Tuesday 11/19/24
I was having a conversation with someone about Donald Trump, which was itself a conversation about people. I said that in not too long, people won't even know that Donald Trump was president. This led to me saying asking, "Who do you think knows who Gerald Ford was now?"
I understand that that was Ford and this is Trump, the presumption being that Ford was nondescript, whereas Trump is not. Okay. Let's do an exercise. What percentage of Americans do you think know who was the president who dropped the bomb(s)?
I'm going to estimate that eighty percent of Americans don't know. If we take Baby Boomers out of the equation, I'm going to say it's ninety-five percent, conservatively. Imagine if you went to some college and started asking that question of students out in the quad. How do you think that would go? And that's at colleges.
How about if you were to ask people who was president for the bulk of Vietnam? Take out the Baby Boomers--that is, the people who were there--and I bet you're at ninety-nine percent in terms of Americans who don't know. This was also the president when we went to the moon.
We're talking recent history here. If people who were alive then are alive en masse now--which is certainly true with the presidency of Lyndon Johnson--we have recent history. What are the two biggest things pertaining to the presidency in modern times? They're Vietnam and the dropping of the bombs.
I think people lack this perspective and often any perspective. Social media and the social mediazation of the American mind has a lot to do with it. Trump will scarcely be remembered at all.
There are people now--and I don't mean five-year-olds--who later on will barely recall him, if they do. Historically, his presidency will be like a footnote which says more about how Americans were--on both sides of the aisle--what culture had come to, what the mania that was Woke culture produced, and the surprise result of the 2016 election and how that came to pass. This last election was not a surprise.
And that will be it, unless something major happens over the next four years.
Want to keep playing this game? Who was the president during WWI?
I feel like that's a pretty big deal, WWI. You know, the Big One?
I live in Boston. It's supposedly the most educated city in the country. There's no knowledge. Not really. If I asked people these three questions today while I'm going up and down the stairs at City Hall, do you think I'm coming back and saying, "Wow, seventy-five percent of them went three for three!" It'd be a shit show of ignorance and you know it.
I think often about our education system. I know that being a teacher can be a thankless job. These kids go to school for these numbers of hours every day, and by the time they are adults, they know little to nothing about anything. And yet, I have this feeling that if every teacher was the most skilled and caring and thorough dispenser of knowledge, who facilitated thought, who excelled at helping people to learn, that the situation would be the same.
Why is that? Are people that limited? Are we so limited now that it's almost impossible for us to know anything even if we wish to know? Has that devolved out of us? Do we forget what we did learn? Are we only interested in that which is stupid? Which we're not even really interested in at all. But do we only focus on that which is stupid? Is it impossible for us not to be clueless?
People who went to school longer than most will talk about education often. Tell me: Have you ever seen anyone stupider than the people in publishing featured in these pages? They're no brighter or learned than someone who dropped out of high school. They are usually dumber, because such a person will actually live in the real world and that will make them smarter.
That's just money. It's not brains. Advantage, opportunity, money. People are very similar mentally. They fall within the same range of intelligence. Because that's how animals are. There isn't this brilliant raccoon who succeeds at getting into your garbage where other raccoons would fail, about whom those other raccoons say, "Well, that's Chip, can't expect to compete with his mind." No, they're raccoons. Pretty comparable from one to another. Now, genius? That's different. We're not talking genius here, though.
I've said this before, but I learned nothing from anyone in college. They didn't have anything to teach me. There wasn't anything anyone knew that I didn't know, and, further, what they were teaching was usually wrong, and I would be the only one who knew this as everyone else was writing down whatever that professor said. This was in areas like music, art, film, and literature. In other subjects, like history, a professor was only a stand-in, because if you weren't lazy, you could know far more about a given subject than they were going to teach anyone, because it was just something they'd gotten from books.
They didn't have brilliant insight and ideas. They weren't advancing new theories that explained why something happened and with real veracity, too. They had that job because you were too lazy to learn on your own. So instead you came to them and got this very limited factual presentation. You memorized some dates. But you didn't really know why anything happened, and you weren't thinking your way through history. That's a big key.
(Speaking of reading and amounts of time and historical time: In Peter Bogdanovich's book of conversations with Orson Welles, Welles marvels at the length of Robert Caro's multi-volume Lyndon Johnson biography. And here we are in November 2024, Caro is still with us, and the concluding volume is still to come--or at least people have been anticipating it.)
I had two great teachers in my life (which isn't to say I didn't have other good teachers; I will say, though, that the further I went along, the worse the quality of the teaching, on the whole, got, with almost everyone in college--save one person--being completely useless). I wrote about one of them--my third grade teacher--in a recent op-ed for the Chicago Tribune. The other teacher was my tenth grade English teacher, who the other kids thought was crazily demanding. You can't be demanding enough for me when it comes to writing and literature. And no one in history has ever been as demanding with anything as I am now with myself when it comes to writing. When I write each day, I expect of myself that I will write the best thing ever written. Each day. So that if I only lived and wrote that one day, that would be the best work that exists. I think it's obvious that I'd be like that, I hold myself to that standard, and I live and write that way for that purpose. And the work is what the work is.
Regarding the first teacher: I don't think any of my classmates had some special experience as I did. By which I mean, a special experience for them at all. But that was third grade. We were small children. And, in many ways, I never was even when my age fit the bill of a small child. Had you known me, you would have thought, "This kid is very different," which is what people did think. People didn't know what to make of me, or what to say that I was.
But in tenth grade, when kids are becoming young adults, and aren't very far off from being actual adults, I'd also say that that teacher didn't really "reach" anyone that I knew either. Maybe she reached one person every few years and had a profound impact on their lives, and that's one of the better batting averages in these matters, or perhaps the best, and in a career she impacted the lives and personages of twenty people or whatever.
I think she made literature lively for the other kids and encouraged to take chances in their thinking. You could, for instance, only go so wrong in her class, which is to say, not very wrong at all, if you were trying, and you were thinking.
For instance, if someone said something that didn't even happen in a book, because of something else they misunderstood, or some idea they were trying out, she wouldn't shame that student. She'd say something like, "Whoa! Someone had some extra pages in their copy of the book!" We liked that. It was funny and lively. You didn't mind being on the receiving end of a joke like that--it was cool. And, more importantly, it didn't discourage you next time.
At this time, I was a hockey star, but any day that I could stay after school--that is, if practice wasn't right after school--I'd do that and I sit and talk Shakespeare with this woman. Sometimes there would be another kid or two there who needed help, and I was just along for the Shakespearean ride.
I remember one time she said to me, "You know all of the lines, what act they're in, what scene," and I'm thinking, yes, well, makes sense, and I guess it wasn't until later that I realized she was saying something else to me in that moment.
These were two great teachers--the best, in my view--and the other kids all had the same access to them that I did, but I don't think they learned very much in those classes, despite who these teachers were and how good they were at teaching.
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