Same Day, July 17, 1996 10:48PM: Buenos Aires, Argentina

February 10, 2012 1 Comment

For those of you who dare, this is the second chapter (the first is here, still).

This is a continuation of July 17, 1996. The scene opens in a café, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  It’s located in a Bohemian spot, Boca. It’s what we commonly call un barrio.  

One of the characters is reading El Clarín, which is a popular and central newspaper in Argentina.  And, as TWA Flight 800 is real,  Hojjatoleslam Ahmad Musavi is a real character, though highly fictionalized here so as to avoid condemnation.  Others, Gardel, Evita Perón and Maradona —  el Che — are of course real.

The rest — I’m responsible for putting you through this …

El Clarín, on the lower right hand side of its front page, in a small tight square unnoticed by most of its readers even as they licked the tips of thumb and index finger and turned to the paper’s next page, reported that an unidentified Middle Eastern man was found dead in a dingy alley near the Rocha Bend of the Riachuelo in La Boca.

Artists and laborers in red, yellow, blue-green chapa houses, built at the dawning of a nation by Italian immigrants working in nearby meatpacking plants and warehouses in Buenos Aires’ oldest neighborhood, aroused by first light, awakened to a coiled body in fetal position, throat cut from ear to ear, face down and eyes wide open submerged in coagulated gutter water and floating cigarette butts.   Winter flies gathered the spittle.

Víctima de juego sucio, reported El Clarín.

“I hope he’s not here,” said Marcelo Abendroth in a whisper, his long,  delicate hand outstretched over the story of the dead Middle Eastern man in El Clarín laying opened on a flimsy table in the dim Rincón Café in San Telmo.   He looked down at the story and stared at it for some time.  Then he carefully drew his café to the edge of his thin lips so as to avoid being stung by its heat.

He scoped the Rincón.  A gilded portrait of a young Carlos Gardel, fedora at an angle over the tangista’s upturned brow, hung side-by-side with the Madonna sagrada, Evita Perón, over the murky bar.  Abendroth grinned.  A dozen small fat candles in constant vigil beneath the portraits flickered a quiet light onto a mahogany bar and scarred it with a melancholy wax.   The bar was an altar , an homage to an imagined Argentina.  Bottles of wine and whisky and gin and absinthe from France stood without order – whisky next to wine, cognac and warm cokes and vodka.  At the end of the bar next to the television held high on a homemade wooden shelf was a signed poster of a youthful Diego Maradona in his blue and yellow of better days.  The poster was tacked into the plaster wall.

Near Plaza Dorrego, the Rincón was the local café, the nexus for life’s transitions.  On its wounded external brick wall was a spray painted caricature of a youthful Che Guevara, in his boina and scraggly beard, frozen for posterity.  And beneath the image of the Argentine doctor from Rosario, in blood red:  Until Victory Always!

Marcelo Abendroth wore a brown gabardine suit, a dark blue wool turtle neck and Italian loafers without socks.  He had taken off his jacket and draped it behind his seat.  Abendroth had skeletal shoulders and a spindly neck.  He rolled his sleeves half way up his forearm exposing fine wrists.   A Rolex dangled like a woman’s bracelet from his right wrist.

Abendroth looked down at the newspaper, again, and moved his hand to the side and glanced at the story.  He read the headline out loud: “Víctima de juego sucio.”  And raised his conditioned eyebrows to show indignation.  “Very Argentinean, the knife,” he said sternly – as stern as he could be given his demeanor.  “I hope that Abu Dokhan lives up to his name.  And vanishes.  I hope he didn’t have anything to do with this.”

Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi had eyes that were outsized portals as black as night.  They fell on a thick weariness that told a story of an anguished life.   Musavi’s face was round and wide.  He ran his hand over his bald head – a sign of his frustration with Abendroth’s questions about the whereabouts of the smoke-bearer, Abu Dokhan.

But Abendroth noted how Musavi brightened when he heard the name of the most wanted Lebanese.  Musavi sat up and eased his hand down his burly face and rubbed his bulbous nose as if he suddenly had an itch.  The table trembled from his weight.   Hairs protruding from his nose were like ivy entangled in a moustache that covered his upper lip.  Abendroth looked away in disgust.

“Hezbollah calls him The smoke-bearer, the Abu Dokhan.  That’s what it means, smoke-bearer.  He vanishes like smoke,” said Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi with pride.  “All westerners think we Arabs are related or that we know each other intimately.  Everyone knows who Hajj Radwan, the Abu Dokhan, is – that’s his real name.  Hajj Radwan.   But I.  We,” he said pointing to Abendroth and then himself. “We have nothing to do with him, my friend.  And I have nothing to do with this dead man.”

“In this country all Arabs are implicated, I’m afraid – first the Israeli Embassy is bombed, then AMIA is leveled,” said Abendroth.  “I’ve been told that the dead man had a bird stuffed in his mouth.”

“A bird?  What kind of a bird? It’s not in the paper,” said Musavi.  He spoke as if he was gargling with marbles.  He leaned towards the much smaller Abendroth.  Musavi seemed to be about to swallow him.

“They don’t want to alarm people. We Argentineans are a superstitious lot.  A canary.”

“Ah.  Someone has indeed sent a message.”

Musavi sipped his bitter black coffee, eyes on Marcelo Abendroth,  Director of the Economic Education Trust, a subsidiary of Triad Management, a consulting firm concentrated on information and influence ; it mines special interests for investors in the United States that look to expand their holdings and have some bearing on power.

“I love the coffee in your country.  It reminds me of home,” said Musavi, his thick lips expanding into a smile that made his face even wider.

“The destruction of the Israeli Embassy and AMIA are not subtle messages, Musavi.  Not at all.  What’s next?  There’s always a next.  Something.  Always more, something else,” Abendroth said leaning forward over his espresso.  But he immediately relaxed because he knew from Musavi’s blank gaze that there wasn’t going to be a response.  Abendroth was not one to push.  He smiled coquettishly, which was his way when he was nervous.   He looked down at his hands, palms down, and rubbed the tops of his finger nails with his thumb as if he was removing dust.  He admired their luster.

“Abendroth.  In German it means evening or dusk, does it not? Argentineans are always on the lookout for Germans.  It must make you self-conscious.  Nervous perhaps.  No?  The indictment in people’s eyes when they know – and suspect.  Similar to what we Arabs feel.  So you must understand that Hajj Radwan, the Abu Dokhan, is a coincidence – that’s all.”

“Coincidence.  The Israeli Embassy and the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association, the AMIA itself after the embassy.  Coincidences, Musavi?  Suddenly this dead man.  What are you hiding?  We’re always hiding something.”

“Money is truth, Mr. Abendroth,” said Musavi in his thick accent.  “The only truth.  Nothing else.  Money.  It creates democracies.  And it can create autocracies and dictatorships and whatever we need it to do.  Money can hold whoever we want in power, for as long as we want.  Money paves roads.  And sometimes, as you say, it can hide things.”

“It depends on the story, Musavi.  It has to be the right story.  Freedom has a price.  It’s a balancing act.  That’s the world we’re in.  Our world.   And you want to play in it so you must tow the line, Musavi.  With care.  Or you might not be let in.  Entrance comes at a price.”

Marcelo drew his espresso and then waved to the sleepy waiter.

“Ajenjo.  Para los dos, por favor,” he ordered.

“Ah bien.  La fée verte.  Muy bien.  Perfecto.”

Marcelo Abendroth leaned towards Musavi as if he didn’t want to be heard.  “At our first meeting in Iguazu, I remember the smoke-bearer.  He was there.  I remember.  He was with you.  In your entourage.  I can see him there plainly.  Like it was yesterday.  I saw him.  I remembered him when I read this story.  This was before the embassy.  Before any of it.  This dirty business.  What are you doing, exactly, Mr. Musavi?  What can you say to me?  If it’s learned that Hajj Radwan was with you – it’s obvious no?  People would think.  Put two and two together.”

“Anyone could have done this killing.  Someone could have been angry at this guy because he said something foul against Boca and fútbol passions ran wild and they cut his throat after too much drink.  Maybe he was a River fan.  Look where we are, Marcelo.  This is not uncommon in your country.  It could have been a woman – because of a woman.  The signs are there – the knife.  The knife is always used when a woman is involved.  It could have been the Iranians.  Who’s to know?  Or maybe it was that psycho al-Gaddafi – he has a bone to pick with your president.  Menem’s an Arab, too, after all, and word is, he crossed Gaddafi.  On the street I hear that your president reneged on a missile deal.  You can’t take ten million dollars from Gaddafi, not give him anything in return and get away with it.  Come on.  Your people should know better.  Perhaps Gaddafi is paying him back – a warning.  Maybe that’s the message.  A message from Gaddafi.  Don’t cross me Menem or next time it will be closer to home.”  Musavi paused and looked down at his black café, put his thick hands around the tiny cup and, as his large round shoulders came up around his head and he looked like a giant sea turtle, said, “And maybe it was the CIA.  You know they’re everywhere and they like it down here.  They like your country, all those Germans smuggled in – who could have imagined that American military power was built with Nazi know-how? And it came through here, your country, Marcelo.  It’s very easy here.  It’s chaotic and delightfully confusing.  Anything is possible in your country. Everything can be done here.  People are wonderfully distracted.  That’s why we all like your country.  Certain countries exist to facilitate the needs of others.  The legacy of the Cold War, I’m afraid.  We have to live with it.  Adjust.  Isn’t that how we’ve evolved?  It’s the probable course of things.  And who’s to know?  Maybe the CIA is fronting for Gaddafi or the Iranians, maybe both.  It’s all possible.  It depends on which way the story will be turned.   Isn’t’ that what you said?  We’re all in this twist now – twisted together in a coil, stories intertwining, running into each other, infecting one another.   We can’t escape it.  History, the present, the future – they’re all intertwined and confused.  No one knows the truth.  No one knows where we’re going.  We have to create new truths.  New rules.  I don’t recall Hajj Radwan there with us.  I’m sorry,  Marcelo, I don’t.  Not at all.  Maybe you’re mistaken. You westerners think we all look alike.  It’s not just.  Not just at all.  We Arabs don’t know each other. We’re not all related.  The eye is fickle, my friend.”

“And the heart is worse.”

“Perhaps.  Perhaps you’re right.  Maybe the Iranians, maybe Gaddafi.  The CIA.  We don’t know anything about this dead man.  And, yes, the embassy and AMIA are messages, indeed.  That’s all.  Messages, Marcelo.  The result of something much larger. Eventually we’ll set a good course, catch the right wind with the right force.   Perhaps Hajj Radwan has been here – perhaps not.  We will never know.  Unsavory characters know how to blend with the rest of us.  They blend and wait – and then strike.  A friend today can kill you tomorrow.  And never be found again.  Maybe getting away with a thing like that is the ultimate freedom.  An aphrodisiac – the most powerful of all.  What’s a life worth, anyway?”

Abendroth lit a cigarette and inhaled with the deep satisfaction of someone who smoked because it eased him.   Musavi leaned back in his chair and extended his arms, his hands holding the edge of the delicate table, and took in the contentment of watching Abendroth’s unease.

A bandoneon cried out Gardel.  El día que me quieras.

The bandoneon player, all in black like the night echoing through the front window behind him, was lost in the woe oozing from his fingers moving instinctually up and down the white keys that shone like the moon. El día que me quieras.

Musavi studied Abendroth.  A full silence fell between them.

“I’m not sure about all this Musavi,” Abendroth said in the semi darkness of the Rincón.  He was hesitant.

“We’re merely trying to learn to live in the world that has been created by you westerners.”

Musavi took a red pack of Dunhills from his pocket and lit a cigarette, too.  He held the cigarette between his thumb and index finger.  Inhaled.  And exhaled slowly and leaned forward and flicked the edge of his cigarette into a tin ashtray between them.

The bartender turned on the old black and white TV at the end of the bar and its radiance fell on the dim Rincón.  The bartender reached for the rabbit ears and adjusted them and a coarse picture came into view as if traveling a great distance through fog.

… A las 20:45 horas, once minutos después de despegar del Aeropuerto Internacional Kennedy, el vuelo 800 de TWA, con destino a París, Francia, se estrelló en el Océano Atlántico frente a la costa de Long Island…

Marcelo Abendroth turned towards the TV, a disturbing blue-gray eye, an unannounced brightness that pushed aside the solemn comfort that can exist among strangers, and took a drag of his cigarette.

Suddenly the TV picture was gone and a scratchy graininess shoved Gardel’s sadness, jostled it, and brought forth another.

The bandoneon player kept on, his melancholy persistent, like mourning.

“Carajo. Puta.  Qué mierda,” the bartender railed.

“Chin,” said Musavi, raising his absinthe.  “Salud.  It’s done.  The future is ours.  Let’s not cry over what’s past.  We’ve done well together – and we’ll do more.  We understand each other.  And we have a place to start.  A starting point.  We’re in deep.  And we’re going deeper.  When there are no answers to a puzzle, my friend, the only solution is to go in deeper, dig further into the maze.  It’s the only way.  There’s no turning back.  There’s only going deeper.”

Marcelo Abendroth turned away from the TV and raised his glass to Musavi’s. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “To forging ahead.  Going deeper.  Here’s to the labyrinth.  Salud.”

“Al futuro,” said Musavi.  “Nuestro futuro.”

They pulled their heads back and swallowed the warm ajenjo and slapped their short glasses on the table.   The table shook and creaked.  Musavi looked up at the black television screen.

Filed under American Literature, corruption, cultural studies, fiction, Homeland Security, men, Muslim, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Religion, the University, TWAS Flight 800

July 17, 1996: New York City, Upper West Side

February 8, 2012 3 Comments

These are the first pages of a story I’ve been working on for quite some time.  The larger working title is THE DOUBLE HELIX.  The first third is called BENDING. The second and third parts are titled TWISTING and COMPRESSION.

Please feel free to comment.  Your comments will definitely help me.  Where do you think it’s going?  What’s happening here?  Who are these people?  This is fiction that grows from history.   The major event, here, which happens on July 17, 1996, is true.

“Providence sometimes foreshadows the future of men in dreams, not so that they may be able to avoid the sufferings fated for them, for they can never get the better of destiny, but in order that they may bear them with the more patience when those sufferings come; for when disasters come all together and unexpectedly, they strike the spirit with so severe and sudden a blow that they overwhelm it; while if they are anticipated, the mind, by dwelling on them beforehand, is able little by little to turn the edge of sorrow.”

Achilles Tatius in The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon

 

 

PART ONE: BENDING

July 17, 1996: New York City, Upper West Side

Life’s din diminished some in that small moment when he pulled open his apartment window with such expectation that the last few inches the window flew up knew only his eagerness.

With his palms on the coarse sill, he ducked under the window’s frame and leaned into the horizon – the  Hudson River and the Jersey Palisades across the way and the George Washington bridge just north beaming a dull evening gray.

He waited all day to tilt into the serenity that arrived with the humidity and pressed him to push away his day.  He arched his back and stretched and took it in.

He panned down six stories and set his eyes on an incongruous dance of Poodles and Labradoodles and French Bulldogs and a Great Dane and a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua and a couple of Golden Retrievers held easily by a dog walker in a weathered Yankee cap, a danseur never entangled in the leashes held to one hand, then the other, the exchanges fluid and experienced.

The dogs sniffed the smells coming from a square earth and lifted their legs to trees and squatted when they recognized something.

The Great Dane and the Chihuahua and the Bulldog dumped together as if responding to some great secret.  The rest waited, and the dog walker studied them.

The young Dr. Raúl Sicard was transfixed by the scene.  What others might find inconsequential, something to pass by, intrigued him.  There was meaning in the seemingly mundane.  He was a geneticist and he liked nothing better then to lose himself in thought when he came face-to-face with an adaptation like this.  He strayed off to see if he could imagine the adaptations that drove the dog walker and his canis lupus familiaris to this moment, this place, here and now.

The city dog is so different from the country dog that roams unconstrained across a larger earth and squats without fear, he thought, never lifting his leg.  Almost nothing separates them – yet everything does.

He stretched further out his window and took a deep breath, even though the air was heavy.  Streets lamps came on. The Palisades were lit and reflected off the Hudson River.

Haitian women rushed stately blue strollers with large white wheels around the dog walker scooping up the steamy remains with a hand gloved in a baggie.

Up and down Riverside Drive and across Joan of Arc Park, in the promising glow of summer evening, went these intertwining objects – the dog walkers and the Haitian women and their stately strollers.

This is how the world moved that day, July 17, 1996, before Raúl’s eyes adjusted to the sadness that arrived when the phone rang outside everything familiar to him and stopped him from stretching as far as he could into the picture knocking at him, asking him to leave things behind for a bit.

He held the grainy sill and turned to the ring that tempted the faith he found in his routines.

He felt the weight in the room, a sadness that came out of nowhere – yet it seemed old and familiar, and lodged itself in the pit of his stomach.

Raúl leaned inside and faced the phone.  He held the sill with his right hand, not yet giving it up all the way.  Not yet.

The knots in his spine that would otherwise crack and unwind the fatigue that amassed from hours curled over a microscope deciphering the nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms tightened.

The sadness multiplied.  He had no explanation for it, dumbfounded.  He liked knowing where things came from, how they evolved, what changed them, how they appear.  How things appear even suddenly like the ring of the phone that hung in the air with the sadness.

He traced his steps for signs.  Just a few moments before the first ring he entered his apartment and dropped the keys in the bowl on the table beneath the mirror near the front door and draped his lab coat over the chair meant just for that otherwise it would be useless.  Grabbed a beer and turned on the TV for noise.   And pulled open his window.

At some point that day, the sadness must have begun to set in unnoticed.  Maybe the sadness had been there all along – that was more logical.

The phone rang again.

He could consider the ring’s origin or rather the origin of the intuition he had that came with the ring and told him that something happened and he was involved.  But that was too much, too far to go.

Something traveled the distance and found him and opened a black hole and he didn’t want to be present.  He didn’t want to be sucked in.  Know its spiral history.  That’s what humans do, he thought, run for cover – and wait and adapt slowly, hopefully.  Those that can’t adapt don’t make it, ever.

He felt bound.  In the genetics lab life laid down road signs, roots to instincts that he could quantify.  There was nothing to measure here.  Nothing at all – but an intuition.

The phone pawed at him trying to get to where the heart is.

There was no way to revise the day, see it fully in memory’s half-light.  After working in the lab he and friends sat in a sidewalk café across from Lincoln Center and had a Brooklyn Summer Ale and dreamt of things that may never come to pass.  On a  cloudless bright day, they descended into the dank and murky subway station on 161st and took the number one, Broadway – Seventh Avenue local to 72nd Street and strolled to Lincoln Center where a Guatemalteco on the corner sold dolls with bouncing heads and a Jamaican next to him hawked antique copies of Paris Match and Look and National Geographic in several languages.

A invisible woman with tattoos of crosses and peace signs on either hand and barely able to stand on the corner waited for pedestrians to push by and she’d mumble spare some change as they forgot her, a picture of an extinction, something that no one wants to see intimately, the end of an adaptation.   Soon, she would not be.

It’s all like this – the Guatamalteco, the Jamaican, the invisible end of an adaptation.  It all had to be like this, a design, an order.  Nothing spoke to him of the sadness he felt – but it had been there, he was sure of it.  Had to be.

He tried ignoring the third ring and turned to the hum of the TV.

A voice over a static map of Long Island filled the room with sadness.  That’s when the phone rang a fourth time, its red flash igniting the papers on the desk next to it and the bills waiting for another week.   An inexorable eye looking back at him.

Nothing mattered now.  Except the fifth ring.  Its sound hung in the air, hollow.  The phone and the TV.

…At 8:45P.M., eleven minutes after take-off from Kennedy International Airport, TWA flight 800, bound for Paris, France, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island.  Witnesses say they saw a bright flash in the sky.  But nothing is certain.  There are no causes known at this time.  The Coast Guard responded immediately, dispatching numerous search and rescue vessels.  The New York City Police Department, the New York State Police Department, and the Suffolk County Police Department have all responded as well.  The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched a team from New Jersey.  And we’ve been informed that numerous private vessels are also involved in this initial search and recovery effort…

“]

TWA Flight 800 [Animation

 

The phone rang again.

“Papá,” he whispered.  Raúl said it just to hear himself say it, to test its feel and the emptiness that arrives with flashes from a life lived, rattles you and tempts your faith.  “Papá,” he said again.  It filled the room.   “Papá.”  It overwhelmed everything.  The sanctity of his routine, the lab, the dog walkers and their dogs crapping and the Haitian maids and their Cadillac strollers.

He picked up the phone and staggered.

He felt him there, the ghost of his father standing beside him as still as recollections tend to be where light suddenly is as darkness and the darkness is where we are and where we will be.  Where the problems of the heart live just beyond the design, beyond the touch of order.  This sadness was new and full.

Filed under American Literature, cultural studies, fiction, Homeland Security, Media, men, politics, the University, TWAS Flight 800

The Place of the Intellectual: the Future and Its Enemies

September 20, 2011 4 Comments

Academic dawn is like no other beginning.   No other daybreak like it exists.  Alumni never forget it and forever pine away for that first light of college life – the anticipation of the first day of classes in early September.  It’s filled with possibilities – new friendships, new stories, parties, homecoming, new loves, new dreams.  It has a way of giving lift to the soul because the slate is wiped clean by the certainty of the semester to come – everything has to be forgotten, left behind and erased to begin anew, to carry on for the next fifteen weeks.  A new September, every September, is an aphrodisiac.  And everything that is to come in one’s life, whether it’s been dreamt, planned and scheduled, will give way to the glorious routine of strolling to class across a genteel campus, maples and pines waving in the breeze, students perpetually smiling – de rigueur – to show how hopeful they are, how eager they are for a professor’s  lecture.  There is a finality and a logic to this ongoing cycle, a neatness, a tidy composure and a comfort that permeates everything and is instantly obvious the minute one steps into a luxurious, modern classroom – cushioned seats that rock, adjustable arm rests, desks on wheels that can be moved to form circles or be put in lines, which no one does anymore in this new age of composed dialog.   For seventy five minutes, listening and doodling and thinking and drifting and wondering while the professor strains through a lecture, there is escape, there is release.  The lecture is a momentary stay against the confusing madness beyond the consecrated ivy; it’s predictable and welcomed, it pushes aside everything  – suffering, anxiety, sadness, and even memory.  All.  It pushes aside life.  Daily, with each class, faculty and students experience the almost infinite cycle of new dawns, daylights that come in waves with each course and that call attention to existence itself – and at a distance, from the comfort of well appointed abstractions and theories and criticisms.  Oh how beautiful it is to keep the world and its filth at an intellectual distance.  Academic dawn lightens the air and it excites.  It makes everyone eager on a college campus in September. Academic dawn is a drug; with it the foreseeable, the inevitable, is forestalled – so we like to think.

What today we can’t sidestep is the place of the professor, however, particularly because s/he is being averted by our culture.  The professor is experienced more as gatekeeper, rather then an expert on a subject. The professor creates requirements, hoops students must jump through in order to find their lives in a society dominated by a harsh, vertical economic system.

The professor is essentially an abstruse theorist that uses code words to explain the obvious, we’re told;  s/he builds intellectual edifices for the elite and has absolutely no relationship with the “common man,” an acerbic criticism that likewise places into question university education because it is overpriced and overrated, say critics.

The criticisms of the professor and the elite University that houses him or her has helped usher in an age where the professor, most commonly referred to as an intellectual, is not a person to emulate and listen to. These are extraordinary anti-intellectual times in America.  And why not?  In Boston, for instance, where there are over 60 colleges and universities and one can pass a Nobel laureate on the street quite easily, there is still extensive and daunting poverty; there is racial divide and gender divide.  Eight miles from Newark, rife with socio-economic and racial problems, is Columbia University.  Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute and author of The End of Poverty, is there, yet the South Bronx, even closer then Newark, struggles with mere subsistence, as are other poor communities of color.

The divide between our problems and the intellectuals that study them is an abyss of massive proportions. This gap is implicit in every single problem we have — socio-economic, political, health and education. So it’s not surprising that America has become intensely anti-intellectual, preferring the misguided bravado of a wanna be cowboy like Rick Perry, instead of the softer reflective hand of a scholar such as President Obama.  We would rather engage destructive ideologies instead of reasoned argument framed by facts.  We have chosen a caustic path, a nihilistic path, rather then the path of deliberation based on compromise and negotiation.  We have successfully shunned the professor, the intellectual — but at what cost?  Where might we be heading?

There appears to be little respect for those individuals that quietly spend their time studying what we call life – the economy, social tensions and new developments, the media, culture(s), politics and the arts — and try to make sense of it all and speak it to us.

Power is best kept — and gained — if the citizenry has its eyes glued on  The Kardashians while ideological sound bites and name calling are squeezed in-between episodes.  Tea Party narrow minded conservatives.  Democratic big spenders.  Socialists.

So on this path to nowhere, what is the place of the intellectual in America? What are the representations of the intellectual, to use the phrasing of my own intellectual father, Edward Said?

To find the answers to these questions — and to locate myself, as well as others labeled intellectuals, I once again turned to Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures, published first in 1994, then again in 1996, by Vintage Books Edition. (The lecture can be heard here.)

In the Introduction to the print venture of the lectures, Said says that, “One task of the intellectual is the effort to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and communication.”  This initial statement may be one cause for the disenfranchisement of the intellectual; in this sense, the intellectual, both a public and a private figure, is subjected to the limitations posed on him for being the one who articulates “stereotypes” and “reductive categories.”  This is critical since we are in an age where reductions of reality are how media and politicians function; or, said better, perhaps, the function of both media and politics is to reduce all pictures of reality into stereotypes — then separating these into ideologies.

In other words, says Said, “The problem for the intellectual is not so much … mass society as a whole, but rather the insiders, experts, coteries, professionals who in the modes defined earlier this century … mold public opinion, make it conformist, encourage a reliance on a superior little band of all-knowing men in power.”  This, then, automatically puts the intellectual in a challenging position since the “insiders”, the “band of all-knowing men in power” dislike criticism; it threatens their way of being, their methods.

Yet another reason why the intellectual is marginalized is that s/he relies on clever and insightful uses of language; it is the only means of expression in a culture that privileges writing above all other forms.  ”Hence,” said Said, “my characterization of the intellectual as exile and marginal, as amateur, and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power.”  The intellectual is easily exiled by the art and science of his or her methodology, the tools that must be used in order to describe and critique the reductive methods utilized by the mediating forces of a culture.

Thus, the intellectual lives in “a spirit of opposition, rather than in accommodation, that grips me (Said) because the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo at a time when the struggle on behalf of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighed against them.”  Said himself is a perfect example, as is Malcolm X.

For me, in my own case, this alienates me from many — if not most — in the academic community since the overall interest is not to stand in romantic opposition against forces that advocate for and create the means by which the status quo is maintained.  I am therefore narrativized into a secondary position — truly exiled from the academic world that has taken me years of toil to enter.  In pursuing the position of dissenter, the forces of the status quo push back harder and in subtle forms.  As Said says, the “inescapable reality” is that the intellectual “will neither make them friends in high places nor win them official honors.  It is a lonely condition, yes, but it is always a better one than a gregarious tolerance for the way things are.”

I’ve been dismissed, routinely passed over.  I live on the outer most edges of the academic community, literally and figuratively. But the experience of others pale by comparisons to my own.  And in this exile, students, hundreds of students from all walks of live, for that matter, reach out; their parents, too, on occasion send me notes of thanks or seek me out to thank me for what I say to their students.  This would seem that those outside the bastions of intellectual pursuit behind the hallow ivy know something that mediated constructions of power and reality forget or willfully leave out: the power of the intellectual as romantic dissenter that speaks truth to power is that s/he imbues others, mostly students, with different points of view that can help cast them into alternative versions of the accepted truths.

The central fact  … is … that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être, is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”

Traditionally, the academy has been experienced as an institution on the left — this could not be further from the truth. An intellectual persisting with the notion that all human beings “are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously” is routinely marginalized and exiled within the academy. Thus the intellectual is exiled from the society in which he lives — and the status quo wins and suffering and injustice persist.

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

Pass or Get Out of the Way: Defining the Future for Our Students

June 30, 2011 Leave a Comment

As we awaken to a new dawn in the US, about half of all state schools in England and Wales are being affected by a strike by UK public sector workers.  The right to work will be the single most important issue affecting the public sector — all of us working today.  In the US, as in the UK, the assessment and control methods that are politically sanctioned to evaluate teachers are unprecedented.  And the most Draconian aspect of this almost universal (in the West) re-evaluation and castigation of teachers is that those who will suffer most are the children: their world, particularly if these kids live in socio-economically challenged areas, will fall further into the abyss of the cyclical nature of poverty.

An approach that’s being tactfully admired by the powerful in many US states is the “Impact,” in name and approach more reminiscent of a Terminator movie then a subtle teacher evaluation system.

Sam Dillon, writing for a New York Times that’s more comfortable covering the “accepted” mainstream methodologies of any system of power rather then investigating the reality of things, does a credible job of lining up, for the careful reader, what the challenges this method of evaluation pose for parents, students and teachers.

In his Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired Dillon tells us that, “Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.”

The Impact is “a centerpiece of the tempestuous three-year tenure of Washington’s former schools chancellor, Michele Rhee.”  This detail is enough to raise concern.  But it hasn’t.  Blindly we march on, seduced by Obama’s Race to the Top, rather then careful criticism of what will likely cause a lot of collateral damage.  I warned against this in Education Stimulus Package: In Duncan’s Hands, Hope is on a Tightrope.  But, just as the right to work will be the defining issue of our times, collateral damage will be the defining metaphor. Does anyone care?  Why are we so silent? At least in the UK, teachers are taking to the streets.

The Impact is best described as an efficient sorting system.  Some educators  describe Impact this way — efficient  and sorting.  These are accounting terms, not terms mindful of teaching and learning.  The terms follow a trend in education that moves away from a pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment and  towards a business model.  Impact is a business model, not an education model; it aligns with the current goals of many governors and mayors, particularly in New York and New Jersey, two hostile states to the right to work: privatize education.

What’s the problem?

Educators “note that the system does not consider socioeconomic factors in most cases and that last year 35 percent of the teachers in the city’s [Washington] wealthiest area, Ward 3, were rated highly effective, compared with 5 percent of Ward 8, the poorest,” says Dillon.

Impact relies heavily on classroom observation — a good thing.  It has 9 criteria: explain the content clearly, maximize instruction, check for student understanding are some examples used to rate a lesson.  These are good, solid criteria.

The problem with this methodology — and the problem with most if not all methods for evaluating teachers and, at the college and university level, for advising students and, likewise for evaluating professors — is that it measures the students’ capabilities simply from the shoulders up.  That is to say, the whole student is not being evaluated; only reasoning skills, computation and understanding according to a system that leans favorably to accepted classical methods of teaching and learning — delivery and acquiescence in silence — are privileged.   In essence, what is being evaluated is the teacher’s ability to transmit traditional pedagogical methodologies.  But these methods may be way too abstract for some students, particularly if these students come from poorer communities.

We are in fact assessing how well teachers transmit traditional forms of social mobility, negating the realities of certain students’ lives. Before we begin, then, in the assessment model — Impact — we are already rejecting the student.

The Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, in More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, says,

It is important to remember that one of the effects of living in a racially segregated, poor neighborhood is the exposure to cultural framing habits, styles of behavior, and particular skills that emerged from patterns of social exclusion; these attributes and practices may not be conducive to facilitating social mobility … These patterns of behavior are seen as a hindrance to social mobility in the larger society.

A system such as Impact comes about, as Wilson tells us, this time using the work of Eliot R. Smith, because “most Americans believe that economic outcomes are determined by individuals’ efforts and talents (or their lack) and that in general economic inequality is fair.”    We could argue that Smith’s pronouncement is now the politics of the day — the attack on the right to work, the dismantling of unions, and the Draconian measures of teacher performance.

“Indeed, living in a ghetto neighborhood has both structural and cultural effects,” says Wilson, “that compromise life chances above and beyond personal attributes.”

Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, speaking to Dillon for his NYT article, said, “Teacher have to be parents, priests, lawyers, clothes washers, babysitters and a bunch of other things” in schools in poor and challenged neighborhoods.  ”Impact takes none of those roles into account, so it can penalize you just for teaching in a high-needs school.”  Saunders echoes Wilson.  And I’ve describe this phenomenon quite clearly in Newark’s  South Ward: The Miller Street School and the American Paradox.

The solution to our education problems, as I’ve described it, actually lies in Saunders’ description of what teachers are called to do when working in poorer neighborhoods.  In these communities, as I’ve said in Newark’s South Ward, the school, as is The Miller Street School, are an oasis pushing against the chaos found in the streets.  If teachers are parents, priests, lawyers, clothes washers, babysitters and a bunch of other things, as Saunders says, then we must create, in each school, a hub of support for all these things.

Right now, parents have to move to multiple locations and work through multiple human services departments, filling out form after form, seeing multiple people, more often then not being shoved to yet another office and more forms, more interviews and never really voicing their concerns and problems. This is costly — and it agitates the notion that it’s their fault, that if they worked harder people would be better off.

What if all social and professional services were under one roof?  What if all aspects needed to enable a more graceful, dignified and cogent approach to social mobility were in one place, a hub or mall for social mobility? Isn’t this efficiency? Wouldn’t this cut costs?

I’d argue that not only is this a cheaper approach, but then it would allow us to pool together resources, including the tracking of a student through this system so as to better get a sense of how the student learns — the obstacle and challenges, the conditions for study at home, and so on.

Of course, this would thwart the interest of many governors and mayors to privatize; it would run against the desire of many corporations to extract the poverty dollar from the most needy; it would, in fact, work against today’s trend towards the newest form of governance, inverted totalitarianism. (There are so many examples of inverted totalitarianism, today, that I’m thinking of changing my blog’s title! I’m getting exhausted constantly having to explain it!)

What we need is less Impact.  We need to realize — and accept — that schools in poor neighborhoods are an oasis of hope.  It is this realization that can lead to a conflation of resources — child care and health care, nutrition, family counseling, on the job training, study skills training, even community colleges — under one roof, held together by technology and carefully trained experts — nurses, social workers, first year general practitioners, counselors and teachers — working together.  From this vantage, we can create teacher assessment vehicles that will include master teachers, parents in the community, student evaluations and outcomes and all read against what today we call social mobility. Anything else is failure. Anything else is a genuflection towards the powerful elite that seek to define our lives for us.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Obama Administration, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the Environment, The Miller Street School, the University Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Nothing Will Change: the 2012 Presidential Election

June 23, 2011 13 Comments

Whether Obama retains the White House in 2012 or a Republican wins, nothing much will change. The evidence is overwhelming.

It no longer matters who sits in the Presidential seat or in Congress — unless, of course, the Republican is Newt Gingrich, the extremely nasty former Speaker of the House who wrote a doctoral dissertation excusing the brutal colonization of the Congo, or the absolute dizzy opportunist, Michele Bachmann , who is convinced that CO2 is a natural byproduct of nature.

But even if the intellectually challenged Sarah Palin were to win, all candidates will succumb to the law of the land: the state and the corporation are the main sponsors and coordinators of an “unprecedented combination of powers distinguished by their totalitarian tendencies, powers that not only challenge established boundaries — political, moral, intellectual, and economic — but whose nature it is to challenge those boundaries continually, even to challenge the limits of the earth itself,” says Sheldon S. Wolin in Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. The Kock Brothers’ exertion is a perfect example. Thus, all candidates — in the White House and Congress — must adhere to the demands of this imbalance of power that invents and disseminates “a culture that taught consumers to welcome change and private pleasure while accepting political passivity,” argues Wolin.

We live in less democratic times; we wallow in a “collective identity” that is imperial rather than republican. The consequence is that we interiorize an artificial vision of civilization created by the political coming- of – age of corporate power and its concomitant myth making apparatus.

Inverted totalitarianism … while exploiting the authority and 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.

Let’s take a look under the hood at the engine that runs the inversion of power in our current ideological state apparatus.

The top 5 contributors to the 2010 campaign committee of Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the US House of Representatives, are:

  • Comcast Corp, who actively lobbied “net neutrality” legislation, FCC programming issues, and general telecommunications issues. In 2010, Comcast focused its lobbying efforts on a getting a merger between Comcast and NBC Universal approved by the federal government. People and political action committees associated with Comcast Corp. together generally favor Democrats when it comes to political campaign contributions. The monopolization of expression.
  • McGuire, Woods, et al –recently represented BVT Institutional Investments in the sale of 10 shopping centers located in Florida, Texas and Georgia. The $130 million transaction was one of the country’s largest retail real estate transactions of 2011 and marks the conclusion of McGuireWoods’ representation of BVT in connection with its U.S. Retail Income Fund VIII portfolio & in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the whistle blower provisions in Section 806 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) do not protect employee leaks to the media. Rather, the statute’s plain language protects only disclosures made to federal regulatory and law enforcement agencies, Congress and employee supervisors. McGuireWoods, defending Boeing, moved for summary judgment on the grounds, among others, that SOX does not protect complaints and disclosures to the media. The District Court agreed and dismissed the case. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
  • Dominion Resources — Electrical Utilities, Gas and Electric
  • Goldman Sachs — we know who they are, all the way to their involvement in the Obama administration and their creation of financial instruments that lead to the recession, the demise of the American economy
  • Blue Cross and Blue Shield, through its 45 local chapters, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association provides health care coverage to more than 80 million people. Blue Cross/Blue Shield also has a contract with the federal government to review and process Medicare claims. The association proved to be particularly active lobbying Congress during the health care reform debates of 2009 and 2010. It has also lobbied Congress to make it harder for the government to penalize companies if their employees defraud the Medicare program and process false claims. Local Blue Cross chapters have paid about $340 million to the federal government to settle Medicare fraud charges since 1993.

The next 15 contributors to the Cantor camp follow the same pattern — KKR & Co, which sees itself as the leading global alternative asset manager, Guardian Life Insurance Company, New York Life Insurance, McKesson Corporation, pharmaceuticals and health products, and so on. We get the picture: insurance companies, lawyers, financial firms — banks too big to fail — tobacco (Altria Group, the world’s largest), pharmaceuticals. Representative Eric Cantor has reported a total of 2,849 contributions ($200 or more) totaling $3,057,540 in the current cycle.

Who is Cantor listening to? Cantor is an example of the “tendencies of our system of power that are opposed to the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy. Those tendencies are, I believe, totalizing in the sense that they are obsessed with control, expansion, superiority, and supremacy,” says Wolin.

Let’s look at another leading figure, John Boehner, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, elected to represent the Eight Congressional District of Ohio for an 11th term in November 2010, raised $9,796,947. His five leading contributors are AT&T, Murray Energy, First Energy Corp, American Financial Group and the Boehner for Speaker Committe. The top industries contributing to the Boehner effort are: Retired, Securities & Investment, Insurance, Electrical and Health Professionals.

Boehner’s portfolio is just about identical to Cantor’s. Major international companies have their hold on the two top leading Republican leaders. The tragedy we are currently living is that we seem unaware of the deeper consequences of these relationships. “We are experiencing the triumph of contemporaneity and of its accomplice, forgetting or collective amnesia,” Wolin tells us. “Stated somewhat differently, in early modern times change displaced traditions; today succeeds change. The effect of unending change is to undercut consolidation.” If we take a look out our front doors, take a walk down the block, in our cities and in our villages, we can taste “undercut consolidation.” It’s everywhere — city and state workers, public institutions, the NBA, the NFL; neighbors don’t know who their neighbors are; hope is on a tightrope, the future bleak.

The Democrats don’t fair much better. The top Democratic donors are ActBlue (composite of many, many small, grassroots donations), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Laborers Union, Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union, EMILY’s List (composite of many, many small grassroots donations), Plumbers/Pipefitters Union, National Assn of Letter Carriers, Ironworkers Union, United Auto Workers, United Transportation Union, American Postal Workers Union, UNITE HERE, AmeriPAC: The Fund for a Greater America. This suggests that unions are the primary donors.

But a closer look tells a different story. Let’s take Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of The US Senate. In the 2005-2010 campaign cycle, his re-election committee raised $24,815,104. The top 5 contributors were MGM Resorts International, Weitz & Luxunberg, mesothelioma and asbestos lawyers, Girardi & Keese, trial lawyers, Simmons Cooper LLC, also specializing in mesothelioma and Harrah’s Entertainment, hotels, resorts and casinos.

The top 5 industries contributing to the Reid campaign are lawyers, Securities & Investment, Lobbyists ($1,052,801 total!), Real Estate and Health Professionals. Reid is a carbon copy of Cantor and Boehner — so what, in fact, is the difference,  unions under attack because we need change?

In American’s Future After an Obama Victory, which I wrote in 2008 during the presidential campaign, before turning to Wolin, I was already suggesting that the Obama Administration was going to be challenged forcefully by the extremes in our culture. The last 3 years give us plenty of evidence. Obama has followed, even energized Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan (think drones), education and healthcare (think privatization and insurance lobbyists), energy and, sadly, race.

Obama’s victory in the general election was aided by his tremendous fund-raising success. Since the start of 2007, his campaign relied on bigger donors and smaller donors nearly equally, pulling in successive donations mostly over the Internet. After becoming his party’s nominee, Obama declined public financing and the spending limits that came with it, making him the first major-party candidate since the system was created to reject taxpayers’ money for the general election.

The top supporters of Barack Obama were the University of California ($1,591,395), Goldman Sachs ($994,795; note the connections to his staff: Summers [World Bank, President of Harvard that nearly bankrupted the endowment], Rubin [spent 26 years at Goldman], and Paulsen [former CEO of Goldman], all of whom influenced Geithner [worked for Kissinger, IMF Director of Policy Development and Review Dept, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York]), Harvard University ($854,747), Microsoft Corp ($833,617), Google Inc ($803,436).

This list of contributors to Obama continues unabated — and all other contenders pale by comparison: Citigroup (who laundered Mexican cartel money), JP Morgan Chase, Time Warner (Patrick Leahy, another top Democrat, was Time Warner’s largest recipient, 2009-10, $61,400). Of the top 20 contributors to the Obama effort, 4 are universities, and the rest fall in step with the ongoing search, by the corporation, for opportunism (which is not to suggest that the new corporate university is not after the same). “Opportunism involved an unceasing search for what is exploitable, and soon (following a trajectory since WW II), that meant virtually anything, from religion, to politics, to human well-being,” says Wolin. “Very little, if anything, was taboo, as before long change became the object of premeditated strategies for maximizing profits.”

This is where we find ourselves today — in the name of change we are unchanging in the face of an uncompromising corporate will. The corporation owns the House and the Senate. These folks, our elected officials, are spokespersons for the corporate elite. If we wonder why CEO’s make so much money, this is why. If we want to know why education is being dismantled and privatized, benefitting the upper classes, this is why. The dissolution of collective action is here, too. The privatization of schools. And the increasing gap between the wealthy few, the middle class and the poor is here. Our forgotten communities, Newark’s South Ward, the South Bronx, Compton, others — it’s all right here in this negotiation between corporations and our officials.

And since we’re now on the verge of a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, private security firms are smiling. Is this the world we want? It’s already just about out of our hands.

Though I’m speaking to deaf ears, knowing full well that I write to no one, as I speak, the NRC (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission), that boasts it’s “protecting people and the environment,” in an unprecedented move, voted 3 – 2 to advise the Obama Justice Department to intervene on behalf of Entergy Nuclear in the company’s lawsuit against the state of Vermont. Vermont wants to shut down Vermont Yankee, the aged nuclear power plant.  A government agency that is solely responsible for the nuclear safety is extending its sphere of influence and advising the Federal Government to intervene in a state’s negotiations with a private entity.  How is that not inverted totalitarianism?  What about us, the people of Vermont?

The tragic story is that this inversion of power is happening while citizens go on with their lives not conscious of the consequences.

Filed under Citizenship, Class, climate change, corruption, education, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Socio-Economic insecurity, the University Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

An Education Revolution = A Revolution in Our Communities

March 7, 2011 Leave a Comment

In February of 2010, Sir Ken Robinson, speaking at TED, said that, “Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don’t find doing very easy… It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense.” Sir Robinson then goes on to say that, “Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. At the heart of our challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence…Human flourishing,” he says, “is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process and you cannot predict the outcome of human development…It’s not about scaling a new solution, it’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.” Sir Ken Robinson is not calling for change, rather he’s calling for revolution — an Education Revolution.

All evidence in the US suggests that, in practice, Plessy v Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling of “separate but equal” – meaning, the acceptance of a dual system of education – is more appealing to the dominant class.

A “separate but equal” education system restricts access to social mobility; it strengthens a hierarchical socioeconomic system controlled by few. The gains of the Civil Rights Movement are long forgotten in education.  Privileged African Americans along with white Americans have given up the struggle for integration, receiving undeniable benefits from private academies.  “Separate but equal” has become a rationale for a dual system in American society – the privileged succeed and the underprivileged must find what works, though always one step behind.  We then call attention to the infrequent victories coming out of challenged communities, but we never  bring up the obvious: the lack of adherence to Brown v the Board of Education.

Our schools mirror our communities. Without changes to our communities, without emphasis on the family, however we define family, there can be no change in Education. Thus, we need an Education Revolution that begins with a revolution in our communities, particularly in the most impoverished.

In our tendency to sacrifice a large  swatch of our population primarily along racial lines — and class lines, too, especially when we speak of environmental racism — recent scientific research in genetics point to factors contributing to disease and behavioral disorders among minorities, especially African Americans.

Christopher W. Kuzawa and Elizabeth Sweet, from the Department of Anthropology, Northwester Univeristy, Evanston, Illinois, in their article “Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race: Developmental Origins of US Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Health,” suggest that, “There is extensive evidence for a social origin to prematurity and low birth weight in African Americans, reflecting pathways such as the effects of discrimination on maternal stress physiology … [T] here is now a strong rationale to consider developmental and epigenetic mechanisms as links between early life environmental factors like maternal stress during pregnancy and adult race-based health disparities in diseases like hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and coronary heart disease.”

Knowing what we now know, are we slowly killing certain populations in the US, namely African Americans and poor communities because we fail to see the benefits of integration? And when we realize that close to 1 in 3 Black men are in US prisons, does this not beg us to conclude that this approach to community destruction is systematic?  How do we narrow the achievement gap?

Randy L. Jirtle, Department of Radiology Oncology, Duke University Medical Center, Durnham, North Carolina, and Michael K. Skinner, Center for Reproductive Biology, School of Molecular Biosciences, Washington State University, Pullman, in “Environmental Epigenomics and Disease Susceptibility” say that, “Epidemiological evidence increasingly suggests that environmental exposures early in development have a role in susceptibility to disease in later life. In addition, some of these environmental effects seem to be passed on through subsequent generations.”

We exist in two Americas divided by access to opportunity. These harsh divisions eliminate the benefits of diversity. Scott E. Page, in The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, says that, “Diversity and ability complement one another: the better the individual fruits, the better the fruit basket, and the better the other fruit, the better the apple … We should encourage people to think differently … These differences can provide the seeds of innovation, progress, and understanding.” ( see Scott E. Page’s lecture)

If the answer is diversity, why are our communities segregated, our schools separate and unequal? The answer is simple: education focused on enlightenment is dangerous. An enlightened citizen questions, challenges the status quo, and seeks alternatives. Education, today, is not about change, rather it’s about ensuring that we maintain the systems of production — supply and demand; power is thus balanced, meaning that a vertical society is maintained — some succeed and live well, others sustain those lives, and hopelessly aspire to something better through state lotteries and get rich quick schemes, such as those that lead to the mortgage crisis that affected mostly people of color and helped bring our economy to its knees. But we’ve not learned and the distance between the haves and the have nots is increasing.

As bell hooks says, in Teaching to Transgress, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” To educate — and to be educated — is the “practice of freedom.” Since this is so, then closing down some classrooms, eliminating teachers , and destroying unions that support and protect them, ensure that we live in a divided country. And if we look at who benefits from this division, we see that only those on the top of the socioeconomic ladder benefit. In poor communities, families are destroyed, first and foremost, because this keeps the prison industrial complex healthy and an informed citizenry poor. We’ve not moved far from the psychology of racism that comes from slavery.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, education, global health, philosophy, politics, Public Health, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the Environment, the University Tagged with , , ,

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 Convocation in an Upside Down World

September 12, 2010 Leave a Comment

In the past few weeks thousands of young first year college students gathered for convocations across the US — the beginning of a new academic year. A convocation is a calling forth to assembly by summons. It’s a long standing tradition inherited from the culture we fought against, Great Britain. In Hymn, ‘O Day of Rest, Wordsworth writes, “To holy convocations The silver trumpet calls.” This past week students marched quietly and obediently into sanctuaries of learning because they’ve heard the call from higher education: come forth to your future — here is your future. In the Church of England, a convocation is a provincial synod or assembly of the clergy, constituted by statue and called together to deliberate on ecclesiastical matters. Despite faculty regalia (very Harry Potter — no wonder Quidditch is played on some of our campuses!), and the convocation usually taking form in hallowed ground in colleges and universities, in the secular world, first years are called forth to deliberate matters of conscious, moral matters that can be questioned in the disciplines. First years are called forth by the faculty, the representatives of knowledge, the bearers, we like to think, of wisdom; we call forth young minds eager to confront the ideas that have created our civilization, to learn.

But to what exactly are we calling first year college students?

In Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha C. Nussbaum suggests that in our pursuits — and allegiance to traditions and their concomitant ideals — “we seem to be forgetting about the soul, about what it is is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner; about what it is to approach another person as a soul, rather than as a mere useful instrument or an obstacle to one’s own plans; about what it is to talk as someone who has a soul to someone else whom one sees as similarly deep and complex.” We have failed here. We are thus calling forth our first years to a world that defines human relationships, Nussbaum contends, as being “of mere use and manipulation,” rather than comprised of “faculties of thought and imagination that make us human and make our relationships rich human relationships.”

Two provocative New Yorker covers show the confusing world our knowledge making has created for our first years. We are calling our first years to Barry Blitt’s August 30 cover, “Pause,” and Peter de Sève’s “Beasts of Burden,” September 13.

Pause

Pause by Barry Blitt

Beasts of Burden

Beasts of Burden by Peter de Sève

In Blitt we find a relaxed middle aged man, his slight paunch of satisfaction and complacency, staring at a vast ocean and murky sky, a world that’s wide and foreboding, aiming a remote control to pause it — or to change it. Peter de Sève gives us a city street, in the foreground a child bent over from the heavy backpack, pulling a donkey that is likewise burdened by all the belongings of her master; across the street, kids carry books as they hurry to school. Access and social mobility separated by a street — Main Street — where we find promise and hope on one side, the hopeless “beasts of burden” on the other.

Socrates advised that the citizens of The Republic should be educated and assigned by merit to three classes: rulers, auxiliaries, and craftsmen. This is the world we’ve defined for our first years. But Socrates, unable to devise a logical argument for this social construction of power, fabricates a method, and tells Glaucon:

I will speak, although I really know not how to look in your face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction … They [the citizens] are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth…

Glaucon, in his reply, utters a prophesy: “Not in the present generation; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their son’s sons, and posterity after them.”

Indeed, “Pause” and “Beasts of Burden” share in their conviction that we’re living proof of Gloucon’s prophecy. Blitt and de Sève point to a society “addicted to ideologies — a civilization tightly held at this moment in the embrace of a dominant ideology: corporatism,” says John Ralston Saul in The Unconscious Civilization. “The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy,” says Saul. “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.”

In Blitt’s “Pause,” man is tragically convinced that he can “pause” the rate of change — be it climate change, political change, a change in how we perceive justice. In this cover cartoon, Blitt’s middle aged man still sees himself as the center of the world, now holding forth with a technology he falsely believes can save us. Our students have been raised with this conviction — technology can solve everything. De Séve shows us how blind we are, unable to see suffering at the hands of a vituperative, vertical socioeconomic system that relegates positions we can’t get out of, so we justify these with even more ideals — they must be lazy, if they only worked as hard as we do. What can I do to change this? our young minds wonder, succumbing to the wild and negative distributions of power. In both cartoons we see a society that scorns knowledge. “To know — that is, to have knowledge — is to instinctively understand the relationship between what you know and what you do,” says Saul. In Blitt and de Sève, knowledge is totally absent — gone, lost. We, the faculty, have lost our wisdom and we’re about to impart this sense of loss to our students.

These past few weeks, we called forth our first year college students to a world confused, upside down. Then we ask our new students to step into our classrooms where our wisdom will show that we have enabled a harrowing world to emerge from our regalia and our ceremonies, our traditions. In the September 4th Economist, in “Decline by degree,” Schumpeter, wonders whether America’s universities will go the way of its car companies. The American “luxury model is unlikely to survive what is turning into a prolonged economic downturn. Parents are much less willing to take on debt than they were and much more willing to look abroad for better deals … America’s universities lost their way badly in the era of easy money. If they do not find it again, they may go by way of GM.”

So while our young minds struggle to understand just how perverse the world we’ve created really is, they also must confront the notion that colleges and universities have been constructing a decorous world of illusion that cannot go on, if for no other reason than how we’ve been going to school and what we have been turning out as our future leaders have given us the world we now inhabit. We can’t “pause” this world — and in it, there is no Main Street, we are all “beasts of burdens” separated only by degrees.

Welcome to your first year!

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, education, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Religion, Socio-Economic insecurity, technology and education, 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 – AM)

June 6, 2010 Leave a Comment

NCORE

NCORE

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

Special Feature Presentation

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

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

Intro

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

Q & A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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