Larry Norman (I Don’t Want To Know)

February 20, 2020June 12, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

My wife and I went to see “Knives Out” this past weekend. (Spoiler Alert: It’s REALLY Good.) At one point two of the main characters were sitting in a diner and I heard familiar music playing in the background – music I’d never have expected to hear anywhere outside of my personal collection.

You can be a righteous rocker, or a holy roller, you can be most anything.
You can be a child of the slums, or a skid row bum, you can be a corporate king.
But without love, you ain’t nothin’ – you ain’t nothin’ without love…

It was “Righteous Rocker” by Larry Norman. Larry FREAKIN’ Norman in a mainstream movie full of name brand talent 40 some years after his musical peak.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of him – most people in this century haven’t. He was a major influence in some very specific circles and a minor figure in rock’n’roll in the late 1960s and 1970s, but hardly a household name outside of those worlds. Norman was the original “Christian Rock” guy. Long hair, leather jacket, steeped in the blues and psychedelia, he was horrifying parents and confusing pastors long before Stryper, Steve Taylor, or Daniel Amos were old enough to tour.

Gonorrhea on Valentine’s Day – and you’re still looking for the perfect lay.
You think rock’n’roll will set you free, but you’ll be deaf before you’re thirty-three.
Shootin’ junk ‘til you’re half-insane; broken needle in your purple vein.
Why don’t you look into Jesus? He’s got the answer….

I came across my first Larry Normal album – on vinyl, of course – in a small Christian music shop and book store in Tulsa back in the late 70s or early 80s. It was a live album called “Roll Away the Stone (And Listen to the Rock),” and I couldn’t resist. He looked completely unhinged, and I’d never seen anything like that in Jesus music before. Upon taking it home and playing it, my world was shaken even further. The mix was raw, like it had been fed from a few mics straight into grooves with little concern for revision or refinement. I was in rock’n’roll heaven.

Er… as it were.

Eldridge was a bad man – at least that’s what the people said.
But Eldridge, he was only working out all the things they put inside his head.
Just a little peace and quiet was his one desire –
But it never came, ‘til something set his soul on fire…

Over the years I bought more Larry Norman albums, and later CDs. I never had everything, but I had plenty. Eventually he fell off my regular playlist and I lost track of his career until I read somewhere that he’d been in medical treatment and wasn’t entirely healthy. In February of 2008, he died of something heart-related. When I read about it, I cried.

That’s only happened with a handful of people I’ve never actually met. It doesn’t always happen even with those I have. He was a big deal to me.

See, Norman’s music in many ways got me through high school and some really weird years afterwards. He was a big part of surviving my divorce and navigating my subsequent religious disillusionment. His songs remained a consistent reference during various outbreaks of crashing and burning throughout the years. He impacted my musical tastes more than I realized; my current love of Sirius/XM’s “Underground Garage” station still reveals tracks to me which clearly influenced songs he’d written or musical devices he employed.

In some cases, I suppose, it’s possible that they borrowed from him.

Mama killed a chicken – she thought it was a duck. She put it on the table with it’s legs stickin’ up.
Papa broke his glasses when he fell down drunk – tried to drown the kitty cat, turned out to be a skunk.
You gotta watch what you’re doing, don’t you know? You gotta know where you’re going…
Do you know?

Here’s the messy part.

I’d picked up from various interviews with other artists here and there that Norman was apparently a rather difficult person to work with. I had a few friends much more plugged into that world than I was, and they indicated on different occasions that he had a reputation as unreliable and a tad bit deranged at best and hypocritical and manipulative at worst. I learned that he’d divorced his first wife and that his second had originally been married to his close friend, Randy Stonehill (another successful Christian music guy from back in the day).

Apparently, pretty much everyone else at the collective “Contemporary Christian Music” slumber party either didn’t invite him at all or stayed on the other side of the room and whispered when he went into the kitchen for more dip.

I wasn’t certain that he was actually evil, but perhaps it was just as well I’d never actually met him or been otherwise connected. There’s a reason we avoid getting close to our heroes, after all.

I’ve been shot down, talked about, some people scandalize my name…
But here I am, talking ‘bout Jesus just the same.
They say I’m sinful, and backslidden – that I have left to follow fame…
But here I am, talking ‘bout Jesus just the same.

A year after his death, a documentary was released purporting to fully expose his corruption and deception and the like. “Fallen Angel: The Outlaw Larry Norman” certainly had an impact – it got people across Christendom talking, especially those involved in or attached to the strange world of Christian music. Whatever else he was, he managed to remain a polarizing figure in death as much as he’d apparently been in life.

A few decades ago, I’d have wanted to watch it, even if I found it uncomfortable or disappointing. I’d have researched it a bit to see how much of it was considered accurate by those closer to the situation, or what sorts of responses had come from Norman’s circle of friends and colleagues. Heck, I’d probably have taken an emotional position and projected it passionately into the void for fewer than eleven people to hear.

But I didn’t.

I wasn’t interested in watching it. I didn’t want to know how much of it was true, what was false, which parts were exaggerated or a matter of perspective. It’s not that I don’t care at ALL about the truth – I do. I just don’t need to know this PARTICULAR set of (presumed) facts. They’re secondary to what mattered to ME. Hearing more about who he pissed off or which musicians felt betrayed by him is right up there with knowing his blood type or whether he paid his taxes on time. They probably matter, but they won’t change anything, so why bother?

I chose not to care.

Last night I had that same old dream – it rocked me in my sleep.
And it left me the impression that the Sandman plays for keeps.
I dreamed I was in concert, on the middle of a cloud.
John Wayne and Billy Graham were giving breath mints to the crowd.
Then I fell through a hole in Heaven; I left the stage for good…
But when I landed on the Earth I was back in Hollywood.
(Rats.)

I think of this sometimes when I watch people I care about ignore the obvious signs that their marriage is in trouble or that their child is depressed or addicted or violent. It’s not a matter of judging anyone – just an observation at how easily we choose to ignore what we don’t wish to see. Maybe it’s a sign of our affection. Maybe it’s out of fear. Maybe it’s simply a matter of convenience.

I can’t imagine it harms anyone else for me to love Larry Norman whether he was a difficult person to work with or not. Honestly, even his theology is pretty secondary to me – I knew it was pretty out there even when I was 17 and blinded by my fascination and affection for everything he did.

It’s a bigger deal if we refuse to see things or accept them in our relationships. We may have a responsibility to intervene, if not for them, then for those they might hurt in the process. These can be tough calls to make – the balance between unconditional love and accountability.

This sort of willful blindness is dangerous, however, when it comes to educational leadership, or political power, or corporate influence. It’s not essential that I know personal dirt about my superintendent, but it is important that I critically examine his or her claims to legitimacy and whatever track record they bring to the discussion. I don’t really need to know about whether or not a candidate smoked weed in college or cheated on his wife, but it matters whether or not she’s using her position primarily for personal gain and at great harm to her constituents.

I’m still trying to sort out to what extent I care about Chik-Fil-A’s position on blood diamonds or the Salvation Army’s theology regarding marriage. I know those things matter – but I also know I like chicken sandwiches and feeding poor people. Plus, I’ve been on the receiving end of the WHO-IS-THIS-DEMON-SPAWN-TO-SPEAK-OF-YOUNG-PEOPLE?!? approach, and I didn’t care for it.

But the fact that someone makes me feel good, or that something they’ve said or done gives me warm toasty insides, doesn’t automatically cancel out the potential harm they’ve done or are doing to others. A nice bump in my retirement account or a few positive stories about less federal regulation shouldn’t offset, well… you know.

I still don’t want to know the details of Larry Norman’s personal life or business dealings, but I do worry about the role of confirmation bias in the rest of my choices – politically, socially, even at school. I see others in such blatant avoidance of important, destructive truths, and it seems to be the opposite of everything I believe as an educator.

Then I remember my love for Larry Norman, and I sort of understand.

Sort of.

Backstage, I cross the middle ground – curtains up and house lights down.
I sing my songs, I try to pass my heart around… and sometimes afterwards, people think I tried to put them down.
They feel so bad inside, it doesn’t matter what I say; I hope tomorrow they have a better day.
We’re all so trapped – we need release. We need Your strong love and strange peace…
Bring us Your strong love and strange peace.

Of Hockey Bias And Edu-Paradigms

October 17, 2015June 12, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

I have a confession. One which is likely to shatter your adoration for my suave veneer and perpetually professional perspicacity. In fact, send the children out of the room, because –

I like hockey.

More specifically, I like Dallas Stars hockey – especially when mingled with the weird world of Hockey Twitter Commentary during games. When you follow and love the same team, you become a strange little community… not exactly friends, but more than random fans at the same game. It’s fun. And maddening. And sometimes just odd.

Then there are the feels…

Of course, emotions can run dark as well as light. I mean, it’s live – so there’s that. It’s also semi-anonymous. Even those using their real names aren’t real people in your real life with real faces and real feelings, right?

I realize the logic falls apart pretty quickly there, but that’s kinda my point.

It’s also Twitter, meaning “not a private line” – anyone in the world can look up what you’ve written and hold you to it. This has the potential to become a thing when controversy and strong emotions mix.

Often, during hockey, controversy and strong emotions mix.

Especially when someone gets hurt. Not normal hockey hurt – but ‘uh oh, that looked bad’ hurt. This happened Thursday evening when the Stars visited the Tampa Bay Lightning – a particularly strong team loaded with offensive talent and surrounded by a passionate fan base.

I don’t follow many Tampa people, but response from the Dallas end was predictable…

Hedman – the player receiving that hit – left the ice and didn’t return.

And then it got uglier – in the game AND on Twitter – with what looked like retaliation – and that’s also where it became interesting from more than a hockey standpoint.

I respectfully suggest that what unfolded over the next few minutes was a lesson in perspective and assumptions, with maybe a few big words like ‘confirmation bias’ thrown in for good measure. I’d also argue that the lessons potentially learned from this round of Twitter Fallout could be applied in realms ranging from political arguments to interpersonal relationships to discussions over education reform.

See, some of us got pissed.

My outrage was not without provocation. I’m at home on my couch, watching events unfold on my TV. The camera zooms in on the injured player – MY injured player – while the Stars’ broadcast team expresses concern over his condition. As the extent of his suffering becomes clear, the crowd’s applause swells in the background – and with it, my blood pressure, my adrenaline, and my just-two-beers-I-swear-fueled sense of injustice and twitter-outrage.

It is clear, it is unspeakable, and it is objectively horrific.

Except the crowd in Tampa watching the game live didn’t view a half-dozen slow-mo replays of Benn’s hit on their guy – who they feel like they know and care for. They saw it once in real time, maybe a replay on the Jumbotron, and their guy was hurt enough to leave the ice – which brings the feels. Nor would they have side-by-side video comparing it with the retaliatory hit a minute later.

As the kerfuffle brews after the hit on McKenzie, most people physically there would be drawn to the developing scuffle, the potential for a rather large-scale fight. So yeah, the cheering increases – but we’re experiencing two different things. I’m watching McKenzie, MY GUY, listening to familiar voices confirming my fears; they’re watching a potential fight of all-on-all at a live event with only group feels to drive their reactions.

On the surface we appear to be reacting at the same time to the same events, but we’re not exactly working from the same reality. It’s not just that we disagree – we’re not even addressing the same things.

Time for more preconceptions to enter the mix…

My hockey world consists largely of TV viewing and Stars Twitter – a mixed group, to be sure, a bit cynical and sometimes pissy as hell, but not a group which generally chants for blood or demonstrates pleasure when someone gets injured – no matter what the team or circumstances.

Well, maybe if it were Corey Perry. But otherwise, never.

We tend to give one another the benefit of the doubt when, you know – THE FEELINGS – so when I’m challenged on my interpretation, it is through that lens:

Look what the power of relationships and presumed goodwill can do to change the tone of a discussion. I don’t even KNOW these guys in real life. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never even interacted with Kedge online before.

But we see ourselves as ‘on the same side’, and consequently I receive their comments much differently than I might otherwise. We’re all suddenly showing our bellies and reassuring ourselves that we’re all good.

Take a moment and mentally apply this to any of your favorite realms of recurring consternation – political, social, personal, or professional – and the parties involved.

Imagine the change if we began with different assumptions about one another. I’m not saying all intentions are good or all participants pure-of-heart – just that we might wait until they’ve established actual malice before proceeding under that paradigm.

In other words, let’s not be like me during hockey.

The next day I was called out by someone I don’t know at all – a writer who covers the Lightning. By way of perspective, writers for SBNation.com contribute as a labor of love – they’re not making serious money; they’re fans.

I asked for clarification, and he referred me to his comments of the previous evening:

What’s the difference in perception?

Well, he knows his team, for one. He has history with the players and a feel for what they are or aren’t likely to do. He probably attends live games in Tampa, and thus sees things through arena norms compared to my televised paradigm. When I’m watching hockey, I’m a fan participating in social dynamics; when he’s watching, he’s a fan doubling as a reporter.

I’m not saying he’s right. Don’t be ridiculous. Clearly I’m far more outraged, therefore justice is on MY side.

But I AM suggesting that there’s something to be gained by viewing circumstances through other lenses. His dissent – while not particularly warm and fuzzy – was also not personal. He finds my thinking bewildering… perhaps inane. But that’s what he attacks – my position. He can even explain why he thinks so, with just the right amount of tone.

OK, maybe it’s a tad belittling – but still…

I’ve been attacked on Twitter in far more juvenile ways, I assure you. It’s a gift I have, bringing out that side in others. And me, so demure and naïve in the ways of the world.

I have absolutely no interest in some sort of passive relativism preventing us from arguing or resolving anything as we scrape and bow before one another’s point of view. God knows if we’re going to make any meaningful progress in the realm of public education (or anything else) we’ll need vigorous and thoughtful debate.

But perhaps those debates will be more productive and our own insights a bit richer if we begin with different assumptions about one another and work from there.

Unless it’s during hockey.

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Condemnation Bias

November 24, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

You may be familiar with the website “Spurious Correlations”:

You knew cheese was bad for you, but maybe not exactly why…

Bring on Toddlers & Tiaras – it could save lives.

Accio Spinning Blades!

It’s a humorous site which makes a serious and rather important point:

We all know this. Most of us can identify it academically, in abstract situations. In ‘real life’, however, it all too often combines with another fascinating bit of human fallibility: ‘confirmation bias’.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to screen out or forget facts or situations which don’t support our existing beliefs, while remembering with emphasis those which do. The thing where it seems to rain every time you wash your car (or do a ceremonial dance)? Celebrities dying in threes? The way people from certain racial groups or religious faiths seem to always X, Y, or Z? Yeah, that’s largely confirmation bias.

It’s normal. It’s human. But we could be a little more self-aware while doing it.

I had a principal several years back who simply could not get enough motivational folderol. The posters, the sayings, the guest speakers who turn a splattered canvas into a rainbow sunrise of starfish dream destiny – the building was inundated in hopeful banality.

Every year came the ‘ring assembly’. National company, glossy brochures, and a thousand students held captive to their insistence that EVERYONE regardless of background, want, or financial circumstances, could and should go deeply into debt for the unequalled splendor of class ringdom.

I’d assumed the school received some sort of kickback for the opportunity to apply this fiscal peer-pressure on powerless minors en masse, but I was mistaken. Why, then, did we devote half of a school day – an otherwise potentially instructional school day – to arm-twisting on behalf of some corporation?

This principal explained with energy and enthusiasm that students who purchased a class ring were 68% more likely to graduate. He believed in his spirited core that the connection to school and the commitment to the date engraved on the side were driving students to succeed – to stay in school, working towards graduation, bursting with personal and school pride.

And maybe there’s something to that element.

But far more glaring is the reality he missed – that students who can afford a very optional expense like a class ring are far more likely to graduate than students who can’t. There’s definite correlation, but not because one causes the other.

He wasn’t alone. This was the same year the district wanted to remove 2 of the 4 microwaves from the upstairs lounge in the name of ‘conservation’. There were 12 of us using those microwaves each day, apparently running up quite the utility bill. If we were to take turns with half the microwaves, well – the savings!

You see the problem. There may have been reduced total usage, but only because on any given day half of us wouldn’t have time to eat before our lunch period was over.

It wasn’t malicious, and it wasn’t particularly stupid – mostly. The powers-that-be went in with preset expectations and assumptions. The solution only made sense because they’d already decided on their preferred course of action.

Confirmation bias can be particularly ugly when a relationship has soured and emotions are high. Positives are viewed with skepticism or noticed not at all, while every slip, tone, or shortcoming “just goes to prove” some unpleasantry or another. Causes are not merely speculated upon – they are ASSIGNED to unfortunate correlations. For those on the periphery, the fallacies may be less emotionally loaded but are no less ubiquitous.

Spurious correlations and confirmation bias create quite the salmagundi of doom when it comes to education ‘reform’. Most of us enter those discussions already pretty sure where we’re going to end up. We may even sigh with resignation. Obviously we’re far more experienced and insightful than the other buffoons and schemers in the mix. And – whether we admit it to ourselves or not – most of us have several sacred presets hidden in the back of our motivation which we do NOT want threatened by trivialities like facts, reasoning, or experiences.

Once we despise a major player – Gates, Rhee, Duncan, etc. – no statement they utter or action they take can be anything less than nefarious. Wendy Kopp (TFA) could lead a team into a blazing inferno at the orphanage, perish saving youth from the flames, and the major blogs the next day would lead with skepticism regarding how many of them were going to become CAREER firefighters.

Mostly, though, we’re on the receiving end (of, er… spurious correlations and confirmation bias.) We expect it from students – they have their own reasons for seeing and hearing what they wish and discarding the rest. We get it from parents who need to maintain their own narratives regarding their flawless angel-babies. The local media choose their angles based on what’s currently trending, what makes the best story, or perhaps simply how charming the superintendent was last time they were interviewed. In each case, they utilize facts that fit their paradigm.

There’s no need to lie – there are enough versions of the truth to go around.

Administrators are under a variety of pressures over test scores, discipline, attendance, and a dozen other things – some semi-rational, many nowhere near. Given how little they can directly control, their cause-effect narratives can be… well, just about anything that gives them a button to push or a factor to influence.

As to the major “reformers” – in business, in politics, writing books, or leading charters – it’s true there are those willing to consciously fabricate or manipulate to promote their agendas. Some may even be very bad people.

But I think it’s worth considering that they, too, may have their own narratives into which all subsequent input adapts itself. We all know how easily people form “camps” – sometimes over race or religion, sometimes over oblong pigskins. Once formed, party association radically shapes, well… everything.

It’s a basic human tendency. There’s no fundamental shame. A certain amount of assuming and generalizing may even be efficient, or evolutionarily useful.

But we can fight it. We can try to be a LITTLE more aware of our own foibles, and assumptions.

The lack of such introspection is largely why I think so many educators feel rather hostile towards the presumptive “reform” movements in play. That’s why it’s sometimes difficult to “be reasonable,” or acknowledge when those seeking to make changes make a good point or two, or to keep our own emotions in check.

Because it doesn’t always seem like those driving the so-called “reforms” are actually TRYING to see the complex realities of the fields they seek to overhaul. They too often appear to have their minds made up before they even began looking at me, my kids, my job, or my world.

My kids. My job. My world. It’s hard not to take some things personally.

We must call out spurious causation and confirmation bias when we do catch a glimpse – in our opponents, our allies, or ourselves. In the meantime, perhaps a tiny bit of cautionary humility wouldn’t do our classrooms, our reform-based tweets, or our relationships much harm.