for Ronni and her students at George Washington High School, “the Heights,” NY
and
for Mahnaz, who wants to know about Edward Said
and for the late Edward Said, who inspires
Orlando, Fort Hood, Meb, Yanks
The morning after the New York Yankees’ historic 27th World Series win over the Philadelphia Phillies I received another email from my great friend, Ronni. She is the principal at the High School for Media and Communications, located on the first floor of the huge and beautiful George Washington High School, a public high school located in the Fort George neighborhood of the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City, New York. Ronni writes that, “The kids told me that after the game they went down from their apartments onto the street to cheer and hug and set off firecrackers — don’t you love a neighborhood –”. Toilet paper — “the working man’s decoration,” Ronni calls it — hung from trees and street lights all over Washington Heights. She could hear the voices in the hallways of her high school filled with Dominican Pride (she wrote this just like I have it here) for Alex and Cano, and, yes, Pedro, too.
What Ronni experienced the morning after the Yankee victory is a celebration of arrival — Dominicans have arrived. This is Washington Heights, it’s homes, schools and wonderful restaurants and stores, all truly an acknowledgment that America is vital and different. Not but different, and. A new order is in store for us and we must pay attention, acknowledge it and name it, as Julia Alvarez, our “mother-sister” has, as Junot Díaz follows — the narratives of assimilation and change and identity. All this is Washington Heights, a warm, happening place, full of life and possibilities. Washington Heights is undeniably tomorrow.
Washington Heights School kids — and kids in Iowa and Colorado, Texas and Wyoming — heard an accented English on national television — their English. Hideki Matsui even used a translator during his post-game interview, after receiving M.V.P. honors. The hallways of George Washington High School were filled with the pride of citizenship defined by a wide-ranging diversity. This is America. It’s befitting and telling that this victory was won in New York, a city less of the United States, but more a city of the world — perhaps even the capital of the world. The morning after the Yankee victory, President Obama said that the world was back in balance because the Yankees had once again won the series. The statement befits New York, home of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and the memories of the World Trade Centers, re-captured during the 6th game by the Navy brass — they’d christened the USS New York made from parts from the Centers — sitting behind home plate alongside Mayor Bloomberg who had just narrowly (51%) won re-election (New Yorkers were not happy with his aggressive altering of the mayor’s term limits — democracy speaks). Baseball is about redemption, going home; it is inclusive, the future, which takes time and careful understanding to reach.
The original George Washington High School, which was operated by the New York City Department of Education, was built February 2, 1917. The school’s name derives from the Revolutionary War battle fought on the hill of the building site. The school was once an annex of Morris High School. George Washington High School was built and opened in 1919, and then moved into the current building at 549 Audubon Avenue in 1925. George Washington High School has had notable graduates — Jacob Javits, Maria Callas, Henry Kissinger, Alan Greenspan, Harry Belafonte, and, yes, Manny Ramírez, who did not graduate. Ronni’s office window opens to their famed and glorious baseball field harking dreams of future glory, and the Hudson River — the beautiful crossroads of the American experience always and forever evolving and redefining America in “the Heights.” Jews, Gentiles, Muslims, Caribbean, Black and White – the history of George Washington High School is the history of America and its metamorphosis into a place of hope at the northern edge of Manhattan. It reads like something Aaron Copland would have composed, full of the color of deep valleys and mountain tops reaching for the heavens. Washington Heights, history and the future unknown living side-by-side.
Citizenship evolves from hope. Citizenship is directly proportional to how open and tolerant a society is to difference. This is profoundly a definition of justice where, according to Noble Laureate Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice,”human lives are then seen inclusively, taking note of the substantive freedoms that people enjoy, rather than ignoring everything other than the pleasures or utilities they end up having.” This, after all, is what we mean by diversity — tolerance for the Other that is not like us yet also completes us. This is the challenge of citizenship in the “new America” currently undergoing massive changes, a transcendence from a world power fixated on size and speed, to perhaps a more subtle nation that is more reflective, more inquisitive, and a bit more eager to open avenues for dialog where none have existed before. This is the hope.
It’s surprising, then, to read about the confusion that followed Mebrahtom Keflezighi’s New York City Marathon. “Should Keflezighi’s triumph count as an American victory?” asks Gina Kolata, writing for The New York Times. Mebrahthom, Meb he’s called, immigrated to the United States, from Eritrea, at the age of 2. He has been in the United States for 22 years and has completed his education here. How does one prove his or her “Americanness”? “The debate reveals what some academics say are common assumptions and stereotypes about race and sports and athletic achievement in the United States,” Kolata tells us. “Its dimensions, they add, go beyond the particulars of Keflezighi and bear on undercurrents of nationalism and racism that are not often voiced.” This is the American fear — the unstoppable nature of the changing face — and color — of America. On the one hand, we’ve invited the poor, the disenfranchised –”Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”–but on the other end we’ve been involved in violent disorder against these same tired masses for at least a few centuries. The Americas were founded on violent disorder, in fact.
The American notion of citizenship has to first acknowledge this painful reality — we invite and harm simultaneously; we also reap the benefits of immigration, as we see in the graduates of George Washington High School. New York City is the testament that what has founded this country is an international community. “Restless, turbulent, unceasingly various, energetic, unsettling, resistant, and absorptive, New York today is what Paris was a hundred years ago, the capital of our time,” writes the late, great Edward Said in “Criticism and Exile.” “It may seem paradoxical and even willful to add that the city’s centrality is due to its eccentricity and the peculiar mix of its attributes, but I think that that is so,” Said continues.
Ronni closed one of her emails, saying, “A good day for Washington Heights — though I heard one of my students was stabbed last night. He’s okay though.” A few days later, we hear of the violence in Fort Hood, Texas, of a man who shot up an office in Orlando, Florida, and the ongoing human tragedies that are Iraq and Afghanistan that bring us to our knees and all we can do is weep. The weight of America’s lack of political imagination — and will — around issues pertaining to education and healthcare compels us to wonder how we might even begin to address citizenship when citizens’ voices are muffled, our inalienable rights squelched, human needs repressed. This, too, is America in this age of transition.
The New York Yankees, a model of capitalism — a capitalist victory — and Mebrahtom, a model of hope and perseverance in a vertical economy, are the crossroads of America’s future. Ronni, who grew up in the Bronx, as I did, though I too am an immigrant, naturalized in 1972, and her students in Washington Heights are the hope we’re looking for. Historically, Edward Said tells us that the “set of urban expatriate narratives has over time acquired an almost canonical status, as have the various museums, schools, universities, concert halls, opera houses, theatres, galleries, and dance companies that have earned New York its considerable status as a sort of permanent theatrical showplace — with, over time, less and less real contact with its earlier immigrant roots.”
The Yankee players, Mebrahtom and the students attending George Washington High School in the “new Heights” are citizens that are forcing us to adjust old to new, difference to the status quo. George Steinbrenner told Yankee manager Joe Gerardi that what would be better than a 27th World Series victory is a 28th. This can’t happen without Alex and Cano and Jeter and Mariano and Jorge and… Tomorrow’s America depends on how we open up the “and.” We can’t exist otherwise.
The other day I received an email from a dear friend. She said that she didn’t know why but that she was totally engaged in the Yankees vs the Phillies World Series. I feel the same and I haven’t watched a World Series for about 8 years. Why?
We both share the Bronx; we both spent our formative years there. I can remember driving past the old (now it’s the old) Yankee Stadium when I was a kid, my nose pressed against the window in awe. I can recall seeing Mickey Mantle, Roger Marris, Yogi Berra, and the one player I had an affinity for, Héctor López, who played left field. But I don’t think that Ronni, my great friend for 17 or so years, and I feel that we’re so engaged with this series because of our romantic memories of bygone years.
The Yankees, in this series, though “hated” by many non-New York fans, have captured the imagination of viewers because they represent hope for an established institution when so many of our institutions are crumbling. This is it — and it’s ironic : the Yankees inspire hope of a different kind; it is the hope that maybe we’re living an illusion and that we’ve not been lied to, cheated and deprecated as much as we think we have.
But the fact remains, sooner rather than later, the series with Phillie — an outstanding, beautiful team to watch — will be over and we’ll be again left with the reality we escape when we sit in and vicariously become the game. In an American world where the violence and vicious constraints of football dominate, we are enraptured by the hope of baseball: home is where we want to go; space is what we contemplate in the game; possibilities and chance are privileged, as are a deep sense of self-reliance. The game has boundaries that can be overcome, that in fact exist to make us better, unlike football that privileges brute strength, power, and the aggressive taking of territory at all costs — and this within manufactured time constraints. Football has become our lives; it enables us, the voyeurs, to invest our displeasure for our age in every down. Baseball, though, asks that we consider the world aesthetically, without time constraints; it asks that we meditate, converse and experience — even dream — of possibilities.
Football engages us at a completely different level. It’s vertical, as opposed to horizontal, which is how baseball is played. The increased violence in football, the injuries, the tension and the tremendous emotional swings we experience are a metaphor for our mediated lives. It’s not surprising, then, following this football mentality, we find in The New York Times criticism leveled at Al Gore for “profiteering” from his environmental advocacy. No single article has appeared criticizing the Bush Administration and its members from profiteering from Iraq — and they did. Our profiteering from desperate moments is what we do. For instance, within 2 months of the start of World War I, in August 1914, “Charles Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel, one of the world’s largest arms merchants, took a profitable trip to London. There, he secured orders from the British government for millions of artillery shells, as well as ten 500-ton submarines. Though the construction of such foreign vessels broke the law, Bethlehem proceeded with it and the Wilson administration did not stop them. The company earned $61 million in 1916, more than its combined gross revenues for the previous eight years.”And, “By the time America declared war on Germany, Morgan was having a bang-up war of its own. The company had already loaned Britain and France $2.1 billion (around $30 billion by 2004 standards), and had cleared $30 million – around $425 million in 2004 dollars – in profit.” America’s financial empire grew from war.
This is American capitalism at its finest; we are expert at profiteering from death, depravity, violence and devastation. In this system, many are sacrificed. We even have the “sacrifice fly” and the “sacrifice bunt,” say, in baseball. In football, when a player is sacrificed, he ends up on the gurney on the way to x-rays or worse. At the top end of these couple of examples is the capitalist, the one individual or the few individuals that make extraordinary profits, even on the backs of poor families that send their loved ones to die. This is a vertical model; this is the football model — take by aggression by any means necessary. Some will suffer, but this is life, indeed.
In America, we have also held the practice, if not the belief, that we expect someone to be at the top, some to be victorious enough, powerful enough to generate production. In the Yankees’ case, the Steinbrenner family reigns supreme. Joe Gerardi, in my own recollection, aside from perhaps Joe Torre, have worked with George Steinbrenner in a manner that is reminiscent of the middle ages when the peasants and overseers knelt at the knees of the owner and were granted certain privileges in the fiefdom. In the case of Yankee managers and players, its salary, but perhaps much more so, it’s a chance to be in America’s fickle eye for a brief moment. This is where hope exists in our America today. It’s fleeting and in the Yankees in this series we see — and experience — that hope because what we are able to momentarily fantasize is that our medieval system is still there, still wanting, still trying to work.
The Yankees, in this World Series, represent our discipleship to our crumbling economic system; they represent how much we’ve been manufactured into a kind of nebulous and sleepy citizenship; they represent how we wish we could succumb to our illusions about our history. But we can’t. After every game, millions of Americans get up and go to work and face the music.
Baseball is no longer America’s past time. It’s lost its place. This World Series is also about how we, mediated spectators, have lost our place. Football has won this accolade. Vicious brutality, a hankering for pain, and the blatant disregard for the other, coupled to primitive displays of war-like victory dances have won. In the political world, it’s pretty much the same — it’s vicious, un-thinking, a-historical. It’s not surprising, then, that Al Gore, the epitome of an American capitalist, is being blasted by extremely conservative forces. Is this because a new capitalist horizon could emerge that profits from peace? Let’s watch baseball and think about it.
Wallace Stevens tells us that violent order is disorder and great disorder is order. Stevens says that these two things are one. The philosopher Pascal tells us that those who indulge in perversions tell those who are living normal lives that it is they who are deviating from what is natural. This is how great disorder comes about — removing the normal from what is natural. Thus violent disorder and great disorder are our new order and choice is eliminated, which is a significant aspect of human life.
“The great gansterization of America,” as Cornel West defines it in Hope on a Tightrope, is upon us– a tragicomedy where vision and hope are challenged by a perspective that focuses public interest on horror and the expansion of fear. I see this everywhere, but particularly in students.
Voodoo remedies can be found on the internet that promise safety from H1N1; “swine flu parties,” bring people together to supposedly expose themselves to the virus on purpose; record profits on Wall Streets on the backs of tax payers, and health insurance companies that don’t want to give up profits and insure all Americans; Iraq is walking a tightrope, at best; Afghanistan is a dark hole; and American education, K-12, is a disaster, reform focused on homogenizing everything, while more college students are dropping out or, after graduation, are ill-prepared to meet the demands of a competitive world that requires collective intelligence. This is our tragicomedy, our disorder. Young people, most of all, need a community to sustain them but our communities are broken, in some cases non existent so that children have no cultural armor to protect them.
We don’t know what to call what we’re experiencing today, we don’t know how to describe it. But these are the signs of cultural decay. In his new book, Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us, Mike Rose tells us that, “We live in an anxious age and seek our grounding, our assurances in ways that don’t satisfy our longing — that, in fact, make things worse.” Rose calls his small book an “appeal,” saying, “We need such appeals…because we’ve lost our way.” Imagine, we’ve reached a point in our culture that we, educators — and only some of us among educators — have to actually make appeals as to why school is relevant. “We’ve lost hope in the public sphere and grab at private solutions, which undercut the sharing of obligation and risk and keep us scrambling for individual advantage,” Rose continues. “We’ve narrowed the purpose of schooling to economic competitiveness, our kids becoming economic indicators.” In education, the economic – production model has created a hyper-banking system of education. The tragedy is that we’re all going along — a complete and total sign of cultural decay, if I ever saw one.
I look into the faces of students, today, and as they look back and try and give me the illusion of meaningful engagement, I know that motivation, for many, comes from this hyper-banking system. “Where will I fit in this economic-production model?” their gazes tell me. In a response to a long online asynchronous discussion about “insulting art” and the “role of art” (at least I thought I was discussing this) in one of my courses, I finally said, “I give up. I’m tired.” And I gave the class a link to Plato’s Simile of the Cave, and I said, “Being chained to the wall, seeing shadows, is tragedy.” I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t — literally exhausted. My sense is that it doesn’t matter — what I say or where I point students to is irrelevant, so mired are they in the economic-production model and biased and prejudiced cultural constraints manufactured so long ago that they seem to them as truth and reality. And then they text and facebook and tweet merrily along as if nothing esle is going on, as if texting and facebooking and tweeting are somehow ways of gaining the assurances we desperately need, though ironically take us in wrong directions, as Rose says. The incongruities are indeed staggering, so much so that one mere, tired educator can’t keep up. It’s best just to teach the simple sentence, focus on that.
Cornel West, in Hope on a Tightrope, says that, “The poor and very poor are sleeping with self-destruction. The working and middle classes are struggling against paralyzing pessimism and the privileged are swinging between cynicism and hedonism.” I am really exhausted by this world — isn’t anyone else?
We have entered into a period that is undefinable. Frank Rich, in The New York Times, tells us that Stalinists have co-opted the GOP. Obama salutes dead veterans on a tarmac in the darkness of midnight. Students have nowhere to go, nothing to do, no apparent future.
If Wallace Steven is right that a great disorder is the order of the day, entropy follows. What we’re witnessing — I feel this in my weariness, to the bone– is the wicket downward spiral of decay. When I look at students’ eyes, I don’t know what I see — a virtual person? a real person? an illusion of a person? But what I do see, is the deadly scramble for individual advantage, which means no learning can take place at all .
I’m taking a slight break from revisiting my schooling past to address what just happened in Chicago: Chicago Targets Teen Violence After Teen Brawl (and death). Earlier, in Education Stimulus Package: In Duncan’s Hands, Hope is on a Tightrope, I wrote that,
If the rest of the stimulus package proposed by the President and approved by Congress (the Senate is debating the package) is handled the way Secretary Duncan discussed the $140 billion increase in federal money for education we are in for a difficult ride. Duncan (University of Chicago Laboratory Schools / Harvard) is long on hyperbole, short on any understanding of the challenges facing education.
The recent violence in Chicago demonstrates that at its core the way education has been managed (in Chicago) needs to be revisited since Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 project to improve public schools. Renaissance 2010 converted several failing high schools into smaller specialized schools. The goal was to improve learning and boost test scores. But it forced thousands of students to attend schools farther away from home and across dangerous gang and neighborhood turf boundaries.
Chicago education officials support Renaissance 2010, saying that “deeper” problems promulgated the violence in Chicago that ended the life of a young man. The tragedy in Chicago is a convergence of 2 American tragedies: (1) The Renaissance 2010 project is an ill conceived method of management based ONLY on what Freire has called the “banking system of education,” meaning that Duncan’s concern is solely management, the herding of students and teachers into a hierarchical — and quantifiable — system, rather than thinking about the creation of learning spaces that are both safe and invigorating; and, (2), the ongoing work by the US Government, since the stimulus package, to cut the education budget, which then converges with the decline of support in neighborhoods throughout the country–the South Bronx, Newark’s South Ward, Compton, in LA, and, yes, Chicago.
We cannot address problems in education unless we likewise address problems in our communities — unemployment, health care, and the malaise brought on by hopelessness.
In The Uneducated American, Paul Krugman, writing for The New York Times, says that, “Until now, the results of educational neglect have been gradual — a slow-motion erosion of America’s relative position. But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis — its effects exacerbated by the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior that passes for ‘fiscal responsibility’ in Washington — deals a severe blow to education across the board.”
Duncan and Congress are entrenched in a mission to increase efficiency by “busing” students into massive schools focused intensely on standardization, while paying absolutely no attention to the decay that is so evident in some of our communities. Since the Reagan years, the gap between the haves and the have nots has increased. We are now seeing the results of the same old policies that have, through Bush II, ensured that the gap has remained, obvious in the way we’re handling education and health care.
The lack of creativity, the lack of a future looking agenda that taps some of the best thinkers in education, community development and health care means that we’ve not seen the end of this tragic approach. More students will die. Of course, many more students do, perhaps not as dramatically (meaning: getting media attention) as they have in Chicago (last spring, working in Newark’s South Ward, 2 children were shot in a playground — a drive by shooting and the children were collateral damage).
If we don’t take stock of our blindness, we will continue our downward spiral.
The University did see me once. It was in 1985 and I had just finished my first of two Masters on my merry way to the PhD at NYU. I had just gotten off an airplane. I spent a couple of weeks in the UK visiting all the “hot spots” I learned about in my English studies — Oxford and Cambridge, where I thought of Hardy, Rye where I visited my dissertation topic, Henry James. My Master’s Thesis was on the “Structure of the Universe and Paradise Lost.” I was convinced that John Milton saw what physicists would later discover about our universe, so I conflated poetry, science and semiotics for Professor Anthony Low, one of the great Renaissance Scholars of our time.
I was eager to do as he and other professors were doing, namely teach what they loved — Literature. So when I was handed my roster of students, all freshman, at St. Peter’s College, in Jersey City, New Jersey, I couldn’t wait to share what I had learned about the Renaissance and Literature writ large.
But I was fooled. On the way to the class, the department chair at St. Peter’s put his arm around me and said, “Look, your mission is to try to get as many of these students to pass the end of term writing exam because without it, they can’t take any of the upper level courses they need in the majors. They need to learn how to write, and do it well.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. Learning to write? What does that mean? I come from a generation of students that never took “freshman composition,” a course in the modern University used to help students learn to write in the academy. My generation of college students simply went into courses, whether these were in literature or the sciences; we came from our high schools prepared with all the skills required to research a subject (we used card catalogs then), cite sources, come up with a thesis and argue a point. Things had changed. But what really changed in the University is far beyond “freshman composition” — the entire nature of the University has changed.
My first class would not receive any literary wisdom; instead, we would concentrate on skills — but I wasn’t sure whether I could deliver. How do I write? I thought. Can I translate what I do into something practical — and in 14 weeks? I was very insecure but I knew that I couldn’t show that to students.
Thirty or so kids sat staring at me frozen before them. I did the next best thing — read out names, all of which, to their surprise, I read perfectly because they were all Latinos, all Spanish names. There was an immediate bond — we were not of the same color, but we shared a language. Then suddenly it occurred to me: I was hired because of my name, Héctor Vila, is a Spanish name. I was like my students — that’s what the chair of the department must have thought. I could relate to them. Inspire them to pass. But was inspiration sufficient?
I wasn’t hired because I went to NYU. I wasn’t hired because I just completed a thesis on John Milton and the science of the English Renaissance. I was hired because I’m Spanish. That was the only criteria. What else I knew was not essential, except that being a grad student at NYU determined a degree of intelligence, I suppose. Or is it simply that, as a grad student, I was a good soldier, someone who understood what it means to be “a student” who accepts the authority of the professor?
This was the beginning. The first story of how the University saw me — and it would see me like this for the rest of my career. At another school, years later, after I received my PhD and I was working towards tenure, another form of discipline that I’ll speak about later, I was trotted out every time the administration wanted to prove diversity. “You’re perfect for this,” I recall the chair of this department saying to me. “You’re white, articulate, you know what we know — and we can say you’re Hispanic, too.”
So I’ve lived on the boundaries behind the luxusious ivy, never mainstream.
I’ve learned that Education conflates two models: (1) the medieval Abbey, the authority at the center, the Abbot, and the accolades, working diligently and (especially) painfully at their craft in scriptoriums, the margins off center, but eventually retreating to cells to work on their own — it’s an efficient model that keeps everyone in line; and (2) the post-modern corporation meant to manufacture consent, as Chomsky would say, through illusion, subterfuge, manipulations. The bait and switch I experienced at St. Peter’s College is case in point.
The modern University, not unlike General Electric and Dupont and Ford Motor Company, is in the business of raising capital; this is the main task of any viable educational institution, to raise capital. Learning is at least in third or fourth place after research, usually comprised of raising funds from the US Government (defense) and corporations (pharmaceuticals, new technologies, and companies also in the business of defense), writing and publishing, by faculty, in obscure, idiosyncratic journals, and then comes teaching. And how good the teaching is depends on the luck of the drawer since faculty are never trained in teaching. Teaching is never mentioned in graduate school. A new graduate, such as myself, is simply thrown into the classroom by virtue of having a degree. In my own case, I was thrown into an ESL (English as a Second Language) classroom — and I didn’t even know such a “thing” existed. I learned by doing; and I learned by making a lot of mistakes.
At my first job, St. Peter’s College, the Jesuits had apparently figured out how to ensure their future be admitting the new generation of immigrants into their school. Only this generation couldn’t write Standard American English; some had trouble speaking it. And the system placed a very difficult essay exam at the end, a gatekeeper exam.
I decided right there and then not to teach writing, but rather, to teach how to take the test. I told the class that if I could have each and every student learn how to write a sentence — John ran to the store. — I could teach them how to turn this into a paragraph and, eventually, an essay. The structure of the simple sentence — subject + verb + object = an idea — can be used to create a paragraph, of the same structure, and an essay, also of the same structure. A complete formula students could understand. And it was a successful formula — all passed. Every year, for about 3 years when I was at St. Peter’s, just about all students, 90%, passed.
But I was left wondering what I had done? What I represented? What did the University represent that it placed us, students and teachers, in such a bind? I wasn’t teaching. I was merely an antidote to a bad situation, showing students survival skills, a way through a laborious essay exam. I wasn’t teaching them to write. As a representative of the system, I was teaching students how to negotiate the system, how to navigate through its many troubling dark holes.
In the famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl, a victim of Nazi concentration camps and from which the source of much of his teachings comes from, wonders,
But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory true which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors — be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these? Most important, do the prisoners’ reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstance?…
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (86)
The University has long given up these questions; these exist, if they do at all, on the margins of the institution. Long have we given up wondering about human liberty, proof is in the world we’ve created. Take a close look.
I wondered then and I wonder now whether the “last of the human freedoms” is still an opportunity for me. I know now that given the bleak production model of the modern University, the only thing I can offer, the only thing I can teach is how to navigate the disciplines in such a way as to ensure that students are able to choose an attitude because only then can one find one’s own way. But as I’ve said earlier, (here, too) I’m losing what has become a battle for the human heart.
It’s as if we’ve gone from teaching Literature and matters of the heart, say in my case, to teaching surviving an intense system, made more intense by the lack of material promise at the end. The modern University has become its own subject. But it affords us an opportunity to question the idea of justice, the idea of learning, the idea of knowledge. Do students and faculty want to work that hard? The answer to this question will determine whether or not we have a viable future.
How institutions behave and how institutions affect our perception of our world and ourselves is probably one of the most profound reasons I stay “in the battle.” It’s the last and only remaining “field of study” that remains, only because it is here where we can come to understand how we’ve polluted the world with ignominious actions. It is also the only means towards a re-investment in human liberty achievable by choosing one’s attitude towards the conditions of our world.
Just when I began to second guess myself, I received an email from one of my students, Pooja ji, who is working in India. Students energize me, give me purpose — it’s always been a truth in my life. I always say to students that ask why I do what I do that I learn from them, they teach me. If it was otherwise, what we do in a classroom wouldn’t work, not at all. In a classroom, I’m a learner too. The day that ends, I end.
Pooja wrote to my class of Freshmen, and me . She urges all of us living lives on the boundary, living on the edges of Any Main Street, and from disparate parts of the world, to dig deeply, search and ask the hard questions.
“In my month here (India),” she writes, “I have questioned every minute.” She tells these new, young students with hope and confusion in their eyes — fearful, somewhat, but nevertheless looking to create lives that will not be defined by “quiet desperation” — that her experiences have put into question her beliefs. She tells my new students that “four years at Middlebury gives you a set of skills. Your true education begins after graduation.” And she’s speaking to me too, her old gray-haired prof, balding. She’s talking about us.
Of course, life is the greatest teacher — we know this, Pooja sees this, as do my new students; it compels us to face things we may not want to face. We grow by Being, doing. But I’m fascinated by the notion that 4 years at Middlebury College results in skills. Is this simply a choice of words written quickly, via email, while Pooja sat covered in flies, which she described quite well to me earlier in another note? Or is this all I did for Pooja, give her skills? Perhaps. Maybe that’s all I did. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s all I can do, skills work. I am a “teacher of writing,” after all, and not by choice (I totally self-trained for this part of my life, institutionally mandated; we are all institutionalized somehow), but rather, by circumstances, personal and professional — and by professional I mean that institutions and I have had differing opinions of who we each are, what they want from me.
But maybe it’s through skills work that we find each other. Skills work leads to life work? Does it? First we become acquainted through skills, and they lead us to each other, to matters of the heart, which is really where we need to work. I have always felt that leaving matters of the heart out of teaching and learning is negating the learning process. Doesn’t education mean learning about one’s self?
Pooja is one of those students who would learn and grow and create a world for herself despite any system, any orthodoxy. In 25 years of teaching, I can count students such as Pooja on my two hands — that’s it. Others need more or something else or they don’t even look at education as a journey towards an understanding of the self, an understanding of Being.
Pooja arrived at my doorstep with a sense of self, though she didn’t know it quite fully when she first walked on to the campus. Of her early days, Pooja writes,
During my first year at Middlebury, a friend I’d met only a few months before encouraged me to speak to my advisor. I entered my advisor’s office with the intention of deciding what my major would be. Instead, I sat in his office and cried for 15 minutes. He didn’t say anything. He let me cry. After I was done pouring out my emotions, we talked. I didn’t come out of his office with a clear plan for my academic life, but I came out understanding that it was all right to be vulnerable. I began to trust Middlebury as a community and as my home for four years.
I remember those first meetings where Pooja struggled with expectations and what she began to see as a burning desire to express herself, to mold her life, to write. She became a writer. And she designed her life immediately after graduation. She is creating her world, not the other way around, which is succumbing, as many do, to the elegant means of production afforded graduates of elite institutions (this, of course, following the economic downfall, is doubtful). Pooja, and others like her, have designed unorthodox paths, roads least traveled. Don’t we want this for all our students? How do skills work lead to this sense of self, so powerfully expressed?
I’m left wondering what, if anything, I did for Pooja? We have, I think, mutual respect and we’ve moved from a student-teacher relationship to friends. I worry about her living and working in Kanpur; she sees my anxieties over my current students. And now, as her email points out, she is helping me teach and I accept her knowledge, her unique experience. But this way of being for me is not for all. And some might even wonder whether the role of the teacher is to move from “sage on the stage” to friend, collaborator, respectful colleague — a community of civilized, mutually respectful collaborators.
I always tell my students early on in a semester that if my job is done well, by the time we get to the end of the semester, there should be no need for me. I should be invisible, not there. I move towards invisibility. I think that this is hard to do, but I think that it’s the only way to teach because only when students take over a course, a subject, the course itself, have they arrived at a moment of confidence necessary to assert new ideas, theories, actions — to assert themselves on to the world and be themselves, articulating who they are, but more importantly, what kind of world they want.
I’m left wondering about invisibility. As I write myself out of the equation, the University, too, doesn’t see me either. So as Pooja becomes, I whither? Is this the life cycle of “the teacher”?
It’s the beginning of another academic year — my 25th. I’ve often said to students who ask how and why I do what I do that the day I start looking over my shoulder and second guess myself and wonder about purpose, it may be the beginning of the end.
I’m feeling that I’ve been totally unsuccessful and that I’ve done nothing, nothing at all to leave this place we all live in a bit better. Certainly within the institutions where I have worked, I’ve been totally unsuccessful at inspiring any meaningful change focused on what Edward O. Wilson calls consilience. This is very difficult for me to say. It’s very difficult to admit that I’ve been totally ineffective at teaching college students; that I may have done more harm then good. Added to the emptiness.
Take a look — corruption, graft, violence, intolerance, a lack of dialog, little to no communication in a world completely “hooked” in and “linked” and the ongoing competition to get ahead by any means necessary define the malaise we’re all feeling. This is profound evidence that education has failed humanity. It’s evidence that the books and ideas and essays and conversations I’ve been involved in over 25 years have made no impression on the students I’ve had.
For the most part, the work has been solitary. Feelings, ideas, the search for meaning is done with no one. When we do gather in this ivy world where nothing ever seems to be at stake, we gather to hear ourselves talk, to pontificate on how wonderful we are at attracting students, when in reality it’s a sellers market everywhere in higher ed — the blind leading the blind. Parents looking for status for their children — better lives or at least lives equal to theirs.
But the world has changed — it has been changing. And no one is really safe anymore and there are absolutely no guarantees, especially when we think about tomorrow. We are still grasping at old models, the models that have gotten us to this lost point.
It’s not surprising that colleges and universities, today, begin their 2009-2010 academic year in debt, having lost millions from the economic downturn, primarily because for the past 10 to 15 years, we have competed with each other at the surface level — gyms, restaurants, new buildings, extensive IT; the look and feel of schools prevailed over purpose. The importance of the US News and World Report list, which we deny, but rush to immediately upon publication. Now we begin the year wondering about the “future of education” and the “future of the humanities” and “the future of the liberal arts.”
But the real question is this: Why are we asking this question now when this conversation began as early as 1996 when Bill Readings published University in Ruins? Where have we been? Is it a bit late?
“It is no longer clear what the place of the University is in society nor what the exact nature of that society is, and the changing institutional form of the University is something intellectuals cannot afford to ignore,” wrote Readings 13 years ago. We ignored his call. We built buildings, invested in wild economic vehicles and now we’re wondering where we are. The academic year begins in ruins and we’re charging more for it.
I look at my syllabi and wonder what the purpose is to what I’m doing. We wonder what students are doing too. I heard a talented student give advise to students the other day. She said that there are at least 3 readers in every course with every book. The student who skims for facts and ideas; the teacher who lectures and highlights and points to facts and ideas and themes; classmates who lend their reading, perhaps helping you adjust — maybe you missed something. This method is survival, not learning; it is a denial of the most fundamental aspect of a meaningful education, which is contemplation, necessary for ensuring that students — and the teacher — spend time realizing how what one reads and learns “enters” or is synthesized with one’s life.
I worry that I’ve been part of an assembly line. I feel responsible for the world I’ve helped create. I can’t help but think that, like global warming (we have to reduce CO2 emissions), education has likewise contributed to the privileging of larger, fatter, richer lives founded on more voracious competition that inspires callousness. Should we, in education, not be asking what we’ve done?
In the next few postings, I hope to re-examine how I got here, using this space as a mirror that might help define how I got to this uncanny place.
I revisited Amsterdam this past week and spent Easter Weekend, along with countless Spaniards, Italians and Germans, in the early spring sun. Last time I was in Amsterdam was in June of 2008 and I went alone for a conference. This time I went with my wife and we lived in a delicious and charming apartment in the Oud West, on Douwess Dekkerstraat, owned by the artist Patty Schilder.
Oud West Apartment --looking toward Farmers Market
From our balcony, looking out over the Buurtcentrum De Havelaar, we gazed at the Baarsjesweg Canal, especially beautiful in the evening when the sun sets and the large barges slowly make their way up and down after a long day’s work. Two blocks away, in the early morning, the farmers market gathers steam. Here, the true ethnic diversity of the Oud West comes alive–Middle Eastern women in their hejabs argue prices with their favorite vendors, breads and cheeses abound, fish and meats, too. The color and smells and sounds are soothing, seductive. There is no excuse here for not eating right. The food is fresh, beautiful. The difficulty is in buying only what you need, something the Dutch are very good at doing, it seems.
Oud West Apartment looking toward canal
The difference between this trip and my last one is the bicycle. The only real way to experience this culture is on the bike. Though a modern tool, the bike is the heart of Amsterdam. Many consider Amsterdam “the biking capital of Europe.” Amsterdam bikers have the right of way, not pedestrians. The flow and energy of this city is dependent upon how well the biking moves the energy along. The Dutch are great bikers, they weave in and out of crowds, move effortlessly through traffic, grinning or smiling and never (apparently) frustrated. This is Amsterdam. I’ve seen youngsters txting and biking, talking on cells, with passengers, children, sometimes two, one in the rear, the other up front. Much of Amsterdam’s life happens on the bike.
Biking in the north
We rented our bikes from Bike City. The added bonus being that the only hint that this is a rental is written in small, elegant print on the black carry bag on the handlebars: Bike City. Otherwise, the bikes were like all others. Most rental bikes are loud reds or yellows and have huge insignias. Would you want to call attention to yourself like that? We didn’t. We found the best bikes to rent are the 3 speeds with hand brakes. They’re comfortable and sturdy. Our first trek took us through the city, to the ferry landing behind Amsterdam Centraal Railway Station, and up through the farmland of the north country all they way to Slot Ilpenstein. We biked through pasture land, in and out of canals. Sheep nearby. The famous Frisian horses, too. And we managed a glimpse of some drafts.
I Am Amsterdam
From that day on, we rode everywhere, including another “out of the city” day trip to Haarlem, a municipality and a city in the Netherlands, and also the capital of the province of North Holland, the northern half of Holland. The bicycle lends for a particular order to things, a graciousness and decorum we like to call civilized or civilization. It’s interesting because if one examines the history of the Netherlands, we see that this living has come at great human cost. Many fell to the strength and power of the mighty Dutch will. The rise of the Dutch Empire is extensive and dramatic. Out of this, comes Amsterdam, an important port city and center of commerce. What we see in Amsterdam today is a result of this history so as we ride through the city and sit comfortably in cafes adjoining canals, we have to weigh the awesome power that began somewhere around the 1540s and that conquered so much. To the victor belongs the spoils is quite evident in Amsterdam. These spoils are Amsterdam’s gift to humanity. But these spoils also bare an awesome responsibility that Amsterdam’s inhabitants are trying to understand. The story is complex.
Perhaps this is why we can describe Amsterdam as an incredibly important human experiment that’s ongoing. And just maybe, this is why the moral structure of this great little city is experimenting with an unbound secularism founded on an unprecedented egalitarianism, which, in turn, depends upon freedoms of expression and a tolerance for difference. But this is the idealized version, the romantic view. It’s not surprising, then, that when the world is exhausted by the constant chimes of terror, from the Netherlands explodes the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. It’s also the place where Theo Van Gogh, the great-grandson of Theo van Gogh, the brother of painter Vincent van Gogh, was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim extremist, after van Gogh, with collaboration from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, released the Anti-Islam film Submission.
Middle Eastern Women in the Oud West, after shopping
Amsterdam is not without controversy. It is an extraordinary diverse place; however, diversity brings contention, even among the most enlightened. When differences are thrust together, the potential for an explosion is always present. Before 1965, the Netherlands were totally a monoculture–all white Dutch and no threats. This changed with a very liberal immigration policy. Effectively, the society is now segregated. On the streets, we can see the diversity, but where it counts–schools, neighborhoods, business and so on, we don’t see it. There is resentment that what Dutch culture was is no longer–this is true. The monoculture safety net has been taken away. Now the struggle is different, particularly on religious grounds where the Christian and the Muslim, along with the Jew, have to live side-by-side in a society that is increasingly secular. What is Amsterdam turning into? What is it becoming?
I wonder whether Amsterdam today is the “new” Al Andaluz? It has the makings. Why not, why can it not be the “new” place where the three central religions, Christians, Muslims and Jews, live in relative peace and harmony? Only now we are called upon to protect the Muslim, not the other way around as it was when the Muslim protected the ahl al-dhimma (the people under protection). Maybe the tides have turned, though the challenges and the conflicts are as they were in the period between 711 and 1492. What we don’t want is the devastation and the destruction brought about by the Christian King in 1492–in the name of God and love! Al Andaluz was a beacon of learning, and the city of Córdoba became one of the leading cultural and economic centers in both the Mediterranean basin and the Islamic world. Why can this not be the fate of the Netherlands, Amsterdam leading the way?
The Amsterdam I see today is in transition, in flux, pained by both its past and its future. But it’s how it negotiates its day-to-day where the mystery and awe exist. The seeds of tolerance are there–a young Muslim woman on a bike or a Vespa waiting for a light to change and waiting next to her is a tall Dutch blond, also on her bike, and they look at one another and smile. This is the new Amsterdam.
So perhaps the Dutch are such great bikers because they have been learning to negotiate obstacles all along. Whether by conquering territories for their wealth during the time of the Burghers or changing from a monoculture to an ethnically diverse culture, they have been challenging boundaries–national, ethnic and tribal, as well as economic and educational. Amsterdam could be the first small city that will evolve–or not–according to how well it enables those who reside in the margins of life to exist without threat; where once there was a singular uninterrupted culture, as is evident in the architecture and the museums, now there are only threads that are struggling to keep humanity together. And holding these threads are exiles. Amsterdam is a perfect example of a city of exiles, of histories that come from colonization, and newer ones that come along because they have been following the great human migration for survival, for subsistence.
Bikes, Canals, and their Bridges--the web
The Amsterdam of tomorrow will be built on the shoulders of mindfulness and tolerance. And if successful, Amsterdam, as Al Andaluz before it, will hold a noble place in the continuum of great histories that have given humanity, even if for a moment, a ray of hope that we can live together and relish in our differences.
Sarah Chayes Lecture, Middlebury College, Dana Auditorium, March 6, 2009
The complete lecture can be viewed here:
http://muskrat.middlebury.edu/administration/lis/Accordant/DLA/SarahChayes3609/index.html
Sarah Chayes in Kandahar
CATHERINE RAMPELL reports in The New York Times that, “With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation’s payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history.”
In “As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force,” Rampell says that, “The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax is falling.” The ax is falling on jobs that have been dominated by men. “Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.”
This, I believe, is a major shift in our cultural construction of how power is controlled, even determined. In fact, this bit of news can be seen as a last breath of the old hegemony that has nearly driven us to the point of complete destruction.
The jobs typically held by women–education and health care–are the fabric of society; everything else –finance, construction, high-tech, etc–is crumbling. The old guard is indeed falling apart, but the fabric of society, patched together by women, is holding. And with the Obama stimulus package, even increasing its strength.
According to Peter Sloterdijk, the renowned German philosopher and a professor of philosophy and media theory at the Karlsruhe School of Design, there have been 3 phases of globalization: (1) the metaphysical globalization of Greek cosmology; (2) the nautical globalization of the 15th Century that creates global provincialism; and, finally, (3), the overcoming of distance.
It is this last phase–our age–that is extremely interesting from the perspective of a new world order and the emergence of women in powerful positions. For the past 10 to 15 years, women from traditionally male-dominant cultures have found their way to Western colleges and universities. It’s an amazing ratio. Women from the East, especially China and Korea, accompany women from South Asia–India and Afghanistan , for instance–and mingle with women from Africa and the Middle East and Latin America.
These young women, to use Homi Bhabha’s term, choose to be “unhomed” in order to advance. This, for them, is where “presencing begins because it captures something of the estranging sense of relocation of the home and the world–the unhomliness–that is the condition of extra–territorial and cross-cultural initiations”, says Bhabha. It is a form of exile apprehended so as to better themselves. In this condition, women are shifting, apparently always in movement, and challening deeply held beliefs about what has been accepted–to a fault–as the location of women in culture. Women are re-articulating boundaries. They are redefining material reality.
This re-articulation of boundaries increases the potential for the feminization of cultures. The current generation of women in our colleges and universities and heading into the (traditional) world is searhing for interconnectedness, though they suffer a sense of estrangement in doing so. These are the women of the Third Wave of Feminism: the overcoming of boundaries, I call it, which is consistent with the movement’s history. Following Bhabha, women are inhabiting a space “narrower than the human horizon” that provides an “ethical entitlement to, and an enactment of, the sense of community.” This is something new, different. Michelle Obama’s planting of a White House garden, which follows Elenor Roosevelt’s garden historically speaking, is a case in point. The First Lady’s garden implies the need for a healthier nation, one that grows foods locally and that eats healthier–challenges to health care, the food industry, and the psychology of dependency of American citizens.
Moreover, Michelle Obama is a new model. Gracious, elegant, classy and beautiful, she is also in shape, as our obsession with her arms shows. Mrs. Obama is the Third Wave of Feminism, as opposed to Hilary Clinton who represents the Second Wave. The difference is fundamental: the professional women of Mrs. Obama’s generation did not give up men or family; they pursued careers, but also kept the hearth moving. This Third Wave comes with an “ethical entitlement to, and an enactment of, the sense of community.” Women are demanding very different things of the social structures and the institutions that support them.
Women are negotiating languages used in the past to (pre) define notions of reality–and truth. Nationhood, we can see by how women are stretching themselves across boundaries, is a morally arbitrary notion, a necessity of the post-colonial state, for instance. Rather, women are more concerned with an “insufficiency of self” and the needs of new urban communities of interest. Women fully understand the precarious sense of survival we are living today since this has been women’s historical position. They are best qualified to guide us through. Women are therefore the agents of change we need. Women working through their identities, as these come into conflict with ancient–and broken–models, discover their agency and, in turn, transform formally oppressive ways of thinking and being. It is a slow process, historically, but we are on a path we cannot now change.
What in the past has been perceived as less valuable and thus exploitable, disposable and forgettable in the global political economy, now is no longer. Opportunities are shifting. We may be in fact witnessing the emergence of the Fourth Wave of Feminism–matriarchal societies.
We have walked through the looking glass and the other side is extraordinarily dark. We are somewhere between the enemies of the future, as described by Virginia Postrel in The Future and its Enemies,* and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, on the Pequod, up and down over an indifferent sea, yet unaware that Ahab is at the helm, his dead reckoning conflicting with our own, two fixed points clashing.
We’re at the edge of a wide and foreboding abyss.
“Static visions depend on hiding the connections between disparate aspects of life,” says Postrel. She continues,
Statists thrive by issuing prescriptions that ignore the details of life, believing that the details are unimportant, the stuff of anonymous specialists, and can safely be ignored…Critics assume that readers will share their attitudes and will see contemporary life as a problem demanding immediate action by the powerful and wise. This relentlessly hostile view of how we live, and how we may come to live, is distorted and dangerous. It overvalues the tastes of an articulate elite, compares the real world of trade-offs to fantasies of utopia, omits important details and connections, and confuses temporary growing pains with permanent catastrophes. It demoralizes and devalues the creative minds on whom our future depends. And it encourages the coercive use of political power to wipe out choice, forbid experimentation, short-circuit feedback, and trammel progress.
The “relentlessly hostile view” begins by manipulating perception. We are in a crisis of perception. We perceive, for instance, that The Market, as it’s called by business, politicians and the media–and how it’s falsely studied by student-economists–exists somewhere beyond us; that it’s somehow a creature onto itself moving, breathing, devouring without our doing. (This is the way we think about technology, too.)
The Market is us. We don’t know what to do with ourselves, so corrupt and immoral are our actions. The Market defines our socio-moral condition. The Market exposes our deepest, most profound perversions.
Since the deregulation brought about by Reagan and escalated by McCain – Gramm, we have experienced intense fluctuations in the markets. Why? Because of the basic fundamentals of trading. I have a stock tied to a corporation. You want that stock because it can bring you some wealth right now, but you’re unsure. You need a sign that the stock you want is worth something. I react by engaging you in speculation–the ifs: if you bet high, you can also bet on a derivative to try and stabilize a drop, and vice versa. Thus, in a very short period of time, within seconds, we have a stock–a financial instrument–that doesn’t represent anything but speculation based on fear and mistrust. No real value, other than the value we place on our anxiety and the ambiguity of our time.
This is totally controlled by the “tastes of an articulate elite.” It’s not surprising that Paulson, the former Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs, wants–and needs–$700 billion to bailout–not Wall Street and not you and me, the common citizen–Goldman Sachs itself.
Let’s start calling a spade a spade. Let’s start by investigating the fox that’s left standing. Let’s see where and how this problem began, who instigated it. And I dare anyone who does this not to find Goldman at the start and the finish of this, one of the darkest periods of American moral history.
It’s also not surprising that when officials gathered around the table to bailout AIG, the only non-government person present was the current CEO of Goldman. AIG is into Goldman big time, $21 billion!
We really want such a closed group of men controlling everything we own?
Some folks are having a party at our expense. We’ve not been invited–and Lehman wasn’t either. These are elites, as Postrel points out, that are frightened of the dynamism that is the reality of the way we live and are pursuing a utopian vision defined by stasis. Paulson and company, which includes both Republicans and Democrats since Reagan, are laboring very, very hard to keep the world as it is, the control of wealth and power in the hands of few.
I know, I know–I can hear you from here. Many of you are laughing, seeing my words as overly romantic and rife with paranoia about conspiracies. But what I am saying is not concealed, it’s not hidden. It’s right in front of our very eyes; it’s a message: this is the way it is, and this is the way we elites want it to be.
The immoral corruption existing in our markets has run wild since Reagan; deregulation ensures that the worst in human nature will rise to the top. This is historically true; there is evidence all over the place.
While on the one side we are told that we live immoral lives based on our socio-cultural, sexual inclinations, these same people are reaching into our bank accounts and robbing us blind. Isn’t it interesting that suddenly those who love to preach from pulpits have gone silent? Yes, yell at us about our immoral entertainment, our gay lives, our single parenthood and abortions–but when immorality is extraordinary and real, when it devastates people and communities, when there is real soul wrenching suffering, the pulpits across America are silent.
The wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, and this darkness visible hanging over our economic lives are all interconnected, guided by an immoral force that seeks to make an America founded on despair, suffering and tension the future. They are spitting on Hamilton, Madison and Jay and The Federalists Papers, the notion that ambition should be tempered by ambition. This is fundamental to any pursuit of democracy. Our culture is falling, and falling fast because of blind ambition.
In The Doubloon chapter of Moby Dick, Ahab pauses before his equatorial coin and says,
There is something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here, –three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab, and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself.
Here we have it, Ahab the Goldman broker. Extraordinary narcissism willed onto the value of a gold coin that will be, for “each and every man,” a “mirror” that will serve as a vessel to be filled with our fantasies. This is how we get ourselves into trouble. This is the prescription for overvaluation.
“I see nothing here,” says Ahab to his crew on the Pequod, “but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won’t smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here’s nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy ‘em out.”
The deck of the Pequod is the trading floor on Wall Street. Only to gain his aim, Ahab mistakes the mathematics. But this doesn’t matter because the crew–America–is suddenly moved, fixated on the vision Ahab gives them through the inflated value of the doubloon, its gold shinning possibilities, uniqueness. It is a false utopia founded on stasis–keep the world as is, because in this world, I can then pursue my perversions.
This is where we stand today, right now, at the dawn of a new vote on the bail-out.
Yet the economic world has not ended. Skeptics recommend that Congress do nothing. Two-hundred economists have signed a petition protesting the bail-out.
Narayana Kocherlakota, of the University of Minnesota, calls the White House’s case an unconvincing one. “I think one of the reasons why so many people were signing that is the administration has not brought forward the information that would be compelling, that yes, we are facing economic Armageddon,” Kocherlakota says.
It’s evident that no one knows what’s right here; no one knows what the future holds.
But one thing is true: the current bailout is meant to soften the blow to those who have committed the most profound crimes against humanity, the destabilization of the human condition for the excessive profits of a very few people.
This history is long, though. It’s simply that those who cover the news and who are given the responsibility to address these issues have been laughing at the few who have been raising flags all along.
David Kay Johnson, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter of The New York Times and author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill), says that this is “business as usual.” And that it doesn’t matter who will be president next because we are still living–and experiencing–the Reagan Era. Tragic.
“We have created in the United States, largely in the last thirty years, a whole series of programs—a few of them explicit, many of them deeply hidden—that take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class and upper middle class, “says Johnson, ” and funnel it to the wealthiest people in America.”
Is this the America defined by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay? Is this the America we want? What are we willing to do to right this ship?
“The drama’s done,” writes Melville. “Why then here does any one step forth?–Because one did survive the wreck.”
Will any one of us “survie the wreck” to be, like Job, “Alone to tell thee”?
for the Afghans of Middlebury and Simons, the Afghan Writers (in Afghanistan), and friends of Afghanistan in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and in Kabul
I received a text message a few weeks back from one of my Middlebury students. She is an Afghan and she texted me from Pakistan where she had entered illegally. She and her two sisters, one younger and one older, snuck across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to obtain American visas from the US Embassy in Islamabad. Many Afghans–our allies–risk their lives to obtain visas to the US. It’s a way of life so far from our own.
Police in Islamabad held them. No documentation. They talked themselves out of the mess without even paying a bribe, she told me with a “ha ha ha” and a “;-)”, her texting forms for a special–and delightful–grin she has that always says, “I can get out of this,” something in her special DNA that has evolved from confrontations with war and aggression, the reality that someone is always looking, especially if you’re a woman; someone is always coming after you.
They hid in Islamabad for three days waiting for their visas. This is American diplomacy in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, two of the three young women did not receive visas. They applied as “tourists.” Now they must re-enter this process, only this time with their I-20’s in hand, the only conceivable way to begin their dreams of being vital citizens contributing to the rebuilding of Afghanistan.
Let’s not forget that we’re speaking about women, here, who are routinely deprived of basic rights and necessities. (See also: the Plight of Women in Afghanistan and (very disturbing) Images of Women in Afghanistan). We know from studies done by the United Nations that when women are educated, the quality of life increases.
Why do we advocate for women’s rights on the pulpit but act in contradiction when called to action?
It’s always innocence that suffers most in times of war and violence. The main function of war is to suppress, even destroy the organic process–and promise–of change brought about by the basic human rights of education and knowledge. War turns allies away, the opposite approach we need in Afghanistan.
This past summer I received an email from the same student, this time she was guiding an Afghan-Middlebury freshman into Pakistan–same thing, visas (before the US Embassy began issuing visas in Kabul). Anything can happen on this treacherous border crossing. “We saw the Taliban waiting in Pakistan,” she said. The young women scurried, eyes down and heads covered, and got as close as they could to a family, making believe that they were all one group. The Taliban let them through.
Then comes the very dangerous job of choosing a driver to take them into Islamabad. “You never know where you’ll end up,” she wrote.“They ask for money. They can hold you hostage.”
An American Embassy exists in Kabul and this past summer began issuing single entry visas to Afghans coming to the U.S. to study. Students from all over the world obtain multiple entry visas. Not Afghans. When I wrote to my representatives in Vermont about this—Leahy, Sanders and Welch—I received a long letter from the US State Department saying that the reason for not issuing multiple entry visas to Afghans is security but that they were doing their best.
Presumably, a terrorist can enter the US from any point of entry, no? Terrorist cells can exist anywhere, yes, that’s the definition? Three years ago when I was in Buenos Aires Argentina doing some work with Middlebury students at the AMIA, bombed in 1994 by Iranian terrorists, it is now known, I learned about the triangle, a lawless tri-border region in Northern Argentina, Iguazu Falls , a hot bed of potential terrorist threat, where Islamic fundamentalist groups–Hezbollah profiting from the drug trade–exist in the jungles of Paraguay just a short walk across the water where it’s knee high in spots. It was believed then that at least one 9/11 terrorist crossed that border. I stood and stared, almost touching Brazil and Paraguay beyond the dense subtropical foliage, the wild sounds of exotic birds high in the trees.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban train in Pakistan—9/11’s evil seed was grown here and in Afghanistan but we turned to Iraq instead and left causalities behind. (see also: Pakistan Loosing Fight and Pakistan Surrenders — the paper trail on this issue is extensive). Pakistan’s government and military are rife with rogue elements. We’ve turned a blind eye and we’re living with the consequences, deceit and confusion–and corruption in Afghanistan (see also, “Winning the Battle, Losing the Faith“).
We need to collaborate with the Afghans; we need to work closely with them at the village level, helping with governance and infrastructure, education and healthcare, otherwise we’re not going anywhere. Afghans need to come here, too, this way honing skills and gaining knowledge that will serve their society–and on their terms, not ours, such as we’ve learned from Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea (see, for instance, “Military Finds an Unlikely Adviser in School-Building Humanitarian | by Yochi J. Dreazen“.)
In “The Other Front,” Sarah Chayes, the former NPR correspondent, author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban and living and working in Kandahar where, in collaboration with locals, she has created a cooperative, Arghand, as a means to fight back the poppy business, wrote for the Washington Post that, “The solution is to call to account the officials we installed here beginning in 2001 — to reach beyond the power brokers to ordinary Afghan citizens and give their grievances a fair hearing.”
Not being able to enter the United States with multi-entry visas is a grievance–as is the humiliation experienced at the hands of Homeland Security, particularly by women.
Our policy has been to force Afghans into the hands of the Taliban. (We did this 50 years ago when we drove Fidel Castro into the hands of the Russians.) “More and more are severing contact with the Karzai regime and all it stands for, rejecting even development assistance,” says Chayes. “When Taliban thugs come to their mosques demanding money or food, they pay up. Many actively collaborate, as a means of protest.”
The solution, says Chayes, is to bring perpetrators who want to carve up Afghanistan to the table.
But in order to do this we Americans must take responsibility for the way we treat our friends, the Afghan people. We cannot want protection from illegal immigrants in our country while then creating illegal immigrants in other parts of the world. The consequences of war are exile, differenchisement and the creation of helpless nomads looking for subsistence–all fodder for extremism. “Existence today,” says Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, “is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the present…” This is our method, to make survival dark and the world wide and foreboding.
The way we treat Afghan students that come here to learn so as to be better equipped to lead Afghanistan’s rebuilding efforts is nothing short of immoral. Three weeks ago, I accompanied yet another Afghan student to the airport and witnessed a Homeland Security officer look at her passport, then ask if her last name was Islamabad, written on a line that reads, “Country of Origin”! This was followed by a humiliating and extensive search–everything, all personal items strewn for all to see, her arms spread wide. I stood on the other side of the glass nearly in tears. “This is a person I care for,” I was screaming through the glass. “A Muslim woman, for God’s sake!” No one heard. A woman walked past, noticed me, looked at the student and shook her head in shame as if to say, “No. No, this can’t be. “
In our zealousness and fear we corrupt ourselves and others. Slavery worked this way; colonialization works this way, too. “The ‘middle passage’ of contemporary culture, as with slavery itself,” says Bhabha, “is a process of displacement and disjunction that does not totalize experience.” We therefore guarantee that those that come to us from Afghanistan–or try to–are disenfranchised because we deny them their “totalize(d) experience(s),” which requires that we acknowledge our role in their lives.
In the “Fate” chapter of The Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson’s most prodigious work–and most difficult–the sage asks, “How shall I live?” And then exerts the challenge, “We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevaling ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity.” That is, our limitations. Once we accept our limitations, the only recourse is to reach for the heart, which is where we live, what matters most. Our hearts.
We have to first grapple with our own demons, ask ourselves why we make the most vulnerable and good hearted suffer, and then change our ways. “We are sure, that, though we know not how,” says Emerson, “necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times.” I trust he’s right. And hope we can come to this in time for all my Afghan students to return to classes this spring–one more remains in Afghanistan still. I’m holding my breath for him. And he’ll arrive, Inshallah.
On January 30, 2009, CNN’s Campbell Brown interviewed Education Secretary Arne Duncan about the President’s $140 billion increase in federal money for education.
If the rest of the stimulus package proposed by the President and approved by Congress (the Senate is debating the package) is handled the way Secretary Duncan discussed the $140 billion increase in federal money for education we are in for a difficult ride. Duncan (University of Chicago Laboratory Schools / Harvard) is long on hyperbole, short on any understanding of the challenges facing education.
Duncan begins by trying to mirror Obama’s own rhetoric. “This is an extraordinary opportunity and if we want to become a strong economy again, the best thing we can do is have an educated work force.”
But how do we do this ? How are we going to meet the needs and challenges of our diverse society?
Says Duncan, “So the stimulus package is going to do a number of things. It’s going to help us [word missing in transcript here] a tremendous unmet capital needs and so it’s really going to be a huge opportunity to invest in infrastructure and several ready projects that we want to get to work on very early on, late spring and through the summer.
We want to save literally hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs. We’re very, very worried about tremendous cuts, devastating cuts in school districts and states around the country. We want to stay those off going into the fall. We want to continue to raise the bar academically, raise standards, raise expectations, and there’s opportunities in the stimulus package to do that.”
Wait. Capital needs, invest in infrastructure, ready projects, raise standards and expectations–what does all this mean?
It means that the Obama Administration is assuming that what we have to do is pour money into existing buildings, programs and the old ways of doing business in education without first spending some needed money to try and create an atmosphere of inquiry and critical assessment. We have to save teachers’ jobs, even if some of these teachers, like bankers and Wall Street types, don’t merit the jobs they hold. That is, the early money for the education stimulus package is going to be spent on bolstering what we already have without first trying to understand–and realizing–that what we have has gotten us into the pickle we’re in now.
When a society is in crisis, as is ours, it means that education has been in crisis for far longer.
Let’s not forget that highly educated people created the mortgage crisis, the disintegration of our financial systems and two wars. The educated people in our society argued for Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn’t exist–and they new it. Never before have so many highly educated people in America been without work and there’s none to be had in the not so distant future.
On the other end of the scale, in New York City, for instance, less than half of its students graduate high school. I asked New York City teachers why and the most resounding answer is that for over 50% of the students, the curriculum is totally irrelevant. They can’t identify with it at all. Add to that segregation, rampant in urban schools, family problems, health care problems, unemployment and no investment in capital needs is going to alleviate the suffering and move these people from a cycle of self-doubt, depression and hopelessness.
When Ms. Brown asked Duncan about No Child Left Behind, something he says he knows quite a bit about, he was tongue tied, unable to respond in any meaningful way about either the pluses or the minuses of the law.
“Well obviously,” said Duncan, “I’ve lived on the other side of the law for the past seven-and-a-half years so I have lots of strong opinions about it. But what I want to do is really get out this and travel the country, and I’ve about frequently as has President Obama [word missing from trranscript] that the philosophy behind it makes a lot of sense. We need to raise the bar, I would argue, we need to raise the bar even more and have high expectations. We want to hold people accountable.”
Is Duncan kidding? This is Bush rhetoric disguised in the Obama aura. Ms. Brown pushed harder. She asked Duncan to be specific.
CB: But be specific. I mean you certainly know about it, about No Child Left Behind and what it entails to have formed an opinion on whether it’s the right way to go.
DUNCAN: Yeah well again, philosophically, directionally, it’s the right way, but there’s many things in the invitation that we think we can improve on moving forward.
CB: Like what?
DUNCAN: There’s a number of things. I’m very interested in graduation rates, and we want to make sure more of our students are graduating from high school and prepared with college-ready, career-ready skills. I’m interested in raising the bar and having high standards. I’m also interested in growth towards those standards, how much a student is gaining each year. But again, I really want to get out…
Duncan here shows incredible hubris, appearing on CNN totally unprepared, reliant solely on the notion that the Obama magic carpet would carry. This tack is right out of the Bush White House playbook.
Campbell Brown was clearly frustrated and insisted. “Let me stop you because there’s specific complaints here, and the President has talked about them. He certainly did on the campaign trail. We have teachers saying that the reality of No Child Left Behind, is that because it uses testing to grade a school’s performance that many teachers find themselves teaching for the test. And again, the President has talked about this. Now, I assume that’s not what we think is best for the kids so how do you fix that?”
This was a unique opportunity for Duncan to address at least one reality of No Child Left Behind: for children in schools in socioeconomically deprived areas, the conditions set forth by this law stack up against success. For instance, in the past ten years we’ve moved aggressively against Brown v. the Board of Education. Schools today are more segregated than they were in 1954. Martin Luther King, Jr. High School, on Amsterdam Avenue in New York City, in the prestigious Lincoln Center neighborhood, has not attracted a single student from that community. They all go elsewhere so the high school is completely segregated, a hub of color among the affluent who walk around it and ignore it.
How do we raise standards and create an environment of accountability where the odds are always already against the most vulnerable? Secretary Duncan doesn’t demonstrate any understanding of this very real problem.
What we are in fact doing continuing down this mindless path, as cogently and elegantly discussed by Jonathan Kozol in The Shame of a Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, is returning to 1896 and the “separate but equal’ rationale found in Plessy v. Ferguson. Blindly and without much imagination, Duncan is advocating a rationale “for the perpetuation of a dual system in American society”(Kozol 34). This goes all the way through to college and beyond, to how we live in our communities deeply divided by the haves and the have nots. A segregated education system creates a segregated society, regardless of the color of the President. We are far from a post-race America.
“Higher standards, higher expectations, are insistently demanded of these urban principles, and of their teachers and the students in their schools, but far lower standards certainly in ethical respects appear to be expected of the dominant society that isolates these children in unequal institutions,” Kozol reminds us (34).
This is the heart of the matter, the most profound challenge facing our culture today. Isolation causes a feeling of inferiority and disenfranchisement. Kids and their families learn that the world of the Other is not their own. Different standards are in place. Children in the South Bronx, Newark, Washington Heights, areas of Brooklyn, as well as the South side of Chicago or Boston or Compton and South Central feel that they are not a part of the world around them; that they are indeed different, less capable, expectant eyes on them. The tools for success, as we measure it today, are hidden from them.
But Duncan has a solution, at least partially, he says. In Chicago they used money to motivate students, a program that pays kids for good grades: $50 for an A – $20 for a C and a straight-A student could earn $4,000 a year. Imagine the audacity and the extraordinary blindness of such a program. Teaching kids–and enforcing quite powerfully–the notion that the end result to all things is money. Isn’t that why we’re in the mess we’re in now? And what’s $4,000 a year? To a doubting, unmotivated young boy, for instance, existing among other cynical young boys (and I’m using boys purposefully here), watching for cops on a street corner or going down the block to pick up a nickel or dime bag will earn him three times that. So this kid finds himself in a bleak world where everyone is trying to buy him. He’s simply a means of exchange, not a young person with dreams and aspiration. He’ll never be able to find out what he’s good at; he’ll never be able to pursue a dream. (on teens and money attitudes )
On the other side of the socioeconomic scale, affluent parents will spend $4,000 dollars on character building summer camps for their sons already in good, solid schools; perhaps they’ll spend even more money and have their sons go abroad, study a foreign language, gaining an advantage in the global market place of ideas.
For the children from socioeconomically challenged communities, the solution is always the same: pull up your bootstraps, work harder.
Secretary Duncan is facing daunting problems and, so far, he is clueless as to how to proceed. He isn’t even showing that he understands what the problems are.
We have crossed a threshold into an age requiring new methods of collaboration–cooperation, collective action and complex interactions. This new emerging narrative is a transdisciplinary approach to getting things done, to learning, to knowledge production. But we are stuck in a 19th Century education model facing 21st Century problems and challenges.
Education is the key for a successful and fulfilling life. Education opens doors. But the world has changed and we have to determine whether education is ready to meet the needs of tomorrow. America is no longer dominant. New powers, Brazil, China and India, will continue to grow. Challenges are evident around every corner—global warming, terrorism, and limited resources. For the first time in human history, more people live in and around urban centers. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing exponentially. The key for negotiating all these challenges depends upon global cooperation focused on knowledge production, transaction, and exchange. Education, though, is still mired in an ancient silo approach—insular departments, idiosyncratic and narrow studies, the privileging of work done in isolation. The school isolated from the life of the community. We need new methods for training the next generation of leaders, our students.
If every institution is going to be scrutinized, education must be also. Here are the areas we must redefine (nothing Duncan is talking about):
- segregated communities and schools that lead to self-doubt and isolation must be challenged; revitalization of Brown v. the Board of Education
- teachers unions that in the past have provided great benefits to teachers now also provide protection for incompetence and tie the hands of those who would discipline and re-educate and dismiss; if in other sectors of our society we can get rid of the garbage, in education we have to do the same
- technology, lacking in all schools but which should be ubiquitous, should not merely be for communication; technology must be used to create and develop new forms of knowledge construction; OpenSource and OpenCourseware must be utilized to their full capacity, developing new ways of collaborating across disciplines and across populations
- the role of the teacher can no longer be defined by a 19th Century model; the teacher has to be versed in new technologies, psychologies of learning, sociology and economics and how these create social constructions that pre-define our communities and our students–and be able to speak to these and challenge these in collaboration with students, community leaders and families
- community problems need not be left outside the school’s door, but rather, be at the heart of a curriculum that is inquiry based and whose outcomes are measured not by a standardized test, but by the community’s implementation of solutions students and teachers provide
- in many communities suffering because of disenfranchisement, the school has to be the community center; that is, it must be the community organizing hub, the health center (emergency services, routine physicals, administration of prescriptions), job center, the place for social networking and spiritual support, this way the entire community is involved in the production of knowledge
- the production of knowledge cannot continue to be done in silos, divided into disciplines as if the problems of a community and the identities of its citizens are somehow outside the domain of knowledge construction; teachers must collaborate with each other, team teaching in many cases, exploiting the benefits of a transdisciplinary approach that requires the uses of technology
- the only true test of knowledge is application–tests, particularly high stakes standardized tests are absolutely opposed to this truth; in the 21st Century, the era of cooperation and collaboration, knowledge production that requires technologies, the standardized test is obsolete, like trying to cross an ocean in a canoe
- colleges and universities have to adopt school districts and work jointly to address the needs of their respective communities; colleges and universities have to put down their ivied walls and embrace their communities
- the disparity in salaries between those teachers working in socioeconomically challenged communities and those that do not has to be equalized because this is one of the most profound moral inequities in our culture today
These are only some of the challenges facing us today that, I would argue, require that we in education engage in a process of re-evaluation and re-definition because continuing with the same rhetoric we’ve heard for the past 10 years, and which now Duncan is continuing, will guarantee that we not move one step forward in meeting the complex demands of the 21st Century. And if we don’t like what the Education Department is doing, then our moral imperative, taking a page from bell hooks, must be to teach to transgress.
Education is the last vestige of hope we have for a healthy society. But hope is on a tightrope.
The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat ~ or What Alex Rodriguez, Esmailyn “Smiley” Gonzalez, R. Allen Stanford and Bernie Madoff Have in Common
Illustrator Barry Blitt has done it again. He has created yet another great New Yorker cover that parallels the one he did of Obama back in July of 2008. Only now, in the February 23 issue, we find a muscular Alex Rodgriguez signing autographs for steroid pumped children.
Blitt New Yorker -- Rodriguez
The illustration captures the conflicting drama of sports in America today: while we’ve been taught that sports–and particularly baseball–are about community, fair play, honor and courage, the notion that a player works as hard as she and he can for the benefit of the team, we find instead another reality–selfishness and hubris, egotism, deceit, cheating and scandal. And all of it the design of a production system that suggests that winning at any cost is what matters most.
The fundamental American principles of self-reliance, experience and pragmatism are nowhere evident. It’s no wonder we’re all confused.
Baseball was about redemption. It is a forgiving sport for players and viewers; it is also a contemplative sport. The point of baseball is to “come home”–round the bases home. It’s a space game. There’s plenty of time in baseball. But none of this is true anymore. Baseball is as harsh a sport as any other. Home is where the gold is. Possibilities are gone, as is the imagination. Like football, our current national pastime, baseball is now a finite game, about end results. And the end result is not winning, but rather, profit and loss.
In 2008, the 33 year old Rodriguez had a .302 average (.306 lifetime) and earned $28 million dollars. Coming into the 2008 season, the Yankees were valued somewhere between $200 million, to $1.2 billion; their revenue was $302 million (with $28 million in losses); and player costs, the largest expense, was approximately $200 million a year.
“The Yankees—read Steinbrenner—also own more than a third of the YES network, which broadcasts Yankees games to 8.7 million subscribers. The network’s revenues top a quarter billion and its profit margin is 60 percent. Though a completely separate business from the Yankees, YES’s value is directly tied to how much interest people have in the team, making a $200 million payroll a very easy decision.”**
The system corrupts. The profits for many owners, staggering. And players like Rodriguez are used to ensure that a franchise’s tentacles are many and reaching far and wide. It’s not surprising, then, that “A top baseball prospect from the Dominican Republic who received a $1.4 million signing bonus from the Washington Nationals lied about his age and name in what team president Stan Kasten called ‘an elaborate scheme.’”*** The Nationals signed a 16-year-old shortstop named Esmailyn “Smiley” Gonzalez. He was compared to U.S. Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith. “But while the Nationals have been listing his date of birth as Sept. 21, 1989 — which would make him 19 now — Kasten said on Wednesday that a Major League Baseball investigation determined Gonzalez was actually Carlos David Alvarez Lugo, born in November 1985 — meaning he was really 23.” ****
Money corrupts and the prospects of a lot of money earned early and fast corrupts even more. That’s the game now. That’s been American life for quite some time. This is why we can’t see ourselves coming out of this black hole for quite some time.
We learn from the historian Richard O. Davies, in Sports in American Life, A History, that “to be a sporting man in the mid-nineteenth century was to be someone who flouted rules of social acceptability by gravitating toward activities deemed inappropriate for a proper gentleman.” By mid-century this changed and sportsmen had good social standing and created outlets such as boating, swimming, horse racing, baseball, and so on. And by the end of the century, spontaneity is gone from sports and we find “formalized structures, written rules and bureaucratic organizations,” Davies tells us. Professionalism in sports is in–and it comes in with industrialization. Money–read profits–becomes central to the American experience.
Now in 2009, we have incredibly lavish sports venues, extraordinary media contracts and more highly paid stars than ever before. The stakes are high. So so much so that sports venues are sometimes created at the expense of communities nearby–the old Yankee Stadium and the South Bronx is a case in point.
The athlete as role model, in this system, is supplanted by the owner as king. The owner as plantation owner in a vituperative economic model dating back to slavery (see: William C. Rhodan, sports columnist for The New York Times, in Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete /a star like David Beckham, at the time of this writing, is about to be traded–not loaned–to AC Milan). Money is privileged above all else. The premium placed on performance is extensive because the faster, bigger, and more powerful athlete has to hold the viewer’s attention. Salaries and on and off the field mayhem (Phelps’s pot smoking theatrical) are all part of the mediated experience of sports in America. Without it we don’t know what to make of our sports. We need the disjointed narrative to make sense of our oppressive lives that, with every day, appear to hang by a thread.
Phelps + Bong
Professional sports mirror American life and the reflection is bleak and dark. The American athlete is central to our collective experience. The professional athlete is a metaphor for our sense of self, our desires–but also our foibles, our darkest selves. It’s not surprising, then, that during these the darkest of times Mixed Marshall Arts, which used to be called caged fighting, extreme fighting, and no holds barred fighting, is one of the fastest growing spectator sports. Anything goes.
Bernie Madoff and R. Allen Stanford believed this–anything and everything was for their taking. Not unlike Rodriguez and “Smiley”-Lugo, Madoff and Stanford, who lived in an elite system, a bubble, sensed that they were somehow immune to the morals of our society and our socioeconomic systems. Rodriguez’s ready-made narrative is that he was young and naive, a stupid kid. Unknowingly he took steroids. In the case of “Smiley”-Lugo, MLB, agents and owners are all passing the buck, no one really taking responsibility, though there is a history of age irregularities in the league.
Why a 70 year old Madoff, so respected by Wall Street, would create a Ponzi Scheme, your guess is as good as mine. And why would Stanford involve himself in fraud is yet another mystery. But most distressing is the information we’re getting that some of the Madoff money comes from organized crime, while some of the money in the Stanford case comes from a Mexican drug cartel. Madoff and Stanford have allegedly been involved in money laundering. Anything goes, including the taking of people’s lives.
Madoff and Stanford, and Rodriguez and “Smiley”-Lugo are one and the same, born in a time where hubris reigns supreme; where what children see and experience is irrelevant–some will suffer, others will pull themselves up by their bootstraps and survive, and yet others, like those kids in the Blitt New Yorker cartoon will imitate Madoff and Stanford, Rodriguez and “Smiley”-Lugo. This is the most corrupting tragedy of all. Everyone is expendable. And when everyone is expendable, everyone is also a commodity.
Steroids, graft and corruption, these are the symptoms of a lost humanity.
In “Money for Idiots,” David Brooks tells us that, “Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.”
This is the ideal, not the reality. We find ourselves in a moment of real moral oscillation. We don’t know which end is up. We can only look at ourselves, though, and determine who and what we value,what’s closest to the human heart, what’s important. It may mean that in order to balance ourselves out, we have to also balance out idiots–but not criminals–as Brooks contends in his editorial piece.
In the meantime, in the South Bronx, within view of Yankee Stadium, a little girl, Pineapple is her name, Jonathan Kozol tells us in The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, looks out towards Manhattan and describes us as “other people.” She fully understands that we live differently than she does–and she’s only in elementary school. What she sees–the Rodriguez’s and the Madoff’s and the Stanford’s–are what she calls “other people,” and they live different lives, touted as successful, luxuriant, wonderful. Just to get to school, Pineapple and friends have to walk through all sorts of dangers. As she looks outward past Yankee Stadium, how will she learn how to choose? Who will she be given who we are?
