Hope Springs Eternal Amidst Decline: The Bard College Model

July 29, 2011 3 Comments

Witness today: the pathetic — and uncanny — Washington circus concerning the debt and the debt ceiling crisis; the economy is still moving at a snail’s pace, now reacting even more negatively to Washington’s ideologically based idiocies; evidence of climate change is everywhere around us; wars in Iraq and Afghanistan baffle the mind, forever responding to terror and poor Western management; U.S. public education is in the toilet, put there by more controversial political brinkmanship, and continuing to ensure we live in a bifurcated society; unemployment is stagnant, as a result, and more and more people out of work or working in jobs well below their capacity; production is at a standstill, and in some places, such as Ohio, industry has left town — Main Street is emptying out; children and women, some of the most vulnerable in our society, are without health care; the gap between the richest of the privileged white and Hispanics and blacks is wider then it’s ever been in history; some of our cities — Newark for instance — are being left in the dust kicked up by the materialism of the few.

These tragic items are but the results of our manmade decline. Let me say this again: if you look around — health care, education, finance, industry, the environment, our deteriorating infrastructure, the decline of certain cities, particularly those inhabited by people of color and immigrants — every single problem we have today exists because we’ve made it so. Our educated elite have taken us down.

How can the most powerful nation in history come to this? The answer, I dare, is simple: we’ve educated the elite — politicians, lawyers, doctors, CEO’s, and so on — into beings that have long ago left their humanity at the curb, supplanted by delusions of grandeur, the avarice that so carefully destroys everything it touches. Education has become school for profit and self-gain.

As I’ve said in these pages before, what we have here is a crisis in — and about — EDUCATION, writ large (see here, too). Education has forgotten — or repressed — it’s allegiance to Humanity, its very real purpose of creating empathetic, creative citizens.

We can learn something from the models we say we follow, in this case, the Greek Stoics. The Stoics had a radical point, as Martha S. Nussbaum tells us in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, “that we should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government, not temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings.” We’ve moved far from this goal, this reality; it’s no longer a compass point.

Of course, the failure of our EDUCATION — the educating for excellence, efficiency and production, education focused solely on the means of production and accounting, the creation of cogs on the wheel of mediocrity — is devoid of any moral posture. It is an immoral education.

When morality fails or is oppressed, ideologies spring to the rescue. In every tragic circumstance we face today, each can be said to be driven by ideologies — not rationality, not dialog, compromise and bargaining, the hallmarks of Democracy.

Ideologies give us a false sense of reality, an artificial view of the world — and ourselves. Ideologies, as we can see today in Washington, scorn knowledge; these are motivated or, better, are narrated by the corporation. Who will win, whether or not the debt ceiling is raised? Who will win if US ratings are reduced? That’s right: the banks, no matter what happens, win. They win the world. (This is, of course, the grand example, the ultimate example of inverted totalitarianism, where the corporations dictate and the witless masses, sleeping away in illusions of plentitude, are lead to slaughter.)

How did this world come about?

Ken Robinson, for instance, in Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, demonstrates how uncreative our education has been:

The rise of industrialism influenced not only the structure of mass education but also its organizational culture. Like factories, schools are special facilities with clear boundaries that separate them from the outside world. They have set hours of operation and prescribed rules of conduct. They are based on the principles of standardization and conformity.

Robinson could be describing the modern prison, instead — separate …from the outside world, prescribed rules of conduct, standardization and conformity.

What schools have done is effectively standardize and conform and therefore shut down the imagination, killed creativity, in the words of Ken Robinson. What then can grow from here? What we have, says John Ralston Saul, in The Unconscious Civilization, is a “human … reduced to a measurable value, like a machine or a piece of property. We can choose to achieve a high value and live comfortably or be dumped unceremoniously onto the heap of marginality.”

Can we change this? Can we combat this?

Yes, we can. There are examples. One primary example is Bard College. This institution is not held to a separation from the outside world; it is in the world, creatively addressing our culture’s greatest challenges.

Leo Botstein, Bard College President since 1975, is perhaps the best and, likely, the most enlightened of college presidents. He has lead this college from prescribed — and accepted — rules of conduct and carefully defined new rules of conduct that follow a moral understanding of our human responsibilities to each other. This is, indeed, for my money, the only real example, today, of a classical liberal arts education.

Bard has embarked on several endeavors: Bard High School Early College seeks to provide an alternative to the traditional high school, a “rigorous course of study that emphasizes thinking through writing, discussion, and inquiry.” Imagine if other elite liberal arts colleges learned from Bard and took up alternatives to high schools like this? What can we do? Bard has announced its collaboration with the Newark Public School System as well.

The small college is involved in the Bard Prison Initiative, creating opportunities for incarcerated men and women to earn Bard degrees. In From Ball and Chain to Cap and Gown: Getting a Degree B. A. Behind Bars, a PBS special story about the Bard Prison Initiative, we can see the essence of the liberal arts education at work.

But Bard has not stopped there.

It has a Masters of Arts in Teaching Program, too, allowing students to be certified in New York and California. It is a program focused on “both rural and urban-high needs school districts.” No one is doing this. Absolutely no one. Bard is in the vanguard.

And if this is not enough, Bard has established an Honors College in collaboration with Al-Quds — the Al-Quds – Bard Partnership, in Jerusalem. Along with St. Petersburg State University, Bard has developed “The Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences … the first Department in Russia to be founded upon the principles of liberal education. It emerged from Smolny College (officially the Program in «Arts and Humanities»), which was created in 1994 by St. Petersburg State University  in close collaboration with Bard College (USA). Bard College’s interest in curricular  innovation  and the reform of international education coincided with the interests of a group of creatively-minded scholars from St. Petersburg State University.” In other words, in the international arena, Bard is not going to the usual places, as all other schools do; rather, Bard has opted to go where there are obvious challenges — and opportunities.

How is it possible that a small school in Upstate New York can do so much? Endowments of other liberal arts institutions tower over Bard’s, approximately a mere $270 million. How is it possible to do so much with what in higher education is so little these days? It has 1800 students. A faculty of about 224 professors. The cost of attending Bard is comparable to other elite liberal arts colleges, $55, 480 — so what’s the difference? It has a beautiful campus. It has all the accoutrements we expect from these schools — the arts, wonderful grounds, athletic facilities, new technologies abound. So what gives?

Answer: imagination and will, a conviction that what we must do in education, if we’re going to contribute to the reversing of the tide of malaise, complacency, avarice and the blind pursuit of materialism is not compete, but rather, join hands and cooperate, collaborate, listen and learn by thinking critically, dialog and bargain. Like no other institution for its size Bard is doing more for humanity than most larger — and more distinguished — universities.

Might we jump on this wagon and see where creativity can take us, rather then staying on the ideological tracks to despair?

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The Grand Illusion: Private Jets, Private Schools, Private Lives

July 26, 2011 Leave a comment

Private jets, private schools, private lives. Private is the mote money buys. Private, in the new American economic reality, means transcendence. Transcendence, in American Philosophy, once the hallmark of reading and learning, contemplation and the labor to find the self amongst the many, self-reliance, can now be bought. Private means mobility, the ability to move through space unimpeded by the harangue of the less fortunate. Private means not having to dirty one’s hands — or soul — with the problems of the many — unemployment, hunger and poverty, ill-equipped schools, the malaise of hopelessness. Private means hope — the hope that I will gain while others lose. To live in private means that others will not.

In To Reach Simple Life of Summer Camp, Lining Up for Private Jets, Christine Haughney reports that, “Now, even as the economy limps along, more of the nation’s wealthier families are cutting out the car ride and chartering planes to fly to summer camps. One private jet broker, Todd Rome of Blue Star Jets, said his summer-camp business had jumped 30 percent over the last year.” Why hang with the rest us? Just sidestep all of the garbage. Why have long waits when it’s more efficient to simply fly over all of it — the heat, the stifling highway stops and their smelly bathrooms, wet floors, loud hand dryers, tolls and people that still can’t tell the difference between an E-Pass lane and a cash lane.

“At Sullivan County Airport in Bethel, N.Y.,” reports Haughney, “roughly 40 percent of recent flights have carried families heading to summer camp. Officials at Laconia Municipal Airport in Gilford, N.H., and Moultonborough Airport in Moultonborough, N.H., reported similar numbers.”

Are these the jets Obama is talking about? Are these the perks the Republicans don’t want to give up? Are the Republicans — and the Tea Party — fighting to ensure that  Private becomes a strong and permanent demarcation in our society, a new social order, one that travels on private jets, attends exclusive camps, followed by elite private prep schools and colleges? Sure we’ll let in a few faces that aren’t like ours, just to look as if we’re into multiculturalism, but please, private is the perfect way to travel through life hassle free.

This new Private world order is forcing us to adjust, re-evaluate, tread lightly since money is power and power can be wielded against anyone, for any reason, and if you’re one of the less fortunate, then, well, you may get screwed. “The popularity of private-plane travel is forcing many high-priced camps, where seven-week sessions can easily cost more than $10,000, to balance the habits of their parents against the ethos of simplicity the camps spend the summer promoting.”

From the budget negotiations and the drama around the debt ceiling, to the hiring of specialized tutors for prep school darlings to ensure entry into elite institutions, to tax shelters and the readily available servicing of any whim, any desire provided you have the money to pay for it — see DSK, for instance, ironically a part of the socialist party in France — what we have here is a view of the other side of the looking glass. We’ve come through, like Alice, to another world. In this world, the majority is left out; in this world, transcendence still means sweat; in this world, though, for just a few, transcendence can be purchased — as can politicians and the perks that go along with the buying of souls.

In this new world order, Private means a loss of empathy; it is the loss of a humanity. Private is synonymous with a false sense of self; it is a skewed view of the world; it is an illusion, the grandest of all. Private is the false belief that one can buy out of suffering, a moral high ground that abdicates responsibility for one’s actions. We’re in deep do-do.

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Dominican – Haitians and the World Order

July 24, 2011 4 Comments

In Juno Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar’s family — Beli, the mother, and Lola, Oscar’s sister — go to dinner, upon the mother’s invitation, to the Zona Colonial. We learn that “the waiters kept looking at their party askance.” Lola reacts to this in a manner consistent with (some) Dominicans, and of course consistent with notions of “zona” or zone that is aptly named “colonial,” and says, “Watch out, Mom … they probably think you’re Haitian.” Beli, the mother, replies, “La única haitiana aquí eres tú, mi amor” (The only haitian here is you, my love.). In another incident, as “Oscar Goes Native,” we learn that he sees “his first Haitians kicked off a guagua (bus) because niggers claimed they ‘smelled.’” Díaz also gives us the picture of “Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections.”

What do we see here?

It is a picture, in this case of Haitians, that is consistent with how those in need are first seduced by wages, usually much lower than those paid to a native labor force but much higher than earned by the needy of a country not quite as bountiful, and then categorically denied human rights by the dominant culture, in this case the Dominican Republic.

But this is not a problem unique to the Dominican Republic. All dominant cultures contain segments of their population for the purposes of cheap labor. This creates an unequal distribution of wealth and benefits. Economies are built — and strengthened — on the backs of those that are economically and politically weaker. This is the history of Western Civilization. Beginning with the Dutch Empire in the 17th Century, establishing outposts and plantations, skewering the fertile Guyana plains and creating the Cape Colony in South Africa, what we learn is that the modern world has been built by colonialization, the extreme exercise of violent power and control, and therefore extraordinary abuses of people.

Colonizers increase their wealth and the colonized are effectively repressed. Moving away from this history is difficult since it’s built into the DNA of such notions as progress, individualism and now even multiculturalism, as the recent, tragic events in Norway reveal. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is having second thoughts on multiculturalism following the attacks in Oslo; President Nicolas Sarkozy of France held a nationwide debate on “national identity” and banned Muslim full-face veils, for instance.

This way, this method of addressing the ills of our societies as we all confront differences and desires that may be quite alien to some, really begins with the year 1492 and the destruction of Andalusía and the expulsion or conversion ultimatum issued to Jews by the Catholic King himself, Ferdinand of Spain. I stand with those intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, that firmly see this dark moment of discovery and destruction, or the discovery that brought on further destruction already in progress in Spain, as the beginning of the Modern Age. If we look around, we can argue that we’ve yet to live through this period, the black plague issued from 1492 — perhaps the ultimate fukú, as defined by Díaz, “specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.”

Now, as the historically colonized and victimized — Africans, Muslims, the disenfranchised dark people of the world — slowly move closer towards social justice — those inalienable rights we all speak about — they are further victimized by the strong roots of extreme nationalism that apparently grow unabated when the Other we’ve always kept down gains a modicum of political power. Political power leads to economic power. We know this, our history tells us this, so we fear this inescapable reality.

The case of the Haitians in the Dominican Republic, the narrative of their efforts to gain respect and a sense of worth, began on October 4, 1937. Known as the Parsley Massacre, because Dominican soldiers, holding up a sprig of parsley, would ask, “What is this?” And if they couldn’t say peregil, the Spanish word for parsley, they would be executed. (The Creole word for parsley is pési; the French word for parsley is persil.) Between 15,000 to 20,000 Haitian immigrant workers were massacred in the Dominican Republic. Most were slaughtered with bayonets and machetes by the Dominican army and some Dominican big landowners (ironically this practice was thought of as a way to keep the Dominican army from being fingered — no bullets, no trace). Infants had their heads smashed against walls. Women were speared with pitchforks. Many who were attempting to escape back to Haiti were captured at the border and killed. These murders were ordered by Dominican dictator Raphael Leonidas Trujillo, in an effort to “cleanse” the border region and expropriate small peasants or “conuqueros” so that big landowners could take over their lands.

This ethnic cleansing pogrom was part of an ideological campaign by the ruling classes to scapegoat Haitian immigrants for the plight of poor Dominicans and build a Dominican national identity through this process. This has led to an enduring entrenched anti-haitianismo pervasive in Dominican culture, reinforced throughout school and systematically used as an instrument of exploitation.

It seems as if when we exploit and colonize, we hate those we use and destroy. Could it be that this Other is so overwhelming a reminder of our brutality that it’s much easier to take the next step and simply annihilate them? Is it that in conquering we hate ourselves so we must more fully engage in the destruction of the Other to keep our sanity? Must we try to destroy their trace, a tragic irony since this is impossible, given that all our texts that justify our power — the Christian Bible, for instance, the US Constitution — are replete with memory, good and bad, peaceful and violent? The trace is just that — a stain, a drop, an instance that’s verifiable and that enables future generations to judge and adjust. Is destruction and devastation the only way we have of enjoying the treasures we’ve taken because they are so colored in blood? Do we destroy fearing the rise of the Other? Certainly the Norwegian extremist charged with killing 92 people in Oslo, Anders Behring Breivik, thinks so having developed a detailed manifesto outlining his preparations and calling for a Christian war against Muslim domination.

We’re aghast at what happened in Oslo, but given the world we live in today, the question is why doesn’t this happen more often? The answer is that it does, it does happen, only in more subtle forms; the suffering is plentiful, particularly among the people that have been pushed aside, run through with machetes. We’re heading for disaster if we don’t find ways to ask relevant questions to help us change our DNA of conquer, divide, abuse and kill off. At the heart of the current US financial crisis, for instance, is this approach — conquer (the poor who didn’t know what mortgage they were getting into), divide (government’s insistence on ensuring the golden parachutes remain in the hands of the privileged that, historically, have always aided abuses), abuse (14% detectable unemployment in the US, though it’s much higher; let’s not forget the immigration crisis, too — we want them to clean our houses but we don’t want to recognize them, not even after generations of being in the US), and kill them off (let’s take to our guns and hit the Arizona border — it’s a war!).

The latest crisis in the long history that exists between the Dominican Republic and Haiti concerns the documentation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Haitians — or better said: the Dominicans of Haitian descent — Dominican-Haitians — are seeking proper documentation so that they can attend schools and universities. These young people are not trying to gain anything that has not been earned by generations of their families living and working in squalor at the behest of the Dominican government. That is to say, these children are Dominican of Haitian descent — but rights are kept from them without reason. These young Dominicans don’t want handouts; they want what’s just so that they can then create a life for themselves, working hard, going to school and advancing. They see that their personal advancement would be the advancement of the nation. They are not welcomed in Haiti; they’re thought of as Dominicans. In the Dominican Republic, as we see in the hands of Juno Díaz, they are shunned, shoved off buses, ridiculed, made to live on the margins.

In Stranded: Stateless in the Dominican Republic, an Aljazeera report on a documentary by Steve Spapienza (why this tragedy is not touched by US mainstream media is yet another story, one of complicity, of course, since we have an equal crisis with immigrants we seduce with our bounty), we can fully see and understand their plight. But as we see in the featured case, that of Jean Sili and his family, the story ends tragically, as if we’re still in the bloody mess that was the Trujillo regime, the years of the brutal patriarch that ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians (he of course killed plenty of Dominicans as well — no one was spared by El Jefe).

What’s a solution for Dominican-Haitians and, perhaps, for undocumented immigrants to the US?

A solution is being presented by Fundación 180 Grados and a unique concept, gobernabilidad, the notion or quality of governing, the art of governing that proposes as a goal economic opportunity, robust social institutions, and stability between government — the State — civil society and open markets. (Interview, in Spanish, with Guillermo Aramburo, President of Fundación, on Hoy Digital) Fundación 180 Grados aims to create education centers, places where gobernabilidad can take root in the promotion of humanity (social justice, a much maligned and overused term — and I dare say a term used by political correcteness not to addres the reality it hides: we’re talking about humanity, we’re talking about what is human, what is, after all, the normal discourse among thinking and feeling people, the blood stream in each of us that connects us all, something we readily dismiss — human rights). This can only happen if there is equal sharing of responsibilities between an organization and the people it’s trying to serve; one learns from the other, this way the underrepresented, the marginalized, can eventually take control of governance — gobernabilidad. It’s a concrete way of ensuring a fascicle and humane indoctrination into the dominant culture, and vice versa. That is to say, as Dominican – Haitians learn to govern — as they produce economies of scale for their own populations — they integrate into the larger society. In doing so, the dominant society benefits as suffering, which is costly in all shapes and forms, is reduced. The society then moves forward in humane ways, something we’ve yet to be able to do anywhere in the western world.

The light of day is in cooperation and collaboration, not competition. Competition — growth for growth’s sake and profits for few — has brought us wars and global warming, antipathies, violence and depravation. It’s time to work with people, such as the Fundación 180 Grados, that are finding creative and socially just solutions to our vast problems. We can’t learn apart from one another. We have to learn together. This will be the new world order.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, when Oscar is facing his assassins, Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy, sent by their police captain to end his life for loving Ybón, a local puta who made her way through the world as best she could, only to end up in this brutal captain’s hands, Oscar tells these formidable henchmen “that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take  a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.”

In the end, the very end of things, how we, as humanity, have recognized love and the magnificent power of love will be how we’re judged.  Trujillo and his legacy, Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy, those that carry out colonialization’s ugliness, they’re scared of love and loving; those who work only to deny human rights, likewise, are scared to death of love.  Love is powerful.  If we give it, we gain strength.

Filed under Citizenship, Class, corruption, cultural studies, Fundamentalism, Muslim, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

L’Avenir in Provence

July 17, 2011 Leave a comment

Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher that gave us deconstruction, says that the true future is that which is to come unannounced — l’avenir; that is to say, the future we plan for with schedules, programs and calculations is only but a piece of the future. The programmed future is foreseeable. L’avenir, instead, comes to us unexpectedly. The Other arriving without us having foreseen it. The unpredictable is therefore true, the truth, the real future.

Out to Lunch

We — Nina and me — planned a week in Avignon, in Provence, France. We arrived from Amsterdam on the TGV as scheduled — a smooth 6hr high speed ride, a quiet ride. We made our way from the gare to the Centre Ville without a hitch. The taxi let us out at 35 rue Louis Pasteur, our pre-arranged studio — so we thought.

Hidden inside of every plan — perhaps at the center — of every schedule and calculation, as if waiting, perhaps even dormant though anticipatory, with one eye open, is the consternation, the sudden jolt, the fire that spews from a dragon’s mouth when the unknown, that which we did not plan and foresee, suddenly overwhelms all space. L’avenir. This is what happens when you realize that 35 rue Louis Pasteur is not the studio apartment you rented, rather it’s a family home. Where are we? What happened to our plans and calculations? Whose world did we enter?

When you find yourself in a place unknown, you come to realize that you’ve entered someone else’s reality, someone else’s sense of what’s to be.

On the other side of the looking glass, standing across from number 35, there we were, two people, suitcases and backpacks in a future we did not plan for. We were out of sorts; we didn’t have the calculus to compute its logic. It was too foreign, the signs not yet evident.

A condition of l‘avenir is the disruption of all logic. Illogic, when aggravated by the adrenaline that ignites when one is in-between what was and what will be, creates the most dastardly images.

We were ripped off. We’re homeless. What do we do now?

On long trips, mishaps are expected, particularly if one goes abroad and tries to engage a culture. There is anticipation, desire, want. In that moment where the anticipation is supreme, it’s easy to forget things. While still in the states, I forgot to set my cell phone to *228, ensuring cell service in the EU (that was resolved with Verizon’s online help and I got cell service a week and 1/2 into the trip). I had no cell service — I did have WiFi — in Avignon. Perhaps this was the American beginning of l’avenir for us — a small mistake, on the surface, that grew in magnitude, starting a chain of challenges, unknowns to come.

Stranded on 35 rue Louis Pasteur, communicating with our landlord — something previously done online — was key. I left Nina behind and went looking for a phone. Near the center of the center ville I found a phone in a place that sold time on computers and telephones. I called the landlord. No answer, only a voice. I left a message with our predicament. I waited and called again. Nothing. I walked back to Nina, a 5 minute walk at a clip, and reported. We could tell what each other was thinking: where would we stay the night? In July, you see, when the festival in Avignon is going on, rooms are booked solid. There are no rooms. Shit. We were sweating in the stifling Avignon heat.

Are we sure we’re in the right place? Double check the paper work, a folder I always carry as back up that contains reservations, addresses of important locations, names. It’s the right address. No, it’s not. It can’t be. No studio here.

On my third call, the landlord answered. He was standing on 30 rue Louis Pasteur, waiting. He had evidently given me the wrong address. Ah. Ah. Voila. But that was the beginning of the unknowns to come.

While some of us vacation and get away to actually get closer to ourselves, understand ourselves in more intimate ways to better understand where we have been and where we are going, in this case, meeting up with our landlord, in the confusion, we neatly slid into his conflicts, the problems with his world. This move completely disrupts any reflection one may be moving towards. We were thrust into the machinations of our landlord’s uncanny world.

Dragging our bags 100 or so meters to 30 rue Louis Pasteur — literally 100 meters because the street numbers converged at 1 at a plaza and began again — the landlord, Francis, explained to us that the studio apartment we pre-paid for had no water. It wasn’t ready. He then told us that he booked a room for us in a B&B 15 kilometers away in Cavaillon. Would that be okay with us?

In the hot, ugly orange and claustrophobic studio apartment on the street level in Avignon’s center ville — heat you could cut with a knife and dank — a B&B with a piscene was a welcomed solution. And since this was unforeseen, said Francis, he threw in his vehicle so that we could get around Provence until the apartment’s water was returned to order. A day, he said, and everything would be fine. Nina and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders: what choice is there?

We were being lead, not leading. Like life, a journey or reprieve away from the usual requires that you succumb. That’s the thing about l’avenir, I think — at some point succumbing to the presence of the Other is necessary. Which involves trust — trusting that you’re in some sort of whirling pool and there’s no way out. Instincts even become something one questions. You have to trust that the schedules and formulations you’ve previously done are pliable enough to adjust to the new world you find yourself in. Ironically, this doesn’t distance you from your introspective journey, rather it brings you closer to yourself and, most importantly, to the person you’re traveling with (here, traveling is of course metaphorical, as in traveling through life’s strange journey).

The B&B in Cavaillon was glorious. We were given the prize room — a suit with private bath and AC. It overlooked the courtyard on one side, the luscious back of the house and pool on the other. George, the owner, was a delight; he spoke English very well, too, and helped us with our French. He provided an itinerary of where we should go in the Lubéron valley region. And we breakfasted on homemade prune and orange jams, croissant, and fresh breads, fresh squeezed orange juice and strong coffee in large cups — almost the bowls one sees in French movies.

L’avenir can bring fortune. We adjusted quickly, and off we were to the villages in the Lubéron. George was our host for two nights. But as much as George is the consummate innkeeper — gracious, affable, kind and considerate, finding comfort and happiness watching his guests relish in his leisured country life in Provence, Francis is harried, non communicative, and overwhelmed with his role as an innkeeper and, he told us, landowner of apartments in Paris. George tries to live a life whereby planning, scheduling and calculating are privileged — thus when l’avenir inevitably overwhelms all other considerations (such as Francis putting out an S.O.S. to all innkeepers in the area asking for any room, any room at all to house these two travelers I’ve made homeless), he is ready — or at least better able to determine options amidst the consternation caused by the unknown, the uncanny quality of the unforeseeable. Francis lives in l’avenir, a life spent reacting to the unexpected; it is a life taxed by the unknown’s voracity, thus it’s not your life, but, rather, the conditions that rear when no plans are exacted. It’s a life of putting out fires since l’avenir is always smoldering — until ignited: plan after plan always in an ongoing deconstruction of the unnatural state of un-grace that defines Francis. Where George is grace, Francis is chaos.

In my experience, age now 57, humans are two: graceful or not. Nothing else. From this grace, or the ungrace, stem a whole host of realizations, understandings and complexes about life itself and how to lead it. The graceful do not succumb; they are pliable. The non-graceful, for them, life is always difficult; it comes with difficulties first, not beauty. For the non-graceful, exacting beauty and wonderment from life is almost impossible. It’s always dark. The graceful always find light somewhere, soft, rounded corners, not edges. The un-graceful is edgy. Simply moving in space is hard; being with people is hard. Listening is nearly impossible. It’s as if in the un-graceful, narcissism has been disrupted, where the graceful is assured of his narcissism. Again, as Jacques Derrida says, there’s no such thing as no narcissism, only degrees of narcissism.

Francis' 18th Century Inn, I'sle sur la Sorgue

On the third night we were scheduled to be in Francis’ B&B, which is in I’sle sur la Sorgue, the most delightful town, the antique capital of Provence, boast the locals. Through the center of the town streams the Sorgue, it’s source up the mountain a ways in the Lubéron. But as delightful as the town is — and we, Nina and me, will return here; it suits us well — that is how un delightful Francis’ B&B is.

We were greeted by 2 barking dogs — a Doberman, old and stiff, and another nondescript dog, a cross between an ant eater and a Siberian husky, a small one. This dog smelled like no other I’ve ever smelled before — urine, sweat, dirty, all in one odiferous mass of energy that rubbed up against your legs. Lick. Lick. Lick. His thick hair was wet and gave off an odor of sewage. In the pebbled courtyard, several dog poops signaled danger. And in the deep July heat of Provence, the courtyard was steaming with the animals’ remains of their day.

What kind of unforeseen worlds can come from conditions like this? In George’s world, we were let into something soft, something that said that attention to our wants was nurtured; in Francis’ world the signs suggested that we had entered into the place of the unforeseen, a place inhabited solely by the affinity to problems Francis and his wife, Cathy, seem to have. This world is selfish. Guests are, at best, secondary, and a kind of despair becomes the organizing principle. Gestures are heavy, labored. Small things, such as breakfast, is not celebrated as a time to get to know one another, as it was at George’s, rather it was haphazardly thrown together.

Sitting in Francis’ and Cathy’s living room and dinning area, both of which smelled of dirty dog and urine, the animals circling, discussing our future stay and constant movement without our luggage, which were in the non-working apartment in Avignon, Nina and I, separate and then together, came to parallel conclusions about how to live these days. We adjusted. We traveled the Lubéron. We dreamt about a house here, a house there, the children, embraced our unforseeable future and the time we have together, fleeting, and dug into our senses.

We had to — the apartment in Avignon never came together. We ended up wasting a day traveling the 40 minutes or so, in heavy traffic, between I’sle sur la Soruge and Avignon so to then wheel our bags, finally, out of the apartment and back to the stinky yet beautiful 18th Century inn. By that time Francis had flown the coop: mysteriously one morning he left before sunrise, leaving his wife and the housekeeper to fend for themselves. And did I mention that Cathy is in a cast up to her elbow? Yes. Croissants were left in paper bags, bread placed in a basket, coffee left in a carafe for us to tend — that was breakfast. But we gracefully made our way, had a glorious send off in I’sle sur la Sorgue — dinner at La Romantica restaurant, glorious, followed by Pastis and red wine as we listened to a very funny rock band that played American Muzac. The town was full, celebratory, as it should have been on July 14, France’s day of celebration for its incredibly powerful history.

The lesson of l’avenir is simply — and with difficulty — to try to find grace in the unforeseen, the uncanny, since this is what’s being asked of us — to find the grace that lays within in our grasp, that beauty that belies resistance and is always already there inviting our deconstruction, our way of prying ourselves from what is not natural so that we don’t have to feign a naturalness that is not existent anyway. This is the story of our unexpected stay in Avignon.

Filed under cultural studies, travel Tagged with , , , ,

Amsterdam Redux

July 10, 2011 Leave a comment

She said, “You Americans, you live to work.” She let it sink in, her eyes wide, a grin across her face. “The Dutch, we work to live,” she said.

The simple, straightforward statement the landlady of our Oud Suid apartment, Marnie, uttered gave me pause. We work to live. What distance those who live to work must travel to reverse how we engage the world.

In Amsterdam, at a very young age, a baby in arms — no, let’s start this again, better yet: in vitro the child begins to enter the rhythms of the culture. It comes to her through the mother as she pedals gracefully, back straight and head upright. She negotiates the trams and the pedestrians, the traffic lights and, most dangerous of all, the tourists, always an unpredictable menace whether on foot or on a bicycle.

This is Amsterdam

By the time the child is one, her hair curly and blond and her skin is butter fresh and can sit upright without help, she moves from a pouch held over the mother’s shoulder, where the child has been cradled in her trek across Amsterdam for some time, to a seat straddling the bike’s crossbar. Perched like a lookout on a ship’s tall mast, the child takes in her world — the intricate web of bicycles coming and going almost effortlessly, the unifying laws of humanity that enable this choreography to blossom as if it’s somehow a spirit laying just beneath the surface for the child that the mother compels forth with her always steady pedaling. The wheels turning and turning rhythmically, balanced and subtle. The child learns this grace before the child can even say a word, utter a complete sentence, learn about more institutionalized versions of grace. Before the child has a full idea she can grasp and articulate — an I want thought — she has already apprehended the gospel of Amsterdam’s intricate dance.

Before the child can reason, she is already Amsterdam; that is, before she can lay claim to her beautiful blue eyes, control the contour of her curls, she is Amsterdam first. She has become before she becomes; she is both who she imagines she is and who she’s been imagined to be. The history of Amsterdam is in this handing over of its elegance and nature, quietly but resolutely, parent to child on bicycles. Eventually the child straddles a smaller bicycle, head proud, back straight, the handle bars arched like a curvaceous”U”, the edges that loop towards her held in her hands. She has learned to solo. She is safe in the stream, a songline unifying all in Amsterdam — rich, poor, foreign, and different working in unison so as to not compromise the flow, the energy. If you’ve allowed Amsterdam’s vibe into your sense of being, then you know that from this point, on this bicycle, the child has learned grace, pride and manners; she’s learned to be honest and direct; she’s learned to speak with confidence. It’s then that the child can say, with conviction and without reservations, I am Amsterdam.

I Am Amsterdam

I am Amsterdam, the perfect logo seen all over the city is simple, clean and direct. And it’s no wonder since this logo has come to life in the culture that practically invented advertising and design in the mid 1600s. I am Amsterdam points in two directions: back to its history, the Golden Age that created wealth, stability, art and culture by devastating the weaker countries and colonizing the spaces on the map still uninhabited by men with gunpowder, building a world order through violence and oppression — the methods to come that would likewise build other great powers; and it points forward to the tolerance and affability that, out of necessity, has grown out of the bleakness of the Golden Age as a way to embrace others with humility, the different others that want to come to its northern port and see for themselves, experience possibilities, experience being left to one’s devices to survive without judgment. Experience the patience and tolerance that is a natural outcome of having to compensate for creating a magnificent culture from conquest and colonialization, slavery and oppression, great violence and violations of human rights. The Dutch feel the weight of the anvil on their backs; they are responsible for their history and their destiny.

Filed under Amsterdam, cultural studies, travel Tagged with ,

Happy 4th of July — to All Left Out of Freedom, Independence and Hope

July 3, 2011 Leave a comment

We’ll never know what happened in Sofitel Suite 2086.  What we do know, however, is that there is more than one victim.  The hotel maid is a victim. DSK’s wife, Anne Sinclair, is a victim, too.

The ironically named the “Audacity of Hope,” that sneaked out under the cover of night from a Greek port with aid to Gaza, was stopped by the Greek Coast Guard.   Forty US passengers were on board, inspired, I’m sure, by rays of hope for the people of Gaza.  There are a lot of victims here, too.  Palestinians.  Israelis, too.  Of course, freedom, self-reliance, independence and hope are victims as well.  In the Israeli – Palestinian conflict we’re all victims. There are no winners here.  It’s a dark course we’ve embarked on here.

Not a single latino baseball player (40 percent of major league baseball players are latino) will boycott this year’s All-Star Game in Arizona, who passed an anti-immigration law.

We march on, celebrating the American 4th of July — yet thousands upon thousands cannot celebrate with the same audacity.  Of course, the top executives of the most powerful companies that now rule — that is, that run our government for their benefit can, indeed, celebrate unprecedented freedoms.  But for the countless poor, those that reside in the inner most regions of our large cities, their lives are walled up.

It’s to them, the people and their kids that I’ve come to know in such places as the South Ward of Newark, that I write.  It’s to them I send my wishes.  And I send these wishes using the words of sociologist William Julius Wilson, who I have used plenty of times before in these pages.

I think it’s best to simply allow Wilson to speak without commentary, so I’ll cite some definitive conclusions pertaining to The Economic Plight of Inner-City Black Males chapter in Wilson’s book, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, again a text I’ve used numerous times and that must be read and acted upon.

Listen carefully.  Read these out loud, several times, and see what happens:

Indeed, the employment woes of poor black men represent part of ‘the new urban poverty,’ which I define as poor, segregated neighborhoods in which substantial proportions of the adult population are either officially unemployed or have dropped out of, or never entered, the labor force.

…neighborhoods with larger fractions of nonwhites tend to be associated with higher rates of unemployment…[The data shows] that education plays a key role in enabling black men to secure employment.

By 2007, blacks were about 15 percent less likely than other workers to have a job in manufacturing. The dwindling proportion of African American workers in manufacturing is important because manufacturing jobs, especially those in the auto industry, have been a significant source of better-paid employment for black Americans since World War II.

Because they tend to be educated in poorly performing public schools, low-skilled black males often enter the job market lacking some of the basic tools that would help them confront changes in their employment prospects. Such schools have rigid district bureaucracies, poor morale among teachers and school principals, low expectations for students, and negative ideologies that justify poor student performance. Inner-city schools fall well below more advantaged suburban schools in science and and math resources, and they lack teachers with appropriate preparation in these subjects. As a result, students from these schools tend to have poor reading and math skills, important tools for competing in the globalized labor market. Few thoughtful observers of public education would disagree with the view that the poor employment prospects of low-skilled black males are in no small measure related to their public-education experience.

Their lack of education, which contributes to joblessness, is certainly related to their risk of incarceration.

…national cultural shifts in values and attitudes contributed to a political context associated with a resurgent Republican Party that focused on punitive ‘solutions’ and worsened the plight of low-skilled black men.

In short, cultural shifts in attitudes towards crime and punishment created structural circumstances — a more punitive justice system — that have had a powerful impact on low-skilled black males.

…research by Devah Pager revealed that a white applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to receive a callback or job offer than was a black applicant with a clean record.

Thus, whereas the subculture of defeatism is a result of having too little pride to succeed in the labor market, the subculture of resistance reflects too much pride to accept menial employment.

So much for the audacity of hope!  Have a wonderful 4th of July!

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, baseball, Citizenship, cultural studies, education, Fundamentalism, Gangbangers, Inverted Totalitarianism, men, Muslim, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, war on drugs Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Open View Gardens Launches Guest Series

July 2, 2011 Leave a comment

The absolutely wonderful Open View Gardens blog, the brain child of my dear friend and colleague of many years, Barbara Ganley, has launched it’s “guest series.”

Open View

Why Open View?  We learn that,  ”Growing food grounds us in the relationships between earth and nourishment; preparing food brings us into relationship with our culture and community; sharing meals brings us into close contact with those gathered at the table with us.”  This is the essential quality of Open View, offering classes, a shop and recipes.

In Open View we find storytelling and community engagement, kitchen and garden writing, and inspirations — all around food; that is, about how community can evolve in a healthy and creative way when we completely engage food, a very large category.

I’m honored that Barbara begins the Open View Guest Series with my posting The Uncanny Parrilla: Cooking Outdoors the Argentinean Way. 

Buen Apetito!

Filed under cooking, cultural studies, Health and Eating, Local Foods, parrilla, Slow Food Tagged with , ,

Media, Sports (NBA) and the Order of Things

July 1, 2011 Leave a comment

It’s truly uncanny how popular, mainstream media willingly refuses to investigate what is really behind the accepted story, usually promoted by the likes of The New York Times, chronicler of the official story.

Here I’m talking about the NBA Lockout, which began last night.  A student of mine that took my Media, Sports and Identity class (students are now always on the lookout for what’s behind the accepted version of stories), sent me an exclusive from Deadspin: How (And Why) An NBA Team Makes $7 Million Profit Look Like a $28 Million Loss. Deadspin has obtained the financial records of the New Jersey Nets.  These records show how major corporations work:

The hustle: The first thing to do is toss out that $25 million loss, says Rodney Fort, a sports economist at the University of Michigan. That’s not a real loss. That’s house money. The Nets didn’t have to write any checks for $25 million. What that $25 million represents is the amount by which Nets owners reduced their tax obligation under something called a roster depreciation allowance, or RDA.

As my students learn in our course, mediated sports nurture today’s culture of spectacle; it is a culture more comfortable with illusion then reality.  In The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry tells us that “People whose governing habit is the relinquishing of power, competence, and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders.” Thus, says Berry, “They are ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is ‘attractively packaged.’”

Media is the tool that attractively packages  the boredom, paranoia, powerlessness and sexual failure, as every commercial during any sporting event suggests, from Viagra to fast cars and blonds with beers tell us.  It’s also, following Berry, how and why media — and mediated sports — engage in the attractive packaging that ensures we have blind faith in illusions.

The grand illusion is that NBA franchises are loosing money.  This parallels the grand illusion orchestrated in Congress, namely that if tax breaks for “fat cats” are closed, this somehow won’t alleviate the debt and make us all, particularly those of us that are middle class and can read and write and fully understanding are dwindling presence in society feel a bit better.

Mitch McConnel (R-KY), for instance, who will not go along with the President and is opposed to any revamping of the health care system, has, of his 5 top contributors to his campaign, 2 health care companies, 2 energy companies (also opposed to alternative energy sources and ways to reduce dependencies on fossil fuels), a bank, of course, Citibank that cleaned money of Mexican drug cartels, and a marketing firm.  The top 5 corporate supporters for McConnell are securities and investments, lawyers, health professionals, retirees and real estate.  Who is he protecting?

These deceits are best mirrored in our professional sports where players are routinely viewed as chattel or cattle, machines that can be depreciated and are expendable, as we are.  How many men do any of you know, between 50 and 60 that are today either unemployed or under employed?  ”The culture of illusion, one of happy thoughts, manipulated emotions, and trust in the beneficence of power,” Chris Hedges tells us in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (a text I will continue to cite over and over), “means we sing along with the chorus or are instantly disappeared from view like the losers on a reality show.”

Of course we fear being “instantly disappeared.”  So it’s a lot better to go along with the coverage of the NBA lockout that suggests that somehow the poor owners are at a loss, the players greedy bastards making way too much money for shooting a ball.  Some of this is true: there are far too many players making millions and warming the bench.  There aren’t marque players on every team; every team is not in New York, L.A., or Miami and Houston.  Fans understand that.  But as we study the lockout and begin to see a long history where the player is merely a cog, a body, we begin to wonder, as David Shields does in his wonderful book, Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine, “Who owns this body, this body of work?”

We no longer own the United States; we no longer own or direct the narrative — it is a singular narrative — we see on TV and in the press, the pop media; we no longer own our schools, our government, businesses; we no longer own the direction of the country; we don’t even own the direction of our lives.  What’s left but illusion?

It’s best to let Hedges end this post:

Blind faith in illusions is our culture’s secular version of being born again. These illusions assure us that happiness and success is our birthright. They tell us that our catastrophic collapse is not permanent. They promise that pain and suffering can always be overcome by tapping into our hidden, inner strengths. They encourage us to bow down before the cult of the self. To confront these illusions, to puncture their mendacity by exposing the callousness and cruelty of the corporate state, signals a loss of faith. It is to become an apostate.

We are indeed apostates; we have been well thought out; we are simply witnesses to our apathy, to our allegiance to deceit. But in doing so, we are also holding hands with the destructors and deceivers. We are accomplices. We may never recover.

Filed under Citizenship, corruption, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Miami Heat, NBA, Obama Administration, Phamaceuticals, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Public Health, Socio-Economic insecurity, sport in America Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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