Tiger Woods, the American

August 15, 2010 by hector 7 Comments

In 1996, Sports Illustrated named Tiger Woods “Sportsman of the Year.” Senior writer Gary Smith suggested that Woods was the “Chosen One,” a special person who would forever banish racial prejudice from golf. Woods once said to a journalist that he should refer to him as “Cablinasian” — his mother, Kutilda, is Asian, one-half Thai, one-quarter Chinese, and one-quarter white; his father, Earl, a graduate of Kansas State University, who pursued a career in the Army as a Green Beret and experienced intense action in Vietnam, is one-half African American and one-quarter American Indian and one-quarter Asian. Woods was even named after a South Vietnamese lieutenant colonel, Vuong Dang “Tiger” Phong, a friend of his father’s, a man whose bravery earned him his nickname. Not unlike our President, Tiger Woods is an amalgam of America. He is our American. He represents who we are. We look to find our story in his image. But things change. And in these changes, we find a troubled Tiger Woods that resembles the rest of us, the state of America itself. Tiger Woods is the athlete of our times, the sign of our times.

In the Fog, Whistling Straights

What is confusing, following Tiger Woods’ worst tournament performance ever, is that we’re not sure what we’re seeing. We want to look — but we also want to turn away, the weight of disappointment and disillusionment is too much. Woods is man alone, besieged by personal demons. His “tiger” has been cut down. He is a wandering soul, Ishmael floating on an empty coffin in a vast ocean, no trace of the Pequod. We fear we’re navigating open waters as Ishmael does in Moby Dick, an American tale about shipping off on a narrative not of our own making, that doesn’t even consider ours. Woods — as we are — is trying to understand it all. The narrative fell from his hands; it’s now intertwined with the American story in a fine coil. Woods is the American story writ large. That’s why we’re watching. Woods is a mirror of America and in it we find that we have fallen. We’re staggering with Woods, tied for 36th place, 1under par after the second day at the foggy, wet greens of Whistling Straights. Into the fourth round, Woods is in 31st place, 3 under par. Nick Watney, leading the group on Sunday, is 13 under par. It’s an American drama.

The first such prognostication of an American future comprised of extreme, almost orgasmic highs and dark and ominous lows where bearings are hard to find comes to us from literature, Henry James‘ The American. In James’ hands, Christopher Newman is the epitome of America’s individualism, self-determination, and pragmatism. Newman has risen economically — and he thinks socially. He has risen above his station using the inherent possibilities emerging in this new American economy.

In the opening scene of the novel, we find Christopher Newman, “on a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868,” a “gentleman.” In America, Newman has done something unthinkable in old Europe: through hard work and determination — and a marketplace — he’s risen above his station. He has stripped himself of an old class and entered a new one. He hasn’t inherited anything; he’s worked for his wealth. He’s a salesman. And where we find this new American, in the opening scene, is in the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre.

Newman is a strong sexual presence — as is America (even with the heavy hands of Puritanism and Christian fundamentalism weighty on our backs), as is Woods, as are the heroes we genuflect to. (Brett Favre will play for the Vikings because he’s a man, and his heroic sense of self keeps our own in place at a time when we need it most. We need him to play, as badly as he needs to play.) Newman is reclining “at ease on the great circular divan” that occupies the center of the Salon Carré, “his head thrown back and his legs outstretched” and “staring at Murillo’s beautiful moon-borne Modonna in profound enjoyment of his posture.” James tells us that Newman, on the ottoman, “had taken serene possession of its softest spot.” It doesn’t get anymore sexual in James. Legs outstretched, head thrown back, a moon-borne Madonna and the possession of a sweet spot. Newman is taking it all in. The experience is about him, not the Louvre, not the art–him, solipsism so refined that it becomes aesthetically and morally attractive. James is keen on making sure we understand this. Newman’s “profound enjoyment” is “his posture,” nothing else. The art is secondary, a foil for his fantasy,which reigns supreme. From hubris this profound, only a great fall is possible. This is the American story: we expect our heroes to rise above it all but we want them to fall, and fall hard and fast. This is how we live today, frightened that we may fall, quickly and precipitously, into an abyss. As our heroes rise again, we’re then appeased, our anxieties forgotten for a moment — a momentary stay against the confusion. We want to see our heroes rise again — the “come back kid,” Bill Clinton filled this void; President Obama, of mixed race, black, and far from a promising candidate early on, beat all odds and became the leader of the most powerful nation in the world. Hollywood, here, can only follow; it can’t make this up. And in this story is the idealism we cherish: hard work and determination, self-realiance, manhood, the male coming to the rescue of the down and out. We need this story like no other.

Ideologies are manufactured narratives meant to conceal control; that is, the purpose of an ideology is to ensure servitude, not allegiance to the self, to one’s own journey. Christopher Newman is in Europe to take. He doesn’t even want the original art found in the Louvre, James tells us, but rather, he prefers the copy. We prefer the illusion — the illusion of knowing, the illusion of loving, the illusion of community, as Chris Hedges argues in Empire of Illusion.

Tiger Woods lived in a bubble of illusion. As Christopher Newman embarks on a harrowing moral journey of discovery, confused by his winner take all attitude that runs counter to an old, traidtional — and conservative — culture, Tiger Woods’ evolution left behind the powerful weight that human emotions can bring on one. When he was but two years old, he would sit for hours in a high-chair watching his father hit practice golf balls into a net. One day he climbed down from the high chair and picked up a plastic toy club and took a swing almost the mirror of his father’s. At the age of 3, he appeared on the Mike Douglas Show and putted effeciently against a respectable golfer, comedian Bob Hope. By the age of 5 he could hit golf balls with power and control. By the age of 6, he had scored two holes in one. And by the end of the 2005 season, Woods had won 10 tournaments (4 Masters, 2 US Opens, 2 British Opens, and 2 PGA tournaments) and 45 PGA tournaments despite playing in only 20 events a year. To get here, Woods’ parents sacrificed a lot, paying for teachers and green fees. The parents never pushed — Tiger was driven. He played competitive matches with his father. Earl took to distracting him, suddenly talking when he swung or jingling the change in his pocket as he prepared to putt. Earl even clapped his hands. Both father and son have said that this psychological testing helped Tiger learn to control his nerves and concentrate.

This training is not working now. The development of Tiger Woods, as is evident, left a gaping hole where emotions rule. Never has Tiger Woods needed to confront his identity in such harrowing depths. What he carries is beyond jingling change in his father’s pocket. In many ways, we’ve been fooled by the same psychological testing: we’ve been merely sailing along on the illusion that something is going on in the world — the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa — but nothing is off center here; we’ve been coasting along, much as Ishmael first does on the Pequod or Newman does as he sails away to Europe on the burgeoning American myth of endless growth and possibility, without centering, without an anchor on what is virtuous. Tiger Woods is the exemplar of this model; his narrative parallels our own in that our hyperindividualism has concealed the web of deceit that created the mess we’re in now — and with no light in sight.

Tiger Woods has controlled Golf’s narrative since the age of 21, when having turned professional just six months earlier, stunned the sports world when he did the seeming impossible by winning the prestigious Masters Tournament on his first try in 1997 by a record-setting 12 strokes, establishing a new tournament record with a score of 270. At the age of 21, Tiger Woods was already in the rarified endorsement league of Michael Jordan. This “Cablinasian” representative of the melting pot, out of nowhere, through the American rhetoric of will, determination and hard work, guided by the gentle hands of his parents, rose to prominence. And America sighed relief, a “Chosen One” was born and his mild manner, professional interviews, and mere grace and beauty made us feel secure. This is how sports and media work to channel our ideals back to us in reassuring ways.

But none of this is real, even as we watch Woods struggle in the fog of Whistling Straights. The only thing real about this chapter in our story is the fog and the delay of game. Nature, the world around us, is suggesting that we’re not in control and the control we thought we had has created our downward spiral — as happens on the Pequod and as happens to Christopher Newman. Tiger Woods’ attempt to redeem himself is our very own.

Filed under Class, Fundamentalism, Media, Race and Ethnicity, cultural studies, golf, philosophy, sport in America, tiger woods

The Uncanny Decline

July 28, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

It’s uncanny, but one quick view of the headlines can make anyone’s head spin — Afghanistan is a chaotic shambles, a fog, Wall Street gains, Main Street loses, education is heading in the wrong directions (NY just reported record low test scores) and many schools opting out of the dubiously title Race to the Top.

What else?

WikiLeaks, the Russians want more biotech corn, an 88 year old former Nazi is charged with the mass murder of Jews, health insurance is in disarray–everywhere–and states want Fed help, no energy legislation, muscle flexing — South Korea and the US began their largest joint war games, Sunday, which includes a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and North Korea threatens retaliation.

And less we forget, Sheryl Sharrod’s story — the bogus notion that we’re somehow in a post-race America, whisked in by Obama’s magic carpet ride.

No one can make this up! This is who we are.

It’s no wonder we want to put our heads in the sand — or into a tall Vodka! There are no jobs and Americans continue to suffer. There is no future, and Americans are worried sick. There is no leadership, and congress continues to bicker, schoolyard kids arguing for who gets to control the swings, each side trying to bully the other. A great example being set by our alleged leaders.

We are definitely and assuredly spiraling downward.

The first to make us aware was Paul Kennedy, in his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987!). Readers balked, but, nevertheless, were glued to his chapter, “The United States: The Problem of Number One in Relative Decline”:

the United States … cannot avoid confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power that occupies the ‘number one’ position in world affairs: whether, in the military/strategical realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain those commitments; and whether, as an intimately related point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of ever-shifting patterns of global production.

Of course, the United States has not been able to adjust to the “ever-shifting patterns of global production.” This is obvious. As Kennedy points out, the “decision-making structure that permits a proper grand strategy to be carried out” has to be robust. It’s not, we know this now too. Why? Because, historically, the United States has relied heavily on the mechanisms of “piracy” and protectionism in its development, ensuring the world view of the United States as a predator. It’s not by chance that the single most problematic piece of military hardware is the predator drone.

What we are experiencing in this global paradigm shift is a crisis in Education, writ large. That is, we are having problems synthesizing information, siphoning through the wreckage that is mass media induced information, communication, and, most importantly, we are having great difficulty analyzing and putting into practice our historical antecedents. We forget them, toss these out. We are therefore in a global crisis of knowledge, lead by the United States — we shun it. I mean, let’s be real, Sarah Palin is a character that can sway people, even perhaps elections and she doesn’t even know Geography, for God’s sake. How can we blame children for not succeeding in school when someone such as Palin can become a mouth piece for democracy (lower case) and our political system?

In Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Chris Hedges, says that, “The multiple failures that beset the country from out mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of our institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite.” Elite institutions do only a “mediocre job of teaching students to question and think”; their focus, instead, is “on creating hordes of competent systems managers.” All creativity vanishes and hierarchies with clear parameters and highly rewarded specialists blossom. “It destroys, the search for a common good,” says Hedges. In this world, we want TV wrestling and pornography, a reality based on illusion and the notion that consumption is an inner compulsion. The corporation has won.

In 1995, John Ralston Saul already saw this, too, in his The Unconscious Civilization: “What is more contemptible than a civilization that scorns knowledge of itself.” Saul told us that, “The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.” Historically, then, we have shifted from an American culture of production to a culture of consumption; with it, our values and philosophy — community, self-reliance, equal rights and justice — have vanished and we find ourselves in a new a quite harrowing world that embraces, as Saul says, a dominant ideology: corporatism — junk culture and junk politics.

Where do we go from here?

Filed under Citizenship, Class, Media, Militarism, Obama Administration, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, corruption, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, philosophy, politics, the University Tagged with , , , ,

The Uncanny Parrilla: Cooking Outdoors the Argentinean Way

July 21, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

I finally committed to constructing a parrilla (open grill) — the traditional barbecue of Argentina.  It’s really not accurate to call it a barbecue since “to barbecue” is rather sinful in Argentina.  For the Argentinean, the barbecue is way too fast, way too production oriented — the fast food of outdoor grilling. On a parrilla, we Argentinians cook an asado — a slow, carefully orchestrated, wood fired cooking of all sorts of meats.  In the US, we’re not accustomed to cooking the entire cow; Argentinians waste not and cook everything, including the ear, which I tried once.

parrilla

La Parrilla

I built this parrilla to coincide with a rock wall that runs along the back of my house.  I picked up on this model parrilla when I was in Mendoza with my family a few years back.  We stayed in an estancia in the Andes.  After our return form horseback riding, the estancia owner had prepared an asado for us.  The parrilla was made of stone and a large circle; the grill itself, the parrilla proper, sat in the middle.  I made a mental note of it.  This is perfect for the country.

My sisters-in-law complained mildly that it takes too long.  But this is the point — slow food.  The wood is burned to create coal; then you order the coal about so that you have different cooking heat levels across the parrilla. In the above picture, one can see buns, burgers and swordfish all cooking at the same time.  It’s only possible when heat is distributed.  The other fine result is that the food tastes great.  This is always immediately noticed — usually the first or second comment.  It’s because of the wood, in this case coming from my land. In fact, the only non-local item in this asado is the swordfish, brought to us from Harbor Fish by my sister-in-law who lives in Maine.

Asado

Asado in Full

I made by parrilla following the advise of my family, emailing me directions from Buenos Aires.  They sent me some links and I followed some design options from Casa Original. My parrilla is approximately 7″ high, 32″ long and about 18″ wide.  It’s also a double decker, meaning that the deck on top is half the size and is also removable.  This allows for the moving of very slow cooking food to another level.  The parrilla was welded together, following my design, by Brown’s Welding, Bristol, Vermont.

Cooking

Cooking the Asado

Creating the fire is intuitive — all great makers of asados will tell you that.  You have to know something about how certain woods burn and taste.  You have to know something about adding or moving logs to create the energy wanted.  But the cooking is something else altogether.  Meat cooking is special.  At our house, the bible is Seven Fires, Grilling the Argentine Way by Francis Mallmann, probably the premier “asado chef” in the world.  The book is to die for and I’m thankful Ginny, my wife’s first cousin’s wife — and Argentinean — gave it to me as a present..  Since we have our own cow and we’re trying to work with everything locally, right from our small farm, another gospel of meat, given to us by our large animal vet, Al, who, with his wife, Diane, produce the incredible and famed Animal Farm Butter, is The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

The parrilla and the subsequent asado blends two cultures — Vermont’s America and Argentine; it also is a great way to spend time with the family around the fire watching the meat cook slowly.  We’re looking forward to breads and vegetables, appetizers and even desserts.

Filed under cooking, cultural studies, the Environment Tagged with , , , ,

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day 4 – PM)

June 6, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

NCORE

NCORE

In the afternoon and final session  for me, I went to a documentary, Muslim Cool:

Muslim Cool

Themes: Citizenship, Race and Ethnicity, Religion, Fundamentalism, Freedom of Speech, Militarism, Homeland Security, The Constitution of the US, the Environment, Love and Marriage, Gangbangers, Drugs and Violence, Class, Socio-Economic insecurity

You name it, this movie asks that we re-think our tendency to over-classify the Other; thus the dominant class evolves a narrative contracdictory to the Other’s lived experience.  New Muslim Cool defines hotpoints in a changing and (hopefully) evolving society that pits race, ethnicity and class against the perceptions of a dominant class that willingly enables surveillance and force as means of negating the narrative of the Other, those people that look and behave differently then what’s mythologized as the norm: the answer to happiness is a wide birthed consumerism that externalizes those that can’t.

Filed under Obama Administration, Socio-Economic insecurity, america's apartheid system of education, corruption, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, war on drugs

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day 4 – AM)

June 6, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

NCORE

NCORE

Day 4
10:30-noon
Magnolia 2/ Hotel Level 2

Special Feature Presentation

“Hip-Hop and the Politics, Hip-Hop and Race“
Bakari Kitwana –Public Intellectual, assisting what academics are doing; runs “Rap Sessions”, www.rapsessions.org, and organization trying to go back to “old school” – scholars, activists, artists that travel the country

(Note: an interesting conversation about the intersection of hip-hop culture and attempts to engage youth politically.   Hip-hop – non mainstream, not what we hear on the airwaves – provides avenues for engagement, ways of talking to youth.  Kitwana’s RapSessions are interesting too because these bring together artists, journalists and rap performers.)

Intro

•    works with hip-hop artists and scholars, a way of changing the equation
•    showed clips first, then an interview

Q & A

Q.: Is hip-hop relevant?  Commercial hip-hop only pushes people to be sexually active.

BK:  Yes, because nothing else has evolved that is not totally controlled by “some” aspect of the mainstream. Hip-hop could be a random way of communicating with each other.  Chuck D said that hip-hop is Black America’s CNN.  Globally, hip-hop is being used creatively.

Q.: Why do white kids love hip-hop?  It’s said that 80% of all hip-hop is bought by white kids — what is their responsibility?

BK: It’s never been documented that 80% is the number.  No one really knows.  Currently, there’s a rise of hip-hop activism on college campuses. I see it. I visit many campuses year ’round; they’re usurping political action committees. This is a multiracial movement.  Hip-hop exists as a political vanguard right now.

Q: The National Hip-Hop Convention, how did it come about?

BK: It started when students began working and protesting against apartheid in South Africa.  That’s the era of the Third World Press and the advent of Henry Louis Gates and I knew that I knew more, much more about hip-hop then Gates could ever.  It was also the era of Dan Quayle and his “American Values” campaign.  When I went to The Source, I began working and writing on closer relations between artists and politics.  I wanted — we wanted — to bring a closer relationship and political awareness to the new generation through hip-hop.  This was the beginning of an idea about convening a national convention.  At first, no one thought the idea good — but then things changed and we sat around a table — journalists, political activists, muscians, and the idea gained traction.

Q.: How is hip-hop used for political activism?

BK: the actual political organizing of youth happened around the Kerry run for presidents and it evolved, 2004-06.  The crux of my new book is about this so I went and interviewed young political organizers to see how this is done and where we might go from here. The problem now is that you have a Black man in office and young people might say, “What now?”  The time is crucial now and we only have a small window to keep  young people’s heads in the game.  The questions now are — “where are young people today?” and “how do we keep them engaged?

We have to turn to people like Mattie Weiss and Adolph L. Reed, Jr (see his: Is Obama Rewriting his Resume?)

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, america's apartheid system of education, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, the University

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day 3-PM-2)

June 4, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

NCORE

NCORE

2:45-4:15 (Baltimore 5/Convention Center, Level 2)
75-Minute Concurrent Session
“Social Justice Pedagogy Across the Curriculum”

Curricular/Pedagogical Models

Lee Anne Bell, PhD, Professor, Director of the Education Program, Barnard College, Columbia University – New York, New York  lbell@barnard.edu

Glen David Kueker, PhD, Associate Professor, Political Science Department, DePauw University—Greencastle, Indiana gkuecker@depauw.edu

Kamakshi Murti, PhD, Professor of German, Emerita, Middlebury College – Middlebury, Vermont  kmurti@middlebury.edu

Rob Root, PhD, Associate Professor, Mathematics Department, Lafayette College—Easton, Pennsylvania robroot@lafayette.edu

Kathleen Skubikowski, PhD, Associate Professor of English, and Assistant Dean for Instruction, Middlebury College – Middlebury, Vermont   skubikow@middlebury.edu

Catharine Wright, Lecturer in Writing, Acting Associate Director of Writing, Middlebury College—Middlebury, Vermont  cwwright@middlebury.edu

Kennedy Mugo, Student, Political Science, Middlebury College

Intro

•    Kathy: 3rd time coming together, 2005-06, supported by Mellon Foundation; produce collection of essays, second meeting; third time NCRE 23
•    Premise: social just classrooms need socially just academies; faculty are more willing to take pedagogical risks; social justice ed is the responsibility of faculty across the curriculum
•    Social justice education must move beyond a few faculty; has to be thought of a shared endeavor across constituency
•    Institutions have been challenged before; 1970s, writing across the curriculum asked faculty to step out of comfort field; digital technology challenge that has transformed the classroom, committing to spread IT across disciplines
•    Many liberal arts institutions are challenged by developing social justice work
•    We’re being asked to question our courses, perspectives, etc; a call to re-examine our own assumptions, making ourselves objects of inquiry
•    Sharing personal histories and disciplines

Talk

•    (Kamakshi): deliberative dialog –enable people to talk about difficult subjects
•    involves reading and thinking together; how to address and take action
•    humanities teacher has a challenge to bring this forth
•    general framework: identify an issue that is of common concern: discover other people’s interests, group in clusters, research, interviewing citizens, recognize tensions, list actions and test; convene community forums
•    (Kueker): conflict analysis began early in career; 2000, involved in Ecuador as an activist, then drawn to academic questions and writing about social movements – lead to an intersection of activism and academic work; 2006, writing about human rights and mining; firewall between activist work and academic work, following letters of protest from mining company; created an organization, non-profit: what happens when activist work runs into conflict with private goals and needs? What do we talk about when we speak about a socially just institution?
•    (Root): loose working group of mathematicians working since 2006 making the connection btwn social justice and mathematics; at least 3 points of contact btwn mathematics and social justice: (1) mathematical theory of social interaction (evolutionary game theory) – how is it we behave in cooperative ways? How do we get to a society that is fair and socially just?  We all care about motive; (2) mathematics as a tool to delineate and understand and work for social justice, such as theories of voting – could we create a voting system that eliminates vote splitting? Wealth and income inequality, seeing the trends, along with scarce resources; (3) using mathematics to rest equitable treatment that insists on competition and self-reliance – we need to first understand what we deserve? – math as social justice
•    for instance, looking at sustainability; or looking, in stats,  at wealth distribution inequality, which has been going on for 30 years; debt and access to credit to use these to understand interest payments
•   (Catharine): slaughter and conquest in standard English, bell hooks; what do we do not to hear the sound of slaughter in students’ writings and in our own; we can vary assignments – citizen scholar; balance emotional and cognitive, personal and academic; using the language of the senses, from all parts of our being; we can learn the language of scholarship, but include our emotional side; studying and observing and taking in our feelings as we study; social justice writing balances reason and emotion; varied writing assignments – formal, informal; how do we validate an informal paper?;  we can also assign personal papers
•    any faculty can read and re-educate; we tend to teach writing as it was taught to us
•   (Bell): artists and teachers and undergraduate to teach about race and racism in the arts; notion of story when interviewing gatekeepers in higher ed (several hundred interviews); people often told stories to get across a point: how can we use stories to get at social justice?; model on a white board: starts with “counter storytelling community”(informed by critical race theory) – how do we challenge stock stories that are told in mainstream curriculum?; “concealed stories” are not hidden, but suppressed and provide a lens for critiquing stock stories; “resistance stories,” that are in our lore about people who have challenged racism and have much to learn from; “emerging transforming stories” – emerge from a historical and social grounding, they have roots that we need to understand and connect to our history and are transforming – all this (hopefully) lead to change or new stock stories; used to frame a course on student teaching – used to look at stock stories about “white privileged” students going into the city to teach; also used to think about curriculum being used in classrooms
•    (Mugo): perspective as poli sci major; braindrain: a better education is always sought elsewhere, not in Kenya; class examples (1) intro to poli philosophy – “learning about our history” – she didn’t look at Mugo; switched off immediately; (2) international political economy: all data from the American political view (Middlebury from one perspective); (3) economics – learned models, concluding that models have not worked in the past because they were based on western economy; African economic development is not a part of the discourse; point of view is created by dominant class; students are not armed to empower the oppressed people: what’s the use of education if the educated can helped the oppressed?  Let’s all fit into the white man’s model; has come to learn what it is to be ‘invisible’

Filed under composition and rhetoric, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, technology and education, the University

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day3-PM)

June 4, 2010 by hector 4 Comments

NCORE

NCORE

NOTE: this is a very important topic, handled with grace and professionalism! Excellent, informative session.

1:15-2:30 (National Harbor 4/Convention Center, Level 2)
75-Minute Concurrent Session
“Toward a Male Student Imperative in Higher Education: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity Revealed”

T. Elon Delancy II, PhD, Assistant Professor, Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education, The University of Oklahoma – Norman, Oklahoma  tedancy@ou.edu

James Earl Davis, PhD, Professor, College of Education, Temple University – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  jdavis21@temple.edu

Lorenzo L. Esters, EdD, Vice President, Office for Access and the Advancement of Public Black Universities, Association of Public Land-Grant Universities –Washington, DC  lesters@aplu.org

Terrell L. Strayhorn, PhD, Associate Professor and Special Assistant to the Provost; and Director, Center for Higher Education Research & Policy (CHERP), University of Tennessee – Knoxville, Tennessee  strayhorn@utk.edu

Intro

•    Scholars, researchers, leaders – discuss the American Male and higher education; get behind the hype, talk about research (what do we know); how does race and ethnicity inform the hype

Talk

•    (Esters/Presenter): Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the oldest organization in the US
•    American Male Imperative: raise retention of males –hispanic, Af AM, Native Americans
•    Obama has challenged all Americans to push higher ed to be leaders by 2020; APLGU, raise tertiary attainment of the 25-34 year old pop from 41% to 55% by 2025
•    8.7 more degrees
•    If we did nothing else, from current state, we can achieve this goal
•    Getting to 55% by 2025: need to look at particularly populations? Current state: 24-35 = 41.06%; males: 36.11% (decrease) females have increased, but there are more males in the US population btwn 24-35, but in higher ed, the reverse is true in higher ed 1 male = 1.4 females
•    Greater percentage of foreign males is greater than female
•    US. Dept of Ed, national center for education studies (source) – good data here
•    How does the US compare: we rank 20 in enrollment; projection for 2018: male 41% – female 59%
•    Why is this important: impacts competitive knowledge base of workforce; creates economic difficulties and social disparities
•    Key Questions: how might public and research U’s best promote success; is there a need for further research to optimize learning?; what measures are appropriate to monitor performance; what roles might public research U’s help transfers from community colleges where more minorities are enrolled?; what are the interventions necessary?; what impact do demography and preparation have on male/female retention
•    (Davis/Presenter) : (1) larger picture about gender gaps, drawing on the larger earlier picture; (2) smaller study Davis completed that connect to a larger issue of engagement, particularly black men; (3) institutional based practices and how we socialize organize activities in institutions
•    potential loss in skill sets; gaps create economic and social disparity; economic reinvestments in communities
•    Ambivalence to Focus on Men: history of male privilege in higher ed; fear of slowing progress made on women; limited resources – where do the come from?; displaced attention to the needs of the population
•    College Men Paradox: the “problem” of African American, Latino, and Indigenous males in higher ed: Paradox: the progress we’ve made, increased attention, and the paradox diverts attention away from problems of college men generally – retention and graduation problems; fix the problem and growing imbalance btwn gender
•    What do we know? 47% high school grad rates; 10.4% male undergraduates; 30.5% are athletes; over 65% fail to graduate within 6 years (similar data about Latino males)
•    Transition through higher education: a pipeline issue/framework
•    Socialization at the Intersection of Race and Gender: boys receive different social rewards for pronounced masculine behaviors (Adler, Klass and Adler 1991); Elementary school teachers report unique concerns that inhibit boys’ learning potential and development (Stipek, 2004); Early socialization experiences may be more rigid for Black boys; quickly understand the social rewards with exhibiting hegemonic masculine behavior (Lasan, et al, 2000); adultification of Black boys
•    Engagement in College: well-rehearsed gender roles by time of college enrollment (Connell, 1996; Reese 2004); masculine sub-culture places academics at lower position than more acceptable social alternatives (Harper, 2008); adopt gender-specific beliefs regarding study habits and social activities
•    What’s manly on campus?: Czopp and Lasane, 1998: not being concerned about academic performance; academically organized and studious are less masculine and less socially attractive than disorganized and less conscientious male students
•    Tension btwn important academic activities and more traditional masculine behaviors (Skelton, 2002); beliefs and behaviors are inconsistent with norms of academic engagement (Davis, 2006); masculine scripts and performance to show detachment, invulnerability and indifference (Major & Billison, 1992; Young, 2003)
•    Transition to Higher Ed: Increase high school completion rates; Alternative high school experiences – Second Chance High Schools, for instance
•    College Choice: 2 yr vs 4 years, minority serving institutions, cost and debt
•    Men in College: academic: lower gpa, high level of probation, disengagement around activities, especially in campus leadership, decline in important programming, such as study abroad; higher level of engagement around athletics, drugs, drinking, fraternities
•    Higher Ed Outcomes: constructed as behaviors because this leaves room for intervention
•    Mastery Competitiveness – why has traditional behavior not translated to academics?  Vs Antisocial Competitiveness – taking credit for other people’s work; Hypermasculinity – exaggerated, stereotypically masculine, risk seeking behavior
•    Higher level of masculinity, lower levels of positive engagement; men on Black campuses tend to express more anti social, hypermasculine behavior (this is also supported by Black females); normative pressure to adjust to normative masculinity
•    Intervention: gender know-how, particularly for Black men; who is responsible for Masculine pedagogy?
•    Teaching and learning: can pedagogy be male sensitive?; lecture, direct instruction; group work, peer; multi media; Need to promote diverse teaching experiences; need to highlight themes attractive to males; creating men’s spaces on campus; leadership development; more residential opportunities
•    (Dancy/Presenter): theory, research and the latest implications for policy and practice in the literature
•    gender gaps exist across student’s racial groups: trends point to increase research
•    white men dominate college and university leadership, particularly at the presidential level; historically, Am higher ed has sought to preserve white male interests
•    Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory: 4 systems – roles, norms, and rules
•    Identity: Bandura’s Social Learning, Eagly’s Social Role Theory, Intersdisciplinary and Double-consciousness – the “but” condition, “American but oppressed”
•    Heteronormativity (Rich, 1994)—systemic pressure is placed on people to form heterosexual relationships; heternormativity as marginalizing women, LGBT, and other groups of men students (Dancy, in press; Dilley, 2002; Rhoads, 1994) – shaping “the closet”
•    How might policy and practice need to change and evolve in higher ed?
•    Identify spaces where men of all races may more readily befriend women; men students can use women’s and gender affairs offices and centers – befriend rather than objectify; break across the stigmas, encouraging men to see the welfare provided by these programs and centers
•    Create in-class and out of class opportunities to learn about their own diverse narratives; disrupt norms and behaviors that threaten gender relations – conversations about “male” crimes, must involve conversations about gender issues
•    Counseling, tutoring or related educational programs are not signs of weakness – recruit men’s groups and advisors to participate; include narratives of men’s culture and men’s narratives
•    Establishing talks across race; make sure we’re not culturally taxing one group
•    Mentoring programs are essential – men’s sessions and workshops; hiring and promoting practices must not privilege men of any race over women counterparts
•    Women participate in how men are defined
•    Men understand diversity through friendships, shaping their world view; research needed on identity intersections (www.aplu.org — source for articles)
•    (Strayhorn/Encapsulating) General comments: reflect on the data: what is the ultimate goal of higher education? Are we envisioning a place that promotes academic success, where college men are free to be themselves and are encouraged to do so? Are we willing to transform the system overall; policies and programs that force men to engage; disruption of current policies so we can better define a successful student; the role that women play, particularly men of color: consistent evidence that college women want a masculine male, who prescribes to male hegemonic behavior (traditional) – how can we foster alternatives to the norm; what’s the problem? Who is responsible?  We all have to work with the problem that men face.
•    Book source (two presenters have chapters here): Managing Diversity: (Re)Visioning Equity On College Campuses. New York: Peter Lang (2010)

Filed under cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, the University Tagged with ,

Preliminary Notes NCORE ( Day 3 -AM)

June 3, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

NCORE

NCORE

10:30-11:45 (National Harbor 7/Convention Center, Level 3)
Afternoon Conference Pleneray Session
“Diverse Learning Environments: A New Assessment and Plan of Action to Transform the Campus Climate”

Note: this was a very important topic, delivered poorly; the absence of Sylvia Hurtado hurt, big time.  Cynthia Alvarez began the talk while Chelsea Wann went to make more copies of the ppt to hand out (could have gotten emails and sent it).  Anyway, Alvarez speaks very low so it was difficult to hear – except that all she did was to read, line by line, each ppt frame, more often then not, looking at the screen to her right (our left) in the front of the room.  Wann followed the same technique, which tells me they were clearly nervous and, though they know the work, didn’t take the next step: learn how to present the work in a creative, passionate way to best illustrate the important thinking that’s gone on behind the development of their research model and the subsequent outcomes.  In all, this presentation was a disappointment.  I went to the presentation because, at Middlebury, we should perhaps be thinking along these line – researching, assessing and evaluating how diversity functions and why (why it’s important).

Research/Assessment/Evaluation

Cynthia Lua Alvarez, Research Analyst, Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California – Los Angeles, California  — cynalva@ucla.edu

Sylvia Hurtado, PhD, Professor and Director, Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California – Los Angeles, California – shurtado@gseis.ucla.edu

Chelsea Guillermo Wann, Research Analyst, Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California – Los Angeles, California –  cguillermo@ucla.edu

Intro

•    Absent from presentation, Sylvia Hurtado, PhD – bummer! (the leader)
•    Somewhat confusing beginning, Wann and Alvarez explaining that they don’t have enough materials to hand out, but there is material on the web (to be given at the end of the talk)
•    Project funded by the Ford Foundation
•    Creating a diversity institute (future)
Talk
•    A continuation of a presentation done in NCORE, 22, in San Diego
•    Purpose, goals & features of project; developing the DLE Conceptual Framework; Diverse Learning Environments Survey; Action plan
•    Purpose and Goals: develop awareness about diversity, student learning, and student success; asses undergraduate skills for work and citizenship in a pluralistic society; increase retention; create conditions for realizing the benefits of diversity
•    Research: diverse learning environments survey – will be launched nationality in a couple of years; campus case studies of 8 institutions – west and mid west (colleges, private and public and community colleges); National Retention Study (Clearinghouse) – about to be launched
•    Proud of work because they’re being able to quantify affects of diversity
•    Practice: Institute for the Critical Analysis of Quantitative Data – over summer; Diversity Research Institute, also summer work – anyone in the audience can attend
•    Developing the Diverse Learning Environment Conceptual Framework: habits of Mind/Skills for Lifelong Learning; Competencies for a Multicultural World – diverse democracy project; Achievement and Retention – differences in meanings btwn 2 and 4 year institutions
•    Foundational Frameworks: Institutional Adaptations to Student Diversity (Richardson and Skinner 1990); Campus Climate and Diversity (Hurtado, Milem, Clayton-Perdersen and Allen (98-99) and Milem, Chang and Antonio (2005); Student/Institution Engagement Model (Nora, Barlow and Crisp- 2005); Dynamics of Multicultural Teaching and Learning (Marchesani & Adams, 1992, and adaptation of Jackson, 1988) –different climate dynamics have an impact on the classroom, a very intricate intersection
•    DLE Conceptual Framework: this is a box image on the screen that I can’t duplicate, but hopefully find; long and the short: students experience the campus in various, complex ways –historical, structural, institution, psychological, organizational, behavioral; also demographics and pre-dispositions, external influences, outcomes, habits of mid/skills for lifelong learning, competencies for a multicultural world, retention and achievement (at this point, one of the presenters returned to the talk with paper copies of the ppt presentation_
•    Unveiling the DLE Instrument: integrated assessment of climate, diversity, practice, and outcomes; inclusive of diverse social identities; modules targeting specific topics; longitudinal when linked with other student data (e.g. registrar data)
•    DLE Survery Components: core survey; Modules: classroom climate; transition into the major; intergroup relations; community college students’ transfer; transitional experiences for transfer students at 4 year institutions
•    Resources and Questions:
Higher Education Research Institute: http://www.heri.ucla

Diverse Lerning Environments Project: http://heri.ucla.edu/dle

Email: dleproject@gseis.ucla.edu
Phone: 310-267-5930

Filed under education, technology and education, the University

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day1-PM 2)

June 3, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

NCORE

NCORE

5-5:45 (Potomac Ballroom A and B/Convention Center, Level 2)
Afternoon Conference Pleneray Session
“Teach the Children, Free the Land: The Political Economy of Public Education”

Mari J. Matsuda, J.D., Professor of Law, William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawi’i—Mãnoa, Hawai’i ( pioneer in critical race theory; top, most influential Asian Americans)

Intro

•    Loves coming to the conference – she can tell it’s NCORE.  It is a convention of people who are dedicated to the heart and spirit of the country, rich in its diversity. It’s not a convention in Arizona
•    Currently working on a book on the state of public education – history, economy, race and subordination and class
•    3 worlds: (1) greed is good: plow orchards and build macmansions to people that can’t afford them; bail out too big to fail ponzi schemes that are too large to fail, the $ coming from the workers; experts say that this is not suppose to happened; (2) greed is good lite: a modest national health care system, leaving all intact –pharmaceutical, hospitals, etc; business as usual; give cash for clunkers; what you can pull together for yourself will be yours – up and down and malaise: (3) just beyond our grasp: expected to work hard, but the market does not make rules, we do it under the Constitution and build a democracy – we choose how to regulate markets; we will impose reasonable regulations on the food industry; we will propose reasonable regulations on oil and coal so that they can’t kill our oceans and our land.
•    Topic: if we could take hold of our government, we can start investing in our needs – education, health care, homes, etc., everything that’s as important as militarism. This place is imperative, because our nation’s survival dependents on an educated citizen that can build our future.
•    We’re losing minority enrollment because of the economy.  As a critical race theorist, I ask what race has to do with it and I consider all forms of subordination intersecting in our schools.
•    No more orchestra, no glee club, no more play – it’s all gone from public schools.
•    What happened?

Talk

•    In DC, in public schools, mouse feces in closets, no heat, so students have to learn to write and ware mittens
•    To avoid social problems (critical race theory) is to place them on the shoulders of a disenfranchised group
•    Reagan cut social investments using images of poor, homeless people of color, although most recepients were white
•    What does it mean when we say, “They just can’t learn?”  We have to keep “our” students from “their” students
•    Most schools are “black”—black teachers, black students, etc. – all coding, encompassing all ethnic groups of color
•    Derek Bell – when people say urban, we mean “black”; it happens at the uncoscious levels: “We can’t just throw money at the problem because it will be waste.  The problem is waste and inefficiency.”
•    The presuption that they will fail is racist—they don’t have what it takes to succeed
•    No form of subordination is without cause: everyone can read, write and succed
•    Where is the interconnection of forms of subordination that cause this
•    Gender is less obvious: look for gender where it’s hard to see: we swim in the objectification of women. Where is gender of subordination in education?
•    Second wave feminists were involved in practice, though what they asked for became theory, one such area is public vs private, so women originally entered the public in private sphere jobs
•    Ideology of separate spheres carried over, after the second wave
•    Post New Deal Era marked a sharp decline in women wages – short paying women and unfunding schools; we have decreased the total amount of money put into the infrastructure
•    Broken systems generate costs, inefficiencies generate costs – it sends a message to students, which is education is not important.  Feminist take: education of children is woman’s work; in the middle class, women still pick up the work. Women are doing the job that the state is suppose to do.
•    Well endowed private schools do spend money on infrastructure, things are fixed
•    Poar New Deal generation have the same sense of entitlement, but now the parents have to pick up the slack: what will it take to stop accomadating and resisting all efforts to divest the public sector
•    In deep economic era, there is no public outcry at the abuse of the working class
•    Capital will make consessions to the worker if it has no choice; it responds with just enough to quiet it down
•    During the last depression, people did fight back – people marched, 20,000 strong, on to capital hill (unemployed veterans of WW1, run out by tanks and Army personal on horseback) – this image gave us the New Deal (note: we never hear this narrative)
•    Three decades later, poor women, stood up demanding demanding for their children
•    Power concedes to the demands of the poor; we have models of multiracial divesting and as educators we need to retrieve them
•    Now we see public education as expendable: the country belongs to us and we have the power to make the country strong
•    We need a new deal for education
•    DuBois: a deep hunger for learning among those we consider the outcasts
•    We have protoypes of multiracial, small schools that work
•    We know what works; it’s not a mystery, so it’s proof that we are making a deliberate choice to have urban schools fail. Charters, etc., words that supplant the kind of integration that’s needed
•    We have become unknowing survilists in terms of education; we’re taking on education as a personal problem.  But people must be called back to the table to re-do what we’ve left behind
•    Every child is our own – feed, teach, shelter, embrace every child with the love human beings are entitled. This is when we’ll see peace.  An investment has to be made – and it’s a big investment
(note: we do make this investment, but it separates those that can afford it from those that can’t; standardization is what we do when we’re aiming low)

Filed under Obama Administration, america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, jonathan kozol, philosophy, politics, technology and education, the University

Preliminary Notes NCORE (day 1/PM)

June 3, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

NCORE

NCORE

In-between sessions, I usually take a 10-15 walk out on the harbor, where’ it’s always hazy and very humid.  Can’t see the Washington Monument behind the wall of haze.

Another note: I’m totally surprised that at such an expensive conference about Race & Ethnicity, several systemic realities give me pause:  in the conference center, internet access has to be purchased (I don’t); coffee is put out twice a day, then quickly removed; no water anywhere, except near bathrooms; the food in this disneyesque place is very, very expensive (I’ve heard from people counting pennies) and, other than last night, nothing in terms of food is provided (most people have out of pocket expenses and we’re not all exactly rich; besides, this really hurts all organizations that are vanguard, on the margins, that might contribute to these conversations — who is being left out? I wonder).  This note/thought makes me think critically about the role of NCORE in the work towards a more equal world along race and ethnic lines.

Anway, on the way to 90, let’s get going…

2:30-4:0 (Potomac Ballroom C/Convention Center, Level 2)
A Conversation with Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Spelman Faculty for 39 years)
“Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities, I am Your Sister: Selected and Unpublished Works of Audre Lorde”

Book: Who Should Be First (released in August)

Intro

•    Not possible to do anything with Audre Lorde without having her words in the the room
•    “Reflections”, by Audre Lorde (papers held at Spelman College); Alice Walker wrote a piece called, “Audre’s Voice.”  bell hooks, “Lorde of the Imagination of Justice.”
•    A “reading” (Sheftall read from Lorde) notes:
*Affect change for a livable future.  Black, feminine, socialist poet, lesbian, mother – defined as inferior or just wrong
*Opression has no hierarchy.  Heterosexism: superiority of loving of one form over another.  Racism – one race over other and believes in its right to dominate
*No aspect of the self can profit from oppression, particularly when seeking the right to peaceful existence
*Whether there is oppression, black people can be victims
*Any attack on the black community is an attack on gay and lesbian, because “I am” both
*Anti – black is anti gay : cannot fight only one form of oppression; when they appear to destroy me, they appear to destroy “you”
•    Lorde looms large b’cause she understood that there are no hierarchies of oppression
•    Guy-Sheftall: wants to start with a convesation. Lorde was the first “out” black feminist.  First Lorde visit to Spelman was very controversial, and the Woman’s Center was asked whether it was prepared to be always be associated with lesbianism.  Before 1996, had never had an African American female president.  Spelman was founding in 1881.  President Cole was progressive – global and anti imperialist, anti oppression, and a self-identified feminist.  Cole established a reading at her home and invited Audre Lorde to the campus – a controversial gathering.  First person to come to the campus to speak about all her identities.  A student began to cry during Lorde’s talk.  Audre asked her to come and sit with her and hugged her.  Audre’s visits to Spelman helped transform the school and give power to the Woman’s Center.  Radical, black feminist work has not always been embraced, even at a woman’s college, Spelman.  Still operationalizing the work of Audre Lorde.  Work of Lorde is groundbreaking and still very important and relevant.

The Conversation

•    Over the past 30 years, women’s studies have been transformed.  Theorizing has not made its way to the public sphere. Hillary Clinton is categorized as a woman, not a white, middle class woman. Obama was constructed as an African American, primarily.  The 2008 presidential debates was one of the most contentious moments among feminists; hostility took place in women studies program; forced many of to raise the question, “what happened?”  30 years of theorizing seemed not to make its way to the media, to even feminists in the classroom.  Kimberly Crenshaw and Guy-Sheftall and Gloria Steinem convened a meeting in NYC. The Nation published overview of the meeting. Douglas and feminist debate that took place over the 15th Amendment needed to be revisited.  Media does not get intersection theories.  We seem to slip into old paradigms to talk about race.
•    Connection btwn Audre’s essay and what happened to presidential candidate?  Very few groups that are fighting for liberation are progressive on all fronts.  Groups can be radical about one issue, i.e. race movement was strong on issues of racism, but totally oblivious to issues of feminism.  Nothing peculiar about feminist. They have to be pulled, too, into an intersection or areas about race.  Disappointing when people are committed to only one issue, rather than all the issues pertaining to liberation. Progressive black folks were willing to support a totally unprogressive Clarence Thomas.  Lorde attacked all issues of oppression.
•    2008 debate and the national media: press keen on highlighting the split btwn students who supported Clinton, in Spelman, and those that supported Obama.  Where are these students now?  Students have yet to internalize the intersectional approach.  Obama was almost a taboo subject to speak about; could not speak about what might happen or emerge should Obama be president. This could not be talked about.  Racism, at the time, was on the internet, circulating in disgusting ways and never made it to the mainstream.  People are now surprised about racism, particularly in the Tea Party.
•    Michele Obama experienced racism and sexism in obvious ways.  She experiences tremendous commentary about her body, particularly her butt.  Over referencing of the first lady’s body, who can’t escape the gaze.  References to skin color, hair clips, etc.
•    How did “Precious” end up in the movie theaters?  Why Lee Daniels chose to do “Precious”?  Movie would have been a sleeper if it wasn’t for Oprah.  Has to be factored into analysis.  We all share incest, survival narratives.  The “obsession”, almost, that majority white audiences have with the film, “Precious.”  The Bush women had parties in their homes to show the film: if you want to understand black life, look at this film.  Coverage of Precious is quite obsessive in mainstream media.  It’s an old pathological black family narrative. Every imaginable pathology is in that film.  In the novel, Precious does not weigh 350 pounds.  Lee Daniels chose the character: we have to raise questions of Daniels, Tyler Perry, Oprah and the white woman who raised money for it?
•    What does it mean to have the Obamas in the White House and Precious?  What does it mean that a a gay African American male is associated with Monster’s Ball and Precious?  We have to also add the black and white consumer public.  Commercial success came when Oprah endorsed the film.  These are not pathological narrative being created outside the community; the issue is the persistence of these narratives that have no counter narrative.  (A mother daughter incest is very unusual.  The monstrous black mother is another persisten theme, the quintessential horrible mother in the public’s mind. In the novel there is no root to this behavior. Safire, the author, doesn’t help us see who she is.)
•    Back to Lorde’s visit to Spelman: the school is a very gentile place.  There has been some critique among progressive African Americans around ways in which the Obama family gets constructed in the media as the perfect heterosexual couple – perfect wife and two children reinforces the dominant heteropatriarchal family, which eliminates us from having the freedom to see other black families, constructed in different ways.  Obama represents any antithesis that anyone may have about men.  Relieves women from the notion that there are “no men out there.”  What is the impact within the black community of this overwhelming notion that Obama is this quintessential man?  Media coverage makes it impossible to think of families in any other way – privileges heteronormaty.  A more nuances, complex analysis creates problems – but it’s almost impossible for us to think about it right now.
•    When did we as a race (black Americans) move away from our own measurements?  People have made a lot of Obama’s skin color and his biracial background – but if he was not married with two perfect children, he would never have been in the White House.  Obama fits the normative that Lorde is always railing against.  Michele had to play the role of the traditional wife – unfortunate that you have to be a particular kind of wife: she is no longer the career woman; talks about the importance of her role as mother.  The discourse had to be recrafted: supportive wife that follows very traditional gender roles.  Even the issues she’s taken up – gardening, childhood obesity, not violence against women, for instance.  Feminists believe that this is crafted. Early on she was henpecking Obama; she was toned down, even in body language.  Her aggressive, black woman’s speech had to be toned down.  Lorde would say that these are the only options as first lady.  Michele was willing; she had to become something else, givent he negative PR she was having.   Negative, particularly among average white women.  She had to be recrafted to be more palatible. Gender – race issues around this issue that are very problematic.  Cultural narrative as black women as ball busting, controling – not a construction that’s around from white women.
•    Lorde would be saying that there is a “norm” out there that have to be adhered to – and we have to think about this.  She would be paying attention to what Obama is saying about race, gender and sexuality.  She would be looking at all the progressive issues Obama’s has taken up; she’d be placed on some, not pleased on others, such as Obama’s position on Afghanistan.  Bothered about the long term stay in Afghanistan and militarism.
•    Back to Michele and her agency in dealing with her image: are moments of agency resistance?  There’s no question about Michele’s agency; however, anyone in the White House cannot operate their radical politics because of constraints.  Obama is the Commander in Chief and Michele will stay away from highly controversial issues that can get Obama in trouble; she’ll exercise her agency in areas that won’t create controversy.  There are positions that they cannot publicly annouce.
•    CLOSING: Audre Lorde’s Oberlin Speech (1989), a Reading

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics Tagged with , , ,

The Economics of Legalized Corruption and the Consolidation of Power: Some Historical and Critical Realities Behind the Bail-Out

September 28, 2008 by hector 5 Comments

for Adeeb and his fellow classmates, and others who live these ideas and topics in our troubled times

I often cite Napoleon’s famous words to my students, “Dress me slowly I’m in a hurry.” Students, particularly American students, often look puzzled. What does that mean? How can you go fast by moving slowly? How does approaching the world by proceeding with little or less than usual speed or velocity, requiring a comparatively long time for completion and contemplation, enable better solutions to immediate problems?

American culture is addicted to many things but mainly to sugar and speed, anything labeled “new” and deception. William Burrough’s Naked Lunch was viewed as obscene and censored not because of wild pictures of dark characters shooting up but because it demonstrated American’s obsessive compulsive addiction to anything. Power, sugar, horror, violence and destruction, speed, the “new” as well as the decadent, and corruption.

The current attempts by the US Government to bail-out our banking system has all the markings of an addicted culture that in fact enables corruption through laws meant to protect only the wealthiest–the property of the wealthiest. “Corruption is why we win.“

We are now rushing into yet another scheme laid out by those that raced into Iraq and who left Afghanistan in the dust; these are the same folks that can’t work to make our education and healthcare systems stronger and better for all Americans; the same people that can’t run Amtrak.

This is perhaps the reason why the Paulson and Bernanke proposal to stem the financial crisis is a plan “that everyone can find something in it to dislike. The left accuses it of ripping off taxpayers to save Well Street, the right damns it as socialism; economists disparage its technicalities, political scientists its sweeping powers” (The Economist, Sept 27th, 2008; 17).

The truth of the matter is that it’s none of the above. We have to add another condition: The human condition has entered into the mix and no one, but no one trusts “the other.” “In economics and in the remainder of the social sciences as well, the translation from individual aggregate behavior is the key analytic problem. Yet in these disciplines the exact nature and sources of individual behavior are rarely considered. Instead, the knowledge used by the modelers is that of folk psychology, based mostly on common perception and unaided intuition, and folk psychology has already been pushed way past its limits” (Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, 1998; 202).

Money is not the root of all evil, but our perception of money is. When wealth is involved, we Americans are addicted to outdoing “the other” by any means necessary. Long term repercussions are not in our plans. Immediate short term and costly gain–derivatives and predatory lending–is all we see. The devastation and suffering we leave behind is for others. Even when Paulson and Bernanke unveiled their plan before Congress, callous indifference reared its ugly head when they never even mentioned a word about the middle class, the working class that’s going to carry the burden imposed on it by greed.

Working Americans are going to pay more for greed and corruption because it’s permissible.

Globally there is money. Markets are not standing still–it’s the law of survival. Stand still and you die. Warren Buffett and Japan’s Mitsubishi-UFJ agreed to buy stakes in Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. There are more enterprises–and governments–with money to bail-out corruption in Wall Street. We can’t be nervous that foreign capital is buying up America. This has been going on for quite some time since foreign capital knows that when push comes to shove, we will make the mistake of rushing towards immediate gratification. America is fat and now we got caught, one too many times, with our hand in the cookie jar. One bad apple can spoil the bunch. Many rotten apples, supported by laws that enable graft, deceit and corruption, have brought us to where we now are.

But where are we?

Historically, we can argue that this is the culmination of vituperative actions that began at the dawn of World War I, the War to End All Wars, which was the sure sign that it was the war to begin all notions of modern warfare. This is the war that was dominated by an aggressive attempt to control power, which is another way of saying that we sought to control wealth by a very few. There are many obvious reasons why we went to war–Mexico potentially allying with Germany, sabotage, and more–but none is more poignant than “a movement on behalf of Big Government in all walks of the economy and society, in a fusion or coalition between various groups of big businessmen, led by the House of Morgan, and rising groups of technocratic and statist intellectuals. In this fusion, the values and interests of both groups would be pursued through government” (World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals).

Since WWI, the agenda has been the consolidation of power. Government’s role is to protect the few with the most power–the extreme form of John Locke’s economic theories. It’s not surprising that Goldman Sachs, as it becomes “a bank,” will be one of the two firms who will benefit most from the bail-out. Hank Paulson, “the hammer,” as he was called at Dartmouth College, was Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense at The Pentagon from 1970 to 1972. He then worked for the administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon, serving as assistant to John Ehrlichman from 1972 to 1973. Finally he became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs. Is this former eagle scout operating with our best interests in mind, given his uncanny allegiance to the most powerful in society? Or is Paulson finalizing the work that began during WWI, the complete consolidation of all power in the hands of the smallest number of powerful men? Our laws show the history and evolution of this crisis to these ends.

Much as we did in WWI, we could be headed towards the illusion of victory (illusion is the prodigal son of avarice, greed and corruption; we can’t see these and live these as real solutions unless we believe illusions as truth). But if we don’t want to go as far back as WWI, we can look at more recent events.

John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out one of the causes of the Great Depression was “The large-scale corporate thimblerigging that was going on. This took a variety of forms, of which by far the most common was the organization of corporations to hold stock in yet other corporations, which in turn held stock in yet other corporations.” Galbraith tells us that, “during 1929 one investment house, Goldman, Sachs & Company, organized and sold nearly a billion dollars’ worth of securities in three interconnected investment trusts—Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; Shenandoah Corporation; and Blue Ridge Corporation. All eventually depreciated virtually to nothing.”

When Franklin Roosevelt took office, both the President and Congress knew the banking crisis demanded immediate action. The result was one of the crown jewels of the New Deal: the Glass-Steagall Act, officially known as the Banking Act of 1933.

A Frontline report on the repeal of Glass-Steagall shows how those with money end up with pens from the President of the United States on their walls:

Sandy Weill calls President Clinton in the evening to try to break the deadlock after Senator Phil Gramm, chairman of the Banking Committee, warned Citigroup lobbyist Roger Levy that Weill has to get White House moving on the bill or he would shut down the House-Senate conference. Serious negotiations resume, and a deal is announced at 2:45 a.m. on Oct. 22. Whether Weill made any difference in precipitating a deal is unclear.

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill’s chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, “You’re buying the government?”

When Bill Clinton gave that pen to Sanford Weill, it symbolized the ending of the twentieth century Democratic Party that had created the New Deal. Although the 1999 law did not repeal all of the banking Act of 1933, retaining the FDIC, it did once again allow banks to enter the securities business, becoming what some term “whole banks” (Bill Clinton’s Role in the Mortgage Crisis).

The house of cards begins to topple, the inevitable fate of coalitions fused by greed and avarice.

In “Experts Predict Money Crisis,” Christopher Ruddy (August 2007) writes that “there is evidence that this global boom is anything but natural and sustainable, but is really the artificial result of a global liquidity bubble, a bubble that could now be on the verge of bursting. In this global bubble, literally hundreds of trillions of dollars in leveraged debt are at risk. It’s no secret that in today’s society, everyone from the family next door, to major corporations, to the U.S. government is deeply in debt. But while some debt statistics are widely reported, such as our $8 trillion national debt, other debt figures are never mentioned.”

Everyone knew. The US Government–and the White House–knew. The candidates knew. Banks knew. And, most importantly, media knew. Why didn’t anyone act? When silence of this magnitude ensues, something is indeed rotten somewhere.

The role of modern day government is to ensure enough instability to maintain levels of power in the hands of few. This is how it works. (See also: The Conservative Origins of the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis: Everything you ever wanted to know about the mortgage meltdown but were afraid to ask.) We can see evidence of this in Dick Cheney who, we can argue, has moved vice-presidential powers beyond what we have known in the past.

In journalist Barton Gellman’s Angler, (Cheney’s CIA cover name is “Angler”) we learn the details of Cheney’s forty-year political career that gives evidence of subterfuge for the sake of power and mission. His first act, according to Gellman, is Cheney’s self-selection to vice-president. Prior, Cheney, from 1979 to 1982, voted “yes” on all bills for oil tax breaks and for indexing income tax (H.R. 1176, H.R. 2225, H.R. 5318); between 1984 to 1986, he voted to keep mortgage bonds and loosen capital gains rules; he brought in Paul O’Neill, for instance; he mislead Congress and the American people about Iraq; and, to support our discussion, here, Cheney was behind tax cuts for the rich and the reduction of capital gains (see more about Cheney the economist). Cheney believed very strongly that there should be a capital gains cut to unleash producers, which has never worked but has indeed made the wealthy wealthier.

Furthering the irony that by enabling a loosening of rules and regulations–and taxes–for the rich is healthy for the economy, we learned that McCain, for instance, defended the “Enron loophole” and “oppose(d) the $307 billion farm bill because it would dole out wasteful subsidies, but his chief economic adviser Phil Gramm also want(ed) to stop its proposed regulation of energy futures trading, a market that was famously abused when Enron Corp. manipulated California’s electricity prices in 2001.” In fact, “Gramm, as a powerful Texas senator in 2000, slipped an Enron-backed provision into the Commodities Futures Modernization Act that exempted from regulation energy trading on electronic platforms.”

We can see, therefore, how carefully and in ways that may seem complex to the general public, we have politicians as front men for powerful corporations that are looking to consolidate power. The fusion of power at the highest levels is the aim. In September, for instance, McCain said that he thought “deregulation in banking worked well (what is he smoking?) and wants to borrow from Wall Street’s brilliant success to help reform healthcare.” (more on how the Wall Street crisis has been helped by the McCain – Gramm team, here) Any changes in McCain’s rhetoric are merely means by which to soften his image to voters; he is beholding to the most powerful men and their corporations and he’s evolved his political life, not as a maverick, but as a bold advocate–and mouthpiece–for the extraordinarily wealthy. John McCain is a scam artist, applying media-rich extravaganza, like parachuting into Washington the other day to save the day and to continue the pursuit of the fusion of power that began long ago. In fact, John McCain is the most influential supporter of gambling, as reported by The New York Times.

What are we then to expect from Obama? He has not been tested on this yet given his short term in the Senate; however, real estate, Wall Street financiers, and lawyers, all support Obama. In their first debate, when Obama had ample room to really attack–and address–McCain on this, he did not, which raises suspicions, of course. Or is it the continued Obama problem that he may be too cerebral for the American public?

I also often say to some of my “econ majors” to practice the following: “Would you like french fries with that?” They laugh nervously. But suffice to say that “the econ major” is such, not because s/he is trying to work out strange and interesting theories about future markets, but rather, s/he studies economics in a rush to gain a foothold, to have “the good life,” which more often than not means luxury and enough money to buy leisure–the most expensive commodity today.

The only hope I have in Obama is that, perhaps, given that he seems to enjoy deliberation, he’ll be able to speak across differences–our own and those we have with aggressive nations; that he might be able to begin to quell our thirst for more and more and more; and that he may begin to at least entertain a dialog, among us, about who we might want to be when we grow up. This is romantic, of course, but given the signs of the times–the aggressive push to consolidate and fuse centers of power–it’s the only thing I have left. Can you imagine Sarah Palin in this world?

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Somewhere Between the Future, its Enemies, and Darkness Visible

October 1, 2008 by hector 2 Comments

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”?

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Pushing Afghans Away: A Misguided American Policy

January 9, 2009 by hector 2 Comments

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.

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Gaza, Israel and the Memory of Edward Said

January 20, 2009 by hector Leave a Comment

for the martyrs, Kassab and Ibrahim Shurrab

for the suffering, Mohammed Shurrab and his family

and for the future, Amer Shurrab, Adriana Qubaia, Mahmoud and Nisreen

Our world today is evidence that those who profess to speak for God or Allah or a personal Other focused on a single, supreme nature-transcending will have unequivocally erased this almighty power’s truths, a core reality found in Christianity, Islam and Judaism–humility, compassion and love.

At approximately 1PM on Friday the 16th, Mohammed Shurrab (60) and his two sons, Kassab , age 28 , and Ibrahim , age 18, fleeing the family farm in the village of Fukhari, southeast of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, were struck by a hail of bullets from a group of Israeli soldiers in a house about thirty yards away, according to Yasser Ahmad and Ashraf Khalil of the Los Angeles Times. (see also Day 22)

The Israelis issued a statement: “Given the difficult combat circumstances, complex battles and fighting in urban settings, uninvolved civilians are unfortunately exposed to danger.”

Kassab died after staggering out of their Land Rover. He lay on the street for 20 hours. Ibrahim bled to death waiting for help.  Mohammed, a desperate father, could do nothing as his cell phone battery died. In the face of great suffering, no one had the compassion to assist the wounded, the suffering. Thus is war. Thus is violence.

Some of us learned of this tragedy by email because Mohammed’s other son, Amer,  is a Middlebury College graduate, ’08.5. The original email was followed by a desperate string, anguished and outraged, and a Shurrab Family Group quickly formed on Facebook. We could do nothing.

I sat in my living room staring out at the gusts of snow. It was gray and freezing and the wind blew hard. I felt totally useless and alone. I thought of my three sons and what I might do should I ever be called the way Mohammed Shurrab has been–and I wept. I was paralyzed by the events in Gaza and the violence in our world.

I longed for the humane voice of Edward Said, how he is always able to make sense of things like this. I pulled him off my bookshelf, something I do frequently with some writers dear to me because they go head first into matters of the heart.

We find ourselves in the era of mass societies that dominate by “a powerfully centralizing culture and a complex incorporative economy,” says the remarkable Edward Said in his “Movement and Migrations” chapter in Culture and Imperialism. In 1993, following the French urban sociologist Paul Virilio, Said suggested that this form of domination is unstable. Powerfully centralizing cultures and complex incorporative economies are unstable and create instability everywhere. Yet instability is believed to be a means to an end, the control of economies, resources and production.

The fundamental premise of terrorism, also instability, is likewise the foundation of mass societies. They feed each other–and there is no end in sight. Make no mistake, Hamas will survive, this is already clear.

“Israel has succeeded in killing everything except the will of the people,” said Taher al-Nunu, the main (Hamas) government spokesman. “They said they were going to dismantle the resistance and demolish the rockets, but after this historic victory, the government is steadfast, we are working and they were not able to stop the rockets.”

“I think Hamas is stronger now and will be stronger in the future because of this war,” said Eyad el-Sarraj, a psychiatrist here who is an opponent of Hamas. “This war has deepened the people’s feeling that it is impossible to have peace with Israel, a country that promotes death and destruction.”

Iraq, Afghanistan, the global deterioration of economies and the tragic horror that is Gaza’s occupation by Israel all point to the notion that “insecurity induced by mounting crises” leads to destruction, violence and war. The innocent die, wounds fester, hatred builds. “Insecurity induced by mounting crises” builds identities reliant on an Other who is hostile.

Israel’s identity is defined by having scripted the ideals of freedom and justice for Western civilization, yet Jews now find themselves withholding these rights–for security reasons, forced to withhold them, many Jews believe–from Palestinians.

Hamas and Hezbollah have identities defined as the maligned Other, even the absent Other that is always already determined by armed aggression. Tragically and ironically, the Prophet Mohammed–and the Qur’an–teach respect for the world’s incontrovertible order, preaching a message that is intensely democratic. The Prophet, “The True,” “The Upright,” and “The Trustworthy One,” withstood severe criticism and ridicule, relentless persecution, and physical abuse and incarceration, and insisted that in the sight of Allah all people are equal.

We are in the era of mass disintegration. Israel’s occupation of Gaza is an example–and hopefully a last breath–of a global pattern attempting to occupy and inhabit all “normally uninhabitable,” the institutions integral to a culture–”hospitals, universities, theatres, factories, churches, empty buildings”; in essence, the occupation of language, speech, consciousness. (The first instance or example is the Presidency of George W. Bush, especially his first election; the second is 9/11 and the repression of Afghanistan; and the Third is Israel’s occupation of Gaza.) Israel’s occupation of Gaza is modern colonization, the “central militaristic prerogative” of mass societies. And the media accommodates, as it has in Iraq.

The alternative to state aggression is a liberation of speech in critical spaces, the integral institutions, and represented by contemporary movements “as a consequence of decolonization (migrant workers, refugees, Gastarbeiter) or of major demographic and political shifts (Blacks, immigrants, urban squatters, students, popular insurrections, etc.). These constitute a real alternative to the authority of the state.” One of the most impressive “crowd-activated” sites is the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine. This is why Hamas and Hezbullah will thrive. We approach difference and tensions with aggression, where the opposite approach is calling out. We can hear the screams of the suffering, the innocent buried in rubble, bodies decomposing. Our inhumanity is extraordinary.

At least in Gaza, right now, Hamas represents something unique, a “freedom” from the usual “exchange”; that is, Hamas represents a firm antidote to Israeli domination. Israel’s Gaza operation is not meant to stop Hamas’s rockets; it’s meant to shore up a doctrine on which Israel thinks its safety must be still based–immediate response to any signs of a punitive raid, by Hezbullah or Hamas, armed by Iran.

“Those people compelled by the system to play subordinate or imprisoning roles within it emerge as conscious antagonists, disrupting it, proposing claims, advancing arguments that dispute the totalitarian compulsions of the world market,” says Said. “Not everything can be bought off.” This is the war cry of Islamic Fundamentalism, a notion that has fallen on deaf ears. At the heart of Islam–the Prophet Mohammed is the example–is resistance to threats to its existence, even expansion (see: The World’s Fastest Growing Religions)

The problem is that we in the post-modern West fail to understand that in many parts of the world–Iraq and Iran, Afghanistan, some parts of the Arab world and Africa–people, governments and religious leaders are still trying to come to terms with Modernity. There are people and cultures in the world struggling with a singular notion, how are we to modernize?

“The major task, then, is to match the new economic and sociopolitical dislocations and configurations of our time with the startling realities of human interdependence on a world scale,” says Said.

Christianity, Islam and Judaism are interrelated, philosophically and geographically. We have to begin here, in this singular fact.

Islam is derived from the root s-l-m, which means primarily “peace” but in a secondary meaning, “surrender”; its full connotation is “the peace that comes when one’s life is surrendered to God,” that is a surrender to the totality that are humility, compassion and love. Adherence to humility, compassion and love enables creative and virtuous actions. We can’t have peace without this.

Judaism affirms the world’s goodness, arriving at that conclusion through its assumption that God created it. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) and pronounced it to be good. Judaism is a faith of a people, and one of its features is faith in a people–in the significance of the role the Jews have played and will play in human history. This faith calls for the preservation of the identity of the Jews as a distinct people.

The only way to make sense of Christianity–and to make sense of Jesus’ extraordinary admonitions as to how people should live–is to see them as cut from the understanding of the God who loves human beings absolutely, without pausing to calculate their worth or due. We are to give others our cloak as well as our coat if they need it. Because God has given us what we need. We are to go with others the second mile.

Humility, compassion and love–Islam, Judaism and Christianity are one in these principles.

But given the hostile conditions of our world, we can only seek–and find–these principles in the margins, in the shadows, in-between boundaries and lines of demarcation that are always already blurred, stretched, even erased, for better and for worse.

Says Said, reminding us,

Yet it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarceration today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see ‘the complete consort dancing together’ contrapuntally.

Historically then it’s not surprising that a new era is upon us, a new stage marked by the inauguration of a Black man of mixed race–and who has come to be following the compelling history of a movement totally dependent upon non-violent resignation and protest. President Barack Obama offers “something unique” and “even against his will,” represents “freedom [from the age old forms] of exchange.”

People forced to play subordinate roles always emerge “as conscious antagonists, disrupting it, proposing claims, advancing arguments that dispute totalitarian compulsions.” Barack Obama represents this historical reality.  There is no other way to look at it.  This is why in the last week or so there has been such an uncomprimising allegiance to history. Today, we finally have soul in the White House.

Israel’s occupation of Gaza–and Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s, as well as Iran’s, hostilities–represent an anti-historical approach based on the violent dislocation of language, speech and consciousness. This has always failed.

Enough. Enough is enough! We can suffer no more like this. Let’s then join Karen Armstrong and sign a Charter for Compassion instead and help make religion a force for harmony.

Filed under cultural studies, philosophy, politics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Education Stimulus Package: In Duncan’s Hands, Hope is on a Tightrope

February 3, 2009 by hector 1 Comment

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.

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, education, education stimulus package, jonathan kozol, philosophy, politics, technology and education

Women and the New World Order

March 26, 2009 by hector 2 Comments

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.

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, cultural studies, philosophy, politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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

February 20, 2009 by hector Leave a Comment

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

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

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?

Filed under Media, america's apartheid system of education, baseball, corruption, cultural studies, education, jonathan kozol, philosophy, politics, sport in America, steroids Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Afghanistan: Notes From a Remembered War, Sarah Chayes Lecture

March 27, 2009 by hector Leave a Comment

Sarah Chayes Lecture, Middlebury College, Dana Auditorium, March 6, 2009

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

Sarah Chayes in Kandahar

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, cultural studies, education, politics

Amsterdam Revisited

April 19, 2009 by hector Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Filed under Amsterdam, cultural studies, philosophy, politics, travel Tagged with , , , , , , ,

At Play Behind the Ivy — or the Late Confessions of a Weary Prof

September 1, 2009 by hector 5 Comments

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.

Filed under cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Second Guesses and Learning from Students

September 20, 2009 by hector 3 Comments

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”?

Filed under composition and rhetoric, cultural studies, education, philosophy Tagged with

The Last Human Freedoms and the University

October 5, 2009 by hector 4 Comments

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.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, composition and rhetoric, corruption, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, the University

Death in Chicago and the American Decline

October 10, 2009 by hector Leave a Comment

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.

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, corruption, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, jonathan kozol, philosophy, politics, the University Tagged with , ,

Disorder and Great Disorder Are Order

November 1, 2009 by hector 7 Comments

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 .

Filed under Obama Administration, america's apartheid system of education, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, the University Tagged with , ,

Capitalism, Al Gore, and the New York Yankees

November 3, 2009 by hector 1 Comment

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.

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, baseball, cultural studies, philosophy, sport in America Tagged with ,

The Yankees, The New York City Marathon and Citizenship

November 7, 2009 by hector Leave a Comment

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

bannerCitizen

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 health care 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.

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, baseball, corruption, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, sport in America Tagged with , , , , ,

Citizen’s Manifesto, a Call for a New Order

February 28, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

We live in virtual worlds that are inherently nonhierarchical and antibureaucratic.  We live in a real world that has essentially come to a halt — capitalism is flat and government’s hot air is leaking.  Our real world is mired in slow growth, a ruptured infrastructure, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, staggering poverty and violence, a public education system that is so large and so monolithic that it can’t even begin to realize it has failed to adequately function as a leveling force in a democracy, and a nightmare health care system that clearly cannot be maintained and grown to cover the millions of Americans that, in the richest country in the world, have no access.

We’re tired.

We live in virtual worlds that are not loyal and do not reinforce obedience.  Our virtual lives are encouraged by our stories — Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and so on; we engage with our stories, make intimate connections based on our mutual understanding.  We live, instead, in a real world where political figures that are suppose to represent us don’t know who we are — not at all; rather, they speak about “Americans” — “what Americans want”; “the American people prefer”–as if we’re a foreign species unacceptable to the special interest groups and lobbyists that keep handing out money and gifts to get their way.  Washington is totally paralyzed and bifurcated.  At the center is negligence and absolute incompetence, narcissism and corruption — an overwhelming hubris.

Yet what we, the American people, want is simple: peace and harmony, meaningful work, time and space to find happiness with our loved ones.  Is this so difficult to ensure safely?

America is schizophrenic.  We’re frustrated and we can’t take it anymore.  We want an end to the cold, hard and callous way of living and working, particularly in politics — the status quo — and we want to move to a more creative, palliative and compassionate way of life that considers virtue and happiness, first, conspicuous consumption last.  Life is short.  We only have one life.

Hell, we need to turn this ship around, recycle old ideas and scream for new ones.  We need a Citizen’s Manifesto, a Call for a New Order.  We need to latch on to new ideas and discredit ones that don’t work.

Citizen’s Manifesto, a Call for a New Order: The Ninety-Five Theses

(a blog is our version of the Castle Church in Wittenberg)

1. No one is Master over our lives.  We are Masters of our own lives — the only ones we have.

2. We are inextricably linked to the awesome, subtle and mathematical precision of Nature.

3. Nature is awe aspiring.

4. Nature is governed by knowable laws — Physics.

5.  Nature is finite and infinite, simultaneously, going through a process of life and death.

6.  As we decay, we come closer to the infinite; when we finally die, our stories — our lives — remain, giving sustenance to others.  This is how we live in and with history.

7. How we live — the purpose of our lives — will determine our legacy.

8. Being positive and affirming is key for attracting the positive and affirming — cycles of creativity that inspire virtuous action.

9. Climate change is real. It is a sign of our hubris — our disconnection from Nature and ourselves.  Climate change is real because it’s mathematical, a sign of our lack of positive and affirming life styles.

10. We humans have placed ourselves at the center of the universe, while life and our minds are simply a continuation of Nature.

11.  Our mediated  experiences – MEDIA — are shallow and manipulated into believing we are a homogeneous whole, which stands against the diversity we find in Nature.

12. The more DIVERSE the system, the more easily problems and challenges can be solved.

13.  The purpose of mediated experiences is to move us — and have us believe — that conspicuous consumption is healthy for us.

15.  Conspicuous consumption works against Natural Law — and negates the promise of DIVERSITY.

16. Our government lacks diversity, adhering to the homogenizing power of global markets and special interests.

17. We are exhausted by a political system that assumes to know us — it doesn’t.  We the citizens that pay for Washington are the special interest group most in need. Let’s take charge, NOW.

18.  We don’t live in a Democracy, then — it’s something else we can’t yet define.

19.  We live instead in a stagnant capitalist system that aspires towards a vertical economy.  It’s spiraling downward, out of control.

20.  Shut off televisions and get informed.

21.  We are tired by special interests trumping our inalienable rights — freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

22. Let’s boycott special interests, not buying their products, not abiding by their selfishness.

23.  We are tired by politicians doing nothing and yet assuming they know what we want since they always turn their backs on the small, working class citizens who are actually holding this country — and its government — together with the shares extracted from what little value we get from our over work.

24. We demand a payback, in the form of better schools, which we will govern, health care for all Americans, a process to employ Americans to rebuild the infrastructure that is falling apart.

25. Public Education is criminal.

26. Our children are not homogeneous, nor are they automatons.

27. Our children are creative, enthusiastic forces that need a safe and creative environment to learn.

28. Stop turning your backs on our children!

29.  Let’s stop turning from — and denying — history, science, especially, and fundamental economics and put into action what we, the people, already know: we have been transformed, utterly.

30. Reach out to the experts in our country; they’re in our universities.

31. We, the people, have lost control over monolithic government — we need to take it back.

32. Capitalism, as we practice in the USA, is broken — growth is flat.

33. We need to change it ourselves, recognizing that we can’t keep on living with a more growth mantra.

34. Less is more.

35. Efficiency is key.

36. At the heart of efficiency is diversity — the more diverse we are the better we are at solving problems.

37. We live separate, distant lives from our neighbors and ourselves.

38. We want and need to share our stories, a greater intimacy.

39. Intimacy moves matters of the heart.

40. The heart is where virtuous action lives.

41.  Do something, anything, for someone else.

42. Honor thy neighbor as thyself.

43. Travel the road less traveled.

44. Imagination, stupefied by institutions — education, government and entertainment — is the only way out of this mess.

45. Imagination requires discipline.

46. Discipline requires safety.

47.  Safety requires humility.

48. Humility inspires.

49. And vulnerability is strength because it comes from Truth.

50. Love and truth are synonimous.

51. Love and truth are antidotes to corruption.

52. Corruption is a sign of illness.

53. A culture that breeds the illness of corruption is dying a slow death, a cancer has taken over from within.

54.  How we choose to look at a given situation is the only human freedom.

55.  The only human freedom — the freedom to select a point of view — can be leveling.

56.  We all suffer.

57.  To be human requires that we open up to the Other who suffers as we do.

58.  Thus choosing to reside inside the Other’s story will make us more humane.

59. Violence and war — the solutions for all of humanity’s problems — erace the Other.

60. Violence and war are approaches held dear by the most privileged.

61.  Privilege is blinding.

62. This kind of blindness kills.

63. We live in a world of increasing complexity.

64.  Complexity requires simple approaches.

65.  Complexity requires diversity.

66. A lack of diversity is a sign of our illness, too.

67.  Our institutions thrive — and are dying consequently — on zero tolerance for diversity.

68.  Our instutitions are old world models that are broken.

69.  Technology provides answers but we’re abusing out technologies.

70.  Technologies are pushing us.

71.  Technologies are confusing and we’re living in a new world order because of technologies.

72. We don’t understand our technological selves.

73.  Technologies, first and foremost, are by definition created with our fallacies.

74.  Where there is technology, there is both wonder and error.

75.  Failure is important.

76.  Failure = learning.

77.  We culturally define failure as unacceptable.

78.  How we define failure in our culture is another sign of our illness.

79.  Fail all the time — and we’re punished for it.

80.  This form of cultural punishment rejects the imagination.

81.  The imagination requires failure.

82.  Thus we fail to communicate, the most dramatic characteristic of our illness.

83.  A failure to communicate means we live disconnected with each other.

84.  Disconnection causes misunderstanding.

85.  Misunderstanding is the first rung in the ladder that rises to violence.

86.  Then hope is on a tightrope, which is why our illness inspires anxiety.

87.  And anxiety creates desease, the manifestation of our global illness — the disconnection we feel with ourselves, others and the Earth.

88.  There is a way out if we examine the laws of Nature and we place ourselves in this continuum.

89.  Growth is natural — if it’s intellectual, emotional and spiritual.

90.  Growth, when natural, requires safety and the imagination.

91.   Nature is imagination.

92.  Our disconnectedness renders us hopeless because we’re reaching a point where we can’t find the language of social harmony.

93.  Harmony is how the Earth works.

94.  Harmony is a balance.

95.  Harmony is the peace within we need to see the Other.

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, corruption, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, the University

Can Obama be Obama

March 18, 2010 by hector 2 Comments

Guantanamo is still open for business, following the Bush-Cheney doctrine.  Iraq is on a tighrope.  Afghanistan is a quagmire — confusing and violent with no end in sight, corruption at every turn and the Taliban negotiating a come back with their tribal leader, Karzai (he brought them in to begin with).  Unemployment is a plague upon our house.  The economy is stagnant, for the lack of a better or more optimistic word — nothing new or promising in the not so distant future.  Wall Street is totally out of touch with the rest of the country, mired in its hubris, having drawn up the bridge, leaving the illusion they helped create on our side to work through.  Health care — what can we say about health care, the single most significant sign of how unbelievably short sided we are in government?  And government, the crux of the problem, cowardly and ignorant, lacking any sense of an imaginative approach to a future that already is here, pushing us further down as if a great weight is upon us.

Obama showed promise during his campaign.  Many of us voted for Obama because of the promises — change, yes we can.  Well, no, apparently not, we can’t.  Obama is stuck in age old partisan politics complicated by special interests that circulate about him like sharks looking for prey.  Obama can’t function and live up to his potential, preferring a professorial approach that, as a professor myself, know to be a way to conceal the truth of things, the passion that’s not to interfere with the reasoned sense of reality, the illusion of objectivity that students — the citizens — know quite well does not exist, not even in the sciences.  Thus, Obama can’t be Obama — he’s become something else.

The problem with Obama not being Obama is not the upcoming mid-term elections; the dilemma is that we will all be so dissolutioned by the time the next presidential election that we will be hard pressed to vote for him again, leaving the presidency wide open for the fascist-like remains, the crumbs left in the wake of  Bush-Cheney — the racist Tea Party contingency that’s followed by the ignorant bliss of Sarah Palin.  The picture gets uglier and uglier as we look further and further.

Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio has come over to the Obama Health Care Senate plan – what’s left of the original and approved by the Senate — because he feels that this legislation is so important that it could literally be the first of the blocks taken from underneath the Obama Presidency and topple it.

It’s not the merits of the plan that warrant Kucinich’s vote, but rather, saving the Presidency from the extraordinarily negative and bigoted sharks nibbling at the President’s ankles that inspired his allegiance.

This is a mark of our decline, not a gesture of progress and creativty.  While the world clamors for diversity and difference to solve problems, our government — and those that want to run our government — aspire to homogeneity, sameness, the status quo. This will kill us completely.

Filed under Obama Administration, corruption, cultural studies, politics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Everything is Connected: Contemplating the American Decline and the Rise of Fascism

March 28, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

I stood on West 33rd Street and 8th Avenue, in front of Madison Square Garden, New York City, staring at a block long billboard, a top McDonald’s and Duane Reeds, announcing the savagery of a UFC Kick-Ass Match, when a guy came up to me and asked, “You have a cigarette I can buy?”

Before I nodded “no” he shrugged me off and walked away mumbling something to himself. I looked towards the opposite corner, across 33rd, and a giant Pepsi billboard said that the world is better when we buy a Pepsi. Beneath this Biblical declaration, sitting at the entrance to Penn Station, a woman held a homemade cardboard sign — “homeless” — in one hand, on the other a stained paper cup that she shook and called to passersby walking with such purpose that they didn’t seem to see her; she was invincible, unseen, except to a couple of cops who recognized her and said something familiar to her. She held up a cigarette for a light — for someone to light, anyone stepping around her and heading down the escalator to the trains.

When I looked up from the invisible homeless woman, the huge and incomprehensible, always changing digital account of green house gases emitted into the universe caught my attention. The last few numbers in the hundreds column kept rhythm with the extreme traffic and anxious pedestrian tumult of the streets — heads down, pushing and moving, sidestepping, anxious, changing. And I became aware — and saddened — by how owned we are, how much of how we perceive our lives — billboards and giant TV screens, digital versions of our illusions, avatars on Facebook and MySpace and Twitter– is not of our making. What we do on a daily basis is exchange value. How much are you worth to me? What can you do for me? I felt inconsequential.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “Men, in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good.” How much of what we do in a predictable economic system necessitates that we violate and murder, particularly in the judgment of the puppeteers?

Standing on West 33rd and 8th Avenue, I followed the money, how it moves and what it touches in our vertical economy. One way or another, we all have to consume — this is what our economy is suggesting: no way out of consumption. Globalization is also saying that the poorest nations have only one hope: consume your way out of misery. Haiti is our example here — there are more, of course.

I had a memory: in a visit to Amsterdam, staring at the women in booths coquettishly calling to men, I noticed that on the door of these booths are two documents legitimizing prostitution, a city permit and just beneath it, Visa and Mastercard signs. I realized that money works in every nook and cranny of our world; it filters through everything — prostitution, weapons, narcotics, education and health care, war, depravity and violence.  This interconnectivity is forged by the money we put into the system that is pushed and funneled, by powerful people, in directions we have no control over. Everything is connected.  Everything is connected by money.

I learned in Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of The American Empire at the End of The Age of Oil, by Michael C. Rubbert,* in the forward by Catherine Austin Fitts, Assistant Secretary in the first Bush administration, that in “1997, the Washington Post killed a cover story on [Fitts'] efforts to help HUD insure the integrity of its mortgage programs, thus making possible the subsequent disappearance of $59 billion from HUD as a part of this orgy of ‘piratization’ of government assets by private interests.” Benito Mussolini said, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Rubbert’s investigation — his argument — is simple: follow the money and we’ll find collusion — government, private enterprise and the criminal narcotics trade; money washed through Wall Street. The citizenry is mostly unconscious, paying for the infrastructure, dedicating earned dollars (taxes + consumption) to ‘piratization’.

Why? Because we live in a closed system of limited and dwindling resources (oil + gas). “Global demand for oil and natural gas is growing faster than new supplies are being found, and the world population is exploding,” Rubbert reminds us.  We are in a crisis that results in aggressive and hostile methods to ensure power remains in the right hands. “American fascism,” Rubbert tells us, “is something different now … It’s not just private, elite control over the legal system, nor private evasion of the rule of law. It’s a crisis – induced transition from a society with a deeply compromised legal system to a society where force and surveillance completely supplant the system.”

The first Bush election and the Florida fiasco effectively demonstrated a very real coup d’état– the aggressive start of the surveillance society; the derelict response to 9/11 was a convenience — we know this now since Cheney and clan already had plans to invade Iraq. The old and weak system was effectively supplanted with 9/11. Now Obama. He has little room to move; he will be given latitude, but not so much that he’ll change the “crisis-induced” system.

When I stood on West 33rd Street and 8th Avenue, in front of Madison Square Garden, I came to understand my small place, my inconsequential place in a “crisis – induced” system. Like a serf in the middle ages, I can see the mote I can’t cross — none of us can. I thought about self-reliance and individualism, only to realize that these ideas have been turned on their head, used to ensure we keep walking, heads down, thinking about tomorrow, forgetting about yesterday, and never fully grasping — or seeing — the present because, after all, this is where things are going wrong, the ground floor where a homeless woman begs for scraps.

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The Motivation to Drill for Oil

April 1, 2010 by hector 1 Comment

President Obama is not drilling for oil because it’s politically expedient.  He is not drilling for oil because it reduces our reliance on foreign oil — nothing can do that, and certainly not with the oil deep beneath US waters.  President Obama is not drilling for oil to prove to environmentalists that an environmentalist president can extract oil without harm, while simultaneously developing green technologies and reversing economic stagnation.  President Obama’s decision to drill for oil is a military decision.

Simple but true.  The ongoing and always at the forefront plan to control energy reserves that will ensure the US remains the formidable military, economic and political power is not working according to plan. Drilling for oil in America is a way to stall; the idea being that this change in direction will focus us away from the ongoing US military build up circling the richest and last remaining — and dwindling — energy reserves in the world.

Let’s look at reality, the data: According to Judicial Watch — and others, such at the US Government — in NEDPG documents they obtained, using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), we can see that 60% of all recoverable oil on the planet is in an area no larger that the state of Kansas.  This area is known as the “golden triangle”: from Mosul in Norther Iraq, to the Straits of Hormuz, to an oil field in Saudi Arabia 75 miles in from the coast, just west of Qatar, then back up to the Mosul.  And just about all of Iran’s oil lies near its western shoreline on the  Gulf. ( see maps obtained by Judicial Watch here)

It’s quite easy to see that the US military already occupies part of this area and surrounds the remaining.  On January 29, 2001, President Bush established the National Energy Policy Group (or NEPDG) to develop a national energy policy. The Vice President was then directed to lead the group and other high-level officials were named as members. On May 16, 2001, The NEPDG submitted a report and recommendations to the President. The report was published and entitled: National Energy Policy: Reliable, Affordable, and Environmentally Sound Energy for America’s Future.  The stark but very real maps obtained by the conservative watchdog, Judicial Watch, reveal with uncanny precision the Cheney lead strategy to control this area.

In The Guardian, in September of 2003, Michael Meacher MP, UK  Environment Minister 1997-2003, said, “The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure global domination … The plan ["Rebuilding America's Defenses," Project for a New American Century -- 2000] shows Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power … The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies…As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s” (qtd. in Crossing the Rubicon; 42).

The push back military forces are experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by the encroachment of Iran, as well as the problems caused by Israel’s refusal to cease building on Palestenian soil, have slowed the Bush-Cheney NEPDG plan to control the area.  For instance, according to Cheney’s NEPDG, “to meet projected demand over the next two decades America must have in place between 1,300 and 1,900 new electrical plants.  Much of this new generation will be fueled by natural gas.” On the other side, oil powers everything — the food supply, for starters; oil powers more than 600 million vehicles worldwide — and the numbers are increasing.  Realities on the ground have slowed our military occupation — and control — of the “golden triangle.”  But demands for oil and gas have not diminished, even when great effort is being made by the likes of 350.0rg to alert us of the damages we make by continuing to consume as we do.

Where is the energy supply to feed us, for the always ongoing mantra of growth, for our automobiles, which we equate with freedom and self-realiance (an illusion), going to come from? Not off the American coasts.

Oil is going to come from the control exerted in the most vital energy area, the “golden triangle.”  We have reached a crisis point; we may even be at a tipping point. Environmentalists and pr0-drilling conservatives are debating what drilling will do to our oceans and the illusion that drilling in US waters will make us less dependent on foreign oil.  It’s a sham.  The real conversation should be about Peak Oil and our over consumption in a closed eco system. We’re heading towards more military action, not just in the “golden triangle” area, but also in Latin America and Africa — follow the military with an eye on the maps and the reality of our situation will become clear.

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The Value of Nothing

April 3, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

Following my post, The Motivation to Drill for Oil, I want to promote, along these lines, Raj Patel’s book, The Value of Nothing. And coming out later this month, a book about how we might work our way out of the mess we’re in, Bill McKibben’s Eaarth.

Raj Patel on YouTube

Filed under Obama Administration, cultural studies, philosophy, politics

It’s so uncanny, that I’m pissed!

May 19, 2010 by hector 2 Comments

I’m pissed. How ’bout you? You pissed?

Not about life in general, even in the face of such challenges. Not pissed about government and politics, so blind these seem to be to our daily needs. No.

Are you pissed about the rest of us — about us? Are you pissed about how easily we’ve abdicated our responsibilities? Are you pissed about how easy it is to blame just about anyone — religions, government, armed forces, education, doctors and lawyers and insurance companies, multinational corporations, our food production? Does this ease with which we can blame everyone, except ourselves, make you uncomfortable? Isn’t it odd how we blame as if all these entities, private and public, exist outside our lives?

We awakened, Wednesday, May 19, to Arlen Specter’s career ending primary defeat in Pennsylvania and Rand Paul’s Kentucky victory, which he says is the Tea Party speaking. The talk — media’s and politico’s — is cheap: voters are tired of the same old in Washington; we’re tired — we’re being told — of the insiders, the old Washington establishment politics that’s grid locked in partisan bickering. The idiocy I’m pissed about is the notion that voters are actually opting for candidates that are not a part of the circles of power — Joe Sestak and Rand Paul. How ignorant is that? It’s proof that politicians and their symbiotic relationship with mainstream media are working well to ensure a sleepy citizenry that’s been educated to simply follow. Ignorance and laziness piss me off — I’ve had it.

Joe Sestak, who defeated Arlen Specter, is a U.S. representative, a Democrat elected in 2006; he is a retired two-star admiral with 31 years of service in the Navy. He grew up in a large family in Delaware County, and followed his father, a World War II captain, into the Navy. Joe Sestak graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy second in his class, and rose through the ranks to become a three-star admiral; he holds a master’s and doctoral degree from Harvard University. He was a defense adviser for the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. He commanded the George Washington aircraft carrier battle group during combat operations in Afghanistan. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Sestak became the first director of “Deep Blue,” an anti-terrorism think tank within the Navy.

I don’t know, maybe it’s me — maybe I’m misreading Sestak’s CV: Naval Academy, Harvard, commander of an aircraft carrier, congressman — are these not highly priced establishment posts synonimous with power and influence? If Joe Sestak didn’t fully and completely embrace the establishment and thus learn how power works in government — primarily its relationship between congress, the senate, the Pentagon and, of course, the private sector — how did he get to where he is today, flying a Jimi Hendrix freak flag? “Now, if 6 turned up to be 9, I don’t mind, I don’t mind?” Really? I mind since the 6 never turned out to be 9 — 6 is 6 and Sestak and Specter are the same, except one is 80 and has been around for 30 years. Maybe Specter should go, but not because Sestak is somehow something new and different — he’s not.

Rand Paul is the son of Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate whose libertarian backers often take credit for being the germ of the Tea Party. No, that can’t be re-establishing the establishment. Mr. Paul has backing from Mr. Bunning, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and evangelical leader James Dobson, the founder of the Colorado-based Christian organization Focus on the Family. Absolutely, this is not more of the same!

How utterly uncanny is the absolute stupidity of the voters buying into the notion that any of these candidates is somehow not lured by the greatest aphrodisiac of all, power? If these are real “do-gooders,” then once in Washington, they’ll experience how power is maintained by those that need it in their hands most. If they don’t go along, their careers in the spectacle will be short-lived.

We know that the Katrina tragedy was not a natural catastrophe, but rather, a devastation caused by the Army Corps of Engineers. We know, too, that hubris, greed and human error (seen as neglect of the facts) caused the disaster in the Gulf. We know that terrorists grow from poverty and illiteracy, much as did the American discontent — some of it violent — in the 1960′s, case in point being the Newark Riots.* And we know quite well about the deterioration of public life in America and the rise of mediocrity and buffoonery, such as we see in cases like the media’s fixation with Elena Kagan’s sexuality and Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana, a goober who preaches sex-abstinence and couldn’t abstain from sex, as we’ve learned from his resignation prompted by a part time affair with an aid that actually helped him video tape commentary about sex-abstinence.

I’m pissed that with so much evidence we can’t seem to face the reality that we’re humans with lots and lots of faults, making mistakes at every turn. We seem to be convinced that the institutions we inhabit — and that inhabit us — will carry on without us, failing to see — or is it repression? — that we have created the world in which we live; that what we see around us — the economy, poverty, education problems, health care, greed, avarice, the widening gap between the haves and have nots– all of these are who we are.  I’m pissed that in-between state dinners, Presidents Obama and Calderon will not discuss America’s socio-economic dependency on drugs and weapons; that Wall Street and Main Street are complicit in the drug trade.  And I’m pissed that, as Charles Bowden says in Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the  Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, we’re not involved in a “drug war,” but rather, in a “war for drugs.”  We’re all in this together and we’re in denial.  “For decades, investigative journalists, researchers and analysts have noted the symbiotic relationship amongst international narcotrafficking syndicates, neofascist political groups, U.S. intelligence agencies and U.S. Special Forces in the war against leftist adversaries” (read entire link, please).

Am I the only one pissed at the ease with which we are willing to accept the deception and the lies?

We have such a fragile hold on life. We don’t have a sure grip. Our hope bubbles up and pops. But maybe, just maybe this is why we’re in denial and so eager to grab onto anything — the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh’s “grandmother-horrifying derision that passes for humor on radio these days,” the bogus political – media narrative of change; and maybe this is why in our eagerness to reject all that seems familiar, we actually become more entrenched in the systematic decay of everything we’ve always created and have to live with. This denial of our reality pisses me off! It doesn’t you?

Filed under Media, Obama Administration, corruption, cultural studies, education, politics, war on drugs

Preliminary Notes – NCORE (day 1, June 2, AM Session), National Harbor, MD

June 2, 2010 by hector Leave a Comment

NCORE

NCORE

I’m sitting in what’s known as the Atrium, a huge glass dome that opens to the National Harbor and blue skies.  Off at a distance is the bridge into DC and over a hill, the upper edge of the Washington Monument is visible through the thick haze.

Muzac plays and there’s the low hum of chatter, people sitting at tables, talking on cell phones, talking and chatting with each other or, like me, simply writing and checking emails.  I’m sitting in the Belvedere Lobby, which in the afternoons becomes the Lobby Bar – expensive.  Beneath me is the Atrium – large ficus trees, fake tropical plants mixed with real ones, a loud water fountain and restaurants about the perimeter – sports bar, Italian, a quick get a salad and a beer or coke place.  I can hear the low level hum of chatter and the clinking of silverware on plates – breakfast.

10-11:30 (Potomac Ballroom 2/Convention Center, Level 2)
A Conversation with Reza Aslan
“Sectarian Conflicts in Pluralistic Societies: Iraq as a Case Study”

Intro

•    Ethnic diversity more often than not leads to violent conflicts between religious and political groups in plural societies such as Iraq
•    Although such conflicts in recent times may occur less frequently and bee less violent in American society, we need to gain a better understanding of these conflicts in other societies and what lessons they hold for us

(note 1: the media background of candidates is so important, it seems, highlighted with equal importance as the academic)

•    Recognize the way globalization is changing the way people are defining themselves and the assault on national identities
•    Redefining what society and community mean
•    Primary form of identity is national identity, which is no longer the way we see ourselves or even behave
•    We are going to have to deal with other, more primal forms of identity – ethnicity, etc
•    Challenge: US traditional – first nation state to be “minority, majorities” – inevitable conflicts that arise when religion, culture, and ethnicity begin to clash with national identities

Talk

•    Islamic Reformation: “reformation” not applicable to geo-political conflicts one sees in middle east; “reformation” – is a universal phenomenon, and ultimately it’s about the inevitable conflict btwn institutions and individuals about who defines the state – who holds the interpretive capacity? This process has gone on for centuries and we’re now experiencing the “end” of the reformation of Islam, the rapid individualization of religion, the democratization that comes when adherence achieves a certain level of literary and when technological advances (communication/IT), which parallel the printing press in the Christian Reformation, creates a more fractured community; the traditional forms are dissipating and anyone can become a source of authority and emulation. Over the last 100 years, in Islam, we’ve been experiencing the fracturing of the religion and becoming more profound.  It’s neither a good nor a bad thing.
•    When institutions are used to maintain a grip on the interpretation, it’s bound to create conflict and bloodshed.
•    Islam separated church and state 1500 years ago.  The true problem of totalitarian in the Middle East comes from sectarian groups; the only religious totalitarian government is in Iran.
•    Sectarian forces: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria – maintain a monopoly of discourse and have separated themselves from religious groups.  Religion thus becomes the sole means to express one’s political ideas. The only free space is the mosque. Part of the fracturing of Islam and the diminishment of interpretive power among clerics has lead to the politically active, socially active religious movements.  These are non-mosque based movements, such as Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood, anti-institutional movements that define themselves in opposition to the clerics.  The perfect example is Al Qaeda, defining themselves against Iranian religious leaders.  Children of the Islamic reformation and disgusted by clerics, so they don’t have to look to mulas for interpretation of Islam.
•    The young find these leaders appealing because they wouldn’t be ‘caught dead’ in a mosque.  These movements exist because young Muslims don’t feel they have to get their religious education from mosques, turning to charismatic individuals that are socially conscious.
•    Taliban: diverse group, Pakistani and Afghan are different, the Afghan made up of half a dozen groups.  Taliban means student, kids members of a very conservative school that took on a political role in the 1990s when Afghanistan was taken over by warlords.  Mula Omar did not go to school; he is a tribal sheik.  Institutions were opposed to the Taliban – almost every Muslim country was against the Taliban, Iran even fighting alongside the US.
•    Iran: is it holding the “Ace” card?  Israel has becoming increasingly isolated, due to the incompetence of current regime (N); it’s living in era that no longer exists.   Other narratives are available and the Israeli narrative is no longer central.  The images of the Israeli ship event cannot be controlled.
•    “Special Relationship w/ Israel”: the normal issues, boundaries, concepts that tend to define international relations btwn two nation states do not apply when it comes to Israel; we get nothing from our relationship with Israel.  The relationship disproportionally favors Israel.  American national safety is in jeopardy.  Relationship needs to be brought into line.  The “special relations” status has hurt Israel.
•    Iran: complicated issue – a majority S’hia, which is much different than Sunni, where authority derives from text and tradition; the interpreters can maintain a real grip, a monopoly on religious interpretation (14 centuries of access).   In S’hia Islam, the sources of authority come from the Ayatollahs themselves, because they’ve reached a level of spiritual and intellectual authority.  Ayatollahs don’t have to refer to the Qur’an and can issue fatwa.  S’hia Islam can adapt and change; it’s more pliable.  In Iran, a country that’s very conservative, abortion, contraception and sex change operations are possible; they pass out clean needles for drug addicts. S’hia Islam allows for a single individual to make a judgment on a single individual.  The cons are that there is no single authority within S’hia Islam – 30 Ayatollahs have the same authority, no one having authority over the other.  S’hia Islam allows the worshiper to follow whichever s/he likes; allows for incredible diversity and innovation.
•    What we’re seeing in vibrancy in Iran in the political community; every month there are mass uprisings – unions, student groups, etc. Part of it has to do with S’hism, the sense of individualism: the individual is responsible for his /her relationship with Allah.  Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess; it’s in a moment of profound political change.
•    Iraq: majority S’hia country.  The most dynamic experiments taking place right now is happening in the S’hia world.  Iraq is much more diverse than Iran. Iraq has an overly expressive national identity – exaggerated patriotism.  US, by far, the most religious country in the modern world; we want public displays of religion.
•    Winston Churchill drew arbitrary lines and created Iraq.  Churchill gave them a fake name, Iraq, which means nothing and forced the notion of secular nationalism, a western notion, removing any attempts to define the country in indigenous ways. Sectarian conflicts then make sense since the people have never thought themselves in secular national terms; ethnic identities take a front seat.   Indefatigable nature of the Iraqis themselves.  Nothing that binds the citizens of Iraq together, except for a piece of paper.
•    Islam states conversations: are Islam and democracy reconcilable? 1/3 of Muslims live in democracy.  It’s a useless conversation because it’s not born out by empirical facts.  Iran is 98% S’hia and 96% Persian – the ideas of diversity doesn’t exist in Iran.  The challenge is greater in countries like the US, where we have to figure out a way of reconciling identities in a larger framework so that we feel that we belong to a greater society.  This is what’s really at stake when we speak about globalization.  Even in the US we’re seeing the fracturing of the American identity.  Episcopalian Church fractured into 2 communities around the issues of ordaining gays.

(note 2: Globalization is fracturing the US, too, and here we’re also experiencing the push and the pull, politically, between religious groups and groups with an exaggerated sense of patriotism.)

•    People that have very different view are challenging national Identity.  Judeo-Christian means Protestant. We need to rethink how we speak about moral issues.  Shifting moral landscape in the US.
•    Europe: no construction of minarets; France, strip yourself of identity, then you’ll be French; also banning the face covering, as a symbol of the “creeping” Islam.  This is about Europe; as a result of globalization, it’s becoming harder and harder to define what it is to be European – what does it mean to be French?  Europe has had a lot of practice in defining itself against other nationalities.  Islam is the “fall guy.”
•    India: rising economic power with tremendous diversity.  Partition was only 60 years ago, resulting in the most massive human migration.  US pluralism is an accident.  India, on the other hand, has constructed a firm a national identity and a civic identity as well, based not on ethnic or cultural or religious identification, but rather, on the notion of a greater national identity while being true to personal identities.
•    Our ethnic, cultural and religious identities are beginning to be resurgent and national identity is on decline.
•    The relations btwn nations are no longer the same.  What happens in Kashmir is affecting the US.

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