Hillary Clinton, Macha, Pneumonia, and Great-Grandmother Ferguson

[NOTE: Almost all of this is a slightly updated version of some paragraphs I wrote for my blog on OpenSalon, before the Salon.com book-burners closed down the site. Since it's from one of a collection of essays submitted to Wildside Press in Winter of 2014 — and which they will publish apparently when they damn well get around to it — it was definitely written without Hillary Clinton in mind.]

One day back in the late 20^th century, back when I was teaching writing courses, a student staggered into my office, sneezed, coughed, wheezed, and dropped off a paper on my desk, only somewhat spotted by her bodily fluids. She rasped, "Here it is," and waited for my thanks and appreciation. She didn't get any; I said something like, "Okay, now go home and get some sleep; I would've given you an extension." I wasn't going to thank her. I wasn't going to be impressed. What was going through my mind was (1) that she'd exposed me to Whatever Is Going Around — although I'd probably been exposed already (students are disease vectors) — and (2) that far from being impressed that she'd trekked over with the paper, I thought her socially unskilled that she couldn't get a friend to drop it off and/or unsophisticated about modern technology that it didn't occur to her to just send me the essay as an e-mail attachment.

I discussed this matter with some women colleagues, and they told me the problem was Great Grandmother Ferguson.

They'd all been brought up on some version of Great Grandmother Ferguson, "who dropped the twins while plowing the south forty; bit through the umbilical cords; put one twin to each breast to suckle; finished the plowing; then went home to nurse a log-cabin-ful of cholera victims; and you, you little weakling, you're complaining about some minor appendicitis. Woman up! You're whining like a boy!" The rule was, "Real women don't get sick," or they don't allow a little pneumonia to get in the way of getting housework done: that's for boys and men, who "never have to go through a three-day labor like I had to for you — and then you ripped me apart!"

My colleagues explained to me, "Girls are brainwashed, Rich; it's the Macha Creed, and you just have to tell them that times have changed, and we're winning the Revolution, and now women and girls can take a day off to be sick the way men always could. Or at least rich men."

I thought that story and line were great, and I repeated them back to the class, to which several young women responded, "Right! Boys are wimps! If they get sick they go to bed!" And I repeated the point to rather militant stares and repetition of "Boys are wimps!" and finally just said, "All right — all of you! If you're sick, don't come to class. I gave you a roster with contact information; you're divided into groups; get someone to cover for you." And we moved on.

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            So: There may be some convoluted Machiavellian reason(s) why Hillary Clinton in September 2016 hid the fact that she had pneumonia; or it may be just Great Grandmother Ferguson, lying moldering in the grave, but hoo boy! her spirit marches on.

Warnings and Cautions, No Triggering Required

The Atlantic piece cited Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as two classic texts that have

stirred calls for trigger warnings due to their racially motivated violence

and domestic abuse, respectively.

— Katy Waldman "The Trapdoor of Trigger Words"

Slate on Line 5 Sept. 2016

            Before "trigger warnings" became widely known (and conditioning their meaning), there were — still running and more widely seen than trigger warnings there are: MPAA ratings on films, and less formal cautions for parents and others on games and music. And these ratings and cautions and warnings make judgments about what may harm kids and disturb some adults, and most of them, like literal trigger warnings, concern violence and sex, with taboo words and drug use a close third and other potential triggers in line to join the list, if the more fastidious posters on the Internet will set the standard for sensitivity.

            In the early 1980s, putting together a "List of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF," Thomas P. Dunn and I anticipated the current crop of the fastidious and decided that sex and violence and "dirty words" were far from the only potential dangers in works we annotated; so we began adding additional CAUTIONs and a few WARNINGs, with the desire to provide useful information and perhaps chide those overly concerned with sex, violence, and dirty words.

            Thom and I did this for the "Lists of Works Useful" accompanying the essay anthologies The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction (1982) and Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF, and also for Clockworks: A Multimedia Bibliography [sic] of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF (1993).

            To start with an example of an innocuous, there's this one with Dan Simmon's The Fall of Hyperion: "TEXTUAL WARNING: If using the 1990 Doubleday edition, be sure there's an errata sheet giving p. 305." This alert we thought would be useful, but it might also reflect a bit my own mild annoyance that the folks at Doubleday had managed to misplace a whole goddamn page.

            Arguably less innocuous examples can be found among the whole range of CAUTIONs we used in Clockworks. For example:

                        For Tom Swift and His Giant Cannon (1913) we note failed attempts at ethnic humor, including attempts to render non-WASP dialects that might be offensive to contemporary ears, or, on esthetic grounds, the ears of those who grew up reading Mark Twain, who had some talent at reproducing on paper different varieties of English.

                        We found Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1926) silly in its conclusion (though we didn't mention that), but still great visually and of profound importance for an early female robot; but we thought Thea von Harbou's novel version (1926/27) should bear the "Caution: The owner of the Metropolitan exotic-drug and whore house is negatively characterized in terms of the nations contributing to his genealogy." Hint: They're not Aryan, and "The politics of the novel generally (definitely including its gender politics) differ from the film's somewhat, but may be even more simplistic."

                        Anne McCaffrey's The Rowan (1990) was more bellicose than we had expected from her The Ship Who ____ series, outside of The City Who Fought, and also strongly pronatalist, a political position of great importance but one insufficiently recognized by heterosexual readers as political, and one that should be highly controversial.

                        For the re-issues of Philip Francis Nowlan's "Armageddon — 2419" and "The Airlords of Han" (1929), we added the "CAUTION: As [Alan] Kalish et al. demonstrate, the revised versions remove the 'Yellow Peril' language of the original but are still racist (sexism in the revised stories is more complex)." These seminal Buck Rogers stories are significant in prefiguring atomic warfare, but also genocide, and to have genocide "normalized" and even celebrated for young readers is, we thought, a more serious matter than some scenes of fornication or repetitions of the word "f*ck" or even some racial slurs.

                        Dealing with an insightful but definitely post-structuralist reading of Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky (2001), I felt a need to add, "CAUTION: Some proofreading problems aside, this is an excellent essay in the late-20th-c. style of cyberpunk critique, quite useful for studying fictional characters and real people as social-cultural creatures living in postmodern, late-capitalist, sophisticated urban areas of the planet Earth. For such postmodern people, nature is safely inside of human culture and identity is problematic; however," I thought I should remind our readers, "there is a good deal of natural world beyond our small planet, and even in advanced-capitalist countries it is arguable that most people are barely modern, let alone pomo. And it is possible that human beings are spiritual as well as social-cultural animals, and as certain as anything can be that we are animal animals, with an evolved genome and a range of basic behaviors that preceded specifically human culture." Like, a lot of theorists of postmodernism really do need to get out of The City more and deal with a nature that has existence, validity, and power outside of and without humans and which can deconstruct humans quite quickly. And readers into postmodern theory should, on occasion, be cautioned about that. (Such readers — and more so authors — need stronger and more specific cautions before, say ocean sailing or backpacking on glaciers.)

                        Most useful, I think, was our suggesting the need to note the cop stories, movies, and TV shows — even in science fiction — for which people should exercise, "Caution: Contains material offensive to the 4th Amendment and other parts of the American Bill of Rights." If Americans and others have been too acquiescent in the chipping away of our rights in the interest of safety and police power, part of the reason is watching all those television cop shows and shoot-'em-up movies in which police respect for the Bill of Rights, due process, and simple courtesy — is for wussies. Consider the case of a sympathetic White cop with racial prejudices but who follows rules and has the courage to take a bullet rather than shoot an unarmed suspect; and consider a sympathetic cop of impeccable attitudes and sentiments on race and is militantly equal-opportunity in "Taking out the trash" by manfully shooting first and asking questions … pretty much never. Other scholars and teacher issues warnings about racial attitudes; I thought we should say something about the Bill of Rights and US  Civil War Amendments.

                        And we should note racism, sexism, xenophobia, jingoism, religious hatred, natalism, teen-bashing, homophobia, authoritarianism, macho assholery, and other nastiness with assiduous militancy equal to those who spot sex and violence. And we should note them where they appear, e.g., I'll remind people that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), mentioned in the headnote, can do probably without a trigger warning for racial violence necessary for the story, but should have a mild caution that it is certainly open to a charge of casual acceptance of traditional sexism.

Der Arnold und The Donald: Macho and Consciousness and The Terminator

            I recently read a column in The Nation magazine on line on Donald J. Trump bringing in, very briefly, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Okay, this much about that.

            When teaching James Cameron's and Gale Anne Hurd's THE TERMINATOR and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY — nuanced but hardly subtle films — I noted that my students had trouble understanding them because they lacked background in the imagery of German extermination programs in World War II — ordered by an Austrian — and because they lacked the phrase, concept, and category, "Macho Asshole." For my students, "macho" was usually an unambiguously positive term, so some missed the point of TERMINATOR that the ultimate macho man isn't a man at all but a killer robot, and more missed the point in JUDGMENT DAY that if a woman totally Terminator-izes herself to where she has the toughness to murder a wounded man in front of his wife and child — her acquired toughness would be that of a Nazi who could kill infants, women, children, and men for a Higher Cause.

            "Der Arnold" has acted the macho asshole since his introduction to a general audience in PUMPING IRON (1977) where on camera he hides the lucky T-shirt of Lou Ferrigno: der Arnold's main competition, colleague, roommate, and, Ferrigno might imagine, friend. In his relationship with a number of women, part of what's going on is that Schwarzenegger is a macho asshole and acts it. On other occasions, he seems to have sufficient self-consciousness to be acting a role, and it is in part the audience's fault if we miss the touch of irony and if we don't recognize that "macho asshole" is a variety of figurative asshole — with apologies to the anus, an innocent orifice and evolutionary breakthrough — and a Bad Thing to Be.

            Far more than der Arnold, The Donald seems radically deficient in self-consciousness and hasn't been acting a role at all in his presidential campaign and really is a macho asshole with little sense of irony or of the significant existence of other people outside of their relationship to him (preferably awe).

            Der Arnold shouldn't be left unchaperoned with women or girls (or boys or men if his tastes change with age); California, however, is doing okay after his terms as governor. The Donald is more dangerous on any scale and should never ever be allowed the power of the presidency or anywhere near it.

            The people supporting Trump need the category Macho Asshole and need to know enough to recognize a fascistic appeal when they receive one — and be ethical enough to reject both.

Trump, Truth, and T-Shirts (or Non-Alliterating Sweatshirts and Jackets)

            I was walking from my car wearing my favorite sweatshirt inside out, and a neighbor asked me, "Do you know your sweatshirt is inside out?" I replied that I did know and that it — my wearing the sweatshirt inside out — was intentional.

            The sweatshirt says CALIFORNIA in large letters and CALI MADE and "Cali Life." It also shows a hand with an emerald, but I didn't know what that might mean until I Googled for this blog post "California + Emerald" and discovered it probably refers to "the Emerald Triangle": the area covered by the northern California counties of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity, known for cannabis production.

            The reason I wore the sweatshirt inside out was because "Cali Made" can mean "born in California," and I wasn't. I was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, grew up in Chicago, spent much of my young adulthood at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (except for one year of apostasy at Cornell in upstate New York), and spent the bulk of my life teaching at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in Butler County in Ohio's 8^th Congressional District, going from The Land of Lincoln to that of John Boehner.

            And I currently live in Ventura County, CA, some 500 miles from "the Emerald Triangle." (Although the California Emerald Club is my local [medical] marijuana home-delivery service — discounts to military personnel and seniors! — but I won't be using them until marijuana is fully legal in California, or until my back issues get serious enough that I need something to supplement acetaminophen and Tramadol; and even then I don't think I'll want to advertise my dealers on my clothing.)

            Anyway, it's a nice sweatshirt: still black after several washings and the right size and soft — but "Cali Made" would be a lie if it identified me as a native Californian, and I'm not living the "Cali Life" if it involves regular marijuana use nor buying clothes from the downscale Cali Life company or the upscale one. (I bought the sweatshirt at Fallas Paredes, an all-American store in the National Store chain out of Los Angeles, and one with some low-priced clothes in my size because I'm a small man and so are a fair number of Mexican-Americans.)

            I'll wear "war surplus" military gear with the non-rank patches still on, if I can't get them off without making holes, but that's pretty much it with me for Untruth in Clothing. If I wear a university sweatshirt or cap, it's because I attended the school or worked there or — minimally, in the past — because someone who was associated with the school gave me the sweatshirt or cap.

            Sometimes I confuse people. For example, I had on an Illini cap and someone asked me if I were an Illini fan. I feared an argument on appropriating an AmerIndian tribal name, but it turns out that wasn't an issue, so I responded, "I'm not an Illini fan; I'm an Illini." The next question/statement was the incredulous, "You played football for Illinois?"— I was about 5'2" at the time — and I said, "No, I've got two degrees from them. The school. There's a university associated with the sports teams."

            Sometimes people confuse me, as when I paid too much for what I thought a painting a neighbor said was hers but turned out to be a print she'd inherited. In the context of what I assumed was an overflow area for paintings on display for sale, I thought her painting meant something she painted, not something she merely owned.

            And sometimes people annoy me, as did older boys in the Chicago 'burbs who wore jackets that indicated they started for the Blackhawks, when they definitely did not. Or the marketing crap epitomized in the possibly apocryphal story of the restaurant that sold "Fresh Fruit Salad" made with canned fruit — and explained that the name of the menu item was "Fresh-Fruit Salad," which shouldn't be taken to mean that it actually contained fruit that was fresh as opposed to canned. More seriously, there was my actual, personal experience of receiving in the mail official missives labeled bills, telling me I owed money, instructing me to pay the balance, and threatening penalties if I didn't — when I owed them nothing because I was on one form or another of Auto Pay. When I called to complain, I was told, "Just ignore the bill (you can file it as a statement)." I asked the plebian on the phone to send up the corporate food chain the mostly rhetorical question, "Do you really want to tell your customers 'Just ignore the bill'?"

            "WORDS MEAN" damn it!

            And that words — and symbols and some significant silences — mean in complex ways is all the more reason to be careful with them.

            Consider the stories of three young men, kind of Karmically balancing one another.

            One was a student of mine in the early-1970s, I think, who pronounced solemnly at the close of one class, "A lie is worse than murder." I pointed out that this was indeed the traditional gentleman's doctrine and said we'd discuss it next class meeting. And then I went back to my office and spent an inappropriate amount of time fantasizing about coming to class with a starting pistol, holding it to the guy's head, saying "I'm going to blow your brains out, punk" and asking the class what I should now do. If "A lie is worse than murder," I should fire and murder the student rather than having lied about my intentions. But this was back before open-carry laws and stand-your-ground and the student might actually have been a gentleman — and I don't think I had tenure — so I just presented the idea to the class as a thought experiment.

            My student was right about the gentleman's code, Old Style: "Giving the lie" to a gentleman was a challenge to a duel since calling him a liar was an insult that could be erased only with blood. But outside of a code that was starting to look silly in Shakespeare's day, "A lie is worse than murder" is nowadays — since, say, the late 19^th century — itself bullshit.

            The second young man is introduced in a story in The New York Times on line with "Joel Pavelski, 27, isn’t the first person who has lied to his boss to scam some time off work." This is followed by a significant But: "But inventing a friend’s funeral, when in fact he was building a treehouse — then blogging and tweeting about it to be sure everyone at the office noticed? That feels new." Mr. Pavelski, his company's director of programming (which sounds like a job with responsibility) got a week off — or as much time off as he needed — from a boss sympathetic to the pain he supposed Mr. Pavelski was feeling over the death of a friend. Pavelski's boss was surprised to come across a tweet directing on-line folk to "a link to Medium, a popular blog for cathartic, personal essays. In a post titled, 'How to Lose Your Mind and Build a Treehouse,' Mr. Pavelski wrote about feeling burned out at work," plus the recent end of a long love affair, a ten-year anniversary of what appears to be a brother's death, his parents' impending divorce, and a friend's continuing emotional problems — none mentioned in the Times article — "and wanting to rebuild a childhood treehouse as therapy. The first line read, 'I said that I was leaving town for a funeral, but I lied.'"

            Except Pavelski may have misled his boss but not exactly lied: If, but only if, his story on Medium is generally true, "It turns out," he "did come back for a funeral, of sorts."

            Literally highlighted (in green) on the Medium article is the line "It’s easy to say someone died. It’s much harder to say, 'I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.'" More exactly, as stated earlier in Pavelski's essay, "People get visibly uncomfortable" when you tell them someone died. "They clam up and offer condolences, and then pretend that you didn’t mention it at all. They don’t ask any more questions." And Pavelski didn't want questions then but did want them later: he posted the essay in Medium and got the word out that it was there. He lived the cliché, "a cry for help" or at least he got out an appeal for understanding, or published a confession.

            Pavelski and Ben Widdicombe, the author of the Times story (the third, youngish looking man), say a lot here about truth.

            Pavelski doesn't believe that "A lie is worse than murder" — which is wise on his part — nor even worse than getting fired for admitting problems and looking too weak to handle work-related and personal stress. Nor does he have sufficient superstitious faith in the power of words that he'd avoid killing off a friend, so to speak, by lying about a death: many of us would hesitate to make up a death among family or friends because of a vestigial fear such words could have magical consequences in the real world. And the Medium essay is silent on the lie as a betrayal of Pavelski's own integrity or of his relationship with his boss and colleagues — or a lie as pulling a thread or two out of the social fabric, a figurative brick pulled from the foundation of society and community, nor a very nonfigurative shifting of work to Pavelski's associates while he gets his head together and a tree house built.

            For his part, Widdicombe oh-so-fastidiously provides a link to the Medium essay, but in his text, under the logo of The New York Times, he omits enough to twist the meaning of Pavelski's story to give himself an excellent opening sentence and an easy example of the problems that arise "[…] When Millennials Run the Workplace."

* * *

            There's a spectrum from outright lies at the one extreme to the Internet Movie Database's having you click "On Tonight" to find out what's on television at 10 in the morning, from wearing a jacket saying you're a starter for a professional hockey team to wearing a police uniform to make it easier to pull off a hit. And there's distance on that spectrum between the flippant, self-serving lies Ben Widdicombe suggests Joel Pavelski told, and the maneuvers of the over-privileged but sympathetic character that comes through in Joel Pavelski's Medium essay. I stated that carefully with "character that comes through": we can't be sure whether the story told is mostly true to Joel Pavelski's real-world story, with some modifications for narrative effectiveness, in the tradition of the personal essay, or if it's very different from the story of the actual human being, Joel Pavelski, following postmodern practice in, say, the "On the Rainy River" chapter in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

            From the most innocent to the most pernicious, however, all of these slippages from the truth taken together are significant. Taken together, they form the rich manure out of which can grow not so much Donald Trump himself but "truthiness" and the tolerance for untruth that lies near the center of Trumpism.

            It's no big deal if I wear a sweatshirt identifying me as CALI MADE; but it was easy to turn the sweatshirt inside out when I put it on to sit down to finish this blog post. It's no big deal if you wear a gift T-shirt that says "WORLDS BEST GRANDPARENT" if you know you're not even close; but it's not an article of clothing you should buy for yourself, not if you've got the time on your hands and other resources to be reading blog posts and aren't desperate for cheap clothing to cover your body.

            A lie is not worse than murder, but "Words Mean," and we should be careful with our words. Even as we should kill other people only if we really, really have to — and as less than a full-out pacifist I need to make a statement like that; even so we should try to limit our lies to when we really, really need to, and, as much as we can, communicate with truth.

            "Tell truth and shame the Devil" — or at least make it more difficult for the Donald Trump's of this world to attain and hold dangerous power.

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Note

FASHION & STYLE section, "What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace?"

By Ben Widdicombe, 19 March, 2016. <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/fashion/millennials-mic-workplace.html?mwrsm=Facebook&_r=0>