everyone young going down the long slide

A great, great class today. Only my inner cynic (quiet, you) notes that part of its greatness came from having the students talk about something totally unrelated to the class materials. We're reading the Republic--aren't you envious?--and to open as wide a space as possible for Socrates, Our Contemporary, I asked the kidler to each talk about thing that they'd like to improve about contemporary society. (I also think I opened a space for Socrates, Athenian Dickhead, who is my favorite Socrates. But anyway.)

I take very seriously the idea (pace an ascending percentage of my high school, college, and graduate school instructors) that I do not teach primarily for my own benefit. I get paid, after all, like a grown-ass adult, in order to teach others. But I have to admit that today's class was fascinating. Guess what? My Turkish students are concerned, in their heathen alien Middle East Muslim heathen heathen way, with:

1. The proximity of the media to government
2. The depiction of women by and in the media
3. Unemployment
4. Education

and so on forward.

One of my students even pointed out something that I had noticed, but not been able to articulate, that seemed subtly different about Turkish media: what I think of as the notional ideal subject (NIS, if you're nasty) of advertising.

Now, like me, you probably assumed Turkish advertising looked something like this:

Amazingly, and in many senses depressingly, it doesn't. In Ankara as in Topeka, the blandest, middle-income-wealthy-ist, frankly whitest people are used to sell products. Only here, the bland twentysomethings all tend to be married--so you get the couple (let's call them Mete and Merve) that you might in a North American ad (Joshua and Madison.) But where Joshua and Madison would have a zany cast of twenty-something friends to carouse with while living (one presumes) in sin in a Brooklyn loft, Mete and Merve come furnished with offspring, an attractively-styled home, and a father-in-law with a mustache. (This latter point seems to be mandated by law.) For example, here's Coca Cola's ongoing "let's depress Turkish Marxists by emphasizing the utter Turkishness of our product" campaign:

See? Singletons with children, rather than with dumb little hats suggesting work in graphic design. The marital teleology of the NIS is moved along a few years here, I think, but the result is pretty much the same: Mete and Merve are living only a couple of rungs up on the exact same ladder where Josh and Madison will be in a few years. The only solution, of course, is global homosexual Marxist revolution. 

In the mean time, the Republic leaves me wondering: what do I want for my students? I worry sometimes that I'm a pretty conservative person in this sense: I want them to have good jobs, and pleasant apartments, and as much contentment as is reasonable--as I want for everyone. There are days when I think that Dave Thomas, Founder of Wendy's, has done more for human happiness than, say, Louis Althusser, postructuralist Marxist. I don't want the Great Books to leave them stranded in some sort of Socrates-reeking fug, unable to find employment out of concern for not finding the Platonic form of what they want. (I'm more Aristotelian--or, to be least pretentious, more Canadian--than that.) I'd rather they be Mete and Merve at the table above than not, I suppose--or Merve and Merve, if they wish.

Take my wife, please.

But I also want them to know why they want these things. And to know that these aren't the only things they can want. Hell, I don't want to be at that fucking table, chugging figurative Coke and making smalltalk to my figurative father-in-law-with-a-moustache, all of the time. This can all get a little bit grandiose. But I want them, I suppose, to be able to make small adjustments in the fabric of things as they are, rather than overturning everything as this year's local variant of the philosopher king. Today, I was very pleased with what my students wanted; for the sake of all sorts of people, including Merve and Merve, I hope they get it.