Poking the Ants' Nest

I came across an image on Tumblr, an animated gif of raindrops striking the pane of an open window.  I gazed at it for some time, letting all of the stress of the day melt away, when I finally noticed the original poster’s comment: “I could stare at this all day.”  I certainly agreed.  I wouldn’t even need some ethereal new-age music: just the sound of raindrops would suffice.

And then I realized—why is this kind of entertainment so rare?  Why are entire channels and television programs not devoted to this kind of ambient sound and imagery?  Granted, yes, these things exist, hidden deep within our cable or satellite channels, at least for those people who have such things.  Perhaps some are familiar with the crackling fireplace for Christmas. I have also seen a snow-covered evergreen limb, white flakes drifting around it, with the soft sound of a steady wind in the background, also for Christmas. I have also learned of the Norwegian phenomenon known as “slow TV.” But when I considered what types of media are most often being pumped through cable, satellite and the Internet, I noticed instead conflict—heaping troughs of conflict—crude conflict at that—of people shouting at each other—insulting each other—the very opposite of the relaxing experience of soft rainfall.

This event, recognizing the amount of content devoted to crude conflict versus the amount of content devoted to repose, coincided with my reading of Slate’s article, “Teens Hate Facebook, but They’re Not Logging Off.”  I invite one to read the Pew Internet survey results, “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy” to see just how outrageously exaggerated the Slate article is.  The Pew survey suggests frustration but also a canny use of Facebook by teenagers to deal with this frustration.  However, at the time when I saw the Slate article, I was struck by how much I, too, had grown to “hate” Facebook.

In the mid-2000s, when I began using Facebook, oh, how I loved it.  To keep in touch with family and friends I had lost contact with when I moved was a godsend.  I realized through the site that I missed the mundane events of friendship—a friend noticing a silly license plate in traffic, a family member discovering an old photograph, a former colleague trying a new restaurant in a town I had left long ago.  Now, in 2013, I log onto Facebook with trepidation.  Which friend will post some outrageously argued polimeme (political propaganda disguised as a meme) about Obama needing an umbrella?  Which friend will equate Benghazi with Watergate?  Which friend will be offended that gay people are angry over a chicken sandwich? 

Let me be clear in order to avoid future arguments—this essay is not about Facebook because the obvious answer to that problem is to simply stop using it.  My point is this: the bickering present on Facebook is also present in the content being pumped through cable, satellite and the Internet.  Facebook is just one of many distribution centers for the constant bickering one could find anywhere. Must Americans always be sniping at each other?

And so, I asked myself, “Wouldn’t our lives, all of our lives, be so much better if instead of Fox News, or Big Brother, or Kitchen Nightmares, Americans watched, if only for a few minutes, an image of rainfall pattering against an open window?”  What would happen if Norway’s slow TV happened here?

The question made me pause.  First came a deep sigh—“Oh, what a wonderful world that would be.”  After that came a fear—“Isn’t that dangerously close to Brave New World’s soma pills and ‘the feelies’?”

In reading arguments that postmodern America has become (or is becoming) a dystopia, I frequently see writers cite Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four.  For Huxley’s Brave New World, societal conflict is removed in a variety of ways, but all those methods are concerned with pleasure and not angst.  Feeling bothered?  Go have sex, go to “the feelies,” or go take a soma pill.  Huxley’s totalitarianism is glossed by contentment.  On the other hand, Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four takes the opposite route by stifling societal conflict through brutality, “the boot stamping on a human face—forever.”  The Ministry of Love, through constant surveillance of the people, can spot a dissident before he dissents and eradicate him, either through “re-education” or extermination. 

But in 2013, neither vision fits the United States.  We Americans are living in neither drugged harmony nor brutal lockdown.  The image I prefer is that of an ant’s nest being constantly poked by a child.  Imagine such a nest, with ants swarming, increasingly frenetic, until at last the ants begin to bite and sting each other instead of the stick-bearer.  Instead of a world free of societal conflict, the United States feels like a world of eternal, internal, inconsequential conflict—constant, high-pitched sniping about gay Boy Scouts, government seizure of guns, presidential umbrellas, immigrant riots in other countries but not our own, teachers unions, prayer in schools, prayer in the military, marijuana convictions for children and the elderly, use of weather weapons in Oklahoma, gun safety education for children, celebrity psychiatric evaluations, the biological dangers of Wi-Fi,  drug testing for welfare and food stamps recipients, informed choice in apparel shopping, criminalization of still births and miscarriages, transferring problematic teachers and, yes, the use of apostrophes.

My, what a strange list of subjects.

I created this list of topics from a 15 hour period of posts from my Facebook feed.  This is what my friends and family were bickering about.  And to make things worse, that particular day was a quiet day.  And to make things even worse, I had already modified my Facebook account so that the only posts I saw were from my closest friends and family.  The system hid everything but simple status updates from acquaintances and coworkers.

Is there any wonder why I’m so desperate for a webpage that simply shows rainfall?

But back to my image of American dystopia—neither the drugged but docile nor the brute boot to the face to eliminate internal conflict—but the constant poking of an ant’s nest to inspire near total societal conflict—that is a hell of a way to run a dystopia. And yet the mob goes mouth-frothing rabid about the least important things while no one’s talking about the hunger strike currently raging in Guantanamo Prison.  No one’s mentioning banking reform.  No one’s mentioning the power of moneyed lobbyists to decide policy. The list of elephants in the room larger than little old white ladies sputtering the n-word is staggering.  Most of my life has been guided by the old 60s warcry—“if you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention”—so, yes, I do think it’s high time for pitch forks and flaming torches.  I do think it’s time for the mob to be mouth-frothing rabid.  However, I’m convinced that I currently live with a pit of ulcers instead of a stomach because more people are outraged by the asinine baby-name choices made by celebrities than they are about unequal access to health care.

What is causing this misdirected conflict soup in which Americans live? Strangely enough, I have been coming across writers who argue that in 2013, Americans have more common ground than in many periods of U.S. history. How is it, then, that we are living in one of the greatest eras of polarization and partisanship? (Note: these writers tend to be conservative pundits like Martha Zoller's Indivisible: Uniting Values for a Divided America, which sadly does suggest that perhaps we Americans might not truly share common ground any more.)

An obvious answer is narrative itself.  All narrative is derived from conflict. Remember the old, sexist canard: man versus God, man versus man, man versus self?  Not only is narrative more interesting, but an argument could be made that knowledge and meaning can only be understood through narrative.

Could it be the current appeals-to-fear trend in media?  For example, when did the Weather Channel shift its programming from “what will the weather be like today” to “what weather pattern could possibly kill you and your loved ones in your sleep”?

Could it be the state of insecurity in 2013?  The formerly privileged are resentful of lost privilege.  The oppressed are still oppressed.  The economy still feels like a recession to many even though the U.S. National Bureau of EconomicResearch states that the Great Recession ended in June 2009.

Could it be the now eternal political campaign season in the U.S.?  Just as soon as one election is over, the midterm primary campaigns begin, and the carping just keeps carping.

These are questions that I can’t answer.  I’ll let others investigate those angles.  I can only seek to make my own life a little less miserable.

I suspect that the content I consume for entertainment is causing me to engage in unnecessary conflict with others to a greater degree.  Easy enough—begin ignoring the entertainment industry. (But wait—isn’t studying language use in popular culture supposed to be my job?)

Next, I suspect that what I’ve assumed has been journalistic reporting and informed analysis of actual conflict (for example, a riot or a political scandal) is now being delivered as a form of entertainment instead.  For example, instead of reporting the government abuses exposed by Edward Snowden, news outlets report his “thrilling escape from justice.” Even what I take to be objective reporting is instead an instigator of irrelevant conflict.  So—go find a news reporting service that simply reports the facts without punditry and without bias.  Good luck with that.

Finally—go join a monastery while I wait for the mob to finally rise up over an issue that I in my arrogance deem important?

I’ve struggled for weeks on how to conclude this post.  Other than recognizing this seemingly eternal civil conflict involving minutia, I have no answers on how to deal with it.  I suppose that is the epiphany I can take from this, that no easy epiphany exists other than to do what I have been doing these past few weeks—sitting on a proverbial stump and contemplating some utopian otherworld of might be.  Or perhaps I’ll go onto YouTube and watch an example of Norwegian slow TV.

The Beautiful Sentence

This week, I came across a beautiful sentence while indulging in a little summer reading. (A second sentence is needed in the beginning because of an indefinite pronoun in the sentence I love so much.)

Once (it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year 1927) there were two convicts. One of them was about twenty-five, tall, lean, flat-stomached, with a sunburned face and Indian-black hair and pale, china-colored outraged eyes—an outrage directed not at the men who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and judges who had sent him here, but all the writers, the uncorporeal names attached to the stories, the paper novels—the Diamond Dicks and Jesse Jameses and such—whom he believed had led him into his present predicament through their own ignorance and gullibility regarding the medium in which they dealt and took money for, in accepting information on which they placed the stamp of verisimilitude and authenticity (this so much the more criminal since there was no sworn notarized statement attached and hence so much the quicker would the information be accepted by one who expected the same unspoken good faith, demanding, asking, expecting no certification, which he extended along with the dime or fifteen cents to pay for it) and retailed for money and which on actual application proved to be impractical and (to the convict) criminally false; there would be times when he would halt his mule and plow in midfurrow (there is no walled penitentiary in Mississippi; it is a cotton plantation which the convicts work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trustees) and muse with a kind of enraged impotence, fumbling among the rubbish left him by his one and only experience with courts and law, fumbling until the meaningless and verbose shibboleth took form at last (himself seeking justice at the same blind fount where he had met justice and been hurled back down): Using the mails to defraud: who felt that he had been defrauded by the third-class mail system not of crass and stupid money which he did not particularly want anyway, but of liberty and honor and pride.

The sentence is from William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, from a chapter he also published as a short story, “Old Man,” in 1939. At over three hundred words, perhaps it is a bit overwhelming. I’ve examined it several times, and it appears grammatically correct. (Microsoft’s grammar-checker does not flag it, but then again, that disturbs me more than comforts me.) The heart of its power lies in the use of parenthetical expressions along with well-crafted parallel construction, and it underscores Faulkner’s consistent vision that no single story can be told without telling many stories, each story woven into the other, and only by swallowing the world in great-big-enormous-indiscriminate gulps and digesting thoroughly can anyone ever truly “know.”

I love reading sentences like this. I love hearing conversations spoken in this manner. It requires the listener to truly use his or her brain, to hold like a food server an entire dinner on a tray, balanced on the shoulder, to later rearrange plate by plate to the proper diner. Sentences like this can make one smarter.

I fear the postmodern brain can no longer stomach such sentences—mentally—maybe even physically. This isn’t a screed about Yankee minimalism versus Southern verbosity. Also, so much has already been written and broadcast about the dumbing down of American culture that I hate to add to it. I will joyfully remark that both Ezra Pound and H.L. Menken damned the United States as cultural and intellectual backwaters in the early decades of the last century, so not much has changed. But, cultural critics continue to make that cry. Just recently, for example, Nicholas Carr waded in with his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, suggesting that the Internet and its sea of hyperlinks is reducing any user’s ability to comprehend what is being read, that having to constantly evaluate hyperlinks and decide whether to leave what is being currently read and travel to a new text distracts from the reader’s focus.

Is the typical hypertext different from Faulkner’s strings of parenthetical expressions?

I suppose one argument against the comparison is that Faulkner’s text is still linear, and that the parenthetical expressions come at the reader one thought at a time. The reader doesn’t have to decide whether to explore in depth that parenthetical expression or not.

Returning to my original question, whether or not the postmodern brain can still comprehend, much less appreciate, a sentence like the one above, I grow uncomfortable trying to label a cause. Is the cause—the Internet, the iPod, youth culture, music, drugs, TV, gaming, texting, consumerism—an accurate cause or a scapegoat? Because I can’t answer that question, and because I am so tired of enduring so many obvious scapegoats in politics and the culture wars, I’m not comfortable diagnosing anything. Instead, I will point to artifacts.

I teach first-year writing to college freshmen and sophomores. To say they have come to college unprepared to communicate in their native language is a pathetic joke. Very rarely do I meet students who can compose a simple sentence. I count myself fortunate that the state college where I work admits high school students whom the school believes can take college level courses early. These are the students who will apply and win admission to the higher tiers of education, so I’m not just dealing with those students who couldn’t be accepted elsewhere. The most common issue nearly all of students face is the sentence fragment. Not just one or two—I’m talking entire essays, three to five pages, of fragment after fragment.

I find it fascinating; is it a reflection of their brains or their culture?

On a secondary note, the students who come closest to composing sentences like the beautiful one above are my Latino/Latina students. Somehow or another, beginning with Spanish or being fluent in Spanish enables these students to create masterfully long sentences that only require a little bit of correcting, mostly punctuation. I confess I am not a Spanish speaker. I have to let others comment on that. However, I will say this: To those who are English-only proponents, keep in mind what that suggests—Latino/Latina students have better control of the English language than native speakers.

Many years ago, one of my mentors said in passing that mastery of grammar leads to masterful analytical thought—and vice versa, that being sloppy with grammar makes one a sloppy thinker. I’m not ready to say I agree, but I’m moving closer to that agreement. I wonder if there is some sort of Ur-skill involved, meaning some other skill that facilitates both grammar mastery and masterful analytical thought. Should teachers try to locate and identify that Ur-skill, or should teachers focus on the two lower level skill sets in the hope the Ur-skill is muscled through exercise? Again, I’m not sure, but I can say with certainty that my students swim, or more aptly, flail, in a sea of fragmentary thoughts and expressions.

His Story Repeats

This week my literature classes have been discussing new historicism. Every week, we view literature through different lenses—I typically introduce students to notions of class, archetypes, gender, power and psychology. I began the week by asking if there was any value to considering the historical context in which a text was written. I received the standard answer—that history is important because history repeats itself and because contemporary societies need to learn from the mistakes of past societies. I’ve always liked that answer, that history repeats itself, or at least Mark Twain’s assertion that history at least rhymes.

Of course, there are historical texts to read, both imaginative like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and historical like the Domesday Book. When it comes to questions of value, for historians and new historicists, all texts have value, even ephemeral texts designed to be tossed after their use like sales fliers and pamphlets. Yet new historicists take that assumption a few steps further to assert that everything is a text to be read—architectural ruins, uncovered artifacts, even human remains. All of history is a narrative to be “read,” and all narratives are problematic.

As my students and I delved into literary texts and attempted to analyze them using new historicism, I kept recalling articles related to time and physics, like this one. As physicist Carlo Rovelli states, “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on” (par. 3). From articles like this, I’ve come to learn of physics’ “problem of time.” On a quantum level, time seems to disappear. On a macro level, it is clearly evident as “things move forward.” Author Tim Floyd suggests a reason for this: “Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time” (par. 9). At any given time, all that truly exists is matter and that matter’s momentum.

Thinking about the physical state while my students debated, I suddenly thought, “The past does not exist.”

I kept that to myself but could not jar it loose from my head. The point seemed almost too self-evident. Cleopatra is long gone, and the molecules that made up her body have since gone on to form new things. All that is left is the narrative, along with how that narrative is constructed. I also think about Spivak's subalterns, those millions (billions?) of voiceless humans who have slipped this mortal coil into oblivion. Just as paradoxically, history always exists, in the present, in just the same manner that characters in literary texts are said to exist—“Jane Eyre is unaware of the mad woman living in the attic.” Jane Eyre is a character in a book published in 1847, but because the reader is always translating toner ink and paper in the present while reading, “Jane Eyre” always exists in the present. The same can be said for history whenever I pick up Will Durant’s voluminous histories. History always is but never was.

So if “history repeats itself,” what keeps repeating?

I wondered if history repeats because of the way we construct this narrative, and what typically dictates how any reader constructs a narrative is his or her ideology, or at least his or her relationship to the current ideology in power. Do ideological constructs of history keep repeating themselves? One friend suggested that history repeats along the same argument that Northrop Frye uses to explain why narrative myths repeat—individuals interpret history based on their experience of life cycles—birth through death—with youth’s hubris discounting elders’ wisdom, leading to continual conflicts, one never learning from the other.

One of Frederic Jameson’s critiques against new historicism is that it lacks a theory of history. To this I answer that one of the reasons new historicism lacks a theory of history is that there is no history except the one constructed by the living. Sartre makes a similar argument in regards to the individual’s past (his or her facticity—birthdates, for example) versus his or her existential performance of themselves. I’m reading how some critics are calling this notion that history only exists as a narrative in the present “posthistory,” but at the moment those same critics are still squabbling as to what posthistory even means.

Now what does all this matter? Is there no history? Is it, as Henry Ford boasted, “more or less bunk”? Such would break my heart. I’m continually reading histories, and there are historical personalities I find myself seeking out again and again: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth I, Frederick the Great, Suleiman, Voltaire or Ashoka. I sometimes wonder if my passion for reading history isn’t similar to fandom writing fanfic after fanfic of their favorite characters from Star Trek or Harry Potter because they simply can’t let go of the characters.

Where's the beef? Or pork? Or chicken?

I have issues with Farmville. (Having not played Farmtown, I will refrain from commenting on it.) Let me first begin by stating that I grew up on a farm in east Georgia, not far from the Savannah River. I learned not to give the livestock names, and we rarely had a dog reach old age. That is the nature of living on a farm. Some readers might be shocked by the callousness of that statement—hence the reason for this week’s blog.

I rolled my eyes when Zynga, the web development firm that created Farmville as a Facebook app, added pink cows that expressed strawberry milk. I saw it as whimsical, if anything, but left it at that. Then I noticed that ducks, geese and swans are raised by farmers solely for their feathers. I know from experience that such is not the case.

I drew the line with the addition of pigs to the game. Pigs are a significant farm animal that produce nothing but meat. I wondered how Farmville would broach the subject that adorable, stuttering Porky, clever Babe and humane Wilbur are all destined for the table. Language actually has a word for cooking with pork—charcuterie. According to the USDA, 100 metric tons of pork were consumed worldwide in 2006.

Farmville’s choice? Pigs collect truffles. Just so I’m clear, truffle production is so insignificant that Wikipedia doesn’t even devote any time to recording production or consumption information, other than to mention truffles of noteworthy size.

With each new Farmville update, I laugh at how the designers bend over backwards to avoid implying that cute, gamboling farm animals are ever consumed. Turkeys are raised only for their feathers and not for the glutton-fest every Thanksgiving. Lambs are petted. I’m tickled by the constant changes in bulls. For those who don’t know—bull cattle are used to breed more cattle, but only one of them. The rest of the male calves meet with castration so that they can devote their growth to becoming nice, juicy steaks. As for the females, they become breeding machines, with farmers gambling each birthing season for steak as opposed to new breeding stock. (Now that would make a good game—managing growing a herd versus harvesting beef.) The lucky few bulls are milked for sperm. So far Farmville has had users brush bulls (for fur?), only to recently shift to allow users to “calm” their bulls. I’m guessing that’s a euphemism for “milk for sperm.”

Even so, never have I laughed harder than when Farmville introduced the elephant. Elephants are hunted for their ivory. But in Farmville? One harvests circus peanuts from elephants. I fear to ask where one plucks circus peanuts from an elephant. Brother, that ain’t no peanut.

So why should I care? This is a web-based game, after all. Stop over-thinking things. Would that I could, especially when I come across evidence like this, which I found on the website, Failblog.org. For those who don’t wish to click the link, the site uploaded an image of a submission to a newspaper’s “vent” column, where users call or upload comments expressing their ire. I have no idea which paper published this reader’s thoughts, but here is a transcript:

“To all you hunters who kill animals for food, shame on you; you ought to go to the store and buy the meat that was there, where no animal was harmed.”

There is a possibility that such a comment was posted there as a troll by someone who really knew where packaged meat comes from, yet the cynic in me is not so certain. I recall my friend’s favorite retort: “Have you met people?” Sadly, I have. I’m more inclined to believe that there are stupid people out there who believe such tripe.

Games like Farmville and movies like Babe produce in the urban and suburban mind the notion that meat just appears at the grocery store. I’m reminded of Homer Simpson’s comment when Lisa decides to become a vegetarian: “Does that mean you’re not going to eat any pork?”

“Yes”

“Bacon?”

“Yes, Dad,”

“Ham?”

“Dad all those meats come from the same animal.”

“Right Lisa, some wonderful, magical animal!”

I’m convinced the issues behind overfishing stem from consumers not understanding where food comes from. On February 5, the United Nations backed the ban on bluefin tuna. Curiously, the normally highly educated Japanese and Norwegians can’t seem to understand why whaling is wiping out an entire genus of mammal. By far the most damaging details lie in industrial meat production. Living near these industrialized farms is an ecological nightmare, not simply with the smell, flies and bacteria, but the pesticides, antibiotics, and chemicals that leak into the water supply as well. I will let readers explore the Internet to see how chickens, cows and pigs are treated in their sterile cages, from birth to harvest.

Do not misinterpret this posting as a call for vegetarianism. I do, actually, approve of including more vegetables in contemporary diets. But to anyone who attempts to deprive me of my bacon, be prepared to face me barricaded in my home. I will have my steak, and on occasion, I will have my chicken and fish. Humans are omnivorous, especially this human. No, my concern is that we as humans have lost the understanding of where food comes from. Food does not come from a grocery store, or a restaurant, or even a box. Food is grown. Food is harvested. Food is the product of death; even that precious head of lettuce cried out when it was plucked from the ground and sliced into your healthy, preciously-ethical salad. And more and more, our media is only happy to entertain us as we look the other way. I propose that Farmville include an ear-piercing squeal whenever a user harvests a pig so that players can understand that food is no game.

We Shall Always Have the People of Wal-Mart

My name is CR, and I’m addicted to PeopleofWalMart.com. I’ll wait for the polite hellos to end. Like an addict with Protestant decorum, I never read the site alone but wait for a semi-social setting so that I’m not the only one gasping in disbelief or snickering at the disasters posted there. Mostly I gasp. I spread my eyes wide and gape at the image for several seconds, unsure that I’m seeing what I’m seeing.

But I should be ashamed of myself. Most of the poor sods whose images are displayed for all those who can afford a computer and Internet access will never know that they’ve become the laughingstocks of millions of people worldwide. I suspect most of them will never even comprehend why they are the laughingstocks. I feel pangs of guilt when I realize that these poor souls are probably living from paycheck to paycheck, with frightening gaps in between, the kinds of gaps some Internet viewers never experience. Is food a problem? (Perhaps not for those souls we mock simply because their abundant fatty tissues spill forth from their tube-tops and overalls.) Will they lose their homes or be kicked out of their apartments? In such circumstances, do they really care that their fashion is not up to our standards?

Perhaps. Yet the problem with laughter is that it comes unbidden. I click on the site; I see the images; I laugh. Only after do I realize that I probably shouldn’t have.

Easy solution—don’t read PeopleofWalMart.com.

But that’s not so easy. A thing that can be quit easily isn’t an addiction.

I take some comfort in knowing that texts like PeopleofWalMart.com are not new to this earth. Erskine Caldwell toyed with the same ambiguous subject in Tobacco Road. There his starving rednecks wrestled over a bag of turnips. They demolished a brand new car in a handful of days, and poor Sister Bessie, misinterpreting a brothel for a hotel, found herself charmed by the continual affection that strange men offered her again and again. I’ve worked with Caldwell’s text for years now: I still laugh. I suspect Caldwell intended me to laugh because the tone and delivery of these scenes are too ridiculous. However, I wonder if I should be appalled at Jeeter Lester and his tribe, or at myself for doing nothing to relieve their squalor. I suspect Caldwell intended both. Tobacco Road is a semi-documentary, recording how incessant poverty and hunger results in devaluation, where all the social niceties wither away—such things as dignity, honor and self-respect.

Caldwell’s Tobacco Road dates to 1932. That does not make it the first time well-off humanity has mocked the poor and their incomprehension of social niceties. Observe the February image in the Très Riches Heures, crafted by the Limbourg brothers at the request of Jean, Duc de Berry of France, around 1410 (see above).

Here one can see peasants lifting their skirts and tunics to expose their genitals to the observer. Is the image a salacious one, meant to titillate the medieval viewer? Jonathan Alexander, in his essay, “Labeur and Paresse: Ideological Representations of Medieval Peasant Labor,” believes otherwise. He argues that the image is designed “as an ideological representation showing the peasants as uncultured, boorish and vulgar” (par. 15).

As someone quoted to me recently from Ecclesiastes 1:9, “There is no new thing under the sun.” I suppose it is only fitting to reply with Matthew 26:11, “For ye shall have the poor always with you.”

PeopleofWalMart.com not only reveals that the better-off find the antics of the lesser-off entertaining, but the site also illustrates what middle-class culture finds worth mocking:

The morbidly obese. Granted, obesity is not the sole domain of the poor, but the Web houses numerous studies that suggest unwise food choices, poor eating habits, and the high fat content of cheap, industrially-produced food could partially explain how the poor and the obese have become associated with one another.

The flagrantly socially inept. Here I wonder how much shock plays into the entertainment factor: “I can’t believe he (or she) wore that!”

The fashion disaster.

The parent-of-the-year award.

The typical stereotypes, such as the mullet or big hair.

The incompetent cross-dresser. I have no idea what to say about this or what it means. I am more amazed that these individuals made it through Wal-Mart unharmed.

The ultimate mystery. Sometimes, I’m not entirely sure exactly what I’m looking at.

I will say that I call shenanigans whenever PeopleofWalMart.com posts pictures of shoppers who are clearly in costume, either for Christmas, Halloween or cosplay. That’s just cheating.

So if PeopleofWalMart.com perishes from this earth, fear not, for it shall be quickly replaced by some other means of mocking the poor. And there shall be those who think too much, who insist on taking things apart and feeling guilty because of it. Perhaps I should write a screenplay in which I choose to infiltrate the poor, to learn their ways, to discover their differing values and traditions, and help to lead them against their mockers. Oh, wait--that's not new either.

Facebook and the Commoditization of Friendship

I was tricked onto Facebook. That much I will swear to my dying day. One of my closest friends sent me an email link to a new photo album. She has several online photo albums scattered across the Web, and all of them are remarkable. The email I received noted that the new album resided on Facebook. I wasn’t a member, but the email said nothing about joining or setting up a profile, at least no disclaimer that I saw. Perhaps it was buried deep in the legalese. I clicked on the link, and the web page that loaded asked me to verify that I was a real person, asking simply for my name, my birth date and I believe a school name. I should have been more suspicious, but these days so many websites ask me to verify something to prove I’m not some web-bot out to spam the site.

At that moment I clicked submit, Facebook created a personal page for me and then proceeded to contact . . . Every. Person. I. Had. Ever. Met. I’m not entirely sure how the system was able to immediately pair me up with friends and colleagues. Needless to say, within thirty minutes, my email inbox had been spammed with notes from my friends mocking me for finally entering the 21st century.

I will be the first to say I’ve become a convert. Many years ago, my early working experience turned me against talking on the phone. I have very little patience for it and would be quite happy without one. Instead, I lived on the web with IRCC chat rooms (remember those?), with long, crafted emails, with personal websites. Then came academia—who knew that an email inbox could become so quickly flooded with so many painful requests from colleagues and students? I soon lost all interest in writing friends, which is somewhat of a problem when I live in rural Florida and everyone else is scattered across the United States and as far away as Australia.

Now, once a day, usually in the mornings, and depending on my mood, once at night before going to bed, I can type out some pithy Twitter like comment about my status, read everyone else’s, and sometimes read or post short notes. The secret, and perhaps Facebook’s success, is that it is endearingly shallow. Keeping up with friends is now quick and painless. Communication in any form other than notes either posted to one’s profile or sent through Facebook’s internal email system must stay less than 250 characters. In fact, the set-up for the website is much like I’ve always said I’d like to have for high school reunions. I was never very close to my high school compatriots – in fact, my high school experience is very much like the metaphorical one portrayed in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But, I wouldn’t mind a simple online catalogue that tells me who popped out how many kids, who managed to escape Burke County, Georgia, and who managed to grow oldest fastest? Thankfully, I actually like the people I’ve re-connected with on Facebook, so my interests aren’t nearly so callous.

Within the first week, I discovered the first ethical quandary of Facebook etiquette—how to respond to friend requests, especially to people you barely new twenty years ago. The answer—befriend everyone but focus on the few who are close to you. That said, I’ve actually become better acquainted with a few of those same people I barely knew. Who would have guessed? The second ethical quandary—how to handle students? Yes, Facebook, despite its reputation as being “Mom’s website” when compared to the hipper MySpace, has still a very young demographic. Based on advice from other colleagues, I instituted a sharp rule: befriend no student until he or she graduates.

The formalist in me, though, has become deeply fascinated by the patterns I’ve seen on Facebook. Like email, viral messages are rampant—short games people play, either by confessing a specified number of secrets, by manipulating one’s name, or by compiling lists of various interests like food, drinks or music. This semi-narcissism, semi-voyeurism, semi-exhibitionism is very difficult to resist; I’ve seen friends actually complain vociferously about filling out these “surveys” even as they continue to post them. I bring this up not to tease these friends but simply to show how nearly impossible it is to not participate in these viral games.

Another viral pattern involves fan pages and groups—essentially an internal message board within Facebook that operates through subscriptions. One member of a circle will join a group; in doing so, Facebook alerts all of his or her friends. As they see the announcement, they may join, which in turn alerts all of their friends. And so topics from as broad as The Simpsons and Family Guy to as narrow as "Hanging out at the Krystle’s on Vineland Avenue in Macon, Georgia, in the 1980s" will pass through the circles of friends and accumulate fans.

A third pattern takes shape around the applications, which act as a combination game / electronic postcard system. Some of these applications are created by Facebook users such as my current favorite, the Shite Gifts for Academics, with such gifts as 80 freshman composition papers, boring faculty meeting or “that guy.” Another popular one, for me, offers Southern memorabilia such as NASCAR, grits and collards. The third application, however, gave me pause: Kidnap! In this little application, friends snag each other to cities around the world. To escape, one answers trivia questions about each locale. But what is so interesting about this little game? It’s sponsored by the Travel Channel and designed by Context Optional, a Facebook application development firm. That’s right, one can actually make enough money developing Facebook applications to warrant a firm.

Then I saw Facebook as the capitalist, marketing behemoth that it is. Along the right side of the webpage spans advertisements, each one customized to the user’s preferences as judged by our viral group and fan selections, along with whatever profile information we get tricked into revealing. Advertisers actually have a fair amount of leeway when it comes to capturing eyeballs. Facebook offers advertisers advice on how to develop their ads and target the correct audience. By setting a “Daily Budget,” advertisers can limit the amount of money per day they are charged; once the limit is reached, that ad falls out of rotation. Advertisers can choose to be charged for clicks, where customers actually click on the ad and are directed elsewhere (for a minimum charge of a penny per click), or impressions, where customers merely see the ad (for a minimum charge of 15 cents). The minimum daily budget is $5 per ad.

Every note that is written generates revenue. Every “poke,” every game, every Shite Gift, every Kidnap calls forth ads. Every group joined and cultural meme fanned rolls out ads. The very nature of friendship has been cleverly packaged. If, then, friendship becomes a commodity, can we assess value to it? Are those members with a wide circle of friends more “valuable” than those with, say, less than ten? Are those members who interact frequently with the applications and the viral nature of the site more “valuable”? And what is this value? How often do members evaluate (with that word chosen specifically because of its root, value) each other when it comes to status? Are those members with the most friends exhibiting a higher status? What of those members who frequently poke and post? For example, one Facebook member, Bob P., has 129,590,884 kidnaps. Does the status that comes from having many friends and engaging most often with the site go hand in hand with one’s economic, commodity value? Clearly it does for The Travel Channel and Context Optional, but what affect does it have on the everyday Facebook user? If I choose not to participate in the viral nature of Facebook, am I somehow less a friend, and less a person?

Pretty Pictures

This week a book rep handed me a copy of yet another introduction to literature textbook, this time Nicholas Delbanco’s and Alan Cheuse’s Literature: Craft and Voice. Some may recognize Alan Cheuse as the commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. The book rep mentioned as a selling feature the emphasis on visual images and graphics within the textbook, and indeed that is the first thing I noticed. Every page is brimming with photographs in brilliant colors, text wrapping around graphics or hovering over half-opacity images, quotations from the texts in green flashing in the middle of short stories, and excerpts of interviews by the author lurking in the introductory materials.

In their preface, the editors argue that this text is designed for a “visual age” and “to harness the power of media and use it to help students learn the art of sustained reading.” Students, they note “should engage their senses; they must listen as well as look.” As is standard with almost all literature textbooks, Delbanco and Cheuse package along with their text a DVD of videos, mostly interviews, but I had to admit that their concerted graphic design, a veritable Southern Living textbook, is very striking.

(While I applaud the idea of using higher media to engage students, the cynic in me can’t help but realize that such DVD inclusions more often than not force students to buy new textbooks rather than trade with their roommates and friends or acquire from sources other than the college bookstore.)

At first I agreed with them. I’ve seen firsthand how eagerly students engage with rhetoric readers when the texts are designed with visual elements in mind. John Mauk’s and John Metz’s Inventing Arguments, Andrea Lunsford’s Everything’s an Argument and Robert Lamm’s and Justin Everett’s Dynamic Arguments have been very popular with students, while Laurie Kirsner’s and Stephen Mandell’s Patterns and Laurence Behrens’ and Leonard Rosen’s Writing and Reading across the Curriculum have fallen flat. And even though these textbooks have different composition teaching theories at work, let’s face it, the essays in these readers are generally the same. And if the essays do change, the authors typically don’t. Secondly, not only do students become more engaged when the textbooks pop with graphic design, but I can also use the textbook itself as a form of visual rhetoric, a sort of meta-textbook.

Then I realized how I use overly designed rhetoric textbooks—as a meta-text—and ask students to question the design, to explore how the textbook designers attempt to control and manipulate them as readers. That is a benefit to a rhetoric class. Literature, on the other hand, is a different beast. Delbanco’s and Cheuse’s textbook images don’t just enliven the text, they impose interpretations. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” includes an image of the Devil card from a Tarot pack. Granted, the devil is certainly an issue in the short story, but what of the Tarot? For Jack London’s “A Wicked Woman,” the text of the story concerning Ned Bashford’s Greek temperament wraps around Michelangelo’s David; one wonders how an Italian image of a nude Israelite compares. Also, the quotations used to highlight the text, always in green, usually in the center of the page, much larger in print and in a separate font, call attention to passages, as if to alert students that these words are more important than any other in the story. In London’s case, those words are “He did not believe in the truth of women…” In Hawthorne’s case, those words are “He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a heaven above him.”

How can I teach students to come to their own conclusions on a text, based on evidence and reasoning, when the text influences them to such a degree?

Later I grew disturbed by the entire nature of the textbook. Do students really need flashy graphics for a literature textbook? Isn’t imagination enough, and for an introduction to literature, shouldn’t we also be introducing imagination to new readers? The graphic for Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” includes a large beetle, but shouldn’t students decide for themselves if Kafka’s bug refers to a beetle or a cockroach? Doesn’t an image of a gun embedded in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” give away the ending? Where is the “internal movie” that invariably trumps the Hollywood version when the graphic artists impose their own vision?

And have we really become such a nation of dullards that flash is needed? Of classrooms filled with Alice sniffing, “and what is the use of a book . . . without pictures or conversations?”

Delbanco’s and Cheuse’s project brings to mind another debate, one for which I haven’t found my footing yet. Should we be turning academic studies into a television and magazine culture under the guise of “engaging,” or should we place students in an environment that is somewhat disorienting and unfamiliar under the guise of “challenging”? At the moment, I find the Lewis Carroll quotation from Alice in Wonderland very telling; it shows that for many, many years now there has been a dividing line between those illustrated tales for children, the “picture book” and the pure text of adulthood. That today’s students are more engaged with illustrated texts is no new thing and is not a fresh effect of the Internet and MTV. When should we ask people to put away childish things and become an adult? When they are 10, or 23?