HOMELAND SECURITY

Recent events (Division of Nigerian Foreign Affairs) have alerted me to the ever greater perils of daily life. There I was trolling my way through my e-mail when I glanced at the advertisements which so grace the Google pages. And there were three ads for degree courses in Homeland Security at various 'universities' of the mail order sort.

Of course it is my view that we lost the War on Terror as of 9/11 (so much more euphonious than the European 11/9). Quite simply, the sheer cost of protecting each and every one of us from those whose ambition in life (and death) is to blow us up, is a major factor in bankrupting us, giving us a set of national jitters to go along with joblessness and failed health care and insistently greedy bankers, and generally causing a slowdown in national life. A million-strong new bureaucracy of 'security' experts -- recruited only God knows how -- is now enthroned with the power to interfere in our private lives such as would never have been admissible a mere twenty years ago. I mean, did you know that any one of these people can seize your computer? confiscate you hard drive? delve into your correspondence?

Bet you didn't! But it is paradigmatic of American life that there is no niche or want that will not be filled by the Academy. Forget qualifications for degree-by-email courses: not even basic literacy is required. Some early morning hours have been spent considering the sort of curriculum a new-minted professor of Homeland Security might introduce. Here are a few sensible suggestions.

HS 101: Psychological Profiling of Terrorists: perspiration levels, bodily exudations, beard-analysis, Oedipal conflicts, criminal shiftiness.

HS 102: Linguistic Analysis: Basic Muslim, Arab oaths, translating explosive tracts, the hermeutics of stuttering, Body Language.

HS 201: Adanced Visa Studies: Detecting Voids in multiple applications, Buzz Words, detecting altered (edited) documents, Consular Analysis.

You get the picture. Background reading (for candidates who are able to read) include Kafka, Conrad, the Quran, Sharpton, Halliburton (the company, not the pre-war explorer), Basic English for Dummies, Coriolanus, Koestler.

I know this is all exaggerated, but so is the eagerness of the Education Business to pick up on every opportunity to make a buck.

MEDIOCRITY

Since I find myself wandering about in the snow under which my old haunts in Boston lie, and since this causes a problem -- should I venture forth to Barnes & Ignoble which lies a steeping hill below my room just to get a little paper cup of espresso, ever lukewarm and Starbuck's, a brand I usually pass by? -- I would rather, I think, pass on two reflections from the new year, derived from old friends in Academia.

Well, how are things? I ask an old friend, self-exiled from what was once Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. He teaches to crowded classrooms in a local university and recalls for me the bad old days in his native land. 'What always struck me so forcibly,' he says, 'was what happened to my old friends. We were all young, then, and in firm agreement that we had a government of shits and we fought against it with the pawky means at our disposal. It was the most vociferous among them who began, year by year, to retrench. Aided and abetted by Common Sense, they had reached the age at which they really ought to leave the parental cramped apartment and enter Real Life. That meant they would need to have an apartment of their own in which to accommodate the young women they were about to marry. They would also need to have regular jobs and, if possible, escape the penury their Opposition to the regime enforced on them. It was amazing to me how firmly they moved towards "understanding" the government and its problems and how consistently they began the brown-nosing of those they had spent their lives excoriating! They had scorned, hated and despised X. Now they could not say enough good of him. People like me who still opposed the regime were first abandoned by them, then bit by bit began to be scorned, hated and despised as X once had been.'

But how does this relate to your daily life? I asked him. 'Academia,' he replied, is very much like one of those sorry East European states. There is a shuffle at the top and Professors X, Y and Z suddenly find themselves loving those they had very recently despised etc.. Brown-nosing has fresh territory to sniff.'

In short, when the mediocre triumph over their betters, sound minds consider their own advantage, their needs -- those apartments, those appointments, promotions and perquisites. Nothing new to that. I pass on as comment what is the way of the world.

At this selfsame university, which was once mine, I asked a crotchety old friend why it was the case that in Academia, a fraught eastern nation occupied by Soviet look-alikes -- boring people in suits, dull minds with dachas -- real talent was so often opposed and mediocrity so often rose to the top. 'Resentment,' my friend replied. 'There are three classes, here as elsewhere. There are the truly first-class, a second-class that wants only safety and survival, and a third class that has ambitions. Third-class people -- which a good university seeks to weed out -- wants to have what the first class has. While the middle plods on, this rabble seeks to undermine what the first class does.'

If you put Mediocrity in charge, as has happened at my old university, the Middle will plod on, the top will emigrate, and the rabble will rise. That too is the way of the world. And not just in Academia.

THE BULWER-LYTTON PRIZE

For some reason which escapes me, the good folk at San Jose State have held an annual contest since 1982 in which contestants are urged to compete with the worst possible opening sentence of an imagined novel. The contest is named after the hugely successful novelist-cum-philanthropist and Dickens' close friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton because he began a novel with "It was a dark and stormy night. . .", the which innocuous phrase precedes every attempt by Snoopy to write a novel. The reason must be, in that citadel of learning, that someone has nothing better to do.

I will be accused of humorlessness, but I beg to differ with the principle. On the following grounds: (A) It is no great task to find far worse first sentences than Bulwer-Lytton's in existing novels written today, where they flourish by the dozen. (B) For Snoopy, already a literate and ambitious dog, that opening sentence certainly has a meaning and a reason behind it -- dogs don't like such nights; they shiver, bark, howl and cower. (C) Bulwer-Lytton, like many another neglected Victorian from the great age of the novel, was a writer of some substance.

Okay, so it's all in good fun. We like spoofs. The underlying truth is, however, that there are very few people left who can read Bulwer-Lytton: his language is alien, difficult, and requires effort and attention -- as does Dickens'. There is, on the Net, a professorial quiz which proposes that the reader identify specific passages of Dickens (presumably good) and Bulwer-Lytton (presumably bad). It is a tricky test and a false one. Other passages in either author could reverse the verdict. This gradual effacementof the literature of the past, and its language, is something we might deplore rather than seek to parody. My Oxford Edition of Our Mutual Friend contains many pages of notes to explain Dickens' fascination with, for instance, the specific languages of trades now long lost, doll-makers, conveyancing clerks, water-men, Philistines of the day and such. On my shelves is a treasured dictionary, the Dictionnaire du monde rural, in which one can recover the implements used in threshing, winnowing and other rural pursuits. Every language loses a part of its lexicon every day. Danbury, Connecticut, was the hat capital of America; now the only head-cover we see is the baseball cap. The loss is constant, and the language is not replenished by the conjugation or declension of 'f**k', which seems to be as far as common parlance goes. What is a writer to do if the language he uses erodes even as he writes?

It was a dark and stormy night when the profs of San Jose State thought they knew what bad writing was. Far greater pollution is shown daily and climate change can't be blamed for the poverty of our current language.