that life continues well into college, and past it eventually, though I’m not sure they’ll listen. I sure didn’t.

Waiting and Uncertainty

For the past few months, I’ve been doing a whole lot more posts focused on books and movies and TV shows, with the only references to contemporary reality coming in bits about nation-wide news and my own limited glimpse of it from my own life. No one living in the world right now really needs me to explain why: we’ve all been doing most of our living through fiction and the news these days. 

That’s an oversimplification, of course. My life has kept going on: this summer I visited my girlfriend twice, went to a socially distanced family reunion, gave literary enrichment sessions to every elementary schooler within a hundred feet of my house, and learned how to drive. But I haven’t been able to blog about any of those things, or anything else very personal this summer, and I think it’s because I didn’t have enough certainty about them to have anything meaningful to say. When would I be able to see my extended family or girlfriend again? Would I keep myself busy through the school year doing the enrichment sessions, or would some other opportunity work out? Would I be around Minnesota long enough to take my driving test? Most people talk about boredom and repetition when they describe the pain of COVID life, but the uncertainty is at least half of it. The waiting, boring and lonely as it is, would feel a lot more bearable if you had any idea when it would end and what you would do next.

And then, almost out of nowhere, the waiting ended, but the uncertainty didn’t. I got an email saying that a position for in-person student teaching, which I’d dismissed as an impossibility months ago, was open at Grinnell High School. Plans changed three or four times from there (no one’s fault, things tend to get messy when an inland hurricane devastates the state). Things were so up in the air that I didn’t know what housing the college would provide until the day before I arrived, when I found out it would be an actual house, all to myself. 

A little less than twenty-four hours ago the uncertainty ended when I arrived and moved in, but then the waiting returned. I was under self-isolation until this afternoon, when I got my negative COVID test back, and even now that I can go outside, there isn’t much to do in the two days before teacher-prep begins. I know I shouldn’t complain; an entire house to myself is more than I ever could have asked for. But I still feel a little like the winter caretakers of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining: more space than I need and nothing to do with it. 

I’m glad to have certainty now, I really am, and the waiting will be over before too long. But certainty brings its own curse: once you know what you’re going to do, certain options are closed. Of course, a fifth year as a Grinnell student was never an option, but I’m only beginning to fell nostalgic for college now that I know for sure that I’m doing something different. I nearly cried as I walked around the park where the Cross Country team would have its opening picnic every year, past the dorms where I’d lived and the houses where I’d timidly partied for the past four years. It’s hard seeing it empty, as though everyone who used to be here graduated alongside me and left for good, but I know that it would be harder to see the campus full and alive. If that were the case, odds are I’d slip into the New Student Orientation and be a freshman all over again.

Which is a bizarre thing to want, because I was terrified my whole first semester of college, and nearly paralyzed my first week. I didn’t know if I’d pass my classes or make friends or choose a good major, and as though the immediate problems weren’t enough, I also worried myself sick that I’d never find a good job or love or happiness. But, while I remember all that, I have trouble taking my past self seriously because I have what he doesn’t: certainty. I know that I found passing grades and friends and love and happiness and more at this college. So all I see is what the scared little twerp I used to be had ahead of him, and I envy him for that.

And, if I use the same logic from my past self on my present, I think the real struggle right now is the same one I faced back home: waiting and uncertainty. A shorter wait, sure, and a narrower sort of uncertainty;  I know that I’m going to student teach and I’m fairly sure I’ll be at least decent at it. But it’s less certainty than I had the past three times I came back to this campus, and I miss it. I’ll get past it once work starts up and I get started shaping this new part of my life. In the meantime, I guess I just have to wait.

Learning to Love The Legend of Korra

Introducing my girlfriend Mica to Avatar: The Last Airbender was an easy win. I knew that she adored fantasy, animation, spiritual philosophy, and good storytelling, all of which are the hallmarks of Avatar. And I also knew that she’d grown up without much TV, so I was certain to be the one to introduce her to this magical confluence of so many of her interests. And, better yet, it would be a way to show her something special from my childhood, since Avatar was my central obsession in elementary school, second only to Bionicle*.

So, as I expected, we watched it and loved it. The only problem was, bingeing without commercial breaks filling out the episodes and an airing schedule stretching the story, it was over a lot quicker than I expected, and we both felt the need for more. My options were to recommend the terrible live action remake** or the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, which I remembered being competently made, but nowhere near as satisfying as the original, and leaving an odd feeling of melancholy after each episode. I watched it more out of obligation than excitement when it first aired, to prove that I was a real fan of the original.

Watching if again with Mica, I felt the same disappointment as before, and after a few episodes apologized to her, offering to watch something different if she wanted. But she said something like, “What are you talking about? This is great!” So, as we watched the rest of the series together, I paid close attention to what she liked in it, and what failed to connect for me.

Part of it, I’m sure, is the gender politics of it. Avatar starts out with a very male-dominant cast, though it evens out quite a bit by introducing of a bunch of women in season two. Korra, meanwhile, features a diverse cast of women, especially middle age and old women rarely seen in animation. Watching it in middle and high school, I wasn’t mature enough to realize how revolutionary this was, and some subconscious sexism probably biased me against it from the beginning. Even watching it again recently, I didn’t really grasp the importance of the representation until Mica explained it to me.

But the deeper reason I didn’t get Korra at first has more to do with nostalgia, I think. In this world’s mythology, a new avatar can only be born once the old one dies, so the entire premise of a show following a new avatar meant that a character that I’d beloved in my childhood had passed away. The fact that he’d died after a long and meaningful life didn’t make it any better, because it brought with it the truth that, no matter how much you accomplish in your lifetime, eventually the world moves on without you. It didn’t help that the show invokes that sense of loss and nostalgia constantly: in season one you miss the original show, in season two you miss season one when Team Avatar was still together, in season three you miss season two before the world had become so distorted by Harmonic Convergence, and in season four you miss season three before Korra’s trauma. It’s hard to ever get your bearings on where you are when the show keeps reminding you where you were, and how much you’ve lost since then.

Not only does Korra change the familiar world of its past series and seasons, but it challenges the ideas that made those stories so comforting in the first place. Avatar shows a world where growth and struggle can atone for sins and heal harm. Characters are either like Zuko and Iroh, who come to terms with their flaws and undo the pain they have caused (Iroh does this before the story even begins), or Ozai and Azula, who are too far gone and need to be taken down to restore balance. Korra complicates this. When the world changes, it changes permanently. The solution isn’t to return to the past, but make the most of what is now, sometimes even by destroying what came before. Not everyone can be redeemed, even well-meaning people whose ideologies seek to address real harms. And for every villain there is a character diametrically opposed who is immoral, mistaken, or stupid enough to prove that opposing evil isn’t enough***.

What I’m trying to say in all this is that the melancholy I felt wasn’t a mistake or the effect of bad writing, but the point of the show itself. This isn’t to say that Avatar was morally simple (it tackled genocide on episode three) or that Korra is in every way better and more complex (Korra’s wider cast means more dud characters, while the seven main heroes of Avatar are all excellent). I just mean that Korra grows up from Avatar, showing a more complex and modern world, and the new problems that come with that. You can see this even in the art: where the original Avatar had bright shapes surrounded by bold, black outlines, Korra has duller colors that fade into each other more, and the low lighting makes every scene feel like it’s shot at the end of the day, as light has just begun to leak from the world. 

The difference between Mica and I is that she saw both series shortly after each other, so she could understand Korra for what it was: a natural and necessary extension on the ideas of the original. I, meanwhile, had rewatched and obsessed over the original since childhood. I treated it like a sacred text, and the newcomer like a false prophet. I needed a new perspective from fresh eyes to see genuine growth where it really was.

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* And, while Avatar is famously accessible to people of all ages and interests, the entire convoluted mythos of Bionicle is sort of an inside joke, in that it only makes sense if you were in the six-to-twelve year-old age demographic between 2001 and 2009. Anyone coming later is inevitably hopelessly lost.

** Which I planned to shave my head for so I could dress up as Aang at the premier. My Mom didn’t let me go through with it, though, which was lucky both because the movie wasn’t worth bodily modification and, given my unnatural skinniness, with a bald head I’d look a lot like a chemo patient.

*** Best as I can figure, the secondary villain opposing the main villain for each season is Tarrlok for season one, Varrick for season two, the Earth Queen for season three, and Prince Wu for season four.

I Prefer Burr

Like almost all families too careful to go out on the Fourth of July and too cowardly to set off fireworks from home, we watched Hamilton this Saturday. I’d heard all the songs before, but never in order, so as much as I already loved the music, I didn’t really understand the shape of the narrative until I saw it. For example, I’d always assumed that Aaron Burr’s song “Wait for It” came in-between his escalating threats to Hamilton in “Your Obedient Servant” and their duel in “The World was Wide Enough” as a way to explain the villain’s motivation before he kills the hero. But it’s actually one of the first songs, and in the context of the entire story, it doesn’t describe his essential nature as a character (as I’d assumed at first), but his initial philosophy, from which he grows and changes. He starts out patient, willing to restrain himself and wait for his chance, but his envy of Hamilton’s seemingly effortless success pushes him to imitate Hamilton’s recklessness without forming corresponding principles, which in turn leads him to rage and murder. As much as Hamilton is the center of attention, he’s really a static character throughout the show: he’s always ambitious and passionate, always puts his political career above family or friendship, and not even his public humiliation and his son’s death can teach him the restraint he needs to step away from the duel with Burr. As charismatic as Hamilton is, in the end I identify with Burr more for how much he changes over the course of the story. Sometimes that malleability is for the worst; his famous flaw is his inability to commit to any issue he truly cares about. But it also gives him the ability to reflect and apologize at the story’s end. For all his wit, Hamilton never has that sort of introspection.

I tried explaining all this to my mom, but she didn’t really get it. She understood where I drew my argument, but she told me she couldn’t see Burr in quite the same way because the real history is so much more complicated. For context, she has a PhD in history and has taught college classes on this time period for years, so she knows well as anyone what sort of person Aaron Burr really was. And yes, he did regret killing Hamilton later in life, but after the duel he didn’t exactly calm down. His main project after the murder was trying to get a chunk of Louisiana to secede from the union, something that goes completely unmentioned in the musical. 

This brings up an interesting question: does history matter to Hamilton? Can you enjoy Burr’s character, knowing that the pensive and reformed man you see at the end isn’t the whole truth? I tend to answer yes on that question, and my mom tends to answer no, and our respective statuses as an English major and a history professor probably explain a lot of our positions. But Hamilton is a more interesting place to interrogate this question than most historical fiction. On one hand it dismisses any pretense of being a historical enactment quite blatantly, featuring rapping founding fathers and casting slave owners and unapologetic racists like Thomas Jefferson with black actors. But it also puts so much emphasis on the mostly true historical narrative that you can’t divorce it from history easily either. 

The solution, I think, is that the plot is meant to be more than a retelling or a story. The characters are meant to be more than recreations or constructions from the author’s imaginations. It’s a commentary on the American founding, not on how it actually was, but how it’s remembered. The contradictions and holes in the story matter just as much as the places where it coheres beautifully. This is most obvious on the broadest thematic level: a celebration of America’s promise of equality and opportunity, with sly asides showing how those promises have never been fully delivered to women or people of color. The truths oppose each other, but neither are negated. 

The same is true on an individual level too. Burr was the introspective, remorseful man whose rage came from a mistaken but deeply human place, as well as a liar and traitor who never really learned his lesson. Human minds are always messy and compromised, after all, no more loyal to our highest ideals or defined by our lowest crimes than national histories.

COVID Numbness

So I’m embarrassed of my homestate yet again: COVID cases are way up in Texas after a premature and poorly advised reopening. They’re not alone: despite some states staying in shelter-and-place and keeping numbers low, the U.S. is facing a COVID explosion even more extreme than the days when the virus was just taking off. And it’s only getting worse.

Sometimes it’s hard not to wonder what’s wrong with these people. Not that I’ve been perfect about social distancing: I went on a few non-essential errands when businesses first opened up in Minnesota and don’t always move six feet out of the way when I pass someone on my run if they trail is too narrow. But how can you go to a bar when COVID has claimed nearly 130,000 live? How can anyone be so stupid?

There’s an Onion headline from a few years back: “42 Million Killed in Bloodiest Black Friday on Record.” A website called “Literally Unbelievable” archives Facebook posts that mistakenly share Onion headlines as legit, and this one has far and away the most incidents. Of course it’s ridiculous; how could more than ten percent of the U.S. population trample each other in a special sales event? But, glancing at that headline, doesn’t it make some sort of sense, at least for an instant? The reason why, I think, is that articles about Black Friday deaths start with a premise so bizarre and tragic that we can’t really engage with them, and most of the time we refuse to even try. We believe that it’s true, but hold that fact at arm’s distance to keep our mind at ease. With our willingly warped perception, the Onion can ratchet up the death toll to absurdly high levels and many people don’t even notice.

Aside from misleading media, I think that this phenomena is why reasonable people haven’t taken the pandemic seriously: the scale of tragedy is so enormous that no one can comprehend it, and from there it’s an easy step to apathy and denial. This isn't unique to people who refuse to wear masks; we all do limit our empathy, and most of the time it’s a good thing. After all, if we treated each death we heard about with more than cursory grief, we’d never have the strength to read a newspaper, much less a history book. Even those of us who take prevention seriously can’t pretend to feel the weight of each death as if it were new. If we did, then forget wearing a mask or staying six feet apart. We wouldn’t be able to leave our homes, if not from fear then from pain*.

With this all in mind, it becomes easier to understand people who disregard the pandemic. At this point, everyone is sick to death of being alone with limited activities, and if the danger is only an abstract and arbitrary number, then why not go to a bar?

I’ve seen a lot of well-intentioned people online (since that’s the only place I can see strangers communicate these days) try to convince COVID downplayers by citing the death toll over and over and over again. I’m not in the habit of getting into internet fights, so I’m really not one to say, but I’d recommend taking a different tact. Cite personal narratives of those who have lost loved ones to COVID instead. Sometimes this feels wrong; it’s certainly illogical. After all, a death is a death, whether you know the name or not, and focusing your attention on one story obscures the fact that there are too many stories to possibly tell. But the fact is that none of us are wholly logical, and to us, a death isn’t a death without a name. The way to force these statistics to shrink is to make them more than statistics.

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* By the way, I'm not saying that people who haven't worn masks or social distanced have done nothing wrong. They made their own choices and are responsible for the consequences. I just want to point out that their decisions aren't too far removed from the way any of us think.