Two Questions About Politics

1. What are they saying?

The public face of politics is its rhetorical message, and this message must be understood to understand politics. Political rhetoric is a sophisticated and asymmetrical genre. Like fiction, writing politic rhetoric involves highly specialized skills, while the reading of politics must be generalized as widely as possible. Sloganeering is not just a matter of “empty” rhetoric, it is a matter of basic literacy. So while political writers gear their message to engage the widest audience possible, they will only reach as far as is expedient. If you can’t understand a slogan, you will be written off as a conscious political subject.

But in America, Tocqueville’s land of lawyers, you have to understand whole speeches.
Four-score and seven years ago. . . is part of the basic literacy of American politics. The first question about politics, then, is the same as the first question about poetry: What are the words on the page?

2. Why are they saying what they are saying?

No self-respecting politician or poet would stop with the words on the page, of course. Politicians and other sophisticated readers of politics are not offended by slogans. Sloganeering is a sin only to politically naïve intellectuals. Naïve intellectuals are good at figuring out what politicians are saying, the rhetorical message, but, stopping there, they can only take offense at being treated like the naïve readers of the hoi polloi. The hoi polloi, for their part, get what they need from a slogan: A sense of what their vote is worth this year. A politician also does not mind a slogan, because she will read a slogan the way she reads the whole world. Politicians read the world for clues that betray ulterior motives, and no clue can be so thoroughly written so as to speak only for itself. The most honest, carefully-conceived political speech helps comprise the same field of data as alliterative lies shouted through a bullhorn.

Sophisticated readers of poetry may pick up poems like jewels, cut and finished objects. Readers of politics observe objects in motion, infer tactics and teleology from distance over time, hearing what is said in what is done, and what is done when it is said. Politicians read a protean intertext of objects and actions, and this is the ultimate source of our distrust for them. To read politics in this way is to admit that nothing is finished, nothing is true for everyone, and there is a struggle that has not yet been won. And yet political rhetoric, idiotic slogans and inaugurals alike, always has all the answers. A speech tries to drop like a diamond, a piece of partisan poetry, but even the naïve sense that the sophisticated do not believe in giving away diamonds. No, it’s still bread and circuses. We may be entertained or we may be offended, but we know that politicians don’t spend all of their time tossing pumpernickel through a burning hoop.

If we don’t ask why political rhetoric says what it is saying, we are audience members wondering at the skills of an acrobat. When we begin to read words as moves and moves as purposes, we can no longer be audience to the show. When we read words as moves, we must change to an entirely different metaphor. We must leave the circus tent for the battlefield, a place of terrain and tactics and a place where you can still lose the war. It turns out that one of the jobs of politicians is to establish solid ground for their constituents, a place for them to live as though the battle has been won and to believe that certain things are certain enough to count on.

Political literacy leads to political discontent, now as ever. It is not encouraged in schools, because it rarely transcends the carefully amassed discourse of either rightwing or leftwing politics. Politically sophisticated reading is not ideological, because ideology is what we extract when we ask our first question, What are they saying? When we ask the second question—Why are they saying it?—we find that they are not speaking for this moment alone. We find that the jewels they drop before us have no substance, but are instead movements in a long and deadly game. Discontent follows when political rhetoric no longer answers all of the questions we ask it.

And yet knowledge is power, and it is better to know you ride a plank in the flood than to think you live on dry land. The politically sophisticated reader must give up the consolation of the gods in order to read the intentions of the king. Such is the power and risk of democracy: To know that the king is human and not the voice of god, and to feel the weight of the world that you have allowed the king to carry.

Mixed Metaphor

Hone your skills to the finest point

Because the highest peak has the widest base

Suffer no clowns in your own joint

Because the darkest heart has the brightest face.

Those that know their role

Should slow their roll and mind the pace

If there’s no crime in what you stole

There’s no timing in the race.

Know the presence of a king

But let none stand in your place

Throw your hopes into the ring

And never fear disgrace.

Show your true colors

When mired in dire straights

Flow like soul hot-buttered

and always raise the stakes.

Close no open-hearted

And admire no broken fakes

Finish what you started

and give just what you take.

--Mr S.

Theory and Practice One

Even in education, theory loses out to practice. Sounds great in theory, we say, but it’s just not practical. Anti-intellectualism comes at a price, however, when theory is such a debased tender. We find ourselves leaping from practice to practice in a frantic effort to raise test scores, dragging theory along with us like a campaign banner. No wonder that after thirty years of this jumping and flapping teachers come to regard educational theory as nothing more than the opposite of anything practical. Theory becomes, as it were, that which can never be put into practice.

Theories—even bad ones—are worth indulging. Theories are all we have to prove that we are doing what we do in education on purpose. Before we worry about good theories and bad, we should be sure that we have any theory at all. The absence of a theory is the absence of purpose. Try to define practice without purpose and you will discover why the word theory is still around, despite how impractical we know it to be.

Who’s Taking Care of the Parents?

It is the great fantasy of education that if we can reach children we can change the world. While it is true that when children change the world changes, it is not true that education alone can change children. Not the kind of education we’re dealing with, anyway—public education, national education. Not with our technocratic grasping, reaching for children at younger and younger ages: kindergarten, Pre-K, preschool, daycare. And yet we cherish the hope that our fantasy may yet prove true, that we may yet discover the formula for fixing kids and saving the world. But somewhere between here and prenatal instruction, we will come face to face with the very entities that make our hope a fantasy: the parents. It occurs to me that we have, perhaps, done all we can to catch the kids before their parents mess them up. Perhaps it’s time to deal with the parents.

Many teachers would say that they’ve been saying this very thing for years, though they have done nothing of the sort. What many teachers have done, rather, is complain about the parents of their students and blame them for what teachers cannot handle themselves. Teachers, like everyone else, believe in the holy trinity of education: teacher, student and parent. It is upon these three mighty pillars that we rest all of our work, our talk and our hope. Maybe it’s time to notice that our three mighty pillars are built on the outskirts of town, across the tracks, inches from the gutter. What happens out here is between teachers, students and parents.

Let me be the first teacher to climb down off the platform and take the crowd back downtown. What on earth do teachers have to do with the parents of their students? Even the most involved parents spend much less time around teachers than they do around other adults. Let’s not forget that the parents of our students, by definition, are working with ya’ll all day long. You, the other adults of America, you, who have so generously allowed us to go about our business out here by the tracks, you are directly responsible for the parents of our students. When our students get home, they get home to parents who spent their whole day with you.

Is it fair to blame noncombatants for the mistakes of the parents of our students? Aren’t parents responsible for their own behavior and its effects on their own children? Maybe they are. But are they responsible to come home and tell their kids that what happened today didn’t happen? If they have been disrespected by another adult, is it their responsibility ignore the slight for the sake of their children? Maybe they are. But all this talk of responsibility sounds a long way from talking about how to take care of children. What if, to take care of our children, we had to take care of their parents—man to man, woman to woman, adult to adult? Would we accept that as our new responsibility? Or do we enjoy too much the freedom of not having to care about how other people’s children turn out?

Maybe part of adulthood is not having to care about everyone. It is certainly what makes teachers such odd kinds of adults: we have to care about how everyone turns out, or at least everyone in our class. And after a few years and enough classes, we know that anyone could show up in our class, so we might as well try to figure out how to take care of everyone. It may be a fantasy, but it’s all we’ve got until we get a little help from civilians. Not in the classroom, not as parents of our students. We need a little help from the civilians who are either involved with or avoiding our students’ parents. We could change the world faster if we didn’t have to wait for these kids to grow up.

To paraphrase Andre Benjamin, go and marinate on that for a minute. There’ll be more on this.

Will Mr. Stickfigure Ever Wake Up?

I am so used to being mistaken for an idealist that I often forget to be insulted. Idealism is an accusation, a charge of infantilism leveled by self-appointed realists. Accordingly, reality is that which reduces an ideal to mere illusion. Idealistic children are often told by realistic adults that they will find out, one day, how it works in the real world. Idealistic adults, it follows, have it worse—grown people who still harbor childish hopes.

As children, idealists are irked by the flat promise of a practical fate. Still, we learn to bite our tongues in the presence our pragmatic elders, knowing that we still have more imagination than experience. Quietly, we set our will against the impending doom of the so-called real world. Quietly, we promise that our own experience will prove our dreams and defend our ideals against the onslaught of the future.

Realistic adults do not mean to be such ghouls of fate. Their hearts are attuned to the idealist’s looming disappointment. At worst, they are frustrated by our unwillingness to accept their hard-earned experience as an antidote to our easy faith. Generally, they see themselves as doing a dirty job that must be done. Better to talk someone out of a dream than for experience to crush it without explanation. And, as irksome as they are, these realistic adults are not wrong.

Children who wish to carry idealism into adulthood must come to grips with reality. Reality, in turn, grips back, crushing childish ideals, leaving behind the next generation of realists. Most of us find it easier to submit our imagination to reality than to infuse our experience with dreams. Slowly, the only remaining idealists are children again.

When I started teaching, I felt like a child all over. Veterans told me that I was idealistic and that I would come to learn the reality of teaching. They were not wrong. I have learned enough to know that mere childish idealism does not survive in a ghetto school. Three years. Three years is all a mere idealist can stand. But here I am at seven years, so what I tell you is not hope or conjecture, it is scarred in blood and bone.

Only my best, worthiest ideals have survived. Only the dreams that were never dreams. I hoped, when I began, that all children could be taught, and that I could be happy teaching them. I hoped that the study of language would prove infinitely deep, deep enough for us all to sink into, deep enough for us all to search out the secret currents of love and power. I hoped that everyone was the same as I was as a child—deep thoughts, native action, pure energy. Seven years have tested these hopes and found them strong. These ideals are my surest reality, proven by the very force that was supposed to dispel them—the real world. So if you are still waiting for Mr. Stickfigure to wake up, you have forgotten that he was never sleeping.

Nor does he disrespect his elders. The realistic veterans who told him he was too idealistic were not wrong. Mr. Stickfigure has watched the city deny his ideals for seven years. Seven years witnessing relentless disrespect leveled against his children, their parents and their communities. Seven years of scraps thrown to the ghetto, so that classrooms become like the city itself—block by block—good teacher by bad teacher. Good parent by bad parent. Good people by bad people. Seven years watching people pretend that a few inspiring teachers could ever account for a system and institution in disarray and millions of hearts in the wrong place.

Mr. Stickfigure is here to report that your own kids are being miseducated. Whoever you are, they are your own kids. No, they are you, yourself. They are only ever doing what you would do, or what you could understand doing if you cared to know. That’s the truth, and it cannot be denied due to a lack of experience. But the reality is also a chilling kind of anti-ideal; it is the inextricable assertion that some kids are different enough that they need only be fed scraps. As though if we found a reason for their miseducation, such a reason could excuse it.

What happens in a ghetto school is that people forget who the adults are and what they are supposed to do. This is true both in the school and in the minds of Americans when we think of such a school. What we all forget when we think of ghetto schools is the prime directive of adulthood: “Because I said so.” We forget that the absolute line between adults and children, the boundary that allows us to fall back on our authority as experienced persons, the trump card of the realist, this line cuts both ways. It reflects the ultimate responsibility back on adults, the responsibility of knowing what’s best for our children. Because we said so means that we must take care of those we speak to. We abdicate our authority as adults when we explain our students’ failure as if it were theirs alone.

And yet explaining failure is one of the duties of the realist. With the same voice, we explain the failure of our kids and excuse ourselves from it. We allow the reality of failure to pollute the reality of perfect equality, making of equality an ideal suitable only for children. We count ourselves mature by virtue of pessimism, but relinquish the actual responsibility of adulthood when it comes to our schools. Our realism has become its own reality, not by virtue of being true, but by virtue of having consequences.

The reality of a ghetto school is the reality of lies and appeasement. We lie about the purity of the children we are crushing or allowing to be crushed. We lie in order to appease our adult souls with logic and explanations, excuses for the evidence of our eyes. Mr. Stickfigure has spent seven years in a cyclone of excuses, at ground zero, where the storm touches down and shows just how much damage a bunch of hot air can do. The only reality that has withstood his experience is this: Children want to learn, and they’re just like you. The rest has been the default reality of excuses, lies told loud enough to slander hope and justice, making them mere ideals.

It is in the definition of an ideal that there is really no such thing. But we apply this definition sloppily, politically and selfishly. To call something an ideal is to banish it from reality. To call something an ideal is to prophesize its doom. To call someone an idealist is to dismiss them like a child. So if Mr. Stickfigure sounds idealistic, that’s just how he sounds. This is a grown-up you’re talking to, and as real as it gets.