The “One Bad Apple” Theory in American Politics

I blame the Osmonds. Yes, the tediously nice vocal group from Ogden, Utah. Their 1970 number-one hit “One Bad Apple” popularized the follow-up line “...don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl,” an attitude which continues to dominate whenever anybody uses the Bad Apple analogy. It’s just one individual, the thinking goes; we can’t condemn everybody in the same category because that individual is rotten!

This, however, is a complete reversal of the original axiom. Some version of the idea has existed since at least Geoffrey Chaucer, who, in “The Cook’s Tale,” records a wordier, less direct version of the idea. It was recorded by Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack, in 1736, as “a rotten apple spoils his companions.” In source, the aphorism contends that one bad apple does spoil the whole barrel.

Perhaps it seems silly, splitting hairs this way when the “one bad apple” theory has been employed to excuse the Minneapolis Police Department following George Floyd’s death. One tainted individual, Officer Derek Chauvin, doesn’t prove the entire PD, or the concept of policing, is irrevocably contaminated, we hear. Let’s just purge the individual and continue! We can’t blame every cop everywhere because one lawman is a killer.

Except I think it matters. The metaphors we employ in moments of deep struggle condition our thinking. Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote, nearly twenty years ago, that linguistic metaphors define how we, as humans, think. When we define “one bad apple” as an easily removed outlier, like killer cop Derek Chauvin, we allow ourselves to excuse massive injustices as anomalies. That isn’t what this metaphor means.

The primarily agrarian audiences for whom Chaucer and Franklin wrote, would’ve understood firsthand that fruit rot transfers on contact. They wouldn’t have had our post-Enlightenment scientific knowledge that rotting apples emit ethylene, a chemical that hastens fruit ripening, and eventually over-ripening. But they would’ve known, without needing it explained, that one bad apple needs removed from a barrel and destroyed immediately. Otherwise, the entire barrel starts rotting.

Like all metaphors, this one only stretches so far. It makes apples a category, but this category needs to be sufficiently compressed to actually count. Apples in an orchard don’t spread rot unless the tree is somehow damaged; only when they’re harvested and stored in a barrel does fruit rot become directly contagious. Thus, like the Osmonds sang, one heartbreak doesn’t make every romantic love equally doomed.

The Osmonds, circa 1970

But if we compare men overall, as the Osmonds do, with a category of men who’ve undergone the same training and do the same job, we make the transfer from orchard-fresh apples to the barrel. Because of the intensity of police training, the length and relative impunity of careers, and the difficulty of what they do, police are in many ways confined together. They become apples in a barrel.

Which makes purging rotten apples from the barrel even more important. Derek Chauvin, we now know, has a lengthy history of on-the-job abuse, including multiple shootings and some civilian deaths. His organization has systematically covered his ass for over a decade. This perfectly captures what Chaucer and Franklin meant about bad apples: the rot has clearly transferred onto others, including the cops who silently watched George Floyd’s death.

If Derek Chauvin were merely “one bad apple,” he’d need removed from policing immediately. He’s clearly internalized a mentality of domination: standing on someone’s neck is a longstanding metaphor for oppression, even when it isn’t so literal. But Derek Chauvin isn’t “one bad apple”; the fact that his system has protected him for years, the fact that he remains a badge-wearing law officer, demonstrates that the rot has already spread.

Smarter commentators than me have observed how American police work has adopted a warrior cop culture. Whenever someone like George Floyd, Philando Castile, Walker Scott, or Sandra Bland dies in police hands, with cameras rolling, we hear that one death resulted from “one bad apple.” But we only know about these deaths, and their palpable injustice, because we saw them. By that time, it’s already too late to prevent this horrific violence.

As an ex-English teacher, I consider metaphors important. Which metaphors we employ, and how we employ them, speak volumes to our thinking. The phrase “one bad apple” has, in recent years, become intensely associated with bad policing. Perhaps we need to employ a new metaphor: “the cockroach in the kitchen.” Because by the time we see one, it’s already too late; there are thousands of larvae living in the walls.

Listening Lessons

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 39
Bob Hurst, The Listeners

Headquarters Counseling Center, in Lawrence, Kansas, exists to provide help for those who have nowhere else to turn. It has no Freudian couch, no billing department, no aged white men dispensing sage guidance. It’s staffed entirely by volunteers, mostly undergraduates, who make themselves available at difficult and inconvenient hours, the hours when desperate people are most likely to descend into self-destruction. And it provides something people walking in darkness often need: someone to simply listen.

Documentary filmmaker Bob Hurst took his camera into a training course for counseling volunteers, to discover what makes a good suicide prevention specialist. If I admire anything about his technique, it’s probably his willingness to avoid coming to pat conclusions. These young volunteers don’t have neatly prepared answers for life’s contentious questions; the course simply provides them skills necessary to listen impartially. Which, despite what you might expect, proves to be a highly contentious skill.

First, the counselors must practice the task of keeping silent during somebody else’s trials. Counselors in movies and novels often dispense gnomic wisdom exactly when characters, enduring the Dark Night of the Soul, need it most. Not these counselors. We watch as experienced trainers, some with the highest degrees available in their fields, teach their wide-eyed young students how to say as little as possible, add nothing to the conversation, letting the callers just speak.

(After writing this essay, a Headquarters volunteer contacted me, asking for clarification. When I say they “add nothing to the conversation,” this is inaccurate. Rather, they add as little as possible, always remaining careful to ensure callers tell their own stories without interference.)

Many of the world’s great religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, teach the importance of refraining from judging others: we don’t understand another person’s plights, and cannot be truly fair. How many of us, though, are able to actually do that? Our unthinking response to difficult or morally fraught situations is usually to sort people into worthy and deprived categories, which often reflect “similarity to me.” These students struggle learning how to reserve and avoid judging.

Officially, Headquarters is part of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL), a network of local and regional call-in centers where ordinary people many quite poor, phone in when facing the desire to abandon life. This gives Headquarters a potentially nationwide reach. However, the NSPL’s member centers maintain focus on their regions, starting from the assumption that local people understand local needs. This means that Headquarters’ callers mainly live within a short drive of their building.

Much counseling, especially crisis counseling like Headquarters does, starts with the assumption that callers want to live. They wouldn’t call a suicide prevention hotline unless they believed life still had some meaning, however tenuous. Therefore the counseling process mainly involves letting callers tell their own stories, tease out the hidden aspects of their own lives, and rediscover why life retains some substance. The process is often counterintuitive, and often requires the counselors not giving advice.

Popular nonfiction filmmakers like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock might’ve felt compelled to creatively edit this story, creating central characters and a through-line. Not Bob Hurst. Though he sometimes interviews experienced counselors, who talk almost into the camera, and lets several trainees introduce themselves, there’s no linking narration or other storytelling quality. (He does have to insert a title card at one point.) Hurst prefers to let us witness events unfold, forcing us to listen.

In practice, this means something isn’t constantly “happening.” For instance, we witness trainees grappling with the official Headquarters script, which often defies common sense; the trainees desperately want to insert advice or correct mistaken ideas. Conventional storytelling technique says one of two things should happen: either a senior trainer should concisely explain the trainees’ mistakes, or the trainees should have a lightbulb moment. Neither simple solution occurs. The trainees just struggle until they understand it.

Pointedly, this struggle corresponds with the battles callers go through. (For confidentiality reasons, we don’t get to witness an active client call.) The callers, trainees, and audience want compact aphorisms which resolve moments of slow conflict. Reality doesn’t make such a good narrative, unfortunately. Instead, as the counselors listen to callers, and callers listen to the truths which linger, unacknowledged, inside themselves, we viewers listen to our own struggles, realizing we bear our own answers.

We, like Headquarters’ volunteers and callers, need to listen. We learn how to reserve judgement, exist in the present, and avoid the temptations of concise answers. This documentary doesn’t provide a happy ending or “useful” moral. Instead, running slightly over one hour, it encourages us to participate in a movement from one place to another. That movement isn’t always easy or engaging. But it takes us where we need to go, which is outside ourselves.

The False Theology of Easy Science

I know I’m not the only American befuddled by President Trump’s recent admission that he began a prophylactic course of hydroxychloroquine. His previous embrace of this malaria drug, untested on COVID-19 and known to be dangerous even to those who actually need it, seems weird from a man who’s previously described himself as a “germaphobe” and conceals his medical records. But, on further consideration, I’ve realized it’s all one piece with his slipshod scientific record.

And not just his. For all I dislike Trump, his attitude actually reflects a broader American relationship with science, one which embraces supposedly radical discoveries, but distrusts the often tedious process. President Trump’s insistence that a pill, a “disinfectant,” or other minimally invasive treatment, will provide a quick fix, is consistent with his repeated invocation of miracles. He’ll embrace any solution to make the problem go away quickly, and avoid anything slow, time-consuming, or boring.

We Americans want pills for everything. I recall complaints, going back at least to the 1990s, of doctors feeling badgered by patients for “antibiotics” to treat colds, flus, and other viral infections. (Antibiotics only treat bacterial infections.) Or consider the mental disorders we regularly treat with pharmaceuticals: antidepressants for mood disorders and stimulants for ADHD, when we already know all but the most severe forms of these diseases don’t actually respond well to drug therapy.

This desire for pills which instantaneously cure difficult diseases recalls the science-fictional desire, common in Cold War paperbacks, for small capsules which deliver every human nutrient in one morning swallow. Pop a pill, you’ll never be hungry again! This belief persisted well into the 1970s, but by the 1980s, science had demonstrated that food wasn’t optional. We eat our spinach, not just for its chemical content, but because its fibrous texture has specific biological benefits.

“Modernism,” as a philosophy, starts with the presumption that one overall theory will someday emerge which explains all reality in one concise postulation. Marxism, Empiricism, and Utilitarianism are all examples of theories which attempt to explain all reality briefly. We could attach pop science to this list, since lazy-minded individuals (and I frequently include myself in this) look to science to provide a closed-system explanation that exempts us from thinking about the exceptions and contingencies.

American media, with whom Trump has courted an adversarial relationship, actually agree with him on this. The practices known to work, like mask-wearing, avoiding contagion vectors, and staying home, are deeply unsexy. Instead, they repeatedly name-check concepts like rushing to a vaccine, like they think this is Star Trek, and Spock and Bones need only pull an all-nighter to conjure their snake-oil. Or they quote “herd immunity” in ways that reduce the concept to pseudoscience.

As an aside, herd immunity really exists. To cite one relevant example, a small minority are violently allergic to the MMR vaccine. These people rely upon everyone else to have functional immunity to the deadly diseases this vaccine prevents, so the diseases cannot gain toehold in the population. That’s what “herd immunity” means: when a disease simply can’t pass through the population, because too few people are vulnerable. Not, emphatically, letting diseases wash over everyone.

In other words, the mass media, like the president, is clearly scientifically illiterate. They like rushing into science whenever photogenic people Anthony Fauci or Katie Bauman announce some profound discovery, and treat that particular discovery as closed. But this isn’t science; it’s more akin to theology, and specifically to bad theology, basically a belief that trumpets blow, angels descend, and the Truth gets distributed on a parchment scroll. The long, difficult tedium gets written out.

When we don’t see this tedium, we forget it exists. Musicians need to practice; novelists need to edit multiple drafts. The finished product doesn’t roll out perfectly the first time. Science isn’t the end result, but rather, science is the long, difficult practice of asking questions and testing the resulting answers. Like theatrical rehearsals or the test run of a new airplane, most of the process happens privately, because to outsiders, it’s mostly just boring.

Science exists, yes. But it isn’t a matter of citing buzzwords like “disinfectant” or “herd immunity.” Science is a process, and like the processes of governing or eating, the scientific process is often slow, glamourless, and pedestrian. And frequently, rather than reaching for simple pills to pop or UV lights to shine up somebody’s ass, science begins by admitting our vast domains of ignorance. Good science, like good religion, requires admitting what we don’t know.

Religious Truth in a Secular World

What is a religion? That question seems simple and straightforward, because we all, even those with no particular faith, have experience with religion and religious people. In the English-speaking world, our minds may flash directly to antique churches with their towering spires, mosques with their towers for the muezzins, or 19th-Century photos of Native Americans performing the Ghost Dance. Images of ritual and tradition appear readily in our minds.

But what do these religions have in common? That becomes fuzzier. Accustomed to Christianity as our authentic religious benchmark, we might say religions are systems established to worship God. But God, a unifying transcendent force which created reality and will someday judge us, is a distinctly Abrahamic belief; it doesn’t exist in other religions, like Buddhism or Confucianism. Even within Abrahamic tradition, Jews especially debate how literally to take “God.”

This has become pointed in recent weeks as we’ve witnessed religious people among the most aggressive in denying the risks associated with COVID-19. While most mainline Christian churches remain closed, those which have denied closing orders have been particularly vocal, demanding attention and praise for their supposedly bold stands on “religious freedom.” It’s too early to say how influential these churches are, but they’re certainly loud.

As religious historian Stephen Prothero writes, all religions aren’t necessarily identical. Not all have God or the gods, not all have programmed religious services, and many don’t even have written religious texts. Some Kumbaya-singing philosophers will assert all religions are different paths to salvation, but “salvation” is a particularly Christian precept which doesn’t appear in other traditions. It’s really tough to determine what makes a “real” religion.

I don’t proclaim any particular expertise, just an abundance of intellectual curiosity and a bevy of reading behind me. But I’ve noticed two principles which it appears religions share. First, all religions I’ve studied share a belief in capital-T Truth. That is, they believe in a constant and transcendent reality, which may be beyond this world or within it, and which we can partly apprehend with our senses. All religions agree reality exists.

Second, having agreed on the frequently controversial precondition that reality is real, they agree that someone, in the past, has glimpsed enough of that transcendent capital-T Truth to teach others about it. Whether that person is a prophet, like Jeremiah or Mohammed; an especially enlightened mortal, like the Buddha; or a physical manifestation of the divine, like Jesus or Krishna, some person apprehends reality enough to guide everyone else.

Importantly, that person usually needs to be conveniently dead (or, like Jesus and Elijah, ascended). While the living may introduce new “truths,” those truths usually die with the founders: think Charles Manson or Jim Jones. Only when those truths pass onto the second generation, who become evangelists and carry the tradition outward, does the truth become a religion. Sadly, this tends to fix the truth in the past.

Having given this two-part definition, I acknowledge I’ve left room for certain philosophies we wouldn’t necessarily consider religions. Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Adam Smith all introduced philosophical systems which people quote generously to justify choices made today. Like Jeremiah or Lao Tzu, these eminences are conveniently dead, and therefore immune from questioning. Does that make psychoanalysis, evolution, and economics religions?

Arguably, yes. I’ve recently read philosophers, like Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou, who quote Freud exactly like a Christian quoting Jesus, as a source of Truth which is fixed and transcendent. Ardent capitalists and Marxists cite their respective prophets with equal confidence. While science is arguably less fixed on a Truth revealed in the past, the ubiquity of posters with Darwin and Einstein quotes in classrooms implies a low-key dogmatic impulse.

Modernist philosophies like Marxism and Freudianism aren’t superficially religious, because they don’t use language frequently associated with religions, like “soul” and “heaven.” But they certainly behave like religions, because they assert insights about Truth, as revealed by a wise but conveniently dead prophet. I suggest that, when a philosophy jumps tracks from its founder and becomes a source of received truth, rather than a starting line for inquiry, that’s religion.

Further, perhaps religion, even godless religions like Marxism and Freudianism, are necessary, because humans need some baseline received truth. We cannot, like children, ask “But why?” forever, because that’s thinking backward. We need a foundation, an intellectual floor, to build forward from. That’s why, as spiritual religions like Christianity seem increasingly removed from modern life, materialist religions step forward to fill that important role.

Malcolm X, Freedom, and COVID-19

Malcolm X at the peak of his influence

Happy birthday to Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, born this day in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. He would’ve been 95 years old today. Malcolm (dare I address him by his first name?) has been a polarizing influence in my life. Raised in a suburban White family, I grew up believing a wide range of myths about this powerful figure. I was well into my thirties before I realized how little I actually knew about him.

While researching his life, and the influence he had on all subsequent American culture, I encountered this quote: “You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” These words have resonated strongly with me over recent weeks, as we’ve witnessed protests demanding the American economy, shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic, reopen, even though science assures us that’s premature. These protestors use the same word again: “freedom.”

This gets me thinking about what two different groups mean by one word. “Freedom,” a word quintessentially tied to American values, gets thrown around generously, but often isn’t anchored to context. What does anyone mean when they say “freedom”? Can one word have two contradictory meanings? Considering what Malcolm meant, versus what these protestors mean, clearly their definitions of freedom are incompatible and opposed. I’m still struggling to grasp what that means for America overall.

One cannot evaluate Malcolm X without understanding his religious beliefs. A grifter and street hustler in his youth, he converted to Islam in prison. I’ve heard White people dismiss Malcolm’s influence owing to his ex-con status: anybody, they say, can claim faith, but consider the awful things he did in childhood. I disagree. Religions are founded by and for the desperate: Moses was a fugitive. Mohammed fled Mecca, fearing death. Jesus was convicted of treason.

Like Mohammed, Malcolm heard God’s voice amidst the darkness, then carried it back into the light. Malcolm’s definition of freedom meant freedom both from literal prison, where then as now, Black men were more likely than other groups to spend part of their lives; and also the figurative prison of societies where people police themselves to avoid saying or doing anything that would offend the power structure. Racialized power is always arbitrary, and always murderous.

The former Malcolm Little's first mugshot

These anti-shutdown protestors, by contrast, want something we could generously call “economic freedom,” the freedom to buy and sell without restriction. This sounds great, hypothetically. Indeed, freedom to participate in market transactions without prior restraint has been a recurrent demand of civil rights activists. But consider the voiced demands today’s protestors make: they want to play golf, get haircuts, and eat fast food. Fundamentally, they aren’t demanding to sell, only to buy. And that’s different.

Amid the COVID economy, people with highly regarded jobs, including financiers, CEOs, and tech providers, are working from home. The part of the economy that’s been shuttered is mostly the service industry. Those hurt hardest, currently, are those least able to afford even temporary setbacks. By demanding the economy reopen while COVID cases remain near the peak plateau, these mostly-White protestors are forcing the poor to choose between dying in harness, or starving and homeless.

Malcolm understood freedom differently. His father was likely murdered for speaking against injustice; later, Malcolm himself was denied lawful work, then arrested for paying bills through his wits. His demand was that he, and others like him, not be restricted from living and working for arbitrary reasons. He didn’t consider himself oppressed because he couldn’t make others cook dinner and barber his hair. He didn’t evaluate freedom by compelling others to work; that isn’t freedom.

Today we’re witnessing a generation of Americans, again mostly White, who have never been told “no,” and consider themselves heirs to Rosa Parks because the putting green shut down. White Christians have insisted that Jesus will protect them from COVID, while churches from Calgary to Georgia have discovered He won’t. Malcolm wanted freedom for his people to work, engage in commerce, and not die. These protestors want the freedom to make others service their desires.

I’ve come to admire Malcolm, despite my relatively privileged White upbringing. He overcame long odds and, rather than resting on his own accomplishments, wanted to change the unfair landscape for others suffering like he did. His demands were reasonable, and his definition of freedom was modest. Watching these White people falsely wrap themselves in the mythology of Civil Rights, it’s clear that those who most needed to hear Malcolm’s message, still have much to learn.

Manhood in the Time of COVID-19

Why do some men apparently regard wearing antimicrobial face masks as unmanful? Writing in The Week magazine, contributing editor Bonnie Kristian describes the apparent conflict between the masculine imperative to protect others, and the other masculine imperative, to never appear weak. Unfortunately, Kristian has the same shortcoming I’ve seen from many people who discuss manfulness, from either side: they lack a meaningful definition of masculinity.

Since Kristian published this article, I’ve tried to find anyone specifically, unambiguously calling mask-wearing unmanful, and failed. You might find something, but I have a day job. The only inverse correlation between masculinity and mask-wearing I’ve found, has come from people arguing against that correlation. But even if people don’t endorse that position explicitly, it’s nevertheless implicit, when President Trump, a man notorious for wanting to appear strong, refuses to wear one.

Similarly, I don’t have any more thorough a definition of masculinity than Bonnie Kristian. However, as a construction worker, I do have experience within an almost entirely male workplace. (In our area, we have two women electricians, and one woman who intermittently works a concrete pump truck; otherwise, the industry is a sausage fest.) And with such experience in a dude-centered environment, I think I have qualifications to make certain generalizations.

I believe Bonnie Kristian makes one important point in describing her masculinity paradox: she sees manhood as an internal philosophical precept, as something you just inherently are. The men I work around probably wouldn’t agree. Manhood, in an all-male environment, requires constant demonstration to reassert its prerogative. Masculinity evidently isn’t something you are, it’s something you do, and as such, it needs constant re-affirmation in deeds and, especially, in words.

These men, among whom I spend most of my waking hours, constantly spar aloud to demonstrate their manfulness. These words include cheap insults, sexualized banter, and “jokes” that verge into the territory of ad hominem attacks. This “sexualized banter” often includes rape jokes. Much workplace repartee includes men’s attempts to prove themselves as cruel as possible to anyone they perceive as weaker than themselves, including women, homosexuals, and animals.

Their prize for these verbal battles is the right to continue battling. Though I haven’t heard the phrase “man card” used recently, the underlying philosophy remains intact: that manhood is something conferred by other men, and which needs constantly reinforced, lest it be rescinded. Importantly, the earliest use of the “man card” concept I can find comes from a beer commercial, demonstrating that those who define our social roles, generally have something to sell.



Let me emphasize that, here as in Bonnie Kristian’s exposition, there’s a difference between what men say, and what they do. About six weeks ago, my co-workers and I discovered where a feral cat gave birth in the insulation underneath our job trailer, then, for whatever reason, left the kittens abandoned. When I nested the kittens in a box with a towel, these men, who’d previously joked about dumping animals beside the road, tried not to be seen openly cooing over the kittens.

So, manfulness apparently requires men to demonstrate their masculine credentials externally. This makes manliness as much a theatrical presentation, as any runway model demonstratively swishing her skirts during Paris Fashion Week. Being manly isn’t a matter of having virtues of character, as Aristotle and Epictetus asserted; rather, it’s a matter of macho posturing, which men must maintain constantly, for other men’s benefit.

Therefore, if men find wearing a respirator mask to Wal-Mart emasculating, it isn’t because they believe the mask makes them weak; it’s because they believe the mask makes them appear weak to other men. Consider the equally theatrical demonstrations of manfulness we’ve seen recently: protestors storming public buildings and ordering submarine sandwiches while carrying large-caliber weapons. Masks make men look weak; guns make men look strong.

I’d say these men think the mask makes them look fearful, except what else is openly toting an AR-15 except an expression of fear that someone will attack? No, going maskless and carrying armor-piercing ordnance share one common characteristic: the desire for control. To these men, conscious of being perceived as insufficiently masculine, the ideal of theatrical virility requires being seen as in control of every situation.

This isn’t, I’d suggest, a sufficient definition of modern masculinity. Better philosophers can wrangle that later. Rather, it’s a sufficient identifying marker of this specific masculine expression, and why it becomes vulnerable to toxicity. Macho men demand to be seen in control of every situation. And they demand control because they know they don’t really have it.

The Teenage Slam-Master of Manhattan Street Life

Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

Fifteen-year-old Xiomara Batista doesn’t share her words with anybody. Not her highly religious mother, who wouldn’t understand that she thinks in questions and doubts. Not her brother, who keeps some poorly concealed secrets of her own. Certainly not with the eager hop-heads around her Harlem neighborhood, who’ve noticed how attractive she’s become. No, she keeps her words locked inside a leather-bound journal. But even she is beginning to realize she needs to share with somebody.

It’s tempting to comb through Elizabeth Acevedo’s first novel for clues about exactly how autobiographical this story is. Much certainly jibes with Acevedo’s story: an Afro-Latina teen, raised by Dominican immigrant parents, who moves away from her childhood religion and embraces performance poetry at New York’s legendary Nuyorican Café. But as with most autobiographical fiction, that misses the point. It matters because it’s ultimately about us, and the struggles we and the author face together.

Xiomara collects her thoughts about Harlem life and adolescence in the journal her brother bought her. She never intended to create literature; her thoughts just coalesce into poetry. She desperately wants to live peacefully and be normal. But such desires don’t gel when she’s pulled between two poles: the working-class Manhattan which measures success in outcomes, even for teens, and her mother’s devout Catholicism, which manifests in an urgent desire to see Xiomara finish confirmation.

An English teacher at Xiomara’s high school is organizing a performance poetry club. Xiomara feels vaguely tempted. But meetings happen on Tuesday afternoons, directly opposite Confirmation Class, which Mamí explains is not optional. Poetry gives Xiomara some level of control which her working-class home life doesn’t allow. Still, throughout the fall semester of her sophomore year, she prefers to avoid conflict, and attends Confirmation with her BFF, even as she feels tension building up inside.

Acevedo, in creating Xiomara’s poetic voice, avoids the most common mistakes teenage poets make: the deliberate obscurantism of Shakespeareanism, or way-cool fake Beatnik patter. Xiomara instead has a natural, easy voice, one clearly designed for stage performance. Some of the poems which comprise this novel-in-verse have a hip-hop rhythm, and others resemble more a free-verse tide. But we never feel, as with some apprentice poets, like we’re reading a crossword puzzle clue that needs decoded.

Elizabeth Acevedo

Instead, as slam poets do, Xiomara simply invites audiences into her experience, which she’s heightened through poetry. Slam, if you’ve never participated, tends to reward personal confession and the tentative investigation of personal struggle. It also discourages pat answers, which this novel does too, never reaching for the simple moral often favored in schoolbook poetry. Like slam poets everywhere, Xiomara exposes personal struggles, baring her heart. She wouldn’t dare shut that book after opening it.

Her struggles will seem familiar to Acevedo’s teenage audience, or adults who’ve been teenagers. Xiomara’s parents have visions for her: her aggressive Mamí has scripted a religious homemaker life, while her more passive Papí wants… something, nobody knows what, since he never speaks up. Xiomara herself has the first glimmerings of interest in boys, an interest piqued when her biology lab partner, Aman (the symbolism is unsubtle), becomes the first non-relative to encourage her poetry.

So Xiomara performs her first and second acts of teenage rebellion: she starts seeing Aman on the sly, while ditching Confirmation Class to attend poetry club. That’s two activities which violate her mother’s tightly written script. We know trouble is brewing, but Xiomara starts discovering some components of her own identity. As anybody who’s ever passed through teenage rebellion already knows, Mamí will eventually discover Xiomara’s hastily organized ruses. It’s only a matter of time.

By writing in poetry, Acevedo permits Xiomara to speak from the heart. No time spent describing physical environment or other characters’ facial expressions, unless she wants to; instead, Xiomara cuts directly to the emotional freight of each moment and each encounter. That’s what poetry does, or anyway should do: it strips off everything except what matters, here and now, turning every experience into the purest form of language to convey what’s happening, inside, right now.

Sadly, this verse novel probably deals too directly with controversial topics for actual classroom use: public schools are notoriously conflict-averse. It also has some intermittent PG-13-rated language and mild adolescent sexuality. But for home study and for ambitious readers, Acevedo has created a story that teenagers, and their parents, will find wholly relatable. I’d recommend pairing it with Walter Dean Myers’ Monster, which deals with similar themes and settings. Strongly recommended for bold, independent-minded teens.

Online Teachers and the Perfect Scream

You know you’ve seen it: a TikTok user, identified only by the username makeshift.macaroni, posted a video of herself playing the ukulele. She’s a music teacher, she explains, and she’s composed a tune embodying her emotions making the transition to online learning. The heartfelt result has been shared millions of times on multiple media, perhaps because it’s so relatable, to teachers and non-teachers alike:

@makeshift.macaroni ##ukulele ##uke ##originalsong ##teachersoftiktok ##tiktokteacher ##smallgestures
♬ original sound - makeshift.macaroni

Seriously, though, one of my final face-to-face conversations before lockdown involved this issue. A friend asked my thoughts about schools and universities converting to online and distance learning for the remainder of the semester. I expressed my doubts. Throughout my teaching career, I explained, I actively drug my heels over online learning, because I believed the relational aspect of teaching mattered. It’s difficult to build trust over the wires.

Several years ago, I reviewed the book Teaching Lab Science Courses Online, by Linda and Peter Jeschofnig. The authors eagerly embraced online learning as valuable for teaching physical sciences, and made a persuasive case that online teaching is possible, something I’d previously doubted. But they buried an important moment: they cite a survey indicating that students believe they learned better, retained more, and felt closer to their teachers online.

Sounds great, right? Except the Jeschofnigs overlook one important point: the pollsters conducted this survey after the students completed the course. Perhaps students who finished their online studies felt closer. Perhaps they internalized the sciences more deeply. But the cited survey doesn’t quote how many students actually completed the course. If completion is a prerequisite for inclusion in the numbers, that data point probably matters.

Through the years, I read several similar claims, that students who finish online learning benefit from the independence and flexibility. This includes a string of white papers from the MacArthur Foundation, one of which I used as a textbook one semester. Golly gee, students really gain when permitted to control their pace, acclimate themselves privately, and conduct learning without teachers looming. But they all quote students who finished the course.

Repeatedly, I struggled to find information about which students actually finish courses. Two answers made the difference. One, an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote: “Online Courses Could Widen Achievement Gap Among Students.” (Issue of March 8th, 2013, apparently no longer archived online.) Online courses basically benefit students who need minimal supervision, those who already know how to “do school.”

Second, the book College (Un)Bound, by Jeffrey Selingo, gushes lavishly over a famous online course taught at Stanford University in 2011. This course gained international notoriety when 160,000 students enrolled. Except, Selingo admits, buried amid a long paragraph, barely one student in eight actually finished the course. The completion rate is dismally low, but the amortized value made this famous course cost-effective for instructors.

Who, then, completes courses? According to the Chronicle, students who would’ve probably completed classroom courses with minimal assistance anyway. Students whose background and experience include a prior dedication to learning. This privileges students who are primarily White, primarily well-off, and primarily women. Such students benefit from long-distance mentorship because, overall, they need less guidance anyway.

While praising the pedagogical benefits of online learning, the Jeschofnigs casually mention the prior investment needed to advance an online science course. Students need to buy starter science kits which, at the high school level, run around $250, though they wrote that in 2010; it’s probably more now. That means students need families able to casually part with $250, besides the cost of Internet connection, which isn’t exactly Kleenex. The Jeschofnigs’ amazing online course already excludes the poor.

The current embrace of online learning is probably necessary, given the COVID crisis. But in order to sustain it long-term, schools will need to invest in making sure students’ outcome isn’t dependent on parents’ wealth. This will mean making sure all students have equal access to technology, not limited to computers, capable of doing what the course requires, and Internet bandwidth sufficient for keeping up. These cannot be luxuries for the wealthy.

Schools will also have to invest in teacher training. I don’t know why makeshift.macaroni screamed wordlessly into the void, but I have my suspicions: because her training has focused on spotting the students having the greatest difficulty keeping up, identifying their problems, and providing the guidance they need. That will be much harder to do online, when she can’t see her students working. We must aim for a teaching environment where that scream is no longer necessary.

On Miracles and the Miraculous

Christ Healing the Mother of Simon Peter's Wife, by John Bridges, 1839

Donald Trump loves miracles, apparently. He keeps invoking the name of the miraculous in combating the COVID-19 crisis. “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he said in February. “It was like a miracle,” he said in April, speaking of hydroxychloroquine treatment. More ambitious media creators than me have made extensive B-roll clips of President Trump citing the word “miracle” to deflect the coronavirus threat.

Clearly, to Trump (who, though nominally Presbyterian, has apparently seldom darkened any church door as an adult), miracles mean something which suddenly, abruptly, solves a problem, with minimal explanation. Miracles are, essentially, an on-demand quick fix for difficult, dangerous problems with grim political implications. Trump’s willingness to expect miracles got me thinking: as a left-leaning Christian myself, what do miracles actually mean?

To answer this question, let’s first set politics aside. President Trump’s appeals to miracles seem, superficially, to resemble a political panacea. But Jesus didn’t heal lepers or raise Lazarus from the tomb to excuse them from social consequence. When he healed the bleeding woman who touched his garments, that woman still probably needed to undergo temple rituals to return to Jewish life. Jesus didn’t just make problems go away.

Miracles happen when some important problem changes direction. Jesus’ most common listed miracles involve healing sickness, which to his Jewish proselytes meant driving away social stigma, since Temple-era Jews perceived physical disfigurement as outward signs of God’s judgement. But Jesus also drove out demons, raised the dead, controlled nature and the weather, and ultimately was resurrected himself. These were all considered miraculous.

Returning to the bleeding woman, I find something important. This miracle ranks so high, it appears in all three synoptic gospels: Matthew 9, Mark 5, and Luke 8. The healing has a two-part formula: the woman first believes that God through Christ will heal her. That is, the woman places trust in authority outside herself. But then Christ affirms: “Your faith has made you well.” So she trusts God absolutely to heal her, then God’s Son affirms that trust did the healing.

Many mass-market healers, like Joel Osteen and Benny Hinn, place great emphasis on the “Your faith has made you well” aspect. To them, human belief is the precursor to miracles. Believe hard enough, the televangelists proclaim, and healing is yours. Like money or power, televangelist theology makes wellness part of the “name it and claim it” philosophy. To them, human faith is the first mandatory component of miraculousness.

Jesus as a Young Jew, by Goya

This isn’t completely unfair. Jesus, in the Gospels, tells the faithful to expect miracles, and they’ll appear. When four men lower a paralytic through the roof for a healing, Jesus says their faith makes the healing possible. You cannot have miraculous healings without first believing miracles are possible. So the televangelists, much as I dislike their self-serving tendencies, have something biblically solid there.

Yet something happens even before their belief. The bleeding woman, according to Mark, spends years and fortunes on doctors, hoping for treatment. Jesus meets the ten lepers in the wilderness, because they’ve been exiled from society. The hunched woman and the paralytic at Bethesda both suffered for years, pushed to society’s margins, because nothing they’d done could improve their situation.

Nothing they had done.

Jesus performs miracles upon these suffering people only when they’ve exhausted all human remedies. When everything possible within Iron Age medicine had failed, and the Jews believed the only remaining explanation was God’s judgement, these patients surrendered hope in human action. They turned their hope outside themselves, trusted that the universe’s order (which we call God) could provide healing, and sent their prayers toward that order’s human incarnation.

Let me restate that: miracles happen when we turn outside ourselves. When we stop seeking inside our egos, our sense of ourselves as individuals mastering life’s unpredictable circumstances, only then do miracles become possible. Even to Jesus Himself, miracles are the action which happens when doctors, priests, and kings have failed to produce results. The universe restores its internal order only after internal sources have made every reasonable human attempt.

By making miracles his first recourse, Trump front-loads the entire process. He makes miracles the first option, rather than the last, and therefore makes miracles, and the God who performs them, beholden to human ego. This happens whenever humans expect, even demand, miracles. This takes God’s action completely from the two-part formula, and makes reality subordinate to human arrogance.

Miracles cannot be bought or sold. Kings who simply expect them must, like Herod, eventually fall.