Winter

“Now is the Winter of our Discontent. . .”

Shakespeare

                One has to be hardy to live through a Minnesota winter.  And this past winter tested even the hardiest of us.  This is especially true for the non-native Minnesotans, like myself, who ventured north for opportunity and not for the weather.  Since moving here in 1989, I have learned to count the seasons differently.  Here, there are five:  winter, spring, summer, autumn, winter. 

                My struggles with winters are compounded by the fact that I spent the first 28 years of my life living in Sacramento, California.  While not a beach-front Malibu, its winters were certainly much less challenging than Alberta Clippers and blizzards and white-out road conditions.  Winter or summer (which has its own weather challenges), I soon learned that in Minnesota, if you’re hitting the highway, check the weather.  Sudden violent storms (blizzards and tornado-producing thunderheads) lurk just over the horizon.  In the Southwest corner of my adopted state, the prairie affords no natural barriers to block the incessant wind.  Snow can fall horizontally in the howling wind here.  Rain can be blown under the shingles of your roof to find a way into your kitchen. 

                Although Sacramento is not, say, an island in the Mediterranean, it certainly stacks up pretty well against a Minnesota winter.  Tule fog was our greatest threat.  And to have such thick ground fog, there must be no wind.  And the air temp stays above 32˚.  We thought it was cold, but it really wasn’t. 

One of my favorite TV shows when I was a California boy was West Point, a weekly series that dramatized the heroism of military officers who graduated from that service academy.  Each episode usually began with the hero as a green cadet who always seemed to get into trouble.  Every week some officer always yelled at a troublesome plebe warning the callow youth he would never make it. 

                A common punishment for wayward cadets was to have them march back and forth across a large quad.  In true TV fashion, to show the passage of time, several scenes would be blended through the changing of the seasons.  The camera would focus on the errant cadet’s feet, and, by the magic of TV, the ground around those pacing feet would get rained on then snowed on.  What took a few moments to pace off gave the impression of passing weeks then months.  Rain to snow to melt-off just before the commercial.

                My reaction to those feet pacing in snow was always the same.  How could anyone live in snow, I would ask?  At the time, I wanted to attend West Point; I was young and impressionable.  But live where it snowed?  Not for me, that icy life.

                Life kept me in California until I was 28.  After college, I worked on my MA in English literature and taught high school for four years all in and around Sacramento.  But, I was ambitious, anxious to move on to teaching at the university level and willing to put my feet in the waters of what lay beyond my hometown so long as it was along the West Coast.

                I applied to ten PhD schools:  five in California, two others on the West Coast, and a few token ones well beyond Utah just in case.  The tokens didn’t matter.  I was going to Cal or UCLA or at least UC Davis, a campus twenty minutes from home. 

Soon, the rejections piled up.  Berkeley, no!  UCLA, no!  Davis, no!  Those token places out East and in the Midwest increasingly grew more and more likely.  Harsh reality forced me to hatch a new plan:  cross the Sierras in an inverse move of those pioneers of the Gold Rush, snatch up my PhD in record time, and return to teach in California.  I just presumed I would come back to Sacramento State, where I earned my MA, and where I felt I belonged.  I couldn’t imagine living or teaching anywhere else.

                The last winter I taught high school in Sacramento, I lived with my parents because my father was seriously ill.  We didn’t know it, but he had less than two years to live.  That winter was also the worst winter in South Bend, Indiana, home of the University of Notre Dame.  WNDU, an NBC affiliate, was then located on the campus.  When the famous blizzard of 1978 socked Notre Dame, it made national news with live shots of snow piled up to second-story dorm windows and a campus blanketed to stillness.

                Notre Dame was one of the campuses that hadn’t yet rejected me.  And thanks to a WNDU feed, my father and I watched nightly for a week in January 1978 as a three-foot layer of snow and lamppost-high drifts closed the Notre Dame campus for the first time in a century.

                This was not sunny California.

                After the storm but while the campus was still closed, my dad and I sat safe and warm in front of our TV and watched students file into the ND basketball arena for a game.  ND insisted the game go on, so on it went even if the visiting team had to struggle to reach the campus.  True to form, the Irish student body came out of their snow-bound dorms and flowed towards the arena, their heads barely visible along the snow-cleared path.  A trench had been carved out for them just for this game.  It was like watching a white-shrouded World War I trench system without barbed wire.  The famous Golden Dome stood majestic but snow-covered, no longer gold.

                “How can anyone live in that?” I demanded, disdaining every thought of a snowy winter, especially with snow piled higher than your head.

                “You’re going to go to Notre Dame,” my dad replied, a man of few words.  He was a Notre Dame Subway Alum.  None of his four sons had attended ND.  His not-so-secret ambition in life:  have one of us earn an ND degree.

                A few weeks later, I got my acceptance letter from the Golden Dome, with a promise of four years of teaching to pay my way through.  It was a graduate teaching position, the best way to finance further education.  I may have been an idealistic English teacher, but I knew my four years of high school experience amounted to something.  Notre Dame agreed.  Besides graduate seminars and exams and a dissertation, I graded stacks and stacks of freshmen papers over the next several years, but the exchange was well worth it.

                Rather quickly, I even grew to appreciate harsh Midwest winters.  During my third year there, I went cross-country skiing with a young woman originally from Chicago who had winter down pat.  She was a graduate of Notre Dame; her senior year was that blizzard winter I had watched with my father.  I may have seen her on her way to that game.  Who knows?  Out skiing, I wore so many layers, I could hardly move.  After repeated falls, I split my pants down the backside seam.  She married me anyway.

                I don’t think of Minnesota winters in quite the same way as I did while living in California.  They are prolonged (and this past one especially so with snow even at the end of April), but they can be endured.  Once here, I bought a snow blower then up-scaled it to a larger model.  Now, I hire two strapping fellows to clear my long driveway.  I own parkas and overcoats, multiple scarves, several pairs of boots, sets of gloves.  Beyond all that, I’ve made tremendous friends who make trying situations bearable.  Their native (and non-native) good humor about winters of Ice Age proportions reminds me that those frozen months are as much a prolonged season as a state of mind.  Their warm hearts make life flourish here all year, every year.

And yet, when I teach the Percy Shelly poem “Ode to the West Wind” which ends:  “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” I still remind my students that Shelley was living in sunny Italy when he wrote that, not Minnesota.

  

MTC/LAC/LEP

“It is impossible to write a government document without

a mandatory TLA.”

Common knowledge.

                My brother, Rob, (a wiz at computer programming) is the one who informed me of the useful term TLA, the Three Letter Acronym.  In the computer world, acronyms rule:  BIOS, HTML, and URL.  Even online, they populate our messages: LOL, OMG, POS, IMHO.

                In my professional world, that of public higher education in Minnesota, the dominating TLA is the MTC.  (Its cousin, the MnTC is the same exact thing but interspersed inconsistently amid various MnSCU documents.  “Consistency is all I ask!”)

                The MTC, the Minnesota Transfer Curriculum, is a set of ten goals that every student earning a four-year degree at a Minnesota public university must experience.  They range from the essentials, like oral and written communications, to math, the sciences, and the humanities.  Besides content areas normally found in a single department, the MTC also includes thematic aims like “Critical Thinking” and “Human Diversity” and “Ethical and Civic Responsibility.”  These are lofty goals.  To earn a four-year degree, a student completes 120 credits.  The MTC takes at least 40 credits, one-third of a student’s work.  It’s not something “in the way” of graduation but something that’s an integral part of graduation.

                Any system has its drawbacks, and the MTC is not immune.  One remark I hear regularly comes from students “who just want to get done with generals” without seeing any reason for these fundamental and comprehensive goals, and without seeing any integration of these goals in their major, indeed every major.  I heard one student complain once that none of his major classes in business counted in the MTC and that was a disappointment to him.  “But, that’s the point,” I replied.  “The MTC is the superstructure not the exterior.”  I don’t think he was pleased with my answer.

                At Southwest Minnesota State University, we call our MTC the LAC (formerly) and currently the LEP.  (That’s the Liberal Arts Curriculum at one time and now the Liberal Education Program.)  We’ve individualized the mandatory MTC in various and clever ways; we’ve put our own distinctive stamp on it. 

For example, we use the MTC Goal #2, Critical Thinking, to have our incoming students take a First-Year Seminar.  About a dozen professors teach differently themed seminars in the Fall, about eight in the Spring.  Topics range from sexuality to the Great War to the mind/brain question to the meaning of life to jazz.  These are small classes with about 25 students each.  (Prospective students take note:  SMSU = small classes, and at state U bargain prices.)  We also have a further junior-year requirement that integrates oral and written communication, critical thinking, and information literacy around a central theme, once again, unrelated to a major so it can focus on the process and not the product.

                It’s all a noble endeavor when we are confronted with rising prices of everything, fewer students willing to read (for its own sake), and a society that seems to be growing more and more intolerant of ideas qua ideas.  Americans are practical if nothing else.  And when times are tough, they get too practical.  Many begin to think that four years in “college” is enough.  “A lifelong career better be attainable once I don my graduation robe and cross the stage,” they argue, whistling against the wind.

                Sadly, some students with such an attitude don’t realize that most careers will change radically or disappear entirely in a few years.  Many of their future careers haven’t been invented yet.  If you are a bit older, say past 40, you probably remember typewriters and black objects wired to the wall and to its component parts (i.e., telephones).  You probably remember doing government forms (like a FAFSA or your taxes) using paper forms and a calculator or an adding machine.  You probably never imagined first DVDs for rent then those rental stores going bankrupt as movies became streaming data.  Life changes rapidly, almost instantly.  And those workers without the skills to adapt (by learning, discerning, and exploring new ideas and technologies and careers) are doomed.  Remember the dinosaurs; it wasn’t Noah’s Flood that swept them away.  The world changed; they didn’t adapt.

                My point about education is nothing new, I realize.  John Henry Cardinal Newman made the same point (rather more eloquently) in his Ideas of the University more than 150 years ago.  Education shouldn’t just be for the sons of an elite class, Newman wrote, nor should it exclusively be a practical hands-on training for hands-on jobs.  Thinking clearly, speaking articulately, writing well:  those should be the cornerstones of everyone’s education.  Knowing something about real science is important with global climate change, earthquakes and tsunamis, radioactive meltdowns.  Being able to understand math beyond balancing a checkbook is necessary each day with the Euro in trouble due to the economic crash of the PIGS nations, in addition to state and federal deficits.  Comprehending the geopolitical world is about understanding the world not fearing it.

                My First-Year Seminar next Fall is on World War One, the so-called Great War.  As a British literature specialist, I have studied the War Poets in detail:  Sassoon, Owen, Jones.  My students haven’t.  And so, my students explore the history of an antebellum European aristocracy gone by and then the ramifications of a repressive peace treaty.  It’s a fascinating way to start college, too, learning about a generation with such noble ideals and ambitions that was cut off in its youth because they trusted their leaders too much.  It’s no wonder the second act came along so quickly after the curtain of the first; World War Two was only twenty years after the repressive Treaty of Versailles, fought over much the same ground between many of the same combatants.

Confronted with a topic they know little about, my untrained students have to train themselves to discern and to connect it all so it makes sense.  Regardless of topic, these thinking skills are for a lifetime.

                History repeats itself.  The MTC or our LEP won’t stop that.  But, with effort and fortitude, students learn to apply these fundamental skills to their major course of study and eventually in their lives as employees, as engaged citizens, as educated and active voters.

                This is all so idealistic, I realize.  I know critics of higher education are calling for three-year degrees by reducing the kinds of classes I am advocating.  I know many politicians want fewer skeptical and questioning citizen-college grads because a thinking electorate sees through sound-bite ads and knee-jerk, fear-mongering rhetoric. 

                But perhaps now is precisely the time to be idealistic.  Delving into the areas covered by the MTC or our LEP maybe can’t change the world; it may, however, just change our understanding and appreciation of it.

                And IMHO, that should make us all take a deep breath and text OMG!

                 

                Libya:  2011 – The Great War 1914-1918

        “Only the dead have seen the end to war.”  George Santayana 

    I am sure much of the political irony about Libya is lost on the average American college student.  I think that’s the case because the average American knows little about World War I, “The Great War” which raged in Europe, Africa, parts of Asia, and on all the oceans from 1914 to 1918.  It ended nearly 100 years ago and yet we still live with the repercussions of that debacle.  

    My comments are in no way intended to be a defense of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the self-proclaimed Libyan “King of Kings,” the horrific despot who runs Libya, as all despots do, with an iron fist.  He’s not much of a tyrant since he really only controls a bit of sand and beach plus thousands of square miles of dry wadies and desert wastes dotted with an occasional oasis.  If Libya didn’t sit on vast reserves of oil, few would pay attention to it or to its ranting lunatic of a ruler.  (Compare Libya to the Sudan, and you will know what I mean.)  

    Pan Am Flight 103 and Lockerbie aside, (and Gaddafi was only tangentially involved with these after the fact, it seems), Libya hasn’t hurt Europe, and Europe only cares for Libya when her refugees clamor to seek safety in Sicily or when oil prices soar.  

    And yet, Libya is front page on our few remaining newspapers and on our incessant 24-hour networks.  Today isn’t the first time armies are pushing along the Mediterranean coast road and then falling back as airpower shifts the balance of power.  It happened in the early 40’s during World War II.       

    The crux of the irony right now, however, isn’t World War II, it’s World War I. French and British jets are pounding Gaddafi and his armed forces.  The US is aiding in this, especially with cruise missiles, but the Europeans are the ones driving this campaign.  Since the British, French, and Americans are part of NATO, NATO is also involved, which means, (if you are following me), that Turkey is involved.  Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952.

    And so, here is the historical irony.  European and Euro-Asian nations (Britain, France, and Turkey) are exerting a military presence over North Africa yet again.  Thumb through any world history book, and you’ll see that these nations have done this all before.  Turkey was once the Ottoman Empire and in the Great War, the Ottoman Turks allied themselves with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary.  

    And at this time, the Allies, specifically the British and French (along with their attendant empires) tried to first invade Turkey through the Dardanelles, the ill-fated Gallipoli invasion that made Australian and New Zealand soldiers famous.  (The movie, Gallipoli, helped make Mel Gibson famous to Americans; it’s still worth viewing.)  When this invasion failed, the Allies tried a different tactic.  At this time, the Ottoman Empire stretched through what are today independent nations.  (Perhaps not free nations in any political sense, but independent nonetheless.)  Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, to name only a few nations once dominated by the Turks.  Not as far around the Mediterranean coast as Egypt and beyond all the way to Libya, but in the far reaches of the Mediterranean and down to the Persian Gulf, Ottoman Turkey ruled for centuries without rival.

    Wars have a way of producing an opportunistic guise for adventuring countries.  Britain and France, then the number one and number two European empires and thus the number one and two empires of the world, were no exception.  In heartfelt political proclamations about the rights of peoples to command their own destinies, the British mainly (with the French clamoring for a share of the spoils) destabilized the Turks.  (Another fantastic film, Lawrence of Arabia, tells this story; it is also worth watching.)

    Come 1919 when the whole area was at peace and the new maps drawn, it was no surprise who controlled the areas and who didn’t.  But this heartfelt concern for the locals was a deception.  The European empires wanted to replace the old Turkish Empire with their own, and they did just that.  

    At Southwest Minnesota State University, I teach a great deal about World War I in various classes:  20th Century British LIT, a First-Year Experience class whose topic is solely the Great War, various Global Studies seminars (in which we actually take students to the battlefields of Belgium and France).  As a scholar of the history and literature of the British Empire during this specific period, I often remind students that wherever there is tension in the world today, probably Europeans drew the maps.  And they probably drew them in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles in which the victorious Empires thought that their myopic vision for the world (which was based on the sacrosanct idea that they were right at all times) was not just the best vision for the world, but the only vision for the world.

    It took a second world war to disabuse them of this notion.

    What a difference a war makes.  The end of World War I with its ill-conceived Treaty of Versailles was actually the beginning of World War II.  World War II ended with the United Nations and its two major tenets:  make war impossible and end colonialism.

    With jets hitting targets in Libya, perhaps part of the UN Charter doesn’t seem so successful.  And with these former colonial powers leading this charge, perhaps the second part of the Charter is being overlooked as well.  History will be the judge.  And the irony isn’t lost on the observant.  

    Back in college, I remember reading about the cycle of history:  anarchy becomes tyranny because people want stability more than anything else so they surrender to a strongman.  From this tyranny, an oligarchy rises as the tyrant needs to share power to keep it.  This becomes an aristocratic system as entrenched families pass their power down through the generations.  From this, people clamor for political power, hence republican and democratic ways of governing rise up.  But these all fail in time and collapse back into anarchy which sets the whole political landscape in motion once again.  

    The future world I create for The Marsco Saga explores modern democracies after they fail.  The main characters are struggling amid their personal success:  they are part of the power structure which has risen from post-democracy anarchy to give the world stability.  But, they chaff against the draconian methods Marsco employs to stay in power.  The few chapters I’ve posted give you a sense of this central tension running throughout the novels.       

                                 “Hurry up, please, it’s time!”
                                  T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

    I have always been fascinated by time, the passage of time, the effects of time.  Even as a boy, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, I burned the past year’s freshly-completed calendar as if to signify that its time was truly gone.  Even today, I mark off the days on my calendar one at a time as if to anchor time.  Today is done, I think drawing a diagonal mark across the box with the date, tomorrow awaits.  

    And the older I get, the more the years fly by.  I often remind my colleagues at Southwest Minnesota State University that I originally intended to stay here three years.  We came in 1989.  I assured myself, “three years and onto somewhere closer to family, somewhere with a warmer climate.”  Three years has grown into nearly twenty-two.

    Wordsworth speaks of “a spot of time.”  He is so accurate when he explains that some moments in our lives become significant at the exact moment they happen and then also take on more or shaded meaning(s) as we move away from those events.  A visit to a monument, for example, can come to mean much more than the actual trek there.  In his case, his first visit to Tintern Abbey and second visit with his sister five years later both took on deep meaning.  The ruined Abbey hadn’t changed all that much in the five years between his visits, but his life had.  He saw those ruins in such a different light the second time.  And on his repeat visit, he also saw them as his sister, experiencing them for the first time, would have.  It was as though he knew this experience two or three different “times” at once.  

    He is so impressed with his experiences, he is so sure of their current and future influences on him, that he states that he knows the memories of these visits will bring him such happiness and support “In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.”  Indeed, these visits are so powerful to him he senses that such experiences allow us all to “see into the life of things.”  These aren’t just tourist destinations; these are spiritual events with mythic, life-changing consequences.  He gladly acknowledges “with pleasing thoughts / That in this moment there is life and food / For future years.”  

    Wordsworth and others have noted this.  I think it’s the job of the poet, the artist, (photographer, novelist, essayist) to arrest us to a moment we might otherwise not notice, ones we habitually overlook. 

    Today, a colleague and I were speaking of Harper Lee.  To Kill a Mockingbird has been relegated to adolescent coming-of-age LIT by so many, but its enduring force still surges for many young readers.  In perfect pitch Lee wrote a depiction of a time and place in our history that (for the most part) is gone, but which still lurks in many parts of our society although in more nuanced and subtle ways.  

    Looking at the stark, blatant racism of the Deep South in the Depression fixes the attention of high school readers today, arrests the attention of many who hardly know the significance of a black man as president.  That’s a fact (Obama in the White House) they can just take for granted.  Blacks already populate their sports and entertainment world, their school lunchrooms (as teachers and students not just janitors) and their TV screen:  the news, weather, sports are all brought to us by a shifting palette of American colors, not just European White (and Male)—the TV skin tone of my youth.  

    Compare how Mockingbird has stayed with the young readers of today while Catcher in the Rye has diminished.  Holden Caulfield no longer jives with youth because his world was so narrow that today it seems stilted and privileged.  Scout’s world is mostly gone, except maybe in the Tea Party’s image of what America should return to, but her world is alive with variety and promise.  Holden’s isn’t.  His cynicism is old hat; it’s this generation’s cynicism now.  Our youth sense Scout’s optimism; they’re drawn to it.  As cynical as they are, our youth are repelled by Holden’s self-loathing righteousness.  It is too much their own pessimism.  

    My fascination with time drew me to science fiction.  I devoured the classics from Jules Verne to H. G. Wells to Bradbury.  I grew up with Spock and Kirk first-hand, before syndication and without spinoffs.  Star Trek was raw, laughable special effects—that a ten-year-old can do on a desktop today—but I was loyally, glued to the screen of possibility:  diversity (only we didn’t call it that then), intelligence winning over superstition and ignorance, and of course other-worldly adventure.  I stood in line for three hours to see the original Star Wars on that second day it opened.  I ended up seeing it five times within the next month, always with fresh eyes. 

    My own speculative fiction, The Marsco Saga, forces readers to pay attention to time.  As much as I love Dr. Who, I don’t play any tricks with “time warps” or “dual times” or “overlapping realities.”  Marsco time is the gritty look at our time with all its flaws, played out to the least desirable extreme.  Earth, 2092.  Marsco dominates the planet and solar system out to the asteroid colonies with the time-honored strategy of naked power.  As democracies run their course and collapse, they begin disenfranchising their citizens who are least educated, the most costly in terms of social services and the least likely to produce any profits.  This puts a bit of the “Third World” next to every developed city or area around the globe.  Nations downsize.  And they protect themselves with barbed wire and checkpoints, surveillance, and armed troops.  They select and screen who can use their vast computer network, the only one left standing.

    The Marsco World is a world not so different from our own, exaggerated for effect but not as speculative as we would wish.  I have posted a few chapters of The Marsco Dissident on this blog and hope you enjoy them.  This summer, I plan to have the first two novels, The Marsco Dissident and Marsco Triumphant available for e-book download.  I hope you will take the opportunity—and time—to enjoy them.