Star Trek's Multicultural Imperialism

Space... the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.

As evidenced by the crew of the Enterprise, the mission has presumably already been accomplished on earth. On the bridge is a veritable rainbow coalition of skin colors, continents, funny accents, and even a guy from another planet, Vulcan, where all actions are guided by (gasp) reason. Created at the height of the Civil Rights era, the original Star Trek projects the 1964 Voting Rights Act into the future: all races, classes, and gender (although women still wear mini-skirts, thankfully) push the buttons and pull the levers of power as a team. It’s the inclusive dream of liberal capitalism (note, again, ship’s name) come true: democracy, cross cultural understanding, and the entrepreneurial spirit of economic development all mutually reinforcing the fundamental human drive for adventure and creative contact with what’s new. And I love it for this reason alone: it rubs wrong the stodgy, narrow conservatism that hates anything new or different (read: people of color, non-Christians, and gays).

Star Trek XI (the first in over a decade) is, in the best sense, a popcorn movie, a summer blockbuster. It’s awesome big, goofy cliché fun, and jumps up and down like an 11 year-old on a can of Monster. I’m no Trekkie but like many who were kids at that time I watched every episode of the original series multiple times as it was broadcasted daily as reruns in the early ‘70s. With that background, I found the prequel vision of the principle characters fun and, particularly, in the case of Spock even touching. Although, I must say, the cameo appearance of the original Spock, Leonard Nimoy, felt gratuitous (if obligatory) and seemed only to ground a film that otherwise warps through space.

(I am left wondering, though, what the uninitiated make of the cheesy character acting? If they like it they ought to check out more of the original because even as fine as Chris Pine is as the brash young James T. Kirk he cannot prepare you for the Shakespearean hambone antics of William Shatner. And if that’s not enough for you check out Rhino Records compilation series Golden Throats for some Shatner and Nimoy musical performances. Show stoppers!)

At any rate, I’m happy to report that in the Star Trek future discrimination, disproportionality and, apparently, group oppression of any kind disappear. Although, unfortunately, bad guys are still around. Turns out some cultures are just genetically predisposed to being meanies; or, rather, not getting enough love as children, for them, has become a cultural tradition, it is not clear which is the case. In the original Star Trek one group of perennial evil doers, the Klingons, look vaguely like Genghis Kahn’s Mongol horde on a spaceship, evoking a murderous cold war Sino-Soviet hybrid. In the latest installment the bad guys, Romulans, look like white supremacists with a tattoo fetish. Nero, their leader, is bent on revenge against Spock and the Starfleet Federation for failing to save his home planet from an exploding star. In either case these baddies are presented as if they’d be welcomed into the Federation if it wasn’t for the simple fact that they’re all haters and can’t get along with others.

This is just about when, if you think about it, the multicult dream starts to sound like a good old fashion whitewash. Or a Benneton ad, might be more like it! Nero and his Romulan gang want to destroy the Federation because of a natural disaster. Right, and Lil Wayne and his posse are bound and determeined to bring down the United States government because of Katrina. Anybody that doesn’t join hands with the Federation (or celebrate the joys of shopping)must be a cracked sociopath; an “enemy of freedom,” a violent actor filled with blind, misplaced hate. This is the appropriation of civil rights goals to rationalize liberal capitalist imperialism: making the structure of power transparent and inclusive to all races and genders (or other marginalized groups) (or at least commitment to the same) renders opposition to the system as negligible— the actions of incorrigible cranks like Klingons and Romulans. In short: it’s a belief that full civil rights can be achieved without any rethinking and reforming of the system that generates economic inequality. Ideologues of the left and right may snicker at this feel good liberalism but its importance as dream making myth rallying support for the status quo should not be underestimated.

This is no mere red state-blue state divide. Even if the republicans drag their feet on policies that promote inclusiveness, and thinly veiled demagogic bigotry remains their chief campaign strategy, any open opposition to the equal opportunity for all creed would spell their decline, if not total destruction, as a major political party in America. From this viewpoint, democrat or republican, civil rights have become the American Dream in that in America everyone, regardless of their background, ought to be able to strike it rich and live like a King in their castle. But this creed ignores the economic origins of equal rights claims. And the consequences of this outlook on U.S. foreign policy is, in short, an inability to recognize (and so confront and reform) the divisive injustice of American imperialism. Team America is seen as at worst a bumbling superpower with good intentions. By contrast, Kim Jong II is a megalomaniacal dictator threatening world destruction as a way to shore up insecurities about his own power. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Iranian Mullahs view all individual human rights as a conspiracy against the Koran and Islam. Like Klingons and Romulans, these guys were just born evil.

From another viewpoint, however, it is international forces of economic development, beginning with Columbus, colonialism, imperialism, and subsequent mass human migrations, that generated the social ills from which the civil rights movement emerged to correct. It is represented by a democracy for the rich that depends, as viewed globally, on the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of a majority of the planet. It is operationally this amazingly creative machine that makes shiny stuff out of natural resources and human labor but does not take responsibility for its impact on the planet or costs in human life. “Free trade,” the liberal capitalist idea of cross cultural understanding, is a euphemism for: see, you give us raw materials and cheap labor and we will give you Coca-cola and some cell phones. Understand?! Right, Iran’s Mullahs’ are intolerant religious extremists— who rose to power in reaction to the 26 year long U.S. puppet dictatorship of the Shah, who jailed and/or executed any Iranian who opposed him. And, right, Kim Jong is a oppressive, violent, crackpot— who sees nuclear power as the last guarantor of national independence. If the U.S. wants to end nuclear proliferation then, as the country with the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, it needs to lead in eliminating nuclear weapons, of course. And yet, apparently, this is obvious to everyone except Americans.

Truth is most the action in Star Trek revolves around the apparent conflict between Kirk's guts and glory and Spock's emotionally wrought rationalism. But it's precisely this preoccupation with the unification of an Us against a cartoon, evil Them that grates politically. In all likelihood Nero and his angry Romulans, all miners, had probably been aware of the danger of the exploding star that ultimately destroyed their planet for some time and had been asking the powers that be, The Federation, for help and protection, which they did not receive. And as working class people, working for low pay, they did not have the means to move out of harms way but, instead, to provide for their families, they continued to work in these dangerous conditions. That would certainly present a more credible explanation for the maniacal revenge of Nero but it would also put the whole Star Trek mission in a different light.

Star Trek XI must have started production before Obama’s rise but still what timing. Our first black President. Civil rights, led by African Americans, peaked as a movement at a time when class and economic discussion in this country was polarized by Cold War propaganda. Almost 50 years later we live at a time of another civil rights milestone, almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War, and yet the old either-or discourse on economic issues still seems to prevail. Even Obama’s tepid efforts so far to reform a system of wrecklessly inefficient privatizing profit gouging, demonstrating degrees of wealth inequality not seen since the Gilded Age, are pilloried as socialism. Unions are more than ever regarded as shady unpatriotic special interests that hurt competition and are unwilling to make sacrifices for the good of the country. Meanwhile, corporate (let’s compare the criminal records of union’s and corporation’s some time, shall we?) and banking bad actors are lavished with hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts. Even when the evidence that we need economic reform screams out the reaction continues.

In an important way this is a struggle for the soul of America that goes back to the beginning of the republic and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Concerns over national security push back at efforts to mature, to walk the talk of American ideals, to reconcile civil rights with economic justice, in domestic and foreign affairs. Obama’s recent face off with Dick Cheney is the most recent case in point. To Cheney failing to fight fire with fire, failing to take the fight to our enemies, increases the chances of another 9/11, makes us less safe. In other words, torture and secret prisons and suspension of habeas corpus rights and crony capitalism and executive privilege (i.e., to decide who are our “enemies”) are just what it takes to stay free (meaning: rich). On Obama’s side, torture is a recruitment tool for our enemies, provides unreliable intelligence, and is a profound disrespect to our troops in harm’s way. Etc. And around we go… spinning off topic, democrats brainlessly puffing out their chests for fear of appearing weak on national security.

Civil rights progress is measured as slow, hard-won milestones against a, frustratingly, always receding horizon of full equality, and will do so as long as the causes of gross economic inequality go unexamined and unchecked. In contrast with the liberal capitalist dream, as Martin Luther King put it at the height of the Civil Rights era, it’s still racism, materialism, and militarism that we see tragically reinforcing each other in the modern era. It should be a national embarrassment that the U.S. refuses to participate in the International Criminal Court. In the American imperium, as in the Starfleet Federation, multicultural representation or not, there will always be Klingons and Romulans, terrorists and rogue states.

Currently playing: "Life In Marvelous Times," Mos Def

Corporate Frankensteins: The Final Conquest

By Ralph Nader. Democrats will never forgive him but, to me, he’s still an American hero. (One of only a few, by my count.) And still making a case that someday will seem, we can only hope, obvious to everyone.

Corporate Frankensteins

Currently playing:"For All The World To See," Death

Health Care Newsflash--

The profit motive drives up health care costs!

In addition, while increasing costs it frequently hurts the quality of health care.

(There are times since the “free market” bubble burst last fall it feels like waking from a bad dream. Or at least I hope it’s waking up and not just muttering in sleep.)

The Cost Conundrum by Atul Gawande

Currently playing:"Oh Lonesome Me," M.Ward & Lucinda Williams

Johnny Cash American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002)

This is NOT Johnny Cash the shitkicker-folkie man-in-black icon. This is a Mount Rushmore legend, his voice a sepulchral croak. But it reminds me of this broadcast I ran into of Cash and Carter around the same time going through an emotionally wrenching version of “Jackson” and saying goodbye to all their guests as if doing so for the last time. It ripped my heart out. These songs, obvious choices, several he’s recorded before, stamped with the same weary, loving gravitas, do that too. “Freedom, freedom, oh that’s just people talking/your prison is walking this world alone,” he confides, cutting through the everyday murk like a thunderbolt.

Currently playing:"Desperado," Johnny Cash

That's Why They Play The Game

The Cavs were favored over the Magic, even though they’d lost to the Magic both times during the regular season, one of those losses suffering their worst, most humiliating defeat of the year. But the Cavs ended the season with the best record in the NBA and powered through the first two rounds like a locomotive going downhill. The Magic, by contrast, took seven games to dispatch the Garnett-less Celtics and in the first round even allowed the 76ers some reason for hope. By the end of the first game of the Eastern Conference Championship, however, the Cavs looked like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. The formerly supercharged Cavs, w/ the exception of Lebron, looked out of their league. Every position but Lebron’s a mismatch, all in the favor of the Magic. You’d think that the Cavs could take some advantage w/ their faster guards but the Magic defense was always on lockdown, giving up very few fastbreaks. As for the Cavs defense, a strength all season, their frontline looked slow and their perimeter guys totally unprepared for the size of the Magic’s Rashard Lewis and Hedo Turkoglu. It’s a wonder, really, that the Cav’s won two games and a testament, again, to the fact, despite of all the King James hype, this guy is the greatest all-around player to come along in a long time. He’s not quite the scorer that Kobe is but that is the only quarter he gives to any other NBA player right now. His points-assists-rebounds averages have not been seen since Oscar Robertson in the ‘60s. Now Denver, on the other hand, not expected to match up with the Lakers, everyone’s pick this year, looked in games two and four like they were a match and then some. But just as soon as you began to think that this could be an upset in the making the Nuggets rolled over and played dead. It looked like they stopped playing defense but some credit should go to the Laker’s disciplined execution on offense. Still, the number of times Chauncy “Big Shot” Billups drove to within a few feat of the bucket and then gave up a difficult pass instead of shooting was maddening. And Carmelo Anthony had another head-freeze letdown in a big game. Really, Anthony is beginning to look cursed. I should have expected this when notoriously erratic J.R. Smith was the Nuggets best player in their two wins. At any rate, in the championship series, the Lakers will be expected to win. Here’s hoping the Magic can upset those expectations and finish this Dwight Howard coming out party in style!

Currently playing:Buraka Som Sistema's Black Diamond

"The Ballard of Orange and Grape" By Muriel Rukeyser

After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you've read your reading
after you've written your say —
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.

Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack —
sticking out of the crummy garbage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who'd like to break your back.
But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose and pink, too.

Frankfurters, frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans —
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking.

I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE.
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, one each machine.

I ask him: How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? —
How can they write and believe what they're writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE —?
(How are we going to believe what we read and what we write and we hear and we say and we do?)

He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be black and white women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't do.

On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.

Wow, just a walk in the park (or the 'hood), stopping for a hotdog, and reap the whirlwind! What I like so much is the volcanic power building under the surface of restraint.

Currently playing: "You're Not Sorry," Taylor Swift

"cruelty" by Lucille Clifton

cruelty. don’t talk to me about cruelty
or what i am capable of.

when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead
and i killed them. i took a broom to their country

and smashed and sliced without warning
without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it.

it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies,
parts of bodies, red all over the ground.

i didn’t ask their names.
they had no names worth knowing.

now i watch myself whenever i enter a room.
i never know what i might do.

What makes the concision so brilliant is its double-edge. The gulping conclusion. Violence is part of our everyday experience. This is the basis of real conscience: I know what I'm capable of. So "now I watch myself whenever I enter a room." It's both funny and devastating in its humility.


Currently playing:"My Wife's Home Town," Bob Dylan

My Old Friend Is A Monster

Criminally overlooked new wave indie garage (art house) rockers from early '80s Lawrence, Kansas. A fierce blend of jangle and chunky riffage, noodling post-punk bass, hiccuping forcebeat rhythm, and a spastically singular lead voice permanently caught between horny swagger and pubescent emotional crisis. Lyrics are merely willfully obtuse or throbbing hooky eminations from the Id: this post's title, "I must have been stung once," "I think I like you, for goodness sake," "going on a sex drive," "pass my life, pass it by," "roaming through the woods of love," "brought up on hoodoo hive," "if you try, don't try," "we won't be coming back," etc. Their too-cool-for-school (all members wear Clark Kent glasses)revenge-of-the-nerds demeanor (quintessentially Amerindie punk, actually) might appear dated but The Embarrassment make it work because they make every song sound as though they'd stayed up all night cramming. Unheard classic.



Only Al Green could take a song as precious as this one (guess I have a thing for Bee gees songs these days) and make it sound overbearingly sexual, almost menacing. It seems amongst soul man afficianodos Al is appreciated mostly as an eccentric. I'm okay with that: there is definitely an ethereal fragility to Green's art. But this is also a guy who sustained his artistry in peak form for at least five albums, far more than Otis or Sam or Wilson. I resist the label "genius" because of its connotation of inheritance (you're either born with it or not) but I don't know what else to call the whole-body musicality of Al Green.

One Kiss

By Tess Gallagher

A man was given one kiss,
one mouth,
one tongue,
one early dawn,
one boat on the sea,
lust of an indeterminant amount under stars.
He was happy
and well-fitted for life,
until he met a man with two cocks.
Then a sense of futility
and the great unfairness of life befell him.
He lay about all day like a teenage girl
dreaming
practicing all the ways to be unconsciously beautiful.
Gradually his competitive spirit began to fade
and in its place a giant kiss rode towards him.
It seemed to recognize him
to have intended itself only for him.
'It's just a kiss,' he thought,
'I'll use it up'
The kiss had the same thing on its mind,
'I'll use up this man.'
But when two kisses kiss it's like tigers
answering questions about infinity
with their teeth.
Even if you are eaten, it's okay,
you just become impossible a new way.
Sleepless.
Stranger than fish.
Stranger than some goofy man with two cocks.
That's what I meant about the hazards of infinity.
When you at last begin to seize those things
that don't exist,
how much longer will the night need to be?

Our annual spoken word night comes this week, so we've been messing around with some poetry at school. Admittedly, what I know of poetry you could squeeze into a tin can but nearly all my favorite poems don't meet school-age appropriate subject matter and language limits, so this will have to serve as my alternative venue, while I prepare "What If" and "Ode To My Socks" prompts for the classroom. A gentle poke at male vanity, hubris, of "One Kiss," I love best the last few lines: when you at last begin to seize those things that don't exist (i.e., take charge of your long-standing, paranoid, exaggerated, illusions), how long will your self-imposed night need to be? Step into the light.

Currently Playing: "Strange Enough," N.A.S.A.

Don't Stop The Music

Robin Miriam Carlsson, Swedish, goes by Robyn. Starting when she was only 15, between 1994 and 1997, she put out three perfect RnB singles, “You’ve Got That Somethin’,” “Show Me Love” and “Do You Know (What It Takes).” From ’98 to ’04 she put out a couple of LPs and some good music, like the charmer above, that was stylistically a little awkward. During this period she often battled with her record label over artistic freedom and identity. In ’05 she started her own record label, Konichiwa Records, and put out an album, Robyn, finally released in the States last year, that is, as I’ve raved b/f, an electro-pop masterpiece. Christgau dismisses her as a Euro Madonna. That’s fine but she’s more b-girl than diva. She’s a spitfire with a heart of gold. And her sense of dance and melody is right now unsurpassed. I adore her and would like to do everything I can to expand her popularity in the US. Spread the word: Robyn rules!

Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes

A favorite back when I collected only 45s. It all started on trips to the Villa Mart w/ my mom. She'd buy my sister these fruit slice candies and me a 45, as long as we didn't pester her too much while she shopped. My source was Super 62 KGW, Portland's Top 40 station in the late-60s, early-70s. Most of the sleeves were lost almost immediately and I played "Love Grows..." and "Backstabbers" and "The Letter" and "Tighten Up" and "No Matter What" and other faves until I wore as many scratches in the records as there were grooves. They were not being saved for Ebay.

Can Wall Street Play By The Rules?

About time, sheesh. Now I await some insider analysis as to whether this is the real deal or some cover justification for more bailout money. We'll see.

Obama Proposes a First Overhaul of Finance Rules

Currently playing: "My Heart Is Open," Keith Urban

They knew him then, they know him now: Lebron's SVSM teachers are beaming with pride

Terry Pluto/The Plain Dealer Columnist
Cleveland.com

May 4, 2009

There was LeBron James in a dark blue business suit, with a light blue tie looking as much like a young corporate executive as the 24-year-old star of the Cleveland Cavaliers. There was James only showing his nerves as his fingers bounced a bit on the podium.

James took a deep breath and stared out at the packed gym, where he starred for the Irish when they were the nation's top ranked high school team in 2003 by USA Today. But instead of dunking, James was talking about winning the MVP award in a landslide with 109 out of a possible 121 first-place votes.

James thanked his teammates, coaches, friends, family and great players such as Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving "who laid this path before me." He was composed, clear and in his own way (even without notes) and prepared -- just as James was in Allison's speech class, where James earned a B as a sophomore.

"I graduated from here six years ago," said James. "I'm not that far away from this school ... it has helped me become the man I am today."

James told Burdon that he wanted the teachers and students only to be admitted. Instead of receiving his first MVP award in a glitzy studio, he stood in a gym built in 1950 where the walls are cement blocks painted in green and white. The side baskets have old, square wooden backboards. The seats are long, wooden bleachers.

As Barbara Wood listened Monday, the school's librarian remembered how a young James would walk into the library and sit on her desk to talk. They'd Google his name on the computer, how there were only a few mentions at first -- then thousands.

She thought of how she corrected his grammar: "There is no such thing as fiddy cent. It's fifty cents ... with an S. It's more than one S."

She fought back the tears as he spoke with such poise, usually keeping the syntax and sentence structure together.

"He didn't have it easy growing up," said Wood. "But he wanted a better life for himself and his family."

James stops by the school a few times each year, "just him, not with his entourage," said Allison. He still wanders into the library and sits on Wood's desk. He also visits Beth Harmon, an English teacher for the last 11 years at the school.

"I had him as a freshman and sophomore, he was a solid B student," she said. "He was a pleasure to have in class, punctual and polite. As a senior, he'd come to my room and grab some of the candy on my desk. I used him to help me grade papers. We stay in touch, we text 2-3 times a week, and he always answers quickly."

Allison had James as a sophomore for speech, and then as a junior and senior for English. Allison said he knew James was a good basketball player, but had no idea of his national reputation until the middle of his junior year -- probably when James first appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

"I remember his senior year, he gave a speech in my English class," said Allison. "I worked with him a lot. I told him that he'd need these skills, and he has used them well."

About that senior year speech...

"He talked about why it made sense for some people to jump straight from high school to the NBA," said Allison. "He had to do the research, and give real reasons. I still have his notes."

James went from the inner city Akron high school to the top pick in the 2003 NBA draft and Rookie of the Year. Allison said James drew two pictures that the teacher still has -- one of Michael Jordan, his favorite player and whose No. 23 he still wears. The other was of Macbeth.

"We were studying Macbeth and he drew it with a pencil for extra course credit," said Allison. "For a few years, I had it on my classroom wall. But when he became famous, I took it down and put it in a bank vault."

Headmaster David Rathz said the only once did he have to deal with James on a discipline issue -- for making noise in the hallway. He remembered seeing James in a geometry class, his long legs and knees up, his head down over a desk as he worked a problem.

"As a senior, I called him in and said that I was supposed to tell him and the other students they should aim for college," said Rathz. "But I smiled and said I wouldn't mention it again. We knew he was going to the NBA, but he still made the honor roll in his last grading period. He really wanted to do the right things."

Currently playing: "Strange Enough," NASA

Time Tough in Public Education

SSD riffed (i.e., laid-off) 8 teachers from my school yesterday. After bitching and moaning for a few hours over a beer after school w/ soon to be ex-workmates I walked home, plopped on my couch, deflated, and slept for ten hours. At lunch today people were talking about turning out for the School Board Meeting next week. Amidst these cuts, and teacher’s COLA (cost of living adjustment pay raises) frozen, our new Super, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, has been awarded a 10% pay increase. It feels like the Super is spoiling for a fight w/ our teacher’s Union. It’s a story repeated around the country for years now: “failing” schools are the fault of teachers and moribund Unions; the solution is cost-cutting management measures and performance-based number-crunching testing models from the corporate business world. You might think this crap would be wearing a bit thin as the country bails out Wall Street’s failed mathematical models but the simplistic stupidity of NCLB’s testing clampdown continues. It's not that testing or standards or alignment or accountability are bad ideas (or new ones, for chrissakes!)but imposed as the high-stakes be-all-end-all of school reform just distracts and distorts from learning to processing paperwork as evidence of learning. The dirty little secret, though, is that the Union’s intransigent position on teacher evaluations for years is at least partly culpable for these slanderous anti-teacher policies. The truth is that there remain on staff at my school nearly as many teachers as were cut who have been phoning it in for years and put out not a fraction of the creativity and effort of that shown by the 8 riffed teachers. This doesn’t mean I think teacher’s are at fault for “failing” schools. Even calling the schools “failing” has become mostly an agenda to privatize and so undermine public education. (More corporate performance-based management.) Higher on the list of factors responsible for struggling schools, I’d say, are, yes, lack of adequate funding, poor organization, lack of leadership, and a host of social ills for which public schools are at worst a mirror. But the Union has stretched its attention to job security to the point of undermining expressed commitment to student learning. And this dysfunction has made it easier for retrograde ideas ab merit pay and charter schools and the like to get in the door. It’s discouraging. And now the District is just passing the buck, or lack thereof. It strikes me as wrong that public education and health care services should be at the mercy of boom and bust cycles of the economy. Next to our home utilities what could be more basic community services? What could be more essential to America’s democratic promise than public education? And when could there be a more important time to invest in education and health care than in tough times?

Currently playing:"Time Tough," Toots and the Maytals

Hard Times

She keeps the bottle that he sent her for, to this hour; and she will believe in his affection to the last moment of her life, said Mr Gradgrind.

It seems to present two things to a person, don't it, squire? said Mr Sleary, musing as he looked down into the depths of his brandy and water: One, that there is a love in the world, not all self-interest after all, but something very different; the other, that it has a way of its own of calculating or not calculating, which somehow
or another is at least as hard to give a name to, as the way of the [faithful] dog!

Squire, take heart, first and last, don't be cross with us poor vagabonds. People must be amused. They can't be always a learning, nor yet they can't be always a working, they ain't made for it. You must have us, Squire. Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us; not the worst.

It is a dangerous thing to see anything in the sphere of a vain
blusterer, before the vain blusterer sees it himself.

By Charles Dickens

Currently playing:"I Remember Every Kiss," Jens Lekman

Grading O's First 100 Days

The grading period ended last Wednesday. Grades are due. Another crunch time for teachers. After 100 days, somewhere between a quarter and semester in school time, and admittedly not very much time at all in the grindingly slow speed of democracy in our nation’s capitol, Obama is like the student who you think is doing fantastic. A standout member of daily class. Regularly engaged in group discussions, he always has clever, thoughtful things to say. In collaborative activities he assumes leadership responsibilities, suggesting creative solutions to problems and pushing the group work forward. But then when grading, looking back over records of assigned work (fulfilled campaign promises?), you note they have not turned in much and what they have turned in were the simplest tasks requiring the least effort.

Establishing conservative plans to close Guantanomo and exit Iraq, getting a stimulus bill passed (that is too small), opening relations with Cuba, and releasing some memos that authorized torture during the Bush years. Welcome deeds but nothing very substantial.

Worse yet is when you pause to consider more closely the new Pres’s comments on, say, education, a subject close to my home. O’s stimulus bill includes, reportedly, the most money for education ever in an annual federal budget. One of its stated goals is to reduce job losses in education from the economic crisis. But the losses have already started. Cuts locally are being announced weekly without any word from the feds. Another round of cuts in the school district where I work is scheduled for May 15th.

O has repeated an intention that the stimulus money contribute to reforming our troubled public school system. How? Charter schools and merit-pay pop up in his spare remarks like talismans. Without clarifying details these aren’t just bad ideas but, frankly, old hat and dangerously stupid. Charter schools within the public school system, as alternatives programs (e.g., smaller schools, lower teacher-student ratios, more flexible schedules, etc) to the comprehensive high school, are a fine idea. Both comprehensive high schools and alternative programs have their place and should compliment each other in meeting the varied needs of students passing through the ruthless popularity contest and emotional minefield that is teendom. Charter schools as an end-run around teacher unions, however, by profiteering corporations seeking access to public education funding only undermines public education. (O, BTW, sends his own kids to private schools.) Early reports suggest O’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan might be no better than Bush’s Rod Paige. It’s no small irony that in these times of economic crisis public education is going to be saved, again, by corporate conceits.

Merit pay is an even bigger can of worms. Linking teaching pay to student economics—the lower the student economic demographic the higher the pay— makes some sense: certainly, in my experience, the lower the economic demographic, for a host of reasons, the greater the learning challenges and so the more difficult the teaching work. But so far O’s allusions link teacher merit-pay to standardized test scores. This would be idiotic on multiple fronts: 1) Foremost, the pressure to game the system (don’t forget Paige’s so-called “Texas Miracle”); 2) The contested reliability of standardized testing, in general; 3) The impracticality of linking annual test scores from year-to-year to a teacher without looping teacher schedules (which in the short run will weaken instruction); and 4) The tendency to reinforce the already existing tracking system in most schools that matches the more experienced teachers with the easiest to serve students and young inexperienced teachers with the hardest to serve students. I am really not a standardized test basher; such tests have their place. But at my high school the WASL takes up too much time and over time marginalizes subjects not on the test. Moreover, I’ve been to enough meetings on the subject to know the WASL has wrecked even more havoc at the elementary level. I think standardized tests should be part of a graduation portfolio (with course requirements, GPA, community service, etc), not the high stakes be-all-end-all of graduation. At any rate, tying “merit” pay to test scores, really, just continues No Child Left Behind’s punitive model of school reform and accountability. Neither of these— charter schools or merit pay— are new ideas at all. They are parcel to the privatizing, free market stratagem that is crashing down around us as I write.

At this point, perhaps inaction is the best that can be said of Obama’s education policies. His banking plan, by contrast (and still subject to change we can only hope), is already out there. It would be hard to imagine (although we might see even more over the next few years!) more concrete refuting evidence of the Reagan Revolution’s supply side, deregulatory, privatizing, free market bullshit than the current debacle on Wall Street. But rather than exposing the-- literal-- bankruptcy of this economic model, O seems bent on rallying support for necessary reforms talking the talk while at the same time spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on helping giant banks and corporations continue to cover up their gargantuan boondoggle. Bailing out the banks is crony capitalism; bailing out the auto industry, after its conduct the last 30 years, without the most heavy-handed mandates requiring a green restructuring is just plain embarrassing.

Worst, this government coddling has the bizarre effect of keeping alive right wing boilerplate about the perils of big government and socialism and entitlements when in the current context these canards should appear as merely absurd. Government should be big enough to enforce the rules, takeover, and break-up, if necessary, businesses that have become too big to fail (what could be more anti-free market than this notion of businesses too big to fail?). It should be socialist enough to ensure all citizens have the opportunity to share in our national prosperity and are protected from predatory business practices. And, yes, the citizens of this government are entitled to job opportunities, safe food and water, good health care and education, and a fair legal system. These entitlements are the very reason for the government’s existence. Entitlements of the sort (capital gains tax rates on hedge fund managers, for instance) that have generated the widest wealth inequality gap since the 1920s, and the right fiercely defends, are the ones that gotta go.

The risk here, for Obama, trying to maintain popular support while slathering more butter on corporate bread, is NOT small. Bailing out the banks to the tune of hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars risks running the congressional and public wells dry before it’s time to draw support for the reforms necessary to reestablish a regulatory structure that rewards hard work and honesty and rebuilds a green based manufacturing economy that can support a living-wage working class. It’s a risk that is wrongheaded at best. Some, I know, say taking on Wall Street would be political suicide. I don’t believe this and, if not now, then when? And if not ever than things are as bad as some say.

Oh yes, this is what any leftie worth their salt would have said was inevitable given the Clinton team (including Wall Street insiders) O has teamed with in the White House. But I’m not ready to give up on Obama. If we get out of this presidency with a reasonable semblance of affordable universal health care and carbon limits factored into the economy he would be the best president since before my time. And, perhaps I’m grasping at straws, but I see something significant in the video above when Summers gives Geithner a look in the background just as Obama says that when banks play chicken with the government on bailouts he sides with workers and consumers. I still think that with the right leverage O might take a stand and provide the leadership necessary to turn his words on the economy into deeds. Not just because I think O has more to offer in terms of leadership than Clinton did but because in the world today, the pieces are there, financial collapse, threadbare infrastructure and safety net, looming environmental crisis, worldwide pressures from the have-nots, and the time is right for a paradigm shift. Messy, lurching, full of denials, it feels like we’re already in one now.

Like much of America, I’m still charmed by Obama like no President before. I’m still holding out hope that O is the man to lead us out of this wilderness. (And if I’m wrong I had hope for awhile and let it animate my actions.) For now, I recommend President Obama come in after school to catch up on his homework and get some extra tutoring support. Good luck.

Grade: C-

Currently playing: Robyn "Don't Stop The Music"