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Friday, September 01, 2006

Neither arbitrary nor fun

Well, you know, I don’t do ABF Fridays every Friday, now.  And I’m supposed to be on hiatus while I clean my office and put my syllabus together!  But you know what? I did those things. Despite the fact that my office was full of books, folders, mail, offprints, rejected manuscripts, and random pieces of paper stacked on every horizontal surface and stuffed into every nook and cranny, I managed to put everything away nicely and neatly before the students arrive.  And yesterday, I waited for Jamie to get home from his first day of school (eighth grade!), and we ran a few errands, one of which was supposed to be the photocopying of my syllabus for the forty or so students who will show up for American Fiction Since 1945 next Tuesday.

But as I tooled around State College, trying to avoid the crush of New Arrivals clogging the streets and alleys of our fair burglet, I noticed something strange: up in the sky!  it’s a bird!  it’s a plane!  it’s . . . a plane with a banner! And the banner reads “10 WEEK ABORTION” and features a picture which is unclear at this distance but looks kind of pink and gooey!

The effect was stunning, of course.  It’s still stunning today: thanks to the lattice of coincidence, the plane just passed over my house on one of its strategic anti-abortion runs as I was starting to compose this post.  But for all its stunningosity, I have to wonder just what kind of rhetorical performance is involved here.

On the one hand, there’s no question at all about it: this thing is of a piece with the graphic “abortion genocide holocaust” exhibits that appear on college campuses every few months, and it’s the work of people who would get upset about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib only if they were performing abortions there.  So the message itself is clear.  But on the other hand, everything about the context is completely weird.  First of all, there’s the medium: semiotically, “plane flying banner” usually means “something for sale,” as in CHILI’S 2-FOR-1 DINNER or TONITE IS ALCOHOL NITE AT SPUD’S or BOB’S PARASAILING EMPORIUM SPECIAL.  So for an unsettling moment, anyway, the spectacle appears to be offering ten-week abortions.  Second of all, there’s the timing: as our local paper reported this morning, the mastermind behind the enterprise, Gregg Cunningham, executive director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (a California-based organization which no doubt has a small staff), planned the display “to coincide with the return of Penn State students for the new school year and the influx of visitors for other events” (including the Penn State - Akron football game tomorrow afternoon).  It hadn’t occurred to me that a football game might be the ideal venue for a flying anti-abortion display, but it definitely occurred to me that the plane was timed to coincide with the arrival of the students.

So I’ve been spending the last 24 hours trying to reconstruct the thought process behind this, like trying to recreate the entire dinosaur from a piece of the rib cage. The students are coming back—that means people will be having s-e-x!  S-e-x that will go unpunished unless we act now! Clearly, the good people behind (and in) this plane believe that they are taking the message into the very Den of Iniquity itself, the college campus, where the Gomorrahites (how come the Sodomites always get all the attention?) are cavorting and aborting with abandon.

And how, precisely, is this supposed to go over (literally) with the parents in the slow parade of minivans and SUVs?  Are they supposed to think, “thank goodness someone is watching over my daughter while she’s away at college and having s-e-x”?  Because I know that if Janet and I saw this display while dropping off Nick at Penn State, we’d say to him, “uh, it looks like your campus is located where wingnuts take wing.  Are you sure you don’t want to go to Rutgers instead?”

If I were into book-flogging (which, as you know, I utterly abhor), I would add that What’s Liberal? points out that this campus/ wingnut thing is more common than people think, and that “for a fifty-mile radius around State College, there isn’t a single Democratic stronghold, not even an old-school union town, in the midst of solidly white, solidly rural, solidly Christian, solidly impoverished central Pennsylvania.” One effect of this kind of isolation is that people like me sometimes imagine ourselves to be surrounded by Flying Fetusmongers:

We campus liberals . . . often think of ourselves as inhabiting a kind of tenuous archipelago strung across the rural regions of the country; we’re not all clustered in Berkeley or Cambridge, and only rarely do our campus towns resemble the progressive valhallas of Madison, Wisconsin or Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the recycling laws, like the espresso, are strong and widely appreciated.  In State College, Pennsylvania; Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; West Lafayette, Indiana; Gainesville, Florida; Columbia, Missouri; Mount Pleasant, Michigan; Norman, Oklahoma; and Laramie, Wyoming, we talk of Strindberg and Stravinsky with our colleagues while our neighbors in the outlying county march against abortion and gay rights.  In all such locales, the campus culture is like unto a flame in an oil can, with faculty and liberal students huddled like hobos in fingerless gloves trying to catch a little warmth in the night.

And that, I think, is largely where the Myth of the Liberal Elite comes from.  Pinot grigio-sipping professors in the middle of Appalachia and the vast prairie.

The Abortion Plane, however, is new.  Perhaps it will become an annual feature of life in State College, taking off and circling the town every September, and we will gather at the student union building and cry, “the plane!  the plane!” For that, of course, I will need a white suit and matching white shoes.

Posted by Michael on 09/01 at 12:37 PM
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