That Apocalyptic Feeling

This is the last column I wrote for the Stanford Daily:

“When the earth gapes my body to entomb,
I justly may complain of such a doom.”—Voltaire, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”

“And I can’t fight this feeling anymore. I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for. It’s time to bring this ship into shore. And throw away the oars, forever.” –REO Speedwagon, “Can’t Fight this Feeling Anymore”

My Sunday sing-along with the village delinquents had just reached the coda when I heard a pounding at the door.

The sound startled the young ne’er-do-wells and sent our five-part harmony into a pitchy mess. Everyone stayed on key, but they lost their balance and fell from the risers into the inflatable pool of hot pitch below. I have found, in working with degenerate youth, that sometimes all it takes to bring out the golden voices slumbering inside their criminal bodies is a little tough love.

Take the Three Tenors, for example: all products of the musical pedagogy of European fascism. “Lucky” Luciano Pavarotti was a cracker thief in Mussolini’s Italy until the authoritarian youth outreach program fed him the castor oil that brought his sweet tenor gurgling up to the surface. Placido “Sleepy Sunday” Domingo was bastinadoed sixteen times by the Spanish Falange before he could sing a melody instead of jimmy a lock. And Jose “Career Loiterer” Carreras would still be standing on a street corner in the Barceloneta if Franco’s Guardia Civil had not tended to his musical ‘reeducation’.

But back to my story: peeved that I would now have to refill the tub with freshly heated tar, I marched to the door to rage at the intruder whose knocking had interrupted my stern commitment to community service.

“Don’t you realize that I am trying to rehabilitate the malformed souls of our nation’s youth through the formidable spirit of music?” I shouted. “Account for yourself, villain!”

I concluded my greeting with a swift flick between the man’s eyes delivered by my callused bludgeon of a fingernail.

Only when his eyes failed to come uncrossed did I realize this villain was my twin brother, G.P. (Gross Product).

“G.P., you rogue! My apologies, but I didn’t recognize you dressed in your clown suit. What gives?”

G.P. was a real biz-casual kind of guy. He talked a lot about synergy, diversifying stuff, stimulating investment incentives in things, and all the legendary nights out he had with his boys in Palo Alto. He was the kind of guy who praised the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate donations to political campaigns as a victory for free speech. So you can imagine my shock when I saw him swaddled in pink robes, his hair tied in a knot, and a skull tattooed across his face.

“The end is nigh, P.G.! Death has come to swallow our world, to gnash our guts betwixt his jaws.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, G.P. You’re usually so upbeat and of limited diction. What happened?”

“My real estate investments fell through, so I’ve joined an apocalyptic cult.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll get another investment opportunity,” I told him.

“You don’t understand. My penthouse vacation condos in Port-au-Prince fell through all fifteen floors below them.”

“Oh,” I said. But as soon as tried to say something comforting, something remotely optimistic, a little serving of a vomit would surge into my mouth. My mind desperately searched beyond the earthquake in Haiti for a current realm of human activity that didn’t make me gag in despair. Politics, War, Healthcare, Education, Economy, Jobs, Media, Hollywood, Environment—these banal terms, fired into my brain hundreds of times a day, took on a ghoulish appearance that sent me cowering in the warm vat of hot pitch. Not even art—the cherubic voices of my village hoodlum choir singing “Waltzing Matilda” in the round—could draw me from the bilious depths of my black liquid sanctuary.

My brother’s return had sapped my resolve to live among men. In the days following his visit, I tried to carry on with my volunteer work as choirmaster for incorrigible derelicts. But I didn’t possess the strength of will to cane the sole of even a single foot. As a result, the group’s singing failed to improve and recidivism quickly replaced rehabilitation. Petty larceny and gambling returned to the choir room. By month’s end, my Sunday sing-alongs had become wanton orgies of disorder. There would be no great Pavarottis or Domingos made by me—only tone-deaf cracker thieves and donkey-voiced loiterers.

In a final attempt to fight that apocalyptic feeling, I decided to volunteer my living body for scientific testing. Surely, in a world mired in disaster, science is still our one stalwart hope. So I stumbled into my neighborhood medical testing office and shouted at the receptionist, “In the name of progress, hit me with the radiation!” But the supervising physician rejected me, citing some jargony bureaucratic term called “raving lunacy.”

But, really, I’m happier here. I’m with my twin brother Gross Product, who now goes by Death Knell, and all his apocalyptic cult friends. We have a lovely little stretch of hovel in the trans-Bay tube midway between SF and Oakland. I hear the view three hundred feet above us is simply stunning. We have an ample supply of nettles and pass the time telling each other stories of the pending apocalypse and watching the BART passengers zoom by merrily on their crash course to inevitable disaster.

One thing, though. I can’t write these columns for the Stanford Daily anymore. Internet connection is too spotty down here. Besides, ever since I’ve stopped fighting this apocalyptic feeling, I’ve forgotten what I started writing for.

But, please, I encourage you to come visit.

The Everyman Machine

“I go to Washington as the representative of no faction or interest, answering only to my conscience and to the people. I’ve got a lot to learn in the Senate, but I know who I am and I know who I serve. I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck, and I am nobody’s senator but yours.”–Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown

“Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.”–Cervantes, “Don Quixote”

Of course you can smell my truck. I don’t mind. Yeah, it still has that new truck scent. But I assure you that’s because I’m tidy, not elitist. No pretentious liberal phony-scent trees dangling from this mirror. No, sir. Just an American flag, my Helen Gurly Brown commemorative fuzzy dice (a gift from Cosmo) and a tea bag still dripping with earl gray patriotism. Oh, that other smell, you ask? That’s the smell of victory--the people’s victory! Now, with all due respect, please back away from the truck. You’re leaving grease stains on my populist decal.

I know what you’re thinking. How in the heck did a regular patriotic pro-life guy like me take on the juggernaut of the liberal establishment? Well, to tell the truth, I never thought I would end up in politics. It always seemed like a sordid scene run by backroom deals and shadowy interest groups. Capitol Hill brought to mind a cocktail hour intrigue of smug corporate lawyers, spineless party hacks and lobbyists from whose double-breasted suits flowed endless free steaks and Coogi sweaters. What’s more, it was worm-ridden with political philosophies, ideologies, party platforms, all sorts of things that, to a normal liberty-loving dude, sounded pretty suspect.

And, if my car hadn’t broken down that one fateful day, I surely would have carried on being a sedan-driving, golf-playing, nude-modeling drone of the liberal establishment. But when I showed up at Hertz for a replacement rental, my loafers in tatters, all they had left were pick-up trucks. After upbraiding the sales assistant, I resigned myself to the truck and drove home feeling awkward. But something strange happened on that drive home.

At first, the changes were small. I started hanging my arm out the window. I tuned in to AM radio. I started whistling the national anthem. But more perceptible transformations soon followed in their wake. A paranoid fear of illegal immigrants crept over me. I felt the sacred institution of marriage crumbling beneath my feet. My love of unborn fetuses became so overwhelming that I had to pull over and buy a pro-life bumper sticker.

At the highway rest stop, I noticed, much to my amazement, that I was trading banter and sharing laments with the other huddled masses piling out of their pickups and into the urinals. Despite wanting to liquidate their homes and send them to prison, I felt a genuine affection for their folksy desperation and lack of opportunity. I then realized what had just happened to me: I had become an everyman.

Back on the road, my new everyman aroma spewed forth from the exhaust pipe of my everyman machine, sweetening the air with a new hope for democracy.

The minutemen militias of delusional hockey moms and other dangerous ignoramuses crawled out from their bunkers and followed my fumes. They immediately recognized this scent as their own, with its stench of raw civic discontent not masked with any artificial rational fragrances, and proclaimed me their king.

So, here I am, just another small town beauty queen taking on the political machine. As an everyman, I like my democracy old-fashioned (circa 2004): without health care, steeped in war and favoring the rich.

But don’t you go thinking we’re the same as the everymen of yore. Sure, Harry Truman may have made a big fuss about being a small potatoes yokel from Independence, Mo. But then he had to go and ruin his everyman image with a palpable sense of history and an intellectual commitment to governance.

You know what that reeks of? Expertise! Elitism! Now, how are you supposed to serve the people if the people can’t relate to you? And how are the people supposed to relate to you if you know more than they do? That’s bad reality TV and bad democracy. Instead, the everyman politician of the 21st century must be a convincing avatar. When the American people look into the political mirror of democratic government (or Cosmopolitan), they want to see themselves, only with killer abs.

Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a sweet truck.

History Lives in San Diego

Oh, prosaic San Diego! Sing me your secrets. A French-fried potato stuffed in a burrito? A kidnapped Tijuana club owner stashed in a safe house? A syphilis sore blossoming in a sailor’s breeches? A thousand historians holed up in a Hyatt? What other sordid surprises do you keep in your canyons shadowed from the bleach of the blistering sun?

Destiny found me in our southern city of St. James last weekend. I had been invited to give a paper at the annual meeting of American historians: “Rethinking Fingernail Hygiene in Late Victorian Wales, 1891-1895: A Transnational Perspective.” Going into the conference, I had worried my topic was too broad. After all, pre-1891 Welsh fingernail hygiene was a world apart from the 1895 scene. It’s nearly impossible to account for all the transformations wrought by the great Belgian cuticologist Emil Rjinsdorf and his introduction of the scrub brush into the mining cultures of blackened Welshmen.

But my fears of trying to cover too much ground were soon assuaged by a look at the list of other conference panels. I knew I would have no difficulty discussing the broad currents of fin-de-siecle filth and the emerging global perspective on cuticology with my interlocutors in Radio and Gender Performance in Postwar France or Quilting in Third Generation Filipino-American Families.

The conference began wonderfully. Under the yellow morning glow of the ballroom chandeliers, we plied our trade, broke new conceptual ground, and changed our understanding of human behavior with the three to four people who were willing to listen to us. At least two of those people had come thinking there would be free coffee.

Sadly, the free coffee years were over. Like many of the humanities disciplines, history has fallen on hard job times. Granted, you would never know this from the steady stream of effluvia coming out of the historical discipline.

But there were subtle hints of underlying slump. The Career Resource Desk in Annex D of the Hyatt had a “back in five minutes” sign posted on the table for the entire weekend. The buffet spread for “Young Scholars” consisted of raw broccoli, steamed peas, sunflower seeds, and a giant punch bowl of ranch dressing. And I’m pretty sure I saw a scholar of early modern Poland picking cigarette butts off the parking lot.

Of course, that didn’t stop us from enjoying ourselves. In between presentations, we historians unclipped our ties and frolicked in the San Diego sun. The terrace came alive with ill-fitting suits poring over footnotes by the pool and heated discussions in the sauna about the battle of the Bulge.

Then things got real.

A group of masked men with guns burst into the Hyatt. They barricaded the exits, corralled us into the grand ballroom, and bound our hands and feet with duct tape. They told us we were being held for ransom. Apparently, the Mexican drug cartels had also fallen on hard economic times. To compensate, not only were they diversifying their job skills with increasing forays into kidnapping; in conducting business across the border, they, too, were adopting a transnational perspective.

Unfortunately, their plans for profit were misguided. When the university deans received the call announcing that all their historians had been kidnapped, their eyes lit up. A whole departmental budget would be free to pump into a new ergonomic finger gym for the school of engineering. Suddenly, a new solution to the universities’ budget crisis had appeared on the horizon.

When our kidnappers started filling car tires with gasoline, we knew we had to get out of this situation on our own. The time had come to bring our historical knowledge to bear on the present.

A young woman crawled to the podium.

“The first thing we have to do is sufficiently theorize our methodology.”

“We need to adopt a global perspective!” someone shouted.

“But one that is still attuned to the nuances of gender construction!” yelled another.

“Let’s be serious. We can’t move forward until we rethink the boundaries of kidnapper-kidnappee and the intersubjective process of identity formation.”

“I’d like to remind everyone that digital media technology can serve as an excellent pedagogical tool.”

The crowd murmured its assent, albeit reluctantly.

Thirteen hours later, we had struck on a plan. We would survey the historiography of slave revolts, prisoner riots, and hostage resistance from a transnational perspective, but with attention to the specific cultural dimensions of local institutions and practices. This would indicate a direction for future work on emancipation. Meanwhile, we would deliver a series of power point-supplemented lectures aimed at making our captors aware of the normative discourse of masculinity and the legacy of Spanish colonial oppression they were acting out in their transgressive roles.

But when we went to give our first lecture, we came upon the kidnappers at the “Young Scholars” buffet, sprawled out dead on the floor. The empty punch bowl of rancid three-day-old ranch dressing told the tale.

Once again, the unexamined past had brought the present to its knees.

Filial Piety

I overheard the following conversation between two young men tonight at the Palo Alto Caltrain stop. Once I heard the phrase "fighting with my grandma," I knew I was listening to gold:

Dude, I totally broke my ipod the other day.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I was fighting with my grandma. I was in the bathroom, and she was all yelling at me through the door and I was like, "Fuck you, Grandma!" And I was so pissed, I took my ipod off the counter and threw it at the door as hard as I could and it bounced off the door and flew into the bathtub. Totally busted it.

Wow. Really?

Yeah. And she was all like, "You shouldn't use language like that." And I was like, "Shut the fuck up, Grandma. I can use whatever fucking language I like!"

Whoa.

Well, that's my train. See you later dude.

Yeah. See ya.

Getting Down to Business

So much for New Year’s resolutions. There I was on Jan. 1, knee-deep in luggage, resolved to board a greyhound to Lafayette, La. to begin my new life as a philosophy major. Then a tweet came screaming through the ether into my iPhone. UL-Lafayette had announced it was doing away with its philosophy degree. Extinguished were my hopes of becoming an educated southern gentleman, drawling on Epictetus and gazing into the Heraclitean flux of my mint julep.

The pain brought to mind the trauma of last fall, when I showed up at Michigan State with a trunk full of Sophocles and some nasty stuff by Catullus in my back pocket, only to be informed that MSU was axing its classics major. No dorm room bacchanalia with maenad coeds. No drinking Old Milwaukee out of a kantharos. No impressing girls by reading aloud the letters on the fraternity houses.

I was beginning to fear this country no longer had room for a man of my liberal arts persuasion. Thereupon a dark spell came over me. I alternated between carving out chunks of my flesh and flipping through Forbes magazine.

But, just when I was poised to toss a coin and either hack off a limb or major in business, a tweet came blistering through the ether into my iPhone and restored my will to live. The University of Texas at Austin has paved the way to the future of education with a new course: The English Major in the Workplace.

Here students read Death of a Salesman and follow it up with strategies for networking, writing good resumes and giving successful job interviews (this is not a joke). With classes like that, UT is a school that is going to hang onto its English major.

At last, the fuzzy and worthless humanities have become relevant!

Before, we of the humanities had to lurk in the shadows of the nation’s majority, the business majors–teaching their children, writing their newspapers, eating from dumpsters, going to law school when resignation struck. All the while we envied their productivity, their synergy, their output-ability. But most of all, we admired their scrupulous attention to ethics, those questions concerning our collective wellbeing and ultimate aims as individual human beings. Now, finally, we’re getting the specialized workplace skills we need in order to join them in the bang-up business they are doing all across America.

And this is only the beginning. I can only dream of all the other potential edifying courses I will be able to take as an English major in the second decade of the 21st century. Look for these classes in your upcoming course catalog:

How to Sell Your Soul: The Faustian Tradition

The Brothers Karamazov and the Brothers Lehman: The Pitfalls of Family Finance

Siegfried Sasoon/Vidal Sasoon: A Comparison in (Entrepreneurial) Style

Heart of Darkness: Kurtz as Corporate Visionary

Email, Text, Tweet: Advanced Composition

How to Tie a Tie

Selling/Stealing, Brokering/Bamboozling: The Power of Rhetoric

Naked Lunch Power Lunch: A Chat n’ Chew, Meet n’ Greet for Wingtipped Beatniks (martinis and mechanical dildos provided)

Speaking in Complete Sentences and Other Interviewing Strategies

The Power of Positive Thinking: A Study in Textual Exegesis

Bleak House: Sub-Prime Mortgaging and the Dickensian Dignity of Poverty

The Cubicle: A Space for Creative Exploration (prerequisite: Thinking Outside the Box while Inside a Cubicle)

If only the University of California would start offering courses like these. Then its alums would make so much money, they, rather than the state, could subsidize the cost of tuition.

With this new business casual makeover of the bed-headed patched-tweed English major, my degree is sure to make me a valuable worker in the jobless economy. Now I don’t have to major in business just to get ahead in the bread line.

What’s more, I can look my relatives square in the face when they ask me what I’m going to do with a degree in English and tell them:

“Why, I’m going to join the workforce, juggles spreadsheets, earn great big pots of money, sink it into an oversized house, boost the GDP, watch shitloads of prerecorded television, sire some children who will be even more ignorant than I am, get laid off, lose the house, get sick, and then hope to God by that time one of my idiot kids has majored in business and makes enough money to put me in a private nursing home, where I will slowly drool out all memory of my existence.”

“Wonderful,” they’ll say. “That sounds just like a business degree. Eminently practical.”