Insulting Hillary Clinton (and Others)

This question introduced a long post on my Facebook page: "Why do some Bernie supporters and leftists insist on insulting Hillary?" My lightly edited response follows.

            Attacks on Hillary Clinton's record and positions are legitimate, keeping pressure on her and her campaign to do what her critics want her to do: that is how this very serious game is played. To speak to this as a non-rhetorical question on insults, though — here, I think, are some of the broader reasons.

            (1) Too few Americans spend a lot of time in actual communities, i.e., places where people are stuck with one another for the foreseeable future. This leads to the temptation to say any damn thing one feels strongly about.

            (2) Where Americans do live in communities, many of us live in the results of "the big sort," i.e., surrounded by people with similar attitudes, so saying any damn thing we feel strongly about probably will bring agreement.

            (3) Many of us spend time in virtual "communities," with "community" emphatically in quotation marks: places where we can be pretty anonymous and enter and leave at low cost, and places where we feel we can say any damn thing we feel strongly about.

            (4) We're in another age of sentiment ("Get in touch with your feelings, Luke"), where it's seen as unproblematically good to feel strongly and share those feelings with the group.

            (5) As the custom of "busting" ("signifying on," "cut contests," "doing the dozens") show, the adolescent male tradition of the flyting — insult contests — is alive and both well and ill and increasingly unisex. Insults are sincere and sincerity is good ... and again, people can say any damn thing, with extra points for "transgressivity," until they breach some still- or recently-fashionable taboo.

            (6) Relatively few Americans grow up political and so haven't learned that there are instances when one must affront the neighbors and get into arguments, and therefore one should rigorously avoid pissing others off unnecessarily.

            (7) Relatively few Americans grow up political and in real neighborhoods, so many fail to learn to never piss off the neighbors unnecessarily because you never know when you might need a favor.

            (8) Many young Americans have had their self-esteem maintained strongly and work under the idea that they can say any damn thing and insult people and still be able to ask those people for favors.

                        (The editor of The Miami Student student newspaper sent me a Christmas card, which was a nice gesture, and used the opportunity to drop my column. She reassured me, though, that all was well since she'd replaced me with a colleague of mine who was a highly popular professor who she was sure would make an excellent columnist. My friends and I joked that she'd probably ask me for a letter of recommendation, and I said I might write her one because at a young age she had the sort of total sociopathic insensitivity typical of real-pro newspaper editors. Within a week, she asked me for a letter of recommendation.)

            (9) The relatively hard Left and hard Right attract people who put ideas above people and put their ideas above just about any people they are not politically infatuated with. Such folk will say any damn thing they think demonstrates their love of the Good, the True, and the pretty ugly, but screw it: if you disagree, you're just wrong and evil. 

Perrier, Pubes, Condoms, Morēs, & Morality (10 Feb. 2013)

"Manners Are Small Morals"

             I didn't put "spittoons" in my title here, because it's a somewhat long word and a word that might in itself turn away some readers; also, in combination with "pubes," it might attract readers for a different kind of writing than this essay.

            I want to start out with spittoons, though, and the fact that you probably have never seen one outside a Western.

            I'm old enough to remember spittoons in a gym locker-room in Chicago in the 1950s, and a friend of my youth tells me he saw some as recently as the 1970s: in an old-fashioned Chicago pool hall. He wasn't sure if the 1970s spittoons were actually used, or were just traditional decor. The ones in the locker-room were used — and I won't go into details about how I'm sure of that. (Hint: Emptying them was obviously not something the janitors like to do.)

            What's significant here is that I won't go into details because the details disgust me and very likely would disgust you, even a macho guy "you." Within a century or so, spittoons have gone from a sign of increased civilization — a way to avoid spitting on the street — to just gross.

            Part of that change was motivated by concerns for health and hygiene, and enforcement of health regulations, but mostly it was a change in "morés," in social standards and customs.

            I've written before about the power of fads and fashion, and I'm going to reinforce that idea here, but looking more at the up-side.    Especially as multiple-antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis becomes an increasing health hazard, it becomes increasingly a good thing that most Americans no longer casually spit on the street, or even in spittoons — and, mostly, that change in behavior came from a change in morés, in customs, social standards, "manners."

            A couple more items of evidence: more in terms of what people do than what they don't do, with continuing emphasis on guy behavior but bringing in (very crucially) you gals.

            While having my car serviced in a recall, I went into the Parts Department to check out costs for installing fog lights and noticed that they had a refrigerated display with beverages to purchase. So far so familiar: the gas stations I grew up with often had Coca Cola machines. However, the featured item in this Parts Department in 2013 was Perrier Water.

            Trust me, when I was growing up, guys at the gas station who wouldn't shell out a nickel for a Coke, drank the gas station water out of a hose, or (as part of the creeping socialism of the 1950s) from a water fountain. That a trucker checking out mudguards at the Parts Department might drink water from a little green bottle, and pay for the privilege, is a tribute to the power of changing fashions, and to the power of advertisers and marketers to change those fashions.

            Now, moving closer to, uh, home, let us consider the pubic hair of my title.

            I grew up with the folklore about guys' playing nasty honeymoon tricks on their friends, with the nastiest trick getting the groom drunk at his stag party, then (de)pantsing him and shaving his balls. Really, really nasty and perverse friends — the real weirdoes — would shave the guy from waist to thighs, so he'd look prepubescent (not that they'd know the word) and ridiculous when his bride saw him naked.

            As The Simpson's Nelson Muntz would say, "Ha-ha!"

            A quick check of my local porn site (which seems to be in Holland) indicates that a lot of guys have no problem with shaved balls or what may be full-body shaving, with a couple movie comedies' indicting guys' doing the pubic part by themselves to themselves — have the shaving done by a really close and trusted friend.

            And there are women who go way beyond shaving.

            Jeff Foxworthy and I don't agree on a lot of things anymore, but we do agree that if Bikini waxing is ever forced on people, Amnesty International would be sending investigators — and women pay to have it done!

            Even more weirdly and permanently people of both sexes are getting pierced and tattooed — and posting videos of themselves performing naked on the Internet. I'm talking about more or less normal, or at least non-pathological people, who are institutionalized if at all on college campuses and maybe the occasional barracks. I'm talking about people painfully marked, performing private acts to an international public, with faces visible and school colors up so identifying the performers is pretty straightforward even before The Powers That Be start buying genital-recognition software.

            Okay, I'm kidding a bit here but dead serious about how standards can change quickly and how strongly behavior can be modified: piercing, waxing, and tattooing are painful. I joked once that next would come scarification and branding, and, goll-dang, you can get it done in Los Angeles by people reviewed on Yelp!

            People are enduring serious pain in places and ways I want to think about even less than spittoons.

            These changes occurred in less than a generation, and they are major changes in individual behavior and social standards.

            So there is hope for more positive shifts.

            Smoking tobacco is already becoming rare, and chewing and spitting tobacco even rarer. With more social pressure, ashtrays can go the way of spittoons, and smoking in public the way of spitting in public.

            If fads and fashions can get guys to shave their pubes to look like a child or porn star (or gay body-builder?), you can get guys regularly and consistently into condoms when they're lucky enough to find some sex. And until there are more elegant means of birth-control and sex relatively safe from STDs, those condoms are important for public health.

            O, tempera; O, morés! indeed; but we can go with that. People don't change much — not most of us individually, definitely not humans as a species — but our behavior can change.

            Steven Pinker goes over 800 pages on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), showing as much as anything how terribly grossly horrible human beings can be; but he also demonstrates his point that we can do better and are doing better.

            Read Pinker on the earnest topic of decreasing violence, and note that he also discusses manners.

            We can't change much, but we can do better. Look around you and note the absence of spittoons. Watch an old movie and note how many people were smoking cigarettes then and how few now. Consider the utter weirdness of what people do to their bodies, the images they put up on porn sites — and have some hope that, among other improvements, we can reduce the number of unwanted, unplanned pregnancies — and abortions — and reduce the occurrence of sexually-transmitted diseases.


            Never get a pretty much smoking-free California (or wherever)? Never get guys to see condoms as cool? Maybe, but it's worth a try. "Manners are small morals" and some achievable changes in morés are imperatives of commonsense, responsibility, and morality. 

Dear Marketers ... [16 Feb. 2013]

Dear Marketers (Tele- and Otherwise):


I'm pretty confident you won't be reading this, but I do want to get the word out, at least out there, on record, if only in the figurative ether.

If you call and ask, "May I speak to Richard?", there's a good chance I'm going to say, "Probably not." I answer the phone with "Rich Erlich" or "Rich Erlich here" and then add, "How may I help you?" If you then ask for "Richard," it's a pretty strong hint that you weren't listening to me but looking over your script or dreaming of escape from your cube prison — or were using an autodialer and were lucky enough to start talking before I got tired of listening to dead air and hung up.

If you send me a letter starting "Dear Richard," there's a good chance I'll get no further but crumple it up and throw it in the recycling bin.

I don't go by "Richard"; I go by "Rich." If you know me well enough to call me by my first name, you know that. With a very small number of exceptions, the only people who call me "Richard" don't know me and want something from me. 

My last name is "Erlich." That's two syllables: "err" + "lick," and I'm happy with either pronunciation of "(to) err." It happens that the name is Yiddish, not German, so it's spelled correctly and pronounced "er-lick" not "ehrlich"/"air-lick," but either way is fine — and I won't complain about a Bavarian "air-lish" or Anglicized "er-lich," and I'll even be very gentle in correcting "Uhlrich."

But come on: two syllables! Take a stab at it.

And in a print-out letter, my last name is right there in memory, ready for the Merge program on your computer to pick up with "Dear Mr. Erlich" or "Dear Richard Erlich" or "Hey, Erlich-Schmuck: we want your money," which would also be okay with me. And on the phone, I've given my name, so try, "Well, hi there, Mr. Erlich — I did hear that right?" And then you can go after whatever it is you want from me (pretty much always money and/or time).

I'm a small "d" as well as a capital "D" democrat, and a an orthodox small "r" republican. I believe in equality, and I go so far as to decline to call former officials by their former titles and tell people it's no longer correct to call me "professor." (Indeed, I called my students "Mr." or "Ms." or "Mrs." until we voted to go to "a first-name basis" and they could call me "Rich.") I do, though, call former officials and current officials "Sir" or "Ma'am" or, in running into Madeleine Albright in a restaurant in Prague, "Madame" (well, there I may've mumbled "Secretary" after the "Madame"). 

Equality is good, but if you're trying to get something from me — in that context we're not exactly equals for one thing and for another there is much to be said for a bit of courtesy and respect among equals, and some formality between strangers.
 
Times change, customs change, and I won't push this point strongly. But I am also not going to talk to strangers on the phone who don't listen to what I'm saying but still want to come off as first-name friendly. I won't read junk mail addressing me as "Richard," however dear I am to their Merge functions.  Hey, be as informal as you like. Follow them-there surveys and focus groups and run the demographics on how many people really like the first-name approach. I'm hanging up on the false-friendly call, recycling your letter unread.


Very sincerely yours,

Rich Erlich

"I and Thou" / "I and You" / "I and It" (10 Oct. 2013)

CAUTION 1: I'm going to steal from and then seriously over-simplify Martin Buber here, so if you're sophisticated, and strict, about philosophy or theology, you might want to stop reading right now or risk getting really pissed off.

CAUTION 2, and here I'll get into something I know about — There's a good chance even sophisticated English-speakers, for example many of my readers, have exactly the wrong understanding of the English word "thou."


            Most readers encounter "thee's" and "thou's" in old translations of the Bible or reading Shakespeare, and most, I suspect understand "thou" as a formal word: The way we wretched, finite, mortal sinners address God. That's wrong. "Thou" is the English cognate of the Germanic "du" and is like Spanish "tu" plus similar words in the Romance languages: it's the informal second person, used for addressing one's social inferiors, assuming one has social inferiors, or for addressing children or friends. "Thou" is for people and other beings with whom one can be informal, truly friendly.

            I'll modernize "thou" to "you-my-friend, or quite possible friend" and note that one of the nicer things about old Biblical translations is "Thou" for God: God not as Creator and Lord and King but as, at least potentially, friend or lover — or one's opponent in a wrestling match (Genesis 32.22-32).

            Jacob wrestling with the angel is a primitive dumb-ass story taken literally; as an image out of a healthy relationship with the divine, it's pretty profound.

            Anyway, an I-thou relationship is a personal one, as with a friend, including a friend with whom one wrestles or makes love: a relationship that's face-to-face, hand to hand: human-to-human, person-al.
            As I interpreted Buber for literary-critical purposes — it's a long story and irrelevant here — my "take-away" from Buber is that human relationship with God, the great and Eternal Thou, allows significant relationship with humans and other creatures, with the Others in our lived worlds. Whether through God or "immanent Being" or something totally mundane, there is always and necessarily a potential for human relationship with other humans, and that potential is of central importance.

            It's just a potential however, and that, too, is important.

            Look, last estimate I heard was that we humans can "maintain stable social relationships" with maybe 150 other people. Back when I was in a fraternity, our estimate was that a guy could associate fairly closely with maybe fifty other guys; so I think "Dunbar's number" of 150 is about right for a maximum. Obviously the great majority of us live and deal with far more than fifty to 150 other people, so the great majority of those relationships will not be "I-thou."

            Most will be I-it relationships — dealing with Others instrumentally, as if they were things — and that's okay.

            Here's a thought experiment. You go to a bank and deal with a clerk. You are polite to her — quite likely a "her" — and she back to you. Still, next time you go to the bank you may decide to use an ATM: an Automated Teller Machine, which we often redundantly, but usefully here, call "an ATM machine." In the colloquial sense of the word, the essence of your relationship with the teller was I-it: a machine clould replace her. Indeed, if she said to you, "Good morning! And how are you today?" And you said "Fine." And she said, "No, really: you look miserable. How are you?" and waited for a serious answer — if she switched to I-thou communication, it would be indecorous, improper, rather impolite.

            Similarly, back when I taught college, I saw my students as human beings, and at least on occasion I think they saw me that way as well. Still, they were to me primarily generators of papers to grade, and — given the limits of what they wanted to talk to me about — I think I appeared to them mostly as a generator of grades, eventually course credit, and, intermittently, of information that might prove useful, at least useful for getting a desired grade and course credit.  

            If one of my students walked into my office and said, "Hey, how are you?" and I didn't feel fine and gave an honest and detailed answer — I suspect I'd have gotten into trouble. Our relationship wasn't really "I-thou" and an "I-thou" answer wouldn't have been, as they say (often euphemistically), inappropriate.
            But sitting face-to-face in the office, our relationship wasn't exactly I-it. It was, or I think should have been, I-you: a relationship that might develop into friendship, in other contexts, and which might allow, in emergencies, intimate conversation, but was now more formal. It was an interaction not totally instrumental —our just using one another like things — but not quite personal either.

            I'll try to clarify that with three stories and a quotation, and then repeat my point. (Hey, I taught for a long time; trust me: repetition can get annoying, but it's useful.)

            Two of the stories are background, and all can be told quickly.

            On my first day of teaching at Miami University, Oxford, OH (my first job out of grad school), I had my students write writing samples, and for the rest of the week I had tutorials with them, and I graded and discussed with them what they had written. On my second day of teaching, the first day of the tutorials, the second student talked about the essay for a little bit and then started crying, telling me "This is about me!" and he told me how he'd knocked up his girlfriend … and wanted to know, in a sense, "What are you going to do about that?!"

            Uh, huh. Welcome to the Ed Biz, Rich; and welcome to a bit more I-thou than I was ready for, though I gave what advice I could. (And if in my writing I return to the subject of condoms fairly frequently, it's not only because I worked a summer in a public health lab and know the dangers of STDs.)

            On another occasion, I had become friendly with a former student — repeat: former student — and offered him a lift, and he asked if he could talk to me, and we talked, human to human, and his crying there in my car was not an imposition. He asked for advice, and I gave it, and he fairly quickly followed it: I advised him to get out of a relationship where he could not help a woman in great pain but was only hurting himself. Or, more exactly, allowing the woman and her friends to hurt him, repeatedly, systematically.

            And if I sometimes point out that survivors of horrors can move on to do damage themselves, it isn't only because I absorbed that lesson from Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1964), Art Spiegelman's Maus (1991), and, preeminently, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The woman hurting my former student and (now) apparently former friend survived a plane crash that killed her family. The main point of the story for this essay is that my conversation with the former student was an I-thou interaction that was decorous, appropriate. If you think my advice cruel, a secondary point is that a moment of truly human communication is just truly human communication: if you've dealt seriously with any humans, you know we often fuck up, sometimes in the form of giving bad advice. This advice I'll stand by, however; and if you're a woman reader who dislikes such insensitive advice, please imagine yourself with a woman friend in an abusive relationship with a guy who has suffered and/or is suffering horribly; now consider the question, Can she really help him, or is she mostly just getting hurt herself? I-thou, person-to-person, truly intimate human relationships — sometimes suck; and one should run, not walk, away from some of them.

            The last story leads to the quotation and back to my point.

            For a long time I was "Student Mediator" for the good-sized English Department at Miami U. Most of the time, I just shuffled paper in this job and helped students through a fairly complicated complaint process; every now and then, though, I actually mediated. In the relevant case, the student, teacher, and I got together, and I couldn't quite figure out at first what the issue was; and then it became clear, and I said something like, "Oh, you two dislike each other."

            Neither was comfortable with my observation. The teacher was far, far too professional to react emotionally to a student; and the student was much, much, much too good a good Catholic boy to dislike an authority figure.

            Right.

            I told them, "You don't have to like one another. You just have to get along for a few hours a week for the next ______ [whatever] weeks." And I explained to them one form of what I'm calling here an I-you relationship, with a "you" being "a 'somebody' but not somebody I like" — but in a neutral sense of not liking.

            And here I'll throw in the quotation.

            In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the highly-flawed protagonist, Brutus — yeah, he's the protagonist; like, are you going to pay money to see a play called Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger? — Brutus asks his messenger Lucilius how Lucilius had been received by Cassius, a main co-conspirator in the assassination of Caesar, and Brutus's current ally in the following civil war. Lucilius says he was treated "With courtesy and with respect enough" but without the little touches of easy-going friendship he was used to when dealing with Cassius. Ever the analyzing intellectual, if not good at it, Brutus tells Lucilius that Lucilius has described "A hot friend cooling" — i.e., a close friend growing more distant (and that's all; Brutus was a puritanical republican Roman, not an aristocrat from the Empire who'd hump most anything mammalian and breathing). "When love begins to sicken and decay," Brutus continues, "It useth an enforced ceremony" (4.2).

            If Brutus's attitude here is a good indication, and it is, cool correctness wasn't much appreciated in Shakespeare's time, and Shakespeare makes plausible that even ancient, aristocratic, republican Romans would feel the same way. We Americans, strongly into friendliness, have a problem with not liking someone — which is a big problem since there is no reason you should feel one way or another about the vast majority of human beings; there are very few you will actually like, actually know and like as individuals.

            I'm suggesting that a little "enforced ceremony" can be a damn good thing: cool correctness to people we actively dislike but must deal with, a warmer courtesy to those whom we might potentially like and where we can move beyond an I-it relationship to something a bit more personal and humane: I-you.

            As a practical matter, I'd eliminate the friendliness gestures of asking people, "And how are you this morning?" when we don't give a rat's ass and would barely hear an answer like, say, "Depressed, but not quite suicidal" (a great line I heard from the son of a friend). A generalized wish of "Good morning" is fine for now, although it'd be nice to go to something like aloha, or shalom or as-salam alaykum or "Peace, you-all" or "Hi; I'm _______" and state your name. As a practical matter I'd have us admit that the potential for intimate I-thou relationships is crucial — but that it's just a potential. We can have honest I-it relationships with people — coolly correct with enemies or those we just don't take to — and behave more warmly neutral to most.


            I-it, I-you, and, at least on occasion I-and-thou. "Love one another" when you can; rest of the time, let's try be polite and mildly cordial — and let it go at that.

The Lion and the Mouse — and the Alligator (23 Jan. 2014)

"Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river."

— Haitian Proverb I Like to Quote

            When I left Cornell U in Ithaca, NY, my friends gave me a copy of a book of classic insults, which had as its headnote what I have as mine above: "Do not insult the mother alligator until after you have crossed the river."
            I have not always followed this good advice, but at least in theory I would go further and advise against insulting even small alligators even when you're well beyond the river and are pretty sure you'll never see an alligator again. Yea, verily I would say unto you: If you can, make the alligator your friend.
            Three examples, two from the side of the human, and one from a small and figurative alligator's point of view.
            In my late teens, when I was a junior counselor or counselor at a summer camp, teaching archery, a father visiting "my" archery range nocked an arrow and drew a bow while facing away from the targets. We didn't have the term "zero tolerance" back then, and I wouldn't have liked the idea — I definitely don't like it now — but one should never, ever fuck around with weapons of any sort, so I told the aging juvenile to leave the range. I was later asked by a fellow counselor if I knew who the wise guy was. "Sewer Rat's father," I said, naming one of the less popular campers. "Uh huh," my colleague said, and left smiling cryptically.
            When the summer was over and I was back in the City, I read in the pre-Rupert-Murdoch Chicago Sun-Times that Sewer Rat's father had been found in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental with a couple bullets in his head: as we used to say at that time in Chicago, "an obvious suicide."
            On a later occasion, when I was a college junior or senior and a fraternity officer, I called the home of a pledge to remind him he was to come back from vacation a couple days early to help get the house ready for mid-year Rush.
            While we were mopping floors, or whatever, a fraternity brother of mine noted that the pledge in question had been dropped off by his father, who seemed somewhat pissed off at the house generally and, perhaps, me in particular. No big deal, but … "You were polite and respectful, right?" Of course I had been, but firm; I had other calls to make, and if I had to cut my vacation short a couple days, so could a freshman who would've been flunking out of school at a neighborhood animal house if I hadn't gone along with getting him depledged there and over to us in an arcane maneuver arranged by our Rush Chairman and agreed to by the other house with rapidity and graciousness that I should have thought more about.
            "You were polite and respectful right?" "Yeah. Why is this significant?" Did I know what the pledge's father did for a living? I did not. "Contract work," I was told. Maybe a couple contracts a year, and they lived on that, lived very, very well. When this Dad visited again, I didn't make a big deal out of it, but I did show, briefly, unostentatiously just how respectful I could be.
            Nice thing growing up in Chicago when I did: You learned the wisdom of manners if for no other reason than you could never be sure with whom you were dealing and if and how that person might be, as they said, "connected."
            An armed society probably isn't a polite society, certainly not in Chicago, but it can reduce young males' tendencies toward incivility if Ms. Manners might be a representative from the local B'nai Mafia chapter and advise respect while carrying a tire iron.
            My story from the other side, so to speak, is from the subtler world of scholarship. Long ago, I wrote a couple articles dealing with (among other things) Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's fine but underrated and under-read 1955 novel, Gladiator-at-Law. My writing went unnoticed for years, and then I came across an article by a young scholar that not only cited my work but (unnecessarily for the citation) commented on it briefly, but at sufficient length to suggest that it — my work on this novel, my whole rather old-fashioned approach, actually — sucked.
            Okay, I finally get a citation, and a bit of a comment to boot, and it's insulting. Like the guy could have just had the citation, or said that I took an approach different from his and one he thought less useful, but, nah, he had to say something harsh.
            A couple more years pass, and I get a note from the guy who cited me saying, more or less, Hi, hey, what a coincidence, the Chair of his department —let's call him Rick — was a friend of mine from grad school and Rick said that the young scholar should write me. The guy needed an outside evaluation of his scholarship, which he hadn't had time to write much of, so his Gladiator-at-Law piece was going to be important for him to get tenure, and I was one of the few other people to write on the novel at the time and Rick said that I'd write a carefully composed and effective letter for him because I was a nice guy and a responsible scholar and would always give an honest evaluation and all the young scholar had to do was ask me politely and grovel, just a bit. He groveled; I wrote. The punk got tenure.
            "Keep your words soft and sweet," mostly — to modify somewhat a quotation attributed to Andy Rooney — "just in case you have to eat them.” But we should go even farther than avoiding giving offense. And here I'll paste in a fable out of Aesop that I learned as a child and — since I read it in a Latin version in college, not because it was around in my childhood — I'm sure is out of copyright.

A Lion asleep in his lair was waked up by a Mouse running over his face. Losing his temper he seized it with his paw and was about to kill it. The Mouse, terrified, piteously entreated him to spare its life. "Please let me go," it cried, "and one day I will repay you for your kindness." The idea of so insignificant a creature ever being able to do anything for him amused the Lion so much that he laughed aloud, and good-humouredly let it go. But the Mouse's chance came, after all. One day the Lion got entangled in a net which had been spread for game by some hunters, and the Mouse heard and recognised his roars of anger and ran to the spot. Without more ado it set to work to gnaw the ropes with its teeth, and succeeded before long in setting the Lion free. "There!" said the Mouse, "you laughed at me when I promised I would repay you: but now you see, even a Mouse can help a Lion."

Beyond the cynical advice on waiting to insult alligators, beyond the obvious prudence of not insulting Mafia accountants or free-lance hit men — or anyone just casually — "The Lion and the Mouse" teaches the more positive but equally practical lesson of being nice to others whenever we can. As the tough-minded among the Anarchists and communitarians argued, we practice mutual aid in part because it is right to do so and because it feels good to do so: but that good feeling comes from a reliable sense of superiority as well as more admirable altruism; also, however, we practice mutual aid and should be nice to one another because the one sure thing in life is that we will eventually get into trouble.



            So, MORAL: do not insult even small alligators and help when you can. If nothing else, you never know when you'll need a favor, or from whom.

First Day of Class: Grading, Forms of Address

             Before teaching my first course in College Composition, I had been thinking about teaching for a while (my most likely alternative to teaching was a brief but exciting career as a tunnel rat for the US Army in Vietnam), and my initial pedagogical decisions may strike normal folk — who do not teach College Comp. or throw around "pedagogical" — as a little weird. I don't mean that the decisions were weird in themselves, but a little weird in that they were the decisions I made first.

            First of all of them, I decided on a grading system.

            I'm not sure the "CIRP Freshman Survey" of attitudes and values was up and running in the mid-1960s — I remember it from the later '60s on — but I didn't need a scientific survey to tell me that the primary concern of most of my students would not be what they would learn in my course but the grade they got. I didn't like that attitude, but I decided to go with it; after all, even my most idealistic colleagues usually talked about grading student essays, not, say, "carrying on a dialog" with the essays.

            So my very first decision was that I would grade "blind," not looking at the students' names. This system would make it difficult to track individual students' progress in learning how to write, but it would be fairer: I'd be grading the essay, not the student.

            Later, I got some indication that grading blind was a good decision when several of us TA's compared our grading and found that those who looked at students' names were far more consistent, "across the line" of grades in their gradebooks than those of us who didn't. Our inference was that teachers looked at a student's name on the paper, had an idea of the student's ability, and honestly saw — or tended to see — a paper in that grade range. "A" students wrote "A" papers, and so forth. Not always, but usually, what people expect to see is what we do see, and seeing a student's name may set up in a teacher's mind a grade range.

            Still later in my career, a student said that she counted on this teacherly tendency in her schoolwork: she established herself early in a course as a "A" student and tended to get "A's" even if she subsequently slacked off and handed in what she saw as pretty much "B" work. My system, she ruefully noted, interfered with her system.

            In any event, grading "blind" allowed me in one sense to respond more to my students as human beings, including my human response of liking some human beings more than others. So long as I was professional and polite to all, I could feel my human feelings without worrying about favoring students I liked and penalizing any I didn't like — although most students did a good job at invisibility in class, so I didn't feel much about them one way or another, and I'm confident that's how most felt about me. There was always a potential there for an "I/Thou"relationship with some of my students, but ordinarily we were "instrumental" for one another: they supplied me with essays, and I supplied them with grades and comments and, if all went well, aid in improving skills. We also taught each other important stuff, on occasion, and on rare occasion made real human-to-human contact — friendly contact mostly (I remain friends with some former students) — but such moments weren't central to our day-to-day operations.

            I also decided that I'd grade numerically, in part, and on a kind of sliding scale: a system of "weighted" grades. That is, I'd give the essay a letter grade, but then translate the grade into a number according to the standard university system: A: 90-100, B: 80-89, C: 70-79, etc. And then I'd translate those standard numbers into something more modest for the early essays and of increasing "weight" as the term went on. So the initial essay in the course might be worth 5 points, then 10, 25, 50, 75, and 100, with some tweaks to encourage revision — "Good essays aren't written; they are rewritten" (usually) — and I gave moderately generous points for participation.

            With this system, every piece of writing counted, but improvement was rewarded; and with this system someone could sit in class in silent invisibility and get an "A," but it would really help if s/he occasionally bloody well, as we used to say, contributed something. (When e-mail came along, shy people could get credit with e-mail participation, and I stressed even more that there was at least an ethical imperative to participate in some way: it's not fair to just take notes and pick others' brains and never add anything of one's own.)

            My second decision came a bit later, after a colleague of mine got my attention by throwing back at me one of my favorite lines — but the groundwork for it had been laid long before.

            My first day as a college freshman, after my advisor and I had reviewed the few choices I had to make in the "Specialized Chemistry" curriculum for budding biochemists, my first real question was, "Uh, what do you call people around here?" The answer to that question, at that place and time and in that context, was "Mister." In my introduction to serious academic snobbery, my advisor told me, "In a department such as this, everyone has a doctorate" — and just about everybody on the U of Illinois Chemistry faculty ca. 1961 was male.

            So I'd call my instructors "Mister _____," and they'd call me "Mr. Erlich." Now to some extent we were in a civilian variation on the story of the British sergeant major telling his second "leftenant" trainees in the standard-issue sergeant-major voice, "I shall call you 'sir,' and you will call me 'sir'!" (beat, more softly and intensely) "The difference will be … that you will mean it." Not much, though: for the most part, I think that during my undergraduate career, my teachers called me "Mr. Erlich" as a matter of custom and courtesy and, that far, meant it. Only as a graduate student was I called "Rich," and then I very tentatively guessed and called my adviser "Barry." (When my adviser was being recruited to be my adviser, I'd been referred to as "a cynical little bastard from Chicago, with a background in the sciences" — but that's another story.)

            Anyway, I'd been brought up on "Mr./Miss/Mrs./Ms." and addressed my students that way, until some of them told me the formal forms of address made them uncomfortable, and I complained about that complaint to one of my colleagues. "Jeesh!" I said, "It's a matter of indifference!" To which he replied, "If it's a matter of indifference to you, but not to them, just do it their way."

            As I said, that got my attention.

            My colleague might have known — as in, Iikely bragged about it in his presence — that my first and only big "gotcha" moment on my first student/faculty committee was when a very senior colleague said to me, "It's a matter of indifference," and I smiled and replied sweetly, "Then just do it my way"; so that won the argument for my students. Or did in part, since I also saw what would later be called a teaching opportunity.

            In succeeding semesters, I would go over my grading system first day of class and then spend a few minutes on our one moment of class democracy: determining "Forms of Address." Simultaneously, I introduced "Forms of Address" as a possible topic for the class's first essay/writing sample, a topic just about nobody ever selected.

            (The other topic was on clothes, with some very brief selections from John T. Molloy's Dress for Success and a paragraph from Sir Thomas More on how in Utopia, anyway, clothing competition is forbidden. [The Utopians are commies and pretty egalitarian.] Many of my students were scarily sophisticated on matters of dress and did well to write on it.)

            Anyway I'd offer my student a Formal Option for forms of address, where we'd call each other "Mr./Ms." — few married undergrads at Miami University, Oxford, OH — and an informal option where we'd call one another by first names. I also mentioned the option where I'd call them "Mr./Ms. Whatever" and they'd call me "Rich," but rejected that one, and also rejected anyone's calling anyone else just by their last names: that's either really, really friendly among equals or the form for a social superior to address a social inferior. I'd tolerate, I said, calling them by their first name and their calling me "Mr. Erlich" or "Professor Erlich," and I told them the U of I Chem Dept. story for "Dr. Erlich" — but I'd be a little uncomfortable, I said, with that "cross-over" form.

            With maybe one exception in many years of teaching, my classes elected informality, and I said, "Hi. Call me 'Rich'" (beat) — "but I'm still giving the grades." And we'd spend a bit more time talking about forms of address and their significance and how writers can find topics all around us if we just look at "The weirdness of everyday life," or what starts appearing weird when we start thinking about it.

            I was trying to get them into what's called in an awkward English word "defamiliarization" or even more pretentiously Verfremdungs(effekt) or priyom ostraneniya. To paraphrase a dead White male poet, I'll say that I was trying to "make the familiar strange" for them, as a way to find topics.

            And more than that.

            Every now and then, I think, my mini-lecture on grading got students thinking about grades and what they mean and how grades function in their (academic) lives. Moving out from there — the great majority of my students preferred blind grading, and their recognizing that preference could, on rare occasions, get a few asking potentially radical questions on whether they really wanted to be treated personally and be graded as human beings — or, given that preference, was it okay to treat them rather impersonally and professionally and grade them on their work?

            Forms of address are no big deal in themselves, but they tell us something about power relationships. "Hi. Call me 'Rich' …" but I gave the grades, and choosing forms of address was one of the very few exercises of democratic choice my students were going to encounter in their classes. Equally, forms of address are what we might call "age and generation inflected." My students were uncomfortable calling me "Rich" in part because they very legitimately didn't want to think themselves old farts such as I was to them even in my thirties, which is fair enough. But to what extent did they reject the "Mr./Ms." designation because they were uncomfortable thinking of themselves as adults and, as adults, my social equal, however much I might outrank them as their teacher?


            Grading in a College Comp. class is no big deal, and neither are forms of address. (When asked once how I'd like to be addressed, I said I'd like "His Grace, Richard, Duke of TriStates" — Oxford, OH, is near Indiana and Kentucky — so you have some idea how earnestly I take the issue.) But "awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us," as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said; getting young Americans to see the weirdness of the world we see as natural, as I would vulgarly put it: that's basic to education and good to get to on the first day of class.