Mark W Tiedemann

Category: current affairs

  • The Debate, part one

    The talking heads have been bloviating for decades now about the function of government vis a vis a so-called Welfare State.  The Right claims that having the government “take care of” people is a violation of the American tradition of independence and self-reliance and will sap our resources, both fiscal and moral.  The Left has argued that such government programs are there to protect people who have few resources from the depredations of the wealthy and an economy that fluctuates as a normal element of its functioning and that it is the responsibility of the better-off to aid those who are left without recourse in such a system.

    That’s the basics of the debate.  The Right says no, people should look out for themselves.  The Left says many people can’t and it isn’t right to let them starve in the streets.  The Right says it has no desire to see anyone starve in the streets but rejects the idea that others are responsible for the perhaps bad choices of individuals who have been unable to take advantage of an open system.  The Left counters by pointing out the system is not as open as the Right believes and built in to its workings is the inevitability that a certain number of people simply won’t be able to participate.  Even if the Right then agrees, they assert that it is not the job of the State, using tax payer money, to off-set this imbalance.  The Left says it is if people vote for it and even if they don’t there’s a moral imperative involved.  The Right counters that the State is not the instrument for pursuing moral imperatives.

    Well.

    Let me be up front here—I think the Right has it wrong.  They base their philosophy, if that’s what it is, on an idea of equality that is unsupportable.  In the narrowest sense, they argue that our system is open to the extent that everyone has an equal shot at some measure of success and if they fail it is either because they were lazy, foolish, or unlucky.  The government can functionally do nothing about any of that.

    The argument falls apart on its face.  Equality in this country is a principle concerning representation before the State.  The State in this sense is the community as a whole, both public and private.  The ideas that we are not born to a Station in life which determines at the outset how far an individual might go through his or her own efforts.  It was never intended as an assessment of talent or a measure of will or a guarantee of achievement.  It is only a promise of access.  Because people are not equal as individuals.

    They aren’t and there’s not much point in arguing about it.  Intelligence, physical attributes, proclivities, all these things vary widely throughout any population group and to argue that, if somehow we could take away all social obstacles, everyone would be exactly the same is absurd.

    The Right seems to argue that because this is true, the rest of us have no responsibility for the fundamentally unequal achievements of any one, or group of, individual.   They discount social obstacles.  Not completely, because when an individual rises above a certain level, reaches the precincts of success, and has done so from straitened beginnings, many on the Right like to point to that individual as an exemplar of succeeding in spite of the circumstances of his or her life.  So there is a tacit recognition that social conditions matter, but only as an ennobling aspect to a Horatio Alger story.  The question really is why those conditions keep so many others down, but that, as much as the successful individual’s achievement is credited to personal qualities, is a matter of personal failure, not attributable to anyone else.

    Which seems to make success and failure a matter of choice.  Exclusively.  Ergo, the tax payer, through the medium of the State, has no responsibility for such failures.

    This can only be true if the assertion of equality is true as an innate quality.

    The reality is quite different.  Opportunity is not equally distributed.  It depends on where you are born, where you go to school (if you go to school), who your friends are, your religion, your ethnic group, your gender, your health, the laws in place in your community, the local economics, how much money your parents have, local environmental conditions.  What you are able to do is determined as much if not more by those parts of your life in which you have no say whatsoever as any kind of innate ability, quality of mind, or willful intention.

    Yes, there are many examples of individuals born into situations which would seem to guarantee failure who succeed.  They are remarkable and should be recognized.  But the Right has elected to see them as the normative factor rather than the vaster numbers of those from the same background who did not succeed.  Why?  They claim that the exceptional is the nominal and blame the true nominal conditions on personal failure on the part of all those who are not exceptional, then defend a status quo in which no community responsibility is justified to address the conditions which act as both barriers and weights on people left behind by the exceptional.

    Why?

    One argument put forward is that the tax burden to redress social conditions is onerous and ends up punishing success.  But this argument only has merit if the individual so encumbered has no obligation to the community that allowed his or her success.  This leads us to a further statement, Libertarian in nature, that says personal achievement does, in fact, owe nothing to the community, that simply the decision to act is something unique and the effort to succeed is separate from anything the community may provide or contribute, making the successful entrepreneur, for instance, a completely self-made individual.

    If true, then morally the argument is sound.  That individual could claim that what he or she has made has been made entirely apart from the community, that the community then takes advantage of that work and therefore owes the builder, and the builder owes nothing in return.  Certainly not to those who failed to achieve on their own.

    This is sophomoric philosophy at best, the credo of selfish people.

    Why?

    I’ll let this stand for a few days for anyone who might read it to mull over.  Comments are welcome.

  • People Who Have No Money Should Have Nothing

    I’m a tad upset.  The House just voted (all the Republicans and ten Democrats) to de-fund Planned Parenthood.

    Why?

    Planned Parenthood has been the target for the Right since it was founded in the 1920s—during a time, it should be stressed, when you could go to jail for distributing information about contraception.  Jail.  Because such information was seen as destructive of public morals.

    Again, why?  This should be a no-brainer for Conservatives.  Privacy.  The ability to control your own person.  The responsible management of your own life.  But time and again we keep running up against this perverse negative reaction to anything that smacks of responsible sexuality.  I have said this before, but I think it bears repeating, that the right wing jeremiad against abortion has little to do with abortion—it is a war on sex.

    Planned Parenthood is the number one provider of gynecological services for poor women, under and uninsured women, women with few other options if any.  The fact is that no federal dollars have been spent on abortion since the Hyde amendment was passed in 1976, and yet—and yet—this persecution continues.  It only makes sense if we stop thinking that this has anything to do with fetuses.

    There is a very silly movie from 1964 called Kisses For My President.  It starred Polly Bergen as the first woman president of the United States and Fred MacMurray as her hapless husband.  You can imagine what the bulk of it is about—he has to fill the role of First Lady.  It’s a comedy.  Ostensibly.  As the frustrations of his position mount (I choose my words carefully) he clearly resents his position and decides to do something about it.  His solution?  He gets his wife pregnant.

    Now, for some reason which today would be head-scratchable, she has to resign as president.  On this occasion, she yields to the inevitable and MacMurray is beaming like a man once more in charge.

    Does anyone not see the horror in that scenario?

    In 1964 businesses were still firing women who became pregnant.  There were no laws to prevent this.  The idea that a woman might want some say over her own life was still bizarre.  The sexual revolution was just underway and most Americans didn’t like it so much—not because they minded the idea of more sex so much as they hated the idea that their kids would be doing it.  Once it was well underway, though, it became far clearer that underlying all the cheesy jokes and Playboy aesthetics was the very serious issue of providing half the population with the ability to manage their own lives, their own dreams, their own futures.  Roe v. Wade was the capstone of this movement because—

    This must be stressed today because we have generations that have grown up not knowing this history, not having to live under these conditions.

    —because the inability of women to say no in matters of personal sexuality and to control their own fertility trapped many of them in cycles of dependence and poverty.  The fruits of the sexual revolution were not that boys got to get laid a lot more but that women have the final say in whether, when, if, how, and with whom any laying was going to take place.

    For women who yearn for a baby and live in circumstances in which such an advent is welcome, wanted, and cherished and is not a crushing weight and a drain on small resources, it may be difficult to understand what a calamity an unwanted pregnancy might be.  But for any woman who wants to have a say in her own procreative decisions, there should be no question today that the Right, through the instrument of the Republican Party, is trying to turn this country back to a time when the movie cited above makes perfect sense and offers a welcome message.

    What it really means is that if you don’t have the means in hand, and you’re a woman, these people want you to be silent, subservient, and second-class.

    The reality is that women with money have always had access to abortion.  The euphemistic “time in the country” mentioned in so many mauve novels meant just that.  If you were poor, you went to a butcher in a dirty room and took your chances whether it was successful or you ended up with an infection that would kill you or a hemorrhage that wouldn’t stop.

    The Republican Party is tied to a constituency of moneyed interests and moral morons who care nothing for average people.  Why we continue to vote them into power is a testament to a propaganda machine that has worked tirelessly to convince us that our interests are best served by having all protections stripped from us if we live below a certain income level.  They are marching us forward in our goal to become the wealthiest third world nation on the planet.

  • Wake Up! We Are Not Parts!

    I’ll admit up front that I’m shooting from the hip here.  There are many aspects to what is happening in Wisconsin right now with parallels to several past instances in the country in the fight over workers’ rights, unions, and moneyed interests, but I frankly don’t have the time to research them all right now and get something up before it all comes to a head.

    Isn’t it interesting, though, that we are collectively cheering what is happening in the Middle East right now and something similar is happening right here and people don’t seem to be paying attention to what’s at stake?

    Oh, come on, Tiedemann, how can you make a comparison!  I grant you, it’s a stretch.  But on principles, not so much.  We’re talking about who has the right to speak to power and over what.  The protesters in Madison aren’t having their internet access and phone service pulled and it’s doubtful the military will be called in, but on the other hand the Wisconsin state police are being asked to go get the now-labeled Wisconsin 14 and bring them back to the state capitol to vote on something that is clearly a stripping of the right of petition and assembly.  So this can become very quickly a constitutional issue and that’s scary, because right now the Supreme Court has been decidedly against workers’ rights.

    Governor Scott is at least being clear.  I’ll give him credit, he’s not ducking questions about what he’s trying to do.  Wisconsin, like many states, has a budget crisis.  He’s already gotten concessions from the unions, a lot of money.  The unions have not balked at doing their civic duty in terms of agreeing to pay cuts, freezes on raises, and some concessions on benefits to help the state meet its budgetary responsibilities.  But he’s going further and asking that all these unions be stripped of their collective bargaining abilities in order to make sure they never again demand something from the state that the legislature or the governor believes they don’t deserve.  In other words, Governor Scott doesn’t ever want to have to sit down and ask them for concessions ever again—he wants to be able to just take what he wants.

    No one can argue that the budget problems are a fabrication.  In the past, unions have flexed their muscle over similar problems and occasionally been their own worst enemies, resulting in lay-offs, closing down of programs, and so forth.  I myself can certainly see how unions abuse their power.  They have a position to maintain, which is to stand in opposition to management.  Management is concerned with bottom lines, not people, so unions are the enemy. For their part, unions could care less about individual needs and will jettison, ostracize, or bully individuals who aren’t acting in lock-step with unions policies.  A union will roll over an individual in pursuit of its collective agenda just as readily as management will.  Neither side has a lock on enlightened behavior.

    This is one of those times when management has the more ethical argument over the money matters.  States are facing bankruptcy.  They don’t have the money to maintain status quo.  In this, the dreams of the Grover Norquist’s have been realized—the beast, government, is being starved.

    But that’s not what is currently at stake.  The unions have met with the governor and agreed to help.  But Scott wants to end the practice of having to sit down with unions and negotiate over this.  He’s made some Right To Work noises as well—individuals should not be “forced” to pay union dues if they don’t want to.  On an abstract moral level, I can even agree with that, but we don’t live in an abstract world where moral principle trumps bottom line thinking and the practice of power.  We live in a world of zero-sum games and abusive relationships between management and labor.  The reality is that the rights everyone, union or otherwise, have come to enjoy since the end of the Great Depression have been won by unions who stood up to management and said “We are not parts.”

    I mention constitutional issues.  What I mean by that is that we have, under the Constitution, the right to peaceably assemble and we have the right of redress of grievances.  Those are the key components of all union organization.  The Constitution does not say how we are to exercise those freedoms, only that we have them.  Stripping unions of the right of collective bargaining is an assault on both those freedoms and Scott knows very well what it is he’s handing future administrations, which is a muzzled work force.

    Like other freedoms people take for granted today, working conditions and fair pay scales were wrested from those in power, often in bloody contests argued in the streets with axe handles and sometimes bullets.  We are in a period of retrenchment by those who have never been pleased with that loss of authority.  It’s not just in this instance, but in every instances.  Those who rail against womens rights, affirmative action, students’ rights, health care, and any and all regulation of industry, be it financial or manufacturing, are people who either do not understand what came before or are working hand-in-glove with those who wish to take those rights away and establish a plutocracy in which money is all that matters and access to a middle class is a prize to be won by being a good servant.

    The unions conceded to Scott’s demands to help balance his budget.  Taking away their ability to bargain collectively is an attempt to set those concessions in stone and prevent workers from ever again petitioning for progress in the treatment of employees.  This is over and above anything he should have a right to ask. Money right now is being used as a boogeyman to scare people into obeisance.

    This is not the way to solve these problems.  And if anyone believes it will stop there, all you have to do is look around at the renewed Right To Work efforts across the country.  These are union-busting efforts and will result in workers losing pay and benefits in the long run.

    I feel like slapping people who vote Republican and shouting  “Wake up!  They are not on your side!  They’re trying to fuck you and your children!”  The only things they want to spend money on are weapons and corporate welfare.  The only reason to continually cut education funding is to procure a populace too stupid to look out for its own good.  Everything else follows from there.

    Wake up, people!

  • Dust Motes

    Cleaning my office, which serves double duty as a guest room.  We have company coming in this weekend and that’s always a good excuse to clean up.

    So while I’m moving things around, listening to very loud music (Deep Purple, Who Do We Think We Are? which I think is one of the great underappreciated rock’n’roll albums of all time), thoughts are buzzing around my head.

    Already this morning I posted a response to someone on a group discussing Science vs Religion—a topic fraught with the potential for all kinds of angsty in-your-face defensiveness—wherein I once more found myself in the position of turning an argument around on someone who had decided that I had insulted him by insisting on evidence and common sense and the practice of looking at alternative explanations that might undercut a cherished experience.  In this case, we were discussing ghosts.  When I pointed out that the described experience fit well with what is known as hypnogogic hallucination, I was summarily told that if I said that to the experiencer’s face, I’d likely get a kick in the groin.  Hardly a mature response.

    But then it went on to question why someone like me—a materialist—can’t just stop being insulting by insisting that what people experience is explicable in material terms.  It never seems to occur to some people that every time they tell me that I need Jesus or that I’m bound for hell or that my life must be empty and meaningless because I don’t believe in god, that they are being insulting to me.  Built into this level of religiosity is the automatic assumption that they’re right and I’m wrong and that’s the end of it.  They don’t see this as hubris or arrogance because it comes from, they believe, an outside source—god or whatever—and that all they’re doing is conveying the message.

    Well, sorry.  We can all be arrogant on someone else’s behalf and beg off the charge of arrogance because we’re just the messenger.  Displacing responsibility for being rude and offensive is a handy dodge—oh, it’s not me, it’s The Lord’s word!—but the fact remains, you choose to hand out the insult.  That you don’t see it that way is forgivable until it has been pointed out to you how it’s insulting.  After that, you’re just being an ass about it.

    This is not to say people can’t discuss this without being insulting.  I have a few friends who are devout believers and we often bandy the philosophy without ever getting personal or insulting.  I have to say, though, that without those few people who are demonstrably intelligent about the subject, I would probably categorize all such folks as raving loonies with poor social skills.

    To be fair, I know some atheists who are just as offensive.  And while I can understand where it comes from, it never wins any points.

    I try—and I’m only human, so lapses occur—ardently to deal with the subject, not the individual.  There does come a point when the question arises “Why do you believe this stuff?” and it does veer off into the personal.  But it’s the ideas I criticize, not the people.

    Unless by acting upon their beliefs they cause harm.  Then I get personal.  Boy, do I get personal!

    Insulated religious communities, such as some of the splinter Mormon sects who practice polygamy, as far as I’m concerned, are deluded.  Not because they believe in god, but because they feel that belief gives them leave to treat certain people like shit.  Mainly women, whom they view as property.  These little pockets are, for all intents and purposes, little feudal kingdoms with one or a few men at the top dictating to the rest.  I understand the leaders well enough—no matter how they couch their justifications, they are power-hungry bigots who’ve figured out how to feed their addictions.  What I fail repeatedly to understand are all the others who follow them.  What drives someone to surrender their conscience, their will, their choices to be ruled over by a self-serving tyrant?  Unless they like the arrangement they have within the hierarchy, which then makes it just as self-serving to follow, and becomes collusive.  Because it’s a top down, tiered society, and there always seems to be somebody lower down, ending finally with the women and the children, who end up having no say.  The ties that bind are like electrical lines dispersing power.

    We’re watching a wonderful thing happen in Egypt.  Democracy might break out in one of the most populous countries on the planet.  They have validated the dictum that people allow themselves to be ruled, that all the power a tyrant has is only what the people give him.  Ultimately, this is true.  The question is always, how abusive do things have to get before the people have had enough.

    It’s the next stage that’s worrisome.  The Muslim Brotherhood is waiting in the wings, no doubt, for an opportunity to establish Sha’ria law.  Once that happens, democracy is done.  Sha’ria is autocratic, brooks no debate, and is not amenable to differences of opinion that stray too far—like, for instance, equal rights for women.

    Yet to oppress the Muslim Brotherhood is also wrong.  That’s part of what has ultimately undone Mubarak.  It’s hard.  Even here we have to relearn that lesson periodically, that just because we disagree with someone and that someone is disagreeable, we don’t have the right to suppress or oppress them.  It’s more detrimental in the long run to force someone to shut up than any damage they can do by speaking their piece.

    If Egypt transforms in the next year into a genuine secular democracy, then we may begin to see the entire Middle East take the same steps.  Iran would likely be the next one, and in that instance it would be a transformation 30 years overdue, since after ousting the Shah that’s where they were heading.  Within a year, the clerics assumed full authority and democracy in any practical sense was gone.  They were able to do this because no one wanted to defy people speaking for god.  Once you hoist that banner, people get chary of challenging your authority, because they might be challenging god.

    That is the harm in such beliefs.  I won’t deny much good comes from religion, but in so many instances the tenets of religions have predisposed people to support autocracy, tyranny, and act counter to their own best interests.  The assumption that a given leader is speaking for god and therefore must be telling the truth or could not do anything against the good is naive.  By the time everyone figures out that he’s just using the people’s credulity to gain power, it can be too late.

    None of which has any bearing on the truth of the basic assertions.  Whether there is a god or not has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m describing.  What it does have to do with is whether or not one is willing to set that aside in matters of public policy, wherein any use of religion often ends up being a cynical ploy to obtain power or enact laws that may not be for the best.

    Anyway, such are the kinds of things that flit through my mind while I’m cleaning up.  Dust motes dancing over synapses. Time for another side of rock’n’roll.

  • Because Things Are Forgotten

    This is a completely personal anecdote, so take it for what it’s worth.  This is about a defining moment for me in my education as an egalitarian.

    Equality is something we talk about, we assume to be the case for everyone, and never really question.  Here, it’s the air we breathe.  It’s not true.  We are not all equal.  And in spite of our all our lip service to the idea of equality under the law or the equality of opportunity, we all know, if we’re honest, that we’re still trying to get to that level.  Probably it’s a function of how well we think our lives are at any given moment.  “If I’m doing all right, there’s no problem.  What are those people over there complaining about?  I don’t see anything wrong with my life.”

    Well.

    This is about gender equality.  It’s one of the most under-considered things in our present world. When I say that, what I mean is that here, in the West, where we have all but won that particular war, where it is normal to see women in roles that 50 years ago would have caused near-scandal, we have so normalized it that it has become a political topic for talking heads instead of a heartbreaking reality of barriers and stigma and sometimes death, as it is in many places still throughout the globe.

    I saw a PBS special last week about early television and on it Angie Dickinson was talking about her series Police Woman.  Breakthrough television.  It had been the first dramatic tv show since the mid-60s to be headed by a female in prime time.  It was shortly before Charlie’s Angels and a decade after both Honey West and The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.  During the interview, Dickinson commented that the feminists had been angry with her because she hadn’t used the show as a statement for the cause.  She defended herself by declaring that she was feminine not a feminist—as if being a feminist were somehow a bad thing, a dirty word, a slur.

    Which seems to be the case these days among a certain segment of women, many of them too young to remember what it was like when women couldn’t do anything they wanted to.

    Here’s my belief—any system that works to stifle an individual’s dreams and goals and sense of self simply because of a biological condition of being (gender, race, etc) is a system in need of reform at best, overturning at worst.  If you say to someone “You may not do this or that because you’re (a) a girl, (b) the wrong color, or (c) differently abled that an assumed norm” then you are being a bigot.

    Back in high school, I took a fancy one year to the idea of becoming an architect.  I took mechanical drawing one year, then the next architectural drawing.  I ended up dropping it.  But both classes were entirely male.  This was 1971 and 1972.  I didn’t question it.  Probably like a lot of boys then, I kinda sorta had the notion that girls didn’t do certain things because they didn’t want to.  I don’t know where I got that idea, but to my unformed mind it was the only thing that actually made sense to me.  The only reason I didn’t do things was because I had no interest in them.  All the cultural referents supported this rather passive belief and I didn’t question it.  Not really.  I’d already dismissed the idea that girls were incapable of doing the same things as boys because I’d been reading Heinlein and Schmitz, but that was science fiction and the future.  I hadn’t made the connections yet.

    I said both those classes were entirely male.  That’s not quite true.  My architectural drawing class had one girl.  But I didn’t know about her for nearly half of the first semester.

    The classroom was a long room with four ranks of drafting tables, all facing the front and the chalkboard.  At the rear was a small room that probably had been a cloak room at one time but now acted as a supply room for the class and was also where the blueprint machine was set up.  Our class was taught by a Mr. Hoppe, who was a short, energetic man with an almost comic stentorian delivery that reminded me a bit of Don Adams.  He liked to roam the aisles, lecturing us about having something when we left high school that would “put folding money in your pocket!”  I liked him.  Everybody liked him.  He was about five-foot-four, dark hair, cleanshaven, with bifocals.

    What I did not know was that he was teaching a female.  He had her set up in that utility room with her own drafting table.  I thought this was odd.  What, she didn’t want to hang out with the rest of us?  Was she stuck up or something?

    Then one evening I had to go to his classroom to drop off some paperwork, after school hours.  Mr. Hoppe wasn’t there, but three other guys from the class were.  I heard them laughing from the utility room.  I went back and there they were, with this girl’s work spread out.  One of them was sitting at the drafting table reworking some of the drawings while the other two were laughing at what he was doing.

    What was he doing?  He was ruining her work.  This wasn’t the equivalent of drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.  No, he was meticulously redoing her drawings and inserting mistakes.

    Let me say right here that her work was superb.  I have a talent for drawing and a good imagination and I thought I would make a good architect, but there were some things that just made that unlikely.  One was neatness.  My drawings were generally a mess—smudged, bad lines.  The other was lack of patience, but that’s a problem I have with everything.  But her work was pure art.  Clean, easy to read, detailed, just….beautiful.

    “What the fuck are you doing?” I blurted out.

    Two of them just stared at me, but the one doing the reworking said, “Teaching the bitch a lesson.”

    “You’re gonna get her a bad grade,” I said.  I still didn’t get it.

    “Yeah, well, she’s got no business doing this.”

    And I still didn’t get it.  I left and the next day I reported it to Mr. Hoppe.  All hell broke loose.  The three guys were booted from his class.  One of them—the one who’d been messing with her work—vowed to get even.  (He tried later, it didn’t work.  It cost him a black eye and a sprained ankle.  This was during my physically fearless period and he frankly never saw what was coming when he called me out.)

    This went on all the time, I found out.  Mr. Hoppe was delighted that someone had finally said something, because he told us all, that day, that this girl was his best student, he knew she wasn’t making those boneheaded mistakes, but he’d never been able to catch the vandals.

    He actually gave us a feminist lecture.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect it was.  Not because he was a feminist, I don’t think, but because he respected ability above all else.  And she had it, he said, and we should be ashamed of ourselves if we thought it was right to stand in her way just because she was a girl.  He’d been forced to keep her out of the regular class room because time again she would not be left alone to do her work.  The “guys” always sabotaged what she did, either by flirting or by making fun of her or by insulting her.

    I admit I was innocent.  I didn’t understand this at all.  It completely overturned what I thought had been going on.  I mean, I knew a lot of girls who didn’t want to do “guy things” and made a show of it, so it just didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t their choice.  That it wasn’t always their choice.

    What changed for me that day took years to fully manifest.  As I think back on it, there were a few other girls who had wanted to do certain things that girls “just didn’t do.”  I knew one who wanted to take shop. The whole school denied her access to the courses.  One girl I remember raging at the administration and then a week later announcing to us that she was transferring to a private school where she could pursue what she wanted.

    Young women today have different experiences with the world, so often you find them raising their eyebrows at old-school feminists railing at some injustice.  An electric crawl goes up my back when I hear some young female proudly declare that she’s not a feminist and would never be.  I know on some level they’re equating it to fashion, that feminists don’t dress well and never use make-up.  The superficiality of their reaction is probably based on something not much deeper.

    It does get tiresome to listen to some old fart going on about how things used to be.  But I hope the old farts never stop.  How else are we to remember what we’ve gained?

    My feminism eventually became a marrow-deep belief that we must treat each other like PEOPLE first, male and female maybe not quite second, but never let the gender distinction override our common humanity, and likewise with every other distinction you can name that makes no difference.  We all have dreams and ambitions and no one has a right to tell us we can’t have them because we were born with the “wrong equipment.”

    This personal reminiscence has been brought to you by a triggered memory.  Have a good day.

  • Schools

    I spotted this over at John Scalzi’s Whatever and it brought back some memories.

    A woman in Ohio has received a felony conviction for deceptively sending her kids to a school in a district where she didn’t live.  Her father colluded in this.  The article linked doesn’t go into the reasons she did what she did, but I can imagine some of them, and it would have entirely to do with quality of school experience.

    Fifty years ago, my schooling experience—and I phrase it that way because I’m talking about much more than just what you learn in the classroom; it’s a total package, going to socialization and self-image and the whole magilla that a lot of people condemning American public education, depending on their political slant, don’t want to think about—was in the process of being thoroughly fucked up.  Had I not been an avid reader at an early ago outside of school…

    Not knowing the particulars of the Ohio case, I’ll just talk about mine.  I’ve detailed some of this before, but it’s worth going over it again as a reminder.

    My birthday is in October.  Back in the day, my mother dutifully tried to enroll me in school for the school year during which I would have been five.  But at the time of enrollment, I was only four.  They refused me.  “Bring him back next year,” they told my mother, who tried, I imagine, valiantly to explain the problem, which was that I’d end up functionally a year behind.  But the district was adamant.  Bring him back when he is five.

    So I had a whole year of not going to school when many of my friends were.  Not to worry, I didn’t give that much of a damn.  I was pretty much a loner anyway, even then, because, for whatever reason, I didn’t quite fit with everyone else.

    The following September, we’re back at the school, and this time they accepted me.  I entered kindergarten.

    And six weeks later, when I turned six, they pulled me and five others who had the same calendrical malfunction out of kindergarten and moved us directly across the hall into first grade.

    Our first grade teacher—I remember her vividly, a tallish Nordic blonde with a thin face and large, pale blue eyes—made it clear from the beginning that she regarded the six of us as a nuisance.  “Get with one of the others and catch up,” she said.  “I’m not spending any time making up for you’re not being here at the beginning of the year.”

    I could read already and, if I recall correctly, so could Debbie Blake, but the others?  Don’t know.  I quickly became absorbed into my own problems, which became legion in my young mind.  Within a month I could honestly say that I hated school.

    Not just the teacher and the sudden load of curricula which the six weeks of kindergarten had not prepared me, but the whole experience.  My new classmates made me feel slow and stupid and began a pattern of torment that last the next eight years.  My teacher, who apparently recognized that I was probably above average, began a round of parent-teacher meetings designed, I thought, to humiliate me—“he’s a bright child but not performing up to his potential.”  I just didn’t understand.  And it didn’t improve.  I suspect that nine months of kindergarten I should have gotten bore directly on the socialization I was now forced to “catch up” with in a couple of weeks.

    My parents moved during my third grade year.  It put me in a new school district.  I actually had made no real friends to miss, so it was no big deal to me.  But.

    The district line ran, apparently, down the center of my street, and that put me in the Grant School district instead of the Shenendoah district.  Shenendoah was four blocks away.  Grant was a mile and a half.  Grant—I did not know this at the time, but my parents did—had a bad reputation.  (Shenendoah soon would, but not yet.)  I was already obviously having trouble at school from bullying and such and my parents were reluctant to send me to a school, so far away, where the problems might be worse.

    But also—and I didn’t find this out until much later—my performance disappointed them and my dad, for one, thought I had a discipline problem.  Corporal punishment had been outlawed in the public school system.  Dad was a believer in the spanking.  My poor grades and lack of attention in class, he thought, were directly related to an inability on the part of the teachers to effectively discipline me.  So, public school was probably not where I belonged.

    I was summarily enrolled in a private school, Emmaus Lutheran, about ten blocks away, and I entered the fray midway through third grade and there I stayed through eighth.

    My performance did not improve. Nor was I ever spanked for poor discipline.  That, it turned out, was not the problem.  (The bullying soon resumed and continued.  Enough about that.)

    I continued reading on my own and by a curious quirk of circumstance my dad began a long stretch of dinner table dialogues with me that can only be described as philosophical primers—my parents were lapsed Mormons, I was attending a Lutheran school, dad was determined I not swallow the party line whole, and we argued and debated our way through the rest of my grade school, all in an attempt to keep me from being brain washed.

    My next school problem came my senior year of high school.  High school improved somewhat.  Because of the round of different teachers, my performance in one class did not poison it in another, and I could be selective about what I chose to pay attention to.  My grades went up because, frankly, I was more interested.  The bullying had stopped (although I had more fights my Freshman year than the previous two) and I began to acquire the armor of the loner who will not be messed with.

    Roosevelt High School was what could best be described as a blue-collar industrial school.  It had been built and its traditions established when the expectation was that most of its graduates would end up driving trucks for Anheuser-Busch or going into some other local industry.  It was struggling to come to terms with a changed mission during the Sixties and hadn’t quite succeeded.  I became deeply fascinated with photography.  They had no course in it.  I was already interested in writing, but the Journalism class was one year and only half a credit.  In other words, both my fields of interest were pretty much unsupported.

    Senior year, I entered a work-study program which gave me a morning of class work and let me off to work part time in the afternoon.  My very first job ever, acquired over the summer, didn’t survive past October.  I “contrived” to game the system to stay in the program and pretended to have a job.  I was also cutting a lot of classes and days that year—sheer, unadulterated boredom (plus I think I had mono that year, but since I never went to the doctor I can’t say for sure, but it was pretty awful).  In any event, because I’d taken senior English in summer school (to avoid getting a particular teacher who would undoubtedly have flunked me for personal reasons) and because I had carried a larger course load (somehow) the previous year, I had more than enough credits to graduate that January, getting out early.  I plead lethargy for not having done it.  I’d finally gotten a situation where I didn’t mind it so much and didn’t have anything else to do.

    But.  I answered a job ad at the state hospital in February.  It was for a photography trainee.  Note—this was 1973.  The job would have been under the resident photography at the hospital as an apprentice.  I would have been trained to do portraits, copy work, photomicrography, color lab work, the whole bit.  The guy loved me.  Saw my work, the interview went like a dream—and the starting pay was four dollars and hour.  Trust me, for an 18-year-old at the time, this was a fortune.

    The only hitch was I didn’t have my diploma.  I explained the academic situation and begged a grace period so I could get it, since I had fulfilled my qualifications.  I went back to school to do that and was told No.  I had not taken that option in the fall, I was stuck with completing the school year.

    I begged.  Both of them.  The school wouldn’t yield, the photographer refused to hire me, telling me that I really needed that diploma and that he’d be doing me a disservice by allowing me to quit school without it.

    Bureaucracy.  I was, basically, fucked.

    Who knows where that might have led?  A path cauterized.  I do not regret it.  I’ve had a ball living the life I’ve led.  But I still get incensed over schools standing on their petty rules at the expense of a child’s educational experience.  It makes their bookkeeping easy and can often result in damaging the child’s future.

    Was the photographer right?  I have never been required to prove I graduated high school, anywhere, by anyone.  They take your word for it.  In my field, it was what you could do that mattered more than where you’ve been educated.

    So I’m thinking this woman in Ohio was trying her best to meet some impossible requirements.  Depressed housing market (let’s assume) and she couldn’t sell her house in order to move, the job she had was where she lived, the school she wanted her children in was in another district…not to put to fine a point on it, but all the opponents of vouchers and charter schools should be aware that this is part of the reason a lot of people are looking at those options as agreeably as they do.

    And just as a side note, sort of tangentially, consider that idiot governor in Texas recently pronouncing on what he sees as “frivolous” educational options.  To quote Governor Perry:

    Well, there is a lot of fat to cut from our public schools, especially those in our biggest urban areas like Houston and Dallas. I am concerned that some the highly diverse Magnet public schools in this city are becoming hotbeds for liberalism. Do we really need free school bus service, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian-Pacific Heritage Month, ESL, special needs and enrichment programs like music, art or math Olympiad? I think we should get back to the basics of the three Rs, reading writing and arithmetic. I mean when is the last time a 6th grade science fair project yielded a cure for a disease?

    It doesn’t work well, so let’s fuck it up some more, shall we?  Take all the stuff that’s worthwhile and cut it, so we can educate a bunch of truck drivers, processed food workers, and cheap laborers who can compete with illegal immigrants.  (I’m being sarcastic there, please note.)

    You know what I would do if I were king?  I would change the entire school system to this: fund it at at least half the level of current military spending.  All schools would be open 24/7.  Kids could go at any time and find classes in session.  Kids could go to any school they chose (within reason).  I would also make all schools safe havens, staffed with paralegals, nurses, and law enforcement so kids from abusive homes could feel protected if they had to get out.  I would pay whatever it took to feed a child’s imagination.  I would also extend that to make parents mandatorily involved and provide counseling for those parents who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.  The schools would be geared entirely for the benefit of the children, not the parents, not local businesses, and certainly not the bureaucracy.  I would put advanced curricula in the primary schools.  A lot of kids might not “get it” but there will always be those who will catch on quickly, even kids from backgrounds most people might think unlikely.  But I would expose all these kids to meaty material from the get-go instead of waiting till they get to college—if they get to college, which for many of them might be too late.  I would bar all recruiters of any kind from the schools and I would bring in a regular round of professionals in as many fields as I could to do workshops.

    That’s what I would do if I were king.  We’re nickle-and-diming out kids into stupidity and penalizing some parents who try to do the right thing for their children.  For every educational worker who pushes the envelope to improve the system, there seem to be a hundred know-nothings bitching about the cost and arguing over what’s being taught.  This has got to stop.

    Okay, end of rant. I feel marginally better.

  • Ahistorical Nonsense

    Representative Michelle Bachman is the national voice of The Tea Party.  Recently, in speaking to a group of Iowans, she made some claims about American history that would be laughable if they had not come from someone who likes to style herself an authority of Constitutional matters.  She claimed that the glory of our country is that color and language didn’t matter, nor did class or parentage, that once people got here, “we were all the same.”

    Wishful thinking at best.  Certainly that was the idea behind the Declaration of Independence, with its grand opening phrases, but like all such ambitions, it took reality a long, long time to catch up—and it still hasn’t.  The fact is, despite our stated political and social goals, immigrants have always had difficulty upon arriving here, some more than others, and those already here have always resented new arrivals.  And even for those who were already living here, equality was simply not a reality.  African slaves aside, women did not achieve equality until…well, some would say they’re still trying to achieve it, but just for one metric, they didn’t get the vote until 1921.  People who owned no property were barred from the vote for a good portion of the 19th Century and other barriers were put up here and there, time and again, such as literacy tests.  Anything to keep certain groups from being able to vote against the self-selected “true” Americans.

    She went further, though, and suggested that slavery was an unfortunate holdover from colonial times and that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was gone from the United States.”  She cited John Quincey Adams, who was a staunch campaigner against slavery.  The problem, though, is that he was not a Founder.  He was the son of one.

    The reality is that slavery was a deal breaker at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia.  Many of the delegates owned slaves and made it quite clear that any attempt to outlaw it would result in a No vote on any constitution.  A compromise was struck, putting the issue off for twenty years, and until then no one was allowed to even mention it on the floor of Congress.  (Interestingly, the British and others outlawed slavery and the slave trade in 1807, 56 years before we did.) This was violated by a group of Quakers who tried to force the issue in Congress in 1792 to angry denunciations and threats of secession. The Southern delegates were quite clear that slavery could not be eradicated without severely damaging their happiness and well-being.  It was openly remarked that slaves were needed for “work that white men simply won’t do.”

    All of which flies in the face of Ms. Bachman’s attempted revision of the Founding Fathers, many of whom were southern slaveholders.

    We should be clear about these men who established a political system which has had consequences they could hardly imagine.  Some were brilliant, all were intelligent, and most incorporated a mix of heady idealism sparked by Enlightenment thinking and the hard practicality of men determined to get something out of life for themselves and their own.  It would be easy to portray some of them as opportunistic adventurers.  For instance, George Washington and others were all frustrated and hampered by British colonial policy which tried to keep the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains into territory forbidden to them because of treaties the Crown had negotiated with native tribes.  Companies were assembled of American entrepreneurs to claim and sell land in the trans-Appalachian territories, the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and even south of that—quite illegally per British law.  These men had money at stake in this and were going ahead to lay claims and make sales in spite of the British.  They stood to lose a great deal if they couldn’t proceed with these land deals.  So it could be said as easily as anything else that the Revolutionary War was fought by these men to secure future profits.

    This is reality.  Not all of it, by any means, but not to be dismissed either in some spiritual reimagining of the purity of purpose and overarching genius of the Founders.  In fact, it is no shame to say that everyone who fought against British rule here hoped to gain something, and not just the intangibles of liberty—which is not all that intangible in any case.  Taxation was the war cry and what is that?  Money.  Property.

    People came to these shores hoping to find land, which they could neither find nor own in Europe.  This is a fact.  Here, in the so-called “wilderness”, they thought they could do what their forebears had never had a chance to do—own something.  This meant independence.  This meant freedom.

    But today, when the owning of things has a much changed meaning, freedom has a less concrete aspect.  It’s all about principles and ideals and airy things with no material substance.  We’re used to it here, you see.  Freedom isn’t so connected to things for us because things are ours by birthright.  Or so it seems.

    Many of the Founders were large estate-holders, plantation owners, businessmen.  Everything they had was on the line in the Revolution.  This is no small thing.  They risked tremendously for their dream.

    But we should never forget that they were also men of their time and men of the world.  Maintaining institutions that put coin in their pockets was part of who they were and it is idiocy to imagine them otherwise.  We risk turning them into Apostles and overwriting the reality of our own history to make that time some sort of Avalon.  But things aren’t like they were in the good ol’ days…and they never were.

    This urge to hagiography on the part of people like Bachman puzzles me.  Collectively, they have no problem dealing underhandedly with political opponents, pushing through legislation that will benefit the propertied at the expense of the poor, treating their enemies as harshly as possible, and yet they assert that the Founding Fathers were somehow not like that.  They admire the Founders, and somehow manage to juggle the contradictions in their own actions.  Maybe seeing the Founders as they were—people— would make their own actions simply ugly and make them accountable on their own, without the defense that they’re trying to reestablish that Golden Age.

    This is a real problem.  We cannot go forward unless we know where we’ve been, and we can’t go forward honestly unless we’re honest about where we came from.  Yes, this is a free country, but what does that mean in practice?  It means that we have set of standards we’re trying to attain without adding constraint to personal actions.  But unconstrained, personal actions lead not only to explosions of entrepreneurship and leadership and justice and innovation, but also to brutality and open hypocrisy and bigotry and class strife.  You can’t have one without the other, because people are not principles.

    I think Michelle Bachman and her colleagues understand this perfectly well.  If they can convince people that they have fallen from a state of grace, then all the problems are the fault of the fallen, and all we have to do is put things back as they were. As they were included Robber Barons, slaveholders, political misogynists, racists.  If they can convince people that this was the state of grace, then they can carry the nation forward into a future of their conception, which will benefit them.  It would be their trans-Appalachian  enterprise.

    I do not believe it is a coincidence that people like Bachman have also been at the center of the gutting of public education.  An ignorant public can be controlled.

    She asked rhetorically if this was going to be the last free generation of Americans.  The torch of liberty has been passed from generation to generation and we may be the one that fails to pass it on.  She could be right.  If people don’t start filling their minds with knowledge instead of spin, the Michelle Bachmans may well stop that torch being passed.

  • Words Don’t Matter

    The message being put forward, especially by the Right, in the aftermath of the shootings in Arizona, is that it is absurd to blame the rhetoric of violence and hatred for the actions of anyone, let alone Jared Lee Loughner.  Words don’t matter.  The man is a loon, his actions cannot be laid at the feet of anyone else.  Taken far enough, by this reasoning he acted in complete isolation from all influences.  Maybe so.

    But really—words don’t matter?

    In 1774, Goethe published his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, a seminal work in the so-called Sturm und Drang movement.  It was a bestseller.  Napoleon himself declared it an important work.  It is intensely romantic, in many ways Gothic, and it ends with a suicide.  The book had such an impact that it affected fashion, mood, language—and sparked a rash of suicides in imitation.  Many young corpses were found with copies of the book on the bodies.

    But words don’t matter.

    Charles Dickens was so popular that upon arrival in New York for his American visit, throngs gathered on the docks demanding to know the fate of Little Nell.  They were so caught up in the narrative that they suffered true anxiety over her fate.

    But words don’t matter.

    Salman Rushdie lived in hiding for years after publication of his novel The Satanic Verses because of the presumed blasphemy in the book.  He was under death threat for writing about something that is, in fact, recorded in history and mentioned in the Koran.

    But words don’t matter.

    The oratory of Adolph Hitler spurred his country into a manic frenzy of conquest and murder and made many of his countrymen proud.  Later, many could recall little of what Hitler actually said, but whatever it was, they knew it was true.  He ordered them to burn books that might have presented an alternative argument, as most dictators ban anything written that might offer criticism of their programs.  It is vital to silence the opposition, more important sometimes than anything else.

    But words don’t matter.

    For centuries the Catholic Church maintained an Index of forbidden books, books which they feared might turn people away from the church—which you would think, if they were right about being the only true church, could not happen.

    But words don’t matter.

    Attempts to ban certain books from libraries are common.  Something in “those books” must, according to the arguments, be kept from people because it might do them harm.  Now we see an attempt to produce a new edition of a beloved classic with a certain word expurgated, because it is a hurtful word, and some people would like to erase history and pretend that word no longer exists.

    But of course, words don’t matter.

    Abraham Lincoln, when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, greeted her by saying  “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

    But words, of course, don’t matter.

    People dedicated their lives to the cause of liberation, many after reading the Declaration of Independence, which has come to be almost a national prayer, more important to some than the constitution.  The Declaration of the Rights of Man led to the overthrow of a monarch and the subsequent bloodbath that was the French Revolution.

    But we all know, words don’t matter.

    Daily the Supreme Court hears debate over laws and how they accord with the constitution, arguing constantly over what the words mean and what they intend and how they may be interpreted, and rights rise and fall accordingly.

    Yet words don’t matter.

    How many times have we heard someone say “That book changed my life!”  How often has a book or a poem or a story brought us close to tears?  How many characters mean more to some people than the flesh-and-blood people in their lives?

    Here’s the uncomfortable truth.  When a set of words results in a good thing, no one takes offense, no one dismisses it as meaningless, no one shies away from taking credit if the words were theirs.  But when something bad results, suddenly words don’t matter, we can’t lay responsibility on the author or the text.  Under certain circumstances, we have laws that address the negative effects of certain words—we call them libel or slander.

    The problem is that we’re terrified that if we admit to the real power of words, someone might try to take them away from us, and we’ve all seen how that goes.  It’s worse than the problems such actions would redress, because it shuts out the possibilities of dialogue, of wonder, of betterment, of beauty.  Which is why the solution to bad words is more good words.  Cast a wide net, gather in a multiplicity of words, taste them all.

    If, as the Right claims, words don’t matter, attempting to distance themselves from the consequences of something like Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting, why do they hasten to label the shooter a liberal?  Why bring up what he has in his own library?  If words don’t matter, it would be just as telling if he had nothing but a collection of old Archie comics and a set of Oxford Companions.  Words don’t matter, so what if he has a copy of The Communist Manifesto?

    If words do not matter, then we should be able to say anything and see no effect at all on anyone.  No one would get angry.  No one would get sad, or hurt, or embarrassed, or baffled.

    But no one would be enlightened or delighted or assisted or reassured or inspired, either.

    Can’t have it both ways.  You can’t take credit for words doing great things and then pretend they can’t do bad things.

    But the only way to counter the negative effect of certain words and not destroy ourselves is to listen to other words, better words, words that tell the truth, words that aim to educate.  The conversation must go on, but we have to listen.  But we also have to own up to our expectations and our understanding and acknowledge that if we seek to influence with our words, sometimes that influence will go awry.

    Unless, of course, words really don’t matter.  Then, what is it we’re all doing?

  • Challenge the B.S.

    Let’s be clear:  no one should advocate censorship.

    That said, we need to understand the power of language.  Images matter, words matter, what you say has an effect.  Every propagandist in history has grasped this essential truth.  Without oratory, Hitler and Goebbels would never have turned Germany into a killing machine.

    The only antidote, however, is not less but more.  Not more propaganda, just more words, more images, more information.  More truth.

    Ah, but, as the man said,  What is truth?

    Sarah Palin, or her speech writers, has decided to play with that a bit and compare the criticism against her rather fevered rhetoric to the Blood Libel.  Now, she has a perfect right to do this.  Metaphor, simile, hyperbole—these are all perfectly acceptable, even respectable, tools of communication.  No one—NO ONE—should suggest she has no right to state her case in any manner she chooses.

    What is lacking, however, is perspective and a grasp of the truth.  Not fact.  But truth.  Is there any truth in her assertion that the backlash against what is perceived to be an inappropriate degree of aggressive even violent imagery is the equivalent of two millennia of persecution resulting in the near-extinction of an entire human community?  Absolutely none.  In fact, what she has done is add substance to the perception that she is a callous, insensitive, and rather inept manipulator of public opinion.  In other words, a propagandist.

    What should follow now is a discourse on the actual Blood Libel and debate on the public airwaves over whether or not this is a valid comparison.  Then there should be a review of the statistical links between violent political rhetoric and actual violence.  We should have a discussion—not a condemnation, but a discussion, bringing into the conversation more information, more fact, and more than a little truth.

    Do I think Sarah Palin is responsible for Loughner’s actions in Tuscon?  No.  Loughner is, in my opinion, a seriously disturbed young man and would likely have gone off on anyone at any time.  However, he chose as his target a politician, one who had been singled out by the party machinery of the Right as a target.  I believe Palin when she says her intent was to eliminate Gifford by popular vote.  I do.  I don’t accept as credible the idea that she would have sanctioned assassination on anyone.  She wants to play a part in national politics, she wants to win, and insofar as it may be understood, I think she wants to win within the system.  Do I also believe she thinks some of the rules of the system are bad and that she is willing to color outside the lines?  Certainly.  But that’s not a singular criticism, either.

    Do I, however, believe that we have a toxic atmosphere of political discourse which a certain segment of the population may be incapable of parsing as metaphor?  Absolutely.
    Here’s a smattering of samples from over the years from a variety of sources.

    “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for.”—Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95

    “Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, cen…sure him, assassinate him.”—Rep. James Hansen (R-UT), talking about President Clinton

    “We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.”—Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Mother Jones, 08-95

    “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”—Ann Coulter, New York Observer, 08-26-02

    “We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.”—Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, 02-26-02

    “Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past—I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble—recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people.’ The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability.’ In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.”—John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01

    “Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic) can be directly traced back to our departure from God’s Law and the disenfranchisement of White men.”—State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), emailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate, reported by the Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01

    “I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out.” —Glenn Beck (on air), May 17, 2005

    Do I think Sarah Palin has contributed to that?  Yes.  Ever since her appearance on the national stage and her absurd squib about pit bulls and hockey moms.  A great many people reacted positively to that, but I think a great many more, even if they were inclined to support her, scratched their heads at that and went “Huh?”

    Why a pit bull?  Why hockey?  Pit bulls, of course, are perceived as dangerous animals.  And hockey is perceived as a violent sport.  (In a completely unscientific and wholly personal anecdotal sample, I have attended two hockey games in my life.  One a professional game, the other at a community rink through the Y.  Fist fights were a feature of both and at the pro game it was the fist fight that seemed to get the most audience applause.  At the Y game, it was between 10 to 12 year olds, who did not fight, but the adults at one point, in a heated exchange over a perceived infraction, did get into an altercation.)  Traditionally, it would be soccer moms.  Why the substitution?  Well, you could say that Alaska is simply not a big soccer state and hockey would be the sport of choice.  On the other hand, she was addressing a national audience and her speech writers should have known that the more commonly understood expression would  be soccer, so we have to assume it was a deliberate choice.  And comparing mothers to a dangerous pet?

    I could go on.  The fact is, she was challenging her potential constituency to be tough, to be aggressive, to be willing to tear into the opposition, to support the brawl over the debate.  It was a very clumsy way to do it, but the phrase has become part of America’s lexicon of aphorisms, so it must have had some cachet with enough people to matter.

    The people who were unaffected by this were those who simply had broader experience with hyperbole.  If you wish to protect people from the negative influences of certain kinds of speech, you expose them to more and more diverse types of speech, not less.  You do not censor.  Rather, you widen their scope, show them alternatives, and give them more.  The antidote to bad speech is not a ban, but to provide good speech, and allow people to become experienced in how to deal with it.  The people who are often the most susceptible to deriving the wrong signals from speech are those who have the least experience with diverse speech.

    So when someone decides to compare Obama to a Nazi, the solution is to rehearse what the Nazis were and point out how the comparison is ridiculous.  If someone asserts how horrible liberalism has been for the country, the answer should be a catalogue of liberal successes that have now become part of what conservatives are defending.  If someone suggests that our countries injuries are because we have extended civil rights to gays or banned prayer from public schools, ask how any of that played into Pearl Harbor, the Lusitania, the Maine, or the Civil War?

    The answer to hatemongers is not to tighten controls on speech but to open the floodgates to fact and truth.  You don’t expunge what you find disagreeable, you displace it with something of value.  Take their audience away.

    If we wish to have reasonable discourse, then we must produce reasonable speech and put it out there, unapologetically, and in sufficient quantity that the propagandists lose credibility.  We haven’t been doing that.  We’ve been, perhaps, assuming too much.  We assume people are reasonable.  People can be, but many have to be taught how, or at least shown the methods of communicating that reasonableness.  We have assumed that the absurdisms of the pundits will fade simply because they are absurd, but maybe that assumption is in error.  Confrontation is difficult and often disagreeable, but conceding to misrepresentations, half-truths, and distortions only makes us look stupid and weak and makes us all vulnerable.

    So maybe we should opt not to lay blame.  Maybe we should just do what we should have done all along—challenge the bullshit.

  • Taking Cues

    I’d intended to give this a little more thought, but the events in Arizona have prompted a response now.

    In the last post, I opined about the atmosphere in the country generated by overheated rhetoric and the irrationality that has resulted from seemingly intransigent positions.  Some of the responses I received to that were of the “well, both sides do it” variety (which is true to an extent, but I think beside the point) and the “you can’t legislate civility or impose censorship” stripe.

    As it is developing, the young man who attempted to murder Representative Gifford—and succeeded in killing six others—appears to be not of sound mind.  We’re getting a picture of a loner who made no friends and indulged in a distorted worldview tending toward the paranoid.  How much of his actions can be laid on politics and how much on his own obsessions is debatable.  Many commentators very quickly tried to label him a right-winger, based largely on the political climate in Arizona and that he targeted a moderate, “blue dog” Democrat.  This in the context of years of shrill right-wing political rhetoric that fully employs a take-no-prisoner ethic, including comments from some Tea Party candidates about so-called Second Amendment solutions.  It’s looking like trying to label this man’s politics will be next to impossible and, as I say, if he is mentally unbalanced, what real difference does that make?  (Although to see some people say “Look, he’s a Lefty, one of his favorite books is Mein Kampf ” is in itself bizarre—how does anyone figure Mein Kampf  indicates leftist political leanings?  Because the Nazis were “National Socialists”?  Please.)

    Whatever the determination of Mr. Loughner’s motives may turn out to be, his actions have forced the topic of political stupidity and slipshod rhetoric to the forefront, at least until Gabrielle Gifford is out of danger of dying.  Regardless of his influences, in this instance he has served as the trigger for a debate we have been needing to have for decades.  This time, hopefully, it won’t be shoved aside after a few well-meaning sound-bites from politicians wanting to appear sensitive and concerned, only to have everyone go right back to beating each other bloody with nouns and verbs.

    But while it may be fair to say that Mr. Loughner is unbalanced and might have gone off and shot anyone, the fact is he shot a politician, one who had been targeted by the Right.  Perhaps the heated rhetoric did not make Mr. Loughner prone to violence, but what about his choice of victims?

    There is a dearth of plain speaking across the political spectrum.  That is as far as I’m willing to concede the charge that “both sides” indulge the same rhetoric.  They do not, at least not in the same degree, and this is one time when the Right has more to answer for than the Left.  The rhetorical shortcomings of the Left are of a different kind, but nowhere near as divisive as what we’ve been hearing from the folks who bring us Fox News and the national pundit circus.

    “Why don’t we hear congressmen talking about banning Wicca in the military?  Or banning the occult in America?  This shooter was a stone-cold devil-worshiper!  A left-wing pot-smoking lunatic!”—Michael Savage.

    That’s helpful.  Now we’ve dragged the supernatural into it, something I don’t believe anyone on the Left has done yet.  Mr. Savage seems not to have understood the call for “toned-down rhetoric” for what it actually means, but somehow something to be responded to as if it were an attack on his freedom to make outrageous assertions.

    The fact is, the majority—the vast majority—of assaults over politically sensitive issues in the past three decades have come from a perspective that can only be characterized as supportive of the Right.  It may be that such issues attract the nutwings.  It may be that more nutwings find themselves in sympathy with conservative issues.   But it is more likely that the apocalyptic messaging coming from the Right has the correct tone and resonance to provide nutwings with proof that their personal paranoias are correct and they are justified in acting upon them.

    In his excellent book, Talking Right, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg chronicles the shift in language in our public discourse and shows how the choices made by pundits, think tanks, speech writers, and politicians themselves have pushed the discourse further and further to the Right and making it a battle, for some a war, to stop Liberalism.  Increasingly, right-wing rhetoric has adopted a “take no prisoners” intransigence.  Even when cooperation occurs, when bipartisanship happens, and compromise is achieved, the Right makes it look like they won over the Left, to the point where the Left appears to be not only ineffectual but a burden, a drag on society, and in some instances a scourge to be expunged.

    For the most part this has been carried out by the well-honed machine that is the right-wing media.  Republican politicians don’t have to say the truly objectionable things because there is a cadre of talking heads who will do it for them.

    It is fair to say, however, fair to ask: why can’t the Left do this?

    In a fascinating passage in Nunberg’s book he describes the problem:

    “I happened on a striking demonstration of the right’s linguistic consistency back in 1996, when I was playing around with one of those programs that produces an automatic summary of texts by analyzing their word frequency and recurrent syntactic patterns.  out of curiosity, I ran it on a collection of all the speeches that had been given over the first two nights of the Republican National Convention in San Diego, and it promptly distilled them into five key sentences…but when I tried the same experiment a month later on the combined texts of the speeches from the first two nights of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the software returned pure word salad.  Because Democrats are chronically incapable of staying on message, no single group of phrases rose to the statistical surface.”

    The five sentences?  Here:

    We are the Republican Party—a big, broad, diverse and inclusive party, with a commonsense agenda and a better man for a better America, [insert politician’s name].  We need a leader we can trust.  Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being part of this quest in working with us to restore the American dream.  The commonsense Republican proposals are the first step in restoring the American dream because Republicans care about America.  But there is no greater dream than the dreams parents have for their children to be happy and to share God’s blessings.

    (Lundberg traces the current demonization of Liberal to 1988, when in a speech Ronald Reagan—the Great Communicator—said “The masquerade is over.  It’s time to…say the dreaded L-word; to say the policies of our opposition are liberal, liberal, liberal.”  The Democratic candidate that year, Michael Dukakis, rather than counter the charge, ducked it, and the expression “the L-word” entered the lexicon of public discourse the same way as other unmentionable epithets have—the N-word, the F-word, etc.  So Liberal was reduces to a slur, something not said in polite company.  We have not recovered since.)

    It’s interesting to look at those five sentences and parse what they actually seem to suggest.  The word “dream” is in there four times, the word “commonsense” twice, the word “America” three times.  The question to ask is, what comprises the dream and what do they mean by commonsense?  And do you have commonsense dreams?  Dreams by definition are in some way outside the practical, and usually commonsense refers to some species of practical.

    But for the moment, let’s look at that American Dream so oft mentioned and so seldom examined.

    James Truslow Adams, in his book Epic of America  in 1931, first coined the phrase:

    The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, also too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

    This more than a year and a half into the Great Depression demands context.  The “dreams” of millions of Americans had been thoroughly dashed in the Crash of ’29.  People were out of work, losing their homes, with little or no possibility of relief.  At that time there were no safety nets.  No unemployment insurance, no welfare to speak of, nothing provided in the event that private enterprise failed to absorb the majority of available workers, who depended on wages to maintain themselves and their families.

    President Hoover stood resolutely opposed to providing any kind of direct aid, fearing it would sap the will of workers to seek employment.  He was, along with most “conservatives” of his time, willing to see millions destituted rather than risk undermining the vaunted “work ethic” that had fueled American industrial and economic ascendence to that point.

    This was also the era in which unions were still struggling to make inroads in the struggle to achieve fair labor practices.  Unions were opposed by the conservatives of the era because of fears that giving workers power to determine the conditions under which they labored would undermine the entrepreneurial spirit.

    What is most striking, however, about Mr. Adams’ words is his downplaying of the material in lieu of a kind of independent self value, a notion that people have a right to be treated equally as worthwhile, and to be free to pursue their own vision of improvement.  This kind of appreciation for what might be called a basic right of civilized life has been talked about and worked toward through most of  Western history, no less elsewhere that here, but seldom more polarized and equivocated than America.

    Consider:

    Self rule via a popularly elected government subject to recall—liberal idea.

    Recognition of individual value regardless of station—liberal idea.

    Emancipation of bond slaves as a fundamental human right—liberal idea.

    Electoral franchise available to all adults, regardless of race or gender—liberal idea.

    Recognition that women are individuals unto themselves with all the rights and privileges pertaining to a fully enfranchised person—liberal idea.

    Protection of children from exploitation through child labor laws—liberal idea.

    Right of workers to be free from arbitrary dismissal without cause from jobs—liberal idea.

    Limited work week—liberal idea.

    Universal public education—liberal idea.

    The list could go on.  And by Liberal I mean the notion that progress to achieve social egalitarianism is a positive value.

    It also means, implicitly, that people should not judge others according to myths, stereotypes, or prejudices.  This is embodied in the old maxim that in this country “anybody can become the president.”  The truth of this maxim is debatable, but underlying it is Liberal concept of egalitarian value.

    In each of the aforementioned instances, the conservatives of the time opposed—sometimes aggressively, even violently—the changes necessary to make these ideas a reality.  And by conservative I mean a philosophy of stasis, the maintenance of status quo, or at the very least the preservation of privilege among the propertied few.

    Whether it is true or not in every instance, conservatism has been the ideological partner of the well off.  It has stood generally in opposition to change, often for good cause (Speaker Reed of the House of Representatives during the McKinley administration stood in opposition to a change in policy that allowed for America to become an imperial nation by launching a war on Spain.  He was a conservative by any definition and in this instance he saw the manipulation of rules of procedure by those eager to go to war as an unsupportable change), but also quite often simply to preserve the privileges of those viewed as successful.

    So what is it Liberals have to be ashamed of?

    It is this:  for being unwilling or unable to define progress in such a way that the general public can support it and to stand up for their support of such progress.  Liberals have often been unwilling to take stands.  The Left does, but usually it is a Left that is even farther left than Liberal comfort allows.  Radicals.  Extremists.  And by their efforts, everything on the Left has come to be vilified.  Liberals ride the wave in to progress and after the achievement claim to support what has been accomplished.  Liberals tend to be accommodationist to the point of letting conservatives—or the Right—define them, usually to their detriment.

    What is fascinating is how after every period of explosive progressive change, the new order, sometimes quite rapidly, becomes the status quo and defended by conservatism, so that Liberalism almost always loses credit for what it has accomplished.

    But that seems now to be just an appearance.  The Right has been trying to roll back progress for some time now.  Missouri is about to vote on a Right To Work bill—again—which sounds reasonable on its face, but is just one more attempt to break unions.  Unions have lost ground since the Seventies and in many instances they have been their own worst enemies.  Any long-established entrenched power system becomes corrupt and, yes, conservative, and can become unreasonable.  But if anyone thinks getting rid of them will redound to workers’ benefit, they are delusional.  Right To Work has in those states where it has been in force for a long time, translated into lowered pay, lowered benefits, lowered standards, and higher abuses—many of which have been countered by Federal laws prohibiting certain practices.

    By Mr. Lundberg’s analysis, the Right has taken control of the language and ridden that control into power more often than not since Reagan.  And those five key sentences of Republican solidarity seem to attract people, if not to join them outright, at least to demand some kind of compliance to them by their own ideological spokespersons.  But just what is it that those five sentences promise?

    Nothing.  They are an acknowledgment of sentiment, not a program.

    What the Right does speaks for itself.  Lower taxes, gutting of education, reduction of resources to basic research, and, since 9/11, an increase in domestic paranoia that targets an enemy it cannot clearly define but has resulted in restrictions on all of us.  A support of big business (and by that I mean corporations so large as to constitute de facto  governements within themselves, many of them functionally stateless), and an opposition to secularism.  A promotion of the idea of American Exceptionalism based less on actual achievement than on birth-right (hence the current discussions over revision of the 14th Amendment) at the expense of the very commonsense approach they tout.

    Lay on top of all this the superheated rantings on the part of their mouthpieces, you have an atmosphere in which anything that equivocates, that seeks to reflect, that calls for honest debate, that might require rethinking of positions, any compromise is seen by the faithful as treason.

    But against what?

    I have some thoughts on that.  Stay tuned.