Welcome to
the Desert of the Real
Opening Address to the Spring Plenary Session,
May 1, 2003, of
The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges
By Hoke Simpson
In 1966, bluesman Albert King sang:
Born under a bad sign
I been down since I begin to crawl
Born under a bad sign
I been down since I begin to crawl
If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no
luck at all.
April was a month of signs, most of them bad,
and I'm glad it's over.
April was the month in which Lucinda Williams
came out with a new album-if you've been keeping
up with your Academic Senate literature, you remember
that Lucinda gave us the image of broken butterflies
that I used a year and a half ago to characterize
the promise in California of affordable, quality
higher education, a promise made without the budget
to back it up. Williams' new album is called "World
Without Tears," and in the title cut she
sings:
If we lived in a world without tears
How would bruises find
The face to lie upon
How would scars find skin
To etch themselves into
How would broken find the bones
How would broken find the bones
How would broken find the bones?
On another cut of hers, called "American
Dream," the line she repeats again and again
is:
Everything is wrong
Everything is wrong.
April was the month in which a CD by the late
Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough was delivered
to my door. I had ordered it for the title cut
called "Most Things Haven't Worked Out."
I wanted to hear the lyrics, because the title
itself seemed to be the ultimate expression of
the blues sensibility. But there were no lyrics-it
was the only song on the album without them. The
truth of "Most Things Haven't Worked Out"
was beyond words, and Junior Kimbrough just had
to play it on his guitar.
April was the month in which my telephone began
ringing almost daily, with faculty calling from
all corners of the state asking What can we do?
and reporting that their classes were cancelled,
that their programs were being decimated, that
their colleagues were being laid off, and that
their administrations and boards were acting in
panic. In April, it became clear that we were
broken and that the center was not holding.
April was the month in which I heard National
University advertising on National Public Radio
that the state's 108 community colleges were scheduled
by the Governor to be cut $530 million dollars
in the coming year. In April, it became clear
that the vultures were circling the corpse.
April was the month in which I began writing
the first draft of this speech, and discovered
after four pages that I was writing about the
biblical Book of Job and the philosophy of the
Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard. In April, my
synapses took me directly from the state of the
community colleges to the suffering of Job and
the struggle to sustain human values in the face
of an indifferent universe.
And April was the month when I thought about
this being the last speech I'd ever make here.
And I thought back to the speech I gave a year
and a half ago, and its theme, "It's the
funding, Stupid!" with which I'd had a good
deal of fun. And even though I still believe completely
in the validity of the message, "It's the
funding," today that phrase no longer seems
adequate to the expression of our circumstances.
In April, I found the right phrase.
It comes from the movie, The Matrix. (The sound
on the Matrix, by the way, was done by a Grossmont
College student named Dane Davis, and is to my
mind the best example of the application of modern
audio technology in any extant film.) You'll recall
that in the Matrix, virtually everyone has been
enslaved by super-computing machines-their bodies
are suspended in fluid and their brains are plugged
into a computer program, which simulates within
them the virtual experience of living normal lives
in an everyday world. A few people have escaped
enslavement, among them Morpheus, who leads a
small band determined to take their world back.
When he first unplugs his newest recruit, Neo,
Morpheus shows him the landscape outside of the
matrix, a landscape ravaged by nuclear holocaust.
"Welcome to the desert of the real,"
says Morpheus.
"Welcome to the desert of the real."
That's the phrase I was looking for. A year and
a half ago, 9/11 had just happened, our response-our
"foreign policy"-was not yet adopted
and implemented, the economy was in free fall,
but we didn't know it. It was still possible to
believe that perhaps the powerful felt our pain.
Since November, 2001, the raw truth of our situation
has become manifest. We can't avoid seeing where
we really are.
So welcome to the desert of the real. The world
we have been jacked into-the simulation playing
in our brains and on our TV screens-is one created
by and for the privileged elite. America has purchased
peace and prosperity within its borders at the
cost of violence and poverty outside them, and
by marginalizing its own poor. Alabama bluesman
Willie King, responding to 9/11, sings:
You talk about terror
People I've been terrorized all my days
I said you talk about terror
People I been terrorized all my days
You know you took my name and you left me in
chains.
America has co-opted its own revolutionary impulses
with promises of equality and opportunity. But
when greed and indifference result in shortages-and
make no mistake, the budget crisis in California
is not an act of nature-the emptiness of those
promises becomes manifest. The wagons are circled
around the privileges of the elite, and the opportunities
of the less fortunate, their chances for good
health and education and meaningful work, are
abandoned to dry up like raisins in the sun. Langston
Hughes asked:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
…Or does it explode?
We now know what happens to the dream deferred
in the desert of the real.
But what are we to do? Is it enough that we continue
to create oases in our libraries, our counseling
offices, and our classrooms? At the very least,
that, of course, is essential. For in your interactions
with your students, you do change the world, and
you continue to clear the way to a better life
for millions.
I attended one of the ubiquitous accreditation
workshops this spring, and became infuriated as
both of the workshop speakers repeatedly demeaned
our efforts with the observation that, once we
were behind classroom doors, we became engaged
in a "cottage industry." The clear implication
was that we were then free to scam our "clients,"
as we lacked any sort of objective "accountability,"
and thus needed to turn to "meaningful"
modes of assessment. I had promised myself that
I would keep my mouth shut, and would just watch
and learn, and I did contain myself for the duration
of their presentations. But afterwards, I lost
it, and I railed at these poor people-both of
whom, by the way, were abysmal instructors-for
a solid twenty minutes. Do not demean my faculty!
What you do is beautiful,
and don't ever let anyone tell you that it isn't!
What you do is essential.
But I'm going to ask that you do more.
Now, I'm not suggesting that you take up arms
against the government, although I'll grant that
some of what I've said seems to come close to
that. No, I do believe in our democratic processes,
I still think we can take our state and our country
back through the ballot box. But our political
muscles seem to be atrophied. We have to build
them, and we are only going to do that by talking
about politics, and thinking about politics, and
by doing politics.
We in the community colleges have done a great
deal to lay a groundwork for change in these last
two years. We have a lot of people within and
without our system thinking, for once, in macro
terms with regard to our funding. Whereas before
we approached the budget strictly in terms of
annual incremental augmentations, many are now
thinking in terms of the need for a fundamental
restructuring. We have done an analysis of the
real costs of a quality education in the community
colleges, and we have gotten our foot in the door
of the Master Plan such that the Legislature could
take that analysis seriously and act on it. And
we in the Academic Senate have proposed an ongoing
campaign of voter registration and mobilization
of our students to become involved in exerting
perpetual pressure on Sacramento. The response
to this last, by the way, has been a bit underwhelming.
I know we all have too much to do. But no one
is going to just hand us the prize. We have to
engage in the political process, and if at first
we fail, we have to stay engaged. We have to take
seriously what we tell our students: Keep at this.
You'll get better at it, and you will succeed!
When I was in Oxford, Mississippi at a conference
a couple of months ago, a group of us visited
the grave of Fannie Lou Hamer in the town of Ruleville.
Fannie Lou Hamer discovered at the age of forty-five
that she was allowed to vote, and committed herself
to using this tool to transform her future. She
helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party, and at the 1964 Democratic Convention,
she challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation
for its seats. She was interviewed on national
television, and the nation found her a compelling
figure-much to the consternation of the Democratic
nominee, Lyndon Johnson, who didn't like her taking
the spotlight away from him. It was in that interview
that Fannie Lou Hamer made the statement that
is now carved on her gravestone: "I'm sick
and tired of being sick and tired."
While we were at Ms. Hamer's grave, which is
just off the side of a local street in Ruleville,
a busload of kindergarten children pulled up.
Their teacher, seeing that they had a potential
audience, lined the children up in the street
and had them recite a number of poems she had
written, in all of which the children declared
their determination to grow up and be somebody.
Their performance was both adorable and heartbreaking.
The Mississippi delta is like a war zone, with
no one on the streets of the towns, the buildings
crumbling and boarded up, with no work and no
prospects. The only way these children were going
to realize their dreams was to leave and go somewhere
else.
As I watched and listened to them, I found myself
thinking about our own students and what a short
road it is from Ruleville to California. It doesn't
look the same at all; but by the time I was in
Ruleville, our Governor had come out with his
January budget, and it was clear that the desert
of the real in America stretches from sea to shining
sea.
So, yes, I'm exhorting you to do more. Continue,
of course, to create your beautiful oases on your
campuses. But also grab a pick and shovel and
start digging the ditches through which will flow
the waters of political education, and political
inspiration, and political action that will irrigate
the desert of the real and transform it into a
pasture of plenty. The alternative is what we
find ourselves with today: a desiccated dream,
where most things haven't worked out, where broken
still finds the bones, where for many, everything
is wrong, and above which the vultures are circling.
April was a month full of bad signs. But April
is over; today is the first of May. Let's move
forward and realize the promise of another blues
classic that tells us:
The sun's gonna shine in my back door someday
The sun's gonna shine in my back door someday
The wind's gonna rise and blow these blues away.
