The University of Minnesota at Duluth has fired Rod Raymond as wellness director over numerous charges that he denies, The Duluth News Tribune reported. During the last four years, two students filed sexual harassment complaints against Raymond and he was facing other, unspecified charges.

First of all, what the heck is a “wellness director”? Do people not realize how idiotic the title sounds? And what is this university doing, hiring all kinds of completely useless people who have nothing whatsoever to do on campus but molest students?

. . . or stay deathly silent as they always do when there are especially egregious governmental intrusions into the private lives of citizens:

Citing a morals clause in the woman’s divorce decree, a Texas judge has ruled that she cannot live with her new female partner and still retain custody of her children. The clause is common in divorce cases in Texas and other states. It prevents a divorced parent from having a romantic partner spend the night while children are in the home.

I wonder, is the reason why the US Libertarians are so indifferent to the governmental intrusion into the people’s sex lives that they have none of their own? Or none they find valuable enough to protect from said intrusion?

Once you start, it’s hard to stop. I’m reading a Spanish gossip magazine I bought in Spain to use in my classes. On page two, I discover a convoluted evo psych discussion of how pregnant women and women known to have children don’t attract men sexually because having sex with such women is perceived as disgusting.

And then Spain wonders why it has been in the grip of a demographic crisis for God knows how long.

In contrast, the US gossip magazine we discussed yesterday has a feature on how sexy and attractive pregnancy and motherhood have made a bunch of celebrities.

And then everybody wonders why the US is pretty much the only developed country with booming birth rates (and not just among the immigrants).

Here was the last question in the series:

We all know that I hate collective identities and refuse to join any of them. Except one. Which is this single collective identity that I not only acknowledge but am proud of possessing? (For one point).

And a supplementary question: Why? What makes this identity so much more attractive than others? (For 2,5 points.)

The answer is that the single collective identity I acknowledge is that of an immigrant. This is an identity of a person who actively shapes her life and refuses to accept “what the accident of your birth has given you”, to use the words of my favorite writer Juan Goytisolo. This is not a collective identity that just happens to you (like gender, race, ethnicity, linguistic group, etc.). This is something you control.

Now I would like to explain why I don’t feel part of the collective identity of academics. As we all know, I love academia and would not leave it even had I won those $600,000,000 in a lottery. I like my fellow academics for their dedication to their (often arcane and weird) fields of study, their passion for learning, their erudition, their refined sensibilities, their unusual hobbies, their rich vocabulary. Still, more often than not, I feel completely alienated from other academics. This happens for two reasons:

1. Academics love scheming and intrigue. It is highly possible that all human collectives are this way. I haven’t really worked in any other environment but I hear from people that sales companies, law firms, hospitals, etc. have the same kind of petty war-mongering.

If there is one thing I hate about human beings in general and my fellow academics in particular is the incomprehensible joy they derive from creating and dragging out ridiculous, petty squabbles. Instead of approaching a colleague who has offended them and saying openly, “Look, you offended me. I’m upset”, they engage in delivering a series of oblique hits to the offender meant to damage him or her without ever letting the poor sucker know for sure what actually caused the aggravation. As a result, the offender can never really make amends for the damage and is dragged into delivering a series of similarly oblique blows. This sort of idiocy then continues for years or decades, involving everybody around in the meaningless warfare.

How is this not completely insane?

2. Another quality I hate in academics – and one that other professions definitely do not share* – is whining. I am convinced that it is not fashionable among bus drivers, waiters, dentists, business people, lawyers, astronauts, etc. to complain publicly, obnoxiously, and endlessly about the horrible hardship of having to find a dry cleaner’s and attend a meeting. In my profession, on the other hand, it is not fashionable to avoid complaining. Of course, not everybody is that way, but too many people are.

Spending any amount of time with a group of academics invariably leads to me hearing that what we do is useless, nobody appreciates us, our social status is lower than anybody else’s, students are stupid, life is intolerable, and the world is about to end in some particularly horrible fashion.

Have you spent any time with people who work in sales? I have. Their profession is not at all easy. But at no point have I heard them spout as many doom-and-gloom scenarios as academics do at any given time.

Of course, academics don’t really believe all of these apocalyptic ideas they deliver with scary regularity. Just like the academic scheming and war-mongering, it’s a sort of a game. An identity-creating game that exists for its own sake and is highly enjoyable to the players.

It is not a game I am equipped to play, however. Which is why I can’t identify with my fellow academics and feel too different from them.

* I haven’t seen equivalents to the insanely popular College Misery website of the Hospital Misery or Restaurant Misery variety. And it isn’t like waiters, paramedics, nurses, and chefs don’t often work in extremely harsh conditions that no professor ever experiences. And frequently for a lot less money.

A Palestinian student just wrote to say that my pronunciation of Arabic words in the Hispanic Civilization course is perfect. The secret is that before recording the lectures I asked an Arabic-speaking colleague to teach me how to pronounce the words correctly. Finally there is somebody in the course who can appreciate it.

It pays off to be meticulous.

I just glanced at the cover of a gossip magazine that gets delivered to me through no fault of my own and read that Angelina Jolie had both of her breasts cut off to prevent breast cancer. Which she doesn’t have. As we say in my country, the best remedy for headaches is a guillotine.

Do you think it’s true or these magazines cannot be trusted? Jolie is an extremely rich person. She could have hired the best psychiatrists in the world to treat her cancerophobia.

Father: Get this, the husband of your mother’s friend Anya has been castrated.

Me: Castrated? Are you sure?

Father: Yes! Castrated!

Me: Do you mean he has undergone chemical castration?

Father: Well, I don’t know the details but he has been castrated. She didn’t want him to have any more children on the side.

Me: So he agreed to it?

Father: Oh yes, he really wanted it.

Me: Do you mean he was sterilized?

Father: Castrated, sterilized, who knows with these weird people?

This is a true story and not a variation on an old joke where a man runs into a clinic in Israel and yells, “Castrate me, castrate me now!”

“Are you sure?” the nurse tries to ask.

“This is urgent, castrate me immediately,” the man vociferates.

So the medics castrate him and the man calms down.

“Why did you want this procedure so urgently?” the doctors ask.

“I’m getting married in an hour to a Jewish woman,” the man explains.

“Oh, so you wanted to get circumcised?”

“Yes, that’s what I said from the start. Right?”

Mother: Oh, I keep forgetting to ask the most important question.

Me: Yes?

Mother: This lottery ticket in Florida that just won $600,000, were you and N. the people who bought it?

Me: No, we don’t buy lottery tickets.

Mother: Are you sure it wasn’t you two?

Me: Yes, I’m very sure.

Mother: Really? Because I was sure it was you two.

Me: No, Mom, we didn’t buy any lottery tickets.

Mother: Really? Because it’s $600,000,000!

Me: Still wasn’t us.

Mother: Here in Montreal the biggest lottery prize is some lousy $50,000,000. And in Florida somebody just won $600,000,000. Are you sure it wasn’t you?

Me: Very sure.

Mother: Maybe N. bought it and forgot to tell you?

Me: Yes, maybe he is planning to spend the $600,000,000 without me noticing.

Mother: I heard on TV that the winners get the choice of taking $375,000,000 on the spot or taking the full amount spread out over 20 years. I think you should just take the $375,000,000 on the spot.

Me: Mom, we didn’t win the lottery, I promise.

Mother: Well, would it have killed you to buy this single lottery ticket knowing that you would win $600,000,000?

Conclusion: you live with a Jewish man for 38 years, you end up being more Jewish than he is.

It was a huge mistake to begin this book during my Florida vacation because this is one of those novels that absorb you to the point where you can’t do anything else but read it. I dragged out reading the last 100 pages because I didn’t want the book to end.  Richard Russo’s Empire Falls is an amazing, amazing novel that everybody needs to read right now. As I keep saying, Americans should keep writing realist novels because they do it better than anybody in the world and should stop trying to squeeze out post-modernist works of literature because they suck beyond belief at it.

Empire Falls is a dying little town in Maine. The industries that kept the town alive and bustling for decades are all gone, and the town’s inhabitants are leading miserable, blighted existences that are as pointless as they are hopeless. Miles Roby, the novel’s protagonist, has always wanted to leave Empire Falls. At the age of 42, however, he still finds himself prevented from escaping by an incomprehensible apathy that dominates every aspect of his existence. Miles has no interest or passion for anything. He moves listlessly through life and can’t find anything to spur him to activity.

Miles is only one of many male inhabitants of Empire Falls who lead such a stunted life. Among female protagonists, there is at least a couple who try to change their lives. The other characters soon beat their desire for change out of them, however. The most powerful force preventing the protagonists from finding energy to leave is their deep immersion into the patriarchal order. The parents of these middle-aged people feel entitled to abuse, humiliate and belittle them in public, all the while invading every inch of personal space they have. There is not a glimmer of realization among the characters that in year 2000 it is ridiculous to remain so enslaved by one’s parents.

What makes the inhabitants of Empire Falls so hopeless and zombified is their incapacity to inscribe themselves into a rapidly changing reality of the globalized world. The way of life where you graduated high school and went to work at the same factory where your father and grandfather had worked their entire lives is gone. Nowadays, you have to be mobile, comfortable with technology, culturally sophisticated, intellectually agile, and prepared to switch jobs, careers, and states easily. You should also be prepared to shed the way of life where you belonged to your clan and allowed it to make all of your decisions for you and learn to be an individual. Otherwise, you are destined to lead the drab, impotent existence of a Miles Roby.

The novel’s title is very significant. Of course, Empire Falls is the name of the town where the novel is set. However, we can also interpret it as referring to the fall of the great American Empire that is happening right now. Whether the US will lose its hegemony in the world and turn into a place inhabited by helpless and indifferent Miles Robys depends on how the country will deal with this profound global transformation. Russo is a lot less hopeful in this respect than I am. I see a lot of evidence that the country will be able to weather this profound transformation and come out renewed. The Empire Falls is a lot less pessimistic. In any case, the novel is a new American classic that, in my opinion, places its author next to Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis in the pantheon of the great writers this country produced. The novel’s very existence is contributing to my optimism for the future of the US. An empire that produces great literature of this kind is not ready to fall.

The only immigrant group that is more hopeless than mine is that of the Cubans.

A very irate gentleman was soaking in the Gulf of Mexico surrounded by a group of worshipful ladies. He was using the opportunity to impress them with his knowledge of history delivered in a heavy Cuban accent.

“And do you remember that time when Castro said he would let everybody leave if they wanted to? And he even provided the airplanes for those who wanted to escape from Cuba?”

“Yes. . .” the ladies responded breathlessly.

“What you don’t know is that those airplanes took Cubans straight to Siberia. Where they were all killed!”

“No!” the ladies gasped.

“Yes!” the man barked. “All of them were shot on the spot, including small babies.”

I had to swim away because I was afraid laughing so hard would make me drown.