RIP, Michael Denning

Michael James Denning, 1950-2008 Dr. Michael Denning died of leukemia last Thursday. Michael had struggled with illness for some years. He was tough but realistic. Like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, Michael knew what we all have/had coming to us. He did not use mortality as an excuse. He used it to spur himself to "get busy living" (The Shawshank Redemption).

                   

I met Michael in 1977 in graduate school. He liked what I said in a seminar on modern political theory but wanted to push me on my views. The Blue Moon Tavern was on his walk home, so we took the matter one mile and thirty feet off campus to that legendary watering hole [emphasis on "hole" in those days] to which he explicitly dedicated his dissertation in 1984. This was the first of many confabs at the Moon, where the motto was that "There are nights when the Moon howls and the wolves are silent." I swear that Michael pushed me during every single one of our visits.

             

Michael chuckled at my impatience with philosophical gibble-gabble. When a professor elaborated a dilemma that Hamlet faced ― regicide at his father's request versus regicide based on his own anger with the King and Gertrude ― I replied that we each do many things for multiple reasons and that either way Claudius dies, so where's the dilemma? Michael waited out the professor's explanation of the profit of such classroom exercises, then pounced on the professor's distinctions unburdened by differences. That day the professor learned that I was bumptious but Michael far more dangerous.

                   

Michael and I seldom shared coursework, but when we did we made the most of it. We wandered into a graduate seminar in Sociology and scandalized the worshipful, weak-kneed sociology grads:

      #####

Professor: "Bill, that is a fascinating idea, but how would you operationalize it?"

Me: "I wouldn't!"

Professor: "Why not?"

Me: "Because I am working out a theoretical proposition, not writing a journal article. Operationalization should follow thought, not substitute for it."

 

Later that same afternoon, Two-O took the stand to testify. #####

Professor: "So Parsons makes Weber seem like Pareto."

Michael: "Bullshit!" A Greek chorus of Sociology grads sucked in air.

Professor: "So how would you differentiate Weber from Pareto on this point?" 

Michael: "By reading what Parsons and Pareto wrote and realizing that it does not resemble what Weber wrote. [4 minutes of diatribe, screed, and shouting omitted]"

 

Michael recruited me to his softball team, the Lynn Street Dogs, because he needed an outfield arm. The Dogs kept me after it turned out that, for me, the first thing to go was the arm. Sunday after Sunday, Michael patroled the shortfield between left and center and assured that the Dogs beat the other team to the keg. He also led the Dogs in heckling the other team, passersby, and anything else he espied.

Michael and I defended our dissertations on 24 May 1984. He defended in the morning. I went in the afternoon. "The Doctors Dog" then repaired to the Blue Moon to celebrate the end of a raucous era in the Political Science Department at the University of Washington. I am not sure that docility and deference broke out among the graduate throng thereafter, but that's how Michael and I told the tale. 

From 1977 to 2008, Michael and I commiserated on the sheer stupidities that Political Science foisted and fostered. Just today I received notice that the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for last year's Midwest Political Science Association meeting had been awarded to a paper entitled, "Untangling the Causal Effects of Sex on Judging." Although I cannot be certain which expletives Michael would have uttered about such a title, I can be sure that "mindless" would have been among the colorful words. I can hear Michael rasping now: "How can sex cause anything other than pregnancy?" Michael did not go gentle into the post-literate era. 

Michael became Assistant Professor at Indiana University, where he discovered that departments welcomed candor even less than professors in seminars. He tired of Bloomington and headed back to Seattle. He became intellectual in residence at the Port of Seattle. This was a dazzling accomplishment. Bottom-line executives and hard-nosed maritimers employed Michael to distill scholarship and to incubate new ideas. This impressed on Michael and on the executives just how practical the academic could be. 

Eager to return to the classroom, Michael undertook graduate education anew at the Maritime Institute at the University of Washington. This time he was the leader [and lader] of the seminar, pulling tyros back to realities.

However, Michael adhered to his plan: to retire to the life of a dilettante scholar. That is, Michael lived the life to which so many of us aspired when we began grad school. He read books. He thought. He followed his bliss. He financed his scholarship with well-selected investments and, let's be honest, fiendish frugality.

He handicapped the NFL draft every year in the hope that the L. A. Rams, then the Indianapolis Colts, and finally the Seattle Seahawks would stock their rosters well. Michael admired the offensive line of the Rams, so I played the loyal friend and did not mention the manifest superiority of the O-line of Oakland Raiders: Do the names Upshaw, Shell, Otto, Dalby, Buehler, Vella, and Casper now seem familiar, Michael? Regarding baseball [Michael did and I did not], Michael loathed the Designated Hitter while I disliked watching pitchers make outs in what was already a tedious sport when not played with a beer in one hand. Born in St. Louis, Michael remained true to the Cardinals for his lifetime. He tended to loyalty in myriad regards far beyond the sports world. 

Michael loved to argue and loved to save and loved to invest. He loved his wife and his family. He loved the road. He was charismatic and charming when he felt like it. When provoked, he was an intellectual berserker. He was intense, becoming a hermit for days when in the throes of some frenzied investigation.  

He was my closest friend in Political Science. I shall miss him. I shall not miss the pain that he withstood for years. A mutual friend suggested that "Michaelangelo" from Emmylou Harris's "Red Dirt Girl" is the appropriate eulogy for Two-O [his nickname on the Lynn Street Dogs, from a youthful fling in Pasco with Mogen David 20-20]. She was correct once again: 

Last night I dreamed about you/ I dreamed that you were riding/ 

On a blood-red painted pony/ 

Up where the heavens were dividing/ 

And the angels turned to ashes/ 

You came tumbling with them to the earth/ 

So Far below/ 

Michelangelo/ 

 

Last night I dreamed about you/ 

I dreamed that you lay dying/ 

In a field of thorn and roses/ 

With a hawk above you crying/ 

For the warrior slain in battle/ 

From an arrow driven deep inside you/ 

Long ago/ 

Michelangelo/ 

 

Did you suffer at the end?/ 

Would there be no-one to remember?/ 

Did you banish all the old ghosts/ 

At the terms of your surrender?/ 

And could you hear me calling out your name?/ 

Well I guess that I will never know/ 

Michelangelo 

NOW you are truly a dilettante, Michael. I hope you've found a worthy library. Will, the Dog Catcher

Coming Soon --- Haltom's Fourteenth Law: Never do either/or when you may do both/and.