THE ESTABLISHMENT IS NERVOUS ABOUT NMSU'S NEW PRESIDENT

[Note: Because a number of my blog readers are Las Cruceans who do not read the Sun-News, I am posting today's column along with the covering commentary which I provide to those who have opted-in for email distribution of my blogs and columns.]

Friends,

This Saturday's column [below] addresses Establishment's nervousness about the Caruthers appointment.  It is a window into the local culture of political corruption and routine dishonesty at the highest levels of NMSU governance under the direction of the Chair of the Board of Regents, Mike Cheney.  I am not talking money or lies, respectively; I am talking about the way in which processes are perverted and representations are distorted for economic and political purposes.

Long before anyone sought or selected candidates for the NMSU presidency, I wrote a blog entitled "Regents Pretend to Transparency in NMSU Presidential Search" (http://firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/11/regents-pretend-to-transparency-in-nmsu.html).  The pretense to transparency had a precursor in the opaqueness of the firing of the previous president.  As Chair, Mike Cheney is the man most responsible for Barbara Couture's firing and giving her nearly half a million dollars in "hush money."  Cheney refused any explanation of the regents' action on the need for the confidentiality in personnel matters.  His explanation dodged both transparency about the decision and accountability for the expenditure of public funds.

An obvious inference is that the regents had powerful reasons to conceal from the public and spent the public's money to that purpose.  For, if they had just cause to terminate Couture, they could have fired her with little or no compensation and could have stated it with little or no fear of consequences.  But they did not have just cause.  Cheney and the rest of the regents knew that if Couture presented her side of the story, even if he and they presented their side of the story, the public would be in a position to judge the merits of each side and would judge in favor of Couture's story, not theirs.  I interpret a Sun-News story discrediting Couture by the bias of its courses as signaling the sleazy motive for Couture's firing: the wounded egos of local donors, and local and state politicos.  So, under Cheney's direction, they made a costly deal to cover-up the truth.  They paid Couture for her silence ensured by a non-disclosure clause which would shield them from public censure by the disclosure of corrupt and dishonest NMSU governance.  Otherwise, there was no need for a nondisclosure clause at all.

However, silence can signify.  Although I cannot credit Couture for taking money in return for her silence, I can credit her for not offering up the more-time-with my family or health/medical excuses customary in such situations.  Indeed, it does not appear that Couture had anything like such a reason, for nothing of the sort prevented her from relocating across country and continuing her professional career.  I respect the fact that she let total silence speak volumes.

The selection of Carruthers is of a piece with this culture of corruption and dishonesty.  After all, ignorance of the reasons for Couture's dismissal diminished the public's understanding of major NMSU issues and of the qualifications desirable in the next president.  Carruthers's selection was a foregone conclusion because he would not bruise the egos of petty potentates in the state.  If there is a silver lining, it is the sliver of a chance that Carruthers will seek to redeem himself.  But the dark cloud of habitual political connivance makes more likely his willingness to make a lot of money and retire in contempt of those whom he has deceived and disserved to his personal advantage.

Michael

The Establishment Is Nervous about NMSU’s New President

The selection of Garrey Carruthers to be NMSU’s next president has elicited contrasting responses: almost universal silence from almost all those who the regents think do not count, and almost universal appeals for rallying around the regents’ choice from all those who think that they or the regents count.  These appeals are necessary because the choice of Carruthers is problematic even for his supporters.

Immediately afterwards, Mike Cheney, Chair of the Board of Regents, denied, most preposterously, that the 3-2 split among regents along party lines was not political.  His ridiculous gloss: the regents cast their votes according to “conscience.”  His inane implication: political positions and “conscience” cannot coincide.  His incriminating insinuation: regents customarily vote their politics, not their “conscience.”  Thus, NMSU gets a pre-owned politico like Carruthers.

Two facts about this split vote are ominous.  One is that it occurred at all.  The norm in such votes is unanimity, with everyone rallying behind the leader even in the process of selecting him or her.  Two is that the casting of dissenting votes came after—I repeat: after—the majority had declared itself.  The timing is the Democrats’ sharp rebuke to the Republican regents and a clear warning to Caruthers.

The next sign of nervousness came in comments by former FIG—Faith in God or is it Faith in Garrey?—Bulletin publisher and professing Christian David McCollum.  He replied to late-emerging critics first by calling them “negative-thinking naysayers and boo-bugs” (LCSN, 7 May) and then by belittling their criticisms as “distractions” (LCB, 10 May).  When McCollum descends to calling people names and discounting issues about ethical conduct, he reveals his discomfort with criticisms raised and published late in the selection process by the Albuquerque Journal and the Las Cruces Sun-News.  The reports of Carruthers’s paid-for connections between his conscience and his anti-science positions unsettled many people committed to scientific integrity at NMSU.  In his later comments, McCollum further indicated his distaste for, and discomfort with, dissent when he declared that it is “time for the critics to join the majority so that we can all support Dr. Carruthers and help begin to move our university forward.”  Clearly, McCollum, not one to join a majority on issues not to his liking, is anxious about Carruthers.

Cheney is, too.  Thus, he penned a puff-piece vigorously rejecting comments made by the regents’ fair-haired boy in the course of his campaign for the presidency.  Speaking directly to students and perhaps indirectly to the faculty, Carruthers said that he would consider the status and the viability of the NMSU football program.  So, when Cheney wrote a column “Football, all athletics play important role at NMSU” (LCSN, 12 May) within days of choosing Carruthers and while negotiating his salary and perks, he was giving the NMSU president-select a public warning to shut up about this and other controversial issues now that he was the boss-who-is-to-be (except for the real boss-who-abides).

Cheney has reason to be worried.  Despite his cheerleading, all is not well at NMSU.  The faculty remains discontented with the transfer of over $4 million from the academic to the athletic budget.  To placate them, he asserted a gross absurdity in any context, namely, that NMSU has a faculty “second to none.”  Only a fool or a knave would assert such a thing; only a leader isolated from, and ignorant of, the faculty would assume that it was naïve or vain enough to accept his fulsome praise.

This fatuous statement shows that Cheney’s background as banker and political contributor has not prepared him to competently guide a public institution of higher education.  He lauds NMSU as “one of the top economic engines for the state of New Mexico”; that is, as an entrepreneurial, not an educational, institution.  His concern for NMSU’s “reputation” as a land-grant university and his request that people work to “enhance the image” of “our beloved university” reflects inappropriate priorities.  Note: no comment on enhancing its core missions of teaching, research, and service.  Only someone thus out-of-touch, ill-equipped, or politically motivated, would not identify NMSU’s challenges, which extend beyond “psychological baggage,” whatever he means and whoever he thinks carries it; and would deplore “those [malcontents] in our midst who choose to emphasize our challenges.”

Cheney’s biggest problem is that Carruthers, if so inclined, can do whatever he wants to burnish his tarnished reputation before he retires.  He can disagree that Division I football is justified because a few Aggies went pro; he can demote football and promote academic reforms.  Unwittingly, the regents have hired someone who can decide to be his own man and whom they cannot fire.  We shall see.

McCollum, Cheney, and, following their lead, the editors of the local papers are calling for everyone to unite behind this political appointment.  They and other supporters dislike the idea of debate, much less dissent, about NMSU governance, purposes, priorities, and policies.  Plainly, the Establishment is nervous.

SEX AND THE SERVICES

Remember when the argument against letting gays and lesbians serve in the Military Services was that their presence—and knowledge of their presence—would disrupt “good order and discipline”?  Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were vociferous in supporting the “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” policy and seeking the discharge of homosexuals if they were outed.  They lied: the problem is not homosexuals.

The problem is heterosexuals.  The overwhelming and widespread evidence of their sexual misconduct in the Military Services demonstrates that letting them into the Army, Navy, and Air Force has been a big mistake; heterosexuals, not homosexuals, are directly responsible for this breakdown in good order and discipline.  An estimated 26,000 sexual assaults occurred in the Military Services in 2012—a 34.5-percent increase over such assaults in 2011—with the estimated numbers of unreported attacks spiking to 92 percent.  These sexual assaults—physical acts, not offensive language or suggestive leers—are crimes occurring despite what Department of Defense (DOD) claims are its efforts to prevent them.

It is embarrassing that the DOD claims that it is trying, because it is failing so badly.  It must know that it is failing, and failing thanks to poor leadership, poor strategies, poor tactics, and, probably what matters most, a lack of commitment to this mission.  From their highest commanding officers down to their lowliest sergeants and petty officers, the Military Services have proven themselves incapable of command and control of their troops.  DOD’s “chain of command” is a wet noodle.

  Recent revelations indicate this larger truth.  First was the case of the Air Force commander of its sexual assault prevention unit.  Police arrested Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski for groping a woman in a parking lot.  The obvious disparity between Krusinski’s duty and deportment embarrassed the Air Force.  Of course, it protested that Krusinski did not represent the Service or reflect the seriousness with which it takes the problem.  Really?  If Krusinski did not represent the Service and did not reflect its seriousness, then why was this expendable go-fer instead of an experienced general officer in charge?  In the military, you take a problem seriously, you put stars or stripes on it.

Others were less concerned with this case than with the attitudes evident in the conduct of, not one, but two, Air Force lieutenant generals who dismissed court-martial convictions for various sex-related crimes.  First, Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, commander of the 3rd Air Force at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, overturned the multiple convictions of Lt. Col. James Wilkerson for “abusive sexual conduct, aggravated sexual assault and three instances of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.”  Then Lt. Gen. Susan Helms overturned a conviction of Capt. Matthew Herrera for “aggravated sexual assault.”  Neither has offered any explanation then or since.  What is with this?

The answer is Chaperone in Chief, that is, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Mark A. Welsh III.  In Congressional testimony, Welsh declared the problem of the estimated 26,000-some-odd cases of sexual assault reflects American’s “hook-up” culture among young people.  Welsh’s assessment deserves recognition and response because it represents the pervasive thinking among senior military officers of all three Military Services.  One, like the others, the Air Force recruits and accepts such people, apparently without trying to screen out the hookers and the hookees.  Two, the General accepts no responsibility for the failure of his program to prevent sexual assaults, even to slow down the rate at which they occur, and shifts the blame to society.  Three, Welsh presumes to know the intentions of those involved by implying that the estimated 26,000 cases are consensual.  Four, Welsh justifies the dismissal of convictions—and, by extension, complaints—because nothing criminal in these sexual encounters occurs.  He implies that there are no sexual assaults and, therefore, no crimes, just some unfortunate miscommunications or misunderstandings.  The military justice system works just fine.

Welsh’s sworn testimony shows him unfit for command.  On a matter which the Pentagon professes to take seriously and to work diligently, Welsh does not believe in the existence or the seriousness of the problem.  Such beliefs set the example and suggest that the unit which Krusinski headed was ineffective because it was window-dressing, a public-relations stunt.  Of course, given such a belief, he could not consider, much less propose, what some senators are now considering proposing: a change in the Military Code to prevent commanders from dismissing court-martial convictions unconditionally in cases of sexual assault.  The idea is a good one, for it would affirm that sexual assaults do occur and are crimes, and that laws, not people, govern the Military Services as they presumably govern the nation.  Such a provision would support the possibility of military justice to redress grievances in the Military Services.

However egregious the reversals of these two court-martial convictions, ex post facto action on them or the generals would be improper, for, at the time, generals Franklin and Helms had the authority to exercise their judgment in all cases.  The issue is not the authority which they possessed, but the judgment which they lacked.  The same issue involves Welsh’s assessment of the generation participating in the “hook-up culture.”  If Welsh does not understand the difference between consensual hooking up and non-consensual sexual assaults, he not only shows a lack of moral nuance, but also shares the “women-want-it, women-ask-for-it” culture of his age and gender.  Air Force Chief of Staff Welsh sends the message that women are sexually promiscuous, men are naturally provoked, thus all—fondling, groping, assaulting, raping—is fair in love and war, in the Military Services.

Gauging others’ intentions is challenging work.  If biased or uninformed views supply his assessment of the intentions of his troops involved in sexual encounters, biased or uninformed views are more equally likely to inform his assessment of the intentions of enemies, with potentially dreadful consequences.  For example, the US justified its long and costly war against Iraq on assessments of Hussein’s intentions.  Most analysts inferred that Hussein’s refusal to give inspectors access to all facilities meant that he had something to hide.  But they were wrong.  Hussein’s refusal was his bluff to create doubt about his possession of WMDs to keep enemies foreign and domestic at bay.  So, when the Air Force Chief of Staff knows either nonsense or nothing about the intentions of his troops, then he is likely to know more nonsense or less than nothing about the intentions of our enemies.  Welsh’s mindset, a mix of prejudices and ignorance, makes him unlikely to make sensible judgments or give sound advice. 

We are way past worrying about a lieutenant colonel who was the commanding officer of a unit responsible for the Air Force’s anti-sexual-assault program and who turned out to be a groper.  It hardly matters whether local police prosecute the hapless Krusinski or turn him over to the Air Force to scapegoat a deserving culprit.  We should not be worrying only about the attitudes and actions of Air Force general officers; their attitudes are not unique to that service.  All the Military Services have contributed to the estimated thousands of cases of sexual assaults and their poor record of reporting them and dealing with them appropriately.  That record makes the stars and the stripes a joke, a bunch of boys (for the most part; “tomboy” Myers is an exception) whom the nation indulges under its “boys-will-be-boys” culture.  So the Military Services turn out to be, not military forces, but frat parties.

So we should be worrying about the dysfunctional social culture tolerated or fostered by the leadership of all the Military Services; they have long faced this large and growing problem in their ranks.  But the record shows that they do not understand it or its importance, do not care about it or its effects on morale and readiness, and dodge responsibility for it and for their failures to address it effectively.  It is long since time for the parties to end and for the civilians to end them, with bold action to punish not only offenders, but also to penalize by demotions or dismissal from the Military Services at least their immediate commanders for failure to ensure “good order and discipline.”

I hear people muttering about my tarring all military personnel for a “few bad apples.”  I know something about bad apples; I know that, left in the barrel, they make all the apples in the barrel go bad.  Ask all the families who have learned that their priests molested their children how they feel about the Roman Catholic Church.  Ask those who wonder which priests they can trust and which they cannot.  My daughter left the faith when she had young boys because she could not trust Boston-area priests, their bishops, and the Church generally not to molest them, not to cover up their abuses, and not to move offenders from one parish to another, perhaps into hers.

The Military Services have been using the same operating manual to deal with sexual assault offenses and offenders, the “bad apples,” by retaliating against complaining victims, resisting or reducing charges, dismissing convictions, and restoring perpetrators to duty.  They do not deal with the other “apples.”  They let them go bad by tolerating or encouraging silent acceptance of such offenses and offenders.  Any member of the military who does not know about the sexual peccadillos of his or her fellow service members is cognitively unfit for duty.  And any member of the military who does know and has done nothing is lacking in moral judgment and moral courage—deficiencies making him or her undeserving of the honor which the public too often unquestioningly bestows upon people in uniform.  If it is hard to ascertain those who deserve a finger and who deserve a salute, then it is hard to trust not only the troops, but also the Military Services to which they belong.

LOCAL OXYMORONS: NMSU EDUCATION, LAS MONTANAS EDUCATION

Officials’ attitudes toward and beliefs about education will soon appear starkly in decisions by the NMSU Board of Regents and the LCPS School Board: whom to pick for NMSU president and whether to re-charter Las Montanas Charter High School (LMCHS).  Officials are resolved to squander resources—money, effort, and time—on losing causes: NMSU’s football team and LCPS’s student storage facility.  Committed to sports entertainment or staff employment, neither NMSU nor LCPS effectively and efficiently marshals their resources to provide an education of merit.

The Regents’ impending appointment of former governor and current NMSU business college dean Garrey Carruthers as the next NMSU president is a foregone conclusion.  The Las Cruces Sun-News has recently run several front-page “puff pieces” on Carruthers.  Just yesterday, in an obvious departure from format and scheduling, its website rushed to publish a letter attacking local elected representatives who have fact-based concerns about him.  (Although the paper published the underlying facts, earlier reported in The Albuquerque Journal, the letter smeared these representatives by alleging that they were Swift-boating Carruthers.  How screwy and sick can it get in Las Cruces?  Don’t you ask, and I won’t tell.)  The former publisher of the Las Cruces Bulletin weighed in with a lightweight piece recommending Carruthers on the basis of his occupying these positions.  We have yet to hear from the donor-led community of distinguished local college and high-school graduates, some of whom benefitted from pre-graduation grade inflation.

The reason for this silence is obvious.  Carruthers is their go-along, get-along guy.  He is known to all, friends to all the powers-that-be, but not friendly to those who dare to ask him pointed questions, most particularly, students (a posture sure to endear him to the NMSU community—not).  His experience assures everyone in the power structure that he knows better than to do anything which would unsettle a failing state or a faltering university by suggesting reforms.  With his business interests and business perspective, he understands the pro-business, for-profit importance of public education in New Mexico.  The Regents’ appointment will confirm that, of all the candidates who spoke at length about raising funds and increasing sales (higher enrollments), he has the best qualifications for operating the university like a business.  He is not the man to put his presidency or his reputation at risk by addressing NMSU’s woeful academics.

Carruthers’s supporters have every reason to believe that the fix is in.  After all, as I noted in my 15 Nov 12 blog http://firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/11/regents-pretend-to-transparency-in-nmsu.html, the Regents perpetrated a fraud in pretending to be transparent about seeking public comment without providing it with requisite information to advise usefully.  It then spent $90,000 on a search team to identify weak candidates making Carruthers the inevitable choice. Supporters are so confident in the Regents’ choice of Carruthers that they offer nothing to suggest that his record as governor or dean promises the kind of leadership which NMSU requires.  I credit them with not trying to misrepresent a career in politics or academe without any notable achievements improving the state or the business college.

But, as Sun-News and Bulletin editorial support suggests, all is not going so smoothly as the powers-that-be would like because some people are questioning Carruthers’s ethical integrity.  Their comfort is that what doubters or critics have learned, they have learned too late: that he put his mouth where others’ money was in his attacks on the science of cancer-causing second-hand smoke and on the science of global warming.  Worse, he took payments from special-interest groups but declared that work as “public service.”  These stains on his record of pro-business, anti-science activities will spread to enduring doubts about the integrity of university work in science and engineering.  The Regents may think or rationalize to themselves that Carruthers can lighten or remove the stain by his ability to raise money from corporations for the university.  However, his background will augment, not allay, the suspicion that corporations will pressure him to influence the work in those departments to support business interests, and thereby cast even good work under a cloud.

The Regents’ selection of Carruthers as NMSU president will reflect the corruption of NMSU governance and the conversion of a land-grant university into a for-profit corporate campus.  Their pro-business orientation shows that the Regents care little about the teaching, research, and service missions of a land-grant university which doubles as a Hispanic-serving institution in an area long suffering from poverty, hunger, disease, and, yes, ignorance.  Carruthers is their man for corporate science and continued academic erosion and educational mediocrity.

On a smaller scale, the same squandering of resources and the same commitment to squander more characterizes the seven-year operation and likely re-chartering of Las Montanas Charter High School (LMCHS).  The record is managerially and educationally disgraceful.

In chartering LMCHS, the District failed to institute or monitor administrative practices to ensure accountability of resources during its first four years of operation.  Only then did an audit discover that LMCHS had overstated its capital assets and could not locate or account for over “$83,207 in cash.”  Meanwhile, the school earned a “D” for its academic performance and had a graduation rate twenty-five percentage points below the average for Las Cruces high schools.  Even worse, its first four-year class in 2012 sent 39 graduates to 2-year or 4-year colleges; its second four-year class sent none—that is, not one.  Such is the record.

In 2011, the LCPS District set requirements for reform, but LMCHS has not met them.  No matter: no one in southern New Mexico thinks that past performance, instead of renewed present promises and redoubled expenses, matters in a decision-making process.  Talk about such requirements and standards is just verbal foliage for covering pre-ordained results.  (Another case in point is the recent approval of the DACC nursing program after it spent gobs of money on fewer than two dozen students.  NMBON touted the earlier high NCLEX pass-rate, despite knowing that it was jacked up, not from good instruction over two years, but from a last-term, teach-to-the-NCLEX-test course.)

So the current LCPS School Board, with three members who caved to noisy, special-interest parents protesting adjusted school boundaries for their high school made to accommodate the needs of the new high school, and the School Board president, who caved to them, will re-charter a school for reasons which reflect no credit on anyone.  First, once again, it faces noisy parents and teachers, though fewer in number, advocating re-chartering.  Second, it knows that a decision to refuse re-chartering LMCHS would be an admission of its own failure.  Third, it knows that such a decision would rebuke Superintendent Stan Rounds for poor management, Associate Superintendent Steven Sanchez for poor evaluation, and both for failure to take appropriate action from the start.  For these reasons, the School Board will ignore that, by any standard of accountability, LMCHS is a multi-dimensional failure and an embarrassment to the District, the School Board, and LCPS leadership.

Both decisions—the choice of president and the re-chartering of LMCHS—show power elites exploiting or using institutions to serve private purposes or personal interests, not the public.  For the Regents and the School Board, the quality of the education is not the paramount issue.  From the verbiage expended on the issue, the success of the NMSU football team apparently mattered more to the candidates, as they tried to curry favor with one and all, than did the quality of education at NMSU or their vision for improving it.  They also spoke at greater length about raising money and increasing enrollments.

Likewise, the School Board has no sensible, fact-based reasons for re-chartering LMCHS.  Unquestionably, it is politically impossible to justify segregating some students who present problems to teachers and administrators in the regular high schools.  Apparently, it is impossible to demand that teachers and administrators find ways to solve those problems on the other.  But, if “it is all about the kids,” as Connie Phillips, Maria Flores, Barbara Hall, and Bonnie Votaw like to say, perhaps they should not allow some students to be stashed in Las Montanas Charter High School, which neither educates them nor prepares them for further education.

A POLITICS OF LITERATURE AND LIFE, OR WHAT DOES "KING LEAR" HAVE TO DO WITH ME?

Be advised: like Hamlet, I shall “by indirections find directions out.”

The connection between life and literature is a variable, thus a debatable, one.  Life is what it is: everything there is, in all its richness and seeming randomness, without self-evident or even evident meaning.  Literature is much less: a cultural artifact of selected and structured materials more or less life-like and given point by the author’s purpose.  The scope of literature is only a narrow representation of life, but, as a creation by the better and the best authors, a penetrating interpretation of an important part of life.

Arguably, the world’s greatest author is a dead, white man.  I speak, of course, of my man William Shakespeare, but he was not always my man.  After my junior and senior high-school teachers required me to read nearly half a dozen of his plays, I graduated in the strong belief that he was a fraud as well as a bore.  Today, I love the apocryphal story of the college sophomore who goes to the professor and says as much—to which the professor replies, “young man, you do not judge Shakespeare; Shakespeare judges you.”  I might have been, but was not, that student.

Instead, thanks to a college introductory course and to my fear that I could not master even the plots and characters in half of his plays, I immersed myself in them and emerged a convert.  I have been a Shakespeare scholar ever since, though scholarship has never been my profession, only my passion.  Yet I have published a book, articles, and reviews; delivered papers and lectures; and taught a few classes—almost all on Shakespeare.  This week, I retired myself from the public side of my scholarship when I completed a series of four lectures presented under the auspices of NMSU’s Learning in Retirement program and to an audience of upwards of fifty seniors with inquisitive and lively minds.

I made every effort not only to argue for rethinking the genre of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, plays usually labeled as tragedies, but also to urge that how we determine genre is not unlike how we classify, and respond to, other people.  Thus, I put a kind of humanistic politics in play and preached accordingly.

To explain my point, I must explain my thesis, unusual for being an original one after the better part of 400 years of commentary.  The negative side of my thesis is the mistake of labeling a play a tragedy and interpreting it as one because the protagonist dies at the end.  After all, though, by convention, protagonists give their names to the plays labeled tragedies, they are only a part, albeit an important part, of the play.  There are other parts, and they contribute to the play.  Even as foils, they represent something quite different from, and usually better than, what the protagonists, flawed in character or faulty in choice, represent.

The positive side of my thesis is that these plays are better labeled and interpreted as tragic romances, with the tragic protagonists set within a larger frame of meaning.  In Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, that frame is the exile and the return of the antagonist who succeeds to his rightful place in the kingdom from which he has been temporarily removed.  In Othello, that frame is the protagonist’s obligations as a knight and, more importantly as a Christian, from which he departs in killing his wife.

The point is that the evidence for these views, as one would expect of a dissertation, then a book, on the subject, is in the plays.  But literary critics, blinded by their cultural presuppositions and their critical biases, have ignored it.  For example, Robert Miola’s Shakespeare’s Reading does not discuss Shakespeare’s reading, or the influence, of chivalric romance, the predominant literary genre of his lifetime, with its appeal to his aristocratic and popular audiences.

The play seemingly least likely to disclose indebtedness to the English chivalric romance tradition is King Lear, long regarded as an unrelieved depiction of universal injustice tantamount to nihilism.  Notwithstanding, the play is a carefully crafted compendium of motifs and materials derived from that tradition.  Yet English professors everywhere make nothing of his only direct literary quotation, one from a popular chivalric romance; nothing of the single combat in armor between hero and villain which decides the fate of the kingdom; nothing of Lear’s disclosure at the moment before he dies that he was a chivalric knight in his youth; and nothing of the relationship between Lear and Edgar indicated by the use of the word “godson,” unique in his works.   This and much other evidence urge that Lear is a tragic protagonist in a world ultimately shaped according to a romance vision of achievable order and justice, though at terrible cost.  With no other direct evidence of Christian import in this play, its story of suffering in advance of deliverance still resonates with the romance which is Christianity.

The further point is that labels invariably, but also variably, distort the reality of the thing to which they are applied.  If we label King Lear only a tragedy because we focus on the protagonist, we miss the romance because we diminish or disregard his successor.  This apparently merely academic point has an all too practical application.  Labeling other domains of human experience or kinds of people invariably runs the risks of misrepresenting, especially insidiously distorting, the larger reality of human experience as it is or the richer texture of human beings as they are.

Fit it is here to make a plea for an English literary curriculum which encourages reading about those who differ from us in culture and ethnicity, race and gender, age and history, and much else so that, as we learn how to appreciate characters different from us, we can learn to relate to, and respect, people different from us.  

Sad to say, the custom of the trade by English professors is the custom of the country of many Americans.  The ignorant or willful denial of facts and logic by the one parallels the ignorant or willful denial of facts and logic by the other.  If we are to understand the literature which we read or the lives which we lead, then we must make every effort to see them, not with eyes asquint, but wide; not with minds closed by ideology, but open; and not with hearts shut by bigotry, but welcoming.

GUN CONTROL: WHOM DO UDALL, HEINRICH, AND PEARCE REPRESENT?

[Note: A new title reflects new developments this Friday after I posted this blog on Wednesday.  Senator Heinrich has changed his position on the pending Senate legislative proposal from opposition to support.  As I wrote his press secretary, "I am glad to learn of Martin's change of position--I hope that it also reflects a change of heart--on this modest gun control package and promises favorable consideration of future 'gun restraint' legislation.]

The question should be absurd.  But once it is asked, it prompts a tangle of nasty issues, the first of which is the nature of American democracy.  With few and local exceptions, American democracy is representative, not direct, democracy.  Direct democracy can work either when polities have numerically small, geographically concentrated populations, including those with franchises restricted by age, race, gender, and citizenship.  The New England town meeting is more the stuff of myth than of reality in most of America.  For its large, dispersed, and diverse population, America has relied on representative democracy; people elect representatives to state and federal legislatures.

The second issue is the most important.  Once elected, representatives have to balance everyone and everything which they can represent.  The possibilities are many and interwoven: many different groups and many different interests of different groups.   Elected representatives serve the public interest, but there are many competing publics which have interests: city, county, state, and, for some, country.  They also serve partisan or parochial interests: businesses or consumers, management or labor, schools and teachers, hospitals and doctors and nurses, veterans, environmentalists, artists, farmers, hunters—the list goes on.  It includes their campaign contributors and their personal interests, whether political, religious, or pecuniary.  Juggling these often competing interests is hard work, but only for those who are not in thrall to some special interest or rigid ideology—for whom, all issues are resolved by their pocketbooks or prejudgments.

Almost all candidates for public office are as committed to the profession of politics as any career-driven person is to their vocation.  Unlike most careerists, however, they must appeal to the electorate, so, in most cases, some degree of prudent consideration of the opinions of the electorate enters into most political decisions.  On controversial issues usually characterized by a closely divided electorate, representatives know that any decision will divide the electorate but balance what is good and bad for them.

Consider abortion.  Although a small majority of Americans in the country and in almost all states favors a woman’s right to choose abortion, legislators at the state and national level pass legislation restricting it and survive the risks of offending voters because they are closely divided by, and now accustomed to votes against, the majority.  Moreover, most Americans accept that representatives must, in some cases, vote their consciences.

But, in any consideration of gun restraints, one confronts an entirely different and anti-democratically perverse response by most elected representatives.  One of its many issues, universal background checks, the majority of voters favors by nine-to-one ratios, plus or minus a few percentage points, across all surveyed groups.  This virtual unanimity is almost unparalleled on any domestic issue; only Congressional votes on war approximate such ratios of support.  Nevertheless, most Congressional representatives are not supporting legislation to implement this modest effort, among others, to provide greater protections against gun violence.

The reason for this widespread support is clear: most people believe that reasonable requirements for registering arms and restricting their kinds and capabilities are responsible means to reduce the number of episodes and the magnitude of the effects of gun violence.  I doubt that they believe that such requirements will eliminate gun injuries and deaths any more than they believe that legal speed limits end speeding and accidents.  I assume that they believe that criminals will continue to retain or acquire arms—they always have—but that such requirements and restrictions make it more difficult, with benefits to society in terms of injuries and deaths avoided.  The arguments to the contrary, if taken seriously, imply that no laws make sense because people break them and will continue to do so.  The rejection of imperfect means to a worthy end makes the perfect the enemy of the possible.

Representatives who are not supporting gun restraints often invoke or accept appeals to the Second Amendment.  I set aside what I have argued at length is a bogus reading of this amendment to allow the unrestrained access to arms of all kinds and all capabilities.  Pseudo-Constitutional appeals to the Second Amendment perversely assert that the Bill of Rights explicitly recognizes the right to “keep and bear Arms” without acknowledging the right, perhaps because not explicitly stated in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, of the living to keep doing so.  Indeed, the advocates of the means to harm or kill others regard the right to own pistols and rifles more important than the right to life of the people whom they might kill.

Thus, representatives who refrain from supporting gun restraints are ignoring the overwhelming majorities favoring reasonable gun restraints, are accepting bogus arguments against any gun restraints, and are countenancing the inevitably larger numbers of people who will be injured or killed as the inevitable consequence of unrestrained access to arms of any kind or capability.

So, with this knowledge aforethought, our local representatives—Senator Tom Udall, Senator Martin Heinrich, Representative Steve Pearce—cannot deny that they care little for the opinions of the majority of their constituents, little for reasoned argument, and little for human life.  Their care-less-ness reflects a radical rejection of American democracy, New Mexicans, and, quite literally, their lives.  Whatever their other political positions, on this one issue, they oppose the interests of the living in their support of the interests of the merchants and merchandizers of death.  If Udall, Heinrich, and Pearce are not themselves killers, their opposition to reasonable gun restraints makes them enablers of killers.

(Note: I find the following incident an illustration of rough, though tragic, justice.  No gun restraints can prevent stupidity, but they might remind people to take greater care of their arms if they wish to think themselves “law-abiding.”   See:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/09/josephine-fanning-dead-shooting_n_3042312.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=040913&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FeatureTitle&utm_term=Daily Brief.)