The Charade Masquerading as Piety

Bill Moyers has an opinion piece that Alternet.org picked up.  I will leave most of the writing to Mr. Moyers, but will add that I continue to remain perplexed by the animosity those born into privilege and good fortune have toward those born into poverty and ill fortune (or who find themselves there despite working hard and trying to get out of poverty).  Here are a couple of memorable quotes:

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty...  It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bill-moyers-we-are-close-losing-our-democracy-mercenary-class?page=0%2C1

 [T]his is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bill-moyers-we-are-close-losing-our-democracy-mercenary-class?page=0%2C3

Welcome to the Third World

 Alternet has a good piece on how, despite jingoistic sloganeering to the contrary, America is not number one in most categories that matter.  As the author points out:

 Three decades of trickledown economics; the monopolization, privatization and deregulation of industry; and the destruction of labor protection has resulted in 50 million Americans living in abject poverty, while 400 individuals own more than one-half of the nation’s wealth. As the four Walmart heirs enjoy a higher net worth than the bottom 40 percent, our nation’s sense of food insecurity is more on par with developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania than with OECD nations like Australia and Canada.

 What is frightening is the degree to which we have essentially cannibalized ourselves into lowering wages and, hence, lowering our standard of living.

The destruction of labor has been so comprehensive that first-world nations now offshore their jobs to the U.S. In other words, we’ve become the new India. Foreign companies now see us as the world’s cheap labor force, and we have the non-unionized South to thank for that... 

 IKEA has set up a factory in Virginia. Volkswagen has set up in Tennessee, and the likes of Hyundai, KIA, BMW, Honda, and Toyota have all set up in the South to take advantage of the world’s latest cheap labor source. 

This has resulted in an America that does not have any cities among the top 10 cities in the world, that ranks behind 30 countries in life expectancy and infant mortality, and ranks first in such distinguished categories as incarcerated citizens per capita and adult onset diabetes.  Despite the ascendancy of and the abject failure over the last three decades of Reagonomics and other supply-side economic fantasies, we have a Congress that thinks the answer is to shrink the government further, privatize public goods to unparalleled extents, and cut the few benefits those hit hardest by their policies rely on to put food on the table.  Perhaps most frightening is the fact that a near majority of persons in the United States thinks Congress is right.  

For anyone interested in the incarceration issue, WUWM is doing a series on the rate at which Wisconsin incarcerates black males.  We're number one in this category also.

More Reasons Not to Believe the Hype About International Test Scores

Diane Ravitch has a great piece on the OECD PISA scores at commondreams.org.  Of note, Ravitch points out the common misconception that U.S. students scored well on these tests in some halcyon past.  The fact is that U.S. students have never scored particularly well on these tests.  It is also true that the U.S. student performance on PISA tests has had no relationship to the economic success of the nation.  Ravitch summarizes and quotes Keith Baker who has written extensively on this issue:

Baker wrote that a certain level of educational achievement may be "a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success." What has mattered most for the economic, cultural, and technological success of the U.S., he says, is a certain "spirit," which he defines as "ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores."

Unfortunately for school age children, their teachers, and anyone else who has firsthand knowledge of the education process, the education reform movement (or, as Ravitch dubs it, "The Bad News Industry") seems to lack the very spirit of ambition, inquisitiveness, and independence that matters most for our economic, cultural, and technological success. 

For a nation that has risen to be the world's leading economic, military, and cultural power, one would think that those with an interest in education would be asking themselves, "how can we ensure that we continue to get it right?"  Of course this would mean that we would have to address the profound negative impact that growing income disparity has on education, the profound negative impact poverty without adequate social safety nets has on education, and the profound negative impact diverting resources away from public education has on education.  (The fact that I had to write that last clause both shocks and nauseates.)  I am not betting that the corporate interests that pervade the Bad News Industry has any interest in tackling these problems.  It is much easier to bemoan our students' performance on a meaningless international examination than to actually do something that would make education better and stronger.

I will leave the last word to Ravitch:

Let others have the higher test scores. I prefer to bet on the creative, can-do spirit of the American people, on its character, persistence, ambition, hard work, and big dreams, none of which are ever measured or can be measured by standardized tests like PISA.

Public Education Is Not a Job Training Program

There is a piece at theconversation.com on the uselessness of using comparative PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores to assess the state of any individual nation's education system.  In a brilliant summary of the problems with looking to PISA results to justify particular educational reform, education lecturer Graham Birrell points out:

The results released by the OECD would be more useful if they helped us to identify how to improve, but the countries ahead of us have such radically different approaches that anybody can pick and choose almost any educational approach and say there is “evidence from PISA” that it would work.

 Birrell is referring to Britain, but he could be making the same statement about the United States.  It is amusing to think about the vicissitudes of education reform in this country when considering Birrell's next statement:

Do you favour long hours and rote-learning? Well apparently they work, since countries in the Far East do very well in PISA. Perhaps you prefer shorter hours, very highly qualified teachers and light-touch accountability. Well PISA tells us they work too, as can be seen in the success of Finland, which, despite a dip in the 2012 results, has historically always been at or near the top. The data you cherry pick from the PISA results is likely to tell you far more about your own political inclinations than something meaningful about educational answers for the UK.

Certainly one could substitute 'USA' for 'UK' and the statement would apply equally well.

What is particularly interesting about Birrell's piece is the revelation that the PISA examinations are not what everyone assumes them to be.  In short,  

Children in each country only take a small sample of each of the three tests, with their total score being estimated using a mathematical model that David Spiegelharter, Professor of Statistics at Cambridge University, has declared “demonstrably inadequate”.

Of course this aspect of the PISA methodology is rarely reported when (typically) conservative alarmists tout the results as reason to commodify and privatize public education.

Birrell does note that PISA scores can be useful to evaluate education within a nation.  For example, in Britain the results demonstrated that "state schools did much better than private schools" when socioeconomic status was controlled for.  Not surprisingly the tests also showed that economically challenged areas serve disproportionately high percentage of "disadvantaged students."  However, Birrell accurately notes:

However, this more useful side to the results does not justify the central flaw with the whole PISA approach, which is the fact that the scores are used as a tool to reconfigure education according to economic goals.

Much like the UK, we too have abandoned the notion that education has "intrinsic self-worth" and instead consider it little more than an instrumentality to "prepare children for the world of work and the 'global race.'" I for one loathe the idea of public education as job training, which, it must said, ought to be the responsibility of the private sector and not the public schools.  Not only is this wholly instrumental approach to education depressing in an existential way, it also functions in a perverse manner as justification to devalue education.  Rather than focusing on the right to a decent public education, which would entail a broad-based approach to learning with concomitant expenditure of resources, education reformers in this country want to focus solely on whether students leave school ready to find a job.  When this is the focus, education suffers because so much of what we have historically considered valuable in education (the arts, music, physical education, competence in a wide range of subjects) becomes so many useless expenditures to be cut (at least for public schools - if you can pay for an elite private education then you can have all the arts and useless humanities that you want).

The New Tyranny

Pope Francis is proving to be a remarkable leader of the Catholic church. In the Evangelii Gaudium recently published he admonishes unquestioned faith in capitalism and the free market. Using exceptionally strong language he refers to an “idolatry of money” that will lead to a “new tyranny.” I think it is about time that this aspect of the Catholic faith be brought front and center. Perhaps now we will finally see the duplicity of those Catholics who claim to be pro-life with respect to abortion but remain steadfastly anti-life in their economic and social policies. In what would be a welcome bit of schadenfreude, perhaps the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops will recommend denying communion to any politicians who support economic policies that lead to the further exclusion, marginalization, and suffering of the majority of the world’s population. I for one suggest we start with Paul Ryan. After all, as Pope Francis notes, “an economy of exclusion and inequality … kills.”

The Couch Sags

My couch is broken and I couldn't be happier because my son uses it as an end zone and it is beautiful to watch him imagine players and plays and connect his imagined scenarios with a physical enactment, a sort of nascent and unforced drama, an endless series of one act plays, supernally creative play, going through cards and stickers with dates of birth, age, height, weight, college attended, position, playing statistics, and he riffs off every category imagining the battles and who ends up winning and why and I could watch him destroy my couch this way all day.

Piety and Politics

By now most people have seen the photo of Pope Francis kissing the pilgrim with neurofibromatosis in St. Peter's Square.  I am not sure what to make of this other than that the world seems to have an incredibly humble and pious man in what is probably the single most significant and powerful ecclesiastical office in the world.

Amy Davidson has a nice piece in the New Yorker about the picture, the moment, Pope Francis, and whether the Catholic Church is in the midst of change.  I think, however, that she misses the importance of moments like this.  Whether Pope Francis effects institutional change or not will be an important historical question some day, but the remarkable thing about this photo is the striking manner in which it seems to capture the essence of Francis as a man.  I didn't get the impression that this is theater.  Commentators seem to agree that this is a genuine moment and genuinely reflects who Pope Francis is.  If that is the case, then we should celebrate the man not because of his historical significance but instead because as the Vicar of Christ he actually lives as Christ commanded.

Riding a Bicycle

I recently had a discussion with some friends about why we ride bikes.  The answers were typical for persons in their mid-thirties to mid-forties:  it keeps us healthier than we would otherwise be, we like the competitive aspects, we enjoy the camaraderie of racing and the community bikers we see around, etc.  As I thought about it a little more though, I realized that I ride my bike because it puts me in the world in a way that a car cannot.

The immediate trigger for this line of thought was commuting to work on a bicycle.  I enjoy my commute for many reasons.  I love the way the air feels early in the morning.  I love ticking out a rhythm on my ride in to work.  The cadence of my pedaling can almost be musical, unifying mind and body.  I enjoy looking around at the buildings and houses I pass, the people waiting for the bus, the athletes practicing on the fields.  I cannot tell you how sublime it feels when I find myself riding along the lake front on one of those perfect days when the breeze pushes gently off the lake, driving away the summer heat, and the light causes the water to turn a mesmerizing cerulean hue.

I could go on and on about all the things I enjoy when I am commuting by bicycle; however, I realized that what drives all of these things, what makes commuting by bicycle different than commuting in a car or riding a bus, is that cycling puts you in the world.  You are present in your community and almost by default have to engage it.  When I come to a stop light and put my foot down while I wait for the light to change, I hear the people at the bus stop talking.  I hear and feel the vibrations of the car engine next to me.  I smell the exhaust.  I look around and see what is there, my surroundings.  Of course I am focused on the road, but I am also focused on the buildings and the people and the horizon, the clouds in the sky, the wind, the heat (or cold).  I ride by a high school and see the boys preening for the girls and the girls laughing.  I see a group of men under an awning awaiting the bus, commiserating.  I see the city workers painting the lines.  I hear the train rumble on the tracks as I cross one of the bridges and marvel that the cars seem to go on to infinity.

I tell pedestrians that I am passing on their left and they often acknowledge me and say 'thanks.'  I always reply, 'you're welcome.'  I meet other cyclists and sometimes we ride for a while together, chatting.  I see many of the same riders passing me each morning and enjoy the sense of familiarity that this engenders.  I see mothers running behind jog strollers containing their smiling or nodding toddlers.  I see a father riding with his young daughter who pedals furiously to keep up.  I see the young men and women at the Urban Ecology Center planting and clearing and making the river beautiful again.  I pass walkers and runners and old women in scooters.  Often we look at each other and smile or wave or say 'hello.'

I am in the world when I am on my bike.  I hear the city and feel the city and smell the city and see the city in all of its brilliance and ugliness and the in between.  The meat packing plant sometimes burns my nose with the ammoniac reek.  I pass through places with torn sleeping bags and shredded cardboard that were somebody's home.  I see placarded houses and empty storefronts.  I see and feel and hear and smell everything.  The lovely addition to our art museum with its brise soleil unfurled fills me with wonder.  The fox crossing the bike path puts a smile on my face.  The neighborhoods with old trees canopied over the streets and the families in front yards kicking a ball or riding bikes or chasing around fill me with hope. All of this is my city and I love being part of it.

When I ride I engage my surroundings.  I am not averse to automobiles and like taking road trips, but in the city you miss so much when you drive.  The radio is on or the air conditioner is on and the windows are shut and you look at the road and listen to the news or the music and pay little attention to anything not on the road.  Sure, we all look around, but cars move fast and before you have time to think about what you see (and usually it is just see) you are already gone.  On a bike I move slow enough to think about what I am experiencing, to pay attention to the world around me.  While I move faster than a pedestrian, I am still slow enough to notice the world and pay attention to it.  And I am able to cover much more ground than I could walking.

It is lovely to ride and feel and hear and smell and see the place where you live.  It is lovely to be on a bicycle riding.  That is why I ride.

Revisiting Race

Gary Gutting has an interesting piece in the New York Times online edition.  In "Getting Past the Outrage on Race," Gutting contrasts the opposing and seemingly irreconcilable views that arose in the context of the Trayvon Martin killing.  On the one side are those who consider the plight of young black men to be the result of prejudice, institutional and otherwise.  On the opposite side are those who consider the plight of young black men to be the result of a lack of resolve and self-respect.

Please note the very word I used, "plight."  This signifies something pernicious about the way a young black man is viewed by someone who is not black.  I considered editing the word, but I think leaving it in is instructive because it demonstrates the unconscious infantilizing of young black men in which many white commentators engage.  On average a young black man faces enormous challenges that on average most young white men do not; however, using the word "plight" paints too broad a stroke because it assumes that all young black men face an identical and intractable problem.  While circumstances of poverty make for an intractable problem that many young black men have, circumstances of poverty make for an intractable problem for many persons of all races.  Surely an upper class or upper middle class young black man faces issues of race that his white peers do not, yet the issues he faces are different from the issues a young black man growing up in extreme urban poverty faces.  To discuss the "plight" of young black men does erases the quantitative and qualitative differences in the actual and potential experiences of discrimination across the gamut of young black men.  In this way, "young black men" serves as a category bereft of individuality, positive capabilities, and humanity.  Young black men become objects of pity and confusion for white commentators rather than persons living actual lives.

While I digress, I believe the digression is an important one to measure any comments that I (or anyone else for that matter) make against a backdrop of potential paternalism.  While race in America is a significant issue that gives rise to significant problems, the permutations are myriad and do not lend themselves to a one-size-fits-all analysis or solution.  Indeed, one of the great peculiarities of our discussions of race in America is the paucity of attention that is placed on the effects of racism on the white population.  I don't mean this in the sense that white persons are subject to reverse discrimination or any such nonsense, but rather in the sense that a white person who engages in racist thought or behavior, even of the unconscious sort, must also be affected by racism.

Too often white commentators act as if they are at an objective remove from racism, neutral observers not subject to the affects of the racism about which they write and speak.  It seems to me that nothing could be further from the truth.  For example, I (and many others) have long believed that the reason the "southern strategy" works is that the last three decades have seen a significant diminution in the standard of living of middle and lower class white persons who do not possess college degrees and it is convenient for these persons to displace their anger and frustration onto African Americans; hence, the vitriol in discussions about affirmative action and any other legal apparatus that is perceived as disproportionately benefiting African Americans.  This has led to enormous numbers of white persons who derive no benefit from conservative policies to vote for conservative politicians out of a racial bias (conscious or not), especially those conservative politicians who explicitly promise to gut affirmative action, welfare, and any other program perceived (rightly or wrongly) to favor African Americans.  The impact of the racial bias on political choice has been severe:  diminution of organized labor, diminution of the social safety net, an increase in regressive taxation schemes, etc.  Ultimately the racism of many white persons has had a clear impact on the actual power this population wields and the prosperity available to them.

Back to Gutting's piece.  His thesis is that "our continuing problems about race are essentially rooted in a fundamental injustice in our economic system."  Gutting cites Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and notes that Dr. King's principal thesis was that African Americans were "not free" because they "live on a lonely island of poverty."  The thrust then, of Gutting's critique is that persons who lack "basic goods" are at a staggering disadvantage in trying to advance their material prosperity when compared to those who do not have to compete for basic goods.  Cass Sunstein has a fantastic piece on the deleterious effects of scarcity on the poor that effectively demonstrates Gutting's point.  The unstated premise of Gutting's argument is that race will become less of an issue if African Americans are not disproportionately represented among the poor, with which I take some issue as noted in my digression above.  Ultimately Gutting persuasively argues that the distribution of material wealth is unjust and that we need to examine whether this is an injustice subject to correction.

The primary benefit of Guttings' piece is to call attention to the fact that most of the platitudes and polemics about race in America fail to say anything intelligible about the actual causes and effects of racism.  In this way, he presents an effective critique of the diametrically opposed responses to the Trayvon Martin killing as being unhelpful in advancing our understanding of race in America.  While I believe that his contention that systemic economic injustice is the root cause of racial disparity is not entirely accurate, it is refreshing to see a point of view that looks below the surface and at least tries to get to the heart of the matter.  And regardless of whether Gutting accurately diagnoses the reason that many young black men in America face long odds against success, he is most certainly right that:

Unless we work for this fundamental [economic] justice, then we must reconcile ourselves to a society with a permanent underclass...

And that, regardless of race, is tragic.

Lines about Syria

Assad
Doctor butcher man-of-the-world,
Smug tyrant in an air-conditioned palace
While an infant wakes choking to die.
A child with world-weary eyes looks pleading at his mother without surprise,
She reaches to his face and they touch each other's tears.
Silent cries, choking cries, all without surprise.
Rage against, rise against,
Doctor butcher tyrant, suited-slaughterer
Choking, stuttering
Back into bed.

Always Remember

Caleb Crain has a well-written piece in the New Yorker online, an obituary of sorts, regarding his teacher, Peter Kussi, a Czech who emigrated to the United States when the shadow of Hitler loomed near Czechloslovakia in 1939.  Kussi's father was born in the U.S. and was able to obtain a passport to this country as a result.  The Kussis were Jewish.  Crain's article traces the impact of the Holocaust on Kussi's life and work through the letter one of Kussi's uncles had written him from Czechloslovakia in 1942, before being deported to Auschwitz. As Crain writes,

Kussi didn’t receive the letter until 1944, and in January of that year Jiří Eisenstein was deported to Auschwitz, where he died. His wife, Mimi Eisenstein, was killed in the same camp in March, 1944.

Human tragedy is not unique to the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. Jiri Eisenstein himself compared the activities of the Germany to those of the Turks against the Armenians:

The setting is a different one, the procedure is more refined, as beho[o]ves people who live in the centre of Europe, yet the spirit is the same, perhaps even more cruel behind the mask of orderliness and flawless organization.

Nevertheless, the Holocaust leaves a scar on the memory of humankind because of "the mask of orderliness and flawless organization."  In short, the Holocaust represented the industrialization of genocide.  Not only did the concentration camps function as models of industrial efficiency, they were also beset with bureaucratic banalities (as Hannah Arendt so astutely recognized) that rendered the extermination of human life, in many cases, almost secondary to procedure, quota, and supply chain management.  In many ways, this represents the horror of the Holocaust as much as anything else:  that it became ordinary, routinized.

Several years ago I attended the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  I do not exaggerate when I write that the experience moved me in the most profound way possible.  I particularly remember an exhibit in which shoes upon shoes upon shoes were piled up behind museum glass.  Visitors were informed that these were the shoes of children who died in concentration camps.  I stood before the shoes mute, tears welling up in my eyes, wanting to explode in a supernova of grief.  So all encompassing was my sorrow and disgust that I thought I could swallow the world with it.

And yet, the shoes of these children represented, for the administrators of death, a byproduct of an industrial process, industrial waste, if you will.  This realization caused, if it is possible, redoubled disgust and fury.  These shoes once adorned the feet of children.  Children who liked ice cream and sat on their fathers' laps while being read to.  Children who danced and laughed and cried when they scraped their knees.  Children who were born into a world of doom through no fault of their own.  Children.  These shoes were traces of the children.  There can be no adequate answer to the question of how this could have happened?  Any rationalization, however accurate, melts in the face of the enormous sorrow that attends the industrial act of brutality.

Jiri Eisenstein wrote to his nephew of the memory of what happened to the Jews of central Europe:

you may be reminded of the tragedy your people went through, and curiosity being inborn to mankind, you might give them a few thoughts—how did they bear it, how did they live, what did they suffer, which were their hopes, longings and comfort?

These were not my 'people,' but the scale and international scope of the Holocaust makes Kussi's people everyone's people, in a sense.   As such, it is incumbent upon all of us who are heirs to the history and traditions of the West to give the persons who lived through and died in the Holocaust more than a few thoughts.  We must do so not because any reminder of the Holocaust will prevent it from happening again.  Genocide will take whatever terrible forms contemporary technology, political organization, and hatred offer.  It is folly to suggest otherwise.  Still, giving thought to those persons whose life ended in or was indelibly scarred by the Holocaust is a necessary act of contrition and acknowledgement that every life must be elevated above process, bureaucracy, and convenience.  It is a necessary acknowledgement that we are responsible as individuals to behave in an objectively ethical way toward our fellow human beings.  We cannot hide behind the veil of the crowd or the mandate of the state.  Giving thought to the children who wore those shoes is a perpetual reminder that we owe our fellow human beings a duty of care, that we are obliged to consider them always as human beings, as our equals in moral worth if in no other way.

I would like to give some thought to the children who died or lived through the Holocaust.  I would like to perform my act of contrition and remembrance.  I would like to remind readers that we owe the children of our world today a moral duty to acknowledge them and to ensure that they are treated with the dignity and respect befitting all human beings, that the children of the Holocaust serve as a perpetual reminder of our duty to the living as well as to the memory of the dead.

I am not sure how many are familiar with the children of the Terezin Concentration Camp (known also as Theresienstadt), but their story is a remarkable one.

A total of 15,000 children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp between the years 1942 and 1944; less than 100 survived. (Volavková, Hana. I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezín Concentration Camp, 1942-1944. New York: Schocken, 1978).

  While at the Camp, many of the children of Terezin wrote poems and drew pictures.  Despite the odds, a number of the poems and drawings have been preserved.

In these poems and pictures created by the young inmates of Terezin, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their courage and optimism, their hopes and fears. (Id.)

These are the children of Terezin.  They were children like any other children for whom humanity failed.  Read their words and meditate on what it would have been like to be a Jewish child, one of the 1.5 million that died, in the Holocaust.  Meditate on what it would have been like to see hope squashed constantly and yet to still feel hope against reason, how painful that sliver of possible deliverance must have been knowing you held it against all reason.  Meditate on what it would have been like to be twelve years old and to lose hope.

Here is a poem written by a child named Franta Bass:

THE GARDEN

Only take heed, and keep your soul diligently, Lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen, And lest they depart from your hearts all the days of your life; Make them known to your children and your children's children.
--Deuteronomy 4:9

A little garden,
Fragrant and full of roses.
The path is narrow
And a little boy walks along it. 

A little boy, a sweet boy,
Like that growing blossom.
When the blossom comes to bloom,
The little boy will be no more.

Here is another by a child named Michael Flack:

ON A SUNNY EVENING 

On a purple, sun-shot evening
Under wide-flowering chestnut trees
Upon the threshold full of dust
Yesterday, today, the days are all like these.
Trees flower forth in beauty,
Lovely too their very wood all gnarled and old
That I am half afraid to peer
Into their crowns of green and gold.
The sun has made a veil of gold
So lovely that my body aches.
Above, the heavens shriek with blue
Convinced I've smiled by some mistake.
The world's abloom and seems to smile.
I want to fly but where, how high?
If in barbed wire, things can bloom
Why couldn't I? I will not die!

We are shamed by the fact that a child could write the line, "The little boy will be no more," and yet the indomitable human spirit of "[i]f in barbed wire, things can bloom/Why couldn't I? I will not die!" ennobles us and gives us hope in equal measure.  In our shame and wonder at the children of Terezin we can, in small measure, redeem our world if we take our shame and wonder and turn it into action.  There are little boys and girls in this country for whom life seems as fleeting as the boy in the "Garden."  It is within our power to help these children learn that life does not have to be all deprivation and precariousness.  Whether it is through mentoring or community involvement or political action, everyone can do something to turn the our shame and wonder at the children of Terezin into positive action in our world.

In considering the children of Terezin and the Holocaust we face a constant reminder of the moral obligation we have to our fellow human beings to treat them as moral equals.  While the poems still break my heart and the shoes at the Holocaust Museum stoke fury and almost limitless despair in me, when I turn my attention to them and consider the children who wrote the poems and wore the shoes I am elevating the children above the casual death of the concentration camps.  I am pulling them out of the banalities of the bureaucratic death machine and putting them first.  I am elevating the children above their prison.  I remember the children above all else.

Do Nothing Foreign Policy

The American response to the ongoing atrocities in the Middle East and North Africa continues to sicken me.  William Dobson has a well-written article in Slate.com addressing the issue in response to the apparent chemical weapons attack in Syria.

 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/08/barack_obama_is_failing_in_the_middle_east_syria_s_bashar_assad_and_egypt.html

Once again, the administration has demonstrated a bent for the practical and ethically indefensible.  As Dobson notes,

The Obama administration isn’t responsible for preventing this massacre in Syria. President Obama cannot control what happens in Damascus or Cairo, and it’s unfair to suggest otherwise. But he must also own the policies he creates and the messages those policies send. And here’s the truth: The president will run out the clock on the problems he likes least. In Egypt, while Washington fretted over the definition of a “coup,” the Gulf’s monarchies happily stepped in to fill the void. In Syria, the administration hemmed and hawed about arming the rebels for 18 months. When they finally came around to the notion, the “good rebels” were buried in shallow graves. As it turns out, there is a cost to slow walking a foreign policy crisis... 

The Middle East’s autocrats understand how to turn a president’s “judiciousness” into an effective weapon for murder. These strongmen—be it Assad, Sisi, or a host of others—recognize that when an American president demands proof, evidence good enough to stand up in court, to make foreign policy decisions, he is effectively turning a blind eye to their crimes. So, for every peaceful protester who is gunned down in Cairo, the regime gives us an armed mob of Muslim Brothers. As Assad’s death squads go from house to house, Damascus issues denials and counterclaims. If that’s all it takes, then it is easy enough to create the fog of war, even when it’s truly a massacre.

In this way, the administration's inaction makes it culpable.  Perhaps not complicit because American power is not absolute, but still culpable.  Culpable of what?  Culpable of tolerating criminal behavior of autocrats and dictators when the autocrats and dictators in question appear to be more sympathetic to U.S. interests than the alternative.  Culpable of hypocritically abandoning commonly held principles of fairness and justice so as to not rock any boats.  The administration should denounce the coup in Egypt, denounce the Assad massacre, and take appropriate and forceful steps to develop an international coalition to force an end to the Egyptian coup and the Syrian civil war.  Doing nothing is unethical and amounts to condoning the deaths of innocents in Syria and Egypt.

So what can be done?  How about less lawyer-speak and more frankness?  How about calling a coup a coup?  How about telling Egypt that democracy requires elections for regime change?  How about telling Assad that the U.S. will do everything in its power to stop him from slaughtering Syrians?  How about telling Assad that the U.S. will do everything in its power to assist with the orderly transition to a representative democracy, including combating any party who would use violence and terror to subvert the will of the people?  How about acting in away that does not give ammunition to every anti-democratic nation in the world to call attention to our hypocrisy when we advocate for the rule of law, peace, and democracy elsewhere?  How about we just try something other than to sit on our hands?

In Dobson's words:

I used to think that, in the long run, when the memoirs are written and the minutes of the White House meetings are known, the 100,000 people who died in Syria would be one of the worst stains on this administration. Not because they failed to stop it, but because they failed to try. But I was wrong. One hundred thousand was the floor.  

This sickens me.  It should sicken you too.

"30 Americans," A Response

I recently went to the Milwaukee Art Museum ("MAM") and viewed, among other things, the current exhibit, 30 Americans.  The Art Museum describes the exhibit thus:

30 Americans is a dynamic exploration of contemporary American art. Paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, video, and more made by African American artists since 1970 raise questions of what it means to be a contemporary artist and an African American today. Whether addressing issues of race, gender, sexuality, politics, or history—or seemingly remaining silent about them—these works offer powerful interpretations of cultural identity and artistic legacy.

 A number of things struck me during and after the exhibit.  I found myself able to access the pathos, frustration, disgust, rage, powerlessness, pride, confidence, bravado, sorrow, joy, ebullience, and other feelings that the works inspired.  For example, there is a take on the Mastercard "Priceless" advertising campaign showing a scene at a funeral of a young black man who was shot and killed for jewelry he was wearing.  The final line of parody, "Picking the perfect casket for your son.  Priceless" stirred powerful emotions in me.  The elegaic quality brought tears to my eyes; the senselessness angered me, etc.

Despite the tendency of most pieces to stir a response in me, I found myself sensing something inaccessible in the pieces.  After thinking about the matter, I have concluded that the inaccessible place is a parodic or ironic aspect to the work that derives from a presence to which I will always remain outside because the parodic or ironic aspect is rooted in lived experience.  Even though the art is expressed in shared 'rhetorical' or artistic forms that allow me comprehend aspects of the pieces, I can only sense the deepest or profoundest presence from which they arise, feeling the reverberations of what the pieces mean without having the experiential capacity to understand and articulate what the pieces mean at the felt level.  The Mastercard piece moved me, but I have never lost a friend or a relative to gun violence, particularly of the type of gun violence that often besets impoverished, urban minority communities.  The way this experience resonates with the piece of art is something I can only access through assumption and inference, which has a slightly disconcerting and bewildering effect, a shade of which can almost be described as sadness.

What does it mean that a significant part of the art I viewed is inaccessible to me?  First, that the artist can bring to my attention, in a public space, awareness of the arrest or gap in my experiential capacity to understand is significant.  Communication enables the creation of experiences otherwise not possible.  Through dialog, whether visual or audible, written or unwritten, new presences arise.  The artists creating the pieces exhibited at MAM function as hero-translators (in the mythic or epic sense), bringing news of different worlds to their audience.  Marco Polo brought news of a new culture to Europe, enriching and expanding the experiential capacities of Europeans in the process.  Think of the rich history of culinary delight to which Italians have access simply because Marco Polo brought noodles back with him.  Surely Italians have been enriched in this exchange.

The artists whose works are being exhibited do the same thing.  I may not be able to access the felt reality of urban gun violence, but the poignancy of the Mastercard piece gives me a sense of what it must do to persons and communities that experience urban gun violence.  In giving me (and anyone lacking experiential capacity) this sense, the artist creates a new presence, a new statement that is the acknowledgement f the inaccessible experiential aspect of the work.  When persons like me who have not experienced urban gun violence directly (who are surely the majority of the viewers) respond to the piece, we bring the previously unexpressed or poorly expressed experience into the public sphere and give it voice.  The responses, even when incomplete or inchoate, acknowledge the felt experience of the artist and so gives it space in the broader cultural exchange of ideas.  Once the art is exhibited publicly, it is an utterance of sorts that cannot be taken back, silenced, or otherwise erased.

Giving voice to a a real experience, even one experienced by a minority of persons, is important to recognize the breadth of experiences that persons in our culture have and to legitimize those experiences as valid and public parts of the greater culture.  In bringing a new or poorly disseminated experience to the public sphere, the artist brings us closer as people to acknowledging our common humanity and individual differences, creating a communicative space for respect and learning.  From this platform we become a more integrated but less homogeneous culture, a culture that craves contact with difference rather than suppressing it, running from it, or fearing it.  And so, despite my ability to only glimpse the profound parodic and ironic elements of the many of the pieces, I am better for having seen them and remaining open to the aspects I cannot fully understand.

Democracy Hypocrisy

This will be short:  it is complete BS that there is not more outrage from the West regarding the coup in Egypt.  While I am no fan of Islamism, it is duplicitous of the West to advocate democracy but then balk when a movement or party we don't like wins an election.  If civil unrest is due to the majority trampling on the civil and basic human rights of the minority, I understand that the West may wish to remain neutral or even support those whose rights the majority is abrogating.  However, I understand that deteriorating economic conditions drove the coup in Egypt (at least ostensibly-one may reasonably surmise that this was only pretext for an otherwise naked power grab).

A changing economic landscape is the precise sort of civil problem that democratic elections are uniquely qualified to resolve peacefully.  If a particular policy fails to generate expected or promised results, the electorate will opt for a new party or movement that offers a different policy prescription.  While we may quibble over the efficiency of using democratic elections as the mechanism for choosing policy-makers, it is the only method that allows for a government of the people to remain of the people.  The same ethos should govern our response to Egypt:  we should support the democratically elected government so long as the government is acting within their constitutional mandate.  If Egypt's economy is tanking with the Muslim Brotherhood in charge, then we should simply demand that the next round of elections be administered fairly.  If a majority of the population wants a change in leadership, the majority will oust the Brotherhood through the peaceful and constitutionally mandated form of popular election.  Any other solution to changing policy makers renders the West, as advocates of representative democracy, hypocritical.

Jon Lee Anderson has a great piece in The New Yorker addressing the same thing that is worth reading.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/in-egypt-echoes-of-latin-america.html

Lines Written In Memory of My Grandmother

My grandmother died seven years ago this July.  She was dear to me and I miss her.  These lines are for her:

Hand-tied patchwork quilt

My grandmother’s crooked fingers

Dust in the ground

Seven years hence

Worked the yarn

And turned the scraps into the womb-like warmer

Under which we lie safe in the embrace of her love

Albert O. Hirschman - An Economist We Ought to Know

Malcom Gladwell has a review of Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher:  The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell  Prior to reading Gladwell's review, I did not know who Albert Hirschman was.  Now I will probably go out and pick up some of his books to read this economist whose "subject was economics, but whose spirit was philosophical."  Hirschman is an early harbinger of non-conformist approaches to economics, the kinds of alternative approaches to problems that have long vexed neoclassical economists and have landed such original thinkers as Daniel Kahneman, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz Nobel Prizes in economics.

Gladwell notes that Hirschman, an economist by trade, was unique among his peers in that he highlighted the consistency with which economic creativity results from projects gone awry.  In Hirschman's words,

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened.  In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming.  Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is be misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

I find this notion fascinating.  Perhaps this is not surprising since I am drawn to Romanticism and chaos theory, to notions of the lyrical arising out of the indeterminate, to notions of intertextual play.  Although I advocate rationality and pragmatism in matters of policy, it is clear to me that moments of what Hirschman called 'creativity' arise in response to crisis.  Whether it is the environmental crisis that confronted the Karnaphuli paper plant that Gladwell describes in the review or the artistic crisis Bloom identifies in The Anxiety of Influence, creativity represents a departure from the status quo.

The paradox of creativity is that it is inherently unpredictable.  Since creativity depends on the presence of unintended consequences, a creative response is by necessity novel.  Thus, one cannot 'learn' creativity in the sense that one learns grammar or biology or physics.  Though we strive to prepare students and employees to be creative thinkers, we can have little or no foreknowledge of the situations that will arise requiring a creative response and what a creative response might be.  The best we can do is to condition persons to question the assumed parameters of a given problem and to subject her own response to critical analysis, what Hirschman called 'self-subversion.'  Essentially this conditioning would inculcate a mental predisposition to accept uncertainty, vagueness, and ambiguity.  The reason that this may allow for creativity to arise is that creativity is usually plucked from the interstices of convention.

With regard to the necessity of uncertainty as a precondition for creativity, Hirschman was of a mind with his brother-in-law Eugenio Colorni who "believed that doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency."  Despite the reality that creative solutions arise in the context of unintended consequences, Hirschman was prescient in understanding that the idea runs counter to most people's expectations.  In his own words:

While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian's finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede--in fact we find it intolerable to imagine--that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social, or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning...  Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry:  we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.

In the words of a psychology, we are prone to a self-serving bias, in which we claim more responsibility for successes than failures.  This was a remarkable conclusion for an economist toiling in a field that über rationalist, neoclassical economists dominated.  We have been conditioned to believe not only in the possibility but also the ascendancy or order.  We have been conditioned to believe, without convincing proof, that humans are rational economic actors who behave predictably.  Hirschman's iconoclasm in challenging the status quo is a refreshing reminder that dogma does not always defeat originality.

Interestingly, Hirschman also addressed school vouchers in response to Milton Friedman's advocacy of them.  Gladwell notes that Hirschman was above all a person of action who volunteered on the side of the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and then was active in the French Resistance during World War II.  Perhaps in line with his idea that creativity is activity in response to unpredictable hurdles, Hirschman apparently viewed with disdain Friedman's position that school vouchers were preferable to engaging the public education system directly.  Hirschman contrasted the Friedman solution to a problem, what he called 'exiting,' or [in Gladwell's words] "voting with your feet, expressing your displeasure by taking your business elsewhere, with his preferred solution which he called 'voice,' or [in Gladwell's words] "staying put and speaking up, choosing to fight for reform from within."  In one of the most succinct and coherent critiques of school vouchers, Hirschman wrote:

In the first place, Friedman considers withdrawal or exit as the 'direct' way of expressing one's unfavorable views of an organization.  A person less well trained in economics might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them!  Secondly, the decision to voice one's views and efforts to make them prevail are contemptuously referred to by Friedman as a resort to 'cumbrous political channels.'  But what else is the political, and indeed the democratic, process than the digging, the use, and hopefully the slow improvement of those very channels?

This neatly encapsulates my own suspicion that the corporate sponsors of school vouchers and education reform would like nothing more than to remove education from public debate, control, and oversight.

I am off to the public library to pick up a copy of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.  I for one prefer engaging the seemingly intractable problems of our post-capitalist democracy to running away and hiding my head in the sand.  Perhaps you do too.

The Broken Record - The Spuriousness of School 'Reform'

David Sirota has a piece in Salon about the growing body of evidence demonstrating that school achievement is tied to socioeconomic status.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/03/instead_of_a_war_on_teachers_how_about_one_on_poverty/

Sirota points to a U.S. Department of Education study demonstrating that 20% of American public schools were considered high poverty in 2011 and another U.S. Department of Education study that found, "many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding ... leav(ing) students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers."  He then asks:

Those data sets powerfully raise the question that the "reformers" are so desperate to avoid:  Are we really expected to believe it's just a coincidence that the public education and poverty crises are happening at exactly the same time?  Put another way:  Are we really expected to believe that everything other than poverty is what's causing problems in failing public schools?

 The overwhelming evidence that has been generated in the last three to five years demonstrates that any problems with public education have little to do with public schools or teachers and nearly everything to do with growing poverty and a shrinking social safety net.  Sirota cites an apt example supporting this point:  "America's wealthiest traditional public schools happen to be among the world's highest achieving schools."  To cap it off, he notes that most of those schools are unionized.

The growing achievement gap in American public schools should horrify everyone, regardless of political stripes.  When the evidence irrevocably demonstrates that socioeconomic inequality is driving the growing achievement gap then the discussion ought to center around what we can do as a society to limit socioeconomic inequality.  We should stop listening to the 'reformers' message, which is, as Sirota points out, funded by the major corporations that benefit from "the dominant policy paradigms in America - tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and budget cuts to social services."  Instead we should be listening to the growing chorus of the impoverished that portends social and cultural failure for America and figure out how we can return to a nation in which success was not wholly dependent on the wealth of one's parents.  Whether we like it or not, this will involve sharing.  Unfortunately I fear that many Americans have failed to absorb that kindergarten message.

NY Review of Books on Guns - A Surprisingly Moderate and Reasonable Take

David Cole has an excellent review of three recent books/blogs relate to guns in America.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/facing-real-gun-problem/

It is worth reading for anyone who is not reflexive in their response to gun ownership.  Put simply, Cole dispels the myths that sustain both gun rights advocates and gun ownership advocates.  In place of myth, Cole offers a rationale analysis of what causes gun violence and what might be done to limit it without resorting to unconstitutional, unpopular, and unrealistic bans on guns.  In a telling passage, Cole notes

[A]s Nocera's Gun Report and any viewing of the evening news illustrates, the media regularly cover gun violence, and as Diaz (a reflexively anti-gun author) himself demonstrates, the toll of death, injuries, and crime inflicted with guns is no secret.  It's true that gun manufacturer's market their wares, but who would expect otherwise?  Guns have become increasingly lethal, but most gun violence is caused by ordinary handguns, not militarized assault weapons.  Diaz devotes almost an entire chapter to a detailed description of the very powerful Barrett 50-caliber anti-armor sniper rifle.  But he then notes that this weapon has been involved in only about thirty-six criminal incidents nationwide over a twenty-three-year period, or less than two a year.  Civilians may not have any legitimate need for such a rifle, but it is hardly the core of the problem.

In a succinct manner, Cole demonstrates that the problem of gun violence is rather pedestrian.  The vast majority of gun violence, as I noted in an earlier post, is perpetrated with handguns.  However, handguns are not going away.  The Second Amendment protects the rights of Americans to own handguns and the vast majority of Americans do not support their ban (74% oppose banning handguns per a Gallup poll Cole cites).  In Cole's words, we not "to recognize that there are legitimate competing interests on [the gun rights] side of the ledger, and that many Americans value those interests particularly deeply."  If we are to attack the problem of gun violence, we will fail miserably if the only solution involves banning guns that are popular and constitutionally protected.

Instead of the usual anti-gun dogma, Cole proposes a respectful balancing that takes into account the practical reality that gun ownership is here to stay.  First, he proposes revisiting the push for background checks which, as everyone is aware, enjoy strong majority support among even gun owners.  Second, he proposed common sense safety regulations that would make it more difficult for guns to be shot accidentally. Critically, Cole recognizes that gun owners are persons to whom respect is owed and his proposals are not in any way paternalistic.

Most importantly, Cole recognizes that the rate of gun violence is far more pronounced in urban, poor areas. He astutely recognizes that the only way to really reduce gun violence is to reduce the effects of urban poverty.  This means better social safety nets, better schools, and better living conditions.  We may disagree with the best manner of achieving the goal of reducing urban poverty, but as Cole makes clear, if we want to reduce the number of persons killed or injured with guns, the the only way to do so substantially is to stop poor urbanites from shooting each other.

  

Father Andrew Greeley - A Voice of Reason in the Catholic Church

Father Andrew Greeley passed away yesterday.  I am not sure how many are familiar with him, but he is an interesting character who played an important role in the Catholic church in the last half of the twentieth centuries.  To me, he is a reminder that religion does not require prudishness, that the ecclesiastical polity is not sacrosanct simply because it is ecclesiastical, and that ethical conviction flouts dogma at every turn.  An apt summary of Father Greeley's beliefs are summarized in his New York Times obituary:

Before religion became creed or catechism, he said, it was poetry: images and stories that defy death with glimpses of hope, and with moments of life-renewing experience that were shared and enacted in communal rituals. 

“The theological voice wants doctrines, creeds and moral obligations,” Father Greeley wrote. “I reject none of these. I merely insist that experiences which renew hope are prior to and richer than propositional and ethical religion and provide the raw power for them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/us/andrew-m-greeley-outspoken-priest-dies-at-85.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

 The obituary is worth reading in its entirety to get a more complete picture of the man.  Noteworthy to me is that Father Greeley was an early advocate for investigating the crimes priests in the Catholic Church committed against children, punishing the offenders, and changing the organizational culture that allowed the criminal abuse to occur.  I was unaware that he contributed substantial funds to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) when it was just getting off the ground, demonstrating that Father Greeley understood that the strength of the Church as moral agent in the world requires transparency and contrition rather than opacity and misdirection.  All who share Father Greeley's conviction that "experiences which renew hope" are primary and form the nexus toward which all right behavior ought to be directed have lost a formidable and pugnacious ally.

Writer's Block

Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite--
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, I.12-14.

While the general purpose of creating this blog was to address the social nature of being and the implications this has for determining ethical behavior and policy, the blog is a product of me.  Hence, I deviate from the stated purpose when my mind wanders over other territories that require its attention.  At present, I am wrestling with the problem of inaction or what otherwise might be called writer's block.  

I have always found the above-quoted words to be an apt manner of describing the state I feel when I am desperate to write but seemingly bereft of the ability to do so.  Sidney also does well to have that fanciful and ephemeral notion of inspiration, personified in the guise of "Muse" reject the idea that writing is an outside-in process.  I suspect any person who writes for writing's sake experiences moments of inspiration in which the words seem to take on a life of their own, flowing from a place that feels preternatural and external.  The metaphor that comes to mind is the writer as vessel.  In some ways, the experience of inspiration is detrimental because, as a preternatural feeling, inspiration seems wholly other and suggests that the writer is not an independent source of creativity.  This feeling of inspiration as other tends, in me at least, to lead to disappointment and lassitude.  When the inspiration vanishes, I sulk and stop writing.  I search for things that might aid inspiration's return:  poignant music, lyrical writing, intense physical activity, etc.

Oddly, the one thing I tend not to do when feeling bereft of inspiration is write.  As Sidney marvelously demonstrates, the feeling of inspiration is, despite seeming to be other, a product of the self.  While inspiration will visit the writer now and again for reasons that are not always clear, waiting to write for inspiration will lead to little writing and much frustration.  The question is:  how does one overcome the lassitude and frustration?

This presents something of an existential question for me.  For reasons I can only intuit loosely, I am cursed (or blessed) with a tendency to imbue the simplest states of mind with significance.  Thus, Sidney's admonition seems less like hyperbole to me than it probably does to others.  In these moments of lassitude and frustration, the desire to get the words out gnaws at me as if it were alive, trying desperately to escape.  Sidney's admonition feels urgent and the self-loathing that follows lassitude is real.  Writer's block hurts.

To overcome the lassitude and frustration requires daring and faith.  Daring because I must write without inspiration, seeking meaning in the act of writing itself, trusting that the very act of writing will give me access to a reservoir of connections and images and thoughts that will free my mind from the paralyzing frustration.  Faith because writing is necessarily an exposure.  To write when the words do not come easily is to trust that they will eventually flow properly.  To write when the words do not come is to risk failure and ineptitude.  To write when the words do not come is to leap into the yawning abyss and trust that the words will illuminate the darkness and carry one safely to wherever it is the words lead.   And so I write, exposed but free.

Inequality in Education - It's Not About the Schools

Sean F. Reardon, a professor of education and sociology at Stanford, has a provocative and well-thought out piece on the New York Times website on the impact income inequality is having on education.  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/?ref=opinion  The gist of the article is that the two main culprits in growing educational inequality in America are growing income inequality and a disparity in the ways that the upper class allocates its resources to foster early cognitive development compared to the middle- and lower-class.  Noteworthy is Reardon's conclusion that the quality of American schools has little to do with the widening education gap.  He writes,

The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline.  In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation's Report Card, have been rising - substantially in math and very slowly in reading - since the 1970's.  The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation.

One positive note from the article is that "the widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement..."  While it is a small silver lining, it is an indication that the educational policies that have been pursued since Brown v. Board of Education have worked to reduce gaps in achievement between historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities.  Put succinctly, "[i]f we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we wee in the population as a whole."

Reardon points to one factor that largely explains the growing income gap in academic achievement:  the time and resources high-income families spend on activities to prepare children for kindergarten.  "The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed than middle class students.  The difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school."  Reardon reports that educational success has become important even for rich families, so they "are increasingly focusing their resources - their money, time, and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school - on their children's cognitive development and educational success."  Research demonstrates that high-income families have increased the amount of resources they spend of enrichment activities significantly more than low-income families since the early 1970's (150% increase v. 57% increase).  In addition, college-educated parents have been spending increasingly more time with their children than those without degrees since the mid-1970's.

Striking is the fact that the achievement gap is tied to cognitive development that occurs prior to a child even setting foot into school.  Certainly, the public schools can bear no blame for this phenomenon.  In Reardon's words, "much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits:  we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich."

Reardon poses a number of possible fixes that can help reduce the income achievement gap that focus on enabling low- and middle-income families to emulate or copy the behavior of high-income families.  He writes, "[m]aybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children's educational opportunities from the day they are born."  He proposes specific means of doing this:

1. Invest "in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children;
2. Invest in parents to improve "the quality of our parenting and our teacher's earliest environments;" and
3. Increased support for maternity/paternity leaves.

Ultimately, Reardon demonstrates that we need to rethink "our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone."  This is a powerful message that all should embrace.  The surest way to reduce income inequality and the size of the welfare rolls is to prepare children for success so they can land a competitive job in the marketplace and never land on welfare in the first place.  This involves giving middle- and low-income parents adequate resources so that they can spend the time and effort necessary (and be taught how) to prepare their children for entering school.  As the proverb goes, teach a man to fish ...

One final note - for an interesting and harrowing read about American day care see this recent New Republic article. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112892/hell-american-day-care 

Oscar Gamble's Afro

I have been in a seasonal affective-type funk that has left me bereft of words for months.  Thankfully the sun shines again and the thermometer has pushed north of sixty degrees.  This time of year for me means baseball and baseball takes me back to the days of my youth, days when I couldn't wait to scrounge up a quarter to run to the Stop-N-Go store and pick up a pack of baseball cards.  The Brewers were just getting good, my parents just let me ride my bike to the store alone, and the faces on the cards were larger than life, residents of an earthly Valhalla, gods battling for the supremacy of a child's universe.  Oh yeah, and being a curly, unruly-haired kid subject to taunts of "Shirley Temple" from the straight-haired fascist machine, one such hero to me for no other reason than his astonishing coif was Oscar Gamble.



Bask in the glory of this magnificent gravity defying, Man-rebuking, self-confident celebration of kinky hair.

Lines Written to My Son on his Seventh Birthday

I guess this is a prose poem of sorts.  I wrote the first draft on the evening that Luke turned seven years old.

To Luke on His Seventh Birthday
Years scurry away from us when we grow old,
but for now, for you, each one is a resplendent eon.
I would utter wise words, give sage advice:
“Enjoy these carefree days;”
however, your days are only carefree to me,
to you the admonition reeks of condescension.
If I cannot give you advice, what can I give?
Praise seems awkward - though you are the
apple of my eye, seven-year-old boys do not lend
themselves to heroic verse.
This is just the fact of the matter.
Perhaps instead I can offer something more
circumspect and modest, a meditation on generations,
of how you and I fit, how fathers and sons work
(and don’t work), how they come to be
the background against which life is framed
or painted or written, the long work
that makes me me and you you.
To start I must return to the earliest me,
the me vaguely aware of my father and his father
and the beginning of our patrimonial play.

SCENE ONE - my father never talked to his father, not the way I talked to mine.
This is why love for me requires words, conversation -
There I share-engage-embrace-feel my father and everyone,
a peculiar intimacy that drives me, unconscious, unstoppable:
Out of my grandfather’s silence I arose mouth flapping!
But you should know that I don’t know if what I saw
or thought I saw is how things actually were.
This, however, is how things usually go:
we construct ourselves from what we think we know,
which is to say what is is a matter not of the actual
but of the assumed and surmised,
the play of surfaces that accompanies being young,
the play that Freud understood and you will understand
when you see that what is is more than what you saw
which disconcerts and makes you wonder,
“Who am I, really?”

SCENE TWO - a scrawny miracle in my arms,
your exhausted mother smiles wanly
as I take you to the scale on the other side of the room
where the nurse weighs you and you are just six pounds
and I am in love, fiercely protective, miraculous, joy-fear,
astonishing love with my skinny long baby boy regardless
of how we become, because every I is a we,
a sum of yous upon which the I builds itself.
Regardless of how we become, first was love,
uncompromising, unconditional, unassailable love.

SCENE THREE - it could be any day
and you are a boy doing things boys do:
playing with something or another
and we clash because we have to go to school
or brush your teeth
or go to bed
or eat supper -
you will have none of it and strike a defiant pose, refusing to do what I ask you to do.
Sometimes, not every time, we fail to resolve this impasse,
we become entrenched and frustration overcomes me.
I raise my voice to an ugly volume, patience fails me,
you do not give in because you are just like me and before long I take something away.
You cannot stand it and burst into tears -
I recall my father in the moment when we recover,
sitting on the couch together, drying your tears -
my father who let remorse overcome him when we battled,
which I thought was silly at the time because I was over it almost as soon as it occurred,
but now I think I understand.
I do not obsess the way he did,
but I feel the pain of Adamic loss,
recall the first instance of undegraded love,
the moment before the world intruded
and it was just you and me,
your scrawny naked first moment in my arms
when I walked you to the scale with your mother smiling wanly at you and me,
when inchoate love burst through and announced itself overflowing,
catching me unaware,
waking me to its immense capacity in an instant,
a switch toggled to light an enormous room,
a space I never suspected was in me, that feels bigger than I am.
We, you and I, are creatures of the world
and so the world intrudes on this paradisiacal moment
and I could say ‘degrades’ it
because that is what my father felt
as if each hurtful thing said or conflict not avoided
took us farther and farther away from the garden,
rendered our lapsarian misery concrete.
I see how he felt this way,
but I think perhaps he erred
and maybe missed the miracle
that the primary patrimonial feeling is incorruptible,
that it is foundational, undergirding everything, speeding the recovery,
giving me the strength to release my anger,
the strength to return to you,
to the way we were before the world intruded.
And I realize the truth:  
what constantly astonishes is not the fall but the return,
the redemption when love wraps around us,
when we, you and me,
return to the insuperable moment when I understood that you are mine.

SCENE FOUR - I am old, older, and you are no longer a boy.
I imagine how tall you are, how you smile, the length of your hair …
I dream that you are handsome and work magic with a soccer ball
and publish stories and essays
and are tender with your mother
and remain free of my curse of despair …
But these are my dreams,
a way to look at what might have been,
framed in the negative space of my regret.
No, I see something different, nebulous,
something that resists words and identification,
something that will not be trapped.
That something I see is you,
but the you of years hence,
a you I cannot know and over whom I cannot exercise dominion.
And this you fills me with hope and dread
because I want you to find a comfortable way,
a way that lets you live freely and without regret,
a way of success and reward, happiness and satiety …
But what I want is just that.
The only thing I know is that you are there and I am near
and still you will be who you are
despite my hope and my dread and my wishes.
So in this scene I let you go,
as my father let me go,
as my father’s father let him go.
Still, though I let you go,
I remain near always,
with love incorruptible.  

SCENE FIVE - a bier.
Yes, we all die.  
Who does the crowd mourn?
We, that is, you and I,
cannot see who lies atop the platform on the open plains,
under a South Dakota sky,
prairie grasses swooshing back and forth,
so many terrestrial waves sounding shh shh in the dry, perfumed air,
the smell of mortality blended with the wildflowers that the bees from the nearby apiaries use,
ashes to ashes.
A prairie rattler curls through the grass,
straw green camouflaged streak -
who lies there remains a mystery,
though we can look at this tableau and wonder
what tradition revealed this sight to us just so,
we who have no gods of new or old,
who wait in phantasmic perplexity
for the soul of this prostrate body to escape,
to reveal itself to us before it takes flight or disappears
and answer questions -
who are we? and why? why us? why now?
The drum beats slow and deep,
filling our chests with reverberated wisdom.
The careful rhythmic chanting spills over us,
flows through us narcotic-like,
dulling the space between I and now.
The tobacco smoke and the cedar smoke and the salvia smoke
lifts us closer to the sun, the sky, the infinite dome,
turns us face to face,
the delicate gray tendrils swirling together, separating, dissipating …
scents lingering after the image disappears.
And we know only one thing:
through it all stood you and I together,
swirling, separating, dissipating, lingering in incorruptible love
until we are each no more together.