Politicking Providence, among other things

Anniversary of an Infarction

2012-01-20T14:49:00.000-08:00

"Condition of the Heart," Prince, Around the World in a Day, 1985

January 16th, 2006, Martin Luther King Day. One of the worst years of my life had just ended--a year of a series of family and financial crises, capped by the termination of my visiting appointment at Wabash College. Wabash did the right thing, I knew even then. While I learned a great deal about teaching (and being a full-time academic) from my fellow faculty and many fine students, I'd become increasingly unhappy working with the cultists of all-male education, and their unspoken rule: If you can't praise the Wabash mission to the high hills, then keep your trap shut. Still, I felt burned. The college had used my work with students to raise money from alums, and I had done a lot of other service. It was my bad though, not Wabash's, that I'd done so much service instead of doing what I should have done--research, writing, and finding another job. Fortunately, a good friend from grad school days plucked me up and eased me into a visiting position at Albion College.

So on that day I was house-sitting for an Albion professor on sabbatical, in a place just a few blocks from the Albion campus. Around two or three am, I woke up from a terrible dream. My bedroom was upstairs, and I was there in the dream, but the room was now huge. I lay on my bed in the middle of it, and I could see a dark doorway between my feet. I heard a steady rhythm of booms downstairs, as if someone were pounding away on a timpani in the basement. Then I noticed my chest was opened, as if it were a cardboard box, and when I looked over the one flap underneath my chin, I saw two arms trying to line my empty chest cavity with a white kitchen garbage bag. They were making a hash of it, and I was irritated, and that drum downstairs kept banging away, and I hissed "Here, let me do it," and I grabbed the bag. Then I woke up.

It seems so obvious now that some sort of myocardial event had just occurred, but I don't know if I had just experienced an infarction, or if it was yet to come (I love that word, infarction; the OED defines it as the "action of stuffing up or condition of being stuffed up," but for me it's a rude-sounding word that would likely make my grandkids giggle, a healthy giggle over a life-changing, or life-ending, event). I wandered around the house for a few hours, discombobulated. I couldn't focus on anything, couldn't shake the dream from my head, nor the vague sense of dread--as if I were playing the Sesame Street game of "One of these things/is not like the other," and my life depended on it, yet unable to find the damn thing that didn't belong.

I ended up sitting on the back porch in the hushed, early morning dark, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette (I know, I know). Finally, I decided to go to my office. Work might erase the dream and the dread. I remember bitter cold on that walk, though according to the Farmer's Almanac, even with wind chill, the temperature would have been the high teens or low twenties, which hardly qualifies as bitter to me. About halfway there I suddenly felt as if I were walking in icy quicksand. I felt no pain, no shortness of breath. I just couldn't get my body to move. I thought about sitting down on the curb, just rest a bit, but by then I must have been suspecting something was really wrong, I was beginning to get an idea of which thing that was not like the other. I talked my body into moving again, and slowly crossed the short distance to my building, made it to my office, got online, and checked a website that gave a list of symptoms for heart attacks.

I knew I was at risk. My two grandfathers had died in their 40s of heart disease. Both my parents had high blood pressure, and so did I. I smoked, and recently experienced a great deal of stress. But I dithered. I didn't want all the fuss of going to the hospital--I didn't want to appear a hypochondriac. It may have been around eight am when I called a friend, and described what had happened. He said get myself to an emergency room, call 911. But this friend, god love him, tends to be an alarmist at times, and his anxiousness on my behalf only seemed to make me sink further into lassitude. I didn't want the drama; I'd had enough of it already.

But after mulling it over a while longer, I thought, "Crap, let's just get this out of the way." I shuffled back to my house, got in the jeep, and drove to the emergency room in nearby Jackson. Here my memory gets even more sketchy. After describing my moment of quicksand to a nurse, there was a flurry of questions, blood drawn, an EKG, and then suddenly I was on a gurney getting shoved into an ambulance. I woke up the next morning not knowing why I was in the hospital, or how I had gotten there. Apparently the anesthesia they gave me had amnestic side effects, and I must have been on some sort of narcotic because when a doctor came in and told me that he had cleaned out the 99% blockage and placed a stent in my left descending artery--the widowmaker--I thought, "Well, how very interesting." A bit later, or maybe it was before, a nurse checked the dressing over the plug in my groin, sealing the entrance point for the catheter. If it opened, I might bleed to death in a couple of minutes. As she checked me she asked me to warn her if I was going to cough or sneeze, and told me not to laugh, which, of course, I started to do. I cannot remember what started me off, perhaps the bit of repartee we fell into while discussing my condition? Or was it the absurdity of this rather attractive woman with her hands near my privates in a most unerotic tableaux? Or it was the drugs still at work? Whichever, her stern order to stop laughing worked.

Curiously, I did not know until my discharge that I had suffered a myocardial infarction, and it wasn't until a follow-up appointment with the cardiologist that I found out that the heart attack had left no permanent damage. So I was fortunate (or blessed, depending on your views of providence) on a number of counts--1) walking into frigid air makes the heart work ever so much harder, and I made it to and from my office, and to the hospital, after two myocardial episodes; 2) that I even survived the heart attack(s?); and 3) no permanent damage. We can add another. According to my most recent stress test, my heart is in excellent condition.

I still often think of that dream, especially around MLK day. I've done a little poking around in healthcare and medical journals, but can't seem to locate any studies the association between heart attacks and dream states and dread. I don't think the dream caused the heart attack, of course, or that it predicted one, though it may have been my body, working through my subconscious, trying to tell me "Hey, Andy, we've got a problem."

An initial foray via Google brought me this tidbit from an Australian online health magazine:

Thomas Luscher told the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology in Vienna that, although heart attacks occurred throughout the day, their incidence increased after midnight, and peaked between 3am and 5am.
"What's interesting is that this is when dreams become more frequent and vivid," said Dr Luscher, a cardiologist at the Zurich University Hospital.
"Maybe there's a link which should be investigated."

'Well, how very interesting,' but if important, why only one guy in Austria raising this issue and whose words get picked up by some Ezine for senior citizens in Australia?

A longer search with academic search engines did not give me much more. There's lots of stuff on connections between mental and emotional states and heart conditions--there's a US News and World Report article that sums this research up nicely, saying, for example, "It's long been known that acute emotional states--like rage, fear, or panic--can trigger cardiac events that literally 'scare you to death.'" But this is still treating the mind and emotions as causal factors of a physical trauma. I'm more interested in what the mind and heart are doing in response to such a trauma.

I'm sure there must be more work out there that my inexpert searches did not locate. If any of the two or three of you that happen to read this blog know of some leads, I'd welcome them.

And a belated happy Martin Luther King Day to you all. My drama isn't comparable to the national trauma he lived, faced, and which killed him.

Peter Gabriel: Still Holding the Line

2012-01-14T12:51:00.000-08:00

I first listened to Peter Gabriel my senior year in high school, thanks to my neighbor and fellow West Albanian, Pat Hawke, who was always giving me the heads up on new music. He lent me Peter Gabriel, and I gave it a listen, but except for "Solsbury Hill" and "Here Comes the Flood," the album didn't really grab me. Gabriel's music wasn't very accessible to ears used to Supertramp, Kansas, and Fleetwood Mac. So I kind of forgot about Gabriel. I ended up missing a lot of music coming out in the late seventies and throughout the eighties, partly because of my Christian fundy stage (1978-1981), and partly because I was off in Guatemala for Peace Corps (1984-88). In between, I think I wasn't listening to much besides Bruce Cockburn. Anyway, it must have been 1989, we were living in the Lower East side then, and Margo and I went to see Say Anything, and there's that great scene with Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) holding up a boom box blaring Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," trying woo back Diane Court (Ione Skye). That song did immediately grab me, and I remember later asking some friends if they knew who did that song. They looked at me like I was an idiot and said it was Peter Gabriel.

So that got me into a Peter Gabriel kick, and though I haven't become an aficionado, I've gotten a lot of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure from his music over the past twenty years. Recently, Gabriel released New Blood, a collection of covers of his 80s hits reinterpreted with classic orchestration. I think the results are pretty uneven. The orchestral intro to "In Your Eyes" sounded to me like a soundtrack to some bad Merchant Ivory knockoff, and the orchestration on "Red Rain," "Mercy Street," and "Solsbury Hill" seems just too delicate to fully deliver those powerful songs.

But I liked what Gabriel did with "San Jacinto," which is somewhere in my top 100 songs of all time. According to an interview Gabriel did for the New Blood production, the lyrics recall a conversation he had with an Apache man about the rite-of-passage he underwent to become a warrior. This rite is juxtaposed with a commentary on the commodification and consumption of the Native North American culture that Gabriel witnessed in San Jacinto (in California, near Palm Springs). Reminds me of my one visit to Kaneeta way back in 1979, which now lures people with this catchy slogan: "Escape to where the fun shines!"

Peter Gabriel, San Jacinto, IV (1982)

Listen to the original version and you will hear the four stanzas unfold in distinct ways, though a repeated melody of synthesized chimes connects the first three (lyrics below). Gabriel starts off soft, his usually gravely voice smoothed. Then there is the transition with female vocals saying something that I've never been able to figure out, but, anyway, the song continues to build, adding instrumentation and volume, until Gabriel shouts, as if from a mountaintop, "I hold the line!" Heavy bass and dark horns make it all sound so dire, and he falters for a bit--"think I'm losing it"--before sweeping on to his declaration. But holding the line is not about resistance, it's about survival. And the last stanza is sung in a tone that suggests weariness more than confidence.

And I suppose that is what initially drew me to the song. I didn't (and don't, or can't, really) identify with Gabriel's narrative posture as a Native North American, but musically the song seemed so close to how I've felt at times, of near losing it, of persevering without a great deal of confidence.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
San Jacinto lyrics
Thick cloud - steam rising - hissing stone on sweat lodge fire
Around me - buffalo robe - sage in bundle - rub on skin
Outside - cold air - stand, wait for rising sun
Red paint - eagle feathers - coyote calling - it has begun
Something moving in - I taste it in my mouth and in my heart
It feels like dying - slow - letting go of life

Medicine man lead me up through town - Indian ground - so far down
Cut up land - each house - a pool - kids wearing water wings - drink in cool
Follow dry river bed - watch Scout and Guides make pow-wow signs
Past Geronimo's disco - Sit 'n' Bull steakhouse - white men dream
A rattle in the old man's sack - look at mountain top - keep climbing up
Way above us the desert snow - white wind blow

I hold the line - the line of strength that pulls me through the fear
San Jacinto - I hold the line
San Jacinto - the poison bite and darkness take my sight - I hold the line
And the tears roll down my swollen cheek - think I'm losing it - getting weaker
I hold the line - I hold the line
San Jacinto - yellow eagle flies down from the sun - from the sun

We will walk - on the land
We will breathe - of the air
We will drink - from the stream
We will live - hold the line
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The new version keeps the compositional design of the original, but the orchestral instruments make the tone lighter, replacing somberness with a meditative spirit. Gabriel has thirty more years on him, and perhaps he's too old, too wise, to wallow in direness. The musical transition from the third to the fourth stanza is almost upbeat, but it soon returns to melancholy. In the last passage, as the flutes die out and the strings move into a minor key, we hear in the background labored breaths, and it feels to me as if now the issue is not just weariness, but loneliness.

However one interprets these musical texts, they are both beautifully rendered, and if you're a Peter Gabriel fan, New Blood deserves a listen, though it may not get your admiration.

Peter Gabriel, San Jacinto, New Blood (2011)

Stress and Snails

2011-11-17T16:30:00.001-08:00

I have been incredibly stressed these past few months for a variety of the usual reasons--conflict at work, worries about family, aging, blah, blah, blah. . .

I had a routine stress test with my cardiologist last August, and she said, looking at the pictures of my heart at work, that she wouldn't have known from the evidence that I had suffered a heart attack. Good news, she said, but added that I had to learn how to manage stress better--though I'd said little about that to her. I guess she reads minds as well as hearts.

So I've been doing a few things to try to reduce stress. Conveniently, reconstructive knee surgery in late July means I've been going to rehab twice a week, where the PTs work me over pretty well--the exercise has felt good. And I try to get in for a massage session once a week. My wife tells me that recent reports show that massage lowers blood pressure, and that, combined with increased exercise and quitting smoking (umm, well until last week), must explain the lowest blood pressure reading I've had in a long time at my recent doctor's visit, 118/60 (by the way, my family doctor, John Duhn, is the greatest; he listens well, explains well, and is fellow fan of universal, single payer healthcare).

Another thing I've started just recently is to sit down with a book of poetry while I eat breakfast. I read this one a couple of days ago, in a collection that might make the more sophisticated poetry readers cringe, Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times. It's called "For a Five-Year-Old," by Fleur Adock, a New Zealander who ended up in England. Turns out she was born the same year as my father, 1934. Knowing that makes me read it as both the child and the parent.

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor, we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

I had those snail moments, too, as a child: We are not the kind that hits others. We are people for whom silliness is a virtue. We are not to cheat at games, or throw tantrums when we lose. We believe music to be beautiful and essential, along with wandering through forests, climbing mountains, and sleeping by rivers. We absolutely do not, whether angry or not, call our best friend, a Japanese-American, a nip.

As a parent and grandparent, and watching my daughter raise two of her own, I am fully aware of the baggage we bring to raising children, and the detritus of daily life that swirls around our answers to a child's question, worry, or upset. Lord knows I have had, and have, my inconsistencies--the little rages hovering around my moments of gentleness--and that I have betrayed and displayed my harsh edge, yet "that is how things are." Or as Bruce Cockburn sings, "that's the burden of the angel-beast."

I treasure those childhood lessons, and that gives me hope that some of that treasure has been passed on despite myself.

WWJD? Bully a gay kid?

2011-11-12T11:58:00.001-08:00

The anti-bullying law now under consideration in the Michigan statehouse includes language that "prohibits the law from being used to take action against people for a statement based on a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction." Apparently, for some Michigan Republicans, God doesn't seem to mind bullies who pick on homosexuals.

Tea Party activist Rich Swier doesn't even think physical and emotional abuse of homosexual youth is bullying. "It is peer pressure and is healthy."

It's all so bizarre. Think about it. If religious belief or moral conviction transform an abusive act into acceptable behavior, do agnostic and atheist kids get to shove fervent evangelical heads into toilets? Does it free Green activists to shout belittling jibes at littering louses? Do Jehovah Witnesses, when no one's looking, get to smash the sack lunches of good Christians who dutifully say the Pledge of Allegiance?

And as for Swier, who apparently also has it in for Muslims, what twisted prism is he looking through that transforms a sick bully into picture of health?

Thankfully, the Republican Speaker of the House opposes this clause, and hopefully will get it stricken from the text.

[Source: Buckfire and Buckfire.com]

A modest proposal for reducing unemployment

2011-09-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

Obama's fiscal infusion approach to reducing unemployment is simply too little, too late. I have a better idea. Reduce unemployment by reducing the number of job seekers--present and future--through what we can call "enhanced natural attrition." There are already some proposals out there that can we can use to accomplish this.

1) Enhanced natural attrition through liberating the environment for entrepreneurs. Governor Rick Perry is a big advocate of this, arguing that onerous federal environmental regulations raise the cost of production to such a point that employers can't increase production and hire more workers. He's right, but what we also get from ending those oppressive protections of the environment is the side benefit of increased externalities--companies pass on the cost of production (the cost of say, air or water pollution) to the public space, where workers live. Studies show that typically it's the poor and marginalized workers who end up living in the more toxic spaces, so we can enhance the natural attrition of this population by increasing the toxicity of places where they live. With shorter life spans and greater infant mortality rates, we reduce the number of present and future job seekers, with the added benefit of reducing applicants for this or that social and welfare service. And our brave, risk-taking entreprenuers, with lower costs of production, will make more money so they can once again own that second, third, or fourth home, thus boosting the real estate and home construction sectors. Just one of many possible multiplier effects!

2) Enhanced natural attrition through more efficient healthcare delivery. Some of you liberal naysayers out there will likely point out that increased toxicity will lead to greater public healthcare costs. I'm a step ahead of you. It won't if we, as Michelle Bachman so wisely advocates, dump Obamacare. We need to liberate health care insurance companies, drug companies, and all for-profit entrepreneurs in healthcare provision from onerous rules that make them offer services to populations that can't afford them. We can enhance the natural attrition of this population of job-seekers that can't take care of themselves, thereby reducing the number of job-seekers, and those who probably can't even work anyway. What a plus!

3) Enhanced natural attrition through improving national security. The neocons, like those at The Project for a New American Century, had it right. We are a benevolent hegemon, and need to stop apologizing for unilateral intervention where needed to protect the picket lines of empire, and nip evil regimes in the bud before they flower into real threats. We've done Afghanistan and Iraq; it's time for Iran (and damn, we missed our chance in Libya, though Syria's still a possibility). We can enhance the natural attrition of working class folks who happen to be in the armed forces through expanding the scope of armed action in the Near East. What liberals might sneeringly dismiss as a quagmire is really a wonderful opportunity to reduce the number of job-seekers (and future ones they might produce), and, get this, with all the privatization of security-related operations, we simultaneously create more jobs. It's perfect!

Write your Congressperson today! Let's abandon the fantasy of increasing the number of jobs available and instead demand enhanced natural attrition of job-seekers!

Perry's Pre-Presidental Prayer Rally

2011-08-12T04:00:00.001-07:00

Picture from NPR

Texas Governor Rick Perry's decision to attend "The Response," a prayer rally held yesterday at Reliant Stadium in Houston, has provoked another round of debate over the role of Christian evangelicals in politics. Perry and rally organizers maintain the event's "entirely religious."

I know there are people, critics, that say this is just some political event," Perry said. "Well it's not that. This event is not about supporting some organization...It's going to be very simple...It's just a time to call out to [God] and that's it and lift Jesus’ name up on high."
Event organizers on the call stressed that the event is designed to be entirely religious. They said attendees will be encouraged not to wear political shirts or bring political signs to the event.
"This is not an issue of who's going to be our president...It absolutely has nothing to do with that at all. it's about making Jesus king...," said Jim Garlow, a California Pastor.

But the absence of campaign material or speech hardly renders the rally apolitical. Governor Perry is using his political position and stature to encourage attendance to a large public event, in the context of his possible run for the GOP presidential nomination. Also, the full title of the rally has obvious if vague political ramifications--"A call to prayer for a nation in crisis--as does Perry's video invitation to attend the rally:

. . .As an elected leader, I'm all too aware of government's limitations when it comes to fixin' things that are spiritual in nature. That's where prayer comes in, and we need it more than ever. With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis, people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help. . .

To assert that government cannot do anything about certain economic, social, and moral problems is a political claim, as is the diagnosis of those problems--that their source is spiritual. Moreover, as NPR reports, the homophobic American Family Association (AFA) is paying for the event, and is bringing in some evangelical heavyweights with big political chops--James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family), Richard Land (principal lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention), and Tony Perkins (president of the Family Research Council). The AFA has also invited a small cast of luminaries of the fringe Christian right:

--John Hagee, a San Antonio evangelist whose endorsement was rejected by John McCain in 2008 because of Hagee's anti-Catholic statements.
--Mike Bickle, a founder of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo., who has called Oprah Winfrey a "pastor of the harlot of Babylon.
--Alice Patterson, founder of Justice at the Gate, in San Antonio, who has written that there is a "demonic structure behind the Democratic Party."
--And then there's John Benefiel, head of the Oklahoma-based Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, who once said this about the Statue of Liberty: "You know where we got it from? French Freemasons. Listen, folks, that is an idol, a demonic idol right there in the middle of New York Harbor.

So arguing that the event is all religion and zero politics is, at best, disingenuous, and predictably, critics of the religious right are all over this--the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AUSCS), Right Wing Watch, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others, or watch Stephen Colbert's send-up here.

Colbert wryly notes that the prayer rally "doesn't cross the line between church and state; it erases it," echoing the ACLU's worry that taxpayer money might be contributing to the event and, or the AUSCS's argument that Governor Perry is using his office to promote a particular religion. Really, though, the criticism is about the policies and people Perry associates with by sponsoring the rally, such as the Right Wing Watch's reference to prayer rally speakers as Perry's "extremist allies. . .who are dedicated to bringing far-right religious views, including degrading views of gays and lesbians and non-Christians, into American politics."

Is this prayer rally really a big deal? I doubt the ACLU's Freedom of Information request for rally records will reveal use of taxpayer funds, and it really amounts to a kind of nuisance suit. Whether Perry is throwing his governorship behind a particular religion is a stronger point. He did make his invitation as "an elected leader," and did invite all other 49 state governors. And if you check out what The Response states as its core beliefs, this event promotes a standard orthodox evangelical Christian position. That is, it's sectarian.

But does Perry's sponsorship of and participation in the prayer rally mean that he put the weight of the government of Texas behind a particular religion? Did he violate the Establishment clause of the First Amendment, or the "Freedom of Worship" section of the Texas Bill of Rights?

Supreme Court "incorporation" decisions since the 1947 Emerson v Board of Education case have made state and local governments subject to First Amendment religion clauses, though disagreement remains over whether the Establishment clause means no government involvement with religion (an ironclad wall between church and state), or whether it means government can be involved in some way as long as it does not promote a particular religion (a porous wall). In practice, clearly the latter interpretation has held sway, with government activities beginning with prayers and monies going to Congressional and military chaplains. Perry didn't do all that much different than from our presidents have done since Eisenhower--preside over an annual prayer breakfast, except, granted, The Response was hardly ecumenical in comparison.

Texas language is a little more explicit:

No human authority ought, in an case whatever, to control or interfere with the rights of conscience in matters of religion, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship.

So the question goes back to whether Perry's action constituted a Texas government preference for a particular "religious society or mode of worship." I'm no constitutional expert, and am even less familiar with Texas constitutional issues, but it seems to me that Perry violated the spirit of law, but not the letter. He sponsored and participated in The Response as an individual, not as the state of Texas. Still, he didn't seem to make an effort to make it clear he was going as an individual, and not as a governor with presidential ambitions. And inviting all other governors to attend a public event associated with religious leaders that have an obvious political agenda makes his "what's-the-big-deal" position rather dubious. Perry's either obtuse, or just simply dishonest (thank goodness obtuseness and dishonesty aren't unconstitutional, or a lot of us would be in trouble).

Still, I think the critics were too strident. They only strengthen the seeming new norm of vindictive politics--we win the argument by either shouting louder, or telling opponents to shut up, that they do not get to assemble, speak, or practice their religion if it contradicts our policy positions. The critics also confirm what some Christian fundamentalists have complained about--that they are victims of marginalization.

So, critics should have simply reported on Perry's pre-presidenital-bid prayer gig, and not said 'you can't do that.' The reporting's enough. He has clearly shown his cards: he's siding with the militantly anti-gay crowd; he doesn't get the pluralism of the US religious landscape, evidently thinking our crisis is the result of not enough Americans sharing his particular fundamentalist faith; and he apparently thinks public piety will make up for economic and social policies that have left so many lives in disarray.

Shamelessly paraphrasing Proverbs 29: 18, his campaign will perish not for a lack of a vision, but because of it.

Gentrification, Grifters, and Graffiti

2011-08-01T09:35:00.001-07:00

Me with wife, Margo, and cat, Raymundo, in our first Peace Corps site, San Carlos Alzatate, Guatemala, 1985

When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala some twenty-five years ago (1984-1988), Sexta Avenida in Guatemala City's Zona 1 was my main route on foot to anything I needed or wanted to do in the capital. I'd usually stay at the Chalet Suizo on 14th street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, kitty-corner from the Parque Concordia, and right across the street from another one of Ubico’s medievalist fantasies, the Palacio de la Policia Nacional, a castle of crenellated walls, bastions, and bartizans, apparently awaiting the onslaught of commie catapults. I remember the twelve blocks on Sexta Avenida from 18th Street to the Parque Central as a river of bumper-to-bumper traffic and sidewalks streaming with pedestrians picking their way through vendors selling newspapers, used textbooks, trinkets, porn rags, candy, and fruit slices. And there was that heady mix of exhaust, piña and piss, with small splashes of women's perfume and men's cologne.

The picture on the left was taken in 1987, early in the morning before the normal traffic arrived. You can see the cigarette/candy vendor rolling his wares to wherever he’s going to open up shop. The Lux was the place to go for second-run movies—and (I shake my head at the memory), a place where you could still smoke inside the theater while watching the movie. Up the street was the then swankier Capitol theaters mall. The other way, The Pan American for breakfast, when flush with cash and willing to deal with the dour servers who resented scruffy Peace Corps volunteers asking for umpteen coffee refills. For dinner, Picadilly’s or maybe the Fu Lu Sho (I felt a pang of kinship with Francisco Goldman’s character, Roger Graetz, from Long Night of White Chickens, who also hung out in those places in the 1980s). There might be Kandy’s or Pops afterward for ice cream. But usually I was on this road to get to the Peace Corps office several blocks beyond the National Palace, or hit my favorite librerías and ferreterías in the area for office supplies and hardware. And Café León on 8th Avenue was mandatory, one of the few places downtown back then to find export-quality coffee.

La Sexta wasn’t much different during my research stints in 1992 and 1994, but now, as you can see in the picture on the right, it has been transformed. As I reported last year (Goats in Guate), the city decided to turn the avenue into a pedestrian mall with a bike lane and route for a rapid transit bus (the bus service was not yet running as of early July). The Lux now features soft porn flicks, and the Cine Capitol (below left) is now a megapaca—basically a thrift store selling used clothing imported from the US and elsewhere. There are pacas all along the way, odd notes in an urban renovation designed to make an area more upscale (the missing letter in Capitol hits that note again). If you want to catch movies worth watching now in Guate, you have to head out to zone 10. The restaurants and ice cream shops of my past are still there for the most part, except for the German place where I used to get my periodic dose of potato pancakes; it burned down years ago. But now there are a lot more US fast food joints and spendy coffee shops and restaurants. Café León held on too, but now is a pleasant Starbucky’s kind of café instead of a no-frills store.

The city cleared the streets of vendors, shunting them up in a long row of stalls on the already crowded and competitive 18thStreet—I don’t know what happened to those who couldn’t afford the rents. Gentrification has its price—and as is the case everywhere it seems, it’s the poor that pay a chunk of it (you can find a brief story about La Sexta and its renovation here).

There are still many office supply and bookstores on adjacent streets, with dusty, faded window displays that may not have been changed since Ubico’s time, though sadly, far fewer used bookstores where I made some great finds in the 1990s. My favorite hardware store, El Globo, is still there. During my Peace Corps days, I’d walk in, eye all the sultry steel and glittering aluminum hanging from floor to ceiling in this huge room, and feel for a moment that I really was handy with a spade, a master of the hammer, a wonder with the machete--I might just need that wood plane, or a roll of barbed wire. For something, I was sure. Then I’d start the four-step process of getting what I really came for, like a little box of nails, and receive another of my many lessons in Guatemala on how to get over my often unreasonable impatience (Worker 1: helped me locate product, if I could remember the Spanish term; Worker 2: took my order at the counter; Worker 3: took my money and carefully, slowly made out the receipt; Worker 4: upon proof of purchase, handed me the product after carefully and slowly wrapping it in brown paper).

Curiously, during my visits to Guate these past three summers, I've felt a vague urge to enter a ferretería and shop for I don't know what. It wasn't nostalgia. It was like what I imagine a phantom limb may feel like, an itch in empty space that needs scratching. I'd joke with my research assistant, Heidi, slowing down in front of a hardware shop and wondering if we needed a blowtorch or a pickaxe, and I guess that was my way of scratching the itch of memory. And there were lots of other itches, and though I tried ot keep it in check, Heidi had to live with quite a bit of reminiscing, poor woman.

For a few weeks, I worked at the Guatemalan Supreme Court’s Archivo de Tribunales where there was a depository of military tribunal records. That meant dropping off Heidi at the Archivo General near the Parque Central, and walking another mile (see map to the right). I’d cut through the Parque, and take La Sexta up to 14th street, cut left, passing below the battlements of the Palacio de la Policía Nacional (below) and, depending on my mood, hook a right on either 7th or 8th Avenues.

One day right by the Palacio, a 30-something man in a suit greeted me and wondered how I was finding Guatemala. We ended up talking about my Peace Corps past and present research, and his days in Ohio and his current work as a school teacher.

Four blocks later, at the 18 Calle, I realized what this was about. I stopped and asked him if he wanted money. He said no and asked me to sit with him on a bench. He had something important to say to me. I sighed and we sat, and while I kicked myself I heard about his sick father, his troubles with the Education Ministry, his empty pockets. I slipped him what I had in my pocket, around fifteen quetzales. While he looked nervously over my shoulder, he told me God would bless me, and then scurried off. I got up and turned to see a group of young men eyeing me cooly. One of them mimed a kiss at me and suggested the next time it would be his turn. Thusly blessed, I moved away at what I hoped was a dignified pace, and buried myself in a sidewalk crowd.

But happily there were very few days where I felt like prey, and was free to observe the life of the street. If I chose 8th Avenue, I'd run into more noisy traffic, and a growing number of people as I neared the Supreme Court. It ended at 20th Street in a crowded block of little diners, sidewalk stands, and vendors wandering about selling umbrellas, watches, pens, cell phones, and sunglasses--the necessary accessories of the clerks and lawyers, most of whom already seemed to have cell phones pinned to their ears (I even saw security guards and military police chatting away on them while on duty).

And there was the incessant cry of "Tramites, tramites!" When I worked at the Supreme Court archive in 1994, there were orderly rows of suited men in and around the Supreme Court plaza, each with a chair, a little table, and a portable typewriter. They were there to help people do their "tramites," literally 'procedures,' but in this context this meant selling the service of composing and filling out the required legal documents. Now men and women hawked this service on the street, stopping likely customers, and I assumed they worked out of offices nearby, using computers instead of typewriters.

To the right you can see the Supreme Court and its largely empty plaza. I'd enter through that dark space at the lower right of the picture. The Archivo de Tribunales had a staff of five when I worked there in '94, and a nearly soporific atmosphere. Evidently there were few investigating past judicial proceedings in a country where violence had trumped the law for so long. I was often the only one there toiling away through military tribunal records.

The 1996 Peace Accords ending a 30 year civil war opened the way for the 2009 Ley de Acceso (akin to our Freedom of Information Act, but much more liberal). The archive now has maybe fifteen staff, all of them on the move, taking requests for copies, making copies, preparing documents for the archive (which involved slamming bundles of paper on a table to tighten them), while also managing to make snack or lunch orders, get their shoes done by a shoe-shine boy, share shopping finds, and discuss the World Cup. No falling asleep here.

I'd come here a year ago and was told that no one knew offhand where the military tribunal records were, and the index for the collection was missing. But they said try again with a formal request some other time. So I returned this year, a bit more insistent, and made it beyond the front window to the office manager. She looked at me steadily with her light green-brown eyes, with a slight smile on her face, as if she were waiting for an answer to a question she had asked. When I just simply smiled in return, a little mystified, she handed me a piece of paper. I saw dot-matrix print and my signature at the bottom--my request for permission in 1994 to examine the Tribunal records. "Fijase," she said, a Guatemalan word that often precedes bad news, the index was indeed gone, and the collection was stored in a distant warehouse. But, luckily, I had written down parts of the index, and it turned out those case files were on hand. And the the following day I could finally answer her question. "I'm sorry it took me so long, but I remember you." She had been the receptionist back then, this chatty, vivacious twenty-something who was always tossing her curly hair. Now she was reserved, all business, and appeared embarrassed that I hadn't recognized her. I wanted to tell her, "Sister, we all got old," contemplating all the ways my body had begun to break down in the past seventeen years, but didn't think that would help.

Memory is a tricky thing, of course, and is often the occasion for misunderstanding, argument, and pain. I'm not just talking about questions of accuracy, but of what we decide to remember, and how we remember it. This is true for both individual and collective memory. Hence we have our vitriolic debates over the history curriculum in schools, the disagreements over who or what to commemorate with monuments, street signs, or holidays, or fights over access to private and public records. Guatemalans have more dire decisions to make regarding what goes into their public memory. Talk about real phantom limbs: over 200,000 Guatemalans killed or disappeared during the civil war.

Some--probably university students--have made their arguments with graffiti on 7th Avenue. They want someone to pay for the grievous sins of the state. They want the public to remember the civil war as an act of genocide against Guatemala's Mayan population (see pictures below). And there's some nostalgia there, too, for the revolutionary past: "Turcios Lives" is a reference to Luís Turcios Lima, a graduate of US Special Forces training, and one of the leaders of the 1960 military uprising that would be crushed, and then return as a guerrilla movement. And there are the newer voices trying to be heard in the public square--from the feminist scrawling "Women in Resistance" to the marches and demonstrations I witnessed around the Parque Central, sponsored by the GLBT community, AIDS activists, and sex trade workers.

Clearly, La Sexta is not the only thing in Guate undergoing wrenching change, but it would be a mistake to reduce Guatemala City to my inevitably selective memories, skewed anyway by my disposition and predilections, and perhaps the sweat dripping into my eyes as I walked to work. Hopefully, though, the anecdotes and images here complicate the story we usually get in the US news, equating the country with rampant crime, political intrigue, and social conflict. Guatemalans lives are more mundane and richer than that.

"JUSTICIA POR GENOCIDIO" (Justice for genocide)

"JUSTICIA DONDE ESTAN?" (Justice, where are you?)

"AQUI SI HUBO GENOCIDIO" (Here, yes, there was genocide)

"JUSTICIA" (Justice)

"NO MAS IMPUNIDAD. BASTA" (No more impunity. Enough)

"NO OLVIDAMOS NI PERDONEMOS" (We don't forget nor forgive)

"TURCIOS VIVE" (Turcios lives)

"MUJERES EN RESISTENCIA" (Women in resistance)

A Day in the Life. . .in Guatemala

2011-07-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

Map of our typical walk to work in Guatemala City

Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head . . .

I suppose it's a stretch to connect my experience in Guatemala to a Beatles song, and it's not like "I'd love to turn you on," but my recent two months down there on a research trip was something like stream-of-consciousness song. A jumble of loosely connected images and events. A juxtaposition of the ordinary and the strange.

We can, like Lennon, choose to look at strangeness in our ordinary lives, but living in another country can give us the inverse, seeing the ordinary in what seems strange to us, and allowing that seeming strangeness to get us to think more carefully about what we take for ordinary, as right, as common sense. I suppose in consultant-speak this is "cultural competency." I'd rather think of this as a way of seeing a different country without resorting to the simplistic categories of 'exotic' (Guatemala is a "Land of Magic and Color"), 'weird' (sinkholes apparently are "weird news"), or 'messed up' (according to both neocons and the left-leaning).

So's here my first attempt to impose some order on the daily jumbles and juxtapositions of my experiences over two months in Guatemala. First, though, some quick context. I was down there from May 15 to July 10 on a research stint with an undergraduate "student summer scholar" (S3), Heidi Fegel. Grand Valley State University's S3 program is a competitive scholarship awarded to twenty or so students each summer, funding their work with a faculty mentor in a collaborative research project. Our project involved researching the institutional and ideological origins of Guatemalan military interventionism in politics, and that project included researching recently declassified Guatemalan military documents housed at the Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA) in Guatemala City.

We found two rooms to rent at a house not too far from the Archive. Like many larger Guatemalan houses, ours was a series of rooms wrapped around a courtyard (above). We shared the house with with our dueña, Patricia, her cat, Tito, and two other renters, Beberley and Laura. Beberley worked for CONAP, sort of like the US's EPA, (though she left that job to finish up her thesis), and Laura is an artist and a DJ. Patricia is a homeopathic therapist, just starting a practice after several years of working with returning Guatemalan emigres.

So, I guess it's already a little strange. I shared a house with four women from their early twenties to late forties, in a foreign country, researching a topic that is still politically sensitive--though nowhere near as volatile as it was before the 1996 Peace Accords that ended a 30 year civil war. There were days where I'd hear Heidi's indy music wafting into one ear, the thump of Laura's technopop in the other, while Beberly and Paty held animated discussions about the healing virtues of this diet, or that meditative practice. Quite a change from the Grand Rapids ranch-style house life with my wife, mother-in-law, and fellow middle-aged and neurotic male, KC the wonder dog, working away in the solitude of my basement.

But Heidi and I quickly fashioned a kind of routine for the work week, waking up, falling out of bed, and dragging combs across our heads (so to speak; Heidi's hair would likely devour combs). There was a clock in our kitchen (right), but punctuality was not a priority at the Archive, so we followed suit, and one of us would get around to making breakfast, the other doing the dishes, and then we'd pack up our laptops and drinking water, and usually by 8am we would let ourselves out through the front door, security gate, and the driveway's steel portón. The house is in Guate's Zona 2, a pretty safe neighborhood, but all the doors, locks, and concertina wire were reminders that we were living in a country with one of the highest violent crime rates in Latin America. Still, were we to take the US State Department's travel advisory as gospel, we should have been holed up in a swanky hotel in the Zona Viva, and traveling to the Archivo in Zone One in a bullet-proof SUV with an armed escort. I appreciate the State Department's concern for its citizens, but like any country, crime is concentrated in particular places and situations. Avoiding them and ostentatious displays of wealth (like flashing our laptops in public) made life in downtown Guate more than doable. And I believe just not acting like fearful targets helped, too. Of course, it helped that I was already pretty familiar with the city. I lived here for three months in 1988, another ten months in 1994, and had done some quick research trips here the last two summers. Familiarity reduced that flight-or-fight instinct that can pop up in any new or challenging environment (I find driving in, say, Chicago a lot more scary than walking the streets of Guatemala City).

While I was used to navigating Guate, it was all new to Heidi. Though she had spent a couple of weeks in Costa Rica on a high school environmental trip, daily life in Guate and the archival research were different matters. And as her faculty mentor, I was responsible not only for her learning, but for her health and safety. So research abroad with a student assistant added wrinkles to routines I had developed for working in Guatemala. And things like sharing a bathroom, or coming to an agreement over how to cook potatoes or wash the clothes, added new dimensions to the teacher-student relationship, to put it mildly.

But this collaboration was not nearly as complicated as I feared it might be, probably because we're both fairly easy-going, and because Heidi proved capable of handling the various stresses with patience and humor. Oh, we both had our less-than-stellar moments: my conniption when I was unable to find a restaurant while circling the same blocks in the pouring rain, or my incredible stupidity in handing over our passports to a man to handle the customs duties at the Salvadoran-Guatemalan border (though all ended well, I'm still upset with myself over that); Heidi's frustration boiling over a few times due to all the unwanted male attention, or just tiredness coming out as anger at a Greek salad that was not at all Greek. However, these were blips in an otherwise rather angst-free research trip.

So, anyway, we would start off the typical workday with a two-kilometer (1.2 miles) walk to the Archivo. We'd walk the short distance up our street, 10a Calle, to the Avenida Simeon Cañas (see map above). At this corner, if we looked right, we'd see our source of freshly-squeezed orange juice, a stand run by a woman and presumably her daughter, who always dressed to kill and nonchalantly ignored the young men calling out from the packed city buses passing by. Beyond the stand, we could see the edge of the Parque Hipódromo, a complex of baseball stadiums, an amusement park, and the famous Mapa en relieve--a large three dimensional topographical map of Guatemala built to scale (below).

But we would turn left and head south on Simeón Cañas, a wide, fairly quiet boulevard that the city closes on Sundays for bike and pedestrian traffic (on the right, Heidi, at the beginning of our walk down Cañas). With the shaded wide sidewalks, this was the most pleasant part of the walk. Just before the roundabout circling Parque Jocotenango, we'd pass what I took to be a family--a man, woman, and a little girl. The man seemed to be managing a small parking strip, or maybe just offering to wash the parked cars. The little girl might be lounging in a makeshift hammock, or seated on an overturned bucket, eating breakfast with her mom, or having her hair combed. If we returned early enough in the afternoon, we'd see another girl there, perhaps eight or nine, sometimes doing her homework. Their calmness always struck me--the little girl quietly playing, while her older sister sat there next to the noisy traffic, her head bowed over a workbook.

At the roundabout (above), we initially tried just sneaking through during momentary traffic breaks. We ended up using the pasarela—a pedestrian bridge (right, and another below of me, with Jocotenango behind)—instead of braving the drivers who apparently believed they had the duty to teach pedestrians how

‘survival of the fittest’ works in the urban landscape. But we saw lots of Guatemalans ignore the pasarela, which may explain why on average, according to one report, six people die each day crossing Guate streets, even though pedestrian bridges were close by in a majority of the cases. I suppose this is not all that surprising in a city whose population of both people and vehicles has exploded in recent decades.

After crossing the pasarela, we'd loop around the Parque Jocotenango, passing food stands and El Torre, a grocery store where we often shopped, and an Education Ministry building, where there always seemed to be a long line of people waiting out front, and most everyone along the way would give us a quick look of curiosity, even ones we saw every morning. I always wondered what they thought of us. Were we just an interesting distraction in an otherwise tedious day? Did they think "Hold on a sec, this isn't a tourist area--they must be missionaries"? Or maybe some of those human rights workers? Or maybe, like we can idly watch passing traffic, we were just another element in the shifting scenery for them? Perhaps what I took to be their interest was really my self-consciousness. I suppose all of these guesses could be true.

Whatever they thought, they would have probably seen me in a sweat. By this point in the walk, in the humidity of Guatemala's rainy season, and keeping up with Heidi's blitzkrieg pace (one of the very few times in my life when someone has walked faster than me, but maybe I'm just getting old), I'd begin to feel damp. One benefit, I suppose, was that if Heidi wasn't leading, I knew she wasn't feeling well. Fortunately, this was rare, and usually I was just cursing myself for once again forgetting to bring a small towel to mop my brow once we'd reached the Archivo, and I'd know I was in for an hour of worrying about sweat dripping on my documents and keyboard.

After Jocotenango Simeón Cañas turns into Sixth Avenue, but the city was tearing up a huge length of that street, so we'd cut up to Fifth, and continue south. Until reaching the Parque Central, the route now had a lot less traffic, allowing us to focus on avoiding stumbling over upturned pavement, or stepping into one of Lennon's four thousand Blackburn, Lancashire holes that had apparently migrated to Guatemala City (I didn't keep a strict count, but I believe we tripped equally often, and though I had more close encounters with vehicles, I had fewer mishaps than Heidi with food and drink).

So after twenty to thirty minutes since leaving the house, we'd reach the Parque Central, the heart of Guate's Centro Histórico. It's a two block plaza. On the north side of the eastern half sits the old National Palace (above, Heidi checks out an election rally in front of the Palace)--a hulking Ubico era (1931-1944) greenish-grey building that has been recast as the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura. Instead of housing despots, it now serves Guatemala's ongoing nation-building project--a difficult one given the age-old and overlapping divisions between la gente indigena and ladinos (mestizos), the poor and the rich, and rural and urban folks, and perhaps now Catholics and the rapidly growing Evangelical population. If you ever get a chance to visit the Palacio, it's quite stunning inside (you can see pictures here). The Catedral Metropolitana sits on the eastern edge of the plaza (below, Andy, in front of the Cathedral and food vendors that fill the plaza on weekends).

To the south is a large swath of commercial and apartment buildings. The western half of the park is a lovely green space, filled with trees, benches, and food vendors. The National Library faces it's western side, and on the backside of the Library is our ultimate destination, the Archivo General de Centro América (above). The entire time we were there the city was refurbishing the walks in front and on a side of the Archive. Construction site rules are far more relaxed than they are in the US, which made things easier in some ways, but also more risky. We could just walk through like everyone else did, and weave around workers jackhammering cement or laying stones, but we also might walk through string guidelines, step into wet concrete, or get in the way of a mini-bulldozer. It was always a lively way to start our work day.

Heidi, in the Archivo's reading room.

And if you're still with me, within a few days I'll post more on this day in the life in Guatemala, and my encounters with gentrification, graffiti, and grifters as I made my way to the Supreme Court archives another mile away.

Easter thoughts from your friendly neighborhood agnostic.

2011-04-26T05:18:00.000-07:00

When I look for examples of of godliness, or godly people, I resort to fictional characters. J.D. Salinger's Seymour is one of these. Salinger kills him in a 1948 short story ("A Perfect Day for a Bananafish"). After a rather caustic portrait of Seymour's wife (and presumably of middle class proto-suburbanites), Salinger--cruelly to my mind--has Seymour shoot himself while his wife naps nearby.

I don't know enough about Salinger, or am not enough of a literary critic, to know whether Salinger regretted offing Seymour, but Salinger couldn't let him go. Seymour would continue to appear in later stories, and in 1959, Salinger wrote a novella called "Seymour: An Introduction," in which Seymour's closest brother, Buddy, writes a preface to a collection of Seymour's haiku. These two passages stand out for me, for Salinger's vivid storytelling and humor, and for how his literary creation inspires me.

So, for this Easter, here's to all those who already have a belief, and to all the rest of us who don't, but muddle along with a faith that we might learn to see God curled up somewhere, that we might get a ride on a Joe Jackson bike, and that we might get better at loving others as well as Seymour loved Les.

. . .there is very evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places--e.g., in radio announcers, in newspapers, in taxicabs with crooked meters, literally everywhere. (My brother, for the record, had a distracting habit, most of his adult life, of investigating loaded ashtrays with his index finger, clearing all the cigarette ends to the sides--smiling from ear to ear as he did it--as if he expected to see Christ himself curled up cherubically in the middle, and he never looked disappointed.) The hallmark, then of the advanced religious, nonsectarian or any other (and I graciously include in the definition of an "advanced religious," odious though the phrase is, all Christians on the great Vivekananada's terms; i.e., 'See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk')--the hallmark most commonly identifying this person is that he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.

[Les] came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishing. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation--in my view, at least--was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been neatly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les--as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle. And aside from its enormous sentimental value to my father personally, this answer, in a great many ways, was true, true, true.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (Boston: LB Books, 1963): 108-109 and 148-149.

NOTE: nearly the same version of what I originally wrote for my Facebook Notes, April 24, 2011.

Oh, those beleaguered straights.

2011-04-25T02:03:00.000-07:00

InsideHigherEd.com today reports on efforts in the Texas state legislature to "require any public college with a student center on 'alternative' sexuality to provide equal funding to create new centers to promote 'traditional values.'"

Proponents have framed the measure has an effort to get equal time for heterosexuality on public campuses where, apparently, straight folks barely get the time of day. A political interest group, the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), worked with State Representative Wayne Christian in crafting the legislation, but its goal was to not to carve out equal resources for heterosexual programming and support, but to get universities to defund centers serving GBLT students.

The YCT doesn't think universities should be funding the promotion of any kind of sexuality or values. Sounds egalitarian, doesn't it? But YCT Vice Chairman, Tony McDonald lets us know what this move is really about: "It is clear that our public universities are funding centers which promote a radical political and social agenda in favor of normalizing homosexuality and expanding homosexual rights."

Basically, the YCT and fellow travelers have fallen back on the litany of privilege that we have heard before from whites and males arguing against affirmative action, or straights fighting civil rights protections for GLBT people: the minority group aggressively promotes and agenda while the dominant group simply wants to 'live and let live;' the minority group gets all these extra rights while the dominant group is victimized. It's another round of "reverse discrimination," but this time for those poor straight people, who apparently can't cross campus without "pansexual" weirdos waylaying them, or gays sneakily luring them into deviant lifestyles. It is one of the whines of privilege--your existence on the same field with me is an affront to my tender identity, so stop complaining (you've never had it so good, anyway).

I'm all for carefully reviewing university budgets, and, frankly, I'd like to see more resources dedicated to the classroom rather than student services--but US universities have long had functions besides transmitting and generating knowledge--they are mechanisms of social mobility and socialization, they are laboratories of social change, and since the tremendous expansion of higher education after WW II, they have become this place where parents send their children to practice adulthood--hence all the support services for young adults trying to navigate the world outside their homes, as well as their often tumultuous internal worlds.

A Paranoid Style in American Politics for the Millennial Era

2011-03-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" for Harper's back in 1964. In this now well-known piece he compared 19th century conspiracy theories with those of the "radical right" of his day, the John Birch Society and others whose political rhetoric featured "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."

He thought the comparison was a stretch--that the paranoid of his day were markedly different from the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings and other 19th century wingnuts:

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country–that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Has anything changed in the last fifty years? Do we not hear in the anti-Obama/liberal/progressive tirades a lament for the disappearance of a "real America" and calls to take it back? Don't we hear wild accusations of socialism, communism, and treason? Consider other Hofstadter characterizations:

. . .The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. . .

. . .A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. . .

. . .One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. . .

The current hysteria over Muslims gives us all these facets of paranoia. You'll run smack into the apocalyptic gloom at websites like Jihad Watch or in books like "Stealth Jihad." And think of those ex-Muslims "telling all" about the evils of their former faith. Or watch one of Glenn Beck's overwrought chalkboard exercises.

I'm thinking the only difference between Hofstadter's day and ours is the name of the threat.

2012's getting closer--time to warm up the culture war!

2011-03-08T14:07:00.000-08:00

Economic woes have dominated the national political discourse but there are some GOP factions determined to keep their conservative social agendas in play. One such faction is the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition (IFFC), which sponsored a forum of presidential hopefuls, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Minnasota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former US Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and radio talk-show host Herman Cain, and former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer. Ex-Moral Majority maven Ralph Reed also shared his two cents.

The forum took place at a Christian fundamentalist megachurch, Point of Grace, and the IFFC’s Vice-President, Gopal Krishna, got the crowd warmed up with a quick, rousing ‘The country’s-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket’ introduction. I’ve been hearing this stuff for thirty years now, and wonder why it still works, but then I remember I can still laugh at old Monty Python shows. Here’s what Krishna had to say (and, boy, he can outwhite those Iowan Christians, can’t he, though apparently there’s little love lost between him and the GOP state establishment, according to this source.

. . .Therefore, allow me to express some of our concerns and let me know whether you agree with them.

We are concerned that a world-famous capitalist country is now doing a slow dance with socialism [applause].

We are concerned that a rich country which rebuilt other countries after World War Two is now borrowing mind-boggling amounts of money from other countries [applause].

We are concerned that the world’s most powerful country that was respected by the friends and feared by the enemies is now abandoning friends and apologizing to the enemies [whoops, cheers, and applause].

We are concerned that a country that was a melting pot for all the brilliant minds in the world has now become a land of law-breaking illegal immigrants who want amnesty. . .[applause]. . .granting that amnesty will be a slap in the face of all legal immigrants [applause].

We are concerned that a country that was founded on European style Christian moral values has now become multicultural haven for every weird and kinky lifestyle [cheers and applause].

Today’s program is a small part of our efforts to take back our country and restore its principles, moral values, financial independence, physical strength, and leadership. Let’s get started. . .

It’s glennbeckish tripe, based on a fanciful understanding of history and concepts like capitalism, but unsurprising given the nature of the forum. What I just don’t get is how conservative Christian groups reconcile their supposedly high moral standards with standard-bearers like Gingrich—familial wreckage in his wake, and the only Speaker of the House to be reprimanded for ethics violations—and Ralph Reed, who buddied around with Jack Abramoff. But I suppose their bad reps are the result of liberal media bias.

And what the IFFC doesn’t seem to get is that using its gospel to criminalize and demonize those whom they oppose is not going to get anyone outside its choir to listen—and they probably even lose potential allies—the social conservatives who aren’t militant Christians. But then, I understand their quandary: to be principled one must be absolutist, and if one starts compromising, then it’s that slippery slope to liberal hell. Thing is—according to their rhetoric—they're already there. Just can’t win, can you?

You can see the C-SPAN video here, and read NPR’s story on it here.

Letter to Senator Jim DeMint

2010-10-23T06:01:00.000-07:00

I write in opposition to your legislative proposal to cut all federal funding to NPR--an effort to punish that media outlet for firing Juan Williams. NPR is one of the few media sources that does not spout bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric, and to end federal support for NPR is not a blow for "free speech," but rather an effort to silence a news source that does not permit slurs in the public square. You are, in effect, celebrating the right of commentators to blather inane statements that incite an unjustified fear of a category of people based on the actions of the few, conceivably a version of someone shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. In effect, you are contributing to a growing and increasingly ugly domestic crusade against Islam.

I am not one of your constituents, but your proposed legislation directly affects me and millions of fellow Americans. I deeply regret your contribution to a US image abroad that we are hypocrites, preaching liberty abroad while trumpeting religious intolerance at home. And I strongly resent your attempt to hamper our ability to find news and political commentary that does not contribute to the anti-Muslim hysteria.

Viral Ignorance

2010-08-19T15:43:00.000-07:00

A recent Pew Survey produced some pretty remarkable findings. Evidently, the number of people who believe that President Obama is a Muslim, or not a Christian, has been growing over the past few years. As well, and less surprising, those who buy the falsehood already have a poor opinion of the president.

What explains what must be willful ignorance, the insistence on believing the innuendo and misinformation? Given the correlation between people's opinion of President Obama and their belief regarding his religion, it must be that people feel the need dress up their dislike of him and his policies with spurious attributes. It's not enough to disagree, they must demonize. It's an embarrassing aspect of our political culture--that people would dress up a political leader they oppose in the robes of a Muslim or non-Christian because that somehow confirms his supposed vileness.

I can understand why people might oppose President Obama. It's depressing how some of them are framing that opposition in bigoted terms.

Birther Pangs

2010-08-02T02:31:00.000-07:00

The other day at the grocery store I saw the National Enquirer headline proclaiming, once again, that Obama is not a US citizen. Politifact.com has examined three chain emails scurrying through cyberspace that deliver a similar fanciful story.

One makes the pitch that "Obama had to have been traveling on another country's passport in order to get into Pakistan" in 1981. Another hustles the rumor that "Obama's college transcripts reveal foreign citizenship." A third claims that the "Supreme Court has agreed to rule on Obama's citizenship."

One element in what makes films or novels successful is their ability to convince the audience to suspend disbelief. The Birther fiction has enjoyed that kind of success--the collective story-telling of a small but vocal minority of Americans trying to make their own peculiar sense of what may be a perfect political storm: economic hard times, warmaking without seeming end, a polarized polity, and a black President with an ambitious domestic agenda. An important difference, though, is that filmakers and writers know they are creating fictional, if plausible worlds (excepting those like Oliver Stone and Tim LaHaye). Birthers apparently really believe the narrative they're constructing, sustained by the sincere or cynical shout-outs from pundits like Lou Dobbs or politicians like Michele Bachman.

I could just dismiss Birthers as loonies, and remark that their "movement" will maybe get a line or two in a future text on US political history, another generation in the genealogy of paranoid politics. I could worry about the propensity of some to believe in "proofs" of conspiracy based on lame research. I could just be depressed by the anti-intellectualism and racism underlying Birther claims that President Obama is not really one of us. Or I can write to myself. It won't exorcise my dismay, but may help me understand it.

Goats in Guate

2010-07-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

Guatemala City is a terrible and marvelous place. When I lived here fifteen years ago, in the city center (zone 1), I had no fear of returning to my pensión late at night. My route from the bus stop at the Parque Concordia ran through the neighborhood where gay and straight prostitutes plied their trade, and, except for a few catcalls--"chi-chi, guapito"--I was never bothered, though it was depressing to see how young some of those kids were. Now, everything shuts down by 7:00pm, and people close themselves behind barricaded doors and concertina wire. People leaving the city center at night, if they can afford it, get a special taxi service that time-stamps their pick-up and drop-off times, with recorded emergency contact information on hand, in case there's a kidnapping or other criminal threat.

Of course, some things have changed. Back in my Peace Corps days in the mid-80s, beggars asked for cinco centavos. Now it’s a quetzalito. The Parque Central has been completely refurbished, with pedestrian walkways instead of streets on three sides. And the city is making Sixth Avenue, the main commercial street between the National Palace and the government buildings 15 blocks away, a pedestrian passageway with express bus service down the middle. It’s still a work-in-progress, so pedestrians have to navigate the holes, ditches, flying clods of clay being tossed around by the diggers, and dump trucks inching their way along the narrow way. Yesterday I saw one truck’s right side tire inching over the edge into a four foot deep ditch and waved frantically at the driver while women behind me shouted “Se va allí, se va allí!” Why in god’s name there was no one in front of the truck to guide the driver, I don’t know, but así es, and as the truck crawled by us the driver, smiling, said “gracias,” as if we had opened a door for him or something rather than averting a construction-site catastrophe.

Today, while out to get some cash and a newspaper, I walked this same avenida, this time avoiding motorcycles and cyclists rather than trucks. I saw two small groups of blind young adults, apparently getting lessons on how to negotiate the streets. One was stopped at a light, and it’s leader was explaining something, while another group behind was in the middle of a little herd of goats—yes, smack dab in the middle of Guate, goats, which is why I can stand the concussive noise and acrid odors of this city. While the leader took their hands one by one to feel the goats, I asked the goat-tender if he was selling goat milk to the restaurants and stores along the way and he said no, and pulled out of stack of styrofoam cups from his shoulder bag. Twenty years ago I would have bought a cup of milk, but, for good or ill, I’m much more cautious now that I’m of AARP age. But maybe my years have also taught me how to see something lovely in all this seeming mess.

How-To Guide to TV Punditry

2010-05-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

On “Tax Day,” April 15^th, a federal judge declared

that the US law authorizing a National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. US District Judge Barbara Crabb said the federal statute violates the First Amendment’s prohibition on government endorsement of religion. She issued a 66-page decision and enjoined President Obama from issuing an executive order calling for the celebration of a National Day of Prayer. The National Day of Prayer was first authorized by Congress in 1952. Since 1988, the date has been set as the first Thursday in May. The judge stayed her own injunction pending the resolution of any appeals.

“I understand that many may disagree with [my] conclusion and some may even view it as critical of prayer or those who pray. That is unfortunate,” Judge Crabb wrote. “A determination that the government may not endorse a religious message is not a determination that the message itself is harmful, unimportant, or undeserving of dissemination,” she said. “Rather it is part of the effort to carry out the Founders’ plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society.”

On May 6, National Prayer Day, Bill O’Reilly weighed in on the matter, and it’s an exemplary model of how to turn a policy disagreement into a threat to the American way of life.

First, remember that your show is not about making a reasoned argument based on logic and evidence. It’s theater. It’s a show, so start with a simple, straightforward assertion, and add a dose of hyperbole:

O'REILLY FACTOR: In the "Personal Story" segment tonight, today is a National Day of Prayer. It has been endorsed by President Obama. But there are legal challenges all over the place. And that of course, is dumb. The Constitution clearly states the government cannot impose religion on citizens. But setting aside a day to encourage expression of voluntary spirituality is in no way an imposition.

Simple, right? The judicial ruling is “dumb.” ‘Nuff said.

And nevermind that there aren’t “legal challenges all over the place." One group, in one venue, the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit asserting that the federal government’s Day of Prayer violates the First Amendment’s proscription on government establishment of religion. But facts need not trouble us here.

Second, bring someone on the show who shares your view, someone who also enjoys authoritative weight among your viewers. Invite someone equally capable of oversimplifying a complex issue, and someone who won’t make you look stupid. Someone, say, who couldn’t even handle the marshmallow grilling she got at the hands of Katie Couric.

Now, a few weeks ago Sarah Palin said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska,: For any leader declare that America isn't a Christian nation and poking an ally like Israel in the eye, it's mind-boggling for--to see some of our nation's actions recently.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: All right. The governor joins us now. So why do you think America is a Christian nation?

PALIN: I have said all along that America is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs and, you know, nobody has to believe me, though. You can just go to our Founding Fathers' early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that allows that Judeo- Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives.

And our Constitution, of course, essentially acknowledging that our unalienable rights don't come from man. They come from God. So this document is set up to protect us from a government that would ever infringe upon our rights to have freedom of religion and to be able to express our faith freely.

O'REILLY: OK.

Third, don’t worry about coherence. Palin’s answer to O’Reilly’s question—is the US a Christian nation—is evidently yes, but she confuses “Christian nation” with “Judeo-Christian beliefs,” two distinct concepts. That’s okay because we want to stay unclear while sounding so assertively clear. After all, saying “America is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs” is about as informative as saying the US’s roots lie in the Renaissance revival of ancient Greek and Roman thought, or Enlightenment principles. Sure, the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible are a part of the canon of US political culture—but that Bible is not the only text in that canon. Nor is there some sort of single, pristine Judeo-Christian belief system that traveled through time from the early Roman Christians to the doorsteps of the US Founding Fathers. But only dumb eggheads worry about such historical distinctions.

Follow the vague incoherence with some obfustication. Yes, the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution permit the “Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation” for those who choose it, or were simply born with it, but they do not mandate it. But make it sound as if they do codify the Judeo-Christian tradition. And then stretch the meaning of the texts. The Declaration makes vague theistic references with the words “God,” “Creator,” and “Divine Providence,” but for our purposes here, that’s good enough to say we’re a Christian nation. Unfortunately, the US Constitution—the text with the force of law—does not make any reference to a divine entity, except for the standard practice of saying “Year of Our Lord” after the date. And it’s the Declaration that says “inalienable,” not the Constitution. This gives us the fifth point--don’t let facts get in the way of making your point.

PALIN: So it's ironic that here, on the National Day of Prayer, you know, there's so much controversy about whether or not we're a nation that's build on Judeo-Christian beliefs and whether or not we can even talk about God in the public square is absolutely nonsense what we are hearing.

This is good. O’Reilly’s smart programming—addressing the topic of Christian nation on the National Day of Prayer, gives Palin the opening to turn a policy difference over the role of religion in government activities into irony, though it’s not really “ironic.” Irony would be something like an Alabama judge insisting, in the name of religious liberty, that everyone must respect his particular religious beliefs and allow him to plant a huge 10 Commandments monument on government grounds. Well, maybe that’s not irony. It’s just hypocrisy. Again, only smartypants worry about careful use of language.

O'REILLY: All I have to do is walk into the Supreme Court chamber, and you'll see the 10 Commandments. And so we know that you're absolutely correct. The Founding Fathers did base not only the Declaration of Independence but the constitutional protections on what they thought was right and wrong. And what they thought was right and wrong came from the 10 Commandments, which is Judeo-Christian philosophy. That is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sixth, be very selective with your evidence—what those social(ist) scientists call ‘massaging the data.’ And use that evidence to set up the simple equation. 10 Commandments in Supreme Court Chamber equals Christian nation. Easy. Don’t complicate matters by noting the others figures featured on the Supreme Court external friezes such as Menes, Hammurabi, Confucius, and Augustus, or Mohammed, Grotius, and Napoleon—or those pagan Three Fates near the main entrance.

O’REILLY: But here is what's happened. America has, as they say in California, evolved. And now we're a much more secular nation than we were back in 1776. So the opponents of spirituality in the public marketplace say, "Hey, this is a violation. We can't be pushing any kind of spirituality." And you answer?

PALIN: Well, that new kind of world view that I think is kind of a step towards a fundamental transformation of America that some want to see today, I think, again, that it is an attempt to revisit and rewrite history.

I think we should kind of keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They're quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 Commandments. It's pretty simple. I think what's missing in...

Seventh—accuse those whom you oppose of doing what you’re doing (what psychologists call “projection”). O’Reilly trots out a quick version of the modernization = secularization thesis that no one really buys anymore. Palin then knocks down this straw man by labeling it revisionism, even though she’s revising US history to fit her argument. Whatever the case, times have indeed changed, perhaps more rapidly in recent decades. According to one survey study, the percentage of US Americans identifying as Christians has declined from 86% in 1990 to 76% in 2008 (Another survey by Pew reports 78%). And a large proportion of those not identifying as Christians have not joined any other religious affiliation. Maybe O’Reilly and Palin are unaware of these data, but if they were aware, they were right not to mention them. You don’t name the secret fear—the growing pluralism of US society. And did you notice O’Reilly’s sly move? Opponents of federal government sponsorship of religious rituals really oppose spirituality in general. That suggests an eighth point. Never miss an opportunity to misrepresent those with whom you disagree.

O'REILLY: What do you say, though -- what do you say to the people in Chinatown and San Francisco and here in New York and other big cities, the Asian-Americans who come from a different religious culture? Do they not participate in the Judeo-Christian tradition? I mean, they don't believe it. They believe in something else.

PALIN: We get to say to them, "Yay, welcome to America, where we are tolerant and you have a freedom to express whatever faith. You can participate peacefully in whatever religion that you choose. That's what America is all about."

And we would ask, though, that there be respect by our courts. Look at Judge Crabb and this ridiculous ruling or her opinion that's come down that says the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. We would ask that there would be respect for what the Judeo-Christian beliefs are, too. It's mutual tolerance.

Here we see a nice repetition of the seventh and eighth points. Judge Crabb (perfect name!) and the courts are not keeping the state out of promotion of a theistic practice, they are discriminating against all those who share Judeo-Christian beliefs. And this suggests a ninth tactic—act as if you speak for all right-minded people. Your beliefs are common sense; those of your opponents are nonsensical, and this is so obvious that you don’t need to spell out why.

O'REILLY: What do you think drives -- what do you think drives Judge Crabb, who I agree with you is desperately wrong? Again, there is no imposition of religion on a voluntary National Day of Prayer. It's just encouraging people to be spiritual. You can pray to a tree. You can be a Deist. I mean, you know, Founding Fathers, some of them were.

PALIN: Yes.

O'REILLY: So there's no imposition. So what drives a Judge Crabb to say, "Hey, this should be illegal"? What do you think drives that?

PALIN: You know, you wonder what in hell scares people about talking about America's foundation of faith, and you wonder why in the world would she rule as she's ruled? And I guess she'll further explain herself.

But every state Constitution acknowledges God, because every state Constitution, which backs up our U.S. Constitution, can acknowledge that our unalienable [sic] rights came from God not from man.

O'REILLY: Why would Crabb do that? You must have thought about it. Why would Crabb do it? What does she want to accomplish by this?

PALIN: It is that world view that, I think, involves some -- some people being afraid of being able to discuss our foundation, being able to discuss God in the public square. That's the only thing I can attribute it to, is some fear of some people.

But look at our national motto, "In God We Trust." How inconsistent, then, to be told that we, on a National Day of Prayer, which, as you point out, isn't any kind of mandate or any kind of force for anybody to believe any certain thing, but how inconsistent to say that, though, in the public square we cannot talk about or talk to that God that is in our national motto.

O'REILLY: Yes, we can only trust in the God inside our own homes, but once we get out, we can't trust him.

A version of the ninth point. O’Reilly is figuratively shaking his head at the idiocy of people like Judge Crabb. Just a crazy world. Then a flourish of misrepresentation, incoherence and non-facts by Palin. Opponents of the National Day of Prayer have dubious motives (they fear believers), and the federal practice of a theistic ritual is not sanctioning a particular religion, but is a natural response to the roots of our country (also a nice confusion of a government-sponsored ritual and the entire public square). Nevermind that the National Motto was an early Cold War creation (1955), not a primordial creed of the nation. But again, don’t worry about historical accuracy. Palin could have passed off other Cold War religious innovations as existing since the founding: along with the National Day of Prayer (1952), there was adding “under God” to the Pledge (1954), and the National Prayer Breakfast every February (1954). The federal government even granted Billy Graham permission to hold an evangelical revival on federal grounds (1952). Man, those were the days.

All right, Governor, always good to see you.

PALIN: Bill -- Bill, OK, hey, we also need to remember, though, Margaret Thatcher and other foreign leaders and foreign observers thinking America is such a great and exceptional nation, because we do base our lives, our values on the God of the Bible, the Old and the New Testament.

O'REILLY: All right.

PALIN: If they can observe it, we should.

O'REILLY: We appreciate you coming on. . .

Yes—always good to end with some chest-thumping patriotism. In short—oversimplify the issue, misrepresent your opposition, don’t worry about accuracy, logical consistency, or historical complexity, and deliver it all with the upmost confidence in your righteousness, and the certainty of wrongdoing in others.

Bad Combo of Fear and Desperation in Arizona

2010-05-01T15:31:00.000-07:00

The recent Arizona anti-immigration law (full text here) is understandable, but is likely unconstitutional, and just plain bad policy.

It is understandable because Congress has been dithering for years on this issue while others have been bearing the brunt of the costs of unauthorized immigration. I call it unauthorized—as does the Department of Homeland Security—because I don’t associate myself with those who see such immigration as a criminal act, as if someone coming to do cheap labor is on the par with, robbers, murderers, or the thieving executives of Enron and Tyco.

I witnessed these costs several years ago during a visit to Cochise County, Arizona. While walking the trails at Coronado National Forest on the border between Arizona and Mexico, I came upon garbage (discarded clothes, plastic jugs, etc.). Turns out, according to the park ranger (formerly in the Border Patrol), the park has to clean up tons of garbage each year Moreover, the smuggler trails cross through environmentally sensitive areas, degrading habitats for plants and animals (you can find related 2006 fs congressional testimony on this matter here). Cochise County sheriffs sat me down with a folder of pictures—dead bodies their office was responsible for recovering—the result of federal deterrence efforts (like increasing surveillance and building more fences) that did not deter, but only drove migrants to cross through more remote areas, and, hence, higher death rates. It cost the County two to four thousand for each body recovered they said. Moreover, the sheriffs told me, the Border Patrol routinely refused to cite a suspected unauthorized immigrant if she or he was injured. Rather than take on the healthcare costs, Border Patrol agents would simply drop them off at hospitals and clinics, shunting the cost from federal coffers to local ones (though I should add that I heard numerous stories from undocumented Mexicans in Indiana that Border Patrol agents had saved them or a relative after they become separated from their coyote—or abandoned by him—and were wandering lost in the deep desert).

And there was the cost to the Douglas High School—with so many children from mobile migrant families, a significant number of students who were there at the beginning of the school year were gone by the time of testing required by the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB), and therefore the school could not meet the NCLB requirement that at least 95% of students take the standardized tests. And, of course, there are the other more dramatic costs that typically get more attention—the violence associated with narcotrafficking.

Along with bearing the costs of being the conduit for cheap labor for employers elsewhere in the country, unauthorized immigrants make up a relatively high percentage of Arizona’s total population (see table below). Though their number is far lower than those of California and Texas, Arizona’s relatively low population means their presence is harder to ignore.

State	Population (2009 est)	Unauthorized Immigrants (2009 est)	Percentage Unauthorized
California	36,418,000	2,600,000	7.1%
Texas	23,846,000	1,680,000	7.0%
Florida	18,182,000	720,000	4.0%
New York	19,429,000	550,000	2.8%
Illinois	12,829,000	540,000	4.2%
Georgia	9,509,000	480,000	5.0%
Arizona	6,344,000	460,000	7.3%

Sources: US Census Bureau, Factfinder, at http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en; and Department of Homeland Security, “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population residing in the United States, January 2009 (January 2010), at http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois_ill_pe_2009.pdf

That said, the policy is wrong-headed, reflecting the apparent US tendency to resort to force to resolve challenges or turn back perceived threats. Every time the US has increased border enforcement (with fences, more Border Patrol, etc.), the area of increased enforcement has simply meant the redirection of human trafficking, along with an escalation of violence. And US Americans need to keep in mind that migration is not just a domestic issue, it is a foreign policy matter. Migration law is within the constitutional jurisdiction of the federal government, and it needs to act now in order to prevent an array of disparate migration policies that will make overall migration policy even more irrational than it already is. The Arizona law is also impracticable, dumping a gargantuan task on local law enforcement agencies in an economic environment of state and local retrenchment.

And there’s the issue of racial profiling that will undoubtedly result. Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me’s Peter Sagal lampooned the notion that the law has nothing to do with race or ethnicity:

Peter Sagal: “What might make the police think someone is illegal? Not their skin color or accent, no, no, that would be racial profiling. Instead, the police will be looking for people who seem reeeally homesick. . .

Amy Dickinson: “Writing postcards. . .”

Peter Sagal: “Exactly. Just standing there, looking in the distance, saying, hmm. . .

Amy Dickinson: “Oh, if only. . .”

Roy Blount, Jr.: “In Arizona you should probably not go to a policeman and ask for directions.”

Amy Dickinson: “Right. That’s out. . .”

Peter Sagal: “One defender of the bill, one Californian Congressman named Brian Bilbray said ‘No, it’s not about the skin color or anything else. You can tell people are illegal by the way they dress.’ That’s what he said. And he’s right of course because as we all know they often wear T-shirts that say ‘I’m with undocumented.’ Or here’s a favorite, ‘My mother smuggled me across the Sonoran desert and I’ll got was a low-paying job you people don’t want.’”

If you still doubt that race and ethnicity do not really matter in Arizona’s militant anti-immigration policy, consider a new state law that conflates sedition and studies of particular ethnic groups. The law bans public school courses that

Promote the overthow of the United States government.

Promote resentment toward a race or class of people

Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.

Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

Well, who in the world in Arizona public schools is promoting the overthow of the US government? Do they have fringe elements of the militia or Tea Party movements teaching there? No, the implication is that there is a connection between a multicultural education program and sedition. Evidently, the state that resisted celebrating MLK is again fighting the outcome of the Civil Rights movement. Multiculturalism was a result of that struggle, and really took off in the 1980s as educators worked to make history less a story of white people, and more an account recognizing the presence of people of color, and women, in our country’s history. Ethnic studies programs are also the result of ongoing specialization in academia—every discipline has experienced an explosion of sub-disciplines.

What the lawmakers present as egalitarian individualism is really part of a incoherent project to fashion Arizona into what Sarah Palin called “real America,” a place where whites can again be unconscious of their entitlements, not troubled by the seamier side of our country’s history (hey—a shout-out to the Texas Board of Education!), and where everyone speaks American--the Arizona Department of Education has ordered schools to no longer allow teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents to give English courses.

So the Arizona government will take care of the unauthorized immigrants at the point of a gun, and can deal with the critics by shutting down certain kinds of inquiry and teaching, and by calling them treasonous. Along with Sagal’s advice to suss out the illegals by looking for the homesick, Arizona could try testing anyone entering the state for her or his fluency in spoken American. The state will lose some potential retirees from, say, Boston and New York City, but freedom from fear of the other don’t come cheap.

By the way, Arizona made think of the depiction of Topeka, Kansas in the cult Sci-Fi classic, A Boy and His Dog. . .

Hysteria becoming the norm?

2010-03-28T05:30:00.000-07:00

The Harris Poll came out with a survey revealing the hysteria bubbling out there among the masses, an hysteria no doubt resulting from a combination of an economic crisis, seemingly unending war, and the presence of a black man in the White House. The results are rather stunning. 4 of 10 Americans think President Obama's a socialist? Nearly a third still think he's a Muslim? Between 1 and 2 of every ten Americans think he's the Anti-Christ? It's not surprising that the lower one's education, the more likely one is to agree with these statements, but the data also show that ideology and party identification matter much more than level of education for most of the statements. Fear-driven belief can trump any amount of education.

Question	Total	High School or less	Conser-vatives	Repub-licans
He is a socialist	40	45	67	67
He wants to take away Americans' right to own guns	38	45	63	61
He is a Muslim	32	43	51	57
He wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government	29	37	52	51
He has done many things that are unconstitutional	29	35	53	55
He resents America's heritage	27	31	49	47
He does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do	27	35	38	40
He was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president	25	32	41	45
He is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitutions speaks of	25	32	45	45
He is a racist	23	28	42	42
He is anti-American	23	27	43	41
He wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers	23	28	40	41
He is doing many of the things that Hitler did	20	24	36	38
He may be the Anti-Christ	14	18	24	24
He wants the terrorists to win	13	16	23	22

Here's my two cents on each of the statements--

He is a socialist: Socialism is a political-economic system in which the state owns the means of production. We're nowhere close to that, but the US, like all countries, does have a government that intervenes in numerous areas of the economy. If President Obama is a socialist, then so is any homeowner writing off mortgage interest when they do their taxes, any college student getting Pell Grants or federally subsidized loans, any veteran getting GI benefits, any driver racing along an interstate highway, any one using a public library or school, and so on, and so on. If Obama is a socialist, we're all socialists.

He wants to take away Americans' right to own guns: Yes, he's okay with government restricting the use of handguns. Fine with me. But voiding the entire right? Give me a break.

He is a Muslim: For those who don't want to use the N word, you just call him this.

He wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government: Conspiracy theorists have been dreaming up some variation of this since anti-Catholics worried that all those Irish immigrants in the 1840s-50s meant an impending Vatican takeover of the US. We see this fear of losing sovereignty in Cold War sci-fi film (The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and TV (the Borg in Star Trek). It's our individualism writ large, and run amok.

He has done many things that are unconstitutional: In his continuation of certain Bush-Cheney era War on Terror measures, I'd have to agree.

He resents America's heritage: He may very well resent particular aspects of that heritage, like slavery, Jim Crow, nativist bigotry, etc. Understandable.

He does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do: Like Bush, Sr. during the Savings and Loan bailout--the Bush and then the Obama administration worried more about socializing the liability banks amassed then rescuing individuals who lost their pensions or their homes. This is just a fact of political life: the financial class has a great deal of power to shape banking and monetary policies.

He was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president: Again, this is just another way not to use the N word.

He is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitutions speaks of: Ditto.

He is a racist: A favorite rhetorical ploy of a socially privileged group losing the entitlements it unconsciously enjoyed due to its race, sex, sexual preference, religion, etc. So threatened whites accuse blacks of racism, men declare feminists are engaged in a 'war on boys,' straight people argue that equal rights for gays are special or extra rights, Christians complain about not being able to dominate the public square

He is anti-American: this presumes some widely agreed upon definition of American, and it's typically the accusation of those who can't bear to live in a pluralist world.

He wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers: more conspiracy theory claptrap

He is doing many of the things that Hitler did: the lazy labeling tactic too many of us resort to dismiss an argument, but an effective tactic because way too many don't trouble themselves to read history.

He may be the Anti-Christ: Oh, the power of myth. An Anglo-Irish minister, John Nelson Darby, invents this eschatological framework, including the notion of rapture, in the 1830s, spreads it in the US, and it takes hold of the American imagination. We're all so desperate for meaning and direction, and Darby's fanciful revision of the Bible gave so many just that. And still does. To our detriment.

He wants the terrorists to win: this is just a variation of conspiracy theory, one encouraged by Cheney and his crowd who argue in effect that we need to transform our government into a non-democratic garrison state in order to win this so-called war on terror. And if you disagree with them, you must be on side of the enemy. A variation of the intolerant 'love it or leave it' argument.

Cockroach to Beck: You're no Thomas Paine

2010-03-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

A friend gave me Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine. It’s interesting to read a political tract in which I am such an awful or scary guy. I’m a government employee, an academic, and worse, a political scientist, and I’ve been in the company of progressives. At various points, Beck refers to these kind of people as “cockroaches,” “enemies at the gates,” and “deadly masters.”

I won’t pretend to speak for all ‘deadly enemy cockroaches’ across the land, but here’s how one of them responds to Beck’s book.

As the subtitle informs us, Glen says the book is inspired by Thomas Paine, and it includes Paine’s 1776 Common Sense. Beck does readers a service by including it—perhaps it will inspire more folks to read him (it is, however, widely available for free on various websites). I wonder, though, how many of his readers will actually read the Paine portion. Even if they do, they’ll find precious little to connect Beck’s text with Paine, beyond the phrase “common sense,” which Beck repeats, as if saying it lots of times will make it so. I think of common sense as referring to things like ‘Don’t pick up a hot cast iron pan with your bare hand,’ or ‘look both ways before crossing a street,’ or ‘don’t expect everything to end hunky dory if you sleep with your best friend’s girl- or boyfriend.' No, for Beck, his opinion is common sense.

And he’s not just delivering common sense. He’s the mouthpiece of God:

America has let thieves into her home and that nagging in your gut is a final warning that our country is about to be stolen. Our Founding Fathers understood that our rights and liberties are gifts from God. They also understood that WE are an intuitive people. If all that is true, then it only makes sense that He would alert us to our impending loss.

And now He is—shame on us for ignoring Him for so long.

The 'God-talk' is curious, for Paine was hostile to the Christian religion (see Paine's Age of Reason). But such selectivity is not surprising, and the passage above is pretty representative of what we get in the rest of the book. Drumbeats of fear. Pronouncements on US history of dubious veracity. Lots of caps because that’s what Talk TV and Radio hosts think wins arguments: YELLING. A jumble of different ideas thrown together in a single paragraph.

Amid the clichés, name-calling (“border-line sociopaths), the histrionics (“WE ARE NOT SHEEP”), the hyperbole (“The chains of economic slavery. . .are about to snap shut around the necks of our children. . .”), we get the standard conservative critique that I’ve been hearing since I started paying attention to politics in the mid-1970s: America is going to hell; we need to revive an idealized Leave it to Beaver American past; schools no longer teach “real history” and are instead brainwashing our kids; distrust “them,” you know, those “experts,” and get big government off our backs, out of our pockets, and away from our guns.

Along with this we have a walloping sense of marginalization: “The fastest way to be branded a danger, a militia member, or just plain crazy is to quote the words of our Founding Fathers.” That is so absurd that I can only guess that Beck misunderstands the criticism he’s faced. It’s not the material he uses. It’s how he uses it, and his delivery.

Take Thomas Paine. The Paine section includes an Introduction and four essays that give us arguments against monarchy and for a war for independence. Beck could have drawn analogies, drawing parallels between Paine’s indictment of monarchical rule and the increasing concentration of authority in the US executive branch. He could have mused over connections between his own call for a non-violent revolution and Paine’s efforts to mobilize support for the war for independence. And he could have adopted Paine’s tone. Here’s Paine’s opening passage from Common Sense:

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise and the worthy need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious or unfriendly, will cease of themselves, unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

Beck, instead, gives us sophomoric wit:

Politicians, like cockroaches, are not stupid creatures. Both have an uncanny ability to survive, consume all things living or dead, and can apparently live up to one month without their heads—though I would argue that politicians can survive much longer than that.

Beck also gives us a big dose of conspiracy theory. Beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, progressives, the new bogeymen, have been working patiently, cleverly, evilly, to create a fascist, socialist, or communist regime (the terms are interchangeable in Beck’s intellectual world). Beck says it’s not a conspiracy theory, but to borrow from another famous conspiracy theorist—‘If it walks like a duck. . .

That said, I can understand Beck’s conspiricist bent and his fear, even if I dislike his style and disagree with starting assumptions and his conclusions. In Real Enemies, historian Katheryn Olmsed argues that Americans are prone to developing conspiracy theories in part because the US government indeed has engaged in conspiracies. As the scope and size of government began to grow during and after WW I,

It gained the power to conspire agains its citizens, and and it soon began exercising that power. By the height of the cold war, government agents had consorted with mobsters to kill a foreign leader [Castro], dropped hallucinogenic drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting Americans in random bars [MKULTRA], and considered launching fake terrorist attacks on Americans in the United States.

As well, the government handed Americans conspiracy theories that they were to believe in, from a Japanese Fifth Column during WW II or, soon after, a State Department completely infiltrated by communists, on to the Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection that the Bush-Cheney administration sold to the public.

With revelations of real government conspiracies, and with the US government trying to promote particular conspiracy narratives, and then spying on and harassing dissenters, you get an environment rich with conspiratorial possibilities. For example, during the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA turned a blind eye to Contra drug-runners selling crack in LA. While Olmstead thinks it’s preposterous that this was part of a government campaign to destroy the African-American population, it certainly makes more understandable why people might believe in such a conspiracy.

Finally, I can also understand Beck’s anti-intellectualism. We academics, for example, can be tremendous snobs, and much of our writing is inaccessible to the lay public (much of it is even inaccessible to me!). Still, his knee-jerk rejection of “experts” is also an awfully convenient way to protect his view of the world, and his arguments, from any evidence or reasoning that might contradict his own.

Tempest in a Tebow

2010-02-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

Focus on the Family has bought ad time during the Super Bowl in which Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother deliver an anti-abortion testimonial. It’s big news because the Super Bowl has been typically an arena for more or less clever advertising for things like sugar, alcohol, or athletic gear, but not advocacy. Unsurprisingly, pro-choice groups like NOW and others are upset, urging CBS to pull the ad, apparently on the dubious grounds that the Super Bowl is an inappropriate venue for such a message. As if pro-choicers are all avid fans of a sport that is a patriarchal rite of passage for many boys. As if there is some sort of pristine form of the Super Bowl viewing experience that should not be messed with.

Silly, and these groups only play into the narrative that Focus on the Family and other conservative evangelicals have worked hard to promote: that they are marginalized. Meanwhile, Focus folks are happy with all the buzz the opposition has generated and attribute it all to the Lord. God works in mysterious ways, apparently creating a recession so that CBS would be desperate for ad revenue (though not so desperate that it would run an ad for a gay dating service, Mancrunch).

I gather the premise of the Tebow ad is 'What if the mother had allowed illness to convince her to have an abortion' (mind you, the illegality of abortion in the Philippines, where she was at the time, had nothing to do with this decision)? What if? Imagine if she had gone through with the abortion, and then twenty years later Gators fans are, what, scratching their heads, thinking 'we're missing somebody; there should be Bible-toting Heisman trophy-winner here?' Absurd. There are plausible arguments against abortion rights, but 20-20 hindsight isn't one of them (Richard Dawkins makes a more thorough indictment of this logic here).

Some argue that it's refreshing to have a nationally-known athlete featured who can put his faith before self-gratification, e.g., 'saving himself for marriage' rather than killing dogs or shooting himself in the leg, who wears Bible verses rather than shill for some corporation. I don't know, to me it's hardly heroic to resist sexual desire and wear Bible verse references as if they were talismans--not too different from the Trijicon company inscribing Bible verses on rifle sights sold to the US military, though in the former case, it does no harm; in the latter, it's a big PR disaster for US efforts to convince the Muslim world that it's not on a Christian crusade (the firm has recently agreed to stop the practice).

While I think a debate over the Focus ad isn't merited, it is part of a larger, intriguing relationship between athletics, religion, and politics. Football has been a conduit to politics for some Christian conservative males, and I wonder if that's what is in store for the young Tebow.

Upset People Produce Brown Upset

2010-01-20T02:31:00.001-08:00

Politico.com headlines it's announcement of the Brown win in Massachusetts special election"Forces of change." Seems to me that backers of Brown voted for the status quo--no change in healthcare. And given that Senate procedures now make supermajorities required to get anything done, Massachusetts voters have now made the representation of the majority will moot, along with adding another voice to Congress that will spout the patriotic cant that torture is not torture when Americans do it, the urban legend that global warming is a hoax, and the nativist rhetoric criminalizing low-paid immigrant workers. Imhofe will have a friend.

But, that's what Madison and Hamilton and other founding fathers bequeathed us. A political structure designed to thwart majority will and allow only incremental change--except, curiously, in the area of foreign policy, where our government has engaged in radical imperial ventures, for which our elected representatives have tolerated a drastic expansion of executive powers. And the majority has gone along with those ventures, at least until too many dead start coming home. I wish Madison could see us now; I wonder what he'd say?

Another thing. Check out the sign in the picture: "It's our turn for a change." "Our turn?" Just one year under a Democratic President and Congress and Republican and independent voters act as if they've been marginalized for decades? Since 1980, the first time I was able to cast a vote for president, I've lived under 20 years of GOP presidents (Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr.) and 9 under a centrist Democrat (Clinton) and the current (pragmatic?) Democrat. The GOP either had parity with the Dems or the majority in the Senate from 1999-2008 and in the House the GOP had the majority from 1995-2006. I know, it's the reeling economy that's given voters the jitters about the party in power, and I agree that there are lot of valid concerns about health care, environmental, and immigration reform, but, please, opponents of Obama, stop acting as if you're long-suffering victims of liberal Democratic domination.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

2009-11-02T02:12:00.000-08:00

I give Dr. Horrible five out of five stars. For those not in the know, the story is about Dr. Horrible's (Neal Patrick Harris) efforts to get a membership in the Evil League of Evil (ELE), but it's complicated by his love for the sweet Penny (Felicia Day), who has fallen for Horrible's nemesis, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). I can't think of a another movie offhand that delivered a tragedy with such comic flair (If Tim Burton's Batman Returns had been a musical, and had a few more daylight scenes, it might have come close).

On the face of it, it's an exercise in cynicism. The hero, Hammer, is really the awful guy, and the villain is the good guy. The commentaries in the special features are long, knowing winks. It's all just a joke, especially for sophisticates in the film and www worlds. But it escapes pure cynicism because the creators and actors clearly loved their characters, the story, the music, the very act of putting on this act.

So if you do watch the DVD, don't forget the special features, which are as clever and hilarious as the show. Those applications sent in by Dr. Horrible fans to be in the ELE warmed my heart--it's good to know there's so many people out there who revel in intelligent silliness.

You can watch Dr. Horrible online here.

Top Ten Saddest Songs

2009-10-30T15:27:00.000-07:00

Like the previous Top Ten Songs That Rarely Fail to Bring a Smile to My Face, I found this difficult to put together, but for the opposite reason: too many to choose from. And like my little Sis said of her Top Ten Smile songs, it might be different on another day. But, here on this rainy, rainy day, and seeing a green world without really being able to see the green in it, these are the songs that come to mind. I should add that I've been thinking of lines from Nick Hornsby's "High Fidelity" while writing this:

What came first? The music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns and watching violent videos, we’re scared that some sort of culture of violence is taking them over. . .But nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

(Thank you John Cusack for bringing Hornsby's novel to film--one of the best book-to-movie deals I've seen). Well, my answer is the misery. Or, rather, the melancholy. At least in my case, I don't think painful music added, or adds, to my sadness. It clarifies it.

10. Mad World, Roland Orzabal (Donnie Darko Soundtrack, 2001). I think this song should have come at the beginning rather than the end of the movie, given that Donnie is laughing at the absurdity of it all, but the song still captures the angst that fills anyone who thinks about the (seeming?) capriciousness of the world.

09. Ain't No Sunshine, Bill Withers (Just as I Am, 1971). Withers channeling pure loss and aloneness.

08. If You Could Read My Mind, Gordon Lightfoot (Sit Down Young Stranger, 1970). Okay, I'm bordering on treacly, but it's here because I was singing it one day in the Lutheran Heights lodge when pre-marriage Margo walked in and told me to "Stop playing such damn depressing songs!" This simply has got to be in my top ten list.

07. Fire And Rain, James Taylor (Sweet Baby James, 1970). I was nine or ten, and I remember stopping cold when I heard it. It was the first song that I recognized to be speaking of a transcendent sadness. I should add that of course at that age I didn't know or understand the term "transcendent," and I also should qualify this--I already had been hearing transcendent sadness in the Lutheran liturgy and hymns; I just couldn't put a finger on what I was feeling.

06. Cold Rain, Crosby, Stills & Nash (CSN, 1977). CSN at their height of harmonic power, with in-your-face melancholy.

05. People's Parties/Same Situation, Joni Mitchell (Court and Spark, 1974). Here I'm cheating a bit, but on the original LP, these two songs were actually seamless--they were meant to be heard together. Unfortunately, the barbaric CD producers didn't know, or didn't care.

04. We Do What We Can, Sheryl Crow (Tuesday Night Music Club Rock, 1993). Story of my life, though in the context of the academic world.

03. You Get Bigger As You Go, Bruce Cockburn (Humans, 1980). "Bales of memory like boats in tow." The glory and heartache of aging.

02. Llorando, Rebekah Del Rio (Mulholland Drive Soundtrack, 2001). Thanks, David Lynch.

01. All At Once, Bonnie Raitt (Luck of the Draw, 1991). "Looks to me there's lots more broken/Than anyone can really see/And why the angels turn their backs on us/It's a mystery to me.” Can’t get much more wretched than that.

Top Ten Songs That Rarely Fail to Bring a Smile to My Face (a full one, not a wistful one)

2009-10-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

You know, I had kind of had a hard time coming up with this list. As my son once said, "His music is all just so sad." But there are some songs that cheer me, either because they're so clever and just plain funny (there's lots of Tom Waits I could put here), and some that just move me to smile by their ability to communicate gravity lightly (Cockburn and Jones).

10. ABC, Jackson 5 (1970 single): yes, I admit it, I recall fondly some of the early 70s bubblegum.

9. Sugar, Leon Redbone (Sugar): I hear this song and I see him as I did when watching him play on SNL sometime in the 70s.

8. East St. Louis Toodle-Oo, Steely Dan (Pretzel Logic): Usually so cynical, Steely Dan could be playful at times.

7. Open, Bruce Cockburn (You've Never Seen Everything): Not all Cockburn is darkly introspective.

6. Satellites, Rickie Lee Jones (Flying Cowboys): I don't understand the lyrics at all--they just work for me.

5. Twisted, Joni Mitchell (Court and Spark): A spry 2:25 minute joke.

4. The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me), Tom Waits (Small Change): Hilarious.

3. Hot Fun in the Summertime, Sly and the Family Stone (1969 single): Too exuberant not to smile.

2. Rocky Raccoon, The Beatles (White Album): The Beatles' take on US culture cracks me up (I would have put "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?" but I'm trying to hold to a self-imposed rule that an artist or band gets only one place in the top ten).

1. 13 Step Boogie, Martin Sexton (Live Wide Open): Sexton's happiness here is infectious, and for some reason, that sniff he does at one point makes me laugh.

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The Nobel Peace (sur)Prize.

2009-10-09T05:25:00.000-07:00

Compare these two scenes. The difference between the two I believe says a lot about why the Nobel Peace Prize was given to President Obama. While Bush gets dissed at a G20 conference, Obama has a warm conversation with Brazilian President, Lula da Silva (a pretty rare occurrence in the history of US-Latin American relations).

Whatever my disagreement with the Obama administration over continuing the folly of nation-building while war-making in Afghanistan, and its continuation of reprehensible Bush-era policies like rendition, I'm grateful to have a president who people in other countries see as a person of reason and hope.

Alexander Hamilton to Americans: ease it down a notch or two, would you?

2009-10-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

I’m all for anger and argumentation in the public square, but the rhetoric I’ve been hearing in the media, or reading in blogs or Facebook, has been disturbing—all these thoughtless globs of bile being thrown this way and that. I don’t think this is anything new, but that doesn't mean that all the vilification going on out there is any less damaging to the efforts to make important decisions about healthcare, the wars, joblessness, and so on.

When I used to teach "Intro to US Government," I had students read a passage from the first Federalist Paper. Under the pseudonym "Publius," Alexander Hamilton began what would become a long series of arguments in favor of replacing the Articles of Confederation with the proposed Constitution coming out of the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. I think it’s to all our detriment that so many do not frame arguments in the way that Hamilton suggests in this passage (and I know I've been guilty, too, of doing what Hamilton criticizes here).

Here's my paraphrase of the excerpt, followed by the actual passage in it’s full late-18^th century glory.

. . .Obviously, it would be rather dishonest of me to reject the arguments of my opponents based on the claim that they are acting on pure self-interest or secret ambitions. If we’re honest, we all would admit that it’s possible that even those we despise the most might be motivated by good intentions, and there’s no doubt that most of those who have already spoken out against the new Constitution, and those who will in the future, are well-intentioned, even if I think their fears and suspicions are unjustified. Really, no one, not even those we think of as exceptionally wise or good, is immune to the fears and suspicions that warp the perception of a problem and its solution.

In other words, we know we are principled, so we should also be willing to grant that our opponents may also be principled. Likewise, if we think they, our opponents, must be unreasonably biased or greedy, or whatever, it would unreasonable for us to assume that we, through some miracle, have completely escaped those same bad characteristics.

All those who accept this logic, and I don’t see how anyone could argue against it, should take a step back the next time they think they are, without a doubt, right in an argument.

Besides, there’s a practical reason for delivering criticism and arguments in a moderate, or thoughtful, reasoned way. Demonizing those whom you oppose isn’t going to win any opponents to your side. As is the case in religion, we cannot win people over to the right side of a struggle by turning opponents into evil heretics and persecuting them. You don’t win converts with violence, either physical or rhetorical.

The real passage:

...I am well aware that it would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views. Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable--the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears. So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

The White Whine of Privilege

2009-09-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

In my last posting, I talked about how race may be shaping the way people frame their arguments against the Obama administration. It's hardly a novel observation. The issue of race exploded several times during the presidential primary season and the campaign between Obama and McCain (for example, see "Race Moves to Center Stage" or "Wright Brings Race Issue Back in '08 Race"). Now Joe Wilson's yell "You lie!" during President Obama's address to Congress has a lot more people worrying that same awful sore on the national skin.

Over at This Week in Black, Elon James White was so flabbergasted by Wilson that he put aside his usually biting humor and just yelled back:

I won’t even get into the “Oh he wouldn’t have done that if it were a WHITE POTUS”, because its so nuts I can’t even deal on a racial level. What makes you think under ANY circumstances that its okay to yell ANYTHING at the President? I don’t care if he said “Yes We Can…run a train on yo mama” you don’t yell something at the Effing POTUS. You sit there and you wait, go on Fox News and talk all the smack you want, but until then STFU.

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, said she resisted the idea that race mattered in all the outcries against Obama, but

Wilson's shocking disrespect for the office of the president--no Democrat ever shouted "liar" at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq--convinced me: Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, agreed in the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog:

I'm sure that many of these people carrying posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache are regular, God-fearing churchgoers. During the civil rights movement, most white Protestant churches in the South--those that now make up the Southern Baptist Convention--stood solidly against desegregation. Some of the children of those good churchgoers are as unwilling to accept the legitimacy of a black president as their parents were to accept riding on a bus next to blacks.

NPR's Juan Williams, in his typically calm fashion, said

I think there's a perception that being called a liar during a speech before the joint session of Congress is unprecedented, Renee. It fits with a pattern that lots of black Americans--and I might say it's also on Hispanic radio around the country--perceived as sort of a lack of basic acceptance of the stature that's to be accorded any president, a question of his legitimacy.

(Or see Juan Williams try to explain this point to Sean Hannity, a blowhard who thinks you win an argument by simply talking over everyone else. Hey, Juan, why bother?)

Leon Pitts, Jr., after reading the Southern Poverty Law Center's report on resurgent extremist movements, is alarmed, seeing Joe Wilson as just one symptom of something more frightening, a culture war that is "real and scary."

Well, should we be alarmed? What meaning should we read into Joe Wilson's yelp? One side of me is not so bothered by it. I worked at an academic institution for several years where decorum and a facade of democratic consensus functioned to preserve the status quo, to shield its most stalwart defenders from ideas and criticism too weighty for ossified intellects. The place cried out for some open, unsettling, conversation, rather than all the grousing in private. The same might be said for the formal meetings of the national government, where the rules of conduct (along with the constitutional separation of powers, the purposeful bottlenecks) blunt challenges to the status quo.

And there is a longstanding practice in the US of breaking the informal and formal rules of public conduct to make a political point, to crack the status quo. We call this civil disobedience. Thus it is that that ol' civil disobeyer, Al Sharpton, ended up with a curious take on the "You lie!" affair. Asked by NPR's Scott Simon what he thought of it, Sharpton replied

I thought what he said was offensive to all Americans. It insulted the chamber. You know, as an old protestor, you suffer the consequences of a protest, because that's what he ended up doing no matter how much he was justified. He should have been removed, in my opinion, from the chamber.

It's a curious reply because right after deeming Wilson wrong, Sharpton appears to acknowledge the slight possibility of the legitimacy of Wilson's action, but then calls for an action that would be typical of the defender of the status quo. Civil disobedience is in part about theater, and it increases in effectiveness when the government, or the "upstanding" citizenry, crack down on the disobedient in ways that raise the ire uncommitted but interested public (like all those White TV audiences in the north watching their Southern cousins aim their dogs, water hoses, and worse, at Black protesters).

But here I've just begun to do what many White pundits decrying the role of race have done, make an absurd comparison based on a flimsy syllogism. Joe Wilson broke a rule as protest. Joe was engaged in civil disobedience. Joe was punished (very lightly) for this. Gee, Martin Luther King did the same thing, break rules in acts of civil disobedience. And he and his followers were punished. MLK is now considered a democratic hero and martyr. Joe must be one too, and you liberal lefty socialists who criticize Joe are hypocrites because you don't apply the same standards to MLK.

This reminds me of a former colleague, a self-professed neoconservative, who felt marginalized in the college because so few agreed with his political and religious positions. He felt forced to "the back of the bus." Hmm, as if a White male academic in the early 21st century is in any way comparable to a 1950s Black working class woman in the Jim Crow south. Simply ridiculous, but these kind of trite comparisons are all too common, as is the practice of the beleaguered privileged to project on to their critics their own hypocrisy.

I use the term "privileged" in the sense that there are categories of people who enjoy entitlements that other categories do not, and these entitlements are usually unrecognized; they are so "natural" as to be invisible. I am a White, heterosexual male. As such, I'm entitled to not worry about whether or not people know my sexual preference (I just have to keep it in check). I'm entitled to speak about race and gender in my classes with more authority than my Black female colleagues because I don't have to worry about students saying "Oh, that's just your opinion because of who you are." I'm entitled to not being considered a higher threat to the property of store-owners, or to taxi drivers. I'm entitled to not have to worry about crafting a persona, adopting a tone, that is less threatening to people of different social origins. I'm entitled to equal rights, whereas Blacks, homosexuals, and women want "extra" rights. And so on.

And because this privilege is usually unrecognized, because the privileged don't feel privileged, they may lash out angrily at those who keep bringing up the problems of inequality, discrimination, or prejudice. Worse, still, is if the privileged are accused of contributing to these problems. So we have a slew of White pundits who "express outrage about charges that their attacks on Obama are racist."

As I said in my last posting, I don't think race is the only factor at work here in this debate. But to deny any role for race is simply untenable. That role can obvious, as in the recent Drudge Report, with a headline referencing Joe Wilson, with a picture of President just below, and then to the left, a video with the caption: "WHITE STUDENT BEATEN ON SCHOOL BUS; CROWD CHEERS. . ." Jon Stewart, as he does so often, identified the implicit message:

Now Drudge won't say this because he doesn't like to play that game, but I will. . . .Because Barak Obama is President, it is now open season on White children.

Others are less obvious. The Washington Post columnist and neoconservative übermensch, Charles Krauthammer, repeated, with his own particular flair, the refrain that our Black president isn't really American, nor our legitimate president.

Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can't get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.

Well, first off, it's just plain wrong that Obama was "unbidden" given the crescendo of calls for the President to play a greater role in getting health care reform going, but the message here was Obama doesn't know his place. Apparently, Obama isn't entitled to being presidential. Krauthammer's too smart to resort to usual labels of socialist, and he uses "social democratic manifesto" to place Obama outside the United States, in Europe (maybe, ugh, France) with all that overbearing government; and "manifesto" we all know is a favorite word of marxists. If you didn't get the point so far, Krauthammer tells us the President's so far left he's no longer really with us. So if Obama's so far left he's out of the American park, where does that put those millions of Americans who staunchly support a public option (unlike the President), or, worse, a single-payer universal health care system?

Well, maybe they're in some sort of parallel "third world" universe, because that's where the President thinks he is according to Krauthammer:

Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.

So, Obama urges Congress, the most representative part of our national government, to take on the task of healthcare. When Congress was seemingly stuck, he talks to them to urge them some more. But he just doesn't get to do that. He again doesn't know his place. Not only that, his presidency isn't really legitimate to begin with, since a "banana-republic plebiscite" put him into power. He's a mere "caudillo," a foreign term for a foreign guy.

It doesn't matter that the premises underlying Krauthammer’s dreck are dubious. Go to the comments section following the column and you'll see effusive, thunderous praise. Lots of people drink this stuff up. They love their white whine.