‘I lived for a time in Canada, and found myself fascinated by the slavish pride of a culture basking in a self-recriminating joke. “A lobsterman turned his back on three catches in an uncovered bucket. A bystander worried the lobsters would escape, but the lobsterman waved him off, saying, ‘No problem, these are Canadian lobsters. If one reaches the top the others will pull him back in.’” Yet who, lately, seeing how transparent the Internet-comments culture has made our vast leveling rage, our chortling conformism and anti-intellectualism, our scapegoat-readiness, could keep from thinking: “We’re all Canadian lobsters on this bus.”’

Are you having trouble understanding him?  That is probably because the internet has made you as stupid as a Canadian.  Let me summarize.  Canada is a slavish culture.  This means that when Canadians see someone striving for excellence, they drag him down.  In fact Canadians are so vulgar they tell a joke about their slavishness, making it a virtue.  America is getting slavish too because the internet gives a platform to hoi polloi, allowing the base to demand that the excellent conform to their standards.  Like Canadians, they now laugh — they chortle, to be precise — while they sacrifice virtue on the altar of vulgarity.  They are, as the line about the bus suggests, “bozos“– as Canadians always were.

But possibly you are still having trouble understanding.  Possibly you have heard this joke before, but told about crabs not lobsters, and about management not Canadians.  I’ve heard a dozen versions myself, none of which mentions lobsters, and none of which mentions Canada.  Which is not to say, of course, that Lethem wasn’t told the joke in Canada, by a Canadian, about other Canadians.  Anyone can say anything, and anyone else can believe it — and not just on the internet.  But the implication that it’s the national joke is simply wrong, and the implication that it represents Canadian culture is  both wrong and rude.  Lethem panders to the most vulgar American expectations of Caunckstan, of the socialists to the north who are forced, as a political principle, to deny excellence.

There is a relatively well-known Canadian joke about lobsters.  It goes like this.

In a small fishing village, a Newfoundlander was walking up the wharf carrying two three-pound live lobsters, one in each hand.  Whom should he meet at the end of the wharf but the Federal Fisheries Officer who, on viewing the wiggling lobsters, says: “Well me laddie I got you this time — with two live lobsters three weeks after the season closed!”  The Newfie says, “No, my son, you are wrong. These are two trained lobsters that I caught two weeks before the season ended.”  The Fisheries Officer says, ” Trained like how?”  “Well my son, each day I takes these two from my house down to the wharf and puts them in the water for a swim. While they swim I sits on the wharf and has me a smoke, or two. After about fifteen minutes I whistles and up comes me two lobsters, and I takes them home.”  “Likely story”, the Fisheries Officer says. “Lets take them on down the wharf and see if it’s true.”  So, the Newfie goes ahead of the Fisheries Officer to the end of the wharf where, under supervision, he gently lowers both lobsters into the water.  The Newfie sits on a wharf piling and lights up a smoke, then another.  After about fifteen minutes the Fisheries Officer says to the Newfie, “How about whistling?”  The Newfie says ” What for?”  The Fisheries Officer says, ” To call in the lobsters.”  The Newfie says, ” What lobsters?”

If this joke doesn’t say anything about the Canadian ethos, it probably does say something about the Newfies:  about their pluck, about their wiliness, and about their willingness, on a small scale, to defy authority.  It’s not, I admit, a paean to excellence.  But then that wouldn’t be funny.

Lethem’s comments aren’t funny either. This is, though.  At least, if you’re a Canadian.

(Lethem’s piece is here, and I took the pre-edited version of the real Canadian lobster joke from here.)

Those of you who have had similar experiences will also recognize two connected facts.  The first is that the statement is in every case incorrect.  There is lots of scholarship on Levinas out there, and it is quite wrong to say that the face has not been given attention, or that scholars don’t understand the entry of the third, or that they have been unable to integrate into their analyses his problematic lines on Sabra and Chatilla.  The second is that in every case the relevant scholarship is not cited, and in almost every case almost no scholarship is cited at all.  For instance the book chapter I mentioned, which makes the claim that Levinas’s Jewishness has been given short shrift, cites only one secondary source — one — and that is Howard Caygill’s Levinas and the Political, a book widely recognized by Levinas scholars as provocative and far from definitive.

Why do people do this?  I think there are two motivations.  For the established scholar, it is just laziness.  He knows it’s time to incorporate Levinas into his works, he snatches up and reads what appears to be a reputable book that will fill him in on the background, and then he feels free to offer the public his own readings of some of the primary sources.  This doesn’t bother me so much, but it does bother me that he introduces his readings with the claim that he’s breaking ground, a claim that does injustice to the small but excellent group of scholars who actually did break the ground on the Jewish Levinas, and did so with rigorous attention to one another’s work.

For the up-and-coming scholar — the graduate student, say, who sends her first article to a journal and has the misfortune to have me as a referee — I am thinking the formulation points in a different direction.  In such cases the words “what Levinas scholars misunderstand” should be read as “what my teacher misunderstood.”  I am thinking of a good student, who has been taught something incorrect about Levinas (since God knows there is indeed a lot of bad teaching of Levinas being done) and who, through her own diligent work with the primary sources, has figured out why her teacher is wrong and what Levinas is actually saying.  This experience she sums up with the words “the scholarship has overlooked.”  Had she examined the scholarship, she would have found otherwise.

I applaud these courses, all of which strike me as rich.  I wonder, however, whether, insofar as these classes deal with secular movements in thought or politics, they might not more naturally be taught under the auspices of my department, the Department of Religious Studies.  Secularism is, by definition, a counter-movement to religion, and thus would seem to fall under our umbrella.  And when I think of potential majors in such a program, it seems to me that the broader study of RS could give them some important historical context.  After all, a student majoring in Secular Studies should have a solid understanding of what the secularists define themselves against.

Of course there might be good reason for an independent Secular Studies program, namely if the Department of Religious Studies at the institution in question were theological, teaching religion instead of studying it.  But I can’t think of an RS department, outside of those in Christian colleges, where that’s true, and it certainly isn’t true of our department.  Meanwhile I worry that the existence of a program in Secular Studies will make students think that it is.  Even the most reasonable student might be led to conclude, from the existence of the two programs, that we are pushing religion and they are not.

I expressed this concern in an article in the student paper.  In the same piece, one of the founders of the Secular Studies program is quoted saying that “ Religious Studies isn’t necessarily trying to win converts to religion.”  These words caused an absolute furor in one of my classes.  “Not necessarily!  How dare they?”  This was the unanimous sentiment of the class, who explained to me that they are already misunderstood by friends and parents who expect them to go on to graduate work in seminaries, with an eye to the ministry.

I’m not sure if any action would be worthwhile at this point.  But it did occur to me to lobby Secular Studies to cross-list all our courses, in return for which we would cross-list all of theirs.  That way students could take the program, and call it Religious Studies or Secular Studies as they pleased.

But such analyses are not complete.  Synagogues have special funds for the poor:  funds for broad charities, of course, but also special funds for the poor who pray with and identify with the congregation.  Try attending a Shul faithfully for a year and then going to the rabbi and explaining you can’t afford HHD tickets.  It’s not very many rabbis that under such circumstances will turn you away from from Rosh and YK services.  That is, if you really can’t pay.  If the reason you can’t buy Synagogue tickets is that you blew all your money on Arcade Fire tickets, that’s another story.

In the city I grew up, a poor family would have their butcher bill paid every month from the fund.  This happened discretely, without any exchange of words, so as not to cause embarrassment, or what we call verbal ona’ah.  Someone from the Shul would go into the butcher shop and inquire.  If the family had been able to take care of the bill that month, great;  if they hadn’t, it would be taken care of from the fund.  Where did that money come from?  It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that it came from the ticket revenue for Rosh services attended by Jews well able to pay.

So if you’re too broke to pay for your HHD tickets, maybe it’s worth asking yourself if you’re really, really too broke.  One thing I’m pretty sure about:  no one is getting rich off your money.

I’m sure it’s been suggested before, but why doesn’t Toyota produce a car called the Retro?  It would look like today’s cars, and have all the features that are actually useful (I feel sure there must be some) but it wouldn’t do the things my rental does.  Because I can lock my own doors.  And I don’t want my radio to flash ANTONIO… VIVALDI…, since one of the pleasures of listening to KUSC is to test my knowledge of classical music.  Above all I want manually operated windows in case I drive into a canal and my electrical circuits stop working.

Another news item on the Welcome to the Twenty-First Century front.  My alma mater has subscribed to a program called Grammarly which promises to be able to check students’ writing better than their own computers, the advantage presumably being that it pops up a short grammar lesson every time it identifies a mistake (see? so it claims to be educating as it corrects, as if any student is going to read all that mush, come on).  But now get this.  One of the first sentences in the demo is, “The emphasis on nature, the supernatural, and superstitions were all part of Irving’s works.”  And Grammarly suggests changing “nature” to “the nature.”  Haw!

Check it!  See how many errors you can spot.  It’s quite fun.

Until now.  Because the new games, Pokémon Black and Pokémon White, have a twist, a story behind the story.  As you fight your way through the Unova region preparing yourself to compete for the league title, you keep running across people making speeches in town squares arguing that it’s cruel to keep pokémon in little balls and use them as battle tools. Pokémon are meant to live free in the wild, they say, and we should all release the ones we’ve imprisoned and leave them alone.  The people making these speeches are, of course, the bad guys—Team Plasma, they are called—and we have to fight them.  But it’s not obvious why they’re so bad until we discover that their leader, one Ghetsis, actually wants everyone to release their pokémon so that he’ll be the only one who has any, at which point he intends to take over the world.  As this is dawning on us, we also gather that the money and much of the political pull behind Ghetsis comes from a teenager named Lord N.  But when we eventually meet N we find that he has no idea of Ghetsis’s true intentions but is forcefully committed to the idea that keeping pokémon is cruel—though he is, by the end of the game, beginning to wonder whether Ghetsis isn’t wrong, whether monsters and humans can’t live and work together in harmony.

So we have (1) Ghetsis, the hypocrite, cynically encouraging N’s idealistic belief that keeping pokémon is cruel for the double purpose of using N’s charisma to sway the masses to his point of view (which will further Ghetsis’s aims) and using N’s money.  At the same time he keeps N cloistered in N’s own castle.  There N spends his time, when he’s not obsessing over the problem of poké-cruelty, in a room full of toddler toys, obviously established by Ghetsis to retard the teenager’s growth.  Then we have (2) N, the idealist, naive enough that he never even begins to wonder about Ghetsis’s motives, but ever and again turns over in his mind the problem of pokémon.  The game ends with N giving us a solemn farewell and flying off on his dragon to think things over in solitude.  He has not, even now, grasped that Ghetsis was manipulating him.  And finally we have (3) Team Plasma, the masses, some of whom follow the Ghetsis model and some the N model:  brutal thugs and deceived idealists.  This is not a bad introductory account of politics, or a version of it anyway.

Now behind the politics, it seems to me, there is a psychology.  The members of team Plasma who know that the goal is world domination are plain meanies and thus, naturally, cruel to their pokémon.  But the members of Team Plasma who are themselves deceived, and who truly believe that pokémon should be released, are also probably cruel to their pokémon:  for that they believe the rhetoric suggests that they cannot imagine a loving relationship between humans and pokémon.  This provides a deeper link between the thugs and the idealists than that the latter are deceived into helping the former.  They are at their core the same:  at any rate, there is something the same in them;  thugs and idealists share a cold space in the heart.  And this substantially deepens the broad lesson the story tells about the dangers of idealism, bringing it down to the level of the individual.

But if I’m right so far—if I’m right that Plasma members are universally cruel to their pokémon —this lends support to Plasma’s founding idea: pokémon indeed should be released.  The game makes Plasma the bad guys, and does a great job of it.  For the first time in the Nintendo Poké World, we see why the bad guys are bad.  And of course we’re supposed to disdain Plasma’s central claim, and refuse to release our pokémon.  And yet Plasma’s very existence proves the claim right.

Which brings us finally to the gamemaker.  It seems to me that somebody, at some point, took a course in a political theory.  It doesn’t have to have been a very good course.  These aren’t sophisticated ideas.  But at any rate whoever it was kept thinking, and made an attempt to apply the results to the Poké World.  Clearly the purpose of the plot is to defend the entire Poké Enterprise:  to raise the question, which maybe bothers sensitive young gamesters, of whether it is okay to battle with these sweet creatures until they make one another faint, and to answer it with a resounding yes.  It is okay. Pokémon like it.  It’s Team Plasma who thinks it’s not okay.  And Team Plasma is bad.  So the question is solved.  Except, in light of what I’ve said about Plasma’s own cruelty, maybe Plasma is right.  And maybe the question is not solved.

On this basis, I would argue that the gamemaker enters the Poké World in the person of Lord N, obsessively considering the question of poké cruelty and oscillating between answers, embedding one answer within another, and so on.  And the purpose of the game is to consider the moral worth of the game.

But now, the final twist:  the gamemaker is being N in order to take our money.  And therefore he is also Ghetsis.  So at the top-most level, Ghetsis is N and N is Ghetsis.  And thinking about moral questions is a financial transaction.

In the Lawrence pattern, a group of rival nations come together to fight off a common threat, an imperial power that is much more powerful and technologically sophisticated.  Beating the threat takes just about the whole text to accomplish:  the war is the pretty much the whole story.  Except that to fit into the pattern there has to be a twist at the end:  a denouement, in which politics resumes its natural course and the rival nations, no longer facing a common enemy, begin to squabble.

The idea is probably simply that humankind naturally tends toward war.  It gains philosophical depth, though, by the fact that the tendency is always presented under an ambiguity.  Either hostility is the necessary human condition or it’s marginally preventable;  war is either inevitable or almost inevitable.  The general idea gives the books a cast of tragic realism; the narrow ambiguity gives them a cast of political profundity.  Together they make readers feel wised-up, and smart.

I first met the pattern in John Christopher’s Tripods series.  More recently, it became the political backbone of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy.  Orson Scott Card does it all in one book, and it feels a little rushed.  The real problem with Ender’s Game, though, is something else.  Both Card and Collins present the pattern in plots that hang on a game — yes, Ender’s game is a game, and yes, the hunger games are games.  But Ender’s game is nothing more or less than a video game.  Seriously:  this whole book is a matter of reading about someone playing video games.  In comparison the Hunger Games’ game, which is gladiatorial, seems like real life.

And there’s more.  Following Christopher, Collins uses her game as a feature of dystopia:  it’s the bad guys who force you (Collins) or encourage you (Christopher) to spend your life playing games.  In other words, for Christopher and Collins, games are a distraction and prevent you from accomplishing anything.  In Card, they are the only thing to do, and they win wars.

Last year, when she was in first grade, the teacher tested all the kids to diagnose their levels and taught them accordingly.  This meant that Eila was mostly doing second grade math and that her spelling words were things like “eclipse” and “gravity.”  This year the teacher also did diagnostic testing but seems to have ignored the results, explaining to me when I asked for harder work that she’s a “believer in drilling the basics.”  This means that Eila is re-doing math she mastered more than a year ago and that her spelling words include “to,” “an,” and “for.”  I have trouble getting to her to do homework, as she’s lost all respect for assignments, in class and out.

Eila’s class is a one/two split, which means it includes both first and second graders — and there happen to be 17 first graders to 8 second graders.  So I can see why the teacher might be focused on easy material.  But split-level classes are one of the things this school is famous for, and they are supposed to ensure that a teacher doesn’t follow the curriculum by rote but instead finds the students’ levels.  The policy of the school is that in a one/two split, kids should be doing work that ranges in difficulty from K to fourth grade.  I know for sure that no one in Eila’s class is asked to do any work above second grade level.  But even worse:  as far as I can tell the work that the second graders are doing now ought, by the curriculum, to have been done in around October.  Right now, at the beginning of the spring semester, we’re about a third of the way through the fall semester math workbook.

Each week a little newsletter goes out to parents.  Here’s a bit of this week’s.

“Reading:  Please talk about “character” when reading and personification.  Math:  We are working on all kinds of things.  Please continue to help with money & time.”

I find the teacher an enormously pleasant person.  And everyone is entitled to a fallow year every now and then.  Still, I’m distressed.  Elementary school teachers should teach to the curriculum if they can’t teach more.  And they should have a grasp of basic grammar.

Notice, btw, that I leave double spaces after a period.  In fact I feel strongly enough about them that I do them twice:  WordPress corrects them in my draft and I have to go in and put them all back.  Take that, Mr. Manjoo!