6 January 2011: Epiphany
On this day many moons ago, the Star of Bethlehem dazzled a path for the three Magi to pay a visit to Baby Jesus, presumably twelve days old, to deliver their good wishes along with gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
So we were told--on this twelfth day of Christmas a baby visit was paid--aren't they lovely at that age? Is there anything lovelier?
This holiday season, especially in the United States, amid the days of Christmas, animals began to drop out of the sky or float belly-up atop waters--besides the more expected species, these hundreds of thousands of creatures included penguins, manatees, bats, starfish, and jellyfish.
One explanation is that the seas were too calm to offer sufficient food, so that many of the creatures starved to death--those of the sea and those of the air vying for the same sustenance often enough. But a larger-than-usual birthrate will offset the loss, we were told yesterday. These too-calm waters are attributed to unusual behavior by the La Nina climate pattern.
For a rundown of the devastating casualties, please visit "http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=201817256339889828327.0004991bca25af104a22b".
Why the huge concentration in the United States--mass deaths in fifteen different locations? Nowhere else on earth comes close to this--I wonder if the BP gusher had anything to do with it. The first "sky vomit" occurred in Beebe, Arkansas, a few days ago. Then news of other similar events began to flood the media, though I looked in vain at the New York Times Online today for any front-page coverage, or even anything in the Science section, which instead features a reinterpretation of the psychic phenomenon.
Evidently it's no big deal.
Ten out of the fifteen calamities occurred on or near the Atlantic Ocean, as far north as Delaware, and a few within striking distance of the Gulf of Mexico--fully six up the East Coast beginning with three locations in Florida. Of course, if anything had to occur outside the U.S. in this hemisphere, it would be in, and was in Haiti. Too much.
Now, ancient peoples believed that such events constitute omens. Forces beyond us are trying to tell us that something is amiss and there is more to follow. I am reminded of the ten plagues visited on the Egyptians by Moses as an agent of the Lord.
Add to the above atrocities the floods, mudslides, tornadoes, blizzards, earthquakes, and more, all within 2010, and the sum total might mean that Mother Nature is angry and responding to our abuse of her bounty with her own awesome weaponry.
I am far closer to a shaman (not close, though) than to a meteorologist or environmentalist, so that I'm sure that others far more qualified have delivered other explanations of this sudden apparition of a death more appropriate to the Apocalypse than to Epiphany.
But if the path a bit less than halfway up the East Coast is a continuation of the progression of the BP oil spill, which had advanced as far as Florida several months ago, could the by-products of the gusher be wending their way northward, as was the prediction then?
I don't know. Don't flog me for thinking out loud.
A good friend of mine, were she more like-minded than she seems to be--she a technologist as much as I'm steeped in the humanities--might interpret these Christmas-fortnight disasters as omens of a misfortune from which she is now valiantly recovering--defenestration from grad school.
As part of her recovery process, she requested that I post some of the final communications that occurred between her and the powers that be, so I will, in the context of an editor's critique of bad Bureaucratese.
Here is one paragraph I have targeted:
"The GC academic appeals process and decision regarding your particular case will not be revisited by my office as discussed. Kindly do not discuss our confidential meeting with anyone. Further, you did tell me when asked, that you also shared your faculty concerns during the appeals process. Finally, any concerns regarding "bullying" or "incivility" by any faculty member may be directed to the V.P. of Student Affairs; the policy and procedures can be located on the GC Student Affairs website."
First of all, note the passive voice that contradicts the clipped and efficient style the writer is obviously striving toward. Does anyone say, "Food will not be eaten by me" as opposed to "I am on a starvation diet"?
Why is my friend's case "particular"? Clearly she's one in a million. Why not simply "regarding your case." "Case"? Where was that bit of vocab first applied? In medical or disciplinary contexts? The connotation is insulting.
Who visits processes or decisions, let alone revisits them? Offices? Since when do offices visit anything or anyone? Don't we usually visit them?
What does "As discussed" mean here? It evokes disgust in me. But "discussed" must modify something. Here, semantically, it plays an adverbial role, modifying "revisited," which doesn't make much sense. Here again, our friend is grappling for the formula "less is more" and again falling on her face. She needs to allow this theme to expand into "as we discussed yesterday," but even that isn't grammatical. To maintain her diction at all, we must add an em dash after "office" and write something like "as I informed you during our discussion yesterday." The em dash might be replaced by a comma, to soften the tone.
Then there is the request to keep a particular "confidential meeting" confidential; that is, she should not tell anyone what went on that provoked this reprehensible, poor excuse for American English bureaucratic prose.
Now, my friend has not discussed this meeting with just anyone. She instead emailed it to me. I am not discussing this event with anyone, merely sharing it with my readers, so the promise has been kept, if there was one, or better yet, my friend kept the executive's communications confidential, indirectly sharing them with only a few hundred thousand people who don't know her from a rat's belly. So she has nothing to fear. Honesty hasn't yet disappeared from the earth. Only lots of animal lives and human lives, if we expand our perspective from Christmas week to 2010 as a whole.
"Kindly." There is a disciplinary mode to that adverb. Why be kind to someone who has just defenestrated you? And then locked the window? My friend is many things, but I wouldn't put "kindness" at the top of the heap of her many fine qualities. I believe that intelligence comes first and moxie close behind. I'd never ask anyone I remotely respect to "kindly" do anything. Would you?
What on EARTH is a faculty concern? Another glaring shot at clipped, bureaucratic, impersonal diction that fell on its face. A faculty concern is to be sure that the coffee in the samovar in the faculty lounge is freshly brewed each morning. If she means that my friend had some anxieties about the behavior of certain of the bureaucrat's academic colleagues, she should have said so and could have quite easily, by inverting to "concerns about the faculty."
"You did tell me when asked . . . ": Who was asked? I guess, my friend, but the pronoun "me" gets in the way, so one is unsure who was asked or who did the asking. The expression needs to be expanded into "when I asked you."
"Also shared"? What did she do before that to justify "also"? Evidently a long list of violations, including honesty and moxie and revulsion at what people can get away with as long as they, as long as they . . . "What?" I don't consider my own, personal, particular grad school experience terribly positive--I'm still trying to answer that question. "What???"
Maybe I'd have gotten a doctorate if I knew the answer.
But these paragraphs concern my friend and her "superior"'s lousy grammar, diction, and style. She clearly needs to "revisit" freshman composition 101, if they will accept her.
Having taught that course myself any number of times, I'd advise her to "say what she means and mean what she says," as a starting point, and from there we'll take care of skills that certainly don't come naturally to her. Hers can be improved, however.
A comma is needed before "when asked, " to revisit a phrase discussed above. That might clear up some of the ambiguity in that atrocious sentence.
"Any concerns can be directed . . . "? My friend is far more of a director than a sheep, so that was a good choice of vocabulary. But it does appear that she is redirecting my poor, burned-out friend to yet another bureaucratic maze.
The quotation marks placed around "bullying" and "incivility" indicate to me that she is quoting my friend but disagreeing with her interpretation of certain negative interactions with professors who, in the eyes of this bureaucrat, for the purpose of this unfortunate scenario, can do no wrong.
Direct her objections to the "V.P." of student affairs? (Why V.P." but "GC" in such proximity? I'd mark that as inconsistent styling.) Is there a Freudian undercurrent she may have unintentionally injected? Is there a hint of my question or her answer in the above?
And finally, since when does anyone "locate policies and procedures"? Think about it. One can read an explanation of them, but the proof is in the action. Policies and procedures don't sit on a website. They are supposed to accomplish lots more than that.
My friend is suffering from a bad case of policies and procedures written down on paper or thrown up upon a website, but certainly never adhered to. Reminds me of all those employee manuals that outline what to do in the event of sexual harassment. I'm belly laughing. The last time I complained about sexual harassment overtly to a supervisor, she asked me if I was crazy.
So much for policies and procedures.
This particular bureaucrat would receive a D+ for this horrible piece of writing.
The best I can say about it is that it could be worse.
And that I can say to my good friend, too, who has already launched a promising career and is being well paid.
Many are those who would trade places with you, darling.
*****
But back to the beautiful iconography of the Magi visiting the Baby Jesus, before all the hell that broke loose which we refer to as Western history or, even better, the history of Western civilization. Also bestiality, I might add. No, back from Armageddon. We've been there, dummy, many times. Many would argue that we're there now, especially in the House of Representatives if not out of the sky and up from the sea.
So if the adoration of the Magi just isn't relevant in our present context, how about another aspect of the word "epiphany," "sudden realization"? Several epiphanies have been described above: the equation of all of those poor dead and dying animals with the pagan notion of Nature as a source of prophecy, for one, and a graduate school bureaucrat who can't compose a coherent sentence to save her life--what's she doing earning six figures annually in an academic milieu? Granted, not all those there are outstanding stylists, but holy hell, who taught her to express herself verbally?
Another epiphany, seemingly a paradox, is that all smart people don't succeed in academe and some who don't appear terribly intelligent, at least in writing, do succeed.
And there are more epiphanies.
I hope that if you celebrate this holiday or even if you don't, that the stars twinkle more brightly for you, more closely to those that adored the Baby Jesus, than they are for others discussed above, with disgust.
Happy Epiphany and I wish you brighter omens tomorrow as the cycle begins again and Jesus rises in so many ways even as he is burdened with the sins of the world. A star in the sky could not bear them more lightly. Our mistake is having pulled them away from his divine essence and heaped them upon Mother Nature instead.
Let's work on sinning correctly, if sin we must. Let 2011 be witness to many good deeds and thoughts.
Marta, you've written more than enough.
