End of the Semester Issues

It is the end of the semester and students and faculty alike are whining in unison. I appreciate this but, I must say that I cannot place myself in this camp this year. I had a good semester and although I have felt a bit of a letdown over the past week, I am still enjoying my job and the opportunity to interact with faculty and students. Yeah, it is a lot of work doing all the grading and preparing exams and stuff but it has been nice. I have applied for a full time tenure track job. I am getting very nervous about it. It is the first job that I applied for and I have a legitimate shot at it. I think I will get a phone interview and then........ I have a friend who is on the faculty at the place of which I am applying. It has been reassuring as he has given me some pointers but apparently he has said too much as he has now told me that he has been instructed to cease communication with candidates. All of the sudden, I feel all alone and a bit apprehensive about this position. I was going to buy him a victory drink later this week because last week he successfully defended his dissertation....but now I'm not allowed to do that. Secretly I am a little hurt but I also understand that he has to avoid unethical situations as he is also on the search committee. But damn, is the Gestapo so effective as to prevent a victory drink from being consumed?

Sheets and Hoods and Brits, Oh MY!

Saturday night I went to a play at a local playhouse. I was pleasantly surprised at the performance. It is called "The Foreigner" and it is about a UK citizen who goes to Georgia for a weekend away from his hellish life in London. To escape the gaze of the people at the B&B, his friend concocts a story that the foreigner does not speak english. So the Brit learns all the local gossip because people speak their secrets in front of him not realizing that he really does understand what they are saying. This charade ends up invigorating the Brit and replenishing the humanity of the locals. The play was very funny and quite provocative. The most controversial part of the play was when the local bumbling Klansmen came to kill the foreigner as they tried to purge all non-white non-christian influences from the area (they were attacking a Brit for crying out loud...you can't get anymore anglo-saxon in the modern world). During the climatic scene, several players dressed up as klansmen in hoods and sheets. The story re-presented the klan, I would say quite accurately, like ridiculous baffoons who are as intelligent as a "one-way" sign pointing the wrong way. In fact the storyline forced the audience to find great empathy in the foreigner as he proved to be witty, charismatic, and loveable. But I couldn't help but reflect on the image of men dressed in sheets. Being from the North does not mean that one escapes the Klan. Where I grew up in Michigan, klansmen continue to burn crosses (in their own backyards) and march in downtown areas wearing their sheets and hoods. But, I have to say, I think this was the first time that I actually saw a real live person actually wearing a klansmen outfit. I have seen plenty of images on the news and in archives but this was my first eyewitness account. It was sublime, surreal, and scary. Even though the players portrayed the klansmen in a residue of pathetic stupidity, it was quite a moment for me. It was quite provocative because in this part of the country, where I now live, many people want to make English the official language, they want to send immigrants back to their home countries, and they fully support building a wall on the Mexican border (some would support building a wall on the Canadian border too). I am not sure what to make of my first experience of witnessing someone wearing a klan outfit. Although clearly a farce, it struck me profoundly. I was not uncomfortable, in fact, I thought it was a brilliant act of provocative condemnation. But man, I'll tell you, seeing dudes in hoods and sheets....even as farce, it was much more intimidating than I thought it would be.

Late Night Ramblings? I Can't Remember.

I've been thinking about collective memory lately. The idea that we identify with a community because we tap into a shared memory. In other words, how do you know that you are American (or other nationality)? You believe that you are American because you identify yourself with the collective memory of the nation. This is true for any group you identify with: Jewish, feminist, African American, book club member, high school alum, church member, religion, etc. Collective memory is an interesting topic. In 1925 sociologist Maurice Halbwachs pioneered the idea of collective memory. He said, interestingly, that collective memory is a social function used by a group.....not to accurately recall the past, but to interpret the present. Whatever group you identify with and whatever memory the members of that group share, those memories are not reliable to recount the past. For example, Christians tap into the memory of Jesus via the Bible. It is irrelevant whether Jesus actually did anything that the Bible claims. The collective memory becomes powerful enough to form a myth in which a community of Christians reinforce through social interaction and use to help them navigate their current lives.

Another example, my grandfather used to be amish. Thankfully for me, he left that faith before I was ever born. But when I listen to my dad and his brothers recount their childhood as amish kids, I cannot actually count on them to accurately recall what actually happened. When they tell their stories, they are actually using those memories to underscore their present situation as a small group who left the faith and were ostracized by the rest of their family. Perhaps they are trying to legitimize their breakaway from the amish faith, maybe they are trying to demonstrate that they feel the amish are hypocrites and they are not, maybe they are trying to justify their present material pursuits after having lived such an frugal life well into their teenage years. Their stories are interesting and there is some truth to them, but they cannot accurately recount the past. It is not that they are lying or purposely trying to confuse people, it is just how it happens. The next time you listen to someone tell you a story that they remember, consider the group that they identify with and listen very closely; from what they say, you will probably find out more about their present than you will about their past.

From a perspective of history this is really difficult to deal with. In fact you might ask, what, then, is the point of history? Well, the point is not to understand what actually happened but to understand why they group believes what happened, happened. Tricky indeed. I don't know if this translates to personal relationships or not. I have a friend who is an interesting case study. She recalls all sorts of things from her past that no one else recalls. Halbwachs also said that we need to corroborate our memory with other people....if we can't do this, we either go insane or we change our memory. So, my friend is able to corroborate her stories with her siblings but she cannot corroborate them with her parents. For example, my friend says that her mother made her wear saddle shoes in first grade. Her mother denies it but her sisters and brothers say it happened. Did it happen? Who knows? But if my friend was angry at her mother for making her wear saddle shoes, it suggests that she and her siblings have gotten together and agreed that this happened and they use it to explain why their mother behaved the way she did, which leads them to measure their current relationship with their mother. I must say that I remember things from my past and I can't recall whether they happened or not but I feel that they did. In fact, I cannot even remember the larger context of the memory....just the memory. But I have enough context now that I am older to try to project a context on that context-less memory, which helps me explain my current life. Does this mean that you can't believe people when they tell you a story of their past? No, you should believe them, but you should also realize that the context in which they place the story usually is from the present....or at least from the time when they became old enough and aware enough to contextualize the memory, even though the memory happpened at a time before they understood what the memory meant. If you want a pop culture frame of reference for all of this, watch the film Memento.

A Weird Dream

Last night I dreamt, which isn't strange. What is strange is that I remembered it. The dream consisted of me waking up late in the night and hearing this really loud noise. I went outside to see what it was. I was not at my house, I was at my parent's house. The scene was a bit futuristic because something was flying overhead. Imagine a local news station van or SUV with the satellite dish on top and a news crew in the back. This news SUV had wings and was flying over my parent's house and landed in my yard. I tried to talk to them but they hushed me and trained their cameras on the night sky. At first the sky looked like a bunch of stars but as I looked closely their was a war going on in the sky. Apparently the defunct Soviet Union, or North Korea, had attacked the U.S. and we retaliated not with F-16 fighters but with these armed flying SUVs. I couldn't tell if they were fighting in outer space or in the earth's atmosphere. And the U.S. SUVs had a strange fighting formation; they formed a 5-point star formation and moved around fighting the Communist Russian/Koreans. I thought that was a stupid formation in which to fight. It looked like a stalemate. The news crew was very anxious and they told me this was possibly the beginning of nuclear war. But no nukes seemed to be coming, so I sat and watched. The battle went on for hours. I got bored so I went back to sleep. When I awoke the battle was over and the flying battle-scarred SUVs were flying over my house. But I couldn't tell if they were Americans returning or Communists invading. They seemed peaceful. I didn't know who had won. Did the U.S. or the communists? I walked downtown and the whole place was empty except for a Hispanic-looking man who was hanging an American flag on a store front. At first, I thought that the U.S. had won but then I wondered if the Communists had won but was trying to trick all of us so we wouldn't revolt. The news crew was gone and I felt very alone. There are all sorts of motifs in this dream....any thoughts what it all means?