When I was a kid, we used to go to the pond and catch turtles and frogs and fish and ducklings and put them in a baby pool in my friend’s backyard. The turtles did just fine, swimming around and eating seaweed or whatever. The frogs all escaped immediately, except for two who were mating and swam around mating for two or three days. The fish died right away, and we built fish-shaped burial mounds for them. The ducklings became attached to my friend who caught them. They thought he was their mother, and followed him around, until one day they fell off a TV.
When I went back to school, I turned in a “What I Did my Summer Vacation” report about the pond, and my teacher wrote “you sound like real scientists!” I was convinced she saw our dark responsibility for the animals’ deaths, and was keeping it quiet.
My students last year really enjoyed doing the Pledge of Allegiance. They did it, anyway, especially if I was lecturing them about not doing something else. Often, I’d be lecturing them, and then somebody would say “hey, they’re doing the Pledge!” pointing out the door to the class across the hall.
Everybody in my class last year was failing something or other. The Principal would come in and tell them that they were all failing, then it turned out they all got passed on to the next grade. Anyway, I heard that at Harvard, almost everyone gets As. As the Principal once said, pointing to the kid at the top of the Honor Roll, “He brings his notebook every day!”
I was reading about Jane Goodall with my seventh-graders, and they were struck, as I was, by how much like us Chimpanzees are, even though my seventh-graders didn’t feel like they were related to Chimpanzees, even distantly. Anyway, Chimpanzees go to war, too. They gang up on individual males and kill them in ambush, and go on doing this until all the adult males from a particular group are dead. I am sad that animals aren’t any better than us, but then they don’t have the benefit of press conferences.
Midway through Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, the hero becomes unstuck in time while watching a World War II movie, and begins living his life backwards. The movie he is watching is suddenly in reverse. The instruments of war—the bombers, guns, artillery, and so on—are suddenly transformed into instruments of peace. A bomber flies over a burning city, and by a miraculous magnetism, puts out the flames and sucks up the bombs back into its hull. The bombs are flown back to another country, where specialists disassemble them and drive the component minerals back to deep mine shafts, where they can be hidden so nobody can ever use them for harm again. A world in holocaust is healed by those same machines that destroyed it.
We Americans love to talk about World War II all the time, but especially when we feel like we’re being called upon to make sacrifices as a nation, or when we’re preparing ourselves to go to war. Vonnegut’s image is probably an appropriate one. In that time, we say, a group of nations used their instruments of war to massacre and eradicate, and our nations used those same instruments to pacify and to heal.
For those who believe in this line of thought, the 1991 war against Iraq probably makes sense. Iraq was attacking another country, we attacked it back, wanting to bring peace to the area. But, just as plainly, this line of thought does not justify our attacking Iraq now. The terrorist attacks of last September were the actions of individuals—individuals aided by nations and by multinational groups, but individuals nonetheless. To the extent that we can heal that damage, it will be by acting as individuals, individuals organized and aided by our nation and by multinational groups, but individuals nonetheless.
The possession by Iraq of weapons of mass destruction is deeply troubling, but it is the result of the misguided diplomacy that armed Iraq in its conflict against Iran, and perhaps of the misguided diplomacy that created Iraq in the first place. That evil will be undone by diplomacy, economic pressure, the actions of individuals, nations, and multinational groups; not by the instruments of national war.
Our wish to become unstuck in time and undo the damage done is understandable; our wish to put out the fires and by a miraculous magnetism heal the wounded land is only human. But the dangers of terrorism and the threats posed by Iraq will not be undone by war.
I've been reading about Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees with my seventh graders. My students are both struck by how similar chimpanzees are to humans, and utterly convinced of the absence of any evolutionary link between us and them. Chimpanzees play tag with their youngsters, they kiss and hug after they fight, they can learn sign language and how to use a computer. They also, at times, make war on each other. In the 1970s Jane Goodall observed the chimpanzee community she was observing split into two, and one group ruthlessly exterminate the other; gangs of males would catch one isolated male from the other group and bite him and beat him to death with sticks. They went on like this until all the males of the other group were dead. Jane Goodall did not know what prompted the war, whether it was a shrinking habitat or a reduced population from a polio epidemic, or just the possibility of increasing the number of available females, by eliminating all the males. There haven't been any more wars since then, but the population remains considerably lower than it was when she arrived in 1960.
It comes as a real disappointment that animals can be just as lousy to each other as we can. I guess it makes it seems that our tendencies towards violence are bred into us, inescapable. And yet I still don’t understand our country’s rhetoric surrounding Iraq. Since when does unprovoked aggression bring peace? Since when does deposing foreign leaders bring stability? Since when does unilateral action bring international cooperation? Since when does mobilizing against one threat protect us against another? Since when does attacking a dictator stop him from using his weapons? I feel like the juvenile chimpanzees hiding in the trees as the adults went off to war, wondering what all the pant-hooting is about.
My class last year loved saying the pledge of allegiance. Not every kid, and not every day, but overall, they really liked it.
They said the pledge during homeroom. Homeroom is the place where the kid goes in the beginning of the day to put his coat in his locker before he goes to science or math or gym or whatever. Homerooms exist in both high schools and junior high school, but I think they are particularly important in junior high school. This is because the junior high school is a transition from the elementary school to the high school, and back in elementary school the kid only had one teacher. So the original idea with homeroom was that, in addition to one of the kid’s teachers being responsible for taking care of all the paper work on the kid, taking attendance, giving out report cards, collecting permission slips and so forth, the homeroom teacher also has some sort of broader responsibility for the class, calling Child Services if the kid doesn’t come to school, checking his backpack to see that he’s bringing a notebook, getting him in trouble if he misbehaves in another teacher’s class.
This is a pretty reasonable expectation for a period of fifteen minutes in the morning—the kids come in, they put their coats away and get their books, maybe listen to announcements, and the teacher takes attendance, handles administrative tasks, and talks with any individual kid that needs talking to. (In the case of my school, there were three different kinds of attendance to take—one electronic scan-tron sheet, one legal document, and one “section sheet” that followed the class to their other subject teachers.) Unfortunately, in the schools, any individual agenda is assassinated by other competing agenda. For example, it was decided that big junior high schools like the one I worked at were a bad idea. Schools started splitting up into “academies,” schools within a school. In the school that I worked at, one of the academies was the Media Academy, and so it was deemed advisable that the Media Academy produce some kind of media. The main product was a 10 minute “Radio” show that came in over the PA system and lasted for the middle part of homeroom. So now we were supposed to listen to the radio during homeroom. This was fine, except that the PA loudspeaker was too soft to be heard. So in the beginning of the year, when all the kids were trying to appear well behaved and trying to listen, if anybody as much as shifted in their seat, it was impossible to hear what was being said.
My school was a failing school, in the sense that it was on the state’s list of Schools Under Registration Review (SURR) for having really bad test scores. So, to improve the test scores, it was decided that homeroom should also be spent engaged in silent independent reading. Now, let me tell you, this school did not achieve its remarkable test scores by attracting students whose main joy in life was silent independent reading. Besides, most of them didn’t get to see their friends much outside of school. Homeroom was an exciting time, since none of them had seen each other since yesterday and had new CDs or Pokemon cards to share with one another, but not because they all wanted to start reading together, which would have interfered with them listening to that radio program anyway. (I should mention that, despite the three types of attendance, we weren’t allowed to mark any kids late until the end of homeroom, and that the kids knew this, and would consequently come in 5, 10, 14 and a half minutes late, which meant that if a kid had somehow succeeded in opening up a book, he would be immediately stopped by another kid, who would need him to get out of the way so that he could get into his locker, or, more likely, go find a second kid who had the key to a third kid’s locker, where the first kid’s backpack would be found.)
This, then, was the context in which the Pledge of Allegiance was said. It came over the PA system softly, while everybody was discussing Pokemon cards or trying to get into their lockers or just hanging out, and while I was frantically running around telling people to take out their silent reading books or passing out silent reading books or looking for my attendance folders or pointing meaningfully at the inaudible PA speaker. Typically, my students would wait until I had raised my voice a little, pointing out to a kid the absolute necessity that he begin becoming a life-long reader right now, that if he didn’t read “The Outsiders” or “Sharks: Dangers of the Deep” right this second, he was headed for homelessness and jail, and then all my kids would stand up at the same time and say
to the flag, of the United States
of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God,
with Liberty and Justice for all.
which was coming over the inaudible PA at that moment, and then I would have to apologize for not paying proper respect to the nation or the Radio program or whatever, and we would all do it over again, by ourselves, and then head on to first period, smiling all the while.
Once you get to a certain age you realize that politics is a play produced partially for your benefit, and you spend your time trying to figure out what the story is and who the different characters are. A prince, prodigal and wasteful in his youth, grows up to be a fierce warrior who conquers the world. A boy king is tricked by his ministers into a starting a unwinnable war. A plague has come to the city, and the king himself is its source.
In the fairy tales, there are rules the hero must follow if he is going to save the kingdom and rescue the girl. First, he must be polite. Second, he must be clever. Third, he must look for help.
Fairy tales usually start at the beginning and go to the end. The language of our politics is a language of continual forgetting, in which dragons and demons rise from the sea fully formed, and we forget that it was we who gave that demon his fiery arrows, and we who polished that dragon’s unbreakable scales.
It makes for unconvincing drama. Actors at least pretend to tell the truth.
When I was a little kid we used to go down to the
pond and catch frogs and turtles and fish with nets. Then after we’d caught them, we would hold the net closed and run
back to my friend David’s backyard, where we had a baby-pool filled with pond
water. Some of the animals did better
than others in the pool. The turtles
did just fine, and would swim around and eat the seaweed and bugs and
stuff. The frogs, generally, would jump
out and escape. Once, though, we caught
two frogs that were mating, and they didn’t jump out, they swam around the edge
of the baby pool for three days, on top of each other, mating away. The fish all died, and we dug fish-shaped
indian burial mounds for them in the park, like the real burial mounds that
were there.
My friend Olin was so good at catching frogs and
fish and stuff that he got sick of it, and wanted to catch a duck. This was harder, and I remember standing in
the middle of the pond, my feet completely buried in pond muck, waiting for a
duck to come near. But no dice. So Olin was waiting by the side of the pond,
frustrated, and saw a mother duck and her chicks swim by, and he charged in
there with his net, swooping up a duckling in his net, and the mother screeched
and screeched at him, and he and I ran away, and she chased us half the way
back to the baby pool. But the duck escaped
from the baby pool, so we caught it and brought it back to Olin’s house for him
to keep as a pet. I think we told
Olin’s dad that the duckling had been abandoned by its mother. And Olin’s dad, who was a doctor, told us
about Konrad Lorenz and the ducklings that became attached to whoever was
around early in their development, and Olin called the duckling Piker or Pepper
or something, and I think the duckling did indeed start following Olin around,
and learned to go to the bathroom on newspaper that he put out for it, and ate
some kind of fishmeal, and was generally a pretty good pet.
A few days later, David and Josh came back from the park with five or
six duck eggs that they said had been abandoned by their mother. Josh and his mom built an incubator for the
eggs, with a lamp and a shoebox covered in aluminum foil, and a month or two
later two of the eggs hatched. Josh
called them Socrates and Plato.
Socrates, the little one, died first, and then Plato followed him a
month later, so that they only lived a few months. And then Olin’s duck, Piper or Pepper or whatever, fell off the
television set and died. And that was
that.
School had by this time started again, and my
teacher that year was very interested in journaling and creative writing, such
that we spent an hour or so being creative every morning before recess, and I
remember writing to her about the pond and the fishes and the burial mounds and
the baby pond and the ducks, and she writing that we sounded like real
scientists! I worried over this, but it was all besides the point. Until
Christmas break, that is. That’s when
the muskrats start breaking through the ice.