“I could be wrong, but I’m not”

Continuing the account of my college years...

My friends Eric and Chris and I ended up in the same elective class during the spring semester of my sophomore year – a cerebral odyssey known as Television Criticism. Television Criticism was taught by a smug, bow-tie wearing quasi-intellectual who was a sort of minor celebrity in the Christian media community. He was the go-to guy for magazines like Christianity Today that needed a scholarly quote about television, pop music, movies or the like. To be fair, it’s quite possible that this guy was as smart as everybody else seemed to think he was; all I knew was that he couldn’t possibly be as smart as he thought he was.

Being a smug, brash know-it-all myself, I possessed a visceral aversion to others of my kind. This guy, whom I’ll call Professor Q, thought of himself as something of a rogue; he used to go off on long, self-aggrandizing tirades that bore almost no relation to the subject matter of the class. One day he subjected us to a thirty-minute discourse on the meaning of the word motherfucker. Actually, he never did get around to telling us the word’s meaning; this tangent seemed aimed primarily at (1) Explaining that whatever motherfucker meant, it had nothing to do with fucking mothers; and (2) using the word motherfucker as many times as possible. You see, by using the word motherfucker over and over, he could demonstrate how hip he was, in a sort of post-modern, meta-linguistic, neo-aesthetic sense. Also? Motherfucker.

Professor Q loved to make vague, deep-sounding pronouncements that reminded me of Alan Alda’s character in Crimes and Misdemeanors (“Comedy is tragedy plus time.”) He once told us, without further elaboration, that “the primary difference between the Old and New Testaments is perspective.” Like, whoa.

He used to begin his diatribes with the disclaimer, “I could be one hundred percent wrong, but….” This gave him license to make outrageous and impertinent claims lacking any sort of supporting evidence. One of the textbooks for the class was (of course) his own book, which purported to be a scholarly treatise on television and popular culture but was completely devoid of footnotes or any sort of references to scientific research or verified empirical fact. Like his lectures, it was all conjecture, delivered from on high by Professor Q. Ironically, Professor Q, who had a PhD, used to rail against those who used their academic credentials to make unsupported claims. One of his favorite refrains was that “a lot of PhDs are dumber than a box of rocks.” We took his word for it on that one.

Chris and Eric were two of the smartest people I had ever met. Chris was working on a double major in math and philosophy, and Eric was an electrical engineering student. The three of us used to talk for hours after class, tearing apart all of Professor Q’s unspoken assumptions and dogmatic assertions – and devising our own wildly conjectural hypotheses to explain why he was such an insufferable ass.

Toward the end of the semester, Professor Q gave us a list of essay questions that might appear on the final exam. There were five questions altogether, and he stated that any three of them might appear on the exam. One of these questions was: “What one thing would you improve about this class?”

The three of us fantasized about how we would answer this question. In our minds, this question was an explicit invitation for us to tell Professor Q what a motherfucker he was. We prepared for the other questions too, but most of our effort was devoted to dredging up every idiotic thing that Professor Q had said or done over the past four months. We suspected that the question wouldn’t make it onto the actual exam, but if it did, we were ready. Man, were we ready. Professor Q had made studying fun!

And on the day of the exam, there it was:

3. What one thing would you improve about this class?

Zipping through the first two questions in about ten minutes, I spent the next two and a half hours crafting the masterpiece of vitriol and sarcasm. I felt like this was the point that my whole life had been leading up to. Professor Q was everything I hated: a smug, hypocritical pseudo-intellectual who rebelled against the status quo by wearing bowties and using the word motherfucker while setting himself up as the college’s official representative on matters of pop culture. He was an anti-establishment radical with tenure at a conservative Christian college; an elitist who preached against elitism; a PhD who used his academic clout to denigrate the idea of academic clout. Professor Q was going to get a piece of my mind.

I excoriated Professor Q in a six-page essay whose flawless construction would have made my English teachers weep for joy. I had essentially written this entire diatribe in my head over the previous several weeks, complete with introductory paragraph, thesis statement, essay map, and concluding paragraph. The body of the essay was comprised of something like six Main Points (numbered I through VI in my head), such as Hypocrisy, Intellectual Dishonesty, Pointless Tangents, Rhetorical Excesses, etc. At this point in my life, I was a tightly wound ball of anger, cynicism and sarcasm, and I spent two and a half hours channeling every bit of that toxic brew into this essay.

I was careful to back up all my assertions with examples, and to couch the whole essay in impersonal language, avoiding the personal pronouns I and you. (Thanks for the autism, Dad!) The essay was an exhaustive, rigorously argued, and factually unassailable account of Professor Q’s shortcomings as a teacher. My favorite line was “Professor Q’s disingenuous disclaimers that ‘I could be 100% wrong…’ are reminiscent of the Eagles song ‘Victim of Love,’ in which Don Henley sings, ‘I could be wrong, but I’m not, no I’m not.’”

It’s probably not necessary for me to explain that this outburst had as much to do with my own sublimated anger as with Professor Q’s foibles, and that my unbridled rage and tactlessness arose chiefly from my own insecurity. I still thought of myself as a cipher; I raged against the machine because I thought it was the only way to be heard. In my mind, the only way to get through to someone like Professor Q was to attack him with everything I had. I was, in other words, a petulant child with a vastly overdeveloped sense of moral outrage and sarcasm.

Yet, while my motives were tainted and my tactics questionable, the essay itself was a powerfully constructed rhetorical juggernaut. It was difficult to imagine Professor Q reading that essay and not being simultaneously impressed and horrified. Part of me wondered, after I handed in my exam, whether he would find some way to punish me for my impertinence, but I couldn’t imagine how he would do it. My essay had to be the most comprehensive, well-written and incisively argued answer to that question he had received. If anybody deserved an A, it was I. If he failed me, I reasoned, I’d go to the head of the department, who would then get to read my detailed account of Professor Q’s pointless tangents, self-aggrandizing diatribes, and gratuitous use of profanity. I was fairly certain Professor Q didn’t want that. Besides, Eric, Chris and I were in this together. We had all agreed to hammer Professor Q on this question, hadn’t we?

It turns out that we hadn’t. Eric and Chris related that they had each picked a couple of Professor Q’s failings to expound on, but had used much more diplomatic language than I had. Neither of them had written anything resembling my six-page onslaught. I was on my own.

In the end, I turned out to be right: Professor Q gave me an A on the exam, and an A- in the class. I suppose you could argue that he deserved some credit for his objectivity here, but as I said, there really wasn’t much else he could do. I took my grade as a vindication of my position.

Maybe a year later, I was walking with a friend across campus and happened to pass Professor Q. I hadn’t seen him since the final exam, and by some quirk of my mental faculties I didn’t recognize him. I was aware that I knew this bearded, bow-tie-wearing man from somewhere, but I simply couldn’t place him. This may have been a result of my chronic absent-mindedness, or it may have been a defense mechanism activated by my subconscious. All I could do, as I walked past this man, staring daggers at me, was think, “Wow, this guy is mad.” I had never had anybody look at me like that before. He looked like he could throttle me with his bare hands.

I realized who he was a few minutes later and was alternately gratified and chagrined by the realization that my essay had this effect on him. That was the first time I realized the power of my rhetorical abilities – and started to realize that I had a responsibility to use them wisely.