Patriotic Providentialism

Earlier this year there were rows in the Michigan Statehouse over compelling public schools to abide by the Common Core standards.  Senator Colbeck "expressed concerns about a possible lack of local control over what is taught in Michigan schools."  This same Senator was the primary sponsor of three measures recently passed by the Michigan Senate that instruct our public schools how to teach civics.  I guess "local control" is a very flexible principle.

I'm a political scientist, and am all for bolstering instruction on our country's political system, but these measures seemed to be based on a presumption that public schools aren't already teaching civics.  Indeed, Senator Colbeck "conceded that Michigan's current high school curriculum does a good job of covering the topics envisioned in his bill, but said he believes that this additional instruction is necessary" (you can find the Michigan Department of Education's civics curriculum here).

What is this "additional instruction?"  Well, it's really just an injection of religion and a conservative understanding of our country's political history, á la the faux historian David Barton, I'm guessing.  It's no surprise that the group backing this legislation, Patriotweek.org, passes on lesson plans from The Providence Forum, an organization committed to the following idea:

The Doctrine of Providence declares that the world and our lives are not ruled by chance or by fate, but by God. The Providence Forum demonstrably acknowledges that the Providence of God continues to be at work and calls us to action.

Senate Bill 120 is not so forthright about its political theology, but tells schools that it cannot

. . .censor or restrain study or instruction in American history or heritage or Michigan state history or heritage based on religious references in original source documents, writings, speeches, proclamations, or records.

Have Michigan public schools engaged in routine censorship of religious references in political documents?  I can find no news or report on this supposed perfidy (though if someone out there has plausible evidence, I'd love to see it).  This language invents a problem.  Thankfully, pushback from educators forced Colbeck to drop this language that would have encouraged public school teachers to use sectarian documents as part of civics instruction:

. . .school districts may post documents and objects “of historical significance in forming or influencing the United States or its legal governmental system” and explicitly allows for “documents that contain words associated with religion.”

This law also implies that "original source documents," presumably the US Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, among others, are chock full of religious references.  They're not--as Senator Colbeck and other "patriots" should know.  That said, I'm all for talking about religion as one element in a fascinating political history, but not as an occasion to paint a picture of Jesus present at the founding of the nation (and I imagine he would have felt a little uncomfortable among all those deists who denied his divinity).

John McNaughton (Mcnaughtonart.com)

Senate Bill 121 mandates schools to "designate and observe 1 week each year as 'Patriot Week," during which curriculum will focus on what is already in the civics curriculum--US foundational documents, political principles, ideas such as the "social compact" and "rule of law," and so on.  Moreover, students are to get the lesson that all of our nation's war making has been about "liberty."

Instruction in the sacrifices made by millions of military personnel and their families in the defense of liberty starting with the Revolutionary War and progressing to current conflicts.  Discussion should address the historic and modern-day significance of Veterans' Day, Independence Day, and Memorial Day.

I have no issue with honoring past and present members of the military, nor with studying the origins and meanings--not one meaning, as the text implies--of patriotic holidays.  But it is facile to equate all US military actions with the "defense of liberty."  Were we defending liberty while butchering Filipinos in what might be called the US's first counter-insurgency war (1900-1913)?  How about military interventionism and occupations in the Caribbean and Central America in the first third of the 20th century?  Or we could think of Vietnam, or, more recently, Iraq, where "liberty" became the cause only after we couldn't locate Iraq's WMDs.

Patriotism doesn't have to be about chest thumping (the US is "the greatest nation in world history," spouts Patriotweek.org).  It doesn't have to an unquestioning stance towards the military and US military actions.  Nor am I arguing that political and military history should be one long guilt trip.  Lessons in patriotism should include sober reflections on how the US has used its power, and the costs of war.  We should want informed students, not uncritical ones.

Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut, 1972 (acquired here)

Senate Bill 423 is a selective mash of lines drawn from the US Constitution and other national and state-level foundational documents.  Seems so redundant to be telling schools to teach students about things like separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, etc, when it's already in the curriculum (whether they are taught or learned well is another matter).  But I think the point of this law is really in the first "core principle" on which public school teachers are to focus.

(A) The core principles of the Declaration of Independence, including, but not limited to, the following:
    (i) We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

This instruction is lifted from Patriotweek.org's playbook, which is based on the idea that rights and liberties come not from government, nor from action by social movements demanding certain rights and liberties, but from God and its creation.  For example, in its explanation of the "First Principle" of equality,

The Founding Fathers embraced the Judeo-Christian understanding that the Creator created all individuals, that each person arises from His handiwork, and that every person embodies His blessing. Regardless of physical, mental, and social differences between individuals, each individual is equally precious in His eyes. While this First Principle originally arose from a belief in the nature of the Creator, the laws of nature lead many to the same conclusion.

At a very, very general level, the argument that the founding of the US rests on a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world is correct (though we'll have to ignore all the anti-semitism in the US history, and that the term "Judeo-Christian"wasn't popularized until the early 1950s).  However, it's questionable that a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world was the crucial factor behind the US's "exceptional" origins.  By the same reasoning, we could say that understanding was also responsible for fascist horrors in Italy and Germany, two countries also resting on the bedrock of Judeo-Christian ideas.  Association is not causation.

I suspect the other thing driving this legislation is the standard conservative jeremiad in which 'we've lost our way, and need to strip away all the extraneous stuff we've wrapped around our origins.'  For some Christian conservatives, this is the "sola scriptura" argument.  For political ones in Michigan, it's the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance, the US Constitution, parts of the Bill of Rights (SB 423 mentions Amendments 1, 2, 9, and 10, omitting 3-8), and the Michigan Constitution.

A lot has happened and changed since the late 18th century.  The world today would likely mystify our founding fathers.  Many were brilliant and we should study them and their works.  But we shouldn't sacralize them, nor turn foundational documents into a holy canon.  If God and nature were behind the "First Principle" of equality, certain social groups still had to struggle mightily to win that equality, against others--including agents of local, state, and federal government--who thought they had divine and natural law on their side.

Patriotweek acknowledges that our nation took some time to grant women and African Americans political equality, and that this "First Principle" is still a work in progress.  But it's telling that Patriotweek does not give a nod to other social groups who have suffered from inequality, e.g., Native Americans, Latinos/as, the disabled, and the LGBT community.  Hagiographic lessons on patriotism are inevitably myopic.

To my mind, real patriots can celebrate our country's achievements, and recognize its flaws.  Real patriots aren't so insecure that they must take the arrogant position that the US is "the greatest nation in world history," and that God is on its side.  Real patriots can love their country without such idolatry.

Oh, High Cost of Living Canada!

A cousin asked me for my take on whether or not universal healthcare is a reason for Canada's high priced food.  He works at a Costco in Bellingham, Washington, not far from the Canadian border, and he has seen a lot of Canadians shopping for food in his store.  "For example," he wrote, "a block of Tillamook Colby/Jack cheese is $24 in Canada!  One gallon of milk is over $5, and so on. . .(I checked Tillamook's online store--you can get a 2lb baby loaf of Colby/Jack for $16).

While I appreciate his confidence in my knowledge, I'm no economist.  But I rarely let the lack of expertise stop me from giving an opinion, so here's my shot at this interesting question.

First off, across the board, the cost of living (COL) in Canada is much higher than it is in the US.  Here's some numbers according to Numbeo:

Indices Difference

Consumer Prices in United States are 16.46% lower than in Canada

Consumer Prices Including Rent in United States are 13.21% lower than in Canada

Rent Prices in United States are 4.66% lower than in Canada

Restaurant Prices in United States are 18.36% lower than in Canada

Groceries Prices in United States are 17.06% lower than in Canada

Local Purchasing Power in United States is 29.00% higher than in Canada

Not only that--again according to Numbeo--the average net monthly salary for Canadians is $3,000 compared to around $3,360 in the US (both in Canadian dollars).  So on average, Canadians are paying more with less in their pockets.  We should keep in mind, though, that the COL varies from province to province, from city to city.  According to Statistics Canada, using 2002 as the baseline (COL=100), British Columbia's COL in September 2013 for food was 127.0, the lowest of any the provinces (Ontario's was 131.7 for example).

So is the COL in Canada higher due to higher taxes necessary to pay for universal healthcare?  In other words, one could suppose that in order to pay for universal healthcare, Canada would levy higher taxes in order to pay for it, and those higher taxes would be passed off to consumers in the form of higher prices. Turns out it's not that easy to answer that question because it's hard to compare the Canadian and US taxation systems.  Comparing income taxes, as one source explains,

is like comparing the stats of hockey player with those of basketball player. . .[and using] an average is also problematic as the very poor and the very rich skew it on both ends.  In general, lower income Canadians pay less in tax for the services they receive and rich Americans are better off than rich Canadians" (Investopedia).

How about corporate taxes?  The Business Roundtable reports that the effective corporate tax rates were lower in Canada (21.6%) than in the US (27.7%) over the years 2006-2009 ("effective tax rate is defined as total income taxes divided by pretax income).

On top of that, as in many other advanced industrial economies, the marginal tax rate for top earners in Canada has dropped significantly over the past 40 years (see "Do falling tax rates explain the rising income of the top 1%?").

In short, I don't think we can attribute higher food prices in Canada to the taxation needed to fund universal healthcare.  But there are all sorts of factors shaping food prices.  Canada doesn't subsidize agriculture near as much as does the US.  Fuel prices are higher in Canada, which drives up prices for transporting food, and proportionately fewer Canadians than Americans don't or can't buy locally.  Also there are just economies of scale.  The US population is almost ten larger than Canada's--a huge maw of demand, met by a huge and diverse welter of food producers--that interaction of supply and demand is another reason why food prices are lower in the US than in Canada (see "Canadian consumers cope with dramatic increase in food prices").

As well, it is difficult to attribute soaring food prices in the present to an institution--Canadian universal healthcare (which is called Medicare) that's been around since 1946.  If there were a relationship--then food prices would be astronomical by now.

That said, it's plausible to suppose that Canada's somewhat stricter regulatory environment, and proportionately bigger welfare state, in general raises the price of everything.  It's a tradeoff.  Local taxes raise the price of doing business in Grand Rapids, and those costs also get passed on to me as a consumer.  But I also get something for it--parks, pretty good snow plowing on public roads, subsidized garbage and recycling collection, among other things.  Canadians have a higher cost of living, they may have to wait longer to get in to see a doctor or get a procedure, but they don't have to deal with the bureaucratic nightmares that private health insurance companies routinely give health providers and consumers (see Care Abroad: Canada).  They spend less on healthcare individually, and as a whole (the US spends the equivalent of 9.5% of its Gross Domestic Product on healthcare, Canada spends 8%).  And Canada has better results.  According to the UN's Human Development Index (for Canada, for the US):

Under five mortality (per 1,000 live births)--Canada: 6; US: 8

Life expectancy at birth--Canada: 81.1; US: 78.7

Overall health index--Canada: .964; US: 926

I know my cousin's question wasn't about comparing healthcare in the US and Canada, but I couldn't resist some talk about that comparison.  After 20 some years of hearing my wife's experience as health care administrator, and fifty some years of living in a country that sadly tolerates a great deal of inequality (see map below for example), I'm all for single-payer universal health (with opt-out options for the rich who can't bear to mix with the masses).  But I realize that's fanciful.  We can't seem to even get a market-based, private-insurance-friendly healthcare reform off the blocks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/15/
map-how-35-countries-compare-on-child-poverty-the-u-s-is-ranked-34th/

Values Cruising with Cruz

Oh, another Values Voter Summit, a gathering of social conservatives that stands for "faith, family, and opportunity for all."  Yes, well, it's actually one that stands for a particular strand of Christian faith, a particular kind of family, and opportunity for all except for those who are G, B, L, or T, or those undocumented that do their lawns, build their roofs, or clean their hotel rooms.

Checking out the list of speakers, I saw a number of right-wing has-beens, a symptom of the Summit's growing irrelevance to national politics and the US political culture:

Rep. Michele Bachman (R-MN), under the haze of a Congressional ethics probe, is not running for re-election in 2014.   She recently made the false claim that the Obama administration is arming Al Qaeda in Syria, and added that this was a sign of the end times (yes, please, Jesus, come take her away).  Of the 59 Bachman statements Politifact evaluated, 8 were deemed mostly false, 21 false, and 16 "pants on fire." What an icon of truthiness.

Gary Bauer, head of American Values, and one of the most strident anti-gay guys in the US.  His position has becoming increasingly marginal as a growing number of Americans, even conservatives, simply don't share his homophobia (see, for example, this Pew report).

Glenn Beck, booted by Fox a couple of years ago when advertisers finally could no longer stomach his loony-tunes musings.  He continues his asinine conspiracy theorizing via his Blaze media network, reaching a smaller, but apparently more devoted audience.

Jim DeMint, a Senator (R-SC) who suddenly resigned at the beginning of this year and took the position of president at the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation.  Evidently he prefers the well-paid bully pulpit to the harder work of governance.  Last May Heritage published a report asserting that comprehensive immigration reform would cost trillions of dollars and grant undocumented migrants that now pilloried status, "amnesty."  Critics on both the left and right panned the report's math.  They also noted that one of the authors, Jason Richwine, has regurgitated the 19th century racist theory of phrenologists who believed in a racial and ethnic hierarchy of intelligence (Hispanics and blacks are on the bottom).  As Jamelle Bouie suggests, his move to "exercise power from a different perch has backfired, and on this issue, [he is] a more marginal figure than he was in the Senate."

Allen West, a one-term Representative (R-FL) known for a host of outrageous comments that probably spelled his failed re-election bid in 2012.  Along with saying that a number of his Democratic colleagues were out and out commies (Joe McCarthy must have smiled in his grave), he said

These Planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women, and all of these women have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness. . . .We are not going to have our men become subservient [see here for more silliness].

But other invited speakers are up-and-coming darlings of the hard right.  Ted Cruz is one.  The Values Voter Summit just anointed him in its straw poll for the 2016 presidential elections.  He took 42% of the votes, with Dr. Ben Carson (who??) in a distant second with 13%.  These straw polls have been good predictors of electoral failures.

2009 Mike Huckabee
2010 Mike Pence
2011 Ron Paul (Tony Perkins sniffed that Paul won only because he bussed in libertarian supporters)
2012 Mike Huckabee

Why do people with the right values--the rest of us have the wrong ones, don't you know--like Cruz so much?  Here's some choice lines from his Summit speech, and why they likely worked for his audience.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/what_if_we_demanded_ted_cruzs_papers/

Cruz tells it like it is.  Obama has dictatorial ambitions:

This is an administration that seems bound and determined to violate every single one of our Bill of Rights.  I don't know that they have yet violated the Third Amendment, but I expect them to start quartering soldiers in peoples' homes soon.

Senator Cruz must be powerful to get around President Hussein Obama's clampdown on the First Amendment right to free speech.

Cruz is a funny guy, even while reminding of us of what we must fear:

So this afternoon President Obama has invited the Senate Republicans to the White House.  So after leaving here, I'm going to be going to the White House.  I will make a request.  If I'm never seen again, please send a search and rescue team.  I very much hope by tomorrow morning I don't wake up amidst the Syrian rebels.

Oh, please be careful Senator Cruz. You've been targeted for oppression, but you bravely accept the risks, all delivered in dark humor. What a non-subservient manly man!

Cruz mocks the French, a sure sign of fidelity to all those who truly love God and the US, and who see the two as joined at the hip:

Our foreign policy is detente, which I'm pretty sure is French for surrender.

Oh, those frigging French.  Please, Senator Cruz, give us Freedom Fries again!

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/
0,28804,2061530_2061531_2061545,00.html

Speaking of God, you should know, according to the Values Voter Summit, that a "war is raging for the soul of America."

I suspect there's only one group fighting this war, the sponsors of the Summit.  The rest of us are just hoping for reason to reign in DC.

In Honor of Columbus Day, 2013

Excerpt from the Requerimiento, a document drawn up in 1513 that the Spanish conquistadores were to read to the indigenous inhabitants upon claiming ownership (read in Spanish):

http://ows.edb.utexas.edu/site/tejano-history-
curriculum-project/alonso-álvarez-de-pineda-visuals

On the part of the King, Don Fernando, and of Doña Juana, his daughter, Queen of Castille and León, subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants notify and make known to you. . .[that] we ask and require you that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen Doña Juana our lords, in his place, as superiors and lords and kings of these islands and this Tierra-firme by virtue of the said donation, and you consent and give place that these religious fathers should declare and preach to you the aforesaid.  If you do so, you will do well. . .But, if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them. . . 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Portraiture_of_Elizabeth_I_of_England

Queen Isabella's instructions to the comendador of Hispaniola, Fray Nicolás de Ovando, regarding indigenous labor, sent in 1553:

I have commanded this my letter to be issued on the matter, in which I command you, our said Governor, that beginning from the day you received my letter you will compel and force the said Indians to associate with the Christians of the island and to work on their buildings, and to gather and mine the gold and other metals, and to till the fields and produce food for the Christian inhabitants and dwellers of the said island; and you are to have each one paid on the day he works the wage and maintenance which you think he should have. . .and you are to order each cacique to take charge of a certain number of the said Indians so that you may make them work wherever necessary, and so that on feast days and such days as you think proper they may be gathered together to hear and be taught in matters of the Faith. . .This the Indians shall perform as free people, which they are, and not as slaves.  And see to it that the said Indians are well treated, those who become Christians better than the others, and do not consent or allow that any person do them any harm or oppress them.

The Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas's accusations regarding Ovando's response to Queen Isabella's commands, written sometime between 1553 and before de las Casas died  in 1566:

http://floridamemory.com/items/
show/146229

1. I have already said and I repeat, the truth is that in the nine years the comendador governed the island, no measures were taken for the conversion of Indians and no more was done about the matter nor any more thought given to it than if the Indians were sticks, stones, cats or dogs. . .

2. He [Ovando] disrupted villages and distributed Indians at his pleasure, giving fifty to one and a hundred to another, according to his preferences, and these numbers included children, old people, pregnant women and nursing mothers, families of high rank as well as common people. . . 

3. The men were sent out to the mines as far as eighty leagues away while their wives remained to work the soil. . .Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides that they had no mind for marital communication and in this way they ceased to procreate.  As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7,000 children died in three months. . .

7 I believe the above clearly demonstrates that the Indians were totally deprived of their freedom and were put in the harshest, fiercest, most horrible servitude and captivity which no one who has not seen it can understand. Even beasts enjoy more freedom when they are allowed to graze in the fields. . .

I'm not Dr. Schlewitz. I'm Luna Lovegood.

Luna Lovegood
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Luna_Lovegood

According to the Myers Briggs personality survey, I am an INFP, that is, Introverted-Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving (you can find out what you are here).  According to some Harry Potter super-fan folks, that makes me most like Luna Lovegood, which I find pretty funny.  The blonde who wanders around dreamily blurting out incoherent things.  Must be why my students don't understand me.

But the Harry Potter site has a much more positive spin, describing INFP folks as

Idealistic, loyal to their values and to the people who are important to them. Curious, quick to see possibilities, can be catalysts for implementing ideas. Seek to understand people and help them fulfill their potential. Adaptable, flexible, and accepting.

I'm okay, and so are you, pineapple.

Yeah, well, these kinds of surveys are designed to make people feel good about who they are, as is.  It is a reincarnation of the 1950s The Power of Positive Thinking, or the 1960s I'm Okay, You're Okay, or the 1970s Passages.  I'm not sure why I'm so resistant to being told good things about myself.  Sure, I have streaks of idealism, and have paid now and then for sticking to my principles.  But I have current of cynicism, and there are times when I have abandoned my principles.  I have tried to understand my students and help them, when requested, to fulfill their potential, but one uncomfortable lesson I've learned about myself over the past few decades is my capacity for disdain.  "Adaptable, flexible, and accepting?"  Like my body, increasingly limited.

I'm listening now to my internal Lutheran voice, the one Garrison Keillor has mimicked so well on Prairie Home Companion.  Introverted?  Just means I'm a snob who can't deal with the masses.  Intuitive?  I guess a lot.  Feeling?  I worry far too much about what others think of me.  Perceptive?  About others, but not myself.

Sorry.  In a poor mood.  A gray, rainy day.  Watched the Giants lose big time to the Broncos, interspersed with depressingly stupid ads of Pepsi, Call of Duty, and various beers.  In the basement, by myself.  Guess I really am INFP.

Movie Reviews: Too Bad The Spring Breakers Didn't Face The Impossible

WARNING: All sorts of spoilers.

The other day I jumped the gamut of cinematic art--from film as a slap in the face to one intended to inspire.  Spring Breakers and The Impossible.

I started the first, knowing I was entering this movie with predispositions and baggage.  I already have a class conscious-cum-stern Lutheran knee-jerk reaction to the very idea of college kids rushing south to enact some banal version of bacchanalia.  In my undergrad days (hrumph), in Reagan's "morning in America," I worked full time during spring breaks to make ends meet (plus, you know, I biked miles through perpetually flooded streets while at Oregon State, always uphill).  And my introverted sensibility could not have born partying with hundreds or more of unknown people in various states of drunkenness and dress.


The Beatles, Baby You're a Rich Man (Magical Mystery Tour, 1967)

The closest I came to this was a night of bar-hopping soon after my 21st birthday--and I will forever associate partying in a human herd with desultory dancing to a Beatle's medley mashed together with an ear-bashing 4/4 techno beat (BOMP bomp bomp BOMP, and repeat), vaguely pretty women trying not to look bored or disappointed (they had good reason, no doubt), an air of sexual tension suffused with competing, clogging colognes, smoke, and alcohol, and the second worst hangover in my life (the worst was after a night of rum and cusha at a going-away party in Guatemala).

Scene from Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, Writer/Director)
Source: Salon.com

But I had heard about Harmony Korine's previous controversial movies (Kids, Gummo), and decided to finally give this cult-status moviemaker a try.  The story centers on four college girls, bored, and desperate to join others heading to Florida for spring break.  Apparently, they've known each other since kindergarten, are very close, though one is an evangelical Christian (her name, Faith, has me immediately smelling clumsy allegory) and the others (Candy, Brit, and Cotty) spend class time doodling penises and partying hard the rest of the time.  The poor girls don't have enough money for the trip, though somehow the three baddies with cutesy names have enough to score coke.

But this movie isn't about plausibility, it's about polemic, and parody.  The scenes of spring break partying on the beach or in cheap hotel rooms are idealized.  Impossibly, all the young partiers have beautiful sculpted bodies as they dance ecstatically, guzzle beer, snort lines, with guys taking pics of girls baring magnificent breasts, and the girls just delighting in being little more than objects of sexual desire.  Debauchery is just non-stop fun!  Korine makes it clear, though, with dreamy color schemes, slow-motion moments, and jarring editing, that this is a fantasy.  He does give us a few dark moments: a girl collapsed head-down by a toilet, a near rape scene, and the creepy ATL Twins doing lines on a comatose girl's naked body.  But the party rocks on.

Sadly, I suspect some viewers won't get the joke.  It will be party porn, similar to what Anthony Swoffard described in Jarhead, young marines watching anti-Vietnam movies like Apocalypse Now or Platoon, not for the critique of war, but for the "magic brutality" of the combat scenes.

There's brutality in Spring Breakers, too.  The girls find a way to reach spring break nirvana after the three more nihilistic ones--Candy, Brit, and Cotty--rob a restaurant and its patrons, wielding squirt guns and hammers, which they use with abandon, clearly loving the mayhem and fear they provoke.  Once down in St. Petersburg, they are in paradise.  Faith never wants to leave, never wants the moment to end, uttering fatuous lines to her friends, her mother, her grandmother, about how perfect it all is, how she's found herself.  But it does end, she does leave, lost again.

First, they get busted at a party for drug use, and spend the night in jail.  A rising local drug lord named Alien had noticed them before and shows up to bail them out.  But his scene scares Faith, and she's on the bus back to boring college, weeping.  Later, in one of the more nightmarish scenes in the movie, a prelude to a stint of violent crime, the three girls are in swimsuits and pink ski masks, dancing around with guns, while Alien plays a Brittany Spears song on a white piano, as a garish sun sets on the sea around them.  They look like a vivisectionist experiment grafting feral skinned mole heads onto nubile teen bodies.  Predictably, I suppose, this image has become something to emulate in pop culture rather than an occasion to think critically about pop culture (I don't want to promote the websites by naming them here--but if you just google "spring breakers scenes pink ski masks...").

Soon things get too rough for Cotty.  After she's shot in the arm during a showdown with Alien's competitor, Archie, she's also on the most unmagic bus, glumly headed home.  "Spring break forever," is a repeated in the latter part of the film, but it isn't.  The remaining two girls shame Alien into avenging Cotty and his manly honor.  It's enough to screw him and then call him "scaredy pants," thus giving him the choice of their bodies or their contempt.  A no-brainer (literally and metaphorically), and they're off to do in Archie and gang, Candy and Brit in day-glo yellow bikinis and those pink ski masks, their beautiful bottoms swinging in time with the guns in their arms.  Alien is downed immediately (the pathetic Alien, who not long before had repeated "Look at all my shit" to the girls while showing them his money, guns, hat and shoe collections, and his Calvin Klein cologne).  The girls massacre the entire Archie entourage, briefly stop to caress Alien's dead face on the way back, and then drive back to Anywhere University in his car.

The point of the parody?  Not surprisingly, the Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney didn't think there was much of one, just an interesting experiment in pop-art that is "bound to acquire at least minor cult status."  But according to Boston Globe's edgier Ty Burr:

Korine delivers a teenage apocalypse that’s shocking and stupid and exhilarating and tender in equal measure. “Spring Breakers” fuses our worst nightmares and most reckless dreams of freedom until the two become indistinguishable.

Well, I'm neither as dismissive as Rooney or excited as Burr.  I was, believe it or not, once in my late teens and early twenties, and remember the yearning for freedom to do just whatever I wanted to do, to hell with consequences.  But I'm sure that yearning does not disappear in later decades for most people, who go to lesser and greater lengths to ignore it, or keep a lid on it (for the record, I've tried both lesser and greater).  Adults hardly have a monopoly on virtue.

Also, having taught college students for the past twenty years--and hearing variations of "kids these days" ad nauseum--I can't buy the notion that the current cohort of youth is any more rife with self-indulgence or nihilism than the previous cohorts, including my own.  And who raised all those awful kids, anyway, or taught them?  On top of that, over the years I've known many students who have been anything but self-indulgent and nihilist.  In other words, I think the parody in Spring Breakers is too harsh, too generalized.

At the same time, I think the film's most important critique has been missed by most.  It's the ending.  The two middle class students, who have gone to the marginalized poor white and black populations for their highs, who have fed on their cultural fodder, get them all killed, and get away with nary a scratch.  Korine's allegory is in part about class, and it made me think of young grads going into Enron at the end of the last millennium, living large while helping trash California's energy economy (for examples, see the documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room), or more recently, young grads making mounds of money off of mounds of toxic debt that drove us into "The Great Recession" (listen to This American Life's Giant Pool of Money or Another Frightening Show About the Economy).

But that message about class, unfortunately, is likely lost in the question of gender.  Why does Korine make four young women (three of them, as many have noted, from the relatively innocent world of Disney) the fulcrum of his ironic catapulting launch against youth pop culture?  Women can be as badass as men?  A hipster cool point that the masses (especially straight guys) will like the Spring Breaker fantasy, thereby confirming their idiocy (and justifying the condescension)?  I am still a bit mystified, but maybe that was Korine's intention--unsettle the viewer.

So, time for something far more conventional.  Incredibly conventional.  Talking about The Impossible after Spring Breakers is like wolfing down a McDonald's combo meal on the road after a gluten-free free range entree at a restaurant with distressed furniture, and artfully pierced and tattooed servers who in their off-time ride with a biker gang.

But some times a quarter-pounder and fries ain't all bad.

Scene from The Impossible (J.A. Bayona, Director)
Source: aceshowbiz.com

The narrative in Spring Breakers was anything but straightforward, full of sudden cuts, flashbacks, repetitions, foreshadowing and backshadowing.  The Impossible story moved chronologically from an opening that fleshed out the main characters, to a horrific tsunami that separates them, a harrowing aftermath as they look for each other, and a soothing denouement where the main characters are reunited, hurt, but not broken.  All based on a true story (the 2004 tsunami that swept through countries abutting the Indian Ocean).  Humans can survive grave disasters.  Families can remain intact despite awful calamities.  Those are assurances most of us like to hear, even if we know that not all humans survive, not all families remain intact (the movie makes that clear, too).

The movie delivers that assurance with good direction and storyline, great effects, and marvelous acting.  I was so taken in that I didn't think about the craft involved, except for one moment of wondering, "How did they make this all so believable?"  So different from watching Spring Breakers, where every other moment I'm thinking about the moviemaker's flourishes, as if Korine were muttering in my ear, "Hey, look what I do next..."

The story follows a British family--mother, father, and three young boys--living in Japan, which decides to spend Christmas at a lush resort in Thailand.  Naomi Watts plays the mother, playing her so well that she received her second Academy Award nomination (the first was for the 2003 21 Grams).  I'm not sure why.  She was great in The Impossible, but being thrown around by a flood or lying in bed on death's door was not as complex or compelling as her roles in 21 Grams, Mulholland Drive, Eastern Promises, or even I Heart Huckabees.  I thought the notable star was the boy playing her oldest son, Tom Holland.  Really, all three boys were eminently believable.

I checked in again with Rooney and Burr and their takes on this film, and they again took opposite sides.  Rooney gushed over it, calling it "one of the most emotionally realistic disaster movies in recent memory." Burr, though appreciating the moviemaking, in the end deemed it "frustratingly myopic." I suppose I agree more with cynical Boston than starry-eyed Hollywood on this one.

A problem I have with the movie is, again, connected to class--this habit of framing horrible events that disproportionately affect the poor and people of color through the eyes of relatively wealthy whites.  I mean, give me a break.  The moviemakers couldn't even handle giving the audience the family from Spain on whom the screenplay was based?  Granted, there are understandable commercial reasons for anglicizing the characters.  It's easier to give us dumb Americans a way to avoid sub-titles.  It's easier to avoid the awkwardness of having a Spanish family indicated by actors speaking with a Spanish accent (oh, and then the hassle of picking one of Spain's vernaculars).  As well, white audiences who make up the more lucrative cinema market will more readily identify with white characters.  And, after all, thousands of white tourists were injured, died, or went missing as a result of the tsunami.  One need only glance at the BBC's partial list of the 149 missing and confirmed British dead to get a sense of all the heartrending pain for survivors and their families and friends back home.

2004 Asian Tsunami
Source: tsunami.com

Still, according to Wikipedia, in total there were over 148,000 confirmed deaths, close to 46,000 missing, 125,00 injured and 1.69 million displaced.  Most of these casualties occurred in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.  The Impossible ignores the global scope of the disaster and its victims, and the fact that the tourism trade for wealthier white folks exists because of poorer countries with ample supplies of very cheap labor and a need for hard currency.  It also avoids the plausible observation that natural disasters are so much more disastrous in places like Thailand, in part because national governments that expend resources on facilitating vacations for the wealthy have less to direct toward disaster prevention and relief.  Sure, all that context could make a movie screenplay unwieldily.  But it would be something if fewer movies depended on universalizing the experience of the rich and beautiful, while excising the misery of the rest of the people.

Okay, I'm grousing.  I enjoyed the movie, was moved by this story of the human will to survive, of the capacity for humans to put others before themselves in a crisis, and of the love in a family that pulls its members back together in spite of great odds.

But as with many things in my life--film, books, sports, teaching, politics, etc.--I can enjoy something, but still be unhappy with aspects of it (and vice versa in the case of Spring Breakers).

Some Mild Adventures at the OAS General Assembly

I'm on the board of the Institute for Democratic Dialogue in the Americas (IDDA), a non-profit that runs the annual Model OAS in Washington DC, a simulation for college students from across the Americas.  The IDDA executive committee agreed to subsidize my travel in June to Antigua, Guatemala, to attend the Organization of American States (OAS) General Assembly.  The OAS, a kind of UN for the Western Hemisphere, recognizes IDDA as a "civil society organization," and has been encouraging more input into its deliberations from these organizations.  So that's how I ended up in Antigua, attending the 43rd OAS General Assembly, convened  to produce a "Comprehensive Policy against the World Drug Problem in the Americas."

As happens every time I return to Guatemala, I felt like I was just picking up where I left off, as if the months (or years) away had been a brief timeout from a life that is a fusion of Peace Corps volunteer, archival historian and quasi anthropologist, and gringo tourist.  And as usual, the typical patterns of my Guatemalan life unfolded in different ways.

Calle del Arco, Antigua, Guatemala

1) The General Assembly was held at the Hotel Santo Domingo, a lujo place way beyond my means.  Instead, I stayed at the Casa Cristina, a modest but comfortable pensión, about a fifteen minute walk away.  That walk took me through the Calle del Arco, an oft-painted and photographed scene in Antigua.  As I passed under the arch, I saw three Mayan girls sitting on the sidewalk, chatting away. They're vendors; I could see bags of wares between theirs legs.  It was early morning, so maybe they weren't expecting a gringito to pass by at this hour.  Or maybe it's just that they were kids, taking their time to get what was, no doubt, a trying workday started.  They didn't notice me until I began to curve around their outstretched legs, and then they sang out "Hola, amigo, comprame unos manteles...muy bonitos.  When I didn't pause they lamented "Ay, favor, no compra algo?" As I continued I said "Ay, no, pero gracias."  As I passed the last girl she let out a hard sigh of frustration and swatted the back of my leg with her shawl.  I kept walking but looked back and smiled.  They were frozen, but suddenly burst out in laughter--they couldn't believe their precociousness, I'm guessing.  I took it as a good omen for their sales.

Mayan women celebrating Semana Santa
Antigua, Guatemala

2) Near the entrance of Santo Domingo, a few Mayan women and men hung around selling the standard tourist wares.  One young woman tried a number of times to sell me jewelry, trotting out some stock English phrases in a nasal, flat, almost robotic tone.  When "Good price" or "Very pretty" didn't get me to stop, she would call out, "Okay, maybe later." The last time I saw her, I did finally reply.  I said "Tal vez," and then, wryly, "Si Dios quiere"  (Perhaps, if God wills it).  She looked at me, as if she were trying to read me, and then laughed, and practically skipped away saying "Si, si, si Dios quiere." I decided my irreverent diplomacy was worth hearing her own voice.

3) One late afternoon I was again at the entrance, waiting for a bus to take me to another hotel where they would celebrate the formal inauguration of the OAS General Assembly.  While standing there, trying to ignore a warm light drizzle, I saw a change of the guard--Guatemalan special forces.  Two men, with impressive builds, berets rakishly askew, climbed out of a truck.  Automatics slung over their shoulders, pistols on their hips, they angled my way.  One began almost to swagger when he caught my eye on him.  And I would have accepted his macho superiority were his finger not jammed up his nose.

4) So I finally got a bus to the inauguration--at the Hotel Finca Filadelfia just outside of town, another luxurious resort that I could only visit as an itinerate, obscure diplomat.  Some young women--I guessed student interns, with blue blazers and yellow scarves emblazoned with the OAS logo, orchestrated our way onto the bus.  One intern who got on last, upon seeing a senior diplomat standing in the aisle, glared at a fellow intern sitting near him.  She told her, in a pleasant voice with an undertone of outrage, to get up and let "el señor" have the seat.  The diplomat was now equally upset.  "No, miss, never!  I'm fine.  I would NEVER force a lady to stand while I sit!"  "I would die if I did that," he added in a loud mutter.  There were some affirming noises, some laughter, and I was thinking "The man doth protest too much..."

K'iché Mayan Women at a clinic
San Francisco La Union, Xela

5) All the understandable security checkpoints and re-routed traffic slowed our bus.  What should have taken 15 minutes took three times as long.  But the mood remained light on the bus--lots of happy chatter around me to keep my mood up (I'm not one for crowded social occasions where I know nobody, and sometimes even those where I do).  My mood dropped when we reached the entrance to the session hall.  Someone--probably a tourism official a Guatemalan friend later told me--had the bright idea of placing a human statue at the doorway.  She was a beautiful, if slightly emaciated, white woman dressed in full Mayan traje, surrounded by stalks of corn, baskets of breads and multi-colored beans, and giving us a frozen smile.  After a couple of days of wandering among real Mayan women, attending an international forum dedicated to the rights and dignity of indigenous peoples, I was mystified by the thoughtlessness.  I know I shouldn't have been surprised.  This kind of elite appropriation of the heritage of marginalized indigenous peoples has been, is, common, not just in Guatemala.

Anyway, this living statue was the set up for "el show" we were to see after what turned out to be stultifying inaugural speeches.  I didn't stay to see the show, nor did many others, who probably had partying on their minds.  Our bus turned out to be trapped in the Finca's byzantine parking lot.  After pulling forward and backing up several times on one access road, the bus driver tried another, but after more forward and reverse, still no success.  We were in purgatory, our punishment for leaving early.  But someone must have prayed for us because, after 40 minutes of this, we finally found a way out, everyone cheering, the driver laughing.  Another 40 minutes later I was back in my room, with two ultimately inedible slices of Al Macarone pizza, and a very drinkable Chilean red.  I was indeed in Guatemala.

An example of the Guatemalan Ministry of Tourism's branding

6) I attended two three-hour "diálogos," sessions in which civil society organization observers gathered to have an informal meeting with Secretary General Miguel Insulza.  These sessions were a combination of panel presentations featuring representatives of different constituencies (e.g., organized labor, human rights NGOs, business councils), mild and fiery soapbox critiques of the "war on drugs" , Q & A moments with the Secretary General, and opportunities for delegates to raise their voices about matters not on the agenda (even though Insulza urged us to stay to the topics on hand).

To me these sessions were remarkable displays of international diplomacy--the effort of people from a wide range of origins, with sometimes radically different agendas and interests, trying to have a useful conversation (and debate) about how to resolve collective problems.  And I think the OAS made a good move in opening up this distinctive kind of venue at the General Assembly.  Alongside the formal, protocol-laden deliberations between the nation-states of the western hemisphere, there is now an inclusive space for more free-wheeling debate among transnational organizations--a recognition of the shifting character of global relations.

Occasionally, it could get wild.  At the first session a group of anti-Chavez men stood up and, amid applauses and boos, presented a list of complaints to the Secretary General regarding Venezuela's recent presidential election.  Evidently, the Venezuelan government's OAS head delegate was on hand, because he was all of the sudden at the podium denouncing this group, while the young men tried to yell over his amplified voice.  They ended up storming out of the session, followed by sympathizers, with others taking pictures or video of the near-relajo with their phones and iPads.  Eventually the Secretary General got the session back in order (there are Spanish-language news report about this here and here).

At the next session, the Venezuelan head delegate apologized for intervening in a forum where all voices should be heard, but later, when a Guatemalan woman spoke out against family planning and same-sex marriage, a majority of the audience stood with backs to her while others cheered and clapped in support.  But as soon as the woman finished her speech, the session was back on track, and again I was getting schooled in the multiple issues that complicate the creation of a comprehensive drug policy--from the standard debates over incarceration versus treatment, to the impact of illicit drugs on worker-management relations, and on to the ways current policies contribute to the "muerto civil" of social groups that already suffer discrimination (women, racial and ethnic minorities, the mentally ill).

I'm so glad for the opportunity to attend this event.  I learned a great deal, and realized there's a great deal more to learn, not just about the drug issue, but about the incredible diversity in our hemisphere.  And I'm grateful for the serendipitous surprises, mentioned above, that greeted me in Guatemala, whether amusing or trying.  While my body is no longer as flexible as it once was when I first went there in 1984, hopefully they will keep my mind and heart that way.

An afterthought.  Here's some Spanish-language TV coverage of the first civil society organization session (in repeated footage of the session about to end, I think that's me up a few rows on the right, with one leg out in the aisle, wearing light-colored khakis).  The report sums up pretty well the principle bones of contention about drug policy but unfortunately doesn't get into what representatives of different civil society organizations had to say.