Shakespeare's England

June 13, 2011

The Thomas Jefferson Hour

Attn:  Mr. Clay Jenkinson

P.O. Box 7132

Bismarck, ND 58507

            Subject:  Shakespeare’s England

Dear Clay:

            Thank you for all you are doing to bring intelligent discussion of the humanities to a broad listening public.  Our national discourse would be greatly elevated if there were more shows like yours (and fewer hours of talk radio).

            As I write this letter, I believe you have just returned from your cultural tour of “Shakespeare’s England.”  I assume you are aware that a growing number of historians, scholars, Supreme Court justices, journalists, and Shakespearean actors & directors have joined the ranks of giant intellects like Mark Twain in rejecting as preposterous the notion that the man baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon as “Guilianmus filius Johannes Shakspere” wrote the plays and poems of “William Shakespeare.”  Yet, I gather from your inclusion of Stratford in your cultural tour that you do not share Twain’s skepticism.

            In my more than ten years of reading almost everything ever published on this question, I find that the defenders of the traditional attribution really hate this topic.  And if there is one thing that seems to exasperate them more than the topic itself, it is being pestered about it by people like me.  (This, in itself, I find revealing.)  However, given your demonstrated tolerance for good faith disagreement and spirited debate, I trust you will indulge me in a few pages of comment on this subject – and why it is so incredibly important to us – all with the purpose of suggesting that your return from Shakespeare’s England would be an excellent opportunity to take up this topic on one of your shows.  (I have in mind something similar to the “debate” you had with William Hyland on the Sally Hemings affair.  There must be some way to put a “Jeffersonian” spin on this.  Enlightenment reason versus faith, perhaps?)

            So much has been written on this subject that it is difficult to summarize it in a few pages.  I will do my best.

            The case against Will Shaxper[1] – a man who is well-documented as having been a litigious grain merchant and probable shareholder in the Globe Theater – can be summarized as follows:  the author of the canon, whoever he was, must have been highly educated in numerous fields of study including the classics and the law (to name only two).  On the testimony of his writings, he must have been well-traveled, knowledgeable of Elizabethan court life and court politics, and familiar with aristocratic manners and pastimes.  After centuries of searching, not one shred of evidence has turned up to indicate that Will Shaxper ever (i) wrote anything in his own hand except six illegible signatures (with different spellings), (ii) owned a single book, (iii) attended any school of any kind, (iv) read or wrote in any foreign language, (v) had any knowledge or training in the law, (vi) interacted with any courtier of Elizabeth’s court, or (vii) traveled anywhere except on the road between London and Stratford.  His parents and his children signed documents with an “X” indicating they were illiterate.  And yet, we are expected to believe that in between these two generations of illiterates there blossomed the creator of modern English!  The orthodox explanation for all of this is just one word: “genius.”  But “genius” does not give a person the obscure knowledge that a dish of baked doves was a time-honored northern Italian gift (Merchant of Venice) as Mark Anderson puts it.  Knowledge like that comes only from life experience.

            A truly overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence has been amassed to suggest – I will not say “prove” – that “William Shakespeare” was the brilliantly-chosen nom de plume for the eccentric Elizabethan courtier Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.  (The brilliance of the pen-name is itself a fascinating point that I must pass over here.  Suffice it to say: the pen or “spear”, wielded or “shaken,” is mightier than the sword.)

Only a few highlights of the Oxfordian position are possible in this short space:

            De Vere’s maternal uncle and tutor, Arthur Golding, translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English.  Golding’s translation is alluded to so often in the canon that it has been called by many "Shakespeare’s favorite book."  Another of de Vere’s relatives, Henry Howard, invented the sonnet style we now refer to as “Shakespearean” (14 lines of iambic pentameter).  De Vere was highly educated and fluent in several languages – as we would expect the author of the canon to be.  He had access to all of the sources of Shakespeare’s plays (many of them not translated into English in his time).  He was trained in the law – an area of learning that provides such ready and fertile ground for metaphor in the plays.  He was one of the highest-ranking noblemen in the realm, occupying an earldom that dated to William the Conqueror in 1066.  He had intimate knowledge of the workings of Elizabeth’s court – satired with such ferocity in the plays.  He traveled extensively throughout Italy to the very cities featured in the plays.  (He was so enamored of Italy – where so many of the plays are set – that he was lampooned by his contemporaries as the “Italianate Englishman.”)  He was a documented lover and patron of literature and the theatre.  Some of his teenage poems survive.  They sound just like what you would expect the teenage “Shakespeare” to sound like.  Contemporary records indicate he was “among the best” writers of comedies, yet strangely, none of those comedies have survived under his own name.  The famous Ashbourne portrait of “Shakespeare” is very likely a portrait of Edward de Vere passed down to his descendants:

From the cover of "Shakespeare" By Another Name, by Mark Anderson.

             The above image contains two portraits known to be from Shakespeare's time.  On the left, is the so-called Ashbourne portrait of "Shakespeare."  On the right is a known portrait of Edward de Vere, painted circa 1575 when he was in his mid 20s.  The sitter of the Ashbourne portrait looks a few years older.  But are they not the same person?

            Perhaps most persuasively, events from de Vere’s well-documented life are retold so frequently in the plays that one could be forgiven for describing the Shakespearean canon as de Vere’s autobiography.  The authorship literature is chock full of examples, large and small.  Every newly discovered fact about de Vere’s life seems to show up somewhere in the plays or poems.  Simply put, there are many, many, many correspondences between his life and the canon and they cannot all be chalked up to “coincidence.”  Either Edward de Vere wrote these plays or someone with intimate knowledge of his life – the Warwickshire grain merchant Will Shaxper? – decided for some strange reason to make this eccentric courtier’s life the template for the greatest works in the English language.

            To the defenders of tradition, all of this is so much lunacy.  When they do stoop to address the matter at all, they often leave the impression that no Oxfordian scholar has ever made a single good point in defense of Oxford’s candidacy (or against Shaxper’s).  Check out any of the brief “biographies” of Shaxper that one finds in the most widely-used editions of the plays (e.g., Signet, Pelican, Folger, etc.).  The authorship question is briefly raised and quickly dismissed with accusations of “snobbery” (i.e., only a snob could think that only a nobleman could be a genius).  (The Oxfordian argument goes more like this: this particular genius sounds an awful lot like a certain nobleman.)

            The traditional attribution strikes me as having many of the hallmarks of a religious dogma.  It has its high priests (nowadays, more or less limited to the ivory tower and the Stratford souvenir peddlers), its holy shrine (Stratford) and its resistance to open inquiry (a tiny minority of English departments tolerate “authorship studies” – akin to teaching Darwinian evolution at Oral Roberts University).  What I would give to get someone like Harold Bloom in a room, tie him to a chair, and inject him with truth serum!  I find it impossible to believe that he would not at least admit that one or two Oxfordians have made one or two good points over the years.  And yet, in public, Professor Bloom condescendingly dismisses the whole topic as the “Oxfordian lunacy.”  Who is the snob?

            More and more, the argument one hears from the Stratfordians is that “it doesn’t matter” who wrote these plays.  It absolutely matters, Clay!  First, there is the simple notion of historical truth and justice.  Why would anyone want to be ignorant about the true identity of the greatest author in our language?  It matters.  And why would anyone want to deny the true author the immortality he deserves?  It matters.  We have good reason to believe that de Vere chaffed under the anonymity forced upon him by circumstances.[2]  If the penny-pinching Stratford burgher is not the true author, could there be a greater literary injustice than that he has worn the laurels earned by de Vere?  It matters, Clay.  It really matters.

            Also, if you don’t know the first thing about “William Shakespeare” – namely, who he was – how can you even begin to understand his works?  On a recent show you described Much Ado About Nothing as a “problem play.”  It is only a “problem” if you have the wrong author.  Read in light of de Vere’s known and documented life experiences, the play is easily understood as one of his many attempts to come to terms with his difficult marriage to Anne Cecil.  (Anne Cecil, by the way, was the daughter of William Cecil, Lord Burghley.  She was the model for Ophelia in Hamlet.  Lord Burghley, de Vere’s father-in-law, was the universally-acknowledged model for Polonius.  Is it a “coincidence” that Anne and Burghley were part of de Vere’s inner circle?  Does Shaxper have any known or documented connection to these people?)

            I cannot articulate the importance of getting Shakespeare right more succinctly than Mark Anderson did in the final paragraph of his book “Shakespeare” By Another Name:

In the final analysis, repatriating Edward de Vere’s life to the Shakespeare canon provides motivation behind the characters and plots, charts an artistic path intrinsic to the flawed but fascinating life of the artist, uncovers new levels of autobiographical meaning in the greatest works of English literature, and replaces the incomprehensible mystery of a deified genius with a comprehensible – if still incomparable – man who, for all his failures, became the very breath and soul of the English-speaking world.

            I am aware of the fallacy of using “arguments from authority” as logical proofs.  So I offer the following “Honor Roll of Skeptics” only to disprove the common slander that authorship skeptics are a bunch of lunatics and cranks:  John Adams, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir John Gielgud, Kenneth Branaugh, Justice John Paul Stevens, Justice William Brennan, and Justice Harry Blackmun – to name a few.  There are many, many more.

Hollywood has finally gotten around to telling this story with a blockbuster movie called “Anonymous” (due in theatres on September 30, 2011).  Roland Emmerich of “Independence Day” fame is the film’s director.  From the official trailer (available on YouTube), the movie looks typically overdone with distracting special effects and the like.  (Is CGI really needed to depict Elizabethan England?).  Worse, it appears the script will butcher the case for Oxford with speculative side-claims (e.g., Elizabeth I and de Vere were lovers).  Hollywood!  Despite it apparent flaws, I am very hopeful that this major motion picture will bring some much needed attention to this most important of historical “mysteries.”  I live with the hope that in my lifetime Edward de Vere will be universally recognized as the real-life man behind the pen-name “William Shakespeare.”

            Henry James once wrote:  “I am… haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.”  If Thomas Jefferson can doubt the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, surely we can join Henry James in doubting the divinity of William of Stratford.

                                                                                    Kindest regards,

P.S. We met very briefly in Salida, Colorado in September of 2010.  You were there performing Theodore Roosevelt.  Excellent!  I asked you about possibly coming to speak to Care & Share Food Bank about sustainable agriculture.  We may still reach out to you about this through your booking agent.  In any event, I hope to see you again sometime soon in Salida.

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[1] It is interesting that the Stratford documents almost always spell the last name in a manner suggesting a “short a” pronunciation (e.g., Shaxper, Shagsper, Shackspere, Shakspere, etc.).

[2] Hamlet (dying):  O God Horatio, what a wounded name, things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world, draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.  Hamlet, Act V. Scene II (emphasis mine).

The Invisible Wall

When Harry Bernstein was born in an impoverished Lancashire mill town on May 30, 1910, most Europeans’ day-to-day lives had more in common with Londoners of Shakespeare’s time than with Americans of today.  And that’s really the first thing that hits you while reading this centenarian’s compelling memoir – or is it a novel? –  The Invisible Wall.  The story opens in 1914 on the eve of the First World War and runs through the early 1920s when the author and his family move to America.  It is a time before most people had indoor plumbing, garbage removal, electricity, cars, radios & televisions, or supermarkets.  Bernstein was born in the twilight years of the Gilded Age: on the other side of modern machine-based warfare, on the other side of the Russian Revolution, and on the other side of the violent and irrational ideologies that those two events spawned.  And yet this very different world existed within the lifetime of a still-living author.

             The main plot, however, centers around a phenomenon that is just as true today as it was then:  religion poisons everything.  (Shout out to the immortal Hitch.) The “invisible wall” of the book’s title refers to an imaginary boundary line that runs down the middle of a single street in a poor neighborhood – a wall that keeps the formerly Russian and Polish Jews on one side of the street and the Christians on the other.

The wall is strong but not impermeable.  On Friday nights, for example, the Jewish families hire a “fire goy” – a Christian neighbor who comes over and tends to their fireplaces.  Tending a fire was forbidden to Jews on the Shabbos.  Armistice Day, as another example, became an occasion for mingling and genuine good will between the two communities.  But on most days, for most people, religious bigotry was the order of the day.

            As a long oppressed minority, the Jews suffer the worst of it.  But the bigotry and fear of “the other” definitely run both ways.  And very intensely, it turns out.  When ‘arry’s oldest sister Lily falls in love with a Christian lad named Arthur, and worse, marries him in a secret secular ceremony, their mother is required by her religious faith to regard Lily as dead.  Not just disowned, which would be bad enough, but dead.  She actually goes into formal ritualized mourning, something called “sitting shiva,” which involves seven days of sitting and praying in a darkened room in her stocking feet.  Her Jewish neighbors, equally appalled by this horrifying turn of events, visit her in her mourning state as if comforting a woman whose daughter had been burned in the flames of the Spanish Inquisition.

            The birth of Lily and Arthur’s child, after some initial reluctance, finally brings a lukewarm reconciliation to the two families.  They even manage to throw a block party in celebration of the event.  This leads to a single day of reveling on which the two sides of the street find themselves drinking, dancing & socializing together.  Bernstein leaves no room for doubt, however, that all this happy-go-lucky getting along is short-lived.  In an epilogue, he describes his return to the neighborhood in the early 1960s.  Only one of his old neighbors is still living there.  In fact, the neighborhood is about to be bulldozed to make room for a new public housing project.  That neighbor, a Christian named Anna Greene, describes how, after ‘arry moved to America in 1922, not much really changed in the neighborhood.  The invisible wall continued to separate the neighbors into opposing communities of religious suspicion and fear.  

            If our age is more enlightened and tolerant, it is not easy to see.  At least the Jews and Christians on Harry Bernstein’s street were capable of kindness towards each other in dire circumstances.  Today’s newspapers are full of uninspiring examples of our intolerance:  preachers burning the Koran, right-wing evangelists pushing their faith on Jews at the Air Force Academy, demonstrations against Islamic Centers in New York, banning the burkha in France, and on and on.  Just this week, Time magazine offers a feature piece on an up and coming mega-church evangelical preacher who is teaching his flock to reject notions of eternal punishment and hell.  The responses of most right-wing Christians to his warmly titled book Love Wins have not been, shall we say, ecumenical.

Want to be really appalled?  Check out CNN’s documentary Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door: 

Once again, religion poisons everything.

The Second Coming

In August 1914, the supremacy of Western civilization was taken for granted by most Europeans –  kings and commoners alike.  Over a period of four centuries, Western man had watched his culture, technology, religion and manners spread across the entire globe.  Before the First World War, few doubted that the people of this little continent, sprouting off the Asian landmass like an unruly weed, would continue to dominate world affairs and convert non-Western peoples to Western ways of living and thinking.

In 1919, looking back on the recent carnage of the First World War, the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats penned one of his most well known works – The Second Coming – a dark meditation on what it must feel like to witness the final days of a golden era.  Over a period of four years, the West nearly committed suicide, and in the process, discovered the dark side of its celebrated scientific and industrial prowess.  When it was all over, Europeans lost much more than millions of their young men.  They also lost the sunny optimism and confidence that had been central to their worldview.  Violent and irrational ideologies like fascism and communism captured the European imagination, displaced the pre-war liberal consensus, and led directly to the even greater carnage of the Second World War.

The psychological trauma of modern machine-based war permeates every line of The Second Coming.  In the first stanza, Yeats laments what the war had done to Western society.  There is a palpable feeling of futility and hopelessness, as if the human race has finally proven itself incapable of maintaining enlightened civilization:  “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

In Christian theology, the “second coming” refers to the return of Jesus Christ to the Earth during the “end times” and the establishment of a New Jerusalem.  This is understood by Christians as a glorious moment in history.  Indeed, it represents the end of history.  In the second stanza of the poem, Yeats alters this traditional conception of “the second coming” and describes the awakening of a monstrous beast – in the form of a sphinx (body of a lion; head of a man) – whose coming symbolizes the beginning of a new dark period of human history.

Yeats ends the poem with a question:  “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”  It is a question we might paraphrase as follows:  How will our own comfortable age end?  Nuclear holocaust? Environmental catastrophe?  Financial collapse? A Third World War?  Writing in 1919, Yeats was apparently haunted by a premonition that the end of the world was at hand, or at the very least, that a new terrible age was dawning.  For all too many (for example the six million victims of the Nazi Holocaust), his dark prophecy proved true.

Like any great work of art, Yeats’ poem speaks to something universal and timeless.  Without to much difficulty, one can imagine St. Augustine reading – and being moved by – The Second Coming as Roman civilization collapses around him and he flees for safety from the barbarian hordes invading from the north.  The poem also captures what probably millions of Americans felt in the first days and weeks following September 11, 2001 – a feeling that anarchy had been loosed upon the world. 

Yeats’ vivid imagery continues to terrify as we consider new nuclear threats from “somewhere in the sands of the desert” (Iran?).  For him, the apocalypse comes not from any inherent malevolence in the universe but from the complacency of the many (“the best lack all conviction”) in failing to deal with an energized minority who are “full of passionate intensity.”  When we consider the “passionate intensity” of radical Islam, The Second Coming becomes both prophecy and warning.

The Second Coming, by W.B. Yeats (1919)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Interesting Times

“May you live in interesting times.”  So goes the ancient Chinese proverb.  More accurately, this was the first part of a three-part curse.

We do seem to be living in interesting times.  Revolutionary instability is sweeping the region of the world on which Americans are utterly dependent for the continued flow of the resource to which they are utterly addicted and to which they feel utterly entitled to consume without limit.  The relatively peaceful protests in Tunisia and Egypt have given way to violent and bloody crack-downs in Bahrain, Iran and Libya.  Iran has just moved naval ships through the Suez Canal -- something it has not done since our stooge the "Shah" was in power.  Time Magazine’s website reported on Tuesday that Libyan leader “Colonel” Qaddafi has ordered his security forces to blow up pipelines that provide oil to the Mediterranean region (as thousands of Libyan protesters are said to be marching on Tripoli from other Libyan cities).  The elephant in the living room of all this is Saudi Arabia.  The New York Times reports this morning that the Oil Kingdom is losing its regional influence to Iran.  The Saudi regime is thought to be far more repressive and hated by its religiously fundamentalist people than any other regime in the region.  If that place boils over in revolution, or its oil infrastructure is sabotaged in any way, then bend over, grab your ankles, and get ready for $10 per gallon gasoline and economic chaos unlike anything seen in our lifetimes.  When that happens, expect the "drill baby drill" crowd to scream for an invasion of the entire Middle East.

At home, we have an oil-dependent economy on life-support.  It’s an economy that is mostly based on gambling (casinos, state lotteries, and the financial markets), entertainment, debt-fueled instant gratification, planned techno-obsolesce (i.e., buying the new and improved version of each electronic geegwaw every year), military spending, and incremental improvements to the speed at which teenagers can wirelessly disseminate nude photos of themselves.  Personal, corporate and governmental debt-levels are crushing and unsustainable.  American politics is dominated by loud mouths, whiners, frauds and hypocrites.  Our collective heads are so far up our collective asses in denial that we cannot even think straight about our predicament much less respond intelligently to it.  Much less consider changing the way we live or accepting a lower standard of living, say, something closer to what an upper middle class small town banker enjoyed in the 1950s.  As Dick Cheney once famously said, the American standard of living is “non-negotiable.”

Consider NASCAR.  Here is a "sport" whose existence depends on the gratuitous pissing-away (at 200 mph) of the one diminishing resourse that is so essential to our car-dependent utopia that we're willing to invade other countries to ensure we have access to it.  Every year, millions of people gratuitously piss-away millions more gallons of gas driving hundreds of miles to watch these noisy smelly machines drive around in a circle for three hours.  (Can't one get the same basic experience standing on a freeway overpass?)  Is there any better example of how far our heads are lodged up our asses than the wild popularity of NASCAR?

By the way, here are the other two parts of that ancient Chinese curse:

May you come to the attention of the authorities.

May you find what you are looking for. 

That last one might be re-stated for today’s times as follows: Be careful what you wish for . . . you just might get it.  Americans’ most ardent wish seems to be to protect at all costs the oil-dependent standard living to which they’ve become accustomed and to which they feel entitled.  As the Middle East’s fragile stability continues to crumble, things should get very, well, interesting.

Poetry By Checklist

The following is an open letter mailed to my son's middle school principal.

Dear Principal Smith:

In his important essay "Dehumanized" (Harpers Magazine, September 2009), Mark Slouka advances a well-supported argument that the American educational system is woefully preoccupied with achieving one goal to the exclusion of all others: producing “workers” who have the “skills” needed to “compete” in a “global economy.”  In my experience as a parent in our otherwise excellent school district, I find this to be true.

As one compelling piece of anecdotal evidence, Mr. Slouka quotes from the mission statement of an organization calling itself the “Public Higher Education Leaders Convened by Carnegie Corporation of New York.”  This mouthful of a group, which represents colleges and universities from all over the country, summarizes the purpose of education this way: “Leaders of the country’s public higher education sector are committed to create [sic] a long-term plan to serve the nation by enhancing public universities’ critical role in creating jobs, increasing graduates, enhancing the quality and skills of the workforce, and assisting in national technology and energy initiatives through research.”

Creating jobs.  Enhancing workforce skills. Serving the nation.  Chilling, isn’t it?  Not a single word for cultivating independent citizens capable of intelligently questioning settled cultural assumptions, as for example, the settled cultural assumption that maximizing economic efficiency is the highest of all human aspirations.  Not a single nod to the joy of learning for its own sake.

According to these influential educational leaders, what do kids most need to learn?  Whatever will get them hired.  What skills must they acquire?  The ability to follow their employers’ detailed & complicated instructions.  For is this not the essence of what workers in our global economy do?

Dutifully following directions.  This is very nearly the opposite of the goal of a classical – dare I say, liberal – education.  In Mr. Slouka’s view, a view I share, we should be teaching “whatever contributes to the development of autonomous human beings; we teach, that is, in order to expand the census of knowledgeable, reasoning, independent-minded individuals both sufficiently familiar with the world outside themselves to lend their judgments compassion and breadth . . . , and sufficiently skilled to find productive employment.  In that order.”

This traditional view of education’s humanizing function (as opposed to its strictly utilitarian one) is memorably depicted in a scene from the movie “Legends of the Fall.”  The fiercely independent family patriarch, who resigned his commission in the Army over its brutal treatment of Native Americans following the Civil War, decides one evening that his loyal ranch hand’s half-Caucasian daughter is in need of some education.  The girl’s Lakota mother asks skeptically:  “And what will she do with all this education?”  Without even stopping to think, the Colonel answers:  “Why, she’ll lead a richer fuller life, of course.”  A modern educator would have answered:  “Why, she’ll become a productive and obedient cog in the global economy, of course.”

What seemed obvious to cultivated 19^th century men like the fictional Colonel Ludlow is now considered quaint.  It would be lovely, to be sure, to live in a country whose citizens – having universal access to public education – have learned to ponder man’s essentially tragic fate and to draw humane judgments about “right living” from the accumulated wisdom of the ages.  But it is apparently far more important that our countrymen have the skills to compete with high-tech factory workers in Asia.  To quote Mr. Slouka one final time: “You’ll hear a good deal about Singapore if you listen to the chorus of concern over American education.  If only we could be more like Singapore.  If only our education system could be as efficient as Singapore’s.  You say that Singapore might not be the best model to aspire to, that in certain respects it more closely resembles Winston Smith’s world than Thomas Jefferson’s?  What does that have to do with education?”  To ask the question is to answer it.

In microcosm form, the barren state of American humanities education revealed itself this past weekend in a poetry writing assignment my sixth-grade son brought home from school.  This supposed creative writing assignment came in the form of a written checklist of ten detailed bullet-point instructions.  Did I mention this was a poetry assignment and not a science project?

The teacher instructed the students, for example, that their grades would be based on such bean counting criteria as including a “Minimum of 5 action verbs” and a “Minimum of 5 adjectives”.  Poetry by checklist, I immediately thought to myself.

I respectfully submit that this is a writing assignment perfectly tailored to the cubicle zombies our system is trying so hard to produce.  A good poem – one that receives full credit – is one in which the student has carefully checked the boxes in the grading “rubric” (an immensely annoying term of edu-speak in its own right).  The checklist serves two functions that I can discern.  It reinforces the essentially “direction following” nature of this supposed creative writing assignment and it gives the teacher some measurable criteria upon which to base a grade.  It is apparently unimportant to judge creative writing – even youthful creative writing – on general aesthetic standards.  If it cannot be measured or subordinated to business-like quality control standards, then it has no place in American education.  We are a very long way from Colonel Ludlow’s “richer fuller life.”

Reading JFK’s biography recently, I was impressed by the way his parents demanded that all the Kennedy children learn to think independently and to form their own opinions.  The father encouraged dinner-time intellectual arguments.  For all of his personal flaws and political failings, Kennedy’s classical education – his command of history and his intimacy with poems like Alan Seeger’s “Rendezvous With Death” – served humanity well during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Had Kennedy followed his generals’ checklist, or, sweet mother of Jesus, had Nixon or LBJ won the 1960 election, it is quite possible that 100 million people would have been wiped out in the blink of an eye.  Efficient, no?

Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Angle of Repose” addresses these themes.  Lyman Ward is thinking about his son Rodman who has been educated in the modern way:  “If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents’ lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant.  Define my terms.  How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation?  This is all metaphor.  If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.  Rodman is a great measurer.”

If you will indulge me one final pop-cultural reference, I am reminded of a very funny episode of the sitcom “Friends.” Chandler Bing, the one member of the gang who holds down something like a respectable desk job, is telling his friends about the database he’s in charge of monitoring.  It’s called the “WENUS” (rhymes with “Venus”).  WENUS stands for “Weekly Estimated Net Usage System.” It’s some kind of unspecified god-awful quality control or unit tracking system.  Chandler’s purpose in life is to keep a firm grip on his company’s WENUS.  I’m sure Chandler took plenty of courses in business management and accounting.  He passed the full battery of standardized tests.  He probably learned his poetry by checklist.  Undoubtedly, his humanities course work was graded using “rubrics.”  But can he recite a single poem from memory – as the six year old Caroline Kennedy once stunned JFK’s national security staff by reciting “Rendezvous With Death” for them from memory?

I doubt poetry by checklist will contribute in any meaningful way to my son’s budding ability to think critically about his world – nurtured, mostly, at home.  But I am confident, if the occasion ever arises, that he will have been well-prepared by our educational system to keep meticulous track of his WENUS.