University Diaries

The Catharctic Half-Light -- Norman Maclean, Part Two

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:17:45 GMT

Norman Maclean, an Aristotelian, learned deeply what Aristotle taught: tragic art is cathartic. Toward the end of his life, he wrote a small American tragedy, A River Runs Through It, and in writing it released himself from decades of grief and confusion over his murdered brother.

UD finds it strange and moving that Maclean's creative life, at the end of his long teaching life, turned into an embodiment of theories he'd spent years conveying rather than embodying. Few literary scholars have the luck to accomplish their own aesthetic expression of the aesthetics they've studied and taught -- an aesthetic expression, in Maclean's case, that became a powerful story and film.

Those who can't do, teach. In the case of Maclean, he taught and got it done, for himself and for the readers of his story.

He did what people who've elaborated on Aristotle's argument -- Edmund Wilson, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes -- say artists do: He took a wound and lent it symbolic dignity and in this way healed himself.

Here's how Hughes puts it, in a letter:

[All art] is an attempt by someone unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi… In other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session. [Poetry is] nothing more than a facility… for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction… [T]he physical body, so to speak, of poetry is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Aristotle says we emerge from our catharsis at the spectacle of tragic drama reconciled anew to the conditions of our existence; the drama offers an aestheticized but true and tolerable (few can take this knowledge on directly) engagement in the suffering realities of human lives. Ted Hughes, carrying his own notorious wound, also talks of reconciliation. The creation and reception of art is a way to go on living.

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Start at the very end of River, the passage in which an elderly Maclean goes fishing in the Blackfoot by himself:

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Maclean the poet has, in the prose that precedes this, already played each of these figurative lines out skillfully, so that by the time the reader arrives at this conclusion, she feels consciousness as a force electrically charged with meaning: Not until the cool of the evening -- the end of life -- can we begin to sense what our life has been; even then, our understanding is always partial, half-light. We can put ourselves in the way of cathartic insight only when we reduce ourselves, when we subdue our egotism and become receptive to a reality that transcends us. "All existence fades to a being with my soul and memories..."

It sounds, at first blush, madly narcissistic - to imagine that all existence is nothing but oneself. But in fact this is a merging with the world that - in language that also sounds narcissistic - allows one, as Kierkegaard wrote, to "become important with [one's] despair."

The whole age can be divided into those who write and those who do not write. Those who write represent despair, and those who read disapprove of it and believe that they have a superior wisdom - and yet if they were able to write, they would write the same thing. Basically they are all equally despairing, but when one does not have the opportunity to become important with his despair, then it is hardly worth the trouble to despair and show it.

Writing your life, finding a way to evince and aestheticize your despair, doesn't rid you of despair the way a pill rids you of a headache, but it does free you from the pain of its seeming contingency -- the possibility that it's all been meaningless suffering and loss. To become important with your despair means both to give it the specific shape it has by virtue of having emerged out of your life and no other, and to sense the way your despair flows naturally out of the history of human despair -- how it is finally indistinguishable from Aristotle's tragic plot.

So again - "the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River" - are the soundings from the depth of existence, from the antediluvian world, that the artist's hyperattentive ear receives. (Clever Charles Wright calls this, in his poem Disjecta Membra, "a music my ear would be heir to.") A "four-count rhythm" -- the way Maclean's father said you should cast for fish -- assumes this late in the story a meaning having to do with the life well-lived, lived in accordance with the rhythms of nature. The "hope that a fish will rise" is the definitive, profoundest hope of A River Runs Through It -- that we will have the power not merely to catch the underlying truths of our lives, but that we will be subtle and persistent enough to wrestle them free of their murkiness and consider them in evening's half-light.

More details from River in my next post.

A BLOGGER RUNS THROUGH IT - Part One

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:53:24 GMT

UD has stepped in the same river twice, and reread, after twenty years, Norman Maclean's story, A River Runs Through It. She hasn't seen the film again, but she remembers admiring it.

Maclean was an English professor at the University of Chicago when UD was a graduate student there. He must have been retired, or almost retired.

Not that UD would have taken a course with this mountain man from the Big Sky. She was appalled enough when Wayne Booth assigned as the first reading in one of his Chicago seminars the novel Ceremony in Lone Tree, an unceremonial paean to the great western emptiness.

UD had come to the U of C from the urban east; once in Hyde Park, she encountered professors like Booth and Maclean, who'd come from the other direction, places like Utah and Montana, trailing missionary mothers and preacher fathers.

What UD was used to, what UD liked, was a professor like Erich Heller, with whom she'd studied as an undergraduate. A refugee from Prague, Heller specialized in European high modernism and its antecedents: Kafka, Rilke, Goethe, Kleist. She liked Heller's heavy accent. She liked his weltschmerz. Booth and Maclean were slaphappy, with broad vowels.

Snugly - smugly - fitted to the confines of Gregor Samsa's room, UD had no idea what do with the wide open literary spaces of Fenimore Cooper and Wright Morris. Most of American literature embarrassed her.

But university education is supposed to broaden us, and UD gradually stretched her mind to accommodate the value of these men and their worldviews.

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Of course once you look with any care at the worldview of a reflective person, someone like Norman Maclean, you discover it's not much different from Heller's. Wading into A River Runs Through It yields the same conviction of the painful enigma of life, a pain lifted from us occasionally through ecstatic moments of clarity that seem, when you look at all of them together late in the day, to disclose our life's otherwise hidden pattern, meaning, and flow.

Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory. In death it had its pattern, and we can only hope for as much.

Maclean's memoir, written when he was in his seventies, enlivens his murdered brother's remains in this way. He comes to know - or at least to evoke with artistic persuasiveness - this enigmatic, self-destructive man, killed in a fight when he was still young.

Maclean does what writers do: He doesn't just look at epiphanic moments with his brother; he renders them. That's what A River Runs Through It is -- a prose seance, a stirring of dead waters. And in rendering his brother, Maclean renders himself: In death it had its pattern, and we can only hope for as much.

Aristotle (Booth and Maclean were Chicago Aristotelians) writes of the superiority of poetic truth to historical truth: "Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular." At the very end of his story, Maclean quotes his father asking him to "make up a story and the people to go with it," for only with an aesthetic rendering "will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

Literary art is an act of meaning-imposition in an enigmatic world. It consists in, as Don DeLillo said of Norman Mailer at Mailer's memorial service, "figuring out the world, sentence by sentence." What we figure out in this way has provisional value; it's not empirical or revealed but poetic truth. But it is our figuring, our own freed-up imaginative and intellectual energies at work. Art concedes the mystery of the world; the artist is someone who listens more carefully than other people to the hints the world drops.
Look at Gary Snyder's poem, Regarding Wave:

The voice of the Dharma
the voice
now

A shimmering bell
through all.

Every hill, still.
Every tree alive. Every leaf.
All the slopes flow.
old woods, new seedlings,
tall grasses plumes.

Dark hollows; peaks of light.
wind stirs the cool side
Each leaf living.
All the hills.

The Voice
is a wife
to

him still.

The artist listens with profound receptivity to the voice of the world. The enduring beauty and originality of Maclean's artistry lies in the particular ways in which he records and seeks to understand that voice.

In Part Two of this post, I'll enter Maclean's text and follow the flow of his style and content.

CLARITY

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:44:18 GMT

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and UD's gazing at twelve white roses in a twelve-cup teapot. That's her foreground. Her background is the Atlantic Ocean. She's on sabbatical from her university and living at the beach, where quiet autumn days and an exhilarating setting create the perfect conditions for thought and for writing.

She gathered the roses last night, from Table 10 at St. John's College's Evening of Appreciation. This is the Great Books St. John's, in Annapolis, and UD was part of the evening because she gave money to the college in memory of her mother, who admired the serious liberal arts curriculum there.

Among the things the college bought with UD's money was a bench in front of the library with UD's mother's name on it. Here UD likes to sit and imagine students lounging, reading out of the same translation of Marcus Aurelius her mother read.

The drive from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chesapeake Bay was rainy, with dark clouds over the narrows and creeks on the way to Annapolis. This was absolutely flat terrain -- soy fields with linear irrigation machines, corn fields done for the season.

Once in Annapolis, we waited in traffic for happy Naval Academy people to leave the stadium where their team just beat SMU.

"With a clear and single purpose." This was the night's theme, the phrase repeated on banners that hung from the ceiling of the softly lit interior, and UD thought of the admirable simplicity, the fidelity to basic intellectual principles, implicit in this college's course offerings... One of her favorite things about the St. John's curriculum, for instance, is the music requirement, in which all students learn notation. So clear and simple a fact, that educated people should know that language. So bold a purpose, more generally, to transmit the ideas and modes of thought actually needful.

The clarity and containment of St. John's attracts UD as much as it attracted her mother, and she's been happy to tread ever closer each year to an actual human acquaintance with it. She and Mr. UD, each clutching a club soda with lime, surveyed the well-dressed, affluent crowd, the numbered tables dressed in coral tablecloths and candles and white roses, and the student jazz trio playing All of Me. UD wasn't a multimillionaire, like some of the people being thanked tonight -- like the young, semi-retired lawyer at her table who spends most of his time reading books at his house in Woodstock -- but even her modest gift clearly meant something to the school, and she was happy to be thanked.

People -- and schools -- that openly ask basic questions about the meaning of life, about virtue, about love, are always being called naive. Old-fashioned. It's so naive to read primary documents about first things and speak to one another in small groups about them. Haven't you read... You can't open your mouth until you've studied... Technology has made obsolete... Aren't you being ethnocentric...

But sometimes, UD thought, you need to go back to first principles. Hell, maybe you've never been to first principles. You need to go there and establish a foundation for thought. The real difference between educated and less educated people is that educated people have learned intellectual discipline. They know that there are better and worse ways of proceeding to frame, think about, and argue any human matter - The question of the existence of God. How best to offer health care to a large population. Under what conditions we should harvest stem cells. Whether poetry should rhyme.

UD's perhaps quirky take on our presidential elections would have it that McCain is unraveling -- losing a focus on his policy philosophy and gaining a desperate casting-about -- while Obama maintains his notorious calm and focus, in part because one of these men took college seriously, and internalized there not only disciplined habits of mind, but arguments in favor of maintaining intellectual and emotional composure through vicissitudes. Obama has maintained a clear and single purpose because he seems to have learned the great lesson great colleges offer: That in to order to train your mind to think seriously and well about the world, you need to clear your thoughts and emotions of their customary vagueness and narcissism, and cut a clear path toward what matters.

On the two-hour trip back to the beach, UD considered, sleepily, the Bay Bridge under a gray shroud at one in the morning. Tomorrow at the ocean would be another clear day.

Third World Corruption as a Behavioral Science, Part 2

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:32:54 GMT

Start here: The more highly corporatized the university, the more corporate in their attitudes the faculty. Especially faculty imports from the corporate world -- people who aren't really professors, but who, usually for reasons of vanity, play them on campus.

I mean, if you want to understand the origin of catastrophes like Emory University's Charles Nemeroff, you need to understand his mental world.

So start here: Start with a recent news story about the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The man who presided over the collapse got five hundred million dollars in compensation while doing so. To be sure, he and his family have suffered like everyone else because of the economic crisis:

'Mr. Fuld was once worth close to $1 billion and now has a net worth estimated at about $100 million. He and his wife have been forced to sell some of their renowned art collection.'

Start there. Start with the understanding that Charles Nemeroff's understanding of his personal value, his social status, comes from Fuld's world. He's not about ... whatever professors are about ... intellectual discovery, pedagogy, communities of scholars...

He's not comparing himself to Freud. He's comparing himself to Fuld.

If one hundred million dollars a year represents your sense of what your compensation should be, and if you find yourself in a university, you're up shit's creek. There's no way, even with a medical professor's salary, you're going to get there.

But you can make a respectable, extra-university ton of money by selling your reputation to drug companies.

Keep front and center the fact that in this sense the university is immensely valuable, even to people like Nemeroff, for whom the shabby, earnest ethos of the institution is a joke and a personal insult. To play the professor is to play the man with integrity, the man who has eschewed the corporate world because he's above single-minded profit-taking. He's motivated by science and altruism.

And it is precisely everyone's appraisal of the university professor as a serious person, motivated more by ideas than money, that Nemeroff and his corporate clients exploit. Professor Nemeroff shares with you his admiration for our new drug! This admiration emerges solely out of his intellectual scrutiny of its properties. You can trust his sober, disinterested point of view because... he's a professor...

The character emerging from what UD's been describing comes out of a nineteenth century novel. The fraud, the poseur, the hypocrite, the confidence man who breaks the rules more and more flagrantly because he's sure he can get away with it. The world, after all, is a cynical place. He knows how to play it.

This is a comic character, full of high sentence and secret hoardings. The only writer today who can do him justice is Tom Wolfe.

Charles Nemeroffs are amusing in novels. Their reality is sad, sad, sad. If you care about the American university.

THIRD-WORLD CORRUPTION AS A BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE -- Part One

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:06:05 GMT

Universities are winsome, dappled, pathetic things.

Their two main constituents, students and professors, are cute and idealistic. They worry about Darfur and solar power and whether we can be said to reason autonomously.

Other important university constituents, like proud parents and alumni sports boosters, are also adorable in their excitement about things like intellectual cultivation and school spirit.

Universities are pathetic as well as adorable because their optimistic, trusting, idealizing nature makes them hopelessly vulnerable. Like Blanche Dubois, the innocent yearning ways of universities invite ravagement by cynics -- people who represent the world outside the university, where things are more Kowalskiesque.

These mercenaries don't give a shit about the dewy-eyed self-appraisal of the university as a place apart, a place dedicated to the best that's been thought, blah blah. They're in it for the money, and they know a sucker when they see one.

The growing scandal of endemic, third-world corruption in American university psychiatry departments reached a sort of peak the other day, when Senator Charles Grassley added the name of Charles Nemeroff, chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University (chair until last night, when Emory hastily dumped him), to his long list of professors who take massive amounts of drug industry money in exchange for promoting industry products.

These professors already enjoy among the highest salaries on campus, courtesy of students who pay high tuition. Every year, these professors fill out conflict of interest forms and submit them to their universities, where administrators diligently review their claims not to have broken rules about limits on how much money they can accept from drug companies. Every year, plenty of these professors lie through their teeth, but, as the professors know quite well, the administrators who review their claims are going on trust. It's a university and all.... We're civilized... Administrators aren't the police!

UD detests cliches, but laughing all the way to the bank fits too well.

The question is whether universities can defend themselves against Nemeroffs.

The answer is that they cannot.

WHO KILLED DAVID FOSTER WALLACE?

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:08:38 GMT

Suicides, especially the suicides of sensitive writers we love (Virginia Woolf, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace), are a serious body blow. They anger and demoralize us. They make us brood.

Even if he'd left a tightly argued, thousand page suicide letter -- with endnotes -- we'd find what Wallace did mysterious, unaccountable.

Yet if suicide is a million miles away from our experience, it's also luridly intimate.

To be sure, most of us are so wedded to existence that we struggle, without a second thought, even under dire circumstances, to stay alive; yet when someone we know or know about commits suicide, the act can unearth a buried but rather extensive region of thought and feeling in us that has to do with the worth of existence.

One way we try to neutralize suicide's threat to our affirmations about life is to medicalize it, and modern psychology has given us all we could ask for along these lines, a pharmacopia of terms and treatments for what, in my suicidal grandmother's day, people called involutional melancholia. The fact that in many cases anti-depressants recharge depressives' batteries reassures us that brain chemistry, not philosophy, pertains. But in the case of Wallace, even shock therapy failed to spark him.

Like Wallace, my father - twenty-five years ago - hanged himself. His blood teemed with psychotropics.

We can continue to medicalize these outcomes. We can say modern science hasn't yet fully conquered depression. But even when we come up with a pill that keeps everyone away from nooses, the pull toward suicide on the part of so many people will continue to shake us.

*************************************
A British writer, Julian Gough, argues that something about universities helped drive Wallace to suicide. UD wants to consider this argument:

"… [H]e was unplugged from electric, living America, by a life spent in the university system. His father was a professor of philosophy, his mother a professor of English. He majored in English and philosophy at Amherst, did an MFA in creative writing in Arizona, turned his English thesis into his first novel, studied philosophy at Harvard, got a job in the English department of Illinois State University, which he left to teach creative writing at Pomona College in California, where he died.

He was an immensely gifted and original writer, with a brilliant, hyper-analytical mind. The two things such people should avoid are marijuana and universities. He was aware of the dangers of the former (which was not just a threat to his prose—after his first novel he checked into rehab and asked to be put on suicide watch). But he couldn't escape the warm, welcoming trap of the latter. Only universities will give a job for life and full health insurance to a novelist with heavy-metal hair and a history of depression. He was, as ever, aware of the risk to his fiction. In a brilliant, painful television interview with Charlie Rose in 1997, he said, "Oh boy, don't even get me started on teaching… The more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time spent on your own work… I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year, and it's a little bit horrifying." He looked like a trapped animal. He'd been teaching for four years. Eleven years later, still teaching creative writing, never having written another novel, he killed himself.

… A life in academia formed, deformed and almost ruined Wallace's writing. Infinite Jest is nearly a thousand pages of exhausting, inexhaustible, hugely flawed and brilliant novel. It is followed by almost a hundred pages of endnotes (his editor made him cut as many again). The endnotes have footnotes. Wallace was, on one level, aware that he was cut off from ordinary America, but the knowledge put his prose into a hyper-analytic death spiral. Like so many academics, he became obsessed with the white whale (or pink elephant) of the authentic. He spent much of his time attacking forms of language of which he disapproved (pharmaceutical jargon, advertising, corporate PR). This was literary criticism disguised as literature—grenade attacks on a theme park.

Wallace was not alone in this; it happens to most American academic novelists (like the superbly gifted writer George Saunders who, at 49, has still never written a novel or left school.) They waste time on America's debased, overwhelming, industrial pop culture. They attack it with an energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that culture (bad television, movies, ads, pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating, billion-dollar cur. It has to be chosen to be consumed, so it flashes its tits, laughs at your jokes, replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn't worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes.

But under all that froth, that energy wasted attacking confectionery ads, lies the true, hard core of Wallace's work: its engagement with depression, addiction and death. Infinite Jest contains the most accurate and moving descriptions of clinical depression in modern literature. Read now, the Kate Gompert chapters provide a mature, gentle explanation of Wallace's own death. And they forgive us, his wife, his parents, his friends: we weren't to blame. They are noble pages. As Thomas Pynchon has said: "When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death." It is a tribute to modern America that this is so. Modern America beat fascism and it beat communism. Death is the last oppressor left standing in America…"

*******************************************************

The real shock therapy Wallace needed, in other words, was to get the hell off campus. The university, with its obsessive reflection upon authentic and inauthentic modes of existence, put his hyper-analytical mind into a philosophical death spiral. His art and life crashed because he fixated on the wrong things... the sort of things that academics fixate on. He over-intellectualized, and he wasted time dreaming of an authentic life when he should have been living among and writing about people experiencing actual lives.

Although Gough doesn't offer examples of the sort of literary artists he has in mind, UD figures he means someone like Tom Wolfe, with his out there, fully connected, electric acid America... In a way, Gough's argument goes back to the sort of thing critics like Georg Lukacs, a Marxist, were saying in the 'thirties and 'forties when they attacked modernists like Kafka and Beckett: An art of surreal depressive nattering fails to engage with the realities of human lives; it also -- like suicide itself -- undermines our will to live, and our faith in our ability to improve the world.

Yet Gough doesn't really consider the connections between America's debased culture and suicidal tendencies. Nor does he include in his description of that culture what Wallace was really talking about - not so much the lowest of elements of popular culture (moronic tv, etc.) as higher-level, therapeutic culture - the culture into which, as the son of university professors, he was born. This culture can indeed be, as cultural critics like Christopher Lasch made clear, an enervating, disconnected form of life. And of course the university might be considered the epitome of the tendency. But this life is just as real, in its contours and effects, as the middle-class Rabbit Angstrom's life in the work of John Updike.

In a limited sense, though, Gough may be right: If your subject is the dangerous-trance-inducing unreality of affluent, pleasant, postmodern America, you might want to avoid full-time immersion in the particularly narcotic undertow (the phrase is Don DeLillo's) of the university.

THE PENTAGON MEMORIAL

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:26:31 GMT

I'm sitting on Leslie Whittington's bench. Born 1955.

You can only follow one or two stories, and of course UD - a George Washington University professor who has spent research time in Australia - has followed Leslie's. She was a Georgetown University professor, on sabbatical, on her way - with her husband and daughters - to a research appointment in Australia. She was almost the same age as UD.

My mind trails her onto the plane. I pace myself at her pace, sit down, buckle. I enter her terror and disbelief. Her despair at what her daughters' eyes widen on.

*********************************

Well, I'm communing with you in a different way now. While a small rain starts up, and the clouds thicken, and airplanes angle in to land, I'm sitting on your bench, leaning over to look at the little reflecting pool underneath it.

I'm not sure about the reflecting pool. I'm not sure it works.

Each bench, memorializing each person who died in the plane or in the Pentagon, floats a foot or so above a lit rectangular pond. The play of light against stone, the rippling of birth dates, the shadows from shaggy bark trees -- this lends life and movement to the memorial. Water's part of that, and it's a good idea. But I'm not sure about the pondlet in particular. It's a puddle more than a pool.

The benches, though. The benches work. They don't shrink from the reality of the crash. They look like airplane wings stuck into the ground.

Also birds' wings.

You're supposed to sit on the "cantilevered benches," as the memorial's website describes them, and commune there with the dead. But only UD and one other woman are doing this. Others seem to think it disrespectful to sit.

Another design failure?

No. It's early days - the first full day - and there's a tentative feel. People aren't ready to think of the benches as furniture. They place little stones on them, and peonies, and military medals, and photos, under clear wrap, of bare-chested guys sitting together on lawn chairs and drinking beer. At the foot of Leslie's bench there's a hardback book -- A Very Long Engagement, by Sebastien Japrisot. On a white sheet of paper peeking out of the book, a typed message, all in caps, appears: OUR BOOK CLUB REMEMBERS OUR FOUNDING MEMBER, LESLIE. The page lists all the books they would have read.

Look up, and you see the immense American flag draped over the rebuilt wing of the Pentagon. Nearby, construction workers dismantle the high rafters from yesterday's dedication ceremony. Skinny long-haired country boys in white shirts that say REMEMBER undo the reviewing stands and the wiring. In the farther background, George Washington Parkway traffic washes by, and, behind that, the dull midrises of DC rise, making absolutely no statement against the gloomy sky.

Strange that UD cried only when she read, on a big memorial stone at the entry, the word CLAIM. We claim this ground... the message on the stone began. It had a great power in this context, that word, conveying somehow the immense wound still suffered, and the insistence on regenerating the world. Our world.

"Ma'am. See that beam? It's about to swing around. Hold off."

As UD walked back to the Pentagon Metro stop, a uniformed man held her and the rest of the departing crowd to one side while the workers directed a crane operator in lifting and depositing the structure. "Back it out, Eddie. Back it out. Hey where you goin."

We watch, patient, silent, polite, as they delicately bring it down to earth.

PALIN FIRE

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:06:18 GMT

The fiery debates about Sarah Palin's capacity to lead - the quality of her intellect, the nature of her academic and political preparation - focus national attention on a theme dear to UD: Higher education. Why do we call it higher? Does it matter whether one has this rather obscure, somehow elevated, experience?

Does Palin's spotty, undistinguished college career matter? A communications major, she probably had little exposure to history, philosophy, languages (Obama doesn't speak any language besides English, but UD assumes that as a political science major at Columbia University, specializing in international relations, he had at least to study one for a few years), and what we used to call civics. Communications, after all, is radically present-oriented: It's about public relations, television, advertising, radio ...

Here are a couple of course descriptions from Idaho's current catalog:

JAMM 468 The Advertising Agency (3 cr). Functioning of an advertising agency, including management, accounting, creative and media buying systems, government regulation, account management, and creative strategies in the marketplace. Field trips. Recommended preparation: JAMM 466.

JAMM 376 Digital Animation in Mass Media (3 cr). Creation and animation of both video and graphics in the digital realm for television, film, and interactive multi-media. Production fundamentals through individual projects will be emphasized as a means to help stimulate viewer attention and to improve the processing of information and content. Prereq: JAMM 275.

I put the link to the University of Idaho page over "a means to help stimulate viewer attention" in order to highlight the point of a lot of these courses. They're about very helpfully keeping us awake while we stare at screens. Or, as the first example suggests, they're vocational.

Obama's course of study (here's the current political science course list for Columbia University) incorporated history, theory, global politics. Many of the courses (Classical and Medieval Political Thought) are almost purely intellectual, having no immediate vocational utility. Recall, too, Columbia's Great Books undergraduate curriculum, which would have given Obama an exceptional exposure to general civilization courses.

Like a lot of people whose lives are changed by excellent educations, Obama describes himself - a wild kid - finding mental focus at Columbia: "I decided to buckle down and get serious. I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn't socialize that much. I was like a monk."
********************************************************
Does it matter? Does it matter that unlike Obama - who seems to have had a transformative intellectual experience at Columbia - Palin completed an undistinguished vocational undergraduate degree?

No. In the scheme of things, if a politician has a lively, curious intellect anyway, and a lot of political experience, and good political judgment, a substandard college experience, while a pity, isn't a campaign-ender.

We won't know whether Palin possesses these qualities on a presidential level until she has her first serious press conference. Until then, it's worth reminding ourselves why all over the world people cherish a good education. It's not just about jobs. It's about expanding your consciousness in a way that profoundly enhances the quality of your life.
But that's still pretty obscure, isn't it? Consider this excerpt from Errata, George Steiner's account of his undergraduate years at the University of Chicago:

A worthwhile university of college is quite simply one in which the student is brought into personal contact with, is made vulnerable to, the aura and the threat of the first-class. In the most direct sense, this is a matter of proximity, of sight and hearing. The institution, particularly in the humanities, should not be too large. The scholar, the significant teacher ought to be readily visible. We cross his or her daily path. The consequence, as in the Periclean polis, in medieval Bologna, or nineteenth-century Tubingen, is one of implosive and cumulative contamination. The whole is energized beyond its eminent parts. By unforced contiguity, the student, the young researcher will (or should be) infected. He will catch the scent of the real thing. I resort to sensory terms because the impact can be physical. Thinkers, the erudite, mathematicians, or theoretical and natural scientists are beings possessed. They are in the grip of a mastering unreason.

What could, by the lights of the utilitarian or hedonistic commonwealth, be more irrational, more against the grain of common sense than to devote one's existence to, say, the conservation and classification of archaic Chinese bronzes, to the solution of Fermat's last theorem, to the comparative syntax of Altaic languages (many now defunct), or the hairs-breadth nuances in modal logic? The requisite abstentions from distraction, the imperative labors, the tightening of nerve and brain to a constancy and pitch far beyond the ordinary, entail a pathological stress. The 'mad professor' is the caricature, as ancient as Thales falling into the well, of a certain truth. There is something of a cancer, of autism in the necessary negations of common life, with its disheveled inconsequence and waste motion.

In the critical mass of a successful academic community, the orbits of individual obsessions will cross and re-cross. Once he has collided with them, the student will forget neither their luminosity nor their menace to complacency.

...Once a young man or woman has been exposed to the virus of the absolute, once she or he has seen, heard, 'smelt' the fever in those who hunt after disinterested truth, something of the afterglow will persist. For the remainder of their, perhaps, quite normal, albeit undistinguished careers and private lives, such men and women will be equipped with some safeguard against emptiness.

The aura and the threat of the first-class. Americans, with their complacent preferences for politicians who are just like them, are particularly keen on the threat part ...

But Steiner has in mind a different sense of threat: When you've been, at some point in your life, seriously inside higher ed (to coin a phrase), you're forever unsettled by the possibility you've glimpsed of existence pitched very high, dedicated daily to as much lucidity about the world within and without as humanly possible.

Charles Murray on Elites

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:48:49 GMT

As we wait for the next water to break on the Palin story, it's worth recalling that one of the country's most high-profile conservative thinkers, Charles Murray, has been promoting a book which argues, among other things, that college should be reserved for America's intellectually gifted. The cognitive elite, Murray says, is the group most likely to be running government and industry; and, given these crucial responsibilities, it should be as seriously educated as possible:

There is an elite whether we like it or not. And what that elite has in common is that they are not only able, they are also academically talented. They are all in the top ten percent of intellectual ability. And we've got to start thinking about the kinds of education those people who have such an enormous influence on the culture and the society -- what kind of education they need. Here is where college comes into play in a useful form. College should be the place where they are forced to think deeply, drawing on the best that has been written in the past about questions of virtue and the nature of the good and what is required in order to live a good life.

For everyone else, "the solution is not better degrees, but no degrees," Murray argues, noting that the vast number of Americans don't need the higher-level reflection on "questions of virtue and the nature of the good" that the elite needs. Most Americans merely need certification programs in a vocational field, not a four-year BA with its courses in philosophy and so forth. Again, the academic elite needs a serious education in virtue because it's most likely to be running the country; the vocational non-elite can save everyone a lot of time and money by taking career-oriented training targeted to success on a certification test.

The Palin mess puts the problem with this position in an especially clear light.

A lot of Americans don't seem to like highly educated people, and they don't want them running the country. They prefer people with poor academic backgrounds, like John McCain, whose class rank in college was 894 out of 899, and like Sarah Palin, who got a degree in communications at the University of Idaho, a Tier 3 school in the US News and World Report rankings. Mike Huckabee, who had a very parochial college education, did extremely well in the primaries. If John McCain drops Palin from his ticket, he might well pick up Huckabee, who seems to share her genial indifference to large parts of the world outside of the United States.

Many conservative voters, then, disagree with Charles Murray; they expect cognitively middling people with little academic exposure to moral philosophy and international relations to run the country.

Given this preference for intellectually average and below-average folk in positions of power, I think we need -- with Country First the watchword -- to take a position as far away as possible from Charles Murray's. We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents' religion. If they don't get this in college, they're not going to get it anywhere else.

Professor Meets Gun, Part 10: To Arms

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:49:06 GMT

Where to learn to shoot? Where does a fiftyish female English professor with bad aim and a bad attitude go for some bangbang?

UD contemplated this. She considered an NRA class; she considered the many kind shooting invitations from gunnies that she got via this Inside Higher Ed series. She considered taking things slower, the way professors do, sitting around libraries reading about guns rather than shooting them...

And then it - as it were - hit her. Down the dirt road from her Upstate New York country house lives H., a big tough mountain man and owner of many rifles and shotguns.

H. is about pig roasts and buck hunting with a bow and scaring the geese off a neighbor's pond by blasting away at the air above them for hours.

When H. bombs up to UD's house in his all-terrain vehicle, there's something - despite the sweat and the fatigues - regal in his bearing: He sits straight and high, with many dog attendants, master of the mountains.

H. is all that UD is not: A man, for whom women's inferiority is an obvious truth, a Red Stater, an enthusiastic outdoorsman (UD loves her little country house and environs, but you won't catch her tromping the hills all day), a joiner (this weekend, H. goes on a group outing to a loggers' convention)... No doubt H. regards UD with the same amazement with which she regards him; but since they both have a sense of humor, they enjoy talking together.

And so, just now, UD presented herself at H.'s place and asked him if he'd teach her how to shoot.

"Of course," said H. "No problem. Listen, I'm taking my wife to Cobleskill at the moment. I'll come by your place at around four o'clock and take you down to mine and we'll shoot."

"Do you have a gun light enough for me?"

"I have just the thing." He went and got a rifle and showed it to UD. "No kick. Smooth and easy. You'll see."

"What will we shoot at?"

"I'll set up some cans."

UD walked back up the hill to her house and told Mr. UD, who was on the deck reading The Theory of Communicative Action, about her appointment to shoot cans.

"The question," he said, after thinking about this for a moment, "is not what you will shoot, but whom."

"Yes. I certainly hope I don't shoot H. Or myself."
-------------------------------------------------------------
It's 4:17 and here comes H., powering up our hill on his ATV. Mr. UD's mowing the grass.

"Where's your honey?" H. asks Mr. UD, who doesn't quite understand the question.

"Your honey's right here!" UD calls from the house.

"My God, they have ears on them, don't they," says H.

"You have a woman problem," UD tells him, and he laughs.

Les UDs walk down to his place while H. mounts his ATV again.

H. is waiting on his back deck -- it has a long view of a wildflower field and then forest and then hills -- with a 22 caliber rifle. "See how lightweight this is? Now I'm putting the bullets in ... Sure, you can put them in... Just drop them in with the rim in this direction... And I've made a target for you."

On the lawn below us, instead of cans, sits a large upright cardboard box, its back panel removed. A white circle's been painted on it.

H. shows UD how to rest the gun on her right shoulder and hold it in her left hand. "The sight on this is really no good. You can try seeing through it, but it'll be hard. Just aim without it and see what happens. Just get off some shots."

So that's what UD did. UD fired the gun repeatedly, calmly, easily, focusing as well as she could on the target. After fifteen shots, they went down to see whether she'd hit the box at all.

Mr. UD and H. found quite a number of bullet holes in the target, one of them near the center of the white circle.

----------------------------------------------------------
"Now I'll show you a real gun." H. opens the door to his garage and walks over to a way-serious looking safe. Size of a refrigerator. Fort Knox City. He twirls the gold handle on it and opens it to reveal, leaning together, many guns. "Plus there's one I keep in my bedroom in case someone comes in."

"What the difference between a shotgun and a rifle?"

He brings out some shotguns. "They don't use bullets. They use pellets. You use shotguns for shooting birds."

He also brings out a couple of specialty items -- a Nazi knife, and a tiny pistol with a folding trigger, also of Nazi provenance.

"You told me you were applying for a pistol license. Why not just use this one?"

"This one's unregistered, and because it's from Germany, I'd have to send it back there, and go through all kinds of international paperwork. Not worth it... Still, I'd use an unregistered gun like this one if I had it handy and had to defend myself... You know what they say: I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six."

He hands UD a much heavier rifle than the 22 she just used, with a much spiffier looking sight on it. "I want you to try to shoot this. There will be some kick. Give it a try."

We're standing at the entrance to his garage, and one of his dogs scampers about, anticipating an afternoon of hunting. "I don't want to kill your dog."

"Aim at the ground."

Bang. The kick doesn't bother UD, but the blast does. She understands now why everyone at the NRA range protects their ears. The greater power of this weapon is immediately, viscerally obvious to UD, who, as she thanks H. and prepares to leave, considers the fact that although she wouldn't even touch a gun at the Virginia gun show she went to a couple of weeks ago, she seems here, in the calm of the countryside on a sunny day, quite willing to let it rip.

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN, Part 9: Suck My Glock

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:47:56 GMT

UD got a cab ride to the Chantilly, Virginia gun show last weekend with her taxi driver friend, G. No way was Mr. UD going to drive UD to a gun show.

G., a working class woman in her forties, told UD about her alcoholic husband (he died of cirrhosis a year after she left him) grabbing his rifle one night and blasting her car when she got home late from a friend's.

The show took place at the Dulles Expo, a large, low-ceilinged, industrial space near the airport. As she got out of the cab, UD was surrounded by men cradling locked rifles.

Lots of people entered the Expo. The show was well-attended.

An NRA booth next to the ticket kiosk offered to pay your admission if you took out a membership.

***************************************************

The vast room was 99% men, most of whom wore wifebeaters with motorcycle or military messages on them, and camouflage shorts. Baseball caps carrying messages about love of country and love of Harley topped many heads, and tattoos of baroque complexity appeared on arms and legs and necks. Facial hair was big, as were beer guts. Deep southern accents prevailed.

This was not UD's world. She gazed about.

One guy she called Columbine Guy because he was young, skinny, pale, all in black, and carrying a very big gun. His fat nerd sidekick, also in black, had a police stick attached to his belt and fascist symbols on his shirt.

An old man wore his VFW hat plus a t-shirt that said Oliver North: American Hero: Duty, Honor, Country.

A punk couple -- her hair deep black, his belt heavily studded - walked arm in arm.

Guys recruiting for the State Guard wore khaki.

Large groups of Asians circulated.

*****************************************************

UD wandered a bit among the long low tables loaded with pistols, rifles, and shotguns. One of the sellers was a sort of cave man, with rough shaggy hair, a beery face, and seen-it-all, pissed off eyes. He scrutinized customers with tired contempt: their ignorant questions, their stupid enthusiasms.

UD sat down at a little cafe in a corner of the massive room. She watched a guy at a table near hers buy a gun from another guy; the seller barely glanced at the identification card the buyer flashed.

Examining his purchase, the buyer said: "Somebody smuggling a ton of cocaine. That'd give me so much satisfaction. To nail him."

******************************************************

Wandering the tables again, UD noticed that although the guns were out there for you to handle to your heart's content, she wasn't touching any of them. Not one. By the time she left the show, she had touched nothing. ("Taboo," Mr. UD said later. "It's taboo for you." "You're a girl," said Jonathan, a friend who writes for the blog ChicagoBoyz. "It's because you're a girl.")

UD did handle some t-shirts. She bought one that says Suck My Glock.

******************************************************
Back at a cafe table, UD found herself in deep conversation with a recruiter who took a seat near her. He told her about the State Guard. She only knew about the National Guard. Then she asked him to talk to her about guns.

"You have to take responsibility for yourself. No one else is going to save you. I've got a lot of guns at home. I keep one locked by my bed, and all I have to do is key in four numbers to get it out and use it.... I live in the countryside, sort of away from other people, because I like to do a lot of target practice and it's real noisy and people complain. Target practice is relaxing. You concentrate so hard. Everything else disappears."

He lived in Virginia. "You must be pleased with Jim Webb."

"No. I'm not pleased with Tim Kaine either. I don't like politicians. Liars and thieves. The elites follow their own rules. The rules should apply to everybody the same."

He went on at great length about elites.

"You told me a moment ago," interrupted UD, "that you make a hundred thousand dollars a year as an electrical engineer. You're closer to the elites than to any other social group."

He looked hard at UD -- really looked at her, for the first time. "What are you? I mean, what do you do for a living?"

"I'm an English professor."

"What kind of literature do you teach?"

"English and American, twentieth century."

"I do a lot of reading. You should recommend some novels to me. Where do you teach?"

"George Washington University."

"That hospital saved my life. I had this big tumor in my chest." His hands went out wide, like a fisherman describing his catch. "The little country hospital near my house almost killed me doing a test -- put a couple of holes in my heart. I got myself over to GW and they fixed me up."

"Give me a hospital for urban elites over your local place any day."
"You said it."

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN: Part Eight -- We're All That Way

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:43:51 GMT

"Guns," conclude two Yale law professors in a recent Emory Law Journal, "are at the center of an expressive struggle between the adherents of competing visions of the good society - one egalitarian and communal, the other hierarchic and individualistic."

Yeah, and which is which? "The more hierarchical and individualistic individuals were in their orientations, the more they opposed control; and the more egalitarian and solidaristic they were, the more they supported it."

I know ... Must people write like this? Individualistic individuals? Is solidaristic a word?

But put that aside. UD's back from her blogging break -- though she's still on vacation, negotiating Hurricane Bertha-inspired tides at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware -- and ready again to shoulder the subject of guns. She's grateful to one of her Inside Higher Ed readers for linking her to the Emory piece, because it moves her along in her attempt to understand and take up a position somewhere on the control/confiscation continuum...

The piece argues, just as Mark Tushnet does (see this post), that we can waste time fighting about whether lots of legal guns lying about decreases or increases crime (it almost certainly increases suicide), but we're not really going to be able to answer these questions decisively. It makes more sense to understand the cultural divide underlying the gun conflict in America, and then to attempt to get the warring parties to understand one another and possibly moderate their positions. As Wendy Kaminer writes, "Debates about gun ownership and gun control are driven more by values and ideology than by pragmatism - and hardly at all by the existing empirical research, which is complex and inconclusive."
**********************************

UD's problem with the fundamental divide on offer here between hierarchical and individualistic gunnies and egalitarian and solidaristic anti-gunnies is that it doesn't map all that well onto professors.

Of course, you could argue that the large national conversation about guns the guys writing in the Emory journal want to start doesn't need my lot to get itself going; but this IHE series is titled professor meets gun, and its focus for better or worse is on one professor typifying one form of antipathy to guns. So let's proceed.

Let's begin with this excerpt from a recent essay about being a tenured professor in America today. The anonymous author tries to account for the incessant bickering in his department:

Although I'm not even at the midpoint of my career, I'm already worried about the repetitious nature of my job. Teaching the same classes year in and year out would seem to be a one-way ticket to tedium. On bad days, you feel like the protagonist from the movie Groundhog Day. On good days, you feel motivated to discover new texts, develop new courses, and strike out in new directions.

But innovation requires effort, and opportunities for change are often limited by curricula, concerns about coverage, and other constraints. Perhaps we initiate and perpetuate interdepartmental fights in order to keep boredom at bay. Not that we do that consciously or calculatingly, but at some unrecognized level, aren't we itching for intensity? Tenured for life, we perhaps need the drama of conflict to inject the thrill of spontaneous emotion and extreme passion into our stable and predictable existences. Conflict might be our unacknowledged antidote for ennui.

This comment goes to the deep, almost problematic, sense of security UD has always known -- and, as a tenured professor, will, at least in her public existence, rather likely continue to know. (Recall this post, in which UD describes her life of remarkable security, a security that started at birth.)

Professors are so bored in their stable, predictable lives, so oppressed by ennui, that they provoke conflict in their little group just so that, for a few moments, they can feel intensity, drama, and passion.

Of course, this enviably calm life is supposed to help professors think freely and creatively; one might say that a professor's passion is supposed to come from her scholarly and pedagogical activity... though mainly from her scholarly activity, since tenure is ultimately about the provision of intellectual freedom... Yet here we've got a young professor stressing the depressing non-eventfulness of an academic's life, the almost maddening nothingness of it. The claim is that there's an acutely felt tedium to a tenured professor's days, and it's so fierce that the professor will pick fights to give herself a sense of being alive.

**************************************

Whatever else you might say about this picture of dead academics stimulating themselves through quarrel, it doesn't exactly describe the social solidarity the law journal authors evoke. Most professors are pro-gun control, but are they really the egalitarian communal types the article associates with this political position? It's not very communal to be fighting all the time. And as for egalitarian...

UD can think of few more hierarchical settings than American universities. Professors live in a tightly titled universe (lecturer, assistant, associate, full, named, named in three departments, named in four schools, man of letters, man about town, Man Booker recipient...); they're constantly comparing their schools to other schools (the US News and World Report rankings are notorious obsessions, and now there's that other thing, that ranking of public intellectuals.... plus, what, Posner's book?...), and they keep close watch on everyone's course load and annual report and article production, with many departments ranking each tenured faculty member each year in terms of productivity and reputation.

This is one of the big reasons why our universities are the envy of the world. They're full of restless quarrelsome status-obsessives. You want communal egalitarians, go to an Italian university.

****************************************

It's noon. There's a fine breeze and a full sun and a beach steps away. UD will conclude this post with the following thought: We're all that way. We're all of us - Americans - hierarchic and individualistic. At least we're much more hierarchic and individualistic than we are communal and egalitarian. People characterize tenured radicals as communal and egalitarian, but they're really not. They just look that way because they're bored.

UPDATE ON UD's WHEREABOUTS

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:43:46 GMT

No, I haven't shot off a gun yet. UD has been on vacation in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. She has put her bed as close as possible to her balcony overlooking the Atlantic so that she can fall asleep to the sound of waves.

Right now (7 AM), she has closed the balcony curtains to keep the big sun out of the room so she can blog. An hour ago, she stood on her balcony staring at a white, gray, blue, purple, black, yellow, and orange sunrise.

On the beach, she reads what she always reads during her Rehoboth July: Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays. So beautifully written you forget it's a translation, and radiant throughout with the North African sun.

UD has been hanging out with her sisters here (much Scrabble playing); after they leave, Mr. UD arrives.

This post marks UD's return to blogging. In the next few days, she'll post some more thoughts about guns, as she makes plans to attend a gun show on her return to 'thesda, and to go to a range. She thanks her readers for their patience as she ends her vacation from blogging.

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN: Part Seven: Shame, Shame.

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:34:30 GMT

Stop me if you've heard this before, but it's sort of new to UD. If you've read this series, you know she's had a peculiar, sheltered, life.

But if Mark Tushnet (see post below this one) and others are correct, and if gun control/gun rights is ultimately about the culture wars, then maybe UD's making some progress in her effort to get closer to guns in noting the shame/beauty divide.

Many gun control people think guns as objects are intrinsically shameful, something to keep hidden, or, better, something to make go away altogether. Recall UD's friend who compared a gun museum to a women's underwear museum -- any interest in guns betrays the malsain fetishist.

Or consider this recent opinion piece condemning the "open carry" movement, in which Americans are encouraged to wear their guns so that they can be seen.

The author begins in the confessional mode:

Long before I tasted the temptations of sex, I yielded to an irresistible prurience by opening [my father's gun] drawer. Initiation into obscenity.

He offers an historical theory:

...[T]he use of weapons against fellow animals seems ... to have imbued humans with a sense of shame, which spawned post-hunt rituals of sacrificial atonement, the genesis of religion. Only the weapon made it possible for humans to better beasts, but only shame enabled humans to moderate the weapon's use. Otherwise, the human species would have plunged quickly into self-eliminating extinction.

I'm not sure how convincing a theory this is. Why would we, having discovered weapons, have turned them against each other and assured our extinction? Is it only shame that keeps me from finding some weapon and murdering everyone around me? Recall UD's George Washington University law colleague's observation, in a Washington Post piece, about the attitude of some of his neighbors toward his boys playing with guns:

[O]n the playground there seems to be a palpable fear among zero-tolerance parents that boys harbor some deep and dark violent gene that, if awakened, is likely to end years later with some sort of Hannibal Lecter situation. Of course, there are at least 100 million men in this country who probably played with toy guns or swords as children and did not grow up to become serial killers.

Surely our basic motives toward and away from destruction are more complex than these points of view suggest? Yet the opinion piece author goes further in the direction of shame:
The answer [to the question of gun violence] is buried deep in the national psyche, and I am a case in point. The gun is a totemic object, with meanings that drill far below surface arguments about self-defense, the sport of hunting, standing militias, or the intent of the Framers. Children die because these deeper meanings of the gun go unreckoned with.

UD's first question: When, in this primal story of the evolution of human shame in regard to weaponry, did it turn out only to have to do with Americans? Why is it only our national psyche that works this way?

UD's second question: Why does this guy assume his particular pistol bildungsroman has universal resonance?

UD's third question: If you've got a problem with guns, why not try to solve it, rather than shoving it back in the drawer? I don't wanna overplay the sex parallel, but did this guy decide to keep it in his pants for the rest of his life?

It's kind of like Amitai Etzioni -- the GW sociologist -- arguing (scroll down) that scholars shouldn't pursue Second Amendment scholarship that might undermine gun control. Put those ideas back in your pants. You ought to be ashamed.

The underlying view of humanity here seems to be that we are intrinsically inclined to murder and rape, and that only major daily exertions in the direction of self-control stay our hand. Part of this exertion involves an evolved culture of confession, in which, like the opinion piece writer, we reveal ourselves as cases in point -- exemplars of vicious instinct wrestled down through self-denial.

So on one side you've got gun control people (they're not all like this, of course) mobilizing a shame-based philosophy in which we've all got a hair-trigger temper, a quick-draw lust. Civilized life involves the confiscation of objects like guns, because guns arouse these destructive drives.

On the other side, you've got the idea - expressed in the NRA film welcoming people to its gun museum - that guns are a "beautiful marriage of art and technology" that "awaken memories and strong emotions."
In my next post (after extensive Googling on the subject), I'll write about guns and beauty and awakened memories.

Oh. One final thought on shame and shamelessness. There's an outfit selling campuses a twenty-minute video about how students can avoid getting shot. The video costs $495.

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN Part Six: ARMING OBAMA

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:39:50 GMT

I've taken my headline from a piece in today's Wall Street Journal about Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, about whom people are talking as a strong candidate for Obama's Vice-Presidential running mate.
UD is single-handedly responsible for Webb's Senate victory, so she has a special interest in his political future. It was her defense of Webb's free speech rights in the Washington Post -- after his opponent condemned passages in some of Webb's novels that contained explicit sex -- that put the man over the top.

The Post quoted UD (under her nom de actuality, Margaret Soltan) dismissing Webb's opponent for lacking culture, and saying that "Webb's novels [should not be seen] as indicative of his views, any more than voters in England should have been deterred by some of Winston Churchill's more shocking writing." Immediately thereafter, Webb pulled ahead in the race....

So now UD's man makes another possible move - onto Obama's ticket: "A highly decorated war veteran who opposes the Iraq war, Sen. Webb is considered by many Democrats to be the best person to go into battle against another war hero, expected Republican nominee Sen. John McCain," reports the Journal.

Webb's latest Senate victory - the expected passage of a bill providing college money for veterans - is particularly appealing to the author of University Diaries.

Yet how will Obama's backers respond to a "self-described redneck" who "carries a concealed pistol"? Will they recall the incident last March in which one of Webb's aides entered the Capitol building with a concealed loaded pistol -- belonging to Webb -- plus extra ammunition? As the Post notes, "D.C. law bars people from carrying handguns and concealed weapons without licenses." (The law will probably be struck down by the Supreme Court, which returns to the bench on Monday.)

Webb's quite the gun enthusiast. UD might well have seen him the other day at the NRA: "Webb, a first-term senator and former Marine, regularly uses a gun for target practice at the National Rifle Association shooting range." That's, like, his hangout....

The more reading UD does about the issue of guns, the more clear it becomes that many thoughtful people on the subject believe policy divisions about guns rest on deeply rooted cultural differences -- that this is really about the culture wars -- and that therefore, in the words of legal theorist Mark Tushnet, "any gun-related policy likely to survive a political process deeply affected by the culture wars will not do much to reduce violence." Indeed, Tushnet (an acquaintance of Mr. UD's) suggests that "advocates of gun control might actually be impeding the adoption of more effective policies for reducing violence. The reason is that when gun control becomes politically important, a battle in the culture wars occurs. Even when advocates of gun control win such battles, they typically find it difficult to enact or sustain strong gun control policies.... Take the issue of gun control off the political agenda, and those interested in reducing violence might win more elections - and then enact anti-violence policies other than gun control that might actually accomplish something." (I'm quoting from page xvii of Tushnet's book Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can't End the Battle Over Guns.)

The whole culture war thing, Tushnet says, has to do with "the cultural theory of risk," in which you're going to be gun control or gun rights depending on whether you're an individualist who resents outside interference in your life and believes that (Tushnet's quoting a couple of sociologists here) "it would be a cowardly and dishonorable concession to our own physical weaknesses for us to disarm all private citizens in the interest of public safety," or whether you're an egalitarian who believes that "it would send an unacceptable message of mutual distrust in each other's intentions, of collective indifference to each other's welfare... to rely on each citizen's decision to arm herself as a means of keeping the civil peace." [115-116]

Yet as UD ponders these distinctions, things get muddy. At least for her.

Start with the non-muddiness. She and Webb do seem to embody stark cultural differences. Tushnet notes that "Whites, Protestants, men, and people who live in rural areas are substantially more likely to oppose gun control than African Americans, Catholics and Jews, women, and people who live in cities."

UD's a lifelong blue stater raised by urban liberal democrats. She's a Jew and a woman. Webb's a lifelong red stater raised by rural military people. He has a Protestant background and is a man.

Looked at more closely, though, UD and Webb crucially share the individualist rather than egalitarian orientation. UD may have strong left libertarian leanings as opposed to Webb's right, but they both have that American thing where you distrust big government and where the attainment of personal autonomy is among the greatest of goods.

Our biographies are strangely similar in some respects. Webb was a literature professor at the Naval Academy. He's a fiction writer. He's been a journalist. UD's read some of his novels. They're formulaic, to be sure, but all of them reflect a highly literate -- I'd say sensitive, but don't want to embarrass him -- sensibility.

Actually, where I suspect Webb and I most interestingly, deeply differ in regard to guns lies in the amount of risk we've experienced in our lives, and our subsequent appraisal of how risky life is in general. It's not clear that the cultural theory of risk Tushnet cites goes to this, but let me see if I can express some of what I have in mind.

UD has never really for one moment in her existence experienced serious risk. Her father had a permanent government job that paid well. She always had a comfortable stable life. She's a tenured professor. Her husband's father was a tenured professor, and her husband is a tenured professor. Her town, Garrett Park, where she grew up, and where she still lives, was America's first nuclear free zone. UD has stayed married to the same man.

Webb's military family moved twenty times during his childhood. He's been married three times. Lots of people around him, including of course Webb himself, saw military combat. Webb's son recently returned from duty in Iraq. Webb's an anxious, somewhat humorless guy: As Navy Secretary he didn't laugh along with everyone else when a commander in Iceland, asked by Webb to explain extremely high pregnancy rates among enlisted women, said, "What else is there to do in Iceland?"

I mean to say that UD's relaxed -- unarmed... disarmed... because she can sort of afford to be. She was raised in privilege, security, and ease. She's reading two books right now, one of them Tushnet's, and the other, much more typical for her, a prettily written meditation on gardens, a book full of praise for the values of "stillness, repose, beauty, and harmony with the cosmic order." She's always lived in affluent, pretty safe neighborhoods. The world doesn't present itself to her as a place in which she needs to carry a gun... Though, under the pressure of recent campus massacres, that attitude is changing.

Webb's not relaxed. He's an intense and possibly mildly paranoid guy. But he has his reasons.

I do wonder where Webb stands on the emergent open carry movement in America, where people wear their guns openly wherever they go. One reporter comments: "The Open Carry movement is a mystery to me. What kind of psychology - overcompensation, paranoia, antisocial personality - is behind that thinking?"

Steven Gunn, an attorney and board member of the Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah, believes it's pure ego.

"We have inconsiderate boors walking around on the street carrying firearms openly," says Gunn. "I don't think they are truly afraid for their safety. Most of them are trying to make a statement about the 2nd Amendment."

Anthropologist Charles Springwood says open carriers are trying to "naturalize the presence of guns, which means that guns become ordinary, omnipresent, and expected. Over time, the gun becomes a symbol of ordinary personhood."

"Second Amendment questions aside," says [...] a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, "the real debate seems to me a cultural and social one: Do we want a society in which it is an unconscious emblem of everyday life that folks move about with 'portable killing machines' strapped to their bodies?"

Back to the culture wars.

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN, PART FIVE: MY BOYS LIKE SHOOTOUTS

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:33:05 GMT

First, an update: I haven't yet contacted anyone about going shooting, but I will.
While I'm arranging that, I plan to go to a gun show in in Virginia, near Dulles Airport, on July 27. I'll write about it here at IHE.

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Over the weekend, I checked out what I figured would be the fervent gun-control writings of some of my colleagues at George Washington University. After all, professors and guns don't mix...

Yet with the exception of Amitai Etzioni, a GW sociologist, UD was rather surprised to discover among her colleagues attitudes ranging from enthusiastic to mild support of an individual right to bear arms.

We'll do Etzioni first. In 2001, he made the bizarre argument that even if the many -- often liberal -- legal theorists who increasingly argue that the Second Amendment does indeed seem to defend an individual right to bear guns are correct, they should keep their traps shut:

... Very bright scholars are naturally intrigued and challenged by, and rewarded for, going against the grain. Nobody is going to be accorded a prize or promotion, or even get published, for documenting the prevailing consensus. In contrast, making the equivalent argument that the earth is flat after all, especially if the case is made with verve, ingenuity, and wit, is sure to command collegial attention. But in the case of gun control, although no one would contest revisionist scholars' right to engage in such research, I can't help but wonder if they are right to engage in such research. Much more is at stake than giving solace to gun advocates. The revisionist arguments, which I suspect start out as clever seminar-speak, may well influence the courts...

If one holds, as most studies do, that guns provide more danger than protection, and notes that other democratic societies greatly limit private gun ownership, one is naturally troubled by the threat that the new scholarship may help to overturn a strong and long-established endorsement of gun control laws by the Supreme Court. With so much at stake, should scholars refrain from conducting studies that might have grave unsettling social consequences?
... Would my colleagues put on their web site a study that demonstrating how to make the Ebola virus in a kitchen sink? Would they publish ways to make nerve gas in one's basement? As I see it, when the results of a publication may well be fatal on a large scale, great weight should be given to social prudence.
... [M]y good colleagues in law schools [should] consider whether they should devote themselves to an academic pursuit other than undermining the Supreme Court rulings that have rendered gun control possible and legitimate...

UD finds Etzioni's analogies -- an individual in possession of a gun is a deadly virus, a nerve gas -- as well as his aristocratic conviction that the possibly correct reading of one of our nation's more important documents ought to be kept from ordinary American citizens, pretty stunning. But she's grateful he wrote what he did, because he's playing a role she wants to cast in this series -- the typical college professor -- with verve and candor.

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At the other end of the spectrum, and more representative of legal opinion, both conservative and liberal, is GW law professor Robert J. Cottrol, quoted on an NRA site in a discussion of DC's strict gun control laws:

[A] society with a dismal record of protecting a people has a dubious claim on the right to disarm them. . . . [I]t is unwise to place the means of protection totally in the hands of the state. . . .
Cottrol again, more blunt:

[T]he ultimate civil right is the right to defend one's own life... [W]ithout that right all other rights are meaningless.
Though UD's done nothing like a scientific survey, her sense is that many of her colleagues in the law school more or less align with Sanford Levinson, liberal legal theorist and author of the much-cited (and charmingly written) essay, The Embarrassing Second Amendment:

... [W]e ignore at our political peril the good faith belief of many Americans that they cannot rely on the police for protection against a variety of criminals. Still, let us assume that the individualist reading of the Amendment has been vitiated by changing circumstances. Are we quite so confident that circumstances are equally different in regard to the republican rationale...?

One would, of course, like to believe that the state, whether at the local or national level, presents no threat to important political values, including liberty. But our propensity to believe that this is the case may be little more than a sign of how truly different we are from our radical forbearers. I do not want to argue that the state is necessarily tyrannical; I am not an anarchist. But it seems foolhardy to assume that the armed state will necessarily be benevolent. The American political tradition is, for good or ill, based in large measure on a healthy mistrust of the state. The development of widespread suffrage and greater majoritarianism in our polity is itself no sure protection, at least within republican theory. The republican theory is predicated on the stark contrast between mere democracy, where people are motivated by selfish personal interest, and a republic, where civic virtue, both in common citizen and leadership, tames selfishness on behalf of the common good. In any event, it is hard for me to see how one can argue that circumstances have so changed us as to make mass disarmament constitutionally unproblematic.

Indeed, only in recent months have we seen the brutal suppression of the Chinese student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. It should not surprise us that some NRA sympathizers have presented that situation as an abject lesson to those who unthinkingly support the prohibition of private gun ownership. "[I]f all Chinese citizens kept arms, their rulers would hardly have dared to massacre the demonstrators... The private keeping of hand-held personal firearms is within the constitutional design for a counter to government run amok... As the Tianamen Square tragedy showed so graphically, AK 47's fall into that category of weapons, and that is why they are protected by the Second Amendment." It is simply silly to respond that small arms are irrelevant against nuclear armed states; witness contemporary Northern Ireland and the territories occupied by Israel, where the sophisticated weaponry of Great Britain and Israel have proved almost totally beside the point. The fact that these may not be pleasant examples does not affect the principal point, that a state facing a totally disarmed population is in a far better position, for good or ill, to suppress popular demonstrations and uprisings than one that must calculate the possibilities of its soldiers and officials being injured or killed.
Levinson concludes:

For too long, most members of the legal academy have treated the Second Amendment as the equivalent of an embarrassing relative, whose mention brings a quick change of subject to other, more respectable, family members. That will no longer do. It is time for the Second Amendment to enter full scale into the consciousness of the legal academy. ... It is unlikely that ... those too often peremptorily dismissed as "gun nuts " [will soon be considered] providers of "insight and growth," but surely the call for sensitivity to different or excluded voices cannot extend only those groups "we" already, perhaps "complacent[ly]," believe have a lot to tell "us." [Levinson is quoting here from another legal scholar.] I am not so naive as to believe that conversation will overcome the chasm that now separates the sensibility of, say, Senator Hatch and myself as to what constitutes the "right[s] most valued by free men [and women]." It is important to remember that one will still need to join up sides and engage in vigorous political struggle. But it might at least help to make the political sides appear more human to one another. Perhaps "we" might be led to stop referring casually to "gun nuts" just as, maybe, members of the NRA could be brought to understand the real fear that the currently almost uncontrolled system of gun ownership sparks in the minds of many whom they casually dismiss as "bleeding-heart liberals." Is not, after all, the possibility of serious, engaged discussion about political issues at the heart of what is most attractive in both liberal and republican versions of politics?

This seems to me a far more plausible, humane, and progressive approach to evolving attitudes toward the Second Amendment than Etzioni's don't ask don't tell.

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UD concludes with an opinion piece by another GW law professor that appeared a few years ago in the Washington Post. Title: My Boys Like Shootouts. What's Wrong With That?
This professor lets his boys play with toy guns. His neighbors are appalled. At local parks, they stare at him and his kids in revulsion, and take their own kids home lest they witness the outrage.

My colleague is baffled and offended by this zero tolerance:

My wife and I are hardly poster parents for the National Rifle Association. We are social liberals who fret over every detail and danger of child rearing. We do not let our kids watch violent TV shows and do not tolerate rough play. Like most of our friends, we tried early on to avoid any gender stereotypes in our selection of games and toys. However, our effort to avoid guns and swords and other similar toys became a Sisyphean battle.... [W]e do not believe that play guns and swords are ruining our children. Frankly, after three boys, my wife and I have resolved the nature/nurture debate in our house in favor of nature. Yet on the playground there seems to be a palpable fear among zero-tolerance parents that boys harbor some deep and dark violent gene that, if awakened, is likely to end years later with some sort of Hannibal Lecter situation. Of course, there are at least 100 million men in this country who probably played with toy guns or swords as children and did not grow up to become serial killers.
The guy's daughter is indifferent to toy guns, as, I seem to recall, was wee UD.

But, as Levinson notes, circumstances change.

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN - PART FOUR: THE KINDNESS OF RANGERS

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:27:03 GMT

What next? UD has now visited the NRA, written and reflected on it, and read many comments and emails about her having done that. Aside from looking at the articles about guns and their controversies that readers have recommended, the most pressing question about her desire to continue to educate herself about guns -- again, judging from her extensive mail -- is whether she should pick up a gun and have a go at shooting it. Five people, four of them local, have offered to take her shooting at a range.

Before she talks about that, she wants to thank all the gunnies (This is one of many new words UD has learned; and here's a new phrase, courtesy of one of the readers of her other blog: freaking the mundanes. Which in this case refers, I guess, to UD freaking out gun control people.) who've written comments here or who've emailed her to express appreciation for her willingness to get closer to guns rather than, as she's done before this, rail against them at a distance. She's been delighted by the helpfulness, courtliness, and humor of many of these responses.

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One other small matter of business to get out of the way before the should-UD-shoot question: Sex.

In a 1994 piece about guns for the New York Times magazine, Philip Weiss frames his long article in terms of erotic gratification. Samples:

... The guns were heavy. They wearied my arms, and when I looked through the circular or notched sights, everything else dropped away. The solid kick goes out through your shoulder and back and it feels good. You don't know when the gun is going to go off. "It should always come as a surprise," Doughty explained to me. At his urging, I tried to establish a rhythm, squeezing the trigger slowly, applying more pressure as the target came closer, letting off as it drifted away. Hopefully, the gun explodes when the target is nearer alignment. It was almost orgasmic.

... I asked him what he was shooting and he slung a busted fake-leather bag around his shoulder and let me look in. There were two handguns inside, .22's, nestled in old cloths. It reminded me of my own secret adolescent rituals, getting Playboy magazines, one boy introducing another to the pleasures of masturbation. The bond with guns shared some of that same seediness.

... The gratification of shooting is private. Other people looked on but they couldn't share in it, couldn't even see what I was doing. It all happened in my head.

...The gunny's dream about subduing endless enemies was like a pornographic illusion: your sexual powers caused scores of people to succumb to you at your will. No wonder the gunnies were so attached to ugly guns. Asking a gunny to go back to a less sophisticated firearm was like asking a devotee of pornography to go from videos back to still photographs: the level of actuality, the degree to which the thing simulates a primal experience, was greatly diminished.

Reading this, I'm reminded of a comment a friend of mine made when I told him about the primarily aesthetic nature of the NRA's gun museum: "The word I'd use is fetishistic." A gun museum, my friend said -- with remarkable confidence for someone who's never been in one -- is the same sort of thing as a women's underwear museum. That is, anyone interested in guns can't have a primarily aesthetic, or utilitarian, or historical, or defensive interest: To have an interest in guns is by definition to fetishize them, to derive masculine orgasmic gratification from them.
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... So maybe shooting would pacify UD's lifelong penis envy!

But, really, she wonders why one of her commenters can't say this about shooting without being dismissed as a perv:

Each time I practice with a rifle I'm reminded of Eugen Herrigel's classic little book Zen in the Art of Archery, the necessary calming and shutting out of all distraction until the only focus is one's pulse transmitted through the hands to that tool of wood and steel. Shotgunning for clay birds is totally different, all fluid motion and quite satisfying...

It's a constant temptation of one sort of academic to tell everyone around her that whatever activity they do enthusiastically is really -- what's the name of that short story collection about Orthodox Jews? -- For the Relief of Unbearable Urges... This academic would point to the word tool in the comment and get smug and smutty about it. But UD would like to close out this section of her post by suggesting that sexualizing guns is somehow at once necessary and boring. She can't promise she won't do it to some extent -- especially if, assuming she does begin to shoot, it turns out to be a major turn-on. But since - as with most theorizing about sexuality - it seems really stupid, she'll try to avoid it.
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Should she shoot? Those who've offered to take her shooting have all been very thoughtful about it; they say that she shouldn't do it if she has any reservations about it, and that she can learn pretty much what she needs to know about guns without hoisting a rifle. Since a lot of people seem to be paying attention to this Inside Higher Ed series about a professor and guns, she opens the question up for comments.

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN: Part Three

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 12:43:29 GMT

In the museum tower of the NRA headquarters, there's first a little store, and then a little theater with a film about the history and significance of guns in America. Vintage rifles line the walls of the theater, and American flags and eagles abound.

The film features figures like Annie Oakley, Dwight Eisenhower, and Theodore Roosevelt (standing triumphantly, gun in hand, over an enormous dead rhinoceros), and argues that guns are "an essential part of the American story - a link between our rights and our history." It provides a time line of the development of guns, calling them a "beautiful marriage of art and technology."

Clearly addressing people who grew up with guns, the film's narrator says that they "awaken memories and strong emotions."

UD wanders around the bookstore. Sample title: Thank God I Had a Gun: True Accounts of Self-Defense. She buys a shot glass with little handles in the shape of a pistol. UD doesn't drink shots. She just likes the absurdity of the thing.

The first display to catch her eye is The Metamorphosis of an Amendment, a quick history of the writing of the Second Amendment. "Americans feared that tyranny could result from an over-strong federal government and president."

There's a Charleton Heston Gallery and a One Hundred Years of John Wayne exhibit, featuring many of the guns he used in his films.

An "Upland Bird Hunting and Waterfowls" exhibit reminds UD that though she thinks of guns and their cultures as totally alien, they're not really. A photo featuring two hunters, their guns, and their English Cocker Spaniels has UD recalling her mother's many such hunting outings with her Mason Dixon English Cocker Spaniel Club. Her mother didn't do any shooting, but other people did.

The museum's full of people looking with great intensity at each display and talking among themselves in great detail about this and that weapon, its use in the Korean War, whatever. Beyond the Metamorphosis exhibit, there's really no propaganda in the museum; it's directed toward gun aesthetes, if you will: People who find guns -- their variety, their features, their embellishments, their capacities -- beautiful and fascinating.

Back in the lobby of the other tower, waiting for her cab home, UD takes in the plushness of the place, inside and out. Well-landscaped, sparkling clean, almost opulent.

The wall behind the lobby reception desk ('Welcome to Your NRA') is a framed photo gallery of all of the men who've led the organization.

UD's hungry, and considers getting a bite at the NRA Cafe, but she's already called a cab.

Quiet, corporate, neat and friendly, full of ordinary Americans of all races, the NRA is masculine in feel but has plenty of women about. Cameras are everywhere, of course, and some of the staff eye me a little warily, but basically there's an open feel to the place. It's not creepy.

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN - PART TWO

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:13:55 GMT

"The next station is... Be - THES - da."

Ah, 'thesda, UD's stomping grounds. Her childhood home, her blue state roost.

As her metro car slips down the darkly lit tunnel under 'thesda, images of UD's 'thesdan life "churn down the optic sluice" (to paraphrase James Merrill's Santorini). Her eyes conjure pictures of her privileged ... upbringing isn't quite it, since her loving, marshmallowy parents, in synergy with the 'sixties, stood aside and let willful UD do whatever. "The child's a perfect heathen!" says Marilla of Anne in Green Gables. UD was a perfect heathen.

Her parents, on the other hand, were cultured, placid. Bookish. Her mother read ancient history, gardened, and raised spaniels. At his NIH lab, her father studied the chemistry of immune response. He played piano in the evening, and on weekends drove to our house on the Chesapeake Bay and steamed crabs.

"Attention crew: You have one minute to alert personnel. Otherwise, the third rail at White Flint metro is hot and energized."

UD's at Farragut West, on the orange line toward the Vienna station, where she'll get a cab to the NRA.

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During her youth, the political divide in UD's 'thesdan town was between bleeding heart liberals and communists. When Mr. H., a few doors down, died, he was eulogized in Izvestia.

Neighborhood mothers walked the streets with copies of Off Our Backs! under their elbows and PEACE necklaces on their chests. Boycotting went on 24/7. People were Unitarian, Quaker, Copacetic.

Back then UD actually did stand holding hands and singing Kumbaya. Also Hey Jude. At the long-gone Biograph Theater in Georgetown, she sat on a sticky floor and watched Yellow Submarine. Her boyfriend massaged her feet after a long march on the Pentagon.

"This is the Vienna station."
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Five mile cab ride in heavy midday traffic along half-completed townhouse developments. Typical hot DC summer day, but pleasant.

The National Rifle Association's headquarters is made up of two large silver-windowed corporate towers, one of which houses a museum. I'm in the other one. At the reception desk I'm given directions to the shooting range, where Sylvia, who runs things, awaits me.

You walk down various flights of steps and then across a dark underground parking lot to get to the range. People outside the range smoke and carry black gun cases. They're mainly men, with close-cropped hair.

At the range, I say hello to Sylvia, who points me to a lounge where I can watch shooters. Two guys with brooms shuffle about the range sweeping up spent shells (is that correct? spent shells?) the way people at salons sweep up hair.

There's this one guy with a big who the hell knows what, and when he shoots it, it makes big sparky fireworks against the dark blue screen at the end of the room, behind the targets.

You staple-gun your target to what looks like a cork board, then key information onto a pad, at which point the target recedes some distance. Some pistols make a little flame at their tip -- comic book style -- when you shoot them.

A few people sit and shoot. Most stand and wrap their hands strongly around their guns. Mainly men, but definitely some women up there too, blast away.

I ask two guys who've finished shooting and are hanging out in the lounge what the fireworks gun was.

"Maybe AR-15 Carbine, steel core ammo, ma'am. That backdrop's also a sheet of metal so you've got two pieces of steel hitting each other. We were shooting copper jacket lead bullets, ma'am. They don't do that."

UD hates it when people call her ma'am. It makes her feel old. She thought: "Man, if I had a gun..."

"Is the fireworks gun more destructive than the others I'm seeing?"

"No ma'am. Destructiveness is caliber and type of bullet."

This will do for Part Two. I'll write about the museum and other stuff in a bit.

Professor Meets Gun

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:37:46 GMT

Today, UD visits the National Rifle Association. She'll talk to a woman who works there, visit the museum, take a look at the shooting range they have in the basement.

Their headquarters is just across the Potomac River from UD's George Washington University office in Foggy Bottom, a quick cab trip from the Vienna/Fairfax-George Mason University metro station in Virginia.

But of course the NRA is a world away from UD herself. UD -- a typical professor at least in this regard -- embodies the blue state background that makes guns alien, frightening, disgusting things, and the NRA an outrage.

UD's husband, also a professor, thinks the Second Amendment should be repealed. He thinks her NRA visit a species of insanity.

From UD's first announcement, about a month ago, that, in the wake of last year's campus massacres, she wanted to learn more about guns and American gun cultures, Mr. UD has been appalled. "You're weird," was the best he could do. Later he settled into staring at her when she mentioned, for instance, that commentary on her other blog about her desire to overcome her ignorance about guns had been profuse, all of it favorable or neutral.

Last night, the eve of her NRA visit, Mr. UD calmed down enough to have a civil chat with her over dinner at Lebanese Taverna in Rockville, Maryland's new town center.

He expressed his belief that it's very hard to have a peaceful society when guns are significantly outside the possession of the state. He recalled going, under the auspices of US AID, to the National Archives, with a group of visiting foreigners who worked in international aid, and then giving a talk to them about the Constitution. "When I opened it up for questions, they didn't want to discuss freedom of speech or any of that. They wanted to know about our bizarre Second Amendment..."

Bizarre it may be -- to UD, her husband, many other professors, many other observers. But off she goes. She'll record her impressions here, at Inside Higher Education.