Cursed Cursive

Several years ago I briefly dated a man with young children. Anybody who knows me can well imagine why that relationship did not last more than a few weeks. I feel about children the way Republicans feel about taxes. They might be necessary for the continuation of society, but whatever. That, though, is not the point of this post. What did stick with me from that dating experience was that he once mentioned that his daughter was not learning cursive writing in school. After all, he argued, they do everything on the computer now anyway. Why would they need such an antiquated skill? Living in the shadow of Decaying Midwestern Urban Center, I figured that this astounding news was just another local failing in an already pretty dismal school system. The antipathy that the rest of the nation feels for this region had now cost students the very ability to communicate on paper! Not only do we not deserve jobs or a well-maintained infrastructure, but it appeared that we also shouldn’t be able to jot down a grocery list with speed! It always feels good to have righteous indignation about the nation’s uncaring attitude toward the industrial Midwest.

The past year of teaching, however, revealed that this was no local anomaly. You see I taught the U.S. History survey for the first time in many years. Consider it the jury duty of the history professorate. Since I do my best to give even freshman students an idea of what professionals historians actual do, I often assign some significant amount of writing. I began to notice that students took an unusually long time to complete even the most basic in-class essay. Even a paragraph took what seemed like a century. Then I observed that each of them always submitted about a page of neatly block-printed prose. Each letter of each word seemed like it had been crafted with more attention than John Hancock’s signature on a forged ship’s manifesto. Well, if John Hancock had never learned cursive writing. It brought me back to what the former boyfriend had mentioned about his own children. Had we reached the point where students no longer even knew how to write cursive? Little did I know it was deeper than that.



It really did not cross my mind again for another several weeks. In the meantime, I had assigned a document reader of historical sources entitled American History Firsthand: Working with Primary Sources. This choice proved imperfect to be sure. After all, this careful collection of materials lacked a single document from any Latina/o – ever. Apparently the editors imagined that no such people existed in this country despite the fact that they are now the largest minority population. But I digress.

I selected this particular reader, despite its implicit anti-Latino bias, because of what it did do: mixing popular culture, visual, and political documents in one binding. It also reproduced those documents as closely as they might have appeared in an actual archive. This, I thought, simulated the work of actual historians without having to march all my students to an actual archive. After all, the idea of 170 students descending on a manuscript collection would make any archivist sweat more than Rick Santorum in a gay sauna.



The students in this class performed quite well and showed that they had smart and savvy skills. One day, though, when it came time to discuss a series of letters in the reader, they became oddly silent. After using up the usual bag of tricks to try and promote conversation, I asked them what was the deal? With some hemming and hawing, a lone brave student admitted that he couldn’t read the documents because they were in cursive. The rest of the students, happy that he had released the shameful truth, all agreed that the letters were unfathomable. This blew my mind. I mean, it was one thing to have never mastered writing cursive, but reading it was now out of the question? To be clear, too, I did not assign colonial-era documents written with the fluff and frills of old English. That mess could screw anybody up with all those "f's" that are really "s's". No, no. These were something written in the twentieth century with a clear and simple penmanship. I became curious and asked if they learned any cursive at all. They acknowledged that they spent a few days or so on it back in grade school. It was enough to learn a signature, but otherwise, why bother? They could type whatever they needed.



I suppose that there is a logic in the demise of cursive. When was the last time any of us wrote an actual letter to somebody? Anything longer than a sticky note is generally done on a computer. Yet, I can’t explain my unease that cursive is leaving the world.

It is peculiar that I should think such a thing since I have actually always struggled with my penmanship. In grade school I had only one Achilles heel to an otherwise spotless academic record. After all, I played well with others, never ran with scissors, and only occasionally ate library paste. Yet, my report card always listed a “carrottop” for handwriting. For those who did not attend Albuquerque Public Schools, a carrottop was this symbol: ^. It basically meant a “D”, but apparently educational theory in the 1980s suggested letter grades would be too demeaning to a third grader. A carrottop must have sounded so much more pleasant. It’s something you would give Peter Rabbit on his report card. Well, if Peter Rabbit’s future education hung precariously by a thread because he appeared functionally illiterate.

Forever after that point teachers would usually have only one complaint about my school work: “The boy’s handwriting is so messy and small that I almost went blind trying to read it.” It would not be until my freshman year in college that my handwriting improved dramatically. Oddly enough, it was a semester of Russian that turned things around quite a bit. While I can do nothing in that language other than ask directions to the Bolshoi theater, attempting to learn Russian had an odd side effect of transforming my penmanship. Having to learn an entirely new script meant that I also indirectly relearned how to write in cursive in English. This is not to say that I now write in calligraphy (I still field many complaints about my writing), but it is a vast improvement.



This peculiar knowledge about writing cursive puts an odd generational divide between my students and me. For instance, I will have to remember when I grade their papers to block print my comments. Oh, look at me, thinking they would actually read my comments on their papers! Silly, optimistic, GayProf. Nonetheless, it feels quite weird to have such a big gap between them and me. I am not that much older.

True, there are many other things that I do that would seem totally anachronistic to them as well. I proudly drive a car with a manual transmission – Anything else really isn’t really driving. I grill only with charcoal – Anything else isn’t barbequing, it’s just cooking outside. I still pay almost all my bills with actual checks – Anything else seems like a one-way path to identity theft. I therefore long ago accepted that I fell far behind in the social/technological world of my students. I would know if I was tweeting, right?

So it makes me a bit sad to think cursive is at as great a risk as Lindsay Lohan is for a relapse. If you remember this blog then you already know that I am more than a bit inclined to nostalgia. This morning’s coffee has already become a treasured bittersweet memory of something now gone.



The loss of cursive, though, really leaves me blue. It only speeds us even faster to becoming a cyborg nation. As much as I struggled with cursive, I do remember that learning it felt like a rite of passage on the way to adulthood. My mother always had to translate the notes or birthday cards that my grandparents sent in the mysterious scroll. Learning to write (even feebly) in the same manner felt the same as breaking the code of the Rosetta Stone to my nine-year old self. Now it appears that later generations will find the code forever locked to them.

Never Feed Crazy Trolls

Just because I have been away from my little bloggy doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been cursed with the trolls. Alas, these trolls don’t even provide anything useful, like spinning straw into gold or keeping bridges safe with enigmatic riddle-telling.

For whatever reason, these trolls have convinced themselves that I was deeply involved in discussions about the Duke LaCrosse Team in 2006. For those who don’t remember (or lived under a rock or in a cave with no television reception), the case centered on accusations by an African-American woman (who the team hired to strip for them) that she had been sexually assaulted by the mostly white team. After fifteen months, the students were exonerated and the district attorney of Durham, North Carolina, Michael Nifong, had been disbarred.

Investigations revealed that the police seemingly attained the accusations while the witness was under pressure; the district attorney suppressed evidence (and apparently failed to ever interview the witness himself); and the Duke campus erupted in some serious displays of bad judgment. During those long fifteen months, the media (including bloggers across the political spectrum) seized on the case as a means to debate racism, sexism, sexual violence, and economic privilege. To be certain, many of those people stepped over the students' basic rights and access to justice.

At the time, though, I wrote nothing on this blog about the case. For starters, it just isn’t the type of story that I imagine as appropriate at CoG. Why? Well, first, I try to keep up the pretense of the few journalistic ethics that I learned from high school. As I remember from my time in room A-22, assertions of guilt of an accused individual before a jury-of-their peers declares hir guilty is a big no-no (This, of course, doesn’t mean that you aren’t allowed to write about such cases or speculate about their larger implications. Free speech is, well, free. It does mean, however, that one must always assume innocence and write about “alleged murders," or the “individual accused of robbery,” etc. rather than “the murder” or “the highway man”).

Second, I just don’t think that it is in good taste to write about accusations of rape in a blog whose distinctive features are campy comic books and jokes about stalking celebrities. While I am happy to point out racism, sexism, and homophobia in the media, I usually stay clear of stories about specific people who are in horrific circumstances.

Finally, as a historian, I much prefer to write about the dead and buried (or, even better, the imaginary). Everything is so much more settled that way. Current events allow too many opportunities to be wrong and, as best as I remember (and that was a long time ago (and I concede I might have made mistakes that I don’t know about (I am only human and we are talking about something almost two years ago))), I did think that there were a substantial number of things that we didn’t know about this case (despite the unending press coverage).



Since I didn’t blog about it at all, and rarely commented on other blogs that did, I was somewhat surprised that individuals, like my new friend Joey7777, started showing up at CoG and demanding that I “take responsibility for my part in the Duke Case.” Hey, if people really want to know what I think about the Duke Case, who am I to deprive them?

Let me be clear: I have no problem apologizing if I implicitly or explicitly stated the guilt of the Duke students before they had a fair trial on some other blog's comments. Such actions are, indeed, unethical and contribute to the failures of the justice system. That is not something that I want to do intentionally or unintentionally. Nonetheless, I never wrote an entry on the case here or on any other blog.

I don't have a problem with right-wing bloggers forcing left-wing bloggers to eat crow when they have crossed a line and been caught at it. That is a healthy part of free speech (concerns about free speech, I suspect, is not really involved in these accusations, which I will discuss in a moment).

Too many leftist bloggers did cross the line and write about the students as guilty without first-hand knowledge of the case. We can, of course, understand why they might have been inclined to do so. This nation’s history is riddled with cases where women, especially women of color, have been deprived of justice when they have been sexually assaulted. The media also made the case into something that had to be debated. Nonetheless, we all have to be vigilant in understanding how each case develops and remembering that every individual is guaranteed some basic rights, including the presumption of innocence.

The mishandling of the Duke Case could have provided real opportunities for people who consider themselves on the right or conservative to take a moral high ground. Had they desired, they could have become leaders by building coalitions with the left to solve common problems. Without a doubt, the Duke Case exposed that many U.S. police departments and district attorney’s offices are inadequate and geared to politics rather than justice. Those are issues we all should be concerned about, regardless of our political leanings.

It also revealed that the media was not at all an agent of justice, but rather sought to capitalize on the furor around the case for their own rewards. For this and many other reasons, I no longer think that it is valid to debate whether the media has a “conservative” or a “liberal” bias. Such debates only maintain that status quo, making us part of the “info-tainmaint” that has replaced actual news in this nation. We all, on the right and left, need to recognize that the media in this nation, composed of profit-driven mega-corporations, is not serving anybody’s interests in this society.



Alas, though, most people on the right passed on such opportunities for real change. Instead, they have decided to use the Duke case as a means to distract, or even to try to silence and intimidate people. Indeed, they don’t bother with details like whether I really wrote about the Duke Case on this blog or not. Instead, they have presumed that I must have done so because of their own assumptions about who they imagine I am as a person. I have constantly pointed out to my new buddy Joey7777, for instance, that I never had an entry on this topic, but that did not satisfy him.

After many empty statements lacking any real evidence about my supposed deep investment in this case and support of the District Attorney (whose name I had to actually look up), the only thing that he could point to was a comment by me that I allegedly wrote on Angry Black Bitch. After reviewing the past files on the topic on her blog (which, by the way, maintained its own strict journalistic standards when talking about the accused players as far as I can tell), I found only one statement from me on the topic (and I spent most of it discussing the media coverage rather than the “alleged rapists”). Why bother with little things like how much I wrote when you can just make shit up because you think it must be true anyway? Joey7777 has written much more about my supposed writings on the case than I ever actually wrote myself. The Alanis-Morisette-level of irony of making facile accusations about a case centered on false accusations seems to be lost on Joey7777 (Who has time for irony when you are certain that you are right?). Perhaps his next step will be to falsify some entries under my name.

I am not interested in these accusations because of what they say or don’t say about me and my supposed culpability in the case. Trust me, this post’s mere subject is likely to generate an unending rant of hate mail and hasty comments (Thank the goddess this blog is almost dead). I try to keep a sense of humor about such things. To paraphrase the immortal words of Kylie Minogue: Regardless of the hand that is dealt, the joker is always smiling in every deck of cards.



Instead, I am interested in how individuals like Joey7777 are attempting to use the Duke Case to simply get people on the left to shut up while pretending like they care about "justice."

Indeed, some are even deploying a guilty-by-association strategy. Such things can be seen in a discussion in another blog about gays and race (one that I don’t normally read, but there was mention of me, so I was vain enough to look it up). To be honest, in that comment section, I would say neither the left nor the right were really engaged in a productive discussion. However, a telling moment came when somebody dismissed all potential participation by one blogger by stating:

“YOU shouldn't be criticizing anyone if you're friends with that GayProf comic book doofus. Referring to the Duke case, again: Gay Prof was all over the place saying the guys were guilty and how it represented "racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, misogyny…blah blah…" (all the b.s. these academics play around with), and then when the guys turned out innocent GayProf skulked away and hid from the story. So don't go knocking other guys if you're buds with that racist weasel.”

Aren’t they sweet and ever so respectful? That's Professor Comic Book Weasel to you.

We can again set aside the fact that I did not actually blog about the case and rarely even commented on other blogger’s posts about the case (hardly constituting me writing about it “all over the place”). Instead , there is a telling rhetorical strategy at play here. According to this person, if you even knew somebody who once blogged about the case (or, in this instance, seemed like they might have blogged about the case), you are apparently forever robbed from talking about race, racism, shaking up the status quo, or possibly saying anything ever again. Hmm, that's a free society in the making.

My special buddy Joey7777 fancies himself as “doing his part not to let academic sneaks and bullies get away with trying to hurt innocent people.” That’s cool with me. We/I make lots of mistakes. He can look forward to pointing out each and every one if he so desires. It's unlikely that I will respond. He has also invited me to e-mail him. I think I'll pass on that, too.

I would suggest, though, that if he was really invested in questions about social justice in this nation that he could focus his efforts on people and circumstances that matter a lot more than a random prof with a blog and a Wonder-Woman kink. He might, for instance, take an interest in the racial and economic disparity that exists in our prison system. There are many innocent people who did not have the resources that permitted the Duke students to fight the system.

Or he might consider what it means that the International Court of Justice has ruled that the U.S. has violated the rights of over fifty Mexican nationals currently on death row under the terms of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In August of the past year, a ruling from the ICJ concluded that Texas authorities had mishandled one of those death-penalty cases resulting in a prisoner being deprived his basic rights, thus necessitating a stay of execution. The state of Texas ignored both the ICJ ruling and appeals from the UN and Mexico City, moving ahead with his murder. Every comment written here could be time spent saving people's lives and reforming our justice system. To each his own, though.



Indeed, my beloved trolls would do well to follow the statements of one of the actual Duke students involved in the case. In a statement to the press, this student reminded us that it was their status and access to financial resources that helped them to attain their release. “This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed,” he said, “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves. So rather than relying on disparaging stereotypes and creating political and racial conflicts, all of us need to take a step back from this case and learn from it.” I tend to agree.

In the meantime, I wonder how long before GayProf is linked to the Weather Underground. . .