Seeing is Believing

I remember vividly being in the Oberlin College library back in 1967 and seeing Marshall McLuhan's picture on the cover of Newsweek magazine, and at that moment my plans for my future crystalized, and I knew that I would work toward going to the University of Toronto to study with this oracle of the electronic age.  And so it passed.  After graduating Oberlin, and then two years at The Ohio State University graduate school to earn an M.A. in English, I moved to Toronto and studied English at University of Toronto's graduate school, taking McLuhan's "Media and Society" course as my outside elective.  The course would meet Monday evenings in McLuhan's "Centre for Culture and Technology," which was a converted garage behind St. Michael's College library and near Queens Park, and the seminars attracted all sorts of people, not merely enrolled students. 

For readers unfamiliar with the phenomenon of Marshall McLuhan, I suggest reading the following articles about him, to give some context to my memoire here:
http://www.cyberchimp.co.uk/research/testoftime.htm

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/saint.marshal_pr.html

At the Monday evening seminars, McLuhan would hold forth with his probes (they weren't exactly "theories"), and those with enough self-confidence would ask questions or offer comments.  He welcomed intelligent questions and comments, but he had no patience for cliche or sycophantic responses.  A visiting priest once spoke up about how much he appreciated McLuhan and concluded with, "Every day I learn something new, and tonight has been. . ."  Here McLuhan interrupted with, "Just another day," and then he quickly moved on to the next topic.  Faint souls would do well to keep their mouths shut in those seminars so as not to have their feelings hurt.  McLuhan was more interested in hearing new ideas than in suffering blather.  For my major presentation in that seminar, I chose to read aloud from Tom Wolfe's essay about McLuhan, "What If He's Right?" from The Pump House Gang, and then lead a discussion on it.  It was a good class, and McLuhan appreciated it.  A few years later, when the graduate English department wanted to terminate my Ph.D. candidacy due to a three-hour essay exam in Modern Literature, despite two years of course work with A's in English courses and a pass on the other two parts of the Ph.D. general exams, the written in Victorian Literature and the dreaded oral exam in Victorian, McLuhan championed my protest and blamed my "failure" on my having had a weak faculty adviser.  I even heard that he confided to a group of my classmates that I was too "intelligent" for that department, which, of course, I regard as the highest compliment I could have received.  The reference letter that he wrote for me gives evidence of that, and I persevered in getting the original after his passing:

In addition to being a brilliant scholar, teacher, and creative artist, Marshall McLuhan was also a kind and generous person, who contributed greatly to my life experience, as well as to the lives of many others.  I was able to use his ideas, not to mention his courage to pun, in my own high school teaching career.  I should add that his wife, Corinne, even visited my former wife in hospital at the birth of my oldest son Matthew.  I was also fortunate enough to be able to thank Marshall and Corinne after his stroke in the early 1980's, and show him how I was using his teachings in my own teaching.  I am extremely grateful for his being a major mentor in my young adulthood.

One of my favourite McLuhanisms involves how we tend to be biased in favour of the sense of sight over the other senses:  "seeing is believing" but "hearsay cannot be credible"  The sense of sight, he would point out, was the only sense that gives the illusion of connectivity; the others work on intervals.  We tend to be much more concerned with how we appear or look than with how we sound, etc.  He reminded us that the sense of sight can fool us; we're like the fish in water who don't know they're in water until they're taken out of it.  This brings me to the question of, "How can I prove that I was really present at the Monday night seminars?"  Two photos have emerged of a Monday night seminar from 1973, one spotted by my son Matthew in a slideshow in a lecture on architecture and the other from a University of Toronto Alumni Magazine feature on McLuhan.  You be the judge.  First, how I look now, forty years later:

 Next, the seminar photo from back then:

Next, a blowup of a person who might have been me:



Now, here's the other seminar photo:



And now here's the blowup from that photo:

Many of my relatives and friends are sure that this image is me, but others disagree.  I myself have come to believe that these blurs very well may be images of me forty years ago at a McLuhan seminar largely because of the attire and the slumped body language.  Please tell me what you think in the comments, and, if by any chance, you, and not I, are the blur, please correct my misinterpretation!

I'm looking forward to your comments.

Bullies, Bodyguards, and the Bully Pulpit

"Bullying" has received much media attention recently, particularly with CNN's Anderson Cooper's "Bullying:  It Stops Here" campaign, and rightly so.    http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/05/bullying-it-stops-here/?iref=obinsite  and  http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/11/video-the-battle-to-end-bullying/?hpt=ac_t2  The accounts of victimization are heartbreaking, and it's no surprise that some young people have been driven to suicide as a consequence of this social ostracism and ridicule.  This state of affairs is intolerable and unnecessary, particularly in a school context.  The "experts" speaking on Cooper's Town Hall program show how bullying is nothing new and that it takes place as a part of "social combat" for one's place on the social ladder (the pecking order?), but that the prestige that one gains from bullying is short lived and counterproductive.  Another feature of this phenomenon is that the roles of "bully" and "victim" tend to be interchangeable, with the same person playing both roles at different times.  Thus, today's victim may become tomorrow's bully, and vice versa.

How can bullying be prevented?  One suggested remedy is to create "a culture of tolerance" wherein bystanders would not stand idly by tolerating incidents of bullying.  The community would agree to abide by the golden rule of "do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you."  The school community would be educated through "sensitivity training" on how painful being bullied can be, and the interveners or peacemakers would be honoured as praiseworthy.  This makes sense to me.

The popular culture has given us movies that seem to teach the moral of "stand up to bullies because they are essentially cowards and, if challenged, will collapse like a house of cards."  Thus, the prospective victim must have self-confidence, courage, and skills in fighting, or he/she must procure a threatening bodyguard.  Two of my favourite Hollywood movies that address bullying are "My Bodyguard" and more recently "Drillbit Taylor," which actually alludes back to the earlier movie.  http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/my_bodyguard/ and http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/drillbit_taylor/ and http://www.grouchoreviews.com/reviews/3130.  On a personal level, I enjoyed the film "Mr. Woodcock," since the gym teacher is the bully, and my own worst memories of being bullied in school were from being in gym class in Ohio from both teacher and kids because I was overweight.  Since that time, I've always tried to avoid gym class-like settings!  http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mr_woodcock/  Unfortunately, the victim in this film realizes in adulthood that the bullying by Mr. Woodcock actually did him a favour by preparing him for manhood rather than that bullying is shameful and should not take place.  These three Hollywood movies are intended as light comedy, not as social analysis, but they do express a social concern with bullying as a topic.

The problems of bullying in school settings take on a different dimension when adults do not believe that bullying should be viewed as a problem.  Anderson Cooper's Town Hall program discusses a school board refusing to allow anti-bullying education on "religious" grounds.  Some members of that Southern so-called "conservative" community see attempts to prevent bullying as a political infringement on their beliefs.  And how do concerned parents protect their children when possible perpetrators of international bullying are treated with impunity?  Doesn't a President have at his/her disposal the "Bully Pulpit"?  Is he/she a role model? http://ca.news.yahoo.com/canada-arrest-george-w-bush-visits-next-week-145732842.html
And to "blame the other guy" doesn't address the fact that war crimes, such as torture, were committed, if there really is such a thing as International Law.  I guess that the Nuremberg Trials have been long forgotten.  Or perhaps, there's a "double standard" that we seem to live with and believe we're powerless to change.  At this level, of adults, the problem becomes a political issue.


But whatever the bullying problems beyond our reach, if you are a victim of bullying, or know anyone who is, or are depressed or suicidal, I urge you to visit the "Your Life Counts" website, which provides excellent help and resources.  http://www.yourlifecounts.org  I thank my friend John Housser for informing me about this encouraging initiative.

Since I believe in the power of music and song, I'd like to conclude this blog with two music links, the first dealing with the pain of victimization and the second an uplifting call to life and love.  Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the group Joy Division eventually committed suicide, and his sing "Insight" communicates his pain: http://youtu.be/0WxutVmQ8_s
On the other hand, Greg Laswell in his song "Comes and Goes (in waves)" praises the strugglers and helpers: http://youtu.be/pEFxfVyz4Uc

So what do you think?  I welcome your comments. 

Later.

"A Fish Doesn't Know. . ."

"A fish doesn't know it's in water until you take it out of the water" was a favourite saying of the late Marshall McLuhan, my former teacher and mentor.  He used it to point out that when we're totally involved in an environment, we cannot see, or understand it objectively.  McLuhan used to say that it's like asking a drowning man what he thinks of Richard Nixon; the drowning man is too busy trying to stay afloat to worry about a politician.  McLuhan used this saying as a metaphor for the advantage Canada has in trying to understand the U.S.  The Americans, McLuhan would say, were too busy being totally involved to really understand what was happening to them, while the Canadians had the advantage of an objective distance from the turmoil and thus could understand the phenomenon more clearly.

The "fish" saying came to mind the other night when my friend Ali phoned and asked for my opinion on an assignment his teenage daughter Taslima had.  I said sure, and he put Taslima on the phone, and she explained the assignment.  The class was studying the life of Tommy Douglas, the founder of the CCF party (later to become the NDP) and the father of Canada's health care system.  The teacher had assigned the students to find a website about Tommy Douglas and then to write a critique of the website showing its strengths and its limitations.  Taslima found a website written by a former NDP premier of British Columbia and could find strengths but not limitations.  In fact, what was meant by "limitations"?  I saw immediately that the problem was that she, the writer of the website, her father, and myself all agreed with Tommy Douglas' politics, so we were blind to "limitations" of the website, like the fish in water.  I suggested that she do a search of the words "Tommy+Douglas+critic" and see what those who disagree with the ideas of Douglas have to say, and then compare the two sites.  We only know what something is, by comparing it to what it is not.

So that's my story.  A fish tale?  I urged Ali to join my blog.  Do you think he will?  Maybe he'll think there's something fishy about it.