Madame M,
“Principled and respectable men.” The system NEEDS those (desperately), but doesn’t WANT them. That’s why they don’t get produced in enough numbers in enough places. One reason? That coach doesn’t get rewarded for forming those. And so yet even more males may never really become men. Those boys are absent so many MENtors at so many stages—often critical stages—of their lives. And so boys become not men, but chronologically advanced teenagers, deficient in true masculinity. And all to reward what? Temporary, materialistic, shallow, value-less existence, to exploit and be exploited.
And yet that coach probably sleeps well at night, either in willful ignorance or delusion, or comforting himself with (pick one or more) that “it’s the system, I can’t fight the system, everyone’s doing it; it would only punish these boys and this sports program if I did things any other way, let alone the repercussions on me and my family.”
Don’t expect principled and respectable men to come from the tutelage of those only too ready to sacrifice whatever of those qualities they might once have possessed. Especially when so much is so commercialized, when Mammon rules so much of the day. A once time when CHARACTER meant so much more than money, prestige, appearance, power—those days have receded, but I am hopeful that they will come again.
How did such a supposedly God-respecting nation come to in effect worship Mammon so readily? Because we never reconciled the contradictions of capitalism? Maybe. Or maybe because we acquiesced and became diverted too many times when it was important to speak up, to take a stand, to not be manipulated. For sure, wealth does not need to be punished; but it and its zealous adherents don’t need to be worshipped or over-admired either.
Everyday Americans throughout our history keep making this error. Or they lapse in judgment, courage, or character, repeatedly. They do not learn from their history, they do not maintain their watchfulness and healthy skepticism. But those who maneuver to manipulate, those who deceive, those who attempt to dress up greed and traitorous selfishness as something else, DO learn, HAVE learned. They learn from the times they have found themselves slowed or thwarted by the 99%. And so they have bided their time, have amassed wealth and influence, and they use it to tilt nearly everything their way, sowing propaganda to not only disguise and deflect, but to enlist those they enfeeble in the very means to engender the enfeebling! Hot button emotional issues (of various cultural or religious or ideological appearances) are whipped up. These issues are never “solved,” with the reason given as the supposed great power of the “elitists” or “liberals” standing in the way, even when those “liberals” hold few if any meaningful levers of power. The powers that ARE don’t want those issues solved, for it would be harder to divert people’s attention.
You are so right that the actions at Penn State may shade, at least for a while, the efforts of the goodhearted to help shape boys in a positive way. You are also right in that the men (and especially men of courage and character and ethics and what used to be “common” decency) we are not developing (or are mal-developing) showed its effects at Penn State.
Enjoyed greatly the video speeches of Sir Ken Robinson. “If you’re afraid of being wrong, you won’t come up with something original.” Good Sir Ken! And good treasure find Madame! I thought of you the other day when I came upon this quote: “I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.” (Franklin P. Adams)
There is a small caveat to Sir Ken’s thoughts. Well not his thoughts, exactly, which are superb. But how they are used by those whose thoughts are either stunted or oriented toward bureaucratization (whether for box thinking or, ironically, even for personal or bureaucratic advantage). The cycles of educational theory have most recently included “tailoring to kinesthetic learners, tactile learners, etc.” But they have been largely grafted onto an already overburdened educational system, and especially, the very overburdened teachers. Teachers already burned and overwhelmed by a succession of educational theories crammed onto them (some of them even repeated in another form) by people looking to make a name for themselves. Sir Ken touches a bit on this about the inefficacy of “reform” in education. His call for fundamental changes, for “revolution,” is undoubtedly spot on. I also agree (times 100), that fast food is depleting our bodies and minds, and making us listless or malleable (some of which, although Sir Ken doesn’t comment, could be deliberate).
That piece you singled out that Hedges quotes Henry Giroux, now at McMaster University in Canada: That piece was the ONLY one on that page that I might question its near-universality. Giroux, although he can be a bit irritatingly polemic at times, has been what Hedges says he is: a prescient and vocal critic “of the corporate state and the systematic destruction of American education.” He was marginalized for having courage to speak up, especially about “the money being pumped into research and programs that blatantly favored corporate interests.” Giroux, interestingly enough in light of current events, was at Penn State at the time, a place that “had joined itself at the hip with corporate and military power,” where the “faculty were becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force.” (Quoted in Hedges, 91) There was/is real fear and intimidation, and the corporatization of academia, while not complete, progresses steadily, with few pockets of effective resistance or oases of academic tranquility.
The haunting fear of the Auschwitz-era generation is we would forget the hard lessons, the unspeakable horrors, the wholesale slaughter, the soul-shocking assault on the human spirit, the decoupling of humanity. And that we would permit the conditions that led to such abomination to arise again.
Hedges (and before him, Theodor Adorno, as Hedges mentions) is (would be, in Adorno’s case) terrified by the “moral nihilism embraced by elite universities.” Adorno, the author of “Education After Auschwitz,” knew, Hedges says “that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed, and confused population, a system of propaganda and mass media that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment, and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hypermasculinity” (91)
For years, scholars and theologians shook their heads at how, in the heart of a German culture that had produced so many great minds, so many great philosophers, a place that was part and parcel of Western Civilization, how, how, could such a thing as Nazi Germany come into being?
The answer to that is direct (punishment of Germany after WWI rather than inclusion), and yet also complex (too many to list). But there is also the statement (from a Birmingham jail) of Martin Luther King that explains much: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Pastor Martin Niemoller, after being freed from a Nazi prison as the evil regime was being defeated, spent the rest of his life trying to tell a similar story. A story of how he and all Germans were culpable for the rise of the Nazi regime. He gave this speech in many variations, but he, like Adorno, felt desperate that we must infuse this lesson into the human condition. A lesson of danger of not just dismissing political and economic candidates and leaders as “crackpots,” but the price of stifling dissent, of first dismissing, then disappearing, the different and the ideas they hold.
“In Nazi Germany, when they came for the homosexuals, I remained silent; I was not a homosexual.
“When they came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist.
“When they came for the social democrats, I said nothing; I was not a social democrat.
“When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak up, for I was not a union member.
“When they came for the Jews, I did not protest; I was not a Jew.
“When they came for the Catholics, I did not speak out because I was a Protestant.
“Then one day they came for me. And there was no one left to speak up for me.”
Niemoller’s words are bitingly relevant, because he spent decades being, in his words, an “ultra-conservative” who was glad some of those “troublemakers” were being gotten out of the way.
Pay thee, pay thee, heed, America. A steep, steep price is paid in believing—foolishly, ignorantly, and arrogantly—that history is “not important.”
Deresiewicz read Nock? He undoubtedly modeled his piece on it (standing on the shoulders of giants, and other Newtonian utterances, lol).
Great Guns of August, my windbaggery has returned. All this holding forth, and I haven’t even moved off us off page 91! :)
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