Vika blogged an essay by Vonnegut, Cold Turkey that rails against our addiction to oil and suggests that what is happening now is an empire desperately securing a last fix of petrochemicals before it has to go cold turkey.
What stands out for me is the anger of Vonnegut’s essay, an anger I find in myself. Such anger is a warning, but not rightious. This anger mirrors the fury Republican’s felt about Clinton – an anger that was more than partisan pretense – it included a deep sense of insult accompanied by an intolerance of the other intolerant.
As James Hynes describes Lamar, Texas in Kings of Infinite Space, there are three parts to disfunctional America (and this includes Canada):
There are the musicians, slackers, aging hippies, computer entrepreneurs, and academics in the arboreal old city north of the river; the Republican, Texas two-stepping, cowboy boot-wearing, SUV-driving Baptist middle managers in the sun-blasted suburban prairies south of the river; and the Hispanic and African-American gardeners, nurses, fast-food workers, and day laborers crowded into the crumbling streets east of the interstate, among the taquerieas and truck depots and tank farms. (p. 37)
Lets call them the Whigs, Tories, and Immigrants. These three ghettoes are closing on each other – the signs are that each have their story to tell of the other enclaves, each have their cultivated anger, each are erecting their own types of gates (ironic or ironware) and each have reason to avoid really engaging the other. Vonnegut voices the apocalyptic discourse of Whigs afraid of an empire managed by Tories.
The virtue of Hynes’ book is his refusal to let the Whigs off the hook, or for that matter, the Tories (I don’t know yet how he will deal with the third and disempowered class). He damns us both, and our intolerance of the other, to a Texas hell where, as in The Island of Dr. Moreau, we are asked again and again “Are we not Men?” by those we forgot.
My guess is that CS isn’t being taught in a way (if at all) that presents the challenges effectively. What I mean is this: primary and secondary students are unlikely, unless the school employs a programming instructor, to come across any instruction in computing problems, but only instruction in computer use. Personally, I feel that we should teach programming as another form of writing, as a foreign language, as a social studies topic, as science, literature…and I’m not even to the hard sciences yet.
Well, there’s that, and then there’s the interface hurdle. I introduced UGA’s EMMA program to a group of English majors in a class two years ago and the resistance was incredible. The work of English majors, they reasonsed, was emphatically NOT the work of computer science. This resistance can be palbably felt in the basement where we grad students live and work. When I talk to other grad students about my work, I sometimes get boredom, sometimes incredulity that I think I’ll find work in this area, sometimes envy that I’m bold enough to be on the “cutting edge,” and sometimes intense discussion about the loss of our traditional departmental focus…not fertile ground for entrapping new folks. These same folks, though, are enthralled by the very philosophical and theoretical conundrums that HC folks test and question in this most flexible medium.
Perhaps it is that flexibility that is frightening, that open space where work is no longer confined to the strictures of the page. Perhaps it is the fear of irrelevance. Perhaps there is a deeply ingrained belief that the work of the humanities is the capture of thought on the printed page and the constant reinscription of that thought…
I remember taking a BASIC programming class in HS–I was obsessed with turning pixels on and off to flash messages on the screen. I spent hours plotting out messages and translating them to code.
Then I took a Pascal class…ugh. I was in an unfriendly environment and was, admittedly, terrified of using the VAX system at the school I attended and never asked for assistance. I could write the programs, flawless programs, without ever running them. But something about that flashing green prompt was so off-putting that I couldn’t bear to go on.
Fast forward almost 20 years…and I’m at that prompt again, only now I feel more secure and can see the challenges inherent in computing systems. My only regret is that I waited so long.