Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter, Wisconsin and the Uncanny Tyranny of Inverted Totalitarianism

February 27, 2011 2 Comments

What do Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter and Wisconsin have in common? Each is a sign — a result, if you will — of the large scale cohabitation between the corporation and the state.

Anthony, Jeter and Wisconsin are metaphors for a culture that welcomes change and private pleasure, while accepting political passivity that is a consequence of how power is invented and disseminated, primarily through the corporate-government alliance that, by its very nature, challenges boundaries and limits — even the limits of resources.

Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter and Wisconsin are the reification of a managed democracy — the specter of inverted totalitarianism, as defined by Sheldon S. Wolin in Democracy Inc. (2008):**

Inverted totalitarianism … while exploiting the resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of ‘private’ governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power. (also see here)

This relationship — corporate power and government — is obsessed with “control, expansion, superiority, and supremacy,” says Wolin. It is therefore natural that, given these changes that mean to displace “existing beliefs, practices, and expectations,” there will be those who will try to strike a blow against totalitarianism. These loud outcries, muffled by popular media — the voice and most vital instrument of the corporate state — are signs of a new age dominated not by national pride, but by branding and accounting practices, tools usually conforming to vituperative ideologies.

Our metaphor is the athlete’s body. In its limitations — duress and age, much like our own — its value is set and owned. The athlete’s body is his or her body of work, much like a teacher’s is or a pipe fitter’s or a government employee’s. But the athlete’s body inhabits another domain: it is a canvas for our fantasies, made more grandiose by media’s hyper-narrative that concentrates solely on the surface structure. “Who owns this body, this body of work?” asks David Shields in Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine. As we fantasize and watch athletes perform, we are blind to the location of the athlete in our culture; we thus fail to see how far removed we our from our fantasies, yet we persist and acquiesce to the domination of media, sports and the corporation over our collective identity. This is how hope begins to whither.

The plight of Carmelo Anthony and Derek Jeter’s recent scolding, by Yankee co-owner Hank Steinbrenner, for being too busy building mansions rather than thinking about a World Series victory, sets the tone for our condition: collective bargaining is dead, or nearly so, thus athletes — union workers everywhere — have to find alternative ways to increase their value and protection; and in Jeter’s case, you’ll be returned to your place in the world if you style too loudly. At relatively high socioeconomic standings athletes are routinely humiliated and disciplined into positions of servitude — and if further challenges occur, the rules of the game are changed, as NBA Commissioner David Stern is doing by re-examining this new “dominance” by teams that can afford the highest payrolls in a league that perpetually losses money.  The NBA Commissioner and the governors of Wisconsin and New Jersey are interchangeable proxies for the corporate state demanding a high degree of control over labor, as well as control over government policies that may be leveled against the corporation’s need to expand by any means necessary.

Inverted totalitarianism suggests that some corporations will dominate, others will not. So controlling labor is essential. Commissioner Stern faces this challenge. Players will build coalitions — the Heat, for instance, the Celtics, now the Knicks — and compel change from within, thus altering how the system functions. But the primary facility of a predatory corporate system is its ability to adjust, moving and changing to switch one piece of a limited pie for another. This is what we’re witnessing in sports writ large; it’s what we’re witnessing in states, such as Wisconsin and New Jersey . It’s a throwback to the plantation model.

The black athlete — and all professional athletes for that matter — is located in a culture that has yet to dispel the horror of slavery. The consequences of slavery still linger. As Wolin suggests, “…that close to a century after women won the vote, their equality remains contested; or that after nearly two centuries during which public schools became a reality, education is now being increasingly privatized.” In other words, while the public yearns for change, not much has changed. Athletes may earn 40 Million Dollars, as the title of William C. Rhodan’s seminal study suggests, but they are still slaves, their identities governed by a plantation model. And when athletes —  union workers — gain some success, the rules are changed, once again ensuring that corporate power comes of age.

The black athlete that “threw punches we couldn’t throw,” writes Rhodan, “won races we couldn’t run,” represented “time-worn responsibility,” always “representing”, and our sense that, nationally, we were moving away from identity politics; however, upon closer examination, we come to realize nothing has changed. Salaries are high, living styles far better, judging from Derek Jeter’s 30, 875 square foot compound in the Davis Island section of Tampa, but corporate power has increased its dominance over a citizen’s inalienable rights, from the NBA to the NFL to Wisconsin. It’s an all out attack on labor and collective bargaining rights because resources are limited and the corporation can only stay alive by shifting its means, not creating something new and different that may challenge the status quo.

In the United States, we’re shutting down — unless we bring back the  Civil Rights Movement. Citizens are asleep, even unconscious, lulled into a deep slumber — and indifference — by the likes of the Koch brothers, representing the largest bloc of oil and gas donors, exceeding even Exxon Mobil in donations to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and politicians’ service to corporate dominance, best expressed by President Obama’s silence about Wisconsin (the community activist President never went to Wisconsin to show solidarity with working people), even with all his talk about human rights and change.

It’s an incredible world we have here — confusing, bifurcated and  moving towards hopelessness, which occurs when education is gutted, dismantled and given to the elite so as to ensure continued corporate domination. Schools across the country, from kindergarten to the University, are being turned into clones of the corporate system, as suggested early on by Bill Readings in University in Ruins (1998), one of the first intellectuals to chronicle this shift in mission and perspective, and brought to a new interpretation by Chris Hedges in Empire of Illusion (2009), and now in his The Death of the Liberal Class (2010).

It’s an incredible world we have because, given the lessons of history, we are moving away from wisdom; rather, we are moving towards despair and annihilation and nothing short of a full out Civil Rights Movement can turn this around, otherwise, we will continue to experience rising food prices, rising fuel prices, poverty and disenfranchisement, war and violence as resources, controlled by very few hands, shrink.

Hedges is right:

The most ominous cultural divide lies between those who chase after these manufactured illusions, and those who are able to puncture the illusion and confront reality. More than the divide of race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate. This is the divide between a literate, marginalized minority and those who have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture.

And since he is right, dead on, the only way to change this is to join Carmelo Anthony, and the like, and form coalitions, only these have to be formed, not with those that can slam dunk, rather they must be formed among us, the citizenry — the suffering in Wisconsin, Egypt and Libya, Newark, New Jersey, and the South Bronx. And we must form a new and collective Civil Rights Movement that takes as its cause enlightenment and the pursuit of wisdom because, after all, it’s the only path available to us that leads us to freedom with responsibility. Those that govern, it is obvious, are totally irresponsible and the evidence is indisputable — the mindless are leading the blind.

Pascal said that “Those who indulge in perversion tell those who are living normal lives that it is they who are deviating from what is natural. They think they are following a natural life themselves. They are like people on a ship who think it is those on shore who are moving away.” But we are moving away — from each other; and power is ever more concentrated. A new and invigorated Civil Rights Movement concentrated on challenging the stranglehold coming-of-age of corporate power has on our reality is our only way out.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, baseball, Citizenship, Class, climate change, corruption, cultural studies, education, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, sport in America, the University

The Uncanny Decline

July 28, 2010 1 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, corruption, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Media, Militarism, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the University Tagged with , , , ,

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day 4 – PM)

June 6, 2010 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 america's apartheid system of education, corruption, cultural studies, education, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Socio-Economic insecurity, war on drugs

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

June 2, 2010 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.

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

It’s so uncanny, that I’m pissed!

May 19, 2010 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 corruption, cultural studies, education, Media, Obama Administration, politics, war on drugs

The Motivation to Drill for Oil

April 1, 2010 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.

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

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

March 28, 2010 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.

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

Can Obama be Obama

March 18, 2010 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 corruption, cultural studies, Obama Administration, politics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Citizen’s Manifesto, a Call for a New Order

February 28, 2010 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 america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, corruption, cultural studies, education, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, the University

The Yankees, The New York City Marathon and Citizenship

November 7, 2009 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 baseball, corruption, cultural studies, education, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, sport in America, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

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