Fish-nor

The Super Bowl occupies the attention of American football fans during the early part of the year, but “football” has a different definition outside America, referring to soccer.  FIFA stands for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association.  Just as the Super Bowl is the championship game of the NFL (National Football League) in America, the FIFA World Cup is the championship tournament of international men’s soccer. 

The top 32 teams of the season compete in the games.  All of the competitors are the highest ranked players from professional leagues in their native countries. The first FIFA World Cup tournament took place in 1930 and has occurred during the summer every 4 years since then, except during the period of the Second World II. England hosted the tournament in 1966, the year they also won the World Cup, a feat they have been unable to duplicate since then. The stakes were extremely high, therefore, as England defeated Sweden, advancing to the semifinals on July 11, 2018.  Had they beaten Croatia, they would have had a chance at reprising their victory in the final game on July 15th. 

I mention this to introduce an ironic coincidence. A few nights ago, I was watching an episode online from the second season of a British detective series called Endeavour, which is set in Oxford, England.  The episode, titled “Nocturne,” is set in 1966, during the World Cup tournament which led to that historic English victory. The excitement over the game serves as a backdrop to the action in the episode. Endeavour is the prequel to Inspector Morse, a British detective series which ran on television in the UK from 1987-2000. The title character of that series is an older version of the eponymous detective of the present series.  

Endeavour tells the backstory of how the bright, sensitive young Detective Constable Morse evolves into curmudgeonly and antisocial Detective Chief Inspector Morse. His unconventional first name, as he later explains in Inspector Morse, is because “My mother was a Quaker, and Quakers sometimes call their children names like ‘Hope’, and ‘Patience’. My father was obsessed with Captain Cook, and his ship was called Endeavour.”  Captain Cook was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the Royal Navy during the late 18th century. The Morse family motto is In Deo Non Armis Fido (I trust in God, not arms). It also happens to be the motto of Morse College, one of the four colleges at Yale University. But Morse’s choice of profession involves working with violence rather than faith. 

Today we take for granted the ability to watch the game in color on the television through satellite or cable and catch replays on the Internet. But in 1966, broadcasting technology was limited to radio broadcasts or black and white programming on television with the reception provided by an antenna. One of the more humorous scenes in “Nocturne” occurs when Chief Inspector Thursday, Endeavour’s boss, is trying to watch the game at home and tells his daughter to keep moving the antenna in order to get the clearest reception and then to hold it in place. 

Endeavour is unfortunately caught between “town and gown.” Coming from a working-class background like his colleagues in the CID (Crime Investigation Department) of the Oxford city police, he attended Oxford on scholarship, where he studied the Classics. He dropped out without finishing his degree, traumatized by a romantic relationship that ended badly. Because of his family background, he lacks the social connections to blend in with the academic population at the university. While the department and the rest of the country are fascinated by the World Cup, Detective Constable Morse is doesn’t know anything about football and prefers listening to classical music and opera and solving crossword puzzles. He is also a stickler for grammar. His unusual intellect and personality quirks help him to solve his cases, but they also set him apart from everyone else. 

The murder victim in the episode is a retired genealogist whose hobby is researching heraldry. He is found dead in a natural history museum in Oxford, supposedly killed by a khatar, or dagger used by Indian royalty for ceremonial purposes.  On a side note, I recently had the opportunity to see a khatar at an exhibition of the Royal Arts of Jodhpur at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston during a visit earlier this summer.  

A group of girls who are summer boarders at the nearby Blyth Mount School for Girls was visiting the museum at the time the murder took place. Morse interviews them to see if any of them noticed anything that would help to solve the murder.  He learns that the boarding school used to be Shrive Hill House, home of the fictitious Blaise-Hamilton family a hundred years earlier. The family had built a fortune through its ownership of tea plantations in India. On July 27, 1866, the governess, nursemaid, and three of the Blaise- Hamilton children were found bludgeoned to death with a croquet mallet. 

Although the main purpose of each episode is to dramatize the solving of a murder or murders, “Nocturne” is unique because of the way it highlights the effect of various social factors in the timeline of the episode. Morse discovers that the murder at the museum is linked to the events of that fateful day in 1866. The theme of prejudice affects several characters in the story, who are outcasts in different ways, something Morse can identify with, given his own background and personality.  He has a conversation with the murdered genealogist’s niece later in the episode in which they talk about why it is so important to some people to find out where they came from and the niece says, “Surely who you are and what you can do counts more than breeding, so called?”

Morse interviews Stephen Fitzowen, an author who wrote a book about the murders. The author says that it was at first believed that Mrs. Blaise-Hamilton had committed the murders but the theory was abandoned because she had been bedridden for a long time due to a “nervous condition.” In Victorian times, women were often thought to be mentally unstable because of their “volatile” emotions. Morse examines Mrs. Blaise’s Hamilton’s Bible and notices a drawing of five stick figures, one with its face blacked out and several underlined passages referring to bastardy.  I can’t think of anything more shocking to a wife, especially from the upper classes, than finding out that her husband was unfaithful to her and had, in addition, fathered an illegitimate son whose Indian mother would have been her social inferior. While searching the family records, Morse also finds out that Blaise-Hamilton had been paying the boy’s mother a monthly pension. Mrs. Blaise-Hamilton’s frustration with the situation and her depression over the betrayal would have been viewed by the doctors of the time as a nervous malady and treated with bed rest to soothe the sufferer’s agitated mind. 

The boy accompanied his father back to England and is introduced to the rest of the family as the child of a friend who had died during the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny at Cawnpore. Morse observes that being an Anglo-Indian or half-caste wouldn’t have mattered in India but in Victorian England, or even the England of Morse’s time, things were different.  The boy’s physical appearance marked him as having mixed ancestry and prevented him from being accepted by British society. His illegitimacy with its lowered social status would also have kept him an outcast. His father left him with the gamekeeper and his wife, a white British couple, to be raised as their son. 

 The law of primogeniture governed inheritance rights at that time. Primogeniture is "the right, by law or custom, of the paternally acknowledged, firstborn son to inherit his parent's entire or main estate, in preference to daughters, elder illegitimate sons, younger sons and collateral relatives; in some cases the estate may instead be the inheritance of the firstborn child or occasionally the firstborn daughter." (Wikipedia). Although the boy was Blaise-Hamilton’s firstborn son, his illegitimate birth and his father not publicly acknowledging him prevented him from inheriting the family fortune.  

Charlotte, as the only surviving legitimate child after the murder, would normally have inherited the entire estate once her father passed away. The fictional storyline of the episode introduces a change in the law in 1966. Parliament was preparing to hear a report that would potentially lift the restrictions on inheritance towards those who were illegitimate and their descendants, allowing them to make a claim on the estate, just as with any legitimate descendants, which is a crucial plot point in the story. 

Fitzowen tells Morse that the real crime of the man who was wrongly accused and arrested for the murders was that he happened to be Irish and adds, “Bearing the surname Fitzowen, I can testify to this. When in doubt, blame the Irish.” However, he doesn’t recognize the irony of his own remarks. He says that Mrs. Blaise-Hamilton’s mental instability was inherited by her daughter. He believed the girl was the real murderer, referring to her as “Bloody Charlotte,” a name which had survived in local legend. The only evidence he has to support his claim is that the daughter’s face had been scratched out in the photographs he has gathered and that the portrait of her in the attic has her face painted over.  It is only when Morse takes a closer look at one of the photographs that he discovers the real reason that the pictures were altered. Charlotte's father confined her to an institution after the murders, where she died unmarried without heirs. Since she was in a mental institution, the estate and its holdings were auctioned off and the proceeds went to the Crown. 

Chopin’s Nocturne op. 9 no. 1 in B flat minor was playing on a music box when the police came to investigate the murders in 1866. It is heard several times throughout the episode and the episode's title takes its name from the piece. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a nocturne, "is a composition inspired by, or evocative of, the night, and cultivated in the 19th century primarily as a character piece, a relatively brief musical composition, usually for piano, expressive of a specific mood or nonmusical idea. Closely associated with the Romantic movement, especially in Germany, 19th-century character pieces often bore titles citing their inspiration from literature (such as Robert Schumann’s collection Kreisleriana, 1838) or from personal experience (e.g., Schumann’s Kinderszenen, 1838; Scenes from Childhood). Others refer to specific personages directly or in disguise (such as Schumann’s Carnaval, composed 1833–35) or evoke geographic or national images (e.g., Frédéric Chopin’s polonaises, mazurkas, and Barcarolle, 1845–46). Felix Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte (1830; Songs Without Words) covered a particularly wide range of styles and moods, while Chopin tended to favour musico-literary genres, such as ballades, and more-generalized idyllic or melancholy associations, such as nocturnes." 

With Morse’s knowledge of classical music, he recognizes that the complexity of the piece requires the talent of a highly skilled pianist. The schoolmistress says that Shelly Thengardi, one of the summer boarders is the only one with that level of expertise. Shelly is also an Anglo-Indian and subject to the same prejudice that existed against Blaise-Hamilton’s illegitimate son during the time of the murders at Shrive Hill House. She tells Morse that some of the other girls refer to her insultingly as Fish-nor. She is neither fish nor fowl because she neither purely white British nor purely Indian. She says that her father told her that the rule of the British Raj over India was a long injustice but she would not have existed without it, which he saw as a silver lining. Shelly continues to quote her father, saying that the past can only hurt us if we let it. 

When Morse asks the schoolmistress if Shelly and Bunty Glossop, another one of the summer boarders, are friends, she replies, “Shelly's not friends with anyone.” 13-year-old Bunty Glossop is highly intelligent and very observant. She is able to quote Lewis Carroll from memory. Morse and Bunty share some of the same traits. Both are sensitive, highly intelligent individuals who lost their mothers when they were young. This probably influences their temperaments and makes them unable to fit in. 

In the universe of the series, Lady Matilda’s is a fictional college in Oxford, intended to be a combination of the colleges of Lady Margaret Hall and St. Hilda’s. The schoolmistress says of Bunty that “she would be a prospect for Lady Matilda’s if boys don’t get in the way.”  She worries that the ambitions of someone with Bunty’s intelligence and potential to succeed would be sacrificed to the demands of an unsupportive partner.  The schoolmistress describes herself as a 34-year-old unmarried woman in the middle of some God-forsaken nowhere where there are no potential marital prospects. Out of desperation and loneliness, she begins a relationship with a man she met at the pub on her day off. He is a postgraduate student who was working at the museum when the genealogist was killed. It can be inferred from the episode that despite the progress in women’s rights since Victorian times, unmarried women seem no happier than many married women, even if they have jobs and financial freedom. 

The question of property and inheritance rights is still an issue today although the context has changed. The United States Constitution gave the states police power, which governs issues related to marriage and family law. While interracial marriages are now accepted as legal unions, until the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell vs Hodges in 2015, many states did not recognize the legitimacy of gay marriage. This precluded partners in such relationships from receiving the federal benefits accorded to heterosexual couples, including medical and survivor’s inheritance benefits. Obergefell made gay marriage legal in all 50 states by relying on the Constitutional provision of equal justice under the law.

Prejudice towards those who are different because of their physical appearance, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and nowadays, even political affiliation, continues, although we claim to be a democratic society with liberty and justice for all. Whereas in the past it was hidden under the surface, as the episode showed, today accusations of bigotry, intolerance, and prejudice are a rallying cry for individuals and groups, fueling the fires of unrest and discontent. 

It hurts when those who discriminate against us the most are the ones who are the closest to us. Some of us respond by withdrawing and others by lashing out or by engaging in self-destructive behaviors. Endeavour Morse encounters many of these types of individuals during his investigation and over the course of his career and personal life. His own efforts to fit in with those around him are largely unsuccessful, which eventually causes him to change into the person he becomes in his later years.

Amistad

Me prometaste que algun dia
Voy a ser mujer grande, reina de my destino
Sus palabras me dieron la fortaleza en mi vida
Porque vinieron de un alma sincero

En una mirada, podrias leer un futuro brilliante
Pero te escapo el dolor en mi corazon
Tenia muchas experiences en el curso del pasado
Y una de las mas dulces fue conocerte
En eso, encontre a yo mismo

Es mejor asi, la amargura en mi vida no manchaba la felicidad en la tuya
El regalo de su amistad fue lo mas especial que alguien pueda darme.

The Shade of A Hope

My life has been lived in the shade of a hope
That made my days more beautiful and my nights less lonely
In my dreams, I see your face,
Those deep knowing eyes looking at me with warmth and love
I hear your voice, its vibrations coursing through my body
I feel the light pressure of your hand on mine
As though it were a bolt of electricity piercing my all too susceptible heart
Whatever you were, that too I wanted to be
Wherever you were, there too I wanted to go
Whoever you knew, they too I wanted to know
Hoping that it would bring me closer to you

I dreamed of watching for you, waiting for you, 
Laughing and loving and sharing a life with you
But now another will watch for you
Another will wait for you
Another will laugh and love and share life with you
Was I wrong to have built my life around that shadow of a dream?
Was it wrong to believe that you had the power to make a day beautiful or a night less lonely?
The time is past when I could  have shared what was in my heart
You will never understand what you had within your reach
So I am doomed to be left to my unasked questions
And the shade of a hope that can never be.

The Confused Feminist

I recently posted an article on my Facebook page about the antics of Cornell University student Letitia Chai, during a practice presentation of her thesis on how best to integrate refugees into host communities to help them successfully adapt to their new living situation. The thesis was a final requirement for a course titled "Acting in Public: Performance in Everyday Life." The syllabus was fairly lenient in its guidelines about the students’ attire, suggesting that students should "dress appropriately for the persona [they] will present."  Chai turned up for her presentation in a button down shirt and cut off jean shorts. I use the word “antics” deliberately. What kind of persona she was attempting to portray in a presentation that was ostensibly based on the plight of refugees in a host country is still mystifying.

In response to an innocuous query from her professor about her choice of attire, indicating that it was not very professional, and would be distracting to the young male students, and asking whether her mother would approve of her choice, Chai said "I think that I was so taken aback that I didn’t really know how to respond.” I would not think the student should have been so unprepared to answer her professor’s question. I would assume that her thesis defense would have included a Q& A session where she would have to spontaneously field questions from the audience regarding her presentation and be able to articulately defend her position. Her reaction displays her complete disregard for a perspective that differed from her own, as well as her arrogance and immaturity in failing to see her professor's advice as well meant constructive criticism.

An article on the online website https://www.nationalreview.com by Kyle Smith, defended the professor’s position, arguing that part of the professors’ role was to prepare their students to take on adult responsibilities in the real world. As one online commentator pointed out, the way a person dresses not only shows self-respect, but also respect for their audience, and in Chai's case, for the gravity of the subject matter she was presenting on. A male international student in the class commented that a speaker has a "moral obligation" to dress in a conservative fashion while presenting their thesis. There are those who question whether a male who presented in his underwear would have been similarly admonished but the standard of appropriate behavior is not and should not be gender specific. The student did not specify that it was a female’s moral obligation to dress conservatively, simply that it was a general principle.  The student's comment, however, caused Chai to leave the room in tears, choosing to see it as a sexist criticism that belittled her status as a human being. Her response unfortunately would only strengthen the perception of women as emotionally weak and incapable of handling the pressures of a professional career.

Rather than offering any sort of explanation for her stylistic choices, Chai returned to the classroom, determined to give the “best damn speech of [her] life” and began removing her clothing down to her bra and underwear, issuing a command to the rest of the class to do the same. I have taken speech classes in school and undergone further training in public speaking later in life. Nowhere in such training has it been suggested that removing one’s clothing is an effective speechmaking technique.

One of the arguments in support of Chai’s choice of attire was that not all students would be able to afford the cost of formal clothes, especially if they were attending the university on scholarship. Chai’s family lives in Korea. Education is a high priority in Asian societies and families make enormous personal sacrifices to ensure their children access to the best educational opportunities. By the student’s own admission, her mother is an educated professional, and likely a member of at least the middle class. Chai’s background does not indicate that she suffered from any economic hardship. In addition, it was never stipulated that the students wear formal clothes for the presentation, only that they are appropriate.

Chai claimed that she was striking out against sexist and patriarchal dress codes and that her mother, as a feminist, gender and sexuality studies professor, endorsed her actions. Chai’s actions were more similar to those of a toddler indulging in a temper tantrum than a young adult pursuing higher education at a prestigious university. While many young people believe that it is possible to live in an environment where they are free to choose how they present themselves, which apparently includes how much or how little to wear, it demonstrates how little they know about life in the world outside their own privileged existence. If Chai was living in a truly patriarchal environment, as she believes, she would have been exhorted to return home and apply herself to learning housekeeping skills to please her future husband and in-laws, rather than pursuing an advanced degree.

 Smith’s article includes an observation from his colleague that very logically points out that if the young woman felt that she was truly a member of the human race, why would she stop at her underwear?  Which stage of humanity is she referring to? The Bible and creationism claim that Adam and Eve, the first humans, were naked in the Garden of Eden until eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, made them conscious and ashamed of their nakedness. A study of the evolution of modern man reveals that the existence of clothing was initially not because of societal strictures but as a protection against the elements.

Smith’s colleague continues, “If being expected to wear a normal amount of clothing constitutes an unfair, sexist double standard, why not stroll around campus in a bikini at all times, not just when delivering a thesis?” Of course at Cornell, where temperatures are frigid most of the year, that may be just as illogical as a woman claiming that she is a victim of a sexist patriarchy while delivering a presentation on an important issue dressed like a Victoria's Secret model.

I was challenged by a Facebook poster for equating Chai’s removal of her clothing to the actions of a stripper. Yet I must stand by my analogy. The definition of a stripper is “one who removes their clothing in a sexually provocative manner” or a woman, in this case, "who gets paid to perform by taking her clothes off on stage." The classroom was the stage for the student's presentation, while Chai's "payment" was the amount of public attention her performance garnered, both in the classroom and through online viewing. Her intent was certainly to provoke an emotional response from her audience or she would not have taken such an action. 

Chai claims that she wants to raise awareness about the prevailing mindset of oppression in today's society. If Chai truly believed that she was in the right, why did she command her classmates to also strip to support her? Is that not also oppressive to those who do not agree with her views? The irony is that she has no appreciation for how fortunate she is to be able to pursue a higher education and to have the range of choices she does in a democratic, capitalist and liberal society as a nonwhite woman from an educated family. Her entire focus seems to be instead on promoting her self-proclaimed victimization, rather than advocating for the refugees she has studied in her thesis, who have escaped political, religious, economic and sexual persecution in their home countries and who are often viewed as an unwelcome burden by the countries they flee to. From the comments from other posters about her speech, it appears that she was relying on her exhibitionism to cover up the deficits in the content of her presentation. Chai states, "I am not responsible for anyone’s attention because we are capable of thinking for ourselves and we have agency." Her selfishness undermines the relevance of her subject matter.

 Her behavior is very similar to that of Michelle Wolf, the comedienne who hosted the White House Correspondent's dinner on April 28th of this year. Both women took full advantage of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression, with Wolf breezily proclaiming "I know as much as some of you might want me to, it’s 2018 and I am a woman so you cannot shut me up." Yet neither woman's presentation had the gravitas to give them credibility. 

It’s a well-understood premise that men of all ages respond to visual stimuli. As the daughter of a feminist and gender studies professor, this is something Chai should have been aware of. For her to deliberately choose to dress in a manner that drew attention to her figure and then to proceed to further create conditions that enhance such stimuli shows that she was either oblivious or indifferent to the message it was sending to her audience. Society has imposed rules and strictures on what constitutes appropriate conduct between the sexes. However, sex remains a basic human impulse. Restricting daily interactions to one gender as in prisons and the Catholic Church does result in instances where men are victimized by other men.  But those are exceptions, and not what tends to happen in the society at large. The rise of the MeToo movement is evidence that women are much more at risk of harassment and predatory sexual behavior by men than men are by women. The difference is that now women have the power and ability to protest such behavior and see it publicly condemned. Wolf said she had worked in a lot of male-dominated fields but had never been sexually harassed, perhaps because she had the ability and confidence to set and enforce strong boundaries and because she adhered to an accepted dress code in the workplace.

Yes, women should have control over what happens to their bodies and be free to express themselves any way they want, but that does not absolve them from using good judgment and common sense. The latest generation of feminists takes an almost militant sense of pride in placing the onus of responsibility for appropriate behavior solely on male shoulders. A woman who has true control over her body makes conscious choices when it comes to the situations she puts herself in. She would not allow herself to do things that lowered her inhibitions or deliberately made her physically vulnerable. Chai could confidently expose her body in the classroom because it was a safe environment in a westernized society that had laws that punished sexual predators.

However, she would have not had the same protection in a less evolved culture, nor could she rely on that protection once she stepped out of the classroom. If the impression left by her behavior in the male mind was that she did not care about showing a sense of self-restraint in her appearance, what would stop one of her less “socialized” male classmates or peers from acting on his primitive impulses, which could lead to a far more traumatizing outcome? In her call for solidarity, she shows no understanding of the challenges faced by women who do not have access to the resources that she has for redress. In many remote rural areas in India, for example, there is no running water or indoor plumbing, so when the women go to fetch water for their families or to relieve themselves in the fields, they are often sexually assaulted -even though they are fully clothed.

The young woman was subsequently approached by the Title IX office at Cornell. Title IX is a federal law that deals with cases that involve civil rights violations based on sexual discrimination, including harassment, sexual assault or rape. Although she said was not actively pursuing a case against the university, it would be a travesty of justice to the real victims of such incidents for her to implicate the professor or the university as perpetrators of sexual harassment simply for cautioning her that her actions in exercising her right to self-expression could have consequences.

The Mysterious Murder of the Crusades

Much of America’s foreign policy has been predicated on the assumption that the leaders of every other nation in the world should think and act like we do, and if they don’t, they are considered unstable, a myopic and misguided presumption which has resulted in some disastrous decisions in our interactions with other nations. Other than official visits abroad, our leaders are unfamiliar with life in the non-Western world. On the other hand, many Asian, African and Middle Eastern leaders have studied in the West and are familiar with Western customs and beliefs. In addition to their native language, most world leaders are either fluent in, or have some knowledge of English, and often one or two other languages. By contrast, 11 of our last 12 presidents speak no other language but English and none of them have ever studied or lived in any non-Western country before they became president.

The assassination of Conrad of Montferrat, a northern Italian nobleman who was elected the king of Jerusalem in 1192 was referenced in an article by John C. Hulsman on the project syndicate website in regard to the tendency to label Kim Jong Un as an unpredictable lunatic. I was intrigued by the mention of this obscure historical figure and as I researched more about him, I realized that his assassination was a result of a complex relationship of religious, political and economic interactions in the medieval Latin East and an apt example of the dangers of underestimating your opponent.

Jerusalem was a holy place for many religious denominations throughout history. The majority religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, each sought dominance over the area. 

The Crusades of the Middle Ages were series of confrontations between the Christians and the Muslims to establish control over the Holy Land. Conrad of Montferrat lived in the 12^th century, during the time of the Third Crusade.  In 1186, Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria, and his troops captured Jerusalem and a large portion of what was considered Holy Land in the name of Islam. Although he was defeated during the siege of Acre by Richard I (the Lionheart), king of England, Saladin made a treaty with Richard that would allow Jerusalem to be under Muslim control but guaranteed the safety of Christian pilgrims. In 2005, director Rideley Scott made the Kingdom of Heaven, a fictional and dramatized version of the conflict.

Richard returned to England in 1192 to protect his throne from his brother John who had been conspiring with Philip II of France. Richard needed someone who could keep the Holy Land stable for him until he could return with more troops and supplies to re-capture Jerusalem. Richard’s initial preference was Guy de Lusignan, the brother of one of his vassals.  The Constitution of Jerusalem gave the High Court the right to elect the ruler of the city but Guy did not have the support of the barons, especially since he had led them to defeat by Saladin’s forces at Hattin five years earlier.

Conrad of Montferrat became king of Tyre after he successfully wrested control of the city from Muslim forces in 1188 by urging its residents to actively resist Saladin. 

Conrad had an impressive pedigree. His mother’s brother was Leopold IV of Austria and his mother’s grandfather was Henry V, the Holy Roman emperor. His mother’s sister was the grandmother of Philip II of France, Richard’s adversary, which was why Richard was reluctant to support Conrad as the next king of Jerusalem. Conrad’s younger brother had married the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor.  His older brother William married Sibylla, the sister of Baldwin IV, the young king of Jerusalem, and they had a son named Baldwin V. 

When William died suddenly, his widow married Guy de Lusignan. Baldwin IV didn’t want Guy to claim the throne so he named his nephew as his co-ruler.  Unfortunately, Baldwin IV died of leprosy at the age of 24, leaving no children, and his nine year old nephew died the year after him. In the absence of a living male heir, Sibylla claimed the right to rule without the consent of the High Court. When she and her daughters died in an epidemic during the siege of Acre, Guy sought Richard’s backing in attempting to claim the kingship of Jerusalem by virtue of his marriage to her and, but the High Court rejected Guy’s claim.

It instead validated the right of Sibylla and Baldwin IV’s half-sister Isabella to be the next ruler. The High Court also had the power to choose Isabella’s husband and it chose Conrad based on his past record of military success. Richard eventually realized that Guy would not be an effective ruler so he decided to defer to the High Court and support Conrad as well. Conrad married Isabella in 1190. He received the news of his election by the High Court as king from Richard’s nephew, Henry II of Champagne, on April 26, 1192. Before he could be formally crowned, he was stabbed to death on April 28^th by two hashashin, or assassins under the control of Rashid al-Din Sinan, “the Old Man of the Mountain.” Sinan reputedly planned the assassinations of key figures in both armies during the Crusades in an effort to unite Jerusalem.

Although Conrad of Montferrat is not a well-recognized figure in the study of the Crusades, the circumstances surrounding his death illustrate the social, political, cultural and economic factors that were important during that time. In researching Conrad’s story, I learned many interesting things. One was about the superior position of women in the Holy Land compared to their European counterparts. Jonathan Phillips writes that women were much more powerful in the Latin East, and contrary to the accepted practice of male primogeniture in Europe, queens could rule in their own right with a consort who would lead the army (https://www.historytoday.com/jonathan-phillips/crusades-complete-history).

During the 9^th and 10^th centuries, much of the Italian coastline had been attacked by Muslim maritime raiders from the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. By the time of the First Crusade, the four Italian city states or maritime republics of Pisa, Venice, Amalfi and Genoa built strong navies funded by trade.  Naturally, the merchant class held the power in these states. The city states were able to not only resist the Muslims but also to successfully challenge them and take over their trade routes on the Mediterranean. Conrad of Montferrat was supported by Genoa to be the king of Jerusalem while Pisa supported Guy of Lusignan. Although the Third Crusade did not give the Christians control of Jerusalem, they gained access to the city under Richard’s treaty with Saladin. With Conrad as king, the Genoans would prosper.

King Richard has been blamed for Conrad’s murder but he is an unlikely suspect for several reasons. He could not afford to destabilize the region and weaken his power. He had already withdrawn his support for Guy de Lusignan and accepted the decision of the High Court to make Conrad the next ruler, so Richard would have nothing to gain by arranging for Conrad’s death. Richard had many negative qualities but preferred direct confrontation to subterfuge so he would be personally incapable of engineering a strategic assassination attempt on Conrad’s life. 

Richard’s nephew Henry II of Champagne has also been named a suspect in the murder. He succeeded his father as the Count of Champagne just as the news came of the Crusaders’ defeat at Hattin under Guy de Lusignan. Henry went on Crusade but always planned on returning to Europe afterward and never considered remaining in Jerusalem long term. The barons of the High Court had to make a quick decision to fill the power vacuum after Conrad’s death so they chose him, perhaps because he was the best available male prospect for king in the vicinity. Henry could do nothing without Richard’s approval so he would not be likely to murder for the throne of Jerusalem, one he had never really wanted anyway. Henry became the husband of Conrad’s widow Isabella a week after the murder, ruling for the next 5 years until his premature death at age 31. Though he was the king of Jerusalem, he always preferred to refer to himself as “the Count of Champagne,” which is not something an ambitious man would do.

In America, we tend to think of Muslims as a homogenous population with similar beliefs. The reality is that while they follow the same fundamental principles of Islam, Muslims are characterized not only by theological but also cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences. Saladin was a Kurdish Muslim, one of the many ethnic groups in the Middle East. Although the Kurdish people have no nation of their own, they occupy parts of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Islam divided into two branches after the death of Muhammed in 632 left no successor. Saladin belonged to the Sunni branch of Islam, which is the religion of over 85% of modern Muslims worldwide. 

Sunnis, who are more orthodox than the Shi'ites, believed that the right to rule came through merit and that religious leaders should be chosen by election of the community, while the Shi’ites believed that they should be descended from the founder’s bloodline. Shi’ites are followers of Ali, the 4^th prophet or imam, who was also Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law and include the Ayatollahs of Iran. The Sunnis are generally more powerful and prosperous than the Shi’ites. The former Iranian royal family, the Saudi and Bahraini royal families are all Sunni Muslims. Within the Sunni branch, the Salafi movement is an ultra-conservative form of Sunni Islam in Saudia Arabia, Qatar and the UAE (United Arab Emirates). Sunnis are also the majority in Egypt and Jordan. Kuwaiti Saddam Hussein was a Sunni who controlled the majority Shi’ite population of Iraq until his death. The late Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was a Kharjite, or Sunni Muslim. He grew up in Saudi Arabia but was the son of an immigrant from Yemen. The Assad family of Syria is Alawite, or Shi’ite Muslim, while the majority of the Syrian population is Sunni.

There has been ongoing political tension between Sunnis and the Shi’ites in the Middle East ever since Muhammed’s death, fueled by American interference in the region. The modern day terrorist organizations of Al Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni Muslim groups that were ironically sponsored by the CIA in its war against the Soviet Union. The Saudis provided the money and the CIA the training to fight the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980's. A decade earlier the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was employed by the CIA as a tool against Soviet influence in the Middle East.

The members of Al Qaeda follow the doctrines of Wahhabism. They believe that God is the ultimate authority and there is no need for reliance on prophets like Muhammed to interpret God's word and advocate a return to traditional Islam as it was first practiced. When the Saudis began to export oil abroad in the 1970s, the money was used by charitable organizations in Saudi Arabia to establish the madrasas and mosques that were ultimately responsible for the education of the terrorists who were responsible for 9/11. 

The U.S. is now working with the Shi’ites in Iraq to defeat ISIS/ISIL, Salafi jihadists who split off from Al Qaeda over ideological differences. According to a question on Quora, "Al Qaeda wished to bring ‘world-wide Jihad’ to every part of the globe as a means of forcing RESPECT for Sunni Islam within its historic borders. ISIS wished to recreate a CALIPHATE, which involves the occupation and control of large swathes of territory as a means of enforcing extreme Sunni Islamic doctrine within a particular TERRITORY." (https://www.quora.com/Why-did-ISIS-split-from-Al-Qaeda-if-they-both-have-the-same-enemies)

The U.S. is working with its Saudi Arabian allies against the Houthis, northern Yemeni Shi’ite fighters from the Zaidi sect (named after the great grandson of Ali) who want to overthrow the US-sponsored Yemeni government. The Houthis are supported by Iran as well as many Sunni Muslims in the country. The Houthis support the Shi'ite Assad regime in Syria. Hezbollah is a Lebanese terrorist Shiite group that is backed by Iran. By implementing economic sanctions against Iran and air strikes against ISIS in Syria, the US is attempting to weaken the power of Hezbollah and the Palestine supported Hamas, both of which threaten the safety of Israel, America's ally. At the same time, the US is also trying to negotiate an agreement about nuclear weapons with the Iranian government. 

The politics of the medieval Middle East were equally complex. Of all the possible suspects in Conrad’s assassination, Rashid al-Din Sinan probably had the strongest motive. Sinan and his group of assassins were members of a sect of Shi’ite Muslims known as Nizari Isamilis. To the Muslim Sinan, Christian Crusaders were enemies. As a member of a Shi’ite minority that espoused extreme views, Sinan was a threat to Sunnis like Saladin. Conrad’s assassination therefore might have been part of a long term strategy to weaken the power of either side over Jerusalem. A comprehensive understanding of the influence of politics, economics and culture on a region should be an important part of the development of America’s foreign policy but those factors are often misunderstood or ignored. American foreign policy has been motivated by self interest in many parts of the world with catastrophic consequences. This is the parallel that Hulsman is trying to draw by using the example of Conrad of Montferrat.

Another Twist in the Shape of Water

By now, news of physicist Stephen Hawking's death is common knowledge. Like Elisa in Guillermo del Toro's the Shape of Water, Hawking was disabled. Both circumstances were out of their control.Elisa has been mute since birth from an unexplained injury to her throat.  Hawking was completely paralyzed as a result of the progressive effects of ALS, a disease of the neurons that control the voluntary muscles. He lost his voice in 1985 after coming down with pneumonia while at a CERN conference in Geneva. Looking at all of the articles describing Hawking's impact on the world and in his field, I came across words like "visionary", "renowned", "brilliant."

Hawking has said, "Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking."Other than the loss of her voice, Elisa has no other physical disabilities and is able to function normally. Her mind, like Hawking's is unaffected. She is highly intelligent, appreciates music and culture, and teaches sign language to the creature so they can communicate. The rudimentary tools she has at her disposal limits the number of people she can communicate with. Hawking is able to reach a much wider audience because he has more sophisticated tools at his disposal. He is celebrated because of his intellectual achievements in spite of his disability while Elisa, a female janitor in a male dominated workplace, is insignificant and virtually invisible. Even if she had a voice, as her co-worker Zelda does, she still has no way of changing things.

The audience makes the assumption that Elisa works at such a lowly job because that is the only kind of work that she is able to get with her disability. It is not lack of aptitude that limits her. She desires connection but isolates herself, realizing that other people will not take the time to understand her challenges and expect her to adapt to them, rather than trying to adapt to her. Harsh experience has bred caution in her and she would prefer to stay safe and unnoticed in an insignificant position than to put herself in a position where she can be hurt further.

Adversity affects people in different ways. For sensitive people like Elisa, it is particularly traumatizing and the lack of effective support or empathy makes recovering that much more difficult. As a teenager, I got my driver's license, along with many of my peers and drove independently for several years until a serious car accident in my late 20's left me disabled for several months. Although I recovered from the physical injury, the experience left me terrified of driving. The emotional effects lingered for years, as they do for many victims of PTSD. I never sought psychological assistance and instead found other ways of coping, just as Elisa does. I became dependent on friends and family to get around, effectively curtailing my independence. Although people knew what had happened to me, they could not understand why I wasn't able to get over it and start driving again. This only succeeded in isolating me further.

I still longed for freedom and independence, as Elisa did, but my negative experience obstructed my ability to find a solution.  On his website http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-computer.html, Hawking describes how computers and assistive technology have given him the lifeline he needed to do his work.  I recently bought a vehicle that came equipped with technology that would help me in performing many of the functions associated with operating a motor vehicle and with advanced safety features to minimize serious injury. A smartphone with built in GPS provides verbal  navigational assistance without my having to read a map and remember a long sequence of directions.Those two things gave me the confidence to drive again, which helped to restore my sense of self worth.

Unfortunately, Elisa was not as lucky. If del Toro's objective was to increase awareness of and elicit sympathy for the plight of the disabled, that message has not come through. Those who have access to better resources, as Hawking and I did, have a built in advantage even with a disability. Elisa's gender and her inferior economic status are her real disability, not her inability to speak.

Nothing Common About Common Core, Part 2

This morning's edition of the Wall Street Journal contained a review of "Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy", a book by Nicholas Tampio, which opposes the application of national standards to the problem of educational reform. Tampio's main objection to a federally controlled curriculum rests less on the problems with the actual structure of Common Core than it does on the fact that the authority to develop an educational system that meets the needs of all its users rests in the hands of a small group rather than being subject to input from a variety of sources. His argument is based on the founding fathers' fears of an overly powerful central government that resembled the one they were trying to avoid.

As a nation, we rank far behind other nations academically, a factor which Tampio partly attributes to racial and socioeconomic differences within the country, which create significant gaps in students' academic abilities. Students for whom English is not their native language or who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds do not have the edge that their more affluent or culturally socialized peers do. To this I add that students with learning disabilities face an additional obstacle in adapting to the methodology of the Common Core. Common Core involves providing an explanation for how students arrived at a solution rather than simply providing a numerical answer. Even if English is their first language LD (learning disability) students still struggle with deficits in comprehension and processing skills so they cannot articulate their reasoning process clearly. Tony Attwood, an autism researcher interviewed in a November 11, 2015 article in the Washington Post says that students with autism seem to have a special facility for math but struggle when they attempt to explain their answers, which can “mystify teachers and lead to problems with tests when the person with Asperger’s syndrome is unable to explain his or her methods on the test or exam paper.”

Tampio claims that uniform curricular standards restrict creativity and individualism, as it does in China. However, innovation cannot occur without first achieving competence in the fundamentals of a given field. Architects, builders, bakers, surgeons, accountants and individuals in many professions have the ability to employ creative solutions to problems in their work only because they have already mastered the basics. This is one of the problems that English teacher D’Lee Pollock-Moore at Warren County High School in Georgia has flagged in the design of the ELA standards of Common Core. She says, "While the Common Core does integrate reading and writing, it does not ask students to learn how to write by first imitating someone else’s style before inventing their own."

Tampio  also says the problem with the English Language Arts curriculum is that it is primarily focused on a logical approach that requires evidentiary support to analyze literature rather than an approach that allows students to respond to what they are reading. Yes it is important to learn how to substantiate a claim with relevant evidence. But part of a well rounded curriculum goes beyond logic into emotion.  Moore contends that the background of the author also influences style and voice by incorporating their life experience into the narrative, which is missing in the current format of the Common Core. She further explains that the reading standards for 8th grade include identification of literary themes but not an understanding of how they apply to literature. She cites Henry David Thoreau's "On Walden Pond" as an example of a work that changes readers internally, getting them to think and feel and sympathize with the author's perspective. From that combination comes the impetus for change and the desire to make the world a better place. Given the turmoil and the increased polarization in the nation, we need changemakers who can restore a sense of balance and perspective and a respect for the virtues that made this country great in the past. But they cannot do that if they lack the skills and the Common Core does a poor job of training the current generation in the acquisition of those skills.

Nothing Common About the Common Core

I recently got a call from a parent looking for help in math for their child. In the past, I have said that math was one of the academic areas I was qualified to tutor. Now  I have to qualify that assertion to say that I tutor “old school math.”  My experience is invalid because "old school math" is only taught in 8 of the 50 states. The other 42, as well as 4 territories and the District of Columbia, have chosen to follow the Common Core.

Common Core is a teaching methodology that is based on standardizing math and English instruction across the country. The idea was to ensure that all high school graduates had the same knowledge so there were no competency gaps. Standards were also developed for each grade level. Every state decides whether or not to implement the Common Core standards in their curriculum. When it was first introduced in 2009, 48 states adopted the standards, motivated by federal funding for education through Obama’s Race To The Top Initiative.

The NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), is an evaluation system administered by a federal agency under the Department of Education that has been testing 4^th, 8^th and 12^th grade students in public and private schools across the nation in different academic areas every two years since 1969. In 2015, it found that the performance of high school seniors in math had not improved since Common Core had been implemented and had even gotten worse than their performance in 1992 when the tests were first used, according to a blog in the Huffington Post last May entitled, “Results Are in: Common Core Fails Tests and Kids.”  There was a similar decline in reading performance with the implementation of Common Core. 

The author concluded that Common Core is designed in such a way that the majority of students are doomed to failure, especially if those students are poor, or have learning disabilities or are non-native speakers of English. What was ironic about the call I received was that both parents were engineers. They were both highly educated, native English speakers from an upper middle class neighborhood yet neither was able to help their child because they couldn’t understand the math.  Judging from the comments on the Internet, it is a “common” problem. Clearly there is something at fault in the way math and reading are currently being taught in the US from grades K-12 if the majority of graduating high school students are unprepared for college level work.

Math and English are both primarily “language” based academic subjects. Each has its own specific vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Understanding and solving a math problem is similar to reading and analyzing a literary passage or novel.  At higher grade levels math requires a conceptual understanding,  but in the beginning, it’s simply about acquiring competency with the fundamentals. The why is less important than the what and how. One of the problems with the current math curriculum is that material that was typically taught at higher grade levels is being introduced much earlier in Common Core before the foundation is laid.

An acquaintance who teaches math in high school compared solving such problems to building an automobile engine. It’s not enough to be given the engine block and the component parts and told to build the engine.  Knowing what the part looks like and what parts connect with it, along with knowing where it should be in the engine, and what order it must be put in is important in the assembly process. One of the algebra problems in the NY curriculum has students in Algebra I solving quadratic equations by completing the square. Before Common Core, working with quadratic equations was a skill that was  typically taught in an Algebra 2/Trigonometry course or higher, as it is in many other countries.

Reading works the same way. In earlier grades, the process of reading begins with visual recognition of words and their proper pronunciation. Later, students learn to define and use the words in simple sentences. When I was in 7^th grade I had a very strict but comprehensive English teacher.  I learned the essentials of language composition from a book called English 3200. It gave me practice naming the part of speech of each word in a sentence, the definition or function of that word, and the syntax, or its proper position in a sentence. Those were the building blocks of language. From there, it was simply a matter of acquiring the necessary vocabulary to create interesting and engaging prose and poetry pieces, and that is a matter of experience, in other words, spending a lot of time reading. The students I knew who were skilled writers were also voracious readers across all types of literature, and if I have to define what voracious means, there is already a problem.

Common Core focus the bulk of its reading curriculum in the higher grades on nonfiction, according to an article by Joy Pullman, writing for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. The language of nonfiction or informational literature is colloquial so it can be easily understood by a broad audience. Studying the text of Shakespeare or Chaucer or any of the Romantic poets, on the other hand, requires annotation and translation to modern English through the use of SparkNotes or similar supplemental sources. Pullman quotes a study by Sandra Stotsky and Mark Bauerlein claiming that “college readiness will likely decrease when the secondary English curriculum prioritizes literary nonfiction or informational reading and reduces the study of complex literary texts and literary traditions” to prove her assertion that the classics help students with higher level thinking and analysis.

A Wall Street Journal article by Jillian Kay Melchior earlier this year talked about the resistance to studying classical texts on college campuses across the country, including at such bastions of higher education as Yale. The students’ main objection appears to be the fact that classical literature is not applicable to the issues of the current population demographic. Yet the central concerns of humanity have not changed over time. Reynaldo Martinez, a student at  Hostos Community College, part of City University of New York in the Bronx says, “These works open your eyes to the way morality and education and equality are still needed in our society.”

A letter to the editor about the article draws an analogy to a course on U.S. presidents to say that “the ones studied would include those who had the greatest impact, served during challenging times, or made difficult decisions that are still felt by us today. The course wouldn’t select one president from a northern state and one from a southern state, one who was right-handed and one who was left-handed, one who was tall and one who was short, to ensure representation of all demographics.”  

An online comment to the article continues, “I am reminded of a certain football coach from some years back  whose name escapes me at the moment who called his team together after a lopsided loss to tell his players that we are getting back to basics and at the same time picked up a football and displayed for  all to see and said; "this is a football". He ends by saying, ”Maybe that's what we need to do with the education system in our country, get back to basics.” We can’t run before we learn to walk and a Race To The Top won’t be won if our competitors are stumbling to get their balance.

The Problem With The Shape of Water

Guillermo del Toro won the Oscar this past Sunday for The Shape of Water.  Del Toro is a fan of classic cinema, and has used them for inspiration, especially The Creature from The Black Lagoon (1954). He is also adept at the use of visual effects such as light and color and strategic camera angles to create a movie that is impressive for its technical features.  The movie reverses the  roles of the characters in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid with the male protagonist as the merman and the female, Elisa Esposito as "the princess." I haven’t seen the movie, nor do I plan to, since what I have read about it so far doesn't exactly thrill me.

A review by Christopher Orr in The Atlantic Magazine bills the Shape of Water as an adult fairy tale, a claim which is based on an incomplete premise.  In the Disney version, Ariel voluntarily gives up her voice to the sea witch in exchange for legs so that she can marry the human prince and get her HEA (happily ever after) ending. A study of literature provides a different perspective on the film.The mermaid in Andersen's story is told that when she dies, she will become "foam on the surface of the water."  Although she does eventually  fall in love with the prince, her main objective is to attain an immortal soul and avoid dying, which she can only do by being human, winning the prince's love and getting him to marry her. Andersen's description of the immortal soul seems to be derived from Hindu philosophy. Her grandmother tells the little mermaid: "Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars. As we rise out of the water, and behold all the land of the earth, so do they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see.”

A common theme in literature is that the desire for material objects is a dual edged sword.The Bhagavad Gita says that attachment to the fruits of our actions, or desire, brings us pleasure as well as pain.The sea witch in Andersen's story tries to warn the mermaid of the consequences of her actions: "it is very stupid of you, but you shall have your way, and it will bring you to sorrow, my pretty princess."  When the mermaid gets her legs, it will not be a pleasant experience. The sea witch tells her, "you will feel great pain, as if a sword were passing through you. But all who see you will say that you are the prettiest little human being they ever saw. You will still have the same floating gracefulness of movement, and no dancer will ever tread so lightly; but at every step you take it will feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow." She also cuts off the mermaid’s tongue as the price of her humanity. 

Elisa was found near the water as a baby. She too has no voice, like the mermaid, and must communicate through sign language. Elisa has lost her voice due to an an injury sustained in childhood. She has no family and very few friends. Elisa's disability isolates her, limiting her communication to the few people who understand her method of communication like her co-worker Zelda and  her neighbor Giles. She works as a janitor in a government factory during the 1960s, so she doesn't have money either. Along with her muteness, this makes her lonely and vulnerable. 

In my last post, I discussed the topic of loneliness and identified Jane Eyre as a character who has similar obstacles: lack of physical beauty, family or money but triumphs over them, managing to achieve a happy and fulfilling life.  Mr. Rochester, her romantic interest, is a man who starts out healthy and able bodied but has become crippled by circumstance. Near the end of Jane Eyre, he has been severely scarred in a fire that destroys his family home, losing a hand and the sight in one eye. 

Rochester's deformities cause him to hide away from the world and go into self imposed exile. Played by Doug Jones, the creature, or Asset, as he is called, is similar to Rochester and the title characters in Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera in many respects. He shares their intelligence, emotional depth and sensitivity and their desire to fit into the society that rejects them for their appearance. Jane Eyre voluntarily chooses Rochester as her husband because they are soulmates, equals both intellectually and economically who completely understand each other. The movie tries to make a case for the fact that the relationship between Elisa and the humanoid fish is similar, when Elisa says, “The way he looks at me. He doesn’t know what I lack... Or how I am incomplete. He just sees me for what I am. As I am.” 


Elisa wants to be loved for herself and is desperate to find that connection. She becomes attracted to the one male who also cannot communicate in the human world. Elisa and the creature are outsiders and prisoners of their circumstances and it is this similarity that draws them together. Mutual alienation, however, is an insufficient basis for a strong and stable relationship. 

 Moviegoers may remember last year’s live action remake of the Disney classic Beauty and the Beast as well as 2004's Shrek 2. Both are films in which the male protagonist attains a human form by magical intervention, the former through the reversal of a curse, and the latter by drinking a magical potion. There is no such ameliorating influence in this movie: the creature never changes its form. The audience is asked to accept him the way he is. Director Del Toro says that “love is not transformation. Love is acceptance and understanding.” The movie makes the premise of attraction between Elisa and Jones' character more palatable by making him more physically appealing. Designer Mark Hill discloses on Broadly.com that his features include, “a perfect nose, appropriately-spaced eyes, and gills that didn’t look out of place.” Del Toro specifically requested that the creature have big expressive eyes, “kissable” lips, broad shoulders...and a nice butt. 

Carli Velocci, the author of the article “Why We're So Obsessed with Sexy Monsters” on Broadly.com writes that the movie “presents a story in which the woman chooses the monster, and the monster remains monstrous.” But Elisa has little choice. Del Toro's film portrays the human men in his film as either hyperaggressive and violent, like Strickland, Elisa's boss, or powerless and emasculated like Giles.  The Asset is the best representation of positive masculinity, even though he himself is not a man in the strictest sense of the term.

The #MeToo movement has drawn attention to the sexual harassment and intimidation of women by powerful men, men like Strickland. In a December 24, 2017 article on the Hollywood Reporter.com, writer Kristin Lopez notes that Elisa's handicap, which sets her apart from others, actually attracts Strickland to her. He assumes she will consent to a sexual relationship with him because she has no other options and would welcome his attention. 

In Andersen’s story, the mermaid has the choice to kill the prince and to become a mermaid again,  but she refuses to exercise that option. She instead achieves an immortal soul through a complicated plot device called a deus ex machina (literally god from machine) in which an unexpected event resolves a tragic situation. In Andersen's The Little Mermaid, the Daughters of the Air, spirits who lack an immortal soul but gain one through doing good deeds, rescue the mermaid to become one of them. 

Elisa never intends to be with the creature permanently. She only wanted to release the creature back into the water where he came from, out of compassion, so that he can be free from exploitation by the humans. Just as the sea witch does in the Little Mermaid, Zelda tries to warn Elisa of the consequences of her decision, before she helps her. In the final scene, Elisa is shot and on the brink of death. The creature has seemingly magical healing powers and creates gills out of the marks on her throat. In a deus ex machina ending, he supposedly saves her life so that she can live underwater with him since he is unable to live on land. 

Some might see the ending as romantic.  As a male director, Del Toro doesn't seem to consider the implications of a movie that glamorizes denying the female protagonist the ability to choose for herself out of strength rather than weakness, as Jane Eyre does. In A Streetcar Named Desire, American playwright Tennessee Williams depicts the story of Blanche DuBois. She is a young woman from a formerly wealthy family of the Old South who visits her sister in the hedonistic environment of New Orleans. She has pursued pleasure in the form of alcohol and numerous sexual liaisons to escape her guilt and the tragedy of her life. Her behavior and her unequal status ultimately contributes to the subjugation of her will and destruction of her sanity at the hands of Stanley Kowalski, her sister's husband.

The Shape of Water isn’t a fairy tale or a movie about the power of true love, which might redeem it in my eyes.  Love is mocked and denigrated in the depiction of the relationships of all the main characters. Both Elisa’s co-worker Zelda and the antagonist Colonel Strickland have dysfunctional marriages where the love is either missing or toxic. Zelda says of her husband, "All he had going for him was animal magnetism back in the day." Giles cannot have a romantic relationship because of his sexual orientation, which was just as unsettling in the context of the times as is the romantic interaction between a human female and a hybridized fish, an interaction which falls perilously short of outright bestiality. A review by Candice Frederick on Gamespot.com (https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-shape-of-water-review-the-problem-with-inter-s/1100-6455107/) also highlights a glaring inconsistency in asking why the female should fall in love with a  monster or an otherwise physically unattractive partner but the same is not true in reverse. 

Del Toro tries to romanticize the sexual content by representing it as a key part of a narrative about finding love where it’s least expected. Yes, when we fall in love, we make ourselves vulnerable and naked to our partner, both metaphorically and physically. But by so graphically emphasizing the sexual elements in the story, the Shape of Water reduces Elisa to a caricature of a passionate and sensitive woman, and the theme of the movie to a parody of sex and love, rather than a celebration of diversity and differences.

"Adulting" in the 21st century

People have differing ideas about when the word “adulting” first began to be used but it was probably sometime early in the new millennium. It was chosen as the word of the year in 2014 by Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty who said that she saw it in a tweet by Daniel Kroft on May 22, 2010 and has since become popular on social media, earning its own hashtag, #adulting on Twitter and Instagram.

As a part of speech, “adulting” is a noun that has been verbified, or turned into a verb. Brian, creator of TheWriteAtHome blog, lists several verbified nouns which have contributed to the evolution of American English. Adulting is defined by the linguistics journal American Speech as:

1. to behave in an adult manner; engage in activities associated with adulthood

2. to make someone behave like an adult; turn someone into an adult

Brian also talks about nouns that have been unnecessarily verbified, making their usage awkward and clunky. Personally, I think “adulting” is one of those words. I’ve seen the term used a lot by parents on social media lately to describe their pride when their college age children do things that (responsible) adults do on a regular basis or to ask advice about how to help their children make this transition.

There is a distinction between chronological adulthood and behavioral adulthood. Chronological adulthood is the what and when of adulting, what you are able to do and the age at which you have the right to do those things. This varies by country. The legal age of adulthood in the US is 18. By that age, individuals can vote, operate a motor vehicle, get a job, enlist in the armed forces, serve on a jury, sign a contract, own property, make a will, get married, limit their parents’ access to their medical information--and be charged as an adult when they break the law.  

There were no instruction manuals or advice columns for being an adult when we were growing up; you learned by example or trial and error. For many of us, our parents were the first role models for what being an adult looked like. Mostly we thought of adults as being old, boring and strict. They went to work, paid the bills, raised families, laid down rules, meted out discipline-and restricted our fun. Parents who were competent at "adulting" were a source of food, shelter, clean clothes, funds, transportation, comfort, wisdom and stability. 

In contrast to chronological adulthood, behavioral adulthood deals with the how of being an adult. It’s this aspect that currently seems to baffle parents and their (chronologically) adult offspring.  In a June 8, 2016 article on Time. com, writer Katy Steinmetz says, “To say you are “adulting” is to, on some level, create distance between you and what are implied to be actual adults who are adulting 100% of the time and therefore have little reason to acknowledge it.”

Trying to specify exactly what it takes to be an adult is a nebulous and complex task. In general, behaving like an adult implies not behaving like a child. So what do adults do that children don’t?Although I haven’t been 18 for a long time, I don’t really consider myself an adult, since many of the traits and behaviors that I believe define an adult are things I’m still working on. But based on my upbringing and experiences with people whom I do consider adults, I can offer the following general suggestions, which are applicable regardless of age but if learned early, can ease the transition to adulthood:

• Learn the art of making good decisions. The technique is essentially the same whether you are buying an appliance, or a house, evaluating a new job or a potential romantic interest: what is the benefit of making this decision and how much will it cost you (i.e. what would you be willing to sacrifice or compromise?) Never make decisions based on how you feel at the moment. You may not feel the same the next day, the next week or the next year. Also, think about how those decisions affect not only you but the people around you. As John Donne said, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
• Plan ahead
• Accept responsibility. Keep your word and honor your obligations.
• Do what needs to be done without expecting to be thanked or praised for it and always be prepared to do more than your share.
• Rules may be boring and restrictive but they are there for a reason: they ensure order, discipline and uniformity. The only time they should be broken or changed is if they are unjust, not if they are inconvenient, so try to follow them whenever possible instead of looking for ways of changing them.
• Understand that there is a time to stand up and a time to back down, and if you know how to make good decisions you’ll be able to tell the difference.
• Indulge in “mind broadening,” the best way to increase your knowledge base. Read a lot about a lot of different things. Read about things you don’t like or agree with. Talk to people who think differently.
• Communicate. Communicate calmly and respectfully.
• Listen. Everybody has a story and a different point of view.
• Be self- reliant but don’t be afraid to ask for help and accept it graciously when offered.
• Think about how happy you feel when somebody puts you first and put the other person first, even if they don’t do anything for you in return. (I got this one from an episode of the Fox show Lucifer.) The title character is telling his colleague what he most admires about her: “You always put your daughter first even though the ungrateful urchin does nothing to contribute to the rent.”  Most of the time, unless the other person is completely selfish and insensitive, you will get a lot of what you want too.
• Have fun and enjoy life, but don’t go after things or indulge in behaviors that damage the mind, body or soul. The temporary pleasure isn’t worth the long term pain. Exercise good judgment and a lot of self-restraint.
• The biggest thing that defines adults is the ability to anticipate the possible consequences of their actions and to flex and adapt when things don’t go the way they expect.
• No one’s perfect, but don’t stop trying. Show up to life every day determined to do your best and be your best self.