August 14, 2017

Distant thunder.

Departmental retreat. Things change, and I let them flow through my hands, assuming I will not be there to be affected when the changes kick in.

The juggernaut of events rolls past the point where I feel I can have any useful thing to say, any complete understanding. Here’s a dilemma. I believe in Free Speech. I believe there is either Free Speech or there is not, and that cherry-picking– THIS free speech but not THAT free speech-- makes the light go out all at once. I do not believe Hate Speech is essentially different from Free Speech, however lamentable, however jaw-droppingly ignorant. I do not believe that hurt feelings, or even righteous outrage, is the red line that ends Free Speech. This is a conviction I barely have the courage to express, for there is dogma on the left as well as dogma on the right, and one treads carefully. When I reprehend an opinion I hear expressed publically, I assume the remedy is education– somehow to grab someone at the right time in their life and make them justify the things they believe in accordance with reason and Faith and whatever authority rules their hearts. Or, if they are lost, to save those around them by the twin powers of reason and example. I don’t think we can defeat racism– or any other ism– by telling it to shut up. Historical Nazism in Germany would not have been ended by the war, I think, if German citizens had not been dragged to the concentration camps and made to look at the end point of their leaders’ rhetoric, if they had not looked on their ruined cities and seen the outcome of racial delusion. I think our new brand of it has been dealt a blow by the baboons in Charlottesville showing off in front of the cameras and embarrassing everybody who is not lost in the morass of white supremacist rhetoric.  It could be that my leftist FaceBook feed deceives me, but it seems to me that there must be five hundred people outraged and heart-sore for every white supremacist carrying a torch in Virginia. Is this not, in its way, well? Is this not a kind of victory? I want racism to be talked and reasoned to death, to be outlived by generations untainted by it. I think for it to go underground, unheard and embittered, however satisfying to us personally in the moment, will engender something still filthier down the road.

Watched several hours of night rat shooting on You Tube. Satisfying in ways I dare not explain even to myself.

Went on line to discover what courses I am teaching this semester. Mildly disappointed.

I said in conversation about the teaching of writing that what I stand for in all my disciplines–teaching, writing, acting, painting– is CLARITY. One of my colleagues adds “but there are different kinds of clarity,” intending to excuse the opacity of academic-speak from the rigors of clarity.  Its not being the time nor the place stops me from saying, “No, there are not. Clarity is clarity, and what is obscure or muddled is in error, regardless of the excuses it want to make for itself”  I am such a Platonist. . . .