Andrew Hacker on the Supposed Superfluousness of Algebra

An Op-Ed titled ‘Is Algebra necessary’ is bound to provoke reaction. So, here I am, reacting to Andrew Hacker’s anti-algebra screed (New York Times, July 29th, 2012). It is a strange argument, one unsure of what it is attacking–mandatory math education, elementary algebra, higher algebra?–and one founded on an extremely dubious premise: that the way to carry out educational reform is to cherry pick your way through a curriculum, questioning the ‘utility’ of a particular component in case there are no jobs that require an exact application of its material. Hacker makes things worse by leaning on statistics that cry out for alternative explanations and pedagogical reform, rather than the ‘lets drop the subject students seem to have difficulty with’ approach that he favors. If American students are struggling with algebra, it might be time to inquire into how it is taught, to show students how abstraction and symbolic representation are key to understanding a modern world underwritten by science and technology. Dropping algebra seems like a profoundly misguided overreaction.

The ‘surrender in the face of poor test scores’ approach results in a series of bizarre statements of which the following are merely representative samples:

It’s true that mathematics requires mental exertion. But there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x² + y²)² = (x² – y²)² + (2xy)² leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis.

Certification programs for veterinary technicians require algebra, although none of the graduates I’ve met have ever used it in diagnosing or treating their patients. Medical schools like Harvard and Johns Hopkins demand calculus of all their applicants, even if it doesn’t figure in the clinical curriculum, let alone in subsequent practice.

I have news for Hacker. There is little evidence that being able to leads to ‘more credible political opinions or social analysis’ either. Furthermore, if job skills  are examined as superficially as Hacker does in his examples then it becomes all too easy to dismiss large parts of one’s educational background as being irrelevant. Hacker would be alarmed, I presume, to find out that even though modern physicists hardly ever roll balls down inclined planes, freshman physicists are still required to spend a semester solving problems that are full of problems that stress just that. Hacker dismisses the argument for a general education in mathematics with the alarmingly glib ‘It’s true that mathematics requires mental exertion’ without stopping to inquire what that ‘mental exertion’ might consist of and what it might engender in turn. This is hardly an attitude toward pedagogical reform that breeds confidence.

It is a consequence of Hacker’s argument that the only students who should receive an education in algebra are those preparing for careers that require them to apply algebraic techniques and concepts in their jobs. Everyone else can be spared its ‘difficulties, ‘ like the above-mentioned abstraction and symbolic representation. How would an extension of this argument work in, say, fields like history or literature? A relentless whittling down of the curriculum would result, leaving us with a list of subjects read off the Help Wanted Ads section.

This is an impoverished, grimly utilitarian, and ultimately soulless view of education.

The Copyright Police Catch Up With ‘Hung Up’

Well, I’ve finally run afoul of the copyright police. More precisely, two videos I had uploaded to YouTube–some six years ago–have been taken down. Last night, as I searched for them repeatedly, I wondered what might have happened to them. This morning, as I thought about their content, I realized why they might have got the copyright chop: they both featured the video for Madonna’s ‘Hung Up.’

Back in 2006, I moved to my current location in Brooklyn, Ditmas Park, from Fort Greene. Our move was onerous, as most moves are, but some its pain was eased a bit by inviting over my good friend and Decoding Liberation co-author, Scott Dexter, for a  beer-infused packing session. As the night wore on, and as my possessions miraculously found their way into the boxes scattered all over my apartment, we took ever-longer breaks for food and liquid sustenance. Finally, worn down by the tedium of packing, we called it a day (or night), and took refuge in VJ’ing YouTube videos. Among them: Madonna’s ‘Hung Up,’ which features ample footage of that lady’s dancing prowess.

As Scott watched the video, inspiration struck: why not provide a little musical accompaniment? The instrument he picked–yes, he just happened to be carrying it around–was the Vietnamese lip lute, the Đàn môi. We played the video several times as Scott played the Đàn môi, picking up the beat, strumming brilliantly against his lips. If I may say so myself, it was a virtuoso performance, adding a quirky twang to ‘Hung Up’s pop and dance sensibility. At one point, I turned on my digital camera and shot some video of Scott playing, panning around the room to show the packed boxes, my desktop computer playing ‘Hung Up,’ and finally, on myself. Later, my wife shot some video with similar footage. Yes, it was all pretty juvenile, but that’s how most home videos go.

We ended up with two short clips of Scott on the Đàn môi playing along with ‘Hung Up’.  They were pleasant mementos of time spent with a good friend; we decided to put them up on YouTube to share them with friends. Yes, there was some goofy mugging for the camera; there was a musician showing me how skilled he was; there was a little bit of Madonna. A bit of a lark, as it were.  I sent the links to a few folks, and in the years that followed would show the videos off once in a while. I don’t think they were viewed more than a hundred times in all.

Technically, I suppose they were ‘derivative works‘ of ‘Hung Up,’ and as such, my use was an infringement. (I’m not sure I’d have a fair-use defense.) But it still all seems a little silly: we were being Madonna fans, and the videos showcase Scott’s performance more than anything else. Now, they are gone. The world of entertainment isn’t exactly poorer as a result of these two amateur efforts disappearing from YouTube, but the pettiness of it all is a little depressing

Final Exams, Testing Regimes, Contd.

Daniel Kaufman left a very interesting comment in response to my post on final exams; it captures a great deal of what is wrong with testing regimes in general. I’d like to offer some brief responses to it.

First, testing regimes lay excessive emphasis on memorization and rote recall, which has a questionable connection with what might be termed the ‘application of knowledge’:

There is absolutely no value whatsoever for memorizing anything in philosophy. If you are a surgeon and forget where the spleen is, while you’ve got someone opened up on the table, the consequences will be dire. There is no comparable consequence to forgetting something in philosophy. You simply look it up. In philosophy, understanding is everything. So, at a minimum, there is no reason that tests should not be open-book, open-notes, as mine are.

Or consider another subject: computer science, where students are often asked to write code fragments, correct errors in programs, trace out program flow with output etc. The typical programmer in his workplace is not asked to perform these tasks in anything remotely resembling the environment of a final exam. The closest he will come to this is in an interview for a job. For which, see Dan’s point below about ‘the next set of institutions’ and reader JP’s comment  on the post on final exams.

The entire regime of testing, in subjects like philosophy, suffers from a lack of obvious raison d’etre. Students who really care about learning will learn, regardless of testing, and those who aren’t interested in learning will not be “forced to learn” by a test.

And what, precisely, is the connection between ‘testing in time-controlled environments that emphasizes recall of memorized material’ and ‘learning’? I, for one, have no idea.

2a. The idea is supposed to be that testing allows one to quantify *how much* the person understands in the given subject. The problem is, it is not at all obvious that understanding can be measured in a quantitative way in the humanities.

I suspect this might even be the case in the supposedly ‘more exact’ disciplines.

2c. Consequently, it seems the only real reason for testing in subjects like these is so that students can have grades, which then makes it possible for the *next* set of institutions that they will confront, can select them or reject them.

Indeed; the existence of testing regimes is dependent on a host of institutions that need a quick and dirty method of assessing candidates for a variety of tasks. Accurate, perspicuous assessment of the relevant skills in many of these domains remains an inexact, difficult science. Why not take refuge in the faux objectivity of the test score?

3. I would much prefer that grades be based on oral examination and in-class participation, but with the teaching loads that many of us have to carry, with no grading-help, this is simply not possible. So we are stuck with this.

In recent years, I have steadily increased the percentage of my class grades that is earned by participating in class discussions. My rationale has been that participating in a class discussion in philosophy is a great chance for a student to ‘talk their way through’ an assigned reading, to discuss an argument’s weaknesses and strengths, and to ‘think aloud.’

Finally, as to the deeper ethos reflected here, we are quite unfortunate to live in a culture that seems to have absorbed two unfortunate principles: (1) Work is the most valuable thing a person does in his/her life; (2) That things are only really valuable if they hurt. Both ideas, of course, are a legacy of Christianity—both Protestant and Catholic—and contradict both the pre-Christian, largely Greek lionization of Leisure and Contemplation (a la Aristotle), and the Hebraic view that pleasure is a gift from God and should never be rejected (which is why there is no Ascetic tradition in Judaism).

This needs little comment, except to note these ‘unfortunate principles’ have had a deeply pernicious effect on our political life, hijacking too much discourse with a an impoverished vision of the human condition and the ‘good life.’

The Distraction of Distraction

I’ve written on distraction on this blog before (several times: detailing my ‘Net distraction; comparing the distraction attendant when trying to write with a pen as opposed to a word processor or blog editor; describing the effect of changing locales of work on distraction and of persistent online activity on the ‘offline’ world; noting how constraint might be essential to creativity.) This would indicate distraction is often on my mind, that I’m distracted enough by distraction to write about it–again and again. I’d like to think writing on distraction might be curative, that describing my strategies for dealing with it, appraising and evaluating them, might enable me to, as it were, ‘see through them’ to understand what goes wrong. Perhaps writing on distraction will also enable some reckoning with the internal monologues that lead to the breakdown of my ever-weakening resolve to not be distracted; perhaps coming to grips with its phenomenology–the release of tension experienced by responding to a distracting stimulus, the breakdown of my inner resolve to not look away, to not procrastinate–all might help. (It is impossible to write about distraction without writing about anxiety so that little demon will presumably make an appearance.)

At the outset, I should say I find my distraction incapacitating to the extent that–without exaggeration–I can say I am terrified and made unhappy by it. I am prone to thinking I am the most distracted person in the world. (I pen these words in the hope someone will make the effort to try to convince me I’m not so, for  misery needs company.) I experience distraction as a fraying at the edges, a coming apart at the seams, a sundering of the center–whichever description you want to use, it’s all that in my feverish imaginings and experiencing of it.

Since my primary mode of distraction is ‘Net distraction, I’d like to offer another description it. I sometimes use ‘screeching’ or ‘scratching’ in trying to describe the activity in the inside of my cranium that makes me want to stand up and run away–and check mail or reload a page–from reading or writing. All too quickly, when working on a computer, I need ‘release’ and the act of moving the mouse so that something else appears on my screen promises relief. A change of screens, that’s all it is. And ironically, I can never take in whatever it is that I switch to. My mind is too blank at that moment, still perhaps processing residual irritation. Then, seething with rapidly accumulating anxiety about my still-on-the-burner work, I switch back. A little later, the ‘scratching’ begins again. I jump in response. Repeat ad nauseam.

The resultant composite sensation resembles nothing as much as it does a kind of emptiness, a vacuity. Nothing has been taken in, nothing emitted. I feel merely depleted. This depletion calls out for replenishment, and thus, strategies for ‘holding down’ the restless wanderer as well. Nothing has worked yet, and by that I mean no strategy–internet fasts for instance–has shown itself to be sustainable. Perhaps the most successful behavioral modification is architectural as in physical distancing, like that present in my trips to the gym, where for a brief, intense set of moments, I can immerse myself and concentrate on physical effort. In those moments, there is genuine relief, not the empty kind experienced when switching tabs. Then, all too soon, the workout ends, I towel off and head home, already, bizarrely, anticipating the moment when I will sit back down at the scene of my perdition.

Note: In subsequent posts I hope to describe my experiences with the strategies I have tried for dealing with distraction.

RIP Sally Ride

Like many other schoolboys in the 1980s, transfixed by the awesome sight of the space shuttle lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center, by the legend of the moon landings, and by the culturally enforced vision of the astronaut as our era’s most intrepid pioneer, I had a thing for those that went into space. Needless to say, I wanted to be like the men, those dashing, crew-cut, sunglasses-wearing types, piloting jets and shuttles. But that didn’t mean that women astronauts couldn’t make me admire them, especially if their credentials for spaceflight included degrees in physics like Sally Ride‘s did. I was a physics nerd too–one inordinately proud of explaining to anyone that cared to listen what pions had to do with the relationship between a proton and a neutron–and found the idea of civilian scientists and not just military pilots heading into space incredibly inspiring. If I ever dreamed being an astronaut, it was as a Mission Specialist and not as a Pilot  Commander that I imagined myself; I didn’t think I would join the military. And I also dreamed about a career as an astrophysicist, so a physicist-astronaut seemed wonderfully cool.

When Ride’s selection for STS-7 was announced, I took notice.  It didn’t matter she was a woman. Physics just made everyone that studied it cool, and besides, she was an astronaut. What was not to like? I studied shuttle flights closely in those days, diligently making trips to the American Library in New Delhi to watch videotapes of reports on each mission; STS-7’s details–its satellite deployments, for instance–received a great deal of wide-eyed attention from me. (It helped that the mission was led by the dashing Bob Crippen.)  Later, I saw Ride on television handing interviewers with aplomb and grace. I do not remember if any of them asked those sexist questions that were so often directed at her but it is entirely possible that I might have heard and seen a few and not realized just how offensive that line of questioning was. I do remember Carl Sagan being paired up with her for a television interview, and on being asked if he was envious of astronauts like Ride, saying he didn’t consider ‘puttering around in low earth orbit to be space travel.’ In the neighboring television window, Ride just smiled, refusing to fall for the bait. She seemed graceful, smart, and tough, a winning combination at all times.

One thing I didn’t know about Sally Ride then was that she was a lesbian. I wonder what I would have thought then as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, one relatively unsophisticated in his understanding of human sexuality and its diverse forms of expression. My guess is that while I might have had some puerile curiosity about her sexual orientation and would have jumped at the opportunity to crack a crude joke or two in juvenile company, I think that in the end, the combination of astrophysics and manned space flight would have trumped it all. It still does.

RIP Sally.

Why Not A Syrian Mandelian Midwife, Mr. Friedman?

An acute application of gynaecology to international relations, conjuring up visions of revolutionaries being led gently through birthing procedures is on display–again and again, and quite possibly, again–in Tom Friedman’s latest column in the New York Times. Apparently, the Middle East–especially Syria– is pregnant with possibility, fertile with newly planted seeds of political change. It needs midwives by the truckload. ‘ Well-armed’ ones preferably. Pistol-packin’ mamas’ aides, taking revolution from conception to birth–and presumably on to postpartum depression as well if the comparison with the US in Iraq is to hold water. (All the while, unassisted by doulas, but ready to hand off to obstetricians at a moment’s notice?)

First, the necessity of a midwife in extracting nations embedded in English philosophers (the mind boggles at the imagery conjured up here):

[F]or me, the lesson of Iraq is quite simple: You can’t go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes — a war of all against all — unless you have a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition. In Iraq, that was America. The kind of low-cost, remote-control, U.S./NATO midwifery that ousted Qaddafi and gave birth to a new Libya is not likely to be repeated in Syria. Syria is harder. Syria is Iraq.

Second, the explanatory power of the fearsome midwife (like those of yore, that struck fear into the hearts of busybody mother-in-laws and hospital staff everywhere):

The only reason Iraq has any chance for a decent outcome today is because America was on the ground with tens of thousands of troops to act as that well-armed midwife, reasonably trusted and certainly feared by all sides, to manage Iraq’s transition to more consensual politics.

Third, the absence of a suitably ‘armed and external’ midwife induces reticence and modesty into punditry:

I know columnists are supposed to pound the table and declaim what is necessary. But when you believe that what is necessary, an outside midwife for Syria, is impossible, you need to say so.

Fourth, the low probability of the presence of the aforesaid midwife should result in the maturation of nascent revolutionaries:

Since it is highly unlikely that an armed, feared and trusted midwife will dare enter the fray in Syria, the rebels on the ground there will have to do it themselves.

Lastly, the absence of midwives and Middle-Eastern Madibas  has inflammatory potential:

Without an external midwife or a Syrian Mandela, the fires of conflict could burn for a long time. I hope I am surprised.

I think the primary occasion for surprise is already upon us: Why does Mr. Friedman not seize the opportunity presented to him by his last sentence and run with it? There is a midwife, a country, Syria, and a name, ‘Mandela.’ Endless recombinatory possibilities present themselves. In the spirit of charity,  and because Mr. Friedman will surely revisit the smoldering Middle East again, I hereby gift one of these to Mr. Friedman for artful deployment in one of his future columns, :

What Syria Needs is a Mandelian Midwife

Final Exams: Who Needs ‘Em?

A good friend once described studying for the bar exam as ‘a Bataan Death March of the mind.’ That description both trivializes the horrors of the Death March and gestures toward what seems to me, from the outside, to be the mind-numbing, anxiety-inducing tedium of bar-exam preparation. Interminably long video lectures, flash cards, memorization of black letter law; it looks and sounds gruesome.  I’m glad I didn’t have to do it, but being at home with a partner studying for it wasn’t much fun either. (To her credit, my wife stayed calm throughout, disdaining the extreme nerves that afflict many of those attempting to clear this last hurdle in the obstacle race termed ‘an education in law.’)

I have never taken an exam like the bar. The closest I’ve come to experiencing some of the related stress was in my high-school days, thanks to the vagaries of an educational system that elevated grades in graduation finals to the status of a career-and-life-trajectory determiner. My Ph.D qualifiers, by contrast, were not as stressful as they could have been. My fellow-sufferers and I were not given well-defined reading lists but rather, granted access to a host of past exams so we could study according to trends visible in the questions asked every year. A reading list of sorts emerged as a result. Furthermore, as we had considerably leeway in picking and choosing questions to answer, a peculiar sort of directed reading became possible. I started early and very soon, found myself so saturated by my preparation I wished the exams would be held earlier. A curve-ball, though, lurked in my second qualifier, the one on Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, where I found questions waiting for me that I had not specifically prepared for. I constructed an essay on the spur of the moment, ‘winging it’ as it were. That done, I left New York for what I considered a well-earned vacation. (A few weeks later, a good friend gave me the news I had passed in true philosophy student style: ‘The results are out; no names were published, but everyone who took both exams passed; you took both exams; therefore you passed.’ In case you were interested, he teaches logic now.)

The scars, though, of twelve years of primary schooling marked by constant testing has left me despising anything resembling a final. I try to not administer finals in the classes I teach; my mind rebels at the thought of inflicting on students what I would not want done to myself. More to the point, I think final exams are pedagogically useless. (But more on that in another post, some other time.) A few years ago I considered attending law school. Many factors combined to turn me away from that decision, the staggering expense of a legal education among them. But by far the most important factor was that I simply could not be bothered subjecting myself to the ordeal of taking final exams. I had promised myself, as I sipped on a celebratory whisky after my Ph.D qualifiers, that that would be my last written ‘final.’ I’m glad I stuck with that decision. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Re-Reading What One Has Read

A few days ago, I wrote a post on reading (and re-reading) what one writes. Today, I want to put down a few thoughts on the business of re-reading what one has read, sometimes willingly, sometimes not.

Susan Sontag once said, ‘All great books deserve to be read five times at least.’ When asked if she did so often, she replied in the affirmative. (I dimly remember her saying this during a 1992 interview at the 92nd Street Y.) I have never read a book five times–unless you count comic books like the Tintin series, which I’ve re-read dozens of times–but Sontag’s remarks still make acute sense. The most perspicuous definition of a classic book is one that endures, that is read and read again by successive generations, by a diversity of readers. We embody those diversities and temporal passages in our personalities and histories; what better way to enjoy the true worth of a classic than to expose our different selves, changes wrought in them by our unique experiences, to its endlessly multiplied offerings?  It seems staggeringly obvious to me, as it has to many others, that Anna Karenina will be read differently once its reader has actually suffered an acute heartbreak or two, or lived through a slowly disintegrating relationship.

So this sort of re-reading is an acknowledgement of the dynamic relationship between writer and reader, and of the creative nature of reading itself, informed by the particular background that he or she brings to the text. There is another, more mundane, and possibly more infuriating kind of re-reading: when one forgets that a book on our shelves has already been read by us, or even when in returning to a book we are currently reading, we resume at the wrong point and realize that the pages we are staring at are ones that we have read before.

The former might occur to any reader with a sufficiently large library of suitable vintage. We scan through its shelves hunting down the unread, and sometimes forget that our catch is one that we had seized upon and read before. Sometimes we find out quickly as we enter its pages; sometimes revelation arrives late.  I do not think the author should feel insulted that his work had failed to be memorable; our memories are strange things and we still have little idea of what makes some of its inhabitants long-term residents and others merely transitory visitors. Instead, he should hope that I find the revisitation sufficiently invigorating to continue. After all, doesn’t every writer want to be read and read again?

Moving on to the latter kind of re-reading. Resuming a book I’m currently reading, at the wrong point, is a common affliction for me. I do not use bookmarks–for some reason, I absolutely disdain them–and I often forget the page number where I had halted. I try to locate the point of departure but that quest often goes wrong, and so I plunge in with a guess. And sometimes, a page or so later, I come upon a passage that tells me I have been this way before. I find this experience curiously shaming sometimes: Was I not paying attention the last time I was reading these pages?  But here again there is reassurance for both reader and writer: I get a second chance to put things right and pay heed to the writer’s efforts and the writer gets another opportunity to keep me hooked till the end. Oh, and yes, the writer gets read again.

Online vs. In-Classroom Education, Contd.

My response yesterday to Mark Edmundson’s ‘online education is not real education’ New York Times Op-Ed sparked a set of interesting comments in response. I’d like to briefly take those on today as I think they help round out the discussion quite nicely. (Please read the comments in full at the original post.)

My Brooklyn College colleague Chris Ebert wrote:

I am concerned that the current obsession for on-line education is not motivated by extending access, which would be a wonderful goal, but rather by for-profit educational corporations that have shown themselves to geniuses in rent-seeking on tax-payer funded resources at the state and federal level that are allocated to education.

Chris is spot-on. My worries about online education are not as grounded in pedagogical concerns as much as they are in worries about rent-seekers out to make a fast buck, displacing perfectly good modes of education, and continuing the national attack on public education and teachers in general, led by the likes of the vile Michelle Rhee. I do not, under any circumstance, want to see the best kinds of classroom and face-to-face interaction replaced by shoddy online content,   prepared hastily in a rush to cash in on the gold rush of diverted educational dollars. If these ‘content-providers’ see cash cows rather than students, we are in deep trouble. (Scratch that, we already are.)

Reader Krishna amplifies the points I made by pointing out some of the advantages of online education and the lack of a perspective from Edmundson on the actual ground realities of face-to-face instruction:

[Edmundson] advocates for a model on one-on-one teaching that is blatantly absent in US university education lecture system (one can only imagine what the school scene is like). Most lecture halls have 30+ students and ones for introductory courses can have in excess of 200. Does Edmundson really believe one-on-one focus from the professor is credible?

He ignores the advantage of repetition/review that online clearly possesses and face-to-face clearly lacks. He also ignores the ability of online education to be enriched by a face-to-face component (TAs, etc.) that traditional face-to-face often relies upon for real discussion and learning.

I don’t think however that online education necessarily means fewer educators. Indeed, given the care required in developing materials for online education, it seems that there will be plenty of opportunities for trained professionals–school teachers and professors alike–to develop quality content. And as Krishna points out, online education need not be exclusively ‘virtual;’ rather, it could be suitably hybridized to take advantage of the best of both modes.

And Laura Gibbs–who actually teaches online classes–writes:

I’ve been teaching online for 10 years now and I far prefer it to the classroom. For the kind of highly participatory classes I teach, in which I encourage all students to pursue their own learning paths and to share with one another, online is a far better option than the traditional classroom. I don’t want to be the center of attention (as is almost inevitable in the classroom), but instead I want the students and their work to be the center of attention. That is not inevitable in an online class, of course, but it is much more feasible online than in the classroom.

Laura touches on the crucial issue of participation, a point that I alluded to in my first post. For many kinds of students–shy, verbally inarticulate, for instance–the online mode of interaction will actually be facilitative of greater interaction with their peers and their teachers. (Stories of meek, timid students who are firebrands online are legendary; didn’t we learn that from Usenet? )

A great deal of anti-online education pontification comes from folks that have a narrow, impoverished view of human communication, condemning it to one mode of interaction, face-to-face, without paying any attention to the richly varied ways and modes that human beings have of learning from each other. This is an ironically anti-humanist stance, to say the least.

Aurora is All-American, Grimly So

I consider myself to have some facility with words but I’m struggling today to find a term that will describe a political debate that has progressed to the point where the most perspicuous contributions to it are made by satirists, cartoonists and professional humorists. (Should all political debates be so blessed? I wonder.)  The ‘debate’–for reasons of accuracy, I must enclose that term in quotes before proceeding–that I refer to is the so-called ‘relationship between gun control laws and mass murder in the US debate.’ The Onion is first out of the blocks in responding to the Aurora shootings, quickly taking the lead, and it is closely followed by Tom Tomorrow (that link is the response to the Tucson shootings last year, in which fact one might find some resonance with the content of this post today). Having read those two, one is done.

For yes, the endlessly repetitive discussion is upon us again, its numerical parameters tweaked to accommodate its toll of the dead and wounded, with its inevitable grief counseling, Presidential consolations, NRA push-backs and hyperventilating television anchors to follow. And all too soon, we will settle back into our seats, waiting for the next time the New York Times will break out the 18-point font to let us know ammunition manufacturer stock prices have gone up again. As the penguin says, putting up with these mass killings–in one form or another, sometimes as audience, sometimes as participant–is the price we have to pay for living in this nation of ours. It’s a tax, one that won’t be up for repeal any time soon.

The mass murderers come from everywhere and anywhere; their backgrounds straddle ethnic and class divides; sometimes they ‘go postal’, sometimes they ‘go academic’; sometimes they are black, sometimes white, sometimes Asian; they are young, and they are old; sometimes they did badly in school, sometimes they were academic overachievers; they kill when they are laid-off and they kill when they are employed; they kill in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Wisconsin, Texas, Chicago, Washington DC, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware, California, Alabama, North Carolina, Washington, North Illinois, Nebraska (from sea to shining sea?); they kill rich, poor, student, mother, father, daughter, son, all alike; they use all kinds of guns, ranging from simple hunting rifles to high-powered assault gear suitable for invading oil-rich emirates; they kill in shopping centers, university campuses, movie houses, prayer services, high schools; they kill strangers, they kill family members, they kill fellow-workers and students, they kill the young and they kill the old; sometimes they turn themselves in, sometimes they kill themselves, sometimes they get shot. It’s a melting pot, if there ever was one.

In years to come, perhaps it will become a true American rite of passage: you’ve either carried out a massacre yourself, been a survivor of one, or know someone who is a victim or survivor of one. Perhaps in these so-called divisive times, the murderous violence of the gun-toting mass killer will bring us all together, united in blood-soaked gunpowder and attendance at a memorial service.

As American as apple pie? How passé. As American as a loaded ammo belt and a rifle with a scope.