tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6257770332907270012024-03-13T21:15:47.684-06:00History Matters More"The past isn't dead, it isn't even past." (William Faulkner)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-33012341024638476512017-02-12T09:19:00.000-07:002017-02-12T09:19:01.070-07:00"The People Out of Doors," American Exceptionalism, and the American Dream<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We are still in San Miguel de
Allende. It is February, and we have moved from a house in<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> centro</i> to a gringo condo on the outskirts of the city. The two
residences are not more than two kilometers apart, but worlds apart in culture
and life style. In our <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">centro</i> house,
the noises of everyday living intruded all of the time. Just outside our door,
people talked and shouted, children played and laughed and screamed. Evenings
were filled with human street sounds until eleven or twelve every night. Over
the Christmas and New Year's holidays, festivities, piñatas, songs, even out of
doors religious services occupied the time of our immediate neighbours<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On the outskirts of town, I did not
see or talk to any neighbours in the condo complex until ten days into our
stay, and then the people we spoke with made our conversations as short as they
possibly could. It is not only a gated "community," it is a private
community. It reflects the psychological norm for North America. Many of us not
only want to live enclosed behind gates, sharing our community space only with
those who share our values and status, we want to be left alone by those inside
the gates as well. Inside our enormous houses, we often strive to avoid our
immediate families as well, hiving ourselves off from those supposedly closest
to us. The effects have been devastating. We no longer know how to speak with
one another, let alone converse politely, or debate ideas openly. We are fixed
in our own opinions and ideas -- challenges to those ideas are seen as both
alien and dangerous. Discourse is dead.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I have been especially struck by
this because of the events of the past three weeks. The most outrageous of the
current American president's actions has brought people "out of
doors" in great numbers, talking together about women's rights and
immigration. It can be said, of course, that the Tea Party movement began the
practice, albeit on a generally smaller scale, helping to cause the devastating
earthquake of the presidential election. Still, whether left or right, it is
good to see "the people out of doors," rather than simply putting up
with the decisions made by the totalitarian corporate world order, indoors, out
of sight, in private, secretly. Maybe "the people out of doors" will
lead to conversations and, eventually, even discussions, that can lead to push
back against the anti-democratic forces that slowly and quietly have made us
into "one dimensional" people employed only in the furtherance of
inhumane and inhuman ideology.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Having said this, I am troubled by
how the new political protests in the United States are being contextualized,
both in regard to the far right and the moderate centre (the only two
categories left in American politics). We are all too familiar with the
far-right contextualization:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>they
embrace Donald Trump's desire to "Make America Great Again." That
context is, of course, nothing less than a call to empire, and all of the ugly
things that go with empire. The call to greatness is fascistic and jingoistic.
Combined with the "America First" thrust of the Trump campaign, it
suggests arrogant, bullying ethnocentrism at its worst. American ethnocentrism
declares bluntly, that they are the world; they lead it, they protect it, they
govern it, and they see the cultures of Europe, Asia, or Latin America, and
Africa as too inferior to offer any guidance in how societies in general might
improve.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The moderate centre
contextualization is not much different. Last week, I read a column by David
Brooks in the NYTimes in which he baldly said that President Trump should not
be embracing a culture of negativity but should, like all former presidents,
appeal to American exceptionalism, and understand that the rest of the world
needed a sane America because the U. S. was the leader of the free world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A few days before this, I attended a
lecture by the renowned American journalist, Hedrick Smith, whose current book
is entitled "Who Stole the American Dream." I estimate that 300
people attended that lecture (I got the very last ticket). Smith surprised us
by saying little about recent presidential politics in the U. S. He admitted
that it was an "earthquake" but, claiming inherent optimism, said he
was willing to wait-and-see regarding the progress of the new administration.
He made his pitch to revive the "American Dream" through renewed
democracy (ending gerrymandering, for example), through reducing stockholder
shares in profits and enhancing re-investment and worker wages, and through a
renewed partnership among governments and the private sector economy, as is
done in Germany. It was a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tour de force</i>
presentation, one in which he cited statistics, remembered history, and
referenced previous scholars and leaders with ease.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Nevertheless, sitting there as a
Canadian and as an American historian, I was uncomfortable as Smith's intoned
an argument about re-capturing the "American Dream," a mythic constant
in American culture, to which the nation could return. Mircea Eliade's concept
of ancient societies as ones seeking an "eternal return" to some
early, unique, and elemental origin came to mind as he spoke. The implication
seemed to be that Americans need not seek new understandings about themselves
and the greater world around them. Instead, it is argued or implied, they need
to employ methods to get back to who they should be, basking in the warmth of
the "American Dream," re-establishing American "exceptionalism,"
and making the U. S. the "city upon the hill" for all to see once
again. The absence of any mention of the new, big factor that "changes
everything" (to quote Naomi Klein) -- the effects of man-assisted climate
change -- made this "eternal return" motif even more striking to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The "American Dream,"
American "exceptionalism," and the belief in the U. S. as a beacon
for the rest of the world are all ahistorical constructs, just as Eliade's
"eternal return" societies were pre-historic constructs. Indeed, they
were constructs intended to deny history and the quotidian deficiencies of the
present. All societies, American society not excluded, need to recognize how
their real historical pasts have led them to where they are now. All need to
respond in ways that are possible and practical. Many of Smith's proposals were
just that, practical and do-able, but they were offered in the spirit of
returning to a special condition. An "American Dream" might have been
an inspirational concept in earlier eras of the American past, but in a mass,
urban, post-agricultural, post-industrial society it is hard to give it a
proper function. Americans can congratulate themselves for establishing
freedoms in the 18th century, in creating democratic governments, and in giving
a broad range of its citizens the opportunity to succeed economically, but
freedom, democracy and opportunity are goals equally promoted by other nations
today, making American "exceptionalism" an idea that may be
appropriate to the past alone, if at all. A persistent quest for the
"American Dream" and American "exceptionalism" today and in
the future, will simply leave the U. S. isolated and remote, always feeling as
though it is going-it-alone, resentful of others or insisting that others comprehend
the world and history as Americans do.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-71743017528950426162017-01-23T11:10:00.001-07:002017-01-23T11:10:41.294-07:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Make Us Good Again<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was Ignacio Allende's birthday a
couple of days ago, and his home town, San Miguel de Allende
"celebrated" the day with bands (those off-key military drum and
bugle bands that thankfully exist only in Mexico). There was a big parade,
military displays, and several fly-overs of military plane trainers. Allende,
with Father Miguel Hidalgo and two others, were the authors, in September,
1810, of Mexico's revolt against Spain -- a revolution that took over a decade
to complete. As is so often the case in Mexican history, heroism in a good
cause precedes tragedy by only a few steps. Allende, Hidalgo, and the two
others were caught (in different locations) and killed before firing squads,
after which their heads were cut off and displayed for over four years on the
four corners of the armory in Guanajuato. By 1821, the revolution was a
success, but in Mexico success always seems to be blended with tragedy and,
ironically, with defeat as well. Despite the democratic impulses and
constitutional initiatives of Benito Juarez, Mexico's first native president,
later in the 19th century, Mexico suffered from the internal forces of class,
wealth and corruption versus the people. Externally, it encountered an
aggressive U. S. under President Polk, which contrived a war against Mexico,
defeated Mexico, and under the guise of "purchasing" New Mexico and
Arizona and part of California, essentially stole the northern properties of
that country. I have recently been given a red hat a la Trump with the message
on top:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"Make America Mexico
Again." The losses to the U.S. are never forgotten here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The worst was not over for Mexico.
In 1910, Mexicans were again compelled to revolt against a corrupt Porforio
Diaz government, and had to suffer U. S. meddling once again before
establishing a democratic and more equalitarian nation. But the history of
Mexico continues to be one of struggle -- a struggle against profound poverty,
a struggle against a newly capricious U. S., a struggle for better health care
(they have universal health care, at least, which is more than the U. S. can
claim), and a struggle for better education.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Tragedy and struggle are ubiquitous
in this country. As the bands and the military organized to march in
celebration of Allende's birthday, a protest of some 200 or so men, women, and
children temporarily blocked their path, surrounded by a large and hostile
police force. The protest had to do with an incident this last week just
outside of San Miguel. Reports have it that the police were attempting to
apprehend a fleeing criminal. They entered a compound and apparently engaged in
a gun battle with someone. After the shoot-out, three children were found dead
in the compound. Protesters suspect the police were somehow involved in the
killings, but that was not the official version of events. Instead, the police
arrested the father for the killings, after his wife accused him of the
killings (she has since recanted that accusation). He now grieves in jail. Who
knows if we will ever know the truth about this incident? But the double
tragedy of this case is emblematic of the struggles this country always seems
to suffer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What is the point I am trying to
establish here? I suppose some might simply say that we should all be thankful
that we have not had to live Mexico's history or through its present problems. I
would contend, however, that we North Americans -- especially Americans -- have
much to learn from the interrelationships of struggle, tragedy, and the humility
that follows, with which so many Mexicans have lived over time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>After the mid-twentieth century, we
North Americans unconsciously assumed that a kind of inevitable social and
economic progress would continue forever. Americans basked in the victories of
WWII, and the positive international order they helped to create after the war.
Americans also assumed even more unconsciously that the rationalism of the
18th-century Enlightenment, which they embraced in the American Revolution and
through the establishment of the U. S. Constitution, would somehow continue
forward as America's legacy to the world. And, North Americans generally
assumed that the vast middle class created for a brief time in the mid to late
20th century would also last forever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>All of these formerly solid
foundations seem lost forever or appear badly crippled. Democracy still exists,
in name, but money now controls politics almost completely, and instead of
economic prosperity for people, the global economy, a fictive monster, simply
feeds itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What resources are left? A
compelling desire for freedom and equality remains, but it is based more on a
passive "freedom from" than an active "freedom for," while
equality before the law has narrowed its focus to matters of race and sex and
identity rather than matters of economic equality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In some ways, therefore, we might
look at our future as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tabula rasa</i>.
Enlightenment principles are hard to re-establish (although they must be in
relation to Climate Change, or what June now calls, World Wide Death). For
Americans, popular mythologies need to put to rest as well. Americans must
abandon the myth of exceptionalism. They must stop talking in terms of being
the "leader of the free world." In short, they must begin to
recognize the myriad of tragedies that they have encountered, especially since
Vietnam. They need to accept the grief that the recent federal election has
imposed upon them. Suffering and struggle must be seen as part of the American
experience as it always has been in the Mexican experience. Americans must get
out of the slumber of being politically ignorant and culturally arrogant. They
need to become attentive and engaged on a continuing basis. Casual assumptions
about a prosperous and free future need to be abandoned.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
U. S. and Canada are not Mexico but without vigorous political engagement,
economic inequality will continue to rise, plutocracy will increase, education
(perhaps the most important advantage to Americans and Canadians) will decline
badly, and our values will continue to be eroded. The answer, at least for me,
is to be more <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">attentive</i> in all ways,
not just in politics but in charity and thought and deed. It is to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">outraged</i>, and to say so loudly to all
who will listen and to those who at first will not listen, when outrage is the
proper response to events. For all of their setbacks and through all of the
repressions they suffer either directly or indirectly, many Mexicans do not
hesitate to express outrage. And, it is to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">loving, kind and caring</i> whenever it is necessary and however we can.
These are my New Year's resolutions, and they will be hard to maintain, but if,
in the long history of Mexico, Mexicans have continued to strive, I can at least
make my own personal effort.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-18239339419897809682013-05-03T11:57:00.000-06:002013-05-03T11:57:06.512-06:00The Perfect Storm
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[This blog was written before the one that follows it, and is intended for a non-academic audience. As in the case of the one that follows, it was written with the hope that it might be made public in some fashion. And, like the one that follows, it is unlikely to see any publication either than here.]</div>
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<br /></div>
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The
higher education crisis in Alberta has become the perfect storm. A provincial
government trying to prove how tough it can be to the province’s right-wing
voters constitutes one element of that storm. A public that does not seem to
understand what universities are or should be is another. The abandonment by
universities of an academic model in favor of a corporate business model is yet
another.</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
regard to the ruling government and the public, both seem to think universities
are inefficient and its members over-privileged. At worst, both seem to want
universities that are mere job employment centres, where all courses and
programs are directed at current job opportunities and current applied research
needs. Even if the task of universities was this narrow, no institutions of
higher education could flexibly adapt on-the-fly to perceived needs. If they
tried, education would be a disjointed shambles of incoherent programs and
incompetent instruction by under-qualified staff. In reality, universities have
a larger task, much of it beyond employment training -- to educate students to
think critically, to create good citizens, and to improve the quality of our
lives, not just add to the cash in our billfolds.</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>University professors are privileged, as every one of them would admit.
They are privileged to participate in the excitement of teaching and conducting
research. But to get to that opportunity, they must go through tough
competition. Fewer than half who begin graduate studies finish with a PhD. In
most fields, fewer than half of them will ever get full-time university
employment. Those adjuncts who scramble for a living by teaching sessional courses
here and there, seldom make an income above the poverty line. In the U. S., one
source claims that adjuncts now teach 76% of undergraduate courses. Those few
academics who get a tenured position seldom have a job before they are
thirty-one years old. Post-doctoral positions and adjunct teaching are the long
residencies for academics. Even if they get a tenured position, they start at a
modest salary (at the very age when many have young families). After tenure,
good teaching and good research are absolute requirements to improve one’s
salary. Only senior professors ever acquire a good income, and this usually
occurs late in their careers. Few business or professional people in the “real”
world have to face competition like this throughout their careers. On the other
hand, most business and professional people receive higher remuneration for
their work earlier on and throughout their careers. Almost all academics could
prosper more financially by choosing another career path. Yet, they choose the
academic life for its not remunerative benefits, especially the satisfaction of
accomplishment. And, contrary to popular opinion, almost all university
professors work more than a forty-hour week, year round.</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worst of
all, over the past thirty odd years, universities have themselves made an
enormous error by embracing a corporate model of operation. On the one hand,
this model encourages top-down management. Universities were born, and long
existed, on the premise that higher education was a matter of students and
professors, and that administrators and all others in the process were there to
support the student-teacher process. Top-down management destroys this
essential relationship. The corporate model further promotes the idea that
students are customers and consumers while professors are only there to
guarantee that the customers get what they want rather than what they need. The
final stage of such a corporate model is to make universities into competitive
institutions, ones where administrators spend their time “marketing” and
“branding” the institution rather than fostering the academic and intellectual
needs of the university.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
prognosis is not good for the future, at least not until a sea-change occurs in
North American culture. As it is, the perfect storm is overwhelming us.</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-90853347735840733952013-05-03T09:46:00.000-06:002013-05-03T12:00:10.982-06:00Alberta's Budget and the Attack on Universities<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">[This blog was written for submission to the Lethbridge Herald. It is unlikely they will publish it. "The Perfect Storm" blog was written before this one.]</span><br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
time to be blunt. The provincial budget purports to be about “families and
communities” and about supporting “health, education and infrastructure.” In
truth, the lives of people, especially our most vulnerable, are not the object.
Enhancement of infrastructure – buildings and roads, tangible testaments to the
reigning government’s largesse – is the real object. Many weak cultures have
lovely buildings.</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
regard to higher education, this government’s intentions are even worse. The
budget declares that “we need to more closely align [sic] university research
funding with the government’s economic diversification agenda.” Yet, Ms.
Redford adamantly declared the opposite during the election campaign, rightly
noting that “discovery is not a linear process” and the government has “a
limited role to play” in directing the course of research (CAFA conference,
2011). The Minister of Higher Education charges our universities with
duplication and restricted student mobility, yet the province has one of the
best, well-thought-out, credit transfer programs anywhere. As for the enormous
budget cuts, the Minister recently charged, in an interview with the Herald,
that administrators’ salaries were too high, although, even if they may be (I
do not have the figures to know), any correction to high salaries would be a
mere drop in the bucket compared to the 7.3% cuts. In reality, these cuts are
destructive of the whole integrity of universities. To paraphrase an old
saying, the power to budget is the power to destroy, and that is the
government’s purpose:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to cut
university’s down to size, to put university’s in their place. And, what is
this place – subservience to a controlling, micro-managing government.</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, where
are the public protests from this university and this community? Other
universities and their members, as well as other mayors, long ago spoke out
clearly and forcefully against this government’s absurd and destructive plans.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
James Tagg, April 29, 2013</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-35812590149193046562012-12-19T17:52:00.001-07:002012-12-19T17:52:44.529-07:00It's the Culture, Stupid
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The U.
S. has once again proven that it is a culture in very bad shape, if not near
collapse (taking the long historical perspective, in other words -- not
tomorrow). The Newtown, Connecticut massacre reaffirms the “exceptionalism” of
the U. S., especially in relationship to the grotesque possibilities of civil
violence. Tortured miss-readings of the Second Amendment to the U. S.
Constitution coupled with a machismo vision of rugged individualism have
insured the continuance of dramatic acts of killing that no other modern nation
has experienced, or likely understands. Most of the rest of the world,
embarrassed by but resigned to the bizarre culture of the U. S., can only mourn
the consequences of a culture that no longer carries the flag of humanity in
regard to firearms. But the rest of the world does not matter to the U. S.,
unless historical events in other nations can be used to buffer the perverted
violence that is so prolific in the U. S. A. To his great credit, Mayor Bloomberg
of N. Y. C. alone has spoken truth to power and ignorance, pointing out that
the repeated massacres in the U. S. are not found in such repetition in other
countries. Politicians and media folk are often too timid to make this stark
comparison.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the
President of the U. S. wants to open a dialogue on what can be done to change
things – which, given his record, may mean bargaining all effective action down
to the level of ineffectualness, most other Americans likewise look to half
measures to solve the problem of gun-based massacres. Restrictions on assault
weapons and limitations on magazine capacities will lower the number of
casualties – to a degree. Other measures, designed to restrict the use of guns,
all pale in comparison to Chris Rock’s comic, but oddly more effective
argument, that weapons should be freely allowed but bullets should cost $50,000
each. Sadly, Rock’s solution is better than some serious solutions we have heard and will hear.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part of
the problem is easy access to weapons and ammunition, particularly in a country
with 250 to 300 million firearms. A bigger part of the problem is a nation that
misinterprets the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The Second Amendment
was proposed and ratified only ten years after the American Revolution had
ended. In most men’s minds, militias were an integral part of American success
in the War for Independence, and memories of English restrictions of all sorts
were also fresh in everyone’s memory. In fact, however, George Washington, and every
other intelligent participant in the war, realized that an organized, regular
army was the most important element in victory. Militias had been “irregular”
in almost every way during the Revolution, including stability and success.
Still, national myth held militias in high esteem, and individual valor,
actually uncommon in the revolutionary war, was promoted as a means of
self-congratulation, despite the fact that the winning of the war was largely a
consequence of French intervention.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one
in the early republic (1789-1815) that followed could imagine how “arms” would
change in their nature and potency. Effective repeating rifles did not appear
for another one hundred years. As an American historian I think I can say, and I think anyone can safely
say, that none of the so-called “founding fathers” would condone 2<sup>nd</sup>
Amendment protection for modern weapons, even pistols with clips of fewer than
eight bullets. All would be appalled at the culture of weaponry protected by
the 2<sup>nd</sup> Amendment today.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
biggest problem, however, is a culture that has come to glorify a rare form of
brutish individualism and an anarchistic definition of freedom. It is evident
in everything from unrestricted capitalism to the banality of television to the
celebration of violence in entertainment and sports. Kindness, gentleness, and
a commitment to contentment are all but invisible in the U. S. Good young men –
those who do not commit violence and resolutely resist the visceral culture of
violence -- have little status in this society. Instead, they are encouraged to
“man up,” which in some places means – buy a weapon and use it for something.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bill
Clinton’s and James Carville’s declaration in the 1990s that “It’s the economy,
stupid,” may have seemed a shrewdly focused political battle cry. It was ,in
fact, a narrow vision of what was needed then, and now. For thinking persons to
declare, “It’s the culture, stupid,” which is a more accurate understanding of
where matters rest, throws up a challenge that currently appears impossible for
Americans to meet, challenge, and change. As I have said before, twenty-five to
thirty per cent of the American public know and understand America’s problems
very well, including this problem of gun violence. They think critically and
carefully, with an open generosity and kindness seen among few people on this
earth. They are not the majority, however, in a society that too often lives by
vaguely understood precepts, myths and slogans.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-2965929628486391672012-11-10T14:01:00.004-07:002012-11-10T14:09:08.409-07:00The U. S. Election of 2012<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">(The following is an extended and modified version of a talk given to the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs on Nov. 8, 2012)</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt;"><b><u><br /></u></b></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b>Sound and Fury, Signifying What?: The Elusive
Election Campaign of 2012 and the Fundamental Political Culture Behind It<u style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></u></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The
U. S. election of 2012 was very important – for what it prevented. It prevented
the formulation of a U. S. Supreme Court that would have had a decided majority
on the far right. That court would likely have wreaked havoc on women’s rights
and affirmative action. That court almost certainly would have made necessary
government regulations beyond the reach of Congressional legislation. The
election possibly prevented a mindless assault on entitlement programs like
Medicare and Medicaid. And, it prevented a new president with reckless and
idiotic views on taxation and deficit-debt reduction from doing something that
might have caused the Great Depression II.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Political
vision and progressive reform were not victors in that election. Because Mr.
Obama seemed to promise so much in 2008 (without specifying what grand visions
he proposed to initiate), and because Mr. Obama stood in such sharp contrast to
possibly the worst president in American History – George W. Bush, it was
assumed that the differences in governance of Mr. Obama and the Democrats from
the Republicans would be vast. He seemed to have a mandate, despite Republican
control of the House of Representatives. Reform and reformers should have been
in a position from 2009 forward that would have made Bill Clinton’s derisive
mockery of the Republicans in 2012 -- “<span style="color: #212121;">We left him
a total mess, he hasn't finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us
back in” – the first, last, and only words necessary to re-elect Mr. Obama and
the Democrats. They were not. Mr. Obama and the Democrats instead squandered
their moral authority with modest accomplishments, timid compromises, and half
measures. </span>Aside from a modest stimulus, a no-brainer salvaging of the
auto industry, and a confusing Affordable Health Care Act --- all of which
merely represented shoring up private, consumer capitalism as it has been
promoted by the Republicans during the last 30 years – Mr. Obama and the
Democrats did not take on any massive re-working of the economy or initiate any
substantial vision for the future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Mr.
Obama has been astoundingly vague and bland about the vision thing, allowing
political low life like Sarah Palin to taunt him with comments like, “How is
that hopey, changey thing going for you Mr. President.” Mr. Obama speaks with
the glib solemn voice and tone of nineteenth-century politicos (not with an
academic voice, as he is sometimes accused) about what Americans need and want
and where the country should go. Bill Ivey, author of <i>Handmaking </i>America, a just published book<i> </i>that addresses the sorry matter of how directionless
Americans have become, quotes an address the President Obama gave in 2010:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><i>What
has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our
destiny – our determination to fight for the America we want for our children.
Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know
precisely how we’re going to get there. We know we’ll get there.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">How glib, how empty, how
visionless, even how befuddled, are words like those. Ivey correctly calls this
statement one of “vision vacuum” and “leaderly drift.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The
fact that Mr. Romney was even worse about vision and reform provides little
comfort. His 2012 primary and general election campaign represented the most
extreme use of delusion and flip-flopping that presidential politics has ever
seen. He seemed to support both the most reactionary Republican positions on abortion
and women’s rights to their own bodies while hinting that he would not actively
promote the radical Republican campaign platform on which he was nominated. He
promised to overhaul entitlements but to protect Medicare and Medicaid in
manner that suggested a shell game. To further his shell game
“now-you-see-it-now-you—don’t, he promised to lower the deficit while not
raising taxes -- in fact lowering taxes by 20% on the middle class – although
he offered no evidence as to how this would happen, despite the undisputed
evidence of independent researchers that Mr. Romney’s numbers simply did not,
and could never, add up. Chameleons would be embarrassed to be compared to Mr.
Romney; they don’t change color that fast or often. It is no coincidence that
“fact-checking” media, as re-reported by Michael Enright on the CBC program
“Sunday Morning,” have determined that Mr. Romney’s campaign was filled with
contextual lies, lies, and “pants on fire” lies in 46% of pro-Romney
advertising; Mr. Obama’s campaign, it is sad to say, did so 28% of the time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">In
short, neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Romney offered anything approaching a vision
for the future of the U. S.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">It
came as no real surprise, therefore, that they also dodged the issues. Because
the economy and jobs are so important in the U. S. today, both candidates
seemed to be focused in addressing economic matters almost exclusively in their
campaigns. But did they? Mr. Obama talked about the past – saving the auto
industry, and banks, and Wall Street. But what did he propose for the future?
Almost nothing – no new stimulus, no new health care reform, no entitlement
reform, etc. He promised, essentially, to “stay the course,” whatever that is.
Paul Ryan, the Republican V.P. candidate, was right to challenge Mr. Obama by asking
what would be different in the next four years if Mr. Obama was elected. He has
not answered, and we do not know.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">As
I have already said, Mr. Romney dodged the issue of the economy even more,
simply arguing by the end of the campaign that as a successful business man,
his election would, in and of itself, instill confidence in American business
and lead to the revival of the economy and the restoration of jobs in the old
trickle down fashion Republicans have argued since the 1870s. David Brooks of the
NYTimes, a usually intelligent if misguided analyst, declared without a shred
of evidence that he thought Mr. Romney better able to make “big changes.” This
was blind hope at its worst.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Look
at what issues the candidates did not address at all. First, despite the fact
that the campaign ended with an enormous super storm – “Sandy” – neither Mr.
Obama nor Mr. Romney raised the issue of climate change, despite the fact that
storms like this one are predicted as a likely consequence of ocean
temperatures rising. Secondly, while the infrastructure of the U. S. crumbles,
neither candidate this time around suggested a program or programs to address
this matter. Dwight Eisenhower was a staunch private enterprise Republican who
hated federal government spending, but even he suggested, and helped bring into
existence a vast interstate highway system through a combined
private-government effort. Thirdly, despite the blatant villainy of banks and Wall
Street in initiating the economic crisis, and despite the fact that they were
bailed out, neither campaign took up the public cry for new and necessary bank
and Wall Street regulations. In the New Deal, some bankers and Wall Street
criminals were at least prosecuted, and the public today would support such
action if either party had courage enough to pursue those cases. Finally, they
refused to mention the Supreme Court. The new president will be making swing
vote appointments to the Supreme Court, meaning that court would have become
radically right wing under Mr. Romney but now probably moderately centrist
under Mr. Obama.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of these, and
other issues, are of immediate importance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">In
short, both candidates either avoided the very big issues altogether or were
glib about what they might do on the matters they did raise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The
candidates also campaigned locally to a very small sliver of the American
electorate, those found in swing states. Among these, the states of Ohio,
Florida, and Virginia received most of the attention, along with Colorado, and
to a lesser extent Wisconsin. Why? Analysts tell us it is because all of the
other regions of the U. S. were already decided, and they were already decided
because like-minded voters have tended to clump together, either in large
cities or gated communities, leaving whole states already secured in the pocket
of one party or the other. Thus, presidential candidates have not even bothered
to speak to the vast majority of American voters, except indirectly, and
indirectly means glibly, without having to ponder regional and local matters of
federal import.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The
Electoral College, with its winner-take-all application in most states, is
partly to blame. Remedies for that have been suggested but will unlikely pass
since it is not in the interest of the dominant party in such states as California
or Alabama to change it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">A
culture of ideology -- which forms when social discourse has broken down and no
good, pragmatic, workable ideas are available -- is also to blame for these two
political worlds that do not meet and do not speak to one another. The goal of
unrestrained, unregulated corporate capitalism became the real religion of most
of America with the election of Ronald Reagan, who declared government to be
the problem, not the solution. So, from the late 1980s onward, all Republicans
and then, slowly, most Democrats subscribed to this new version of how
economies are superior to societies and promoted again – as they had in the
1870s through the 1890s, and in the 1920s -- a kind of rugged individualistic,
almost libertarian view of how life should be lived. Behind the scenes, modern,
corporate capitalism and consumerism, which have infected almost every nook and
cranny of public life, were the real benefactors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The opposing ideology, of some Democrats, does little to
challenge this Ayn Rand idea of <i>laissez faire</i> joined to hyper-individualism. But the only “liberal”
thing left about the Democrats has flowed out of the <b>“New Left</b>” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which disdained the
old left’s concern for economic issues and instead promoted culture issues
social liberation, including racial equality, women’s rights and equality,
pro-choice, and the rights of the marginalized.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">In
other words, democratic dialogue has ended in the U. S., and it was astounding
to watch Barack Obama spend his first four years trying to restore it among
people who have not even begun to think outside their ideological boxes and
move toward cooperation and compromise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Lack
of vision or major issues, and a campaign that addressed a small part of the
electorate, did not lessen the ferocity of the campaign or its extraordinary
cost. All of this reminded me of the politics of the Gilded Age (between the
late 1870s and the late 1890s). In that period of poorly regulated industrial
capitalism and unrestricted Wall Street power, the Democrats and the
Republicans shared the same fundamental beliefs and interests. Both major
parties supported the Robber Barons of industry. By the late 1880s, for
example, John D. Rockefeller had bribed almost all of Pennsylvania’s
legislators, including those of both parties. Pork barrel and earmarked
legislation prevailed, as it has in our own time. Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney both
have ties to Wall Street. Both parties are lobbied by the same financial
interests, and both receive campaigning financing support from those interests.
Therefore, Mr. Obama does not speak like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, upon
election in 1932, immediately pushed bank reform, condemned the “economic
royalists,” proposed and had passed a “Wealth Tax,” spent enormous sums to
employ the unemployed, and attacked the Supreme Court for its backward ideas
and malicious obstructionism. Mr. Obama has preferred to fashion himself after
Abraham Lincoln (a Republican), in his constant quest to shape his own personal
character even though the urgent matter is the political, economic, and
cultural condition of the U. S. as a whole. Mr. Romney, emulating the
Rockefellers and Carnegies of the Gilded Age, has been more brazen and
unapologetic, paying a mere 15% in taxes on his enormous wealth, and sending
some of his assets to safe tax havens offshore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">In
the Gilded Age, the narrowness in the essential differences between the two
leading parties meant that elections were closely contested, and thus more
angry and violent. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican, gained fewer
votes than his rival, Samuel Tilden, yet became president after a tangled and
corrupt recount of votes (remember G. W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, when Gore
got a half million more popular votes than Bush but was defeated by a Supreme
Court that ordered an end to the recount in Florida?). In 1880, Winfield Scott
Hancock (Demo.) lost to James A. Garfield by .1% of the vote. In 1884, Grover
Cleveland (Demo) beat James G. Blaine (Rep.) by .3%, after which Cleveland lost
to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 despite beating Harrison by .8% in the popular
vote. Then Cleveland came back in 1892 to be the only president to win a second
term after losing the previous one, through a split election among the
Democrats, Republicans, and Populists. The 2012 election looks like a
comfortable win for Mr. Obama when one considers the electoral vote, but any
examination of the popular vote, especially in swing states, shows that Mr.
Obama’s two million odd majority was in fact a slender victory, not a mandate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The
big issues of the Gilded Age were the currency (hard or paper) and the tariff
(high or moderate). (I once had to take a course on the currency and the tariff
in this period in grad school :<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>at
8am!!). In other words, despite starving farmers, militant workers, rich new
economic and social reform ideas, and cities and towns in disrepair, the Gilded
Age only aroused currency and the tariff as central issues because both parties
and their leaders were wedded to banks and Wall Street. Elections were tight
because the two parties were so similar, or at least appeared to be. From 2000
to the present, elections have also been tight, but the candidates have not
appeared to be all that different in where they are coming from and the extent
of reforms and changes they propose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">So,
both presidential candidates offered no vision, avoided some of the biggest
issues of our time, campaigned narrowly, and, in kowtowing to the large
financial interests of the U. S., presented themselves as latter-day Gilded Age
politicians.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Why
have we come to this state of affairs? What cultural underpinnings have brought
us to this point of political stasis and compromised democracy? Let me offer
three, sometimes linked, reasons.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><b>I. The Tyranny of
Corporatism</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">In
the 1870s through the 1890s, and in the 1920s until the Great Depression,
Americans embraced the rule of the unregulated corporate capitalism instead of
democratic choice. After the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, first the
Republicans and then many Democrats re-opened the pandora’s box of corporatism.
The New Corporatism first promoted the view that privatization was usually
superior to public ownership or control, and has now built to privatization
always being superior to public ownership or control – of anything. Now there
is no acknowledgement that anything falls within the public interest. Secondly,
corporatism has come to claim that democracy succeeds to a free market system,
that is, democracy is born from the free market and is dependent upon it. Therefore,
as John Ralston Saul put it in his 1995 book, <i>The Unconscious Civilization</i>, “the citizen is reduced to the status of a subject
at the foot of the throne of the marketplace.” (p.76) The marketplace is to be
the eternal mother of democracy. All things flow from the economy, and all
things are secondary to it. Thirdly, corporatism holds that individualism is
the most important thing to be protected, in fact, almost the only thing to be
protected. Again, as Saul has said, “There are those who talk about
individualism as if it were a replacement for government.” (p. 73). The
individual, unencumbered by society and government, is trumpeted as the hero of
a mythical corporatist world. Corporatism even suggests, in contradiction of
thousands of years of intellectual reflection on the nature of society, that
the individual and their families are the only reality, with society being a
mere fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This
time around, corporatism has not meant economic corporations and businesses
exclusively. This time, corporatism is more total, including big labor unions,
whether auto workers or teachers; the media, which seeks truth second, if at
all, to satisfying their advertisers and getting more of them; institutions of
higher education, which seeks the shaping of students into able citizens and
members of society second, if at all, to selling credentials for employment;
and, organized radical religions, which sometimes proclaim that the only truth
is the Bible, which somehow is made to comport with corporatist goals, “God’s
Will,” which is used as a last retort to democratic action on any issue
whatsoever. “We are – almost all of us – employees in some sort of
corporation,” John Ralston Saul says, “public or private, . . . . [and as such
our] primary obligation is loyalty to the corporation.” (p. 91).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The
idea of a collective society, real and necessary, has largely been abandoned.
How many times did you hear Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney use these phrases:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“the general welfare,” “the public
interest,” “the public good,” “the common good,” or “the improvement of society
as a whole.” Corporatists have conducted a long smear campaign against these
phrases, suggesting that the public good is code for “big government spending,
“liberalism,” or worse – “socialism,” or even worse than that – “communism,”
and thereby have succeeded in repressing any viable notion of the public
good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Meanwhile,
the U.S.A., outside of this corporatist framework, exists primarily as a shell,
its individuals alienated from nature and society alike. The United States of
America languishes in emblematic form – as the American flag or Uncle Sam or
the pledge of allegiance; or as a slogan – as “the greatest nation ever”; or as
a chant at sporting contests -- “USA, USA, USA”; or as the leading military
power in the world, able to impose “shock and awe,” even if directionless and
impotent in creating peace, justice, and liberty.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>II. “Entertaining
Ourselves To Death”</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><b><i> </i></b>It is compulsory nowadays to
first recognize every American election for what they have become:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>day-after-day, month-after-month,
sometimes year-after-year soap opera entertainments, or what media folks call,
without apparent embarrassment, “horse race politics.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">“Horse
Race Politics” are the consequence, in part, of fixed date elections, which
allow parties and candidates to maintain permanent campaigns between elections.
The rise of American popular political journalism in the 1790s, made even more
loud and anxious over the last two centuries, has given us one political
campaign after another of bombast, ballyhoo, and feigned importance. Modern
factors have made matters worse. The rise of television, and even computer
networking, has elevated things like a candidate’s “appearance” and
“likeability” quotient into the most important elements in a campaign. In 1789,
George Washington was elected the first president of the U. S. on the basis of
his character; few would argue that he was likeable, personable, or attractive.
The addition of PACs (Political Action Committees) in the 1970s and 1980s gave
candidates access to “arms length” negative advertising whereby dubious
“truths” taken out of context could be applied to one’s opponent. The U. S.
Supreme Court’s decision in <i>Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission</i> in 2010 extended the recognition of corporations as
citizens to include the 1<sup>st</sup> Amendment free speech rights of
individual citizens (for whom it was intended), thereby allowing even more
enormous funding by PACs – at even further “arms length” from candidates – to
say almost whatever they wanted about candidates. Of late, this decision seems
to have further distended the idea of free speech, and who should have it, to
allow employers to recommend strongly to their employees for whom they should
vote (with all of the threats to advancement or employment that may imply).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The
consequence of these developments has not been to create an electorate richly
informed about candidates and politics, but to distort ideologies and issues
and personal characteristics further. In the main, they have furthered a
“dumbing down” in politics, or what Neil Postman called “entertaining ourselves
to death” in his 1985 book of that title (<i>Entertaining Ourselves to
Death:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Public Discourse in the Age
of Show Business</i>). According to
Postman, Americans have traded rights and responsibilities for medicated bliss.
“Form” in the television age, he argued (and I’m certain he would agree, in the
age of the internet and twitter), “excludes the content,” or, as Marshall
McLuhan put it, “the medium is the message.” Any new edition of his book would
have to have the title:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Entertained
and Now Dead</i>. The public is now fully
anesthetized insofar as they pretend to be citizens.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>III. The Myth of
Exceptionalism</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">During
his first term as president, Mr. Obama was accused by his opposition of
“apologizing” for America abroad, and, of not believing in American
“exceptionalism.” He campaigned doggedly to reverse that impression, often
alluding to “America as the greatest nation,” one imbued with “exceptional”
qualities and having an “exceptional” future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">“Exceptionalism”
is, of course, code for, “we are better than everybody else”; if otherwise,
Americans would readily admit that other nations are also “exceptional” in
their own specific ways. They do not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">“Exceptionalism”
also suggests that Americans have shared a culture amongst themselves apart
from the rest of the world. They live in, and want to live in, an isolated
culture. It began with John Winthrop telling the Puritans before arrival in New
England that, they “would be as a City upon a Hill for all to see.” They were
to be a religious example, a superior religious example. The American
Revolution of 1776-1783 was fought by those who believed the U. S. to be more
“virtuous” than England. Americans deluded themselves into believing that they
were less corrupt and could be freer than any other people. Europe was their
the evil, degenerate other (as it still is), thereby allowing Americans to
forget that they won the Revolution in 1781 because of French military and
supplies support. When Thomas Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark expedition
west, he envisioned an “empire of liberty,” unlike any other imperialist take
over of land in history. The “Empire of Liberty” was justified imperialist
conquest. Pretending that the west was uninhabited, or largely so, Americans
later embraced the “Manifest Destiny” of their western settlement. Still later
yet, during WWI, President Wilson proposed that only the U. S. could “make the
world safe for democracy,” after which Americans proceeded to claim victory in
WWII and the re-building of Europe as a consequence of their special genius and
beneficence (which it partly was).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">With
the receding of America as a world empirical power, and with what I think is a
retreat from military adventurism for the foreseeable future (as I argued upon
Mr. Obama’s election in 2008, and repeat here again), American exceptionalism
seems to me an excuse for further isolation<b> </b>and isolationism from the outer world. But the
increasingly lavish displays of American exceptionalism in all sorts of flag
waving and other gestures, seems to me to be filled with fear as well as
isolationim. Winthrop did not tell the Puritans on the ship the <i>Arabella</i> that they were to be a “City upon a Hill” because he
thought they were morally stronger than other humans, but because he feared
they were not. And, that unconscious fear seems to me to be the case with
exceptionalism today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">What
does this have to do with American politics? It means that image is vastly more
important than reason, that politicians must always appeal to this now bizarre
idea of exceptionalism, and that the scope for offering vision or new ideas is
so limited as to strangle real democracy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">What
do Americans need? They must restore some ideas about the public, collective
good. Regulations and restraints will not be enough. Qualities of freedom
joined to equality, of social community joined to opportunity, and of
individual autonomy joined to public responsibility, must be established.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .25in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">My
next blog will attempt to address in more particular fashion, the new
progressive era that must be established if the U. S. is not to languish as a riven, angry, alienated, dangerous nation.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-35629703988093395702012-06-01T13:35:00.000-06:002012-06-01T13:35:04.178-06:00Reforming the University<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<b><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;">My recent critical appraisal of modern universities
makes necessary this second essay outlining how universities may be improved.
Given that the perfect university or college is impossible to achieve and
maintain, improvement is all anyone can expect. It is impossible to imagine,
for example, that the current </span><b>corporate model</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> of the university can be fully changed. To do so,
would require, first, that governments more fully fund public universities and
colleges, and perhaps also that parents and others assume a substantial share
of the cost of higher education in order that students do not enter university
thinking that, as purchasers of their whole higher education, they are clients
who can demand an end product on their terms rather than receive a true
education. Funding changes of that order are not likely to happen. The almost
religious dominance of free market economy ideology, and political systems and
parties that operate under the constraints of that ideology, are incapable of
making the most fundamental and necessary reform:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><b>public funding</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
is just as unlikely that universities will abandon <b>diversity</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> in favor of more limited programs or a more tightly
focused unity of programs. The comprehensive, mega-university is here to stay.
As my son notes, universities and colleges must, in fact, experience more
diversity as long as knowledge continues to expand. He mentions neuroscience
but he could have added the vast new possibilities for new fields in the life
sciences and physics, which are in turn matched in less scientific fields like
anthropology, psychology, and history, where the scope of the subjects studied
is enlarged by new subject matter and new theoretical and methodological
possibilities. Some practical, applied programs that make up the diverse
university will always remain somewhat remote from grander, intellectually
purer, abstract or over-arching goals of the university, although the number
and influence of these narrow applied programs need not define the university
as a whole.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Given
that we will see no revolutionary change in funding and no stopping the
burgeoning diversity of the modern university, what is left? Here are a few
ideas that I have pondered (to say nothing of having tried to implement) over
the past 50 years:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
1. <i>Goals of Higher Education</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> – Because universities and colleges have come to
assume that their very existence is based on educating for employment, they
have mistakenly drawn the conclusion that they must narrowly target the
supposed needs of given professions and occupations. They have thereby pushed
right past first principles, that are foundational and primary, to educate to
secondary and tertiary goals. That is, they have re-oriented themselves to
educate by way of information rather than knowledge, set formulas rather than
critical thinking, and narrow skill sets rather than a broad range of
methodological abilities. This approach to higher education has its own built
in high costs and inevitable failures. Primarily, it educates to the past and
not to advancement in the future. Alexis de Tocqueville, in </span><i>Democracy
in America</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, long ago noticed that Americans
interpreted their individual freedom to mean that all avenues of success were
open to them, only to discover that as they all individually converged on the
latest, seemingly vast and open, opportunity, that opportunity (read: specific
job) was suddenly closed and no longer available. And, as Tocqueville noted, as
young people swept, like flocks of birds, from one seeming chance to another,
they were turned away again and again. I know many people who have a bachelor’s
degree, multiple master’s degrees, and sometimes two or more PhDs, largely
because of their necessary chase after employment niches that quickly disappear
because the number of applicants far exceeds job demands.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Universities
need not have capitulated so easily and so fast to the dead-end, failed
approach that Jane Jacobs has dubbed, “<b>credentialing</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.” Traditional universities are now beginning to
experience the competition of </span><b>for-profit, on-line universities</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">, and if credentials are the be-all and end-all of
education, those institutions that become the most lean (hiring the cheapest
teachers) and most systematized (low overhead and most target-oriented) and
least concerned with a culture of learning will prevail. The idea that one
needs to experience education on-campus, among peers and professors, has an
increasingly hollow ring among a clientele that sees the traditional university
as wildly expensive (as it is), especially when their sole focus is to acquire
skills that are marketable at the moment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
universities must do, and do so boldly and transparently, is embrace the idea
that their primary responsibility no longer involves teaching technical skills
or creating a factory floor environment of credential production but to forward
the idea that their primary focus will be on teaching and guaranteeing broad
intellectual skills, including the ability to <b>think critically</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">, </span><b>reason</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
</span><b>read</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">, </span><b>write</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">, understand and employ </span><b>statistics</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">, understand </span><b>science</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and know how to use the </span><b>scientific method</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">, and appreciate and pursue </span><b>creativity</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">. If undergraduates leave universities with ability
in all or most of these areas, with a few professional credentials added into
the mix, they will be much more ready for ever-shifting job opportunities and
cultural change. Again, this is not to say that these intellectual skills go
unattended in universities today but they do not exist as the primary mission
of universities, even though some universities purport to do so in the often
unread and generally scorned romantic mission statements in their calendars.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
evidence that reason, writing, thinking and creativity are no longer at the
forefront of universities is clear all around us. The <b>humanities</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">, for example, are increasingly seen as irrelevant,
and in order to avoid defending this argument of irrelevancy, critics simply
charge that </span><b>post-modernism</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> and
its attendant esoterica (go ahead, read Derrida, and you will understand this
charge) are the villains. The fact is, much of post-modernism is valuable
(though not as ideology), and much activity and teaching in the humanities has
nothing to do with post-modernism. </span><b>Critical thinking</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> is seen as more of a luxury or a bad joke by
pundits. Witness Margaret Wente’s recent article in the <i>Globe and Mail</i></span>,
in which she “disses” the humanities and social sciences (the “soft side” of
higher education; she herself, by the way, has Arts degrees with majors in
English) as useless pursuits with no employment future, hinting that they take
up to much of the university footprint (see “Educated for Unemployment,” <i>G
and M</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, May 15, 2012). Individual
intellectual advancement in universities has recently been pegged at 7% (how
the statistics for this were derived boggles the imagination), and even if that
number is ridiculous, experienced university professors would certainly testify
that in too many instances this lack of intellectual growth at institutions
that are supposed to be all about intellectual life, is not far off the mark
(see a recent study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska entitled, </span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><i>Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College
Campuses</i></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
intellectual skills and intellectual rigor are most important for higher
education as well as our public and personal well being, how is this rigor and
these skills to be achieved? Let me attempt a partial answer under two
headings:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Things we do now but
could do better” and “New things to do in the future.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 45.0pt;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;">1. <i>Things
universities do now</i></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> <i>but could do
better</i></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;">a) We
still offer <b>degrees</b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> in the “<b>arts</b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">” and “<b>sciences</b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">”
not degrees in English or History or Physics or Chemistry. In other words,
universities at least still pretend that they are educating students broadly,
and they often do so with <b>breadth requirements</b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> and other mechanisms to guarantee a true intellectual
experience rather than narrow knowledge in a particular field. Universities
must be more sincere and insistent about the need for students to have both
breadth and depth of education. I, and friends of mine, still think the best
formula for undergraduate curricula is to have one-third of student’s
undergraduate courses dedicated to the major, one-third to breadth, and
one-third to the student’s discretion. We cannot afford to drift toward what
appears to be the next logical step for the corporate-credential factory:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>degrees that would read “Bachelor of
Retail Marketing” or “Bachelor of 20<sup>th</sup> Century American History.” (I
have heard students describe themselves in such a manner, and even proudly to
proclaim themselves specialists in some narrow sub-division of knowledge which,
by the way, they do not actually possess).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;">b)
Most universities offer <b>first-year courses</b></span><span style="color: #1a1a1a;"> in the subjects that they offer which have the potential, at least,
to be exciting introductions to new ways to see or experience knowledge. The
retention of good first-year courses is critical to intellectual development
down the road. Many persons will not encounter again subjects they were
required to take in their first two years of university. My first two years were
among the most intellectually stimulating of my life. The very best teaching
must take place in these first-year or introductory course, which usually means
employing older, more experienced, professors in these courses. By taking
first-year courses seriously, teaching itself may be taken more seriously. When
push-comes-to-shove, teaching must will out over every other interest of the
university and the professor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 45.0pt;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;">2. <i>New
things to do in the future<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;">After
a career of batting around different liberal education strategies for providing
intellectual skills and intellectual rigor in undergraduate education
(including interdisciplinary studies, independent studies, capstone courses,
integrated studies for first-year students, and so on) I have settled on two large
strategies that I believe all universities should promote at the undergraduate
level above all else.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
a) The development of good <b>writing
skills</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> among all graduates is fundamental.
Some universities would be embarrassed if they knew the number of their graduates
who could barely write at all. When my wife and I were living in Maastricht
(where I was looking at their “problem-based” education programs) we met a very
bright woman from Indonesia who was trying to write her PhD dissertation in
English, but who had very little knowledge of written English. I have since
heard distressing stories about non-English foreign students who have the same
problem. Many students maneuver their choice of courses to avoid having to
write much at all. Universities would be more embarrassed if they knew how much
their graduates read (almost nothing at all, on average). Knowing how to write
well requires an extensive background in good reading, so the two matters are
naturally joined. Universities will protest that they already are committed to
“</span><b>writing-across-the-curriculum</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">,”
but these proclamations of virtue are usually just covers for sweeping the
problem under the carpet, and under a cheap carpet at that. I believe that a </span><b>senior
essay</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> requirement for all undergraduates
(yes, including those in business school or health or mathematics or music) is
the best solution to the writing issue, if it is taken as a priority and taken
seriously by all members of the university community. I know that ivy league
and superior liberal arts colleges in the U. S. often have this requirement but
they have also lost their interest and intensity in administering this
requirement, or they have just made the requirement so routine as to be
uninteresting. Other than suggesting that good education is getting too
expensive, Anthony T. Grafton is not at all clear about his objections when he
says:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Like a string quartet, too,
the college cannot improve its productivity if it goes on doing what it has
always done:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for example, putting
small groups of students into classes run by full members of the faculty, or
requiring every senior to write a thesis based on original research, supervised
by a professor.” (see Anthony T. Grafton, “Can the Colleges Be Saved?,” <i>NYRB</i></span>,
May 24, 2012). In fact, those two things are essential to creating truly
educated undergraduates. Democratic education need not be diluted education, as
it has become.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
b) A commitment to insure that
every student successfully completes a large (probably a semester-long credit
course) <b>problem-based</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> course strikes me
as another way, along with the senior essay, to cap an undergraduate’s
education and send her forward into the world with real credentials.
Problem-based courses are not new; they have been employed at McMaster
University and Maastricht University for some time. Advocates of this approach
are sincerely enthusiastic, once they have seen how they can be implemented.
Design is critical, of course, and this essay is too short to address specific
design problems and resolutions. Suffice it to say here that problem-based
education incorporates creativity in subject selection as well as in approaches
to solve the problem. Problem-based approaches also provide the invention and
enhancement of research skills, cooperation, reflection, critical thinking,
and, perhaps above all, the explicit conjunction of intellectual life and real
life (a natural conjunction which should be obvious to all of us but, alas, is
not).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Many other specific things can be done to rescue
universities from the grip of the econocentric, market-place driven, corporate
model. A change in the overall culture of universities would help but that will
only come from the implementation of some smaller, targeted improvements. The
true university has long existed and it, or some facsimile of it, will always
exist as long as there are people who believe, as did Cardinal John Henry
Newman, that real education involves knowing and educating students one by one,
not by employing some kind of factory output method (see Newman’s <i>The Idea
of the University</i><span style="font-style: normal;">).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-51424559891010382952012-03-11T18:59:00.000-06:002012-03-11T18:59:38.695-06:00The Tragedy of Modern Universities<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>2243</o:Words> <o:Characters>12788</o:Characters> <o:Company>Univ. of Lethbridge</o:Company> <o:Lines>106</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>25</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>15704</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>11.1280</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:DoNotShowRevisions/> <w:DoNotPrintRevisions/> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin/> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Aside from the debilitating wars of the last half century, no issue of public affairs has been more tragic than the institutional evolution of North American universities (including some American liberal arts colleges). Having lived close to this evolving “tragedy” for almost my entire life, my title is nothing if not understated. Critics could, with justice, call it the “decline and fall” of the university or the “end” of the university, and the words “corrupt,” “criminal,” “ignorant,” “self-serving,” and even “vulgar” would not be out of place in defining many aspects of the modern university.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is important, before embarking on this indictment of modern universities, to remind myself as well as others that many good things happen in universities and liberal arts colleges. Many students encounter, and wrestle with, unfamiliar and challenging ideas. They meet persons with different beliefs from different cultures. Many exceptional professors still hold to the best academic ideals, and make every effort to guide students toward a true education. Some good research is accomplished, although not as much as many lay people and academics may assume. Modern universities have sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, promoted these good qualities, and I would not be so ungenerous as to claim that these things happen, as we say, “in spite” of the university. I do mean to say that the main purposes and goals of today’s universities, as institutions, is something other than the pure advancement of knowledge and the proper education of students.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A long list of negative things may be said about the institutional university, however, and I will try to compress some of these under a few short and general headings. Here they are:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">1. <b>Universities have no coherent idea about why they exist</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Ask any five administrators or faculty about the over-arching purpose of the modern university, and aside from vague hand waving over the word “education,” you are likely to get five different answers. They dare not say that universities today exist primarily to remain in existence, to grow if they can, and to increase intake and increase output. If that sounds like the same amoral goals of for-profit businesses or political parties, well then, you understand what universities today are largely about. After universities enthusiastically embraced the market economy and the corporate business model in the 1980s, they have seldom questioned or examined their intent or their motives in doing so, choosing instead to increase their marketing strategies and efforts. The corporate model drives most of the energies (and much of the money) of today’s universities, leaving them with little time or motive to come together to re-evaluate who they are and why they are here (a few do, especially private schools with deep pockets, e. g. Harvard; this is not to say that Harvard, which is a chief mainstay of the elitist establishment, has really risen above the crowd). Universities exist to award degrees, not to educate, and what they produce, most of the time, are students with credentials, not knowledge.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Evidence for this claim is everywhere. Because governments have decided to saddle students with enormous debt in obtaining their degrees (“credentials”), universities are in an often unspoken conspiracy with students to “process” them efficiently and swiftly. Good grades are much easier to obtain. Class sizes are inflated to take care of larger numbers of students in the corporate capitalist environment of today’s universities. Assignments are truncated to allow these larger numbers to flow through. And, students, who have now become “clients,” demand that they get the credentials they paid for. Intellectual growth, knowledge, and skills are incidental byproducts of this industrial model. The corporate university has attempted to counter this stark reality, in part, by claiming that we live in a complex “information” age, and that they hold the only key to unlock the sources of this “information”; they less often talk about knowledge. Any person with a library card and internet access can acquire “information.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">2. <b>Today’s universities have become all things to all people</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Universities are enormous bazaars, hawking a huge variety of goods (i.e., degrees, programs, and majors) to their customers. They are “comprehensive” universities made up of semi-independent parts. They are “diversities,” not universities. There are few or no core goals for students that are shared among the scattered faculties and schools and programs, from the arts and sciences to health science to business to oceanography to mortuary science (make up your own list; it will take awhile). While some schools will parrot their support for such goals as critical thinking, quantitative and qualitative analytical skills, elemental scientific understanding, and good writing, you can look through calendars and documents and courses until your head hurts, but you will find little coordinated effort to implement these goals.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the late 1950s, my brother was enrolled in an English course in the Faculty of Engineering at The University of Michigan (a prestigious school). In his first year he had to take a course entitled:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Honors English for Engineers.” What is that??? Is there a way to read <i>Crime and Punishment</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and </span><i>Tess d’Ubervilles</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (both of which he had to read) in a way appropriate to “engineers”?? Of course not, but the Faculty of Engineering at the U of M was a powerful independent state within the university that could duplicate in course form whatever subject they wanted.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every hawker’s stall in the university strives to become a self-sufficient, autonomous entity. They offer their own statistics courses, their own philosophy and ethics courses, and their own history and sociology courses. If they lack some basic element, they either ignore it, or they make that basic element adjunct to one or more of their courses. I have read, and heard academics claim, that a “liberal education” can be got from many corners of the university, even from “Marketing” programs in a School of Business. It is hard for me to believe that “liberal education” is any more than a veneer in these cases.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In order to satisfy the appetites and wants of students who have usually not encountered enough of the breadth of fundamental knowledge to make an informed decision, universities offer not just courses but programs in narrowly specialized subjects. Are you still interested in dinosaurs and swimming with dolphins? Do not worry, universities have fashioned programs that will appeal to you.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the process of becoming “credentialing factories” (as Jane Jacobs long ago labeled universities), and being all things to all people, universities have ventured even further into applied fields of study that used to be the domain of community colleges and trade schools. It is hard to tease out important elements of human knowledge, let alone intellectual rigor, in programs in “hospitality” or “equestrian” studies.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">3. <b>Universities treat their communities poorly</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><b>Students:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Student loans have already been addressed, and universities are not so culpable in this matter as we citizens who do not demand more public financial support for public higher education. Unfortunately, students get less and less for their money. Undergraduates are less important than graduate students and academic research. Entering undergraduates are often taught by less experienced graduate students, rather than by senior professors, despite the fact that most first-year courses are among the most difficult to teach well, and are often the most important courses, especially for those taking these for breadth requirements only. Because most first-year courses are large, leaving students feeling anonymous, they become acculturated to invisibility and the lack of dialogue in their learning. My informal queries also lead me to conclude that first-year students are also acculturated to thinking that learning facts and information is the foundation of knowledge. For a much fuller discourse on the many, many ways in which we disappoint and disadvantage undergraduates, see Thomas C. Pocklington and Allan Tupper, <i>No Place to Learn:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why Universities are not Working</i></span> (2002).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Graduate students fare little better than undergraduates. They are often a source of cheap labor for their research supervisors; they are always a cheap source of labor for teaching tutorials and classes. Some are very, very good at these necessary tasks but the enormous profit margin they provide for the university as a corporate whole is the main reason they are in the classroom. In today’s economy, fewer and fewer are reaping any of the employment rewards from their period of indentured servitude, however. Supervisors and teachers are morally culpable (and this includes me) for not being more forthright and forceful in making clear that getting a master’s or Ph.D degree is not an easy avenue to appropriate employment. Because graduate school education provides the basis for hiring more faculty (in more and more esoteric fields), graduate student numbers cannot be decreased without reducing the size and profitability of the whole corporate university enterprise. This corrupt, inbred system of interlocking dependencies is not unlike the structure of society in France just before the French Revolution.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><b>Faculty</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Few outside the academic world understand just how difficult and competitive it is to get and keep academic employment, and then to advance within it. Fewer still, often including those inside the academy, realize what a large role luck has played in their fortunes (or misfortunes). In many fields, there are at least ten excellent candidates for every position available. If one is lucky enough to obtain a tenure-track position, there is no guarantee that tenure will follow. Publications (not necessarily good ones, in my experience) long ago replaced excellent teaching as the chief basis for getting tenure. Refusal of tenure is near to a death sentence; it means you have been fired, and you will not likely get a job elsewhere in the academy, even though your knowledge and skills are not easily marketable anywhere else. Tenure is no protection from dismissal, however; if a university decides to do so, for example, they can eliminate entire programs (as some U. S. southern schools have done recently in regard to programs like computer science, which are undersubscribed).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a faculty member gets tenure, they must then turn their attention to getting promotion to Associate and then Full Professor. This never ending exercise of nit-picking evaluation means more research and publishing. If one cannot accomplish that, she will often be assigned to a fairly basic salary and to extra “duties” that may do little for her or the advancement of knowledge.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who climb the ladder to Full Professor do very well indeed. They have considerable prestige in their university and often in their profession. They have very good salaries. A recent study of income inequality in the U. S., places university professors among a small group of persons who, while they may not be among the top 1%, are among a very elite group of income earners. The statistics, however, were taken from full professors at very elite institutions like Harvard and Princeton, and they ignore the fact that it is a long hard climb to full professorship, leaving few years for many full professors to enjoy a high income. Unfortunately, this latter condition has led to another problem with universities. Senior full professors are holding onto their positions well past the age of 65, thereby depriving a younger generation to move up through the process. Senior professors do less and less teaching, however, despite the fact they have a much broader knowledge base than younger faculty, and presumably bring more “wisdom” to the subject.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><b> Administration and Staff</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no more vertical and rigid hierarchy in the annals of history than among the staff and administration of a university. Those at the bottom, maintenance staff for example, are like the invisible poor of the 17<sup>th</sup> century, despite the fact that most of them come into meaningful contact with students and faculty on a frequent basis. I know of one woman, now retired, whose employment was to make sandwiches and serve cafeteria meals, yet she had a big influence on students who were distressed or confused or who just needed some encouragement. Above this level of staff are those, as councilors and advisors and remedial studies providers, to name a very few, who often influence a student’s career in as profound a manner as do any faculty. They seldom receive meaningful credit for their accomplishments, and more importantly, they are an easy source to eliminate one by one or in whole sections when economic hard times hit, given that neither faculty nor graduate students can be easily eliminated.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then there are the university administrators who differ from their business colleagues only in the degree of ambition and manipulation they bring to advancing up the corporate ladder (some are more vicious that the private economies players; some are less so). The majority are recruited early on in their faculty careers, after they have demonstrated “people skills”; these people skills might better remain tied to undergraduates in the classroom. Untutored in administration, they make mistakes that usually, ironically, have to do with interpersonal relations.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Upper administration are like titans, beyond the reach of ordinary staff and even faculty. In recent years, becoming a vice-president or provost or even being a long serving dean, means that you have acquired rights to a “golden parachute” when you retire. Even before you retire, you have supplements to your income and sometimes unvouchered, and always vouchered, expense accounts. Upon retirement, many months and sometimes even years of paid leave provide a happy sendoff to retirement. Equally problematical with upper administration in the corporate university is their clear lack of focus:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are they fund-raisers, marketers, public relations officers, crisis interveners, or just plain business administrators? One thing they are not -- at least any longer – is educational visionaries and protectors of the intellectual life.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">It is hard for me to review these elements of the modern university without despairing about the future of higher education. I believe that community colleges, despite sharing many of the problems outlined above, are, at least, more honest in their goals and purposes. Modern universities, however, are a long way from reform. There expense has led in part to their quasi-private status, thereby leading to their exploitation of students, staff and faculty. It is no surprise that for-profit, distance-learning institutions have made large inroads on public universities. Once these institutions can establish a better claim to providing their “clients” with more sound “credentials,” public universities will be in a difficult competitive environment. The decline and near disappearance of the idea of the public interest also militates strongly against any reforms. So, in general, and in my field of the humanities and history in particular, much of what universities are assumed to provide – intellectual stimulation, critical thinking, problem-solving, integrative knowledge – will be got by persons discovering things on their own, or in new institutions that will address the loss that has so clearly occurred in our mega-institutions.</span><o:p></o:p></div><!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-27272206878863474092012-01-12T13:35:00.001-07:002012-01-20T12:16:17.490-07:00Fundamental Conditions for Living Well<div class="MsoNormal"><b> </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Over the holidays, I have been asking friends and acquaintances about what is necessary to live well. I get many of the usual answers: health, money, purpose in life, education, and political freedom, among others. It struck me that the tone of most responses suggested a causal relationship between one’s own initiative (i.e., one’s autonomy, agency, and authority), and the conditions that our specific culture or society provides. While I did not disagree with most observations suggested to me, I was also struck that two very big factors were entirely ignored – the health of our one-and-only planet, and luck. It also seemed to me that a kind of democratic spirit in their responses elevated tertiary conditions (e. g., political freedom) and under-estimated more critical ones (e. g., education).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>1. The Health of Our Planet</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> – It seems to me that lately we have responded to this absolutely fundamental condition to “well-being” in three ways. First, many persons feel exhausted and defeated after decades of outrage over the incapacity of our governments and societies to attempt even modest responses to climate change. Secondly, many remain in denial, for one bad reason or another. Thirdly, and most absurdly, some seem to believe that we will find a new planet to colonize. These folks might as well be lumped in with the deniers.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"> Even if we are alarmed by what is occurring, the health-of-our-planet issue clearly suggests just how limited human agency is, whether we are thinking of ourselves as individuals, or in the collective sense of societies. Perhaps this is why we do so little, or make such small, gratuitous efforts (e. g., buying an electric car), in the face of possible extinction. We cannot face how limited our authority is, or how “un-special” we are as a species.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>2. Luck</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> – We used to speak of good fortune or luck more frequently in the past. The Greeks, after all, centered their whole conceptualization of the cosmos on “fate,” although they also felt human beings need not invite bad fortune by acting with <i>hubris</i></span> or stupidity. Until very recent times, most of us were humbled by the chance good fortune we had received. In my own case, I would have to say that most of my good fortune (and I have had a lot of it) was the consequence of the convergence of many lucky circumstances. That is, I inherited good genes and health; I was lucky to be born at a time, and in a place, where democratic, and relatively inexpensive, education had reached its zenith; I was lucky to marry a person who supported and aided and encouraged me; I was lucky to get one of the last university teaching positions in my field, and so on.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Luck is not a popular concept in our aggressive ideological age. To be humble when reflecting on one’s good fortune is anathema to an age that rewards “attitude,” bravado and brash self-assertion, and, social and economic “bullying.” One “makes one’s own luck” is the modern, and often false, mantra (especially, it appears, of some CEOs). To admit luck, good or bad, as a fundamental quality to our well-being means that those of us who are wealthy have no way to justify our wealth. Charity is the buy off for good luck; it is the action that reveals how, beneath it all, we know we are lucky in comparison to someone else. Unfortunately, charity can also act like Catholic confession; we often like to think it can absolve us of taking further social and political action and reform.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>3. Education</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> – A person can be poor or lack good health, but if they are educated to their abilities their well-being will be vastly improved. Obviously, if a person is terminally or perhaps even chronically ill, health may claim a superior place above education, at least until one is healthy again. In short, I do not agree with the slogan: “if you have your health you have everything.” For most of us, however, education at all levels is the most important element which human beings can control and improve. There are corollaries to this axiom. First, everyone needs education that is available and affordable for all. In other words, equality of opportunity in education is essential, and in our society, this means public education. Secondly, vocational education, while a useful secondary consequence of real learning, is not real education for the larger, more important, purposes of creating better human beings, better citizens, and persons who can think rationally and express themselves creatively. Thirdly, education must be perceived individually and collectively as something that occurs lifelong. With good education for all, the richness of life is accomplished, and things like good government, liberty, and social human decency will follow.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>4. A “Modest Competence” </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">– Having a “modest competence” is, in large part, a mere consequence of living on a planet that remains beneficent, of the good luck inherent in one’s person or society, and a culture in which equal education is secured. But it is also a consequence of public goals and private beliefs. I like to use the 18<sup>th</sup> century phrase – “modest competence” – because it is so much more inclusive than saying “a good income” or “money.” A “modest competence” implies economic resources that keep one out of poverty. It is revealing that most countries measure economic poverty as a falling below a percentage of median personal or family income. In other words, poverty is made relative, recognizing that the poor are not a fixed social class but are persons who, through their circumstances, been deprived of the full means to live life fully. By contrast, the U. S. measures poverty as an absolute number, and, the right-wing Heritage Foundation goes further and measures poverty by how many material “amenities” a person or family have. This latter means of measuring suggests that all matters of poverty should be measured in terms of levels of material acquisition and consumption alone.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"> A “modest competence,” however, also implies a set of skills or abilities that make one free from the most demeaning human labor, and of being free of slavery. And, it can be seen as a measure of personal autonomy and agency in general as well as the capacity to be competent in being a contributing member of society.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Undoubtedly, almost all of you who read this will disagree with at least some of my list, and likely some of my conclusions. Given my list, however, I am bothered first by how puny our attempts have been, and apparently will continue to be, in regard to really big issues, like climate change. It makes me worry that we are simply not terribly competent as a species. Secondly, I am appalled at how little true humility and true charity we feel and express as a consequence of the luck factor. This suggests to me that we are not terribly competent as a species but believe we are. Thirdly, our abandonment of real education at almost every level draws me toward the conclusion that we are not terribly competent as a species, and do not give a damn if we are not. And, finally, our inattention to establishing a “modest competence” for all suggests to me that we are not terribly competent as a species, and are filled with disrespect for others and a general self-loathing of the human condition. Yet, despite all of my concerns about the limits of human intelligence and goodness, we can look at our current condition as so bad that there is no way but up. In fact, I do believe that we are at least on the cusp at addressing some of the matters that would improve our collective well-being.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-45913667730507738672011-11-28T17:07:00.001-07:002011-11-28T17:08:39.877-07:00How to Keep the "Occupy" Movement Alive By all accounts, a substantial majority of Americans and Canadians have supported the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. A vast majority of us also have short attention spans. Andy Warhol over-estimated everyone's power of concentration, by five minutes at least, when he made his famous quip that in the post-modern world we could all expect fifteen minutes of celebrity. So, while some might have thought that a rolling series of protests might take place for years, as they did in opposition to the Vietnam War, none of us really thought this protest could be sustained as it was laid out. Winter alone has compromised the Occupy protestors in a way that cannot be mitigated. Will the Occupy protest be forgotten as quickly as our fifteen minutes of fame?<br />
What can be done? What visible presence can be brought in order to sustain and further the peaceful protests that have begun? I believe there is a visible method of protesting that could continue for years, and have real effect. Instead of trying to maintain one camp in every city and town, might it not be possible to have from two to a dozen people volunteer to represent the protest for a half a day or a full day in selected locations in any given urban area. These volunteers might be assigned to stand and picket in front of a bank or brokerage firm, for example. If enough volunteers can be mustered, as they could in our larger cities, Occupy protestors would be present at several venues every day. Some venues, such as a strategic location in view of Wall Street (or, rather, in the view of Wall Street operatives), could be womaned and manned every day of the year for many years.<br />
The virtue of this plan is that it only takes a few people with picket signs to perpetuate the idea of the 99% versus the 1% and .1%. It will not be "news" for the media, at least not after a few minutes, but it will be a steady reminder of reforms needed and policies not taken. Common people, for want of a better term for who we are, will not forget and might even be heartened by the knowledge that someone is keeping the cause alive. In the mass societies in which we live today, attempting to impress politicians, legislators, and the economic movers-and-shakers with numbers of protestors in one place at one time is only possible with a scale of protest numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Tahrir Square has been remarkable in regard to this old style protest, but it cannot be a model for this kind of protest, where the metropolitan center of Manhattan does not carry the central symbolism of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and where the issue is one that resonates with all of us locally across a very big continent.<br />
Permanent protestors, brought out daily on a rotating volunteer basis, has a secondary value. It allows us all to participate in a meaningful way. I joined the "Occupy" march in my home town but I was not the only one who left wondering if such a brief symbolic act was worth very much. Over my lifetime, I have also done volunteer work for political parties. Because political parties do not want you for your ideas or your views on policies (unless you are among the .1% elite in the party), they generally want you to lick stamps, deliver leaflets, or put up campaign signs. Standing in front of Bank of America with a few like-minded protestors is much more rewarding. Unlike "MoveOn," for example, an elite cadre would not simply ask you to sign a petition and to contribute money; you would have to inform yourself well about issues and possible policies because you might be asked important questions during your volunteer picketing, or worse, accosted by opponents.<br />
Finally, organizing for this kind of permanent protest can lead to a larger pool of reform-minded people than will remain if the current method of protest is allowed to fizzle. People like you and me, standing in front of Wells Fargo, might even find other important things that could bind us together in opposition to the world of alienation that has now displaced what used to be called the "democratic people out of doors."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-63449858852062509492011-10-26T15:51:00.002-06:002011-11-12T13:09:32.622-07:00Arab Spring -- American Fall<div class="MsoNormal"> Listening to American commentators “tsk, tsk” about what will become of Arab peoples after their successful removal of those dictators who kept them poor and repressed, is to learn again what the words hypocrisy and irony mean.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> All American pundits express their concern that a powerful religious segment of this or that society might seize power through democratic elections. (Meanwhile, in America, a powerful religious segment of society, led in recent decades by Christian evangelicals, has captured American politics in the most profound and extensive ways.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> Most are apprehensive about the maintenance of secular government among the civic cultures of Arab states. (Meanwhile, in America, a large right-wing contingent wants all Americans to include a Christian God in their Pledge of Allegiance, and to bow their heads to that God in schools and all civic places and at all civic ceremonies and functions. Who is the last president of the U. S. to admit publicly that he did not believe in that God? Well, of course, the answer is: none.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> Many fear that institutions and special interest groups inside those Arab countries will manipulate democratically elected governments and the economies of these reformed states for their own particular and pecuniary interest and advantage. (Meanwhile, in America, it is estimated that there are at least 25,000 lobbyists plying their trade in Washington, D. C. Almost all national candidates for office take enormous sums of money from corporations to whom they are later beholden. When successfully elected, these self-same candidates make little effort to hide the fact that they will serve the interests of those who monetarily supported their candidacy. Some Americans even applaud the <i>Citizens’ United</i> case for allowing corporations to use their vast resources to influence elections in any way they wish [even if they are restrained in an inconsequential way from giving large sums directly to candidates]).<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> Others worry that a new strong leader will emerge in some of these states. (Meanwhile, in America, those on the political left and right and even middle, plead for “leadership” from someone strong enough to cut through legislative logjams and judicial constraints, and cure the economic and cultural ills of the nation. Pleading for strong leadership in a democracy is admitting that that democracy is not functioning.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> In fact, as the Occupy movement (if it can be called a movement) illustrates, Americans and others wish they could join in the Arab Spring party, at least a little. Occupiers and Tea Partiers alike feel, even when they do not understand, the malaise of their own nation. Why should they not? Including myself as an American citizen and culpable villain, I offer this long and discouraging list:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> We have made a <i>civil religion</i> out of the U. S. Constitution and out of our own brand of free market capitalism. The constraints of these two civil religious impulses, all subsumed under a ubiquitous and mystical thing called “American exceptionalism,” leaves little wiggle room for practical reform based on “thinking-outside-the-box.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> For over a century, we have emptied our wallets and destroyed or wreaked permanent damage on tens of thousands of our fellow citizens through the <i>prosecution of various wars</i> -- some small, most not; some just, most not. From George Washington, who warned about “entangling alliances” (meaning being dragged into other people’s wars), through Dwight Eisenhower, who first publicized the nexus between corporate capitalism and a powerful military (the “military-industrial complex”), words of restraint have been ignored in favor of military adventures. These military adventures became worse in the past half century. Fictitious excuses (often known and understood by large numbers of Americans before hostilities even began) were paraded before us for fighting in Vietnam and expanding that war and for assaulting Iraq. Other military adventures were justified for the most pathetic and transparent reasons. And then, when attacked for the first time on their own soil since 1813, Americans allowed fear to overwhelm them, with the consequence of a “homeland security” culture that is nothing short of totalitarian.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> We have pushed a <i>political culture of democracy</i>, and the institutions of democracy, to <i>near collapse</i>. A few young children may innocently proclaim their desire to be “President” some day, but none, in this winner-take-all culture, want to be a city councilwoman or a state representative, or even a member of Congress. So-called “citizens,” who can name at least 100 singing groups or 500 professional sports stars, cannot name more than 10 members of Congress. “Civics” as a high school course has largely disappeared. Saying you are “not political” is proffered as a moral virtue. It is no wonder that libertarian opposition to all government is seen as a legitimate democratic position.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> We have allowed the <i>“freedom” of the free market</i> to supercede and cancel all other social considerations that may stand in the way of hyper-capitalism, and now especially investment capitalism. To quote the Populist Kansas politician, Mary Lease, “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” (c. 1890).<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> We have stood by as the two most important institutions in a democratic society have been bought off or allowed to fail: <i>education and a free press</i>. Governmental lack of respect for education and teachers is no longer something that needs to be spoken in hushed tones. Private schools and home schooling are usually little more than religious proselytizing or narrow cultural propagandizing.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> Our free press is anything but. It takes no wisdom whatsoever to know what Rupert Murdoch represents and promotes, or what U. S. A. Today is willing to engage or say, or why “The PBS Newshour” offsets moderate centrists with right-wing commentators from the Heritage Foundation. If you do not get your analysis and opinion from various political blogs (and there are many good ones), you go uninformed.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> We have allowed ourselves to be <i>“dumbed-down”;</i> we have <i>“amused ourselves to death”</i> (as Neil Postman puts it). The “bread and circuses” of Rome has nothing on us (except for the fact that they at least kept the “bread” coming). We sit and passively watch cage-fighting, where someone is as sure to get mauled as a Christian in the ring with a lion. We applaud sports heroes who suffer brain injury after brain injury and never seem to live to the age of sixty. Life in America is “brutish and nasty” and many times, to fill out Thomas Hobbes’s famous quotation, “short” (usually short on reason and reflection). We watch “reality TV,” where self-proclaimed experts publicly belittle and abuse the many contestants they face while making clear that there can be only “one” winner. It is now a winner-take-all culture, which explains why 99% of the population might be concerned about the 1% who hold the wealth. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> As healthy human beings, we must all have hope. Hope in the case of America today is that things are near the bottom: things can only get better. It is not impossible, as long as democratic political institutions are maintained, for all of the problems listed above to be improved or even righted. It is not likely to come from a populist movement like the one Mary Lease helped to lead, nor from a turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century progressive movement. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> We will likely have to look to leaders who will help us out of this, despite the fact that relying primarily on leaders is antithetical to real democracy. But if it is to be leaders, I have my own list of American leaders of the past. This list includes: Thomas Paine, Benjamin F. Bache, J. Q. Adams, Frederick Douglass, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. What did these people have in common? Several things. They all came to their <u>larger world-view of things</u> through education and long periods of reflection. They were all <u>outraged </u>at matters as they stood. (Mary Lease, for example, admonished poor farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.” All of my heroes above “raised hell”; will anyone do so today?) They were all <u>tenacious </u>in promoting revolutionary or reformist goals. They were all <u>consistent</u> in the things they supported and the things they opposed. <u>Only one</u> of those listed here – Frederick Douglass -- <u>profited financially</u> from his reformist prominence (OK, Jane Addams did accept posh speaking engagements as a kind of holiday to herself, so that she could briefly have some rest in a good hotel room and a couple of good meals). All of them <u>grew intellectually and emotionally</u> from their efforts.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> We can all learn a valuable lesson in civics and humanity from the people listed above. And, if we all imitated their actions, we might move from our current condition of despair to one of real hope.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-33631006305652219852011-08-29T19:27:00.000-06:002011-08-29T19:27:06.928-06:00Jack Layton’s Real Legacy <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>397</o:Words> <o:Characters>2263</o:Characters> <o:Company>Univ. of Lethbridge</o:Company> <o:Lines>18</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>4</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>2779</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>11.1280</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:DoNotShowRevisions/> <w:DoNotPrintRevisions/> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin/> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px;"><b> </b></span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Now that most friends, followers, and commentators have had their opportunity to consider Jack Layton from their particular perspectives, I would like to offer a brief salute to Mr. Layton that may be a little different in kind or in emphasis from the memorials of praise from others.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jack Layton was a professional politician. This does not mean that he could not have made considerably more money in some other profession if partisan politics had proved a dead end (just as many teachers and professors and general practitioners and pastors could “profess” some other calling, to their pecuniary advantage, if they so chose). Jack Layton knew he was a professional politician, and he respected those things that made professional politicians successful. He followed his plan of success, however, by abiding by a few simple rules:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>be as honest as possible, treat those around you with respect and kindness, and try to approach your professional life with some sense of good humour, if not joy. In other words, Jack Layton did what all good professionals and good crafts persons and good business persons do. Most importantly, he approached his profession with forethought and good conscience:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>intention is absolutely necessary for any virtue to be ascribed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But, you might say, have we not had many noble politicians in Canada’s recent past? One only needs to think of Stanley Knowles, Robert Stanfield, and even Ed Broadbent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were (and are) good persons. But they were good persons in a different political culture, one not so ideologically riven, one less negative, less slanderous, and less vicious. Furthermore, they did not bring a third party to major party and opposition party status. The moral high ground is easier if you lose (which is not to say that Mr. Layton fully won either).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I supported Bill Blaikie in the leadership contest that Mr. Layton first won, and I was skeptical of Mr. Layton’s character and goals and tactics at that time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was wrong, not that Bill Blaikie is not a wonderful, moral person. But that too is the rub:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I favored Blaikie because I saw him as the most visibly moral candidate; I did not see him as a political winner, as a professional politician. This is a matter of “shame on me,” since I have spent much of my life trying to convince people that they MUST be political, in a partisan way. I have generally failed, despite my constant chiding of people who say they are “not political” with the retort, “then you are, in a democracy, immoral.” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jack Layton made practical politics respectable, something others should pursue with purpose and enthusiasm. Jack Layton saved, at least in a small way, in a small country, the ideal of politics in a democracy.<o:p></o:p></div><!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-26786465500518260012011-08-23T21:45:00.006-06:002011-08-23T21:49:30.645-06:00An Alternative History of the United States<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16pt;"> </span>When Howard Zinn died in 2010, he had done what few American historians have been capable or willing to do: he had written and published an influential, alternative history of the U. S., namely, <i>A People’s History of the United States</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (1980). This may seem unremarkable. Are not all histories of the U. S., a “people’s” history? Well, no. Until very recently, most American history was heroic and elitist. Examples include, but are hardly limited to: the exceptionalism of the American Revolution (unsullied by the bloodshed of the French Revolution, or so it is not quite accurately alleged); the energy of the westward movement (of which there were many “movements,” and most not very glamorous or praiseworthy, e. g., the removal of the Cherokees, the seizing of Mexican lands in the southwest, and the attempts by Brigham Young and the Mormons to isolate themselves in some alternate universe in Utah); and, the genius of the founding fathers (the many biographies that fawn praise on the “founders” are enough to form a new land bridge across the Bering Straits). In more recent times, some American historians have turned their attention to the maelstrom of popular culture. But here too, America is presented as the author, and often the ultimate arbiter, of all pop culture subjects.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"> You might think that I am going to return to my “old saw” about American ethocentricism and exceptionalism. Well, it must be admitted that these elements are central to my proposal for a new American history – something radically beyond Zinn’s “people’s” history -- but recent events remind me that both of these prominent American characteristics might be subsumed in a new American history, under a different subject title. Maybe we need a “History of American Stupidity and Cupidity.” (Well, that will not work; most people do not own a dictionary to look up the word “cupidity.”) Maybe we need to call it: “Self-Isolation and Self-Congratulation: A History of America.” Or, maybe we need something called: “Cultural Lag: America as a Country Always One Step Behind Modern, Progressive Nation States.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"> Recent events suggest just how laughable the actions and “ideas” of Americans have become (if only these action and “ideas” did not have such important consequences for the rest of us). They also should encourage some brave soul to write a history of how laggardly Americans have proven to be in their history.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"> Let me offer some historical reasons for this needed new history:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;">1. In 1696, a New England Puritan elite succumbed to a popular hysteria over “witches.” Although this “witch-hunt” was begun in the parochial confines of Salem township and Salem village, Massachusetts, many important Puritan “Divines” were implicated. Even the eminent theologian and scholar, Cotton Mather, was convinced (for a time) of the legitimacy of “spectral” evidence in court proceedings against accused person.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"> All of this might be understandable historically if England and western Europe were of a like mind about the existence of witches. But they were not. They had moved on almost a half-century earlier, passively agreeing that the “witchcraft” threat was unreal, “spectral evidence” ridiculous, and real witches a thing of the “dead” past. But the Puritans knew better, and this would establish a long pattern of old world “wrongness” and new world “rightness” that never seems to have ended.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;">2. In the 1790s, right-wing Americans (yes, they have almost always been with us; maybe we should construct a statue to American right-wing lunatics on the National Mall, and then be done with them) believed there was a conspiracy of the “Illuminati” (a mysterious and almost entirely fictional European brotherhood) and of French revolutionaries to take over the new United States. Among the conspirators were new immigrants (from Ireland, in particular), anyone who was a friend of Benjamin Franklin, almost all journalists, Thomas Jefferson, and, oh yes, anyone who was not a Hamiltonian Federalist (John Adams’s Federalists, well, they probably were not enemies within, but they certainly were not any help either).<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">Two hysterias down, many to go. I will not trouble you with most of them.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;">3. In 1861, the United States and the Southern Confederacy engaged in a “GREAT CIVIL WAR.” The South, you see had gotten a truly idiotic 3/5ths clause into the U. S. Constitution in 1789 (which allowed the South to count the total slave population in any given state as 3/5ths of its total population for establishing the number of representatives that state could send to Congress, or for the apportionment of federal direct taxes in that state -- the latter of which never happened). In addition, the South had constructed a truly Willy Wonka version of its own culture, in which southern culture and manners were superior to culture and manners in the North. To top it off, they had convinced southern poor whites, whom they exploited openly and viciously, that the real problem was the threat of Black slaves. Former Congressman James Louis Petigru of South Carolina had it right when he said on the eve of the “GREAT CIVIL WAR”: “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” At least the latter half of his conclusion might be applicable to the current condition in the United States.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"> “But,” you might protest, “wasn’t the Civil War a noble advance for African-Americans and for American national unity?” Only in the most parochial sense, and American history is nothing if not parochial. Without denigrating Abraham Lincoln and many other noble souls of that period, the fact is that any idea about the validity of chattel slavery had been abandoned by other modern western countries long before the American Civil War. Britain abolished slavery in 1772; Upper Canada abolished slavery in 1793; Lower Canada did so in 1803; and, slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 (granted, it was grandfathered in by making free only those slaves who were six years of age or younger as of January 1, 1834). The new French Republic of France abolished slavery in 1794, and ten years later, taking the ideological lead of the “mother country,” Toussaint L’Ouverture led a slave uprising that declared Haitian independence and ended slavery in Saint Dominque.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"> So, what is the point? The point is that the “idea” of slavery was dead long before American’s grandiosely defeated southern slavery. Oh, and by the way, Jim Crow laws and Southern repression kept African-Americans in a state of near bondage until, well, just yesterday.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">American history is replete with new, modern ideas being implemented first elsewhere, and then later in the U. S., only to be superceded with great fanfare about American originality and leadership.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;">4. Take for instance, the matter of Workmen’s Compensation, a small but important part of the modern labor movement. Great Britain, Germany, and, yes, even the United States, had all developed the ideal of workmen’s compensation in the 1880s. But in the United States at that time -- a nation riven by partisan politics, with both parties to the right of many European political parties – the implementation was slow (partly because of highly politicized and often hostile courts). So, Great Britain introduced a real piece of legislation regarding this matter in 1880, and Otto von Bismarck implemented compulsory workmen’s compensation in Germany in 1884. The province of Ontario followed soon after, in 1886, with its own version of workmen’s compensation. It took the U. S. a bit longer, with a few states near the worldwide vanguard, but most far behind.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"> But to read American textbooks, one would think that the modern labor movement arose in the U. S., and that the U. S. then tutored the rest of the world on how to organize labor.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;">5. It hardly needs repeating that the U. S. has been most laggardly in regard to health care. To read American newspapers and magazines, one would think that the Obama administration -- in <i>Star Trek</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> fashion -- had ventured into territory that no one had dared enter before. But, of course, we all know this to be embarrassingly false. The Obama health plan guaranteed the profits of pharmaceutical companies and guaranteed a new pool of customers for health care insurers. In fact, if heath care insurers were less political and more practical, they would know that if they added in almost all Americans to private plans, the health of Americans would go up, and, and with fewer claims for chronic or emergency care, their profits would also go up.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"> Alas, almost every modern country has national, universal health care of one type or another. But, one can be assured that when the U. S. finally implements such a program, they will have long forgotten the efforts of Harry Truman and Hillary Clinton, to introduce such a program, to say nothing of the long “socialistic” health care experience of almost every other country. They will OWN the invention of modern health care, and historians had better get that right.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"> If anyone thinks I exaggerate in my observation of the American political and cultural landscape, I recommend that they read Alexis de Tocqueville’s <i>Democracy in America</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. This is not a history of the United States, and it must be admitted that it contains the sometimes haughty, highly “constructed” observations of a twenty-something-year-old European aristocrat. But even discounting that, the rampant parochialism and stupidity of American politics as it was just emerging in the 1830s, is made undisputedly clear. (Doubters should read </span><i>The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, published around the same time as </span><i>Democracy in America</i><span style="font-style: normal;">; and </span><i>Flush Times </i><span style="font-style: normal;"> was written by an American!)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"> In reality, it would be useful to have an American history positioned within the context of a larger world. American historians have been moving timidly toward “Atlantic civilization” history, but that is a movement begun long ago by a few Americans, some Canadians, and some British scholars. As it is now, we should have a candid history of American insularity, stupidity and laggardness. But, hey, try to find a publisher.<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-43350093355755638352011-04-28T18:04:00.000-06:002011-04-28T18:04:06.358-06:00A Modest Proposal on U. S. Proof of Citizenship After the national humiliation that was (and perhaps still is) the Obama vs. "birthers" circus, it seems only just that the national government and the collective states do the right thing by establishing an appropriate test for national office-holders. This test would make obsolete the need to find ancient birth certificates yet still meet the standards of those who wish that only true Americans be eligible for national office. After all, what the "birthers" apparently want is a way to deny office to persons who do not understand the constitutional, revolutionary, and christian principles upon which the nation was founded.<div> In the spirit of the "birthers" movement, therefore, I offer the following, simple multiple choice exam that must be passed by any candidate before they can assume the national office to which they are elected. Failure to answer all of the questions correctly will result in their ineligibility to occupy national office.</div><div><br />
</div><div>1. In what part of the U. S. Constitution does the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" appear?</div><div> a. The Preamble</div><div> b. Article I</div><div> c. Article III</div><div> d. The First Amendment</div><div> e. The Fourteenth Amendment</div><div> f. None of the above</div><div> g. All of the above</div><div><br />
</div><div>2. Who penned the final draft of the U. S. Constitution?</div><div> a. George Washington</div><div> b. James Madison</div><div> c. Thomas Jefferson</div><div> d. Gouverneur Morris</div><div> e. Thomas Paine</div><div> f. None of the above</div><div> g. All of the above</div><div><br />
</div><div>3. The opening paragraph of the U. S. Constitution contains which of the following phrases?</div><div> a. ". . . to provide for the general welfare . . ."</div><div> b. ". . . when in the course of human events . . ."</div><div> c. ". . . the equal protection of the laws . . ."</div><div> d. "Congress shall make no law prohibiting the freedom of religion"</div><div> e. "These are the times that try men's souls . . . ."</div><div> f. None of the above</div><div> g. All of the above</div><div><br />
</div><div>4. The Declaration of Independence:</div><div> a. has no status as a constitutional or legal document</div><div> b. was written by a man who was unwilling to admit that he was, in fact, an atheist</div><div> c. was a propaganda document intended to influence European powers</div><div> d. was signed in large handwriting by a Massachusetts politician trying to impress his constituents</div><div> e. was criticized and even ridiculed by some American politicians after the revolution was over</div><div> f. None of the above</div><div> g. All of the above</div><div><br />
</div><div>5. The "Founding Fathers"</div><div> a. were more intelligent than subsequent American politicians</div><div> b. were driven to their success through their broad adherance to The Bible and Christian principles</div><div> c. set aside social, cultural, or economic differences in writing the U. S. Constitution</div><div> d. avidly sought to establish the democratic principle of legal equality for those born in the U.S.</div><div> e. believed that God had guided their hand in writing the Constitution</div><div> f. None of the above</div><div> g. All of the above</div><div><br />
</div><div>6. A majority of the "Founding Fathers" were</div><div> a. religious zealots</div><div> b. Baptists</div><div> c. Anglicans</div><div> d. Catholics</div><div> e. evangelical Christians</div><div> f. None of the above</div><div> g. All of the above</div><div><br />
</div><div>7. Who among the "Founding Fathers" was most religious?</div><div> a. George Washington</div><div> b. Thomas Jefferson</div><div> c. John Adams</div><div> d. Thomas Paine</div><div> e. James Madison</div><div> f. Alexander Hamilton</div><div> g. William Pitt</div><div><br />
</div><div>8. What is the source of the claim that: "God helps those who help themselves"?</div><div> a. The Declaration of Independence</div><div> b. Benjamin Franklin</div><div> c. Thomas Paine</div><div> d. George Washington</div><div> e. The Bible</div><div> f. None of the above</div><div> g. All of the above</div><div><br />
</div><div>9. When were the words "under God" placed in the U. S. Pledge of Allegiance</div><div> a. 1776</div><div> b. 1789</div><div> c. 1865</div><div> d. 1914</div><div> e. the 1930s</div><div> f. the 1950s</div><div> g. the 1990s</div><div><br />
</div><div>10. When the U. S. government began in 1789, to whom did the phrase "We the People" refer:</div><div> a. everyone</div><div> b. white men, women, and children</div><div> c. less than 25% of the entire population of the collective states</div><div> d. more than 25% of the entire population but less than 50% of the population</div><div> e. those born in the U. S., and immigrants who met congressional residency requirements</div><div> f. None of the above</div><div> g. All of the above</div><div><br />
</div><div>[The answers are: 1f; 2d; 3a; 4g; 5f; 6f; 7c; 8b; 9f; 10c] How did you do? By their own admission, John Boehner and Michelle Bachmann failed!!</div><div><br />
</div><div><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-74523755933563005492011-04-27T15:18:00.000-06:002011-04-27T15:18:03.624-06:00Obama and the "birthers" The perceived need for the President of the United States to make public the official long copy of his birth certificate to prove that he is, indeed, a citizen of the U. S. is a shameful moment in the American past. It is likely to prove as embarrassing as John Adams's refusal to stay in Washington, D. C. to see his former friend, Thomas Jefferson, inaugurated. It reminds one of all of the loyalty tests devised during the Cold War, and Joe McCarthy's disgusting brow-beating and berating of those testifying before his committee, and the House on Un-American Activities Committee hauling all sorts of terrified persons before their committee to humiliate the testifier and his/her families and friends.<br />
The fact that President Obama felt compelled to offer this evidence is disgusting in several ways. First, on the political level, it is apparent that the Republican Party leadership had many opportunities and plenty of time to quell the "birther" movement from the start. It did not do so out of fear of its most vocal social (not financial) benefactors on the far, far right. Yet, the Republicans had every interest in doing the right thing. In the 1960s, when former governor of Michigan, George Romney, was considering a run at the presidency, a small number of persons raised the point that Romney had been born in Mexico, not in the U. S., and since the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution states clearly that: "Persons born in the United States are citizens of the Uniteds States and the state wherein they reside," they thought they might have a point. Yet, it had long been understood that children born of American parents while they were abroad were also considered to be American citizens. No political opponents made much of this issue, and Romney remained a legitimate candidate in everyone's eyes until he decided not to run. One would think that one of the current Republican candidates, Mitch Romney, who knows the story of his father's political career full well, would have been loud in his condemnation of those who would keep the "birther" issue alive.<br />
Second, the sub-text of race is hardly hidden by those who oppose President Obama's claim to be a citizen. It has only been about fifty years since African Americans could indeed claim the practical rights of U. S. citizens, and many who deny the legitimacy of his citizenship now would willingly return to the era of the 1950s, when Blacks in most of America knew their place, which was not in public office or even voting for that matter. There is more than a little truth to the fact that right-wing Republicans (and let's face it, they are almost all right wing) sentimentalize the 1950s and would like to return to the Eisenhower era, when true family values prevailed. There was more ugly about the 1950s than good, however. The decade did witness the rise of a broad American middle class, caused by the fact that the U. S. was not devastated by the World War II as was most of Europe and much of Asia, but it was also the era of racism, the suppression of women, and a period of anti-intellectualism.<br />
Finally, the even more disturbing element in the origin's of Obama's birth issue is what it reflects about American notions of the "other." In fact, only American intellectuals would use the term the "other" because most non-intellectual Americans either bask in the misperception that everyone is included in America, or they complain that America is not pure enough, i. e., pure white, conservative, native born, and christian. As I have argued in other places, Americans are not familiar with the outer world, especially that exotic world of Africa and Indonesia (and we might as well say Hawaii, in regard to those who hate the "other") which helped to inform and educate Barack Obama. A majority are ethnocentric. In fact, a majority are xenophobic in a way that only the world's most backward, remote, and traditional nations can be identified as xenophobic. For a country that often lauds its heritage as a land of immigrants, this narrow view of human acceptance is especially troubling.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-58533902371376144092011-03-28T09:14:00.003-06:002011-03-28T09:15:21.698-06:00Post-Democratic America<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b></b><br />
<b><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></div></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b> </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">In a recent opinion column in the NYTimes, Thomas Friedman made the smart connection between Barack Obama’s election to the U. S. presidency and the democratic uprisings in north Africa and the Middle East. Might it not be possible, Friedman ruminated, that the election of a black man to the presidency inspired young, dispossessed members of nations currently ruled by used-up dictators to rebel? It will be an enduring irony of this period of history that a nation and a society – the United States of America – which is in many ways moving rapidly away from the demands of living democracy, has inspired others to take up the “struggle for democracy.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"> The phrase, “Struggle for Democracy,” which has been used in book titles and television series and in common parlance, is an apt one in regard to what democracy is. Democracy is not a place of arrival, it is a process of living together in a nation and a society. Many Americans ascribe to that understanding. Even more Americans struggle in some way for inclusion in their own society, or to extend liberties essential in a democratic state. The political culture of the United States as a whole has eroded into something entirely different, however. The U. S. has arrived at the doorstep of post-democracy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> The phrase – post-democratic – is oxymoronic, of course, but it does describe the process of cultural drift and the evolution of political mental states that has occurred in the U. S. since at least the 1950s. The neo-conservative, consensus history that emerged in the 1950s with historians like Daniel Boorstein, proclaimed a history of fulfillment and accomplishment for American democracy – as if the struggle were over. The election of John F. Kennedy gilded the lily of accomplishment, offering us less an effective presidency than a cult of personality and a royal family Americans could call their own. Then everything went wrong. Political assassinations were followed by the impeachment of Richard Nixon, which was followed by the election of an anti-government president, Ronald Reagan. “Camelot” became a wistful remembrance. Politics became something dirty, something a decent person avoided. And, ordinary citizens and elites alike began to avoid political engagement.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> This decline in a vital political culture in the U. S. was accompanied by the rise of baby boomers who claimed they had a right to prosper, and they did prosper. Indeed, the <i>raison d’etre</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of that generation, despite the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, was not social service and the collective improvement of society (except for a few counter-culture individuals) but one’s own ability to become rich and to hold onto those riches. Baby boomers passed on to their offspring the ideals of material wealth and entitlement. The term democracy elided into something akin to the sanctity of the individual and claims for individual privacy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the importance of politics and government in democratic America was eclipsed by the quest for individual prosperity, greed, and the anti-political, anti-democratic culture of “looking out for number one.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"> The rise of popular culture from the 1950s onward was both symptomatic of these fundamental changes, and a driving force away from democratic political engagement in its own right. Over time, young and old alike could name prominent bands and singers, or members of sports teams, but could not name their congressman/woman or identify the principle political issues of their time. As my students would say with pride, “I am not political.” By our own time, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and prominent Tea Party spokespersons could not even distinguish the different phrases and contents of the Declaration of Independence (which has no legal standing) and the Constitution of the United State. Over the past sixty years, we have not only become “dumbed-down,” we have become proud of our stupidity. It matters not that one knows nothing of complex issues: “this is what I believe, and my opinion is as good as yours.” In contemporary America more than any place on the face of the earth today, one’s mere opinion successfully claims equal status with scientific theory, rational arguments, or even truth itself. In the realities of democratic government, politics as the “art of the possible” has been replaced by ideological certainties born of one’s mere opinions, much to President Obama’s dismay.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> In my own field of America History, the evolution of historiography has been from the prominence of political history in the 1950s to social history in the 1970s and 1980s to the prominence of cultural history today. I respect this shift in emphasis and have participated in it myself but I find that many of today’s American historians have limited understanding of political history and therefore little interest in the issue of democracy, insofar as democracy is a political or governmental matter.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"> It has been suggested to me that in the American context perhaps democracy follows a natural pattern not unlike that of a climax forest. We should all hope that this analogy is appropriate, and that we can anticipate the peaceful decline of the old stands of timber for new growth from the bottom up.<o:p></o:p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-83502748005965884282011-01-21T11:57:00.000-07:002011-01-21T11:57:29.123-07:00Humility Before Civility<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is difficult to discover appropriate “first principles” of social conduct, and we often do a very poor job of sorting out “first principles” from imagined or perceived needs of a secondary order. Over the past half century, for example, we have witnessed a headlong rush to give “the economy” priority over “society.” Protecting and improving “the economy” is the current mythical “first principle” in North America. Although the idea of “the economy” is somewhat abstract, “the economy” never seems to encompass the real local economic needs of ordinary people, and it as often does not even mean the needs of a national economy, but rather some fictive, imagined capitalist dream world and/or the remote and heartless idea of a world economy. No day passes without someone making the absurd declaration that we humans need to serve the gods of economic growth first (usually meaning undisturbed, unalloyed market-capitalism), and the health and other social needs of human beings and societies need to be served second, if at all. Rather than have recognized this no-holds-barred, capitalist ideology for what it is -- a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” and a survivalist, social Darwinism “red in tooth and claw” mentality -- we have allowed “the economy” to assume the vestments of an unimpeachable “first principle” not unlike the “first principles” established by Thomas Aquinas in relationship to Christian theology in the High Middle Ages.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, now, when everyone in the U. S. has come to call for a new “civility” in American politics and life, we are confronted again with the question: should “civility” be recognized as a first principle for human conduct<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and social organization, or, is the “first principle” concept of civility first analogous to the idea of “the economy” outlined above. Is “civility” really a second order condition that flows from some first order idea, just as a good economy should be a second order consequence of a first order emphasis on good societies? Of course, I believe “civility” as the consequence of the success of a more important “first principle” – namely, “humility.” “Civility” is the happy result of widespread “humility.” (And, one could argue, as I have in other blogs, that humility itself is a second order quality derived from empathy, but I will leave that discussion for another time).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be humble is often defined as to be “without pride,” and for this reason humility has failed as it runs up against has the boastful, self-confident, cocksure, mythology of <i>laissez-faire</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> or free market thinking and behavior. This is not to say that people can be perfectly free of personal “pride.” And, if we believe the New Testament to be at least fundamentally accurate as an historical account (as I think we can), then even Jesus sometimes acted in a prideful manner. The implicit assumption in achieving practical humility is that we try to restrain an excess of pride in ourselves.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A more fundamental, rational, and useful way to understand humility as a first principle -- from which civility is a derived consequence -- is to consider humility as the conscious ability to understand that we are not, individually, the measure of all things. Whatever our talents and abilities, other persons have correspondent talents and abilities, and no matter how intellectually or socially accomplished we may be, someone else, indeed, many other people, are more intellectually or socially accomplished than we are. No matter how kind and generous we may be, there are others who are more kind and generous; no matter how smart we may be, there are others smarter. And so on and on.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is always a surprise to me (although it should not be) when I read obituaries, and discover the uniqueness and richness of almost every human life described in those remembrances. It is even more surprising when we are told about the rich and meaningful lives of persons who are the victims of mass killings (as in the recent Tucson case in which six people died in the aftermath of an assassin’s attempt to kill Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords). One of these was a young girl whom one might first guess was just another mall pedestrian but who, as it turned out, was a inquiring young person eager to learn more about democratic politics work. Who would have considered this? Or, who would have guessed that some people, in the midst of the this melee, including a federal judge who was killed, would have heroically intervened to try to stop the killer. The point is not entirely the heroism that people display but the breadth and depth of their lives that emerges from their biographies. To know another person at all, is to recognize the integrity of that person.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We need not feel abject inferiority in the face of the humbling truth that almost every other person we encounter contributes something important to society, and has some quality from which we can learn important individual lessons. In fact, rather than retreat into some kind of Calvinist despair about our unworthiness in the face of this truism, we should consciously and rationally begin to approach every other human being with the understanding that they have some quality or virtue which we undoubtedly wish we possessed, or possessed in a larger measure. Every person we encounter need not prove to us beyond a reasonable doubt that they are virtuous in some specific way. It is simply sensible for us to assume that they are.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we move from accepting the necessity of humility to its operational consequences, we arrive at “civility.” How could we treat any other person with something less than dignity, if we accept the rational argument for humility. Because we are currently living in Mexico, we have come to understand the importance of saying “Buenos Dias” when meeting someone on the street. Mexicans, more than many people on this earth, know the necessity of humility. Acknowledging others on the street, or in passing, used to be a standard element of “civility” but it is interesting that that acknowledgement has now – after the rise of an “every-man-for-himself” market-place ideology – become optional. (Yes, people have baldly told me that whether you greet someone with a “hello” or “how are you” is entirely optional, even with people you already know). </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Small courtesies like taking one’s turn in line or giving someone space to pass you on the sidewalk have fallen into similar disuse, as we fail to acknowledge that others even exist, let alone possess those personal qualities that are similar, equal, or superior to our own. So, if other persons do not matter, if we are not humble in the presence of others, why should we listen to the ideas or opinions of others? Why should we hope for anything other than the elimination of our political opponents? No one used to use the term “bully pulpit,” but it is now used routinely in regard to the advantage that the President of the U. S. possesses in being heard. But the “bully pulpit,” so to speak, is not held in monopoly by the President; legions of others – especially radio hate mongers like Rush Limbaugh – conduct grandiose, uninterrupted monologues in which the worth of other opinions is completely ignored or disdained. Only humility, which is something individuals can come to understand rationally and apply willingly, will provide an antidote to the uncivil behaviors that surround us today.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand, it is not easy to assume that some transformation in American manners and “civility” will soon take place. I have read some journalists who argue that when Joe Welch, the attorney for the U. S. Army in the Army-McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s, finally got thoroughly disgusted with Senator Joe McCarthy’s behavior and resignedly asked, “Senator McCarthy, have you no decency?,” that American “civility” suddenly returned to American life. It did not. The incivility of American life continued, and although it was sometimes pushed underground for a time, incivility has largely remained a chief feature of American political life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, incivilities are more prominent in American history than almost any other element. To name only a few<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“uncivil” cases in historic American political culture – cases having to do with the much vaunted “founding fathers” and their generation -- look at the Matthew Lyon – Roger Griswold assault in Congress in the 1790s, or the vituperative attacks on both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s and early 1800s, or the famous Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel, in which Hamilton was killed by one of the most “promising” political figures of the early 19<sup>th</sup> century. An early American historian, Joanne Freeman, who has written brilliantly on “honor” in early American political life in an earlier book, recently published a revealing article on political violence and the bearing of weapons in Congress from the 1820s through the 1860s. “Incivility” in the form of violence, in Congress, was more pronounced in some periods of American History than it was on the nation’s streets. Freeman is apparently writing a new book on American political violence which will reveal how central “violence” and “incivility” have been in American political life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In regard to more contemporary times, Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent book, <i>Bright-Sided:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, presents another angle on America’s no-humility, no-civility culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While Ehrenreich attacks the false notion that being positive and cheery in one’s outlook and emotions results in greater happiness, health, and prosperity, and while she lambastes the many self-help speakers, organizations, and gurus, and their methods of operation, the most important message to be derived from her well-researched book is that American history from its beginnings has focused on how individual Americans are solely responsible for their own well-being (whether that well-being is spiritual or economic or physical or mental). In my work as an American historian, I have always come to the conclusion that the American perception is that every individual should pursue and possess three things:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>autonomy (freedom to construct one’s own life), authority (freedom from others governing one’s life), and agency (the innate capacity to make whatever you want of yourself). Ehrenreich convincingly details the course of what she calls “bright-sided” positivism from Calvinist beginnings to R. W. Emerson and Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale to almost every management or business school to the American Psychology Association to modern therapists, and so on. The unifying message throughout is that everyone should be positive (in fact, must be positive and cheery), that we are in control of making ourselves better through work, and that failure only happens when we do not consistently act in a positive manner (even if such an attitude is entirely inappropriate in certain circumstances). No wonder the American rich (and even not so rich) today argue that they should keep whatever wealth they have “earned” (when, in fact, they have truly earned very little of the wealth they possess. Fortuitous circumstances of birth and place of residence and education, inheritance, infrastructure, subsidies, a nation not leveled by war in the 1940s, and even chance, are far more important than the usually puny “valued added” work of the individual claiming that “they” earned their wealth).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, where does “humility” fit into my “autonomy, authority, agency” triad, or Ehrenreich’s review of a “self-help culture” that has always pervaded American history and, more importantly, bamboozled gullible Americans? It does not. It cannot. Yet, Americans may yet have “humility” thrust upon them, and have “civility” follow as a consequence. The poor have always discovered the reality and necessity for humility. Many of the poor have also come to realize the promise that humility possesses for some kind of self justification and hope. The way the U. S. is going, there will be many more poor citizens in their future, and they will learn, through experience, all too well the limits of “rugged individualism” or “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” or “naming and claiming wealth” or “owning one’s responsibility for one’s self.” Humility should be embraced as a reasonable necessary condition to civility but future circumstances may well decide the fate of humility and civility for America.<o:p></o:p></div><!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-53258240715605406742011-01-10T14:09:00.002-07:002011-01-10T15:36:59.864-07:00"Eliminationist" America<div class="MsoNormal"> The assassination attempt on the life of Representative Gabrielle Giffords this past weekend has already aroused the old – and sadly too old – American debate (and it is a thoroughly American debate) as to whether this would-be assassin and accomplished killer of six others was a lone deranged person or someone whose acts were stimulated, perhaps even initiated by political rhetoric and an unyielding political right-wing ideology. There is no need to repeat or analyze again the singularities of this case. There is the need for Americans to ask themselves some hard questions about their peculiar “culture,” however.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> The isolated, deranged gunman argument, which I have seen repeated again and again throughout my life, and is repeated today by Ross Douhat in the NY Times is getting harder and harder to support as a simple explanation. American political assassinations are simply too frequent, in comparison to acts of political murder in other “advanced” democratic and modern states, to allow the crazy -loner theory to inure us to such a sorry lament of inevitability. Paul Krugman’s observation in today’s NY Times, that an “eliminationist” political culture is at least partly a factor in this assassination (and I would argue it plays a part in other American political assassinations as well) is closer to the mark in explaining how mentally troubled persons (who can be found in all societies) are tempted to act out their politically bizarre and awful dreams in America.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Many on the so-called American left (N.B.: people living in the sane rest of the world should be reminded that the American “left” is the equivalent to your centre to moderate centre left) blame gun control, which is only a secondary issue in assassinations. Most on the right, as I have said, blame individuals whose mental health has simply failed. As this argument implies, these damaged individuals have become damaged by means of bad hard wiring in their brains or drugs or chemicals or anything that has to do with the discrete individual and nothing to do with the society and culture in which they live.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> The American public – unfortunately including too many American historians -- are keen to proclaim the doctrine of American Exceptionalism as a means to define themselves, and to detach themselves from the evils and inferiorities of a European past. But when it comes to accepting the negative qualities of their “exceptionalism,” such as an historic pattern of political assassinations and attempted assassinations, which are at least as prevalent as any observable positive “exceptionalisms” they may trumpet, they are silent. This hypocrisy is no problem, however, because American exceptionalism allows – no, it insists -- that Americans remain the sole judges of their own behavior and their own past. In a wonderful exercise of tautological thinking, to do otherwise would be to deny their own exceptionalism. Americans need answer to no one but themselves (morally or for purposes of public image) and they are thus free to construct whatever historical narratives and structural arguments that will satisfy their sense of comfort.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> We need to remind ourselves of two necessary truths:</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 45.0pt; text-indent: -9.0pt;">1. <i>American political violence</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> “is as American as cherry pie,” even if H. Rap Brown was wrong on so many other political levels. But, hey, if you are God’s chosen people or at least a culture more favored than any other in the world, you need not seriously address this “manifest tendency” of “manifest destiny.” Even those on the so-called left like to suggest that the latest round of political violence is new, and a product of America “now,” rather than acknowledge that it has been there all along. The “eliminationist” politics that Paul Krugman laments comes, in fact, from a long American heritage beginning with Puritan authoritarianism and the ruthless winner-take-all politics of colonial Virginia through the uncompromising politics of High Federalism and the Essex Junto through Jacksonian extremism and the emergence of the “No Nothing” Party through abolitionists versus slave owners through American industrial capitalists like John D. Rockefeller versus progressivism through the same laissez-faire capitalist ethic of 1920s and 1930s Republicans versus the New Deal and FDR, and on and on (as you all know) to today. If Americans were more familiar with other political traditions: the common law of England; parliamentary democracy and the idea of a “loyal opposition”; minority government and the compromises it imposes; and, just the sheer political humility that some nations – e.g., Germany, by necessity – have come to terms with, Americans might be able to moderate, and perhaps even subdue, the “eliminationist” cancer of their political heritage.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 45.0pt; text-indent: -9.0pt;">2. <i>American ignorance of an outer world </i><span style="font-style: normal;">persists throughout American history. Until recent decades, for example, most American presidents had never traveled nor lived abroad. Most Americans (other than the very rich), historically did not travel abroad at all, and when they did they often incubated themselves from the “locals” and their culture. The flagship of American travel today is the “Luxury Cruise,” which isolates travelers just about as completely as anything can from encounters with another culture. Many Americans love to be tourists but most do not want to be travelers or to live, even for a moment, the life of the expatriate. Until Americans grow more curious of the outer world (not the outer world of empire, or the world they felt they had to subdue), their hope for their own inner political peace is not likely to be fulfilled.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal">[N.B. It is necessary to always state the following caveat regarding my political blogs: what I write above does not apply to twenty to thirty per cent of American citizenry at any given time in recent American history. Diane Athill in her book <i>Stet</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> talks of hoping and trying to be in the thirty per cent or so of all persons in the world who are thoughtful, reflective, generous, and broad-minded. I believe that that many Americans have also always been in that category, including many Republicans I know. Unfortunately, twenty to thirty per cent does not equal the fifty to sixty per cent that would improve American culture and democracy.]</span></div><div class="MsoNormal">Jan. 10, 2011 Tlaquepaque, Mexico<o:p></o:p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-69337047154801919162010-11-13T18:56:00.000-07:002010-11-13T18:57:33.652-07:00America’s Near Future and the Failure of American History<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px; "><b> </b></span><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>It must be clear by now that, in a few more years or a few more decades,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>the U. S. A. will no longer be the chief arbiter of relations among nations. It will not be the world’s primary democracy nor the political beacon for emerging free societies. It will not be the hub of the world economy, and its dollar will not be the center around which other currencies will orbit.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Yet, contrary to those who subscribe to linear historical inevitability, it will not “collapse” (in some Jared Diamond conceptualization of societal collapses). It still has massive agricultural resources, industrial capacity, and educational/intellectual potential. It could even become a leader in what we now call “alternative energy” or the “eco-friendly” revolution. (We call this “future” by various names but what it will be – very soon -- is simply what we will come to accept as the normative future in terms of energy-power, human interrelations, human mobility, and so on).</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Like other modern nation-states that have felt the sting – and the embarrassment – of losing their leading roles on the center-stage of the world’s nation-states, the U. S. will go through a transition of denial. England, or what became the U. K., lost its primacy in the West in 1919. It did not recognize this loss for several decades, although it did recede from empire to commonwealth with more grace than India, for example, may be willing to acknowledge. France lost its moral center in 1940, disgraced itself in Vietnam and some of its other former colonies, and grudgingly gave up its European continental importance (in the 1950s) in favor of a gallic sense of internal, cultural superiority (starting with De Gaulle and lasting until Sarkozy).</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>The U. S. will react to its decline in a more exaggerated way than either the U. K. or France have done. Although the two latter nations are renowned for their haughty claims to cultural superiority, and for their too frequent displays of insular “jingoism,” the U. S. is an even more profoundly proud and smug nation. Its origins are based on a mythology of colonial rebellion against religious authority and arbitrary government. Its two central historical motifs – the American Revolution and the Civil War – have to do with victories for local autonomy and self-rule, in regard to the former, and the morally purposeful, industrialized, unified nation-state, in regard to the latter. “Conquering” the “empty” frontier, “stabilizing” the Western Hemisphere, and “Saving the World for Democracy” through the two World Wars, have further gilded the ornate frame around the mirror into which all Americans gaze narcissistically.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>What do Americans see as they peer, seemingly perpetually, into that elaborately framed mirror? They see EXCEPTIONALISM writ large. American historical debates about who they are as Americans, or how they got here, may be sharply debated between leftist historians and rightist historians, but both sides agree that Americans have possessed, and continue to possess, a special “genius” not shared – indeed, not shareable – with or among other peoples of the world. American ideals may or may not have been achieved, depending on which group of historians (past or present) one is reading, but they are special American ideals, and not international ones.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>American “EXCEPTIONALISM” has been supported by most importantly by one thing – American historians. The products of these historians have represented a nation in ways that are largely self-congratulatory and entirely self-referential. It is true that a few American historians have refused to play that game, but most American historians deal in the matter of:<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“how did we get to be so good and great” or “how did we fail, given our special dispensation of historical grace, to become so good or great”? The proof of this failure of written American history is to be seen in what American historians study and write about, and what they do not study or write about. Much of American history has been political, and much of that political history has been “heroic.” Until recently, it has been top-down history, from presidents down to mayors and city councils. Witness, for example, the “PBS New Hour” having a “presidential historians” panel, but no other American history panel. American History is an in-house game. Although many British and French historians, for example, live in and were educated in countries other than the U. K. of France, very few American historians are to be found outside the U. S. For ordinary Americans, what happens in America, stays in America. Its borders are sharp. Canada and Mexico might as well be the North Pole and Antartica. It is true that a few American historians have now ventured into things like “Atlantic Culture History” which links the U. S. to England and Europe. But, American History is mainly limited to the continental geography of the U. S. (Hawaii and Alaska intrude uncomfortably, occupying folding chairs at the family dinner table). When American historians are adventuresome, they consider things like “popular culture,” which, of course, is an American product with world derivations. Comparative history, which exists in the rest of the historical world, is an unknown thing to Americans and American historians. How, after all, can America be compared to anything else?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>So, the prospectus for how Americans will react in the next few decades to what is only a partial demise in their importance, is not a promising one. Their claims of exceptionalism are likely to become more shrill. Their detestation for the “other,” in all forms, is likely to become more extreme. The best the rest of the world can do is to try to welcome Americans into the broader world, and that may take a great deal of good will and time.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-89301982337017591072010-06-16T20:02:00.002-06:002010-06-16T20:06:43.089-06:00The Destructiveness of Words<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>In the last two days, we have heard two people use words that say more than they, and even we, want to acknowledge. First, President Obama, in his speech yesterday, referred to people in Louisiana and Alabama as “our neighbors.” I do not believe that anyone, even those criticizing the speech for partisan reasons, has picked up on this “mistake.” If the President were queried on the matter, I am certain that he would say that he meant that all Americans who did not live in those two states were neighbors of those who have suffered misfortune, etc., etc. In fact, however, Louisianans and Alabamans are full citizens of the United States; they are not “neighbors”; they are part of the nation, just as equal as any other members of the union. “Our neighbors” are Mexico and Canada. In a previous blog, I said that American ethnocentrism was not just a national siege mentality against a hostile outer world but was reflective of a strong regional disparity in the U. S., where even various parts of the U. S. A. were like foreign and strange territory to those who do not live in them. So much for democratic national solidarity. Poor Louisiana; poor Alabama. It is Katrina redux.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Today, Carl-Henric Svanberg, the president of British Petroleum (they would like to be known as BP in order to take on a greater world-wide glamour, and in order to attract more stockholders) said that he wanted to help the “small people” of the Louisiana and Alabama coast. The Huffington Post (huffing as usual) and other media latched on to this mistake. Tonight, on the PBS Newshour, Mr. Dudley, a clever spokesperson for BP, excused the Swedish president of BP, claiming that his president speaks English as a second language, and that he meant “small business people” not lesser people. Carl-Henric Svanberg almost certainly learned English as a young boy. He likely knows how to speak and write the English language better than most Americans. So, you may be assured, you can keep the “small people” reference in your mind for what was meant – people poorer, weaker, and more impotent than Mr. Svanberg and his capitalist executive colleagues.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Language means something. Who among us has not said something truly destructive to those we love, and we know that what we said had some kind of truth to it even though we immediately want to disown that truth. The President of the U. S. (who almost certainly has not even thought of “neighbors” as a mistake) has just made one of those irretrievable mistakes. Mr. Svanberg has more graphically made the mistake. And, what are the messages? First, it is still a world of “them” and “us.” In the U. S., it is a matter of “I’m all right, Jack.” In the larger capitalist world, it is a matter of large capital versus, well, everyone else, and everyone else, in the end, loses. In both cases, the real substance of “democracy” loses.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>There is a tragedy beyond this. As everyone speaks the language of human-being superiority, animals throughout the northern Gulf of Mexico are in truly mortal danger. A new genocide, of sorts, is being played out. We will not lament, and shed our false tears, until someone like David Attenborough comes along ten years from now and documents the whole thing. By then, it will just be sentimentality. And, while you are at it, you might shed a false tear for democracy as well.</p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-69335804266731390582010-05-24T19:24:00.007-06:002010-05-25T18:52:21.941-06:00The (Im)perfect Storm<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>"Flash in the Pan" is the archaic phrase that comes most to my mind when I consider the history of the American republic and its latter-day, very short-lived empire. As an American historian, I have sometimes questioned my choice to teach and do research in the subject of American history. After all, many of the so-called "founders" of the nation thought they had failed at conception. And, the America that properly emerged victorious and confident after World War II did not last for more than a brief moment. Cold War insecurity led to dominance over mainly second and third-world nations (e.g., Vietnam) who in turn became surrogate client states that prove the adage: "the tail that wags the dog." Now the great nation -- and it was a great nation -- slips away with little effort to preserve itself as a nation, let alone as a nation with pretensions to lead the world in public morality and goodness.<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Three elements have converged to guarantee the rack-and-ruin of the U. S.A. They have combined to form a "perfect storm" from which Americans and, alas, perhaps the rest of us, cannot easily escape. Only one of these elements can claim any pretense to virtue.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>1. <b>Libertarianism</b> -- The American ideal of "liberty," born in the colonial period and brought forward in the American Revolution was truly revolutionary for its age. Without going through a discourse on the history of liberty in the last two hundred odd years, let's just say that it was a grand idea. But at least in the last thirty years that idea has suffered from distention. It has become a coarse and grotesque corruption of itself. Liberty has now become libertarianism. "Leave me alone, I want to be completely free!" In other words, I have no obligations other than to myself. Government is not just a necessary evil (as many in the 18th century would admit) but a complete evil. Regulations of any sort (other than traffic regulations) are anathema to being American, or so these ill-educated, myopic ethnocentrists contend.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>2. <b>The Public Interest</b> -- No one in the U.S.A. dares any longer to argue that there is a "public interest" to be considered and protected. The U.S. Supreme Court proved recently in the <i>Citizens United</i> case that even "THEY" no longer identify a "public interest." No appeals to the needs of society or the needs of the nation, let alone the needs of the world and humanity, have any cache with Americans. There is "<b>my"</b> interest and nothing else.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>3. <b>Ethnocentrism </b>-- Americans are a self-referential people. They look in the mirror and gage the rest of the world by what they see. Many of them may be"tourists" but most of them are not travelers. A small and significant number of Americans understand the "outer world" or what most Americans call the "overseas" world (even "overseas" when they are talking about Canada and Mexico). But that minority does not count at all in terms of developing a national consciousness. Instead, most Americans are ignorant of the rest of the world or fearful of the rest of the world. All but the traveling minority are scornful of the rest of the world. But it is worse than that. Most observers and commentators on the American nation (well, most since Alexis de Toqueville) assume there is a spirit of national unity in the U.S. There was, but it has largely disappeared. Americans see themselves as Virginians or Californians more than they see themselves as Americans. Few yet see themselves as "citizens of the world," as Thomas Paine declared himself to be. (Paine made a big mistake in that. Although he was an American citizen, and obviously did much to further the success of the American revolution, George Washington -- yeh, the big guy himself -- refused to retrieve Paine from a French prison during the French Revolution because, in Washington's opinion, Paine had relinquished his American citizenship by going to France and becoming a representative in their National Convention. Washington's refusal to save Paine was a harbinger of all things to come in American ethnocentrism). Narrow-minded, parochial, ignorant of and fearful of the rest of the world, Americans have imprisoned themselves in their own country.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>So, what does this have to do with a perfect storm? Well, it helps to explain a lot about the tepid, almost ho-hum, attitude of Americans to the Katrina disaster and now to the Gulf of Mexico oil surge disaster. If we all want to just be ourselves, and if we have never heard of the idea of a public interest, and if everyone who lives outside our region is considered an outlander, then how can there be any response? Katrina and the oil disaster (which will probably be far, far worse than even the most negative experts claim) are just chapters in many "perfect storms" to come. The Americans have no means at their disposal to deal with any of them. Libertarianism is their individual refusal of responsibility. A lack of a sense of a public interest means that no agencies, government or otherwise, can intervene in disaster unless they do so completely on their own, without public support. Ethnocentrism leads to a sense that disaster can never touch "my" region or my home; no hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes will deprive me of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>There are reformists impulses in American society, and many Americans would like to change many things. But the prospects for this happening in the foreseeable future are dim.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-12086762274624747202010-05-06T18:22:00.001-06:002010-05-06T18:24:00.457-06:00What “Freedom” are we Talking About?<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-weight:normal"> The <i>reductio ad absurdum </i></span>of “freedom” and “liberty” that has become the mantra and entire ideological “argument” of the right-winger movement in the U. S. A. (usually but not exclusively known as the Republican Party) needs more examination. Since the right-wing will not be addressing or defining what they mean by “freedom,” I will volunteer some definitions.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Most people probably assume that freedom is a pretty simple concept, and that everyone shares their definition of freedom and what freedom encompasses. But starting with John Stuart Mill and moving on with Isaiah Berlin in the mid-twentieth century and then Charles Taylor and others more recently, freedom has been increasingly seen as meaning at least one of two things:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>1) freedom as a removal of shackles or restraints, and 2) freedom as permission and opportunity to create something, do something, to take positive action in some regard. The first – known as negative liberty or negative freedom – has an illustrious history in things like the end of slavery or the end of a censured press. The second – known as positive liberty or positive freedom – has an illustrious history in things like society or state-driven economic reforms or social justice reforms.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Paradox and irony do not begin to describe how the modern right-wing has twisted the concepts of negative and positive freedoms into comical parodies of all real freedom. First, the right-wing refuses to see any positive liberty because they refuse to see any role for the state, and <i>ipso facto</i><span style="font-style:normal">, with no state there are no social and economic reforms and justices to be addressed. Some question whether there is such a thing as society at all, following the famous dictum attributed to Margaret Thacher that “there are no societies, there are only individuals and families.” The right-wing’s world of besieged families resisting outside influences as if they were defenders of the Alamo, and their Ayn Rand world of bizarre fictional individuals who robustly and egoistically fashion their lives with little social assistance, defy the realities of a real world of mass populations and that world’s vast historical accomplishments in everything from health to education to economic well being that have been produced through the collective efforts of societies. Thomas Paine, a friend of free market ideas and an opponent of strong governments, nevertheless believed that human beings naturally formed societies, and that society was the fundamental basis for both public and individual good. In short, ignoring historical realities and real modern needs, the right-wing does not recognize positive the legitimacy of positive freedom at all.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Oddly, the right-wing now seems to outdo itself in idiocy when it comes to distending its natural penchant for negative freedom. The thirty-year revolution that began with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thacher seemed grounded, at first, in old (some would also say respectable) ideas about <i>laissez-faire</i><span style="font-style:normal"> capitalism, low taxes, and a minimal state. Those ideas, which admitted some idea of limitations, have now taken on an unlimited character:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>capitalism should be left entirely unfettered; no taxes should be passed (well, unless you are fighting a war for the empire somewhere); and the state should wither and disappear altogether (they seem to know little about their ultimate affinity with Karl Marx). Many who advocate such things as unregulated capitalism are the unknowing (and sometimes knowing) stooges of big corporations and investment banking. But lately, this extension of “pure” freedom has had some very strange consequences (one would say amusing if one did not give a damn for the world and human life in general):</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.25in">1. Tea Party members and other right wingers demanding lower taxes, despite the fact that some 40+% of Tea Party advocates, under new tax breaks for the middle and lower classes, do not need to pay any tax at all. In fact, some 45% or more of American households do not need to pay any federal income tax. See Gail Collins amusing blog in the NYTimes “Celebrating the Joys of April 15” (April, 15, 2010) for other interesting statistics on a tax regimen that angers the right because those with big incomes (one can hardly call them “earners”) pay most of the bill.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.25in">2. A Supreme Court which in its “supreme wisdom” has declared corporations of all sorts eligible for First Amendment free speech protections. Not only did the Court overrule a lot of impressive precedent, they gave a new, rightist, purist definition to “person” which defies reason and the Constitution. (I have said more on this elsewhere and could say much more, but it would not matter. <i>Citizens United</i><span style="font-style:normal"> is the Dred Scott case of the 21<sup>st</sup> century; it has the same apparent logic and the same catastrophic unreality).</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.25in">3. An oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that will have long term effects, and begs the question as to whether deep off-shore drilling can be done at all. Yet, several Republican right wingers have used this “opportunity” to ask for more off-shore drilling, in complete defiance of what has just happened and of reason itself.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.25in">4. A terrorist attempt in Times Square in NYC that has right wingers falling over themselves to proclaim their full attachment to the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution (wrongly interpreted as it is), and pledging their troth to the practice of even those on a terrorist watch list having the “right” to bear arms.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">So, what do we have here? On one level, we have people so uneducated (in what we used to call “Civics”) and so simple-minded as to demand an absolutist interpretation of freedom. On another level, we have people living in fictive worlds of their own, very strange, imaginations. “Avatar,” the movie, is not much ahead of the curve. Many right wingers have in fact made themselves into “avatars.” They live in a world they imagine, or think they want. Reality plays a very small role in this exercise of freedom.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In the end, I think of the words from “Me and Bobby McGhee” – “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Total negative freedom is total alienation, and the right wing is certainly alienated from society, and perhaps now from themselves.<o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-15482184738126363762010-02-28T12:45:00.006-07:002010-02-28T12:51:02.850-07:00Talk Is Cheap (and priceless)<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;">
</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;"><span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-weight: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>My father was not taciturn in his speech but he did think that actions spoke louder than words. Among his most firmly held beliefs was his conviction that the material consequences of the work he accomplished – water well drilling and plumbing -- would speak to the memory of his existence. I know some of my father’s inventions. He crafted (invented) a well-drilling rig on a homemade oak and steel frame, for example, and short of both money and access to proper well drilling equipment he made many of his own heavy tools. Unfortunately, unlike the visible fruits of labor of sculptors or architects, my father’s work was inconspicuous except to the few who chanced to examine it at close range. Still, what one did rather than what one wrote or spoke, was what mattered most to him. He did not disdain the written and spoken word but neither did he think that either was as important as the useful knowledge of the craftsman. In his mind, “book learning” was not bad; it was just secondary to the invention that flowed from experience in material crafts. For my father, those who talked were worse than those who wrote. Almost every time after having had to listen to someone talk too much (and, on more than one occasion, that included his two sons and his daughter), he would mutter:</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">“the empty wagon is the one that makes the most noise.”</span></span></b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>I cherish the memory of accompanying my father to drill wells with his improvised machinery, and of watching him solve a knotty plumbing problem. But I also wish that I had some verbal or oral artifacts of his life to pass along to my sons and grandsons. I only have vague ideas about his life between his birth in 1896 and WWI. I know he briefly joined the “Wobblies” (IWW) (a “youthful mistake,” he later told me) while training as a steamfitter in Detroit, and I know that he was inducted into the U. S. Army late enough in the WWI to avoid being sent “over there.” His life in the 1920s and 1930s – those were all depression years where we came from -- and even much of the 1940s will always remain obscure to those few of us who still remember him. What my brother and sister and I recall of him are more the incomplete remembrances of children and adolescents than of keen observers.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>Neither my brother nor my sister and I ever shared my father’s view on the limited value of books. We all read a fair amount (my brother read an enormous amount), and I entered a profession that required constant reading. For a long time, however, I probably shared some of my father’s prejudice about “talk.” Perhaps my ill-formed diminution of “talk” or oral sources was reinforced because I am an 18</span><sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">th</span></sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> century historian, whose primary sources are manuscripts. I have always loved research that involved diaries, journals, letters, even commonplace books and almanacs, and I have always pitied those poor modern historians who had to use lesser materials like radio broadcasts and film and oral history evidence. Oral, spoken evidence was too light, too transient, too unreflective, and too “cheap” to for me to take seriously.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></span>For the past year now, I have been conducting oral history interviews of persons who were engaged in the founding and early development of the university where I spent my career – The University of Lethbridge. Because it was not founded until 1967, many of its earliest members are still able to remember well their involvement in that university’s early years. Yet, my initial motives were more negative than positive in regard to recording these interviews. Instead of lauding the richness of oral history interviews, I too often have said (and still say), that the regrettable lack of written sources about this university’s first formative years makes the use of oral history sources necessary. No one has left rich diary and journal sources. No one’s correspondence remains extant, and since the rise of computers and email, it is certain that useful electronic source materials disappear in a nano-second as well. So, I sigh and lament that all I can do is record fifty or so oral history interviews (twenty-seven are completed as of this date). Because I have the time, I usually add with little enthusiasm, that I might as well finish this project on the first generation of the U of L out of duty. These interviews just have to be done, I suggest with the tone of voice of someone who must wash the evening dishes. Before I began the project, I also said to myself (and no one else) that these interviews would be like mining some low-grade ore field, looking for a few nuggets valuable enough to keep. I thought I was looking for a few meager answers to specific questions about the origins, policies, programs, governance, liberal education, and people of the first decade of the University’s existence.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> I was wrong, of course, and after my first interviews, I slowly began to distance myself from my snobbery and weak prejudices. What I found were fascinating, highly varied, stories about childhoods and personal educational experiences. Arcs of personal narrative, of personal history, emerged in the earliest interviews and have continued ever since. The enormous achievements of my colleagues in their personal and professional lives made me much more humble about my own accomplishments, and made me respect the fullness of everyone’s life when put into an autobiographical context. I have put most of my pre-planned, specific questions aside. I now start each interview with no notes. I just try to encourage interviewees to describe their lives, and then we proceed largely on autopilot. I eventually “converse” too much with everyone I record, but what my interviewees say is so evocative of our shared past that I often cannot keep my mouth shut (my father was right, at least about me). I now find myself contemplating more openly the views of others about teaching or research or curricula or programs or liberal education that I once resisted openly and forcefully. With every new interview, my respect for oral history sources increases.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> This is not to say that I am blind to the shortcomings of oral history. Remembrance of the past well after the occurrence of events is problematical at best. Autobiographies – which oral history interviews are in short form -- are one of the weakest forms of historical evidence. My personal narrative, biographic approach creates incomplete and false historical narratives. My role as an interviewer who converses with his subjects – and one who was a participant in or observer of most of the events discussed – further distorts any objective picture of the past. But, look at those written sources I used to admire above all others. Personal letters are carefully crafted to address a specific reader. Diaries and journals are biographical and generally written in a self-serving manner. It is true that if one puts together a large enough body of someone’s personal correspondence and self-reflective writing, a subtext of unintended truths seep out of this verbal self-justification. Yet, I have seen subtle, undeclared truths about the character or essential nature of my interviewees seep out of an hour and a half to a two-hour interview as well.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> As a late convert to oral history, I cannot tell you how much I would now give to be able to turn on my digital recorder and talk to my father for two hours. Since I cannot, I urge the rest of you to sit down and record the stories of your family or friends. You do not have to wait until someone is old; interviews of young children also produce amazing results. While the most astute interviewer cannot get a subject to recreate the past accurately even the most novice interviewer can conduct an oral interview that will produce an astounding record of their interviewee’s experiences, ideas, and feelings.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> I am just reading a memoir by Studs Terkel, the famous Chicago interviewer and raconteur, entitled </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Touch and Go</span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">. Terkel knew, and inevitably interviewed, an enormous range of the rich and famous. But, as he puts it, he is (was; he died last year) really someone who has “been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us, for lending voice to the face in the crowd.” According to him, his epiphany in this regard came at a public housing project in Chicago where he recorded a young mother.</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Here is what Terkel says:</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.25in"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I don’t remember whether she was white or black. The place was mixed. She was pretty, skinny, with bad teeth. It was the first time she had encountered a tape recorder. Her little kids, about four of them, demanded a replay. They insisted on hearing mama’s voice. I pressed the button. They howled with delight. She put her hands to her mouth and gasped. “I never knew I felt that way.” She was astonished, sure, but no more than I was. Such astonishments have always been forthcoming from the etceteras of history. Ever since the Year One.</span></span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-12170521346356902992010-01-28T18:09:00.007-07:002010-01-28T18:59:58.531-07:00A Modest Proposal: Mexico, Canada, and the "Citizens United" decision<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As a loyal Canadian, and someone devoted to American constitutionalism, let me make the following "modest proposal" (with apologies to<i> </i>Jonathan Swift). <b>Pemex</b>, the state oil company of Mexico, and <b>Petro-Canada</b>, the at-arms-length-from-direct-government-control Canadian petroleum company, should form an American "dumby" corporation -- what used to be called in the good old days, before Progressivism ruined everything in the early 20th century, a "holding" company. This company could incorporate in N. J. or N. Y. or Massachusetts, or wherever the most troublesome progressive Democrats and judges run for office. (Any first-year law student should be able to write up articles of incorporation that will pass muster in the U. S. and in these states).<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Once this corporation is established, it can support candidates for federal office in the U. S., or for elected judges who might be critical to decisions important to Canadian-Mexican interests. Better yet, as a "new citizen" of the U. S., this corporation -- let's call it "Friends of American Democracy" or maybe "F___k American Democracy," both say the same thing in modern American political double-speak -- can work to defeat candidates who think that the Mexicans are just a little too lax in the methods they use to extract oil or distribute and refine it, or who think the Alberta oil sands (i.e., "tar sands") are an environmental corruption.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In addition, being the largest suppliers of oil to the U. S. -- something Americans cannot grasp given American fascination with a Middle East that always puzzles them -- Mexico and Canada can demand some <i>quid pro quo</i> from the U. S. Congress. In regard to the Mexican half of our new "F_____ American Democracy" "new-citizen" corporation, how about getting candidates to oppose any fence across Mexico's northern border, giving full amnesty to illegal immigrants working in the U. S. (i. e., those Mexicans who almost always out-perform Americans incapable of competing with them in wages or in quality of work), and engineering a special deal for poor Mexican corn growers who cannot compete against corn from the Midwest U. S. -- corn that is subsidized by as much as 50% of crop value. Canadians can demand that Americans quit harassing their border with idiotic security plans that have little or nothing to do with security. Canadians might want to get an even better auto-pact, and other trade advantages.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Mexicans and Canadians should revel in the opportunities that the <i>Citizens United</i> decision affords them. A few million dollars is nothing -- truly nothing -- compared to the advantages that these two countries might exact from a nation that does not even know that they -- Mexico and Canada -- exist. (For American readers, let me remind you that <b>Mexico </b>is that strange elongated one to the south, the one that used to own California and New Mexico and Arizona, and , oh yes, Texas. <b>Canada </b>is the cold one to the north -- but you knew that, didn't you -- the second largest country in landmass in the world). Oh, but you say that you know that tourists go to Mexico: well, then, maybe Mexico could get a special tax on American tourists who loiter on their beaches. Oh, and you have heard of Eskimos (they aren't all American, you know) and baby seals so maybe Canada could get the U. S. to end any contention over Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic. Jeez, you have to love the American brand of democracy and the <i>Citizens United </i>Supreme Court ruling. Americans truly are ahead of the rest of the world. They have seen the intelligence in giving away their manufacturing to anyone who will work for a penny an hour less than will their workers, in exchange for the celestial level of having a "service" economy only. And, best of all, they are willing to sell the bothersome governance of their country, and the decisions of their judges, to the highest bidder. What genius!!</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-625777033290727001.post-20841010774142575252010-01-22T16:17:00.006-07:002010-01-22T16:24:55.837-07:00From Liberty to Libertarianism to Anarchy<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote></blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> am as flabbergasted as anyone about the decision by the U. S. Supreme Court in the case of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission</span></span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. Accompanied as it is by the probable death of any U. S. health care reform, the U. S. Senate victory by the Republicans in Massachusetts, and what appears to be the expulsion of the Obama administration to the political wilderness, everyone should be alarmed about the future that lies before us. Because I assume this blog is read by my Canadian friends primarily, I want to emphasize that the current of events in the U. S. is important to Canadians as well. As a student of U. S. Constitutional History, I can assure everyone that this is decision with monumental implications.</span></span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Supreme Court decision in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Citizens United</span></span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> reversed precedent set and expanded and repeated since 1907 regarding the prohibition of corporations involving themselves in financing campaigns for or against political candidates. It is impossible to conclude anything other than that ideology alone drove the majority of the court. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion implies that it is too difficult in modern times, with a huge variety of ways of speaking and technologies to convey that speech, to discriminate among speakers. And, in a kind of wave of the hand, tossing aside lightly the enormous weight of precedent, Kennedy essentially comes down on the side of a fully libertarian vision of First Amendment rights. Remember, this is a country and a court that has and does limit speech in all sorts of ways if they think that speech inimical to the peaceful maintenance of the state, and often if they merely think that speech is radical. And, they have often restricted, by one means or another, not only who can be heard but who can speak as well.</span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-style:normal"><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Justice Stevens -- in a dissent made enormously long (90pgs.) because he had to repeat all of the weight of precedent, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">stare decisis</span></span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, and old arguments -- put the real argument against this new ruling by the Court by emphasizing that the Court is giving corporations new stature under the idea of protecting speech for individuals. As he said, </span></span></span></span></span></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-style:normal"><span style="font-style:normal"><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in"></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in"><span style="color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.”</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in"><span style="color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">In the 19</span></span><sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">th</span></span></sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> century, corporations were given the standing of “persons” for legal purposes and for certain limited rights (e. g., the right to sue and be sued), but not because anyone seriously thought that a corporation was a person in body or mind. The corporation is a fiction, and it constitutes only a fictive “person” for legal convenience.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Stevens also attacks the effects of this decision. Although assumed effects have less argumentative weight in constitutional law than fundamental principles and precedent, in this case the evidence of what is going to happen is overwhelming. Corporations will have it in their power, through clever and careful manipulation and the means to control most public speech (aside from the internet and private correspondence), and to decide the outcome of elections – no matter how vigilant the electorate may be. “One cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre and cause a panic,” so said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., but the majority of the current court is quite willing to let a corporation openly, or at arms–length or behind layers of third and fourth party front-organizations, spend millions of dollars to destroy any candidate they wish through powerful devices of propaganda expertly and precisely employed. Public lives will be ruined. Private lives will be ruined. An electoral panic for against candidates will ensue. Only the wealthy friends of corporations need apply for high public office. The greater part of the American democracy will shun politics even more than they do now. The consequences may be catastrophic.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The U. S. Supreme Court’s decision, however, is just part of a larger mudslide, a larger erosion around the very foundations of American society. This slide has its origins in leftist lifestyles as much as rightist politics. “Do your own thing” liberalism married to private profit-motive </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">laissez-faire</span></span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> capitalism has produced a powerful libertarian offspring. That offspring is now well out of hand. Thomas Frank’s observations on </span></span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Bill Moyer’s Journal</span></span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> last week (Jan. 15) are chilling in the context of the </span></span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Citizens United</span></span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> case. I thought Frank a bit extravagant in his argument that the Right wants to destroy government altogether by crippling its authority and by placing advocates of radical libertarian principles into office (in short, sycophants or toadies who will destroy government). After this court decision, I am not so certain that he overstates things by much. Ironically, I do believe that the Right wants a powerful central state insofar as the military is concerned – a military that can force other countries to abandon their own free will.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> Even more problematical is the heightened unreality about many things that has come to inhabit the minds of many people. The “birthers” are unwilling to believe birth records; Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck are willing to bend facts to suit their larger “truths”; Canadians are told that they do not like the health care system they have despite the fact that all evidence is to the contrary. It gets worse. While Neil Postman may have been correct a few years ago in claiming that we were, as stated in his book title, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Amusing Ourselves to Death</span></span></i><span style="font-style:normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, he has drastically undershot the mark. We have not just abandon thought and reflection through our attachment to instruments like television, we have become unable to discern truth from fiction. The two have begun to merge seamlessly, and as truth and fiction merge, we get the most outrageous claims about what is and what should be. Now we live two lives, our mundane existence (if we are indeed attached to that existence at all) and the life of our avatar. We are more than one step beyond the existentialist denial of “essences.” We now think we can shape and re-shape ourselves into many different persons. In the process, we are becoming “no person.” “No person” is quite willing to be shaped by the visual media into whatever is available, and “No Person” does not want anyone – family, society, or government – to spoil their delusion. “No Person” is quite eligible for the manipulations of corporate America in the political arena.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> In our household (and I do mean that others in our family have arrived at their own independent opinions on American affairs), we used to sigh at what we saw as wrong-headed policies, grit our teeth at the election of bobble-heads, and shout at the TV over stupid decision-making. I cannot speak for others but I am now getting a little frightened, perhaps not for me, but for the future, for my family and my friends who must contend with this world for another half century or more.</span></span><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0