Captain Capitalism who is a very intelligent and kind person and who always promotes me on his massively popular blog sent in the following question:

If the Soviet Union was so bad, then why didn’t people flee?

I ask because (in the case of a Vietnamese friend) the North Vietnamese “said” they would allow anybody who wanted to, to leave.  Well, that ended up not being true.  North Korea people can’t “just leave” but it’s on a peninsula and with mountains so the passes can be guarded.

But the Soviet Union just seems so big and so vast with sparsely populated areas, I can’t see how the government could effectively stop somebody who was determined from fleeing.

Additionally, couldn’t you, say, fly to Finland, then to the UK and then declare you were defecting?

I know this sounds stupid, but I would love to post your answer on my blog because it would be of interest to my readers.

The question doesn’t sound in the least stupid to me. The Soviet reality is so different from anything people have experienced or can imagine in other countries that it is, indeed, very difficult to comprehend it.

Leaving the USSR was next to impossible. People who applied for visas (mostly the Jews who had relatives outside of the country) were persecuted, sometimes imprisoned, and sometimes placed in psychiatric wards. The idea behind this was that anybody who wanted to leave the Soviet paradise had to, of necessity, be insane. Such people would be put on massive amounts of powerful psychotropic drugs with the goal of “curing” them of their desire to emigrate.

The only people who could leave the country for a short visit overseas were the ones who were considered “reliable” by the regime. You had to be an artist going on a tour or a very famous scientist traveling to a conference with a group of other Soviet people, many of whom were KGB informants and were following your every move. Of course, if you were a Jew, you wouldn’t be able to travel at all because Jews were considered unreliable by default.

All of this vigilance didn’t always work and some of the artists or scientists did end up asking for refuge in the countries they visited. This meant that they would never see their families again and could not even hope to get in touch with their relatives back in the USSR. People were never allowed to travel with their families, and who could face losing everybody you know and love for good? Single people were not allowed to travel precisely for this reason. If you wanted to work as a diplomat, for example, you had to get married because only then could the government keep your wife and children as hostages whenever it liked to do so.

In Captain Capitalism’s reality, people can just get on a plane and fly to Finland. This is a great, beautiful reality, and I really love it that there are people in the world who think in these terms. A Soviet person, however, could not have imagined such a possibility. Even traveling by train from one city to another in the USSR was very problematic. You needed to be prepared to show paperwork explaining why you needed to travel just to buy a ticket. Getting on a train or a plane to travel within the country was extraordinarily difficult. And when I imagine a poor Soviet citizen approaching the ticket counter at a Soviet airport and asking for a ticket to Finland (Bulgaria, Poland, etc.), I feel bad for that hypothetical Soviet traveler already. This person would have ended up at the police station and then the psychiatric hospital within minutes.

Gosh, folks, you couldn’t even make a phone call to another country. Talking to a foreign tourist in the street would put you in jail. We were completely isolated from the world because the Soviet government knew that the only way to keep people from running away in droves was to lock them down.

It’s true that Siberia is vast and sparsely populated. Obviously, nobody could guard the entire expanse of the border perfectly. However, you have to possess very special training to survive the climatic conditions. Besides, you need to know where exactly to go to have a chance to cross the border. Remember that one thing that you could never ever hope to purchase in the USSR was a map. Of anything. All maps were top secret. Also, a person who tried fleeing the country in that way – even if s/he were successful – was destroying the lives of every family member for generations to come as a result of the flight. How many people can face something like this?

I hate the Soviet Union.

Spain-splaining is a term a fellow Hispanist has come up with. I have been on the receiving end of the phenomenon quite a few times, so I know what this blogger is talking about.

Once, an acquaintance from Spain decided to prove to me that my Spanish could not possibly be as great as I thought it was.

“Let’s see if you know these very difficult words in Spanish,” he said and proceeded to list them.

The words he thought had to be impossibly complicated for me were: urbanización, existencialismo, colonización, internacionalización, and other similar words.

The poor guy was crushed when he discovered I knew what they meant. He was even more shocked to find out that these words sounded almost exactly the same in English, Russian, and French.

The best thing about students is that they grow. In college, they grow really fast, too. In the first year, they resent the written assignments I make them hand in every day of class. There is a lot of eye rolling, exasperated sighing, and shoulder twitching. The freshman class always hands in tiny little paragraphs written carelessly between classes.

By the third year, however, they begin to realize that these written exercises are extremely helpful. Sometimes, I get small written notes attached to the assignments where students thank me for taking the trouble to work on their writing every day. The responses they hand in become long and detailed. I can see that they want to get as much as they can from each assignment. In my Culture of Spain course, for instance, nobody – not a single student – has handed in a response that is shorter than one page. They could have easily limited their responses to one or two sentences but these are third-year students who realize that they would only cheat themselves out of extra knowledge if they did that.

If one survives the laziness, the immaturity, the cheating and the indifference of Freshmen, one can be very happy with more advanced students. Students come to college with grievous problems in basic socialization and a stunning degree of immaturity. With Freshmen, I feel like I work at a daycare. It is very rare that you see a student whose parents did a good job and sent their kid to college with the basic knowledge of how to exist in human society. To give just one example, whenever I teach a Freshman class, I know that I will often have people fall into my office and address me with, “I want. . . ” or “I need. . .” It takes a couple of years to teach people that they need to knock, greet the person in the office, and say something like, “I’m sorry, am I disturbing you?”

Last week, an angry disheveled person stumbled into my office. She plopped a stack of books on my desk, knocking off my own papers, placed a bag on top of the books and began to rummage in it. All of it was done in complete silence. After five minutes of silent shuffling of stuff in her bag, the student announced, “I need you to sign a form but I don’t know where it is. Do you have this form?”

“You must be in my Freshman course,” I said. “Would you like to introduce yourself?”

I can’t wait to see her two years from now and hear her tell me, like students sometimes do, that she cannot believe how wild she used to be.

From a student’s essay:

The President of the US and the Congress work together to make the country better and this makes the citizens feel proud of our country.

It’s when I read statements like these that I begin to feel old and cynical.

Reader Twicerandomly asks:

One of my guilty pleasures is novels by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I suppose I don’t take them seriously because they are historical adventures with dashing heroes and beautiful women. What do you think of his novels?

I understand Twicerandomly’s feelings very well. I’m also kind of ashamed of my love for mystery novels. I never managed to get into Perez Reverte because the mix of historical novels and mystery writing is not my cup of tea. However, Perez Reverte is generally considered one of the better mystery authors today, and deservedly so. He writes well and tries to be very conscientious about his research. I’m not personally into him but I understand people who are.

My favorite mystery writers are Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George, Michael Connelly, John Lescroart, and Peter Robinson.

Do you feel guilty about any of your reading preferences?

“And I’ll make the same observation about Mourdock now that I made about Santorum then: This guy is so catastrophically incapable of self-reflection that he is able to acknowledge that rape (forcing a woman to do something with her body she doesn’t want to do) is a Terrible Thing, while simultaneously asserting that the denial of abortion (forcing a woman to do something with her body she doesn’t want to do) is a Moral Imperative.”

“One year after college graduation, women are paid 82 cents for every dollar earned by their male peers, according to a report from the American Association of University Women. The gap is evident even when comparing women and men who work in the same field, and had the same college majors.”

“Academics, on average, lean to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving even more in that direction.”

“Let’s narrow the topic to the act of writing scholarly prose. On my view, this act takes about 30 minutes and, properly speaking, only really happens if it happens daily. (That is, you are not behaving like a scholar if you write once every three months for 72 hours straight.) A scholar can commit between one and six acts of writing every day. I recommend 27 minutes of writing followed by a three-minute break.”

“We have the right to interpret the universe in a way that makes sense to us. What we don’t have a right to do is expect — never mind demand — that other people share our worldview. This flies by some Republicans, and they trip over it. Particularly when it comes to abortion. They are so lost in their own religious belief — that a fetus is a baby, that God is against abortion, contraception, often sex itself — that the idea that other people get to form their own beliefs too on these issues, just like they do, flies by them. It boggles their minds.”

An absolutely sensational musical video on the presidential debates. Enjoy!

I always hated Monk but never knew why. Here is a brilliant analysis of the show that made it clear to me why I never could get into it.

“If your God condones forced pregnancy, get a new God.” I don’t think anybody could put it better.

If you still fear that psychoanalysts will tell you what to do, read this en enlighten yourself already: “I would never have signed up for this job if my sole goal were to help someone figure out how to live and die in accordance with the Big Other’s wishes. This is why neutrality is fucking key. If clinicians actively encouraged bourgoisie values such as the importance of the nuclear family, gainful employment, a comfortable retirement and some (but not too much) community activism then we would undoubtedly miss out on loads of conflicts and problems that often remain un-analyzed if these normative values are upheld as sacrosanct.”

Other than purple hair and the sweatpants, I already do everything the author of this great poem plans to do when she is an old tenured woman. So now I don’t even know what I will do when I get tenure. By the way, how can anybody buy a piece of clothing that has the word “sweat” in it? What next, an excrement dress? Poop jeans? Blood scarf?

The title of the post of the week goes to: “When people ask me why I am voting for Barack Obama in this election, I say, “Because I am a Christian and I vote my values.” I am pro-life, and when you line the two candidates up side by side, there’s an overwhelmingly clear choice.” I’m totally with you, Nerissa. (And what a beautiful name, too.)

And the most idiotic post of the week: “Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.” It is unbelievable that anybody older than 15 can be so ignorant about the nature of human sexuality and the definition of a friendship. I have somehow avoided “spontaneously sleeping together” with my close male friends for years. And they managed the great feat of not “spontaneously sleeping” with me. I think we all deserve a medal now! Jeez, this makes me want to barf. The article’s author needs to go get laid already to stop seeing those bubbly sexual impulses where they don’t exist.

The new blog theme I’ve been trying out since yesterday did not prove to be an unqualified success. So I’m trying out another one now.

How do you feel about this one?

P.S. We have many space lovers around here. I hope they like the theme.

P.P.S. As faithful I am in my personal life, I often get restless about my blog theme. This is very weird.

One of the main skills I want to develop in my students is academic writing. This is very hard because they come out of high school grievously unprepared to do any serious writing. I prepared the following exercise to teach them to identify bad writing and explain why it was bad.

Here is a short text I created that contains many of the most common mistakes students make when they write their essays:

Lope was a very poor boy. He lived in great poverty and his life was very poor. As Ana Maria Matute shows in her short story El Pecado de omisión. At first, this novel was difficult for me to read and I was almost about to give up but then I read it again and understood it much better. Lope lived in great poverty. Everybody in Spain was very poor during the Franco reign. . .  Only after Franco’s downfall people began to live much better and Lope’s story wasn’t possible any longer. As we learned in class from our wonderful Professor Clarissa, Franco died in 1975 and that was a good thing. I think. I think Ana Maria suffered a lot in her life and that influenced her writing. Maybe her childhood was as poor as Lope’s. . . There are many interesting things in this story because it’s an interesting story. I liked reading it even tough it was hard at first.*

In class, I asked them to go over the text and identify all of its many problems. Then we went over it together. At first, the students had no idea why I thought the text was bad. They kept looking for grammar and spelling mistakes because, for them, bad writing is, first and foremost, grammatically incorrect. They are not used to the idea that an academic essay needs to conform to a certain format and are mostly unaware of stylistic problems. By the end of the class, however, they got it. Everybody was laughing very hard.

Of course, I will only know if the exercise really worked after I see their final essays on November 14.

* In the exercise, the text was in Spanish.

Evelina Anville says that men tend to be more into patriotism than women. I never considered this but now I’m finding evidence that she is right. Compare the following statement from a female student’s essay with the penultimate post where I quoted a male student writing on the same topic:

The United States is a greedy country more concerned with enriching itself than with anything else. When I traveled to Mexico, I saw a very different way of approaching life. The people there are poorer than we are here in the US, but they were truly happy. They sincerely enjoyed life every day and didn’t concentrate on mindless acquisition of material goods.

About the new theme.