Hamm Lynn, Street Piper
American Monday, Sleeping In
(Fall,
'01)
Whenever
I hear September 10, 2001 called the last day of "life as we knew it" or
"normalcy," I imagine Rip Van Winkle returning to the mountain
for another 20-year snooze--not to avoid his wife, but to avoid being
taken to school.
My students sometimes use the word "innocence" to describe
America's loss. Can't deny this logic from a generation too
young to recall Iran/Contra, Savings & Loan, The Challenger,
never mind Vietnam or Watergate. Moreover, it suits diminished
attention spans, both incessantly clicked and increasingly remote,
that a single day should replace a decade as the object of our
longing.
Leave the Fifties to Beaver; Father knew best as late as September
10, 2001.
On that Monday, the weekday on which Americans either identify with
or defy lazy Garfield, I asked four college writing classes to define
another word as used in six news-reports. Each involved free
speech: T-shirts in high schools, lyrics on music radio,
cellphones anywhere at all. Each contained a common declaration
from an indignant student, disc-jockey, motorist: "This is
America!"
America or not, few teachers will admit out loud the extent to which
today's youth are enslaved by the concept of cool.
Since the first rule of cool is to not care about anything
other than one's own amusement, their presence in the classroom is,
at best, sullen.
If lucky, I get maybe five students per class whose minds have
survived 17 years of Madison Avenue cool. On 9/10 those few
reached a unanimous definition for America: "A
condition or place in which anything goes."
Even the sullens, unable to surpress sly smiles, nodded their
heads.
When
"everything changed" I was not on campus, but on Wednesday I told stories
to my most attentive classes since The Gulf War. Stories of
mindbending dates, including June 5-6-7-8, 1968, when my high school
graduation turned into part of a national requiem. I conceded
that none of these matched the previous day--and that their stories
had yet to conclude.
Strong beginnings, though, even if half opened with "I was
listening to my car radio when Howard Stern said he saw a plane hit a
building." Others heard of it between the eight- and
nine-o'clock classes. Most teachers took students to rooms
with televisions. One refused to believe her students,
upbraiding them for a cruel joke as she started her lecture.
Commuters awaited cool Howard's punchline.
All stories turned into contacting relatives, many outlasting busy
signals from New York. A few students were absent that day
because the call, when it did come, brought very bad
news.
A lot of them aren't in class on any given day, but these are the
sullens, whom I consider absent even when they do show. The
high attendance rate following 9/11 made me think that this might
change, but by the first week of October came essays that I could sum
up in the two- or three-word mantras of cool: "Get
over it." "Move on."
The engaged students, too, bemoaned the reappearance of the pre-9/11
neuroses of road-rage, impatience at check-out counters, and all
kinds of public rudeness and carelessness.
"We're back to September 10!" proclaimed one young woman.
"But isn't that what everyone wants?" I asked.
"No, I mean our September 10, what we talked about in class
that day."
Clearly,
America's response to 9/11 showed unparalleled compassion. Not
just at Ground Zero, but at blood-banks and donation centers
nationwide. Meanwhile, however, at another kind of "Ground
Zero"--borrowing that term to denote the starting point of
American life--students have returned to the cool routine
of just getting by, teachers to that of letting cool slide.
All teachers and students, cool or not, readily understand
that American education has become, like politics and sports, a
business. All decisions, starting with those that pack over 25
bodies in classes requiring--or that should require--writing essays,
are dictated by the bottom line.
What better response to such callousness than to join the ranks of
cool? And if a teacher is still naive enough to think he or
she can stop the slide of cool? An administrator will
soon chill that inconvenience with the first rule of modern
American education: The customer--or the customer's
parent--is always right.
Thus, American education returns to sleep despite the barbaric
awakening. Reminds me of the detail from Rip Van Winkle
that Martin Luther King liked to re-create: Rip eyes a poster
of King George when he leaves the village; does a double-take at one
of George Washington when he returns. King paused for laughter
at his mugging mime, but then it was his turn to roar:
"Old Rip slept through a revolution!"
Today it's a devolution. While it may be manifest on
T-shirts and in lyrics, it thrives in the just-get-by-ism of
students, the let-it-slide-ism of faculty, and the bottom-line-ism of
administrators that prevail in our schools. Following 9/11, we
had the inclination to reverse this. Thinking was
momentarily hot, while cool was so, well, uncool, that
for awhile it looked like bin Laden might come out of hiding before
Leno and Letterman.
We may yet have that inclination again. Any yearning for the
America of Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, however, offers little hope.
It's as if two words--one still with promise; the other stunted
with paralysis--have become one:
America is cool.
NOTE
Martin Luther
King used Rip Van Winkle in sermons, if not in speeches, in a
delivery much like that of a stand-up comic. I have heard it
(more than once) on a recording aired on WGBH (Boston) by Eric
Jackson, host of Eric in the Evening, every year on the King
Holiday. Not entirely sure, but I think the recording was made
in Lima, Ohio, just a month or two before he died.
-30-