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Show Anting Alone Page 173 of a dying breed. "Look at him," they seemed to be thinking, "a fully grown man, in reasonably good health, with all ten fingers and all ten toes, who wants to spend the rest of his life teaching English and trying to live on a professor's income. Sort of depressing -" They mostly tried to ignore Sam. They didn't even bother to chuckle and sneer along with Sam when he tried to display his sophistication by ridiculing the authors of the required comp textbooks, who tried to sell their product by being so hip with their references to already dated teen concepts like Pink Floyd and Pet Rocks and pizza in their sentence combining exercises. The tall, gleaming farmboys knew it was all jackoff stuff; for they were in the real substantial hard science majors with computers and chemicals and things. They were concerned with motion in the physical world, and with having a respectable income one day soon. They and their comp themes (which they always kept in Champion-Clasp brand folders - a detail that only a budding pedagogue like Sam would notice, or maybe a budding fag who wanted them to take him in a champion clasp) brought questions to Sam's usually smug mind. Was Sam really just a flaccid woosy, a quaint secular humanist, for not thinking automatically in terms of America's defense posture, in terms of concrete manipulation of matter and energy? Did Sam simply lack the moral vigor, the courage - yes, the imagination - to grasp the true vicious state of humanity - particularly those branches of humanity located behind the Iron Curtain, in the local barrio, and in the office next door? Are human improvability, human redeemability, human cooperativeness really just flabby, half-fag, professorial pipe dreams? Hah? |
