Pam & Tommy, Tara and education

Last night I watched a tv series via Hulu? I am not sure which streaming service because I pop back and forth from one to another a half dozen times before I find something I want to watch. To be honest, I never would have chosen Pam & Tommy except for an article I read during the day about the show and how it affected their lives and careers.

My only experience with Baywatch was one day when my daughter and I were babysitting my nephew who was an EverReady Bunny of relentless energy. We had taken him to the park, the playground, and my daughter and I were TIRED! But he was still a firecracker. My sister had told us that in the evening, if we were tired and he was still on the go, we could turn on Baywatch, that he was mesmerized into a kind of trance by it. I laughed at the idea and had never seen Baywatch. To be honest, I have been a kind of intellectual snob and I thought shows like Baywatch were beneath my intelligence. Frankly, in another program I watched on The Mind, a narrator had made the observation that attention and how we spend it was what it is all about. I wasn't going to waste my valuable attention on some bathing suit, woman-insulting-mockery when I could be watching a documentary or reading a book. That evening, however, we were running for cover. We needed a break, so I put Baywatch on and the magic happened. My nephew settled down into a kind of beatific stupor and we got to rest.

I thought about that but it simply became a family anecdote about my nephew (who is now 28) not a topic worth exploring or resolving. In fact, I really didn't give Baywatch another second of thought. I had never listened to the rock group Motley Crue either. But the article that I read about the Pam & Tommy show talked about the impact of a papparazzi event on the lives of Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee. They had made a home movie of themselves having intercourse which had been stolen and sold over the 'new' World Wide Web. Ironically, the release and popularity of the video had slut shamed Pam Anderson into the dust bin of history and it had re-energized the fading career of Tommy Lee. That's what the article was about, how Pam Anderson became a late-night talk show joke, ridiculed and humiliated, while Tommy Lee had become a kind of raucous cultural hero. I couldn't say if this was true or not because I didn't follow the story at all, and the tv series has stopped at episode 4 which is when the video is stolen and sold on the internet. It hasn't gotten to the aftermath yet.

My initial reaction to the four episodes of the show that I did see last night was, first, humor at the roguish Seth Rogan and disgust at the depraved and shameless lifestyle of excess Tommy Lee displayed. Needless to say, I wouldn't be on the team celebrating Tommy Lee's snagging of his cultural sex symbol Pam Anderson. I was with the proletariat chafing at the exploitation of the rich against the working class. Tommy Lee had hired a team of home renovators to create his fantasy bedroom for himself and Pam. He keeps changing the plans and never pays the the construction workers for anything, leaving them holding the bag for all the materials they purchased and the labor they did, when he eventualy fires them in a fit of temper. He also threatens the contractor, Seth Rogan, with a shotgun. Seth Rogan burglarizes the house in revenge and finds the sex tape in the safe he steals.

I am still processing the emotion that I felt through most of the episodes and afterward which was sadness and pity for these hollow, shallow people who had nothing to talk about and lots of money but no real interests besides intoxication and sex. And poor Pam was derided and exploited although being well paid for her humiliation. Inside the major plot there is also a sex worker in the porn industry which kind of underlines the point about the varieties of exploitation that women at the bottom of the sociodemographic financial strata are prey to.

This morning I was reading a very interesting essay by Tara Westover, who wrote a 2018 best seller called EDUCATION. It was about her escape from a horror movie version of a fundamentalist Mormon childhood in rural Idaho. She and her siblings never went to school, saw a dentist or a doctor; the children taught each other what they could. Through a series of almost miraculous events, Tara is rescued, gets to go to school, get dental care, and an education and career. Her book was of great interest to me espcially in light of a never resolved argument I had with a professor/friend when I was in colege. She had written a book extolling Home-Schooling. She had come from fundamentalist background herself, and was a kind of Sarah Palin prototype, a right wing conservative sexy swinger. Her sense of morality was all over the place. She seemed to want to restrict others while being permitted to flout whatever moral rules didn't fit her desires. We argued and argued over Home-Schooling and I said it would give crazy parents the opportunity to shield themselves from being exposed as neglectful and even abusive towards their children. Aside from the children being denied one of the few ways they had to contact the outside world about living conditions at home, I felt there would never be the kind of oversight that would protect the children from not getting educated at all at home. This became demonstrated to me in at least two cases of home-schooling I ran across in later years. In both of these cases the children weren't educated at all. The mothers were, in both of these cases, feckless, sentimental, and ignorant and the children were let to run wild and not educated at all. In another case, a young man I met in an adult education program where I taught, was denied further education because he had been home-schooled and had no diplomas. We helped him get an Adult High School Diploma so he could go to Community College.

All of these things made me think about education and what it meant to me and what it means to other people. My college education was my greatest love affair. I didn't go to college for a career, but the career came out of college and saved my life. It did, indeed, lift me from what would have been a life of drudgery and poverty, into a life of comfort and security. I went to college as an adult of 27 because I was a reader and I wanted to know more about the magic and the mechanics of litereature. I went to college to learn. In those days I could work my way through college and I did at the jobs that would have been my future without an education: waittress work, Kelly Girl and Manpower Temp work, factory work, and nurses aide work in a nursing home. When I got to college, it was the best of times to be there becasue thanks to the student revolution. I had marvelous teachers, real poets like Basil Pyne,and real authors like James T. Farrel, and teachers who were passionate. I became a teacher to show more kids like the child I was how to get to this nirvana, this paradise of learning which would lift them from lives of poverty and intellectual deprivation.

I spent 35 years in education from my early days teaching in high school to my last days teaching at a university. What I found in the early days was that none of my students were like me. Just because I was working class and poor, didn't mean that our shared culltural and economic milieau made us alike. What I found myself teaching were classes full of Pamelas and Tommys. They were interested in sex and intoxication not literature, not writing, and I spent all my energy researching ways to turn that tide and open those doors.

My experience underscores for me, the miraculous nature of a Tara Westover story. It wasn't just our circumstances that were filled with extraordinary twists and turns, but it was the extraordinary nature of our own minds that made us want to learn, to study, to know more, to rise up. My own daughter was a good example. I could make it possible for her to go to college and yet she rejected it and quit in her freshman year to fly to California and become a movie star. She survived and has a fine creative life in Brooklyn, New York with a whole tribe of talented and accomplished young men and women who rejected college and made their own way in the world through film, music, theater and art. The world changes and with it the resources and paths that new generations take and travel. She didn't want or need a college education and she has made a very satisfying and fulfilling life for herself. I guess the only conclusion is that no one can know where the journey will take us when ww set sail on adult life and the weather on the oceans is always changing.

Tara Westover, in her essay, lamented that financial circumstances have made it impossible for young people to do what she did, and indeed what I did (college was even less expensive when I went - $1400 per year in 1970). All I can say to any of that is ADAPT and EVOLVE, and maybe the education route isn't the only or even the best answer any more anyhow. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac were both drop-outs from college, and they managed to find the vein of gold in the mountain that brought them unimaginable success if not necessarily personal happiness. Maybe that is a different kind of journey after all.

Happy Trails whereever your journey is taking you. Jo Ann