Straight Man

pensive. Somehow, Blair and others like her have concluded that what’s most important in all educational settings is to avoid the ridicule of the less gifted. Silence is one way of avoiding it. If I could teach Blair how to become invisible, she’d be interested, but she doesn’t want to argue with anybody, and who can blame her? Students like Blair have learned from their professors that persuasion—reasoned argument—no longer holds a favored position in university life. If their professors—feminists, Marxists, historicists, assorted other theorists—belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested intalking to each other than in staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can’t remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions.
    Or perhaps I’m just the wrong person for the job of teaching persuasive techniques. After all, the list of people I myself have failed to persuade recently is pretty impressive. It contains Dickie Pope, Herbert Schonberg, Paul Rourke, Gracie, and Finny (both the man and the goose). I haven’t even been able to persuade Leo to temper his excitement at having had a story accepted for publication by a “prestigious anthology” of new American student writing. It’s an old scam. Accept the student story or poem for publication, convince the writer to pay production costs, then sell the anthology to proud relatives at extortionary cost. Leo’s eyes narrowed suspiciously when I explained how the scam worked, his angry validation morphing to indignant suspicion. Of me. Neither have I been able to convince Leo that he should write a story with no violence in it, a suggestion that’s got him plotting, I suspect, the next chapter of his novel, the one where his murderous ghost pays a visit to his old writing teacher. I’ve read this chapter before, though Leo hasn’t written it yet.
    With ten minutes left in class, which (thanks to Leo) started fifteen minutes late, my worst student, who’s only present today because I threatened to flunk him for the term if he missed another class, leans back in his chair and says, apropos of nothing, “So. Like, are you going to kill a duck, or what?”
    Bad students are almost always inspiring students. Most often they inspire despair, but occasionally they’ll inspire an assignment. “You tell me, Bobo,” I say. Bobo is not the student’s name but rather my name for him. “By Monday, in fact. I want from each of you a cogent, persuasive essay. There are two possible theses. Either I should or I should not kill a duck. Don’t straddle the fence by suggesting that I maim a duck or pluck a duck.”
    As I explain the assignment, there’s a communal groan, but I’m cheered by the fact that more hostile glances are thrown in Bobo’s direction than in my own. Bobo has assumed the posture of a man whoshould have known better, who
did
know better, in fact, and was the victim of a spasm. His fellow students all seem to understand that they were minutes away from a rare weekend without a writing assignment.
    “By
Monday
?” Bobo says, incredulous.
    “I’ve threatened to kill a duck by Monday, Bobo,” I remind him. “By Tuesday I won’t need your advice.”
    “Typed?” someone wants to know.
    On the way back to the office I skirt the pond, which has returned to its placid aspect, the demonstrators who earlier linked arms against me having all gone home with the TV crews, leaving the fowl unguarded for the weekend. A single STOP THE SLAUGHTER placard has been planted in the bank to ward off evil. Ineffectually, for here I am, able if not ready to wreak mayhem. I notice Finny (the goose, not the man) some fifty yards farther along the bank, and something about his appearance strikes me as curious. When I get a little closer I see what it is. Finny has been fitted with a foam neck brace, like a whiplash victim. He eyes me curiously as I approach, as if he fears I’ll make a bad joke at his expense. Animals, I am convinced, are as adamant as humans about maintaining their dignity, and Finny seems to be struggling to maintain his. A cartoon goose in a turtleneck, he cannot quite meet my eye. “Finny,” I say, checking to make