Dennis Fox’s Weblog

The Senate’s so-called nuclear option seems likely to go into effect in the next few days. That would end the filibuster as a means of blocking majority action, at least in terms of judicial nominations. Despite the likely outcome — swifter and more certain approval of George Bush’s choices to turn the judicial clock backward a century or so — the apocalyptic terminology is a bit overblown. Sure, the prospect of the majority Republicans running things single-handedly even beyond judicial appointments is scary, but what we’ve got today is already pretty scary. Indeed, maybe eroding the bipartisan middle is good thing.

Here’s the broad danger, as described by the Christian Science Monitor:

“It will change the character of Senate,” says Robert Dove, a former Senate parliamentarian, now professor at George Washington University. “Since the 1976 election, no party has had 60 in their caucus. It meant that if you’re going to get cloture, it’s going to be bipartisan. With the proposed rule change, ending debate becomes a much more partisan tool,” he adds.

Beyond appeals to fair play and the Senate’s hallowed traditions, plus threats of holding up Senate business in other ways, the Democrats can do little but hope they someday regain a majority and have a chance to retaliate. That’s not unreasonable, but progressives have another option: stop applauding the kind of bipartisanship that’s brought us the Iraq war, the Patriot Act , and No Child Left Behind and start taking advantage of its end.

There’s a popular myth that bipartisanship is always a good thing, that compromise is always the best outcome, that progress and democracy and good policy always arise in the middle. Many who define themselves as somewhere vaguely in the center consider the political extremes outlandish, dogmatic, vaguely anti-American. That’s why one New Democrat after another has turned toward the middle, abandoning what should be their natural base somewhere on the left. One result is that Democrats become at least as dogmatically wedded to the status quo as lefties supposedly are to trying to change it. Another result is that too many policies are so watered down with concessions designed to amass bipartisan support and avoid shaking things up that they can’t possibly effect meaningful change.

If things work out well, the end of Senate bipartisanship will ripple outward beyond the Capitol. It could reshape the internal Democrat debate over whether to keep trying to steal Republican issues or whether instead to return to the broad coalition of workers, people of color, environmentalists, and others who have increasingly abandoned all hope of Democratic attention. Conventional wisdom may push toward the middle, but the nuclear option exposes that middle’s false hope.

A more militant political force further to the left willing to stand for more fundamental changes in society than today’s Democrats will ever support may find that all those supposedly apathetic Americans really do pay attention to who’s on their side and who’s only pretending. They may even become a majority, without having to worry about Republican filibusters standing in their way.
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First published on eTalkinghead.com

The effort across the country to insert creationism into public school biology classes continues. Replacing the term “creationism” with “intelligent design” and avoiding direct identification of God as the intelligent designer do little to hide the motivation of conservative Christians to inoculate our children against Darwinian evolutionary theory. Biology teachers are up in arms, school board candidates fight about it, and all good-thinking liberals and humanists are appalled.

I’m not quite as appalled, despite my left-of-liberal atheist frame of reference. Don’t get me wrong. I think creationism is a crock. I don’t want Bible literalists determining public school policy — they do enough damage in the private sphere. And I figure evolutionary theory is more or less the way to go despite disputes among competing experts over how the pieces fit together. But what seems to me most important is something I haven’t seen mentioned: the whole creationist-spawned debate should make us reassess the artificiality of dividing the sum of important knowledge into curriculum-friendly, arbitrarily defined parts.

Some creationism opponents say schools should address religious objections to evolution in humanities or social studies classes, but not in biology, where the science must remain pure and natural, untouched by supernatural hokum. That fallback position seems reasonable only when we take separate spheres of knowledge as a given. Interdisciplinary approaches, though, dissect complex issues using multiple strands of evidence. They acknowledge that relatively few major topics, perhaps especially controversial topics, are confined to one single narrow realm. And purely on pedagogical grounds, not addressing in class material that’s clearly relevant and likely to be on students’ minds seems educationally unsound. Whatever happened to the “teachable moment”?

There’s another factor: Perhaps even more than is true for literature and history and Spanish, it’s dangerous to study science in isolation. Broader societal issues are always relevant. Sure, kids need to learn basic principles and techniques to appreciate the discipline and joy of discovery. They need to understand what it means to “think like a scientist.” But they also need to realize that thinking like a scientist blind to their work’s antecedents and consequences is wrong. Atomic bombs come to mind. So do germ warfare, internal combustion engines, IQ tests, and many other technologies advanced by scientists who didn’t always care what their expertise would spark. Science is not value free. Neither is science teaching.

Not only do I think high school students can survive a creationism discussion in biology class, I think many would come away from that discussion with an even greater understanding of what science really means and how scientists respond to nonscientific criticisms. That’s important. Vast numbers of people believe in creationism, in astrology, in other ways of framing the world that drive scientists crazy. Science class is the best place to take those issues head on.

One more point. It might not  be so bad if the fallback position — addressing the creationist attack on evolutionary theory in non-science classes — was really taken seriously and extended to other topics as well. Indeed, public schools that ignore religion’s central role in American life do their students a disservice. An honest education system would move well beyond superficial descriptions of what different religions profess and the importance of respecting differences to assess how religious thinking, religious institutions, and religiously motivated violence so often lead to repression, oppression, discrimination, and disaster. If such subject matter was the norm, we might have fewer creationists making believe they’re biologists.

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First published on eTalkinghead.com

High above whatever lies beneath the clouds below me, I’m on my way to the West Coast. Over the next two weeks I’ll attend a conference (Psychologists for Social Responsibility) and visit friends and relatives, first in Portland, Oregon, and then on Denman Island, off the coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island. It’s good to be breaking routine. It’s especially good that there’s no one in the middle seat next to me, so I’m not completely hemmed in.

It’s almost nine months since I started this blog, primarily to keep track of what was then my planned winter visit to Israel and Palestine, in the context of my conflicted views about events in that part of the world. My regular website, which I still maintain, has more than a dozen columns and essays on Israel and Palestine, plus dozens of political and academic essays on other subjects more or less related to my interests in critical psychology, law and justice, and anarchist politics. In comparison to the the more structured website, I hoped the blog’s easier, more spontaneous approach would facilitate my ability to insert my own analyses and views into a broader public discussion, make contact with others whose interests overlap mine, and focus my attention on Israel and Palestine — the political issue that has come to dominate my attention over the past three years almost as much as it did when I became a Zionist in the 1960s — as well as on other issues that still interest me.

For the most part the blog accomplishes what I hoped it would. It’s a challenge at times to find the right balance between analysis and speculation, first reaction and considered conclusion. Sometimes important things happen that just don’t grab my attention. Frequently I avoid simply rehashing views I expressed elsewhere at greater length. But, all in all, I anticipate continuing this project.

One downside to all this blogging is that too often the process dilutes my enthusiasm for sitting and writing the longer, more structured pieces I used to do more frequently. The blog becomes one more way to stall, along with my local newspaper column, my photography hobby, my Arabic class, and even this flight westward.

I’ve been telling my family, my friends, and myself for a couple of years now that I’m about to start writing a book about my own Zionist history and my subsequent political confusion and reassessment. I would expand on many of the themes I touch on in this blog, assess my participation in Young Judaea and the group that started Kibbutz Ketura, reflect on what moved me in that direction and what moved me away and what moves me today. I think my struggle to work through ambivalence, to dissect the competing strands of tribal identity and universal values, is widely enough shared among many American Jews to make a book feasible. Having a publisher lined up would be more motivating, but in the meantime this blog helps me keep track of things to get to in more detail later. And it’s satisfying on its own. But at some point I should move from a rambling to-do list to something more substantial.

What motivates these thoughts, beyond the imposed luxury of the six-hour flight’s lack of Internet access, may be that last week marked my official end of employment as a university professor. After several years on disability leave, this week I’m officially retired from the University of Illinois at Springfield, with a pension and a certificate naming me emeritus associate professor of legal studies. Since I’ve been on leave anyway, the change in status has no substantive effect (well, the cut in pay is pretty substantive), but being labeled retired at age 56, an age at which my friends and colleagues have years of full-time work ahead of them, stimulates even more self-reflection than the disability label did. Perhaps that’s why a couple of weeks ago I finally gathered together papers I wrote decades ago as a young Zionist. Maybe wading through the morass will get me closer to that book.

I just received an invitation to write about The Design of Dissent, an exhibition at New York’s School of Visual Arts scheduled to run June 3 - July 2, 2005. I can’t make it to the June 3 opening, but may try to get there later on. The website shows a few of the displayed graphics, including the thought-provoking 2002 “Israel Palestine Blood Bath.” Here’s some of the website description:

School of Visual Arts presents “The Design of Dissent,” an exhibition of over 100 political posters and other graphic art from around the world, curated by SVA faculty, board member and legendary designer Milton Glaser and graphic designer and SVA faculty, Mirko Ilić. The exhibition celebrates the launch of the publication The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics, with forward by playwright Tony Kushner, published by Rockport Press.

The exhibition and book examine the varied, vital graphic response to the constraints of government and the “powers that be” from around the globe. The works contain an element of discord, an appeal to justice and an attempt to liberate some truth that lies beneath the surface of public discourse. Tony Kushner states in the book’s introduction, “The political is in the arena of the miraculous, where the collective and the communal, so routinely repressed, so viciously suppressed, stages its returns, where eternal truths and immortal edifices can dissolve in an eye blink, in historical time where change rather than stasis is the only constant.”

“The Design of Dissent” showcases posters, books, buttons, magazines and other ephemera from the 1960s to the present, from countries such as Israel, Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, Russia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Iran, Turkey, Bosnia, Serbia, Spain, Poland, Malaysia, Germany, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico and the United States.

Today’s Immigrant Rights Rally at Boston’s drizzly Copley Plaza attracted a few hundred demonstrators. According to an item on Boston IndyMedia, the annual May Day event

is an effort by “immigrant communities and citizen allies from around the region” to raise awareness of immigrant concerns among the voting public, “show New England politicians that they need to take immigrant concerns seriously and get much more positive main stream coverage for immigrant concerns.” Rally organizers also hope to provide a forum for coalition building among immigrant communities, share victories, and “bring together a diverse array of immigrant communities for a unified show of strength.”

Over half of the over 30 organizations co-sponsoring the rally are new to the coalition, including the Boston chapter of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. According to Hamza Pelletier, who works with the freedom foundation they have done a major push to attract the Muslim community to the event. The group has been promoting the event on the web as well as, “Trying to promote it during Jumua, which is our congregational prayer on Fridays, and advertising through our newsletter which went out to over 1000 people.”

I didn’t notice an organized Muslim presence, but did see a Jewish banner:

A handful of counterprotesters also showed up, some of them wearing “U.S. Border Patrol” hats like the people out there on the border last month keeping us safe from invading Mexicans trying to earn a living doing work most US citizens would rather not touch. My one conversation with a couple of the True Patriots clarified the gulf in world views.

At the rally I picked up a flyer calling for a protest next weekend when the neo-Nazis are coming to town for Holocaust Memorial Day. This is also from IndyMedia:

Billy Roper, the national chairman of the neo-nazi White Revolution, will be in Boston from May 7-8 to protest Holocaust Memorial day. FUCK THAT! Join Northeast Antifascists in telling Roper and the nazi trash that follow him around they aren’t welcome in Boston.
Bash the Fash!    Sunday, May 8th    1:00pm
Congress Park (near Faneuil Hall,) Boston

“Why do so many people support conservative policies that hurt them?” In These Times has a partial explanation:

For an important subset of these policies, the answer is simple: They don’t know the numbers.

Public opinion polls consistently show that people hugely overestimate the portion of public spending that goes to programs like welfare or foreign aid. For example, a Kaiser poll from the mid-’90s found that 40 percent of respondents ranked welfare as one of the two largest items in the federal budget, and 40 percent put foreign aid in this category. At the time, the two largest items in the federal budget were Social Security at 22 percent and military spending at 18 percent. The share of the budget going to Aid for Families with Dependent Children, the core welfare program, was less than 1 percent. Adding in food stamps, housing subsidies and other low-income programs could push this figure close to 4 percent. Less than 0.5 percent of the budget went for anything remotely resembling foreign aid.

The extent of this misinformation is important. If a person believes that 25 percent of the budget is already going to welfare, then she is likely to have a very different attitude toward further spending than if she knew the real numbers. She would believe that welfare spending is already imposing a substantial tax burden—one that must have a real effect on the living standards of many middle income families.

This overestimation of how many low-income people there are reminds me of something I came across in the 1990s while teaching about class inequality. In class surveys, my undergraduate students vastly overestimated the percentage of poor people.

At the same time, though — and this is what In These Times leaves out, though I imagine they’d agree — the students vastly overestimated the percentage of very rich people as well. As a consequence, many had an unrealistically high degree of confidence that they themselves would one day be wealthy. This inflated belief that they would “make it” added to student belief in the “American Dream,” converted in their minds from a stable job and decent house to early retirement with a multimillion dollar bank account.

Why support changing the rules if you think those rules will make you rich?

Last week I noted Juan Cole’s criticism of a New York Times editorial about Columbia University’s response to allegations that professor Joseph Massad intimidated pro-Israel students. Cole amplifies those remarks today in a Salon article called The New McCarthyism. I was struck by this part, where Cole blasts the Times for complaining that Columbia’s investigation committee did not explore whether Massad’s teaching was “fair”:

The fact is that you will never get agreement on such matters of opinion, and no university teacher I know seeks such agreement. The point of teaching a course is to expose students to ideas and arguments that are new to them and to help them think critically about controversial issues. Nothing pleases teachers more than to see students craft their own, original arguments, based on solid evidence, that dispute the point of view presented in class lectures. That is why the New York Times editorial is so wrong, and so dangerous. University teaching is not about fairness, and there is no body capable of imposing “fair” views on teachers. It is about provoking students to think analytically and synthetically, and to reason on their own. In the assigned texts, in class discussion, and in lectures, the students are exposed to a wide range of views, whether fair or unfair.

Cole reminds me of my own university teaching experience. My views were often clear, even as I sought to teach students how to reason and write more analytically. To remain “objective” or always provide even-handed “balance” in courses dealing with the interplay of psychology, law, and justice or the dynamics of racism and sexism would have seemed misleadingly artificial. But, as Cole says, I too relished clear-headed disagreement, much more than the mushy agreement with my politics that some students mistakenly thought would guarantee an A. I tried to teach students that there are almost always both good and bad arguments on both sides of controversial issues. The key to disputing is not to demolish the other side’s silly arguments but to wrestle with their good ones while improving your own less persuasive points. That’s not so easy, either in a university classroom or in the broader world of political engagement.

Unfortunately, my view of teaching, and Cole’s, and from what I can tell Joseph Mossad’s as well, is under attack, as Cole notes briefly toward the end of his Salon piece and as I’ve written about many times previously. That teaching is designed, as Cole says, to expose students to new ideas and help them think critically about controversial issues makes sense to many of us, but not to the forces behind the wave of “educational reform” that continues to re-shape American public education. The federal No Child Left Behind Act and its many state antecedents are designed, through a combination of intention and side-effect, to refocus teaching on memorizing facts rather than challenging ideas, on superficiality rather than substance, on narrow job training rather than critical thinking. Efforts have already begun to move this sort of education reform upwards into the university. The attack on Joseph Mossad, on Ward Churchill, on other lefty professors is only the beginning.

Sex, sloth, anarchy: Fringe has it all in today’s Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail caught my attention because a month from now I’ll be in British Columbia visiting friends. Canadians often claim superiority to the United States, and I think they’re more right than wrong, but more on that after the excerpt:

VANCOUVER — The B.C. Sex Party thinks public schools should teach youths to enjoy sex and masturbate. The Work Less Party says the North American rat race is shortening our lives and wrecking the environment. Then there is the Annexation Party of B.C., which posits that British Columbia would thrive better as the 51st state of the United States. They are the fringe and single-issue parties with platforms ranging from myopic to out there. …. [Y] oung people often gravitate toward fringe parties, especially if they are drawn to a single issue, such as the Marijuana Party’s platform to legalize pot.

However, B.C. appears to have a party to fit every movement: the Green Party, the Natural Law Party, the Western Refederation Party; every belief: the Idealist Party, the Freedom Party; and every anarchist twinge: the Party of Citizens Who Have Decided To Think For Themselves and Be Their Own Politicians.

…. Despite their tongue-in-cheek platforms, some fringe parties have serious messages tucked between the easy gags. Mr. Ince of the Sex Party said mainstream parties are notoriously skittish about dealing with sex issues — be it education or prostitution — because they fear alienating voters. But Mr. Ince said prostitution is a life-and-death issue for thousands of women. Canada’s laws feed antipathy to prostitutes and put their lives in danger.

And while Liberal Leader Gordon Campbell appears to be coasting to a second term, pollsters say there is sufficient public dissatisfaction with the Liberals that some disgruntled voters will vote fringe. But what’s considered fringe east of the Rockies is inching toward mainstream on the Coast. That’s the case with B.C.’s Green Party, which actually led over the NDP in the popular vote in some ridings four years ago.

Except for the Annexation Party’s short-sighted interest in joining the U.S., most of the parties mentioned seem to raise serious issues despite, as the article says, their tongue-in-cheek platforms. However, I’m not sure that running for office is the best way to raise those issues. Once a party begins to imagine actually winning, there’s pressure to drop the interestingly outrageous in order to better appeal to the cautious mainstream. The Green Party’s history on both sides of the Atlantic is a good example.

But I kind of like The Party of Citizens Who Have Decided To Think For Themselves and Be Their Own Politicians.
One of the friends I’ll visit in British Columbia is Ron Sakolsky, who taught as I did at the University of Illinois at Springfield (originally the more interesting Sangamon State University). Ron has an article in the most recent anarchist magazine Fifth Estate (their 40th anniversary edition) about his post-retirement move from the U. S. to Canada. It’s not on-line, but here’s a bit of Ron’s view on the U.S - Canadian divide:

As an anarchist in voluntary exile, I’ve never looked back. What’s hardest about being an expatriate though is that many people here, especially other expats, assume that I am uncritical of Canada and even want to become a citizen. Actually, I prefer Canada to the US with the same wariness that makes me prefer a good cop to a bad cop, never forgetting that both the good and bad cop are often part of the same police state entrapment scenario and neither should be trusted with your liberty….

For starters, I am very aware that I am living on stolen land… Much of BC remains unceded and Indigenous title to the land has never been extinguished…. As always since the original European invasion, the struggle for land and liberty continues unabated…. [Ron goes on to talk about white supremacy, class inequality, and other issues.]

However, Canadians generally seem to me to be less arrogant than their US counterparts in relation to world politics. Canadians, for the most part, don’t grow up thinking that their country is the center of the universe or that they are the toughest kid on the global block in the way that most Americans do. This is not to say that Canada is idyllic.

Perhaps not idyllic, but the week I expect to spend with Ron and his partner on a small island off Vancouver Island’s coast sounds pretty idyllic to me.

After a three-month break, this week I resume my regular opinion column for my local weekly newspaper, the Brookline TAB. I write every two or three weeks about town issues, many of them in the context of broader social and political issues. I’ve been doing this on and off for almost six years, writing about town decision making, high-stakes testing, police discretion, community planning, racism, youth values, and much more.

I used to write more frequently about broader political topics — war and peace, Israel and Palestine, etc. — but ever since the Boston Herald bought the TAB’s owner — Community News Corporation — the editors generally insist all columns must have a local focus. That gets confining, but it also pushes me to see what there is right in my neighborhood. All my columns are on my website.

Despite the paper’s conservative corporate ownership, my editors have let me write about what I want, assuming it’s local. It’s been a challenge writing for a mainstream audience, even in a place like Brookline, a liberal urban/suburban enclave surrounded on three sides by Boston. I do try to write in a style that encourages people to keep reading so they can at least think about the more significant underlying issues. I’ve pissed off a lot of town officials over the years, but I also get a lot of positive feedback; both are pretty gratifying.

Given its local focus, I’m not posting today’s column here, but you’re welcome to read it anyway if this sort of thing grabs you. Transportation Board Digs In addresses a hot local issue I’ve written about frequently: parking. The topic’s triviality crystallizes a number of more significant  concerns, including the interplay among different town decision making bodies and residents acting through a Town Meeting; the proper role of “professional expertise” in a democratic system; the role of personality and turf in town policy;  and one of my favorites, police discretion and priorities.

Last summer I reported on my participation in protests at the Republican National Convention in New York City. I briefly described cops instigating a confrontation on the steps of the New York Public Library.

So it’s satisfying to read this in today’s  New York Times:

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue. “We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed,” the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. “I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own.”

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention. For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.

I doubt Officer Wohl will be charged with perjury for lying about the arrests he claimed to make. Prosecutors and judges who know cops lie rarely do anything about it. Stretching the truth to maintain their own version of order is just one of many common police practices.

Even though these cases are being dismissed, that’s after seven months of activists being embroiled in the legal system — finding lawyers, going to hearings, spending money. It was clear during the convention itself that most of the arrests were bogus, but city authorities were less concerned with arrests holding up later in court than they were in preventing demonstrators from straying past officially approved boundaries and learning not to do it again.  In that they were mostly successful.

I’ve referred frequently in my Brookline, Massachusetts newspaper column to the misuse of police discretion even in a police department that’s “modernized” and “professionalized” over the years. We too have dishonest court testimony and racially biased cops. We even had a bogus political arrest a few years ago, when police arrested Palestinian activist Amer Jubran on trumped-up charges. Those charges were later dismissed, but the town never acknowledged the arrest should never have taken place.

Ward Churchill, Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the latest target of right-wingers trying to force American universities to better serve conservative and corporate interests. Churchill’s characteristically undiplomatic language in an essay he wrote shortly after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center makes it easy for his critics to win public support for clamping down not just on this professor’s radical activism but on every other left-oriented academic. The supposed focus on Churchill himself — his specific word choices, his academic credentials, his personal background — masks the right’s broader effort to rid higher education of anyone who rejects mainstream conventionalisms.

My interest in this issue has a personal component. I began teaching at Sangamon State University in Illinois in 1988, where Ward Churchill received his BA and MA degrees in communication more than a decade earlier. Critics searching the Web for whatever dirt they could find or manufacture about Churchill soon found an article I wrote with fellow professor Ron Sakolsky.  “From ‘Radical University’ to Handmaiden of the Corporate State” described the forced transition from SSU’s early years as an exciting alternative to traditional  higher education to the corporate-friendly University of Illinois at Springfield it has now become. That article — now linked to by enough conservative bloggers to make it the first Google hit when searching for Sangamon State — brought thousands of visitors to my site in February. The 1,847 site visits on February 10 numbered four or five times my site’s more usual tranquil pace.

The article on my site is the third version. The first version I wrote in 1994 for RadPsyNews, a newsletter of the Radical Psychology Network, which I co-founded a year earlier (“‘Radical University’ Celebrates 25th Year and Dies”). Ron and I later expanded that version for the magazine Radical Teacher. We updated the piece again in 2000 for Teachers for a Democratic Culture, which itself came about in response to earlier right-wing attacks on academia. TDC and RadPsyNet both seem to be stagnating a bit, but Radical Teacher remains a valuable resource for teachers who want not only to find classroom resources but to help fight the kind of assault now aimed at Ward Churchill.

Churchill’s primary linguistic excess was the mention of Eichmann, in the middle of his long essay, when he referred to some of the World Trade Center victims:

They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. … To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in — and in many cases excelling at — it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were  too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which  translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

Robert Jensen offers the best analysis I’ve read, agreeing with Churchill’s main argument about America’s long murderous history while offering a critique-in-solidarity of some of Churchill’s specifics:

Let me be clear: … I am not asking Churchill to back down. Nor am I suggesting he should let go of his anger, an aspect of his intellectual and political profile that I have long admired. When Churchill sees injustice in the  world, he does not react as a cold, dispassionate scholar hidden away in a protected office but as a human being outraged by the injustice who wants it to end. There are too few scholars like Churchill, who dedicate their work and lives to ending the suffering that injustice brings. His 9/11 essay conveys that anger, and whatever the differences in interpretation I’ve outlined here,  I cannot disagree with, nor discount, his anger. I remember feeling  a similar anger that day, mixed with the shock and sadness. And  the more I learn about the world, the more I feel it. None of  us should let go of that anger just because others are scared  of it.

The more personal right-wing attacks on Churchill seem silly to me. Whether his SSU master’s degree qualified him to be chair of the Colorado Ethnic Studies Department was a matter for his academic peers and university administrators to decide. Calls for the state legislature to rewrite the rules of tenure and promotion are little more than subterfuge, seeking to eliminate not just Ward Churchill but every other present and future professor who speaks out against American Empire. Similarly beside the point is all the blogging about whether Churchill is really an American Indian or only masquerading as one. Even if Churchill exaggerates his Indianness — I have no way of knowing, and beyond the level of gossip I don’t really care — harping on that possibility serves only to deflect attention from what he actually has to say.

And what he has to say is worth understanding as we move further into the American Century. Over the years I’ve used some of Churchill’s books and articles in my own teaching. His work documents and makes real centuries of oppression and repression, not just of the Native Americans whose cause he identifies with but of indigenous people around the world. The main point of Churchill’s essay, after all, was not the aside about Eichmann but the link between American actions and terrorist response. That link is worth exploring, despite the blinders on those who insist America does no wrong . Churchill’s real sin is trying to remove those blinders, as painful as that can sometimes be.

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First published today on eTalkinghead.com

According to news reports, Al Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s latest audiotape threatening Iraq’s election this weekend noted a variety of specific complaints, but the most important point is this:  “We have declared a bitter war against the evil principles of democracy.” And he added this: “God was the highest authority, not elected officials.”

Westerners often dismiss this kind of God-First talk as bizarrely foreign and even inexplicable. The secular among us often assume that democracy trumps religion, and even many who are religiously motivated embrace  Western-style pluralism and believe, at the same time, that religion and democracy are complementary rather than contradictory. We’re often baffled by those who support a more literal commitment to God’s primacy that makes democracy irrelevant. Yet such commitment is common, and not just in the Islamic world.

Religious fundamentalism is a complicated, multifaceted phenomenon, with a variety of meanings and implications. Generalizing about it, though, I take it to mean a belief in religion’s fundamental truths supposedly as revealed in the past and a commitment to following those truths today regardless of alternative values such as democracy and regardless of consequences for other people, especially those who don’t share the same views. Given my general anti-religious perspective, my negative assessment of fundamentalism in particular is no surprise.

Al-Zarqawi’s explicit preference for God over democracy is matched by fundamentalists of other religions, though often more diplomatically. As I’ve suggested before here, it increasingly seems to me that the three Abrahamic religions have a particularly lethal take on God’s word. Maybe I just don’t know enough about other religions.

Christianity expanded through conquest as much as by persuasion, inflicting atrocity and genocide on those resistant to Jesus. Its fundamentalists, and even many who aren’t fundamentalists, often agree with al-Zarqawi that “God is the highest authority,” a stance that increasingly sets American politics apart from other Western societies.

Islam came out of Arabia with the sword, insistent that Allah is Great and allegiance to him inevitable. Islamic fundamentalists get the most attention today, but their logic is not unique.

Judaism took another route, the Chosen People rejecting forcible conversion and keeping for itself its special relationship to the Almighty. Yet with the rise of Jewish power in a Jewish state, the clash between fundamentalist Judaism and modern democracy becomes more stark. My now-completed month-long visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories was punctuated by growing threats by Jewish settlers to stay in Gaza and the West Bank — as God wants them to, they tell us — even if that means resisting government orders to evacuate.

Religious fundamentalism isn’t the only danger. Nationalism often elicits the same single-mindedness, as in both Israel and Palestine as well as just about anyplace else. But religion raises complications by an order of magnitude. Nationalists can compromise under mutually agreeable terms. Religious fundamentalism makes compromise impossible.

George Bush is pushing ahead with his plan to return the United States to its pre-New Deal state of affairs. The president’s goal, neglected during his first term but now resurrected, is to end today’s widespread assumption that one function of government is to help its citizens. Now it’s Social Security’s turn:

President Bush, who has promised that his plan to allow private investment accounts in Social Security would give workers a ”better rate of return,” is seriously mulling a companion effort that could cut future promised retirement benefits for millions of workers by 6 percent, even when potential gains from private accounts are included, analysts said.

I’m not an expert on the Social Security system, butI’ve paid some attention to it ever since I worked as a Social Security interviewer in the 1970s and then for the Massachusetts Disability Determination Services for a year in the mid-1980s. That’s the state agency that decides if state residents are disabled enough to receive Social Security disability benefits. Indeed, a paper I wrote during my psychology/law post-doctoral work about the political aspects of deciding whether someone is mentally disabled is usually the page on my website that receives the most hits. Social Security remains both troubling and controversial.

Social Security was designed during the 1930s Great Depression to keep old people from starving to death and, coincidentally, to help head-off a growing socialist movement for more revolutionary change. The plan reflected the awareness that far too many people, after a lifetime of work, cannot pay their bills. The working poor would now become eligible for Social Security retirement benefits, a government guarantee that one generation’s workers would help support the previous generation’s retirees.

The politics of Social Security also reflected the reality that, to garner widespread support, those who work but remain too poor in retirement must be treated differently than those unable or unwilling to work on a regular basis. State welfare might or might not help the latter, along with whatever charity could be mustered. But despite its obvious income-transfer nature, Social Security would officially remain a non-welfare program designed to help only the “deserving poor.”

Today, lengthening lifespans and changing demographics make it harder to maintain Social Security’s financial underpinnings. But instead of making manageable adjustments to Social Security to meet the future needs of today’s workers, and certainly instead of going further and erasing the artificial distinction between Social Security’s “insurance” facade and less-favored welfare programs, the trend is to privatize Social Security, thus ending the generation-transfer obligation. “Responsible” middle-class workers may be able to put enough money into private investment accounts to have something to look forward to in retirement (if they don’t become disabled first), but the millions of working poor and even many middle class workers too disorganized to meet approved financial planning standards will be left old and poor.

So much for the New Deal.

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First published today on eTalkinghead.com

Eliot Gelwan writes about the death of Philippe De Broca, reported in the New York Times:

De Broca’s 1966 King of Hearts, an antiwar twist on the time-honored theme of the inmates running the asylum, was a constant presence in my life, having an engagement at Cambridge’s Central Square Cinema in the ’70’s of more than five years in length. The City of Cambridge ought to do something to commemorate his passing; and now is a particularly apt time for a revival of the film.

I too saw the film in Cambridge, a few years after my first attempt in New Paltz, New York failed because my infant son refused to sleep quietly through it. I saw it again in between buses once in Tucson, Arizona, playing as usual with Harold and Maude, another great take on spontaneity and convention. My most recent viewings were of the video. They’re still worth seeing.

For a week now I’ve been too busy to sit and blog. In addition to intermittent preparation for my Israel/West Bank trip and a variety of family and other projects, I’m getting ready to move my little home office downstairs to the basement. So I’ve been going through papers piled on my desk and table and book shelves, filling up my waste basket with old news clippings, meeting notices, and other things I no longer feel the urge to do anything with.

My paper-reducing effort hasn’t yet elicited too many nostalgic aha! moments like those I had in 1998 before moving from Illinois to Massachusetts, when I had to sort through more than a decade of packed filing cabinet drawers. But I have come across items that now seem relevant once again. There’s the four-year old Boston Globe op-ed piece by Robert Kuttner, for example, titled “Bush Picks An Extremist for AG,” referring to the selection of the now-departing Attorney General John Ashbrook. I don’t know if Kuttner used the same title for Bush’s selection of Ashbrook’s replacement, Alberto Gonzales, but he might as well have.

Then there’s the June 2002 Globe article on the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision approving public money for school vouchers, with an accompanying analysis titled “Decision gives few hints of how high a wall remains” between church and state. Bush hopes to appointment judges inclined to dismantle much of the remaining wall. Another article that same day explained that many states have stronger barriers between church and state than the federal system now requires, a topic much in the news in the wake of the latest election’s Red State/Blue State disparity. For some time now, civil liberties activists and others rebuffed in federal courts have focused on state courts instead. That trend will now escalate, with liberals rather than conservatives demanding state’s rights rather than single uniform federal standards. There’s some danger in that, but also some opportunity.

Another 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that same day in 2002 allowed public schools to test students engaged in extracurricular activities for drug use on a random basis rather than only when suspicion exists of actual use. The conservative assault continues. Perhaps that’s why I also saved the clipping titled “Magazine picks Vancouver as pot lover’s paradise.” There’s been a lot of post-election talk of how much better it might be to live in Canada. It gets tempting.

Canada was also mentioned in a Globe column by Christoper Shea after the 2002 congressional elections. The piece, “Class truce: Why the poor won’t soak the rich,” notes that residents of Canada are more likely than those of the United States to end up better off economically than their parents. Despite the American myth of Horatio Alger successes and the media’s focus on the relatively few who make it, our own system is more stratified by hard-to-break class lines than most of us are taught to think. The Democrats are not going to emphasize class war, but someone should.

My desk-clearing continues.

I don’t usually post the columns I write for my town’s weekly newspaper, the Brookline TAB. My regular “Gadflying” column focuses on local community topics, though I frequently bring in broader issues — over the past five years I’ve written about police discretion, high-stakes testing, pressure toward over-development, gay marriage, town democracy, and much more. All are on my website. The site lets interested readers subscribe to receive by email all my published political and academic essays (but not my blog entries).

I’m posting today’s column because it is broader in scope than most and because it extends a bit last week’s post-election blog entries.

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I had planned to write about next week’s Town Meeting, Brookline’s semi-annual exercise in citizen decision making, but my attention keeps returning to last week’s election. As it turns out, though, the Town Meeting Warrant illustrates how Blue places like Brookline differ from all those pro-Bush Red states.

It will surprise few readers that I share the local horror at the president’s re-election. It may surprise some that I don’t share the widespread appreciation for our own Senator Kerry, whose push toward the swing-voter middle proved as wrongly aimed as it was fruitless. Yet still the prospect of Four More Years leaves me as nervous as my neighbors about what Bush Unbound will destroy next.

Still, unlike many of those neighbors, I didn’t find Bush’s re-election incomprehensible. In contrast to so many residents of liberal hotbeds like our own, I’ve actually lived in Red states — a year in Georgia, two in Nebraska, and ten in Springfield, Illinois, technically the capital of a Kerry-Blue state but geographically and culturally right on the Mason-Dixon line.

I rarely felt at home during my interludes away from Boston and New York. My wife and I met good people, liked our jobs, and appreciated the lack of drive-time nastiness. We were pleasantly surprised that so many stores closed on holidays rather than stay open to make extra money. But we didn’t belong.

It wasn’t just that we had to work harder to find independent films, restaurants with hot-enough Asian food, and interesting places to take our daughter on weekends. More draining than the inability of smaller, tamer settings to meet our Eastern urban tastes was the alienation that came from just walking around. I never could fathom waiting patiently for the light to change before crossing lightly traveled streets.

Many of our friends, originally from one coast or the other, also felt out of sorts. Speaking up at work or community meetings to propose changes or complain about unfairness branded us as misfits, or even worse: impolite. Home-grown activists often fared better because they shared more of the local ethos, from food tastes and conversational styles to military experience and religious motivation.

I’m glad to be back east, especially in a town where dominant norms challenge rather than support people bothered by Asian and black faces in the street and gay couples next door.

But the truth is I’m also glad I’ve lived where daily expectations are so different. I’m glad I had students who grew up on family farms, went to church every week, and had life plans far more conventional than mine. I’m glad I liked many of them and that some of them even liked me, that we could connect despite our differing experiences and perspectives.

Nowadays I notice when people in the Northeast sneer at whatever lies west of the Hudson. That cultural norms are more conservative doesn’t really justify the disdain. Not all Bush voters are dupes or dopes.

Here in Brookline, Town Meeting next week will debate whether to require townwide recycling in multifamily dwellings, express disapproval of corporal punishment, and facilitate more low-income housing. Members may rebuke the Transportation Board and Planning Board for paying too little heed to town residents. They will rename a park to honor Sumner Kaplan, one of Brookline’s most public liberals.

Even the most difficult ideological debate — whether to prolong the temporary picketing ban designed to protect abortion providers from anti-abortion protestors outside their homes — pits abortion activists against civil libertarians, liberal against liberal.

It’s different in Red country. Yes, many of those states have almost as many Kerry as Bush supporters. But where the dominant culture sees “liberal” as epithet rather than cause for honor, placing on the public agenda issues like those on Brookline’s seems to many as preposterous as we find voting for George Bush.

If we understood conservative worldviews better, we could more easily demonstrate how left perspectives can complement the rejection by some on the right of materialism and consumerism, individualist selfishness and mass media superficiality, even corporate power and military aggressiveness. Whether we aim to persuade them or beat them, we need to get past our mutual incomprehension.

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First published in today’s Brookline TAB.

I’m as appalled as the next leftist that we’ll have George Bush around to terrorize the planet for the next four years. Unbound now by re-election worries, our lame-duck president can let his true inner Bush emerge. On my end of the political spectrum, that’s pretty scary. But even if John Kerry had won last Tuesday, life wouldn’t be perfect. The Iraq war would continue, corporations would still have too much power, and the rich and powerful would still dominate the rest of us.

Still, the shock at Bush’s victory in the Northeast and on the West Coast demonstrates that not enough Blue-state Americans spend much time in all those Red states. To the surprise of people who’d never move west or south, I actually found things to appreciate during my own sojourns outside New York, where I was born, and Massachusetts, where I now live. But it’s also true that I rarely felt like I belonged.

That sense of not fitting in, of realizing how different my worldview was from so many of my neighbors, of discovering how provincially urban my tastes in movies and music and restaurants were, prepared me for the likelihood that a majority of voting Americans would choose Bush over Kerry. I wondered during the presidential debates if those Red staters would notice or care that Bush couldn’t answer even predictable questions, but I always knew my perceptions might not be universally shared.

As others have noted, the Electoral College’s winner-take-all rule exaggerates the cultural divide a bit. My decade in Sangamon County, Illinois, seemed culturally as Red as the rest of the southern mid-West despite the Blue majority a few hours up the interstate toward Chicago. Even Massachusetts has cultural conservatives, the South and Mid-West liberals and radicals. Yet although the culture doesn’t really split as neatly as the Electoral College map, the cultural divide suddenly on every pundit’s lips has been with us for a long time.

It’s worth noting that Bush’s victory had other causes as well. Like many on the left, it seems clear to me that the Bush campaign’s heavy dose of deceit (or maybe honest presentation of his own self-deceit, to give him the benefit of the doubt) magnified fear and encouraged selfishness. Kerry’s middle-of-the-political-road tepidness, designed to appeal to swing voters, failed to motivate either those in the middle or, more important, the largest bloc: nonvoters. Yet even if Bush were more honest and Kerry more dynamic and a shift of a couple of percentage points had left Kerry the winner, the cultural divide would remain significant.

Two decades ago, trying to make sense of another dismaying event — Ronald Reagan’s re-election — I wrote that many on the left as well as on the right seek community and mutuality rather than isolation and alienation, even if the communities they would prefer might differ sharply from one another. It’s reassuring to think there might be some commonality across the divide, eventually.

In the meantime, we’ll see more battles than reaching out to the other side. Bush’s pledge to end divisiveness will prove even less meaningful than his identical pledge four years ago. If he and his people have their way — if the left doesn’t regroup quickly and effectively — our lives will become more restricted, our role in the world more aggressive, our society more unequal. What’s shocking, though maybe not surprising, is that some people knowingly seek such outcomes. That so many more accept them is sad.

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First published today on eTalkinghead.com

My off-the-cuff midnight suggestion to split the United States into three separate countries — letting a central/southern conservative nation develop unfettered from, and unfettering of, two coastal/Great Lakes liberal enclaves — might not have been particularly practical, but it still strikes me as a good idea. Eliot Gelwan’s more realistic focus finds me agreeing, mostly:

… There will be endless analysis of how this happened but faced with the prospect of four more years of the most destructive and inept president of my lifetime I have two things to say. First, this was a referendum mostly on the intelligence of the American people and the bankruptcy of the political process; people get the leadership they deserve. And, secondly, he is not my president.

… the only chance for American politics is if there is a genuine principled, nonopportunist opposition…. And let us hope for the growth of a new and truly effective movement of popular resistance and ongoing civil disobedience as well…. I will be damned if I will passively accede to living in a crypto-fascist theocracy.

… Indications are that the fundamental divide in US society is not around specific political issues like the war or the economy as much as around social and cultural values…. FmH and other progressive weblogs have to be tools for a broader culture jamming and subversion of the dominant paradigm.

… it is a sham to say that even a majority vote is a reflection of the popular will. It is a reflection of media spin, ignorance and manipulation.

I agree with Eliot’s emphasis on the nation’s cultural divide and his call for more militant action. I touched on these issues when I reacted two decades ago to Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election. I still don’t think the Democrats can become the force for popular resistance Eliot and I apparently agree we need. Instead, as I wrote a couple of years ago in a piece called When in Doubt, Go Left, we should “aim for the society we really want, far different from the tepid goals of most Democrats. If we’re right, our vision should appeal to the vast majority. If it doesn’t, let’s find that out too, and determine together how to go left more effectively.”

Where I think Eliot treads on thin ice is in blasting “the intelligence of the American people.” I share his emotional response, though his final note about the impact of media spin, ignorance, and manipulation is more on target. However, even granting that, I think Eliot gives too little emphasis to his important point about social and cultural value differences. It seems to me value issues related to religion’s role in public life — abortion, gay marriage, public prayer, and more — divide the public much more than liberals and leftists often acknowledge in a serious way. Many of us on the left think religion should be a private concern in a live-and-let-live society. We underestimate the degree to which strongly felt religious belief demands a community focus, though the escalating religious fundamentalism among Christians, Muslims, and Jews may finally make the rest of us realize that our own liberal distinction between public and private departs from global norms.

Value differences may stem in part from different factual assumptions about human nature and about the consequences of particular policies, but it doesn’t seem to me intelligence is the most important factor. Both cultural conservatives and cultural liberals come in smart and stupid versions. So as I’ve noted before, those of us on the left need to take conservative perspectives seriously rather than simply shrug them off. That doesn’t mean compromising our own principles. It does mean figuring out how to subvert the dominant paradigm, as Eliot says, combining rational persuasion with militant resistance.

I don’t think the Democrats are up to that task.

It’s almost midnight. I’m sitting here watching the half-filled election map on TV gradually fill in, Bush red across the South and up through the lower Mid-West into the mountains and Plains, Kerry blue taking the Northeast and now California. The stark color contrast shows the Republican dominated middle of the country and the more liberal coasts. Even if Kerry takes the upper MIdwest, the country’s apparently growing political divergence seems obvious, reflecting widespread cultural assumptions about regional differences.

A few minutes ago, staring at that map, I was reminded of a scheme that appealed to me a couple of decades ago: splitting the U.S. into smaller geographic units, separate countries unbound by constraints imposed by people with very different values living in other units. No matter who wins this election, it seems to me dividing the country into at least three separate countries would make a lot of people happy. The center and south get to move rightward, unburdened by all those liberals, and the two coasts and upper Mid-West move left, or at least preserve the status quo. Maybe then we could break the three big blocs into even smaller units, and try to push some further to the left to where things really gets interesting.

Of course, each region today is more divided than the two-color map implies. So after splitting the country, millions of people might want to move to a more congenial region instead of remaining stranded where they don’t fit in.

This fantasy might seem juvenile or utopian or just plain silly, but it make more sense to me than keeping a few hundred million people imprisoned in a single political unit. A national or federal system may have certain advantages, but any advantages are outweighed by imposing national standards on people separated by both geography and values.

In theory, we already have a federal system of 50 separate states, but the constitutional bottom line imposes on everyone both floor and ceiling. No matter who wins today’s election, we remain divided, endlessly seeking lowest-common-denominator compromises on one policy after another. Why not free us from one another and let each region, even each smaller geographic unit, seek its own political and cultural way?

Just a thought.

The big news in South Florida where I was visiting family this past week was the lead-up to today’s election. Kerry and Bush both campaigned nearby. As I noted last week, my parents received daily calls urging them to vote for Kerry. Most calls were tapes of big-name politicians but a few were from live callers reading a script. The big push was to get people to vote early.

Tempers are rising, and so is the bizarreness. A West Palm Beach cop tackled and arrested an independent journalist who was photographing early voters lined up on a public sidewalk. The local election official who devised the no-photo rule is the same woman who devised the infamous Butterfly Ballot in 2000. She recently lost her own re-election bid, so her effort to throw out the First Amendment may be one of her last bad decisions.

In my parents’ circles, the thought of anyone voting for Bush comes as heresy. Still, they expect the Orthodox Jewish vote, or at least the ultra-Orthodox vote, to go to Bush, who’s seen as more supportive of anything Ariel Sharon does despite Kerry’s identical policy positions on Israel and Palestine. I don’t like Kerry’s reflexive support for Israeli policy any more than I like Bush’s, and as I’ve noted in earlier postings there’s plenty more about Kerry not to like. But still, on a personal level I was relieved to read a survey showing that 82% of Miami-Dade County’s Jewish voters support Kerry. The Jewish community may someday abandon its traditional liberal politics — perhaps an inevitability given its rising economic status — but I’m hoping the big break with the past doesn’t come from voting for someone as antithetical to American Jewish political and intellectual traditions as George Bush.

Of course, the heavy Jewish support for Kerry might really wither if he did indeed differ from Bush on Israel (or if he was further to the left than liberal, but that’s another topic). A liberal Democrat who planned to pressure Israel to end the Occupation and who really took Palestinian needs seriously would likely stimulate much more Jewish flight to the right. That would create a dilemma for American Jews still liberal on social issues and even on economic policy, but given the political mainstream’s essential unity on Israel, it’s not a dilemma most Jews will have to face any time soon.

Unlike back home in Massachusetts, where John Kerry’s expected trashing of George Bush in next Tuesday’s election means we’re subjected to just about no presidential campaign advertising, here in Florida where I’m visiting my parents the race is a toss-up. This afternoon my parents’ phone rang and there was Bill Clinton’s voice urging them to get to the polls. Hilary’s taped voice has also called, and so have a slew of lesser luminaries. On a drive today we passed a long line of early-voting Floridians, determined to make sure their vote isn’t lost through some last-minute foul play, but my father says that he and most other people they know will wait until Election Day, when their regular polling place will be open with minimal wait. I suppose if they run into problems on Tuesday they’ll regret not voting early, but the prospect of standing for hours in the sun to get a jump on the election seems to them, as to me, pretty silly.

Mark Jurkowitz, the Boston Globe’s media reporter, writes today about rising complaints of media bias. Some see a liberal tilt, others a conservative one. Jurkowitz, noting the now-common observation that voters who watch Fox News overwhelmingly support George Bush while CNN watchers opt for John Kerry, points to the “growing evidence that citizens may be matching their news sources with their ideology.”

I complain about the tilted media also, though the tilt I object to most is the one toward the corporate-defined mainstream. Still, I  don’t think there’s any alternative to filtering news through one lens or another. And I’m not so sure that’s entirely a bad thing.

Jurkowitz adds this:

Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, has characterized this phenomenon as the ”cafeteria dimension of selecting an outlet to fit one’s own views….  If you look at how the public really cuts through information, they come at it from a values perspective.”

News is always filtered. Someone always decides what stories to cover, which aspects of those stories are important and which can be omitted, whether to take something at face value or dig further. Even an apolitical journalist makes choices based on a sense of journalistic responsibility, the public good, or some other equally value-laden objective reflecting the lives of middle-class professional journalists. And such filtering is necessary. Unfiltered news would overwhelm us, as anyone trying to make their way through the blogosphere should understand.

In the old days, competing daily newspapers presented an array of political positions. Readers in many cities could select a paper that matched their own sense of how the world worked. Of course, that sense often resulted from exposure to the media as well as from other socialization and propaganda sources. But the choice of newspaper was often a frank political choice.

Today that mainstream newspaper diversity is drastically reduced, replaced by competing cable TV and Internet sources. The range within the corporate-owned mainstream remains narrow — Fox and CNN differ in their coverage of Bush and Kerry, but both present positions that support rather than challenge the broader American status quo. The Internet offers more diverse alternatives, including many further to the left that offer what seem to me more comprehensive assessments of the world than we see on either Fox or CNN or for that matter in the New York Times, but their impact on most people is minimal to nonexistent. Citizens interested in broadening political debate and expanding dissemination of information should push to break corporate control of the mainstream media instead of simply demanding that corporate news outlets do a better job than the one they’re designed to accomplish.

The common yearning for nonpartisan, objective, unfiltered news coverage ignores what should be clear: the ability of well-trained journalists to write without obvious bias does not mean their values don’t affect what they do. As a reader, I’d rather judge for myself how credible the reporting is, and knowing more about the reporter’s values would make my effort easier. That’s similar to how I felt as a student when I sometimes wondered how the teacher’s personal views affected the subject matter presented.

The traditional American commitment to objective journalism offers the appearance of objectivity without the impossible reality. I don’t mean to say reporters are lying to us. Good reporters know how to report factual information and I imagine most want to do a decent job. But even good reporters are affected by their sense of the world, a sense that’s never universally shared. So are their editors and publishers. The required appearance of neutrality, seemingly designed to keep the news honest, actually prevents journalists from having to consider how their own values and interests affect their work.

What I hope to read every day are reports presented honestly and fairly from a variety of perspectives: honestly acknowledging that the journalist’s own views might affect the story, and fairly acknowledging that competing views and analyses exist. I’d also like every news source to openly declare its allegiances. That would make it easier to seek out a broader range of competing views, if that’s what we really want to do.

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First published today on eTalkinghead.com

Someone with a masters degree in clinical psychology who wants to move toward radical psychology emailed to ask this:

Any thoughts on where you would do a Ph.D. if you had to do it all over again?

I have several kinds of responses.

Although a few psychology departments outside the U.S. do offer a degree in critical psychology (mostly at the masters level), most in the U.S. don’t acknowledge critical or radical psychology in any serious way. A determined student who finds a sympathetic mentor can sometimes do a fair amount of independent critical work and even get a nonmainstream dissertation proposal past a mainstream committee. That’s what I did, but my circumstances were somewhat unusual — the email I get from grad students makes it clear that this is still an iffy approach. And even with my ultimately successful effort, my disinterest in traditional social psychology research eliminated me from departmental funding and left me out of the running for most academic psychology jobs. So the pressure in mainstream departments is to toe the line and mask your radical inclinations simply to get through the program, and then simply to get a job, and then simply to get tenured, and by then those radical inclinations may be somewhat rusty.

So if I were starting over, I would go to a place like Vanderbilt’s new interdisciplinary department of Community Research and Action, which is no longer strictly a community psychology department (though community psychology in general is easier for justice-focused students to navigate than other subdivisions within psychology); Vanderbilt is trying to create, essentially, a Ph.D. program in social change. Or to Duquesne’s psychology department, which emphasizes critical theory. Or to one of the other departments listed on my website’s FAQ page or similar places (I’d like to know if others exist).

However, the truth is I’m not sure I would start over again in psychology, or even go to graduate school at all. My interest in seeing how the Vanderbilt program develops reflects my impression that a Ph.D. in psychology is not the best route for someone whose primary goal is working for social justice and social change. (There are other goals, too. Academic work can be intellectually challenging, even socially useful, without being radical. And the perks of professorhood are many. But my focus here is on the prospects for radical change.)

Over the past few years I’ve come to think that students who want to change the world or some significant piece of it, or who even want simply to do reformist political work, would be better off studying many other things — organizing techniques, journalism, law, history, Internet technologies — or simply getting experience in existing activist organizations.. Students already enmeshed in graduate psychology departments, and their psychology professors as well, have reason to try to nudge their field in a more critical direction; every field of study needs a critical push, and critical psychology students and faculty can benefit from finding and supporting one another. Making space within psychology for alternative approaches and concepts is worth the effort But it seems to me someone starting out could find other arenas both more useful and less frustrating.

I’d be curious to hear from other psychology students and professors about this. If you were starting over, knowing what you know now, what would you do?

A few years after moving to Springfield, Illinois in 1988 to start teaching at what was then called Sangamon State University, I learned of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site an hour and a half away. While preparing to teach the Columbus Quincentennial course I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I visited the Mounds. Here’s how Wired describes it today:

A thousand years ago along the banks of the Mississippi River, in what is currently southeast Illinois, there was a city that now mystifies both archeologists and anthropologists. At its zenith, around A.D. 1050, the city that is now called Cahokia was among the largest metropolitan centers in the world. About 15,000 people lived in the city, with another 15,000 to 20,000 residing in its surrounding “suburbs” and outlying farmlands. It was the region’s capital city, a place of art, grand religious rituals and science. But by 1300, the city had become a ghost town, its carefully built structures abandoned and its population dispersed. …

The 2,200-acre [State Historical] site contains the central portion of what had been roughly a 4,000-acre city. Scattered across the site are about 68 human-made mounds of various sizes, some no more than a gentle rise on the land, others reaching 100 feet toward the sky. Originally, there might have been more than 120 mounds, but the locations of only 109 have been recorded. Many were altered or destroyed over the last three centuries by farming and construction projects.

What I remember from touring the site’s museum was how utterly alien to our traditional thinking this place is. Our image of native Indians from childhood Westerns and grown-up stereotypes — savages living in teepees, incapable of or uninterested in organizing larger societies — collapses at Cahokia. Here was a city which, as the museum described it, had all the attributes and problems of modern cities: specialization of labor, centralized government, waste-disposal systems, coordination with food suppliers outside the city and trading partners hundreds of miles away.

Cahokia is useful not just to bust the stereotype of incompetent savagery but also the counter-stereotype that Indians lived in a state of universal perfection destroyed by European conquerors. Columbus and those who followed him inflicted genocide on millions of native Indians whose daily lives were in many cases superior to those of most people in Europe. But life in the Western Hemisphere wasn’t perfect. At a time when it was popular to romanticize American Indians as living at peace with nature and each other, Cahokia reminded us of the danger of overgeneralizing.

Cahokia was a local example of native peoples developing on their own, before the European conquest, many of the drawbacks that come from large concentrations of people. There was a clear class division, as the Wired story makes clear, with rulers and servants and, perhaps, slaves. I remember the remains of the stockade, apparently designed to keep the poorer masses separated from the elites living downtown. According to dental records, the population apparently suffered malnutrition from a diet too heavily dependent on corn. Organized religion led in Cahokia, as in Europe and elsewhere, to ritual death and the sacrifice of some for the benefit of others.

So for me, the Cahokia story is both inspiration and cautionary tale. Cahokia itself demonstrates that danger comes not just from evil Europeans but perhaps even more universally from trends toward over-ambitious organization and elite rule. But at the same time, the fact that pre-Conquest cultures that were capable of creating centralized, organized societies more routinely did not do so provides a measure of hope to us all.

A president’s appointments to the federal judiciary can do more long-lasting harm to the American people than just about anything else they do short of initiating global self-destruction. As a report two weeks ago by the Environmental Law Institute reiterated, President George W. Bush’s judicial appointees take a markedly different stance on environmental regulation than judges appointed by Democrats. That surprises no one, despite the common civics lesson that judges are just supposed to follow the law.

Perhaps because potential judicial appointments interest so many people, both candidates’ explanations of how they would pick judges are misleadingly simplistic. If you believe what Bush and Senator John Kerry tell us, even they think judges are just supposed to follow the law. You have to read between the lines to discover neither one really means it.

During the second presidential debate, Bush gave this confused but conventional explanation:

I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States…. I wouldn’t pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn’t be said in a school because it had the words “under God” in it. I think that’s an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.

[I’m omitting here Bush’s garbled discussion of the Dred Scott decision, which ignored entirely the Constitution’s explicit allowance of slavery]

And so, I would pick people that would be strict constructionists. We’ve got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution…. And that’s the kind of judge I’m going to put on there. No litmus test except for how they interpret the Constitution.

Bush’s account at least has the virtue of letting us know he, too, sat through civics class.

Kerry countered by saying Bush came into office declaring:

What we need are some good conservative judges on the courts.” And he said also that his two favorite justices are Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas.

But although Kerry claimed “I don’t believe we need a good conservative judge, and I don’t believe we need a good liberal judge. I don’t believe we need a good judge of that kind of definition on either side,” he went on to deliver what most would consider a liberal agenda:

The future of things that matter to you — in terms of civil rights, what kind of Justice Department you’ll have, whether we’ll enforce the law. Will we have equal opportunity? Will women’s rights be protected? Will we have equal pay for women, which is going backwards? Will a woman’s right to choose be protected? These are constitutional rights, and I want to make sure we have judges who interpret the Constitution of the United States according to the law.

In the third debate, after noting Bush ducked a question about whether he wants to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing a woman’s right to an abortion, Kerry added this:

I’m not going to appoint a judge to the Court who’s going to undo a constitutional right, whether it’s the First Amendment, or the Fifth Amendment, or some other right that’s given under our courts today — under the Constitution. And I believe that the right of choice is a constitutional right.

We’re left with two candidates both insisting they’d appoint judges who would interpret the Constitution according to law without political bias or personal opinion. Yet somehow both already know what those interpretations should be: Bush knows a law-abiding judge won’t remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, ignoring the possibility that some law-abiding judge might think Congress’s 1950s insertion of “under God” into the pledge was impermissible entanglement of state and religion. Kerry says no law-abiding judge could overturn Roe v. Wade’s constitutional precedent, ignoring the fact that Supreme Court justices often overturn precedent and minimizing the distinction between constitutional amendment and judicial ruling.

We can figure out from all this what kind of judges each would appoint, but it would be more honest for them simply to say they‘ll appoint judges likely to agree with their own approach to resolving controversial issues. And that’s just as it should be.

Bush’s appreciation for Justices Scalia and Thomas helps us understand how much he really wants to bring the United States into the 19th Century. Kerry prefers the 21st, but should drop the pretense that he just wants judges who’ll interpret the law. As the former prosecutor surely knows, law is politics by other means. Many of the legal rights we have today became constitutionally protected only after pressure on legislators and judges by mass movements for social justice. Kerry should embrace that history rather than make believe it’s irrelevant.

We have further to go, regardless of who wins the election. At a time when even John Kerry voted for George Bush’s Patriot Act, whether our rights ultimately expand or disappear depends more on our own efforts than it does on theirs.
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First published today on eTalkinghead.com.

My previous work on psychology, law, and justice goes into more detail about my take on the nature of law and legal decision making.

A report on investigative journalist Seymour Hersh speaking last week in Berkeley:

“I think it’s real simple to say [Bush] is a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood,” explained Hersh. “I’m serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he’s doing.” In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other neocons are “idealists, you can call them utopians.” As Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.

“No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [Bush],” said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh’s sources say the war in Iraq is “not winnable. It’s over.” As for Kerry’s war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator’s plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. “This is a disaster that’s been going on. It’s a civil war, the insurgency. There is no ‘win’ anymore in this war,” he argued.

I don’t doubt Bush believes what he says, which, given his performance in the three debates, is pretty frightening. As I’ve noted before, the president’s verbal difficulties seem to reflect a simplistic thought process. I’ve read speculation that Bush is really suffering from early dementia — supposedly, his verbal abilities were better when he ran for Texas Governor — but it’s even scarier if what we see is Bush at his best.
In the third debate, Bush did a coherent job answering questions about the few things he was familiar with, like abortion. Most of the time, though, he floundered.  What’s really scary is that so many people liked what they saw. Maybe they’re comforted by the suspicion that Bush is just a puppet for Cheney’s people. Doesn’t comfort me, though.
I’m glad Hersh pointed out Kerry’s weakness on the war. I’m not sure how much good it does us if Kerry just uses his more advanced cognitive skills to justify a bad war. That’s Cheney’s turf.

At one point during the third presidential debate, John Kerry pointed out that George W. Bush failed to answer a question about job losses. After quickly advising laid off workers to go back to school, the president simply bragged at length about his public school education initiative, the so-called No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Bush never did explain how improving the education of young children helps their parents find jobs.

Kerry might have used his nuanced analytical abilities to make two needed comments. First, education is not the all-purpose cure that mainstream public figures claim it is. The individual pursuit of yet one more degree can’t compensate for structural economic inequality even if it enables one laid-off worker to beat another laid-off worker for one of the few remaining jobs. And second, instead of raising public school education to a higher level, No Child Left Behind is really designed to achieve the opposite. But Kerry made neither point.

Directly challenging the notion that more education is always a sufficient policy response would have run counter to America’s individualist ideology. And exposing No Child Left Behind as the elitist, corporate-initiated sham that it is would have been indelicate, given that Kerry himself voted for it. So the Massachusetts senator just repeated his routinely weak criticism: the problem with NCLB is that Bush never funded it as promised. Instead of pledging to end NCLB’s attack on public education, Kerry merely said he would make sure the law is fully funded.

Education is a wonderful thing, but different kinds of education lead to different results. Many parents want their children not only to learn the basics — to read and do math and obtain other skills they’ll need for college and jobs — but to learn how to think more effectively about complex issues. Indeed, advocates of public education have long argued that just such an outcome is crucial in a diverse democratic society.

Wrestling with complexity is a skill that schools can teach. It means letting students study topics in depth rather than skirt disconnected topics superficially. It means drawing connections between different areas of study rather than studying each in isolation. And it means acknowledging that some questions — particularly value questions — have no unambiguously right answers, only opposing positions with very different societal consequences.

Many parents and legislators support the federal No Child Left Behind plan and the many similar state plans that preceded it because they mistakenly believe drastic action is necessary to fix our schools. We’ve all grumbled at cashiers who can’t make change when the cash register breaks. Yet American public schools that receive adequate funding do well when compared with those in other countries. Our schools’ problems have more to do with drastic income gaps between rich and poor districts than they do with anything else.

The forces behind state and federal “education reform” know this very well. Indeed, they want to make sure public schools focus on basics so that more high school graduates can manage that cash register and read their job assignments when they show up for their shift at Walmart. But teaching public school kids to think critically about the world around them? That’s not on the corporate agenda. After all, that’s what private school does, for those who can afford it.

No Child Left Behind requires public schools (but not private schools) to test all students every year from third grade on. Every school must make “adequate yearly progress” toward 100 percent student proficiency by the year 2014. If even one subcategory fails (limited English-speaking, disabled, poor, racial and ethnic categories) or has fewer than 95 percent of its students take the test, the entire school fails. A second failure in a row — even by a different subgroup the second year — invokes sanctions ranging from letting students transfer to other schools (most of which will also soon “fail”) to firing teachers to replacing local school officials with state bureaucrats. According to education researchers, NCLB ensures that every state will eventually conclude its schools are so bad they must either be taken over or privatized. We’ll end up with back-to-basics public schools for the poor and middle class and a few elite public schools — and lots of private ones — preparing wealthier children to aim well above Walmart.

Kerry might have pointed this out.

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This was first published today on eTalkinghead.com.

See my previous essays on high-stakes testing.

Reuters - About 200 American Indians and supporters were arrested on Saturday for standing in the path of a Columbus Day parade in downtown Denver that commemorates the Italian explorer they blame for the genocide of indigenous peoples. Carrying signs that read: “Columbus: America’s first terrorist” and “We were here first,” about 300 opponents of the parade stood in its path. Police stopped the parade a block before it reached the protesters and told them to move. About 200 refused and were arrested.

In 1907, Colorado became the first U.S. state to make Oct. 12 a holiday, the reason American Indians have campaigned in Denver for 15 years to change the name of the holiday. … “We’re here to protest a few racists who continue to honor Columbus,” said Russell Means, a longti