Entries from September 2005 ↓

A former engineering student has written a really funny article speculating on why college students are leaving engineering programs in droves.

The United States contains a finite number of smart people, most of whom have options in life besides engineering. You will not produce thronging bevies of pocket-protector-wearing number-jockeys simply by handing out spiffy Space Shuttle patches at the local Science Fair. If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America’s engineering programs to retain students like, well, me: people smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the engineering apple, but turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching.

Frankly, I’m surprised I made it through my computer science coursework without (a) throwing myself off a bridge, (b) going stark-raving mad, or (c) fleeing to the calm reassuring solace of the English department. For, unlike the author of that piece, I have absolutely no aptitude with numbers.

I remember the first equation I was confronted with: it was a two and two, with a sort of cross between them and two parallel lines after, followed by a question mark. It was on the blackboard.

My teacher was staring at me, expectantly. I looked at her, looked at the thing on the board, and said: “Forty Two?”

“No,” said my teacher, giving me the smile that doctors in white coats give to people whose forebrains they’ve just removed.

“Did you just say two plus two is forty-two?” whispered Jackhammer from the desk behind mine. Jackhammer was the bully the school had assigned me when I matriculated.

I was sweating. I said: “Could you rephrase the question?”

The teacher thought. “I don’t think so, no.”

“Could you phrase it in the form of an answer?”

Jackhammer tapped his pen idly on the back of my chair, whispering dark promises. I wondered what shallow body of water he’d be plunging my head into after class. I imagined it would be brackish and un-transparent, and thought that maybe, just maybe, if I answered this question correctly, he’d have mercy, because all bullies have a large and undying respect for mathematical proficiency.

“Well,” I said. “Let’s break this down. You have a two, and then you have another two. You have two twos.”

A pause. “Yes. That’s correct.”

“They’re obviously pretty close. I mean, they look the same, they act the same, they represent the same number of objects. They are, essentially, identical.”

My teacher sighed. “The answer is the same as four plus zero.”

“So you have two identical objects, both expression of the same Platonic form, if you will. Physical manifestations of a divine and unchanging absolute. They are the same thing. And when you put two of the same thing together, you get the same thing. The answer, therefore, is two.”

A silence, marked by scattered chuckles. The teacher looked at me. She said: “The answer is four.”

“Lies!” I said, bolting from my seat. “Lies and vile calumny!”

So you can imagine my horror when I walked into my first Calculus class, in college, and the professor, a small figure at the bottom of a great amphitheater, began to scrawl a series of cramped greek characters on the board, with accompanying graphs that featured curved lines that sloped toward, but never quite touched, the x axis. I was given to understand that the the area under these lines was very important, though I couldn’t for the life of me imagine why. I wrote down everything he wrote down, and listened to everything he said, then went back to my dorm room and extracted a ceremonial blade and sat in the lotus position and was on the point of committing ritual seppuku when my eye fell on one of the books for my next class. It was a something called Ridley Walker, by someone named Russell Hoban. The cover looked interesting, and, deciding to judge the book by it, I put down the sword and turned to the first page, which read:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly been the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint lookin to see none agen. He didnt make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly.

I was captivated. I turned to the next page, and then the next. I went to class, and listened to my teacher talk about it, and the more she talked, the more I liked. I felt comfortable, suddenly. At home.

The next day, I went back to calculus. There were more graphs on the board now, great spidery criss-cross things with shaded areas and long equations that would haunt my nightmares that night and every night thereafter, unfolding like monsters and striking me down with the sheer power of their malign inscrutability.

But I had Ridley Walker, now, and all the books that came after it, so I survived. That’s the thing with great hardship; it doesn’t necessarily kill you, and it doesn’t necessarily make you stronger, but it does help you figure out what you love.

Speaking of corrections … I think the conclusions I came to in my last post, on Sullivan’s reasons for instinctively shitting upon this weekend’s anti-war rally, may have been a little hasty. He could have been reacting to one of the event’s main organizers, a far-left group called Inernational ANSWER, whose coordinator once had nice things to say about Iraq’s “long, proud tradition of anti-colonial resistance.” According to Salon, their loopy intransigence led to some potentially rally-shattering decisions:

Then there was ANSWER’s rejection of message control — its leadership demanded that each of its component organizations be allowed to protest issues besides the war. Starting at 9 a.m., therefore, the Palestinian boosters took over Farragut Square with their own signs and chants, while bands of anarchists, affordable housing advocates, and Hugo Chavez supporters staked out intersections around D.C.’s downtown.

There was this, too:

In the frequently carnivalesque march that looped around the White House and downtown, one could spot just about any slogan imaginable, from the 9/11 conspiracy theorists to the simply unintelligible: Riding a green ladies’ bicycle, a white-bearded hippie sanctimoniously coasted past a line of stationary D.C. cops, holding aloft a poorly lettered sign reading “WHY? Motherfucker$.” Four of D.C.’s finest double over laughing in his wake. “The city prefers the officers to keep a straight face,” their sergeant said. “Sometimes that’s hard.”

The event was a success anyway, but all of this does point up one thing the Republicans have that we don’t: message discipline. It’s fraying a little now, because the message has become so ludicrously indefensible, not to mention batshit crazy, but there’s still a remarkable amount of coordination in effect not just in the halls of Republican power but outside of them, throughout the conservative media/blogosphere. We need some of that.

In the course of belittling this weekend’s anti-war rally in DC, Andrew Sullivan makes outrageous allegations about the size of the crowd, and then, quickly, corrects. Sullivan is a proto-conservative, and so his views are largely antithetical to mine, but he’s also one of my favorite bloggers, because he writes well and seems to build his opinions out of actual facts and a careful, reasoned sort of morality. So what’s with the kneejerk reaction to the march? He supported the war at the outset, but soon grew disenchanted with the way it was executed and has become, to my mind, one of its most vociferous and effective critics. He probably doesn’t agree with the political views of most of the march’s participants, but he must agree, to some extent, with their reason for being there.

I think there are two things going on here: one, the protesters arrived at their opposition from completely different avenues than he did, paths that Sullivan likely abhors; second, I think conservatives just dislike big marches like this, on principle. By and large, people don’t mass spontaneously in support of Republican priorities: you’ll never see huge crowds getting together in front of cameras to support a massive tax cut for the very rich, or an environmentally disastrous repeal of mercury standards, or a prescription drug bill that forbids the government from bargaining for better prices, or an initiative to eliminate personal bankruptcy. The rallies that live on in our minds were pro-worker, pro-civil rights, anti-Vietnam (Johnson was the prime malefactor in the Vietnam war, of course, but I’d argue that his actions with regard to that war were largely anti-Democratic).

Large bodies of citizenry massed in one placed must scare the shit out the jackals who run this administration, in particular, because most of their policies do not bear scrutiny. They are conceived and fostered in the shadows, where their details and their implications are hard to see, unless you look very hard. BushCo relies on people not looking too hard, and a good deal of its political machinery is devoted to distracting its audience with props and platitudes and huge, sunny lies that are repeated so often and so ubiquitously that they become a kind of folk truth.

Rallies like this, then, tens of thousands of people in protest motley marching on the Whitehouse, drawing attention to the lies that got us into this war, the criminal incompetence that’s sinking us into is muck, shine an unwelcome light on what is arguably this administration’s greatest policy failure. But it’s just one failure of many; and if this domino falls, all of the others — the fiscal mismanagement, the rampant cronyism, the entrenched corruption, the pervasive kowtowing to the priorities of big business — will fall too, and this administration will be exposed for the unnatural disaster that it is.

Last week, I went down to my local donor center to give blood. When I walked in, two of the clinicians, a man and a woman, were arguing over which of them was faster at doing donor interviews. The woman was especially vehement. “You think you can beat me?” she said, finally. “Prove it!” She scurried over to the one of the interview rooms and banged on the door until it opened and a third clinician peered out. “Move,” said the woman. “Jerry’s taking over.”

Clinician #3 came out (smiling), Jerry went in, the door closed. “I’m even giving you a head start,” bellowed the woman, then turned to the assembled donors. “Ok! Number 46! Let’s go! LET’S GO!”

Please don’t let me be 46, I thought. Please please. Not 46. Please. I looked down at my number, which was 46. I looked up. The woman was glaring at me. I rose. She pointed at an open interview room and said: “Go! In! Now!“

I went in, and sat down. There was a great wind, and a blur, and the woman was sitting beside me, pulling out the donor questionnaire, a series of deeply personal questions about your sex life, your medical history, your past experience with drugs, your current health, etc. It is generally administered with the utmost sensitivity and discretion.

“Haveyoueverhadsexwithaman?” shouted the woman, her lips moving so fast that the question disappeared behind a little sonic boom.

I paused, trying to decipher. Couldn’t. “Excuse me?”

“Haveyoueversharedaneedlewithamadcow?” she said, putting a little tic in the first question’s “yes” column. She was going too fast, burning consonants like rubber. My mind couldn’t process it.

“What?”

She marked the “no” column, and said: “Haveyoueverusedebolacologne?”

“I’m sorry … I can’t understand …”

She marked the next twelve questions yes, then grabbed my arm and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around it and started pumping. She asked another question; something about badgers, maybe. Whether I’d ever snorted any powdered badgers, is what I heard. I said no.

She marked the question yes, continuing to inflate. I watched my upper arm bend inward like an hourglass. She asked me a question that sounded like have you ever had a threesome with any transsexual sumerian window washers. My upper arm had shrunk to the radius of a capillary tube. I let out a little gasp of pain. She marked the yes column.

Finally, she released the pressure, and jammed a thermometer in my mouth and asked whether I’d ever eaten monkey testicles. “Please,” I said, my words muffled by the thermometer and the pain emanating from my reinflating arm. “Let me go.” She marked the yes column, yanked out the thermometer, threw it over her shoulder, and took out the tiny needle they use to draw blood for the anemia test. She grabbed my hand, and twisted it around, and stabbed me.

I screamed. A geyser of blood rose out of my palm; she darted a cup under the plume and dumped it into the test solution, then marked me passed without waiting for the result.

There were about fifty question left. She glanced at the page, made an impatient sound, then showed it to me. “Have you done any of these?” she said.

I looked helplessly at the tiny print. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I …”

“Good.” She marked the rest of them no, then stood up, grabbed me by my misshapen bleeding arm and slung me out of the room, then followed, hands extended to the ceiling, head thrown back in triumph. “That’s RIGHT!” she yelled, turning toward the still-closed door of the other interview room. “Nobody’s faster than me! You got that Jimmy? Nobody!“

There was a smattering of applause from some of the other whitecoats.

I dragged myself to the nearest chair and sat down, tore off a piece of my shirt and began to fashion a tourniquet for my hemorrhaging palm. I was almost done when she came up to me and dropped a plastic bladder in my lap, for the actual donation of whatever blood I had left, along with a pamphlet detailing the center’s exhaustive safety procedures. “Thankyouandhaveaniceday,” she said, and spun toward the interview area and shouted: “DOUBLE OR NOTHING, BABY!” Then turned back. “NEXT!”

The man beside me, a large rugby-player-looking guy with cannonball muscles and an anvil head, stood up, dropped his number in my lap, and ran.

I sat staring at the little card. It said number 47. I was too weak from loss of blood to move or protest. I looked up. The woman was staring at me. “WELL?”

I whimpered.

We were standing in line at a ticket counter at Bushkill Falls, in the Poconos, surrounded by people from New Jersey, a few of whom fit the New Jersey Person stereotype perfectly: they were big and loud and florid and mulleted and when they spoke it sounded like a small bullhorn factory exploding. Their accents were broad and rotund, and they swung them at the language like mallets, flattening helpless sounds into something new and strange, something unnaturally concave, and doing it incredibly loudly. We felt like a bunch of mimes trapped in a room full of partially deaf drill seargents.

The guy in front of us was carrying on an ear-splitting conversation with some poor kid in the ticket booth. As far as I could tell, he was trying to figure out why the trail maps cost $2. It went something like this:

New Jersey Guy: BUT WHY DO I HAVE TO PAY TWO BUCKS FOR THIS MAP? I ALREADY PAID FIFTEEN BUCKS TO GET IN HERE.

Beleaguered Ticket Guy: You don’t have to pay for …

NJG: I MEAN IT’S JUST A BUNCH OF SQUIGGLY LINES ON A PIECE OF PAPER. IT’S NOT LIKE WE’RE BUYING THE GODDAM MONA LISA.

BTG: You don’t have to buy it, sir. You can have this map instead. It’s free.

NJG: FREE? (pause) WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT?

BTG: Nothing, sir. It just doesn’t have the Adventure Trail marked on it.

NJG: (pause) SO I’M NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE ADVENTURE TRAIL?

BTG: You didn’t sign up for that tour sir.

NJG: I DON’T WANT TO TAKE THE TOUR, I JUST WANT TO LOOK AT THE ROUTE. IS THAT OK WITH YOU? IS THAT A PROBLEM?

BTG: (pause) Here.

NJG: WHAT’S THIS?

BTG: It’s the map you were asking for, sir.

NJG: I TOLD YOU I’M NOT PAYING TWO BUCKS FOR AN EXTRA LINE ON MY MAP.

BTG: It’s on the house sir.

NJG: (pause) WHY? WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT?

And the really outstanding thing about this exchange was the total lack of acrimony. The guy didn’t seem aggrieved or angry or anything; he was just having a chat.

By the time we got up there, the ticket guy looked dazed. He cringed when we handed over our money, then cringed when we thanked him, as quietly as we could. As we walked away, we heard someone asking why the bobble-head bears in the gift shop cost twelve bucks when you could get exactly the same bobble-head bears down the shore for ten. Ten! He was asking it very, very loudly.

For just the briefest instant, there, I thought that Bush and his pack of viles were on the verge of actually owning up to a mistake. Before he went on his show-tour of New Orleans, the man Himself said that the results of the relief effort were “not acceptable.” He didn’t attribute the unacceptableness to anyone, but it seemed to me that this might, just might, be a prelude to some sort of watered-down pseudo-mea-culpa, along with a promise to make things right for the future.

Well … no.

Bush, who has been criticized, even by supporters, for the delayed response to the disaster, used his weekly radio address to put responsibility for the failure on lower levels of government. The magnitude of the crisis “has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities,” he said. “The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable.”

Truman had a little sign on his desk proclaiming that the buck stopped with him. I think it’s safe to say that Bush has nothing like that on his (dusty, disused) desk. There are no buck-stops in the oval office. Any bucks caught within five miles of the White House are shot on sight. The White House is a Buck Free Zone.

Yesterday I heard Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff saying that here were actually two catastrophes in New Orleans this week: first Hurricane Katrina, and then the breach in the levees that allowed Lake Pontchartrain to flow into the debilitated city, and drown it.

At the time, this struck me as kind of an odd thing to say. I mean, yes, technically, the hurricane and the various nasty things caused by the hurricane are separate things, but that’s kind of like saying that being caught out in the rain and getting wet are distinct and unrelated phenomena.

But now, after reading statements by various Bush Administration officials tying themselves into rhetorical pretzels to escape blame for the horror that New Orleans has become, it all makes perfect sense. Because here’s the thing: they planned for the hurricane, they were perfectly prepared for a hurricane, but this levee thing — my God, no one could have seen that coming! How were we to know!

We know that the Bushies don’t live in the reality-based community, so this formulation probably makes perfect sense to everyone caught inside the White House’s Happy Fantasy Bubble, but, really, it’s absolutely ridiculous. Quite apart from the fact that the various governments had two days warning about Katrina, this exact scenario has been discussed and dissected ad nauseam from pretty much the moment New Orleans was established in its sinking bowl. This wasn’t ignorance; this was negligence, or carelessness, or incompetence, or all three wrapped up together.

There are probably a lot of reasons for the scale of this failure, from the slow degradation of FEMA during Bush’s tenure to the resources being drained by the Iraq war to last year’s inexplicable decision to deny New Orleans the funds necessary to shore up its levees, but what it comes down to is this: we are watching a profound failure of governance, at every level. It’s a national tragedy.

Hunter says it best:

We have witnessed two disasters this week. The first was an act of nature. The second was not. The second disaster, still ongoing, is unforgivable.

That’s the only word that comes to mind, a word I keep repeating to myself. These deaths, these men, these women, these infants dying now in these hours didn’t have to happen. They did not have to die waiting for convoys to gather outside their city or for reservists to stand alongside their shattered police forces. They did not have to wait in darkness and fear for help to arrive, only to struggle for days without that help ever coming.

This is not politics. This is not partisanship.

This is unforgivable.

So, yes, there are two catastrophes here: Katrina, and our federal government’s breathtaking incompetence in the face of Katrina. Chertoff got it half-right; which, for this administration, isn’t bad at all.

My Muse has fallen silent. She’s never really had much to say to me, but lately I’m getting nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Which is, I think, extremely ungrateful, given the fact that I not only let her live in my head, but also feast on a veritable treasure trove of repressed subconscious angst. And besides … just look at her. She’s a vaguely humanoid reptilian gecko creature with four heads and a big thwapping tail with spikes lining the sides. She has breasts, lots of them, but they’re in all the wrong places. Three of her heads are smoking a cigarette at all times, and the fourth is usually drinking a scotch on the rocks. Very occasionally, the scotch head puts its glass down, belches, looks around for another drink and, if it can’t find one, leans down and whispers something in my ear. A snatch of prose, maybe, or a skeletal description of a character. Or maybe just a bit of dialog. And then she turns to another one of the heads and starts screaming at it to help her look for some more fucking booze.

This is what I have to work with. It’s tragic.

And it’s getting worse. For the past month, she hasn’t said a word to me. She sits there flipping through fashion magazines and eating twinkies and watching the Home Shopping Network. Sometimes the heads have spitting competitions. Sometimes they try to gnaw each others’ ears off. She’s just a terrible tenant.

This morning I sat at Starbucks staring at the trainwreck of the story I’ve been flailing at for the past month, beseeching her for something, anything. She ignored me, pretty much, though sometimes I’d get a flat stare, or a nasty little chortle.

This morning I decided to abandon the story. It’s going nowhere, and it’s going there slowly. Writing a story without Muse Juice is like driving a car without gas. You don’t drive it, you push it, which means you can’t steer it at the same time, you can’t get on highways, you can’t get anywhere fast, and, most likely, you can’t get anywhere at all.

So maybe I’ll start something else, though I don’t for the life of me know what. There’s nothing in the tank. I look inward, and all I see is the drunk head chugging Old Milwaukee through a bong while the smoking heads cheer her on.

Maybe she’s waiting for some sort of a sacrifice. Maybe she wants me to quit my day job and hole up in a filthy apartment and starve for a couple of years. Maybe she wants me to start writing romance novels, or midget erotica, or cookbooks for epicurean cannibals. Maybe she wants to join a masochist bat cult, or schedule a series of barium enemas, or transcribe the entire text of War and Peace backwards.

I don’t know what she wants. She won’t tell me.

Goddam muses.