I learned something a couple of days ago

But then I forgot to blog about it and now I've forgotten what it is. 

It's been a while

But it's hard to write about "What I've Learned Today" when I am so darn smart that most days I don't learn anything new. Here's what I learned today.

My principal is a liar

Altho I diligently tried to go to both the Library and Room F103 to do either of these trainings, in fact there were no such trainings to attend. When I went to the library, the training going on was on how to be positive and welcoming or some such bullshit and the only people attending were the school clerks and academy secretaries. No teachers. They all stared at me. I knew immediately I didn't belong there. Like I said, I'm pretty darn smart.

Besides, there are no people in this building more positive or welcoming than our support staff. This is the last training they needed. There were no other trainings there. This was lie #1 from my principal. PrinciPAL, my ass.

Nevertheless, I persisted. I went on to find Room F103 for the Goalbook Training. I've only worked in this building since 2005 (and late 2005, mind you). So it took me a spell to recall that F-Hall is the tiny art corridor underneath my office. Oh, that's right. I office in F210. Derp. So I went down to F-Hall and started counting thru the doors. F107... F106... next studio over... F104... F103... BAM!! exit door to the lunch patio.

There IS no F103. That was lie #2 and #3. Neither the room nor the training seem to exist. I'm wondering now if it's a test of some kind. Like, maybe he'll give a bonus or an accommodation certificate for anyone honest enough to report back that there wasn't a training to go to... to confront their immediate supervisor that he's a bold faced prevaricator... like maybe he wants to see who doesn't fear his arbitrary power... who places integrity over obscurity as a personal value in their bureaucratic career...

No, no way.

I'm hunkering down. Avoiding notice. Ducking behind the hedges. Hiding in the broom closet till it's time to clock out. I'm no fool. I'm a teacher. And there ain't much left in this world for me to learn.

Echoes of Tragedy

In one week, three people who were touched by school violence took their own lives.

Parkland, Florida high school shooting survivor Sydney Aiello, 19, suffering from PTSD and survivor's guilt, shot herself in the head a week ago

A day or two after her funeral, an unnamed sophomore also a survivor of last year's Marjorie Stoneman Douglas HS shooting also took his own life

And most recently, Jeremy Richman, father of one of the 20 elementary school children gunned down at Sandy Hook in 2012, also committed suicide.

The cost of allowing rampant gun violence to go essentially unaddressed, other than with obvious caution, reaches far beyond the simple death tolls that accompany the news of each shooting. It's a grim sport we practice, watching the initial reports, waiting to see if the shooting is going to go to double digits, as with Sandy Hook and Parkland, or if will reach the unfathomable body counts of Las Vegas or Christchurch.

But still, we wait when the news comes in. We wait and we count, as if numbers can make the horror of decivilization manageable. We wait through the initial reports that inevitably say there was a second, or sometimes even multiple, gunmen. It's always just one gunman.

Maybe we think if it's two or three shooters, if it's organized, that makes it more sensible. It's an evil organization in the world. Violent men manipulating other men--always it's men--makes sense. True diabolical evil would send others to do their bidding, like petty Lucifers. Then there's a guiding intelligence to the bloody chaos; then there's a rationality, at least.

Because who could hope to benefit from this slaughter directly? Because how can we live in a world where one lone man could cut down 20 or 50 or even a few strangers?

We understand the angry ex-husband, usually drunk, lashing out at his abused former partner, a loser making the ultimate loser move of destroying the one life. We understand the crazed mother drowning her child in a tub. It's horrifying, but it's an intimate murder, a private dysfunctional family matter that boils over with passionate hatred. It's graspable, because it's irrational.

But the irrational violence of the mass murderer targets victims, and the most helpless victims imagineable--school kids, churchgoers, movie watchers. They could be any of us and so it has that intimacy. But it's strangers killing strangers, so it's still detached, an event at a peaceful social gathering. It's random, but it's personal. It's impersonal, but it's life shattering for the families of the victims, and ultimately for the society that sees the violence on television

Thank you, Blogger dot Com

Today I learned that Blogger/Blogspot blogs are retained even if you leave them unattended for 8 years. Okay then. What else have I learned?

My Hero, the Chauvanist Pig

One thing we always have to keep in mind in the study of history is to assess people by the standards of the times in which they lived. In a judgment-drunk society like teeveefied America, the shallowest form of interaction with historical characters is to point out that they weren't as modern as, say, modern people.

The Great Emancipator Lincoln held demonstrably racist views for almost all of his life. George Washington held slaves. Thomas Edison was a serial polluter. Moses didn't support universal suffrage for the working class. Albert Schweizer was a vivisectionist. And so forth...

So it shouldn't come as anything close as a shock when I read the little-quoted quote from Martin Luther King Jr. in Anna Holmes's blog at the Washington Post demonstrating that the good reverend's views on spousal abuse (when he wrote an advise column in the 1960s) would probably offend the most conservative of anti-feminists of the 21st century.

King’s response to a cheated-on wife was to suggest that she “study” her rival to learn what her husband wanted in a woman. (“Are you careful with your grooming? Do you nag?” he asked.) He informed an unmarried woman grappling with whether to have sex that “real men still respect purity and virginity” and instructed an abused wife to determine whether there was anything within her personality to justify such treatment. “Are you sure that you have a radiating personality, a pleasant disposition, and that feminine charm which every man admires?” he asked a Miss Lonelyhearts. To a newlywed having troubles with her mother-in-law, he remarked, “There is an expression that no home is big enough to have two women at its head.”

But let's bear in mind that King was writing in Don Draper's America. Like the fictional Don Draper, Dr. King was a typical midcentury man, a high profile man on rise, a serial philanderer in an age when sexual conquests were a measure of a man's character, when women's suffrage was considered the culmination rather than the beginning of the women's equality movement.

Ouch. I say we shouldn't be shocked. And yet I have to, at least a little bit, do a spit take when I read this excusing of physical abuse from the American prophet of nonviolence. I'm not shocked as a student of history, of course. I'm not even surprised. But as a hero-worshiper, I don't want to read words like this from the guy I extoll as the best exemplar of the American Promise in the 20th century.

The meaning of Martin Luther King goes far beyond the midcentury Civil Rights Movement that led to his death. I don't see him as just a martyr, which I think most people in our sex-death-and-race obsessed society tend to cue in on. But King did more than just speak up for black people; he was more than just an eloquent spokesman. King distilled the essence of the great democratic political experiment of America into a coherent philosophy. His view of how to confront oppression, particularly popularly supported oppression, within the inherently non-violent context of democratic structures was in many ways the culmination of how a democracy, and really of how any civil society, could work once we reject the longstanding imperative of might makes right.

The upward progress of western society, the saving grace of western society, has been the slow moving moral arc coming to prove that right makes might. MLK put that beautiful and almost-naive principle into action and he made it work. He used nonviolent confrontation to hold a mirror up to American imperfection and forced a society to live by the purest intentions of the credos we expressed. He put muscle on the bones of "all men are created equal" in such a way that he fundamentally changed the way all Americans, and all citizens of democratic countries, think and speak today in the 21st century.

Planted in his "Freedom Now" philosophy and in the actions he led in standing up to institutions of power with only the moral high ground for armor were the seeds for the feminist movement and the anti-domestic-violence social aesthetic of today. By changing the language of liberty, equality, and human rights in America, MLK created the social awareness we need today to cringe at a preacher saying "If your husband is slapping you around, honey, maybe you oughta learn to treat him better."

But that's the historical fact we're left with. It's not fair to the man to make that the basis for judging him on the issue of spousal abuse. He was a man of his times, as all people are. He wanted to be known as "a drum major for justice"; he never claimed to have never sung out of key on occasion. It's not easy to think of our heroes as having feet of clay. Maybe it's better to think of them as only having feet of flesh.

Iowa City Has a Superhero. Update: He's Drunk.

It's not just in the movies. There are real superheroes in the world. They are ordinarily ordinary people, albeit geeks, who dress up in outlandish costumes in order to make the world a better place. Most of them spend more time posing in their costumes and updating their MySpace accounts than actually patrolling the streets. And among those who patrol the streets for crime, just about all of them will "take action" by whipping out their cell phones and dialing 911 when they encounter evil-doers.

But apparently there's one guy in Iowa City who's taking justice into his own hands, even of those hands might be a little jittery most days. This fearless approach to vigilante justice leaves the illustrious Captain Save-A-Ho entirely unappreciated by the Iowa City Police Department. Those fools!

'Captain Save-A-Ho' arrested on Ped Mall

A self-professed protector of women was arrested for public intoxication Monday afternoon.

Iowa City Police Officers were dispatched to the Pedestrian Mall at 2:43 p.m. for multiple complaints of a man harassing people. Police said they found 34-year-old Jerald T. Navarre shouting and smelling of alcohol.

Police said Navarre showed signs of intoxication, admitted to drinking and told officers he was “a little drunk.” He refused pre- and post-arrest breath tests.

The man allegedly told officers he is “needed” on the Pedestrian Mall to “protect women.” He goes by “Captain Save-A-Ho,” police said.

Navarre has a lengthy criminal record with various arrests for intoxication, burglary and escape from custody, according to online court records.

Navarre has been charged with public intoxication.

Alas, the neverending quest for truth and justice continues.

Classical Romans believed there were two Chinas

Now, I also happen to believe there are two Chinas. Not in the Nixonian sense in which there's a Red China and a Taiwan China, but in the dictionary sense that there's a geographic China that goes in Asia and a porcelain china that goes on that stupid little shelf over your refrigerator. But I digress.

What the Romans believed was that the place called China by Americans, Chine by Frenchies, and Zhonghua by actual Chinese people (or should I say "by actual Zhonghuans"?) was actually two separate countries. The first, which could be considered sort of the northern area, except that their sense of geography was all screwed up, they called Serica, meaning "the land where silk comes from."



The second place they called "Sinae," which surprisingly does not mean "place where sinuses come from." This was more or less the actual China, although a bit to the south. The name is something of a mystery. Calling it "Sinae" seems to imply that the name derives from the Qin ("chin") Dynasty, only the use of the name Sinae significantly predates the accession of the Qins.

The Romans were otherwise considerably misinformed about China. Some writers reported that the Seres people had no language of their own, but only made strange noises to mimic talk in dealing with their Indian neighbors, and were tall and blue-eyed. Some conjectured that the people of Sinae could live to 200 years old. The map above, courtesy of Ptolemy, indicates that the Romans knew the earth was round, but thought it was bounded by uninhabitable land and 12 great winds beyond the narrow western and eastern oceans.

This all, of course, directly contradicts what we know about the sciences of antiquity as revealed through the later seasons of Xena, Warrior Princess.