First Impressions & Second Thoughts

NO PUBLIC IN THE "PUBLIC" SCHOOLS

2012-01-21T16:39:00.000-07:00

When the grades came out, the Las Cruces Public School District demonstrated once again its consistent less-than-mediocre performance. Nearly half of its schools received below-average grades of D or F. The same was true of the public schools, taken as a whole, throughout the state. This poor report card is consistent with the results of other evaluations such as the state’s reading and mathematics proficiency tests and National Education Assessment Program tests. All of them agree: public education in New Mexico ranks in the lowest five percent of all states.

When the report card is poor, state “educrats” invariably complain about flaws in the methodology underlying the results. And they are right, up to a not-very-distant point; all evaluations have imperfections. But no one needs to pursue educrats’ obfuscatory, specious, or tendentious nit-picks to know that when all methods indicate the same mediocre or worse results, they are likely collectively and reliably reflecting a truth. In response to which, local school boards and superintendents do little more than issue press releases.

Thus, the LCPS District responded with typical hypocrisy and implicit blame-sharing, if not blame-shifting. Superintendent Stan Rounds stated that the district was “today asking every parent, every parent of every child to step up with us in a partnership here to move our kids forward, to accelerate them. This is a good wake-up call for all of us to hold hands and do that, to recommit ourselves.” The hypocrisy is the pretense of wishing parental participation in public education. Rounds neither stated nor promised specifics for this process of stepping-up or partnering or committing. Step up to what and how? Partnership how and with whom? Commit to what?

The record shows that the District does not want parental or citizen participation in District affairs. The exceptions have been the two redistricting committees, both of which performed admirably. Yet neither the School Board nor the Superintendent has seen their success as urging a continuing, constructive role for parents and other citizens to help the District and improve public education. Indeed, on the Superintendent’s watch, the School Board reformed its policy on standing committees, which had lapsed, by eliminating them altogether. His advisory committee is a compliant construct of no consequence.

But parental and citizen participation can support high-quality education. I have extended experience with superior public school systems in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Fairfax County, Virginia. Both graduate most of their students; both send most of their graduates to colleges, many among the best in the country. Both expect, encourage, and welcome support from community residents in addressing the full range of educational issues. I know that both communities enjoy socio-economic advantages which Las Cruces lacks. But I believe that communities lacking them like Las Cruces should make even greater efforts to involve residents to overcome these disadvantages.

One of the obvious advantages of inclusion is better decisions on educational issues because of more and better information about the education actually provided by the District. As a founder of what became the country’s largest employee-owned company used to say, “all of us are smarter than some of us.” A District noted for its educational mediocrity disagrees; it prefers a priesthood of pedagogues to the experience of parents.

In my recent sortie into the “math wars,” I noticed once again that parents have no effective way of involving themselves in the education which their children receive in school. Eketrina Moore, a parent concerned about mathematics instruction, wrote a guest column for the local daily paper because she had no better place to address her concerns and those of other parents. School personnel are expert in deflecting parental concerns or complaints about curriculum or instruction. So, too, School Board and District staff in ignoring them. Ms. Moore could have spoken for three minutes at a School Board meeting; had she done so, Connie Phillips, its chair, would have kindly thanked her, and the Board would have ignored her. Steven Sanchez, the Assistant Superintendent for education, would have listened but neither responded to, nor had any exchange with her about, her concerns.

When NMSU experts on mathematics or mathematics instruction wrote a column dismissing Ms. Moore’s concerns because she lacked the “big picture,” I learned that when they talk, the District—that is, Sanchez—listens. The District values controversial theories of experts to the clear and continuing record of mediocre academic results. It does not respect parents who are concerned about their children’s education, does not care that test scores justify their complaints, and ignores businesses’ criticisms that LCPS graduates lack basic knowledge and skills, and have poor work habits.

Since public participation can benefit public education, I wonder at the effective exclusion of parents and other citizens from participation—I do not even need the qualifier “meaningful”—in District affairs relevant to public interests: curriculum, instruction, athletics, health and safety, budgets, and facilities. Indeed, I worry that, given the recent conduct of the four women School Board members in the high school redistricting, the exclusion of the public from District affairs enables them to serve their private interests and those of their friends, as they intend, not the interests of the public.

Moreover, these four School Board members are personally fearful of allowing any public participation which might involve controversy or criticism however constructive. Recently, when some members of the redistricting committee criticized Rounds’s change in transfer policies, Bonnie Votaw complained that they made the redistricting decision more difficult! Obviously, these four members cannot handle opinions different from theirs, especially when, in this case, they wanted to advance private rather than public interests. Earlier, when they considered a suggestion to have open public meetings to listen to residents in their districts, they decided instead to go to some schools and meet with students. This decision makes clear that they can cope only with children and subordinates, and are fearful of dealing with adults.

It is worth noting that members Maria Flores, Barbara Hall, and Votaw were teachers and represent teachers. Anyone concerned about public education needs to remember that fact when teachers complain about the failure of parents to involve themselves in their children’s education. Teachers and principals rebuff parents, and School Board members, the Superintendent, and other District staff do likewise—and then complain about the lack of parental involvement and ask parents to bail them out when they fail. The District deserves the blame for the lack of public participation by parents and other citizens. It is late and lame for Rounds to ask for their participation when the District has flunked again after long going it alone.

There are ways forward, but they can work only if the District first mends its ways. I offer one way, with the following steps: Revise District policies to encourage and enable public participation by parents and other citizens. Terminate the Superintendent’s advisory committee. Encourage PTAs and booster organizations to form an independent, District-wide organization open to PTA and booster organization representatives, other parents, and other citizens; and charter advisory committees on a range of educational (curriculum and instruction), health and safety, and educational management issues (budget and facilities), among others. Initially, until the organization is widely recognized, require teachers and principals to report parental concerns to the District administration and require the District administration to report them to the leadership of this organization.

The important thing is to put the public back in “public” education. Increasing public participation would better inform parents and other citizens, encourage more support from them in student education, improve academic performance, enable better decision-making, and develop future leaders in the District and the city. The alternative is a continuation of the status quo, which disserves students, parents, and businesses.

MOVING THE DISTRICT FORWARD TO MEDIOCRITY

2012-01-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons and even more excuses for the poor overall performance of the Las Cruces Public School District according to the state’s new A-to-F grading system. The Superintendent’s response that the district’s report card was not so bad because some of the Ds were close to Cs sounds as if the district aspires to, or would be satisfied with, mediocrity.

And there is a mix of non-surprise and surprise. The non-surprise: an A for Desert Hills Elementary School, located in a culturally and socio-economically advantaged area. The surprise: Bs for Las Cruces and Onate High Schools, and D for Mayfield High School. MHS came to everyone’s attention—it thinks itself the flagship of the district, apparently—because of the redistricting ruckus created by its parents and others, including many music-lovers with an MHS-uber-alles mentality. They were aided and abetted by three school board members who worked hard during the high school redistricting process to advance the parochial interests of MHS at the expense of the district as a whole.

Which facts focus attention on these three: Maria Flores, Barbara Hall, and Bonnie Votaw. All three are teachers. All three have personal or professional links to MHS. All three touted their background as teachers when they were candidates or applicants for the school board. The record of their performance in bringing their experience as teachers to bear on improving the academic performance of students in this district is unknown and probably non-existent. Indeed, their attention to special interests probably distracts them from the larger responsibilities of their job.

Ideas for education reform by the district have come to their attention. They have chosen to ignore them. What are those ideas? I can think of two: public participation, which they advocate in campaigns and ignore afterwards; and curriculum reform, which they oppose in defense of present staff and former colleagues. In short, they have made themselves isolated, insulated, and special-interest-oriented.

Their failed leadership in the redistricting process was simply the most obvious manifestation of their unfitness for educational leadership. A televised example occurred when the remaining board members had to replace a vacated position. They made the ability to work well with them a major criterion. Barbara Hall, assuring them that she wanted to do what they wanted to do, won. Other applicants stating their commitment to the public and public education, and the benefits of their non-teaching perspectives, not subservience to other board members, lost.

These three board members and the board chair, who aligns herself with them, have betrayed the public and disgraced themselves. The only public service left to them is to replace themselves with younger, community- and education-minded citizens who are not teachers, and then to resign.

EDUCATION REFORM IN NEW MEXICO: IMPEDIMENTS AND ONE PROPOSAL FOR NOW

2012-01-07T08:44:00.002-07:00

It is a very good thing that New Mexico is a land of cultural and scenic enchantment, because it is unlikely to be a land of economic or educational enrichment. Without the benefit of military bases and two national laboratories, it would probably be the poorest state in the union. With the benefit of its public schools and colleges, it is one of the worst educated states in the union.

The record is clear. Fifty percent, plus or minus, of fourth- and eighth-grade students fail to demonstrate proficiency in reading and math. One-third of eighth-grade students drop out of school before graduation. Fewer than ten percent of enrollees at Dona Ana Community College and fewer than fifty percent of enrollees at New Mexico State University graduate within 3 and 6 years, respectively. This record reflects academic performance for decades—a persistent mediocrity which, one must conclude, satisfies the people and their leaders, though almost all of them pretending otherwise.

Elected officials understand the necessity of this pretense and the importance of catering to constituencies with vested interests in the status quo, and thus have done nothing effectual to reform education for results. But, at the same time, they lack the knowledge of education which would enable them to distinguish the effectual from the fashionable. Recent efforts under the banner of education reform—among others, to improve testing, evaluate student and teacher performance, hold teachers and schools accountable (now, giving them A-F grades), shrink class or school size, and hire specialist teachers or educational consultant—do nothing to educate anyone. Every one of these efforts is a management gimmick unrelated to the transfer of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values from those who know more to those who know less. These gimmicks cost money and often create constituencies to vote for those who legislate for and fund them.

Ignorance in matters of public education begins at the top. When I interviewed Diane Denish and Susan Martinez, and attended their Albuquerque debate on education, I was stunned less by their ignorance than by their incomprehension of their ignorance. I was not stunned that Martinez appointed as Secretary of Education, not an educator, but an ideological politico inimical to public education from a state with a different economy and different demographic and educational issues. But the Senate, signaling legislative indifference, has not rejected this nominee not qualified under the state constitution.

Closer to home are elected legislators who patronize public education but have, as the record shows, nothing to show for it. These solons of Santa Fe, like their colleagues, spend about five percent of their time and energy on about fifty percent of the state budget. Typically, the longer-serving legislators from Las Cruces and environs, polished in the pieties and platitudes of good politics, have voted for spending money on the potholes of public education to no effect.

They and other legislators are reluctant to consider alternatives to the educational fads and fashions which perpetuate educational mediocrity because they are ignorant about education, embrace conformity, and desire approval. I speak from my experience with State Senators Stephen Fischmann and John Arthur Smith, both of whom have chosen to carry water for Martinez and Skandera in advancing elements of the “Florida Plan,” a dubious and deceptive approach to public education. But I am only one, and perhaps the least, of many sources providing them not only sustained criticism of this ideology-driven approach to public education, but also alternatives to the conventional wisdom. Indeed, neither has considered the views of such national experts as Diane Ravitch, who knows from her work on both sides of most of today’s educational issues.

I discussed alternatives and their rationales with both senators; I sent or gave them materials, or references to materials, on many alternatives on many educational issues. When Fischmann defended his vote on an element of the Florida Plan, he claimed that he had not received other ideas for improving education. I took this lie, not as a slight to me, but as a necessity to him to cover a lack of courage because of a lack of conviction in reforms not in the mainstream. After a discussion with Smith, throughout which he said “yes, yes” to my comments and suggestions, he said, as we walked to our cars, that his wife was a teacher. I immediately realized that each “yes, yes” meant “no, no,” many teachers being among those most opposed to education reform. I am not surprised that Smith is sponsoring legislation to support Martinez’s politically motivated, punitive, and discriminatory proposal for retaining third-grade students not proficient in reading.

Both senators are typical of most elected state and local officials. Lacking expertise in the subject, they follow the politically powerful, “educrats,” and special-interest agents who sustain the status quo—sheep following goats. Unable to distinguish good from bad advice, they accept the conventional wisdom and avoid the responsibility to think and speak for themselves, and to consider possibly effective alternative educational reforms.

Paradoxically, the last place from which to expect initiatives to reform education is schools of education. When I met with Michael Morehead, Dean of the NMSU School of Education, we rehearsed the record of poor academic performance and high dropout rates in Las Cruces. When I asked him why he thought that his school had well prepared its graduates for teaching, especially at the elementary school level, he answered that it sends principals a client satisfaction survey and receives uniformly favorable replies. When I asked what incentive respondents had to reply otherwise, if otherwise was the case, he had no answer. When I asked him why the low proficiency scores and high dropout rates over decades did not provide a better measure of the preparation of NMSU School of Education graduates, he answered by blaming everyone else, mainly parents. I replied that it seemed odd that the School of Education, with a faculty doing educational research and many students native to the city, county, or state had failed, over decades, to find ways to teach New Mexico students effectively—a comment not well received and urging my departure.

Notwithstanding, there really are low- or no-cost means to improve public education. I am going to discuss one in detail now and others later.

One no-cost proposal addresses the training of elementary school teachers. Everyone avoids this subject because, as these teachers tell us, they try so hard and have good intentions—and because they are politically potent. It is not cynical to say that trying hard and having good intentions are not the stuff of education or the reasons why taxpayers pay for public education.

A symptom of the establishment’s unwillingness to consider these teachers as a major factor in poor student performance is the shift in perceptions of the problems. A few years ago, the perceived problem was dropouts, and the solutions were programs to prevent them. But such programs are too late, costly, and ineffective. For, if students had not learned to read by the end of fourth grade, they would be unable to read to learn thereafter and would and did drop out to avoid continued frustration and failure. Then the perceived problem was the poor preparation of preschoolers. Early childhood reading programs may do some good, but initial gains will be lost from the moment their students enter kindergarten because elementary school teachers, the first to teach—or fail to teach—them cannot sustain the benefits of an early start on literacy. (Such, by the way, has been the record of Head Start.) The shift from one perceived problem to another perceived problems skips over the problem.

The first problem—one elephant in the room—is the failure of elementary school teachers, who are responsible for teaching reading—or were. When it became evident that large percentages of students were not learning to read, students were blamed as the problems and reading specialists were hired as the solution to do what regular teachers had once done. But the large percentages of students still not learning to read persist. Obviously, students were not the problem, and reading specialists were not the solution. But, by avoiding the first problem and adopting a non-solution, legislators everywhere created an ineffective, special-interest constituency now permanent at great expense to the state—another elephant in the room.

The following proposal, if implemented, promises better results at virtually no cost. The proposal is a simple one: require schools of education to ensure that their graduates have mastery of the subject matter which they will have to teach in conformity to state-mandated curriculums. The truth is simple; for example, if students must know grammar, then teachers must know it to teach it.

The concept of curriculum alignment is known to the state. It studied the alignment of high-school courses with college requirements to serve purposes educational and not. But it has not studied the alignment between schools of education course requirements and state-mandated curriculums. Until it does, it will not understand how serious the misalignment is, how much teacher training is misdirected, and how harmful to students the results are; and it will be unable to document the need for reforms.

The gap between what schools of education require of prospective elementary school teachers and what state curriculums require is great, greatest perhaps in English. At NMSU, prospective elementary school teachers select a concentration in one of four academic subjects: English, history, science, or math. About nine in ten pick English. All but two of the required English courses are in literature. The exceptions are composition courses in college writing at the 100 and 200 levels. These courses wrongly assume undergraduate competency in the fundamentals of grammar and the principles of composition. If prospective teachers lack this competency when they enroll, they have no way to acquire it. The NMSU School of Education does not ensure that its students who will become elementary school teachers have or acquire the knowledge and skills which the state curriculums require.

Obviously, one way to improve teaching by elementary school teachers is to require courses ensuring their mastery of the knowledge and skills which the curriculums imply that they must teach to their students. Requirements for this alignment are modest: have schools of education revise their course requirements in these four subjects; have the appropriate academic departments develop state-curriculum-based courses for teachers; find teachers to teach those courses, and reduce requirements for methods courses, which crowd out subject-matter courses and cannot compensate for ignorance.

There are problems: schools of education might not know what state curriculums require, and their faculty members and perhaps those in other academic departments might be unable to teach such courses. Likely impediments to this suggestion are less these practical difficulties, but attitudinal resistance. The lesser is a faculty belief that graduates going into elementary school teaching know or can quickly learn what they need to teach. The greater is a faculty mindset which discounts intellectual development and academic mastery, and overrates emotional and social development—in a word, disconnects the interplay among them in student development and disregards the public interest in competent graduates. A result of this institutionalized anti-intellectualism is mediocre state scores in reading and math proficiency—proof of just how successful school of education deans, faculty members, and their graduates can be in acting free of accountability to the public.

More, later.

THE STORY OF CHRISTMAS AND THE SOURCES OF ANTI-SEMITISM

2011-12-23T10:47:00.001-07:00

I did not discover the music of Jimi Hendrix until 1990, some 20 years after his death—not the first time I have arrived late to the scene. I did not discover a heated exchange between fellow Cornellian Ann Coulter and Donny Deutsche on his talk show on October 8, 2007, until more than four years later. Their mutual recriminations left neither a winner nor a loser; the tie reveals both the sorry state of the relationship between Christians and Jews, and of Christian understanding of Judaism and Jews. The latter is paradoxical and dismaying since Christianity evolved from Judaism, and Christians and Jews have co-existed for nearly two thousand years. So, at this time of year, some reflections on this strained relationship and continued misunderstandings, all of which began only a few years after the birth of the Jew Jesus, may not be amiss.

I am not going to referee the exchange between Coulter and Deutsche. Both give a bad account of themselves. Deutsche identifies Coulter’s remarks as anti-Semitic, but his response emphasizes his hurt feelings, which cannot address, much less rebut, her views. Coulter denies his charges, but is oddly incurious and seems indifferent why a Jew finds her remarks anti-Semitic. Between their inadequate responses, there is little to choose but much to consider. So I am going to examine the assumptions which underlie such exchanges and make them so often worse than unproductive.

In a post-Holocaustal world in which anti-Semitism is politically incorrect, honest discussion of anti-Semitism is difficult, especially between Christians and Jews. Most Christians, whether they know it or not, hold, to varying degrees, anti-Semitic beliefs; their religious education in home or church makes their acquisition almost unavoidable. In this climate of political correctness, anti-Semites are on the defensive; they resist their discovery as anti-Semites or deny their views as anti-Semitic. Jews are on the offensive; they have the high ground, have ages-old grievances, and, as we shall see, have solid facts and good arguments. So they are doubly aggrieved both by anti-Semitism and at Christians’ defensive denial. It is not surprising that Christians and Jews can rarely discuss anti-Semitic Christian beliefs which have rationalized persecutions over centuries and led to the horrors of the Holocaust, without descending to an acrimonious impasse.

I take two beliefs to be anti-Semitic. One, Christianity is superior to Judaism. Two, because Christians accept Christianity, and Jews accept Judaism, Christians are superior to Jews. Coulter accepts both beliefs, claims that Christians share them, yet denies that Christians or their beliefs are anti-Semitic. Her stance is clear and clearly anti-Semitic. Christians believe that Christianity is perfect because it completes what is incomplete in Judaism, and is thus superior to Judaism. They believe that “Christians consider themselves perfected Jews” and are thus superior to Jews. Because Christianity is superior to Judaism, Christians believe themselves superior to Jews. Christians “just want Jews to be perfected”—to Christians, an expression of their loving desire to remedy the imperfection of Jews, namely, their incomplete faith.

Coulter’s specific position is that the imperfection of incompleteness in Judaism is its failure to accept Jesus as the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New Testament. Coulter’s central misunderstandings about the relationship between the two faiths are commonplace Christian errors of three different kinds.

First, Christians mistakenly equate the sacred writings of Jews with some of the sacred writings of Christians. But Holy Scriptures and the Old Testament are not the same texts. First, Holy Scriptures has a three-fold division of texts: Torah, Prophets, and Writings; the Old Testament has no divisions. Second, Holy Scriptures has one order of books; the Old Testament has another, which follows the order in Torah, but re-orders and mixes books in Prophets and Writings.

Second, Christians mistakenly assume that the Old Testament anticipates the New Testament—an obviously untenable assumption. Most, if not all, of the books of Holy Scriptures were written and canonized long before a few, if any, of the books of the New Testament were written or canonized. Implications follow. One, Jews did not think, and cannot be imagined as thinking, of their sacred texts as anticipating some yet-unwritten sacred texts building upon them. Two, Jews have always regarded Holy Scriptures as the complete expression of the essentials of their faith; for them, it requires no sequel or old-new sequence.

Third, Christians mistakenly interpret Holy Scriptures in terms not of Hebraic cultural resources and linguistic meanings, but of Christian meanings, many reflecting Hellenic cultural and linguistic influences. For instance, Jews interpret “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” as a law of just compensation; Christians, as a law of revenge. The critical—I would say “crucial,” but for the pun—example concerns the meaning of “messiah.” If the word in Holy Scriptures anticipates the word in the New Testament, it must either have the same meaning in both texts or be an extension of the earlier to the later meaning. But marked differences in meaning deny equivalence or a continuum of meaning. Whenever Isaiah, by some Christians called the “Fifth Gospel,” refers to a messiah, it refers to an earthly politico-religious leader like David; Hebraic culture contains nothing anticipating an eschatological figure like the risen Christ and thus lacks a launching pad of Hebraic meaning for the requisite linguistic trajectory. The landing zone is a Christian construction based on Hellenic meaning from Greek death-and-resurrection myth and religion.

Christians further use Holy Scriptures in other ways to serve their purposes. Even before Christian theologians began transforming Holy Scriptures into the Old Testament, the Gospel writers themselves manipulated the text of Holy Scriptures to serve missionary purposes. Christians can see the results by comparing the quotations following “you have heard it said” statements in the Gospels with the actual words in Holy Scriptures. Side-by-side comparisons show distortions of two kinds: kluges, which create a single statement from snippets from different places; and cuts, which omit words giving very different meanings in context.

The question is why all of this work to misrepresent Holy Scriptures. My answer is a simple one: the earliest Christians were already struggling with the signal fact that most Jews in the Holy Land and many in the Mediterranean diaspora refused to accept the Jew Jesus as the Messiah. How could Jews refuse to recognize one of their own and fail to follow his teachings and those of his apostles, also Jewish? How could Christians explain this refusal to gentiles (most of whom would not know Holy Scriptures, recognize its manipulation by Christian missionaries, and probably not care, but many of whom knew or lived near Jews)? The answer serviceable to Christians then and traditional since has been smears on the character of Jews as “a proud and stiff-necked people,” benighted or recalcitrant, and damned. Thus have Christians justified their repudiation of Judaism and its supersession by Christianity in the face of the continued allegiance of Jews to Judaism. This strategy not only has failed, but also has defeated itself because the survival of Jews and Judaism, despite centuries of Christian persuasion and persecution, creates some doubt about the cogency of Christianity, especially given the difficulties of some of its theological doctrines.

So Christians rarely respond with an open-minded consideration of Jewish beliefs and values which have secured this steadfast allegiance of Jews to their faith. Few Christians can imagine, much less admit, that Jews may have rejected Jesus for their good reasons. One, Jews valued the emotional comfort and moral guidance of their faith, one complete in itself and satisfying to its believers. In this respect and in respect of cultural inertia, they are no different from those of other faiths. Two, and more important, they rejected at least one of Jesus’ central principles because it contradicted a central principle of Judaism. His “resist not evil” contravenes a primal, paramount Jewish obligation to be righteous and do justly.

Instead, most Christians judge Judaism and Jews by the beliefs of Christianity and Christians—an inherently anti-Semitic approach which corrupts their judgment. The implicit thinking is that a comparison of religions implies a competition between them, which Christianity by its self-serving judgment and disparagement wins. (Coulter even speaks of Christianity as a “fast track” to God!) So they disparage Judaism, demean Jews, and disrespect a faith which has proven its self-sufficiency and a people who have survived despite millennia of Christian abuse.

The question is what purposes anti-Semitism serves. For a few Christians, by discrediting Judaism or denigrating Jews, anti-Semitism helps protect Christianity as a prestigious brand name, a merit badge of religious attainment or superiority. For many Christians, it seems a prop of faith made by a favorable comparison. But the need for a prop implies that Christianity cannot exist independent of, and relies on, Judaism; and the comparison, though made to show Christianity superior to Judaism, cannot show Christianity good in itself. For most, if not all, Christians, anti-Semitism betrays a lack of confidence because Christianity has failed to convert most of those who should be most convertible, Jews. Christians see the conversion of a Jew as a triumph of faith, a reassurance that they are right by this success, whether by persuasion or persecution.

Such responses are a great shame. So much of Christianity satisfies the axiological standards of all religions: the good, the beautiful, and the true. Yet Christianity corrupts itself by insisting that its truth be true not only morally and religiously, but also historically. For some Christians, for their faith to comfort them, it must provide them certainty or security. An example of the former is textual literalism, even in matters of history and science; of the latter, anti-Semitism. Under such conditions or in such circumstances, some Christians insist that faith—by definition, belief or trust in what is unknowable or open to doubt—be as certain and secure as knowledge. Those who convince themselves that their faith is a form of such knowledge have done what has been bad and ugly about Christianity in world history.

The difference between Judaism and Christianity on the uses of history in their faiths is instructive. Jews may be interested in whether historical truth underlies the story of the Exodus, but, if it were shown to be historically untrue, they would continue to celebrate Passover, think Moses a great lawgiver, and cleave to the Ten Commandments. (They would care less if the story of his birth proved false.) They would do so because historical facts are less important—indeed, may be unnecessary or even irrelevant—to the truth of the lessons of their laws, which comfort and guide them in their lives. Jews must have their laws, what they call “mitzvahs,” obligations which are, inextricably and simultaneously, blessings to have and discharge as moral and civilized people.

Christians may be interested in the truth of bodily resurrection, which many, but not all, believe is essential to faith. For those who believe it essential, the discovery that the Easter story was not true because of an indubitable discovery of Jesus’ remains would bring on a crisis of faith (and probably the same response to disproof of the nativity story). Better by far to think the Easter story a metaphor of religious transcendence by love over the world’s material and moral temptations to sin.

A minor but modern point illustrating this difference is different responses to the theory of evolution. For Jews, evolution is no threat to either story of creation in Genesis and a matter inconsequential to faith. However, for some Christians, it is a threat, is opposed and rejected for that reason, and, for a few, requires a fanatical insistence on the literal historical/scientific truth of creation and, indeed, of every word in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

For me, Christianity’s real creation story begins with the good and beautiful story of Christmas, the birth of Jesus, the beginning of the life of one of the world’s great moral and religious figures. He creates another, though not entirely new, set of insights, true about a wise way to act well in this world and thereby to share in some part of God’s salvation with others who also act well in this world.

I return to Jimi Hendrix for words of wisdom appropriate at all times but particularly at Christmas: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

Merry Christmas.

SAY "YES" TO CLASS WARFARE

2011-12-10T10:55:00.003-07:00

In modern parlance, the phrase “class warfare” has a Marxist/Leninist origin and nothing but pejorative meanings in contemporary American discussion. But no one has to be communist or even a socialist to observe a fact as old as human pre-history: some have more and some have less.

Societies establish classes dividing the have-more from the have-less but enable some degree of socio-economic mobility, greater in many European countries than in the United States. Everywhere, a few doltish, lazy, or unlucky rich people lose what they have and drop down; a few talented, energetic, or lucky poor people get more and move up. But for the most part, “old money” families are old because they have maintained their wealth for generations. It remains to be seen whether the families of parvenus can keep their “new money.”

America honors itself an essentially middle-class country. By population distribution, middle-class people outnumber poor or rich people, and poor people outnumber rich people—a distribution graphed by a lop-sided Bell Curve left-leaning toward the poor. By wealth distribution, the rich have more than the middle-class, who have more than the poor—a distribution graphed by a lop-sided Bell Curve right-leaning toward the rich. Over the past 30 years, dramatic increases in the lop-sidedness of both Bell Curves show the growth of economic inequality. As the middle class becomes poorer, America becomes a two-class society of the rich and the not-rich.

Democrats and Republicans/Tea Partiers divide on their responses to this development. The divide appears in divergent preferences for progressive or flat, or regressive, tax rates. Democrats want to help the not-rich; they propose laws to raise revenues by raising progressive taxes and oppose laws for flat, or regressive, taxes—all to alleviate the tax burden on the not-rich. Republicans/Tea partiers want to promote the rich; they propose laws to reduce spending by reducing revenues and propose laws for flat, or regressive, taxes. They call progressive taxes the weapons of “class warfare,” a phrase slowly creeping into the Democrats’ political lexicon.

I have no problem with the phrase or the fact of “class warfare” if we understand what the fight is about. It is not about the fact that those who make more pay more if deductions or loopholes do not distort the tax structure. But it is about the fact that the meaning of fairness depends on the metric of the burden of taxes on the taxpayer. Pick tax rates scaled to income (progressive taxation), take one side; pick one tax rate applied to income (flat, or regressive, taxation), take another side. From the perspective of the preferred tax structure, the other is unfair.

The question is whether both perspectives are equally justified? Or, in other words, is it fair that some people pay, not less or more than others, but disproportionately less or more. The answer depends on how different tax regimes operate and affect people.

Progressive tax regimes establish tax brackets and tax rates for those brackets. Since 1945, we have gradually reduced both the number of brackets and lowered their rates. The effect has been to increase the tax burden on the non-rich. Further reductions in brackets and rates make a progressive tax regime like a flat, or regressive, tax regime. The problem with the latter is that it ignores a well-known economic principle about the value of money; money has not only a face value, but also a context value, and it is the context value which is the metric of tax burden.

The less money you have, the more you value it, and vice versa. If you have little, you pinch pennies; if you have a lot, you light cigars with $100 bills. So, at the same tax rate, taxes paid by the not-rich are more valuable than taxes paid by the rich, and the burden on the non-rich is greater than the burden on the rich. For the not-rich, flat-tax-rate payments may mean having less money for nutritious food; for the rich, flat-tax-rate payments may mean less money for a foreign vacation. If you prefer a flat-tax rate and dismiss its different effects, your sense of fairness, such as it is, lacks concern for different burdens on different classes, and discloses contempt for the not-rich.

What impresses me about Republicans/Tea Partiers on this issue is their intellectual confusion, moral callousness, and, of course, Christian hypocrisy. Most of them argue, or sympathize with the argument, that America is a Christian nation. Yet their real god is not one of love, but one of love of money. Mammon is their god; their Gospel is greed; and flat-tax rates, their creed. For the rest of us, the message at this time of year is charity for all; throughout the year, progressive tax rates. The poor should not inherit the earth, just get a fair share of it. My text is Matthew:

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and though shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow me. … Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, that for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (19: 21, 23-24)

Jesus distinguishes between the rich and the not-rich, and thought that a redistribution of wealth would be good for all. In our idiom, higher taxes would improve the chances of the rich for an afterlife and the lot of the not-rich in their present life. The text says “yes” to “class warfare.” And so say I.

DOING ONE'S DUTY TO CONSTITUENTS AND COUNTRY

2011-11-24T09:54:00.002-07:00

With this and next year’s election rapidly approaching, I want to honor an official elected to Washington who put his duty before his ideology to make government do the right thing. Washington Senator, formerly Representative, William Armstrong, a conservative Republican, was my representative in the mid 70s, and he helped me to get part-time employment at the Colorado Springs campus (Cragmor) of The University of Colorado. He is now president of Colorado Christian University.

In ordinary times, a young English Ph.D. does not seek such assistance. But those were not ordinary times. In a few years, a projected scarcity of English Ph.D.’s became a persistent surplus. I was a part of it. At a time of preferential hiring for minorities, women, and those with specialties not mine, few colleges needed another white, male Shakespearean. So I was lucky to get a one-year, full-time position to teach composition in Manhattan, Kansas, and commuted on a fortnightly basis. But, when the Arab Oil Embargo struck, the country cut the speed limit to 55, and my daughter’s first words were “Daddy,” “car,” and “bye-bye,” I resigned and sought part-time work at Cragmor.

I applied but could not get a job. Moonlighting officers teaching English at the Air Force Academy taught the extra courses. I thought it wrong that ranking government employees could take a second job and deny me, a qualified civilian, any job, even a part-time, one. So I did what any trained scholar would do: research.

In turn, I requested the relevant regulations from the Air Force Academy, the Air Force, and the Department of Defense. In turn, although their regulations clearly stated that officers could not take jobs for which civilians were qualified and available, all three denied any violation.

Then I wrote Armstrong, who served on the House Armed Services Committee, with my complaint. I was not surprised when a staffer replied that Armstrong had asked DoD about my complaint and had been assured that the Academy was in full compliance with all relevant regulations.

In the spring of 1974, with President Nixon facing impeachment and others linked to his campaign or administration having given false assurances about their compliance with laws, I wrote Armstrong again, this time to say that I thought his reliance on the word of the accused seemed untimely and unwise. My letter caught his attention and prompted a telephone call directly from him. He told me of his confidence in DoD assurances. I remember my response very clearly.

I said that I was not a lawyer, only an English Ph.D., but that I was sure that every legal document from the U.S. Code to the Academy regulations prohibited competition between officers and civilians for the same job. I said that neither of us could make an interstate bet over the phone but that, if we could, I would wager whatever I was worth to a dollar of his that I was right. Armstrong was impressed. He said that, though he thought the odds were a million to one that I was wrong, he would inquire again.

Two weeks later, Armstrong called. He said that I was absolutely right and that he was flabbergasted and furious that the DoD had lied to him. He said that he would see that my situation was resolved to my satisfaction. The end of the story is short. The Cragmor campus president apologized for my frustrating experience and promised a suitable response; the English department chair invited me to an interview, the purpose of which was to match my interests to unstaffed fall-term courses. Later, he gave me my choice of any spring-term courses.

I tell this story because it has at least three lessons. First, although Armstrong was a strong supporter of the military and trusted it to tell him the truth, when he learned that it had lied to him and had violated the law, he took action to redress its misconduct. (I doubt not that the liaison officer who lied to him and perhaps others involved were reprimanded or reassigned or even encouraged to resign). Second, although he was a conservative Republican and probably imagined that I was anything but, he acted on the principle that justice must be done, regardless of real or presumed differences of politics.

The third lesson includes the first two: Armstrong’s conduct exemplifies what we expect of elected officials: whatever their affiliations or allegiances, duty to truth and right, not ideology, comes first.

In these difficult times, when we lack confidence in government, we must elect officials who, whatever their ideological convictions or political alliances, know their duty to their country and constituents. We must vote for those local, state, and federal officials who know that their duty is not to shirk duty by shrinking government, but to make it work. Conservative Republican William Armstrong knew and did his duty. I honor him for knowing and doing it.

A VETERAN REFLECTS ON BOOMERS AND BOOMLETS

2011-11-12T10:46:00.001-07:00

My parents lived through the Great Depression and raised me with attitudes and values which came from living through tough times, weathered or witnessed. Even as a child to the manor born nearly two years before Pearl Harbor, I felt that no good could come of letting the good times roll. As a septuagenarian, I have the same feeling, now reinforced by the facts of my lifetime that no good ever did come of the good times.

Two qualifying notes: One, although what follows focuses on individuals and not on institutions, I know full well that it takes both to make the mess in which we are in find ourselves. But we are the people, and if our institutions disserve us, we have to take personal responsibility that their failures reflect our deficiencies. Two, when I speak of Boomers and Boomlets, I speak not of an entire age cohort, but of that part of it once mostly white, middle-class, and suburban; now more diverse racially and economically. Yet I know that many of those whom I omit have succumbed to the pervasive and pernicious socio-cultural influence of suburbanites since the end of WWII. I generalize in the service of truth as I see it.

My father was too old for the Second World War, so I was not a child of The Greatest Generation. Lucky me. Many of that generation were hard workers and great fighters, to whom great tribute is due, and Ted Koppel has capped his career by paying it on our behalf.

But many were lousy parents. They over-compensated for their deprivations and hardships by indulging themselves when they returned from war. They left the crowded cities for the sprawling suburbs; weakened the family and social networks which guide and nurture adults and children; in an unprecedented buying spree, bought homes, appliances, and cars; and increasingly, left home for two jobs to pay for them. TVs instead of tables became the centerpiece of family togetherness, with everyone watching the Box, not conversing with each other.

Self-indulgence became generational. Thus arose the Boomer Generation, those born after 1945, many of whom grew up believing themselves entitled to whatever they want when they want it, and feel victimized or become resentful if they do not get it. Self-centered and materialistic, they have lived on credit consumerism without saving and avoided sacrifice by opposing, then eliminating, the draft. With the economy in its worst condition since the 1930s, they sense that the bill is coming due, but, neither well raised by parents nor well educated by teachers, they have no clue.

Thus raised, thus self-replicating, as many Boomers raised their children—I call them Boomlets—even more self-centered and materialistic, and increasingly clueless about anything resembling the real world. Instead, they are well versed in “reality shows”—a fitting phrase for the confusion of the real and the illusory. They are equally steeped in the inanities of Twitter and Facebook, the perfect technologies to divert the idle or mindless into revealing the triviality or vacuity of their lives in trivial or vacuous messages, complete with pictures. Their idea of getting serious is distilling their political and social wisdom into semi-literate, 140-character, messages of even less value than 30-second sound bites.

Boomers then and Boomlets now are incapable of more, for they can no longer offer a sensible account of any choices affecting their lives. A recent study found that young adults cannot make a moral argument about what is right or wrong, and, indeed, seem not to understand the concepts of right and wrong. They deem judgment unfavorably—don’t be so judgmental, they say—as much because they have been taught (judgmentally) that it is wrong as because it is do intellectually and morally demanding.

Boomers and Boomlets received, and want their children to receive, an education reflecting their lifestyle: teachers who cater, or pretend to cater, to individual learning styles and needs; courses which stress self-expression and relevancy; and social promotion, high test scores, and excuses to celebrate a graduation or a diploma. Long gone are rigorous curriculums of structured sequence of information and skills to be acquired and applied, as the basis for what matters in education: inquiry, critical thinking, and problem solving. For them, formal education is too stifling and difficult, and jeopardizes self-esteem. The result is a dark hole of ignorance and ill manners which is sucking almost all politicians into it, in a race to the center of stupidity and boorishness. Educated, decorous candidates are, by definition, elitists, not ordinary Americans like them.

Boomers and Boomlets have lived in denial of reality, but reality has not lived in denial of them. The infantilism of frustration at this confrontation shows itself in their temper tantrums: the tempest in the Tea Party, as it were, in the run-up to the 2010 election; and the inchoate gatherings of the Occupy Any-and-Every Place movement now the run-up to the 2012 election. Indeed, even as they indulged personal pleasures, they abdicated political responsibilities. Not surprisingly, they are surprised that the vacuum created by their vacuity powerful commercial interests have been happy to fill. The empty and hateful sloganeering on the Right and Left; the angry and indiscriminate flailing at Big Business or Big Government; the swinging-to and swinging-fro in responses to candidates, one dumber than another—such emotional and erratic behavior reflects those without mental or moral compasses.

The economy has collapsed, probably not soon to recover, because Boomers and Boomlets built it, not on the rock of self-improvement and productivity, but on the sands of indulgence and pleasure. The mental and moral slovenliness of it all is coming home, not just to haunt us, but also to hurt us. Paradoxically, as many Boomers and Boomlets are getting dumber, they are getting more resentful of, or cynical about, hard workers, smart thinkers, and those who make sacrifices to serve their community or country. They sense that they are likely forever on the outside looking in. They blame everyone else, accuse bankers of ripping them off and elected officials of failing them—right they partly are—scapegoat minorities, and complain that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Actually, they have headed in the wrong direction, and arrived in a bad place. Any escape is possible only by the miracle of realizing that they must perform a miracle: unlearn everything which they think they know or want to believe about life. No more “you deserve a [whatever] today”; more “you want it, you work, earn, and save for it.” If it is too late for you, then teach your child or grandchild what you have learned at last: the meaning of “no” and the value of “not now.”

I do not believe in miracles. Boomers and Boomlets will go bust and take everyone else, and the country, along with them. Everyone else is not only old fogies like me, but also, among others, many in the few remaining factories, many in the few remaining family farms and ranches, and many in the military who seek to improve themselves and serve something other than themselves.

On this day after Veterans Day, this veteran notes that too many Boomers and Boomlets let others take the risks and suffer the consequences, and give them mouth-honor in return, if they return. But themselves sacrifice for country or serve the community, work hard to grow them well, or get smart to guide them wisely—surely, they think, I suffer from shell-shock.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL IS IN A SORRY STATE

2011-10-29T08:15:00.002-06:00

[A caution first: My political opinions about Israel are in no way anti-Semitic, a term more bandied about to smear an opponent or discredit ideas not to one's liking than used to identify attitudes, beliefs, or conduct which implies the legal, moral, political, or religious inferiority of Jews. Nothing in this column states or suggests such attitudes, beliefs, or conduct. Israel has legal and moral rights to exist--its anti-Semitics deniers of those rights, notwithstanding--but irreversible demographic trends are making the exercise of those rights ultimately inoperative and unenforceable. It is long since time that Americans and most particularly Israelis recognize that reality and its implications. No "friend of Israel" helps the state or its citizens, Jewish and Muslim alike, by encouraging intransigence.]

Events leading to the creation of the State of Israel were controversial, and its existence since its creation has remained controversial. Nothing is gained by re-litigating any issue involved; every accusation has a preceding counter-accusation. Contention may go back to pre-historical times, when Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons lived farther apart in the Middle East than in Europe. Nevertheless, recent history explains the present impasse created by Europeans and perpetuated by everyone.

Russian pogroms in the decades before and after the turn of the century prompted many Jews to flee to Palestine. Reacting to this continuation of centuries of persecution, Zionism encouraged European Jews to leave for Palestine. The migration of Jews to a Muslim-dominated land predictably led to change, contention, and conflict.

Before the First World War, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire sparsely populated by poor Jews and Muslims living in peace under lax rule. The influx of European Jews destabilized it, and the Balfour Declaration, promising it as a Jewish homeland, roused Muslim resentment at British control and Jewish ascendency. In the 30 years between the Balfour Declaration and the U.N. vote creating two states—one Jewish, one Muslim—both groups jockeyed for power. British vacillation between honoring its commitment and promoting its interests increased frictions between the two groups. As statehood approached, both sides prepared for war; when statehood arrived, war broke out, Israeli forces prevailed, and Arabs, exiled or self-exiled, became refugees occupying squalid camps in surrounding countries.

In the next 25 years, Israeli forces defeated Arab armies in 1967 and 1973. In the Six-Day War, Israeli armies conquered and occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and Syria’s Golan Heights. Israel still controls these areas today and continues to expand earlier or build new settlements in all but Gaza.

Sixty years of intermittent conflict and ineffectual peacemaking have achieved permanent impasse. Most of the pros and cons of the American debate lack redeeming merit. America’s reflexive support encourages Israel’s intransigence, which is reality-denying and counter-productive. Christian fundamentalist support of Israel, to promote the in-gathering of Jews, a pre-condition of the Rapture, is anti-Semitic in using Jews for Christian purposes. The anti-Semitic New Left abhors the state of Israel as a vestige of colonialism and argues its illegality despite its creation by the United Nations. Indeed, Israel’s continued occupation of conquered areas is imperialistic; worse, it is pointless. That land, occupied in an era of terrorist attack and rocketry, cannot serve as either a protective barrier or a bargaining chip in negotiations. Instead, its occupation offers false security and is self-defeating, for it antagonizes Palestinians, prompts attacks, and impedes a resolution of differences.

The truth of the matter: Israel, intended as a democratic, Jewish state, is an increasingly untenable political entity. The paramount and persisting fact: its population has faster growing numbers of Muslims than Jews. A two-state solution cannot save Israel as a democratic, Jewish state from the signal consequence of this internal dynamic—a fact foretelling a majority of Muslim citizens. Israel’s response is not a strategy with purpose, but a syndrome of fatalism. By continuing to alternate between shifting policy impulsively and drifting indecisively, Israel exacerbates many problems, ameliorates few of them, and postpones the final reckoning.

Willy-nilly, Israel faces a short-term existential choice—a democratic but not Jewish state or a Jewish but not democratic state—with either choice leading to long-term failure. If Israel chooses to be democratic but not Jewish, Israeli Muslims would vote for the creation of, or annexation with, a Palestinian state. The results would be the eradication of Israel, the annexation of its land, and the incorporation of its people into a Palestinian state.

If Israel chooses to be Jewish but not democratic, its options would include the expansion of political or economic restrictions on Israeli Muslims, their expulsion, or their extermination. Israeli Jews would probably reject these options for moral, legal, or practical reasons. Otherwise, Israeli and regional Muslims would react overwhelmingly: insurrection or invasion, with international support of either or both. The inevitable outcomes would be those above, with the possibility of repeating Jewish history: exodus or holocaust.

Either choice leads to an inevitable outcome: the dissolution of the State of Israel. The inevitability reflects the inherent contradiction that a state can be both religious and democratic.

I suggest a two-step, not a two-state, solution. Step one: a single-state protectorate of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza under U.N. administration, like the Allied administration of Berlin, but without zones of occupation (Syria recovers the Golan Heights). Step two: a single state with a constitution consistent with the U.N. charter and guaranteed by the U.N. to ensure democratic rights and representation to all. A Jewish minority would influence, not dominate, its direction and development. A Palestinian majority would support such a state and reconcile with Jews, in keeping with the centuries-long history of good relations between Jews and Muslims.

JEOPARDIZING PUBLIC TRUST IN HIGH SCHOOL REDISTRICTING, TRANSITION, TRANSFERS

2011-10-26T07:36:00.000-06:00

In 2008, the Las Cruces School Board requested and received public support for a bond to build a $112 million high school to relieve overcrowding at Las Cruces, Mayfield, and Onate high schools. The promise was that this fourth high school, since named Centennial, would be comprehensive and comparable in educational opportunities—academic, athletic, and extracurricular—to the three other high schools. On 18 October, while it listened to a presentation about yet another bond request, the Board and the Superintendent placed their public promise justifying its previous bond in jeopardy.

As a rule, redistricting is controversial and contentious. Two year’s ago, redistricting elementary and middle schools was the exception; this year, redistricting high schools is the rule. Yet the Board and the Superintendent have reacted to public comments with panicky dismay and precipitous decisions. School Board Chair Connie Phillips; Vice Chair Maria Flores, Mayfield parent; and Members Bonnie Votaw and Elizabeth Hall, former Mayfield teachers, shied from opposing other Board members who yielded to the demands of former colleagues or continuing friends at Mayfield. Phillips announced her recusal from voting on redistricting but continued to influence discussions and decisions on the issues. Superintendent Stan Rounds, working with Board members, perceived their growing discomfort and acted to give them relief. The results are bad decisions with dire consequences for students and the bond-backing public.

Las Cruces, Mayfield, and Onate have between 2000 and 2400 students apiece. To relieve overcrowding at these three schools means reassigning some of their students so that all four schools have about the same number of students. The obvious problem is that a change in school size not only influences educational opportunities, but also does so unevenly. The general gain comes at the price of specific pain. The minority affected adversely often objects, often vociferously and vitriolically. The majority not so affected, or accepting or approving of the redistricting, seldom speaks up.

With construction of Centennial High School nearing completion, the Board chartered a Redistricting Advisory Committee to draw boundaries ensuring an appropriate assignment of students. Board criteria and Superintendent guidance were clear: balance in school size (numbers of students) and composition (ethnic and socio-economic factors), with consideration to growth in student numbers, neighborhoods, natural or highway boundaries, and safety, transportation, and roads. At the Committee’s first meeting, the Superintendent stipulated balance in school size as 1800 plus or minus 50 students at each school. At a later School Board retreat, the Board, under pressure to leave the Elks area, the most difficult of all, in the Mayfield attendance zone, wanted a wider range so that the Committee could consider more options. The issue was how much wider. To avoid large ranges educationally detrimental, the Board adopted a flexible, non-numerical standard (think pants size options: regular and relaxed fits) which would provide “comparability,” but not uniformity, in numbers and composition (think omelets, not pancakes). All those attending agreed to “comparability” in school size and composition as essential to comparable educational opportunity.

The Committee fully complied with its instructions. It first examined some two dozen scenarios, then some half a dozen more with Elks in Mayfield. As hard as it tried, the Committee could not achieve anything like comparability in school size if it left Elks in Mayfield. At best, the other three schools would average 580 fewer students in 2014/15 and 470 fewer students in 2020/21, the first and last years according to the available data showing Centennial with four full grades. (Those fewer students equal about 19 and 16 fewer thirty-student classes, respectively.) When this attempt failed, Committee members voted almost unanimously to support a finding that a District of one large school (Mayfield) and three smaller schools did not best serve all students. But Chair Merrie Lee Soules, who had been in frequent contact with Phillips, refused to permit the majority’s desire for a statement of the Committee’s compliance with its instructions because, as Soules said, she wanted to avoid “boxing” the Board into its own criteria! However, by the time she presented the Committee’s final recommendation, Rounds had decided on transition/transfer arrangement which would undermine any redistricting plan for many years.

The Committee did not consider transition/transfer arrangements. Until the 18 October Board meeting, the announced transition/transition arrangement was clear: seniors would remain in their current high school, juniors could volunteer to attend Centennial, but sophomores and freshmen would attend it. Athletes could apply for an automatic transfer; others could apply for transfer under the current open enrollment policy. Thus, Centennial would open at least half-full with two full grades of freshman and sophomores, would be fully populated in two more years, and would thereby get off to a sensible, even a promising, start in three years.

At the 18 October Board meeting, Rounds announced a different transition/transfer arrangement: the District would automatically approve transfers by any students in the sixth through the eleventh grades, from their new assignment zone to their original one. In other words, whatever the redistricting plan, the new transfer policy requires no student to attend Centennial for three years (today’s fifth graders would be the first students required to attend), the school will not likely be fully populated (around 1800 students) for four more years, and overcrowding in the other three schools will continue. The Committee would probably think even less of a system of three large schools and one, new, small school—a situation differing from the original one only by the addition of a $112 million building—for seven years.

Rounds’ announcement of the new transition/transfer arrangement revealed that the Board had caved to pressure from Mayfield parents, students, and teachers angered by the loss of the Elks area because its effect on Mayfield’s music and athletics programs. His pre-emptive announcement spared the Board public input of any kind, whether disapproving or supportive. His precipitous announcement made populating Centennial highly problematic and a comparable education of students almost impossible, for seven years. Thus, Centennial will be neither comprehensive like, nor comparable to, the other three high schools for a long time. Its future difficulties will be likely to replicate many of Onate’s past ones.

This task of populating Centennial falls mainly to its first principal, Michael Montoya, currently the principal of Picacho Middle School. Throughout the redistricting process, he was the spokesman for Centennial; in the transition/transfer period, he will become the salesman for a school with no students, teachers, coaches, or activity directors (orchestra, drama, etc.); no curriculum of known courses, athletic teams, orchestra, cast—nothing sure, everything awaiting one student at a time willing to take the risk that other students will join him or her.

The Board and the Superintendent have ensured Centennial of a shaky start. The school will not be empty, only underpopulated. Some students will accept assignment to Centennial under the new redistricting plan. Others from the three current assignment zones may transfer to Centennial and be welcomed under the District’s open enrollment policy. Some “white flight” from the Las Alturas and Sonoma Ranch areas is likely; it will give Centennial an ethnic and socio-economic composition different from that of the other three schools and thus a reputation as a school for rich, white kids.

Worse, for the prolonged period of its start-up, Centennial is unlikely to have enough students in their grades to justify the same array of academic courses which the other three high schools offer. The District has a limited array of options to compensate: smaller class sizes and higher staffing costs, busing, or distance learning. The latter will require the Board and the Superintendent to mislead students and parents that remote learning is comparable to classroom learning. Obviously, this misrepresentation is a self-serving deception; otherwise, the District could dispense with almost all of its teachers.

This is Plan A: crossing fingers. But if Plan A fails, Centennial’s struggles from the start and for years will prompt a transition to Plan B. Initially, Phillips, Flores, Votaw, Hall, and Rounds will invoke, with expressions of heartfelt sincerity, their good intentions to have done everything “for the kids.” These protestations not only will not distract from the truth in this case or justify their decisions, but also will likely prepare for after-the-fact exculpation or accusation. Eventually, they will make charges and counter-charges, and ultimately blame the Superintendent or staff for failing to succeed though their desires and decisions made failure all but inevitable. This is Plan B: pointing fingers.

Meanwhile, many students will suffer the consequences of the District’s lack of leadership and its flawed decisions; and the public will perceive the lack of integrity of District officials in their failure to honor public promises made to secure bonds. Until they remedy this situation, they should make no more promises for still more bonds. If they do, the public should not accept them because they have betrayed its trust.

HIS PLAYS WERE WRITTEN BY ANOTHER MAN NAMED SHAKESPEARE

2011-10-18T09:07:00.001-06:00

I am delighted that war has broken out between the entertainment and academic worlds. The question, to which I give a frivolous answer above, is whether the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were authored by him. I like to sit on the sidelines, so to speak, and watch the ignoramuses and the intelligentsia duke it out.

Oh, yes, as a Shakespearean scholar, Ph.D’d and published, I have no doubts that the man from Stratford and the man in London are one and the same man—some people doubt that equivalence, so I mention it to overlook nothing—and that that man wrote all or large parts of the plays attributed to him (collaboration among dramatists was commonplace at the time).

However, my work on Shakespeare has almost nothing to do with his biography. Almost: I once favorably reviewed a clever book discrediting Shakespeare’s authorship without committing to proposing an alternative. Even so, an amateur wrote this book; indeed, only amateurs write articles and books advancing the thesis that someone else wrote the plays and poems attributed to my Main Man. I have nothing against amateurs, but I have much against those who come to Shakespeare’s text and the relevant historical documents with biases unrecognized or unacknowledged, with their minds made up, and with no expertise in reading them in their literary or historical contexts. A few amateurs, like the author of the book which I reviewed, try but fail to persuade trained scholars, not because of an academic conspiracy, but because of deficiencies in their scholarship. Most amateurs do not write to persuade scholars but to put forth erudite-seeming stuff to gull the public, for fun or profit or even politics.

As others have noticed, the emergence of the anti-Stratfordian movement, the name given the anyone-but-Shakespeare crowd, in the mid-nineteenth century parallels the rise of the detective story. Its existence today reflects a growing trend in anti-elitism, especially of the anti-authoritarian variety, unconsciously intended to exorcise personal demons (Freud, too, had his problems). The irony is that amateurs who are anti-elitist in rejecting Shakespeare’s authorship do so on an elitist assumption: no one from a small town and small school could possibly become more than a bumptious country bumpkin in the big city, could read widely, observe closely, and write well. It also reflects a burgeoning taste for conspiracies about almost anything about which adherents have a deficiency of information and a surplus of zeal. As a famous biographer of Shakespeare once observed, the good which comes of all this anti-Stratfordian fanaticism is that it is not channeled into politics. He made that observation long before the rise of the Tea Party. My prayer is that it stick with Agenda 21 and leave the Bard alone; on second thought, my prayer goes the other way around—welcome, Tea Party, to my field.

The reason why this contretemps amuses me is that the issue is both unresolvable and unimportant. It is unresolvable because the motives of the amateurs are akin to the promptings of faith, not reason; scholarly arguments are dismissed as special pleadings—just an anti-intellectual, ad hominem response. It is unimportant because the answer cannot change anything about our understanding of the plays themselves. For all the energy devoted to denial, no anti-Stratfordian has made the effort to show the identity of his or her candidate for authorship in anyway explains anything in any play or poem by “Shakespeare” or influences an understanding of it.

Even so, I have stooped to join the ruckus. What is at issue, as I hint above, is the larger question of dealing with reality and not denying it. In the case of Shakespeare, I suspect more ink than blood will be spilt; in the case of all else, the results may be quite different. We cannot make good decisions on bad or biased information, but we seem resolved to do so with our current array of some party candidates. (Does Perry think that Shakespeare might have fought against us during our revolt against England, as he dates it, in the “16th century”? As someone once wrote, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

THE TEA PARTY IS GOD'S OWN PARTY

2011-10-15T16:34:00.000-06:00

Public criticism and scorn is diminishing the repute of the Tea Party, if the conduct of local members is indicative and recent polls are credible. Some members hide their affiliation; some operate in stealth. Locally, Jim Harbison, columnist for the Sun-News, and Natalie Chadborn, candidate for City Council, District 1, have chosen not to disclose party membership. Harbison is a rank-and-file member; Chadborn is the party secretary. Its reputation may have peaked, but the Tea Party remains formidable within the GOP—indeed, it seems to dominate it—and detrimental to the public policy of this country.

The received wisdom about Tea Party members a long-term study has confirmed. In “Crashing the Tea Party” (NYT, 16 Aug), two researchers report that its members “are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do”—a polite, academic way of saying white and racist.

The study dispels the notion of a grassroots movement of “nonpartisan political neophytes”; most Tea Party members were “highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born.” Like other Republicans, they favor smaller government. Unlike other Republicans, “they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006—opposing abortion, for example—and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics….The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.”

The researchers trace the increasing opposition to the Tea Party to this emphasis on religion in politics. “Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.”

The proximate rankings reflect a high degree of overlap between Tea Party members and Christian fundamentalists (often Southern Baptists). The virtual identity of the two groups suggests that the Tea Party is a movement both political and religious, but less the former than the latter. Tea Party members are less political revolutionaries in the American tradition than religious rebels like the Puritans, who meant to establish a Godly city on the hill.

So, given its passions and priorities, the Tea Party is a politically militant religious movement which loathes and opposes the modern secular state and prefers a theocracy. This view explains the “alternative reality” which many critics mock. What they miss is that the revisionist history and the bogus science are serious efforts to infuse or redefine reality with religion. Tea Party members reinterpret many of the Founding Fathers, not as Enlightenment deists, but as conventional but committed Protestants whom they fashion into Christian political saints credited with struggling but failing to abolish slavery. The point is that the purity of their religious principles and moral practices permeated American democracy at its birth and made the country a “Christian nation.”

Tea Party members’ religiosity explains their efforts to supplant science with pseudo-science. They deprecate evolution as mere theory and advocate intelligent design as truth; they deny man’s role in global warming because it goes beyond God’s role. They discount science as a means to knowledge; they value Biblical “science” based on textual inerrancy as a means to faith and deplore or dismiss whoever or whatever differs from it. So no rational discourse dissuades them or dislodges their beliefs, and mockery plays to their self-perception as those persecuted in His name.

Their religiosity also explains their attempts to debilitate the political party seen to promote secularism and socialism, and their opposition to its social and environmental programs. Tea Party members see the rival party promoting programs with government, not God, as the agency addressing human needs; and thereby impeding their efforts to make the country reliant on the Creator and the Christ. While exploiting traditional concerns about the size of government and current fears about deficits to attack their rivals, they expose their pre-occupation with religious/moral issues like abortion, homosexuals in the military, and same-sex marriage. Thus, their legislative priorities have addressed these issues, not jobs or the jobless. Indeed, their efforts to widen the gap between haves and have-nots are a modern, Puritanical way of using wealth to distinguish the saved from the sinning.

Tea Party members speak contradictions: as Christians, piously of reliance on God; as conservatives, politically of self-reliance (aka “personal responsibility”). Many other Americans share those contradictions; they struggle to define the boundaries between church and state. Tea Party members preach but do not practice a don’t-tread-on-me policy; most other Americans do both. So the 2012 election question abides: America—theocracy, plutocracy, or democracy?

PRIVATIZING AMERICA: IMPOVERISHING DEMOCRACY

2011-10-02T08:31:00.000-06:00

The idea of privatization is not a new idea. Governments at all levels have long turned to the private sector—large corporations, small businesses, and individual entrepreneurs or consultants—to provide supplemental goods or services which, for reasons of efficiency, they do not provide for themselves.

For three decades, the idea of privatization has expanded. Initially, starting thirty years ago, privatization has sought to reduce government costs by transferring some routine operations to the private sector. Lately, in the past few years, it has sought to reduce government size by transferring comprehensive functions to the private sector.

Rationalizations of privatization involve one or more of several overlapping factors: waste-fraud-and-abuse, size, power, roles, and responsibilities. But the rationalizations have changed emphases. Initially, advocates claimed that government is so bloated that the private sector can do the same jobs as well for less money—to achieve greater efficiency. Lately, they have also claimed that government is so bloated that the private sector should take over traditional functions—to promote limited government and preserve freedom.

Both of these fundamental ideas of privatization are agenda-driven, advocated invariably by Republicans but advanced in practice by some Democrats as well. With the shift in emphasis and focus—most controversy targets much of the federal government—, privatization has become a political issue, increasingly implicated, not only in questions about government efficiency, but also by challenges to government authority and functions.

The basic issues, underlying the inevitably interwoven motives of profit and politics, are questions about the philosophy and foundations of the federal government, its purposes, functions, scope of operations, and relationships with other levels of government and the private sector. Thus, issues of privatization morph into a critical issue of Constitutional interpretation. The major challenge arises from those who ignore the Preamble and insist on the Tenth Amendment. They seek radical change, with privatization serving as the instrument to strip the federal government of its ability to serve, in addition to national defense, the many diverse national interests and societal concerns of the country’s citizens.

Positions on regulation indicate these contrasting interests. The private sector resists many regulations because they not only provide few, small, or no benefits to individual companies or entire industries, but also raise costs and lower profits. Government requires many regulations because they protect other companies or industries, or promote collective interests benefiting the nation or society, like clear air and water. Privatization would reduce regulation, with benefits to part or all of the private sector, but with baleful effects on the public and its citizens.

In this political context, privatization of functions serving these interests and concerns is inherently antithetical to democratic government. Private-sector entities are accountable to limited, largely powerless numbers of equity holders united by their interests in growth or returns. Government is accountable to all citizens, who have interests other than wealth alone. Because the relative power of the private sector and government is inversely related, expanding privatization diminishes the consent of the governed and reduces the freedom of citizens to control their lives. Two areas of contention between government and the private sector are public health and public education.

Arguments for privatizing health care, long provided by a mixture of public and private institutions, are specious. The first truth is that privatization has had its chance, has failed, and would fail again. If it had worked, millions of people would have had access to affordable health care and health care insurance, and health care reform would have been unnecessary. The second truth is that privatization often leads to poorer health care as providers work harder to cut costs and increase profits than provide good care. Case in point: facilities for the elderly have long been sources of recurrent scandals. The third truth is that government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, far from causing deterioration in health care or a decline in medical compensation, have had opposite effects. Overall, the health of program participants has improved, though, in trying to mediate between effectiveness and economy—that is, trying to prevent private-sector waste, fraud, and abuse by doctors and hospitals providing unnecessary services or overcharging for services—the programs have some perverse effects on quality of care. Moreover, private-sector compensation has not suffered; indeed, the rapid, steady increase in the nation’s health care and health insurance costs suggests that business is good.

Arguments for privatizing education are more insidious. Like health care, education has been a mixture of public and private institutions. Earlier, public funds went only to public schools. Lately, some go to private ones on the ground that they are performing a public function. The thrust is to privatize education by discrediting and debilitating public education, establishing charter schools, and transferring funds (vouchers) to privately operated schools. Research using long-term data discredits claims that they do better than public schools. Worse, private, for-profit, higher-education schools largely funded by government loans to students are providing poor education and strapping students with large debts. Privatized education is becoming a government-funded fraud.

Weakening public education is bad enough; weakening education itself in a privatized system is worse. The future of privatized education is a narrowing of education and the increasing fragmentation of America as a coherent society. If non-public schools become dominant, they or their corporate holders will have power to shape or eliminate educational regulations; and to influence or control curriculum, standards, and testing. Result: diminishing accountability to the public through its government.

The effect on curriculum will be further debasement. Today’s jobs-oriented curriculums will become more so, focusing on reading (not writing or literature), mathematics, some science (in some schools replaced by religious “science” like intelligent design), with little or no history or economics (in some schools shaped to the operators’ ideological views). Result: an education ironically less suitable for jobs and increasing unsuitable to citizenship in a democratic society. If government privatizes education, it loses its ability to perpetuate itself as a means to serve abiding public interests because private interests will have obscured or obliterated them.

Privatization involves economics and politics, but values one more than another: profits first, patriotism second. Its thirst for profits is a threat to freedom.

A Personal Note

My experience in the 1980s with the Grace Commission and a Fairfax County, Virginia, Blue Ribbon committee teaches me that the argument for increasing efficiency camouflages the ambition to diminish government authority. Even at the level of efficiency only, claims of bloat depend, not on findings of major waste, fraud, or abuse, but on begging policy questions; claims of savings from efficiency derive from cuts in goods, services, or their quality.

In the early 80s, at President Reagan’s request, J. Peter Grace directed an investigation by the Private Sector Survey on Cost Control known as the Grace Commission. It announced purpose was to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government—the standard GOP triad of its tirades against government—and to make recommendations to reduce or eliminate them. Committees of businesspeople scrutinized federal operations for efficiencies. A Democratic Congress ignored the Commission report. The report died the victim, not of Democratic, but of Republican, politics. Its real purpose was evident in its recommendations to diminish or dismantle many government programs which were traditional GOP targets.

In the mid 80s, Republicans won control of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and immediately chartered committees of Republican businesspeople to investigate many aspects of county government, again, purportedly, to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. Although legally public, the committees, in contempt of citizens, tried to operate in secret. They announced meetings in fine print in out-of-the-way places, held them in corporate offices during working hours, and did not allow for public participation. In response to widespread outrage or ridicule, the Board rejected all but one of its committee reports. To the consternation of ideologues, the privatization committee, adopted sensible criteria for deciding the conditions which justified privatization on grounds of efficiency. According to them, the committee realized that privatization was not a viable candidate for controlling the costs of any county government operation at the time.

For those who may be interested, I report its criteria. A government decision to privatize an operation for efficiency uses a simple calculation: the total of estimated costs of privatization—continued administration of the operation (contracting, accounting, monitoring, etc.), allocated equipment and facility costs, transfer-of-function costs, and contract costs (business charges for costs and profit)—must be no more than the estimated cost of bloat. In its deliberations, the committee assumed a rule of thumb to justify privatization: bloat must equal about one-fifth, plus or minus, the budget for the operation.

THE HIDDEN AGENDA OF ENDING SOCIAL PROMOTION

2011-09-17T08:14:00.001-06:00

In my blog “Ending Social Promotion” (12 Sep), I claimed that Governor Martinez had no plan “to deal with the estimated 12000 students held back each year: no extra classroom space for the additional students, no additional funding, no specially trained personnel to intervene, no specially defined curriculum or instruction to improve reading—nada, nothing, zippo.”

Senator Fischmann emailed a response, “Michael, Read the bill! It's 8 pages long, and in many ways it is not what you think.” From an elected official, I always appreciate a courteous response and a Tea-Party-type “read the Constitution” rebuttal. Actually, the bill is 10 pages long, the disparity matters, for pages 9 and 10 really matter.

The issue about the effectiveness of this approach appears in Fischmann’s mincing words with me about whether the bill does or does not have some of the things which he says it has and which I say it does not have. For him, the bill has student-specific plans, parent-teacher conferences, reading specialists, testing, and summer school. For me, the bill offers those things, though I did not say so; what I did say was that it offered nothing “special,” just more of the same, more of what has already failed. Fischmann thinks that multiplying by zero gets a value more than zero; I do not.

Nevertheless, Fischmann writes that he likes the bill and tells me that he would vote for it except for one flaw: its lack of funding. Good objection: the bill imposes an unfunded mandate on school districts. I know that he realizes what an unfunded mandate would mean for them. Without additional funds, school districts would have to shift funds from their regular programs to additional efforts to remediate deficiencies—in short, do more with less—after estimating their share of 12,000 failing students and budgeting for them. This shift in funds could have the perverse effect of undermining student proficiency in regular programs and require even more remediation for more students—a downward spiral doing little to improve public education. (School districts would pay for summer school for K-8- grade students and for K-9-grade students if the state decides that their parents, who would otherwise pay for it, are indigent. Did anyone consider the effect of parental payments for summer school on the high-school dropout rate?)

Except for this little objection, Fischmann believes that the bill has educational promise. But the track record of such remediation programs elsewhere—is what fails elsewhere more likely to succeed here?—suggests that the program defined by this bill, however funded, will not only fail, but also harm students educationally, emotionally, socially. Their track record shows lower academic achievement and higher dropout rates.

Re-reading the bill, I discovered a provision not mentioned in the bill description at the start but placed at the very end (I refer to pages 9 and 10, after page 8, which also state major exceptions to or loopholes in the overall policy to end social promotion): it creates second-class students. It says that students not academically proficient the first time through and, after remediation, not academically proficient the second time through get removed from the regular school program and enrolled in a program with other students who have also failed to achieve academic proficiency—a two-strikes-and-you’re-out policy. Fischmann assumes, I assume, that they will get a “separate-but-equal” education from teachers inspired to teach classes of students identified as academically deficient (without, he assumes, I assume, emotional, social, or disciplinary problems).

Fischmann and other supporters of the bill—sponsors are John Arthur Smith and Nora Espinoza—must know that removing students who have failed to achieve academic proficiency from regular programs and placing them in alternative programs stigmatizes them. (I do not know about the others, but Fischmann earlier supported stigmatizing entire schools with letter grades.) Worse, on a larger scale, without a word of discussion thus far, and with some effort at concealment, the bill’s provision to segregate students by academic ability begins the erosion of the long-established and widely accepted educational policy of mainstreaming.

As I have written many times before, elected and appointed state officials, many of whom have never taught in the classroom, are passing laws dictating what state-certified professional educators should be doing in the classroom. With this obscured provision to begin the surreptitious dismantling of mainstreaming, they are also deciding in Santa Fe which students should be in which classrooms. Fischmann was right; the bill was not what I had thought. But either Fischmann should read with care the whole bill, including pages 9 and 10, for, in many ways it is not what he thinks it is. Or he should come clean about his positions on public education, for, in many ways, they are not what he has led others and me to think they are.

ENDING SOCIAL PROMOTION

2011-09-12T07:45:00.001-06:00

Ending social promotion at the end of the third grade year has a lot of appeal to those who play politics with public education. People with no classroom experience—Governor Susana Martinez, perpetually interim Secretary of Education Hanna Skandera, and Paul Gessing, Executive Director of the Rio Grande Foundation—advocate the idea to advance a reform which has successfully manipulated scores without improving education in Florida.

People knowledgeable about education know that students learn to read through grade four, not grade three, and read to learn thereafter. The question is why aficionados of everything Floridian prefer third grade. The answer is that holding back poor students in third grade limits testing to good students in fourth grade and thereby boosts tests scores. Whatever else might be said about social promotion, this proposal is a deceptive political stunt. This crowd wants to grab headlines by claiming that it has improved education when it has merely manipulated test data.

The proof that this proposal is not a serious educational one is the Governor’s claim that interventions for those held back will be so effective that no Plan B is necessary—a presumed belief in its magical perfection. If the Governor knows that such interventions will work, why does she not urge their adaptation in grades K-3 to ensure proficiency in the first place? Indeed, the way to end social promotion is to improve education in ways which make it unnecessary.

Worse, the Governor lacks even a Plan A to deal with the estimated 12000 students held back each year: no extra classroom space for the additional students, no additional funding, no specially trained personnel to intervene, no specially defined curriculum or instruction to improve reading—nada, nothing, zippo.

Of course, under these circumstances, it is likely the some of these 12,000 students held back one year will still not achieve proficiency. The question is whether to continue to deny them social promotion (for some, for how many years?). And I have not until now even mentioned the effects of ending social promotion on graduation rates, future academic performance, student behavior, and truancy and dropout rates.

Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse—this is it. Watch the positions and votes of your state senators and representatives on this one.

(I ask that those of you concerned about the Governor’s proposal forward this comment to your associates and others. Thank you.)

OPEN LETTER TO GEN MITCHELL, OF THE LAS CRUCES TEA PARTY

2011-09-09T08:04:00.001-06:00

Gen,

Your letter begins with a common Tea Party refrain: “I am willing to bet (and I am not a betting person) that Jerry Eagan and other doubters of Tea Party goals and desires have never attended a meeting.” The assumption is that attendance at a Tea Party meeting would persuade doubters about something or other, it is hard to tell what. Sorry, Gen, but you would lose your bet; to know you—I speak, of course, of your party, not you—is not to love you.

(Let me digress on one point. If you claim “we [Tea Party members] have the same desires as most Americans do,” then you would not differ from the American majority who elected a Democratic president three years ago. But your claim is false; you do not have the same desires. Most Americans desire democracy to prevail through a process of discussion and debate, including respectful disagreement with opponents. Many on the Right, especially most Tea Party members, prefer the political rhetoric of disrespect and demonization; labeling the majority-elected president a “Liberal/Progressive/Socialist,” as you do is typical. Most Americans do not approve of the tactics of derogation and division, threats of armed resistance, or talk of possible secession (from the governor of a state which once did attempt to secede). So they are not going to find attendance at Tea Party meetings comforting or appealing.)

Now for the really bad news. Debbie White, to whom I gave some encouragement in her failed run for office and some advice on educational issues, invited me to attend one of your recent meetings. I did so, but I went unnoticed, so no one was on their good (or bad) behavior on my account. But for one excision, I copy the 9 August email which I sent to Debbie the next day.

Debbie,

If I had not left town for a rare weekend away with my wife, I would have written sooner to thank you for inviting me to the meeting of the local Tea Party.

One benefit is that you have given me cover from the criticism that I have never been to a Tea Party meeting. Apparently, the critics believe that if I just knew some party members, I would find them warm, fuzzy people—a fact which would change my mind about its positions, etc. I keep it a secret that I know the chapter president and offered her educational advice and moral support during her campaign for office—a fact which might make your life more complicated!

The meeting itself was like most chapter meetings of advocacy organizations—mostly boring…. The demographics confirmed what I knew generally; of the 45 or so people, all but about nine seemed over 60, and all but two or three seemed to be white. I do credit the interest in getting more young people involved and your personal welcome to the young Hispanic man there. Though the demographics are typical of the national profile, they seem more skewed in a city and country lop-sidedly young and Hispanic.

As for the discussions, I thought that you ran a good meeting and your secretary—did I understand correctly that she is a candidate for city councilor for District 1 (mine)?—was right on top of things. Some of the exchanges between members and some speeches by one member showed a surplus of anger or irritability which, I think, many people associate with the Tea Party. I was surprised to hear Jim Harbison associate the origins of the EPA with Agenda 21, since the EPA was a 1970 creation of the conservative Republican administration of Richard Nixon, and disappointed that a membership old enough to know better apparently did not or preferred not to correct the error.

Which brings me to a related point. You well know that I am a severe critic of Tea Party positions or members’ opinions. (But give me credit for being an equal opportunity critic; I have been a severe critic, one of the first and fiercest, of President Obama and, it turns out, right from the start). I am not surprised that local members are angered by my criticism and talk back. But, as one who believes in, and tries to practice, respect and honest rhetoric in the exchange of views, I am dismayed by what passes for responses to my criticisms. Indeed, I think that there must be a Tea Party playbook for responding to critics, with four major steps:

1. Use labels and call names to denigrate or demonize the critic.
2. Misrepresent the critic’s positions.
3. Impute unworthy positions to the critic.
4. Ignore the criticisms addressed by the critic.

A recent letter, in disregard of the fact, falsely labeled me a Democrat. It claimed that I “castigated” a Tea Party member without even stating my reasons for my criticism: manipulation of the Constitutional text to make an argument—an evasion which I see as, one, indifference to dishonesty and, two, an ends-justifies-the-means principle. Other recent letters from Tea Party members are of the same kind and character.

I can take of myself, of course, and I often respond. But I would like to see the Tea Party take a reasonable and responsible approach to engagement with its critics. After all, if its positions are sensible, members should be able to advance them on their merits or rebut criticisms as stated; they certainly cannot advance their positions by personal attacks on those who disagree with them. Indeed, after a while, people realize that Tea Party attacks on critics are actually a sign of weakness, not strength.

I am reminded of another radically angry group from my youth, the Black Muslims. In my experience with the few whom I knew, members conducted themselves with dignity and discipline in their exchanges with whites, whatever their feelings toward them. In my much broader experience with other blacks, many of whom were also angry, I noted the same personal deportment. I could talk with them, they could talk with me, and the exchanges, however heated by disagreement, were never ugly or unpleasant on either side. Of course, the Black Muslims did not prevail in the discussion of civil rights, but, despite white fear and loathing, they made a positive contribution to the general discussion and played a constructive role in black communities.

I offer these impressions and suggestions—think of them as constituting an outside audit—for whatever worth they may be to you as the president of the local Tea Party.
Thanks again for inviting me. I do not promise, but I may, drop in again.

Michael

I omitted from this letter some other details worth mentioning here. Jim Harbison’s calling the mayor “stupid,” even though Harbison claimed it was not behind-the-back bravado, was more of the typical Tea Party name-calling indicating attitudes towards those who disagree. His talk about the UN’s Agenda 21, with unquestioned agreement by members, reflects the same sort of unfounded fears about one-world government which go back to the 1940s and the founding of the UN.

There you have it: a visit by someone who had not previously attended a Tea Party meeting, who attended, and who escaped unscathed—and no differently disposed toward it or its members. If you want to understand why the Tea Party is losing public approval and credibility, you might want to re-read what I have written. Its fate is to become a cranky political cult inveighing against democracy as we have known it in its challenging imperfections and its lofty aspirations of “liberty and justice for all.”

GOVERNMENTS' BROWN FARM FIASCO

2011-09-03T09:24:00.009-06:00

A joint county- and city-made fiasco at Brown Farm, city-owned and –operated county land between El Camino Real and Spitz Avenue, north of Cedardale Loop, features government mismanagement from top to bottom. Everything about this floodwater control project explains growing distrust of, and anger at, government for failing to manage resources and projects to serve the public. In this case, the county wasted $75,000, the city about $7,500; degraded conditions on 25 acres of public land by ignoring and thus violating relevant laws; and increased heath risks to thousands of county and city children and adults.

In 1991, the county prepared a flood-control plan for this area but shelved it for lack of funds to implement it. Later, the city bought the land. In 2011, when it received funds, the county pulled the plan off the shelf, secured right of entry from the city, and implemented the plan to enlarge berms and holding ponds.

In a modern-day inversion of the story of Rip Van Winkle, who awoke to a changed world, county and city acted as if nothing had changed in 20 years. In 1991, neither development on adjacent land south of Brown Farm nor West Nile Virus existed; by 2011, they did. But no one in county or city government consulted nearby residents, reviewed or revised the plan, or considered whether changed circumstances rendered the plan obsolete because of the risks of storing so much water, capable of breeding mosquitos, so close to so many people.

Indeed, no one in county or city government knew the magnitude of the risks: how many residents live, work, or drive, and what city or county facilities lie, within the three-mile radius of mosquitos’ range from their hatch. According to the 2010 census, 68,000 people live within this area; probably tens of thousands more drive every day into or through this area. In-range facilities include several elementary and middle schools, Mayfield High School, health and senior centers, and, ironically, City Hall. Yet no one in city or county government considered that larger holding basins and a later additional one perpetuated and augmented a known health hazard.

But everyone in county and city government considered preventing flood damage to property but not protecting citizens from disease or death. Of course, in the usual double-standardism of government, the city has a law on West Nile Virus which requires citizens to eliminate standing water in, among others, flower pot saucers and birdbaths, or face a penalty of up to $500 and 90 days in jail. But it does not enforce the law on identified violators.

County and city crews incompetently executed on-site work despite taking short-cuts contravening applicable laws. The plan called for a 60-foot-wide berm; the county built an 80-foot-wide one—wasting effort, time, and money; and requiring on-site excavation of a large, shallow basin for the necessary soil. The county strip-cleared the land, destroyed vegetation, ruined habitat, killed wildlife, and created a dustbowl and an eyesore. It neither planned nor budgeted for land restoration or reseeding. The city, in widening two trenches connecting holding basins, made them run uphill; after returning to correct the grade, it left them still running uphill. No one supervised any government or contractor work.

(The pictures below, from top to bottom, show one "before" and two "after" pictures. The two at the top show much the same ground from roughly opposite angles; the one at the bottom shows one of the trenches running upgrade.)

Responding to complaints by nearby residents and after negotiations with them, the city agreed to reconfigure the site to make all water flow northward and to restore the site. Acting in bad faith, it funneled some water into a vegetated channel which runs uphill and stores water closer to more people, and directed the rest into the existing system. The city thus made an additional, entirely unnecessary, and harder-to-treat holding basin and wasted more money.

So the county and city created more problems than they solved. They increased risks to people; lied to, or dealt in bad faith with, citizens; wasted money; and turned green fields into a tan wasteland.

In another meeting, now with councilors and managers, the city agreed to promptly develop and implement a plan addressing residents’ concerns, ensuring their involvement, and establishing two-way communication. No resident not involved believed that the city would keep its word, do the right work, or do the work right. Three weeks later: no word, some work.

Distrust of government extends beyond residents witness to this fiasco, for good reasons. First, City Council spends too much time debating policies or laws, too little time ensuring their efficient implementation or enforcement. Second, city managers and department directors do not ensure efficient implementation or enforcement. Between erratic compliance with policies and laws, incompetent performance, dishonest communications, and avoidance of citizen participation, city government fails to serve the public interest. Citizens are justifiably distrustful, and many are righteously angry.

Whether the city remedies the Brown Farm fiasco, reforms its approach to public service, and rectifies its attitude toward the public remains to be seen. But, as the election approaches, candidates should address the issues of honest government and efficient management.

OBAMA, LEADERSHIP, AND ELECTION REJECTION

2011-08-20T07:59:00.001-06:00

Despite the three-ring circus—House, Senate, White house—in Washington and its cast of crazies, incompetents, and craven souls, the debt ceiling crisis was significantly a consequence of Obama’s cumulative failings as a leader, partly understandable as they may be in the circumstances.

He is not to blame for the challenges to him and his presidency by a Republican Party, even before its invasion and infection by the Tea Party, which not only has long believed that the Democratic Party is illegitimate, but also regards him, a man of mixed-race, as anathema, to be opposed at every opportunity. Mitch McConnell has been forthright in declaring his first priority to be Obama’s defeat in 2012. So I share the widely held belief that this leader in the Republican Party represents its priorities: political power over—even at the expense of—economic recovery.

So Obama is not to blame that, in most instances, he chooses to “lead from the rear,” to work behind the scenes so that Republicans do not oppose worthy ideas reactively because they are his. However, on major issues which cannot be advanced behind the scenes, he is to blame that he has tried appeasement to avoid conflict and to appear reasonable; made concessions, whether reasonable or not, in advance of negotiations; and failed to achieve better, but attainable, results. We saw his preferred strategic approach in the case of health care reform: let the House and Senate squabble, then cobble together something inadequate but better than the current program.

He is to blame for using the same strategy when it is totally unsuited to the issue and allows his implacable opponents to treat him differently from other presidents because he acts differently from, but not better than, other presidents. His repeated attempts to overcome them by appeals to bipartisanship in defiance of repeated failures reflects a foolish consistency, the hobgoblin of his mind. The most recent instance was a simple issue which his back-and-forthing converted into a national crisis: raising the debt ceiling to pay debts incurred and due. Until now, raising the debt ceiling has been a standard ritual which results in a one-page piece of legislation specifying a new dollar amount and a new deadline. But Obama let it to become a complex and contentious one.

Obama did not say or do what any other president, I believe, would have said and done: he would sign such another bill and no other. He should have said that, in the absence of such a bill, he would authorize an increase in the debt ceiling on the basis of the Constitution’s authorization of debt, the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision which puts the validity of that debt beyond question, and, as a reminder, his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

At the same time, he should have advised that existing laws governing expenses and revenues authorize additional debt between the signing of the debt ceiling law and its deadline. He should have said that, to avoid a significant repetition, fiscal reform must begin at once to avoid another debt ceiling debacle. He should have announced his intention to develop a specific, comprehensive proposal for the necessary reforms in all major legislation affecting expenses and revenues, and set a deadline nine months hence, in time for the 2012 election. He should also have indicated that, as a step in that direction, he would offer a specific, jobs-creating, economy-building set of proposals for enactment on the return of Congress after Labor Day (just recently promised).

Instead, by standing back, he allowed issues irrelevant to raising the debt ceiling to encumber a traditionally routine process and precipitate a crisis. Then he succumbed to his strategy of seeking bipartisanship by endorsing what would and has become a partisan committee which will reach no agreement on deficit reduction within a few months, a set of penalties presumably automatically triggered by its failure but which Congress will disarm first, and thus a return to the status quo ante. He is not to blame for having created the crisis; he is to blame for having aided and abetted it.

So too much cannot be said of Obama’s flawed leadership and his flawed legacy. I admired Obama's character and scorned McCain's (lack of) character; Obama, unlike McCain, possessed qualities desirable in a leader, but not the qualities of a leader. I soon detected and deplored his conflict-averse nature, which makes it impossible for him to lead when he faces opposition. He was decisive in deciding to attack Osama bin Laden’s compound, a decision not without difficulty but without domestic opposition. But in situations in which he faces domestic opposition, he is decisive in deciding not to lead.

Two cases in point. At the start of his administration, Obama chose to avoid controversy about an array of civil rights or human rights abuses by our government in violation of national and international law. He has prevented not only the prosecution, but also the investigation, of any of the alleged violations or their alleged perpetrators. In the case of torture, he has violated his oath of office and the laws of the land.

At about the same time, he chose to avoid controversy about the financial institutions and their leaders largely responsible for causing this country’s worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Again, he has discouraged not only their prosecution, but also their investigation. He helped their recovery without exacting any reforms as conditions of acceptance of assistance, in the naïve belief that they would not resist the modest reforms along the lines of previous but since abandoned regulations. And he did nothing about jobs or homes in depressed business and housing markets. So he did not show that he cared any more than Wall Street about Main Street because he did not demand that Wall Street do something about Main Street.

In other words, Obama does not judge, not that he be not judged, but that he be not judgmental and controversial by holding anyone accountable and taking any corrective action. As a result, he has set precedents for future presidents to invoke as justification of the inevitable repetitions of similar and other abuses in future administrations. Rule of law—what rule of law? HIs lack of leadership is thus inseparable from his legacy of legal and moral abdication, the more notable in a lawyer/teacher expert in the Constitution.

Still, an election looms most ominously. And once again, Americans will have a choice of the lesser of two evils. I refreshen the cliché by asking a simple question: would any of these current contenders and any of the possible late entrants be taken seriously by any of the Founding Fathers? The question answers itself.

Even so, I would prefer a choice between something like a Democrat and something like a Republican. But given his propensity to deal with Republicans and adopt their positions, I think the choice will be between Obama the moderate Republican who could find no political future in the GOP and either a panderer to the Tea Party or one from its stark, radical reactionaries. Given this choice, I shall vote for Obama instead of a deficient and dangerous candidate.

Two brief digressions. On the stump, Obama’s shows his infection by the Right, with his confusion about the role of government; one moment, it can do great good and only politics keeps it from doing that great good; next moment, Obama speaks of solutions emerging from, say, the cornfields of Iowa, from the fields of his dreams. Then, Perry’s candidacy raises several questions. Out of gallows humor, I ask three: Can the other 49 states secede from Texas? Would doing so make them “traitorous”? Would Texas treat them “ugly”? In seriousness, I ask two: How does Perry reconcile his impulse to secession with an impulse to preside over the country from which he would secede? How does he explain his aversion to the government and his desire to dismember much of it with the Constitutional and legal obligations of the office?

If given the option, increasingly unlikely, of a Republican candidate not beholden to the economic and political extremists, and religious fundamentalists (labeled and self-described as Christians) on the Right—if they have enough sense left to nominate such a candidate—I may vote for Romney, though he has begun to dabble in pitch and to defile himself, or Huntsman, who has yet to live up to his reputation.

In that event, I shall cast my second vote in my lifetime for a Republican presidential candidate, and I shall regard the second Democratic presidential candidate for whom I did not vote with the same scorn with which I regard the first one. Against a GOP candidate who can demonstrate leadership by defanging or defeating the rabid crazies and the frothy craziness on the Right, Obama will lose and deserves to lose. Indeed, I have lost most of my respect for the man who, despite his published introspections, never saw the truth about himself or never had the integrity to admit it to himself: that he may be a good man, he may be the better man for the job in these times, but he is not a man good enough for the job.

JIM HARBISON'S COMMUNITARIAN NONSENSE

2011-08-17T15:43:00.004-06:00

Every once in a while a piece comes along which is simply too rich in falsehoods, nonsense, and contradiction to pass up. Jim Harbison's latest effort, which appears in "The Bulletin" (29 July, A7 or http://www.lascrucesbulletin.com/ee/lascrucesbulletin/default.php?pSetup=lascrucesbulletin) is one such. Harbison strings together assertions unsupported by anything other than what the author regards as self-evident truths. Some are nonsense, some are false, some contradict his principles—so what? What matters to him is denigrating anything which he dislikes with a nasty-sounding term.

Harbison defines communitarianism as a doctrine making the state dominant in and controlling of the lives of individuals—a kind of totalitarianism. But it does little more than elaborate Aristotle’s remark 2500 years ago: “man is a social animal.” So it tries to establish boundaries between the individual’s responsibilities to society and society’s responsibilities to the individual—without infringing on an individual’s responsibilities to himself and others.

Harbison asserts that federal and state governments operate according to this doctrine –an assertion devoid of sense or support. The term denoting this doctrine is not part of ordinary political parlance. Wikipedia’s discussion of its “Influence in the United States,” states that “Reflecting the dominance of liberal and conservative politics in the United States, no major party and few elected officials advocate communitarianism.”

Under the pretense of criticizing an academic doctrine and its non-existent practices, Harbison unleashes a reactionary attack on anything not to his liking. “To create their utopian society more activities are identified as unacceptable or criminal such as diabetes, smoking, name calling, heavy energy consumption, neglect (in their view), driving when you could ride your bike or take public transportation. Other examples include areas of public health versus individual privacy, prayer in school, advocate taking your child away because of obesity, or codes enforcement that criminalize behaviors such as failure to cut your weeds or recycle your trash.”

Let us look at his first list:

Diabetes: let’s approve of it and stop paying for its treatment.
Smoking: let’s allow it everywhere and disregard that secondary smoke adversely affects others. (Harbison believes that smokers have rights to smoke when and where they please but affected non-smokers do not have rights to enjoy those times and places without risks or adverse effects. He believes that some people are more entitled to individual rights and personal freedoms than others are.)
Name-calling: let’s act as if name-calling is not abusive and harmful. (His logic would approve calling his wife—what?—and allowing libel, slander, and privacy-violating materials spread on the Internet.)
Heavy energy consumption: let’s continue reliance on unstable regimes and risks of economic losses and disruptions.
Neglect (in their view): let’s imagine what neglect is A-OK.
Driving [instead of bike or bus riding]: let’s identify those who define driving as “unacceptable or criminal.”

Now let us look at his second list:

Public health versus individual privacy: suppose we try to figure out which is “unacceptable or criminal.” Both seem like good ideas to me.
Prayer in school: let’s determine whether he refers to individuals praying by themselves, or classes or assemblies praying as a majority differently from the faiths of a minority. Let’s ask whatever happened to “personal freedoms” in his advocacy of majoritarian prayer in the schools.
Advocate taking your child away because of obesity: Let’s identify who is urging this action. Let’s wonder at his paranoid imagination.
Codes enforcement that criminalize behaviors such as failure to cut your weeds or recycle your trash: Let’s allow neighborhoods to run down so that depressed housing values can decline even more. Let’s find an instance of someone penalized for not recycling trash.

Forget Harbison’s rant about communitarianism. Ask the question: what kind of world does Harbison want us to live in? Answer it: a smoky, weedy, trashy one with lots of abusive, neglectful, obese, diabetic, and cancer-prone people praying to God in gratitude as they drive their gas-guzzlers through stop signs and red lights, and just enjoy the heck out of their personal freedoms.

COMMUNITARIANISM: A GUIDE TO THE UNACCEPTABLE AND THE CRIMINAL

2011-08-07T17:09:00.004-06:00

This column has been removed as duplicated by the "Jim Harbison's Communitarian Nonsense," which is essentially the same column. I hold this space only because of the two comments.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION OF DECLINING EXPECTATIONS

2011-08-01T09:37:00.003-06:00

The day after the 1960 election, my American philosophy professor, a man who paced back and forth during his lectures, entered the classroom and sat down. Stunned by this unprecedented act, we fell silent in wonder at what it meant. Lifting his head from his hands, which had covered his face, he explained that he had been up all night, with every radio in the house on, so that he could follow the returns of the very close race between Kennedy and Nixon (the result would not be known for a few hours). Before he resumed his lecture with his customary pacing—I think that man had to walk in order to talk—he made a remark which has haunted me since. He said that, though it mattered who won the election, the job of future American presidents would be to manage a country in decline.

Fifty years later, we are there now. We have avoided the inevitability of America’s declining strength—of its economy, of its place in the world, even of its place in the hearts of some. We indulged our good fortune after World War II; imagined that victory and the vitality of recovery guaranteed us perpetual supremacy (or required us to try to maintain it); ignored the likelihood that recovery in other countries would create economic and political, if not also military, changes and challenges to that supremacy; squandered moral, political, and military assets in unwise wars unwisely fought, showed ourselves to be poor stewards of our human and natural resources; and borrowed recklessly to sustain an unsustainable lifestyle.

America is downsizing, and the failure of American presidents and other elected leaders to prepare for this eventuality—indeed, their success in pretending that it could not happen here and in persuading us that it could not happen here—is magnifying the strains which now jeopardize American democracy. The country’s weakening political commitment to its principles and procedures in these difficult economic times suggests that its allegiance was always contingent and superficial. Patriotism was lip-service for pay-off. What has democracy done for us lately?

Ironically, Obama is a man fit for these times; he deserves credit for being conflict-averse, easily cowed into caving on everything for which he says he stands. His weakness makes him a hollow man, filled with vain hope, emptied of vigorous audacity. He has failed to exert the leadership necessary to lead America to adjust to the reality of the modern world by managing and thereby mitigating America’s decline. He has failed to adjust Democratic principles and policies to this reality. By “leading from the rear,” he has defaulted on leadership.

So he is getting out of the way of the future and turning it over to Republicans. For, although their distributional principles are unfair and, in the long run, will inflict even greater harm on the country’s economy and democracy, Republicans, including Tea Partiers, will unwittingly lead the downsizing of the country. Their policies, if implemented, will be self-inflicted wounds on their interests and the country’s. Unrestrained capitalism has always undermined itself. As the saying goes, nothing fails like success. So they vehemently inveigh against government generally, and debts, deficits, and taxes specifically. They are determinedly deluded in thinking that the implementation of their ideology to shrink government and unleash capitalism will return America to an imagined Golden Age and thereby restore its economic, political, and moral/religious health. For what has failed in the past, is not working in the present, and cannot succeed in the future will, willy-nilly, bring American down, and down to earth.

The dream is over; the nightmare begins.

Unless. Unless it is too late, Democrats need to do the equivalent of what staunch anti-communist Nixon did in visiting communist China. They need to be the ones to accept that to achieve national and popular objectives, they can no longer be grandiose, but must be pragmatic, as guardians of the public weal. Michael Dukakis might have been America’s most hapless presidential candidate of a major party in recent history, but he might also have been its only candidate running before his time, with his emphasis on competence in government. The idea of the president as Manager-in-Chief ensuring competent government does not produce vapors of inspiration, but I think that Americans today realize that stewardship is absolutely necessary if the country is to recover the sense and the strength to adjust to the reality of declining expectations—the second American Revolution.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF WOMEN'S LIBERATION

2011-07-24T19:13:00.000-06:00

I was a feminist before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared in 1963 and re-invigorated feminism. I have been blessed with smart, strong women in my life. My paternal grandmother was a leading volunteer, for, in her day, women of her socio-economic class did charitable work; they did not work for pay. My mother was a volunteer or employee, depending on what she wanted to achieve. My partners and wives have been smart and talented in their careers. A former girlfriend, famous in the women’s lib movement, declared me an honorary member of the sisterhood. I tease my feminist friends that I believe in gender equality because I believe that women are so much like human beings that it is hard to tell the difference!

So I hope that no one misconstrues as reactionary my mixed reviews of some consequences of women’s liberation.

Once, discouraged or denied careers in other fields, many of the best and brightest women became legal secretaries, librarians, nurses, and teachers. Now, encouraged and welcomed, they become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and scientists and academics in all fields. Today, more women than men enter some of these professions, but nursing and teaching have suffered. A mix of good and bad consequences, intended and unintended.

Many women who would otherwise have stayed at home to raise children, cook meals, wash and iron clothes, and clean house—there is both good and bad in a life of such important routines—left for work. Some hoped to achieve the glamorous career life advertised by Gloria Steinham, who knew only the life of the privileged and the lucky. Some faced the grim reality of finding only the limited employment opportunities and positions which other women had had for years. But many have found careers worthy of their considerable and liberated talents—an intended consequence.

The larger numbers of women working outside the home led to the growth of the day-care industry, the growth of demands on schools to provide social services, and the increased number of latch-key children, who return from school to homes without adults to welcome and watch over them, and, too often, to the trouble an adult-free house enables—all unintended consequences.

This liberation of women seeking and securing jobs outside the home led to a greatly increased supply, even an oversupply, of labor for jobs of many kinds. As a result, this larger workforce has had a flattening effect on inflation-adjusted wages—an unspoken, unintended, and unhappy consequence.

Early on, everyone thought that a second job by a liberated woman would provide the extras for the family. Instead, it contributes to the necessities, as middle-class families with two modest incomes struggle to keep up with the rising costs of living. As the divorce rate has remained steady, it means that many single-parent—read: female-parent—families are in, or sliding into, poverty. For a single salary for most people no longer suffices to support a family of three (not to mention four, if a second spouse lives in). To the costs of food, clothing, housing, transportation, health (and health insurance), the mother adds day-care expenses while she works to pay them all.

The over-supply of labor, flat wages, and now high levels of unemployment are making a bad situation worse. People find the idea of cuts in tax rates appealing, but they count for very little, for most families of middle-class means already pay little, if any, taxes. Small reductions in taxes will do something, but not much, for families if they can barely make ends meet. Adequate savings for the future, whether invested in a private or a privatized account, are difficult, if not impossible, as well as risky. Hoping to better their lot, people will continue to borrow for education, homes, and cars, with loan repayments and loan interest adding to their expenses.

The current state of affairs is unsustainable if a middle class in America is to survive and thrive. Without some changes in the labor market, the children or grandchildren of the middle class will become peons in corporations.

If the problem is clear and the prospects are dim, the question is: what to do about it. The quick and dirty answer is: reduce the size the workforce and upgrade its skills. To the question how to do so, I have no definitive, only a possible, answer.

Consider the links among unemployment rates, level of education, and gender: dropouts, 14.3 percent; high school diploma, 10 percent; associates degree, 8.4 percent; bachelor’s degree, 4.4 percent—with higher percentages of women than men attending and graduating from college. If women like school and men do not, perhaps role reversals—women as breadwinners, men as homemakers—are answers. However, most men are too macho to imagine themselves doing domestic duties. Some can imagine looking for a smart partner—guys, not gals, would be the gold-diggers—, but smart women know that such men make poor mates. Men better start booking before looking and hooking.

JUSTICE DONE

2011-07-09T09:26:00.000-06:00

In the history of mass hysteria, the Casey Anthony trial may set some sort of record for triviality unless someone can identify underlying psychological disorders or social discontents joining mob folly and media frenzy.

I recognized such antics, I found them repugnant, so I did not follow her trial. From general news coverage and commentary, I saw and heard snatches from time to time. However, I paid close attention to a part of the prosecutor’s closing remarks. Her voice was loud and grating, her gestures stilted, and the manner of her presentation to the court irritating; I would have voted guilty if her rhetoric had been on trial. Worse, her argument was weak, less circumstantial than inferential. It boiled down to: defendant lied many times; ergo, defendant killed her daughter. I followed the fallacious inference but failed to see any relevant evidence. The Scot’s verdict of “not proven” would be a perfect verdict in this case, and, I think, the jury rendered it. So these twelve men and women did their job—which means that justice was done.

Yes, the death—the murder, if you will—of Caylee Anthony is terrible, and the loss of a young girl’s life is great and saddening. And, yes, the behavior of Casey Anthony is repugnant, if not downright psychopathic. But a guilty verdict is not indexed to some scale measuring emotional responses to the details of the crime, however gruesome or bizarre; the gravity of the allegation; or the character, mental condition, or conduct of the accused. Nor does a not-guilty verdict require the defendant to provide a plausible alternative to the allegation. It requires the state to prove, according to a standard of reasonableness, that the accused committed the alleged crime. So if, in this case, the jury did not believe that the state had met its burden of proof, then the jury did its duty, and, by definition, justice was done.

We may believe—I do—that Casey Anthony killed her daughter, but our belief is neither here nor there, no matter how strongly we hold it. What we should believe is that the state, after spending millions of dollars in three years of work, could not make a better, if not a convincing, case in support of its charges against the defendant.

Which makes me wonder about whether justice is done in most cases in America. How many court cases on less sensational accusations and with little or no media coverage proceed to guilty verdicts based on deficient evidence and flimsy arguments? I know of one minor case in which everyone in the legal system, from the arresting officer to the city attorney to the prosecuting attorney to trial judge to three appellate judges committed or abetted perjury to cover the misconduct of the state trooper. Indeed, from the bench, the trial judge testified against the defendant! Did I say Mansfield, Ohio, the notorious Black Hole of the state’s system of justice?

We often read about police “testilying” in cases. We often read about prosecutors withholding evidence—incriminatory evidence which the defense might rebut or exculpatory evidence which the prosecution cannot rebut. But we rarely read about judges who do not countenance such abuses of the judicial process and the miscarriages of justice which result. (We more rarely read about juries concurring in the malpractices of officers of the court on the one hand or indulging jury nullification on the other. But we more often read about them behaving badly in civil rights cases in the South in the 50s and 60s.) The system amounts to a mutual protection racket of police, lawyers, and judges. Thus, the Supreme Court declared that public law enforcement personnel are not liable to civil claims for damages from avoidable incompetence, even if it results in conviction of innocent people—justice most definitely not done.

So the larger questions are whether prosecutors and judges do justice, and how many unfortunate defendants are sentenced to long terms, life, or even death—all so that police can get credit for collars, prosecutors can win cases to advance their careers, judges can run on tough-on-criminals platforms, and all can work together to advance the others’ interests. The criminal justice system, now being widely supplemented by the privatization of prisons, has become an industry of injustice.

The Casey Anthony trial, even more than the O. J. Simpson trial, revealed deficiencies in the legal system, especially in police and prosecutorial work, not in the people sitting in the jury boxes. Thanks to them (and, in this trial, a no-nonsense judge), justice has been done, even if, in both trials, the defendants, the likely perpetrators of heinous crimes, went free. Better the freedom of the guilty than the loss of liberty of the innocent—a measure of respect for the individual in our society.

IN MEMORIAM

2011-07-01T23:18:00.004-06:00

Recently, in flood-control operations below our home, city/county workers wantonly ruined much of the habitat. A last-minute effort saved most, but not all, of a small “island” created by a mesquite tree. But it was too late to save the family of foxes crushed or buried alive in their den. The restoration of the habitat will not restore them.

The foxes have been resident in this area for as long as anyone in the neighborhood can remember. They were our friends. They walked our wall and visited our yard. They hunted white-winged doves attracted by our feeder. Their kits used the yard for natural purposes! I am told that my cat Edgar visited them at their den. Some of you may remember that our holiday card two years ago featured the picture of one adult resting just on the other side of our wall. I include the picture in memoriam of them all.

GESSING'S REACTIONARY FEDERALISM: MISREADING THE CONSTITUTION

2011-06-26T07:21:00.001-06:00

[NOTE: My blog this week is much longer than my usual; it an 1800-word essay addressing a recent argument by the Executive Director of The Rio Grande Foundation, a state-based think tank representing "conservative" political and business economic interests. It is not a cutting edge argument; instead, it is an off-the-shelf argument. But its usefulness from my perspective is that succinctly states the major points of the conventional argument being advanced by many. My points in rebuttal are also not cutting edge; they simply make the conventional case against what I take to be a bizarre position intended to advance special interests. This blog in rebuttal appeared last week in Heath Haussamen's NMPolitics.net, a site well worth a daily visit.]

Fifty years ago, in A History of the Modern World, then the standard for introductory college modern history courses, R. R. Palmer used a striking analogy to explain the Catholic Church’s reaction to the Protestant idea of an individual’s right to read the Bible, interpret it for himself, and live by his interpretation, without regard to the Catholic Church. He invited readers to imagine the American people’s reaction to the idea of an individual’s right to read the Constitution, interpret it for himself, and live by his interpretation, without regard to the Supreme Court. He assumed that Americans would be horrified and thus would understand the Catholic Church’s reaction.

What Palmer offered as a theoretical possibility has become a practical reality. I was never bothered that, from the beginning, Americans have argued about the meaning of its foundational documents and court interpretations. For, with few exceptions—the issue of slavery being one of them—generations of Americans have accepted their legal answers to legal questions. The consensus has enabled America to move forward, although a few fringe groups have continued to inveigh against this or that amendment or ruling. Occasionally, the court does reverse itself, as it did when, in Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka (1954), it overruled Plessy versus Ferguson (1896).

But I find myself bothered by a radical shift in the nature of the discussions of this foundational document. Previously, discussions have involved not only the Constitution itself, but also its historical context and court interpretations. Originalists believe that it had a first and a final meaning defined when written and ratified; they believe that the work of the Supreme Court is to apply that original intent to later cases. Others believe that it had a first meaning which, in its provisions for amendment and interpretation, denied a final meaning; they believe that the Court’s work is to apply meanings which reflect an evolving understanding of them and changing circumstances to later cases.

The division is absolute; one must take sides, not pick and choose lest one commit the fallacy of special pleading. I accept the latter, prevalent, and traditional view; indeed, I can make no sense of originalism. Theoretically, later readers of an earlier document can never be sure to accurately and comprehensively understand its original meaning. Practically, the large majority of Americans reject original provisions in the Constitution. One case in point: originalism accepts the Constitutional provision for slaves, which explicitly includes them in the census but tacitly excludes them from the franchise. Another: it accepts the Constitutional silence excluding women from the franchise and rejects the Nineteenth Amendment. These cases show originalism to be inescapably racist and sexist, as the drafters of the Constitution themselves likely were. Originalism cannot make adjustments in such cases without undermining its basic principles and endorsing Constitutional evolutionism. (One irony: many of those who have insisted on a respect for precedent and opposed judicial activism but have become originalists are advocating aggressive judicial activism in overturning most precedents of settled law.)

The shift is that Republicans, Tea Partiers, and other reactionaries read the Constitution in ways distorted by their political convictions, partisan criticism of current laws, or special interests. They may claim to be originalists, but they are really contortionists. They offer ideological interpretations retrojecting their desires into the Constitution and producing distorted interpretations which serve special moral or religious, or economic, interests. Moral or religious zealots are sincere in supporting such interpretations as the means justifying their ends. Economic self-servers are cynical in supporting them as a means glossing their greed with seeming Constitutional sanction.

I have glancingly addressed issues associated with the Constitution in other columns and blogs, but I directly address Paul Gessing’s “Federalism is key to America’s future” (24 May on this blog) because it is a local example of interpretations of the Constitution tailored to serve special interests. Gessing is the Executive Director of the Rio Grande Foundation, which is largely funded by oil and gas industries. These and other large corporations prefer state governments to have more, the federal government to have less, power because they can exert more influence on the former than on the latter. His first four paragraphs on federalism, most of which I quote, should be read in this light:

…Federalism, at least as conceived by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, meant that the central government in Washington had a few, strictly-limited powers, but that an overwhelming majority of what was to be done was to be left to the states and people.

The belief that Washington’s powers were few and limited was so important to the founders that two separate amendments essentially re-stated this. The 10th amendment clarifies the issue, simply stating, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

To say that we have strayed far from this concept over the past 225 years or so would be an understatement. Federal policies now dictate state actions in education, health care, environmental policy, and a wide variety of other regulatory powers (to name just a few).

None of the aforementioned policy areas were named in the Constitution and, given the strict limits placed on federal activities, it seems worthwhile to at least discuss whether Washington has a role in these policy areas at all. But we have obviously crossed that bridge in the courts and Congress, and now we have a $14 trillion federal debt to show for it.

The first thing to say is that no connection whatsoever exists between the size of the federal deficit and government policies claimed to be Constitutionally improper. At any time, the federal government could have adopted tax or spending policies which would have prevented or eliminated any deficit. In fact, the Clinton administration did exactly so; had its policies been continued, they would have eliminated the deficit by 2010.

The second thing to say is that no credence whatsoever attaches to a claim that “we”—millions of Americans, thousands of elected federal officials, and hundreds of federal judges—have “strayed far from this concept” of limited federal powers. Democracy can make mistakes, but it is rather audacious, if not arrogant, for anyone to imply that everyone else has been wrong about everything important for over two centuries.

In raising these two non-constitutional issues, Gessing reveals a reactionary’s discontent with things as they are. In purporting to offer a federalism for the future, he actually offers a tendentious redefinition of it based on four common fallacies of reactionary Constitutional interpretation—to which I now turn.

One, Gessing reads the Constitution without regard to its historical context. A significant part of that context is its predecessor document, the Articles of Confederation (1781), which, as its name implies, defined the American polity as a loose association of states. The failures of that political arrangement were its inabilities to deal with matters of foreign policy and of domestic relations within and among the states. Political leaders recognized the need for a strong central government which could provide a unified approach to relations with other countries and a government capable of ensuring stable intra- and inter-state relationships and of regulating interstate trade. They convened the Constitutional Convention to that end and created the Constitution articulating it.

Two, Gessing reads the Constitution selectively, to cite the provisions which serve his point and to skirt the others. He ignores the Preamble, which states: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” He avoids the first purpose for the Constitution: “to form a more perfect Union,” not a more perfect confederation. This phrase implies predominant powers for the federal government in its preference for national unity over state multiplicity.

Three, Gessing reads the Constitution perversely, with a “reverse rhetoric”; what comes first counts for less than what comes last. The Constitution ratified in 1788 specifies the three branches of the federal government and their powers. The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, ratified in 1791, places some restrictions on the government largely in favor of individual rights; the Tenth Amendment reserves to the states whatever powers the Constitution does not grant to the federal government or deny to state governments. His strange argument makes this afterthought the foremost concern of the Founders in drafting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (He asserts that two other amendments limit federal power without naming them or later identifying them when asked to do so.) Those, like Gessing, who use this amendment as a standard to judge the constitutionality of federal legislation might appropriately be dubbed “Tenthers.”

Four, Gessing pretends that the general language of the Constitution precludes specific legislation reflecting its Preamble’s concerns. That the Constitution does not mention “education, health care, environmental policy, and a wide variety of other regulatory powers” does not imply that the federal government has no powers in these areas. (What makes these and other areas “regulatory” only? Why are his choices not cases of special pleading?) Obviously, a phrase of purpose like “promote the general Welfare” can be meaningful only if the government creates laws and agencies to serve this end.

Ironically, by paltering with language and logic in this way, Gessing undermines the rationale for federal government support of the special interests which contribute to his organization. For, if a phrase of purpose precludes specific federal powers in areas related to it, then the absence of a phrase of purpose also precludes specific federal powers in areas related to it. Ergo, according to his logic, if the Preamble says nothing about a Constitutional purpose to promote prosperity, the federal government has no powers of any kind to assist private interests, which constitute a large part of the economy—bye, bye, subsidies, tax benefits, waivers, exceptions, etc.

Of late, reactionaries have been urging distorted interpretations of the Constitution and its amendments as part of their more general effort to “take the country back.” This serviceable ambiguity means both of two things: taking it “back” from others and taking it “back” to a past. Which is to say, reactionaries want the country to go backward, not forward, into the future. They repudiate the modern world—its demographic diversity, its mixed economy, its sciences, its arts, among others—and propound flawed arguments to persuade the unhappy or the unwary that the Constitution sanctions a return to some Garden of Eden or Golden Age. These fictions are myths of the past, not maps for the future. For that, we need the federalism defined by the Constitution of traditional American consensus to help us move forward.

A WORD ON ANTHONY WEINER

2011-06-11T15:00:00.002-06:00

Lee Siegel, in Saturday’s "Daily Beast." articulated and augmented my response to the responses to Anthony Weiner’s sexting or whatever it was to women unknown to him. Almost everyone’s question is: what was he thinking? Almost everyone’s answer is: he should resign.

My questions and answers are different. What are these people thinking? What are Democrats thinking? What are Republicans thinking? Perhaps the question should be: are these people thinking? And what do the rest of us do about them—they are the majority—in light of the answers?

As a matter of decorum—wonderfully old-fashioned word; does anyone know today what it means?—Weiner’s messages or pictures leave much—indeed, just about everything—to be desired. Those who seek his resignation are objecting to what—public indecency? I do not want to believe that is the answer, but it must be the answer, because no one has demonstrated one scintilla of damage to anyone involved at either end of the sexting messages because of the sexting. Of course, the hue-and-cry about Weiner has damaged him and perhaps his wife and friends. But real harm otherwise—nada.

Where were all those who object to Weiner’s sexting—a manifestation of some self-damaging personal disorder, which deserves more sympathy than censure—in other recent cases? Where were they when they learned of David Vinter’s adultery and criminal solicitation of prostitutes? David is back in the Senate. Where were they when we learned of John Ensign’s adultery with a staffer and wife of another staffer, then a criminal family payout to hush the matter up, then his office’s criminal efforts to secure work for the staffer’s husband? John had over a year in the Senate and resigned only to avoid a Senate Ethics Committee’s recommendation that he be expelled.

I could go on, as Lee Siegel does, but the point is clear: misbehavior in the virtual world now trumps misbehavior in the real world. I do not want to be excused—I started to write, excuse me—for saying that this preference for what is virtual to what is real is deranged, and far more seriously than Anthony Weiner’s vicarious titillations enabled by social networking.

A friend, a professor of English at Cornell University, believed in the 60s that Americans needed mass psychotherapy. I thought he was wrong then, but I am sure that he is right now.

I have just learned that Weiner is seeking therapy. Good for him. And good for his constituents for keeping their wits about them and supporting a man who has been a good representative for them. I wonder how well Weiner’s naysayers have served anyone but themselves and—speaking of indecency—are abusing a disturbed individual.

PRELIMINARY PROGNOSTICATIONS

2011-06-11T13:51:00.001-06:00

Fewer than 18 months to go until the last ballots are cast in the 2012 election. The outcome is, of course, impossible to predict. In some states in which Republicans control both the executive and legislative branches, they are doing everything they can not only to redistrict seats to improve their chances of electing Republican Congressional representatives, but also to restrict the franchise among groups—seniors, youths, and minorities—most likely to vote Democratic. In fairness, when Democrats get the same chance, they redistrict to improve their chances, but they try to expand, not restrict, the franchise.

The flat-out truth, which the mainstream media refuses to step up to stating: Republicans are abandoning all but the pretense of adhering to democracy. They have long feared and now despair that demographics are against them and the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism is inoperative. Fear and despair make them desperate that their only hopes for electoral success are efforts to target reductions in the franchise, to intimidate minority voters who are predominantly Democratic, to engage in dirty tricks, to spend obscene amounts of hidden special-interest money on candidates and advertising, and to throw truth and decency aside in national, state, and district campaigns of lies and smears.

If they succeed, Republicans will do in other states and in the federal government what they are trying to do, with some success, in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana, among other states—namely, legislate Democrats out of meaningful participation in the political process. After running on the slogans of, say, jobs, as they did in 2010, they shall, if elected in majorities, implement their stealth agendas of economic benefits to their special-interest contributors and of moral, religious, and lifestyle restrictions on those who are not “real Americans.” (Attacks on women’s abortion rights will intensify, and attempts to reverse same-sex legislation and policy will increase.) In short, the run-up to and the election of 2012 will see a Republican effort at an electioneered coup ending democracy as we have known it.

Come we then to the candidates for the highest office in the land. On the Democratic side, there is, of course, only one (but, starting now, the party should hedge its bets): President Barack Obama. Frankly, the longer he serves in office, the less I understand what public-service reasons he had for seeking it in the first place (except to prove that he could seek and secure it). The more he makes fine speeches, the less he makes good sense in addressing the nation’s needs. At another time, I shall dissect by elaborating earlier criticisms his failures at home and abroad. But not just now. Suffice it so say, as they used to say, Obama is not only Bush-lite, but also Bush-bad. He may be moderate, but he is certainly Republican in his top-down approaches to the economic problems. So he fixed banks and big businesses, and forgot about jobs and homes. Given most of his competition at this time, I have to hope that he wins, but, if he loses, as the chances of his doing so improve with every dodge and dither, he will have earned his defeat.

Many are beginning to think that his re-election, far from being a done deal, is doubtful or doomed. I agree. An Obama campaign based on an it-could-have-been-worse theme is not going to beat an opponent’s campaign based on an I-can-do-better (much better) theme. Given an economy still muddling along, with high rates of unemployment and foreclosures, and high gas prices—not to mention a slide into the second dip of a double-dip recession—Americans may be willing to vote for any warm-blooded alternative, even defective candidates far worse than Bush or McCain, whom Obama followed or defeated.

So it is hard for me to get excited about a candidate whose chief recommendation for re-election is that he or she is not Barack Obama. The current candidates who advocate Tea Party or other hard-right positions offer nothing which can appeal to most Americans. Michelle Bachmann is a lot smarter than most pundits give her credit for being, but she may be too cutesy-clever by half. Sarah Palan is a lot dumber than they give her credit for being, but she has the “reality” show audience on her side. Both of these darlings of the Tea Party have taken positions from which they could never back down without triggering a vociferous and possibly enervating backlash. Neither of them seems to have passed high school history or high school civics—which makes their misunderstanding of America’s past a sign that they misunderstand America’s present, and misunderstand its Constitution to boot. By contrast, Newt Gingrich, who, as a professor of history, has presumed to be an intellectual and has coasted on that reputation for years, is slowly being exposed as an imposter and poseur.

Two other candidates on the hard right appealing to the Tea Party go in very different ways. Ron Paul is a smart guy with a clear and consistent libertarian ideology, which appeals to the streak of American individualism in us all, but which disqualifies a true believer from high office in a government which must meet the needs a society, whether conceived in democratic or capitalistic terms. Rick Santorum has proven so morally absolutist and callous that his former constituents want nothing to do with someone who prefers the purity of ideology—on abortion, no exception for the health of the mother—to the sanctity or wellbeing of adult life; and thus resistant to the very facts which he has demanded in debate and has received in disproof of his doctrine.

I give great discredit to panderers to the Tea Party like Tim Pawlenty, who has not only flip-flopped—he is not alone to do so—on abortion, but also advanced such a retrograde prescription for economic disaster that I expect him to encounter so much trouble from the less hard right in the party that he tries harder on the harder right of the party. He looks weak and is weak and will remain weak—not the kind of leadership which we need.

To his credit, Mitt Romney is smart enough to keep quiet, build a campaign coffer, and outwait and thus outlast the incandescent burn-outs who will titillate us for a few weeks at a time; and who is starting to move furtively toward the center. And, then, there is the sleeper: Jon Huntsman; keep an eye on that boy, he’s a smart one. (Sorry, Gary Johnson is comatose). So, on the Republican side, I prefer the two Mormon candidates for the Republican nomination. Perhaps Mormons are the country’s last best hope of moral rectitude and political moderation. Whether someone is waiting in the wings at this stage for this lot to falter remains to be seen. If it is Rick Perry, perhaps 49 states should secede from Texas!

In any event, Obama will have his hands full. His record on the matters which count—killing Osama bin Laden aside—is not one with great voter appeal. Why a smart guy could not learn the simple lesson—it’s the economy, stupid—I do not know. Of course, the appeal of voting for our first black (actually, bi-racial) male president (I do not forget fully black Shirley Chisholm) and the thrill of electing him are gone and cannot be repeated (you get to be first only once). Indeed, I worry that Obama has done so badly that, though he remains personally popular and likeable—I like him and Michelle, too—he may prompt suspicions, especially in those who struggled to overcome, or over-compensate for, their prejudices to vote for him, that he has not been up to the job because he is half black—dreadful racist thought. But we are thinking many dreadful thoughts just now about far more important and truly dreadful things.

RELIGION--BELIEF OR CONDUCT: MY CREDO

2011-05-14T08:18:00.000-06:00

I am not your ordinary believer; in fact, I am not sure that I am a believer. But let’s pretend that I am. So it should not matter to you more than it matters to me whether my deity-above-all is Lord God or Jesus Christ or Someone Else. And it does not matter to me because I think that it does not, or should not, matter to Him (or Her). I do what I do, He does what He does, and I cannot see that what I do can mean more to him than it does to me. If He needs my praise or prayers, He is smaller because more self-centered than any deity worthy of my serious regard and His exalted position. If He cares about me, He cares about me; if not, not. Frankly, I cannot tell one way or the other, and I am not going to spend my time worrying about it.

But I can make a difference, not by doing rite, but by doing right. My big rule: if it helps people, it is good; if it harms them, it is bad; if it both helps and harms, for the most part, I count noses. That basic moral principle makes many moral decisions easy. I have one refinement when I consider the Golden Rule, of which there are two versions. The one is that a person should not do unto others what he would not have others do unto himself. The other is that a person should do unto others what he would have others do unto himself. Both have their place, but I prefer the former to the latter.

The former states a negative; it is not assertive, but it is respectful of others. I experience or anticipate unpleasant things for myself; I can easily imagine that others would experience or anticipate them similarly. This simple act of moral imagination gives me pause if I have any care for others. Still, the negative Golden Rule does not rule out acting to help others. Since I would not want my needs as a human, say, according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, unmet, so I would not want others’ needs unmet. I do not want to be hungry, sick, naked, unsheltered; I do not want others to be hungry, sick, naked, unsheltered.

The latter is more problematic. The latter states a positive; it is assertive, and it is not respectful of others. It is makes one’s preferences the standard for others and leads one to make choices for, or to coerce, others accordingly. If one likes peanut butter sandwiches, he would oblige another to eat peanut butter sandwiches, even though that person might be fatally allergic to peanut butter. Or one believes in this or that God to be saved, so one would insist that others had better believe in one’s God to be saved. We know what comes of that kind of caring for the souls of others: dead bodies.

So my God does not care what I believe; if he cares at all, he cares what I do. If so, I do not think that he cares whether I observe rituals, but I think that he cares that I do more than write checks to charities. Whatever rituals can do for us, they can do nothing for Him. Whatever salvation there is for us, it does not come from bowing heads, bending knees, saying prayers, or singing psalms; or proselytizing to get others to share our beliefs or rituals. It comes from saying words and doing deeds of compassion.

The guidance on my refrigerator door is not the Ten Commandments or the Lord’s Prayer; it is an eight-word moral code of my own: seek truth, do right, demand justice, pursue peace. Do we always know what is true or right or just or peaceable? Absolutely not—which explains why we must talk with others and listen to one another. Are we able to carry them out on our own, do everything on our own, make it all happen? Absolutely not—which explains why we need each other to work together. Remember: even He did not do it all; He quit after six days, took a break, and left us to finish His work.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ROYAL WEDDING

2011-04-30T07:59:00.000-06:00

The wedding invitation was a surprise. Unfortunately, it arrived too late for my wife and me to make the necessary arrangements to attend. We were among the very few to send regrets. Thus I dreamed. Then I rose early and watched from afar, like one to two billion other people. Half of them seemed to line the streets of London, then to swarm them after the cortege of carriages and cars went by. I saw nary a stiff upper lip; instead, many a Union Jack, many a smile, and a few tears of joy.

With a modest background in military intelligence, I looked for security forces. Aside from the police standing at intervals along the routes and one fellow in a yellow security vest near a TV camera, sharpshooters and support personnel were nowhere visible. My understanding is that sundry security agencies contacted the usual and some unusual suspects to remind them of the date: Friday, 29 April, absolutely nothing happens— right, old chap?

I need not tell those who watched the entire ceremony that it was everything which our British cousins do better than any other people in the world: the entire ceremony. No delay, no hitch, no false step; all grace and good bearing; all pomp and circumstance. Even the intermission for the signing of the marriage license had a genteel rightness to it—not too long, not too short, just right.

And for young and old in England, who need no reminder, and for Anglophiles everywhere else, there was the eye-blearing fly-over of a Lancaster bomber and two fighters, a Hurricane and a Spitfire. Heroic past and historic present honored one another by this witness to RAF pilots who fought with game and grit in a dark hour against otherwise overwhelming forces to ensure just such moments for the monarchy and more—I tell you, it was almost, but not quite, too much.

William Arthur Philip Louis is a fine fellow. But Catherine Elizabeth is peerless. Transcending great beauty, she is all royal in her self-possession, dignified deportment, and gracious demeanor, with a smile as radiant, warm, and welcoming as—I know not what. They say that she is discreet. Of course, she is. How else could she have overcome the difference of class and the caution of the highest blood? They do not say—why not, I wonder—that she is intelligent. Her attendance at St. Andrews testifies to good brains to go with good looks. We may expect much of them and their good works.

The new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge bring new life and high luster to the English monarchy. More, the traditions evoked by, and the ceremonies of state revived for, the occasion should, I hope, remind us of the value of values seldom appreciated, less often acquired, in these pedestrian days. Perhaps this young and winsome couple will help us restore them to ourselves and to our posterity.

SHAKESPEARE PROFESSORS AND TEA PARTIERS

2011-04-16T15:52:00.001-06:00

My attendance at this year’s annual conference of the Shakespeare Association of America served as a useful reminder that academics are people as given to looniness as the maddest member of the Tea Party. Disregarding fact or argument, and disrespecting those who disagree with them are as widespread among the highly educated—my father would have said, “over-educated”—as the educated and under-educated.

I have missed only one of the past seven annual conferences of this association. In the past decade or so, the numbers of members and attendees have grown dramatically. Unfortunately, the quality of seminar papers and discussion has not done the same. I have been threatening not to attend for several years, but I have yielded to the appeals of friends in academe to re-join them in following years and to participate, as I always do, by writing a paper for a seminar.

My seminar this year was “Macbeth: The State of the Play.” The play interests me; I have written a book chapter and two other conference papers on it, and have taught it as a guest teacher to two high school classes. Much there is to say, so the inclusive charter of the seminar gave me room to explore the play from a new angle: “This seminar invites papers on any aspect of Macbeth in its time, our time, any time: the text and its authorship; Jacobean contexts; witches, magic, the supernatural; the play’s history on stage and screen; adaptations and appropriations.” The topic was broad enough to admit the kitchen sink; indeed, one paper discussed food and feasting in the play.

Professors were less professional than personal in their papers or participation. Respect for Shakespeare and other scholars was in short supply. One editor attacked the editing of Macbeth by another editor, whose editions of Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s plays are standards in the field, without proposing solutions to the problems. A literary historian exonerated the Catholic equivocator of whom the Porter speaks—a little like trying to resurrect Richard III’s reputation—without showing that or how exposing or correcting contemporary mistakes or Shakespeare’s distortions about a centuries-dead priest has any bearing on the meaning of the play. Nevertheless, these two papers were among the better ones, worth the time to read and discuss. Two papers which invited reconsideration of the play’s genre as satire or romance other professors simply ignored or superciliously dismissed, respectively. Professors shouted down with Shakespearean proof texts the suggestion that Macbeth was a sociopath (more likely, a psychopath). A few other papers ineptly addressed worthwhile subjects. Out of about thirty papers, perhaps six or so had merit.

The discussions in the split sessions were an embarrassment in their inanity. Both soon descended into trivial but earnest exchanges about modern stagings and stage props. For example, was Macbeth’s severed head better carried by its hair or in a bag?—really! None of the professors thus ardently engaged attempted to make clear what these tidbits had to do with the “State of the Play.” Worse was their myopic, if not narcissistic, attempt to rationalize their subjective responses bearing little resemblance to the play on the page or on the stage, at least to any contemporary reader or on any contemporary stage. Thus, they censured most of the last two acts which they regarded as boring, confusing, or inept. They reserved special scorn for the long scene, usually cut by modern directors, between Malcolm and Macduff. They were about complaining, not explaining. In short, so they decided, the play is a failure.

The presumption of this view, which most professors shared and elaborated, is astonishing in its disregard of biographical or historical perspective. It implies that, at the height of his powers, Shakespeare failed to write a competent play. It implies that he failed despite his effort to write one with a special appeal to King James, his court, and his people. It implies that the play discredits one of James’s ancestors and discounts the promise of the ascension of that ancestor at the end. If such were the case, James—not foolish, not ignorant of his family’s or his birth-country’s history, not incompetent as a writer himself—would likely have pitched a royal fit; dressed down Shakespeare and his theater company, The King’s Men, who were his servants; and forbidden future public performances. Nothing of the sort happened.

Beyond these implications are the facts. The play was popular in its day, before James at court and before the public in the Globe Theater. Even removed from its cultural and historical context of Stuart England, it became and has remained popular for centuries in countries throughout the world. This is failure?

To these professors, mostly in their early 30s to mid 40s, self-centered and self-convinced, apparently so. Isolated from the historical realities of their subject, they chose not to interrogate their responses to, or views of, the play. Intolerant of dissent and disrespectful of dissenters, they deterred discussion with those not committed to their positions or approaches. They preferred to defy the facts, defy the inferences, and defy the judgment of millions, including Shakespeare scholars, over hundreds of years.

What distinguishes some Shakespeare professors from most Tea Partiers? The answer appears to be: little or nothing. What some Shakespeare professors do with Shakespeare and to scholarship is what most Tea Partiers do with the Constitution and to democracy. Both share in the barbarism of disrespect to, or destruction, of texts, literary or political, and of the institutions which depend on them.

This conclusion should come as no surprise to those who realize that the shift in education from communication to expression has, over the past 40 years, undermined accountability to facts and logic, and underlined feelings and freedom divorced from any standards except self-serving ones. So whether the decline of cogency and civility occurs in cultural or political contexts, it manifests societal decay probably irreversible.

SATIRE IN A SILLY SEASON

2011-04-02T08:34:00.001-06:00

A Note to Readers:

I offer the following satire in the spirit of serious silliness which has again struck stark raving mad the people whom many have long suspected of being stark raving mad.

First, I refer, of course, to the announced commitment of the House leadership to insist that every piece of legislation cite the provision or provisions in the Constitution which justifies the legislation. Yippee! But the pledge seems more honored in the breach than the observance.

Then, I refer to the fact that yesterday, April 1 (aka April Fool’s Day), the U. S. House of Representatives passed a “Government Shutdown Prevention Act” (GSPA), which declares that, if the Senate does not pass the House-approved budget (H.R. 1), with its $61 billion in spending cuts, by 6 April, the GSPA will become the law of the land.

How’s that for Constitutional compliance? If the Senate does not pass and the President does not sign H.R. 1, GSPA will become the law of the land regardless, so Eric Cantor and the Creeps insist.

In that context of craziness, perhaps my satire on further steps to restrict abortions may be worth a chuckle. However, I must advise you that I have chosen not to read the Constitution.

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“A Modest Proposal” (a la Jonathan Swift) to Discourage Abortions

The unending controversy about abortion features arguments about the definition of life; specifications of the moment of conception or of birth; the name of the unborn—zygote, embryo, fetus, baby, child, person—; the moment of viability; the circumstances of rape, incest, and the mother’s health; and so forth. After half a century of what some charitably call a “debate,” we have no answers, only anger, aggression, and guns deployed to protect “life” at the expense of the lives, or the quality of lives, of others.

Today, after almost five decades of women’s liberation, feminism, and the sexual revolution, federal and state legislatures are still predominantly male governing bodies still passing abortion-related laws. Most of them are intended to restrict the exercise of a woman’s right under Roe vs. Wade (1973) to an abortion. But even the most ardent of the anti-abortion life-lovers would not imagine restricting in the slightest way, even for public safety, the exercise of a right to own or use guns. That disparity counts for almost nothing by comparison with the perverse positions and worse practices of the Catholic Church, with its all-male ecclesiastics. Curiously, in the last half century, its opposition to abortion parallels its tolerance of increased sexual molestation of young adherents. From the lowest to the highest echelons, some ecclesiastics end respect for life at birth.

I resent this largely male enthusiasm for restricting the exercise of rights which women have under the law to make choices for themselves. I resent even more the power of male elected officials to impose such restrictions when they themselves take no responsibility and suffer no consequences for their decisions. It seems to me we have a new way, albeit vicariously and legislatively, for boys to sow wild oats once again.

So I offer “a modest proposal” to correct this inequity yet discourage abortions: penalize the fertilizers. If we have restrictions on a woman’s reproductive choices, fairness demands that we have corresponding restrictions on a man’s reproductive choices. Jurisdictions which discourage or deter women from having elective abortions should comparably restrict heterosexual men from having elective sexual relations.

If the state impedes a woman’s exercise of a right to an abortion, it must make the penalties fit the pregnancy. If the pregnancy results from rape—date rape included, college boys, so eschew alcohol and ecstasy, and make yourself agreeable enough to get consent—or incest, the state should castrate the miscreants, maybe only one testicle for first offenders of non-incestuous acquaintance rape. If it results from accidents between consenting adults, it should deny sexual relations by the parents except with themselves throughout the minority of the child. The prospect of eighteen years of individual, hands-on experience by both parents will, I think, make all straights very, very careful about unwanted pregnancies, in or out of marriage. If it results from under-age female promiscuity, I suggest adoption for the child and eighteen-year incarceration for the father. (This paragraph does not consider what to do about the mother, who would be free to carry on carrying on.) The importance of reducing the number of abortions, if not eliminating them altogether, makes these penalties neither extreme nor expensive.

Only the originality of this “modest proposal” is likely to count against it and impede acceptance and enactment. But, I assure you, the number of unwanted pregnancies will decline, the number of abortions will decline, and the number of adoptions will soar—an anti-abortionist’s dream come true, one without the moralistic nightmare of abstention. The only thing counting against this proposal is its likely encouragement of gay and lesbian relationships—a subject for another occasion.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF NATURAL CATASTROPHES ARE MAN-MADE

2011-03-19T08:38:00.001-06:00

Not always, but often.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods—many big, bad things happen. To some, when they happen at the wrong place, always at the wrong time, the message is that natural forces, inevitably and invincibly, can overcome man-made cities or facilities, and that we are powerless to stop them. The message is one of fatalistic despair. Only one phenomenon is worse because it exists on a global scale: a falling sky.

The earthquake registering 8.9 on the Richter Scale and the 30-foot tsunami which it created caused thousands of deaths, devastated the east-central coast of Japan’s main island, and damaged a nuclear power site with six reactors. They recovery will take years and years. Some have concluded that the threat of severe accidents or disasters, with resulting radioactive releases, makes reliance on nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels problematic.

The arguments for and against nuclear power are another topic for another day. The simple facts are that the current nuclear power regime, now half a century old, provides a substantial amount of electrical power to the grids of many countries. This first regime reflects the false starts of a complex, nascent technology and an overconfident, emerging industry: many poor siting decisions, poor plant designs, poor reactor designs, poor accident-prevention or -mitigation strategies, and more.

Whether the second regime, now waiting for the right technological developments, economic conditions, and regulatory approval, can do better remains to be seen. My hope is qualified by an understanding that the problems with nuclear power have less to do with technology and more to do with management. Perhaps, a better way to put it is to say that the problems with nuclear power are the desire, here as elsewhere, for low-cost, short-cut, politically convenient solutions.

Consider the dikes built centuries ago to protect New Orleans. Modest upgrades over the years to protect the city against a Category III hurricane were far from perfect mainly because of poor design, poor materials, and poor equipment. But the major problem was the decision not to protect the city against a larger hurricane. The decision seemed like a good idea at the time because no larger hurricane had struck the area in centuries and because no one wanted to pay the costs of prevention or mitigation, which increase proportionately to estimates of the severity of the threat. Worse, it ignored the size and scope of the consequences to a growing population in a growing city, with an expanding, expensive residential, commercial, and industrial base. Unlike homeowners who increase their insurance coverage as their houses appreciate in value, government at all levels did not proportionately increase their protection and preparation as the city grew.

Or consider the Japanese government decision to site six nuclear power plants in an earthquake- and tsunami-prone area—most in Japan would be prone to one or the other, if not both. Given the risks, it might have stipulated earthquake-resistant designs capable of tolerating quakes one or more orders of magnitude greater than the greatest earthquake registered in the country, tsunami-resistant structures and above-crest support facilities, separate power sources for each plant, and separate, on-site water stored to flood each containment vessel. These and other stipulated features would have cost much more than current features did, but they would have spared the far greater costs of what can be recovered and, in the lives of thousands, what cannot be recovered.

Since we already have an old, large nuclear power regime, we will need a new, larger regime to meet future electrical energy demand, including displacement of fossil-fuel energy. This second regime must avoid the past’s cheaper and easier approach which ultimately jeopardizes safety, health, and the environment, not to mention the economy.

The biggest problem-avoiding strategy is to develop the second regime in a mixed-free-market manner. On the one hand, the industry pays its way, without guaranteed loans, subsidies, or liability caps. On the other hand, the government simultaneously does two things. One, it establishes and enforces regulations and standards reducing the probability or the consequences of natural disaster and human error. Two, it eliminates all energy taxes and all support of other energy industries so that the public faces the full, real costs of energy in any form. Let energy competition begin.

These points are the start of a national energy policy. A mixed-free-market in energy means that all forms of energy compete on a market-price-clearing basis. Thus: Energy industries pay their way—including all costs posed by the consequences of operations, disasters, or accidents—by setting prices to cover costs and make profits. Government regulates the energy industries to require that they build into their operations, facilities, and equipment whatever it takes to reduce risks to safety, health, and the environment from operations, disaster, or accident. It regulates the infrastructure for energy or fuel distribution to maintain reliability and efficiency. Finally, it conducts basic research to support industries’ applied research and development.

No one can prevent natural phenomena from occurring or accidents from happening. But we can prepare and act sensibly and safely. We can start by addressing fossil-fuel-energy industry conduct, its influence on government, and government efforts to encourage fossil-fuel-energy industries, all of which lead to realized threats to, and harmful effects on, the public. We have to encourage government officials to do the right thing, make energy industries pay their way, and make us pay taxes for the government to fully discharge its energy-related responsibilities.

CONSIDERING THE CONSTITUTION IN CELEBRATING THE FOURTH

2011-03-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

Motivated by anger at or hatred of the federal government, many on the far right invoke the Constitution to advance their political agenda. Contrary to long-established understandings, their interpretations derive from wishes in their head, not words on paper. Ironically, their interpretations, if implemented, would change America from a democratic republic to a corporate oligarchy.

Instead of accepting the ratified Constitution, with 27 ratified amendments, these partisans advocate one from several so-called Constitutions: the original Constitution, without amendments; the early Constitution, with 10 “Bill of Rights” amendments; or various “Constitutions” picking and choosing among later amendments. All reflect nostalgic sentiment or “originalist” philosophy.

Those familiar with legal phantasms understand originalism as a specious doctrine which holds that judicial interpretations of the Constitution must follow the meanings intended by its original architects and that what the Constitution does not mention does not exist. We can only imperfectly ascertain original meanings from historical records. Even so, original meanings do not preclude evolving meanings as circumstances change. Paradoxically, the Constitution’s original architects were not originalists; they specifically provided for adjudication of its meaning (ambiguous, vague, or novel situations) by a Supreme Court (Article III) and by Constitutional amendment (Article V).

Originalism suffers not only from Constitutional provisions for evolution, but also from deficiencies of rigid literalism.

Instance: Article I, Section 9, provides that the government shall neither prefer one port over another nor direct vessels to one port instead of another. Since the term “vessel” applies only to boats or ships, and the term “port” only to harbors, originalism leaves the government free to do as it pleases with trains, buses, and planes, and their facilities.

Instance: Article II, Section 2, declares the President to be the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy” (and “the Militia of the several states”). Originalists would argue from the fact of omission that he is not commander in chief of the Air Force. Someone else could command it, and, if he disagreed with the president, put this service at odds, if not at war, with the others or with the government itself.

Originalists distort and misrepresent the Constitution to serve their politics.

Instance: They ignore the unamended Constitution when they interpret the Second Amendment. Article I, Section 8, gives Congress power for calling up “Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” and for “organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia”; and allows states only to appoint officers and train the militia “according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.” Thus, the Constitution gives the federal government authority over state militias to enforce laws and to protect federal and state governments and the country as a whole. The Second Amendment allows people to own arms and not rely on the federal government to provide them. Tea Partiers have something hallucinogenic in their brew if they imagine, as Sharron Angle does, that the Founding Fathers intended it to protect the people from a “tyrannical government.”

Instance: They wrench the Constitution out of historical context to fit it to their political philosophy of low taxes, small government, and states’ rights. The Articles of Confederation (1783), a weak-federal-government predecessor, failed from the start mainly because it lacked authority to tax, resolve differences among states, and amend itself without unanimous consent by the states. Its soon-apparent failures prompted the Convention to draft in 1787, and enough states to ratify by 1789, a Constitution creating a federal government strong enough to tax and borrow funds, take precedence over state interests in the national interest, and adapt to change by judicial interpretation or national amendment.

Unlike us, the Founding Fathers did not expect a poor, small, or weak federal government to do big things on small budgets.

Because the Preamble challenges their political philosophy, originalists ignore this primer for a strong federal government committed to benevolent purposes. It states a platform transcending the factionalism of state or party interests: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”

I especially like the silence about states and the phrases “more perfect Union,” “common defence,” and “general Welfare” (the latter two phrases also appear in Article I, Section 8). Ben Franklin said it best: “There are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them.... I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution.... It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies.”

Astonish them we have—and sometimes ourselves—which explains why we should celebrate independence not only on the Fourth, but also everyday.

HUCKABEE FOR . . . FOX COMMENTATOR

2011-03-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

Mike Huckabee has again demonstrated his fitness to be a Fox commentator.

In an interview with Steve Malzberg, reported in yesterday’s The Washington Post, Huckabee made two statements about Obama’s upbringing. First he said,

I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, [is] very different than the average American.

Then he said,

...if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Later, a Huckabee adviser had no explanation for these remarks. Later still, Huckabee’s spokesman, Hogan Gidley explained:

Governor Huckabee simply misspoke when he alluded to President Obama growing up in 'Kenya.' The Governor meant to say the President grew up in Indonesia.

When the Governor mentioned he wanted to know more about the President, he wasn't talking about the President's place of birth - the Governor believes the President was born in Hawaii. The Governor would however like to know more about where President Obama's liberal policies come from and what else the President plans to do to this country - as do most Americans.

“Simply misspoke”? Simply a lie, and one Huckabee had to have authorized. We do not have a campaign-weary Obama making a slip of the tongue when he referred to America’s 57 states. We have deliberate statements in a scheduled interview with four references to Kenya, two references to the British, and one historically accurate reference to the Mau-Mau, a tribe which rebelled against British rule in Kenya. So the idea that Huckabee meant Indonesia is a lie, and the rest of his spokesman’s comment is persiflage intended to distract attention from the lie.

Huckabee has revealed himself to be, not the honest and thus honorable man whom he presents himself to be, but just another hack who will lie about little things and not admit mistakes. The odds are good that he will lie about the big ones and never admit mistakes. Not my guy for anything but Fox News.

BEHOLD THE WONDERS OF THE FREE MARKET

2011-02-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

To do so, turn on your television, find your favorite news channel, and enjoy the views from the south side of the Deep South—white sands, blue water, and fluffy clouds in serene skies. Or take a Caribbean vacation—sightseeing, shell-collecting, sunbathing, swimming, snorkeling, deep-sea fishing, and seafood. Ah, yesterday. Now switch channels and witness an economic, heath, and environmental, disaster of unprecedented proportions developing daily on and off our southern shores. Oh, today.

First responses to a catastrophe with consequences lasting for decades seem to be partisan point-scoring, fingerpointing, and scapegoating. The usual suspects are greedy and deceitful oil companies, or corrupt or incompetent government agencies. Most people choose sides on the basis of their attitudes not only to the parties, but also to free markets and government regulations. In the debased vernacular of political discourse about economic topics, most people regard markets and regulations as existing in an either/or, not a both/and, relationship. Therein lies the problem.

Let me start with the obvious. “Free markets” are the spaces for transactions between a seller and a buyer. But to be “free,” like it or not, they must be fair. The old adage, “caveat emptor,” or “let the buyer beware,” recognizes that many transactions are not fair. So advanced economies have laws, regulations, and case laws to protect the buyer, and, as economies have grown in size and complexity, society and the environment. The fluctuating tension resulting from changing circumstances and evolving technologies underlies many controversies about the balance between markets and their regulation.

The tension in America reflects strong pro-business and widespread anti-government sentiments. Depending on political philosophy or expediency, politicians oppose or approve, shrink or expand, market restrictions. The result is imperfect markets because regulations do not exist, are small in scope or riddled with loopholes, or go unenforced.

Controversy erupts in the interplay of free markets and regulations in extractive energy industries, prominently including oil and gas, and coal, because they involve many people and much money. Both political parties shy from regulations protecting public as opposed to profitable interests until a disaster of large-scale death or destruction strikes. Then, in a spasm of publicized indignation, they pass legislation, walk away from their handiwork, and fail to oversee the enforcement and effects of regulation. The result is a market free of effective regulation. So “accidents” happen.

American free-markets balance this “bad” with “good” government intervention. Oil-and gas, and coal industry lobbyists play a double game by fighting restrictions on, but seeking assistance for, their companies. Although oil companies constitute most of the world’s ten largest companies and make huge profits, lobbyists urge that the industry needs help with its business. Both political parties believe that it is good to help the needy (who help them right back with campaign contributions). So both parties give oil companies what they want: support, subsidies (like caps on liability, which let companies budget limited costs of risking unlimited damage to everyone else), sole-source contracts (which inflate costs to the government), tax credits, and tax deductions (like oil depletion allowances, which save taxes on oil sold because someday it will run out and leave them with no more to sell). Today—fair is fair—the no-more-oil, alternative-energy industry wants help with its business, so it too lobbies for and receives support, subsidies, credits, and deductions. As a result, the government spends tax dollars on both the fossil-fuel energy industry and the alterative-energy industry, and Americans pay higher-than-otherwise taxes as fees for a “free market.”

My free-market/regulation position is simple. No direct or indirect government transfers of tax–payer assistance from public to private sectors (lower taxes, anyone?). Government regulation of the financial industry by all means and to the extent necessary to prevent collapses, without protection afforded equityholders. Government regulation to promote fair transactions, protect the safety and health of people, preserve the environment, and hold companies accountable for consequences of their actions.

In this vein, Louisiana’s governor commented that one of the two industries—oil and gas, and fishing—on which his state has long relied killed the other. Only a hard-core believer in capitalism’s “creative destruction” could admire the destruction wrought in the Caribbean, an admiration likely abated after a face-to-face, or fist-to-face, argument with those whose living depends on clean Gulf waters.

Given the nature, size, and scope of oil-and-gas and coal-mining operations, only the federal government has the capability to reduce the risks of damage and destruction, provide help, and offer the means of recovery and remedy. We may resent government regulation, but we cannot allow private companies to turn oceans into toxic cesspools, and mountains and valleys into barren moonscapes. So we must not prevent the government from regulating to protect the public interest, and people or companies from each other, between catastrophes; and then, when disaster strikes, complain about, or criticize, it when we the people have hampered its ability to do its job.

MASKING THE TRUTH ABOUT MOSQUES

2011-02-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

The media have recently broadcast comments or published articles, columns, and letters about the so-called “New York mosque.” Most opposing its construction on the approved site reflect or exploit election-year Islamophobia. Some reflect or appeal to the continuing discomfort or hostility of those who believe that Obama is a Muslim. Such emotions explain the incidence and intensity of false claims and fallacious arguments expressing these writers’ opposition.

One column cannot defuse or dissipate such irrationality and intemperance, but I hope that a reasoned rebuttal can help the undecided, if there are any, consider the controversy more carefully and compassionately.

The most common error is the mischaracterization of this proposed 13-story Islamic community center with its top two floors dedicated to worship, as a mosque. Community centers, Christian and Jewish, with rooms set aside for prayer, exist throughout the United States, and no one calls them churches and temples. Shame on the media for perpetuating this mischaracterization which prompts widely repeated false assertions and flimsy logic.

Opponents frequently asperse the honesty of the Cordoba Initiative’s Imam’s or its website statements of purpose. Many simply deny that the claims that Muslims seek and have sought for centuries “interfaith tolerance and respect.” Those who go beyond mere counter-assertions misrepresent the historical record by disregarding, distorting, or denying facts; taking them out of context; or applying a double standard to them. So the honesty of opponents more than the honesty of proponents is in question. In truth, the history of both Christianity and Islam are replete with abusive behavior false to their ideals, but most accusations against Islam apply at least equally to Christianity.

“Cordoba” leads opponents to consider Islamic Spain and rewrite its history as an example showing that neither peace nor prosperity prevailed under Muslim rule. On the contrary, after Muslim Arabs and Berbers defeated and evicted Christian Visigoths, Muslims and Jews lived in comity and comfort. Jews were second-class citizens liable to mild discrimination and modest taxes, but Muslims let Jews practice their religion and participate in the economy and the government. Together, in the period known as the “Golden Age,” they developed a state in which both prospered and the arts flourished.

By contrast, the history of Spain after the Christian reconquest is one of religious intolerance and national economic and cultural impoverishment. By expelling Muslims and Jews, its fanatical Catholic government ruined the economy, relied on colonial exploitation in the Western Hemisphere to prop it up, and precipitated Spain’s decline.

Opponents apply a double standard to criticize Muslims for their practice of building their mosques over destroyed churches—a criticism curiously irrelevant to a community center built blocks away from destroyed commercial buildings. Christians do the same thing. (In fact, the practice goes back to the dawn of history.) In England, Christianity built churches on Druid religious sites. Las Cruceans probably know something about the Spanish Conquistadors’ and the Catholic Church’s practice of building churches on Inca, Aztec, and Pueblo religious sites—not to mention horrific massacres, enslavement, and forced conversation of indigenous people. One exception, honored as such, was Diego de Vargas, who, in re-conquering New Mexico in 1692 after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, negotiated more than fought with the Indians, and, successful, prohibited slavery, did not destroy kivas, and tolerated dual worship.

Christianity perhaps more than Islam has a record of intolerance and hostility to those not only of other faiths, but also among its sects. Unlike Islam, Christianity has a long history of theologically rationalized segregation, persecution, impoverishment, and murder of Jews. Catholics reconquering Spain forced their conversion or expulsion. The Spanish Inquisition, though originating in the Albigensian Crusade fomented by the Catholic Church against French heretics known as Cathars, established its torments for use against Jews, then against perceived enemies elsewhere. The Counter-Reformation pitted Catholics against Protestants in decades-long wars; the English Civil War pitted Puritans against Anglicans. The purpose of the First Amendment right to freedom of religion aimed to prevent Christian sectarian hatred and conflict.

Another objection to an Islamic community center two blocks from, and out of sight of, Ground Zero is that it signals to radical Muslims a “victory” mosque memorializing a military triumph. The objection is absurd. Islam has no such mosques (as Christianity has no such churches), and no one should care how a few fanatics interpret the nature or location of this building. But everyone should care about Al Qaeda’s message to the large majority of non-fanatical Muslims: America’s anti-Islamic hysteria in attacking Islamic institutions shows its hypocrisy and hostility; America has no freedom of religion and is making war on Islam.

No one should argue that Islamophobes should not exercise their right to free speech. But everyone else should expect them to be as responsible to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in exercising this right as they are reckless in seeking to deny the right to freedom of religion and its exercise by others.

TARGETING ABUSES OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT

2011-01-22T08:37:00.001-07:00

The Second Amendment matters little to me. I have a modest history with firearms. I fired rifles in the backyard to kill sparrows using birdhouses intended for other species, in camp competition, and in military training. I needed a handgun only once in Vietnam and have handled no firearm since. But I accept that firearms matter to others for a variety of purposes, some fine, some not so fine.

I believe that people have not only the same right to firearms as they have to automobiles, but also the same responsibilities for them: registration for ownership and restrictions on use. Loaded guns no more belong in crowded places than speeding cars belong on city streets. The amendment is not needed to protect peoples’ rights—no one wants either their firearms or their cars—and should not be used to pervert or preclude their responsibilities. It certainly does not justify firearms without restrictions, as two common arguments suggest.

One is personal or family safety. Crime statistics and media sensationalism suggest that we live in dangerous times. And America has more violence than other nations with advanced economies. But in the quotidian lives of over 300 million Americans, firearms do little to promote individual safety. Firearms kill more people in domestic accidents or violence than in criminal incursions into the family circle. Most of those who possess firearms for self-defense are, in a showdown, unable or unwilling to use them. But no one denies your right to arms for self-defense even if you are a greater threat to those in your home than to those invading it.

The other is political freedom. Despite inflammatory talk, America faces no risk of a government-led confiscation of firearms as part of an effort to suppress individual dissent. Despite anger at illegal immigrants or fear of foreign attacks, Americans face few, if any, dangers from identifiable threats which can be effectively addressed by armed citizens. If the government transfers terrorists to a super-max prison in Colorado or Michigan, neither their good citizens nor those of Maine, Florida, and Idaho are going to need arms to defend their families and themselves in their cabins, condos, or double-wides.

Let us face it: the Second Amendment is a linguistic nightmare and a historical anachronism. Here it is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Some versions vary in punctuation and capitalization, but the variations do not much affect meaning. Still, I do not find this amendment as problematic as many find it.

Unlike the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment alone uses an absolute construction, a rare syntactic form which establishes conditions for what follows, like a sentence adverb (e.g., “hopefully”). The conditions are now historical anomalies in its references to a state, not a nation, and to a militia.

The amendment is a fossil. It does not assume the very nation and its federal government which the Constitution defined. Instead, it implicitly rejects both. It reflects a political compromise, with those who believed in a strong federal government allowing this after-thought to assuage ruralists who drafted an amendment assuming states to have powers not since either available or practical. Although state militias survive in law and fact, they are government troops acting under government orders for the public good of the state or nation. The national government, not the states, has primary, overriding responsibilities to defend the nation and to enforce the laws of the land. Only paranoid or political wingnuts—often one and the same—imagine armed American citizens fighting pitched battles against National Guard or regular troops, much less doing so successfully. And they would be a far cry from “well-regulated.”

The main clause is straightforward in stating a right like other rights in the Bill of Rights; like them, it is not absolute or unqualified. The right to free speech entitles no one to libel, slander, incitement, and the like; it is limited by the need to prevent harm to individuals and society. Likewise, the Second Amendment defines the right to “keep and bear Arms” but is likewise limited by a similar need. The absolute construction itself implies a specific political purpose which restricts the right: “the security of a free State.” So an individual bearing arms at a political rally or wearing them in a coffee shop is not “well regulated” and is not doing a thing for “the security of a free State.” He may not like government policies or the coffee at Starbucks, but carrying a weapon to a rally or a restaurant is a threat to constitutional democracy and a danger to law-abiding citizens.

Go hunting, shoot skeet, enter marksmanship competitions; otherwise, keep your firearms at home, unloaded and locked up. And stop using the Second Amendment to justify their misuse.

ACCOUNTABILITY IN NEW MEXICO PUBLIC EDUCATION

2011-01-08T13:03:00.000-07:00

For a quarter century, everyone has demanded accountability in public education because of declining student academic performance. Everyone wants teachers or schools to explain or justify themselves and officials to punish or reward them. I am not much for accountability, but, if it is the order of the day, why for teachers and schools only?

School board candidates or members invoke accountability. But I have rarely heard of principals holding teachers accountable; superintendents, principals; school boards, superintendents; or the public, school boards. So, for them, accountability is a charade. Too bad: I would love to hear Las Cruces and New Mexico officials explain or justify poor local and state educational performance, and to see the consequences of that accounting.

Most politicians and businesspeople also like the word accountability. They invoke it to seem sincere, sensible, and responsible about wanting to improve public education. They like a word reflecting inclinations for short cuts and quick fixes easily represented and rationalized by numbers. They use it to cover their lack of understanding of education and their reluctance to try to understand it. So, in a state with a long-term record of poor and deteriorating public education, they give 5 percent of their attention to 50 percent of the state budget. I would love it if they were held accountable.

Politicians and businesspeople have twisted accountability into a rationalization of a biased approach to assessments which, intended or not, stigmatize, intimidate, or punish teachers or schools. The approach combines two seemingly plausible procedures to give it a veneer of reasonableness. One procedure counts data like test scores and dropout or graduation rates; the other procedure scores the data; the results determine labels, threats, and interventions. They do not use results to suitable, constructive purposes: criticize to remediate and encourage to enhance—to improve.

As a result, politicians and businesspeople have achieved a record of consistent failure by enforcing a doctrine of accountability based on counting and scoring procedures. The longer they have dictated the use of these procedures and ignored curriculum content and instructional methods, the greater the deterioration of education. The more they have demanded that teachers or schools obey their dictates (or else), the greater the damage to, and deterioration of, educators’ ability to do their job. As imposed by politicians and promoted by businesspeople, accountability has sped the decline of public education and has let them scapegoat everyone else for it.

For nothing about this doctrine has anything to do with education. Under the spell of its underlying numerology, politicians and businesspeople believe that what their approach cannot count and score has no value and need not be taught. Accountability shrinks curriculum and straightjackets instruction. It constricts education to teaching from textbooks and teachers’ manuals to tests of skills in reading and computing; it thus stifles literature, history, and science; it strangles other valuable lessons which students learn from good teachers outside the work-by-the-rule fetters of accountability.

However, public education might benefit if politicians and businesspeople applied their doctrine of accountability to two deserving targets.

First, the Public Education Department, with no record of helping public education. PED’s curriculum guidelines and benchmarks are mindless, mind-numbing documents serving no good purpose. Worse, it requires districts to produce similar documents in greater mindless, mind-numbing detail serving no good purpose. It does not monitor classroom implementation, which is non-existent; it shuffles papers and requires others to shuffle papers. And its application form for teacher certification devotes much space to character and fitness, some to education, none to experience. Since politicians and businesspeople decry the decline in student academic performance and declare a desire for better teachers, perhaps they should ask why PED’s curriculum efforts have not improved public education, and whether its certification requirements have failed to ensure teacher competency but have succeeded in excluding talented people from teaching.

Second, the state’s colleges or schools of education, with no record of adequately training teachers. For example, NMSU’s COE requires prospective elementary school teachers to take upper-class courses in only one of the four core subjects which they will teach. Most opt for English, a few for social studies, and almost none for mathematics and science. Inevitably, many have trouble teaching mathematics and science. Ironically, despite several reading courses, many have trouble teaching reading. The results have been similar for a decade: only 50% of 4th-grade students demonstrate proficiency in arithmetic or reading. Perhaps politicians and businesspeople should ask the COE and its faculty why their graduates are ill-prepared to get students off to a good start, and hold this school and its teachers accountable for the performance of their students.

I am not much for accountability. But fair is fair. Those with power over local districts and those with authority to train teachers should be no less accountable than those whom they boss around or lord it over. Why are top state and school of education officials not accountable to the public which pays them?

THE FAILED PRESIDENCY OF BARACK OBAMA

2010-12-27T12:51:00.001-07:00

Increasingly, Democrats, liberals, progressives hope and pray that Obama will assert leadership on this or that issue. Sorry, my friends on the Left, give it up. It ain’t gonna happen. This Prince Hamlet decides and does nothing; instead, he dithers and dodges.

Two years ago, I opposed McCain more than I approved Obama. I rightly credited Obama as informed, intelligent, articulate, and reasonable; and with mostly sensible policies. I wrongly assumed that his personal qualities and his political policies and experience would translate into smart but strong leadership. But I quickly recovered, and quickly discovered that Obama is not so smart or so strong as I had expected. As a man and as the president, he is so conflict-averse that his preferred personal and political strategies are bob-and-weave, cringe-and-cower, and duck-and-run.

Even as I have criticized Obama, to the disappointment or disparagement of some family and friends on the Left since the election, I have defended him against Tea Party and Republican rampages of indecent personal and baseless political attacks. If right-side troglodytes had not gone after his birth certificate; spread lies about his country of origin, religion, and economic or political orientation; and distorted or lied about his policies, they might have been done two constructive things. They might have enabled a useful debate on important national issues, and they might not have forced left-side supporters to defend the problematic as well as the practical.

Playing to a public wanting results, Obama has advocated bipartisanship. But, in its name, his concessions in advance, or instead, of negotiations camouflage his desire to avoid confrontation or controversy. Ironically, his strategy obviates bipartisanship; Republicans need not negotiate in any kind of faith since they can get what they want by being partisan and unpleasant. Looking back, I ask myself how did he not learn in Chicago, in Illinois, in Congress, and in the campaign that politics is a contact sport?

First, Obama ducked controversy by discounting likely violations of international and national law (torture); disregarding obligations under treaties and laws, and precedents for legal action; and discouraging their investigation. Despite his special expertise in Constitutional and civil rights law, he established precedents for later administrations to justify future encroachment on, or erosion of, laws, liberties, and democracy itself.

Thus, he has squandered the goodwill and respect which foreign governments granted him as one different from his predecessor in international affairs. America’s reputation is now tarnished by its choice to disregard treaties—a tactic which will come back to haunt this country’s efforts to work with other countries. For leadership in a multi-polar world must be by the example of moral leadership and mutual respect.

Second, Obama dodged conflict by accepting a face-saving but empty promise by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to slow down, not halt, as Obama requested, further construction in the West Bank. Foreign leaders realized that Obama lacked backbone. Result: no influence with Iran’s Ahmadinejad, little with Afghanistan’s Karzai, and less and less with other foreign leaders on international issues.

Third, Obama deflected contention with the financial industry by appointing some of its members to his administration, and by bailing out bankers and brokers before bailing out the bankrupt and the broke, still not bailed out. By first loaning them hundreds of billions without securing their agreement to terms and conditions effecting reforms, he later enabled the financial industry to resist reforms and made it difficult to enact them.

Meanwhile, to avoid conflict with Republicans, Obama rejected nearly unanimous advice from most economists, who urged a stimulus package of nearly $2 trillion dollars. Instead, he proposed a stimulus package about half that size, just large enough to save some jobs and prevent a depression, but not large enough to reverse the recession, from which the country has yet to recover.

Fourth, whatever one thinks of him or his positions, no one can deny that he gives no problem his clear and uncompromised support for any solution, including those which he himself has advocated. He let health care reform, his signature issue, become and remain a muddle because, without indicating that he had any convictions on the subject, he let Democratic Congressional leaders take 15 months to produce a piece of legislation, the making of which discredited or disgraced just about everyone involved in either party, no matter what position or positions he or she took.

Likewise, Obama cannot reconcile his strenuous campaign promises and current positions on extending all or only some of the Bush tax cuts. The House, which must initiate tax legislation, has voted to extend them for individuals making up to $200,000 and for couples making up to $250,000. But Obama is undermining that legislation approved by a large majority of House Democrats by trying to negotiate a face-saving surrender to Senate Republicans standing firm on extending the tax cuts to all.

Obama has turned away from the trigger of the continuing meltdown, the collapse of the housing market, as millions of foreclosures continue to occur. Because he has allowed too-big-too-fail financial corporations to grow even bigger, the damage to the economy threatened from this sector dwarfs the damage just done by it.

So the economy continues to stagnate, and Obama is not using his office—who can associate something like the “bully pulpit” with him?—to rally the nation to transform the economy, including deficit reduction and tax reform. Instead, he takes the bold, creative, and decisive action—not—to create a commission.

Obama has abandoned most of his campaign issues. Guantanamo is still open for business, with detainee trials still deferred and discredited. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act remain laws of the land and likely to remain so because he is taking the path of least resistance and least right to protect or expand civil rights. Education reform under the “Race to the Top” is “No Child Left Behind” with money and smiles, and not more than one whit better. Green industry initiatives have flagged. Cap-and-trade has failed.

Republicans are responsible for their obstructionism, but Obama is responsible for its duration and intensity. He refuses to repudiate personal attacks on his birthright and beliefs; he refuses to rebut distortions of, and falsehoods about, his policies. Obama’s tolerance of persistent personal and political abuse indicates a serious personality defect and grave moral weakness. His desire for peace at any price has costs.

The biggest is Obama’s loss of peoples’ respect, even among supporters. Regardless of what they believe, regardless of what place they occupy on the political spectrum, Americans follow with respect, if not without reservations, a leader who fights for the right as he sees it or even someone who is strong but wrong. But they do not follow someone cringing and craven however right he may be.

The sad fact is that, good and decent as is, Obama is temperamentally incapable of getting it back; getting it back would require what Obama lacks: courage, which is an essential element of convictions, and, in his case, convictions which are Democratic ones. He will not get it back by re-runs of his belief in bipartisanship and public relations activities: speeches, photo ops, interviews, and TV appearances.

By tolerating abuse, Obama has made personal disrespect and political disregard painless. By contrast, imagine Mitch McConnell or John Boehner or any of the other pipsqueaks-in-opposition talking or walking as they do if Lyndon Johnson were in office. He would have a glass bowl full of their soft body parts prominently displayed on his Oval Office desk.

Democrats, liberals, progressives hope and pray that mid-term Democratic losses will give Obama the grit to fight. But they have already witnessed his self-abasing backdown: he blamed himself for not talking enough with Republicans, who have talked only “no.” Cajoling or scolding him by turns, the Left has wanted him to succeed and has worked for his success, but the reality no longer deniable is that Obama has irretrievably failed.

So, my friends on the Left, get over hoping and praying for anything but a Democrat up who can replace him before he takes down all those who have hoped and prayed for him for two years. Find yourselves a real Democrat, man or woman, smart and strong enough for the presidency.

PALIN BY COMPARISON

2010-12-12T10:34:00.001-07:00

With everyone else talking or writing about Sarah Palin, I have to catch up. But I am not going to slog through the personal stuff about her family life or the gulf between her moral pretensions, and her and her family’s performance. Nor am I going to rehearse her alleged ethical or criminal lapses in office. Tabloids and talking heads have done that work in mind-numbing detail. Psycho-social drama is their thing, not mine. Everyone else sees her as a politician, a celebrity, or a political celebrity. I see her differently, as a threat, ironically, to the one thing which she purports to hold most dear: freedom (whatever it means to her).

Saint Ronnie versus Saint Sarah

Someone near and dear to me argues that Palin is a female doppelganger of Ronald Reagan. Palin herself invites the comparison despite her ignorance of the basic facts about the man. For example, speaking at Cal State Stanislaus earlier this year, she extolled Reagan for coming west to California to get his college education in nearby Eureka. Wrong: Reagan got his diploma from Eureka College in Illinois long before relocating. Such ignorance of the icon whom she disses by exploiting keeps her from realizing that the comparison is not flattering to her. For the parallels are few and flimsy. Both come from modest backgrounds, went to college, entered politics, and became governors. But the disparities in the details of these parallels reflect big differences between these iconic figures.

Reagan grew up during the Depression, worked hard, mixed easily with people of all sorts. He majored in economics and sociology, got a job in broadcasting, then became a prominent Hollywood actor in B-grade movies, including “Bedtime for Bozo” and “Knute Rockne, All American.” Raised a New Deal Democrat, he led the Screen Actors Guild; working as a GE spokesman, he became a Republican. He entered politics, became a successful, two-term governor of the state with the largest and most diverse population and economy, and then became a successful, two-term president.

By comparison, Palin knew no economic hardships, never worked hard, and knew or mixed easily with few people different from her. Her college education in communications was haphazard, but she got a job in broadcasting. She entered small-town politics as mayor of a small city and later became governor of state with a small, mainly white, population and with a small economy funded largely by federal money and corporate royalties. She quit after two years with relatively little to show for her tenure.

The big difference: Reagan knew, respected, and liked people (his friendship with Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House who opposed much of his legislation, was legendary); had a working knowledge of domestic and foreign issues; and demonstrated geniality, good sense, and self-confidence. Palin is his opposite in these respects. She describes herself as a “pit bull with lipstick”; she remains indifferent to knowledge or nuance about national issues; and her sense of grievance and her resentments motivate her attitude toward, and attacks on, those who question or criticize her or her views.

Reagan is Reagan, and Palin is no Reagan. Reagan was a charismatic political leader who worked with political friends and foes alike; Palin is a charismatic demagogue who uses political power to reward friends and punish enemies. In real life, Reagan was an extrovert, a nice guy; Palin is a narcissist, and nasty.

Palin Is a Unique Populist

Palin is a populist unlike the traditional advocate for the down-and-out who emerges in tough times. In the 2008 economic meltdown, she did not demand economic reform, financial assistance to the needy, or public works programs for the unemployed; she did not deplore the abuses which caused misery to many or sympathize with those who lost, or feared losing, homes, jobs, health insurance, or education. In the 2010 BP-created Gulf disaster, she had no feeling for people affected, livelihoods destroyed, and way of life threatened. Yet she has her greatest appeal to, and support from, whites suffering most.

So what is Palin’s appeal, and how does it work? My guess: it reflects a new kind of populism, in three respects. First, the old populism supported anti-trust, anti-rich rhetoric and government-effected wealth redistribution (Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt). Her populism is capitalistic, even corporatist. Palin fans traditional slogans about lower taxes, less regulation, and smaller government, into inflamed loathing of government (“death panels”) and rabid support for environment-damaging corporations (“drill, baby, drill”).

Second, the old populism used traditional anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism, with its lexicon of sneers at “Boston Brahmins,” “limousine liberals,” “eggheads,” and “pointy-headed” or “ivory-tower” academics. Her populism is original in discounting, or dispensing with, facts, logic, and truth. Palin knows that “you betcha,” a wink, and an aura of ill-usage work—and work better than policy papers or program details—because her followers can grasp them intuitively.

Third, the old populism attacked economic inequality but asserted personal equality—you’re-as-good-as-they-are stuff. Populism for the past 40 years has played the victim-making identity issues of race, gender, and culture. Her new populism moves in a new direction. Palin makes no use of the old populism to address economic fears and makes modest use of identity issues in code words, notably her repeated phrase about “real Americans.

Rather, she aggravates her followers’ feelings of inferiority and inequality to those who have what they have not. She shares their feelings and knows them to care more that she runs against those whom they begrudge than runs for any issues in particular. She knows that the little required of them to feel an affinity with her and appreciate her as a celebrity is all which her campaign requires of them for her to succeed. So she will continue to ignore and outwit conventional politicians who think that her ignorance or incompetence matters to them and will diminish her appeal. They like her because she seems (and is) like them

Dealing with Palin and Palin Dealing with Decline

Republicans are particularly worried about Palin and her possible candidacy. The Democrats probably want her be Obama’s opposition. (If so, they should think again by recalling the Harry Reid liked the idea of running against Sharron Angle until he had to, and nearly lost. Harry won because he is skilled fighter; Obama may not because he is not.) I have my fair share of concerns about Palin and then some, so I am happy to offer advice to Republicans with their fair, but different, share of concerns.

My advice begins and ends with a strategy mindful of her personality and her propensities: avoid triggering her sense of grievance or her resentments. In any engagement, be respectful, attentive, undemonstrative, unresponsive. Discuss your views; disregard her views. Neither agree nor disagree with her; if necessary, rebut by indirection. Avoid criticism, even its appearance; ask no questions, seek no specifics, dispute no views. If you fail, she will tailor her response to any confrontation, direct or indirect, to elicit the sympathy of her followers and possibly others.

Palin has rallied the chronically disgruntled or resentful members of society, culled and gulled them, and led them to the polls. However, such attitudes and emotions lose potency over time, and I think that they already are losing it. She is discovering, and has more to discover, that, no sooner has she helped Tea and Republican candidates, than those elected are turning, and will continue to turn, on or away from her. When Tea Party representatives fail to fulfill campaign rhetoric and, instead, turn into run-of-the-mill politicians seeking re-election, they may tarnish her reputation and diminish her power. Whether she can retain her celebrity status with its political appeal remains to be seen. Her likely future: increasingly frantic, inane or degrading, futile efforts to restore the glory.

Slighted and scorned, she will turn on those who turn on her and may run for president in spite. If she does run, she is popular enough with her followers to win some primaries, but probably not popular enough with Republicans or Independents to win a nomination or with most Americans to win election. This majority, reasonable and responsible more often than not, elects presidents to work their hardest and do their best for four years, not quit for fun and profit after two.

THE WEAKER SEX

2010-11-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

“Frailty, thy name is woman.” Hamlet refers, not to women’s physical weakness, but to their moral weakness, an idea going back at least as far as the Biblical story of Eve’s succumbing to the Serpent’s temptation. The fact that women are physically weaker than men has, on the assumption that might makes right, led to the idea that women are morally weaker than men. Of course, the assumption embraces a pro-male bias favoring physical strength.

Human evolution and group organization placed a premium on physical strength (as well as speed, stamina, and throwing ability) in the millennia when it counted for the survival of the species and the success of states. Reliance on physical strength inclined groups to accept male dominance and gender-based divisions of labor. Throughout human history, these adaptive arrangements have become societal norms in almost all cultures. A man’s place is in the world; a woman’s, in the home—so goes traditional thinking.

But—O temporal, o mores—they are a-changing. Medical science supplants myth about biological strength. Males may be physically stronger, but not all strengths are physical; in fact, females are stronger in other ways, from start to finish. Boys have a higher infant mortality rate, and men do not live so long as women. Disease for disease, injury for injury, men die at higher rates than women. Physiologically, if not physically, women are stronger than men.

Thanks to labor-saving devices, physical strength matters less and less. Such devices have reduced the number of people working on farms and ranches; in mines, forests, and fisheries; and on assembly lines. A need for heavy labor may always exist, but the market for it will continue to shrink. In post-industrial economies, more jobs require less brawn and more brain—not a change favorable to physical strength, male dominance, and gender-based divisions of labor.

Women are also stronger psychologically and morally. Although they suffer from depression many times more than men (from male domination?), women better support each other, work better together, and do the same work better. Women’s greater emotional and social competence suggests their greater moral strength of compassion, consideration, and cooperation.

The Industrial Age created the conditions for women’s efforts to secure rights comparable to men’s. Because cultural change lags technological change, progress has been erratic and slow. Women did not get the vote until 1920. They did not get many jobs until World War II, but were displaced by returning veterans. Not until the advent of women’s liberation, did women begin to make sizeable in-roads in the male-dominated economy and male-dominated professional fields. Their struggle for careers outside traditional women’s jobs—from low-level jobs as seamstresses, secretaries, telephone operators, waitresses, and other service jobs; to mid-level jobs as librarians, nurses, and teachers—and for compensation equivalent to their male peers has significantly, but not entirely, succeeded.

Men maintained dominance in education and employment as long they maintained economic hegemony. However, when women have had equal opportunity for education and careers which relied on intellectual capabilities, they have not only succeeded, but also surpassed men. They get higher grades than men; more women than men attend, and graduate from, college; and more women than men now enter the professions of engineering, law, and medicine. Women now run major corporations, and their numbers as elected state and federal officials are growing. All of these developments are good and for the better.

But not all the consequences are good and for the better. We are making progress toward a gender-neutral society, but that progress has its costs. One obvious cost is the decline in public education as many of the best and the brightest women who once entered teaching now enter professions previously denied them, to be replaced by their less academically oriented and talented sisters.

A barely acknowledged cost is the effect of this social change on men. Because of unprecedented competition in school and at work, men are leaving fields or losing benefits once reserved almost exclusively for them. The asymmetry of the change hurts. Women have long aspired to “men’s work”; men have long belittled “women’s work.” When women do “men’s work,” men, sexist as many are, redefine it as “women’s work.” The directionality of mobility also hurts. Women’s upward mobility corresponds to men’s downward mobility. As women enter the world of men, men exit it; as women move into academic positions and technical professions, men move out of them. Few appreciate the issue created by women’s equality with men: men’s equality with women.

Can men accept equality, and can they achieve it? Today, the weaker sex has its work cut out for it. Many men are confused about their identity and worth, and uncertain about roles no longer defined by physical strength or rewarded by men-only privileges. Many failing to cope increasingly resort to brute force to re-assert dominance; one result is increased domestic violence. Images of men show masculinity by a two- or three-day stubble and male vulnerability by a knee or blow to the groin. Advertising identifies “real men” by their interests in watching sports, drinking beer, ogling big breasts and flat bellies, and driving rugged trucks over rough terrain at unrealistic speeds. The cliché “boys will be boys” has an ominous significance. America now needs a concept or model of mature manhood to liberate men and make them strong enough for the so-called “weaker sex.”

MERIT AND MONEY IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

2010-11-13T12:25:00.004-07:00

Merit pay for public school teachers is an idea which refuses to die. Born during the “Reagan Revolution,” along with privatization and supply-side economics, the idea relies on a simple principle: reward better (teaching) performance more (and worse [teaching] performance less?). I understand that Republicans and some reformers glommed onto merit pay in their desperation about the decline in student education in public schools evident even 25 years ago and continuing since.

The principle works in commercial and manufacturing sectors, but not in public service sectors, especially public education. The reason: what works in competitive contexts and cultures does not work in non-competitive ones. No one becomes a public school teacher expecting to get rich, and none is disappointed!

No matter how school districts have designed and implemented them, all merit-pay programs, launched with fanfare, have collapsed as failures from which other school districts have learned nothing. Despite this unblemished record, the survival of this idea testifies to the strength of its ideological appeal in defiance of facts and factuality.

Some 10 years ago, while driving through Cincinnati, Ohio, I stopped for lunch, picked up the local paper, and read about a soon-to-be implemented merit-pay program. It resembled nothing so much as the multi-year failure attempted over a dozen years before in Fairfax County, Virginia. When I got home, I placed two calls. First, I called the president of the Cincinnati School Board, who was not a little hostile both to me as a perfect stranger and to my bad report about the highly touted merit-pay initiative. He admitted that the School Board had not considered the experience of other school systems which had attempted merit-pay programs, but assured me that Cincinnati’s would work.

Second, given that reception, I called the local teachers union and spoke with the its vice president, who immediately understood my concerns. I explained why the program would collapse, predicted that it would probably collapse within a few, maybe only two, years, and forecast that his membership would be angry not only at the school board, but also at its leadership. I could hear the alarm in his voice when he agreed. When I suggested that the leadership get to work at once on a plan for a smooth transition process when the program failed, he thanked me. Two years later, the program ended.

All merit-pay programs thus far have failed because they are inevitably unfair and eventually unaffordable. All offer large salary increases to teachers who significantly improve student academic performance. Everything hinges on the selection process, which hinges on the evaluation process, which hinges on the criteria of student academic performance, which are biased or unreliable. For, inevitably, every year, teachers face different students, different mixes of students from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, with different family educational backgrounds and attitudes toward education, and and from different schools, teachers, and curriculums. True, pre- and post-testing scores can measure student change in one year. But the same teacher working at the same level of competence and effort can have students making more or less improvement in one year than in another—hardly a reliable measure of or reflection on the teacher, surely an adverse influence on results-based evaluation and selection, and certainly not fair.

Another reason for failure reflects the effort to be fair by basing awards on multi-year evaluation and selection. The unintended consequence is the creation of a two-class teaching force and, with it, the personal and professional ugliness of “class warfare.” A rigidly structured program giving some teachers large, long-term rewards for improved teaching cannot terminate them without bruising egos, causing embarrassment, and lowering morale. Worse, because of budget limits, those first awarded merit pay keep others from getting it, even if they improve their teaching—a self-limiting, if not defeating, program outcome.

Merit-pay programs have continued to fail, the academic performance of the public schools continues to decline, and the causes of decline abide, some beyond, some within, the control of school districts. In the end, all school personnel—teachers, principals, superintendents, and school boards—must do what they can do: play the cards in their hands, not carp about the cards still in the deck.

Most people assume that more money for education means better education. Many believe that raising teachers’ salaries by more than a cost-of-living adjustment will increase student academic performance—nonsense, of course. Teachers offer three main reasons for higher salaries: they are professionals but are paid less than others; they do, or try to do, their job, but cannot overcome factors beyond their control (socio-economic conditions, unsupportive parents, or recalcitrant students); and current schedules of compensation cannot attract better teachers.

True, teachers are not paid so much as other professionals, but they are not poorly compensated. They do not work in, and take the risks of working in, the private sector; instead, they have job security except in very bad economic times, itself a form of compensation. The academic demands for teaching are lower than those for other professions, though the differences are smaller at higher grade levels. They receive additional compensation in health coverage, retirement payments, and a shorter work year.

Most important, if teachers are correct to claim that poor academic performance or the decline in student education results from the factors beyond their control, then higher salaries can do nothing to reverse these results. It is absurd to ask taxpayers to pay teachers more if they cannot improve student academic performance or if they tout only their benign motives, worthy intentions, and determined efforts.

Last, if higher salaries are required to attract better teachers, those higher salaries should be paid to them only, not current teachers also, unless they have or acquire the qualifications of the better teachers. Otherwise, attracting a few better teachers becomes unaffordable because of the huge surge in cost of across-the-board higher salaries for the large majority of no-better-than-they-already-are teachers.

I suggest a simple program to give annual awards to a few teachers for distinguished performance by relying on teachers’ professional holistic judgment. Every school receives a salary supplement amounting to a small percentage of the school’s aggregate teacher salaries (say, 1%) and distributes it to a small percentage to its teachers (say, 10%) for notable professional performance. By secret ballot, each teacher nominates 20% semi-finalists, the school principal combines and ranks the nominations and uses the combined list to guide his or her selection of finalists, and the superintendent reviews each school’s lists to ensure reasonableness and fairness, and approve the distribution of awards.

Such a program could be a first step toward enhanced professionalism, and fair and affordable means to reward better teachers by treating all of them respectfully.

ELECTION INTIMATIONS AND ANTICIPATIONS

2010-10-30T10:37:00.001-06:00

(The news is bad because the media is worse. For a price, much of the press is no longer free. For the neo-Constitutionalists among us, that news is good; the only report some of them like to hear is the sound of a discharging gun.)

Item 1: In the course of the 2010 election campaign, Tea Party candidates have shown themselves to be proto-crypto, anti-democratic types for whom we have no good name and who have no coherent or cogent philosophy or programs. They exploit the anger and ignorance of American citizens who, dumbed-down, are democracy-adverse. No surprise: the justification of any political system is popular satisfaction. With most Americans dissatisfied, democracy is an endangered political species in the United States.

Tea Party candidates may be running for office, but they are running from their positions, their past, the press, and, most important, the people who must make a choice on Election Day. The ironic hypocrisy is that Tea Party candidates have complained that establishment candidates are out of touch with the American people while they are avoiding contact with them.

Candidates who refuse to describe and defend their positions know that they cannot justify them or attract voters if they try. Candidates who refuse to discuss their past know that they have something to hide. Worse, such candidates once elected by dodging communications with their constituents will ignore them and their interests to vote an ignorant, thus damaging, economic agenda, and a narrow, mean-spirited moral agenda.

The new electoral dynamic is the mix of gerrymandering which promotes partisan ideological purity and political primaries which implement it. Gerrymandering will redraw boundaries not only for federal elections, but also for state elections. I expect it to make many state legislatures more conservative and thus more likely to repeal some amendments to the Constitution and adopt some radical amendments. Control of primaries will mean greater and more inflexible control of candidates before and after election, with large dollops of money from unknown sources added into the brew. There is no end in sight of the beginning of the end of democracy. The putsch is in progress.

At the risk of appearing anti-Catholic—I am not—I note that the five justices on the Supreme Court who voted for unrestricted funds in the Citizens United case were all Catholic. It seems that the old Catholic doctrine of equivocation—remember Macbeth?—has returned to re-assert itself with a vengeance. All five were nominated as judicial conservatives, which usually means jurists who follow precedents (under the doctrine known as stare decisis). For the last two nominees, Roberts and Alito, simply lied—pace “equivocation”—to the Senate about their convictions, which are politically rather than legally motivated. Happily, the one remaining Catholic member of the court, Sonia Sotomayor, proved to be the true judicial conservative in standing by previous decisions.

Item 2: Although Obama is more popular than either chamber of Congress and both chambers together, and more productive in his first two years than almost any other president in history, he has succeeded in demoralizing ardent supporters and in alienating independent voters. His lack of passion is the smallest part of the problem. His lack of convictions, which explains his lack of courage, on tough, especially on moral, issues is a larger part. His failures to work in a clearly bipartisan manner—mostly talk, little walk—; to solicit diverse views as he promised; and to provide full and frequent rationales for his initiatives and innovations are larger still. But largest of all is his failure to be, and appear to be, a reasonable but also a strong leader. The midterm election results will be a referendum, fair or unfair, on his presidency; it will be a repudiation of him and his style even more than his positions and accomplishments. He has only himself to blame; blaming Republicans only, even mainly, will be an abdication of responsibility for his personal deficiencies and political failures, relief from either of which is not impending.

From the start, Obama has opposed Congressional investigations, administration action, and judicial proceedings on every human rights/civil rights abuses committed by his predecessor. Although he has ruled out some of the worst kinds of criminal conduct on his watch, he has not re-affirmed the rule of law by prosecutions of past offenses or proposals of new laws, and thereby has let past criminal conduct stand as precedent. His abhorrence is no deterrent to their resurrection by a subsequent administration. He has failed to close Guantanamo Bay prison facilities, has accepted and advocated indefinite incarceration of “enemy combatants” with little or no legal recourse, and has proposed no legislation to guide current and future anti-terrorist conduct in accordance with law.

Obama’s failure to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” by accepting court decisions ruling against it on Constitutional grounds reflects both moral bankruptcy and political inanity. In this instance, his idea that Congress should repeal this law amounts to abandoning his declared purpose to end DADT. Consider the repeal effort thus far. The House repealed it largely on a party-line vote dominated by the Democratic majority; the Senate failed to repeal it largely because of Republican opposition. The new Congress will have a House dominated by Republicans and a Senate unduly influenced by strident homophobes. By contrast, many past administrations have joined in Supreme Court cases to overrule previous federal laws. Obama’s belief that he must support laws which he purports to oppose and which the courts have up-ended makes little legal, political, or moral sense. What does he want?

Item 3: The biggest moral issue is American foreign policy in the Middle East. There were good reasons to end the war in Iraq; there were no good reasons to continue the war in Afghanistan. In the latter country, the U. S. ousted Al Qaeda and had little reason to think that a return of the Taliban would inevitably lead to a return of Al Qaeda. When Obama took office, Al Qaeda had about 100 activists in the country; nearly two years later, it has thousands there, with many more thousands just across the border in Pakistan. U. S. efforts in Afghanistan have been self-defeating; U. S. involvement in Pakistan has been increasingly counter-productive. What does Obama hope to achieve?

Finally, Obama has been at his worst in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He can be a better friend to Israel by demanding that Israel cease all development in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and by enforcing those demands by progressively more severe reductions of economic, financial, and military support. At the same time, he must demand good conduct from Fatah and Hamas if it wishes to have U. S. recognition of and support for Palestinian statehood. But does he have the nerve to make the case to American Jews?

Item 4: Obama will have enormous difficulty correcting for his major strategic mistake: helping corporations and capitalists, not focusing on the people most affected by the economic collapse: those who had lost jobs or were in danger of losing them, and those who had lost their homes or were in danger of losing them. Even in executing his top-down strategy, he could have achieved structural reforms in the financial industry, not by law, but by the terms and conditions of loans to financial institutions requiring an infusion of funds to survive. But lacking the most fundamental negotiating skills, Obama has demonstrated that he is far more impractical than idealistic. I wonder whether I am alone in finding his negotiating approach—give away what the other side wants before it gets what his side wants—bizarre.

And unsettling and unpromising. In the face of determined Republican opposition in both chambers of Congress, and with Republican control of the House, which originates or refuses to originate revenue legislation, Obama has little control over the legislative agenda for the next two years. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner may be unpopular faces of Republican resistance, but Obama must do more than merely highlight their lack of interest in bipartisanship, especially since the Tea Party regards it as a form of backsliding and betrayal (loop back to the first item). Indeed, the Republican Party now evinces an inherent belief in its Devine Right to Rule. The manifestation of this belief will first appear is a series of investigations into the Obama administration and lead to House impeachment, an action thereby against the second consecutive Democratic president and, again, for the legal, moral, and political equivalent of zits, not your Constitutional “high crimes and misdemeanors.” My conclusion: the Republican Party is committed, or moving inexorably, to end of popular democracy and establish one-party rule.

And so I end where I began.

My predictions about some of the controversial campaigns offer few surprises. My one upset pick is the Senate race in Kentucky, where, I think, Paul will suffer more from the graphic display of his followers’ violence than Conway has suffered from his attack on Paul’s past. (Note that neither of these candidates, like many elsewhere, evinces anything like dignity or decorum. Almost alone in that category: Chris Coons of Delaware. Full disclosure: I gave my mite to his campaign and his only.) I doubt that Republicans will acquire a majority of the Senate and have no idea how large their gains will be in the House, but surely enough to take control. However, predict that the margin will be smaller than the media is hyping—a prediction most at risk of error.

Predictions (Winners>Losers):
SENATE: Murkowski or McAdams>Miller (AK), Murry>Rossi (WA), Boxer>Fiorina (CA), Angle>Reid (NV), Buck>Bennett (CO), Kirk>Giannoulias (IL), Conway>Paul (KY), Manchin>Raese (WV), Toomey>Sestak (PA), Coons>O’Donnell (DE), Rubio>Crist or Meek (FL)
HOUSE: Pearce>Teague (NM)
GOVERNOR: Brown>Whitman (CA), Martinez>Denish (NM), Cuomo>Paladino (NY)

Now vote.

TALKING OURSELVES OUT OF DEMOCRACY

2010-10-23T09:41:00.000-06:00

We cannot best understand or use The Constitution if we try to interpret it in its presumed “original” meaning. Apart from difficulties in ascertaining that meaning, the principles and the language reflecting and reinforcing its contemporary culture cannot invariably help us in current circumstances. For instance, the “press,” as in “freedom of the press,” strictly construed as the eighteenth century would have understood the word, meant either a human-powered machine which pressed paper to hand-set, inked type; or the resulting printed publications. An originalist exclusion of today’s electronic devices as “press”—radios, televisions, internetted computers, and various “walkie-talkie” type electronic devices—would make no sense to anyone.

However, especially when technology does not render their principles or terms obsolete, some idea of what the Founding Fathers meant can be valuable without being determinative. One instance is what the Founding Fathers understood by “speech,” as in its freedom. In this polity-defining document, they meant political speech. I am not sure what allowance they would have made for non-verbal expression; probably, they would have allowed flag-burning and hung effigies as speech but not money spent for candidates or parties, and certainly not for pornography. For the most part, I believe that they meant rational discourse about political issues, debate rooted in fact and logic, evidence and argument.

I am not suggesting that the Founding Fathers, when they created the Constitution, were fools who knew nothing about political protest and rabble-rousing—some of it to good purpose. They knew all about the Boston Tea Party. But, for the big causes and for the long run, they relied on a rhetoric of reason to prevail. Indeed, when he penned the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson did not write, “Down with the Crown” or other such slogans. He stated his assumptions, including those “truths” which he proclaimed to be “self-evident,” and gave his reasons, the multiple grievances of colonialists against the king, to justify the revolution. He hoped his words would persuade, not King George III to reform, but his countrymen to rally to the cause.

Almost 225 years later, those who address political issues no longer believe in that rhetoric or accept its underlying values, which, until lately, served us well. Instead, we resort without qualm or shame to a rhetoric of disrespect, dishonesty, and coercion; thus, repeated false claims in the health reform debate about death panels, and armed attendees at townhall meetings or rallies. Partisans on both sides, left and right, share this rhetoric. Some years ago, a Greenpeace representative whom I knew came to my home with a handout claiming that a nuclear power plant requires more energy to build than it can generate. I denied the claim; he promised documentation, failed to provide it, and disappeared into his group of true believers willing to lie for their cause and to disrespect both people and truth.

Although most cultural change occurs gradually, a sudden shift in rhetoric occurred in only a few years during the Vietnam War, the consequences of which shift are with us still. Since that shift, a growing number of teachers have not taught, and a growing number of students have not learned, the rhetoric assumed by the Founding Fathers. The result is a clear and present danger to public education, national values, and American democracy.

The shift resulted from the liberal assault on “the system”—structure, tradition, authority, elites, and reason—and on those who have some regard for them. The response to this assault was a conservative counter-attack emphasizing a macho patriotism of flag-waving and “law and order.” The result: the “culture wars” which we are still fighting today. The irony is that conservatives have learned and adopted the rhetoric of liberals—simple, unsupported standards or assertions of right or wrong: liberal “if it feels good, it is good” versus conservative “just say no.” Such assertions fail to serve civic discourse and find support only in non-rational forms of communication: shouting, marches, threats of violence—what we see on television or U-tube.

The reason: English and history teachers taught this rhetoric to those now today’s liberals and conservatives. Teachers taught them less and less to understand what others think, and more and more to respond to what they feel; less and less to communicate with others, and more and more to express themselves. Teachers approved all views, ignored their mistakes or misdirections, and thus failed to teach them how to handle correction or criticism. Teachers inculcated one lesson for life: a person’s say-so is privileged and right if sincere, and people who disagree are perverse and wrong.

So liberals and conservatives cannot handle adverse comments, seek out people and “press” with like views, and shun or attack those with unlike views. Partisan operatives resort to subsidized disinformation, smear campaigns, or armed intimidation—a rhetoric of dishonesty and coercion, not rational discourse. The alternative is a return to the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers: informed, intelligent, respectful, and civil. Otherwise, those who care more about ends than means, more about their political cause than their personal character, more about their power to prevail than a shared process by which people make, or should make, decisions under the Constitution—those owe their primary allegiance to something other than American democracy.

THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN IS A WAKE-UP CALL

2010-10-16T11:51:00.001-06:00

A hue-and-cry went up when the Supreme Court decision permitted unlimited and unregulated funds into political campaigns. Many Americans expressed disapproval because they did not want foreign governments and big companies, some foreign, influencing (a euphemism for “buying”) candidates. The US Chamber of Commerce, collecting and distributing (euphemisms for “laundering”) such monies on behalf of Republicans, is enabling them to outspend Democrats seven-to-one.

Since the hue-and-cry soon subsided, Americans have given this corruption of the democratic process little further thought, but they should—now. Otherwise, the more effective this deluge of special-interest money is in buying the 2010 election, the more likely the 2008 election will be remembered as the last relatively free and fair one. My suggestion: vote against all candidates supported by groups or contributors whose real identity and purposes are unknown.

Some may celebrate the success of Bush Justices Roberts and Alito, who lied to Congress that they respect precedent. Their decision enables beneficiaries like Sharron Angle and Rand Paul to avoid broad-based fundraising, conceal their extreme positions from all except followers, prevaricate to the public, run ads with dreamily vague slogans or despicably ugly smears, and dodge the mainstream media. Unaccountable before elected, they will remain unaccountable if elected.

Their Big Lies are that government cannot succeed, though Republican senators have worked to make it fail by using “holds” to block critical appointments and their 40-vote bloc to frustrate majority rule; and that they want small government big enough to enforce their harsh moral code on all Americans. Their White Lies are their fictions about employment and the economy. But….

The latest numbers show that unemployment has dropped to and leveled off at about 9.6 percent—down, but not far enough—with a recent, modest uptick because of the end of census- and stimulus-generated employment. Still, are Republicans pleased? No: apparently, they want higher unemployment, for they have opposed legislation to help small businesses hire workers and to support infrastructure jobs—road, bridge, and airport repairs, etc,—for construction workers unemployed by the housing slump.

The same numbers show that private-sector employment has risen (as it has for seven months) and public-sector employment has fallen. Business is growing, and government is shrinking. Are Republicans pleased? No: they criticize Obama for the unemployment which they have encouraged, because he has done what they only talk about doing.

The stimulus package has done much good but not achieved a full recovery. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office and many economists, both Republican and Democratic, estimate that it prevented the recession from becoming a depression and thus saved well over a million jobs. Some economists believe that a stimulus package twice the approved size would have reversed it. Obama claims that he has agreed with this view. But he asked only for what he thought he could get (and got); he did not ask for what he believed the economy required. By not trying harder, he precluded the chance to get more and thus made sure that he got no more. (Does he think that, if he asks for half a loaf, someone will give him the other half?) Nevertheless, Republican leaders decried the stimulus package—they knew economic muddle and misery would win them votes this year. With unabashed hypocrisy, many GOP governors, first touting their refusal of its funds, then took the money and tried to take the credit.

Government intervention in the automobile market to save the Big Three turns out to be an unqualified success. At the time, many Republicans protested it. I, who am not one of them, did, too, and I confess that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I can confess my error because I am not ideological; I can see that the intervention worked, saved these and dependent companies, saved jobs, and helped the economy. A show-stopper: the latest industry report shows Big Three car sales increasing market share at the expense of their foreign-based competitors. Republicans refuse to acknowledge this or any other government success.

In all four instances, Republican ideology trumps the reality of positive results, which have disappointed them. The danger is that, if and when they return to power, they will be equally ideological in applying purist doctrine regardless of lessons learned.

Economic issues are the big issues. But culture war issues, once concealed, are emerging as Republicans grow confident of big wins. We are learning that, the more conservative the Republican, the more likely they are to hold absolutist views on abortion (Sharron Angle denies exceptions for rape or incest and advises victims to turn lemons into lemonade), repressive views on homosexuality, and bizarre views on sex (Christine O’Donnell equates adultery and masturbation—how would she know about either, much less both?), and regressive attitudes, values, and views, about women and minorities.

If fearful or mad voters prevail and Republicans win big, we shall get unprecedented gridlock and greed, and problems aggravated beyond solution.

WE REMAIN PASSENGERS ON THE MAYFLOWER

2010-10-09T17:41:00.004-06:00

America is the world’s only country which defines private commercial enterprises as corporations with the same rights as those of individuals. It is the world’s only country which defines money as a form of speech and gives it full legal protection. It is thus the world’s only country with a government comingling plutocracy and democracy as a matter of law.

This formulation may come as a surprise to many, especially when it is stated so bluntly. But it does so only because almost all of us have forgotten those who had a decisive influence in shaping and guiding this country’s attitudes and values: the Puritans.

It is probably fair to say that very few Americans have read any Puritan writers. The Federal Period, then the Romantic Period, put them behind us. Or so we thought, though we once permitted traces of the Colonial Period into the curriculum. American history included the "Mayflower Compact" and John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” testaments to the mix of religion and politics inescapable in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. American literature began with some writings by Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edward, and Cotton Mather. But for the most part, we acquired any sense of Puritanism from reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark romantic novel The Scarlet Letter.

Many otherwise enlightened educators regard it as sufficient exposure to Puritanism. It teaches us to think of Puritans as the strictest moralists primarily focused on sexual morals. Adultery then rated pretty high on the list of sins—remember: a commandment forbids it. Today, it ranks as a common pastime often embarrassing, but otherwise unencumbered by any sense of sin—which may explain why many liberated from a sense of that particular sin are Christian preachers. These educators are wrong: Puritans were much more than rigorously moral, though Reverend Dimmesdale’s guilt because of his moral slackness and hypocrisy makes for a good story.

They omit the knowledge that Puritans were intensely religious, in two ways: outward and inward. In the outward way because of their desire to purify the Anglican Church of rituals and regalia which they associated with the Catholic Church; in the inward way because of their intense, almost obsessive, piety. Puritans were the fundamentalist Protestants of their day.

The most important part of Puritan piety is the nagging, quotidian struggle between a belief that faith alone justifies and the fear of that even the strongest faith cannot ensure salvation. As Milton, himself a Puritan, put it, “God doth not need / Either man’s works or his own gifts.” We do not understand such concerns or comprehend their intensity today any more than we can appreciate evil—it is all deprivation, not depravity, right?—but, for Puritans, the conflict between belief and fear created almost unendurable stress. Relief came in a strange form: the assumption that material success, the accumulation of wealth, was an earthly sign of one’s personal salvation by God’s grace.

As we have dispensed with mortal sin, so we have dispensed with a concern with God or his Grace. Instead, we preach the salvation of those who make themselves wealthy by their unaided efforts. In urban megachurches, ministers preach the comforting doctrine, perverse by Gospel standards, that Jesus wants us to be rich, happy—and good bowlers. In metropolitan office suites, they preach stock options, credit default swaps, and golden parachutes. Only in tin-roofed, clapboard-sided churches, do they preach damnation, especially for Muslims, homosexuals, and illegal immigrants. The bond between many Southern Baptists and most Wall Street moguls is the belief that wealth alone justifies, demonstrates the possessor’s moral and social superiority, and permits contempt of, and separation from, all others as pre-destined failures who, like suckers, are born every day. For them both, the economic but godless equivalent of Puritanism and related to it is capitalism, with winners, the wealthy, and losers, the rest of us.

American politics divides between Republicans, presumed religious, and Democrats, presumed secular. Perhaps. But, unquestionably, the Republican Party comprises the neo-Puritans of our times. It is a muddled mix of the Salem Witch Trialism in its hunt for perversion even more than sin and Robber Baronism in its adoration of amassed wealth by the elite—or, in the lingo of the earlier time, the elect, the saved. The moralists, like the poor, we shall always have with us; the materialists—who knows? The struggle to answer this question is central to American political discourse.

The Puritans on the Mayflower had a royal grant to settle in Virginia but decided to go north to settle in Massachusetts. In response, the non-Puritans passengers and crew—the “strangers” on board—decided that they were no longer bound by Puritan decisions since the Puritans had chosen to violate their obligation to the English crown and obedience to the king’s law. And so it is today: Puritans committed to a churchly “city upon a hill” and others determined to live free in a civil society.

GIVING PUBLIC EDUCATION THE BUSINESS

2010-10-02T10:49:00.000-06:00

In The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch recants. Once, she advocated curriculum reform; then, as a Department of Education Assistant Secretary, advocated the principles, policies, and practices of No Child Left Behind (NCLB); now, more than half a decade later, renounces them. It takes guts for a once-public official to make a public repudiation because it generates charges of apostasy or betrayal. When I learned of Ravitch’s recantation, I wrote to welcome her back to the traditional, humanistic approach to education in a democratic society.

Ravitch’s latest book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current condition of American pre-college public education. It is an impassioned warning that today’s approved solutions to poor academic performance and low graduation rates are tomorrow’s assured problems of even worse. The book makes a strong case that the application of presumed business principles, policies, and practices to public education has had, is having, and will have disastrous consequences.

Unlike Ravitch, I have never had a favorable opinion of Bush’s NCLB. I suspected an initiative on education offered by a president notably anti-intellectual but friendly with businesspeople who have long and rightly complained about the quality of graduates entering the workforce. So I was not surprised that the NCLB approach purported to be business-like, with a focus on market principles of competition and choice, management and money, performance measurement and standards, and monetary incentives.

Anything purporting to be business-like has a reflexive appeal to Americans who believe that the business of America is business. It has acquired greater appeal because of increasingly negative attitudes toward public schools. Within a decade of the Vietnam War, Americans had become alarmed by the decline of student academic performance. Disillusionment, disappointment, despair were commonplace. These adverse attitudes prompted The Nation at Risk, which appeared early in the Reagan administration but avoided business-based prescriptions. But they prompted politicians and businesspeople to think that business-like approaches could cure the ills of public education.

Too bad most politicians and businesspeople forget the lessons of history and repeat them. They are repeating the mistakes of the Vietnam War in American education. As Robert McNamara, former Ford Motor president, believed that quantified measures of battlefield performance could guide the war effort and produce success, so today’s politicians and businesspeople assume that quantified measures of student performance can direct education to better results. As high, often inflated, body counts did not prove that we were winning the war—as I recall, we lost it—so higher, often manipulated, test scores do not prove that we are better educating students.

Too bad most politicians and businesspeople flatter themselves that other people and other institutions are like them or theirs. So they think that business is like education and that what works for business can work for education. They think of schools as factories, teachers as assembly-line workers, and students as products. They cannot imagine fundamental differences between products and services, and curriculum and instruction; and between the motives, purposes, and values (even personalities) of politicians and businesspeople, and those of educators. They neither understand nor appreciate the distinctive nature of public education and its historical contribution to democracy and capitalism.

As their efforts, doubled and redoubled, have failed, politicians have become increasingly frustrated with, and businesspeople increasingly unfriendly toward, public education. Ironically, foisting their incessant and inappropriate initiatives on schools and teachers in the name of reform defeats their avowed purpose of improving public education.

Take three. Charter schools pick and kick both students and teachers, leave public schools with the rest, yet provide an education no better and often worse. Test scores to evaluate schools and teachers—close some of the former; fire some of the latter—incentivize states to lower standards, encourage schools and teachers to teach to tests, and get unreliable results. Top-down management denies teachers a voice in decisions affecting their professional conduct, forces them to work to the rule of elaborate lesson plans and approved classroom methods, then stigmatizes and punishes schools and teachers as failures for getting poor results.

Then, despite having created a sweatshop environment for teachers and students, and having blamed everyone but themselves for their failed efforts, politicians and businesspeople talk about the need to attract good teachers. Good luck with that.

What most politicians and businesspersons bring to public education is a toxic mix of arrogance from high position, and ignorance of education. They wield the influence of taxpayer funds or personal fortunes in my-way-or-highway approaches and projects with little, if any—guess what?—accountability. Barack Obama and Arne Duncan meet Bill Gates in making money the be-all-and-end-all in education and high-handedness the first principle of reform. (Race-to-the-Top means Run-for-My-Money-and-Jump-through-My-Hoops.) Their misguided meddling manufactures educational disarray, demoralized and ineffective teachers, and disillusioned and incompetent students. Maintaining their product-and-service lines will further impair, not improve, public education. My business-like idea: fire the current lot and hire educators qualified for the task.

WHO CAN WIN THE CULTURE WAR?

2010-09-18T07:56:00.000-06:00

A Chinese curse goes, “may you live in interesting times.” The fulfillment of that curse has been the unending culture war begun on the home front during the Vietnam War. In this war at home like that war abroad, objectives and tactics shifted with changing circumstances. Opposition to the war first expanded to opposition to the “system,” then narrowed to opposition to the draft.

There were life-style protesters: hippies refusing to bathe, boys growing facial hair, girls not shaving their armpits and legs, many smoking pot or doing drugs, the more dedicated retreating to communes famous for naked kids, lousy food, and unsanitary conditions—the Woodstock Nation.

There were political protesters: young men, mostly white and middle-class, who burned (or pretended to burn) draft cards; and students who staged take-overs at universities, marched in large demonstrations, burned the flag, wore it on the seat of their pants, or fled to Canada.

There were civil rights activists: many black and some whites who conducted sit-ins, rode buses, canvassed for voters, marched in protests, and extolled posturing militants who mostly ran food kitchens in their ghettos.

And there were academics who inflated grades so that college boys could avoid service and let others take their place and the risks (the poster child of this stratagem is Dick Cheney). Responding to Johnson’s and Nixon’s manipulations and lies, these academics attacked the “system” of traditional educational structures (think grammar and the canon; think historical revisionism) and substituted doctrines of intellectual, political, and moral plasticity.

As a result, we lost much more than the war; we lost our way.

I anticipated a conservative reaction to counter-cultural, draft-dodging, civil-rights-crusading, and cynicism-sponsoring types. When a leading campus radical challenged me to say on which side of the barricades I would be when the revolution came, I said that there would be no barricades, for there would be no revolution. I knew most Americans to be reluctant and slow to change, to resent and resist those demanding it.

I did not anticipate—delicious irony—that radicals on the left would create radicals on the right. Conservatives—are some aging hippies, war protesters, civil rights activists, and liberal academics?—have slowly changed to become the new radicals attacking the “system,” now relabeled “tyrannical government.” Those who once rallied to support the federal government now rally against it. Newt Gingrich tried to shut it down. John Roberts and Samuel Alito lied to Congress about their impartiality and their respect for precedent; then, once seated on the Supreme Court, proceeded as activists to decide cases, even overturning settled law, to reduce government authority. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner advocate a politics of “no.” Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Breitbart, and others have become purveyors of reportorial fiction or editorial smarm. As liberals have taught them, so conservatives have learned that truth is plastic and decency optional.

Less ironically than hypocritically, conservatives decry liberals for the self-indulgence of the “me” generation, on the pretense that they are not part of the same generation and every bit as self-indulgent. Liberals tend to personal indulgence like pot, drugs, and casual sex; conservatives, to political indulgence like corporate greed, environmental abuse, and regulatory abandon. But I suspect that not a few liberals and conservatives have skeletons of the opposite persuasion in their closets. My suspicion explains why their children share a lifestyle once liberal, now conservative as well, with dyed hair, tattoos, and body rings and studs—outward manifestations intimating inward similarity. More important, the youth of both sides share something else: a greater tolerance of personal differences of ethnicity, race, religion, and sexuality.

That tolerance gives me some hope that the young, though ill-educated, are less ill-tempered and narrow-minded than their parents and grandparents, hostile opposites still fighting the old culture war. It gives me some hope that they, though less informed, are more inclined to work with one another. In that process, they will have to teach themselves and each other what their parents and grandparents have failed to teach them about times before their time, about persistent questions which each generation of Americans must answer for itself, and about the subjects relevant to developing their answers. Otherwise, they, too, will lose their way.

My prayer is that they will reject unrestrained selfishness and accept some public service and personal sacrifice as more fulfilling than unstinted self-indulgence. If so, they will recognize that government cannot do all things but can and must do some things. They will realize that all resources are limited and must be prudently conserved and fairly allocated; and that social programs—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid—cannot serve if they cannot survive, so that their benefits must be distributed on the basis of need, not—wonderful word decried by moralists—entitlement. When they match realism with tolerance, they will end the culture war which need not have been fought but, having been fought, needs no winner.

THE SINS OF THE MANY ARE VISITED UPON THE FEW

2010-09-08T12:45:00.005-06:00

America is not a “Christian Nation,” but most of its people are practicing, professing, or self-presuming Christians. By identification with this religious majority, Christians enjoy a comfort or security of association denied members of smaller religions. They also enjoy a sense of superiority, usually unrecognized and often undiminished by a lack of information about Christian doctrine or church history. Not surprisingly, they know almost nothing about the doctrines or histories of other religions and can be remarkably insensitive to their followers.

Juxtapose two current examples. One is the objection to the proposed Islamic community center in New York on the historical claim that Islam builds mosques on the grounds of destroyed churches. Obviously, many Christians believe that it desecrates holy ground and resent the idea of Islamic supersession. Obliviously, many Christians deny, do not know, or do not acknowledge the identical Christian practice in spreading Christianity throughout pagan Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Pots and kettles.

The other example is Diane Alba’s Sun-News story (8 Sept) about Rosh Hashanah. In it, she recounts the meaning of Rosh Hashanah to local Orthodox and Reform Jewish congregations. Then she reports its “messianic”—read: Christian”—meaning to a local proselytizing Jews-for-Jesus group. As a Christian journalist, Ms. Alba is either ignorant of or insensitive to Jewish opposition to such proselytizing imposters and thus the inappropriateness of including all together higgledy-piggledy.

The important point is the parallel between architectural and textual substitution. Like Christian churches razing and rebuilding over Aztec temples, or Islamic mosques razing and rebuilding over Christian churches, Jews-for-Jesus delete the Jewish meaning of Rosh Hashanah and substitute their meaning. Ms. Alba does not and probably cannot perceive the parallels and understand the offense given. So, too, most Christians.

Indeed, the use of Holy Scriptures as prooftext for the New Testament is a doctrinal variant of desecration by reinterpretative supersession. The traditional Christian response to the refusal of Jews in Jesus’ time and place to follow him is imputed to the character of the Jewish people as “proud and stiff-necked.” Such labeling is inherently disrespectful. It dismisses the possibility that first-century Jews in the Holy Land believed in the values of their religion, regarded emergent Christianity’s departures from or repudiation of them as unacceptable, and resented its manipulation, even its perversion, of their Holy Scriptures.

I am not making a case for Judaism or against Christianity. I am trying to make the case that those who, one way or another, are, or identify themselves as, members of a religious majority have much work to do to respect others. Some want to respect those of other religions; most say that they do. Then many give themselves away as either hypocritical or ignorant.

Consider the request for the Islamic community center to relocate out of sensitivity to the feelings of family members of victims, members of the armed forces, or the troop of those who sympathize with them. The assumption is that, by honoring this request, Muslims can restore civility and comity to the community and the country. Rubbish. The opposition to this community center in New York is being played out at the sites of other Islamic buildings of all kinds throughout the country. The request is a reflection of Islamophobia—period.

I hope that the Islamic community center is built on the site approved for its construction. For compliance with the prejudices of Islamaphobes will lead, not to social harmony, but to further requests or actions hostile to Muslims. The truth is that prejudice knows no bounds. Thus, efforts to placate prejudice by acts of accommodation to its demands do not satisfy, slow, much less stop prejudice, but inspire it to further demands.

The anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany is a historical example. Jews attempted to abate the abuses of anti-Semitic legislation by compliance, not confrontation. With the tacit consent or active support of the largely anti-Semitic Christian population, Nazis made the laws increasingly severe, and embarked on increasingly inflamed verbal assaults, and engaged in ever more frequent violence, against Jews. No Jewish efforts at acquiesence or accommodation saved Jews from ghettos, concentration camps, labor camps, and extermination camps. The Holocaust is a monument to the failure of appeasement and pacifism as answers to prejudice.

My practice is to offer solutions to problems which I identify and dissect. One solution to prejudice, a variant of the cardinal sin of Pride, is prayer and fasting. Another is action following the example of righteously practicing, not merely ritually observant, Jews at this time of year. For them, the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are days of repentance, during which they seek forgiveness from those whom they have offended or wronged. Perhaps committed Christians should consider, not vicarious atonement, but face-to-face absolution; or, in the absence of individuals affected, resolve to study, examine themselves, and repent any prejudice, however manifested. It would be the Christian thing to do.

WAKE ME UP WHEN THE ELECTION IS OVER

2010-09-03T19:17:00.001-06:00

If we look to the philosophical precursors of the Declaration of Independence, we find much emphasis on property. But with Benjamin Franklin’s encouragement, Thomas Jefferson discounted its importance and demoted its status. So the Declaration of Independence resonates with the words expressing the Creator’s endowment to all people: “inalienable rights” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

All Americans honor the words, but only half really believe them. The radical split in our two-party system, which arose in George Washington’s administration, is between those who give priority to property and those who give priority to people. The split is small-c constitutional; it defines who we are collectively; it divides us into those whom we now call Republicans (also conservatives) and Democrats (also liberals).

We need no help to identify which party prefers property to people and which prefers people to property. Republicans want small government and low taxes. They prefer state rights because state governments are small, also weak, thus even less able than the federal government to resist the corrupting blandishments of fat cats, big corporations, and their campaign contributions. They want low tax rates for the rich, in defiance of the economic facts about the decreasing value of money as its amasses and the dangers of its aggregation. They resist regulations as restraints on the free exercise of property rights and the pursuit of profits. They want little or no corporate regulation regardless of the safety, health, and environmental effects of corporate operations, products, or services on peoples’ lives. For the same reasons, they resist laws favoring equity or equality. Those who are not rich but hope to get rich and thus support the rich are praying to win the lottery of life. Good luck, and best wishes that you do not discover that the rich are laughing at you all the way to and from the bank.

Republicans are campaigning anew and vigorously on distortions, misrepresentations, and blatant lies; and using scare tactics, tried and true, to direct anger and hatred at the scapegoats-du-jour. Their Tea Party associates—say, Sharron Angle, Jan Brewer, Rand Paul—are dissembling their far-out positions and dodging the press. In recent weeks, only two Republicans have acted honorably: Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Hatch, both outspoken in rejecting anti-Muslim hysteria. When a New York Jew and a Utah Mormon take a shared stand virtually alone against bigotry, they shame other party leaders and most followers. I find it hard to vote for the mendacious, the mute, or the mean.

I subscribe to the Preamble of the Constitution. Like the introductions to most legislation, the Preamble gives direction for understanding and implementing the articles and amendments which follow. It reads: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The Preamble is not very Republican; “property” is mentioned nowhere. Nevertheless, I doubt how many or how much Democrats subscribe to the Preamble, although it favors their traditional values.

Currently, Democrats seem incapable of campaigning. Obama has done his usual stand-up-one-minute, stand-back-the-next routine. As they say in his Windy City, all talk, no walk—and no cred. Everywhere they are so demoralized that they are calling their convictions into doubt because they lack the courage to advocate them.

If the Democrats think that their major legislative initiatives—stimulus, bank and Big Three bailouts, health care reform, among others—resulted in laws which did, have done, or will do the country much good, why are they silent on them? Why do they not tout these achievements if they believe in them? Instead, demurring or mumbling about their accomplishments, they give credence to Republican obstruction or rejection under the brand name “party of ‘no’.” Ironically, Democrats going into the campaign are acting like the party of “no” by decrying Republicans and their promises to hold investigations ad nauseam, undo what good has been done, and, in fulfillment of party dogma, repeat the failed policies of their all-Republican, Bush-league government for six years. Sorry, my friends on the left, these counter scare tactics are no rallying cry for hope, transformation, or anything else, including my vote.

Will Rogers joked, “I belong to no organized party, I'm a Democrat.” I belong to no organized party either, am a registered Independent, and do not want a choice between autocratic ignoramuses, ideologues, or incompetents on the right; and know-it-all wafflers and weaklings on the left. So I am more apprehensive about the approaching elections than about any other which I have ever anticipated. The parties differ in their policies but agree on their politics. But politics always wins out, and the people always lose. Prove me wrong, or let me sleep through it.

THE GOP: A GATHERING OF PREJUDICES

2010-08-21T10:29:00.002-06:00

Demoralized by military defeat and economic depression, the Weimar Republic, Germany’s post-WWI parliamentary democracy, was destroyed by competing anti-democratic groups—fascists, aided by aristocrats and corporations, and communists—using propaganda and street gangs to fight for power. The right’s tactic to win support from the discontented was targeting Jews. Vilifying them and “foreign” influences led to restrictive legislation, violence, and the Holocaust. No one thought it could happen in an educated, industrialized country like Germany.

No one thinks that it can happen here, no one is talking about it happening here, but we had better think and talk about the possibility before it realizes itself. Already in our time of social turmoil and economic stress, the barriers of personal decency and political tolerance are giving way to the inchoate forces of American bigotry. Its renewed energy reflects insecurity and fear caused by bad times in employment and housing. Many white Christians and some white Jews respond by making scapegoats of minorities. Their prejudices link bad times to a black president.

History teaches two lessons about bigotry in politics. One, bigotry has no bounds and transfers itself from one target to another as politically convenient. Two, those who acquire and retain political power by demonizing and exploiting fear of others begin as threats to, and end as destroyers of, democracy. The dominant campaign tactic of the Republican Party is fear of them. “Them” is whomever they choose to demonize: blacks, “illegal immigrants,” Hispanics, Muslims, homosexuals, communists, fascists, socialists, liberals, progressives, Democrats—who next?

Those who respect historical facts know that yesterday’s GOP appealed to racists opposing civil rights laws and regulations. The Republican “Southern Strategy” was a largely successful attempt to win white Southerners, and a partially successful effort to win northern urban Catholics, from their affiliation to the Democratic Party.

Those who respect facts of current events know that today’s GOP appeals to bigots of all kinds: race bigots skilled in denial of their racism (they say that the NAACP is racist); religious bigots unabashed in pushing the president-as-Muslim lie and in abridging the religious freedom of Muslims (they oppose mosques in downtown Manhattan or mid-state Tennessee); and ethnic bigots inflamed by Mexican immigrants (they say that foreign invasion threatens national security). This Republican strategy, assisted, if not instigated, by various branches of the Tea Party, intends to inflame all white Americans.

The threat is serious when the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a Jewish organization committed to freedom of religion, betrays its principles by opposing the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero. Its official explanation about compassion for victims’ families is plausible; so, too, in the context of anti-Muslim hostility and a “Christian Nation” crusade, its fear that Jews may be targeted next. If so, abandoning its principle seems a calculated move to prove the “real American” purity of American Jews and to disarm those who might raise that dual-nationality canard about them.

The good news relies on the past as prologue to the future. Americans have always pulled back from indulgence of fears and insecurities. Spasms of paranoia have gripped this country in the past century: the first “Red Scare,” with the Palmer Raids of 1919; the fear of anarchists in the 20s; and, of course, the second “Red Scare,” with its hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 40s and 50s. In all three episodes, mainstream Republican and Democratic leaders proved resistant to the hysteria.

The bad news is that the GOP no longer has mainstream Republican leaders willing or able to resist hysteria and oppose bigotry. Fringe bigotry is becoming party bigotry as functionaries curry the fringe’s favor. Thus, the prejudices of Sarah Palin (too many of “them” at her Hawaii college, according to her father), Newt Gingrich, and leading House Republicans like John Boehner and Eric Cantor. The party is mounting a tiger to ride into the fall election but will have difficulty dismounting. If exploiting bigotry enables the GOP to acquire power, it may have to continue to exploit bigotry to retain power, regardless of damage to American democracy.

For its great concern is losing power, perhaps permanently. Demographic trends are reducing a white majority to a plurality. Because of its whites-only appeal, the GOP has opposed civil rights for minorities since the 60s and is attacking ethnic, racial, and religious minorities now. (It opposed women’s rights in the 70s.) By challenging post-Bill-of-Rights amendments, including those defining citizenship and enlarging the franchise, the party re-iterates its exclusionary, anti-democratic appeal—neither a demographically nor a democratically winning strategy.

The bigotry which the GOP is endorsing, arousing, or exploiting is consuming the party. The Gathering of Prejudices has become so racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic that it is acting, not on informed self-interest, but on all-corrupting fears and hatreds which threaten American democracy. “Land of the free, home of the brave”— how long? Apartheid America—how soon?

YOU HAVE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, BUT YOU SHOULD NOT EXERCISE THEM

2010-08-17T15:48:00.001-06:00

The furor over the possible construction of an Islamic community center with the two top floors for prayer a few blocks from and out of sight of Ground Zero reveals the worst hypocrisy of many Republicans and conservatives (a word or two on Democrats and liberals comes toward the end). If what follows does not apply to you and you do not agree with the views of Boehner, Gingrich, Palin, and other such leaders, then you had better speak up. They have been invoking the Constitution to judge Democrats and federal legislation under the Obama administration, but, comes a case that requires allegiance to the Constitution, and they are the first to abandon it.

Of course. In other circumstances, they have proposed radical amendments to the Constitution either to serve particular partisan planks or to advance a particular partisan platform. The latter is a doctrine of originalism eradicating either all amendments since ratification in 1789 or all amendments after the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791. Either version of originalism runs into complications beyond the care or comprehension of these Republicans and conservatives because they are emotionally driven by their extreme reactions to anything which does not fit their definition of a white, Christian America, apparently the only thing which they wish to conserve.

Not that they do not have go-along-to-get-along types who are not white or Christian. So, when interviewed about the location of the mosque near Ground Zero, Eric Cantor, a Jewish congressman from Virginia, acknowledges the Constitutional right in the First Amendment to freedom of religion; he then adds as rebuttal in this instance, “but come on.” As a Republican leader and conservative spokesman, Cantor, in this comment, sets a new record for an intellectual articulation of a counter-argument. The Cliff Notes version of his statement would necessarily elaborate, in order to explain, his profundity; it would translate Cantor’s statement, as my title suggests, thus: “Muslims have freedom of religion, but they should not practice it, for they are also free not to practice it and should not out of regard for the feelings of non-Muslims.” Some freedom.

I like it that a Jew can forthrightly address this inflamed issue. I can imagine Cantor’s counsel to Jews in Germany in the 1930s: just hunker down, do not make trouble, and all will be well. We know how well this approach worked for Jews (and Christians) unwilling to stand up for their rights and those of others. Cantor is not alone; the ADL agrees with him. I wonder what they will say when it becomes the turn of the Jews in America if and when Christians find their community centers, temples, synagogues, and shuls offensive.

Let me offer to Cantor and those of his ilk a suggestion in line with his eloquent and erudite line of reasoning. Let us apply the same principle of have-it-but-hold-it to another provision of the First Amendment. Let us do the same with free speech: you have the right, but pipe down because someone finds your views offensive. In Islamic states, such speech restraint would accord with sharia law—a little irony, what?

Even more wonderfully ironic is that many Republicans and conservatives who have long decried what they characterize as liberal self-indulgence and sense of entitlement now attack a Constitutional barrier protecting freedom of religion and its restraint on the exercise of strong emotions, in this case, against Muslims and their religion. There has always been a struggle between free speech and the heckler’s veto. Now the struggle is between free speech and hurt feelings. Oh, my, the poor dears; scrap the Constitution. Plainly, the mob and its emotions have taken over the party, its allies, and its cause.

(I note that no one has asked why people who suffered painful losses nine years ago have been unable to do what is necessary to accept the fact and accommodate their feelings. I note that no one has asked how moving this Islamic center would help rather than perpetuate their distress. And I note that those oh-so-sympathetic Americans have waited nine years to give their support to the suffering survivors.)

Because words have consequences, reckless and inflammatory talk is dangerous. Because their demagoguery undermines understanding of and respect for the Constitution, Republicans and conservatives constitute a clear and present danger to American democracy and the rule of law. Rousing a mob to win an election means ruling according to the mob afterwards. I am not entirely partisan here; Democrats and liberals constitute the same clear and present danger, only to a lesser degree. They are busy ducking or spinning the issue, trying to game their campaigns, and figuring out a message instead of standing up for the Constitution and American values. Some, like Harry Reid, are caving out of political expediency; others will surely follow.

Appeasement does not work. Apathy does not make the problem go away. The answer is the one which Obama gave: the Muslim community has the right to build an Islamic community center or mosque at whatever site it chooses in accordance with applicable laws, whatever anyone might think—or feel—about the appropriateness of its location.

FLIP-FLOPPING ON DEMOCRACY

2010-08-07T09:01:00.001-06:00

Constitutional scholars walking streets and packing heat claim that they must exercise (use or lose) their Second Amendment rights. So they demonstrate their defiance of Obama’s alleged intent to take away their guns. Their proof: the only gun law which Obama has signed permits guns in national parks and monuments. They perceive an insidious ploy here: a fake-out to lull gun-owners into a false sense of security, then snatch their guns when they fall asleep—a paranoid perception perhaps inspired by the re-make of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Such Constitutional sages claim that their larger effort is to protect themselves from an over-reaching federal government threatening to take over the country and enslave its “real Americans.” They see the recent federal law to ensure that most Americans have access to affordable health insurance and thus medical care as the first shot in this attempted take-over, a clear and present danger to the not so unified states of America. They urge court challenges, state nullification, state militias, and succession. Most of this talk arises in former confederate states or states settled mainly by Southerners. It looks like the South is trying to rise again.

They want their country back, without the demographic changes long emerging, now evident, in the modern world. They want to turn back time and rewrite history. They want to return to imagined original and presumably unambiguous, unalterable meanings of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights only. However, their originalism overlooks that the Founding Fathers were not originalists! For the Constitution establishes a Supreme Court and provides for amendment. Our Constitutional sages also hoot and holler about liberty, freedom, and, recently, that “Christian nation” thing. Left out: democracy.

For some, democracy has never been popular. Yesterday, they liked a franchise limited by property qualifications, poll taxes, or literacy tests. Today, they prefer voter deception or intimidation, impediments to voter registration, and allegations of voter fraud. For others, democracy is popular when they equate the demos to white folks. Since the Civil Rights Movement, many have feared that laws abolishing segregation, promoting integration, implementing affirmative action, and ensuring voter rights have diminished whites and enhanced non-whites as citizens.

Eventually, their logic of original intent will drive these retro-Constitutionalists to try to restore that fractions-of-a-person thing. Their argument: the Constitution recognizes male whites, Indians, and “three-fifth” types; since it does not mention slaves, this fraction applies to all non-Indian people of color. Their assumption: the “demos” is predominantly male and white, and American democracy is white male rule or it is not democracy. So Constitutional originalism is code-word talk expressing modern racism, sexism, and xenophobia. In fighting “big government” and the modern world, these Constitutional retro-fitters advocate infringement, denial, or repeal of amendments extending Constitutional rights, including the vote, to racial minorities and women.

Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican senatorial candidate, preceded several Republican senators in advocating amendment or repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment, which defines citizenship and extends the Bill of Rights to the states. He approves property owners’ rights to deny food or lodging to minorities (would Jews need to wear yellow stars?). Party debates over immigration and civil rights reveal Republicans deliberating whether they support racist, sexist, and xenophobic doctrine—or representative democracy.

Republicans continue acting in support of “democracy” as white rule. They were for a democracy of all people until, with the election of a president of color, they realized that white people will no longer prevail in their circumscribed democracy. Facing long-term defeat, they offer unprecedented disrespect to an elected president and obstruct his legislation even before he proposes it in the hope that it and he will fail and thereby create an apparent example of black incompetence and inferiority. They fabricate: he is not a native-born citizen, so not qualified to be president; he is socialist, communist, fascist, or anti-American; he is a Muslim, the Anti-Christ, or God-knows-what-else. Race comes first; states’ rights, second; country, third; the Constitution, whenever, if cooked to convenience.

Of course, Republicans deny racism in their party; indeed, they accuse those who note its recent history of racism of being racists themselves or playing the “race card.” The GOP’s Andrew Breitbart is the epitome of this strategy. But the facts affirm many Republicans’ prejudice and animosity toward people of color. She whom many much admire left a Hawaiian college because, says her father, she felt uneasy amidst so many of “them.” Without her tacit appeal to “real Americans” who are fellow racists, Palin would be the answer to a Trivia question.

John Boehner’s “hell no you can’t” congressional speech expresses Republican fear that the Constitution as it is works against Republicans and that “We the People” are not who we were. Republicans are right: the Constitution we have amended; the People, enlarged and diversified. Responses to these changes reveal those who have flip-flopped on democracy and those who believe in the Constitutional rule of a reconstituted and reinvigorated demos.

SEA OF LOVE, STATE OF HATE

2010-08-02T17:16:00.000-06:00

“In the wet-ass hour, who’s your daddy?” Al Pacino’s question in “Sea of Love” is getting a re-run, with a twist, in a question by Arizona’s junior senator, Jon Kyl: are your parents legal residents? Since, in many places north of south of the border, the answer is often “no,” Kyl wants to amend the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to all children born in the United States, to bar citizenship to children born here of illegal immigrants.

Yo, Jon, how many generations? Better be just one, with the others “grandfathered” in (do we have something against grandmothers?). Otherwise, to those who have been fighting terrorism since 1492, we are all illegal immigrants, and none of us is a citizen.

Moving right along, right smartly ….

One problem is that “illegal” is arbitrary. Change the law, let anyone coming into the country get a “Green Card” at, say, a Border Patrol station or Post Office within, say, 30 days, and the entire problem of “illegals” goes away. Refugees from Castro’s Cuba were initially illegal, then made legal by the Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act of 1966. No problem then, but a problem now for people like Kyl who, let’s face it, hate Hispanics.

But haters like Kyl might prevail and open a box of Pandoras, as a friend puts it.

Having two illegal immigrant parents is pretty clear. What about having one illegal immigrant parent? Does the gender of the illegal immigrant parent matter? Is the dad illegal—citizenship OK? Is the mother illegal—citizenship not OK? (Sounds like we are getting pretty Jewish here in parsing citizenship the way Jews parse religious identity.) Does it matter if the legal parent is a native-born or a naturalized citizen?

While Kyl is at it, and given his concerns about voter fraud, maybe he should know a little more about the legal parent: is he (or she) Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or Tea Bagger; Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or other; white, black, brown, yellow, red, or albino—not to mention half-tones; and so forth and so on?

What about marital arrangements in which a citizen marries an illegal immigrant, has a child, and then divorces? What if the citizen marries a foreigner, returns to this country, has a child, and then divorces? What if money is involved? Except for the money, soldiers bring home war brides all the time. Has anyone every heard of the brides then divorcing their husbands? By the way, the amendment to the Amendment had better establish rules for custody. Now, go back to the previous paragraph and run everything through the gender-citizenship status-party affiliation-religion-race sieve again.

ARE WE DUMB ENOUGH TO DIMINISH DEMOCRACY?

2010-07-24T16:10:00.002-06:00

Yes. Mid-term election campaigns confront America with threats of serious, perhaps permanent, damage to its democracy because of cultural biases, educational deficiencies, and political demagoguery.

Too many Americans have not figured out how they can be both equal and excellent. They have morphed a doctrine of political equality into a doctrine of personal equality, which encourages the average and discourages the aspiring. They insist on mediocrity and insinuate that those having learned manners and morals, and earned an education are elitists. They celebrate sincere expression more than sensible communication, avoid judgment rather than avail themselves of it, and prefer know-nothings with simple messages to know-it-alls with complex ones.

This triumph of mediocrity over merit results from the dumbing-down of American education since the Vietnam War. Since then, America’s schools—public, private, parochial—have successfully produced two consecutive generations knowing less than the previous one. We are working on the third one. The result is a new record; in the history of humankind, America is the only society not devastated by war, famine, or disease to have achieved this distinction.

The evidence that many adult Americans cannot read with comprehension, write or speak with cogency or correctness, compute with accuracy, or think carefully and clearly is everywhere. Commonly indicated by a “whatever” and a shrug are an indifference to, or denial of, facts or inferences. The results—dumbness, detachment from reality, naiveté, and narcissism—are dangerous to democracy. Incapable of making informed decisions in their best interests, the afflicted are prey to demagogues who exploit their ignorance and manipulate their trust with simple solutions to complex problems.

Inconsequential falsehoods are illustrative. At Cal State, Stanislaus, Sarah Palin aligned herself with Ronald Reagan in rousing, upbeat remarks: “This is Reagan country, and perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California’s Eureka College would become so woven within and interlinked to the Golden State.” Uplifting but fact-free. Reagan graduated from Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, state of his birth; he did not move to California until five years after graduation; and Eureka, California, does not have a college. But, hey, who gives a wink?

Not her followers. Perhaps they assumed that Palin spoke truthfully about a hero of hers. When they learned otherwise, did they care that she knew nothing about her hero and simply used their affection for him to win acceptance for herself? Probably not: true believers do not care about truth. So, on serious issues, they do not care that she lied about “death panels” in the health care bill or, after urging that we “drill, baby, drill” for offshore oil, lied, after the BP spill, that she had not.

Palin is not unique; she has local equivalents in ignorance of, indifference to, or manipulation of, truth. In “What the U.S. Constitution is really about” (24 June), David Montes relies on his readers’ ignorance of, indifference to, or gullibility about, the basic facts about American history and government.

Montes’s column echoes the far-right-wing mantra that “the Constitution was intended to protect the people from the government. It was designed to protect our right to bear arms, our freedom of the press, to protect our religious expression, to protect our property.” Neither statement approximates the truth. He refers, not to the Constitution, but to the Bill of Rights. Defending these falsehoods, he added others, that “The Bill of Rights was added before it [Constitution] was ratified by the people so it's [Bill of Rights] always been considered an aspect of originalism.” The truth is otherwise: nine states ratifying the Constitution made it effective on 4 March 1789; the Bill of Rights was not proposed until 25 September 1789 or ratified until 1791.

As originalists must, Montes palters with the truth to conceal the conflict between originalist dogma and later, favored amendments. After invoking a Constitution bent to serve his politics, he absurdly claims that “Before we can honestly debate policy we have to honestly conclude which policies are actually constitutional.” Honestly, we can debate any policy if only to amend the Constitution. Honestly, no one can debate with those like Montes who use misrepresentations of the Constitution to rule out debate about policies not to their liking. Honestly, they know the Constitution goes against them.

Palin, Montes, and others of their mendacious ilk have a political strategy of deception and dishonesty to serve partisan purposes. Their pretense is protecting the Constitution to protect Americans from “tyrannical government” (do federal laws which they dislike make it “tyrannical”?). But their practice promises to debilitate democracy and diminish freedoms, for those relying on such means to get power will rely on them to keep it. Campaigns tactics smearing opponents and spreading disinformation mean to rile or mislead some to vote against their real interests, and to demoralize or disgust others to discourage them from voting. They and those ignorant, gullible, angry, or resentful are clear and present dangers to democracy and freedom.

THE SHIRLEY SHERROD STORY: DOES ANYONE BELIEVE IN TRUTH OR RIGHT?

2010-07-21T20:34:00.001-06:00

Poor Shirley Sherrod. Two white men, both presumably educated, have abused this black woman in one way or another for their political purposes. Between these two, there is very little to choose. Only a once dirt-poor white North Carolina farm couple has risen to her defense as someone who helped them and whom they regard as a friend of the family. She and they alone have told the truth and done right.

Two facts must be rehearsed. The better known one is that Ms. Sherrod’s entire speech before the NAACP in 1986 is a narrative about her growth in wisdom about race. The lesser known one is that, just a year ago, an organization led by Ms. Sherrod and her husband won a $13 million lawsuit for government discrimination against black farmers, a case opposed and lost by the Obama administration.

Andrew Breitbart is no better than he should be, as they would phrase it in the eighteenth century, when referring to a member of the lower class. He is a political hack; for him, the manipulation of truth is an indispensable tool of partisan misrepresentation to serve his purposes. His explanation for using these film clips—he claims someone else, whom he cannot name, he claims, clipped them—is that he wanted to respond to the charges of racism leveled by the NAACP at the Tea Party movement. The ethics of this rejoinder—you, too—admits what he purports to deny. Even his “you, too” is a lie. And he subscribes to the two lies-make-a-truth school of ethics. His conduct points to something larger: the Tea Party, having no truth with which to defend itself from the charge of racism, resorts to lies instead. Such a strategy comes as no surprise to others who have witnessed its members’ and allies’ deception and dishonesty for political advantage at every turn.

Tom Vilsack is not as good as he should be. Vilsack, a white man from a conservative state, accepted at face value what he saw and heard, and perceived as discreditable about a black woman from a southern state. Vilsack raises the question of his racism in one of its standard motifs.

Speaking Tuesday, Vilsack offered two explanations, both entirely inadequate, for his peremptory decision. “Yesterday, I asked for and accepted Ms. Sherrod’s resignation for two reasons. First, for the past 18 months, we have been working to turn the page on the sordid civil rights record at USDA and this controversy could make it more difficult to move forward on correcting injustices.” This reason does not explain how a controversy, especially one involving a white male superior and a black female subordinate, makes moving forward on civil rights issues more difficult. Continuing this statement, Vilsack added, “Second, state rural development directors make many decisions and are often called to use their discretion.” This reason identifies no indiscretion, although it insinuates, without specification, that Ms. Sherrod exercised it improperly.

Of course, reflecting racism or not, Vilsack reacted to and acted on incomplete information. He was a fool to accept a discrediting film clip at face value. Incomplete information was not inevitable; indeed, it was avoidable. Vilsack might have asked for a copy of the complete tape. And he was a knave to disregard ordinary decency and legal rights and safeguards. He might have acted according to the most basic principles of due process: presume innocence and talk with the accused.

So, when a white male superior takes such impetuous, ignorant, and illegitimate action against an accused black woman subordinate, it is hard to imagine Vilsack’s good faith in trying to correct past racial injustices. Indeed, his acts perpetuate that “sordid civil rights record.”

A day later, after a storm of protest, Vilsack shows himself to be ethically challenged. “The controversy surrounding her comments would create situations where her decisions, rightly or wrongly, would be called into question, making it difficult for her to bring jobs to Georgia.” “Rightly or wrongly”? To him, it does not matter whether Ms. Sherrod’s remarks over 20 years ago (or at any time) were right or wrong; what matters is that they are controversial, that is, political.

As the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Vilsack shows himself to be a leader who betrays employees if they create controversy. It does not matter whether they are right or wrong. He shows himself to be both cowardly and corrupt in acting on rumor in the form of a film clip. The man is unfit to lead.

Given these facts, what are we to think of Obama and his White House, which may or may not have urged Vilsack to fire Ms. Sherrod? Though not involved, it has apologized, why? It apologized for what, exactly? It has taken action against whom, specifically? It has demonstrated its respect for a presumption of innocence and due process, how? It has shown its proclivity for political decisions without any effort to learn the truth or do right, why?

So far as I am concerned, time is up for Obama. However articulate, intelligent, and agreeable he may be, he has shown himself to be a moral weakling and coward. He has stood up for nothing. No stand against torture. No stand against spies snooping on citizens. No defense of administration employees attacked for their associates and backgrounds (how soon he forgets the attacks on his associates and background). No withdrawal from federal cases expanding presidential powers. No stand even in the one area in which he should have an inherent competence and acquired conviction: race. The man is unworthy of our respect and undeserving our vote. He has not transformed Washington, he has not transformed himself, but he has transformed me.

DOUBLE STANDARD IN THE MIDDLE EAST

2010-07-10T07:45:00.001-06:00

Recent and not-so-recent incidents in which U.S. troops killed Afghani civilians riding a bus and Blackwater personnel killed Iraqi civilians on a street have prompted heated outcries and heated charges that these events indicate a systematic pattern tantamount to war crimes. I address these emotional responses because they reflect and reinforce biased, mainly far-left, political positions on Middle East issues.

My cooler but I hope not callous response is that these incidents, though deplorable, are not indicative, much less determinative, of a pattern. My general response: although it sometimes fails, the U.S. tries to avoid civilian casualties and damage; the “other” side never, ever, tries.

First, no such pattern exists, because, if it did, we would know about it. Enough journalists serve in these countries to report systematic efforts to kill civilians, not isolated episodes of civilian casualties. These episodes, however regrettable, are random and rare. Inferring a pattern over-generalizes.

Second, U.S. policy and training, in base camps and in country, are to prevent or minimize civilian casualties. No one has to believe that the U.S. has such policy and training only because of high moral principles; one has only to believe that commanders from the Commander-in-Chief to every 2nd Lt. and NCO knows that killing civilians is just plain dumb, tactically and strategically. This policy and training deserves credit.

Third, although commanders issue orders to avoid civilian casualties and minimize damage, orders do not ensure compliance. They work most, not all, of the time. So commanders and orders are not everything and ever-effective. The U.S. is not so good as, say, Israel, in investigating episodes in which civilians are killed and in holding perpetrators accountable, but it tries to investigate and hold accountable those involved. Absent reason to suspect them, orders before and investigations after episodes in which civilians become casualties deserve credit; and accused troops, the presumption of innocence.

Although the U.S. record is not one of perfection, it is one which reflects efforts, as matters of policy, training, and command, to distinguish between civilian and military spheres, and to minimize civilian casualties in asymmetric warfare with guerilla forces.

Because the charges made against U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are also made about Israel and Israeli forces, I consider the tactics of “the other side,” sub-national terrorists groups: Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

First, these groups make no attempt to distinguished between civilians and military personnel, or between civilian facilities and military ones—unless it is to attack civilians or civilian facilities. These groups have declared and act on policies, training, and commands to kill Americans and Jews regardless of their status. Thus, the World Trade Center or markets in Tel Aviv are civilian-only targets, and attacks on them intended to kill American and Jewish civilians.

Second, in their policies, training, or operations, these groups do not even make an attempt to distinguish between Arab or Muslim civilians and military personnel, or between civilian and military facilities. They conceal their personnel and military equipment and supplies in residential areas or educational, medical, or religious facilities; they deploy their personnel or discharge their weapons from such areas or facilities; and they use civilians and civilian facilities as shields against retaliatory attack.

These strategic and tactical deployments prove my point. Terrorist groups have developed these deployments in reliance on and in exploitation of this U.S. and Israeli distinction. They rely on it to provide some protection to their personnel, supplies, and operations. They exploit for political purposes the unintended or unavoidable civilian casualties or collateral damage of counter-terrorist operations which their terrorist deployments make likely. Their hypocrisy tacitly gives the U.S. and Israel credit for conduct morally superior to theirs.

These considerations have nothing to do with the many policies debatable and debated in the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. They have nothing to do with the plight of the Palestinians, the creation of a Palestinian state, the drawing of boundaries, the locations of capitals, any reparations for lost homes and lands, the right of return, etc.

However, these considerations have everything to do with a double standard applied to military operations—Americans and Israelis bad; their opponents good—as if verdicts on military operations support judgments on political issues. In its customary form, the double standard denies American or Israeli troops extenuations for accidents or mishaps, but allows the other side excuses for deliberate civilian casualties. In discussions about the American-versus-Taliban-or-Al-Qaeda, or the Israeli-versus-Palestinian-or-Hezbollah-or-Hamas, conflict, this double standard is proof—conclusive proof, as I see it—of anti-Americanism or anti-Semitism, respectively.

Anyone has the right to interpret American and Israeli military superiority or economic hegemony as imperialism and to oppose it. Anyone has the right to identify with the downtrodden or oppressed and their causes. But no one has the right to dodge facts or defy fairness to advance positions reflecting a dubious political morality and a despicable religious prejudice. The issues are too important for such distortions.

IS AMERICA A "CHRISTIAN NATION"?

2010-06-26T07:57:00.000-06:00

The news from Texas about its state history curriculum fascinates, what with the state school board’s controversial additions, removals, or modifications. Most seem intended to airbrush the portrait of a country attractive in the main, despite blemishes and scars. American has not always been right or done right, but it has always struggled and is still struggling, to correct its faults and flaws, and to cleave more closely to its stated ideals. We have much work still to do. “We shall overcome” is perhaps the most American theme of our history, and this history, not some touch-up for conservative political comfort, correctness, or crusade, should inspire resolve as well as pride in Americans.

One part of the proposed revision of the Texas history curriculum suggests that not all Americans are pleased with some of the fundamental provisions of our government. Some school board members want state history textbooks to assert that America is a Christian nation. If the board approves this revision, its decision will influence not only children in Texas, but also children elsewhere, and adults everywhere. For it will distort history with a slanted doctrine decreed by politicians serving the purposes of parochial political and religious indoctrination, not deliver a more balanced account determined by historians making sense of our struggles to define and perfect ourselves.

Whatever it might mean, this notion that America is Christian nation runs athwart the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. It begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” I address the second phrase by saying your “free exercise” ends where mine begins. After a brief digression, I address the first phrase because an official state decree that “America is a Christian nation” would be an “establishment of religion.”

A friend sent me a film about the growing “persecution” of Christians in Great Britain, what with Muslims and homosexuals numerous and ubiquitous. It says that the same “persecution” is coming to America. The film urges that a decree that a country is Christian can stop this persecution. He meant to arouse my sympathy for their plight and to alarm me about our future plight. I responded with neither sympathy nor alarm. Despite their history of persecuting each other, not to mention Jews, Muslims and others, Christians do not have it coming, but, then, it is not coming.

Apparently, “America-is-a-Christian-Nation” advocates believe that labels protect people and make them better. But Brits were not safer and did not behave better as a people or a polity when they were uniformly Christian and officially Anglican. Christians have not become endangered or behaved worse as their dominance has dwindled. And Christianity will not die out if the Church of England is disestablished. Christianity in England is not under attack; instead, enlightened Brits, many Christian, seek to curtail its hegemony out of respect for people different from them.

American advocates are responding to similar demographic changes with the same intolerance. Teaching all students that America is a “Christian nation” implies that non-Christians are not part of a “Christian nation,” thus not “Americans.”

Whatever their religious beliefs or practice, our Founders approved a prohibition of any establishment of religion. They knew—their history was not airbrushed—about the religious strife between Catholics and Protestants, and between Anglicans and Puritans, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. They wanted to spare American a virulent, sectarian cause of abuse and bloodshed.

We can amend the Constitution and permit such a declaration if we want, but what would be the implications of doing so? Defining Christianity? Testing Christian allegiance? Preferring some denominations? Denying Catholics public office? Outlawing Mormonism? Arresting Unitarians? Rounding up Jews and corralling them in ghettos? Crusading against and deporting Muslims? Feeling good and godly about it all?

Advocates elide such questions to secure an ersatz agreement sure to degenerate into controversy and conflict. Given sectarian differences, even people who think themselves Christian might wonder if others agree. Get’s scary, doesn’t it?

I think that Christianity—or, perhaps something else entirely, the message of Jesus—is about love (enemies included), charity, and the Golden Rule. Sadly, advocates of America-is-a-Christian-nation manifest none of the above toward others and outsiders: non-Christians, homosexuals, immigrants—any stranger at the gate. They are more into wearing the label than into living the love, and it shows, and it repels people of all faiths. I suspect that many who regard Christianity unfavorably do so because advocates acting in its name and in disregard of their conduct set a bad example and give the religion a bad reputation.

This “America-is-a-Christian-nation” stuff is another undemocratic, unpatriotic impulse to betray the country. It contributes nothing to anyone’s spiritual life and moral conduct, or the nation’s political and economic well-being. It is a subterfuge certainly insidious and potentially dangerous. Instead, we should affirm America as a nation with “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY?

2010-06-23T09:16:00.002-06:00

The current imbroglio about General McChrystal, and his and his aides’ comments reported in Rolling Stone is converting the conduct of the war in Afghanistan a human interest story about boys’ locker-room trash talk and a political gab-fest. Which means that we have lost—whatever that means—a war which we cannot win—whatever that means.

For what it is worth, I think that the general’s remarks were motivated by two concerns. One, although he persuaded the President to adopt his strategy and tactics, and provide more troops (30,000 instead of 40,000 but deemed sufficient), he did not accept the President’s policy of an effort limited in purpose and resources, and having a deadline. In short, he either hoped that success would buy an extension or marched off in radical disagreement with the President’s policy. Two, success having eluded him and conditions on the ground deteriorating, he wants to be fired rather than either quit his command or face defeat on his watch.

What did McChrystal do in the war? He signed up for something in which he did not believe and then wanted out when the going got rough and tough. Thus, his and his aide’s name-calling and denigrations of others are the prelude to blame-shifting.

There are more major lessons to be learned from our recent experience with counterinsurgency (“COIN” as it is called) warfare than I have the time or talent to enumerate. I note a few.

First, the Constitutional provision giving civilians control of the military wisely recognizes that warfare involves more than military strength and thus cannot be trusted entirely to generals and admirals. But it also implies that politicians must assess the more-than-military aspects of war before committing to it. The Constitutional provision requiring Congressional approval wisely recognizes that Congress is better positioned than the President to recognize these more-than-military aspects of war. The capacity of Presidents—I have in mind Johnson and Bush—to manipulate Congress into approving hostilities constitutes a serious threat to the democratic enterprise not only abroad, but also at home. The results of such presidential adventurism have been ruin all around.

Second, whatever our reasons for engaging in COIN warfare, we must ensure both that they are congruent with those of the country in which we would engage and that that country wants to “win,” or succeed, as much as we do. We cannot succeed in a war which our putative ally does not want to win.

Three, whatever our strategy or tactics for engaging in COIN warfare, we must ensure that the ally which we assist is representative of and has the respect of its people. We cannot hope to succeed if we are, in fact, assisting a government either corrupt or incompetent. (I note that both the Vietnam War and the Afghanistan War involve leadership more interested in its self-aggrandizement than in securing the country, even the government itself, from its enemies. Generals like Mullen, Petraeus, and McChrystal should have learned these lessons but appear not to have done so. If McChrystal had, he might have said, “Sir, without your strategy and tactics for winning in Kabul, my strategy and tactics cannot win in the field.)

Four, to develop the tag line of “War Games,” the winning move is not to play. The best way to “win a war” is not to fight it but to prevent it. If we have a trillion dollars to fight a war, perhaps we should have a trillion dollars to assist nations develop themselves in ways which, in benefitting themselves and their people, benefit us.

Getting out of Afghanistan will require more courage than staying in. We are good at doubling down on more of the same with no better prospect of a good outcome for anyone. We are bad at cutting our losses (and theirs). But if we call for withdrawal from Afghanistan, we should call for ways to help whatever government emerges restore its country. We have to run the risk that it will bite the hand which now wants to help it.

Such did not happen when “godless communists” routed us from Vietnam; they wanted to be our friends, as they had wanted to be our friends in 1945. We had to fight with those who sought our friendship before we could become friends—not my idea of a smart foreign policy. The parallel to Afghanistan is not so evident, but I think that it is still there. For I think that Afghanistan is more nationalistic than Islamic. Even so, I think that Islam is no more monolithic today than we thought communism was monolithic decades ago. Indonesia is a case in point. So let us deal with Islamic countries one at a time.

Peace.

IDENTITY POLITICS AND PUBLIC EDUCATION

2010-06-12T16:17:00.001-06:00

In the early 70s, English professors at The University of Michigan wanted it to allow “black English” as an acceptable form of academic communication. Invited to help develop the proposal, I deplored the idea. I said that blacks allowed to use “black English” would be encouraged to deny themselves the full benefits of effectively communicating in Standard English. I added that the proposal would be racially discriminatory, in effect, if not intent. The proposal went nowhere. Years later, a “black English” advocate and mentor to the department’s first black female assistant professor vigorously opposed her request for tenure and promotion, to the dismay of those who thought her well qualified though quirky.

In the mid 80s, the federal government required that school districts provide dual-language instruction for all non-English speakers in all subjects. With such students collectively speaking about 125 languages, Fairfax County Public Schools requested and received a waiver from this inane requirement.

In the mid 90s, the Oakland, California, school board accepted “Ebonics” (“black English” renamed by blending “ebony” and “phonics”) for use in its schools, purportedly to help black students become versed in Standard English. English professors rallied to the cause, again, more on political than pedagogical grounds. The federal government denied funding to Ebonics-based programs because it lacked educational merit.

Dual-language instruction for non-English-speaking students raises similar issues. School districts with large numbers of Spanish-only-speaking students have long used dual-language programs for academic instruction. Whether such programs are successes or failures remains debatable; whether benefits justify costs remains dubious. But the existence of constituencies supporting, and supported by, them is indubitable. Financial benefits accrue to education bureaucrats and dual-language teachers who protect such programs to protect their jobs. Political benefits accrue to elected state officials who tout these programs, use taxes to pay for them, and play ethnic politics—all to win support from ethnic constituencies. Ultimately, no one knows—and many do not want to know—whether such programs are helpful or harmful. The concern is that non-English-speaking students take separate, thus unequal, thus inferior, courses in their first years in school, with persistent educational deficiencies thereafter. An unintended consequence may be keeping minorities down or back, or in their place.

By contrast, earlier immigrants acquired literacy in English by a simple, no-cost, a-political way: immersion. From 1870 through 1920, millions of illiterate Europeans immigrated to the United States. Although grandparents and parents often continued to speak their native tongues, children went to public schools taught in English, learned English from other students, and received an education. Of course, they struggled, but they learned English in a short time and everything else in due time. They did not have to surrender their native language, culture, or identity, though many chose to abandon it or to reserve it for their private lives and relinquish it in their career or college.

This history of English language acquisition by non-native speakers shows that the process of educational conformity inside schools did not enforce cultural conformity or enfeeble ethnic identification outside them. Immigrants faced the choice whether, and if, in what ways or to what degree, to assimilate. Obviously, many chose to assimilate, but many did not. Nothing in this history is new in America; every ethnic group struggles with cohesion and identity; most survive, some better than others.

On the analogy that the Constitution precludes an establishment of religion, the government should eschew any effort to enhance ethnicity, or enrich or empower ethnic groups or group members. It simply has no proper role in educating groups of people in accordance with their ethnic, cultural, or linguistic background.

There are three practical reasons for opposing identity-oriented instruction in populations with large numbers of non-white, non-English-speaking students. One, democracy works best when everyone shares a common cultural grounding in language, just as its economy works best when it shares a common currency. The country does not need enclaves increasingly alienated from one another. A shared American culture does not deny or denigrate sub-cultures; instead, it works to create personal respect, and to preserve political comity, among ethnically diverse peoples.

Two, identity-oriented programs in public education not only do not work, but also damage those whom they purport to educate. Evidence does not establish that programs tailored to specific cultural or linguistic communities improve school attendance or academic performance over the long run. On the contrary, they distract students from the education which can enable them to become highly functional within the larger society. Moreover, such programs, invariably involving segregation within schools, become patronizing and discriminatory, with a variety of predictably unsavory results.

And three, identity-oriented education is antithetical in spirit to the most important aspect of education. The etymology of “education” offers a hint; it traces to “educere,” or “to lead out.” Identity-oriented education encourages students to focus on what they are born to, not on what they might become as well. Public education should attempt nothing to help or hinder students from developing their ethnic identities as they choose. It should attempt an education to encourage and enable all students to become productive participants in, and contributing members to, the larger society. To this end, it must ensure both quality and equality in education for the good of all.

PALIN BY COMPARISON

2010-06-06T09:45:00.001-06:00

Aside from an occasional jab or two, I have steered clear of commenting on Sarah Palin. I recognize the futility of discussing a totemic figure for a certain mindset of her reflexive defenders and devoted followers of a certain political persuasion. Once this cult figure becomes the subject of discussion, rational discourse between those who regard her as a political saint and those who do not comes to an end. The latter, at least, begin with facts available in the media, less the analysis than the audio-visual evidence of Palin’s words.

I am not going to slog through all the stuff about her family life and the disconnect between her moral pretensions, and her and her family’s performance. Nor am I going to rehearse all the allegations about ethical lapses and criminal conduct in office. The tabloids and the talking heads have done that work in mind-numbing detail.

What strikes me is that Palin’s only response to this steady stream of discreditable information has been to attack those, Republicans as well as Democrats, who raise such matters. Since news of her miscues and misconduct comes to us through the mainstream media, her invariable response is to attack the “lamestream” media and its motives. The pattern of her responses is an absolutely narcissistic dualism of accountability: it is never her fault but always theirs—whoever they may be. So it is long since time to ask about her promptings.

The important facts about Sarah Palin are her humble origins and haphazard education. She recognizes that many people have less humble origins and more focused educations; she knows that most fellow politicians and practicing journalists are better off in social status and education than she. Out of her sense of inferiority arises her ever-ready resentment toward or hostility to those whom she perceives as condescending and presumptuous in criticizing or disagreeing with her views or opposing her positions. Whatever they offer not to her liking she takes as insult or attack, and responds in kind.

I grant that many people accept her slogans about “real Americans,” lower taxes, small government, “drill, baby, drill,” “death panels,” and the like as readily as they accept the same slogans offered by others. I also grant that Palin is not special by virtue of the appeal of her resentments, which resonate with the similar resentments of many of her followers. For resentment at the better born or the better educated is as American as apple pie. The lexicon of resentment at “Boston Brahmins,” preppies, the “Eastern Establishment,” “limousine liberals,” “eggheads,” and “pointy-headed liberals” is a rich one of long standing. (Am I alone in noting that no one accuses conservatives of being smart and that they seem to do their best to avoid the accusation?)

What sets Palin apart is her disregard of the facts of her performance. As John McCain’s Vice Presidential running mate, she summed up her energy policy in the rousing phrase, “drill, baby, drill.” In later remarks extended by several sentences, she specifically included off-shore drilling as well as on-shore drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She claimed that both sitings were safe and environmental. Now, in response to mockery of that phrase in light of the fatal explosion and oil leak known as Deepwater Horizon, she declares that she did not support off-short drilling. She lied then, but she also lies now. For drilling on Alaska’s North Shore and piping oil across the state to port facilities have cost lives and caused spills. The casualties, contamination, and other consequences have been smaller, less costly, and less publicized, but they have not been negligible.

Palin is neither the First Liar in politics nor even a very good one. But she is one of the rare politicians who gets caught in a big lie at an important time and denies it with another. While busy rebutting criticism by rewriting history and by attacking critics and, of course, Obama, she, who claims oil-industry expertise, has had not one word of suggestion for dealing with the BP-instigated disaster. More notably, she has had not one word of sympathy for the people affected, their livelihoods destroyed, and the way of life threatened—and these people have supported her. Some may now recall that during the presidential campaign, during the economic meltdown, she also had nothing to say in sympathy for those losing their homes, their jobs, or both.

By comparison to other politicians, Palin is a sociopath, a person with a personality disorder characterized by a lack of conscience and compassion. Her history is one of ambition, opportunism, self-promotion, hypocrisy, dishonesty, disloyalty to peers and betrayal of friends, and resentment at or hostility toward anyone who judges, criticizes, or opposes her. She who holds herself to be believed and obeyed brooks no dissent or disregard. So do not expect her to show any concern for anyone but herself or anything outside herself, off-shore, on-shore, in office, or out.

FIXING PUBLIC EDUCATION: ITS FUTURE SHOULD RECOVER ITS PAST

2010-05-29T11:59:00.001-06:00

I offer three generalizations about public education. One, the current generation of students is the second one to graduate from high school knowing less than the previous generation. Two, public education has failed so badly that its diplomas assure no one that graduates have mastered a minimum of functional information, skills, or habits of work or study. And three, efforts to address this failure by accountability schemes, especially tests, are counter-productive because they make everyone think of education as something useful only to increase school scores and provide credentials for graduates to get on with their lives.

If we knew and agreed how to fix this failing system and ensured that appropriate resources reformed it, we would have to wait almost a quarter century to see results and almost another quarter century to see their effects on our society, its culture, and its economy. In the meantime, America’s slide from promise, prosperity, and power would continue. It reminds me of a fellow veteran’s comment during the controversy about Agent Orange, a defoliant with harmful effects on humans: he said that it had killed him in Vietnam but that he had not yet died. Thanks to schools of education and their graduates for toxic doctrines, lax standards, and corrupt practices, the failure of public education has finished America as we have known it, but it has not yet fallen.

Education professors and public school teachers will scream in protest, blaming, among others, students and parents most of all. We have heard these screams before; what better defense than a good offense? But the educational priesthood alone decides that the public gets to pay-in, but it gets no buy-in. Teachers alone decide the actual curriculum (not to be confused with the “curriculum maps” on the LCPS website). They alone, unlike others workers, insist on being respected and rewarded for their intentions and efforts, not their results. In fact, they are fighting this administration’s efforts to make data on student performance a measure of teacher performance. Education professors and unionized public school teachers, in fostering and protecting mediocrity, rightly deserve most of the blame for the failure of public education.

Consider the teaching of English. Many of those who can read cannot read with comprehension. Many of those who can write cannot write something informed, coherent, and mostly literate. In my two second-term English classes at NMSU, not a few LCPS graduates could not write short papers on topics of their choice which were cogent and competent, without sentence fragments, splices, and run-ons. They and others, in their ignorance and their indifference to it, committed the gamut of other major as well as minor errors of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and word choice. Criticism offended them; low grades outraged them. Of course: their incompetence had not prevented LCPS teachers of English from passing them.

Consider the teaching of mathematics. Students are trained to think about numbers and operations, not to use them. They write in journals how they would go about computing or solving instead of doing computations or solving problems. The result: basic incompetence. In an NMSU classroom, I asked a pre-nursing student what ten percent of 500 words are; her answer: 15. In a local store, when I said that printing addresses on 500 envelopes at $0.10 apiece would cost $50.00, the clerk gave me a funny look, walked to the register, and used a calculator to assure herself that I was not pulling a fast one. These LCPS graduates could not multiply by one-tenth, divide by ten, or move a decimal point one place to the left. Yet their incompetence had not prevented LCPS teachers of mathematics from passing them.

What can be done to reverse, however slowly, the wrong direction and continuing decline of public education? I answer by reflecting on my education in the 40s and 50s, which required my classmates and me to master the traditional materials of core subjects in traditional ways. Although most of us went to college, the few who did not were well prepared for careers. And all of us learned not only what was necessary to pursue either path, but also what we needed for better personal and civic lives. I do not believe that our education for colleges or careers yesterday cannot well educate students for college or careers today.

I have three reasons for my belief. One, traditional K-12 curriculums and associated instructional methods (e.g., classroom drills, quizzes, tests; homework memorization, exercises, papers) have a record of working. Two, my teaching experience with students ranging the socio-economic spectrum showed both to work. Three, new-fangled curriculums and methods have failed. Why in the world did education professors and public school teachers “fix” what was not broken? What were they thinking?

Their continuing gabble about individual learning styles and educational plans, fidelity to requirements, exposure to course content, diversity, and multiculturalism sounds like do-good rationalizations for evading and thereby eroding education. For they are not enabling subject-matter mastery, not establishing resulting confidence, and not encouraging student satisfaction so that students can take pride in what they learn in school. It is time to return to providing an education by which students can achieve educational success and a better chance to succeed after graduation.

IT’S ELEMENTARY: EDUCATION IS WHAT TEACHERS TEACH

2010-05-17T09:20:00.001-06:00

“The generation now entering the workforce is less well educated, on average, than the generation about to retire” (The Economist, 12 July, p. 42). For decades, national media, relying on reports or studies (e.g., A Nation at Risk, 1983), have reported that U.S. students are less well educated than their parents, who, in turn, are less well educated than their parents. History knows few instances of prospering nations failing to educate their youth to the level of their adults.

For decades, the U.S. has spent about twice per student what two-dozen other countries with advanced economies have spent. But according to international measures of educational achievement in major academic subjects—language, history, mathematics, science—the U.S. ranks well toward the bottom. In short, the U.S. spends much on labor-intensive public school education and gets little for its tax dollar.

Taken together, two 1963 books suggest explanations: James D. Koerner’s The Miseducation of American Teachers and Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique. Koerner surveyed the literature on intelligence and academic abilities and achievements across majors and professions; education majors and teachers measured near or at the bottom on all measures. Freidan argued that women deserved equality, not least in careers. Until then, intelligent, well-educated women had few suitable career choices: legal secretary, librarian, nurse, or teacher.

Since then, many talented women have entered fields like business, computer science, engineering, journalism, law, mathematics, medicine—good for them—, eschewed the field of education, and thereby reduced its already modest intellectual capital. The effect is most noticeable in elementary school teachers. The decline in their academic qualifications reflects the steady dilution of the pre-college curriculum. Their college majors in educational psychology, child development, or elementary education do not supplement their academic deficiencies; instead, they support their primary commitment to nurturing student emotional and social growth. The increasing academic mediocrity of these teachers matches the declining academic achievement of their students.

Were it not for the growth of teacher unions to protect them, unions might otherwise seem a redundancy. All public school teachers are civil servants, with assured salaries, job rights and security (tenure in fact, if not in law), and health and retirement benefits. Teacher unions represent teachers in negotiating compensation and work conditions. But they abuse power by defending incompetents and dumbing down standards and qualifications for teaching certification. By making public schools union shops closed to those without education degrees or equivalent coursework, unions protect their members from competition from and comparison with those well suited by expertise, experience, and temperament for teaching.

Case in point: teachers of English give bogus reasons—it cannot be taught formally, only in context; it does not improve writing; it stifles creativity—for no longer teaching grammar; the real reason: they do not know it or appreciate that it helps careful reading and enhances precise writing. But a retired copy editor with a degree in English could teach grammar at the elementary school level and show how it works in business or professional writing at the high school level (and teach literature with sensitivity to the language which powers it at any level).

Elementary school teachers help define the curriculum content and structure, and instructional approaches and means to fit their limited academic background and reduce their job demands. They cannot set high standards for their students because they lack what it takes to teach to those standards. Their deficiencies and failures make problems for middle and high school teachers, who cannot set high standards because their students come to them undereducated, thus unable to meet them. Teachers’ decisions define the decline of academic performance.

By now, some readers will be in high dudgeon and will urge the standard defenses and excuses—bad parents, bad students, and low salaries. But we should first ponder three questions. One, given college training which they believe indispensable, why are elementary school teachers unable to adapt effective strategies to educate their students? Two, given nationwide academic decline, why are teachers incapable of admitting their part in it and accepting responsibility for it? Three, why do teachers not criticize themselves, identify and address their inadequacies, and offer plausible remedies?

Because the transmission of knowledge and skills from teacher to student is central to teaching, elementary school teachers are the first to start the cumulative process of transmission. They must teach the information and skills which students must master if they are to learn in middle and high schools. If they are not well enough educated to do the job, they must get re-educated, by “professional development” or self-study.

The most important skill is reading. If elementary school teachers, with or without help from reading specialists, fail to teach reading—not just word recognition, but text comprehension—by the end of fourth grade, then they have failed to teach the most important skill for continued learning. For those unable to read well thereafter will have almost irremediable difficulties with all academic subjects. Bad behavior and poor attendance in response to frustration or failure are not surprising consequences. Much of the fault rests with those teachers who, knowing too little, expect and teach too little.

GO NUKES—NUCLEAR POWER IN AMERICA’S TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

2010-05-02T21:39:00.000-06:00

About 20 years ago, a Department of Energy client sent me to an unusual conference on nuclear power because it included representatives from industry, environmental groups, academe, and federal and state governments, including regulators. I recall two things. One, the Nevada representative reviled the federal government for its heavy-handed dealings with the state in its efforts to make Yucca Mountain a national waste depository. Two, after the second day, my client wondered why I had had nothing to say. My moment arrived just before the conference was summarizing its discussion. My sardonic comment: if the country had tried to design a nuclear power regime to fail, it could not have done better than deploy the one which it had deployed in the previous 35 years.

With nothing at stake, I never had trouble either admitting that the problems of that regime are many or asserting that many are not unique, ungainly, or insoluble. Which brings me to Chip Ward’s 5 March editorial in the Los Angeles Times. Ward, founder of HEAL Utah and author of books opposing nuclear power, has a stake in the controversy about nuclear power. Unfortunately, like many opponents of nuclear power, he is a fear-monger who decries radioactive waste, mining hazards, expense, and carbon footprint; but whose standards are never clear.

His concerns are exaggerated. First, radioactive waste. America has failed to solve its radioactive waste problem for political reasons. Other countries with nuclear power regimes like France and Japan do not have such problems. So the issue of radioactive waste is not inherent in nuclear power and is solvable except for scare claims about it. By contrast, radioactivity may be a greater problem at both ends of the coal fuel cycle. Coal shafts are slightly radioactive; worse, fly ash, the spent fuel of coal use, is far more radioactive because this combustion by-product concentrates the radioactivity in coal.

Second, mining hazards. All mining is dangerous. Most uranium mines are surface or shallow-pit mines which present modest environmental problems readily solved by modest containment efforts. By contrast, coal mining has a higher ratio of deaths, disabilities, and diseases per worker from mine collapses and respiratory disorders.

Third, expense. Nuclear power regimes in other countries testify to their economic viability because they have been sensibly implemented without huge litigation costs.

Fourth, carbon footprint. The claim that the carbon footprint of constructing nuclear power plants exceeds the avoided carbon footprint of their operation is a lie which has been a staple of anti-nuclear zealots for decades. Pollution comes in many forms, and lies by environmentalists are one of them.

However, the current regime does have real problems. All of its over 120 plants are different, some more, some less, from each other. The regime never standardized its designs, so each plant required separate regulatory approval for siting, design, and operation. Probability risk assessments were simply guesses by experts, and mistakes were matters not of second-guessing but of discovering how unreliable PRAs for different, if not unique, designs were. Interventions by environmentalists and others, most amply justified, prolonged regulatory decision-making and increased costs of siting, construction, and operation. The consequences—long delays and large expense—the industry inflicted on itself, with help from often inept government agencies and often irate interveners.

The problem with screeds like Ward’s is that they pretend that the next-generation nuclear power regime has learned nothing and changed nothing in the past 30 years. But much has been learned and almost everything changed, and all for the better.

The new regime has a radically different approach to developing and deploying nuclear power plants. First, it standardizes a few designs; as a result, each plant design requires only one regulatory decision and can be “mass” produced. This standardization shortens regulatory schedules and reduces production and construction costs.

Second, the new plant designs come in scaled sizes and are modular. Scaled sizes mean economies because plants can match demand in markets, and modularity means that additional plants can be added to the grid to match market growth.

Third, the new plant designs reduce safety, health, and environmental risks by using relatively simple architectures and passive-safety devices to prevent accidents or releases. Gone are the complexity and redundancy of defense-in-depth engineering, with its great technical and managerial risks, and great costs. Instead, come passive-safety devices which eliminate the need for grid electricity, trigger safe shut-downs, and reduce the odds of operator error or radioactive releases.

Even the issues of waste and security are solvable. If nuclear power companies know that the federal government will not build a national storage facility for spent fuel, they will support other options: state permanent storage facilities or carefully designed and secure permanent on-site storage facilities capable well beyond the lifetime of the plant.

The only thing which has not changed about the new regime is the warriors waging wars against the old regime. The vanguard of nuclear power has moved on.

EVOLUTION VERSUS WHATEVER

2010-05-02T21:38:00.000-06:00

The controversy about evolution, with efforts by some to dismiss the theory as “only a theory,” as if divorced from fact, continues. It raged for 65 years after the Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” appeared in 1859. It subsided after the Scopes trial in 1924, when Clarence Darrow cross-examined William Jennings Bryan and embarrassed the champion of anti-evolutionists. Since then, a small majority of Americans has regarded even leading anti-evolutionists as dumb rubes. That unflattering opinion, perhaps true then, is false now. Today’s anti-evolutionists have evolved; they are more educated and eloquent, sophisticated though also sophistical, people, many with advanced degrees in the relevant sciences. In recent years, they have taken up what most had dismissed as a lost cause to challenge the science curriculum in Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Although almost all scientists favor evolution, a large minority of Americans still does not accept it.

Notwithstanding, evolution is so well established in science as to be tantamount to a fact; it explains not only “the origin of species,” but also and more importantly the means by which they change. A knowledge of evolution supports efforts to address human concerns about disease and health, famine and food, and the biosphere in which we live and which we share with other organisms. It enables a better understanding of how we got to be who were are, what we might and perhaps should become, and how we can be better stewards of what some call “creation.” So why do many people reject a theory, or a fact, well established by science which is the basis of enormous benefits to people and their planet?

One reason is that some people resent or repudiate the idea of an ape-cousin in the family tree.

Another reason is the fact that many Americans know little science. Those who “sound off” to the media repeat objections to evolution raised and razed decades ago. Allegations of “gaps” in the fossil record assume that evolution occurred gradually over hundreds of millions of years, time for many incrementally different, intermediate forms; instead, it occurred in short spurts of rapid change, with small, transitional populations leaving few traces, between long periods of equilibrium. The allegation of a missing mechanism to explain evolution was valid in Darwin’s day, but it no longer exists; mutations of genes and mergers of DNA materials explain evolutionary change.

The main reason is the fear which many Americans have, namely, that evolution—as they see it, random, purposeless, materialistic—counters or corrupts their religious and moral beliefs. To them, its worldly benefits matter less than spiritual ones. So they seek to banish the study of evolution from public education, have its status demoted to “mere” or “unproven” theory, or balance it with pseudo-scientific alternatives. Whatever the proposed alternatives—creationism, intelligent design, or, more recently, the bogus balancing of the “strengths and weaknesses of evolution”—the driving purpose is to inculcate a basis of belief in a “higher power”—“God” is the word always lurking behind euphemisms like this one. The issue is not one of “free speech” or “equal time.” Texas talk of being “fair” to both “sciences” is clap-trap; there is science and non-science—period.

By such schemes and sleights of hand, anti-evolutionists think to reinforce their faith by conning others to accept their beliefs. Their effort would be unnecessary if they were as strong in their faith as their rejection of evolution and their insistence on Biblical inerrancy suggest. Thus, for them, the Bible states the literal or nearly literal truth. A few believe that the world was created in six, 24-hour days; more believe that those six days were six periods totaling a few thousand years. Except for such small differences, all believe that a cogent, compelling being created things once and forever, even what appears to be the fossil record itself. But why create that “record” if it misleads?

Whatever the answer, even if it be to test faith, anti-evolutionists misunderstand faith in its relationship to truth. The Biblical account of creation, for example, cannot be both a matter of faith and a matter of truth. The two are different things. Faith allows doubt about things unknown or unknowable; truth reflects certainty about the known. So the insistence on Biblical inerrancy is a sign, not of strength in matters of faith which lacks all doubt, but of intolerance of doubt and of insecurity in need of certainty.

Many non-anti-evolutionist Christians are strong in their faith without a belief in the Bible as the literal truth to sustain their faith. Holy it is to them; guidance it is to them; science it is not to them. Christian faith is stronger for admitting doubt and relying only on doctrine understood in light of revelation, tradition, and reason. It is not stronger for denying doubt and depending on Biblical inerrancy. It is weaker for needing the prop of pseudo-science trying to validate Genesis 1.1-2.3—one of many Semitic creation myths, including Genesis 2.4b-25—as a history of the earth. Indeed, not one moral command or religious doctrine depends on a geological or paleontological fact; more generally, faith is based on moral myths, not facts. So, the Bible need not be true to be good, but it can be the Good Book and do good if read with humility and used for humanity.

MEMOS ON MEANNESS AND MENDACITY

2010-04-13T20:13:00.007-06:00

10 April. Responding to a local column about the way in which the Tea Party and other extreme conservatives or Republicans are forcing reasonable people to the left, one person questioned, ""When are you going to get it's NOT OK for our Congress, President and Supreme Court to continually violate the Constitution?!" I have of late become impressed with the number of Constitutional scholars walking around the streets and packing heat. Right now they are shooting off their mouths; pretty soon they will be shooting off their guns. But what they will not do is identify a single footprint from the trampling of the Constitution. My guess is that this person wants to restore that three-fifth of a person thing. More generally, a lot of people have been for democracy until a lot of other people included in the demos turned out not to be like them. We do not hear about democracy from them any more. We hear about Constitutional infringements, gun rights, and succession. This radical, rebellious, even treasonous talk receives support from my local paper. It censored my column "Time to Mess with Texas," which appears as a blog.

12 April. One Don McLeroy, recently defeated for re-election to the Texas School Board, made comments which clearly revealed that he does not know that history is based on facts from which historians draw inferences. He claims that it based on principles, which it is the business of school teachers to teach. His principles bear a marked resemblance to conservative or Republican--take your pick--doctrine. It is not about principles which may or may not guide people in the conduct of their lives. Consider that Texas joined the confederacy to protect state rights to enslave people, despite Jefferson's "principle" that "all men are created equal." McLeroy and the other members of the Texas School Board are, collectively, about indoctrination, not instruction. Their complaints about "liberals" distract from the connivances of "conservatives."

13 April. Rachel Maddow indulges scare tactics because she is anti-nuclear power. Tonight, she equated high-enriched uranium (HEU) used for weapons with low-enriched uranium (LEU) used in nuclear power reactors. HEU is over 20% enriched uranium, usually around 85% enriched uranium for weapons. LEU is about 3-5% enriched uranium for fuel rods. If she does not know the truth, she is irresponsible; if she knows the truth, she is a liar. Either way in this instance, she resembles all the people she exposes for ignoring the truth or lying about it. Which is it? Sad.

SHOOT TO KILL THE SECOND AMENDMENT

2010-04-04T12:26:00.001-06:00

The Second Amendment has not mattered to me. I have only a modest history with firearms. I fired rifles in the backyard to kill sparrows using birdhouses intended for other species, in camp competition, and in military training. I needed a handgun only once in Vietnam and have handled no firearm since. But I accept the importance of firearms to hunters and inhabitants of high-crime neighborhoods.

I believe that people have not only the same right to firearms as they have to automobiles, but also the same responsibilities for them: registration for ownership and restrictions on use. Loaded guns no more belong in crowded places than speeding cars belong on city streets. The amendment is not needed to protect peoples’ rights—no one wants either their firearms or their cars—and should not be used to pervert or preclude their responsibilities. It certainly does not justify firearms without restrictions, as two common arguments suggest.

One is personal or family safety. Crime statistics and media sensationalism suggest that we live in dangerous times. America is a more violent nation than other nations with advanced economies. But in the quotidian lives of over 300 million Americans, firearms do little to promote individual safety. Firearms kill more people in domestic accidents or violence than in criminal incursions into the family circle. Most of those who possess firearms for self-defense are, in a showdown, unable or unwilling to use them. No one denies the right to arms for self-defense even if you are a greater threat to those in your home than to those invading it.

The other is political freedom. Despite inflammatory talk, America faces no risk of a government-led confiscation of firearms as part of an effort to suppress individual dissent. Despite anger at illegal immigrants or fear of foreign attacks, Americans face few, if any, dangers from identifiable threats which can be sensibly addressed by armed citizens. If the government transfers terrorists to a super-max prison in Colorado or Michigan, neither their good citizens nor those of Maine, Florida, and Idaho are going to need arms to defend their families and themselves in their cabins, condos, or double-wides.

Let us face it: the Second Amendment is a linguistic nightmare and a historical anachronism. Here it is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Some versions vary in punctuation and capitalization, but the variations do not much affect meaning. Still, I do not find this amendment as problematic as many find it.

Unlike the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment alone uses an absolute construction, a relatively rare syntactic form which establishes conditions for what follows, like a sentence adverb (e.g., “hopefully”). The conditions are now historical anomalies in its references to a state, not a nation, and to a militia.

The amendment does not assume the very nation and its federal government which the Constitution defined. Instead, it implicitly rejects both. It reflects a political compromise, with those who believed in a strong federal government allowing this after-thought to assuage ruralists who drafted an amendment assuming states to have powers not since either available or practical. Although state militias survive in law and fact, they are instruments of collective action for the good of the state, not of a group or an individual. So the construction is a fossil. The national government, not the states, has primary, overriding responsibilities to defend the nation and to enforce the laws of the land. Only paranoid or political wingnuts—often one and the same—imagine armed citizens fighting pitched battles against National Guard or regular troops, much less doing so successfully. And they are a far cry from “well-regulated.”

The main clause is straightforward in stating a right like other rights in the Bill of Rights; like them, it is not absolute or unqualified. The right to free speech entitles no one to libel, slander, incitement, and the like; it is limited by the need to prevent harm to individuals and society. Likewise, the Second Amendment defines the right to “keep and bear Arms” but is likewise limited by a similar need. The absolute construction itself implies a specific political purpose which restricts the right: “the security of a free State.” So an individual bearing arms at a political rally or wearing them in a coffee shop is not “well regulated” and is not doing a thing for “the security of a free State.” He may not like government policies or the coffee at Starbucks, but carrying a weapon to a rally or a restaurant is a threat to constitutional democracy and a danger to law-abiding citizens.

Go hunting, shoot skeet, enter marksmanship competitions; otherwise, keep your firearms at home, unloaded and locked up. And stop using the Second Amendment to justify their misuse.

ONCE "NEVER," NOW "NO"

2010-03-25T15:52:00.002-06:00

Republican political rhetoric since the election of the half-black, half-white Barack Hussein Obama has undergone a degeneration not seen in over half a century. Then, McCarthyism was the rage, and the John Birch Society was the army of rage. But it did not take long for Senate Republicans to realize the danger of enabling the fringe, of putting democracy itself in harm’s way. So they censored McCarthy, shunned him, and let him get drunker more often, to die of alcohol-related disease.

I am not sure that today’s Congressional Republicans care. I am not sure that their unbridled anger at a black president with a New-Deal-Fair-Deal-New-Society view of America does not, in their minds, justify tearing the temple down. Even if you say only “no” but say it often enough, you say “no” to Democracy and to America as we have known it.

Over the years, researchers have studied intellectual and moral differences between people of different political persuasions. Most such profiles, the greater populist anti-intellectualism on the right than on the left, and the prejudices of better educated people—all lead many people to believe that conservatives or Republicans are not as intelligent or as smart as liberals or Democrats. I do not share such beliefs. I have known far too many intelligent and smart conservatives or Republicans, and far too many unintelligent and stupid liberals or Democrats to think that one side has a greater share of brains than the other. I think that I know what accounts for this stereotyping.

From almost the beginnings of Western recorded thought 2500 years ago, people have carefully distinguished reason from passion. Except for the Romantic Movement of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and its intermittent recrudescences thereafter (the Hippie Movement being one of them), most serious thinkers have favored reason over passion in the conduct of a well and wisely lived life and of a civil and civilized society.

Accordingly, some people try to live a life guided by reason regnant over emotion. In the extreme, they may be characterized by their respect for facts and logic, their openness to new evidence and better arguments, their respect for others and their opinions. They incline to introspection and self-restraint, struggle to understand their motives and purposes, and act on conscience to eliminate personal prejudice.

Other people make no such effort, but live a life guided by reason serving the demands of emotions and thus directing people toward the ends which their emotions determine. In the extreme, they may be generally characterized by their efforts to confirm their convictions; their responses to others on the basis of agreement or disagreement with their views, attitudes, or values; and their likings or dislikings, however acquired or sustained.

Most of us fall somewhere along the spectrum between these extremes. However, the contrast makes a point: the first group reasons; the second group rationalizes, and the difference makes all the difference as we have seen it recently in the prolonged and pointless exchanges between the two political parties. We are, I think, not dealing mainly with the interplay between policy positions and political advantages. We are dealing with radically different mind-sets, between those who reason from problem to solution, and those who know the answer regardless of the question. Everyone can be equally intelligent or smart, or not, thereafter.

Whatever one thinks of Democratic positions on the bail-outs, stimulus package, health insurance reform, and the rest of the agenda, they are like past Democratic (even some Republican) positions. The Democratic view that government can be, and do, good is not novel. Finally, the party seems as fractured and dysfunctional as ever, with unity achieved as a ramshackle arrangement energized by necessity. Republican opposition to Democratic positions and the Democratic view of government is not new either. Even Republican party unity is no surprise, though its unanimity is, and is suspect.

Even the vitriol is new, not in kind, but in degree; so, too, the discourtesy and distance between members of both Congressional chambers. Joe Wilson’s shouted “you lie” addressed to the President during the State of the Union message seems no longer an aberration, but an inauguration of John Boehner’s remark that a Congressman from a neighboring Ohio district “may be a dead man. He can’t go home to the west side of Cincinnati.” Boehner’s disclaimer notwithstanding, being “a dead man” is no metaphor for suffering a political defeat; political defeat means that you can go home to spend more time with one’s family.

What underlies this rhetoric of vitriol and violence is a political hysteria stretching from armed nutwings to some elected federal officials—all conservative, all Republican—all afraid that the modest grant of political power to a black minority in the Sixties is now, given the demographic changes of the recent past, becoming an enormous transfer of political power to a non-white majority. Opposition to that change is summed up in one word: not “never,” but “no.”