I'm quitting The Divestiture Tour. I've been unfriended too often to have enough friends left to give things to. I've even been unfriended by people who weren't even on Facebutt. I don't think anybody'd put me up for the night if I struck out on a cross country trip by car, either. Especially not with four dogs. I'm tired of taking photos of stuff to give away, too.
So, the blog started to drift into some kind of disquisition on the inherent morality of work, in which I intended to heap additional punishments on the character of one Gregory Schmidt, Incompetent Supreme. And also tell the story of my bathroom, which obsessed me for more than half a year. Now that I have a functional bathroom again, I'm used to living that way. The story of my bathroom doesn't seem so important, although my brother did fabulous work. Also, about the blog. Some people didn't catch onto the humor of it, and some didn't like it, and some didn't like it that I was trying to be funny about the end cycle of my life, so I'm going to start another website. Blog. First I have to look around for a blog template that publishes the posts backwards, so that people start at the beginning of the story. Although, I don't know. What if I died, and published a post the day I died, and everybody would want to read what lead up to that. No. Still better to use a flashback narrative. Start with the obit--maybe I'll just write that right now to make sure it's done right.
As far as my stuff, I'm giving it all the heave-ho. Nobody wanted my easy chair, or hell most of the other stuff, either. I'm going to chuck it all on "large household items and appliances" day.
Look for me in some future incarnation.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
THE HERO OF THE STORY IS . . .
Huntsville Police Department's Mark Roberts said that unidentified people at the scene acted to prevent further deaths. This is curious to me because Bishop Anderson was apprehended in the parking lot, according to the reports I've read. Wouldn't the most effective act to prevent further deaths be to contain Bishop and take the weapon? The weapon was found in a bathroom in the floor below the floor where the department meeting took place. It only took three minutes for the first responders to show up, and I believe 911 was called, but that was enough time for Bishop to get to the second floor, drop the gun, and walk out of the building.
People are desperate to find heroes and vilify others when something like this happens, although there really aren't too many things like this. It has been fascinating reading blogs and news stories today. Google Trends rated searches for her as 5th most searched at noon (volcanic level of interest in their parlance) to 7th just now (around 5 pm). Now she's just "on fire."
People are desperate to find heroes and vilify others when something like this happens, although there really aren't too many things like this. It has been fascinating reading blogs and news stories today. Google Trends rated searches for her as 5th most searched at noon (volcanic level of interest in their parlance) to 7th just now (around 5 pm). Now she's just "on fire."
BECAUSE THE STAKES ARE SO SMALL!!
When I first heard the report on NPR yesterday that the Huntsville campus was under assault from a female in a pick top and black and white sweater, I thought, "Wow, a fashion report on a mass murderer." I was a bit more interested in the murderer's style than the event. I thought the report described a fashion-conscious student mass murderer. Student shooters are indeed intentional. The category of mass murderer is among the easiest to understand, whether they are students in school-related murders or workplace attacks. They nearly always snap under strain related to academic performance--university shooters differ from high school shooters, where social stressors are a greater factor (like being an outsider). Some have psychological diagnoses that dominate the causes imputed to their rampages above sociological stressor explanations, even though some social or socio/psychogical stressor sets them off.
The rampager turned out not to be a student with a keen fashion sense, but a dowdy professor in casual clothes. When she was arrested Friday night, it is reported that she said, "It didn't happen. There's no way .... they are still alive." I found this comment typical of the kinds of comments violent offenders, including domestic abusers, are reported to say when confronted with the results of their rages. They often have a hard time believing what they did caused any real damage. Chris Brown, when shown the pictures of Rihanna's face after he beat her up, said on Larry King that he just couldn't believe that he did that, and that was long after Rihanna had healed. I wouldn't doubt if that was perhaps the first time he saw the pictures. Perhaps the criminal justice system removes the victim from the process, and also removes the perpetrator from the evidence of her own crimes. Dr. Bishop may not see the pictures of the crime scene until she goes to court, and she may be shielded from them even then--or so I think based on the murder trials I have attended.
Mass murderers usually snap under a combination of stresses, seek revenge against those they think caused or contributed to their distress, and go out in a big act of violence that ends when they kill their ultimate victim--themselves. It's not unusual for them to kill their families and the people in a workplace from which they were fired, or that is the site where emotionally intense dramas that stripped a person of a valued sense of self. For men, losing a job in which he has invested all of his self-esteem as a man, a provider, and a master of the universe, can mean the loss of something far more important than money, and perhaps even love. The loss of one's masculinity, or the realization that masculinity is not after all an internal quality, but something that can be conferred from outside, is a devastation that can turn men to monsters. Women don't often have the same status, and when they do perhaps they don't invest so much of their human value in a self-concept that is in the control of outside forces. Anyone who buys into this system of values is dancing on the edge of a sword, and in academe it is hard to balance on that sword. You can do all the right things, and still be on the outs. Our trials temper some of us. Not others.
Still, mass murderers usually are not women, and it's very unusual for a woman to be this violent. Women murderers often prefer not to use a gun. That's killing like a man--one of the reasons women serial killers are often left out of the serial killer pantheon, but Aileen Wuornos is IN. Women more often kill members of their families, and use poison. Usually, when women do kill it's in defense of an assault, and may use whatever weapon is at hand. Women STILL comprise a very small part of the criminal population.
I was up till 3:00 reading about Amy Bishop, the professor charged with wiping out half of her academic department. When those job posts go up, I wonder what kind of person will apply? I wonder if the department will even survive. It sounds like she perhaps outperformed her colleagues in the department. There was some jealousy because she'd developed with her husband a device to replace the petri dish. Some suggested the university was taking her research and pushing her out. Amy Bishop was also a vocal critic of administration. In particular, last semester she fought the school's new requirement that all 1st and 2nd year students HAD to live on campus. Some thought her political position vis-a-vis administrative decisions contributed to her tenure denial. She filed an appeal to the tenure decision, and some suggested that her department undermined the appeal. Her rampage followed her notification Friday morning, the 12th of February, that her appeal was denied.
Mass murderers usually snap under a combination of stresses, seek revenge against those they think caused or contributed to their distress, and go out in a big act of violence that ends when they kill their ultimate victim--themselves. It's not unusual for them to kill their families and the people in a workplace from which they were fired, or that is the site where emotionally intense dramas that stripped a person of a valued sense of self. For men, losing a job in which he has invested all of his self-esteem as a man, a provider, and a master of the universe, can mean the loss of something far more important than money, and perhaps even love. The loss of one's masculinity, or the realization that masculinity is not after all an internal quality, but something that can be conferred from outside, is a devastation that can turn men to monsters. Women don't often have the same status, and when they do perhaps they don't invest so much of their human value in a self-concept that is in the control of outside forces. Anyone who buys into this system of values is dancing on the edge of a sword, and in academe it is hard to balance on that sword. You can do all the right things, and still be on the outs. Our trials temper some of us. Not others.
Still, mass murderers usually are not women, and it's very unusual for a woman to be this violent. Women murderers often prefer not to use a gun. That's killing like a man--one of the reasons women serial killers are often left out of the serial killer pantheon, but Aileen Wuornos is IN. Women more often kill members of their families, and use poison. Usually, when women do kill it's in defense of an assault, and may use whatever weapon is at hand. Women STILL comprise a very small part of the criminal population.
Six months ago, in August of 2009, Andrew Pakhomov, a University of Alabama Huntsville professor of physics was sentenced for murdering his wife in 2006. He taught until he was convicted. This was a very interesting case involving marital infidelity, domestic abuse, alcohol, remarriage in 2007, and a "sentimental rock." There are wildly various reports about him on rate your professor dot com. Now, Amy Bishop, assistant professor of biology, wiped out the biology faculty there.
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The size of the student population in Huntsville is about 7500. Even at Arizona State, with a student population of 50,000 at the time I was there, something as notorious as the Pakhomov case would have been a much-talked about incident with the power to overwhelm campus culture and the machinery of scandal. So, the Amy Bishop incident took place in an atmosphere that surely buzzed about the all-too-human frailties of Dr. Pakhomov. These incidents must have the Huntsville administrators feeling completely out of control. Administrators live in a different culture dominated by a mania to use numbers, quantitative data, to prove they are effective, and to force faculty to manipulate numbers to manufacture similar proofs. At the same time, universities have adopted a bottom-line mentality, surely exacerbated by the withdrawal of public funding and public support, that was more appropriate to Reagan era business philosophy. This includes irrationally bloated pay and perquisites for administrators, and viewing students as commodity consumers with the right to view their education providers as their own paid employees. This turns the relationship of student to professor upside down. The professor is supposed to be a learned repository of the skills and techniques of the discipline. A student is supposed to submit his efforts to learn those skills and techniques to the expert, in an environment of responsible concern for the new generation, who will have the responsibility to carry on the traditions of the experts. This is a gloss on the upside down world of the plantation system that is academia.
I learned from some of my students just the night before Professor Bishop chose her radical way to right her wrongs, that they have some concerns about SAU that are very similar to the concerns that infect the Huntsville campus. Like Huntsville, SAU is a commuter university. Dr. Bishop was vocal last semester, while the news of Dr. Pokhomov's murder conviction was surely still fresh on everyone's mind, about the new president's decision that all first and second year students would be required to live on campus. According to my students, first and second year students are required to live on campus at SAU, too. Not required to live on campus, apparently, but required to pay $4000 for a room on campus whether they live here or not. One of my students who doesn't live on campus, but pays for a room on campus, said the university rented her room to someone else because she doesn't use it.
And then there's PARKING. My students are very frustrated about what they see as the stupid parking arrangements for students. They believe the university should build parking structures, which the university has not done because of the expense. Students feel squeezed by a conspiracy between the university and the city, who are in league with the devil. The city systematically re-designates street parking so that St. Ambrose people can't park on residential streets, or the streets that surround the campus. The parking problem struck me as a little funny when I first came here because I was accustomed to the parking problem at ASU, where parvenus have to take a bus from the parking lots to campus (one student got killed by a shuttle when I was there), or walk a mile or mile and a half in that Arizona heat to get to campus. You don't want to park in the lots, because the sun will turn your car into an oven, and you can't get sun-sheltered parking unless you show up at 6:00 am. The brick and concrete visionaries there are also loathe to spend money on parking structures rather than spill out into run-down neighborhoods, or force nearby close-to-the-bone businesses out of business so they can soak up more real estate, and raze the small-minded structures on them that housed working and lower class immigrants, working poor, and the businesses that serve and exploit them.
The Alabama locals view the Huntsville campus as a research intensive university. It has ties to NASA. Apparently, technological innovation is very competitive there. In the wee hours, I found a story that reported Dr. Bishop's teaching load. I can't find it now to cite it, but I thought it indicated she was teaching 4/4. That is a heavy workload for someone in the sciences who is also has an active research agenda.
SAU is far more teaching-oriented, and we ordinarily handle workloads like that, but without the imperative to do research. Which is not to say that the tensions here wouldn't pile up on the vulnerable with as much ferocity as it would at a research-oriented university. And who isn't vulnerable? In The Dresser, Norman (the dresser) confesses his painful unrequited love to Sir (the great actor for whom he feels this love). Sir, not understanding who the players are in Norman's drama, replies, "We all have our little sorrows." Norman, with a terrific understanding for scale and proportion, retorts, "The smaller the man, the greater the sorrow."
I look forward to reading the comments, which I hope you will post, and which I invite you to post.