yonmei

yonmei @ 03:20 pm: In which Orson Scott Card indulges every conservative fantasy
Well, not quite every conservative fantasy. Not yet. Just the ones about... dah-dah-dah-dum... college.

In this chapter, OSC explains that all of the conservative fantasies about what it's like to attend one of those bastions of "liberal bigotry" are true.

"Everybody compares America to Rome," said Averell Torrent to the graduate students seated around the table. "But they compare the wrong thing. It's always, 'America is going to fall, just like Rome.' We should be so lucky! Let's fall just like Rome did -- after five hundred years of world domination!" Torrent smiled maliciously.

I suspect the Chapter One we read was written in a terrible hurry and bolted on, and that this was meant to be the opening paragraph of the novel. I think this because it's a much better opening paragraph than the one for C1, which is The team of four Americans had been in the village for three months. Their mission was to build trust until they could acquire accurate information about the activities of a nearby warlord believed to be harboring some operatives of Al Qaeda. That would be an attention-grabber if you were a bored newt.

I note, however, that "five hundred years of world domination" is an absurdly simplistic way to describe the history of Rome. But I don't think OSC is being sarcastic in ascribing this to Torrent: I think he's just assuming his readers will know no better.

Reuben (carefully re-introduced to us as "Major Reuben Malich", just so we know) takes notes in Farsi (usually): so that none of the others will know what he's writing.

The obsessiveness of this is kind of stunning. To begin with, the obsessiveness of assuming that other people will want to read what he's writing. Especially when what he's writing are these kind of notes: America's purpose is not to dominate anything. We don't want to be Rome.

We're told about Torrent that he's only a little older than most of his graduate students, but that "there was no doubt of his authority" because he had written a doctoral dissertation that had become "the cover story of all the political and international journals". (We're not told, at least not in Chapter Two, what this doctoral dissertation was about, or how it became a cover story in all those journals.) Oh, and everyone at the table, aside from Malich, is an atheist:
"Only Malich was older than Torrent; only Malich was not confused about the difference between Torrent and God. Then again, only Malich actually believed in God, so the others could be forgiven their confusion of the two."

Torrent appears to be trying to start a discussion, but no one wants to be the first to speak, which is no wonder, because it turns out that Torrent gives unfriendly nicknames to his graduate students: he addresses Malich as "Soldier Boy", and asks his opinion as part of "America's legions".

Let's leave aside the really godawful idea that a bunch of graduate students would be sitting around having a seminar about whether or not America can be compared to the Roman Empire. This reads like the writing of someone who has no notion what professors talk like to their graduate students, or what a graduate student seminar might sound like, but has a vague idea that professors talk about intellectual stuff like Romans and suchlike. (Had Orson Scott Card wanted to write a realistic scene that took place in a graduate student's seminar, he could probably have asked to sit in on one. I've sat in on a seminar as the guest of one of the students: I don't doubt Card could have wangled an invite or several if he'd wanted to be realistic.)

You wouldn't have a graduate seminar course on "the Roman Empire". You just wouldn't: it's too damned big a topic.

Card's novel is called Empire. The seminar topic has been chosen to let the readers know, as anvilliciously as possible, what "Empire" Card is going to write about, by casting back to the European empire that Card can rely on his readers having vaguely heard of.

I know it's a popular meme among conservatives that "lib'rul" professors don't respect right-wing students. I imagine it is particularly popular among young right-wingers who prefer to believe that their bad work is marked down not because it's bad but because it expresses "forbidden ideas".

But this is just beyond a joke:

A professor does not address a graduate student by nickname during a seminar, unless the seminar is proceeding on a basis where everyone is talking to each other in a friendly/informal way, and the nickname is one that the student accepts as their own name. A professor does not invent a nickname for one of their students and address them by that name during a seminar or a class or a private face-to-face tutorial or at any other time where they're interacting as professor and student. A professor who did this habitually would shortly find themselves up in front of a disciplinary committee. A professor at work does not behave as rudely and disrespectfully to students as - for example - George W. Bush habitually does. That's what this nicknaming/disrespect reminds me of: Bush's casual nicknaming/disrespect of his subordinates.

Anyway: "Reuben refused to let the implied taunting get to him." and thinks: "Be calm in the face of the enemy. If he is an enemy."

Because Reuben, as we know from C1, is just that cool. He can handle firefights in Afghanistan. He can handle taunting professors in New Jersey. He moves like a tiger, shoots like an Olympic marksman, and mourns like Laurence Olivier. And gosh, the subtlety: is Torrent the enemy? Or isn't he?

Reuben's response is the kind of graduate-level answer every professor hopes for:
"I was hoping you'd answer that one, sir. Since that's the topic of the entire course."

Yeah. Because when professors ask leading questions at graduate seminars (evem ones dealing with the massive/improbable/massively-improbable topic of "America and the Roman Empire"), they want to hear a graduate student respond "You tell me."

At this point, Torrent should have turned his attention to the other students, got them to come up with answers to this question, what they'd been thinking about since they signed up for the course, maybe got them to discuss areas the seminar might focus on. Later, in decent privacy, Torrent would have said to this student who wants to attend a graduate-level seminar: "All the more reason why you should already have thought of some possible answers. Are you telling me you haven't thought of any?" - and, depending on Malich's reply, might have invited him to depart the seminar, since if he hadn't thought of any possible answers, he obviously wasn't ready to attend it. He doesn't, though. He says it right there and then to Malich.

It turns out that Malich had been thinking of answers to that question "ever since he set his sights on a military career" (which, we're supposed to believe, was in 7th grade: American students learn about the Roman Empire in 7th grade?) but he's not about to share his ideas with his fellow students at a seminar. His idea of learning is all one way. Instead of responding to the question; "he said nothing, simply regarding Torrent with a steady gaze that showed nothing, not even defiance, and certainly not hostility." (Orson Scott Card editorially drools that "In the modern American classroom, a soldier's battle face was a look of perfect tranquility.")

I suppose one could argue that this is a fair response by a student to a professor who has just used an intended-to-be-humiliating nickname. But apparently we're supposed to assume that this "taunting" is SOP for lib'rul professors with right-wing students, and Malich is just going to take it in his tiger-like stride.


More later. Ugh.