No rhyme or reason but feeling pretty good today.

Once again this Thanksgiving weekend I am reminded of how illogically good I feel when my sports teams are victorious, particularly the Iowa Hawkeyes. The Hawks trounced Nebraska in football yesterday and both the men's and women's basketball teams are still undefeated. 

My logical self knows that the losses will come, just as they have so many times... and every team loses, of course. My logical self knows that what a bunch of young athletes I have never met (and will never meet) do on a field or court has nothing to do with me and my day-to-day life. 

And yet...

Bottom line: I am thankful for the weird and (maybe?) metaphysical connection I feel for Iowa and most of its sports teams. It might be due to spending my first half-century living in Iowa City (other than a handful of years in college and the Air Force). It might be due to having two degrees and to my father having an Iowa degree. Certainly having three children who are Iowa grads and a wife who is a graduate helps. And now we have two granddaughters there. 

My rational self knows that fandom is random and circumstantial. My irrational self is fine with me yelling at the TV after bad calls and feeling tense during close games. 

At some point, I have to admit that a lot of things I do and feel are not logical. I spend a lot of time writing in-depth comments on student writing, even though my rational self knows that few students even read my comments. I also have read the research that proves that most teacher comments are ignored, no matter the age if students or area of study. I do the same with publication critiques, even though I have been writing the same basic comments for student writers and journalists for decades.

I'm sure there is the occasional student who reads and heeds my advice... and that must be what keeps me doing the job. It's not the money, though I appreciate the added income in my retirement. 

There's so little logic to all the above that I realize I have nowhere to go with this post. There is no epiphany or dramatic action. 

Maybe it's best if I just wrap up with a simple, "Go, Hawks!"

 

Where is the 'moral majority' when we need them?

This week's added political and cultural craziness featured the president calling for the deaths of six members of congress, all military or CIA veterans, due to their social media video that points out the fact that illegal orders should not be obeyed.

I took a quick look at both the Washington Post and New York Times websites and found... nothing much. Perhaps at this point the editors assume their readers no longer consider outrageous threats from the Trump Cult to be news. 

There has been serious coverage of the "extralegal" murders of over 60 people on what the administration calls smuggling boats in international waters by the U.S. I would guess that those continuing murders/assassinations prompted the video, since there is a very good chance that courts will eventually find those murders to be illegal.

I have not seen any coverage of the military members who have carried out the orders to blow up the boats, but assume they are mostly drone operators who might be anywhere from Kansas to a warship in the Caribbean. And the state of mind of the operators, whose actions are indistinguishable from playing a video game? 

"I was just following orders."

That turned out to NOT be a very good excuse for Nazi soldiers during post-WWII trials. Many of them were hanged or imprisoned for long stretches. 

I occasionally try to imagine what various National Guardsmen and active duty military are thinking as they are deployed within the U.S. without convincing evidence for their presence in various cities. I also try to imagine the state of mind of ICE agents, ordered to use pretty much any means necessary to accost, arrest, and detain suspected undocumented people, often women and children.

They are all just following orders, of course, and most of them would suffer fines or firing or imprisonment if they defied their orders. 

Trying to translate how Republican politicians and White House operatives react to the video is both easier to imagine and more appalling. The Trump response is to leave out the word "illegal" in their responses and counterattacks, and that is clearly what most of us would term "lying." 

Here's the thing: when people can simply place the original video on a screen and, for example, the Press Secretary simply misquote what was clearly stated, and someone turn that into an argument... well, it is an insult to the citizens of the country.

I am convinced that the president is in the throes of dementia, adding to his egomania and hunger for power. Comparing the way the press went after Biden, who also displayed signs of dementia but without the narcissism is maddening. 

The media have lots the ability to hold the bully to account, and that saddens me. Holding the powerful accountable should be one of the main purposes of a free press. Most media are opting to avoid the facts and the implications of a crazy person in charge.

The young people of America are watching and absorbing all this. 

Read my lips... or don't bother

I read a column by David Brooks in the New York Times today that prompted me to, once again, think that there is little new under the sun, so to speak.

His thesis was prompted by a single paragraph from a theologian, and that graf boiled down to something like "we should judge people's beliefs by how they live their lives rather than by their professed allegiance to a particular faith (or lack of faith).

So, wait. "We are what we do more than what we say?" Shocking.

That Brooks gets paid to share this is a surprise to me, just as I was a bit surprised that HE seemed to think he had discovered something. His greater point, by the way,  was that this generosity of spirit could convince large numbers of people to move beyond Christian Nationalism. 

Sure.

Not coincidentally, I read somewhere that many Americans polled about their views on Trump on his policies might aim at simply "owning" or provoking the pollsters. The pundit who mentioned this imagined that Trump might enjoy much less support than polls indicate. 

I would argue that, for related reasons (including "this is what I SHOULD say), he might enjoy much more support. 

Bottom line: polls depend upon respondents being willing to share opinions and to be relatively truthful in their responses. Yes, I know sophisticated polls are designed to overcome people lying or shading the truth or being deliberately inconsistent. But polls, in the end, are dependent upon what people say.

Elections, on the other hand, are easily measured and rule-based. In fact, we call places people voting "polling places." Ballots are marked in secret... just the voter and a series of stark choices. 

Recently, there were gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey whose results were far different from what the polls indicated. Those polls claimed that the races were close. They were not.

Of course, the polls might be flawed, but when so many polls prove to be inaccurate so many times, we should simply suspect that what people say and what they do are not the same. I am not suggesting that people are secretly good, necessarily, or secretly bad, or secretly selfish or racist or misogynist or whatever. 

I will also note that most news media that publish poll results are interested in more readership and no one wants to read about runaway elections that are not competitive. Our media have long abandoned any serious examination of policies and local observation on a wide scale. The country is too big and too diverse and too difficult to even comprehend.

Let's just focus our attention on the latest Twitter/X controversy and ignore the fact that most of the nation never reads a tweet. We just read what pundits have to say about tweets.

So, thanks, Mr. Brooks. Today's little essay reinforces my inclination to skip over all news stories that involve poll results... until there are actual elections and clear results.

Everything else is just navel gazing. 

It was over 54 years ago that I enlisted...

It's nice to be thanked for my service, of course, but I never know exactly how to respond... beyond "you're welcome." That response is accurate but not even close to capturing my mixed feelings about the nearly three years I was in the Air Force. 

No need to rehash my many dumb choices (and a tiny bit of bad luck in the draft lottery), but once I was drafted, I was left with few choices. I don't swim, so the Navy was not an option. The Marines didn't appeal, mostly due to my not being gung ho in any way. The Army offered just two years of service, but a much higher chance of carrying a rifle in a rice paddy.

The Air Force, like the Navy, required a four-year enlistment, but the idea of four years doing something to support planes and pilots matched up quite favorably to a shorter commitment but with higher risk of being shot. 

Then, by sheer luck, my tech school graduating class (a "class" graduated every Friday after eight weeks learning the intricacies of base supply management) was dispersed all over Europe for our first duty assignments. The Friday before graduates all went to Thailand. The next Friday's class, I later learned, went to Vietnam. 

I have a few stories from the military, but none of them will end up in a movie and none involved much heroism, beyond simply surviving the quite natural fear and uncertainty of suddenly being at Lackland AFB in Texas, getting my head buzzed, learning to march, and enduring lots of creative criticism in very colorful language. 

I served two years at RAF Lakenheath in England, eventually becoming the base funds manager by default when the master sergeant who led our little unit retired. I was a college boy, after all, though I usually did not get into the details of my flunking out... which is what got me drafted in the first place. 

Kathleen and I had what I like to call a two-year honeymoon and returned to the States with a five-month-old baby girl. Then it was off to Grand Forks AFB for about eight months before the Air Force determined that it was overstaffed and offered "early outs" to thousands. 

So, after two years, eleven months, and 13 days, I was discharged. Somewhat wiser. A little older. 

So, maybe you can get a sense of my slight discomfort upon being thanked for my service. I was not a willing recruit to begin with, though I did what was required. I was not in combat, though there were some harrowing moments on the London Underground when things were really busy. I lived with my partner, lover and best friend for most of the experience.

I was clearly not a hero. 

But I guess most of the people who served in those last years of the Vietnam conflict were not heroes. Just people, brought together by circumstance, to live through their involuntary servitude before returning to the reality of civilian life. 

Some vets wear caps proudly proclaiming their units or service branch. 

That is not me. 

At some point, teachers need to acknowledge the 'lost cause'

Today has been one of those days where I am spending a lot of time criticising, though mostly in my head, the work of various students. My own college students are so often disappointing, whether it is in writing and thinking quality or in the common failure to read assignments directions carefully. And high school journalists often disappoint me, mostly because they often have great ideas but rarely produce the quality storytelling that would elevate their reporting.

Yet I carry on. It's almost masochistic but I continue to write the same basic advice over and over to individuals and to publication staffs (including their advisers). My message has been sharpened over many years and I think I am doing a better job of providing "rules of thumb" that can cut through all the somewhat extraneous comments I could make.

For instance, I still comment on fragments and run-ons and obvious typos, but I try to couch those comments in arguments such as "Our credibility diminishes every time a reader is distracted even a bit by our grammar and spelling and punctuation errors." 

I often follow that sort of comment with something like, "It seems a shame to have your excellent ideas and arguments overlooked by readers who can't move past your lack of control of the language."

That sounds "snooty," even as I type it, but I do my best to be honest.

When critiquing student media, I often follow my comments on type choices or design choices or lead writing choices with something like, "It all begins with choices... after all, there is so much that happens in a high school over the year that we have no hope of covering it all. Consider tightening our topic choices but deepening our reporting."

My assumption is that this very sound advice (in my head, at least) mostly is ignored, whether for my college writers or for those high school editors and advisers. 

A large chunk of the blame has to go to the medium of sharing: online writing. I hate to assume that my reader knows nothing, so I assume instead that my reader has been rushing or is unable to find enough hours in the day or some other excuse. 

I suspect that I could truly help all those writers and all those young journalists if I could just sit down with them and have a back-and-forth, where I could see their confusion and we could expand on whatever is not making sense for them. 

A friend mentioned recently that it was too bad that what I do best -- interacting live with students -- is not longer a possibility in my online teaching life. 

And there it is. My online teaching as a tactic is the problem that I need to continue to tackle, though at 75 I wonder how many adjustments and techniques I can develop until I am quietly ushered out to pasture. 

On the other hand, the good news is that a 75-year-old online instructor could easily be a hale and hearty 35-year-old instructor in terms of how the course is organized and the feedback I deliver.

On a third hand, I suspect that the 35-year-olds are having similar challenges as the 75-year-old.

We all just need to tone down our criticisms, I guess. They are not moral failings and no one really intended to do substandard work. 

I just got a note about next summer's courses and my plans. I suppose I will take on another summer writing class knowing full well that I will be sitting in a hot office quietly fuming once again.