First, a poem.
Kong Looks Back on His Tryout with the BearsThis is perfect. The job of the liberal arts is to make you think. The job of the English Professor is to show you the power of the written word.
William Trowbridge
If it had worked out, I’d be on a train to Green Bay,
not crawling up this building with the Air Corps
on my ass. And if it weren’t for love, I’d drop
this shrieking little bimbo sixty stories
and let them teach me to mambo and do imitations.
They tried me on the offensive line, told me
to take out the right cornerback for Nagurski.
Eager to please, I wadded up the whole secondary,
then stomped the line, then the bench and locker room,
then the east end of town, to the river.
But they were not pleased: they said I had to
learn my position, become a team player.
The great father Bear himself said that,
so I tried hard to know the right numbers
and how the arrows slanted toward the little o’s.
But the o’s and the wet grass and grunts
drowned out the count, and the tight little cheers
drew my arrow straight into the stands,
and the wives tasted like flowers and raw fish.
So I was put on waivers right after camp
and here I am, panty-sniffer, about to die a clown,
who once opened a hole you could drive Nebraska through.
Results?
Bruce Fleming, an English professor at the United States Naval Academy, is returning to teaching following a two-day period out of the classroom while officials conducted an investigation into the charges several midshipmen brought against him.This isn't just a troll, this tells a much larger truth, which is exactly the point the good Professor was trying to make. He just had no idea his students would take it to a whole other level.
"The investigation concluded and determined that Professor Fleming should return to his normal teaching duties," Naval Academy spokesman Cmdr. John Schofield said, while declining to discuss the details of the charges, claiming it would be inappropriate to do so.
Fleming, however, was very willing to discuss the details of the allegations and the investigation. In an email to Military.com, Fleming wrote that several weeks ago two female midshipmen -- a junior and a senior -- took exception to some criticisms he made of the academy's sexual assault prevention program, in particular relative to the recent sex scandal involving members of the Navy football team who were accused of raping a female midshipman at an off-campus party.
The two female midshipmen in Fleming's class took their complaint to the Academy's Sexual Assault and Response (SAPR) office, saying that they had been offended by a poem Fleming had chosen to teach as a metaphor for elements of the sex scandal. On his Facebook page, Fleming identified the "offending poem" as "Kong Looks Back on His Tryout with the Bears" by William Trowbridge.
Well played. Well played.
UPDATE: In the spirit of Professor Fleming's troll ... I have to apologize to the front porch ... I did a little trolling too.
A double apology to my STEM friends - though some known engineer types did quite well - it isn't fair to throw poetry and a thousand years of English literary tradition your way - but it needed to be done.
MS, however, fell right in to my troll. Sorry Shipmate, but you made my and Professor Flemings point, in a fashion. Let me help out a bit by having the author speak;
I wrote my first Kong poem, “Kong Looks Back on His Tryout with the Bears,” with no intention of writing any more. But that poem gave me an idea for another and the next yet another. Motivated partly by my attraction to the old 1933 version of the film and partly by a sense that Kong embodies something very human, I wound up with 25 or 30 pages of Kong poems. X.J. Kennedy, in an essay called “Who Killed King Kong,” persuasively argues that Kong is an example of the pitiable monster archetype, a figure who’s good or at least well meaning inside but is trapped in a monstrous body, which hides that goodness from the world. I found in Kong yet another figure in which to combine seriousness with comedy. Like Quasimodo, the Frankenstein monster, the beast in Beauty and the Beast, that monster must suffer and eventually die alienated from fellow creatures. Once again, this figure becomes an archetype because he reflects something in us, who sometimes feel the world doesn’t see the beautiful person deep inside our unbeautiful exterior. Kong may be a monster, but he is as vulnerable and lonely as any of his human counterparts. I didn’t make the Kong poems into a book till about 15 years after I’d written the original poems. It somehow took that long to make me realize that, if I wrote 15 or 20 more, I’d have a book.Yes, there is a book.
And the author? Big race baiter, eh?
The current Poet Laureate of Missouri, William Trowbridge holds a B.A. in Philosophy and an M. A. in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. His poetry publications include five full collections: Ship of Fool (Red Hen Press, forthcoming), The Complete Book of Kong (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2003), Flickers, O Paradise, and Enter Dark Stranger (University of Arkansas Press, 2000, 1995, 1989), and three chapbooks, The Packing House Cantata (Camber Press, 2006), The Four Seasons (Red Dragonfly Press, 2001) and The Book of Kong (Iowa State University Press, l986). His poems have appeared in more than 30 anthologies and textbooks, as well as in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, Columbia, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and New Letters. He has given readings and workshops at schools, colleges, bookstores, and literary conferences throughout the United States. His awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference scholarship, a Camber Press Poetry Chapbook Award, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Yaddo, and The Anderson Center. He is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, where he was an editor of The Laurel Review/GreenTower Press from 1986 to 2004. Now living in Lee's Summit, MO, he teaches in the University of Nebraska low-residency MFA in writing program. His web site is http://williamtrowbridge.net.You can even listen to him if you wish.
From those two MIDN to MS in comments and to everyone else who is reaching for the smelling salts, you need to step back a bit and think why you have a knee jerk reaction to something without doing the intellectually honest thing - and something your education should lead you to - and take a moment to research a bit. Look deeper, read deeper, think deeper. Know that - something great literature and poetry does - your initial response is often wrong. What seems up front is actually not there; what is important is often only found upon reflection and re-reading.
This whole exercise is a superb example of how we let people acting like their own version of Red Guards stomp around the intellectual landscape smashing with their ignorance anything that does not match their blinkered view, or that may be construed to conflict with their fragile worldview.
Cultural Marxism - yea, it's a thing ... and there it is red in tooth and claw.
You don't have to agree with Professor Fleming on everything - I don't - you don't even have to like him - I do - (I like a lot of people from one end to the other, especially the interesting ones as life is short and not meant to keep you comfortable, that is why I like MS as well) --- but you have to respect what he has done here.
What a great educational opportunity for the MIDN. Not only does it demonstrate the power of good poetry, but perfectly demonstrates the use of the archetype (something the eldest Wee Salamander in her 2nd year of AP English knowitallness will prattle on about over dinner) - but it also demonstrates how the non-political can be made political simply by desire.
One downside note - and something Professor Fleming has demonstrated here - these little Red Guards are not harmless. By causing a Professor to be suspended for a few days over a complaint that anyone with even a basic review of the poem in question would know is a bogus claim founded on ignorance - they have created a chill in the air. The weaker mortals will not challenge. Will second guess every word, every 4th level possible interpretation of a work.
Those familiar with Critical Theory will quickly see the problem. Almost any work can be torn apart as racist, sexist, or homophobic. People cut their PhD's creating such alternative universes. If you fear that someone could make such a claim simply because they want to - and that could lead to a suspension - then they will rapidly narrow the authors they will use. They will pull back from any challenging boundaries. People become less educated, less curious, more close minded. Is that what we want? Hang one; terrorize a thousand dontchaknow.
For now though, I will continue to laugh as the cat continues to paw-about with the mice.
by Rudyard Kipling. This one is fun, but it’s also got substance. It’s the story of a wily teen-aged boy who, though actually the son of a British soldier in Raj India, has been brought up to speak all Indian languages, wear all disguises, and pass as anything he chooses. He plays the game better than those he lives with and loves, and has fabulous adventures that keep the reader rooting for him to pull it off one more time. The substance? It’s about being true to yourself, finding what matters—in Kim’s case, it’s absolute loyalty to a spacey (and hence borderline ridiculous, i.e. non-studly) Buddhist holy man whose disciple he agrees to become. Kim is the perfect combination of actor in the world and fully developed inner being. For me, that’s the definition of a successful person, especially a great warrior.
. Part of the authorless Sanscrit epic called the Mahabarata that exists in countless versions and dates from thousands of years before Christ in one form or another, this central and usually excerpted section is central to the issue of what a warrior is, and why. The hero Arjuna finds himself in battle against members of his extended family. Understandably, he doesn’t want to fight. His charioteer, conveniently for the story, is none other than the god Krishna, an avatar of the even more fundamental god Vishnu. Krishna tells Arjuna it’s his duty to fight because that’s what he does and who he is, being a member of the Kshyatria caste. We don’t have birth castes in democratic America; rather each person has to figure out who he or she is—in a sense, what caste we belong to. If you figure out you’re a warrior, then fighting is who you are and what you do. That’s why you fight.
by Saint Augustine. Augustine is one of the great Fathers of the Church, a towering intellect who provided an answer to the question, How can a good God allow evil? (His answer is sort of a sleight-of-hand: evil, according to Augustine, isn’t a real thing, it’s just the absence of good.) But it’s the record of his misspent youth, lying, stealing, and fornicating before turning it around, that has endeared him to centuries of readers. The story of his theft of pears is a classic; my personal favorite is his explanation of why men have nipples. It’s the classic reminder that the way a person is at the time we meet them isn’t necessarily the way they will be. We humans are limited in our knowledge of what’s lurking within others. For leaders, the moral seems to be this: cut others some slack; guide where you can but then at some point, you have to back off. I see it as a warning to leaders that our ability to change the world right here and now is limited: model the behavior you want, but be aware that the largest patterns of human development may be beyond your control. Lead, in short, with love and humility.
by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. A melancholy classic about change and the necessity to adapt—something that all old people, and some young—and specifically old warriors who have risen in rank in a specific world—need to hear. The title character is a Sicilian aristocrat in the time of Garibaldi who has the breadth of vision to see that his apparently timeless feudal world is in fact changing. He also realizes that in order to keep the values that underlay that world alive, he has to go along with changing the warp and woof of life—welcoming a non-aristocratic bride for his protégé and nephew, who has decided to fight for the cause that will bring an end to the Leopard’s lifestyle. It’s a parable for the necessity to accept change and the fact that the privileged of the Earth are the ones who have to lead the way, rather than becoming defensive and crusty. The inability to lose sight of the spirit in blind adherence to the letter is a huge problem for another authority-driven clan of alphas, not just the feudal aristocracy of Sicily: the military.
, by Bruce Fleming. I was told to include this, but of course I like it because it’s my most recent book and we’re living the situation it describes and analyzes. In brief, the military is tiny these days in the US, and all-volunteer, and involved in such dicey undertakings. The result is that most civilians have turned away from it or just don’t care. This, understandably, annoys the military that puts its collective behind on the line. What are we doing this for? they say. The result is mutual ignorance and distrust in our society as a whole. I propose changes for both sides, because we can’t have a world where the warriors feel aggrieved and the civilians ignore them. The civilian world first: briefly, liberals have to acknowledge the military more and consider it as a career (= more ROTC at Ivies). Conservatives have to stop kowtowing to anything the Pentagon asks for. The military: because the military serves the civilian world and not the reverse, the biggest changes will be here. In brief, the military has to stop defining itself by contrast with the civilian world and accept another sort of definition (what I call “military metaphysics”). Now, the military gets its sense of itself by saying it’s superior to the civilian world: more virtuous (“held to a higher standard”), harder (look how fat they are), more loyal and self-sacrificing (we put out behinds on the line). But if you have to denigrate the people you defend to get a sense of who you are, why defend them? This line of thought leads to banana republics, juntas of colonels. Instead the military has to understand that it’s a specific niche profession that attracts people who are drawn to it. Civilians pay for them to be who they are, do what they were born to do (see the Bhagavad-Gita). That has to be good enough in terms of acknowledgment. Stop asking for hugs on the street: the profession has to be its own reward. If it isn’t, you’re in the wrong line of business.
, by Graham Greene.
