Brush Up Your Shakespeare

(Cartoon via the splendid "Married to the Sea" and many thanks to Stony Pillow for the reminder.)

In his column today (“History for Dollars”) David Brooks pulls his Mighty Barcalounger of Wisdom up to the tribal fire and offers the Youth of America some of advice on what to study in school.

The thing is, while I don’t necessarily disagree with most of his advice, it really needs to be served up with a big side of “However...”

So, on Right Side in italics you will find Bobo’s words, all unfairly scrambled up and taken out of sequence to suit my low and deceitful ends, while my helpful addenda indented a little into the swampy ground of the Rive Gauche.

Got it?

Good.

“Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion.”

Translation: Once you learn to simulate human emotions,the world is your oyster, pilgrim!

In fact, if you get really good at it, when they turn their backs on you,

You'll get the chance to put the knife in.

“Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.”

Told ya we were going there (but honestly, even I didn't realized we'd arrive at the Mercantile Alibi for the Humanities so damn fast.)

Look, nearly 60 years ago, in “The Space Merchants”, Frederik Pohl (who, as it happens, is in a hot race for a Hugo Award this year. Which is nice) and C.M. Kornbluth were already painting an eerily detailed picture of a future where the poets have finally discovered that writing for truth and beauty is a short, doomed road to poverty and have moved on to more lucrative professions...

"‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time ---‘

"That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. There are only so many people capable of putting words together that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity.”

Pohl and Kornbluth did not write this as a triumphal celebration of the Poetics, but as a dire warning of a future where the Humanities have been crushed into the Procrustean bunk beds of Advertising and Conspicuous Consumption.

“Let me stand up for the history, English and art classes, even in the face of today’s economic realities.”

Here, then, is the real the heart of the problem.

Money.

Which is why I more than halfway suspect this whole column grew out of the chit-chat at a Bethesda lawn party where Brooks was killing off his third bottle of chardonnay with his neighbors Tom Friedman and John Roberts.

In America, after 30 years of suffocating in the long shadow of Ronald Reagan, “wealth” is now virtually semantically identical to “class”. And in that world, college has become less and less about education, and more and more an increasingly unscalable wall that allows the upper class to keep the smelly rabble the hell out of their neighborhoods and places of work and (they believe) their son’s trust funds and daughter’s heirloom vaginae.

And so, if you are not of the Blood Royale, and have somehow managed to shepherd your kids through that gauntlet of public primary education and gotten them out the other side able to read and write and with their intellectual curiosity intact, higher education means something very clear and specific to you: your child’s one and possibly only shot to achieve escape velocity from the stagnant Lower Classes and make for themselves a better life.

So while “Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon” are fine additions to anyone’s mental inventories, for those of us who are not currently in a position to yack about our investments over the back fence with Tom Friedman, it is a Major Fucking Investment in which every nickel is dear, and every hour counts. And frankly, waving “Narcissus or Solon” around in front of someone for whom the reality of their Golden College Years means squeezing in maybe a year at a "name" school before the money runs out, and then picking up some classes at Community when-and-if seems a lot like taunting a hungry man with a rubber biscuit.

But in principle, Bobo is dead right; adding the likes of “Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon” to your stock of knowledge is a fine thing. Of course, what he doesn’t mention is that those subjects -- as well as the rest of the limitless stores of human knowledge -- are largely available for free to anyone using an arcane tool known as a “public library card”.

Hence the title of my little missive:


Of course, you won’t get a piece of paper at the end of your labors, but if the reason you’re grappling with Big Ideas is the lure of parchment attaboys, well, you’ve kinda missed the point.

“Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose).

“You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.”

In case you've never shopped for one, the preceding has been lifted directly from paragraph three of the brochure for every single writing program since the beginning of recorded history. It has also been the last, consoling thought standing between legions of English majors and infinity, as they teetered on a mountain of student debt, peering into the abyss of professional catastrophe, and wondering whether to take themselves permanently out of consideration for an O. Henry Award Ernest Hemingway-style or Sylvia Plath-style.

Of course, it is true that your Mad Werd Skillz will be crazy in-demand in the workplace, in the sense that, several times every day, you will be called upon by a various of persons who outrank you or can outrun you and asked to find out if "dis is spelled rite" or to "make sure Da Boss sounds good".

Also you must be Vewy, Vewy Quiet about your scrivenerian awesomeness. Seriously, take a tip from a battle-scarred vet, kids; Muggles run this world and they slay the smart ones and the wizards first.

Of course, on the plus side your education will equip you with an vast vocabulary of obscure literary bon mots and historical references which you will be able to deploy at will and with 100% accuracy. Sadly, no one but the catatonically frustrated Graphic Arts major temp (with a pet ferret named Mouse Van Der Rodent) who has been brought on-board to brighten up the miles and miles of soul-crushingly awful PowerPoints your boss endlessly extrudes in lieu of actual work will be able to understand your bizarre references,. Also your increasingly maniacal solo-chuckles at your own undecipherable cleverness and isolation will drive your co-workers further away every day.

But hey, the life of a muttering, cubicle hermit can still have its rewards.

“Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.”

Weird how I read that as "hacks the Left to get you deep below."

“But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech.”

True.

And fairly often we nail them to trees.