Eating the Turkey Soup: A Christmas Story

One December when my brother and I were around ten and twelve years old, our mother enlisted us in a holiday good deed she was doing. She wouldn't tell us who we were doing it for, and after we got caught up in our task itself we stopped wondering. When we were finished, we went back to thinking about other things. But on the afternoon of Christmas Eve someone came by our house with a pot of turkey soup to thank our mother, and we realized who we'd been doing that small good deed for.

The first lesson from that moment was immediate and overwhelming: we didn't think it so much as feel it, like a powerful physical reflex. We both knew right away that we were never talking about this again to anyone, ever: not even to each other. We were sorry that we knew. (If the version of the story I told above is vague and lacking in detail, well, good.) People are entitled to their privacy and their dignity. I could not have explained that in words, then, but I understood. And I remembered that lesson later, not because I talked about it, but because it provided the example that kept me from speaking about other things when I should not.

The other lesson I learned that week came more slowly, and I tried to refuse it. My brother and I did not want to eat the turkey soup.

We didn't especially like the soup. We preferred our mother's chicken soup (still a gold standard as far as I'm concerned), and there was no shortage of things to eat in our parents' house during the holidays. And anyway, the person who had given us the soup would never know whether or not we ate it.

But our parents insisted. Of course, we had to eat the soup. It was not because we liked it, or needed it ourselves. It was not because the person who had given it to us would know. It was because we would know. Eating that soup was part of our obligation.

I was nowhere close to understanding this then, but that turkey soup taught me the difficult lesson of gratitude. And I owed the person who gave us the soup gratitude. I owed that person the opportunity to give something back. That wasn't merely a social obligation; it could not be satisfied through a polite pretense. It was a moral obligation and it had to be made real. I really had to eat the soup. I had to take it into my body, and accept the gift honestly.

It is better to give than to receive, they say. But you do an unkindness when you do not allow someone else to give to you. And when the person doesn't have much to give, you do them wrong to refuse their gift or deny them gratitude. It's not always an obvious lesson, and I didn't find it an easy one, but I am grateful to the person who taught it to me.

Happy holidays.

cross-posted from Dagblog

In Praise of the Late Term Paper

It's that time of year again, or actually one of the two times each year, when semesters end and bleary-eyed college professors scale mountains of ungraded papers and exams. One of my friends claims that he can track the academic calendar by the crescendo of professors griping on Facebook and Twitter about bad papers, worse excuses, and outrageous examples of student entitlement. Some of this is necessary foxhole camaraderie, some of it verges on the unprofessional, and some does a lot more than verge. Too many lame papers and excuses will put most people in an ugly mood. But I want to give two cheers to one group of students who never get any love at this time of year: the students whose papers are late because they take the assignments seriously.

I like an on-time paper as much as the next person. Meeting deadlines are an important adult skill that students should be learning. Of course, I admire the excellent students who always do their best work by the stated deadline. That is intrinsically admirable. And when every student is late, it becomes impossible to help any of them; the greatest obstacle to rescuing students from their last-minute emergencies is the sheer number of other last-minute student emergencies. 

But all that said:

I've read some papers in my time that should have been late. I have read papers that have been turned in on the due date or earlier but that the writer hadn't even begun to work on seriously. Oh, those papers were presentable enough. They weren't full of comical errors. There was nothing to quote on Facebook. The margins were correct. But the papers were nothing. The writers had done as little work on them as they felt they could get away with, and avoided most of all the labor of thinking hard about anything.

Some of those papers would have been good papers at a lower level. The writers just stuck with what had worked before, handing in a polished introductory-class paper in an advanced class, or a meticulous high-school paper in a college class. Faced with the problem of an assignment that explicitly demanded a rather different paper, some worked tirelessly to misconstrue the assignment and find some loophole that would justify writing a simpler, more familiar assignment. And then, hoping for extra points, the writers handed those easier pieces of writing in early. They preferred to be judged on promptness rather than thoughtfulness, and many of them reasoned that there was no more room to improve their essays, so spending a few more days won't help. The saddest part is, they were right. They had set themselves elementary writing tasks, using skills they mastered years before, and executed those tasks well. It is like watching a high school senior filling in a coloring book, or listening to a forty-five-year-old playing "Chopsticks" on the piano. There is no way to do those tasks better, which is why I did not assign those tasks in the first place.

Those are the most demoralizing papers that I read. The mess and chaos of students trying to write something that they are not yet quite capable of bringing off does not bother me. But the orderly, sealed-off neatness of a paper that refuses to learn or grow makes me ask myself what I'm doing in the first place. That refusal is polite but insistent and unbendable. And sometimes the only thing that breaks through that stubborn insistence is a grade that makes the student upset.

On the other hand, some of the students who do accept the assignment and try to do it honestly find themselves struggling. They are trying to work out new skills, in response to new demands, and that doesn't happen on a predictable timeline. The work is messy. Progress is non-linear. So sometimes the deadline rolls around while the student is still up to her or his elbows in wet clay, trying to find the piece's shape. Those students aren't late because they're lazy. They're late because they are working hard. Giving them a few extra days to complete an assignment is productive, because they will use that time productively. Their papers will genuinely be much better a few days after the deadline than they could have been on the appointed day. An extension leads to a better product.

Not that every student who needs such an extension will ask for one. Some do not feel entitled to one, and some students will simply abandon an entire class in despair because they don't have a paper written on time. Of course, the same class will contain some squeaky wheels who are trying to get themselves as greasy as possible, and who will have no qualms about asking for all kinds of special arrangements. Some of the more demanding students prompt eye-rolls, but the only real harm they do is distract the professor from the students who are suffering in silence. It's important to shake your head clear at the end of the semester and look for the students who are in danger because they haven't asked you for anything. Many times, those students are the ones who generally enjoy less privilege in their daily lives: more likely to be the first in the family to go to college, more likely to have gone to a troubled high school, more likely to find tuition a major burden. Those students don't expect to get any breaks because they usually haven't gotten any. They read the rules in your syllabus, which some of their more affluent classmates simply view as initial negotiating positions, and take those rules seriously. If they can't meet a deadline, they just assume they're done for, because that's consistent with their previous experience. The only way to persuade them differently is to show them differently, and you can't wait for them to come to you.

Keeping Christmas at Home

Last Sunday was the first day of Advent, which means in the most traditional sense possible the beginning of the Christmas season. Of course, Retail Christmas Season began five minutes after Halloween ended, prompting me to some bleak reflections in my last post. But the truth is, I love Christmas, no matter how much this year's commercial display may be getting me down. Last Saturday I bought a wreath and a bunch of assorted greenery. My spouse made an Advent wreath from some of it, and decorations from the rest. Christmas lights frame our living room window, and I've got some nice holiday jazz on the stereo. I enjoy this holiday a lot. But the Christmas-Industrial Complex defeats the season's purpose.

This is not a post about the meaning of Christmas. "The Meaning of Christmas" has become one of those phrases that has been used in so many slippery ways that it's become hard to use straightforwardly, even with the best of intentions. This is a post about the uses of Christmas.

Christmas belongs to you. It does not belong to The Man, whoever The Man might be. It is not meant for you to work harder on your boss's behalf. It is not meant for you to spend more in order to make Wall Street happy. It is meant for you to refresh yourself, physically, spiritually, and emotionally, using whichever form of refreshment you need. What it was never, ever meant to be was an excuse for the Powers That Be to squeeze more work or more money out of you.

Like every medieval holiday, Christmas began as a break from daily labor, an interruption in the grind of ordinary time. Of course that break had an official religious purpose; every holiday was originally a holy day. Religious observance was the only acceptable excuse for a day when you didn't work. And of course, people did a lot of other things beside praying and churchgoing on those official holy days. Calling the "true meaning of Christmas" religious is not the whole truth, because the religious celebration (no matter how genuine, or how personally important to me) has never been the whole story.

In a comedy by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, a character who's been tricked into marrying a prostitute (which is considered hilarious), consoles himself:

Marry a harlot, why not? . . . if none should be married but those who are honest [i.e. chaste], where should a man seek a wife after Christmas?

17th century Christmas was not a festival of childhood innocence. It was a holiday for adults to feast, drink, and make merry in adult ways, like a snowier Mardi Gras. (This is one of the reasons that the Puritans despised it, and did not celebrate it in early New England.) If it seems odd to have a holiday from the church calendar celebrated with drinking and sex, remember that Mardi Gras comes from the church calendar, too.

And to say that the "meaning of Christmas" is "the children" ignores most of the holiday's history. The 19th century re-invented Christmas as a family holiday centered on kids, but since Christmas has been celebrated in various ways since the 4th century AD, that's about 1500 years of Christmas not being about the children. (It was also the Victorians who turned Christmas into a shopper's festival to boost end-of-the-year consumption. The focus on children and the materialism arrived hand in hand.)

So I'm not going to tell you that modern Christmas is too secular or too materialistic. It has always been secular and excessive, just as it has always been spiritual and reflective. It has never been one or the other. The meditation and the merry-making are part of the same thing.

Christmas is a break from ordinary time: an annual pause. It is a day to suspend our everyday concerns and our anxious labor. That has been its use and purpose for more than a thousand years. Those who have no interest in its religious symbolism can still profit from that break. The body needs it. The mind and the soul need it. And it comes at the most necessary time, the darkest hour of the year, when nature, including our own nature, cries out for a rest and a respite. It is an annual snow day, scheduled in advance because we all need it.

There is nothing wrong with buying things for Christmas. There is something wrong with the pressure to buy things for Christmas, with the relentless campaign to make Yuletide consumers prop up our sagging economy, with the annual barbaric spectacle of Black Friday. There is something wrong with turning an annual day of rest into a fount of stress, competition, and financial anxiety. Christmas is meant to be a step out of our daily grind. This is true whether you spend the day drinking, giving gifts, or singing hymns: they are all faces of the same fundamental, necessary break from the everyday. And that purpose can be served by December traditions that have nothing to do with Christianity. The traditional Manhattan Chinese-restaurant-and-movie combination is a seasonal respite par excellence, specifically designed by and for non-Christians.

What Christmas was never meant to be is an intensification of the everyday routine, the rat race writ large. And that, no matter how many sentimental pieties it comes wrapped in, is deadly. It is inhumane at its heart. That takes the bleak midwinter and makes it bleaker.

Take a break this December. Your body and your spirit need it. Celebrate the official holiday any way you like, even if Jesus isn't involved. (It's not his actual birthday; he won't mind.) Some of you will have your batteries recharged by connecting with family. Some will feel better after a little quiet prayer. Some will benefit most from a new sweater and a stiff egg nog. But whatever it is, make sure you end the season more rather than less rested. The holiday is meant to nourish you, not the other way around. And there's a lot of winter left to go. This is the moment to turn on some lights and relax.

cross-posted from Dagblog

The Long, Cold Christmas

My morning commute these days takes me through a shopping center; the train lets me off underneath it. It's been Christmas in the mall since the first day of November. That's no surprise. Christmas has become the crutch our retail economy leans on. Many stores run in the red for eleven months and see Christmas put them in the black for the year. A bad year calls for a big Christmas, and a string of bad years calls for bigger and bigger Christmases. If shoppers don't keep finding more and more money for Christmas presents, the whole economy shrinks. It doesn't sound sustainable, but I don't blame local merchants for wanting to start Christmas early and hoping to extend that sweet jolt of retail steroid. We are out of other ideas.

Part of the shopping center was once a department store, famous in our area and featured in a well-known Christmas movie. People in this city are enormously proud of that movie, and proud that it was shot here. I have been urged, while standing in check out lines, to visit the house where many of the film's family scenes were filmed. We don't have too many other things to be proud of. But the store shown in the movie has not a department store for many years; it closed before I came to this city. Still, the store windows have traditional Christmas window displays, all Dickensian scenery and nodding, grinning mechanized dolls. We will go through the motions of Yuletide joy. But there are no children's toys in the space beyond those windows. Last year the old department store became a casino.

The casino's advertising mixes with the lights and Christmas wreaths and the carols piped onto the sidewalk. Gamblers stand outside, smoking. It's hard to see anyone who looks like a high roller. Most of the gamblers seem lower-middle-class, hard working people come to gamble. They are not on vacation, and this is not a resort. The casino's posters are pathetic come-ons, designed to flatter the gamblers that they are daring and glamorous: "Risk Takers Wanted" and "We Turn Gamblers Into Legends." I never see anyone who looks like a legend, and I find the posters sad. No one should be played for a sucker so plainly and publicly. Nobody's self-deceptions should be used to con them in the public square.

We have been voting whether to allow this casino ever since I arrived in this city. It feels like I have voted against it every two or four years. The casino was always voted down until 2012. The long, sluggish recession finally made it impossible for the rest of the voters to say no. We had to do something, anything, to bring some money back to downtown. We are out of other ideas.

Christmas is a cold season, and it gets longer every year. The only part of Christmas that never starts any earlier is charity. The lights are on commercial trees and the seasonal music is on the radio long before the Salvation Army appears. People ask you to spend early and often. They're slower about asking to give. Christmas charity still starts on the old schedule, reflecting older values. As for the rest, the bleaker things get, the more Christmas we all seem to need: more shiny lights and temporary discounts, more glossy commercials and easy sentiment. The harder it gets for everyone, the more we are prodded to celebrate and to spend. We watch endless fantasies of bleak, Dickensian London, and those not making sufficiently merry are told not to be like Scrooge. Most Americans are in no danger of being like Scrooge; saving too much of our enormous wealth is not really our big problem. We may be in a remake of A Christmas Carol, but we're not playing the lead. Instead it's the Bob Cratchits who are asked to be the founders of their employers' feasts, to spend money they don't have, to work themselves a year older but find themselves not an hour richer, all to leave an annual profit in the boss's stocking. Dickens's Scrooge finally vows to keep Christmas all year round; our Scrooges would probably do the same thing if they dared.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Jonathan Martin Does Not Need Your Nonsense

A few weeks ago, an NFL player named Jonathan Martin, offensive left tackle for the Miami Dolphins, walked off the team and sought counseling for emotional health issues. This has led to the suspension of his teammate, the incongruously-named Richie Incognito, on charges of outlandish workplace harassment; an official NFL investigation into the team, now reaching to behavior by the coaches; and the kind of publicity you just can't buy. Plenty of NFL players, sports pundits, and armchair tough guys have denounced the 6'5", 312-pound Martin as soft and weak and proclaimed that outsiders just can't understand what goes on in an NFL locker room. While I don't accept that locker rooms are sacred spaces that outsiders have no right to criticize, it is true that we don't have a great sense of what is going on inside them. Maybe Miami's locker room is unusually dysfunctional, and maybe it's dysfunctional in ways that every NFL locker rooms is. But in either case, Martin may not be any weaker than the other players. He may simply have more options.

Martin played for Stanford and majored in classical history. He's a 6'5" behemoth who's fluent in Latin. His parents are attorneys who met at Harvard, and he turned down a chance be a fourth-generation Harvard student in order to play for nationally-ranked Stanford. (It's worth noting that Martin is bi-racial and the longest Harvard legacy in his family is on the African-American side, going back to a great-grandfather in the 1920s.)

Those facts may lend themselves to a familiar narrative about the privileged kid who isn't used to doing things the hard way. But playing football for Stanford is not really the easy way. Martin played on a top-ten, nationally ranked team; that team could not have competed that successfully unless the football training was extremely rigorous. Playing football for Harvard, on the other hand, would be much easier. The football part of playing football for Stanford isn't significantly different than playing football for Nebraska, Mississippi, or UCLA. What is different is that Stanford football players (and excuse my pride here) also have an extremely rigorous academic program, comparable to any Ivy League school's. At Stanford, football practice is like football practice at Nebraska and class is like class at Harvard. Which part of that sounds like the easy way?

But Martin's background does give him options that many other NFL players don't have. I don't think Martin is the only player who's felt like he can't take the abuse any more. The difference is that most other players have to take it anyway, even when they can't. Where else are they going to go?

If Jonathan Martin never plays football again, he will certainly not see NFL-style money for many years, and possibly never earn as much over the course of his working life. The NFL is paying him seven figures a year. But the total sacrifice of lifetime income may actually not be that large, and there is a real possibility that over the next thirty years Martin could make as much outside the game as he would if he stays in the NFL. He is one of the players most likely to replace his football income by other means. That money would come slower and be less glamorous. But if he went back to Stanford to finish his classics degree and then went into law or finance, he might make upper-middle-class money or better very quickly, and potentially pull down seven figures a year near the end of his career. Instead of making millions for a few years in his twenties, and then some lesser income, he could make a lesser income and then a huge one. Or he could decide that making a six-figure salary in a workplace where no one calls him a "half nigger," talks about "shit[ting] in his mouth," threatens to gang-rape his sister, or shakes him down for $15,000 is better than making millions while being relentlessly extorted and degraded. Jonathan Martin can afford, in the most literal sense, not to put up with that shit.

The average NFL player, on the other hand, does in fact need to take that shit. A great many NFL players cannot afford to walk away. They do not have the choice between making their NFL salaries and making a dignified living as an affluent professional somewhere else. They have the choice between making millions of dollars, no matter the cost to them personally, and making working-class money. If they left the game, many of them would simply be large men without college degrees. For many, their partial college educations were not a genuine preparation for any other field. For most players, there is no other plan. It's the NFL or nothing.

Nothing is more human than resenting someone who is free to walk away from abuse that you have to accept. It isn't reasonable or fair, but it is very, very human. If you have to take as much as your coaches and teammates dish out without showing that it bothers you, and you've developed whatever coping strategies you need to keep accepting that mistreatment, there's no one you hate more than the guy who doesn't have to take it. You can't afford to hate the people who actually beat up on your body and your mind. You have to tell yourself you don't. So there's lots of resentment waiting to be transferred to the guy who decides he's too good to take the abuse that you have to take. What makes him special? It isn't fair. And actually, it isn't, although it's not the guy who's refusing the mistreatment who's to blame.

And let's be very clear: people defending Incognito's behavior or denigrating Martin's have talked about the hazing and bullying, always in vague generalizations, as necessary "toughening." But when you get down to the specific behaviors involved, it's never about making the younger player tougher. It's about making them compliant and docile to authority, beating them down and forcing them to accept any abuse whatever petty tyrant in the locker room decides to dish out. Being "tough" in this context means being a better victim. No one who demands that you give them $15,000 so they can take a trip to Las Vegas is doing that to build your character. And forking over the money does not make you strong. It makes you a chump. That is what the hazing in Miami's locker room was designed to do: not to make the younger players strong, but to break their will, to make them pushovers, terrified to miss a "voluntary" extra practice, afraid to do anything that would displease a coach.

Most of our public conversation about the NFL lately has been about concussions and brain damage. But we cannot have any serious conversation about player health when the players themselves have been cowed this way. An NFL culture that prizes obedience above anything else, that demands players accept any abuse they receive in silence, can never protect its players' health. The whole system is designed to destroy them.

cross-posted from Dagblog