800 Words: The American Lycee - A Syllabus - Grades 7-9 - American Stories

Submitted without comment or explanation.

Grade 7 - The Television Era: 1999-

The Sopranos

Freaks and Geeks

The West Wing
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Malcolm in the Middle
Monk

Futurama

24

The Daily Show
Six Feet Under

Family Guy (second incarnation)

The Shield

South Park

The Wire

Arrested Development

Deadwood

The Office (British and American)

Lost
The Colbert Report

Friday Night Lights

How I Met Your Mother

Mad Men

Breaking Bad
True Blood
John Adams

Louie

Game of Thrones

Homeland

Girls

Additional Texts:

Movies:

Three Kings

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Social Network

Elephant

The Dark Knight

WALL-E

United 93

Juno

Little Miss Sunshine

Thank You For Smoking

Up In The Air

There Will Be Blood

Brokeback Mountain

Gran Torino

Books (to be studied either complete or in excerpts):

Non-Fiction:

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Freakonomics by Steven D Leavitt and Steven J Dubner & Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

The Outsourced Self by Arlie Russell Hochschild 

Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

“A Problem from Hell” America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals by David Halberstam

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer & Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10th, 2001 by Steve Coll

The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

The Closing of the American Mind by Alan Bloom

How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer

The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington

Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman & The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria

Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Journalism by Paul Krugman
The Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren

Republic, Lost: by Lawrence Lessig

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips

Fiction:

The Koran

Atlas Shrugged & The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Anne Proulx

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Plays:

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

Avenue Q

In the Heights

Grade 8 - The TV Era: 1983-1999

Cheers
Frasier
Late Night with David Letterman
St. Elsewhere
The Golden Girls
Moonlighting
NYPD Blue
The Cosby Show
A Different World
Picket Fences LA Law
Law & Order
Star Trek The Next Generation
Family Ties
Murphy Brown
Saturday Night Live
Married With Children

The Simpsons

Seinfeld

Twin Peaks

The Larry Sanders Show

Homicide: Life on the Streets

The X-Files
3rd Rock from the Sun
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Beavis and Butthead
King of the Hill

Animaniacs
Daria

The Drew Carey Show

Everybody Loves Raymond

Friends

Ellen
Will and Grace
Spin City
Ally McBeal

Sex and the City

Additional texts:

Movies

Jaws & Star Wars

Close Encounters of the Third Kind & ET

Blue Velvet & American Beauty

The Breakfast Club

Do The Right Thing

Hoop Dreams

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Forrest Gump

Glengarry Glen Ross

Hotel Rwanda

Wag the Dog & Primary Colors

Dazed and Confused

Books:

Non-Fiction:

Speeches and Letters by Martin Luther King Jr.

Autobiography of Malcolm X

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed Along With Our Families: by Philip Gourevitch

Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick

The End of History by Francis Fukuyama

The Age of Reagan 1974-2008: A History by Sean Wilentz 

The Starr Report by Kenneth Starr

Power and the Idealists by Paul Berman

What's The Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank 

Capital by Karl Marx

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater

The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman

Twilight of the Common Dream by Todd Gitlin

The Big Con by Jonathan Chait


The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stieglitz

America: The Book by Jon Stewart

Ashes to Ashes: America’s Cigarette War, The Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

Fiction:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Watchmen by Alan Moore

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Rabbit is Rich & Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Plays:

Angels in America by Tony Kushner

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

Fences by August Wilson

Speed-the-plow by David Mamet

Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim

Assassins by Stephen Sondheim

Grade 9 - 1962-1983: The Film Era

The Manchurian Candidate

Dr. Strangelove

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Graduate

In the Heat of the Night

The Dirty Dozen

Bonnie and Clyde

The Producers  
Blazing Saddles

2001: A Space Odyssey

Easy Rider

Midnight Cowboy

M*A*S*H
Five Easy Pieces
A Clockwork Orange
Dirty Harry
Patton
Serpico

The Last Picture Show
McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Little Big Man

The French Connection

The Godfather Epic

Mean Streets

Badlands

The Conversation

Chinatown
The Long Goodbye

Nashville

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Rocky 
Taxi Driver 
All the President's Men

Network

Annie Hall & Manhattan

The Deer Hunter & Apocalypse Now
The Shining
Blowout
Raging Bull

The Right Stuff

TV

The Andy Griffith Show

Bonanza

The Brady Bunch

Dragnet

Get Smart

Hogan's Heroes

Mission: Impossible

Star Trek

All in the Family

Mary Tyler Moore

Taxi

The Carrol Burnett Show

The Jeffersons

Good Times

Books:

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan

The Making of a President by Theodore H. White

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson

Ghandi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Non-Violence by Erik Ericksen

Armies of the Night: History as a Novel/The Novel as History by Norman Mailer

Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

So Human an Animal by Rene J. Dubos

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan

On Human Nature by E. O. Wilson

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

The Imperial Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

Fiction:

Herzog by Saul Bellow

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth and Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

Theater:

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George by Stephen Sondheim

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

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800 Words: The American Utopia: Part 1 - The American Soul

Over and over again, we hear that America is a country without a history - that America’s still making and writing its history books. The experiment isn’t over or conclusive, how can we learn anything about a history we don’t yet know or understand? So who cares if we’re 17th in global education?

But look at us - the declining power with declining cities, declining law enforcement, declining industry, declining political systems, declining schools, and declining press (yes, I based that list on the seasons of The Wire...). How do we now look so close to the edge of a permanent fall? And if we’re at the edge of such a fall, then how did we rise so high? Perhaps America won’t fall at all, but if we don’t, it’s because there will be reforms in place which completely change the nature of this country, and if the nature of this country is completely changed, then there is quite a bit of history to study and understand.

If there’s one country in the last two hundred years that has a lot of history to study... maybe it’s Germany or Russia, but after them it’s us. Some of us do pay attention to little bits of that history. Anybody who can quote Bob Dylan lyrics or lines from The Godfather has their little bits of history which shape their knowledge of the human heart. Some people even know enough of American history (though not enough..) that their souls feel tired of an American culture that’s clearly not working, and therefore fill their cultural life to the brim with the Europe of critical theory, or the East Asia of action movies and anime and video games. But I can’t help thinking that they latch onto such things because they need an explanation of the exhausted culture from which they hail in which they can no longer believe. Critical theory gives them the required armament to explain why we can no longer believe in our institutions. Meanwhile, the stupefyingly complex technology of Asian culture is still very young, with pyrotechnics that well exceed its emotional maturity so far (with a number of obvious exceptions... for just one, rent Grave of the Fireflies...) But unlike so much prominent American content (never mind the underground stuff), Asian culture is exciting - it’s young, it’s exuberant, and it feels completely new. The recent past belongs to America, but the future clearly belongs to Asia.

But when you stay with American content long enough to get past the current tiredness, you see its entire history laid out before you as it never could be in the past - there is a lifetime of soul-sustenance for those willing to find it: classic rock and R&B and country and bluegrass and jazz, classic Hollywood movies and classic TV, classic theater and classic musicals, classic poetry and novels, classic art and classic architecture, even some classic sports games and classical music. At this point, America has its classical canon - every educated American knows what it is, and every American has to either have experienced it or want to experience it in order to be considered an educated American. Once upon a time, Americans were blank slates onto which education from older cultures formed their awareness of their souls. But there should be no doubt, there is now a fully American Soul - educated and seasoned almost exclusively (much too exclusively) by American culture, and possessed of a wisdom that comes from America having grown a culture so large that it obliterated whole swaths of other cultures from around the world.

Furthermore, American comfort is so widespread, and for the moment its responsibilities for earning this comfort so minimal in comparison to most of the world, that there is ample time to immerse ourselves in this culture, to appreciate and love it, to to discuss and debate it, and to cultivate it still further. The ability of Americans to accrue debt may end tomorrow, but until it does, we are at the point of grand summation - the time to understand what it means to be an American at the zenith of world power is right now, because it can’t last forever, and it’s already amazing that it’s lasted this long. Americans are highly motivated people no longer, and if any of us remain highly motivated, we’re fighting an uphill battle to achieve anything that resembles our dreams. So in the meantime, what else is there to do but amble through this glorious museum of the recent past?

The most important year in American history was, of course, 1945 - when we officially ended the Second World War with the Atomic Bomb. It was the defining American triumph, the defining American achievement, and will perhaps become the defining American tragedy. But I think most people would agree that the most important cultural year was 1968. It was the summit of all the American energy generated by the Allies’ triumph. During the Cold War’s height, education and motivation to learn was considered paramount to the species’ survival. The GI Bill made education widespread, and federal grants made education cheap. But all children develop minds of their own, and by the time the GIs' kids went to college, they demanded to follow the paths on which their minds set them. They not only questioned the foundation of America’s moral triumph, they also questioned the foundation of America’s intellectual triumph. They no longer wanted to read ‘great books’ or set themselves up for scientific careers that would advance human knowledge. Instead, they went that most American of ways - they did their own thing, and did so on a scale never seen before. Before the Baby Boomers, Americans upheld a very particular (and slightly authoritarian) social contract based on the continual enforcement of a community’s shared values of tolerance. The contradiction there should be completely obvious - previous generations may have believed in tolerance, but the community obligation was at very least as important as the individual right. If a community felt that the individual right had stretched too far and negated its responsibility to the community, the community felt completely justified in repressing those ‘deviants.’ The result of this was the unity of purpose which saw us through reconstruction after the Civil War and overcame the Great Depression, but it also looked the other way at racial violence and discrimination, economic exploitation, and imperial subjugation abroad. It was not until the Baby Boom generation that the idea of individual rights as more important than community obligation became widespread. In doing so, they caused enormous, and long overdue, gains in freedom for minorities. And yet they may have simultaneously undone the social contract (hardly a beneficent one) which enabled America’s rise. It was a Faustian pact. We are now a freer country than ever before. We’re also a more stymied, dysfunctional one than we’ve been since The Great Depression. The Baby Boomers changed the definition of American culture into the most American possible conceit - the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest number of people. And by changing it, they probably defined the meaning of American culture for all time.

Just a few years before 1968, Cold War-era universities were places of highly disciplined learning and bastions of what used to be called ‘value-free scholarship’ (scholarship for its own sake). The idea of value-free scholarship is probably a myth - the US government would never have funded it if it hadn’t felt the need for top-quality scientists in the Cold War so direly. But it was the rebellion against the University, not the University itself, that gave America it’s identity.

Just briefly look at the most eminent figures in American culture. No novelist has had anything like the impact on America which Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have had on the Russians. We have a national poet in Walt Whitman, but does he count as our National Writer the way Shakespeare does for the English or Goethe does for the Germans? We probably don’t have a National Writer. Hell, we probably don’t even have a National Book unless you count The Constitution. But if we don’t have a National Writer, we certainly have a National Songwriter. I think a much better case could be made that Bob Dylan already had a larger impact on American society in a half-century than even Walt Whitman has in a century-and-a-half. We have great artists, but no National Artist. However, we have a National Photographer in Ansel Adams, and the impact which Steven Spielberg and Orson Welles have on America dwarves any other visual artist in any medium. We have a number of good playwrights, but not a single one among them ever had the impact of musical theater creators like Rodgers and Hammerstein or Stephen Sondheim.

The most important American art, of nearly all genres, was made in recent generations; created to be consumed by either the WWII generation or the Baby Boomers. We have national poets, but we have no national novelist, or artist, or composer, or playwright. Except Whitman, our national cultural figures are all very recent. And even Whitman seems almost completely contemporary in the way that he insisted on a colloquial, simple language. Had he lived a century later, you could easily see him learning the guitar to travel the open road with Woody Guthrie or headlining a Beatnik poetry slam with Allen Ginsberg.

But it is this colloquial, simple language, which defines our cultural contribution. We’re like small children playing with enormous toys. On this new continent, we have created technology which so outstrips anything that comes before it that we barely know how to use it. There is 4,000 years of written poetry and roughly 1,000 years of written music, but there are roughly 110 years of movies and only a bit more of sound recording and photography. Education in math and science and medicine is defined by its exclusivity. If you want to study these subjects meaningfully, you have to learn at an extraordinary level over a period of a decade. But the arts are currently defined by their populism. Anybody can write or sing a song, anybody can make a movie, anybody can write a story. No extraordinary ability is asked of our cultural figures, and it’s possible that the most extraordinary thing about American culture is the technology with which it’s transmitted. Don't misunderstand, simplicity is not a byword for mediocrity, but the fact that there is no reward for craftsmanship in the arts in the manner there is for the sciences necessarily means that nearly half of the artistic glories we’re capable of producing go unrealized.

And it’s not just the artistic culture that suffers from this lack of critical complexity. It’s the civic culture too. Since about 1968, so many of us have come to assume automatically that the nation’s founding was cynical, based on economic interests, the exploitation of Africans, and the murder of Indians. Never mind that America is a country with one of the longest democratic traditions in human history, with freedoms that have never stopped growing (however incrementally), and done because of a founding constitutional document which is so simple that anybody can understand and interpret it for themselves. Furthermore, not a single movement which attempted to move the country away from republican democracy ever gained significant traction in the country’s entire history. American democracy is extremely imperfect, but thus far, it’s always been well-supported by its citizens, continually expanded its freedoms, and demonstrated the feasibility of democracy for the modern age. Any person who does not reflect on these facts in awe shouldn’t be taken seriously when they criticize anything about this country.

American values, such as they are, are no longer commonly shared. We no longer agree about what’s good and evil, and virtually all quarters of America are despondent over the fact that this disagreement exists. Half the country seems to hold to traditional definitions of the sacred, and the other half searches for a new definition on which no two members seem to agree. The American Soul is divided, with one half clinging to past - old world - models, and one half searching uncomfortably since 1968 for a new model which no American has definitively found. One side prizes unity, the other, individual expression. In a conflict between the two sides, do the individuals have a 1% chance of winning?

And because no American has established a commonly accepted new model, the half of America which sees the need for one is adrift. Its members are discontent without realizing the basis of their dissatisfaction. Their native intelligence is enough to show them that something has become deeply rotten in the American Soul, but they don’t have the tools to understand why. More than ever before, America is a nation of individuals. No two people critical of America share the same values, and because they lack the same values, they can’t pool their critical thinking together to effectively criticize the country - incompetent in defining the country’s problems, and ineffectual in creating change.

America needs new definitions. New definitions of good and evil, new definitions of the sacred and the sublime which demonstrate the struggle between the two ethical poles, and new arguments for why it’s important to choose between them. The old values of what is good and what is evil, tied up with old notions of God and retribution, clearly don’t have much hold on Americans anymore. Such notions predate America by thousands of years, and even if they were invented in America, they are un-American in every sense. If we don’t provide a new set of values, if good and evil simply no longer exist, what then is worth fighting for?

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800 Words: Depressive Paternalism - Part 2

“We still speak of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset.’ We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.”

George Steiner

“And you thought the first part of this was arrogant...”

Evan Tucker

For roughly a decade, I’ve lived with an extensive, Falstaffian, pot-belly. A few months ago, I was told by one particularly grating “Type-A-cquaintance” that I should get myself checked for a hernia. But a far closer acquaintance of mine recently told me, apropos of absolutely nothing, that I should strongly consider bariatric surgery (surgical weight loss). He even prefaced it by saying ‘I know you’re going to be mad at me for saying this.’ Well..., I know I’m fat, but that’s ridiculous. Not even I’m not that fat. I may eat like a swine, but I exercise regularly. I feel physical exertion easily, I live with bodily pain of all kinds, and I sweat a river every day, but I never lack for energy. The time may well come for gastric bypass, but I’m 31 fucking years old with a BMI of "only" 36. I’m plenty worried for the long-term prospects of my health, but I don’t yet have diabetes or heart disease or any other ailment associated with long-term obesity - and believe me, I’ve gotten it checked again and again. I simply need to lose weight rather badly, and there are quite a number of steps which I should probably consider before hacking my body to pieces so I can make it smaller.

This is a particularly close acquaintance of mine, and I’ve been told many many times by many many people that I should simply ignore what can only be termed a long-ongoing campaign of contempt he’s continually at great pains to show me, in spite of the fact that this is a particular acquaintance that can never, ever, be shed. Apparently I therefore have no one to blame but myself for the fact that I care so much what he thinks. But the problem with this solution is that through the years I’ve done what I could to ignore him, and continue to do so. After he uttered this particular imbecility on Thursday night, I called up another close mutual acquaintance and we laughed heartily at his idiocy as we have so many times before. I then hung up the phone, only to discover that I couldn’t sleep. Around five in the morning, I finally nodded off, and within five minutes of my awakening a few hours later, I felt utterly miserable about the hopelessness of my weight problem, which of course led to further miserable thoughts about my relationship with this person, which then led to miserable thoughts about my miserable relationships with other people, which then led to miserable thoughts about my miserable failures in less tangible areas, which led to an almost complete emotional darkness - far too overwhelming to be within my control and a darkness which any true depressive will recognize instantly, but others will inevitably call a self-fulfilling prophecy. As always, I tried to believe that such negative thoughts are self-fulfilling. But unfortunately, it’s almost completely the opposite. It’s the overwhelming desire to think positive thoughts which is a prophecy of negativity. All of my experience with this illness has taught me that a depressive who attempts to will himself into positive thinking sets a trap, which when it snares him will multiply depressive sensations as the realization grows of how impossible it is to control one’s thoughts and feelings. Within an hour of my awaking, I was sobbing on my bed, as utterly miserable as I was convivial the night before.

I have ample reason in my life to be depressed. But those reasons do not dictate the appearance of depression, and at this point it’s far more likely that depression dictates those reasons. Depression is an illness which chooses the person, not the person it. And to tell a depression sufferer that an unceasingly positive attitude can beat this illness, or that a depressive can simply choose to stop thinking depressing thoughts, is every bit as outrageous a manipulation as telling a rape victim that her short skirt caused her misfortune, or a cancer patient to forego medicine for holistic cures. And for a manipulation like that to continually come from a close personal acquaintance is a second wound, nearly as powerful as the first, and far longer lasting in its impact. If civilization continues to evolve to better places, then this sort of belief will soon be considered as willfully naive, as dangerous, as barbaric, and as evil as any of those other medieval bigotries. If such people exist in your lives, then you know that you may love these people, you may be thankful for every single thing they’ve given you, and you may owe them nearly everything. But you can never, ever forgive them for such a belief, and if they do not see the error of their ways and do everything within their power to repent, you know that it will forever be your primary memory of them - the ultimate difference between ‘He was great … even though...’ and ‘He was bad … even though...’ Because at the very time and on the very issue that you needed such people most, they stabbed you in the back.

It’s entirely possible, perhaps likely, that those of us who point fingers like that have sins towards them upon our heads just as egregious, but those unto whom evil is done do evil in return. The war between the depressives and the anxious is a war of attrition which will never end, and anyone caught in the middle can’t help but be collateral damage, their lives suffering from the suffering the two parties inflict upon one another. These two parties may love one another, but they clearly hate so many qualities they see in each other, and they’d sooner tear one another - and everyone in proximity - to shreds than ever concede an inch. It is a stalemate to which there can never be an adequate solution, merely ceasefires until the next battle.

Where did it all go wrong?... What goes wrong in the brain of a child ‘semi-prodigy’ that he spends his entire adolescence, and perhaps his entire adulthood, devoting all his alleged intelligence to a world he never understood? Was my head simply too filled with information too early to develop the proper skills at the proper time? Did the gears simply snap into place too early to understand the world for what it is? Was I lucky that my fortunes fell so early and I’ve spent my young years overcoming the setbacks which perhaps would have been inevitable come middle age had I rose high when I was young?

Just a few more years without these problems might have made all the difference. I could have handled the learning disabilities without depression, and I probably could have handled the depression without learning disabilities. But the combination of the two was, thus far, lethal. Just a few more years, and I could have been confident on the path to a professional violin career without risking a panic attack at the idea of practicing, ten more years and I might have learned the ropes of journalism, twenty more and I could have been a lawyer or an academic or God knows what the limit could have been? But in retrospect, that was mostly impossible. I was depressed because I saw my future all too clearly. I realized that no kid was like me, no school existed for a child like me, and I existed in my own little world. How I was never diagnosed with a condition like Asperger’s, I’ll never know. I’ve been told over and over again by doctors and friends that I do have social skill and read people rather well. By this point in my life, I know the world around me like a map, yet I still feel as though I exist outside of it, in a world which only I occupy. A world may yet exist which can accommodate people like me - perhaps it did in the past, but as of right now, it certainly doesn’t.

In both good and bad ways, I’ve spent most of my life trying to change ‘me.’ So long as I’m breathing, I’ll keep trying to better fit the circumstances of my life. What else can I do? But I think I’ve earned the right to make a little list:

Asking purely as a fantasy, what would have to change in a world I could live in comfortably?

1. Language. Contemporary language is a trafficked drug mule. It is almost impossible for most people to say what they mean, or to mean what they say. So many more people read and write than ever before in human history, yet it has never been more clear that the way in which most people speak or write is either sub-literate, or pseudo-literate. There are more English speakers in the world than ever, yet the result is that language is stretched on a rack. Most people carry with them a faux-populist insistence that every demotic (google the fucking word...) linguistic usage has to be accepted as worthy of dignified treatment, or there is a faux-intellectual insistence on accepting every piece of jargon as worthy of dignified study. The result is that if they so choose, there isn’t a single English-speaker in the world who can’t hide behind the bullshit which language allows us. There are an infinite number of ways to contort language, and the result is that both the public and private realms of interaction are corrupted in ways they needn’t be: politicians and corporations and clergy can affect ethical behavior without ever setting off the alarms of the people they control, while friends and family can lie all too easily to one another. Corrupt lawyers can parse laws into ever more microscopic evasions which can let anyone with money get away with murder, and intellectual frauds can create whole new fields of ‘study’ in the humanities which only study how language can be perverted to say absolutely nothing, and in the process ruin the curiosity (and sometimes the careers) of their smartest students, who eventually realize that nobody is interested in their field of study, nor should people be. The more meanings we accept to every word, the more elisions and evasions we allow. English may be the common tongue for the plurality of the world, but never has the gulf of how English is used separated you from your neighbor so clearly. Perhaps it was always like this, but it doesn’t have to be.

And because language is so contorted, nobody thinks to use it to speak their minds. No matter how much information we share about ourselves on the internet about what we do, there is preciously little content of substance about what we think. The thought that someone would keep a public diary in which he continually speaks his mind, and exposes his innermost existential questions with few aspirations to self-promotion, and absolutely none about presenting a ‘best self’ to the world, is anathema to virtually everyone else but me (and occasionally to me too). There are thousands of blogs on any given subject and sub-subject, read by small communities of like-minded specialists. But how many blogs are there which are about nothing more or less than what it’s like to be human? What does it matter if the internet is tracking you when you have so little to offer of interesting and universally appreciable content to track?

Furthermore, how can people even present a ‘best self’ to the world when there is increasing evidence that there is no ‘self’ to begin with? What does the ‘self’ even mean in an era on the cusp of of mass genetic manipulation, cloning, organ transplant, and personality-altering drugs. Each of us is many different selves, constantly warring with one another for domination. Like so many linguistic perversions, the “self” is long since proven to be a nonsense-concept, and there are no words for all the multiple identities which consciousness can produce at any given time.  The sooner the world realizes that each person has many different identities within their “selves,” the more perceptive and compassionate we all are capable of being to each “self” within each other.

Lastly, we live in an era that values concision. In this era of screens and the images they show, we’ve all apparently decided that we’re too long-winded - we use too many words, we talk too much, we make our lives too complicated when we can simplify them so easily by being more terse. The wrong words get us into trouble, and right words go unnoticed. Every writing program tells you the same thing: never use two words when one will do. But they never tell you the just-as-true opposite: never use one word when two are required. The only concept in the world that does not require nuance is the need for nuance. A picture may say a thousand words, but there’s no guarantee that those thousand words the picture says will be any less vapid. At least with a thousand written words, you might get some context.

For the first time since the Middle Ages, the linguistic gulfs between us grow greater. Every academic field has its own jargon, every region its own particular meanings for words and words for meanings, every social class its own dialect, and every field of interest its own inside information. So many new concepts, many of them beneficial , are created from such flexibility. But if we want to minimize misunderstandings around the world, then the world needs a common tongue. Not just a common language, but a language in which we’re all trained vigorously, in which the meaning of every word and clause can be both rigidly disciplined and free to be flexibly used to make the most difficult concepts simple.

(to be continued...)

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