Phthursday Musings: Force and Power

Get a load of my son’s schedule this week:

• Monday = Baseball game

• Tuesday = Hey nothing

• Wednesday = Soccer practice (but it rained out)

• Thursday = Baseball practice

• Friday = Baseball game

• Saturday = Soccer game

• Sunday = Baseball practice

He is 7.

I write all of this not to say that we’re tired or that he’s overwhelmed or anything like that. Maybe I could speak to some of that, but that’s not what I’m doing here.

Rather, I’m tipping my hat to you, single parents. I’m tipping my hat to you, neighbor who walks her daughter to school every morning with her other three kids in tow. I’m tipping my hat to you, schedule makers and snack wranglers and all the rest of you.

I’m not complaining. But this stuff is not always easy. And we have a 2 : 1 adult : child ratio going. You flip that ratio? Good golly!

So is this schedule a burden? Nah. It’s a godsend.

Like many of you - not that you need to cop to it - I think I’ve got COVID-19. Not the virus, of course. I mean the pounds.

This crazy baseball / soccer schedule is getting me out the door too. Some nights I’m doing a lot of standing around, but I’m at least getting that near-daily walking in, and there’s a lot of other chasing stuff around as well. It’s getting me used to the idea of being out of the house in the late afternoon / evening.

All of the talk about normal, or new normal, or no normal… look, everything is relative. But it wasn’t hard for me to imagine us having evolved to a place where we just didn’t leave the house, where we got to be increasingly sedentary. And I think this crazy sports schedule came along at exactly the right time to snap us out of it. Does it get us back to normal? Well, it gets us back to balance. And a sense of balance feels like normalcy to me.

Now, am I going to shed this whole COVID-19? Oh, I kind of doubt that.

But the goal I set for myself at the beginning of 2020, it’s still my goal. I’m going to find a way to get back to a 25 minute 5K. It’s a tangible goal, and it might be this year, it might be next year, and hell, maybe it’ll be when I’m 50, but I’m going to get back to it. Hey, who wants to join me in this goal? Srsly, call me!

So I’m sitting here Thursday night, after a practice, listening in on a school board meeting.

There’s a presentation under way about student achievement. I believe the first 10 minutes of the presentation have been spent talking about the presentation. Right this moment, nothing has actually been presented yet.

I’ve long assumed that I spend way more time than most people providing preliminary information, caveats, disclaimers, etc. I’ve assumed that a lot of this is drudgery, but I’ve nevertheless stuck with my modes, because in building up all the prologue, I tend to figure out a path forward. It may not be the path I thought I was going to follow. I may have had no path in mind. I mean, look at this section, it wasn’t even something I thought I’d be writing about tonight. It sure fits META-SPIEL though. I’m writing about meta presentation! I’m writing about what I’m writing about! Congratulations to me!

My favorite writer these days is Zeynep Tufekci, who is nominally a sociologist, but I don’t think any single word encompasses what she does, except for maybe: meta. This past week in her Insight Substack, she had a guest author, UNC professor Whitney R. Robinson, who wrote about meta-epistemology, the theory of the theory of knowledge, or in other words, “how we know what we know”.

META-SPIEL, perhaps, we might restate as "meta-discourse”, which could be defined as “how we talk about what we talk about”.

The idea that any of this, at a formal level, might define a line of study? Never anything presented to me. There are all sorts of fields that I didn’t even know the existence of, even when I was in college. Linguistics? I mean, sure, at some point I learned that Noam Chomsky existed, but the field may as well have been like studying the abacus so far as I understood. Epistemology? No way I heard about that as an undergraduate.

As a grad student I started hearing more. People talked about Foucault or whatever. There was allegedly a class we could take called “Theory of Theory” but it didn’t sound intriguing so much as it sounded scary as hell.

Well, I’m 44 now, and damn it, I want a degree in epistemology! Sign my ass up! I want to take Zeynep Tufekci’s class!

Look, if the closest community college were to offer some kind of Certificate of Epistemology, I’d sign up. All the better if I could add that to my resume. I can see the corporate recruiter’s glee now: Hey Gene, this guy knows COBOL and has a Certificate of Epistemology! Our prayers have been answered!

It’s like my son’s crazy schedule. It’s forcing me out of the house. I could really use something like a class to force me into certain kinds of discursive modes. No idea that I’ve kicked around with anyone has gone anywhere, because that force component isn’t there. And even with things opening up… well, the bar isn’t going to be my destination of choice. A classroom though? One day a week? Coffee before or after? It could do wonders.

By the time I got to the end of this section I had to turn off the school board meeting because the talking around things had gotten to be too aggravating. Sometimes you can talk about what you’re talking about because there’s actual insight there. Sometimes… not so much.

I want to write a bit about Armenia here. This doesn’t have to do with the rest… it’s not enough for a separate piece but I wanted to get it out there.

The word came last week that President Biden was going to formally acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. And then, this past weekend, he did. It was a powerful statement, and, I am hopeful, it portends greater things from this administration. Nobody forced him to do this. It was, on the whole, politically expedient not to do so. He did it anyway.

I’m not going to rehash the facts. I do want to touch on my own knowledge and how this fits in with my vantage on the world.

I first learned about the Armenian Genocide as it was included in The Marshall Cavendish Illustrated Encyclopedia of World War I. (I read this entire thing over the course of multiple years, checking out volume after volume from the Rockford Public Library… it probably deserves its own write-up.) Not only did I learn about what had occurred, I also learned how the Armenian Genocide provided a template for Hitler to follow two decades later.

In college, I wrote two long papers on the Armenian Genocide. I’m not sure why it stuck with me quite the way that it did. It’s not something I ever had occasion to discuss with anyone outside of writing about it. It never directly came up in any class I took, at any level.

Armenia, in my mind, was something like a smaller version of Poland. Prior to World War I, Poland didn’t exist as an independent country; the Polish people lived in Germany or Russia or Austria-Hungary. After the war, Poland became independent again. Today, Poland is a nation of about 38,000,000 people, with a larger Polish diaspora far beyond the national boundaries. Armenia is an independent nation today, of about 3,000,000 people. But what much of might be called traditional Armenian land is today in modern Turkey or Iran, and of course there has been an ongoing war with Azerbaijian for years over Nagorno-Karabakh.

What happened to the Armenian people over time - the Genocide, the years of subjugation under the Turks and Russians, the “incomplete” nature of the post-Soviet Armenian nation - has, I think, been a sort of model, a framework in my mind, about international relations as a whole, and maybe even about power dynamics more generally, but, always somewhat in the abstract. I’ve never been to Armenia, I’ve never hung out with Armenians. I think the idea that it felt very remote in some ways but not in others gave it a rare place in my imagination.

And this, I think, is why Biden’s statement is such a big deal to me. It truly is something he didn’t need to acknowledge, at least not for his own benefit. It makes me think that as this administration tries to unpack its charge, it’s going to be far more willing than its predecessors to confront hard realities… that we might actually see real progress with… I don’t know, maybe Native American affairs? I’m thinking big things here, but things which won’t exactly win elections, being pursued not out of a sense of political expediency, or even out of a sense of “good government”, but out of a deep, sympathetic understanding of power and how and when to use it. I’m cautious… but I’m hopeful.