Do We Get It Now? The Joker is Real and Batman is Not.

Begin rant.

I have had it up to my eyeballs with superheroes. They were invented for 12 year olds to ease them into and out of adolesence, not to keep society perpetually in adolescence. We have the technology to do the harm that the villains do – and we use it. We don’t possess the super powers the heroes have and we largely ignore our own capacity to do good in favor of sitting, mouths agape in service to the glorified high provided by gratuitous violence and rampant disrespect for human life and dignity. Batman, as I recall, does not have super powers – he is mortal. He, nor anyone like him, came to the rescue when the Joker came to call in Colorado.

Are we learning anything yet?

I understand parables and fables and the constructs of fiction and I like special effects. I love movies, have always loved movies, have found tremendous solace and wisdom in movies. Movies are not an escape, though, if they don’t feed all the parts of your mind, and if you don’t do anything beyond the screen that comes from thoughtfulness. I realize the need for escapism borne of a poor economy and a real world punctuated by war and senseless violence. Back during the Great Depression the folks we now call The Greatest Generation turned to movies that shared their pain and lifted their spirits (The Grapes of Wrath, It Happened One Night, Public Enemy, 42nd Street, Top Hat, Red Dust, Rebecca), not sociopaths and explosions that stoked their anger and underscored their impotence. We have some lovely movies out now (Moonrise Kingdom) but they are not the ones that have PR budgets in tens of millions, midnight showings and top grosses (pun intended). We set Hollywood’s priorities with our ticket money and our internet hits – what are we telling them?

Yes, our leaders in government, politics and religion are failing us (and some of them are stoking our anger, too, with their politics of divisiveness, class warfare and hate), but maybe if we gave them the same level of attention we do these overwrought, overviolent and oversexed films they might have some incentive to get some work done. It’s not enough to weigh in about the latest cable news brouhaha – we need to understand what is actually happening. It’s work. It’s important. It’s the kind of thinking that makes you mad in a good way. We desperately need heroes in real life, and we will not find them at the movies. We will find them in the mirror.

End rant.

Addendum: Ross Douthat from The Times weighs in.

22 July 2012 0

College: They pay for laundry nowadays but are we still being taken to the cleaners?

A friend called me to consult about a high school graduation gift for my daughter and said one her ideas was to give my girl rolls of quarters to use in the laundry machines in the dorm. We often joked about how we never did break the habit of hoarding quarters for laundry and still cashing them in at the supermarket every couple of years. Being a thorough person, she called my daughter’s college to find out if the machines still take quarters and discovered that students no longer have to pay to do laundry at school – it’s covered under the exorbitant tuition (they do offer to send it out for a fee – I wonder who does that?). My theory is that as soon as the college went from women only to co-ed in the late 80s they figured that if the machines were free the guys would be more likely to do laundry. But even as late as 2005 students were paying, so I have to wonder if it became a selling point with parents – “Look! If you go into debt up to your eyeballs your kid will still have clean clothes.” Or something like that.

But with the recent flap at the University of Virginia and others like it (they basically fired their President for not being prescient about the economic downturn and a patsy for big donors), I am beginning to wonder if the education we are about to pay for will become obsolete. College is important, yes, but has the one we have chosen to give our daughter the kind of education she needs? Any number of families we know have seen their freshmen turn on their heels and return home, saying the schools are not providing the kind of teaching they expected or want. Kids have always come back home, of course, for any number of good reasons – I took a year off myself to regroup emotionally and financially – but part of it seems to be that students are not satisfied to learn in a lecture hall what they can easily look up on the Internet. Somebody, somewhere is probably designing a degree program based entirely on TED talks. MIT and Harvard have seriously upped the ante on online learning – for free, for now – and now all universities are scrambling to figure out what that means, whether they should copy the Edex, as it is called, model and whether they can afford to. But I don’t want my child to learn online or at home. She learned how to use the internet for research in high school, and lucky for us her the actual teaching environment at her high school is low tech – it’s an essential school, which means it values dialogue and critical thinking more than anything else. If she finds herself in a lecture hall she may roll her eyes but she’ll stick around and listen.

What’s even more worrisome is the message that all the college and high school graduates are hearing this year: that it doesn’t matter how educated they are, come graduation day they will not be able to find a job. Just this evening I heard my girl tell her younger brother that when he ventures off to college in several years she will probably be back living at home – not a terrible fate but not the one most young adults (or their parents) have in mind. These days it seems easier to instill values than it is to instill optimism. I keep trying to think of my parents, growing up during the Depression and then World War II and how they never could have foreseen the prosperity that came after those times. They said that during the 1950s, it was like the sun coming out for the first time after a long winter. While we have not endured the same kinds of darkness they did, we are nonetheless steeped in a fog of misinformation and cynicism that gives us no clear path back into the light. Even the foundations of faith and democracy feel less solid than they once did – why should academia be immune?

Hope springs eternal, though – and I cling to the cliché. I recall the moment last fall when our girl was perched on the edge of her seat in one of those lecture halls at the school she will attend, listening to a professor reveal the threads of evolution in a Victorian poem. I see the books pile up in her room that are summer reading for fun (Nabokov? Seriously?), I hear her name the movies she wants to see this summer and note not a single zombie or vampire walks among them. And I remind myself – again – that the way we acquire knowledge is less important that the way we prioritize, sift and synthesize it, and the way we apply it is most important of all. Whether colleges and universities are funding that process – and putting salaries and teaching fellowships ahead of laundry services and coffee bars – is what we are about to find out.

28 June 2012 2

9/11 Postscript

After all of my hand wringing yesterday afternoon, perspective arrived in the evening. After a patchy, overcast weather all day, a thin stripe of sunshine lit the trees across the pond followed by a pink sky, promising a lovely day today.

And as I watched the full moon rise after the light faded, my boy mention as he passed me, “I planted a seed in your garden today.”

“You did?”

“Yes. I planted my nectarine pit in the garden so that it would grow into a tree.”

Never much of a gardener before, I began planting new things each September since 2001 as a way of reminding myself to appreciate where I am now and to invest hope in the coming spring. The result is a garden that gives me more joy than I ever imagined. This year’s bulbs sit in a box in the garage waiting to be planted, but it’s good to know something went into the ground on the 11th. Now, to figure out where he planted it and keep the chipmunks away from it.

Finally, we stumbled on the Science Channel’s Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero and it was gratifying to see something emerging, at last, from the ashes of that day. No false reality TV drama, just stories and extraordinary images of the new buildings and the memorial and how they are being built. The series is several hours long and worth every minute. Thank you, Steven Spielberg.

12 September 2011 0

Predicting the Unpredictable

Last week my youngest told me that if he could go back in time, he would find the terrorist headquarters and blow it up – he actually said he would sacrifice himself – so that 9/11 would never have happened. That’s the lesson he brought to this day. When I told him that we can never quite know what might have prevented that day ten years ago, he found that answer wholly unsatisfactory and I don’t blame him. I didn’t like it either, but I also know that my childhood was laced with an understanding that we weren’t expected to control our futures, only to prepare ourselves to lead the best life we could with the blessings we have. Among the many disillusionments of the 21st century, this responsibility to control everything in life that we are imposing on our children, and its attendant assignment of blame for every mishap, is the biggest one. What was once the ebb and flow of daily life has turned into a lady or the tiger conundrum every single day.

Now more than ever, it seems we are trying to predict the future and we are still surprised when we are wrong. With the 24 hour news cycle, smartphones and iPad apps, the media devotes so much time and space to people saying they know what the future holds interspersed with other people trying to say they saw the most recent disaster coming followed by a systematic and relentless assignment of blame. What is wrong with this picture? How do we calculate our success rate in preventing catastrophe? Most of the time the people who saw it coming – if there are any – cannot be found on CNN, Fox or the Huffington Post, that’s for sure.

There was a time when the most we could expect to warn us of disaster was the tornado siren. What we have now that earlier generations did not is a bombardment of information that gives us the illusion that whatever happens, we should see it coming. We spent days preparing and watching hurricane Irene blast up the coast only to have her ravage inland rivers – apparently, no one warned Vermont. All of the tsunami sensors in the Pacific did not dissuade Japan from placing a nuclear power plant on the coast. And all of those big banks got hoodwinked by the ratings agencies and never noticed all of those bad loans they were underwriting. It’s no wonder we scratch our heads and wonder how we missed it because as time goes by our mistakes seem ever more stupid and obvious.

Pick a topic – our health, the economy, or the weather – there are any number of solutions to it that are just a click away. And yet, the flow of disasters almost seem to speed up rather than abating with all of this new knowledge and the ability to communicate it. If we leave the TV and the internet on, we are fed, ever so smoothly, the myth that we can prevent bad things from happening when in some respects the bad things are perpetuated by us sitting in front of the screen. And the more preposterous and untenable the theory, the better – we reward the wing nuts: I watched the movie Network last spring and it could have been a documentary.

The moment of revelation in youth that people do terrible things for reasons we cannot understand is one we never forget, and a certain part of our lives is indeed devoted to trying to avert the personal disasters we have known in the forms of death, illness, poverty and pain. Those moments stand juxtaposed with the more collective events for which we don’t feel any personal culpability but then feel compelled to do something about: My parents had Pearl Harbor as a defining moment (and that came on the heels of the Great Depression), the following generation had the death of President Kennedy (followed by the Viet Nam war and Watergate), and we have this day (followed by two wars and a financial meltdown). What one generation does in response to its challenges defines the generation that follows, and I don’t pretend to know that that means for my children – I’m not getting into the prediction business.

Many years ago my cousin was dying of cancer, and she removed every newspaper, magazine and television from her home so that she could focus on her art and on helping others (she offered free financial advice to retirees). I admired her focus but recall thinking that I would never shut myself off from the world the way that she did, even in those circumstances. Now, as I watch the towers fall yet again, I understand, and yet I watch, hoping to think of something good we can do with my son’s time machine.

11 September 2011 0

Empty Skies

The days that followed September 11, 2001, were uniformly sunny and warm as if even the weather stood stock still in the wake of that morning. And when we walked each morning down to get the paper in those first days following the attacks, the skies were noticeably empty and quiet as every commercial plane in America sat idle somewhere on the tarmac, waiting to hear that the coast was clear.

The skies are quiet now again, I noticed this bright morning as I walked out from under the canopy of trees into the open field at the end of the drive, but now it is the economy that emptied them. Airplane fares are high and far fewer planes are in the air. A friend who travels extensively and who finds himself stranded in airports time and again, noted, “Now, very often, you really can’t get there from here.” The idea of catching the next flight is no longer a matter of hours but sometimes days, even to major destinations. Luggage that must be scanned and checked requires more time to clear, extending the time required between flights – last spring we ended up renting a car and driving home from New York because 90 minutes would not allow us enough time to make our connection – the next flight home would have been 24 hours later. It was a three-hour drive – this is why people carry overstuffed carry-on bags and heave them into the overhead compartment.

Fewer planes in the air is not necessarily such a bad thing, but I have to wonder if I will ever stop assessing the collateral damage of that day – whether it distracted our institutions from proper stewardship of our economy, whether it fostered more hate than unity among us, and if my love of a clear September day has been hijacked permanently.

15 September 2010 0

Is there a “no candy” aisle for News?

There used to be a Saturday morning news break for kids hosted by Walter Cronkite called In the News, and it gave a summary of the weeks events with extra background material for kids – it was probably more in-depth than anything we see on Headline News today. But there was Uncle Walter up on the screen so there was no mistaking that whatever he told you about what was really happening.

Fast forward to 2010, when W. comes in and tells me he’s “worried about 2100.” “You mean that stupid movie about 2012?”, I ask. “No, 2100, – look, it’s on YouTube.” He pulls out the iPod and does a search, his fingers moving like lighting across the tiny keyboard. He hands it to me and I watch, mouth agape, a commercial for a “documentary” about all the disasters that await the world in 2100 – New York City under water, forests aflame, an apocalypse via CGI. And in the corner of the screen there is an icon: ABC News. The news division is now in the prophecy business, reporting science fiction as hard news. Never mind that 2100 is farther away than W. thinks it is, his iPod is telling him he should be concerned about it and has stunning visuals to reinforce this myth of fiction presented as fact.

My memories of the nightly news from toddlerhood identify me as a media hound from way back, and I learned early to question the source of any story, but it’s becoming so clear to me that the sheer number of sources and the advances in visual technology make it so much harder for kids to decide whether what they are hearing and seeing is worthy of their attention. When A. did a research paper recently on health care, it was astounding how difficult it was to find hard information that was not subject to spin or propaganda – and the crazier the rhetoric, the sexier the site was. Those graphically austere government sites with all the real documents on them are not nearly as fun to peruse as the Daily Kos and the Drudge Report. And even some of the sites with more sober graphics were selling an angle. It was hard for both of us to determine whether a source was reputable.

But even though I am complaining I am grateful that there are so many sources of information, from caller ID to Facebook, because if we take the time to identify good sources, we can access them at any time and we can teach our children about critical thinking in a concrete, hands-on way. The hardest part is knowing when to turn it off. When my cousin D. was dying of cancer, she quit her lucrative job, got rid of her TV, cancelled her newspapers, and devoted her time to painting, sewing, and helping local seniors with their finances and taxes. I did not know her well earlier in her life, but those last few years I did know her to be one of the most joyful, peaceful people I have ever met. I don’t have the fortitude – or the desire – to unplug completely like she did, but I use her example as a constant reminder that we need to work hard keep our eyes and minds firmly on this side of the looking glass.

8 January 2010 0

Grand-ish Opening

Well, we had our soft opening in October and now, on this New Year’s Day, I am opening new links to Lettershead on Facebook and other sites. I don’t often read blogs belonging to others and so I can’t offer a truly compelling rationale for reading this one. My reasons for launching Lettershead are offered in the right sidebar – since I am driven to write, it is nice to have a place to put it my stories and to share those things that I once put in letters but have in recent years have tended to languish on my hard drive. I hope to use this techno-venue to sort through fact and fiction from what happened in the last decade (and the ones before that) and to present new facts and fiction of my own in the years ahead. There’s also a list of people and places on the right linking to sites that I do visit, other LettersHead sites, reviews, etc.

You can wade through the earlier posts or wait for what will emerge in 2010 – but thanks all the same for stopping by. Heartfelt thanks, also, to everyone who encouraged me to start LettersHead and who have helped along the way – you know who you are and you are all lovely.

Happy New Year!