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The last course I
taught at San Francisco State ended mid-August, two
weeks ago, and I can still feel the wrath of one girl.
Shirley was a tall, pretty, and intelligent
Chinese-American, born and raised in the U.S. In the
final assignment she thought she had done well – a memo
where each student thanked others who had aided in one's
development through the course. Shirley got recognition
from seven peers.
I only credited her
with two thanks from peers, however, because five came
from students who thanked her with nothing related to
themes they'd developed over the course, nor to any
themes in Shirley. These five, instead, only
generalized good feelings for others clustered
interchangeably with each other. From day one I'd
warned against such shopping lists. Only a few had well
learned to focus on values in others and in oneself and,
in memos, reviews, and oral presentations, to cite them
by cohering specifics.
Shirley, however, was
angry she didn't get her full points. If five out of
seven recognized her without doing so as I wanted, she
felt it unfair herself to be accountable for their
omission. In her final, e-mailed comments she expressed
strong sarcasm, as if it were onerous, ludicrous, and
impossible for her to have gone around to everyone
writing final memos to be sure that those thanking her
did so to please me. She was pleased. She expressed
scorn that I as instructor should void generosity she
felt clear.
The course at San
Francisco State was a required one for all its College
of Business seniors, but CoB administrators never
scheduled near enough classes for it. Every term
brought crowds desperate for any last-minute openings.
Failure to get in meant extending one's senior year –
saddling many with an additional semester's tuition.
Those who got in my course, or hoped so in wait lists of
twenty and more, all nodded their heads yes, they
understood, they accepted the peculiar communication
standards I set. Students had to quote peers in all
work after the first week. They had to base all oral
and written work on the cultural "stuff" that expressed
them: transportation fashions, food styles, landscapes
they lived, worked, or played in, interior design,
music, clothing, film – all the "stuff" that showed
selves in public performance. It also displayed the
overlapping layers, contradictions, and thematic
consistency that friends, family, and larger society
gave us. But I stressed – and again, yes, they agreed,
yes, they understood – I would grade on how well they
tied such connections to themselves and peers.
To help students
focus, I asked that in memos they include a heading line
with "re" or "concerning" to specify theme or a main
value unifying each memo. This helped some keep focus.
Too many others could never get the difference between
theme and topic. For the thematic heading – which
might be conformity, freedom, neighborliness, loyalty,
belonging, and so on – too many instead kept indicating
only topical terms, neutral as to good or bad, stopping
short as to engagement or none (my family's former
neighborhood, some film character's workplace, a
favorite sport or meal).
Confusion between
topical and thematic opens the gate to the illogic of
shopping lists. Shirley fell into this confusion more
than once in the course, and again in her last memo –
throwing together a bunch of peer names as a generalized
happiness she claimed her growth in the course. How she
had grown in light of any theme or values, or in
association with any issues any peers had raised, never
occurred to her. Beautiful, radiant, confident, and
genuinely intelligent, Shirley had nevertheless never
particularly engaged any themes in the course, but did
so randomly, occasionally, by hit-and-miss.
One could ascribe this
all-too-common failure at thematic focus to the heavy
schedule students had: the part-time or full-time jobs
of almost all, the long hours many spent in traffic
congestion, the inevitability of courses isolated from
each other, and the class sizes that grew every
semester. These circumstances, while true as facts – as
topics – still could not explain anything substantively
about the habits most of us acquire. Shirley had
thought that if peers through the course were listening
to her, and able to recognize her in the end, their
ability to see and say thank-you came from themselves –
from their own intentions, time, and energy. Or it came
from talent or patience in reportorial skills that some
of them honed (to please teacher). She presumed that if
one listened to others or not depended mainly on oneself
– as if, by the logic of our television, movie, and
electronic media culture, the consumer of experience has
a right to feel oneself set apart, or above, but
certainly beyond whatever one takes in or shuts down.
In order for beautiful
Shirley to have gotten a better grade – for others in
the course to have responded to her more specifically –
she'd have had to have written things during the course,
and to have given oral presentations, all with some
effort to pull listeners and readers out of their
observer-only comfort zones. If she had invested
herself in some key issues of her choice – conundrums,
concerns, or any other cohering themes – she would have
communicated herself as a person engaged, alive,
implicated. This posture differs from that of the
dutiful student bowing to specialization orthodoxy, the
neutral consumer impartially absorbing whatever
authority gives. If she had couched her cohering self
in terms of reference to peers listening, it would have
challenged them to sit up and think, to ask themselves
if she was locating herself accurately in relation to
them. If her substance connected well to them, she'd
had shown specifically how she took at least some peers
seriously, and they could have thanked her finally for
that.
Most of us do not take
others seriously. By the nature of commercial culture,
we ever position ourselves above, apart, and beyond.
Such buying-and-owning poses feed into the entitlement
and control promises our consumer culture builds into
everything. Willy-nilly, even amid the crowds and
competition of everyday life, we fit ourselves to the
ethics of imagining ourselves as number one, but alone.
Corporate academics elevate this as being objective,
specialist, and secure for the interchangeable units of
hierarchy.
The older gods of
nationalism, religious intolerance, and ethnic
chauvinism all work the same way. Under guise of group
cohesion, all reduce the messy loose ends of
individuality to the comfort of being like others in the
group. All learn to imagine others in the group as like
oneself – all mirrored in the same narcissistic
imaginations, so the only skills that finally matter are
turn on or turn off, listen or not listen, buy or not
buy.
Republicans and
Democrats both have now had their national conventions,
both squared off in electoral war aimed at November 2.
Both elevate themselves in fighting something called a
war on terrorism, as if all America – or all the world –
equally subscribes to winning as main narrative. Our
triumphalism unrolls in its simple script allowing
technological, military superiority to humiliate, anger,
and alienate the entire Muslim and third world. Shirley
isn't alone. As she assumed peers in our course could
listen or not according to their own choices, so we good
Americans could for years assume that Muslims,
third-world types, and others were similarly free to
accept or not the many benefits of our rich,
good-hearted corporate colonialism. Shirley isn't
alone. As she could not imagine placing herself into
more engagement, walking-in-their-shoes with her peer
audience, and crediting them as active parts of a
relationship – and she a reciprocal part in it – we good
Americans could not imagine the relationship we have
already reached with mainly Muslims but also many others
worldwide (foisting on them the despotic, savage, and
corrupt regimes we have ever propped up for our happy
flow of cheap oil). We think we're simply the good
guys, crusading against bad. We can't see that we've
located ourselves in many other stories worldwide, too –
or we pretend we don't have to see – that the others can
fit our simpler innocent narrative: whoever not being
with us is against us. |
