we are not sticks of gum

I cut into Amanda’s story on CNN with the 911 call on Monday morning. Her voice so incredibly young for her age, her syntax evidence of a decade of being squelched. Writing about it now even stirs up the anxiety I felt when I listened to her. The anxiety attack so acute for me Monday morning that I had to flee the house, do anything for distraction, get my breath back, get the ground back beneath me, because when I was twenty, I was abducted by two men and brutally and violently sexually assaulted and beaten.

I was a Mormon missionary in a small town on the Franco/Belgian border. The beating resulted in a skull fracture, a broken jaw, nose, ribs, and road rash on my thighs. The assault left me with a broken coccyx, genital trauma and rectal and anal tissue damage that I still deal with to this day, thirty-two years later. I escaped my captors after being dragged behind their speeding vehicle, my pants at my ankles. In that interminable moment the instinct was to pull myself off the abrading pavement, but the logic was certain death if I didn’t escape the car, so I let go.

Systematic desensitization got me to a point of admitting it, remembering it, talking about it. And then I listened to Elizabeth Smart speaking at John Hopkins University at a conference on human trafficking. While I wouldn’t dare compare my incident with hers, she articulated in her speech something we shared, something I believe all rape victims share, the truncation of human value that only the physical invasion into a person’s being could execute.

A nightstick invaded me. Up to that moment I was beaten to point of defenselessness.  

I know the moment when the truncation happened, in a gutter on a bridge in the dark. I had pulled myself off the road fearing I’d get hit by a car or they’d come back and run me over. I had pulled my pants up racked with pain. And then the shame.

Elizabeth Smart very hesitantly tells of an object lesson in her speech. It’s the “ABC gum” doctrine, one that I had heard before, too, but by virtue of my gender ignorantly thought it didn’t pertain to me. But other lessons did.

I grew up with the better-dead-than-unclean school of virtuous training. It was reinforced in the Mission Training Center, a place where nascent missionaries attend to learn teaching methods before reaching their assigned areas. In a fireside, Gordon B. Hinkley, who’d later become President of the church, was quoted from a general conference talk, “I know what my mother expects. I know what she’s saying in her prayers. She’d rather have me come home dead than unclean.”

Not my mom. I knew she’d just rather have me come home, regardless the stains.

It was later, having tucked it all away and faking my way through the rest of my life, when I read a book called The Miracle of Forgiveness, by an author that I had grown up with, a leader, the president of the church through my adolescence, a man I revered as a prophet who talks to god. President Spencer Kimball wrote:

“Also far-reaching is the effect of loss of chastity. Once given or taken or stolen it can never be regained. Even in a forced contact such as rape or incest, the injured one is greatly outraged. If she has not cooperated and contributed to the foul deed, she is of course in a more favorable position. There is no condemnation when there is no voluntary participation. It is better to die in defending one’s virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle.”

My shame bifurcated into two levels; not only had I no value due to the invasion of my body, I had no value in not dying in my defense.

To restore myself, my self, I have since truncated something else, similar to the moment I let my body fall to the pavement that was tearing the skin from my legs. I let it all go, all the promises, all the doctrine, all the saving ordinances, all the comfort, some of the fear, most of the judgement, much of the shame.

Any institution that purports the value of a human being to be connected to their sexual purity creates an incredibly vicious cycle in human behavior from which none come unscathed. The result of which, manifest throughout any religious influence, at the very least, is a discounted soul. When aspirated with the invasive trauma of rapists and molesters, the soul surrenders, will flatlines, the light goes out. That is a fate worse than death.

We are not sticks of gum. Look at Elizabeth Smart. You’ll see battlefield courage. When the press unfortunately pries its way into Amanda Berry’s life, the same will be displayed. An examination of my own is rife with mistakes and poor judgement, but it is scaffolded by the value of the purity of my motivation to be a loving man, husband and father. The only way that can be taken from me is if I allow it.

with stupefying rapidity

We brushed with the context under which hundreds of thousands live every single day, a cultural, social, psychological and temporal risk of losing one’s life in one’s own neighborhood. And collectively we watch in a way, surprised, unprecedented, through the veins of social media and arteries of cable news cycles feeding information and images with stupefying rapidity, and mediocrity never before seen.

Two levels of this bear scrutiny: the multiplication of errors in reporting the events as they unfolded, justified, it appears under the mantra of exclusivity, and the overwhelming acceptance of public service preempted by a citizen.

The natural gas explosion. The dark-skinned male, running while Saudi. The bombing of the JFK library. The unexploded devices. The arrest and custodial attainment of a suspect. The FBI identifying suspects where none had actually been identified. A woman noticed the blood. The boat was on fire. All of these verifiable, yet none verified, instead were paraded before duped viewers under the auspices of speculation with stupefying rapidity.

I even sucked it up. At noon on Wednesday, the AP app on my iPhone pushed a headline that an arrest had been made and I announced the same at the beginning of class. I trusted the AP, where I should’ve known better. Later I watched as King on CNN perpetuated the same misinformation for almost an hour, leaning on his credible sources for the hit, all the while Wolf Blitzer touted the exclusivity of the report. Why was it that CBS canned Dan Rather?

At least CBS, having learned from lessons passed, filled most of their nascent air time with, “…we’re waiting for confirmation.”

This isn’t CNN. This is our Fourth Estate, our nation’s check and balance. Errors will happen. NPR reported Gabby Giffords diseased. Somewhere along that news chain a misinformation gets chambered and fired off before a producer somewhere gets to check it, or overlooks it, or trusts its impetus, and then it hits frequencies and bandwidths spraying over slackjawed viewers vacant of critical ability in the shock of breaking news.

Now, there’s a double entendre.

But that’s no excuse. I wonder how we’ve gotten to a point of tolerating this. No, I wonder how we’ve gotten to a point of not even being bothered by this. It’s easy to point fingers at the networks, especially so at Fox, but anymore if anyone’s surprised by their slant, by their filters, or those of any enculturated news outlet, they perhaps deserve what they get. They want what they get and get what they want, truth notwithstanding. Oh, wait. That sounds like the Legislative Estate.

As a researcher, I’m reduced to the pretense in the value of instant notification. In the rush of exclusivity, “while we can’t confirm,” and “we’re trying not to speculate,” are the news’ new sin licenses. We beg a sin license when we justify telling an off-color joke by saying, “I don’t usually repeat dirty jokes, but this one is really funny…”

When the second airplane hit the World Trade Center Tower, a student rushed into my morning class, interrupting in her declaration of what had happened. It didn’t appear to be out of shock or dismay, but rather the giddy feeling of knowing something the rest of us didn’t and being the first to knock us over with the severity and utter incredulousness of the story. The same with Columbine, Aurora, Newtown. You heard it here first. First has obscured fact.

As Anderson Cooper reported the capture of suspect two Friday night, he basked in the glow of throngs of happy and relieved Bostonians marching by his post chanting “USA,” in the defeat of domestic terrorism. This immune to the undercurrent of reports that the FBI had in fact observed, detained and questioned Tamerlin Tsarnaev, suspected of being radicalized upon returning to the US two years previous. This is going to get ugly. Anything politicized usually does. And, unfortunately, this is where Americans will need to depend on the Fourth Estate the most. We’re already polarized, the question for me is, how vacant will the middle become?

At the risk of being unpatriotic and sounding ungrateful, there’s something more. Boston’s finest, along with the cooperation of various agencies, hundreds of foot soldiers infiltrated a locked-down populace in the search of a wounded nineteen year-old college student, who is also a suspected terrorist.

The still images of their search seen on the network coverage showed citizens being removed from their domiciles in bare feet and bathrobes while armed and armored personnel searched premises in Watertown. After locking the city down for a day, they failed to find the suspect, and they allowed the people to resume their normal activity, charging them to be vigilant. Here, in America.

On one hand, I live in a state where its association of sheriffs vowed retaliation upon invading federal authorities intent on taking away arms. On the other is a state willing to roll over on federal mandate, surrendering constitutional rights to aid in the capture of a terrorist. Certainly, it’s just a matter of what’s at stake, right?

From the last report I heard from Rachel Maddow on msnbc, it was a man who, upon hearing the news that citizens could go back into the streets, walked out of his home for a smoke where he noticed blood, and then blood on his shrink-wrapped boat, and then a man under a tarp in the boat.

In their press conference, Watertown officials were quick to declare that suspect two was found outside of their twenty-block search radius. To their credit, after they were alerted of the suspect’s whereabouts, they were able to take him into custody alive. And perhaps releasing the public to go about their business was a tactic that paid off. I’d like to hope so.

It appears this kid was wounded in the shootout the night before as he fled police for a few hundred yards in a vehicle which he then abandoned and fled on foot. This after a shootout that killed his brother, after the two threw improvised explosive devices at officers, after suspect one reportedly ran over his brother in his escape. Escalated. Bleeding. Disappears. No question I’m armchair-quarterbacking this, but this wasn’t Boston’s finest finest moment, though it could be argued they outshined the LAPD.

My point is that in stupefying rapidity we’re quick to wrap the flag around us and declare once again that we’re not to be messed with. But we have been messed with. We’ve been hurt, we’ve suffered incredible losses. I don’t feel right in using that plural personal pronoun we, they have suffered, we as a nation have been violated. The capture of a nineteen year-old terrorist doesn’t eradicate that, and yet Monday, we’ll go back to business as usual.

And so will thousands who live with quotidien terrorism. I just hope that as Americans, we’ll still be afforded the luxury of being surprised by it.

we want to be with somebody

We’re on the romantic relational part of my interpersonal curriculum and I posed the question to students if they want to get married. Every hand went up save for one. And then I asked why. The responses are typical, the first being, it’s the “next thing on my list.” Other answers include lessening loneliness, validation, and even a few speak to the idea of love.

In the class that followed a student spoke up to the lingering question. “We’re all relational.” She went on to say that it’s a natural part of who we are, a predisposition to the human condition. Absolutely. I know of a few folks who’d disagree, but for the most part, I know for my part, we want to be with somebody.

And I couldn’t leave that alone. “So, we’re getting together for something more than just procreation?” And the answers like companionship, sharing life’s experiences, supporting and being supported quickly came to the top; the exuberance in the room was encouraging. Even in just talking about it we were getting kind of giddy, kind of romantic. It’s easy to get romantic about romance.

“Then, why are we so bent on deciding who can and can’t get married?”

Silence.

the impossibility of the fourth estate

One of the things I hate about The West Wing is its transparent fiction. It’s like listening to Michael Douglas’s character, the President of the United States defend his slandered leadership in The American President; you wish there were really this type of leadership. Anywhere.

But, that’s Hollywood, or rather, that’s Aaron Sorkin, who’s penned the quick and biting prose from A Few Good Men to now, the HBO series, The Newsroom with Jeff Daniels. It’s astonishing, and at the risk of being a sucker, I think should be required viewing for any wide-eyed journalism student wishing to contribute to the Fourth Estate.

I missed the pilot when the series began and just caught it over the weekend, and cried.  It’s pissed me off, it inspired me, it made me want to write, to investigate, to teach, to work with a team, to make a difference, all from a collection of characters lead by an anchor on the cusp of giving in.

Like CNN. That is, they’ve given in. The anaphylactic audience that has any reaction to substance appears to steer editorials of assertion and agendas instead of investigative fact-finding, at least something a little deeper than the latest boyfriend-killer.

I’m not saying anything new here by declaring the death of objectivity across the broadcast spectrum and superhighway bandwidth. The burden of the Fourth Estate has shifted from the Murrows and Cronkites through the lenses and frames of thousands of producers, scribblers and shooters to rest squarely on the shoulders of the most frightening, assuming, biased, shallow and non-critical perpetuators of misinformation, the general public, for whom social media has done no favors.

I want MacKenzie McHale and Will McAvoy to be real. I want to be able to go to a source and listen and become informed and inspired to find out more for myself. I want someone to ask the questions I have burning in my head like Neal Conan on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.” Now that program is coming to an end, announced Friday last.

It’s called the Fourth estate for a reason. And for reason. It is a constitutionally amended premise, an idea that someone should be trusted to keep an eye and ear on things governing the People; an institution immune to capitalism, an institution of provision and examination, civil, just and true in both their acquisition and distribution of information.

This stewardship demands skill, scholarship, tenacity, morals, ethics, language and meaning; professionals who live and die by by-lines and deadlines in a 24-hour news stream as unrelenting as any timepiece. It demands a persona by which a country can, at the very least, be united in believing, in trusting.

The irony is that its very system, the cycle of news and its distribution, has made that impossible.

best price on myrrh

The congruency that once existed between Thanksgiving and Christmas is in decay.

Look no further than the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday. American culture is now laced with urban realities of human beings being trampled to death in others’ efforts to get the best price. It’s all about value, after all.

In the Christian celebration of good news, the ultimate gift, there is a remarkable likeness of value inscribed in the gospels in telling the greatest story ever told. From herald angels to the finest three magi could give to the king of kings, there were no bargains to be had in recognition of an Atoning One. That bargain would come later, the ultimate discount in lots cast for the robe of the same. What a steal for that Roman.

And yet, to celebrate the very same gift, the tradition has become the discount, how little for how much, the find of the gift defined by it’s discount rather than it’s value.

Imagine, “Is that your best price on myrrh?”

Sure, low prices enable us to spread the cheer a little farther, but this justification pales in the hypocrisy of honoring the birth of an Atoning Child with a discounted present.

Double entendre intended.

the beauty found in contradiction

Filmmaker Helen Whitney graced our campus last week with her lectures, Spiritual Landscapes: A Life in Film. Each was a look and commentary of some of her work including Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, The Mormons, and most recently Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate.

I sat and listened to her Friday evening. She’s driven by the religious experience and how it drives human behavior in contexts ranging from crises of faith to the reconciliation of, “that what was will never be again.” And she does so from a unique secular position.

That’s why her work resonates with me. The shades are off in her search, any agenda thwarted in the purity of her questions. And that’s why I was so affected by the message of that evening. I’ve since tried to get a grip on that feeling by writing here.

I think it’s fair to say, generally, that we value consistency. We like, or rather we want the quotidian order of things to go the way we’ve predicted. If you’ve ever turned your car’s key in the ignition and have nothing happen as a result, you know what I’m saying here. The failure of any appliance in the home sends us scrambling to reach whatever that functionality was before it went on the fritz.

Remember that moment before the car accident, before that diagnosis, before the phone call, before the process server. We were tending to some purpose, perhaps lost in the routine of the day to have things change unpredictably. And most of us don’t like that. We don’t like uncertainty. We want that what was to last.

When certainty fails, the earth moves beneath our feet sometimes subtle enough for a new perspective, other times traumatic enough for a new paradigm. When it’s the truth that fails, beliefs change.

The search for constancy, certainty, continuity is religion. When Whitney began her research on Mormons she attended a Latter-day Saint Sacrament meeting. This happened to be on the first Sunday of the month, a Sabbath set aside for fasting, and a meeting reserved for the expression of conviction. As members of that congregation stood and declared the construct of their belief, it wasn’t done in uncertain terms like I think it’s true, I hope it’s true, I believe it’s true.

What stunned Helen was the disclosure of these witnesses that they knew it was true, convicted of it. Certain. I’ve often sat in Fast and Testimony meetings marveling at the same idea because in contrast, faith is not concrete, it is not certain. If it were, the point would be self-defeating. Nevertheless, here is a congregation, a religion that not only professes the certainty of its principles, the certainty within them assuages the mourners, calms the afflicted, and encourages any who struggle. At least that’s the idea, the implication, the promise.

And then the crash, the interpretation of the mammogram, the voice of the Highway Patrol trooper, the divorce decree. That what was will never be again. Faith is tested.

In the test faith is promised to assuage, calm and encourage. This seems to work for so many people. Often the faith of many is sought to ease the broken-hearted through collective prayer and fasting; goodwill toward those who hurt, who lost, who struggle. When faith fails, the contradiction within its ascribed certainty seems irreconcilable. Faith becomes a contradiction when it doesn’t restore a certainty that what once was.

Maria is my friend and colleague, a deeply faithful woman who lives in a junction of influences that are contradictory. She told me she lives with contradiction, comparing to that celestial moment when one can watch the sun set and look to the east and see the moon rise simultaneously, caught between heavenly bodies. She finds beauty in between, in the paradox, in the abandon of certainty.

The film, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, illustrates the same in a story of a boy who tries to make sense out of the most senseless day of his history and ours; September 11. He lost his father in the collapse of the World Trade Center and struggles to find some certainty in making sense of a key he’s convinced his father left for him, and to discover what it unlocks. At the risk of a spoiler, he doesn’t. Sense never comes. The credits roll without it.

When the earth moves and one loses their faith, the evaluation reflects back to them that the reason for its failure is not inherent in the virtue of faith, but rather in their unworthiness or their weakness.

Friday evening, listening to Helen, watching excerpts from her work, the question illuminated in my thinking once again, why can’t we be okay with that? With uncertainty, without making sense, without having all the answers, without having some divine reason as purpose for crisis?

Having been on both sides of this coin let me relate. When I held a conviction for what I believed to be true I found great comfort in its certainty. Many of my questions were answered, even in the wake of fathering a remarkable son whose life would be a constant struggle and would be cut short, the circumstances of which could have been prevented.

There was a certainty in knowing that if I did all that was expected, obedient to saving ordinances and faithful to covenants, that I would not only see him again, I’d be sealed to him as his earthly father, enabled to live with him forever and realize the blessings of his perfected resurrected state. There seemed to be some sense in the malpractice that resulted in his daily suffering and truncated life. My faith made it easy to reconcile the contradictions of suffering and a higher-power. The way he lived his life induced beauty in it.

It was at this time when I became reacquainted with a sense I had discovered as a Mormon missionary, an invasive premonition that one would sooner deny than validate but couldn’t, because it was the truth about how faith evaporates when you consider yourself unworthy. Guilt then overrides any consideration that this sense was truly complementary to my physical ones instead of subsidized by a shitty self-concept. If you feel that you may never be good enough, the certainty of heaven becomes unreachable and gone is the comfort in its conviction.

On the dissent side of the coin I eradicated the inherent evaluation of worthiness. It took a long time. It became a non-condition of my relationship with my dead son and subsequently my living son and daughter. I stopped being compelled for righteousness’ sake, I removed ideas of heaven and hell, and engaged in living without these conditions, without predication, without sense.

While within this uncertainty there’s much less the comfort I once found in conviction, there is no longer the overarching emphasis to figure out why. Why anything. No matter what decisions I make, no matter my impetus for good, life will do what she wants and once again, what once was will never be and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I choose good for goodness’ sake.

There is peace in understanding now that I don’t need certainty. What I need, instead, and the irony here is delicious, is faith.

Faith is that beauty found in contradiction.

the unavoidable feeling of relief

Over lunch the other day my sweet wife and I talked about assisted suicide, a topic one son has been debating in his pre-med studies at college. He holds an opinion that may seem contrary to the Hippocratic oath, that it’s the right of the patient to determine their fate given the circumstances that decision is out of their capacity to make. And I realized he has no context that relates to that decision for a brother he never knew. None of our kids do.

The only thing more unnatural than outliving a child is not intervening in his dying.

My brain stops in this consideration, this writing an attempt to wrench the words that belie the pain at a risk to a valentine too worn for its days.

His heart stopped beating in my arms and those of his mother. We’d intervened before, hundreds of times, some heroic, most just part of the quotidian task of his care. Eight years and ten months. The onset of this last pneumonia manifest damage that was unrecoverable. The alternative to dying was a respirator, upon which he’d never wean. Our pediatrician prescribed an ability for him to be comfortable in his passing, and even in euphemizing that I’m not sure he was; he was just out. I believe one has to have a level of consciousness to be comfortable. Perhaps it was, instead, a vain attempt at our comfort, more a disconnect for him. I’ve debated this for eighteen years.

Shortly after he died I got a job working in durable medical equipment, much of which was respiratory related. A breakthrough at the time, just months after his passing was BiPAP, which basically is the ability to ventilate without intubating, the cruelest timing of any invention I know. Shift the temporal context and maybe he could have been saved. That parenthetical’s a son-of-a-bitch.

The overarching debate was quality of life. Over the course of his life we had gone from strong suggestions of a neurologist to institutionalize him, to the praise of his third-grade teachers in his matriculation to mainstream. He had dipped his toes in two oceans, marveled at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and survived an over-zealous yellow lab bent on being his canine companion.

That versus aspiration pneumonia more common than the common cold, hips that would never form and a fecal vault that wouldn’t void. What are inalienable to able- bodieds, weren’t only foreign to him – to eat, to walk, to poop – they were terminally depriving of quality living.

According to me, the able-bodied.

He found it in a stretch or in the compression of his legs into his hips, the reward of such therapy was his smile. It was in the rare clear breath free of the threat of aspiration, something I’ve dismissed as easily as clearing my throat.

He found it in the most dire times. When it comes to speech the most basic collaboration we make between consonants and vowels is ma. With the mouth closedvibrate the lips by humming, then open your mouth. There you have it. It wasn’t that easy for him. After realizing some success with patterning in his physical therapy, I thought to try it in developing his ability to speak. Patterning is developing muscle memory by practicing a move over and over again, hundreds of times until the brain can do it autonomically. I worked with him for weeks. He’d make the hum but struggled to open his mouth. He’d sneak an index finger to his chin and do it manually, but he couldn’t do it by virtue of just opening his mouth coordinating with the hum.

Not long after, he was back in an intensive care unit, rapidly desaturating from aspirating on his own fluids. A nurse was trying to thread an IV in the only place she could find a vein, on top of his little blond head. His mom held him while I held his hands so he wouldn’t intervene on his own behalf and the nurse started the puncture. It hurt him. He rarely manifest pain through crying, I can’t remember a single instance of him doing so. Instead he tensed and shook, looked at his mother and said as if he’d been speaking it his entire short life, “Mama.”

At two years and then some he created a single word, double syllabic vocabulary that came to mean everything. “Mama” meant “I love you,” “I’m hungry,” “I hurt,” “Hi Grandma,” and a thousand other iterations this word could ever know. This tiny window opened a world of communication for him, for us, a quality of living that was never predicted by any attending physician, but realized by a boy who had outlived any prediction made on his behalf.

And that’s the rub for me, because it was by my definition of quality of life where decisions were made about his quality of life. Maybe he was completely satisfied with tube feedings, Barney, and the struggle to just oxygenate. Maybe I saw an opportunity in his pediatrician’s terminal evaluation of unrecoverable to just let it be, to end almost nine years of around-the-clock care, to surrender a fight for a life we were lucky to have for every day of his existence. There is an immeasurable grief in that surrender.

And that’s a killer, because in his passing was the unavoidable feeling of relief.

There it is, in writing this out, a better construct of two utterly polarized emotions that dance like electrons across my heart.

stop the bleeding

On the heels of my undergrad work I landed a couple of interviews in small television markets in the shadows of larger ones, Chicago and Seattle. The second was for a field reporter position in Yakima. They saw my reel and called me in.

The interview went well. The station was nice given its market size and there were certainly worse areas one could start a career in television journalism. I had worked my way up the chain and had my final interview with their assignment editor. He explained they’d had a rash of gang violence in their coverage area and had a drive-by shooting the day before. He explained they had a field crew nearby who reached the crime scene before the police and trauma arrived. On the sidewalk in front of his house lay the victim. As the photog was powering up his camera the victim’s mother came through the front door, saw her child and started screaming.

“What would you do?” was the editor’s question.

I watched CNN Headline News this morning. Robin Meade was filling while a courtroom in Aurora, Colorado was preparing a hearing for James Holmes. She had on her show via phone a psychologist from a New York hospital. HLN had just contrasted Holmes’ character from summer camp counselor to mass murderer, and she asked her phone-in guest what could possibly be going on in Holmes’ mind.

The psychologist warned against speculating anything, but she did indicate that minds like these seek publicity regardless its infamy and that news organizations feed into this by showing the perpetrator’s photo and talking about his life, all the while a photo of Holmes was displayed. She went on to say that instead of focusing on the alleged gunman, perhaps more attention should be paid to the victims and efforts to restore sanity in Aurora.

The show cut quick to Meade who was as quick to point out they had just run a story about the victims in  the previous segment. Meade went on to chide the psychologist, “I mean, you’re a psychologist, surely you must have…” I changed the channel at that point.

I didn’t even think about my response. “Stop the bleeding,” I said. My career ended there in that newsroom. He smiled and thanked me for taking the time to come to Yakima for the interview.

During the long drive home I wrestled with the realization that I wasn’t cut-out to be a reporter. While I could write and shoot, I could interview and edit, I could even do a decent stand-up, what I couldn’t do was ignore the entire story, including the contextual ramifications of the events, even as they were unfolding.

The psychologist was right. The media in their ernest scooping and patronized grandstanding have plastered screens, websites and front pages with the image of a killer and stories of his life, and while I’ll admit this is total speculation on my part, I suspect Holmes got exactly what he wanted.

If it bleeds it leads.

my palms sweat

Happens every time this year, twice, no, thrice, at the end of every semester. They’re taking the final for whatever class they’ve been taking from me. And I wonder.

What stuck? Rubbing foreheads and grimaces and furrowed brows all make me second-guess that clever stem or the clarity of choices. They’re so nervous.

A few years ago I made all the answers on my Interpersonal final “C”. I was finishing my grad work in assessment psychology and thought I’d try that little experiment. It was fascinating. By number six or seven, test-takers were beginning to see the pattern and it freaked them out. A couple, student-athlete types, filled in all the Cs on their Scantrons and were quick to leave the classroom.

Others labored over every single option, because certainly the next one couldn’t be C again. It just couldn’t be. By sixteen, seventeen, a few broke down. One started to cry. There were fifty questions on this assessment.

I threw the test out. Of course. I wouldn’t count it towards their grade. But it confirmed for me the efficacy of anxiety in test-taking; how it’s turned to such a nail-biter, an escalation that does little more than interfere with that neurological response everyone is banking on to do well. Yes, I compounded it, but they had it to begin with.

Some students are laughing as I write this while they take the test. This final has a few humorous stems to reduce the anxiety; a release valve. And that makes me smile.

How is it that we’ve come this far in an academic process to have its very value, its assessment, undermined by fear and loathing? Shouldn’t it be, instead, as a manifestation of all that was learned over the semester, or the baccalaureate for that matter, something more engaging and joyful? Something that says, “I embraced this, sweated over it, examined it, made sense out of it, and now I want to tell you all about it!”

And that’s why my palms sweat, not just because I want my students to do well on the final, but because the process of the final is inherently flawed and does not accurately measure achievement – not when fear is induced and used as impetus to succeed.

captain context

(From my Digital Photojournalism post on Illustration)

Over the weekend a Facebook friend coined a term for me, one that’s apropos considering how I’m driven by it.

When it comes to flushing out ideas or concepts on illustrative or editorial photography, there are dozens of approaches. Kobre sites John Newcombe’s The Book of Graphic Problem-Solving: How to Get Visual Ideas When You Need Them, where the photographer is encouraged to list characteristics about the subject or the story. Source, Delivery, Size, Weight, Winners or Losers.

That doesn’t work for me. And it doesn’t have to, we all have different approaches to brainstorming how we might symbolize meaning or create a metaphor to depict a visual punch.

Quick, what just came to your mind’s eye?

Do you see a red boxing glove right now?

That’s what I saw just as I was writing those words. Where did that come from? You got it: context.

As Captain Context might say, inspiration is found in the communicative affects of each context; physical, psychological, cultural, social and temporal. The more of these that can be drawn together to eek out a concept, the better.

In 2008 I directed the play Facing East by Carol Lynn Pearson. It’s a story rich in context, a tragedy, a story of loss about a Mormon couple who debate the influences that resulted in the suicide of their gay son.

I wanted to shoot the art for the playbill and the poster, knowing the characters and the story as intimately as I did, applying Captain Context’s pentium.

1. Physical – The play takes place in a cemetery, graveside. I didn’t want to depict this, though. I felt as if it may steal the thunder, so to speak, of the actual staging of play. So, I got to thinking, what other moments take place at a funeral? Pictures. It’s odd to me, but for some reason, especially in the cultural context of Mormon funerals, we take family pictures. The concept evolved then, photograph Ruth and Alex McCormick in their family portrait, less their family, their son, Andrew.

2. Psychological – As you can imagine, this is some pretty heavy stuff here as we watch the McCormicks wade through blame and accusation. Their expression, the psychological context, had to reflect this weight, as well as what their respective characters bring to the story. The way they’re illuminated brings this home, purposefully eliminating the catch-lights in their eyes.

3. Cultural – This is the play’s eight-hundred pound gorilla, and one that made every packed house uncomfortable: Mormonism and homosexuality. I couldn’t depict the latter for this image. After all, I wanted people to come see this show, Mormon people especially. This forced me to capitalize on the former. Bishop and Sister McCormick had to have the neighborhood appeal of your Utah neighbor. Obviously this was imperative to casting this show making it easy to photograph, but certain elements had to be considered within this context; hairstyle, costumes, artifacts such as the corsages, and texture within the textiles.

4. Social – They’re married. They are a married Mormon couple. Culturally, there is an implied patriarchy here, but Ruth’s character evolves to somewhat thwart Alex’s role as both a father and a bishop, hence their juxtaposition.

5. Temporal – This would’ve been taken before the internment, where the play unfolds and where Ruth and Alex and later Andrew’s companion, Marcus experience the transitions wrought from their disclosures and reminiscing, so their expression had to be tied to some time before the funeral but within the proximity of the day.

And this was the result.

The poster was laid out by an artist extending negative spaces of the background and Alex’s jacket for copy space. The line, “It doesn’t feel like darkness…” is another juxtaposition, not only with the psychological context of the image, but of the play and particularly of Andrew himself.

Ruth was played by Andrea Davenport

Alex was played by Garry Peter Morris