Haltom's Fourth Law: If it does not fit, use a larger hammer

Expect Procrustean thinking wherever you turn.


The same Ballard Vietnam vet who tended to repeat "Don't mean nothing" was prone to "If it don't fit, use a bigger hammer." Son of a Swedish carpenter and adept at home repair, Mike disparaged those so given to impatience and brute force that their repairs tended to make matters worse. On the other hand, Mike might have pondered why German carpenters call deep impressions made when hammers missed nails "Swedish dimples."

Not restricted to shoddy repairers or volcanic vets, Haltom's Fourth Law mocks all partisans of "I want it to be so; therefore, it is so" methodologies. Haltom's Fourth Law parodies the Procrustean.

At a glance one surmises why Haltom's Fourth Law should hold true. We each know dozens of folks capable of Procrustean thinking. Some are flat-out practiced at bricolage to "verify" what they fervently wish were true. Each of us knows few who are capable of Promethean thinking, so it cannot suprise us that Procrustean thinkers greatly outnumber Promethean thinkers. We each have friends or colleagues who will stake a claim and defend it long past the point at which anyone could believe the nonsense, so we realize that the Procrustean greatly outnumber the candidly perplexed and vastly outnumber the Promethean. The plurality of Procrustean "thinkers" is what Haltom's Fourth Law memorializes.

We see it around the University of Puget Clowns all too often. A colleague who has never uttered an intellectual thought and could never publish anything the least bit intellectual laments that since a certain administrator left, "the intellectual climate has declined." The lamenter knows that not one colleague in one hundred could suggest suitable measures by which such a decline might be measured or tested. Indeed, that is why the lament is risk-free. No matter what information one might marshal, the lamenter will parry the information as somehow suspect and will reiterate that the intellectual climate is poorer. Most colleagues will not press the lamenter over such empty blather, for they realize that the blather dresses up the true source of displeasure: the lamenter enjoyed some largesse from the prior administrator that has not been forthcoming from current administrators. The lamenter should be taken as seriously as we took Ronald Reagan when he attributed declining math scores to the absence of school prayer.

Expect Procrustean excess in peer evaluation, especially when such lamenters serve on the FAC [as, being false-positives, almost all of them will]. Every anecdote or observation may exemplify one's prejudices if only one is agile, shameless, and relentless.

At the departmental level, suppose you observed a colleague who did not do in a situation what you are confident that you would have done. If the colleague is vulnerable and you are invulnerable, pummel the sucker! After all, you know yourself to be the perfect judge of all classroom situations. What you would have done is the best thing to have done. The vulnerable evaluee frittered away a golden opportunity to follow your lead. What lousy teaching!

Or suppose you are on the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] and learn that one or more administrators opposed hiring an evaluee and that people in power don't like the evaluee. Time to concoct some vague, abstract failing that is ineluctable because ineffable. Subsume every negative on students' evaluations under some rubric that you cannot quite articulate. Claim that you know it when you see it. You must not define the great, generalized flaw, of course, for then it would be too obvious that most students crammed into the "Category that has no Name" did not mean what you are mistaking their comments to indicate. Just refer to assorted parts as if they constituted a discrete, valid failing. Most members of the FAC cannot spell or detect synecdoche or metonymy, so no one will call you on wholly Procrustean amalgams. And you'll please administrators behind the cover of confidentiality.

In faculty meetings, our Procrustean colleagues husband anecdota and apocrypha the way Ballard youth brandished "Ford persuaders" and whacked engines until the engines resumed [barely] running. One Puget Clowns colleague suggested that faculty tend to follow the advice of Red Green: "Any tool can be the right tool," but I have stuck with the metaphor of the hammer to preserve the subtlety with which colleagues at faculty meetings pound large square pegs into tiny round holes. Many is the faculty meeting during which someone has tried to force a four-by-four through the holes in peg board. When the peg board gives way, many colleagues exclaim, "We have a perfect fit!"

This is not to claim that all administrators have used sledge hammers to run faculty meetings. President Phibbs and Dean Davis fixed faculty tools around some top-down orthodoxy and orthopraxy, then let the credulous [merely 90-95% of the faculty] attribute policies and practices to governance. The Phibbs-Davis team brought down Thor's hammer when they had to, but they seldom had to because they were so adept at selecting, using, and [usually] rewarding the right faculty tools for the right jobs and because they were so adept with needles, nails, screws, and surgical instruments.

By contrast, President Pierce was so maladroit at "leading" faculty that she frequently and publicly had to resort to sledge hammers and jack hammers. The faculty were fortunate that, for some reason, she usually missed her targets. Maybe it was a vision thing.

Pierce violated the Faculty Code to sell the law school, then stonewalled the Faculty Senate and the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] when they raised her violations. She then spun laughable yarns about what had happened. Frustrated at the ability of Senate Chair Walter Lowrie and the PSC to read the Code [Yikes! Once the PSC was replete with literates!], Pierce and her new dean tried to recruit incoming faculty at "Rookie Camp" in 1994. They plied newbies with the claim that Pierce and her team wanted to upgrade the university but were obstructed by an old guard. One need not be a seer to foretell the fates of rookies who believed Pierce and her dean. The reputations of some of the first-years barely outlasted the lunch at "Rookie Camp" when UPS veterans were grilled about why they were thwarting Pierce's brave, new world. Some of the first-years were gone before the new dean was sacked! In sum, Pierce wielded big hammers to get her way but tended to brain her allies rather than to clobber her opponents. [Of course, hitting one of her few supporters was a much tougher feat than nailing her many detractors, so I should show some respect for her markspersonship.]

President Pierce and her deans eventually flourished a hammer suited to their arrogance: administrative prerogative. During the Pierce presidency, administrators all too often escalated to that sledge hammer when they did not get their way with consultation, conversation, or cajoling. The class schedule that Puget Clowns uses at present was run by the Academic Standards Committee and the Faculty Senate multiple times, but it found few if any takers. The administrators could neither persuade nor entice faculty to agree to the new scheme, so the then-dean declared that scheduling, long thought to be part of faculty prerogative with respect to curriculum, was in fact subject to administrative ukase. Tlansration: We tried to woo the faculty, but the faculty spurned us, so now we have moved to the famed "My way or the highway" syllogism.

Exhuberant over getting their way, Pierce's administrators decided that furnishings and arrangements in Wyatt Hall were not matters for consultation with faculty who would occupy the offices but were matters meet for the administrative prerogative hammer. When students, staff, and faculty questioned the headstones and electronic signs that popped up around campus, a subaltern did not deign to discuss such matter. Administrative prerogative made administrators deciders of such things, we all were told.

At faculty meetings, in committee meetings, and in departmental meetings, then, expect Procrustes to run the inn. Prometheus -- whose name means foresight -- is usually absent, chained to his desk or to a barstool and beset by various vultures masquerading as eagles around Jones Hall. Administrators follow Prometheus's brother Epimetheus -- hindsight -- in hammering students, staff, and faculty even when administrators might prevail through discourse or dialogue.

Coming Soon -- Haltom's Fifth Law: "No one who whistles in public can."

Haltom's Third Law: No one who professes ethics has any

How much should we generalize about trained incapacities?

As far as I know, my third law originated with me: "No one who professes ethics has any." In graduate school I noticed that faculty trained in philosophical disputation tended to deploy ethical precepts and moral casuistry in academic forensics to an extent far greater than they practiced scruples in their lives. I speculated that facility and experience with ethical argumentation led these instructors to discover that they could justify almost any conduct, which in turn meant that they could rationalize sleeping with their students, cheating on their spouses as well as their taxes, and other behaviors that might strike the untutored as less than moral.

I have so far resisted temptations to generalize Haltom's Third Law to the scope of Berkowitz's Law: "Academics' specialties reflect academics' deficiencies." The late Steve Berkowitz was a sociologist at the University of Vermont. He exemplified his own law to at least the extent that he was maladroit at relating to fellow humans individually or in groups. However, more than personal projections were involved. Steve saw how many political scientists were impolitic and/or inept at organizing people or administering programs. He noted how many geographers are often lost. He reminded me both how many undergraduates I had known who seemed to have selected psychology as a major to deal with their own manifest problems and how many psychologists I was meeting who seemed utterly maladjusted. [I should add that clinical psychologists have struck me as much more likely to exhibit imbalances than, say, cognitive scientists.]

Now, many academics do exhibit "trained incapacities" [Veblen]. That is, in acquiring specialized expertise, many academics lose practical, everyday know-how. We have all run into:

• teachers of writing who cannot write a personal statement
• post-modern theorists who no longer think or talk coherently
• economists who cannot manage a household budget or make a decision
• rhetoricians who could not interest high-schoolers in sex
• professors of education who could not teach a cat to sit up
• literary analysts who cannot tell that "Dr. Strangelove" was satire
• humanists possessed of precious little humanity
• historians who cannot remember on what date the Fourth of July or Cinco de Mayo falls
• political scientists who preach but never practice accountability or due process
• "internationalists" who can barely speak English, let alone a language used in areas that they purport to study
• musicians who cannot live with or in harmony

But we have also met many academics who were equally inept at each of the mundane tasks above but had not been trained into such ineptitude. Thus, I suspect that Berkowitz's Law is the product of selective attention to ironies. Many academics cannot write well, as any veteran of the Faculty Advancement Committee can attest. The author of this blog never took an English course after high school, so it is less noteworthy that he never learn [sic] how to write. Nor is it cause for comment when one who publishes in academic outlets becomes less and less able to write succinctly or understandably. [Perhaps that is why so many colleagues avoid publishing.]

Thus, I have resisted generalizing Haltom's Third Law along the lines of Berkowitz's Law.

However, it may be that my third law suffers from the same etiology as Berkowitz's Law. That is, maybe academics tend to become less scrupulous and more cunning over their careers. Certainly tenure makes less circumspect some academics who are utterly ignorant of ethics. Accession to petty administrative posts [department or program chair, for example] has released some inner demons or made obsessive-compulisive disorders evident in ways that called for dazzling casuistry by those not trained in such macabre arts. So maybe my attention has been drawn to the irony of propounding ethics while behaving badly.

Still, I insist that all or almost all purveyors of ethics in academia have turned out to be themselves seriously unscrupulous. I have known more than one expert on ethics who adjudged every stimulus or situation by how it might benefit himself or herself, so I can cite that example without singling out anyone. Kant would have excluded the exemplar's reasoning from the realm of moral philosophy altogether, but the exemplar plays on her or his professional specialty in ethics to camouflage her or his selfishness.

Maybe Haltom's Third Law could be improved by noting that all intellectuals are trained to rationalize, to chisel, and to befuddle. One must defend one's dissertation after all! Maybe all or almost all academics have proclivities for hypocrisy, larceny, and mendacity. Nonetheless, "ethicists" stand out for their sheer chutzpah.

I am so happy that I did not bring up Bill Bennett in this entry before now. I bring up his name now to remind readers of Rump Parliament of this bon mot from Jacques Ellul: the accomplished propagandist accuses targets of the very misbehavior that the propagandist has committed in the recent past and/or anticipates executing in the near future. I need not retrace the ethical gambols of Dr. Bennett. I need only remind readers that self-professed ethicists, like other propagandists, tend to excoriate sinners over sins with which the propagandists are only too familiar.


Coming Soon: Haltom's Fourth Law! "If It Does Not Fit, Use a Larger Hammer."

Haltom's Second Law: It doesn’t mean nothing.

Most things are not meaningless but are not what they seem, advantageous as it might be to induce one to leap to obvious but misleading conclusions.


My second law, borrowed from a disabled Ballard Vietnam vet who mumbled, "Don't mean nuthin' " every day, exploits a double negative. That double negative permits the usual, idiomatic interpretation – the second negative is a colloquial intensification of the first – without necessarily foregoing the literal interpretation – most expressions or actions bear or convey meaning. To preserve that useful ambiguity, I adopted the veteran's mumble as a law second in importance only to "F**k it/you/me/them/this/it all."

Let's listen to a lyric from Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" as I propound.

… [M]an standin' o’er a dead dog by the highway in a ditch.
He's lookin' down kinda puzzled, pokin' that dog with a stick.
Got his car door flung open; standin' out on Highway 31.
Like if he stood there long enough that dog get up and run.
Struck me kinda funny, seemed kinda funny sir to me.
Still, at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe

Taken literally, “It doesn't mean nothing” reminds us of the tendency of homo sapiens to imbue myths [e.g., mission statements] and rituals [reaccreditation] with significance. Suspended in our own imaginings, we manufacture meaning whether we find meanings to be as obvious and intrinsic as a curse or as subtle and elusive as a Rorschach blot. Except zero and "the null set," no expression means nothing. But meanings assigned need have nothing to do with any referents or content. We make even nonsense meaningful. Take this blog, for example.

Now Mary Lou loved Johnny with a love mean and true.
She said, "Baby, work for you every day and bring my money home to you."
One day he up and left her and ever since that
She waits down at the end of that dirt road for young Johnny to come back.
Struck me kinda funny, seemed kind of funny sir to me.
How at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.

The idiomatic interpretation – "nothing" is an emphatic alternative to "anything" – is consistent with the literal interpretation to the extent that one denies this or that meaning but not all meaning. The idiom is slang for “This thing does not have the import or implications that you are assigning it.” Some evident meaning(s) attached to events or expressions must be questioned or vitiated before they settle into intractable truths. When a dean says that some concerned faculty member does not understand “the other side,” the faculty member must realize the high probability that the alleged other side is inconsequent. The other side need not mean nothing, but the dean may be exaggerating or distracting. Sometimes, faculty detect vacuous misdirection, as when faculty derided assurances that administrators and committees had "addressed" faculty plagiarism. Even those assurances, however, did not mean nothing. Rather, they betokened that cover-up artists had no better forensic options. Out of ammo, administrators directed attention elsewhere. For once, it did not avail them.

Take a baby to the river; Kyle William they call him.
Wash the baby in the water; take away little Kyle's sin.
In a whitewash shotgun shack, an old man passes away.
Take his body to the graveyard and over him they pray,
“ Lord, won't you tell us, tell us what does it mean.”
Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.

So what is the profit in Haltom’s Second Law? If a colleague marshals some symbol, verity, cliché, or canard and the colleague is not sincerely deluded, the obvious meaning is there to make respectable or to obscure the ulterior meaning(s). Seek the ulterior meanings. If a cigar sometimes is just a cigar, nothing is lost by presuming that it might be something else. When apologists invoke "multiple narratives," one may find oneself awash in the Rashomon effect. Before one howls like Benjy going around the town circle in an unaccustomed way at the end of The Sound and the Fury, one should politely inquire what the content of the alternative narrative might be. When apologists then raise confidentiality or some other dodge to excuse their unwillingness to present their excuses for scrutiny, then howl. Just don't howl "F**k this!" and leave the room. That would be uncivil expression although utter bullshit is not.

Congregation gathers down by the riverside.
Preacher stands with his Bible; groom stands waitin' for his bride.
Congregation gone, the sun sets behind a weepin' willow tree.
Groom stands alone and watches the river rush on so effortlessly,
Wonderin' where can his baby be.
Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.

My second law, as formulated in high school, was, "It's all bullshit anyway." However, that law was disproved repeatedly over the last decades. Some of "it" – say, the modal use in the Faculty Senate of "multiple narratives" – does not rise to the level of bullshit. Even bullshit or sub-bullshit may disclose truths, so many pronouncements are bullshit useful not only to the bluffer but to everyone present who knows a tell when she or he sees one. When the Ballard vet suggested a superior formulation, I adopted it. I certainly hope no committee addresses my plagiarism. How harrowing!


Coming Soon: Haltom's Third Law! "No One Who Professes Ethics Has Any."

Haltom's Laws

Haltom's First Law helps to sort things and persons out.

"Rump Parliament" turns now to rationalization of Haltom's laws. I have formulated various norms over the last 35 years. Some of my norms posit behavioral regularities based on my perverse interpretations of observations and experiences. Other norms prescribe how I aspire to live or ought to live. I have adapted many of these "laws" from the adages or apothegms of others. As far as I recall, some originate with me. I propose to enumerate my behavioral or normative laws so that I can keep track of what I "know."

My first law expresses misanthropy and/or futility -- "F**k them/it/me/this."

This first law is misanthropic in that I mean it to misstate slightly Kipling’s famed advice -- all men count with me but none too much. When I say "F**k them" or "F**k 'em," I mean to dismiss some person(s) as unworthy of concern or solicitude. More polite formulations of this usage might include "Life is too short to worry about this fellow" or "Why concern yourself with such a person?" Perhaps Rick Nelson came the closest to a denotation of Haltom's First Law in his song “Garden Party:” “You can’t please everyone so you got to please yourself.”

I derived my first law from the cliché "F**k him if he can’t take a joke." I complemented that old saw. If he or she can take a joke now, he or she will not be able to take a joke later, so why not f**k him or her now and get it over with? The sooner one turns one's attention and energies from someone who will fritter them away, the sooner one will have attention and energy for those who might profit from one's regard.

Hence, when confronted with whining, misplaced entitlement, or other resentments, I draw on my Ballard upbringing: I exclaim "Uff da!" and move on. I think but usually do not say, "F**k 'em." A variation on this melody recalls my buddy from Far Rockaway who could say "F**k you" as if each word had multiple syllables. And, of course, one might emulate Vice President Cheney's suggestion that Senator Leahy have sexual congress with himself.

When I say "F**k it" rather than "F**k them," I mean that some matter [rather than some person] lies beneath my regard. "To hell with it" would work as well, I suppose, but would not be as pithy. "F**k it" dismisses matters from my mind. It assigns some thing to that 98% of all incidents or issues best forgotten.

"F**k me" I got from Clint Eastwood's film "The Gauntlet." Clint's character lifts a shade and sees dozens of guns and gunmen outside the shack he is in. He exclaims, "F**k me!" That is a little more graphic than "I am a dead man" or "Holy Mother of God!" Still, like "F**k it," "F**k me" expresses the all too common futility of life or situations.

A colleague in 2007 exemplified the use of "f**k this" to express futility. He became exasperated with maneuvers to prevent senators from acknowledging the simplest truths about the Professional Standards Cult [PSC]. Recalcitrant or cowardly senators were engaged in implausible denials, in disinformation that demeaned the Senate as well as the cult [and demeaning the PS Cult is no mean feat!], and in excuses that would shame Bill Clinton. Amid the disingenuous, the deceptive, and the daffy, one senator exclaimed, "F**k this!" and picked up his stuff and left. Some senators pronounced themselves offended [see Haltom's Eighth Law]. Perhaps the most Pecksniffian senator decried the remark as lacking civility. He had a good point: The civil thing to do would have been to condone evasions and occlusions and to avoid admitting that a rogue committee had misbehaved repeatedly. Still, whatever this invocation of Haltom's First Law lacked in civility it made up in honesty. The senator meant, I believe, that the proceedings were a waste of his and the senate's time. That senator complied with Haltom's first law without being aware of it, I think.

So, when colleagues are conniving in some manner that demeans all present, quietly repeat to yourself variations of Haltom's First Law. When colleagues dissemble in committee-work, write on a pad that no one else can see, "F**k them." When faculty meetings again devolve into self-serving badinage, pick up your papers and walk out of the room, stopping to whisper, "F**k this!" to a colleague who can be trusted. When yet another email invites you to throw good time after bad, feel free to say behind a closed door, "F**k it." The alternative is to awaken amid the "Fall Faculty Non-Conversation" screaming, "F**k me!" That might be uncivil.


Coming Soon: Haltom's Second Law! "It Doesn't Mean Nothing."