Politics in the Classroom: Not such a bad thing?

Students in most of my literature and cultural courses have probably noted that I do not hide my political identity.  Of course, like most of my colleagues, I think I strive for evenhandedness, fairness and bringing a multiplicity of voices to the classroom.  And, certainly, when grading, I attempt to be extremely sensitive to recognizing my own possible bias.  Indeed, it is quite possible that, in an attempt to be fair when I grade, I allow students certain leaps of logic that I would not in the classroom setting where realtime dialogue is possible.

Unsurprisingly to me, it turns out that American students lack many of the basic skills required to "talk politics."  Anne Colby, at the Carnegie Foundation, exposes the problem at length in a recent AAC&U article:

Although preparing young people for intelligent democratic participation is undeniably important for them and for the country, this goal is not addressed in a direct and systematic way in American higher education. To be sure, higher education does improve political understanding and engagement. Virtually every study of political knowledge, interest, and participation shows a positive relationship of these variables with educational attainment. But, despite this positive effect, many college graduates are not very politically knowledgeable, sophisticated, skilled, or engaged.
Even though the proportion of the U.S. population attending college has increased dramatically in the past fifty years, according to some indicators, political knowledge and engagement have actually decreased. Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996), for example, found that from the 1940s to the 1990s, overall levels of political knowledge did not go up, while the percentage of Americans attending college more than doubled. As they put it, “Today’s college graduates are roughly equivalent [in political knowledge] to the high school graduates of the 1940s.” Likewise, Bennett and Bennett (2003) report that the statistical strength of the relationship between higher education and political knowledge and participation has weakened in recent years. They found, for example, that exposure to higher education had a weaker differential effect on news consumption in 2000 than in 1972. Research my colleagues and I have conducted suggests that this trend could be reversed if higher education would address students’ political learning more directly.

 What is unsurprising too is that Colby underlines the importance of active learning and engaging pedagogies.  Powerpoints on government structure are really courses about politics, but rather organization.  Students need to learn to engage in personal ways that make politics (its structures, its discourses, its history, media, etc.) contextualized and pertinent.  It is about global learning, and tolerance.  It is more about opening minds than "teaching" them things:

In practice, it is not easy to sort out exactly what it means to align efforts to support political development with these core academic values. It does not mean giving equal time to ideas that are without merit, for example. But it does require a real commitment to open-mindedness on the part of faculty and administrative leaders.
In the courses and programs in our study, we saw that it is possible to combine passionate concern and commitment with openness to views different from one’s own. Many of the students reported that they gained a gut-level understanding that those with opposing views are real people, not demonic caricatures. They learned how to find common ground with people whose interests are quite different from their own and saw that both can benefit when they cooperate around shared goals. We were continually impressed by the ways these courses and programs were able to work toward political clarity and conviction combined with human understanding, tolerance, open-mindedness, and a sense of community that transcends ideological difference. [My emphasis]

I am always pleased to read that a good classroom is not necessarily a "neutral" environment but a place to weigh, balance and discard "bad" ideas--without throwing the people who hold them.

No on Prop 8

Courage Campaign asks you to sign their petition. 180k have so far. Why not you?

http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/s/repealprop8

Reaction in France

France is reacting overwhelmingly positively to the American election, but the French political class is also doing some introspection.  The youth, children of immigrants, are saying things like "I'm going to put my picture on my CV now" [In France, one attaches a portrait to a CV].  Not all are optimistic, but, still they see the elections as a positive step.

Recent French elections have some strong parallels with Nixonian and post-Nixonian identity politics.  Sarkozy, for one, managed to send out clearly racist messages while sounding the alarm about "personal responsibility," "delinquance," etc.  It is/was classic dog-whistle politics.  Like some American administrations, though, he as been innovative in not always promoting the elite-school technocrats but rather universitaires and minorities.  His actions, like George Bush appointing Powell or Rice, show the cognitive dissonance of his public policies and personal ones.

Thanks, Linda.

Here's what I wrote to my congresswoman a few minutes ago:

Dear Congresswoman Sanchez,

I was writing to follow up on today's vote on the FISA bill. While the bill still passed, your 'nay' vote is greatly appreciated. I hope that when it comes time to elect a majority leader, Steny Hoyer will not be at the top of your list!

As always, thanks for your service to Whittier and congratulations on being patriotic and voting against laws that undermine the constitution.

I will be contributing to your election campaign.

Child Labor

Besides saying that child labor is still practiced on a wide scale, I found this section of the article particularly salient:

[I]t is not inevitable that growth will drive child labour to the economic margins before rooting it out completely. As in the past, if associated with an unequal distribution of income [emphasis mine] and child-intensive production processes, economic growth can increase child labour rather than eliminate it.

And once in place, child labour can be difficult to uproot as child workers forgo schooling and apprenticeship and so grow up to be unproductive adults, who, in turn, cannot earn enough to support their children through education or training. It only takes one generation of child workers to trap an economy in such a low-productivity equilibrium.

Second, despite the spectre of avaricious parents, the children most at risk of early, hazardous, and even slave labour are those without adult kin. Where families have been broken up and denuded of prime-age adults by wars and epidemic disease, the prospects for preserving childhood look bleak.

A Trillion Here, A Trillion There, A Trillion Everywhere

Channeling Brad Delong again for this graph:

That Boy

h/t: TPM

Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) on Obama: "I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button. He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."

Interesting wording. As a Southerner, I hold no illusions as to what is implied by the use of 'boy.' You see, as many folks from the South will tell you, Black people are like children: they can't take care of themselves and are inherently without foresight or responsibility, and they are the reason the government has so many bad social programs. Now, these same Whites will also tell you that they are OK with taking care of the childish and irresponsible Blacks or "foreigners" maybe a little bit, but there are limits. In fact, these same racists will tell you how generous they are for even paying taxes that go to public schools since they would much rather have schools for their own white children only, like they did back in the good ol' days.

Seriously, Geoff Davis is a racist and this one sentence proves it to me.

So much for the information age?

The Chronicle has an article up (that I rather like but have some major problems with) about a professor's discussion regarding rendition. It's called "So Much for the Information Age."

I teach a seminar called "Secrecy: Forbidden Knowledge." I recently asked my class of 16 freshmen and sophomores, many of whom had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes and had dazzling SAT scores, how many had heard the word "rendition."

Not one hand went up.

This is after four years of the word appearing on the front pages of the nation's newspapers, on network and cable news, and online. This is after years of highly publicized lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and international controversy and condemnation. This is after the release of a Hollywood film of that title, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, and Reese Witherspoon.

I was dumbstruck. Finally one hand went up, and the student sheepishly asked if rendition had anything to do with a version of a movie or a play.

I nodded charitably, then attempted to define the word in its more public context. I described specific accounts of U.S. abductions of foreign citizens, of the likely treatment accorded such prisoners when placed in the hands of countries like Syria and Egypt, of the months and years of detention. I spoke of the lack of formal charges, of some prisoners' eventual release and how their subsequent lawsuits against the U.S. government were stymied in the name of national security and secrecy.

The students were visibly disturbed. They expressed astonishment, then revulsion. They asked how such practices could go on.

I told them to look around the room at one another's faces; they were seated next to the answer. I suggested that they were, in part, the reason that rendition, waterboarding, Guantánamo detention, warrantless searches and intercepts, and a host of other such practices have not been more roundly discredited. I admit it was harsh.

[...]

Still, it is hard to reconcile the students' lack of knowledge with the notion that they are a part of the celebrated information age, creatures of the Internet who arguably have at their disposal more information than all the preceding generations combined. Despite their BlackBerrys, cellphones, and Wi-Fi, they are, in their own way, as isolated as the remote tribes of New Guinea. They disprove the notion that technology fosters engagement, that connectivity and community are synonymous. I despair to think that this is the generation brought up under the banner of "No Child Left Behind." What I see is the specter of an entire generation left behind and left out.

It is not easy to explain how we got into this sad state, or to separate symptoms from causes. Newspaper readership is in steep decline. My students simply do not read newspapers, online or otherwise, and many grew up in households that did not subscribe to a paper. Those who tune in to television "news" are subjected to a barrage of opinions from talking heads like CNN's demagogic Lou Dobbs and MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Fox's Bill O'Reilly and his dizzying "No Spin Zone." In today's journalistic world, opinion trumps fact (the former being cheaper to produce), and rank partisanship and virulent culture wars make the middle ground uninhabitable. Small wonder, then, that my students shrink from it.

Then, too, there is the explosion of citizen journalism. An army of average Joes, equipped with cellphones, laptops, and video cameras, has commandeered our news media. The mantra of "We want to hear from you!" is all the rage, from CNN to NPR; but, although invigorating and democratizing, it has failed to supplant the provision of essential facts, generating more heat than light. Many of my students can report on the latest travails of celebrities or the sexual follies of politicos, and can be forgiven for thinking that such matters dominate the news — they do. Even those students whose home pages open onto news sites have tailored them to parochial interests — sports, entertainment, weather — that are a pale substitute for the scope and sweep of a good front page or the PBS NewsHour With Jim Lehrer (which many students seem ready to pickle in formaldehyde).

I sympathize with professor Gup. As one of the teachers of the Introduction to Global Studies course here at Whittier, I have felt first hand this frustration with students' apparent ignorance of current events, and all too often their apathy. That said, I cannot completely agree. First of all, students today actually seem quite engaged in issues regarding the environment, they are far more anti-war than most students I can remember in the early 80's (or, said another way, they can see first hand some of lies and contradictions of our government), and students sense on some level that things are really changing, for better and/or worse, in the wake of globalization. (Note to self: There are people who study this. I should find out who and see if students are more engaged or less. Maybe those researchers even have a blog!)

Prof Gup's premise seems quite problematic to me as well. He is assuming that reading newspapers and watching CNN is the portal to being informed. I'm not so sure. The last century during which major newspapers and television channels dominated local markets did NOT lead our citizenry to become better citizens. Participation in our system of government was declining and a whole political party (Republicans) sought office for 40 years on the basis that government was in general a bad thing, that they should, to paraphrase Grover Norquist, "starve the beast." (Except for the military, of course). Political blogging and the internet have become a viable and informative way to engage in the political process, and that power is being courted by the big players--key evidence that, in spite of his "uninformed" students, something is afoot.

His premise also assumes that these major news factories are really informing the public. The record here is mixed too. Are people who watch Fox News more or less informed than someone who does not? Some interesting studies have shown that viewers of ol' Rupert's news outlet are somewhat likely to be ill-informed rather than well-informed. And CNN? What do Glenn Beck or Lou Dobbs inspire in their viewers other than fear and loathing? I'm sorry, Dr. Gup, you're letting these news outlets off far too easily and you are not considering the ground-breaking work done by Talking Points Memo or Media Matters (and any other number of groups). Do I need to bring up Judith Miller or the Washington Times (Go Moonies!!!)?

The information age will never be a panacea for the problems of our world until we accept that the media that we do have do not really represent us. Millionaire "reporters" and pundits by definition and constitution will not serve the public's interest well because they are simply too far removed from those concerns. The electoral process, as imperfect as it is, is still less forgiving than the clubby major newspapers and networks. I mean, the average income of the fictive families on television during the 50's was about 35K (adjusted for inflation). The average family in sitcoms now earns approximately 200k per year. I say this just for comparison's sake. Our media has become more elitist and less engaged with the public all while pandering more. I think that our mainstream media--those who bear the biggest responsibility for informing the public over the public airwaves and with their publicly chartered corporations--are much more to blame for the state of things than any other single thing. If we are going to begin casting blame, let's start with news corporations that have been thinking a lot more about their shareholders than about their public responsibilities. Indeed, we have decades of interesting data, so let's look there and let blogging reach its second decade before we start casting stones about technology.

But I will agree with Prof. Gup on this:

The noted American scholar Robert M. Hutchins said, decades ago: "The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens." He warned that "the death of a democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." I fear he was right.

So do I. It's just that I fear that this apathy will come to us via our media outlets determined to tell us everything about Britney Spears and nothing (or something on A22) about that little thing called rendition.

Expelled: The Lies!!!

Scientific American now has a whole series dedicated to the misrepresentations and pandering of Expelled.

No one could have been more surprised than I when the producers called, unbidden, offering Scientific American's editors a private screening. Given that our magazine's positions on evolution and intelligent design (ID) creationism reflect those of the scientific mainstream (that is, evolution: good science; ID: not science), you have to wonder why they would bother. It's not as though anything in Expelled would have been likely to change our views. And they can't have been looking for a critique of the science in the movie, because there isn't much to speak of.

Rather, it seems a safe bet that the producers hope a whipping from us would be useful for publicity: further proof that any mention of ID outrages the close-minded establishment. (Picture Ben Stein as Jack Nicholson, shouting, "You can't handle the truth!") Knowing this, we could simply ignore the movie—which might also suit their purposes, come to think of it.

Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks—all recycled from previous pro-ID works—would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency.

Expelled wears its ambitions to be a creationist Fahrenheit 911 openly, in that it apes many of Michael Moore's comic tricks: emphasizing the narrator's hapless everyman qualities by showing him meandering his way to interviews; riposting interviewees' words with ironic old footage and so on. Director Nathan Frankowski is reasonably adept at the techniques, although he is not half the filmmaker Michael Moore is (and yes, I do mean in both senses of the phrase).

The film begins with the triumphant entry of financial columnist, media figure and former Nixon White House speechwriter Ben Stein to a filled college lecture hall. (If this review were styled after the movie, I'd be intercutting clips of Nixon flashing a victory sign with Stein's scenes from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and his eyedrop commercials, but you get the idea.) Stein explains that he is speaking out because he has "lately noticed a dire trend" that threatens the state of our nation: the ascendance of godless, materialist, evolutionary science and an unwillingness among academics to consider more theistic alternatives. A montage of short clips then shows Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and other scientists scorning religion or ID without context. "Freedom is the essence of America!" Stein insists, and he frets that scientists who like their empiricism with a dash of deus ex machina are oppressed. He and Expelled charge that scientists, in their rejection of religious explanations, have become as intolerant as Nazis. Or maybe Stalinists—the film clips were ambiguous on that point.

(The newsreel footage from the old Soviet days kept confusing me. Stein does know that the Stalinists rejected the theory of evolution as a biological rendition of capitalism, doesn't he? And that they replaced it with their own ideologically driven, disastrous theory of Lysenkoism? Does Stein think that moviegoers won't know this?)

That last paragraph is my favorite! Isn't it funny how every authoritarian political movement wants to change history and science for political expediency (think: GB)?

There's plenty more.

Expelled: The Stupidity!!!

As you may know, a new movie is out about the "flaws" of evolution. It's called Expelled and Ben Stein is in it. It is such a good movie that BIOLA University, that paragon of truth-seeking, gave ol' Ben a prize:

In light of Stein’s contribution to the pursuit of liberty and truth, particularly as it relates to the field of Intelligent Design, he is being honored with the 2008 Johnson Award. The award ceremony will feature premiere clips from the forthcoming movie, the personal appearance of scientists who were expelled from their jobs because they are sympathetic to Intelligent Design, and will include a brief address by Stein.

Clearly there is a lot of money floating around to promote "truth." But let's forget all the dubious "science" of the Intelligent Design movement. Let's look at Ben's decision to be in this film for what is isn't (a search for the truth) and for what it is: a lucrative venture that allows him (and those like him) to further the rightwing movement by portraying the Right as a "reasonable" everyman under attack by an elitist Left.

As D. Niewert recently posted on Jonah Golberg (columnist for the LA Times), the right, as a rule, is more bigoted than the left and much less willing to consider other points of view. What must be understood, though, is that the Right, almost by definition, portrays itself as constantly under attack and as the defender of "truth" and "values." Ironically, ideas themselves are never in combat for their actual truth or value, so we must understand that the battle is not about truth per se, but about the righteousness of those who defend it. Take a look at what Niewert's argument:

Still, it's hard to top the claptrap that Goldberg propagated in his most recent L.A. Times column:

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there's the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing random motorists that "hate is not a family value." But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

It might be helpful to come to grips with the concept in question here: Bigotry is usually defined as "stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own," and a bigot as "a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices." Bigotry, as we have known it historically, is not based on rationality or reason -- as the scientific belief in evolution is -- but founded instead on prejudice, inbred beliefs, and supernatural reactionarism.

And what we also know about bigotry historically is that it has largely been a characteristic of the right, particularly the cultural conservatives who enforced the segregation and oppression of nonwhites for much of the 20th century.

You can see in Golberg's and Steins' argumentation two clear elements: the Left are the "elite," they are "smug" and "intolerant" of "our community." They portray this as a battle between people, not ideas. Moreover, they paint themselves as under attack: look we're being eaten up by that giant fish!

Somehow I just can't feel sorry for two relatively rich people who get important space in major newspapers. How are they in the minority? Remember: they are not, they just like to say they are.

So next time a member of some group (Republicans, Christians, Environmentalists, whatever) tells you that they deserve a hearing just because they consider themselves an oppressed minority, ask yourself a few questions: is group x truly oppressed? is group x really seeking dialogue, or are they looking for a platform? is group x interested in the truth and open, or are they more interested in being a victim? Of course, there are many shades of grey here, which is why the NYT regularly and stupidly inserts references to ID movement ideas into its articles out of a false idea of journalistic fairness. Just remember this: you can respectfully decline to listen to unscientific insanity. It's not bias, it's logic.

Goodbye to Yoo?

B. Delong links to this paragraph re John Yoo's basic (lack of) ability to understand the law:

With this many academics talking about this stuff, if there were enough directly applicable precedents to be 'controlling' here, someone would know the story offhand. I could be wrong, but I'd bet a fair amount that the decision of how to apply the faculty code of conduct is up to Boalt Hall, reasoning from first principles, not from precedent.

And at that point, I have a very easy time saying it's the equivalent of scholarly misconduct. Legal work isn't exactly scholarship, but it has its own ethical obligations. And writing a memo like that [of March 14, 2003] (everyone's harping on Youngstown, but that's something whose absence takes the memo out of the realm of possible good-faith argument) is unethical -- if those arguments were made to a court, they would be an unethical attempt to deceive the court into believing there was no contrary precedent. That failure to meet the standards of practice required by the legal profession appears to me to be close enough to a failure to abide by the standards of the scholarly profession that it can be treated as an equivalent level of scholarly misconduct.

Note that I'm not arguing that he's such a bad man that he should be fired, but that the memo establishes that he is such a bad (either implausibly incompetent or much more likely ethical-standards-violating) lawyer that he should be fired as a professor of law....

I think it's a pretty easy case to make... [O]n some level the reason you can fire a professor for scholarly misconduct is to make it clear that if you, e.g., falsify data, you may not teach -- people learning to be scholars shouldn't learn that such falsification is compatible with scholarship. Writing legal arguments that ignore (not find some way to distinguish, but flatly ignore) controlling precedent is very much the same sort of misconduct, and the argument that people learning to be lawyers must be protected from coming to believe that it's an acceptable part of lawyering is closely parallel...

I don't know where I stand on this. Academic freedom should be absolute--even to make a mistake. However, it would seem that one's ability to do one's job and interpret basic facts is not so much about academic freedom as it is fulfilling the prerequisite duties of one's job--a very different case indeed.

I doubt that anyone will follow through with this. (I wonder: is this cosmic payback for Ward Churchill?) If censure or something does come down the pipe for Yoo, left-oriented law professors should watch their backs. The Right is much, much more ruthless.

NITLE Summit Conference Blogging Cont...

I've finally gotten 30 minutes to myself and, as promised(!), a few more notes from the meeting.

Starting backwards, last night's keynote from Michael Wesch was entrhalling. If you don't read Wired or have a clue to who he is, check out his blog, or, better yet, check out what his students have done:

Exciting stuff...

I've been playing ayiti: the cost of life. Lot's o' fun. I'm not--or rather my family is not--doing very well, but, then again, I just started.

I think I'll give this to my students in a couple of weeks and see where it leads us, and adding in a discussion question with moodle for tips, tricks and lessons learned... Should be interesting.

That's it for now. I've got to get ready for more conferencing.

The Politics of Language Learning

To be sure, in our lower-level language courses there is lots of communication and interaction going on, but how good are we, at these levels, at providing students with rich and multimodal contexts of language use? How good are we at creating communities of practice, the kinds of "temporarily shared social worlds" that create mutuality as well as provide affordances for learning? How good are we at engaging students' ongoing negotiations of their social identities? (Walther, Ingebord. "Ecological Perspectives on Language Learning." ADFL Bulletin, Vol 38.3 and Vol. 39.1, Spring-Fall 2007.)

I've been struggling with this a lot and wondering, as does Walther, about our textbooks, our language curricula, and, more generally, the notion of global education in the liberal arts. I highly recommend the article for its consideration of communities of practice in language classrooms and within the larger social context, including the politics (academic and national) that shape perceptions of languages.

I believe wholeheartedly that the skills one acquires while learning a language must go beyond communication, a fairly a-political notion of human interaction, and quickly introduce students to higher-level processes for organizing their experiences and the world. Certainly the communicative model allows for the introduction of individual experiences and multiple perspectives, but his alone is not enough. Textbooks and our general methods of teaching should allow space for addressing the larger questions raised by linguistic and social diversity. Class, race, gender and power rarely make it into our 100-level or 200-level courses, and this is a shame, for it contributes to the notion that language is a secondary tool and that language courses are merely grammar and multi-cultural tourism. (Of course, we are imperfect, and some of what we do fits this superficial stereotype.)

In a primarily mono-lingual culture such as we have in the U.S., students already realize, however faintly, that the very act of learning another (an Other's) language is political. Such an act, especially when it comes from personal agency rather than as a curricular requirement to be fulfilled, questions monolithic constructions of identity, family and nation. By acknowledging the inherent politics of our profession we can begin to construct a more solid framework of theories to share with out students, and by doing this we can capture the energy of inquiry and participation embedded in socially constructed knowledge. It dawns on me, though, that many of my colleagues would resist such a politics of language learning even as they would acknowledge its presence. The reason for this, I think, is such paradigm changes bring risk to departments institutionally as language departments begin to function more like a social science or as an engaged member of the humanities. Also, such paradigms will no doubt bring teachers to question their own assumptions about themselves, about their social class and the meaning of what they do.

We should do better, and we should start by asking more of our textbooks and ourselves.

[more to come]

We all know something

I want to go to a conference like this.

"In his 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowieki captured the spirit of the collaborative trends in media and society. The combined individual activities of many can provide an accurate understanding of even the most complex issues. “We all know something” is the underlying theme driving much technological and societal change. Although the well-crafted reasoning of experts will continue to play an important role in conferences, the more informal discussions and presentations at “unconferences” offer valuable exposure to—and, more important, the opportunity to contextualize—cutting-edge ideas.

The real emphasis should be less on technology and more on the affordance of the open dialogue that now defines the primary value of conferences. Whether a small-table discussion, a chat at the bar, or a contribution to the conference wiki, blog session, or Twitter-fest, the common defining theme centers on control. Instead of listening passively, conference attendees in each of these scenarios experience a high level of engagement and ownership. Web technology, to date, has best symbolized this important shift, since its decentralized structure does not reflect as strong a central position for the speaker or teacher."

It is surprising that those of us who preach about the open classroom so often subject others or let ourselves be subjected (some may say abjected) to such structure.

Like many, I believe that knowledge is social and that institutions that push toward proprietary or even secretive ends are so anathema to democracy that they should be avoided at all cost. Indeed, the costs of insular "knowledge" is high. Look at what the class of experts known as Wall Street has recently wrought. Look at the "experts" who got us into the war now entering its fifth year.

So it goes that we do not need to comprehend every detail of a topic to be informed about it. Understanding physics is necessary to understand how to build a missile. It does not take physics to understand that bombs are bad. Of course, we cannot be experts or even well informed about everything, but, on the other hand, we cannot abdicate our responsibility to inquire and to inform ourselves about the world around us.

My point is that if we are truly believers in democracy and building knowledge from within the social realm, we must learn to live in it, teach in it, and to demand it from others, whether in politics or academic conferences.

Large conferences, like large classrooms, are built on a flawed model. While they are efficient at delivering specific types of information, they are inefficient at creating new knowledge. The opportunities for networking and Q&A are simply too limited, and, as everyone knows, networking and social connections are why everyone goes to conferences. That probably why I've always felt more at home at, say, SE17 rather than the MLA. It's probably why I am happy at Whittier College too.

Here's a quote from John Dewey that alway lingers in the forefront of my thoughts: "A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all."

While expertise is a real and valuable thing--would I want a neophyte building a bridge or a plane I was about to use?--it is all too easy for experts to forget that their power and "value" is socially determined and not intrinsically tied to their so-called knowledge. This is as true for the teacher as it is for the economist or the carpenter. While it may sound like knowledge represents one more market in which ideas are traded, that only remains true to a point. Dewey's phrase means more, because, implicit in the idea of an expert class lies the idea of class power. Once a group of, say, economists gain political favor (in academia or in Washington or Moscow), it becomes easier for that group to wield more power, to use political and social influence to skew the marketplace for ideas. The market, thus skewed, becomes less a bazaar and more a cathedral (to use the famous computing metaphor).

Expertise leads to more specialization and, often, self-aggrandization: I understand x and am therefore valuable to you; you should pay me more. I write complicated arguments based on math, philosophy and Science(!); you should pay me more. Our society tends to believe the experts even when the evidence should easily convince us of the contrary. How many CEO's leave companies in ruins while they grow richer? How long will it take to see that Greenspan's long reign and his bubble(s) are not the work of a good economist but that of a good politician? How many profs from Harvard or Yale supported the war in Iraq?

Don't believe me that specialists think they are really special? Look at this article by Harvard prof G. Mankiw:

NO issue divides economists and mere Muggles more than the debate over globalization and international trade. Where the high priests of the dismal science see opportunity through the magic of the market’s invisible hand, Joe Sixpack sees a threat to his livelihood. This gap in perspective grows especially wide whenever the economy experiences short-run difficulties, as it is now. By all indications, the issue could come to dominate the presidential campaign.

See? Economists are magicians, priests, scientists! Everyone else is a muggle-minded "Joe Sixpack." Again, let me ask how long will it take to see that Greenspan's long reign and his bubble(s) are not the work of a good economist but that of a good politician? How many profs from Harvard or Yale supported the war in Iraq (or go about blindfolded yelling "free trade!")?

Those are simple questions, and some would say naïve, but that is my point. Power, beliefs, news, hierarchical structures can make us blind to our own power and to the powers that be. Power makes us forget to be like children and to ask the simple questions, the ones that matter. Simple questions, like the simple needs of shelter, food and community, are the foundation for democracy and democratic economies, and, while simple answers are rare and should generally be avoided, simple questions are often the most revealing.

Sorry to be so long-winded, but I think this is important. I will be attending some unconferences this summer to hopefully learn something from some experts and to ask them some simple questions. Just think: what if Colin Powell had presented his "proof" that Iraq had WMDs at an unconference rather than the U.N.? What if the NYT's W. Kristol actually had to answer to some of the lies he gets from Newsmax? (I'll refrain from linking to that trash.)

Now I'm not saying that organizations and institutions have no place, for I think they do, but permit me to believe that if our world contained a little more democracy, a little more Web 2.0, it just might be a better place.

Bodies and politics

A Quote:

[The body] is a concrete physical space of flesh and bone, of chemistries and electricities; it is a highly mediated space, a space transformed by cultural interpretations and representations...

Body and the body politic, body and the social body, body and the city, body and the citizen body, are intimately linked productions.... The practice of using the individual body as a metaphor for the social body, of deploying it as a sign of the health or disease of the social body, develops in the Athenian polis with ideas of democracy and reason and continues into the present. Body and city are the persistent subjects of a social/civic discourse, of an imaginary obsessed with the fear of unruly and dangerous elements and the equally obsessive desire to bring them under control: fears of pollution, contagions, disease, things out of place [for the ancient Greeks, the definition of 'pollution']; desires for controlling and mastering that [become] the spatial practice of enclosing unruly elements with carefully guarded spaces. These acts of differentiation, separation, and enclosure involve material symbolic and lived spaces....bodies and cities and tests...and are practiced as a politics of difference, as segregation and separation. (Hooper quoted in Soja 114) [Soja, Edward. (1996) Thirdspace. Malden, MA: Blackwell Press.]

It was five years ago today

That John Ashcroft said in front of the Senate: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends." (Dec. 6 2001)

Translation: "Those of you who complain of losing your civil liberties are in bed with the enemy."

That the man is not in jail shows how little we have progressed since then, but there are signs of hope and resistance to unconstitutionally enforced subordination.

We had an election and won. We won not based on fear but rather on the knowledge that the erosion of constitutional protections, begun under Ashcroft and embraced wholeheartedly by Gonzalez, was and is doing significant harm to the United States as a nation and as a set of individuals seeking prosperity and community within its borders. We won using community, netroots, personal phone calls, alternative media. We won thanks to people and unions. We won in spite of corporate media's tepid, untruthful and polluting "journalism." We won in spite of millionaire pundits. We won on the self-evident observations of what we see around us in factories, offices, cafes, restaurants, and family dinners. We won thanks to the pictures we saw--and not the interpretations of them by the priesthood.

Yet, in spite of this, we see our own citizens tortured and handcuffed. We see our physical environment degraded through exploitation. We see our community and mental environment degraded by surveillance; we are watched rather than protected. We see a new boss in the Pentagon, same as the old boss, and we see senators welcome him like a pal. We see the gods of Wall Street lecture the democrats on how they are supposed to act. We see trade deficits and deficits of discourse and action.

In sum...

All is still not well in the corporate kingdom of brand America.

Friedman: Liar, war-monger... respected.

Friedman takes a lot of flack... and it is all deserved. That he is one of the leading opinion-makers is both travesty and tragedy.

I should have linked to Greenwald earlier:

But tragically, there is nothing unique about Tom Friedman. What drives him is the same mentality that enabled the administration's invasion of Iraq and, so much worse, it is the mentality that is keeping us there and will keep us there for the indefinite future. We stay in Iraq in pursuit of goals we know are fantasies, because to do otherwise requires the geniuses and serious establishment analysts to accept responsibility for what they have done -- and that is, by far, the most feared and despised outcome.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Well, actually, they do. Of course, sometimes the horses hurt us too. For example, a group of striking hotel workers in Houston were trampled by horses. I would like to blame this action on the horses. Unfortunately, the horses were guided by a less logical animal: humans of the law-enforcement kind.



This is nothing new, of course. [update] What is more, as I just read over at mydd.com, it turns out that bail has been set at nearly 900,000 dollars [update #2: reduced to 1000 dollars each] for each of the persons arrested in the protest. That seems a little excessive, but, then again, going against the economic system has always been considered more criminal than personal violence. Here's the press release:

HOUSTON, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- In an unprecedented transparent attempt to severely limit the right to peaceful protest and freedom of speech of low-wage Houston janitors and their supporters, a Harris County District Attorney has set an extraordinarily high bond of $888,888 cash for each of the 44 peaceful protestors arrested last night. Houston janitors and their supporters, many of them janitors from other cities, were participating in an act of non-violent civil disobedience, protesting in the intersection of Travis at Capitol when they were arrested in downtown Houston Thursday night. They were challenging Houston's real estate industry to settle the janitors' strike and agree on a contract that provides the 5,300 janitors in Houston with higher wages and affordable health insurance.

The combined $39.1 million bond for the workers and their supporters is far and above the normal amount of bail set for people accused of even violent crimes in Harris County. While each of the non-violent protestors is being held on $888,888 bail ...

    * For a woman charged with beating her granddaughter to death with a
    sledgehammer, bail was set at $100,000;

  * For a woman accused of disconnecting her quadriplegic mother's breathing
    machine, bail was set at $30,000;

  * For a man charged with murder for stabbing another man to death in a bar
    brawl, bail was set at $30,000;

  * For janitors and protesters charged with Class B misdemeanors for past"
    non-violent protests, standard bail has been set at $500 each.

More than 5,300 Houston janitors are paid $20 a day with no health insurance, among the lowest wages and benefits of any workers in America.

Interesting, no? Revealing, no? Surprising--no. Repression of this sort often takes the form of "justice" reasonably meted out by reasonable judges (as long as you consider "reasonable" to be defined by the upper classes and the legal system they created). [end update]


I can't help but draw a parallel to Greg Grandin's book, an excerpt of which is in Counterpunch:

But before the crisis of 1982, there were the golden years between 1978 and 1981. Just as the international left flocked to Chile during the Allende period, under Pinochet the country became a mecca for the free-market right. Economists, political scientists, and journalists came to witness the "miracle" first hand, holding up Chile as a model to be implemented throughout the world. Representatives from European and American banks poured into Santiago, paying tribute to Pinochet by restoring credit that was denied the heretic Allende. The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank extolled Chile as a paragon of responsibility, advancing it 46 loans between 1976 and 1986 for over $3.1 billion.

In addition to money men, right-wing activists traveled to Chile in a show of solidarity with the Pinochet regime. Publisher of the National Review William Rusher, along with other cadres who eventually coalesced around Reagan's 1976 and 1980 bids for the Republican nomination, organized the American-Chilean Council, a solidarity committee to counter critical press coverage in the US of Pinochet. "I was unable to find a single opponent of the regime in Chile," Rusher wrote after a 1978 pilgrimage, "who believes the Chilean government engages" in torture. As to the "interim human discomfort" caused by radical free-market policies, Rusher believed that "a certain amount of deprivation today, in the interest of a far healthier society tomorrow, is neither unendurable nor necessarily reprehensible."

Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago professor whose 1944 Road to Serfdom dared to suggest that state planning would produce not "freedom and prosperity" but "bondage and misery," visited Pinochet's Chile a number of times. He was so impressed that he held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin there. He even recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete her free-market revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of Chile's 1982 financial collapse, agreed that Chile represented a "remarkable success" but believed that Britain's "democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent" make "some of the measures" taken by Pinochet "quite unacceptable."

Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a "transitional period," only as long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. "My personal preference," he told a Chilean interviewer, "leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism." In a letter to the London Times he defended the junta, reporting that he had "not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende." Of course, the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet's regime weren't talking.

Hayek's University of Chicago colleague Milton Friedman got the grief, but it was Hayek who served as the true inspiration for Chile's capitalist crusaders. It was Hayek who depicted Allende's regime as a way station between Chile's postwar welfare state and a hypothetical totalitarian future. Accordingly, the Junta justified its terror as needed not only to prevent Chile from turning into a Stalinist gulag but to sweep away fifty years of tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, labor legislation, and social welfare provisions -- a "half century of errors," according to finance minister Sergio De Castro, that was leading Chile down its own road to serfdom.

"To us, it was a revolution," said government economist Miguel Kast, an Opus Dei member and follower of both Hayek and American Enterprise Institute theologian Michael Novak. The Chicago economists had set out to affect, radically and immediately, a "foundational" conversion of Chilean society, to obliterate its "pseudo-democracy" (prior to 1973, Chile enjoyed one of the most durable constitutional democracies in the Americas).

Where Friedman made allusions to the superiority of economic freedom over political freedom in his defense of Pinochet, the Chicago group institutionalized such a hierarchy in a 1980 constitution named after Hayek's 1960 treatise The Constitution of Liberty. The new charter enshrined economic liberty and political authoritarianism as complementary qualities. They justified the need of a strong executive such as Pinochet not only to bring about a profound transformation of society but to maintain it until there was a "change in Chilean mentality." Chileans had long been "educated in weakness," said the president of the Central Bank, and a strong hand was needed in order to "educate them in strength." The market itself would provide tutoring: When asked about the social consequences of the high bankruptcy rate that resulted from the shock therapy, Admiral José Toribio Merino replied that "such is the jungle of . . . economic life. A jungle of savage beasts, where he who can kill the one next to him, kills him. That is reality."

But before such a savage nirvana of pure competition and risk could be attained, a dictatorship was needed to force Chileans to accept the values of consumerism, individualism, and passive rather than participatory democracy. "Democracy is not an end in itself," said Pinochet in a 1979 speech written by two of Friedman's disciples, but a conduit to a truly "free society" that protected absolute economic freedom. Friedman hedged on the relationship between capitalism and dictatorship, but his former students were consistent: "A person's actual freedom," said Finance Minister de Castro, "can only be ensured through an authoritarian regime that exercises power by implementing equal rules for everyone." "Public opinion," he admitted, "was very much against [us], so we needed a strong personality to maintain the policy."

Jeane Kirkpatrick was among those who traveled to Chile to pay respect to the pioneer, lauding Pinochet for his economic initiatives. "The Chilean economy is a great success," the ambassador said, "everyone knows it, or they should know it." She was dispatched by Reagan shortly after his 1981 inauguration to "normalize completely [Washington's] relations with Chile in order to work together in a pleasant way," including the removal of economic and arms sanctions and the revocation of Carter's "discriminatory" human rights policy. Such pleasantries, though, didn't include meeting with the relatives of the disappeared, commenting on the recent deportation of leading opposition figures, or holding Pinochet responsible for the 1976 car bomb execution of Orlando Letelier, Allende's ambassador to the US, in Washington's Dupont Circle -- all issues Kirkpatrick insisted would be resolved with "quiet diplomacy."

Setting aside the struggles surrounding religion, race, and sexuality that give American politics its unique edge, it was in Chile where the New Right first executed its agenda of defining democracy in terms of economic freedom and restoring the power of the executive branch. Under Pinochet's firm hand, the country, according to prominent Chicago graduate Cristián Larroulet, became a "pioneer in the world trend toward forms of government based on a free social order." Its privatized pension system, for example, is today held up as a model for the transformation of Social Security, with Bush having received advice from Chilean economist José Piñera, also a Chicago student, on how to do so in 1997. Pinochet "felt he was making history," said Piñera, "he wanted to be ahead of both Reagan and Thatcher."

Friedman too saw himself in the vanguard. "In every generation," he is quoted in his flattering New York Times obituary, which spares just a sentence on his role in Chile, "there's got to be somebody who goes the whole way, and that's why I believe as I do."

And trailblazer both men were, harbinger of a brave and merciless new world. But if Pinochet's revolution was to spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere, it first had to take hold in the United States. And even as the dictator was "torturing people so prices could be free," as Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once mordantly observed, the insurgency that would come to unite behind Ronald Reagan was gathering steam.

Today, Pinochet is under house arrest for his brand of "shock therapy," and Friedman is dead. But the world they helped usher in survives, in increasingly grotesque form. What was considered extreme in Chile in 1975 has now become the norm in the US today: a society where the market defines the totality of human fulfillment, and a government that tortures in the name of freedom.

That's a rather long excerpt, but you see what I mean. Somewhere in our psyche, "freedom" has been tweaked into coercion. "Pure competition," the ideal preached from on high by von Hayek, by Friedman, has become that article of faith which only faith--in direct contradiction to the weight of evidence--can sustain. And, as usual, the faithful are willing to resort to violence and repression to spread their gospel and defeat the infidels.

The repercussions of the "free" market place on the masses have left the masses to their own devices, which is to say it has left them to become subjects of a state in which they have little or no voice, either politically or philosophically. This is reflected in von Hayeks comments on Chilean dictatorship and mass murder: "My personal preference," he told a Chilean interviewer, "leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism."

So, while academics can find within such economic thinkers food for discussion of a liberating, egalitarian sort, when theory meets practice--and this is what is most important--these supposed "philospher kings" reveal their true colors.

So, in Houston as elsewhere, democracy remains dead. Friedman and von Hayek live on, however, riding the horses of "freedom."**





**Yes, I was going to put "apocalypse" here, but it was too obvious. Moreover, there are too many who actually think this. I'm sick of magical thinking and delusion.

The Nexus of Misogyny, Arms, Fascism

The last couple of weeks have brought numerous articles of import to the web. I read Stan Goff's piece on fascism at truthdig.com. I read, at alternet.org, Burbick's article on gun culture. I was looking at the "comfort women" of the Fascist Japanese Empire. In print media, I have been teaching My Year of Meats in class.

So I was intent on bringing together Goff and Burbick's works in a post of my own. I was taking notes, reading more, just trying to be a flâneur. --In the process, I have become an addict of de.licio.us and my tag cloud kind of says it all:

Anyway, and fortunately, I didn't write anything because Dave Dneiwert did, and did it much better than I ever could.

All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. ... What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours. ... Women are by nature instruments of Satan -- they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation.

-- Malleus maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), published by Catholic inquisition authorities in 1485-86

The Freikorpsmen hate women, specifically women's bodies and sexuality. It would not be going too far to say that their perpetual war was undertaken to escape women; even the motherly battlefront nurse is a threatening intrusion in the unisexual world of war. This hatred -- or dread -- of women cannot be explained with Freud's all-purpose Oedipal triangulation (fear that heterosexual desire will lead to punishment by the father, homosexual yearnings for the father, or some such permutation of the dramatic possibilities). The dread arises in the pre-Oedipal struggle of the fledgling self, before there is even an ego to sort out the objects of desire and the odds of getting them: It is a dread, ultimately, of dissolution -- of being swallowed, engulfed, annihilated. Women's bodies are the holes, swamps, pits of muck that can engulf.

--Barbara Ehrenreich, from the foreword to Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies

Where are they coming from, these violent men? The right-wing terrorists like David McMenemy. The onslaught of damaged males inflicting violence on women in dramatic and public ways. It all seems so new, so sudden. And yet so familiar.

What is most striking about this seeming trend is how abstract the women victims are for so many of the perpetrators. Both of the deranged school shooters in Pennsylvania and Colorado simply picked the schools at random, and selected girls as their victims retributively, for supposed harm done to them in the past by other females. All of them indicated a long-sweltering rage at women.

Read the whole thing.

More great news for children in the U.S.

The EPI is reporting that:

The rate of uninsured children in the United States has increased for the first time in seven years, from 10.8% in 2004 to 11.2% in 2005. From 2004 to 2005, the number of uninsured children grew by 361,000 to a total of 8.3 million uninsured children.

This is not surprising. However, every time I come across statistics like this, it reminds me of what a strange culture the U.S. has. Somehow, the words like "family values," "culture of life," and "moral compass" roll of people's tongues as if it were reality when in fact the reality is quite the opposite.

You know this, of course. Luckily, Medicaid steps in (minimally) to cover what the rest of our system does not.Image Source Courtesy of EPI

I can only think of Cat Stevens' "Where Do the Children Play?":

[...]Well youve cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air.
But will you keep on building higher
til theres no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?

I know weve come a long way,
Were changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?