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I've never really had a problem with essay tests. The regular multiple choice ones I was OK at too, if I'm being honest, unless the subject was something I was not good at, which I was always very careful to proclaim as "boring" to explain away my lack of deep mastery. It's just a piece of spiritual serendipity that the things I was absolutely shit at also happened to be mind-shatteringly dull. You make interesting small-talk out of trigonometry and I will blow you.*

The trick with the essay tests is, if you have a basic facility with language, make sure you don't leave the things you don't know out there all on their own to be recognized by whomever is tasked with grading the thing. I remember very distinctly not reading Rain of Gold by Victor Villaseñor. Of all the books I have not bothered to read, it was among my favorites. I remember vaguely some of the bits from the beginning that reminded me of Latin-y magical realism repackaged from books I had already read, so avoiding reading it, even though it had been assigned as part of the required Ethnic Studies general education course during my undergraduate days, was an exercise not only in exquisite forbearance in the name of unearned douchebag snobbery, it was also an act of blind contrarianism of the most utterly meaningless type that so animates the soul of entitled 20-year-olds all across this great nation of ours.

When it came to the blue book test on the material, the goal was, at all costs, to minimize direct citation (not hard when not possible anyway). Address the questions as fuzzily as possible; think of them not as inquiries into direct knowledge but rather an invitation to exercise one's creative centers. A true mix of left and right brain, which, after all, is what college is really all about. Well, that and social development. For instance, college is where I learned to have enough self-awareness and sensitivity to my partners to apologize for being poor at sex. There is no fudging that test.**

A good essay test is a question of morality. You can't leave the "facts" out there on their own, to be slaughtered by the ravenous beasts and furious armies of assessment and syllabus requirements. It's inhumane. Statements addressing the question need accompaniment. They need footmen and archers and pathfinders woven to solidity out of rhetoric, obfuscation, extended metaphor, soliloquies, asides, all mortared together with sticky false authority refined purely out of horseshit. The goal is usher the "answer" across the field of battle, from one end of the blue book to the next, as unharmed and intact as possible. In a lot of ways it's way harder than actually knowing the material and then writing some on-the-nose summary, all "content" and "relevance" that never dares to risk falling for a chance to soar.

This is the exact same approach the U.S. has taken to the idea of military intervention into foreign countries. Since the first Gulf War, when we were swamped by an international partnership bonded by the idea of responding to a well-defined threat with a well-defined prescribed action, there has been an almost desperation among American leaders to make sure we dress up our actions with a lot of friends in a Grand Coalition of happy warring partners. It's not our idea. It's everyone's idea. We're just helping.

As the justifications got worse and worse for interventions that made less and less sense, the attempts to cloak our myriad invasions in multilateralism have been getting sadder and sadder, nadir-ing (we thought) with G.W. Bush in the run-up, run-in and run-out of Iraq War II: Shock 'n' Awe.

It used to be we could cover ourselves at least with a couple of automatics. But as of today, even the fucking British are out of our Syria plans. And just as a slap in the face while holding the implement one would normally use to stab you in the back, they have opted out because democracy. And deliberate debate. And legislative oversight. And governmental responsiveness. And popular will. All that shit we gave up on 'round about 2003.

Still it looks like we're about to do something in Syria, nobody's sure yet what. But without the padding. All alone. Not even with our own Congress. No trills or curlicues or weird Slavic diacriticals to exotic-up the verbiage. 

We didn't do the homework, but look, the test is happening as scheduled. We're about to give the answer, but it's clear we don't believe the premise ourselves, not really. The usual remedy would be to throw in a few distracting fictive elements. But to be honest, those are a lot less fun when you already know the ending.

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*Sorry, I know that's a) vulgar and b) cheating. "Interesting" and "small talk" are obviously antonyms.

**All I can do now is hope to God that poor choice of phrasing doesn't lead to some very unfortunate googling.