My comments on your show June 25th.
I listened intently to both sections, one on home ownership and the next on rising costs of higher education.
First owning a house. We bought a house with the help of my ex-wife's parents back in the 70s. I felt that as part of my duties, since I couldn't contribute anything but morgage payments, I would also remodel the house and drastically upgrade its look and physical quality. It was a classic Berkeley brown shingle that had been going downhill for thirty years. These jobs required the usual deck materials, plus engineering the design for a deck off the second floor, cutting out new openings from the dinning room so dinner and parties flowed from both, reworking the bathrooms stripped down to the studs, plumbing, fixtues, and all the redwood, cedar, oak, mahogany, Italian tile I could afford. All totaled the materials alone accounted for half the purchase price of the house.
I drew on all my skills as a carpenter, plus all my skills as an artist, and of course whatever money I had. It became an art project and it took all my free time for about five years, while I worked fulltime at UCB on a lower middle class pay scale, did the usual house work and child care on somekind of half and half schedule. A real prince for the new age.
The first thing I discovered was that the ex-wife had no interest in working on the house. Things went downhill in the marriage fast after that.
>From my standpoint, unless you're already a millionair, if you buy a
house, your chances of a divorce go up some significant percent. This
result comes from the necessity of re-negociating the power relations
inside the marriage. Owning properity is bad for people.
While I have sympathy for the millions who are losing their houses, in my opinion they are better off. They didn't own the place anyway, because the bank owned the place. So to hell with marriage, houses, and banks. Let's find another way to have families, raise kids, make love, work, live, and enjoy life. I'd rather swell cheap wine on the sidewalk than go back to that crap.
My experience with the american dream is you go to bed at night not getting fucked, toss in terrible nightmares, get up in the morning exhausted, go to work with dread, work all day harassed, harried, and brooding, fight traffic going home, seething with rage, listen to the news ready to push the button for the big one,.. When you arrive at your sweet dear home, you are ready to strangle the cat for even thinking of coming to greet you because you know the little bastard just wants dinner.
Now on to the other segment on higher education. Goddamn, always straight to the heart, and another issue that nearly finished me off, i.e. getting an education. I've got probably one of the best educations available anywhere, maybe even better than was available in the US before my generation of WWII war babies.
Adolph Reed was right when he mentioned his idea of an education had to do with a sense of purposiveness. You have to want an education for some collection of reasons that have meaning to you, on the inside or from your heart. You have to compulsively desire it, not just perform it.
So maybe the reason I think I got a fine education was because I wanted one badly enough to struggle for it. Those eight and half years full time sure as hell were not easy to live. Every aspect of my life was fighting against this goal. All of those forces came down to money. My parents would feed and house me, if I stayed home to live and respected their rules. After that I had to come up with the rest of the money for registration fees, books, supplies, transportation, gas. This meant I had to work and go to school and live at home, which in those days was a form of humilation.
Then that family dissolved when my mother died, and I moved to my father's family which wasn't pleased with my arrival. It became clear after a rather short bereavement, I had to leave and move out on my own. I was an intruder. Meanwhile the draft board required a copy of my school registration and a signed form stating I was a full time student. Next, as an art student, I needed a place to make my assignments and projects. I was living in my small bedroom, that hadn't changed since I was about eleven, which was the last time I needed an extended staying permit. It was more of walkway between the kitchen and the main bedroom hallway. It worked fine as a weekend bedroom for a part-time kid, but not for a young man who needed a life. I stayed away most days until dinner, then out again. It was a thankless life for all of us.
How was I going to keep full time student status, work, afford a place to live, stay out of the army, have some kind of social-sex life, and get an education all at the same time? Oh and yeah, studio courses run two hours for two units, so the number of units and hours required are completely disproportionate to the amount of work, thought, and practice required for a good grade. Of course the teachers had their own high standards and didn't hand out grades for free. They were as generous in their grades as an insecure post-doc under Herr Doktor supervision, teaching a five unit core calculus requirement.
Well those were the days when public higher education was nearly tuition free. Life was hard in uptopia and then even the illusion died.
What's the point? Those eight years were the best I ever had until I was in my mid-fifties, renting a studio flat, divorced, working less than full time, and my kid was at UCB in Chemistry.
The lesson is, we as a society have to figure out an another way to get the kind of education that Reed talked about too briefly. The system, the institutions, and the entirety of that world is mostly gone as I knew it. One interesting catch-22 that UCB practices is to require many upper division requirements for majors and then only offer a reduced class list of them during any particular year. This stupidity, virtually insures you can not work, even as a TA because of scheduling conflicts. No, it is not on purpose, but it works out that way. I doubt getting a proper education will ever come back in my lifetime. And the reason is of course money.
In terms of Reed's concept, there is a corresponding problem in the sciences. It is just more subtle to understand. The basic problem is that science is not just a technocratic discipline and practice you can learn if you are bright and reasonably committed. It has another dimension that is critical to its own achievements. I can't find the right words to discribe this component, but it comes down to understanding and research into the humanities that are allied to the sciences. In anthropology for example, it helps a great deal to have learned an art, especially as a current hobby. In something like mathematics or physics, many of the giants also studied music and philosophy. There are many other examples that I've found through the years. It can be trivialized by saying you need to broaden your horizons. Scientic careerism is another giant hurdle, so that a successful career doesn't necessarily mean making great contributions. The arts are much more familiar with this strange dicotomy. I hope a significant number of physics and math students are beginning to learn the ropes.
One of the nice side effects of studying Marx, is that Marx was an economist, a sociologist, a philosopher, journalist, and a political activist. I am guessing he also played an instrument like the violin. So you get a better `education' in just about anything if you study him. It's not just that Marx might have been right or wrong on some detail, it was his whole point of view that seems to contain all these other dimensions.
And conversely, I discovered I got to be better at doing art, after I had taken science and math classes... even if I risked poor grades and lost required subject units.
So, what's happened in science education, is to drop all of those `soft' classes, amp-up the competition and technical difficulties in the core requirements, shorten the PhD track and pumb out the product in a work speed up routine. That works very efficiently to produce more money for the institutions and more people with degrees. Gee, too bad it is counter-productive to doing science at its best...
Another great show Doug. I expect to come into some money pretty soon, so the check is in the mail... for my long overdue subscription renewal. Yes, it has been that tight living on social security in the middle of a depression. Need a tooth pulled, get out the plastic and pray.
CG