James Tadd Adcox
. . . I ought, however, while we're between slides, pause here to speak a few words of gratitude, in fact I meant to do so earlier, at the beginning of the presentation, shortly after I revealed my topic, but it appears my note cards have gotten out of order, not badly so, easily enough fixed, just a moment, there.
Obviously I would like to thank our professor, Dr. Jonson, who has encouraged me to "find the evidence for myself," a motto that, in my opinion, one ought to inscribe upon the threshold of this presentation, so to speak. Go find the evidence for yourself! Can there be any more rousing summons to the scholarly life?
The truth, as all the greatest philosophers know, is always hidden. One of the surest ways to know that something is not-truth, therefore, is its very openness. If someone says black is black and white is white, the clarity and obvious truth of such a statement should raise doubts in the mind of any decent thinker. Cannot black be, under the right circumstances, green or pink? Or white indigo? Who says two plus two must equal anything at all?
One must, as they say, as Professor Jonson said, as I now repeat, find the evidence for oneself! One cannot leave all the thinking to the supposed experts, finger quotes very much intended. This undoubtedly is what Professor Jonson meant when he shared with me that, so far as he was aware, there was no compelling evidence whatsoever to question the authorship of the Bard's plays. I am extremely grateful for Professor Jonson's guidance throughout this semester, particularly his willingness to meet with me via video chat outside of office hours, even if at times he seemed annoyed by the frequency of our meetings. One picks up on these things, Professor. Still, I think of him like a father figure, in spite of the whole age thing. He has a wisdom exceeding his years, and I only wish I could have been as sure of myself and my place in the world as he appears to be at his age. Instead, I was working in restaurants and spending too much of my time with a guy named Bud who wore an ankle monitor. Not that Bud was a bad guy. He wasn't educated, but of course, neither was I, at the time, having dropped out of college to pursue entrepreneurship. And there's something to be said for being educated in the school of life, in which Bud was enrolled, as indicated by the ankle monitor.
Bud didn't know anything about literature. But I would say he had certain qualities that one might recognize in a tragic hero, of the sort written about by the Bard, whoever the Bard might have been. Including, among other things, tremendous ambition. Of a sort. Whenever we would hang out, he'd spend his time telling me about his plans for the future. Which were always changing. But always ended up the same way: he would get rich, and he'd show those fuckers. Which would lead to a listing of the fuckers. A list that expanded each time we hung out. At first, the list of fuckers was limited primarily to other people we worked with in the restaurant kitchen, select members of the waitstaff, and his parole officer, a small, red-haired man whom Bud referred to as a "mincing fucker." The fuckers exploded from there. Soon he was keeping a categorized list of fuckers in a notebook in his pocket: fuckers he'd met on the bus, fuckers he'd encountered in line at the Aldi, fuckers half-remembered from middle or elementary school, whose full names he had to look up on the Internet. His tragic flaw, if I might engage for a moment in a bit of literary interpretation of Bud, was that he couldn't stop thinking about the fuckers long enough to focus on getting rich, so that he could show the fuckers. Then he died in a motorcycle accident, not long after my wife and I moved to Flagstaff. Which I might have recognized as an omen, one of several, had I known what was to come. Which is the problem with omens, typically. Where omens are concerned, hindsight is everything.
Bud, wherever you are: I would like to dedicate this slide of my end-of-semester presentation to you.
I would like to thank my beautiful, elfin wife, if there were any chance of her watching the recording of this presentation, which I suppose there isn't. But if there were any chance of her watching this, somewhere down the line, perhaps after we've reconciled, through some set of circumstances I am not currently capable of imagining, I would like to thank her for the several good years we spent together, even if things weren't so good at the end.
I'd like to thank my younger colleagues in this class for their many invaluable and at times overly critical contributions to this presentation during peer review. Among the students who welcomed me with mostly open arms, I would like to particularly thank Nicholas, even if unfortunately he is no longer a member of this class, or a student in good standing with the university, and cannot, therefore, hear my words of gratitude. Nicholas! Alas, Nicholas. I saw something of myself in him. And even more so these days, now that he's left the university and taken a job, according to members of our peer review group, washing dishes in the back of a restaurant somewhere. Which might seem like a setback, Nicholas, but remember: you have your whole life ahead of you. Though that's not as long as it seems, at first.
More generally, I would like to thank my colleagues for the ease with which they, you, have accepted me as a peer, especially since I have often, in the past, felt uncomfortable around teenagers. Not all teenagers, I should hasten to add, but rather that set of particularly teenagery teenagers, such as the two young men standing in front of my car this morning, punching each other in the arm. One of them was wearing a plastic cowboy hat. Why was he wearing a plastic cowboy hat? We will never know. Its cheap plastic surface gleamed, cheaply, in the morning sun, an effect that was blinding from certain angles. They snickered under their downy mustaches as I approached, though I could not see anything then, and can think of nothing now, that was funny. "Excuse me," I said, and when they ignored me, continuing to punch each other in the arm, I repeated, more loudly: "Excuse me." This was the occasion for louder snickers; then, as though by accident, or as though they had been planning to do so anyhow, they moved aside just far enough that I could reach the door. I fumbled with my key ring, trying to get the correct key into the lock; more snickering. One of them asked the other, quite as though I weren't there, what "this dude" thought he was doing. This dude, I informed them, was trying to get into his car—a perfectly reasonable thing for this dude to do without expecting to be molested (another snicker) by hooligans. A long silence, punctuated only by hooligan snickers and the frustrated intake of my breath at the key's refusal to turn. Finally, one of the two—the one in the cowboy hat—said, "That's not your car, though, dude."
Indeed: it was not my car. It was not even the same color as my car—a mistake I can only explain by how discomfited I was to see these two teens hanging around beside what I thought was my car. They could have mentioned this fact at any time, without forcing me into a situation in which I had to blush and back away suddenly while they continued to snicker and make rude jokes about me under their breath. What made it worse was that my car was directly next to their car, parked just behind it on the street. A different color, as I said. Also a different make and model. In certain respects the encounter was refreshing, inasmuch as it highlighted, by contrast, how lucky I have been to get to know my fellow students in this class, many of whom, yes, are teenagers, but hardly teenagery in the above sense. For the most part.
I remember being a teenager myself, of course, standing around with nothing to do, punching a friend in the arm and being punched in turn, feeling a huge, self-satisfied sense of judgment towards everything and everyone around me, especially the old. Which is only right. I have discovered, since becoming a father, and then an ex-father, that I am now imbued with the sort of maudlin sensitivity that, when I was younger—the age of my colleagues in this class, for example—I would have found both comical and embarrassing. I find myself having responses to sunsets, for example. I remember how when I was younger each time the sun set my mother would gesture at it and say, "Isn't that just spectacular? Doesn't that just make you feel something?" And she wouldn't be satisfied until I agreed, in my grudging adolescence, that yes, it was, and yes, it did. And at times, out of spite, I told her instead that I thought it looked like shit and I didn't feel anything, ever.
This would lead to a long argument about my attitude towards life and the appropriate ways of addressing one's mother; but the next evening at sunset she'd be gesturing at it again and asking me: "Isn't that just spectacular? Doesn't that just make you feel something?" And my whole self would cringe inwardly and I'd mumble something or another about the sunset.
Now when I see a sunset, I find myself wanting to ask this of someone, even though there's usually no one around. Sometimes if I'm out on the street I'll call out this question to someone passing on the opposite side of the street. At times they smile at me, warily. Mostly they ignore me. Or offer anatomically impossible suggestions.
If there's no one around, I might say it to myself, under my breath, and wait for an answer I know isn't coming.
Or, to give another example of this newfound sentimentalism: news stories. There are certain news stories I simply can't read anymore. Like the one about the nine year old girl the police pepper-sprayed in the face. Or the boy, I think he was seven, who was shot while playing with a toy gun. Not only do I refuse to read these stories, if it were up to me, everyone, reporters and everyone else, would stop talking about them, just shut right up. If it were up to me, as shameful as this might be to admit, every one of these stories would be buried in a thick governmental report somewhere, and we'd never have to hear about any of it.
Is it a dereliction of duty to refuse to read stories such as these? To willfully not know the details leading up to the police officer spraying pepper spray into the face of a nine year old girl who was helpless in the back of his police vehicle? Duty to whom? Who does it help, I ask, I'm asking, I'm literally asking you right now, listening to this presentation, for me to invite this horror inside of me? What good does it do that little girl, or anyone else, for me to see a story like that and have my whole day ruined?
When I was a teenager, when I was a young adult, I prided myself on my ability to face the horrors of the world. I sought them out, even. I acquainted myself with them and shook their hand. They confirmed my suspicion that the world was a terrible place and only I, and possibly certain of my friends, were pure and noble. Which we were, at the time. More or less. Having had very few opportunities to be otherwise.
Perhaps the proper response to such news stories is to change the world. Thus what I believed when I was young. I thought: if you can't face the world as it is, then you have the responsibility to change it. But the world resists our efforts at change. Or it resists mine, anyhow. I tried to introduce a new, more democratic form of electronic money, and not only did the business fail to take off, I was told it was illegal and threatened with stiff fines and a potential jail sentence. Perhaps a braver man would have stood up to these threats, on principle; but bravery, too, is the resource of the young, who have not yet had the chance to learn all the methods by which the world can crush you.
The old are by nature guilty. And who is better positioned to judge them than the young, who are by nature innocent? My friends, my young colleagues, my successors and judges, the truth is that the previous, older generation, those dinosaurs, are always, without fail, irredeemably wrong. I ask myself what my son would think of me, had he lived to be a teenager. Probably he would have judged me, as is only right. It felt, at times, as though he were doing so already.
It feels, at times, as though he is doing so still.
I am reminded of the scene from one of the Bard's immortal dramas, in which a man has been accused of witchcraft and is being asked about it while the townspeople, his friends and neighbors, many of them teenagers, pile heavy rocks on top of him, trying to get him to confess, and the man only cries out: "More weight! More weight!" This in my opinion is the very model of what the old should do when confronted by the young with the evidence of their many failures—not to try to defend themselves, certainly not to try to escape, but only to cry out: "Yes! Yes, children! More weight!"
If I were a braver man—I've already admitted I'm not—that's what I'd cry out each day: More weight! More weight! Crush me, colleagues, with your goodness! Ahh! Ahhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
I see, however, that I am getting a little carried away here. A little off-topic. I will discipline myself. Put on blinders. Resume the reading of note cards. Ahem.
Next slide, please.