July 12, 2009AD
"When suave politeness, temp'ring bigot zeal/corrected I believe to one does feel... -- Fr. Ronald Knox, Absolute and Abitofhell, 1912
"A man over forty with long hair begins to look like his mother..." Orson Welles
"I made my way to school/And found my teacher crouching in his overalls." -- David Bowie, PANIC IN DETROIT
"For Christ's sake be kind." -- Kurt Vonnegut
HARM NONE -- button given to Mercy High School students by Tom Schusterbauer
After turning fifty, I looked down at my feet. I was wearing (Chuck) Converse high tops. A moment recalled when reading Laura Berman's June 11th column on a Catholic high school English teacher named Tom Schusterbauer. At least I think he teaches at a Catholic school. The name of the school is Mercy High in Farmington Hills. Previously, he taught at Notre Dame High School. He wears Converse high tops with his blue jeans and black CAULFIELD (as in Holden) t-shirt. At age 62, he owns 34 pairs of the canvas shoes once associated with ten-year-old boys.
The column is a masterful example of coded journalism -- which these days is pretty much all of journalism. Political code isn't that complex. After all, the press doesn't cover our new president, they cover for him. But the cultural code in this case is tougher to crack.
Ms. Berman (and I hope that "ms." doesn't offend; after all, unlike Baroness Barbara Boxer, Laura Berman isn't a member of the American House of Lords) quotes a number of Mr. Schusterbauer's students. That some passed barely and others failed his class should mean he had standards. But what those standards were is encrypted and not revealed.
There's an indication in one student's comment: "At first I was irritated with him as I could no longer wander in my ignorant bliss... I owe him many thanks for forcing me to listen and think for myself."
Thinking for oneself is done mostly in groups these days. Large groups. And although Ms. Berman is coy, a picture is worth a thousand decryptions. An accompanying photo of the classroom blackboard shows a poster declaring "Happy Birthday Eric Foner." Below it is another poster of John Wayne -- its lettering, unfortunately obscured, but fairly predictable given the Duke's political affiliations; Senator Barry Goldwater and Gov.Ronald Reagan being the most prominent. Eric Foner is the son of leftist academic Philip Foner and himself a leftist historian. I don't think he would dispute that identificataion. He would, in fact, be proud of it. His most famous book is on post-civil war reconstruction that, by any standards failed. That he sees the new president and his policies and programs as a long-delayed continuation of a penetrating reconstruction on a panoramic scale is clear from his years of criticizing Pres. Bush's generous compassionate conservativism.
Was Mr. Schusterbauer's class an ideological pass/fail? Even in today's through-the-wormhole world of Catholic education that's hard to imagine. Although imagination is required when reading his story. Catholic high schools aren't cheap; Farmington Hills is an upper middle class suburb several orbits away from the violent and dysfunctional world of Detroit's Stark Terror High. But making students think usually means making students think like me. Schuste -- as students at this all-girl high school call him -- has been teaching since he was twenty-two. Forty years. He matriculated then in the swinging/swooning/swearing sixties. And given that A CATCHER IN THE RYE is still on his reading list, it's fairly obvious that he was taught to think for himself by his own Schuste.
When you read something like this, it isn't so much that things have changed, but that they haven't. In high school we read A CATCHER IN THE RYE and JOHNNIE GOT HIS GUN and although deprived of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, our teachers, especially those who taught English, somehow got us on the ground floor of the justice mission. The vilification of the American military, rule of law, Vietnam, racism ... we got the whole curriculum. With a little of George Harrison's electronic noodlings -- WONDERWALL -- besides. Although it is hard not to see the late sixties as the beginning of the end for our cities to the detriment of their mostly black populations, the Agenda took root. Still does. Still flowers. If weeds in empty lots can be called flowering.
My English teachers were mostly nuns and priests. Almost all liberal, all spreading the social gospel of Vatican II.0 (Liberation OS). I suspect that those still alive have long since left the Church along with tens of thousands of other religious in the seventies seeking self-expression. Or like the principal, have been defrocked for seeking self-gratification.
Schuste shows film clips -- in the sixties we saw the whole film -- of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and CONRACK. These teenage girls, who have spent half their lives in this new century have their minds firmly planted in the last. "We have to fight prejudice in different ways because these things happen all the time," one girls says in response to the Harper Lee story. Gosh! Are black men still being hung from the neck until dead for an allegation of rape? There is great unfairness, but these young girls are blind to it.
On CNN Wednesday night, a middle class black woman described how she had found her 11 year old son hanging from the ceiling of his bedroom. The mother had complained on several occasions to the school about the abusive bullying her son endured. Nothing was done in a school with a predominately black student body AND black administration. He couldn't take it anymore. He killed himself. Will one of these 20th century girls write the novel of his life? Will he find his Harper Lee among them? Given the world of Schuste, I doubt it. They can't see the misery because they can't see the racism. Or sexism or homophobia. No forest. No trees. Just signs.
Mr. Schusterbauer is described by one former student as "a bastard" in his grading. He may well be a cruel "bastard" in another way. He often shows a film clip of his daughter Courtney, age nine. Courtney was killed by a student driver and would now be forty. What's the point of this extravagant indulgence? "You don't own life. Life owns you," he says. Take a stand. (No, I don't get it either.) Berman desribes students crying after the teacher shares. This sort of manipulation is common in colleges and graduate schools. I experienced it myself in law school in the early nineties. But why force this on children? It is a personal tragedy. A private tragedy. And it approaches abuse in its exploitation of the unformed emotions, consciences, and intellects of young girls. Only sexual molestation would have been worse.
"You taught us how important it is to express one's character every single moment" one student says. That sounds like an exhausting relationship in the offing -- expressing feelings "every single moment." Don't kids just hold hands anymore?
Another girl explains "it is about trying to be a good person." And a good Catholic?
Toward the end of the piece Ms. Berman writes that "his students.. will march onward." March toward where? Well, I guess toward the same "No Outlet" streets that Rep. John Lewis exhorted Americans to "march, march, march" toward during the 2008 election.
Suddenly Fr. Jenkins and Pres. Obama and Notre Dame make sense. Not once in this half-page column does Ms. Berman mention the words "God" or "Catholicism." Mr. Schusterbauer sounds more like Dharma of "Dharma and Gregg" than someone interested in, much less affiliated with, the Church. "Life owns you" evokes Dharma's "Universe" -- always guiding, hinting, wanting, but never actually saying anything or offering anything to believe in. "zeal/corrected 'I believe' to 'one does feel'." Almost one hundred years after Fr. Knox's post-Christian England slouches post-Christian America in a dragging shuffle familiar for its listlessness and lack of imagination.
No paradoxes here. Nothing explained only by God. Not even science intrudes. Harm None? Another slogan directed exclusively at the male English-speaking world and its anglo-saxon capitalism and pitiless rule of law. No wonder Larry David's SEINFELD continues on its eternal digital loop. No Hugs, No Lessons were his instructions to writers. A cold window sweeping away the sticky, sweaty world of super-heated radiators. Very 20th century indeed -- with that cold wind replaced by nothing.
Those few years ago, I looked down at my Converse hightops and realized: I'm too old for these things. Too old as well for the suffocating airless world of absolute relativism. I suppose if not for the "C" word, Mr. Schusterbauer would have borrowed Vonnegut's slogan directly, "for Christ's sake be kind." HARM NONE is more blunt, clumsey, less colloquial, but the sentiment's the same. Sentimental.
It is a safe toss of the dice that Tom Schusterbauer does not teach Kurt Vonnegut's HARRISON BERGERON. This prescient assault from the 1950s on early 21st century America contradicts everything the English teacher and his Detroit News Boswell feel is precious. The constitutionalization of equality and emotions sweeping away individual talent and cultural exceptionalism.
Cardinal Arinze who is in charge of liturgical discipline at the Vatican might have called Mr. Schusterbauer a "Rev. Showman" if he were a priest. It is the cardinal's description of priests who use the mass as yet another opportunity for self-expression. This English teacher uses literature -- or its faded political equivalents -- as an opportunity to express his outrage that his generation made things worse as often as it made things better. So he passes on his failure and shame encrypted as comfortable outrage.
In 1970 his classroom would have been hell for me -- and would be still. But it's the girls I feel sorry for. I feel that. Thinking about it is too painful.
Sam Macomb
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