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.

The Universality of Loneliness

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. --Kurt Vonnegut

Loneliness is terrible because it makes you feel as though you have nothing to look forward to and no one to provide stability in a capricious and cruel world. Aristotle said, “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human.” Loneliness, in Aristotle’s definition is an unnatural state, but it is the common condition of many characters in literature, both American and British. J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Edgar Allen Poe’s The House of Usher, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, to name a few, are all novels that deal with highly sensitive characters who are lonely for one reason or another.

 In some of the novels, location contributes to loneliness. The characters live in places that are physically isolated, like the House of Usher, the Yorkshire moors of Bronte’s novel or an island as in Robinson Crusoe. Sometimes the characters choose to be alone even though they have the ability to be a part of society. Roderick Usher and Miss Havisham never leave their homes to interact with the rest of the world. Usher is sensitive to light and sound which makes it difficult to interact with the outside environment. He also stutters and can’t express himself fluidly. The House of Usher relies on supernatural elements as a part of the narrative. Usher believes that the house is alive and he is its prisoner.  Usher doesn’t care about his personal appearance and over the years, the house too has fallen into disrepair. Miss Havisham continues to wear her wedding dress. She, like Usher, always stays indoors. She looks older and frailer because of lack of exposure to the sun. Her house stays frozen in time since she stopped all the clocks at the moment when she receives the letter from her prospective bridegroom cancelling the wedding.

 Jane’s husband in the Yellow Wallpaper and Boo Radley’s father and brothers in Mockingbird attempt to control their unacceptable behavior by keeping them confined at home. Eventually, Radley himself makes the choice to stay at home and keep away from society to escape its toxic environment. In other cases, the choice is not in the character’s hands. Like Boo Radley, Holden Caulfield is disgusted by the hypocrisy and duplicity of the world.  He is also grieving the death of his brother Allie. Holden, Blanche DuBois and Jane Eyre are sent away to impersonal institutions such as boarding schools or asylums by their families. Frankenstein is also rejected by his father/creator so he wanders the world looking for love and companionship. These individuals are extremely sensitive, which makes it difficult for their families to understand and relate to them.

The depictions of Blanche DuBois, Carrie Meeber (Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser), Jane Eyre  and Jane in the Yellow Wallpaper all share the common characteristic of women who are victims of their passionate natures.  As a young child, Jane Eyre gets locked in “the red room” for standing up for herself against her cousin. After she meets Mr. Rochester and is preparing to marry him, she learns that his first wife, who also has a passionate personality, ironically has been locked in the attic at Thornfield. In the Yellow Wallpaper, Jane is confined to the nursery of the home where she and her husband are spending their vacation.

Carrie Meeber is a young woman who has a series of failed relationships, much as Blanche does at an older age in Streetcar. Miss Havisham is a jilted bride and Bertha Rochester is a discarded wife. Jane in The Yellow Wallpaper is a mother with postpartum depression and Blanche DuBois is an aging widow who has lost her home.  No matter what stage of life the women are in, none of them are happy.

Creativity seems to go hand in hand with loneliness in many of the novels. Roderick Usher paints, plays music and composes poetry.  The female protagonist of the Yellow Wallpaper keeps a journal. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield is a writer, whose favorite class is English. Gaston LeRoux’s Phantom is a singer, musician and architect. The creative impulse is admired but often involves mental processes that are beyond ordinary understanding.

Men are frequently seen as the instruments of women’s mental instability. Blanche’s sexuality and Jane’s literary aspirations make them both dangerous to the patriarchy. Blanche’s promiscuous past begins as an escape from her feelings of guilt at her husband’s suicide and the death of other family members leading to the loss of her family home. Blanche’s descent into madness is accelerated when her sister Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski rapes her. In the Yellow Wallpaper, the suppression of Jane’s creative endeavors by a paternalistic husband reflect a Victorian culture that did not encourage women to pursue aspirations outside the domestic sphere, causing her to have a mental breakdown. Jane Eyre has a temporary breakdown when she discovers on their wedding day that Mr. Rochester is already married. Mr. Rochester ascribes his wife’s behavior to a family predilection for insanity, but her unhappiness at being forced into an unwanted marriage and trying to accommodate to a foreign culture might also be contributing factors. Miss Havisham in Great Expectations is not just rejected by her fiance, but he and her half brother cheat her of her fortune, a trauma from which she never recovers.

A change in financial status plays a role in the loneliness of some of the characters. Blanche DuBois comes from a rich Southern family but her position in society goes down when she has to sell the family home to cover funeral expenses. Miss Havisham was also wealthy but the destruction of her dreams makes her bitter. Carrie Meeber, in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is a young girl from a poor family in a small town who moves to Chicago and strikes it big. Both Blanche and Carrie search for connection through their romantic relationships but neither is able to. Carrie ends up in her rocking chair, rich but unhappy, just like Miss Havisham who failed to find satisfaction in a loving relationship.

Physical appearance as an isolating factor is also a common theme. Boo Radley and Frankenstein are perceived as monsters as are Gaston LeRoux’s Phantom of the Opera and Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame because they do not conform to societal standards of physical appearance. At the end of Shelley’s novel, the creature’s creator, Victor Frankenstein, is dead. Having neither family nor friends to depend on, the creature jumps out of the window of a ship on which he and Dr. Frankenstein are travelling and floats away on an iceberg, separating himself from the world that has rejected him.

Charlotte Bronte’s  Jane Eyre  has neither looks, money or family connections and has also been betrayed by her lover. That would appear to doom her to a lonely and unfulfilled life. However, she is a product of the author’s dissatisfaction with the restrictions of Victorian society. Jane doesn’t avoid the outside world but embraces it with all its foibles and tries to make things better. She is a friend to the consumptive Helen at the boarding school at Lowood, and stays with her until she dies. She later becomes a governess to Mr. Rochester’s ward, Adele. She helps the little girl, who has been abandoned by both her parents and, being French, is a foreigner to the English, to adjust to her life. Even after being mistreated as a child, Jane returns to her aunt’s home and helps to take care of her in her final days. She also stays with and helps Diana and Mary with their work after she runs away from Thornfield. Her discovery of Mr. Rochester’s suffering brings her back to help him. Although her life is incomplete in many ways, she is a source of strength and support for those around her. Though Jane also suffers periods of loneliness, of all of the characters mentioned, she ultimately achieves everything that she hopes for. She finds relatives who care for her, gains financial independence, becomes a wife in a loving marriage of equals, and starts her own family when she becomes a mother.

Jane Eyre was written over 150 years ago, but her example reinforces the wisdom of Vonnegut’s words. Perhaps that is the real solution to ending the tragedies of the mass shootings that have traumatized the nation. We should all work together to create an environment that nurtures and support its members and looks out for those who are in danger of slipping through the cracks because they feel alone, unloved and unwanted. Give these troubled and confused young men the assurance that that their lives are important and that they have something of value to contribute to society and we may actually succeed in replacing violent behavior rooted in loneliness and isolation with a community reflects the Aristotelian ideal.