The Aggie Librarian hasn’t felt much like writing lately, but I have been kicking around in my head an idea for this column for some time now. What prompted me to start writing was, in part, finishing Michael Parenti’s excellent book The Assassination of Julius Caesar : A People’s History of Ancient Rome. It is a long overdue re-examination of Roman history, wresting it from gentleman Classicists down through the ages and taking a critical perspective informed by Parenti’s unique brand of analysis. It calls into question self-serving aristocratic, ostensibly Republican partisans’s self-aggrandizing, self-flattering accounts of the events leading up to and following the assassination of Julius Caesar. Most importantly of all, it stresses that Ancient History is, well, not so ancient after all. In other words, some of the issues critical in the time of the Ancient Romans are still with us today. Some of the outlandish statements Parenti quotes from the likes of Cicero and Cato, for example, sound uncomfortably close to contemporary Bush administration talking points. As Pierce Brosnan, in the role of James Bond, once commented: “Governments change, the lies stay the same.”
Julius Caesar, in Parenti’s analysis, emerges as a populist leader, struggling against aristocratic privilege and avarice to ameliorate the lives and working conditions of Roman commoners and slaves, and for this he is condemned as a demagogue, an autocrat, and a usurper of “Republican liberty”...in similar fashion the way Louisiana Governor (and later Senator) Huey P. Long was later demonized in American politics, or Salvador Allende in Chile.
I had been thinking long and hard about the nature of a college education, how my happiest years by far have been those carefree years when I was an undergraduate student and later graduate student, both at Rice and my first on-campus semester at UNT when I was starting library school. I make no secret of the fact that I like to drink beer. A lot. I have learned to self-moderate over the years and cut myself off to stay safe if I haven’t secured alternate transportation to-and-from my favorite watering holes. What I loved about college was that I always lived on campus, always could eat in the campus dining facilities cheaply, and lived always within stumbling distance of some pretty interesting bars and other hangouts. Now, you may ask yourself what the hell has this to do with Julius Caesar and Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, anyway? And it’s a valid question, so hear me out. When you examine the lives of the ancient philosophers, thinkers, orators, historians, and political theorists…and not just in Ancient Greece and Rome, but their example is the most familiar to us…you see mostly well-to-do gentlemen with lots of leisure time on their hands, and servants to do the dirty work for them. Men who have plenty of time to lounge about consuming wine and engaging in thoughtful conversation with other men (and rarely, women). What I’m trying to connect here is that the atmosphere of the contemporary college education, especially at the graduate level, tries, albeit imperfectly, to re-create, as closely as possible, the very same material conditions enjoyed by the ancient philosophers and writers. Free from undue material want, free from the need to labor long hours using one’s bare hands, enough free time to socialize, to read, and to think profound thoughts (and plenty of pedestrian thoughts as well). And when you think about it, the ruling classes have fought hard throughout the centuries, to deny these simple pleasures, and the time to think for oneself, to the toiling masses, who, through resistance and struggle, have managed to win for themselves things like…weekends, the 8-hour day, public transportation, etc. What was previously granted from on high by the church…festivals, holidays (holy – days), had to be won back, tooth and nail, by the people themselves.
Like the majority of aristocrats, actually, this free-time is usually squandered fruitlessly by the masses as well, not put to creative use to make something of lasting value. Television is far more effective a distraction and a sedative than all the Roman bread and circuses, or the Holy Church. But at least the potential is there, and it is those material conditions which create the fertile ground for the mind to grow in, which is why we structure residential graduate school student life the way that we do currently. It doesn’t always take, for some people, and some schools hyper-exploit their graduate students to such a degree that it inhibits their ability to effectively perform individual research. Heavy heavy teaching loads are not conducive to an effective graduate school education.
Unlike the Roman aristocrats, however, contemporary graduate student life, enjoyable as it is, does come to an end eventually, and for the majority of us who have managed to forestall the “real world” for a time, the drudgery of the working life comes as something of a rude shock indeed. The happy few that can become professors, particularly in the natural sciences and useful arts, are among the luckiest people in our society. An even smaller select few become successful professors in the humanities, while the vast majority that somehow remain in academia and don’t get discouraged altogether remain on as hyper-exploited college instructors with no hope of tenure, even materially worse off than the average public school teacher.
It’s very hard to keep an intellectual life going when you work 10+ hours a day, come home tired, exhausted. Seems at times there’s barely any time to read, barely any time to stop and have a beer or two after work, what have you. I’m struggling with that now. My schedule recently changed from 4 days on, 3 days off, working 9.5 hrs a day with a ½ hour lunch to working a 5-days on, 2 days off MTWRF schedule—ostensibly from 6:30am to 2:30pm. Sounds sweet to some, but in actual practice, I rarely leave the office on time, due to the case workflow. My old schedule was more realistic as regards day shift case work-flow. So it ends up I’m working a lot more over time on my new schedule, with a good deal less free time. More money, I guess, but I’d rather have the leisure time back. And it’s not like it’s library work, either.
I am working hard to get back into the library game. I’m starting to apply to selected positions again. I know my getting shit-canned by TAMUG is a black mark on my employment record, but I’m doing the best I can to massage that without overtly lying. I think the new cover letter I wrote was actually pretty good. But I know it’s going to be a long road of rejection after rejection ahead of me until I maybe get a new library position. If Peak oil, expanding Middle East war, and dollar-collapse don’t wreck the economy first. I helped mom move some plants from pots to the ground today this morning. My first step towards learning how to be a gardener. They were flowering plants, not food plants, but when the season changes and Texas enters the late growing season, I plan to be out there growing spinach and other crops. I anticipate the need to re-localize the economy as much as possible the rest of the 21st century and beyond. Growing one’s own food will become a necessity again, for many many Americans. Most of us have lost the art of knowing how to preserve and self-can foods, etc. It’s a survival skill that is going to become painfully relevant again. Sugar Land is not the ideal place to live—no suburb is—but it will have to do for now until maybe, perhaps, I could find a place to live independently in rural Missouri somewhere, not far from a big town like Farmington, but far enough in the country to have some elbow room, to raise food crops, and do some recreational shooting & hunting. Part of the problem with planning for a potential collapse of civilization as we know it, is that the job of Librarian is very much connected to the structure of industrial civilization. Whether or not even literacy would survive a post-industrial collapse is an open question, much less whether libraries as we know them would make it. Like I’ve said before, don’t throw away those old Library Science textbooks on how to do 3x5 card catalogs JUST yet…and save old manual typewriters (not electric), too--’cause we just might need them again if we have to go back to all-local, all-original cataloging. Maybe that sounds like crazy-talk to some, but if you take the implications of Peak oil seriously, then that could very well be in the cards for us—pardon the pun. If the networks go down, the OPACs will go down, and all those books on the shelf will have to be manually re-cataloged, if people have any good sense or foresight when that time comes….not if, mind you, but when. I hope not in our lifetimes, but I’m afraid that’s wishful thinking on my part.
I went back to the gun range yesterday (Sunday) to squeeze off several hundred rounds of .22 LR ammunition through my Ruger Mark II target pistol and my Rossi pump-action rifle which is a cheap Brazilian knock-off of the Winchester Model 64. It’s an okay rifle, but it tends to jam at least once nearly every outing, which is getting tiresome. It jammed twice today. First time I got the range officer’s help to clear the jam; Second time I managed to clear it myself. With all the trouble this gun has given me over the years, I’d have been better off purchasing either a Henry Arms levergun, a bolt-action .22 LR, or else a .22 LR tube-fed semi-automatic like my paternal grandpa’s gun. Pa’s gun was always a beaut’, and it never misfired once in all my years of shooting it since his death and my coming of age. It now belongs to my Uncle Art, I assume. I’m getting better with my shooting, especially with the Ruger Mk II at 15 yards, which is the maximum target distance on the pistol range. I need to move up to 25 yards and beyond for rifle fire. I need to practice bench-rest rifle fire from a sitting position…certainly more stable than offhanded shooting. I also find myself wishing the rifle overall were longer…it feels like a kid’s gun in my hands and against my shoulder; the slide action moreover makes for an unstable hand-rest. I don’t know if my Marlin .30-.30 would do any better or not, but I need to take it out to the rifle range and put some rounds through it from the sitting position. I also need to loose a few shotgun rounds (12 ga & 20 ga) on the trap range one of these days, too. I’m slowly but surely feeling more comfortable on the shooting range. I wore my NRA t-shirt out there, mainly because I feel like it won’t attract as much attention as, say, my Karl Marx t-shirt, or my Peace t-shirts or my “No war” t-shirt, or my Green Party t-shirt, etc, etc. But even my NRA shirt is mildly subversive—the backside reads “the 2nd Amendment: America’s original homeland security”; Seems pretty blasé on the surface of things, but if you take it to mean “no standing army”, in the 18th century understanding, then it becomes quite a radical proclamation indeed—and this is precisely how I do mean it. I am a socialist, but I have an anarchist streak a mile wide, so I sometimes find myself advocating some policy positions more commonly associated with people in right-wing circles, but it’s frequently a more nuanced position than the right-wingers adopt. I usually don’t try to explain myself, just prefer to let others think what they will of me. One thing that has been interesting, from a librarian point of view, in joining the NRA and the GOA, is becoming aware of magazines and books and publications that might be very popular in a rural or small town public library that I probably would never have thought of before. It’s always good to learn new things, and sometimes you pick up things from the most surprising places, too.
In the meantime I’m trying to read Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over and also Kenneth Deffeyes Beyond Oil, two very key books in the Peak oil debate. More on my impressions of those works later.
