The Yuletide Twilight Zone

As some of my regular readers might know, I have sort of a love/hate relationship with tradition. Sometimes I think it is the greatest thing in the world and sometimes I think it is a nothing but a source of worthless discomfort and pretense.

But, be that as it may, my dad taught me stuff. He usually taught me stuff by just doing what he did -- he wasn't big on sit-down "lessons," but he certainly set a clear example. One of the things I always saw him do was to "tip" people who did things like bringing heavy boxes out to the car. It was automatic -- he'd hand the guy a few dollars and the guy would say "Thank you sir," and life would just hum along.

I like that. It seems like a nice little traditional formula, to me.

(Wavy dream sequence lines take us from past to present . . .)

Flipping Switches

When did we all get to be so nice? -- so unbelievably nice?

I'm teaching a composition class right now; it is a cross-disciplinary class that I team teach with a history teacher. We explore global issues and then use the good-old Aristotelian modes to discuss and write about them. We have a great bunch of kids -- about sixty of them. They are all high school seniors, of varied academic levels, from advanced to standard college prep.

For their last paper, we explored the issue of genocide and assigned a paper in which they were to question what would cause an individual to decide to participate in such atrocities. After we showed them the extremely moving film Hotel Rwanda, the history teacher introduced them to an experiment performed by Stanley Milgram. In short, Milgram wanted to explore the factors that would have affected Nazis who participated in the atrocities of the Holocaust.

What Milgram did was to create an experiment that was not what it seemed on the surface. He advertised for people to participate -- he would pay them four dollars. The volunteers were directed to a panel with switches. The switches were marked with voltages. What the volunteers were supposed to do was to ask a person, in another room, questions. The other person was to be shocked if he didn't give the proper response, in increasing levels of electricity.

Finchian Logic

Once in awhile, I will read something, somewhere, and I will realize that, on this particular day, I am not likely to write anything nearly as good -- and that, consequently, I should just shut the heck up and let another writer's words be heard.

Please read this brilliant piece by my good friend and When Falls the Coliseum colleague, Scott Warnock. A fantastic narrative meditation on fatherhood and the choices a man must sometimes make:

 "A Story: What Would Atticus Finch Do?"

Slow-Cooked Fast Food

You know what frightens me a little about us? -- people, I mean. We are really eager to accept things the way they are, even if they are way worse than the way they were pretty derned recently.

Oh, sure, we'll moan about "how it used to be," but, for the sake of ease, something in our heads makes us want to accept stuff, "as is." Things go more smoothly that way, I guess.

Or maybe we do this because we feel like we simply can't stand up effectively against things like plummeting standards. One of the most popular American phrases right now (annoying as I might find it [imagine the whole of the American populace not adjusting its phraseology just to please me]) is: "It is what it is." Usually, this is a resignation: It ain't changing.

And the Winner Is . . .

A friend and former student of mine just posed a question on Facebook: Who is the best songwriter of the last twenty years?

I've been thinking about this for three days and it's difficult to say -- not because I haven't liked any songs in the last twenty years, but because I'm not sure that I can think of a lot of actual songwriters who have written over that period, outside of the established ones (like Elton John, who is doing some of his best work ever, even though there is not a lot of buzz about it).

What it comes down to, for me, is that there are three kinds of people who put together songs.