Legacies

Today marks the end of the National Poetry Month.  Of course, we will continue to write and read poetry later too! ;)

Today's poem brings together a couple of different aspects that interest me.  African-American poetry (remember?) and my interest in old stories as in the legacies that I have inherited and are a part of me.

Here is Legacies by Nikki Giovanni:

her grandmother called her from the playground   

       “yes, ma’am”

       “i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old   

woman proudly

but the little girl didn’t want

to learn how because she knew

even if she couldn’t say it that

that would mean when the old one died she would be less   

dependent on her spirit so

she said

       “i don’t want to know how to make no rolls”

with her lips poked out

and the old woman wiped her hands on

her apron saying “lord

       these children”

and neither of them ever

said what they meant

and i guess nobody ever does

Gracias, Mexico. You made us possible!

If there is one word that characterizes well what ticks in America, it would be hustle.  Like the hustle at the pool table.  The hustling phone calls that I get about my car warranty or social security.  I mean, this is a country that has hustlers in plenty in its history, and one even got himself elected to the highest office in the land!

That American ethic of hustling also made possible a "Creation Museum" in Kentucky.  What an innovative hustle to make money!  Take, for instance, the way the museum deals with dinosaurs.  Their sales pitch is that dinosaurs and humans co-existed.  In this hustle, they ask, "were you there?"

Think about it: were you there when God created the earth? No, but we have a book inspired by the Creator that tells us how He did it. If we start with God’s Word, dinosaurs living with humans—at least early on—makes sense.

Tickets per person range from $24.95 to $39.95, and "parking not included."  If you want to see how humans lived with dinos, you need to fork over extra for parking your vehicle!

In understanding the universe in which we don't literally read "a book inspired by the Creator" we go about in search of evidence and rational explanations.  In other words, science.

Thanks to science, we understand that humans and dinosaurs didn't live together.  Had I known this in my childhood, I could have avoided a few nightmares!

But, until today, I hadn't considered the possibility that the dinos had to go extinct in order to make homo sapiens possible.

Our presence here on earth was a result of "the mother of all accidents" when a 6-mile wide asteroid crashed into earth.  The essay argues this crash made all the difference: "It stands to reason, then, that without the asteroid impact the dinosaurs that had reigned for more than 100 million years would likely still be here, and therefore the primates would not be, and so neither would we."

The odds of an asteroid hitting earth are very low.  The odds of that size of an asteroid hitting earth are very, very low.  And then the location where it crashed.

The rocks around the Yucatan target site are rich in hydrocarbons and sulfur, which resulted in the production of enormous quantities of soot and sunlight-deflecting aerosols. Geologists figure that as little as 1 to 13 percent of the Earth’s surface contains rocks that could have yielded a comparable stew of destructive materials.

This small target means that with the Earth rotating at about 1,000 miles per hour, had the asteroid arrived just 30 minutes sooner, it would have landed in the Atlantic Ocean; 30 minutes later, in the Pacific Ocean. Just 30 minutes either way and the dinosaurs would probably be here.

And I wouldn't be here blogging!  Dumb luck has been the story of our lives!

So, have a special dinosaur-themed celebration on Cinco de Mayo!

Preventing the bad air

There are a few recurring topics in this blog.  I am obsessed with them.  Some day, when those issues end, I will stop blogging about them.

Like malaria and mosquitoes.  I hate those damn insects.  I have been blogging about them forever.  Soon after I brought the blog back up again, I wrote about the Asian tiger mosquito.  This was in 2009.  The Asian sucker went global and became “the most invasive mosquito in the world.”  Since then, there have been quite a few posts on the damn blood suckers that spread diseases and cause terrible human suffering.  

As a kid, I had only known about malaria.  Later, I learnt in school that there was something called a "yellow fever" that mosquitoes merrily spread.  Then dengue. Chikungunya.  Enough already!

I have been dreaming of a world without mosquitoes.  I won't miss them at all.  Instead of waging trillion dollar wars in which the US bombs the shit out of brown people, I have argued that the US should instead fund the development of anti-malarial vaccines that can vastly improve the quality of life of brown people.  All we did was elect a white supremacist, who said brown people should stay back in their shitholes!

Yet, there is a ray of hope.  There is promise of a malaria vaccine.

For the first time, a vaccine has shown high efficacy in trials – preventing the disease 77% of the time among those receiving it. This is a landmark achievement. The WHO’s target efficacy for malaria vaccines is over 75%. Until now, this level has never been reached.

In a pre-Covid world, this would have made the front pages of newspapers.  Now, when people are dropping dead from Covid, as my doctor described the happenings in his old country, 77% efficacy for a malaria vaccine in development doesn't seem to matter one bit.

Source

If researchers could have figured out the vaccine formula a couple months into the Covid-19 pandemic, how come we haven't achieved anything against malaria?

It took researchers less than a year to develop a roster of effective vaccines against COVID-19, but half a century of toil has still not yielded a vaccine against malaria that meets the World Health Organization’s efficacy goal. Part of the problem is low investment in preventing a disease that predominately affects low- and middle-income countries. Another issue is the malaria parasite (Plasmodium spp.) itself, which has a complex life cycle and the ability to mutate key proteins, generating fresh strains.

How do the Covid-19 virus and the malaria parasite compare?

The malaria parasite is complex, with more than 5,000 genes, meaning it has many different characteristics for vaccine designers to choose to target. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has just 12 genes, and its spike protein was the obvious target for vaccine scientists.

Malaria parasites have evolved with humans and their ancestors over the last 30 million years, not only generating a multitude of strains but also impacting our own evolution, with gene variants that lessened the effects of malaria being passed on over time. Worse still, these parasites generate chronic infections in millions, suppressing the human immune response that a vaccine tries to generate.

It has been a long-running battle against these blood-sucking drones.  Even if we can't eliminate them, maybe we can at least eliminate one of the diseases that they spread.

Mourning the death ... of liberal education

 (The following essay has been rejected by two publications.  So ... time to self-publish!)
***************************************************

Through the past pandemic year, I, like many, have had several Zoom meetings—with students, colleagues, relatives, and my physician too.  However, I wish I hadn’t had a recent Zoom meeting in which the college dean informed me that I was being laid off from my job as Professor of Geography at Western Oregon University (WOU.)

The two-page layoff letter that arrived via email during the Zoom firing included this line: “Please note that your layoff is not disciplinary in nature and does not reflect on your performance.”  But that provides no consolation.

Geography is not the only program that is being phased out.  Philosophy and anthropology will also not be available as majors or minors from fall 2021.  Students will no longer have an option to minor in physics either.  Many other programs are also being right sized, as the university president’s plan puts it.  As a result, a few tenured faculty, including me, have been issued layoff notices, some tenure-track lines will not be filled, contracts for quite a few adjunct faculty will not be renewed, and academic programs are being curtailed.

The American higher education landscape had been rapidly changing even in those halcyon days before we became familiar with the word “coronavirus.”  During the pandemic year, the rate of change reached unprecedented levels, with the result that tenured full professors are being laid off and academic programs are being shut down at WOU.  

The fashion over the years across higher education, and at WOU too, has been to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and to gut anything that resembles traditional liberal education.  The logic has been that STEM graduates are more employable than are those who spent their college years studying subjects like geography, philosophy, and anthropology.  

This false impression persists despite the growing mountain of evidence that points to the value of liberal education for employment and also for our collective well-being.  The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) is one of the many groups that routinely make this point very clear.  In a recent research report that is based on surveys of employers, the AACU points out that a “liberal education provides the knowledge and skills employers view as important  for career success.”

In the vast world of employment in which specialized professional credentials are not required, employability is about skills, and not about whether a student can solve a linear algebra problem.  The preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself, and the skills are gained through a broad array of topics outside one’s major.  A few years ago, WOU developed undergraduate learning outcomes that make clear what the core of an undergraduate education is about: Quantitative literacy; Written Communication; Inquiry and Analysis; Integrative Learning; Diversity and Global Learning.  These are the essential outcomes that employers repeatedly cite as being important.

Unfortunately, politicians of all stripes have only made it worse for liberal education.  For instance, in 2014, President Obama mocked art history as an undergraduate major.  Senator Marco Rubio, during his failed run in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, claimed that we need more welders and fewer philosophers.  Obama and Rubio were not the only leaders trash-talking liberal education and calling for vocational versions of higher education.  Politicians have been virulently attacking various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful.  The harsh sound bites quickly reverberated among the public and through the political world that determines funding for public universities like WOU.  Three years later, Rubio acknowledged the value of philosophy and philosophers.  Meanwhile, Obama sent a handwritten apology to a University of Texas art history professor regretting his glib remarks.   Their apologies were mere whispers that few heard.

All through my life in India, I didn't know that there was something out there called “liberal education,” but that's exactly what my heart had always been after.  In India, we kids who were good in school were compelled to think only about two options—engineering or medicine.  Rare was an academically talented kid who fought against the system in order to study literature or history.  That’s how I ended up earning an undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering, even though my heart was never in it.

My intellectual world opened up when I came to the US for graduate schooling.  In 1987, I joined the urban planning program at the University of Southern California (USC) and, for the first time in my life, I had a formal and structured opportunity to study philosophy, political science, geography, and more.  It was liberal education on steroids!  I was in heaven.  I immediately fell in love with liberal education and latched on to it pretty strongly. 

When I accepted the employment offer from WOU, I told friends in California that the charming campus and the curriculum presented the university as a public version of a private liberal arts college.  In fact, for a while, WOU’s marketing materials included this tag line: "Steadily emerging as a leading public liberal arts institution.”  A few years later, that was replaced with "Providing an academically challenging and unique comprehensive public liberal arts education."  When I served as the Director of the university’s Honors Program, I was all too thrilled with providing college freshman what I wished I had in India—liberal education.

Over the recent years, WOU ceased to be a public version of a liberal arts college.  Programs that had the appearance of being professional and employable were increasingly favored over traditional disciplines.  The writing on the wall became clearer with each academic term that it was a liability for me to be associated with Geography.  I am, therefore, not at all surprised that I am being laid off.

The layoffs and program curtailment as a result of right sizing the university are evidence of the death of liberal education at WOU.    I mourn that death.   

Planned obsolescence and unplanned responsibility

In this NYT commentary, the author wants us to ask three questions before we buy the shiny new electronic gadget introduced in the marketplace:

“How long will this last?,” “How will I get it fixed when it breaks?” and “How will I recycle this when I need a new device?”

When I read that, I had two immediate thoughts. 

First, how many NYT readers will care enough to think about those questions and act on them, and how does this number compare to the billions of humans who don't read the NYT?

Second, I have routinely posed these questions in my classes; consider the following paragraph from my blog post in June 2015:

I routinely force students to think about where their old smartphones end up when they upgrade to the latest gadget.  I have assigned essays, like this one, which then provide the context for them to pause for a few minutes and think about the resource consumption.  I practice--at least try to--what I teach.  Thus, I have a difficult time getting rid of my old smartphone even when it serves all my purposes. Last December, when I was taking photographs of the high school classmates who had come to the niece's wedding, one friend laughingly said "ever since the first time I reconnected with Sriram, he has been using the same camera."  Yes, it has been the same camera too for a few years now.  Just because it is old I should dump it?  I don't operate that way.

Maybe if I had been asking other kinds of questions, and teaching sexy subjects, I would not have been laid off, eh!

The NYT commentary notes:

This year, the French government began requiring tech manufacturers to list an “indice de réparabilité,” a repairability score, on product pages for items like the iPhone and MacBook. If a device can be repaired, then its life can be extended, saving consumers money and the planet the burden of so many trashed gadgets.

As much as I like the idea, I think the reality is that this is not going to make much of a difference when gadgets are sold by the billions every year.  Sure, a few customers might tinker with their smartphones, or a few businesses might spring up in countries like India.  But, for most people, the cost of fixing the cranky smartphone might outweigh the benefits of a shiny new one.

I wish the writer had at least mentioned one important phrase: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR.)  Hold producers and other entities involved in the product chain,  responsibile for end-of-life product management instead of trying to work the the general public  I checked my own blog to see when I first mentioned EPR in my writing.  It was in February 2012.

Some day, sooner than later, we will hold producers like Apple responsible.  Soon, I hope.

Finally, a man with cojones!

"President Biden on Saturday recognized the mass killings of Armenians more than a century ago as genocide," the NYT reports.

Finally, a President calls it a genocide.

To use Biden's own words, it is a big fucking deal!

The declaration by Mr. Biden reflected his administration’s commitment to human rights, a pillar of its foreign policy. It is also a break from Mr. Biden’s predecessors, who were reluctant to anger a country of strategic importance and were wary of driving its leadership toward American adversaries like Russia or Iran.

So, isn't Biden worried that this would push Turkey to work with Russia?  Nope. Because Turkey and its autocratic leader, erdogan, are at their weakest in many ways, writes Soner Cagaptay, who is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

Biden, of course, is not being mean. He is simply aware that for the first time in many years, Erdogan needs the U.S. more than Washington needs him. Biden is, accordingly, using this window as a lever, hoping to correct some of Erdogan’s behavior, including his anti-democratic actions and close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. ...

The crux of the issue now isn’t that Biden is mad at Erdogan, but rather that almost the entire U.S. government is. Many inside and outside the administration see Erdogan as an autocrat who poses a threat to U.S. interests regionally.

I have always wanted the US to recognize the tragedy as a genocide.  The following is a re-post from March 2010

*******************************************************************

The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted, by a narrow one-vote margin, on a non-binding resolution "condemning as genocide the mass killing of Armenians early in the last century by the Ottoman army."

 
Of course, as a reader of this blog you are fully aware that this is not the genocide that happened in 1994 in Rwanda.  Or the genocide carried out by the Nazis.  Or .... well, you get the point, which Samantha Power articulated in her book A problem from hell.

The Armenian genocide happened (yes, Turkey, it happened!) almost a hundred years ago and we still lack the testicular fortitude to take a stand on it.  The presidential candidate who was praised for her testicular fortitude, Hilalry Clinton, is now the Secretary of State.  So, what was her response?  Ahem, not much different from the previous secretaries who all lobbied against such a resolution!

“We do not believe that the full Congress will or should vote on that resolution and we have made that clear to all the parties involved,” Clinton said. 

So, you are thinking, but the candidate who beat Clinton in the primaries, Barack Obama, promised change.  In fact, the following is what he said two years ago: (ht)

I also share with Armenian Americans – so many of whom are descended from genocide survivors - a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide. That starts with acknowledging the tragic instances of genocide in world history. As a U.S. Senator, I have stood with the Armenian American community in calling for Turkey's acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. Two years ago, I criticized the Secretary of State for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term "genocide" to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy. As a senator, I strongly support passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.106 and S.Res.106), and as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.
Genocide, sadly, persists to this day, and threatens our common security and common humanity. Tragically, we are witnessing in Sudan many of the same brutal tactics - displacement, starvation, and mass slaughter - that were used by the Ottoman authorities against defenseless Armenians back in 1915. I have visited Darfurian refugee camps, pushed for the deployment of a robust multinational force for Darfur, and urged divestment from companies doing business in Sudan. America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that President.

I guess elections are nothing but castrations...

Meanwhile, Turkey is already ticked off, and has begun a lobbying campaign.  The Turkish government has recalled its ambassador to the US for consultations, and

A Turkish government statement condemned the vote, saying, "“This decision, which could adversely affect our co-operation on a wide common agenda with the US, also regrettably attests to a lack of strategic vision.”

Racism is a public health crisis

Way back when I was a graduate student in Los Angeles, I interned for a while at a regional planning agency in downtown Los Angeles.  Some of my fellow interns were undergraduates, and one of them was an African-American.

Of all the interns, he was the only one who always showed up well-attired.  While the rest of us made it clear through our outfits that we were students, he came dressed as if he were a full-time employee.  I thought that maybe that was his thing.

Only decades later, it dawned on me that maybe he was well-dressed in order to make sure that many of us with our implicit biases would not mistake him for being a hooded mugger from whom we had to escape at least by crossing over to the other side of the road.  If that were the case, what a terrible burden that he had to deal with every single day!

Now, it is not that I have not been mugged.  Once, three guys surrounded me one late evening and I had to empty out the few dollars that I had.  I was now in a bind: I had no money to pay as fare for the transit bus, and it was quite a distance to walk to my crummy graduate student apartment.

A bus pulled up.  I told the driver that I had just been mugged, and that I had no money.  He waved me in.

Mugging was real.  But, to then suspect that every black young man is a mugger is where the racism kicks in.  And therefore people walking away from young black men is an explicit demonstration of that racism.  

Through his professional attire, my fellow-intern was perhaps signaling to those with explicit or implicit bias that he is simply one of us.

Racism is one damn public health crisis. 

As this commentary in The Conversation puts it, "Treating racism like the disease that the CDC says it is suggests boosting our investment in public health funding would be money well spent."

That's exactly what my county government resolved two days ago, following up on the CDC statement.  The resolution also makes an important public admission:

WHEREAS, the racist history of Oregon in particular, including the presence of the Black exclusion clause in the State’s constitution, has had lasting negative consequences for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (“BIPOC”) communities of the State and Lane County;

A terrible history that we have here in a "liberal" state.

If you thought that this was a unanimous resolution, then you don't know Oregon.   There are plenty of people, even my own neighborhood, who are racists.  It is not without reason that then-candidate tRump came to Eugene in May 2016!  Remember this post in which I described one effect of his visit?

So, yes, the county resolution was not unanimous.  There was one who voted no--Commissioner Jay Bozevich.

“If we’re already doing all of the work that is called for in this,” he said at the April 21 meeting, “I see this as almost an unnecessary piece of virtue signaling.” 

He added that he did support the definition of racism put forth by staff. 

As the report reminds us, "Lane County’s resolution comes weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s April 8 statement that racism is a serious public health threat."

The CDC's statement was possible only because of the outcome of the elections last November.  Thankfully!

The former fellow-intern perhaps has a son or two who could be in their mid-20s now.  I would certainly want them to have all the rights and privileges that people like Bozevich take for granted.

This land was made for you and me ... and ants too!

It is Earth Day!

I worry about the natural environment, the living and the non-living, to qualify as an tree-hugging nutcase according to some. But, I am not ideologically fully in the environment camp, leading some to view me with suspicion that I am one of those right-wing guys.  As always, I don't belong to any party.

I am concerned about all things around me.  I don't even want to kill spiders or ants.  Unless they directly interfere with my life.  I don't want to see ants in my kitchen, but I don't care if they are having a party on the sidewalk outside my home.  I don't like to see spiders or flies or gnats inside my home.  When I do see them inside, well, I do kill them.  But I feel bad for them.  I feel guilty when I crush those tiny critters. Sometimes I even apologize to them, as if that makes any difference to the ant!

I care for, and worry about, the natural environment--the living and inanimate--because of a deep conviction that the cosmos is not merely about us humans and our own comfortable material existence.  My sincere belief that there is nothing for me after this life ends does not mean that I am going to trash this place while I am here.

Source

Even when I kill ants and spiders that come into my home, I make sure I kill them as fast as I can.  I don't want those critters to suffer.  I cannot imagine how scientists do experiments on animals; I would think that it is nothing but watching them suffer.  If from those experiments we derive some life-extending benefits to humans, are our additional years worth all that suffering we put the animals to?  Why this supremacy of humans?

I don't ever get trapped into the Earth Day rhetoric of "save the planet" either.  The planet has no feelings.  It just is.  It is not "save the planet" mantra; it is about saving ourselves.  It is about the every day life (and death) issues, starting from how we treat the rivers and the mountains, the ants and the elephants, and fellow humans, ... that Earth Day should be about.  

We need to think of every single day as Earth Day.

Born to be wild

We watched a movie last night that was all about girl power.  The 16-year old girl in that movie shows up riding a bicycle.  And when the movie came to an end about two hours later, she rides off in her bicycle.

Girls + bicycles => power is a time-tested formula.  In countries where women do not have rights, girls do not even get to bike, leave alone doing anything else that symbolizes independence and power.

A couple of years ago, in the immediate outskirts of Kanchipuram, we saw three girls in school uniforms pedaling away on their brand new bicycles.  How did we know they were new?  The frames had the thin, filmy, plastic wraps.

My immediate thought was that it was perhaps a government project to give free bicycles in order to make sure that the kids don't drop out of school.  The success has been well documented.

I asked them about the bicycles.  Yes, they were new. And provided by the government. 

The leader of the pack was excited, animated, and eager to share with us how liberating it was for them to now freely go around.  Like the detour that they had taken on the way back home from school, which is why our paths crossed.  She said that the distance between home and school was about ten kilometers (six miles) and biking was far more liberating than taking the bus.

Girls on bicycles.  A simple measure of progress.

Peace!

 

No more sinecure unto death

Prosaic I am, yes.
But, I love the idea of poems.

Having a book of poems around is like having flowers on the table.

Like playing an old LP on a sunny afternoon.
Like having coffee with cheesecake.
Or better yet, having coffee with cheesecake while listening to an opera LP on a sunny afternoon in a room with a bunch of flowers in a vase.

But, prosaic I am.
Some of us are born that way.

Yet, from time to time, I seek out poems.
With my "indefinite tenure" having been revoked, 

I needed something to channel my emotions.

That's what poems are for.

Now you know why I seek out poems.

But, don't forget that prosaic I am.

With Tenure
by David Lehman

If Ezra Pound were alive today
(and he is)
he'd be teaching
at a small college in the Pacific Northwest
and attending the annual convention
of writing instructors in St. Louis
and railing against tenure,
saying tenure
is a ladder whose rungs slip out
from under the scholar as he climbs
upwards to empty heaven
by the angels abandoned
for tenure killeth the spirit
(with tenure no man becomes master)
Texts are unwritten with tenure,
under the microscope, sous rature
it turneth the scholar into a drone
decayed the pipe in his jacket's breast pocket.
Hamlet was not written with tenure,
nor were written Schubert's lieder
nor Manet's Olympia painted with tenure.
No man of genius rises by tenure
Nor woman (I see you smile).
Picasso came not by tenure
nor Charlie Parker;
Came not by tenure Wallace Stevens
Not by tenure Marcel Proust
Nor Turner by tenure
With tenure hath only the mediocre
a sinecure unto death. Unto death, I say!
WITH TENURE
Nature is constipated the sap doesn't flow
With tenure the classroom is empty
et in academia ego
the ketchup is stuck inside the bottle
the letter goes unanswered the bell doesn't ring.

Small talk returns

The sun is shining.  The air is warmer.  Vaccinations are well under way.

No surprise that the grocery store felt very lively.

The guy who has worked the produce aisles through the years that I have been shopping there waved out to me along with a loud HELLO!

After picking up everything that I had on my list, and more, I reached the checkout counter.

"I haven't seen you forever," Kathy said.

"How have you been?"

"Alive. Happy to have a job."

I nodded as I placed my groceries on the belt.  I wondered if I should tell her that I am alive, but that soon I will be out of a job.

Wendy came over to say hi.

"Hello, big boss."  Recently, she has had to take on supervisory responsibilities.

I decided that this was the moment.  Wendy has been a friend in a very unusual grocery store small-talk way for almost a decade.

"Want to hear some big news?" I asked them.

They both drew closer.

"I have been laid off.  No job after December."

In unison, they responded with "WHAT?"

"It is always the best teachers who are fired," said Kathy while shaking her head.

Wendy met my eyes, and perhaps she noticed that I didn't seem worried.  She quickly recovered to the humor road that is familiar to us.

"Want a cashier job here? We can start you at all of 7 dollars and 95 cents."

Before I could come up with a repartee, Kathy jumped in with, "come on, we can fast track him at 11.95"

I laughed.

"Have you had your shots?"

Kathy was all done.  Wendy has had her first.  "How about you?" she asked.

I told her that I was still waiting for my turn.

"Call up White Bird.  They'll take you in right away if you tell them you have been laid off."

I laughed again.

It has been a long time since I laughed at the grocery store checkout counter.  Life cannot be bad then.

Start building new temples

The US military confirmed the image of a triangular, pyramidal, Doritos-like, shape as one of the UFOs that was photographed by a navy pilot.

Despite all our interest in UFOs and aliens, the military is trying its best to stall the report that it has been asked by Congress to prepare and present to the public.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the director of national intelligence to work with the Defense Department to provide a public accounting by June 25 on unexplained sightings of advanced aircraft and drones that have been reported by military personnel or captured by radar, satellites and other surveillance systems.

The request came after revelations in 2017 that the Pentagon was researching a series of unexplained intrusions into military airspace, including high-performance vehicles captured on video stalking Navy ships.

The truth is out there, as Mulder always told us ;)

I, for one, am not really looking forward to an alien encounter because history overflows with groups totally wiped out of existence, or nearly eliminated, by alien population.

But, curious I am about aliens.  I am way more interested in what any evidence of aliens might do to religions.  The grand faiths that tell their followers about how all these on earth came to be, and what happens after the faithful die, will suddenly have to account for an unexpected plot twist that we on earth are not alone in the universe nor are we special.

As Carl Sagan has pointed out in (the now out-of-print book) The Cosmic Question, “space exploration leads directly to religious and philosophical questions”. We would need to consider whether our faiths could accommodate these new beings – or if it should shake our beliefs to the core.

What happens to the faiths that are built on a narrative of Adam and Eve and their original sin?  The children of Abraham will have to deal with Alf and Mork!

The old Hindu faith in all its variations--the local, the Vedic, and the offshoots like Buddhism--will easily work with the evidence that there is life out there.  

The Vedic philosophy discusses multiple lokas and the mahavakya says तत् त्वम् असि (You are that.)  The alien life and you are all manifestations of the same Brahma.   A framework that is not built around the divinity of a person, but instead uses concepts like reincarnation or a gazillion gods, will point to aliens as our relations.  A different incarnation.

So, get ready for a few Paralokaswamy temples!

But, at the end of it all, we will never know how all these came to be.  I will quote, again, from the Rig Veda:

Who really knows?
Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced?
Whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen
- perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not -
the One who looks down on it,
in the highest heaven, only He knows
or perhaps even He does not know.

Cogito, ergo sum

What will I blog about, now that the university president has officially pink-slipped me?

Blogging has served me in multiple ways.  It is cathartic when I am able to get my angst out.  Would I have survived the four years of the 45th President if there were no blog for me to express my emotions?

Some posts were simply my reflections on life, and death.  From the sparkles of the river, to death in the extended family, to small-talk at grocery stores, there are plenty of posts that are about life.

Blogging was also a way for me to read and think about ideas and issues that I could potentially use in the classes that I teach.  Uighurs, climate change, sustainable cities, ... all these topics not only interested me personally, they were also part of my professional development. Some of the materials I even incorporated into the syllabi.

And, oh, in the days when newspapers were alive and well, blogging was how I played with ideas and worked out the nuances, before I composed final versions that I sent to the editors.

Now, I face a new world.

Local journalism is dead.

My contract to teach will soon expire.

Will I be interested anymore in topics like higher education, about which I have written a lot?  If I will no longer engage students about Uighurs and the Roma, how much will I want to read and blog about them?  Were my curiosities merely serving such instrumental purposes, or will I continue to read, think, and write about them?  Will I join the majority that simply doesn't care about our collective issues and welfare?

I will soon find out, and so will you.

Observing Ramadan without fasting and prayers

It is the new year in the traditional calendar back in the old country.  This time, it coincides with Ramadan.

I suppose it can look bizarre for this atheist to post about religious observances like Ramadan.  But, I have never been one of those militant atheists making a fanatical religion out of atheism.  As long as the religious do not impose their practices on me, I seek nothing but peaceful coexistence with them.  And enjoy food and laughter and conversations with them. 

Furthermore, I am not that different from most atheists in that we reach the conclusion not with ignorance about religions, particularly the religion with which we were raised.  Even through my agnostic teenage years, I was curious about the Hindu faith and its philosophy.  Which is also why I am so familiar with ideas like dukrijnkarane that I talk about. 

Curiosity then made me find out at least a tiny bit about a few other religions.  Unlike most of the truly religious who are committed to only knowing about their own beliefs, we atheists often end up knowing a tad more about various religions.

For all the non-believer that I am, I consciously think about my existence, and worry about what it means to be human.  When bad things come my way, like when I get laid off in a Zoom meeting, I do not need a god to turn to.

"Shit happens" I tell myself.  And, for the most part, I expect shit to happen more frequently than it does.  I am acutely aware that the entire cosmos does not exist only to serve me!  The cosmos is. It doesn't have feelings towards me or you or anybody else.

In my framework, whether it is Rama Navami or Ramadan, or whatever, those religious days are designated times in order to help us mortals reflect on our fleeting existence on this "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," as Carl Sagan so poetically put it.  These special religious days are intentional pauses to our everyday lives.  A forced interruption that then makes us think, for at least a few minutes, about what we want to do with the little time we have on this planet.

In fact, the disconnect between such need for introspection versus the believers merely reciting the Vishnu Sahasranaamam and the Bhaja Govindam and more was the point of departure for the young me questioning the idea of god and religion and belief.  I was convinced then, and even more convinced I am now, that living a moral life has nothing to do with god and religion.

What does a true believer do during Ramadan?

By abstaining from things that people tend to take for granted (such as water), it is believed, one may be moved to reflect on the purpose of life and grow closer to the creator and sustainer of all existence. As such, engaging in wrongdoing effectively undermines the fast. Many Muslims also maintain that fasting allows them to get a feeling of poverty, and this may foster feelings of empathy.

A noble idea, right?  And this is something we ought to think about every day.  Don't we want to be empathetic every day of our lives?

Empathy is what is emphasized in Gandhi's favorites among the prayer music.  While the reference to the Hindu god, Vishnu, might distract a militant atheist or anyone committed to other religions, I ignore the Vishnu part and appreciate, and love, the ideas expressed there: 

Vaishnav people are those who:

Feel the pain of others,

Help those who are in misery 

Wouldn't you want to be friends with such people?  Wouldn't you want to be such a person?  A wonderful ideal to work towards, though a tall order for most of us mortals.

Cry me a river!

When engaging in serious discussions, I can easily become highly focused.  Almost lawyerly sometimes.  

But I also watch out for how the other party responds.  If I sense that there is a deviation from the substance, if the responses are even mildly passive-aggressive, leave alone fully aggressive, then I lose any interest in discussions.  I lose interest in the person too.

However worthwhile the topic, I decide that the person is not worth my time and attention.   When the other person reveals their colors that I don't like, I simply leave.  After all, as the old fable conveys it, a scorpion will always be a scorpion, and to expect otherwise means that I am being a damn fool.  Life is too damn short and stressful as it is; why invite more scorpions!

Thus it was that a few months ago that I decided against pursuing the discussion when I wrote in the email: "Looks like this is taking a different turn ... Peace out!"

People who don't know me will, more often than not, conclude--especially in such instances--that I am always serious without any funny bone.  The real me, if people do get to know me, even if it is in the classroom where I am the instructor and they are students, is a person who loves humor.  Often the jokes might be funny only to me, yes, but, hey I enjoy them.

I grew up with humor all around me.  Classmates, cousins, some of the older relatives.  But, most of all, the magazines in Tamil and English that had plenty of jokes and cartoons.  Madan's cartoons were my favorite of them all. 

In one of his cartoons, a patient is at the pre-op stage, and he asks the surgeon whether he would be able to play the violin after the surgery.  To which the surgeon replies that he will, of course, be able to play the violin. Then the punchline: "Amazing, because I do not know how to play the violin."  

It doesn't take much to amuse me, yes. 

Laughter is also how we deal with stressful situations, though sometimes I do wonder if I will benefit from a big cry.  A cry that will require plenty of Kleenex boxes, and lots of water to rehydrate myself.  When my daughter was young, she once told me that everybody needs to have crying sessions.  In India, I have witnessed laugh exercises.  Maybe I would have joined in if they had crying exercises.

Anyway, if you see me having a good cry, make sure to congratulate me on having done it!  

The layoff has been a stressful situation, no doubt.  After I emailed my siblings about my layoff, my sister texted that she felt very bad about my layoff.  I reassured her that I am fine, and will be fine.

My brother called after reading my email.  

"Don't worry about me," I told him.

His response was instantaneous.  "Who said we were worried about you?"

We laughed. 

I think this is how most of us men deal with the unpleasantness in life, of which there is plenty.  I am often reminded of Lynn Redgrave who delivered with dripping sarcasm along with the character's accent in Gods and Monsters: 

Oh, men! Always pulling legs. Everything is comedy. Oh, how very amusing. How marvelously droll.

Losing my mind ... not yet

I have no idea how things were when I was young, leave alone a hundred or a thousand years ago.  All I know is that more often than not I run into dishonest talk and practice. Unfortunately for me, my personality is not wired to deal with people who are far from honest in everyday life.

Of course, it is a challenge to practice being open and honest as much as I can.  Yes, "as much as I can" because there are moments, of which I am painfully aware, when I am less than honest.  This does not surprise me--I am but a mere mortal.

When younger, it was easier to yield to the temptation of not taking the high road even for the idealist.  But, the greyer, balder, and paunchier I get, the less I am interested in talk and practice that is not honest, and even less interested in less than honest people.

Interestingly enough, such is the conviction now when I am a committed atheist, whereas when yielding to the dishonest thought, I was an inhabitant of the religious environment in which I was born and raised!

Will I be able to stay sane and honest when surrounded by the multitude that is dishonest?  Will those confident idiots make me one of theirs?

There is at least one comforting verse from the old country, which has plenty to offer:

जडसंगेऽपिन लिप्ताः श्रीसद्भावेऽपि नोत्तरलाः ।
अंभोजकोरका इव विज्ञा विकसन्ति विश्वस्मै ॥

- अन्योक्तिस्तबक

Even when wise men stay with idiots, they will stay sane.
Even when they have wealth, they will not lose their mind.
Just like a lotus bud will maintain its cleanliness even amidst mire.
It will stay steady even when it has so much beauty. It will bloom beautifully when sun shines on it.

- Anyoktistabaka  Source

Comforting those words are, but the older me does not believe it.  

Yet, I want to believe the old couplet because the alternative simply sucks!

Every job has an expiration date

By firing me (and a few other faculty too,) the university's managers are essentially arguing that it would not make a difference to the university nor to the world.

I think otherwise.

Nor will they be able to convince me and the world that I was doing a "bullshit job," to use the phrase that the late anthropologist/commentator David Graeber coined in order to describe the modern economy.  Graeber, whom I have quoted a lot in this blog, defined a bullshit job as being so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince himself there’s a good reason for him to be doing so.

My work was never pointless.

Of course, I have always mocked myself, like in this tweet from six years ago:

Sriram is a curator who uses straight-up bullshit to create enlightenment of learning in the fecund Willamette Valley http://t.co/e0DHvHrbUk

— Soon to be "a former professor" (@congoboy) March 21, 2015

I often mocked myself in the classroom too.  The jokes were about me--after all, they are the safest ones.  After one of those jokes in an Honors class many years ago, a student, Ermine, loudly said something that made quite an impact on me.  With a smile that seemed to suggest that he knew what I was doing, Ermine commented that I engaged in that kind of humor because I was super-confident about myself.

Guilty as charged!

A few years ago, a faculty colleague commented that I could very well be the university professor who is most known outside the university because of my commentaries in the newspapers.  Whether or not I was the most known, I certainly did receive emails from people I had never met.  They were responding to my commentaries in the papers.

Like this person who wrote on March 21, 2005:

Sir 

Thank you for your excellent guest opinion and for your work with students.  We fear for our country's future as it is more and more difficult to discern reality from make believe.  You are a bright light.

Of course, even a couple of university personnel wrote to me.

After having read that same commentary, a then dean at the university, Hilda R., emailed in March, 2005:

Nice Op Ed piece in the Statesman Journal recently, Sriram.  You help make WOU look great.

"You help make WOU look great."

I am now being laid off because the president and provost have decided that I don't help make WOU look great.

A year later, in September 2006, it was another dean at the university, Stephen S., who emailed me: "Sriram,  Nice editorial!  Keep up the campaign."

The campaign has been put to an end.

Perhaps you are thinking that I am providing old data, and I have been the cliched deadwood since.  Nope; I stopped counting the number, but I think I was getting closer to 200 newspaper commentaries.  Or, maybe it is past that number?

In April 2017, the executive director of the state's higher education commission surprised me with this email:

Dr. Khe, 

I just wanted to say that I really appreciated the column you submitted to Oregon Live. It is heartening to hear that the election has generated the type of student interest that you describe, and that you are at WOU helping respond to those questions, guide those discussions, and expose more Oregonians to the field of geography. Such important work. Thank you!

The president and provost have decided that I don't need to respond to students' questions and guide their discussions anymore--especially if they are in the field of geography.

There is one feedback from a reader whom I have never met that I carry around in my wallet.  A talisman of sorts.  It is from 2008.

I was fortunate to have had such a meaningful job for all these years.

Though I wish that the job had lasted a tad longer, it had to end sometime; after all, nothing goes on forever.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

April is poetry month.  Something that even this prosaic blogger remembers and likes to blog about every April.

Poetry speaks to the emotional beings that we are.  I did not realize the emotional appeal of poems until I was well into adulthood, as a working stiff in the US.  I went to a poetry reading.  The poet was a local boy who had made it big on the other coast.  As the middle-aged poet read lines from his poem, it hit me: This is what poetry is about!  Those lines spoke to me, which is what we expect from good poetry.

Since then, I have come to realize that when the right person reads a great poem, oh boy, it is as if the mysteries of the universe are being solved.  One word at a time, and one verse at a time.

We collectively experienced that when we listened to Amanda Gorman reading her poem at President Biden's inauguration.  When her reading ended, we wanted more.  Remember?

As Margaret Renkl writes in the NY Times:

Thank God for our poets, here in the mildness of April and in the winter storms alike, who help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.

Thank god, indeed!

The title of this post is from the final stanza of Lord Tennyson's Ulysses.   Ulysses reaches Calypso’s island, exhausted after a shipwreck.  The goddess Calypso offers herself to Ulysses and also promises him immortality.  Think about this: The most beautiful woman ever and immortality.

Ulysses turns down the offer.

He then heads to the high seas.  An unknown expanse of adventure.

Ulysses wanted to live a life that he would not regret.

Tennyson writes:

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I wish us all well with the chances that we take, and may we never have to regret the chances we didn't, and don't, take!

A former professor speaketh

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”

Think about that.

The person who articulated that for all of us? 

e.e. cummings.

I doubt that most of us are born with the courage to grow up to be who we really are.  Most of us are the cowardly lions of the Wizard of Oz.  Somewhere we have to pick up that courage.

Where?

Education.

In a real education, institutions and educators will emphasize “the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”

I wish!

Increasingly, it does not work that way though.

Even we individuals apparently do not care to become better people.  We are most fascinated with those who have built "better mousetrap" who are also the ones who have made money from those mousetraps.  We are making it increasingly clear that a moneyed person is much more important and valuable than a better person.

Such an attitude gets reflected in education too.  In college, it is all about the better mousetrap.  College has stopped being the place where students gain the courage to find out who they really are and to then live that life with happiness and contentment.

Is it any wonder then why students are unhappy.  There is a growing body of evidence that students are unhappy.  And in the adult world, anxiety and angst seem to dominate over happiness and contentment.  Yet, we have a lot more educated population today than ever before.  The two sides of the ledger don't balance well.

“I think students are looking for meaning,” Peter Salovey, president of Yale, told Quartz at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

Of course they are looking for meaning.  But, apparently most educators don't care.

Increasingly, we run into graduates feeling intense burnout only a few years into their "real" lives outside college.  They begin to wonder, and worry, if what they do is not fulfilling, then what?

If only we had equipped them with the ability to prepare for life with a meaning, that provided them with happiness that is intangible!

Oh well ... I tried to do the best that I could.  Now, the countdown to the end date has been set by my managers.  In a matter of months, I will be referred to as "a former professor."

Such is life!

Intellectual parochialism wins

In May 2018, which is nearly 3 years ago, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a rare joint statement on "increasingly threatened" disciplines and approaches.

They noted in that statement:

we believe that institutions of higher education, if they are truly to serve as institutions of higher education, should provide more than narrow vocational training and should seek to enhance students’ capacities for lifelong learning. This is as true of open-access institutions as it is of highly selective elite colleges and universities. The disciplines of the liberal arts—and the overall benefit of a liberal education--are exemplary in this regard, for they foster intellectual curiosity about questions that will never be definitively settled—questions about justice, about community, about politics and culture, about difference in every sense of the word. All college students and not solely a privileged few should have opportunities to address such questions as a critical part of their educational experience.

Indeed!

Through my years in higher ed, and over the past almost 20 years at WOU, I have been fighting nothing but losing battles defending liberal education.  The war has now ended.

I worry that instead of broadening the reach of liberal education, universities like WOU are rapidly moving in the other direction of further limiting the horizons of less-privileged students. We seem to be well on our way to re-creating the huge divide that has always existed between the privileged few and the overwhelming rest--a divide that public higher education was designed to address.  

Students have always been shocked when I tell them, for instance, that Harvard does not even offer an undergraduate major in "criminal justice," which is one of our high enrollment programs.  They seemed genuinely puzzled about students majoring in English or philosophy at these expensive schools like Harvard.

Over the years, we have hyped up these high enrolling majors, and actively invested them, as if we know something that the privileged few do not.  Universities like WOU systematically, intentionally, and strategically create and market academic programs, often by vocationalizing it, even when the links to gainful employment are dubious, as this 2013 report shows, and there's nothing to convince me that things have changed. 

The academic environment at WOU is a contrast to how the privileged students are treated at the elite schools.  And even after they declare their majors, Stanford notes that "to avoid intellectual parochialism, a major program should not require a student to take more than about one-third of his or her courses from within a single department."  We, on the other hand, actively promote intellectual parochialism.

The joint statement concludes with this:

Higher education’s contributions to the common good and to the functioning of our democracy are severely compromised when universities eliminate and diminish the liberal arts.

The liberal arts will live on at the elite institutions.  But, democracy is not by the elite, for the elite.  The death of liberal education at the institutions that educate the masses does not bode well for the health of democracy :(