If I’m a moderate, it’s only in the sense that I attempt to communicate moderately face to face, and am genuine in my attempts to understand opposing arguments. Other than that, I’m quite radical—politically, theologically, and in my general thinking.
This presents a problem when teaching 44 college freshmen in northern Utah. Chances are that about 75% of them are conservative—politically and theologically. I do not think they have thought critically about a lot of issues—and this is partly based on my own experience, as many of them remind me of myself as a freshman, and partially based on the surface approach I see them take in some of their arguments. Some of my students are brilliant writers. I have many students who are far ahead of where I was as a freshman in writing ability. But nearly all of them fail to think very critically about issues (the clear exception being my older students).
I believe these students need to learn to think critically. If they do not, their college education has been useless. But, I feel I am absolutely the worst possible person to introduce them to critical thinking skills, to get them to examine their views, to get them questioning their closely held opinions. Were I a moderate, I could effectively argue both sides; as I am not, I believe my students would react very stubbornly to me attempting to teach them to examine their views. I feel paralyzed, as well, by my belief that on current political issues, I am right, and they are wrong.
Monday was the first time we’ve discussed anything of a very political nature in class, and it’s the fourth to last class of the semester:
First, I list ten or so things on the board: spiritual beliefs, gender, age, health, political views, family, marital status, etc. Then I had the students fill in the info in their notebooks while I did this on the board. This is the first time my students learn that my Spiritual Beliefs are different than theirs. I can hear the air leaving their lungs. I suspect they already know I’m politically left. I describe these as lenses through which we look at issues and the world (this Cultural Lens thing was taken from theorists Meeks and Austin, according to my notes), and ask the class for a pressing issue we can examine.
“Healthcare.”
Good. Someone knows. This is two days after Reid maneuvered his bill past a filibuster.
I write “Health care reform” on the board, and then make a cross, and ask the class to explain to me what the perspectives are on the right and on the left. This wins me a twenty second round of silence from a generally responsive class. I add the words Republican and Democrat to the sides of the cross, in case that’s the issue. Now I get one taker—the usual suspect, a girl who tends to speak quite emotionally, and has a lot of ideas, even though they are occasionally young and developing as she speaks (she’s like me and speaks too soon).
“I know I’m not in favor of it.”
“Of what?” I ask.
“Health care.”
“Health care reform,” I say, nodding my head, just to be sure she’s not actually against health care altogether.
“Right.”
I want to steer this back to where it was headed. “Can you tell me the views of the democrats or republicans?”
“I know the democrats want to make it like Canada, and the republicans don’t want to. And I know that all the doctors are against it too.”
So, immediately we have a problem. She’s now stating as fact things that are false. What do I do? I decide to nod, and ask her if she knows what the republicans want to do, but she doesn’t. So I go to the board and start writing things.
And here’s my second problem.
The republican’s plan almost sounds like a joke. In my best efforts to describe it, it sounds as bad as it does when the republicans describe it. “They are against a public option for people younger than 64, but they are additionally upset about the possibility of taking away funding for a public option for people over 64. But,” I pause, thinking, how can I make these republicans not sound absurd? “they don’t see it like that — see — they…” I pause again. “OK,” I tell them. “Here’s the problem. I can’t describe for you the republican’s plan, because I am on the other side. I’m far left, and anything I tell you about the right will be untrustworthy. You will have to find it out some other way, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t describe it without my biases.”
At this point, I have them write for five minutes about how three of their cultural lenses influence their perspective on these issues. I select my spiritual beliefs, my family, and my class (upper middle — and I explain to them that despite our low-incomes as college students, it’s most realistic to consider our class as the same as our parents). And I spend the time writing on the board, filling it from left to right. This is something I’ve been doing all semester, as it seems to help them see how freewriting works. I think I write extra bad, illegibly, on purpose, so no one freaks out when I articulate that my belief that there is no justice in the universe aside from what humans can provide, no afterlife of rewarding the poor and the needy and humble, compels me to argue for justice and diminished suffering for all in this life, regardless of income, and thus, I support universal health care.
I ask for volunteers to read, and the same girl wants to read. She says her sister will die if universal health care is passed. I ask her to elaborate on this. We know, from before, that her sister is somehow disabled — I believe both physically and mentally. “If my sister has a problem,” she says, “and everyone has health care, then we go to the emergency room and what are we supposed to do if everyone is there? It will be too busy, and my sister will die, because they are all in there.”
I couldn’t even begin to touch this one, because my student was seconds away from tears. I cut her off just to keep her from breaking down. It was, I suppose, due mostly to her fear of losing her sister. I can’t help but suspect, though, that based on the way she said they—those undeserving in her imaginary emergency room—some of her emotion was over anger at the thought of this scenario. I wished I could probe her opinion and perhaps get her to think about it—for example, might the current state of health care in the US contribute to higher emergency room use than one in which everyone had access to primary care doctors? I also wanted to ask if she thought it was reasonable for me to wish for women to be stripped of their right to vote so I could stand in line for less time next November? What is this quality of worth that makes some people more deserving of timely care than others? I would have liked my students to consider such a question. Is it wealth? Race? Family? Religious affiliation? Gender? Employment status? For as long as we do not have equal access to health care, we are using something as a gatekeeper. What is it? Does it make any sense?
Instead, I tried to feel the girl’s concern. I attempted to be genuine and said, “I can understand how you feel, actually. It sounds like you have a pretty enormous personal stake in this. It sounds like “Family” is probably the lens through which you are viewing this issue. And to be honest, that’s one of my biggest as well.” I turned to my chicken scratches on the board, because in addition to spiritual beliefs, I’d written about my family lens. “See,” I told her, “I have a similar family stake.” And then, reading from the board, “Without government funded health care, my wife dies.” I turned and shrugged my shoulders. “Perhaps all political views really come down to that — our own personal stake. Maybe, no matter how much I think I’m fighting for justice or whatever, it’s just personal self-interest.”
Then, I did add, “You should check into that thing about doctors not favoring health care reform. My wife’s doctors have written letters to the editor about how important universal health care is. And I thought the majority of doctors actually supported a public plan. So look into it.” She nodded, still looking close to tears, but didn’t seem to feel I’d stomped on her or her family.
The last thing was a boy who read what he’d written, about supporting the republican view, but then looked up and said, “See, but I grew up in a republican house, so like you were saying, I’ve never had the democrats view described correctly.”
OK, maybe that’s a small victory. I don’t know.
But looking back on this, it’s very upsetting. It’s upsetting, because I fear my student didn’t actually hear what I said. I don’t think she actually considered that there are others who fear losing their friends and family members — that there are 40,000 people who die each year because of our current policies. I heard what she said. And I’m still thinking about it. How do we solve her problem? It’s as important as mine, or any other of the tens of thousands of families who will lose loved ones every year because of lack of health insurance. Did she hear what I said? Or is she somehow able to continue believing that all death, all suffering, is not equal? That they do not deserve to live as much as she or her family does?
It seems the first step would be for her to think critically. And yet, even writing all of this, I double back, fearing that my moralistic leftism is blinding me from something. Am I missing something?
Monday in my Fiction Workshop I got some very useful feedback on one of my short stories. At the same time, I feel I have no idea how to make a piece of fiction actually work. I can read Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction cover to cover, I can write a pretty good analysis of the text chapter by chapter, I can write a killer sentence, a nice paragraph, a good scene, or a compelling character altogether. But what makes a literary story actually successful?
What makes it successful?
Does successful mean it sells? By this definition, of course, almost no literary story in the world is successful. Twilight is successful (at least we can all agree on that; the books are masterpieces, with perhaps my one complaint being that if the werewolves run around in human form wearing cut-off levis, where do they hold the shorts when they change to wolves? In their teeth? And when they morph back to humans, do they remove those shorts from their mouths and then stand behind a tree and hop on one foot, squeezing back into their clothes?).
Does successful mean it gets published? Well, I’ve read plenty of short stories in reputable journals that I think are completely boring and forgettable. That’s disregarding the numerous less-than-prestigious publications and the perhaps hit-or-miss quality of some of the writing in them. If publication equals success, then the qualities of a successful piece are very very broad. My opinion is that many published stories are unsuccessful.
Does “successful” mean a fictional story is understandable and appealing to a large audience? Probably not—the literary audience seems rather not-broad. Naked Lunch—incomprehensible, and not appealing to a large audience, but in my opinion successful.
So, my opinion, it seems, keeps cropping up, even if I don’t know what it is. I’m starting to get a sense. It’s a rather high bar, and that’s probably why I don’t anticipate ever considering myself a successful fiction writer. I think my opinion is that successful literary fiction really makes a difference — that it really changes things. This is perhaps why I have a hard time with the stories I write. I don’t think they really make any difference for a reader. This is also perhaps why I lean toward nonfiction writing, and particularly writing with a sort of instructional element. It seems more “useful.” My bookshelf is heavily biased toward informative creative nonfiction books.
It’s not that I think “Art for Art’s Sake” is useless; I just have never been able to emotionally connect to it. And perhaps it’s just supposed to be purposeful for the person creating it. My own much less artistically pure opinions about art and writing clearly slant me toward nonfiction, I think. There is so much to learn about existing, and there is very little time. Is this fictions goal? To teach about the world? It seems to be nonfiction’s goal more commonly than it is fiction’s. I think.
So what is fiction all about? I think I don’t understand it, at its core. I think I lack a fundamental and basic understanding of the art.
A. Toni Morrison is coming to Utah State University in the spring. Considering the enormous budget cuts we’re experiencing, that’s pretty amazing. I’m really excited to hear her read.
B. My friends and I were having a brief discussion on the topic of Superman, and how he seems a lot different than other superheros in that he is pretty much all powerful. Since our group lacked that one kid who knows a ton about comic-book heroes, the discussion quickly devolved into a discussion of how Superman, being Superman, is so different from other superheros that he probably doesn’t even conform to proverbs. I think it was Andrew who started this by saying/asking, “A rolling Superman gathers moss?”
So then there was “The early superman does not get the worm.”
And “When in Rome, Superman does not do as the Romans do.”
And “When Superman and Chuck Norris get in a fight, Superman just beats the crap out of Chuck Norris.” Which is my favorite.
C. I write freelance copy on the side (Johnwroteit.com), and I used to just cycle all $$ back through to Google Adwords and the web-hosting company. I figured that as a really busy student I would just build my clientele, and use all the money for more advertising, so that after I found myself out of school and out of work I’d have something to use as a platform for attempting to do this full time. After I became very busy with school and such this semester I upped my rates to $50, and I’ve been getting enough business that I need to consider that I might turn a profit this year. Anyway, I think I need to do what needs to be done to turn myself into a sole proprietorship or something. Anyone know anything about that?
If you are curious as to what I do exactly, well, I’ve written copy elusively exclusively for small businesses websites. I used to market myself for other services, but I focused in on small businesses recently when I recognized that was who was drawn to my service. They send 50% up front via Paypal, I do the work, and they send the rest after. I’ve had one client who failed to pay on the back-end, but I haven’t given up on him yet.
It would be hard to be dependent on the money, because it’s so variable. Like I said, I’d like to build my name and references so when I really need the money (and have the time), I can dive in.
The key to a successful reading list is to keep it manageable. I have five weeks of winter break to use. In addition, the following things are in need of accomplishment over winter break:
1. Moving a few blocks — This means several days of packing, cleaning, loading, unloading, cleaning, unpacking.
2. Holiday cheer — Maryssa and I will have our obligatory New Years Eve fight. Last year I was driving around town looking for her when she was back at the apartment the whole time. The year before that—well, never mind, seriously.
3. Revising my fiction pieces to the best of my ability and sending them to about forty journals.
4. Finishing the essay I started two days ago. I’m aiming it at Tin House.
5. Finding and proceeding to cook a duck.
So, given all of this excitement, what reading quests might I accomplish?
First priority is researching for the essay I plan to write in the spring. Second priority is reading some John McPhee, because I haven’t. Third priority is reading as many back issues of Harper’s as I can, because that’s where I’m aiming to publish the essay I’m writing in the spring. Crazy, I know.
The List:
1. Mormon Thunder: A Documentary History of Jedediah Morgan Grant, by Gene A Sessions.
Dr. Sessions has included photo copies of tons of original primary sources in this exhaustive book on my great great great grandfather, captain of one of the first waves of plains-crossing Mormon Pioneers, first mayor of Salt Lake City, aggressive preacher of Blood Atonement, husband of seven wives, and father to Mormon prophet Heber J. Grant. I can hardly wait.
2. Radical Origins: Early Mormon Converts and Their Colonial Ancestors, by Val D. Rust.
A look at the Puritan ancestors of early Mormon converts, like Jeddediah Morgan Grant. I’ll only need to read a few chapters.
3. The Founding Fish, by John McPhee.
McPhee has written so many books that I can hardly decide where to start. This is a recent one in which he tracks the historical significance of a particular fish he loves to fish for. That’s something I’d like to write; I’m curious to see how he makes this interesting.
4. Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee.
This is McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize wining compilation of his previous works on the geological history of the US. I’ll be reading a fraction of the 700 page compilation of four books and an essay. I want to see the way he deals with science and geology in literary nonfiction prose, because I have a specific interest in geology.
5. Harper’s.
The USU library has every edition 2005—present bound and available for two day checkout. I’m looking for the articles that strike me as non-current-event features. Last night I read two articles from 2008, one about a craps (gambling) course and the tendency for humans to want to control uncontrollables, and one about the Magic Olympics.
6. The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, by Christopher Cokinos.
I started this book before the semester began and haven’t been able to get back to it. Chris is my friend and the professor who assigned the essay I won the Norman Mailer Award with. He’s also likely to be my thesis chair.
I think that’s all I’ll get to, if that. In the event that I accomplish these feats of reading, I’m going to read Gessner’s Sick of Nature and Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is one of those books I talk about like I’ve read but HAVEN’T!!
“It’s very Kafkesque.”
“Yeah, that’s because it’s written by Franz Kafka.”
—From The Squid and the Whale, when the main character is describing the end of the book he has not yet read.
Reading lists, anyone? And what book do you love to talk about despite the fact you’ve not ever actually read it?
I’m coming to the end of my first semester of teaching freshman composition (two sections of 22 students each).
Notes for next semester:
1. Begin syllabus by listing WAYS TO FAIL MY COURSE
2. Under that heading: A) send me repeated emails asking what you missed in class; B) miss 19 classes; C) sign your emails in which you ask what you missed in class after your nineteenth absence with “Thank you for your patience and understanding;”D) abbreviate the word “minute” as “min” in a formal essay (and without even using a period to signify the abbreviation); E) start paragraphs with “So” and start sentences with “Like, basically,” in a formal paper.
3. Continue syllabus by stating, in bold print: THIS CLASS IS HELD AT 8:30 AM. AT NO POINT IN THE SEMESTER WILL THAT FEEL ANY DIFFERENT THAN IT DID THIS MORNING. AT NO POINT THROUGHOUT THIS SEMESTER WILL YOU WAKE UP FEELING BEAUTIFUL, RESTED, OR HAPPY TO BE ALIVE. IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS, PLEASE FIND ANOTHER SECTION.
4. Continue syllabus by noting: If you email me asking what you missed, I will send you false information.
5. Make sure students are aware that over the course of the semester, I will bestow them with an inordinate amount of bad luck. My classes average four root canals, a rollover, one dead grandfather and two dead grandmothers, one grandmother who needs to be driven to California for a quilting convention, one mother who insists on the aforementioned grandmother being driven to California for the aforementioned quilting convention, several instances of sudden fracturing of families, two love triangles, six broken body parts, one thousand diagnoses of swine flu, and forty empty printer cartridges.
Just kidding, It was fun.
Good news: I’ve received official notice that “Final Cascade” has been accepted for publication in Creative Nonfiction (Site Wikipedia). Creative Nonfiction “was the first and is still the largest literary magazine” devoted exclusively to nonfiction. It’s founding editor, Lee Gutkind, has a great interview published in The Writer’s Chronicle’s Oct/Nov edition. Gutkind founded the first nonfiction MFA in the country and I think he’s a big part of the recent-decades uprising of creative nonfiction in academia. Paradoxically, he recommends against jumping right into an MFA program. (Drive a truck and write, he advises in that interview.)
Two really cool things about publishing at CNF:
1) When I open lit journals, I must admit I sometimes skip the poetry, or I’m just looking for nonfiction, or just fiction. Often, especially as a busy student, the genres I’m not looking for go unread. I have a couple Tin House magazines that I’ve not read anything but the nonfiction in. But when someone picks up CNF they are looking for nonfiction. CNF has a circulation of 4,500, and it’s likely that many of those who pick up the journal will not skip over my piece. This is all very unscientific, but it makes sense to me.
2. They are a big nonprofit organization, not just a magazine, and they believe strongly in the nonfiction genre, as I do. Their recent developments include a complete makeover for the magazine: Instead of a small, paper-back sized journal, as of March 2010, they are publishing in a larger format. I prefer to read larger formats, and they seem to have more popular appeal to me. CNF is also moving from a 3/year publication schedule to a quarterly publication schedule, which is really saying something considering how frightening the publishing and literary mag world is right now.
The other bit of really good news is that I’ve been offered literary representation by an agent at ICM New York who contacted me after reading about me in the New York Times. I’m not sure about author-agent etiquette, so I think the extent of the info I’ll publish on my blog right now is that ICM is one of the largest agencies in the world. Very lucky, very fortunate, because they don’t accept unsolicited submissions, they find writer clients through their contacts and, apparently, through reading the arts section of the Times. I’m very excited to move forward with this.
This is all like I’ve played a huge poker tournament and won. You must play well to be the winer, but critically, you must catch the cards, and you must beat Aces with Tens a few times to get there.
This is a photo of the sunrise over Bear Lake, an hour into my 3.5 hour drive one morning this past February. I got to the High Uintas by 9 ish, rented a snowmobile, and took a day hike for part of the essay I was beginning work on. It became “Final Cascade.”
I think one of my favorite poems would be a fitting addition. It’s G.E. Patterson’s “Autobiographia” from his collection Tug. When asked my favorite poem, I always think of this.
Autobiographia
G.E. Patterson
I had everything and luck: Rings of smoke
blown for me; sunlight safe inside the leaves
of cottonwoods; pure, simple harmonies
of church music, echoes of slave songs; scraps
of candy wrappers — airborne. Everything.
Mother and father, brother, aunts, uncles;
chores and schoolwork and playtime. Everything.
I was given gloves against winter cold.
I was made to wear gloves when I gardened.
I was made to garden; taught to hold forks
in my left hand when cutting, in my right
when bringing food to my mouth. Everything.
I had clothes I was told not to wear outside;
a face you could clean up almost handsome;
I had friends to fight with and secrets, spread
all over the neighborhood; the best teachers,
white and colored. I’m not making this up.
I knew that I had everything. Still do.
Seth Abramson has put an inordinate amount of work into compiling the best database of MFA (Master’s of Fine Arts) statistics available to those looking to apply for Creative Writing MFAs. This information he published readily on the MFA Blog and his personal blog, thesuburbanecstasies. Notice I didn’t include a link to his personal blog: he closed it down, presumably partially do to the angry response to the inclusion of his MFA rankings in the most recent issue of Poets and Writers.
Read some of the predominantly negative responses to Abramson’s rankings here, or here, or here, although the latter is more balanced.
Well, I wish the best for Abramson, and am severely disappointed that the MFA world is so damn uptight they had to make his digital life digital miserable all because they disagree with, mostly, the (extremely well explained) methodology of his survey. Here’s my take on MFAs, overall:
1. They ought to be funded or nonexistent (for those not in the MFA world, that means MFA programs ought to provide their students with tuition waivers and living stipends — several programs currently do).
Currently, hundreds of sucker-students each year enroll in MFAs that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. In one sense, I think it’s almost predatory. There is simply no justification for paying for an art degree. The schools that don’t fund their students ought to be required to post a notice: “You will not get a job with this degree.” Of course, one might think that a prospective student had done the research to discover that unfunded MFAs are a disastrous idea. This is true; all prospective MFA students ought to actively research funding at every school they want to attend. There’s a fantastic resource compiled by a hardworking MFA grad/Harvard Law grad named Seth Abramson, and Abramson has done the tedious work of tracking down the ever-nebulous information about funding at all of these schools…and oh yeah, the MFA world has done all they can to shut him down, and now succeeded. Good work, MFA world. Keep those sucker-students coming.
2. There are far too many MFA programs and MFA students.
Come to an MFA, graduate from an MFA, teach at an MFA. Write stories to be read by other students and teachers of MFAs. The more students we get in, the more students to read our obscure writing and subscribe to our journals, and the more positions we can fill with MFA grads. It’s like a circular economy that’s destined to fail at some point. The point at which it fails is the point at which its graduated students write a 700 dollar check every month for the rest of their life to a student loan lender. These students aren’t good enough or marketable enough to expect to make any sort of career out of writing, and they fund the entire circular MFA economy with their tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition (taken as debt) while getting nothing more than a few years sitting in circles and working their poems and fiction to death in an effort to get published in journals so small they will be out of print by the time said student creates his first CV for a professorial application.
3. It’s not that I’m against MFAs.
I’m not. I’m planning to go to one. But I’ll not go if I’m not funded. If I’m not funded, I’m not good enough at writing to make enough money from writing to even pay off the loans I’ll have to take out to attend the MFA. If I am good enough to ever make any money writing, I’m good enough to get fully funded at an MFA. No one should go to an MFA if they can’t get funding. The purpose of an MFA is to give the student time for writing. It’s not worth 60,000 debt for two years of working on a collection of poetry. That’s like a thousand dollars of debt per page. I looked at the Columbia nonfiction writing MFA. It would cost me 60,000 dollars per year for two years. As soon as that’s funded, I’ll apply. Until then, it’s practically offensive to any rational mind.
4. The MFA world is against ranking MFAs because ranking of MFAs, especially by funding, highlights the enormous issues associated with unfunded MFAs and makes MFA world folks who attended unfunded MFAs, and who regret the mountains of debt but hate to admit it, feel they made a poor and expensive and stupid choice, and they’d prefer to think their poetry chapbook was worth 60,000 dollars of debt, or just write that monthly student loan check and not think about it.
5. The ranking system we need to fixate on is the funding ranking system.
Funding should be king. All the unfunded students attending MFAs are living outside their means and setting themselves up for a lifetime of debt. Unfunded programs are feeding on the ever-present delusions of writers and the availability of graduate student loans. Rank them by funding; publish it loud and clear. We can’t rank teaching. We can’t rank art. We can rank rank absurdity, and rank absurdity is an unfunded MFA.
The House Democratic leaders, and Harry Reid in the Senate, are so concerned over upsetting anybody. They cringe at the best arguments democrats have. That’s why the democrats are so incompetent. Obama is the same—always speaking as if the Right and the Insurance corporations would act to save American lives over profit. That’s called Delusional Thinking, and it’s pervasive among the current democratic supermajority, who have an enormous mandate for health care reform and continual polling indicating a resounding majority opinion that we must have a national health care option for all, and ASAP.
The Republicans and the Insurance Corporations have shown themselves to be absolutely committed to profit above human life, and they’ve manipulated the ignorant and uneducated religious right into voting against their own middle-class interests. My own embarrassment of a senator, Orrin Hatch, has fought tooth and nail against our getting real health care reform, and last week he sent me a response letter stating “the current health reform bills will result in more spending, more government, and more taxes,” — a letter that arrived in my mailbox on the same day that he, Orrin Hatch, inserted a provision into the “current health reform” bill that would fund prayer treatment—yes, like, the government will pay someone to use prayer to heal you. Hatch is all for using taxpayer money to fund magic treatments that don’t work, and he’s all for insurance corporations getting rich off of taking money and watching people die, but he’s angry—really really angry—about the idea of his constituents having their health care assured through a public option.
Orrin Hatch is an idiot, and perhaps the best argument for senate term-limits. When I won the Norman Mailer award, I had this fantasy that he would call on the phone to say congratulations (random, I know), and I could tell him I’d rather burn in hell than speak to him. Click.
Alan Grayson, Democratic Representative from Orlando, Florida, made people mad when he acknowleded the fact that the Republicans have no health plan:
“If you get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: die quickly. That’s right. The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick.”
Now he’s under fire from the right for pointing out the fact that the lack of health insurance causes “44,789 excess deaths annually,” (says a peer reviewed article by some probably godless researchers at some community college called “Har-vard”), and that “uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts.” Using something Grayson calls “Math” and “Multiplication” (double-speak for communist propaganda), one can extrapolate the number of people who will die within given populations in a single year. Grayson recited, at the front of the House, the names of each Republican representative, his or her district, and the number of deaths that will occur as a direct result of the lack of health insurance coverage in his or her district in the year 2010.
Of course, the Republicans tried to stop him from doing this. Reciting facts is a controversial thing in front of a Republican Representative. If there is one thing Republicans hate, it’s facts (and math and science and education for all and Latinos and winning easy elections in NY 23 and social security and women):
Note that they do succeed in stopping him (watch the whole video) — and then they stalled for an hour before Grayson was able to resume listing the people who will die next year for the single reason that they don’t have health insurance.
The New York Times says Representative Grayson “could be the latest incarnation of”
a wing nut — a loud darling of cable television and talk radio whose remarks are outrageous but often serious enough not to be dismissed entirely. Mr. Grayson is the more notable because he hurls his nuts from the left in a winger world long associated with the right.That might just be the point. House Democratic leaders publicly frown on his behavior and have urged him to tone it down, saying he contributes to an atmosphere of incivility.
But Alan Grayson is right on. He’s telling the story. He’s doing what Republicans do so well (and it works for Republicans, when they aren’t too busy cheating on their wives or getting indicted for fraud).
It’s all about the story. It’s language. It’s rhetoric. Harry Reid seems to think he can actually get something done with a rational argument. Come on. You think the public is rational? Obama thinks he can get something done by being a gentleman and reaching across the aisle. His political youth is glaring and becoming frightening. It’s time to ratchet up the language, and control the rhetoric. Harry Reid and the other failures in the Democratic leadership can jump in a cold lake. They don’t get it. The New York Times article misses one crucial difference between Alan Grayson and the Wing Nuts of the right: Truth. Calling Obama a Socialist when he hasn’t raised taxes is wing-nuttery. Stating facts is not, and can’t ever be.
Republicans are murdering Americans when they strip health care reform down to a handout to the insurance corporations. When they kill reform, they kill Americans. This is an issue of life and death. It would take more than a dozen 9-11’s to kill as many Americans as will be killed next year by the conservative battle against health care reform.
(of course, those who died in 9-11 were innocent; those who are uninsured are lazy.)
I’m writing a short story every day of the month in November. I’ve got one due for my fiction workshop, but it’s also National Novel Writing Month (see NaNoWriMo.org), in which thousands of people write really crappy 50,000 word stories to say they’ve written a novel. I’ve done it before (in 2005), and it was beneficial in showing me I could be productive enough to spit out 189 pages of writing in a month — in the middle of the semester, too. But, I can’t justify writing another terrible 50,000 words when I could actually get something out of forcing myself to sit down and write a short story each day. I’m not worried about wordcount, and I’ll write microfiction when I need to for time.
So, we begin NaStoWriMo, National Story Writing Month.
It’s also MARYSSA’S BIRTHDAY! Yea! Happy birthday Maryssa.
Last night we dressed up as Coraline and Wyborn, but the party we went to ended up being rather poorly attended. It was fun to get quality time with some old friends, but we’d hoped to be able to show our costumes off to more people. I left the camera 200 miles away (where we went for the party), so, severely unfortunately, I can’t show the pictures. We are thinking of orchestrating a costume party for Maryssa’s birthday in a couple of days, since preliminary facebook photos indicate our friends did not dress up last night. Everyone is rather busy this weekend or we’d try to put it together for tonight.
Now, back to homework.
The English department at USU was awesome enough to set up a reading for me tomorrow, Tuesday, October 27, at the Haight Alumni Center on Campus from 12:00 noon to 1:15 ish.
I’m really excited to have an audience to read a bit from “Final Cascade,” and I’m just glad the department has been so supportive and excited about the award.
Of course, anyone is invited to this. For anyone wanting to come, if you don’t know where the alumni center is, it’s that single story building just south of the new on campus housing below the TSC. It’s just east of the new cement parking terrace at the bottom of campus. If you walk from the LDS institute building to Old Main, the alumni center is midway on your right with a roundabout in front of it.
There will be cheese. In cubes.
