Learning a Second Language Is a Lot like Learning to Ride a Horse

I had never ridden a horse until today and I'm still not certain if I can call what I did today riding a horse. My wife, ever the adventurous one of our relationship, encouraged me to learn to ride while I was away. As a dutiful husband I accepted her challenge. So, I checked out where I could ride, got the phone number for the Arabian Equestrian Club off the internet, and called to get directions. Unfortunately, the woman on the other end of the line didn't speak any English, but I was nonetheless able to express my intentions and understand enough of her directions to get my taxi driver going in the right direction.

The whole experience of the day was humbling from the error-filled conversation I made with the Taxi driver whom I knew to be secretly plotting to extract extra cash out of me to the experience of falling flat on my face off my tiny horse--he didn't seem too tiny when I was on him. Nonetheless, I achieved my goal: I got to and from the distant equestrian stables, managed to ride a horse, and returned in one piece with most of my cash still in hand.

And at the end of the day, I can make a silly metaphor that I like to think is quite apropos: learning to ride a horse is not that different from learning to speak another language. For instance, you must master the animal and it can't master you. I naively thought that there would be some sort of symbiosis between man and animal--some Avataristic link between man and beast--in which our minds would become one. This was not the case. I quickly realized while awkwardly clinging to the reigns that the horse was going to do whatever it wanted to do unless I forced it to do what I wanted it do. That took knowing precisely the right commands to give the animal (something I was not particularly good at since my trainer didn't speak any English and my vocabulary knowledge was much more suited to carrying on conversations about politics and history rather than receiving instructions about the manner in which one pulls the reigns of a horse). I would point out that learning a language requires a similar approach. You don't just listen to a language as an adult for a few months and then poof, your mind melds with the language and thoughts begin to flow freely from your brain to your mouth. Rather, you master the language by learning the precise patterns required to formulate your thoughts into expressible and comprehensible phrases. All the while of course, you feel rather unsteady as I did on the back of that horse.

Me atop of my magnificent Arabian steed whom I like to call Hassan because that 's the Arabic word for horse. Also, I could call him Asskicker, because that's what he did to me, or Buttons, because that's just a really cool name.

Me at the Roman theater in Amman built sometime around the reign of Marcus Aurelius.  And no, the stadium is not built at a slant, apparently the kind Jordanian whom I asked to take my photo had never taken a picture from a camera that wasn't attached to an iPhone.

Sometimes, you also just feel downright ridiculous as I did when my trainer and a group of bystanders laughed at me and made jokes at my expense. A person of my advanced age should know how to ride a horse some people may think just as many that I converse with in my broken Arabic must be shocked that I don't understand what they learned long ago, their mother tongue. And then there are those moments when you just get thrown off the back the horse--I'm fortunate the giant beast didn't step on me after I fell flat on my face. And when that happens, when your language breaks down and you can't hold on anymore, you just have to pick yourself up again, brush yourself off and hop back on the saddle.

Scenic Downtown Amman.

I am humbled and humiliated everyday, and for some one that loves to be right all the time--as my wife can attest to--learning Arabic or trying to ride a horse has been a painful experience: it hurts to fall on your head about as much as your throat hurts from trying to pronounce all of those nasty voiced faryngeal fricatives of Arabic (I've heard of some Arabic learners sticking their fingers down their throats to activate their gag reflex so they know what their throat should do to pronounce one properly). I like to think, however, that pain and humiliation is just the thing we all need to grow. If I can quote Doogie Howser paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche, "What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger." And everything you do need to know, you can learn from Doogie's computer diary entries at the end of each episode. I hope you remember all those pithy entries.

Ode to the Nation

"Immerhin hat das den Staat zur Hölle gemacht, daß ihn der Mensch zu seinem Himmel machen wollte." --Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin


For years I have struggled with the above dictum by Hölderlin, a German idealist and Romantic poet and intellectual. I would translate the quote as "What has always turned the state into a hell is that man has desired to make it into his heaven." I have often used this pithy axiom to discredit any political ideology that has utopian aspirations; however, on my recent trip to Washington D.C. the German poet's words raced through my mind as I stood inside the Lincoln Memorial reading the Gettysburg address inscribed on the edifice's southern wall.

The last time I was in D.C.--I mean anywhere but the airport--I was a bright-eyed young patriot about the age of my eldest son. Like the tourists that surrounded me on this most recent trip, I had felt compelled to photographically document all the civic temples dedicated to our nation's glory and greatness. Yet my confidence in my nation's  righteousness of purpose, if once unshakable, has withered and worn from my studies and travels as a student of history.

Me in front of the National Archives

As I read the words that I've heard countless times before about a "new nation" that was "conceived in Liberty" standing under the shadow of a colossal statue of the leader that would send more Americans to their deaths than any of his predecessors and successors, I was struck by Lincoln's words about the fallen: "that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause [equality] for which they gave the last full measure of devotion." Not only Americans, but people from distant lands stood

all around me on that sunny day in Washington, sweating from their exertion in the muggy heat of that Washington summer day to reach the feet of our former president, a champion for equality known round the world. Yet, I couldn't help but consider that perhaps our adherence to these ideals of liberty and justice and our devotion to these nations that we create (because a nation, of course, is a very recent concoction) compel us, much like Lincoln, to struggle, fight, kill, and die ultimately making our state a hell on earth.

Of course, I doubt these sentiments are what the State Department hoped I would take away from the day they gave me in Washington. And perhaps I too should resolve that my ancestors not die in vain to paraphrase Lincoln. Wait, were they my ancestors???  I think at least some of my ancestors fought and died on the other side, the side of inequality. And did they rush out on the battlefield instilled with a malicious desire to perpetuate evil and tyranny? Can righteous desires lead men to fight on both sides of a battlefield? And can't equally an unrighteous volition, that of imposing one's will over another, be the persistent inducement for war?

Despite my rant, however, I am grateful for my country. They've been funding my education for sometime and given me this free trip to Washington and Jordan. Horray for America!

O Tempora O Mores

At the beginning of every academic year in Qatar I would leave aside a few periods of my English class to teach my students a little history, a little reductionist history that is. Reductionism, anathema to all serious historians, is the attempt to understand complex phenomena, in this case historical, by breaking it down to its constituent parts and usually emphasizing one of these constituents as the primary motivator. This is the history of social scientists who are always attempting to "ferret out the independent variable." In other words, it's an attempt to explain the past, the whole of nearly infinite interconnecting variables, with a phrase like "it all boils down to" this. For example, take a historical question like why did the Germans kill the Jews in the Second World War? There are innumerable reductionist histories that attempt answer this complex question with an oversimplified response. Perhaps the most acclaimed attempt at an answer of recent years came from political scientist Daniel Goldhagen, reductionist extraordinaire, who boiled it down to "eliminationist antisemitism," a virulent strain of a religio-racist mindset that developed ONLY in Germans over centuries and made them Jew killers (forgetting of course that many of the most brutal concentration camps of the Holocaust were manned by other nationalities). Anyway, the point I'm trying to get across is that reductionism is bad history but it does serve a purpose, namely to throw into sharp relief one variable that may have acted as a catalyst, one of many as is always the case, for some momentous development in human affairs.

For my Qatari pupils, all of whom subscribe to a sort of third-worldism approach to history which demonizes the Europeans and their American successors as vile and insidious imperialists, I invented a reductionist narrative of about a millennium and a half of human history that would serve to explain why their country was paying me thousands of dollars to teach them to read in English. In other words I was explaining to them why it was that they had to attend university in English even though many would never spend any significant time of their life outside of their own country. Of course, my history would have to be palatable to their sensitivities so my narrative began with Mohammed's visitation by the angel Gabriel who entrusted him with a book of monumental importance. I would remind them of Francis Bacon's terse maxim, "knowledge is power," and ask them how a bunch of camel driving nomads would suddenly bolt forth from a desert and build an empire that would extend from the Iberian peninsula to the heart of Central Asia and beyond. Knowledge is power and they had received their knowledge from a book, a divinely inspired one (remember I was teaching Wahhabi Muslims). Yet learning increased as the Muslims amassed more books. The Abbasids in Baghdad were so eager for knowledge that they began a concerted effort to translate the great works of Greek philosophy. So great was the library and learning of the Arabs, I would flatteringly tell them, that were we living in the thirteenth century, I would be paying them to teach me Arabic for it was at this time that learned Europeans would make the pilgrimage to Toledo in Spain where they could encounter schools that would teach them to read in Arabic.

Alas, I would lament to my students, this Arab obsession with learning would soon dissipate as the Arab world was corrupted by invasions of Mongols and Turks. I would skip forward to Gutenberg's printing press and contrast Europe's meteoric rise after the Renaissance with the injurious Ottoman ban of printing throughout its Arab territories. While Europe was producing millions of volumes of books by the sixteenth century, only a few hundred could be found throughout the near east. This then must have caused the decay of the Arab mind and the consequent decline of Islamic geopolitical power. Naturally, I didn't believe the whole of what I was saying but it certainly left an impact on my students, and, to an extent, Gutenberg's press must be considered a monumental event in human history that did indeed catalyze learning in several European nations. After all, my job was not to teach them history but to teach them to read. Indeed, my lecture left them with a renewed sense of urgency to read in English--the new language of learning.

This was my life for two years, encouraging Arab youths to learn and, most especially, to read: to take joy in lifting a book from the shelves, to thumb through its contents, and to absorb its contents through an active engagement with the text. The apathy towards reading I abhorred in my students was a localized problem or so I thought.

 On a recent flight, however, I had an encounter with a woman that caused me to think otherwise. There I was minding my own business on a rather empty international flight. As rarely happens in coach no one sat to either the left or right of me. So, as the lights went off in the plane I could stretch out, turn on my reading lamp, and enjoy my book. After a few minutes I was interrupted by a fellow passenger. She turned around to face me from the seat in front of me and complained, "excuse me, could you turn off your light? I'm trying to sleep!" By the tone of her voice you would think I had just lit up a cigar. When I informed her that I had no intention of turning off the light as I was reading, she only seemed more perturbed as she hunched back over and stretched out over the three seats in front of me. This occurrence jarred me and I have since spent a few minutes on each flight I take to observe the passengers and ascertain the number of fellow readers. My calculations have compelled to mourn the passing of the reading passenger.
 
As Cicero once did in his oration against Catiline I want to inveigh against this illiterate generation, "O tempora o mores!" Oh the times, oh the customs! I consider the absence of literature on planes only a symptom of this corrupted age in which we live. People don't bring books with them--even on flights across the world. Why? Well, they've grown accustomed to the technological accoutrements of our i-civilization. When they go on a long trip, they bring their tablets or smart phones, but only a minority employ them to read those skimpy magazine articles filled with colorful pictures that would entertain even my two-year-old. The art of texting, tweeting, gaming, internet shopping and facebooking have displaced the simple but essential skill of a learned society: reading. And like the Byzantines and Sassanids of the seventh century, we may awake one morning to find the barbarians from our periphery overrunning the heart of our intellectual empire.

Our Division of Labor

The last few months have been an ordeal, and I mean that in its most literal sense. Our word ordeal, despite appearances, is not from Latin or Greek origins. An ordeal in our teutonic forefathers' tongue meant something like "that which is dealt out" (assumably by the gods). When we today complain of something being an "ordeal," we are, without recognizing it, comparing our trials to the more brutal juridical proceedings of our German ancestors, who if accused of a crime, in order to be proven innocent, were required to walk blindfolded and barefoot between red-hot plowshares. Escaping this ordeal uninjured would result in the dismissal of the accusation, for naturally the gods had unanimously decreed the defendant's innocence with such divine protection.

Ordeals such as these persisted into the Christian era. Peter Bartholomew, who gained notoriety for discovering a shard of the holy lance in Antioch on the First Crusade, braved an ordeal voluntarily to prove the veracity of his divine visitations--apparently the Savior Himself visited him regularly--by walking through a bonfire and emerging unscathed. So he claimed at least--he died, presumably from his injuries a week later. Now, after my own ordeal, let's hope I don't suffer a similar fate.

Of course, my ordeal was not of the medieval sort, but much like Peter Bartholomew, I undertook mine voluntarily. After living the good life in the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, we decided to return to the impoverished US to try our hand at higher education. Without health insurance or full-time employment, we attempted to pursue my dreams by applying for doctoral programs in history (an ordeal in and of itself) while having a fifth child, homeschooling our children, exploring other avenues of employment with the US goverment, teaching a full load of English and Turkish classes, and improving my credentials as an English teacher with a second MA in TESOL. I say we because clearly no individual could hope to attempt all these things at once.

You see, I did not survive this ordeal but we did. My wife accompanied me through the flames, and lest we stumbled and succumbed to the unbearable heat, we had the steady hands of experienced grandmothers to pull us through. Ultimately, we became artful in our division of labor. Grandmom McCollum never tires of shopping and holding little fuspot babies. Grandma Dryg can entertain the rambunctious bears for hours with wholesome stories and intricate railroad construction. My beloved wife does what no other can: educate the three silliest boys in the western United States. Finally, I do what I do best: I educate myself while somehow managing to make enough money for us to eat.

At this time of year when we express our gratitude and remember that one individual who came to do what we couldn't do for ouselves, I would like to express my thanks for those who did what I could not. I have a heavenly Savior in Jesus, but I also have an earthly one in my wife. She has believed in me when I could not and has endured all my whimsical endeavors, no matter the cost. Her light awakens me long before the sun light peaks over the mountains and lifts me out of bed when all my strength has vanished. Thank you, Bunsy.

The Nanny State-ment

"We were reluctant at first, but let me tell you, it was the best thing we ever did." Thus ended the persuasive declamation of our acquaintance on the advantages, nay the blessings, of acquiring a live-in nanny. Now, to someone from the States the idea of a live-in nanny sounds, well, elitist, expensive, and just plain uncomfortable. That's there, but in the Gulf (Persian that is) the "nanny state" takes on a whole new meaning. Not only do the governments hand out entitlements that would have Vladimir Lenin turning in his ice box, but there also happens to be an abundance of third-world nannies ready to make your dreams of self-actualiztion possible at the expense of your children's future. These nannies can be quickly pressed into service as your modern-day indentured servants for the low price of a plane ticket from Indonesia and a few bucks to line the pockets of sundry shady businessmen.

Yes, slavery is alive and well, and you don't have to turn on some sappy Indie film or watch CNN's Anderson Cooper wax strong about it with a feigned tone of sincerity to learn about its pernicious and pervasive presence throughout the world. No, you can experience it and exploit it for yourself; all you need is a job in the Gulf. What is even better is that you don't have to feel bad about exploiting these people because they are not really slaves. Sure, they look like it--they have no skills, they have no education, and they spend their lives with a dour, depressed look on their faces--but they aren't slaves. They signed away their lives because "it is so bad in their own countries they'd rather come here and be your slave." To put this all in persective, as one of my lessons devolved into tangential conversation with my Qatari students, the topic of nannies came up. I confided to my students, who of course were all raised by these nanny slaves, that "I just don't think I would feel confortable having some strange person living in my house." My substitute: "I'd rather get some sort of a helper monkey. You know, a little monkey that could fetch the paper for me, wash the dishes, maybe even play the accordion if I so desire." Of course, I was just being silly, but one of my students responded to my ramblings with grave sincerity. "Teacher, no, you no want helper monkey. Monkey very expensive. Monkey, like 10,000. Human, like 1,000" (dollars, I assume he meant). The lesson: humans are cheaper than monkeys.

So, we have these cheap pseudo slaves and we can feel OK about it because it's really an act of charity taking these people in from war-torn Sri Lanka or impoverished Nepal (one is reminded of the mid-nineteenth-century defence of slavery as a patriarchal institition), but the real clencher is that these nannies don't just make our lives easier, they make it better. We can finally forget about cooking, cleaning, and all the other desultory and meaningless chores of life. Now we can spend our lives creating what we really want to with our life: learn to paint, sail, ski; open your own business; see the world. No longer do we need to worry about home; like some less glamorous expat incarnation of the Kennedys, we can stroll the malls of Doha childless(they're at home with the nanny), our I-Phone in one hand and our shopping cart in the other.

This would all be a marvelous life if we lived in a sitcom world where children rarely appear due to child labor laws. The problem is our children are always there even if we are not. We can build our childless self-actualized life with cheap imported labor, but this is not tantamount to having our cake and eating it too. At the end of the day parenting takes time, and that time is often gruelling and seemingly unrewarding. We expats spend hours making sure our kids get into the best schools, after-school activities, and sports, yet we rarely think of the hours they spend being watched by people we purchased at the lowest price. What are our children learning when they are not at school? That brown poor people should do all remedial labor? That mommy and daddy are too busy pursuing their "dreams" to sit down with their babies and give them a bottle? That manners are to be employed only when conversing with Westerners? Ultimately, we leave our children to be raised by people who, for the large part, have had no formal education and for whose culture we have little appreciation and understanding and then we have the audacity to tell ourselves that we're doing the best thing for our family. Perhaps those hours we spend at home doing the day-to-day routine are the most valuable time we have with our children. After all, shouldn't we be grateful for every moment we have been given with them even if it may involve the family cleaning up that nasty poo stain the potty trainee left on the toilet seat?

Is the Sediment Weighing me Down?

If one thing can be said of my wife and I, it is that we are not sedentary folk. Live in the same place all our lives? What are we, from Utah or something? After one year in most locations we're usually anxious to pull up the stakes and move on. Sometimes when the watchful eyes of my spouse are directed elsewhere, I take a few minutes to look at the world map on our wall and imagine where our next adventure will lead us.

These moments, however, are becoming few and far between. In the few minutes of silence I enjoy, the more pressing matters of financing our ever growing tribe seem to encumber my thoughts. Ibn Khaldun, the famed fourteenth-century "Herodotus of the Arabs", observed in his treatise on universal history that the growth of empires resulted from powerful nomads who, trained by the harsh conditions of their lifestyle, directed their military prowess against their wealthy but impotent sedentary neighbors. Once wealth accrued, according to Ibn Khaldun, impuissance and decline were inevitable. The once vibrant force of nomadic life gave way to the luxuries of city life, a malaise invariably ensued until another nomadic and bellicose force absorbed the city dwellers into their new empire. Hence, Alexander's march across the decadent Achaemenid Persian Empire, the Germanic migrations that usurped the power of Rome, or the Bedouin Arabs that toppled the Sassanids and sent the Greeks cowering behind the walls of Constantinople.

Where is my family located on Ibn Khaldun's cycle of growth and decline? My gaze, once fixated on the horizon, now concentrates on the numbers in my bank statement. Our cushy job here in Doha makes us reluctant to move; it is the lure of the sedentary lifestyle. Like Shahs or Caesars of old I am more preoccupied with my coffers than the glory of the advance into the unknown. Full of financial worries and longing for the insouciance of my earlier life I now confront our dilemma: should we stay or should we go?

Sharing Doesn't Work; How about Fratricide?

My family and I were invited to eat at a friend's house tonight. You may ask, why would such a mundane occurrence as a dinner invite merit a blog post? Well, for most families, surely it wouldn't. But for ours, this is quite a rare occasion. You see, I believe our reputation precedes us. With four of the silliest boys on this hemisphere we seldom receive an invite and with good reason too. My wife and I remarked that the host family must surely be so new to Doha that they haven't heard of our tempestuous boys.

Well, after tonight they definitely heard them. If it wasn't Hector screaming frantically for milk, it was the other three fighting relentlessly to dominate their young host's toy car collection. As I listened, or rather attempted not to listen, to Cinci's high-pitched wail as Sherman repeatedly "stealed" his toy from him, I could hear my wife with a veneer of calm and understanding encouraging Sherman to share with his brother. After two hours of our children's shreiking cacaphony, I'm certain our departure relieved our hosts.

Driving home with a few moments to contemplate as my wife dozed and my children, perhaps exhausted from two hours of incessant yelling, settled into a pristine silence, I wondered why my children can't share. " With four boys you'd think they could learn how to share, " I had heard my wife complain to our gracious hosts. Well, maybe sharing just isn't what boys do. The dynastic troubles of monarchies of old are replayed in the microcosm of my family. It seems that boys have always wanted everything within reach.

It's no marvel to me that the first recorded homicide in Western history was fratricide, Cain's killing of Abel. As man developed, it seems, boys had a tendency to quarrel over their share of an inheritance. As families began to acquire wealth, they realized that such capital, rather than being dispersed equally between heirs, should be concentrated under one patriarch in order to preserve the family's wealth. But to whom should go the greatest share? In the West the law of primogeniture entailed the majority of an estate to the oldest male heir, thus solving the internecine feuds that often ensued the death of a powerful patriarch. The Ottoman Turks had a different way of dealing with a boy's inherent desire to obtain his share, they codified the law of fratricide. With the death of the sultan civil war inevitably ensued as brother would contend with brother as each struggled to ascend the throne. Finally, the victor, he who had killed all of his brothers, claimed the spoils, and thus the empire, rather than being entailed away to the various offspring inhabiting the Ottoman harem, was consolidated in the hands of one man.

Unfortunately, neither primogeniture nor institutionalized fraticide appear to be suitable antidotes to the civil strife in my domain. Should we choose to impose primogeniture upon our family, Atticus, I'm sure, would be elated but his brothers would be loathe to acquiesce in his predominance. Although from the high-pitched shrills emanating from our walls the neighbors may conclude that fratricide is the law in our family, I'm afraid my wife doesn't have the stomach for it. So, it would seem that the search for a Pax McColluma will remain elusive in our lands.