Conditions Are Not Ideal

Many years ago, when I finally finished graduate school and had to begin to work for a living, I found a position teaching college English in a small college in Louisiana. Our department, although one of the largest, had only four others on the faculty, all of them more experienced than I, and three of them somewhat older as well as wiser. I learned many lessons in the ten years I spent in that department, but perhaps none was more valuable than one handed down by my predecessor who had retired some years earlier, a scholar of medieval English drama and a former chairman of the department. When I or one of the other junior members would venture to complain about some enormity or indignity we had been forced to endure, some lack of resources or the inadequacies of an aging facility, one or the other of the senior men, who themselves had come to the college as newly minted professors, would fix us with a stare, shake his head, and stammer in imitation of their retired colleague, "Conditions are not . . . ideal."

My understanding of the profound wisdom in that remark has grown with the passing of years. As I've tried to apprehend what is going on around me, locally, nationally, and globally, I find myself shaking my head and muttering, "Conditions are not . . . ideal." Not that I believe they ever were. As that comment or observation appears to suggest, the human condition seems always to have been something less than ideal. Another expression that springs to mind is the old phrase from World War II: SNAFU -- "situation normal -- all fouled up," although usually with a more colorful verb beginning with "f" instead of "fouled," but I'm trying to keep this thing "G" rated.

Somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten that this is, in fact, the normal state of affairs, especially when dealing with our Uncle Sam, but also more generally where human beings are concerned. And that goes double for machines. I hope no one thinks they will save us. What was it Yeats said? "Things fall apart." He also mentioned that "the center cannot hold," as I recall, although he probably spelled it "centre." The poem goes on:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

He called it "The Second Coming," and reading it now you would think he was a prophet as well as a poet. But then I suspect everyone who has ever read it has had the same thought.