Waking up from the Dream

Rude awakenings, when sleepers awake from a long dream they are often angry,

This happened to the PSU students who rioted after Paterno was fired.  They were distressed that his exit was swift and disgraceful, but they were also more broadly angry that the football myth had been betrayed from within.  They attacked the messenger, a media truck, --the medium that had fed them the illusion was now blamed for its demise.  They were not initially angry about Sandusky’s crimes, rather they were upset that their “college experience” had been spoiled.

“Awakening as a graduated process that goes on in the life of the individual as in that of a generation.  Sleep is its initial stage.  A generation’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams.” 

 --Walter Benjamin, note on the Arcades Project

By no means is this desire to keep dreaming confined to students or the young.  This week’s Time magazine cover shows directly how American readers generally are encouraged to worry about staying in their dreamy beds rather than listening to the rumbling outside.

Pederasty and Football

Just because you don’t follow football much and have been to only one game since you got here, doesn’t get you off the hook.  There is the horror at reading the wrenching details of crimes committed where you work.  Sorrow for the children put through awful misery.  That’s enough to send you into despair, without the mythic grandstanding that sports fandom creates.  You work at a place, you have to take responsibility for the bad things that happen there, even if you had nothing to do with them.  Yet that does not mean you have to accept collective guilt either.  One way to negotiate the distance between individual and group guilt is through critique.  So here goes.

Too much about the response to the pederasty reported at Penn State has revolved around the collective “we.”  Even the remorseful public gestures for the victims have the feel of one giant narcissistic ego convulsively seeking redemption.  When the real problem is the collective “we” in the first place.  We should not be such a “we.”   We should be individuals pursuing an education, not some vast horde chanting in unison.

The big hype surrounding the football program is what got those boys into the locker room with an old pervert in the first place.  They were in awe of the players and coach, so much so that they could be lured into awful situations. 

It is belief in the goodness and power of football that now leaves fans and players unable to fathom what happened.  Just look at the stammering of ex-football players, incapable of explaining how Sandusky could do such terrible things.  Blind faith is what leads to such speechless incoherence and rage.

The collective shock that Penn State has gone through this last week must lead to more critical thinking, to a complete re-evaluation of the college sports machine.  We cannot cure or undo the crimes by coming up with one giant collective act of atonement.  The crimes were a result of the disjuncture between our collective image and the terrible interests of one person.  The Sandusky case shows how the myth can be used for sick personal interests regardless whether they contradict the public image.  The collective “we” cannot solve the crime, nor prevent some future crime.  Individuals need to act on their own in defiance of what is good for the program.  They have to stop thinking for the team and instead think for themselves.  For as everyone who has seen the time line published in the papers, everyone who has read the one mother’s anguish that no one stepped into stop the rapes, it is perfectly clear that it was the breakdown of such personal moral decision making that caused the crimes to go on unabated.

Instead of acting as a group, we have to think for ourselves and abandon the Dionysian frenzy that sweeps across every weekend.   We have to dismantle the collective myth of football, understand that the game is an entertainment, rather than a higher calling.  Otherwise, more rot and corruption, more provincial self-congratulation at our own awesomeness will lead to some further yet unimagined abuse.  A university is a collection of individuals thinking rationally and critically for themselves—that is the definition of Enlightenment which, in the end, is not a team sport.

Goethe in Love

The cinematic event of the decade approaches.  Who can fathom the mixed emotions, the excitement, the worry--all evoked by this new film, a new sexy cinematic adaptation of Die Leiden des jungen Goethes.  Run to the movie theater now!  You will be showing this film to your students for years to come.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/younggoetheinlove/

Germany 1772 - the young and tumultuous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) aspires to be a poet; but after failing his law exams, he is sent by his father (Henry Huebchen) to a sleepy provincial court to mend his ways. Unsure of his talent and eager to prove himself, Goethe soon wins the praise and friendship of his superior Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu). But then Lotte (Miriam Stein) enters his life and nothing is the same as before. However, the young lovers are unaware that her father has already promised Lotte's hand to another man. Director Phillip Stoelzl returns to the very wellspring of Romanticism - Goethe's loosely autobiographical masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther - and conjures up a beguiling and refreshingly innocent period romance.