Rambling On

My friend Cynthia wrote a blog about the murder of her mother and her mother's lover by a neighbor who felt he was cleaning up the neighborhood by killing his neighbors. I knew this story already and cannot imagine the horror or the hate of the perpetrator. I have been very close to several women who were lesbians. My friend Mary Jo died last year at about this time. My Christmas card with a donation to her endeavor to stay alive came back with Deceased stamped on the envelope in a way that it was almost impossible to read. I would say that Mary Jo changed my life. But that is a long story.
Reading about these two women who had lived in the country, I was thinking about the lesbians I had known who lived in the country and a visit to a house in St. Paul in the early seventies. I will start with the visit to the house in St. Paul where I was the only male (I must have had the demeanor of someone who was male without being male). That day the women at the table (we sat on the floor around a large slightly elevated board, perhaps 12x4) talked about a women's commune that forbid the presence of men. One of the women who had visited the commune had brought her infant son and had been denied entrance. And then there had been problems getting propane gas because of the deliveryman was a man and could not enter the farm. There seemed to be an undertone here of who was the better lesbian, but also freedom from all types of male dominance. When I used the toilet, there was a sign that said, DOWN WITH MALE CHAUVINISM.
A funny thing happened that day. I went to the house with Mary Jo who I think was still not living in St. Paul and Tuny or Susan who was not a lesbian, but had hung out so much with gay men and lesbians that she began to doubt her own sexuality. She once confessed to her mother that she thought she was a lesbian and her mother asked her if she was sexually attracted to women, very calmly, and she said no. During this serious conversation, Tuny picked up a very large lettuce leaf and swatted the woman next to her on the face. I forgot to mention that Tuny had a demeanor and voice that seemed imperceptible despite her six-feet -tall frame. It caused a few moments of silence, an inexplicable action.
The women I knew who lived on farms were friends of a lover I had for two years. I think they had been happy until the older woman's son moved onto the farm and started building his own house. The woman's grown children took up more of her life and then the relationship ended. I knew another woman and know this story from my late friend Arthur. This woman lived on a farm by herself and developed a bizarre frugality. She would use coffee grounds and tea bags three or four times. That was one of Arthur's examples that I still remember. The clincher was that she had a huge trust fund and drove a Mercedes to the simple cabin where she lived. It is not much of a profile of a person and the times I met her, she was fun and charming and I could see why Arthur liked her so much. Arthur collected odd friends or they were drawn to him. He died in 1990 and I have written about him a few times.
The other story I told in my reaction, which I think I heard at that house in St. Paul was about a lesbian bar that was trying to go male gay so they had begun having drag shows. Perhaps the bar wanted to get rid of the lesbian feminists who talked more than they drank. These women were disgusted by the portrayal of femininity of the drag queens. On the other hand, the butch leather jacketed lesbians loved the drag queens. The lesbian feminists heckled the drag queens and threw things at them , but when feminists left the bar, the butch lesbians were waiting for them and beat them up. At the time I thought it was ironic, but now it seems to have no contradiction. The feminist lesbians were against women having to play a role so they wore blue jeans and no make up and felt liberated of the trappings of womanhood, but the others felt safe in the clothes of tough lower-middle class men and empathized with the sense of liberation at being who you were not supposed to be.
Today I have been thinking about the shooting. People without power in America use guns to be right. People with power do not need to use guns. I'm thinking of Ada Haiman, who does not necessarily articulate her hate, but uses her power to humiliate others and so makes herself feel better. How many spirits has she killed in her lifetime? How many more will she kill to make herself feel respected. Power is so intertwined with our sense of justice and dignity. And power allows you to cover your trail with documents.
My mistakes were several. First I refused to agree with her about a student magazine Bridges. She insisted that the whole publication had been ruined because the letter at the beginning had a paragraph with less than three sentences. I can imagine Ada on a campaign to ban all books with paragraphs with less than three paragraphs. This would be similar to the hell she and Mildred put the 3003-4 level through with embarrassing essay evaluation sheets. Instead of talking about how we got students to write better, we spent hours and hours discussing points for grammar, capitalization, for topic sentences, in other words creating the perfect instrument (that is edu-ese) so that anyone, even those who did not write, did not understand writing, could teach it, since it was mostly a matter of counting and not thinking. This sums up Ada. She was trying to turn her friend Mildred into a writing teacher since they both were pushing for writing in the basic classes, but their whole approach was anti-writing and pro-calculation. It was a humiliation that we had to participate in.
My next error was the seminar. I had been given 18 credits without any discussion. M. Hudders had handed me my program and said, "It's the best I can do,"and then twirled her hotdog body stuffed into the carnival colors of her clothing on her high heels and walked away from me. And then on top of this, I had to attend 8 seminars on General Education without being asked what might interest me about the seminar, how it could be set up. I was asking for a small questionnaire. It became obvious that this was a show of power when the seminar was put on my schedule as if it were an extra class.
In the first session of the seminar, I brought up some of these points and some were answered, but Ada had expected complete control. She talked about her discourse analysis technique in the class which allowed her to reveal the racists in the class to the blacks in her classes. When she began to discuss epistemology I mentioned that if we were really studying epistemology, we should look at the essay itself to find out how it controlled knowledge and structured knowledge. She quickly agreed, but a few minutes later she returned to me. Her mind had been working on how she could humiliate me, how she could do to me what she does to her students, in other words show that my language proved my prejudices. "Wait a minute, Mawk. You said should. You said we should do that in our classes. You're saying that we do not."
"No, Ada, I do not know what other people do in their classes."
You could tell that she felt that she had me. I was to be silenced, just as her students were. It was going to be her voice.
"NO, no, no, you said should."
Then I said the words that would feel great, but make my life miserable later, "Ada, I can say that you should not kill people, but that does not mean that I think you kill people."
I had done it. Some people laughed, who perhaps thought that in her own way Ada had already killed quite a few people. She tried to move on as if the conversation had never occurred, but she was frazzled. She was not used to people contradicting her and she did not want to begin a tirade in front of so many colleagues. For her, screaming would have meant she won the battle, but she couldn't do it here.
After the seminar, I went up to Ada to make peace. "Ada, it was much better than I expected."
"You were busting my balls," she said.
It seemed like an inappropriate comment on her part. She had been trying to humiliate me and impose her will. She had wanted to bust my balls.
And then I said the other stupid thing, "Ada, I didn't know you had balls."
Even though there was an attendance sheet at all of the meeting (it was obligatory for all untenured faculty), when I went up for promotion that same semester, I had to hand in my typed notes from the seminars.
During the course of the seminar, she had to admit that none of her readings had anything to do with General Studies or the Interdisciplinary Approach. In one of the following sessions, the next one I attended, she brought in the English director to make sure that we behaved. Those were her words. We also learned that people teaching English in General Studies should probably have degree in linguistics, as she did, because what we were really teaching was the English language. To most English educators this would be absurd. Language is taught through use, but in her interdisciplinary approach, you related language to physics by studying physics, through socio-linguistics you included sociology, through articulatory phonetics, you included biology. It was an example of teaching the structure of the elephant by having the elephant stand on top of you.
Perhaps if the man with the gun or Ada Haiman and Mildred Lockwood were more sure of themselves, the attacks on others would stop. Power can always find excuses for itself and because it can destroy others, its proclamations and assessments become a type of unquestionable law. In a university, that is a horrible state.
Once again, writing has helped to give me a bit of equilibrium, though I do feel a bit sad.