15 posts from February 2008

Just finished reading Daniel Quinn's book My Ishmael. I confess, it would be particularly interesting book to use in a class on the Agricultural Revolution. In the past, I have not been terribly interested in covering the period before Egypt and Mesopotamia in significant detail, as I prefer to focus on periods in which there was a good deal of debate about ideas - ideas that make a big difference. Quinn does a creative job arguing that no idea is more fundamental to our culture than ideas about food production and distribution. His argument is that we jettisoned the possibility of a sustainable culture when we began "locking up the food" as he puts it.

Throughout the book, he makes the argument that our culture is not based on an accurate or realistic understanding of human nature. our laws are not made for people as they are, he argues. Our economies are not designed to serve humans as they really are. Our educational systems are not designed to educate humans as they are. It is almost as if he is saying that humans as they were in 10,000 B.C are humans as they are. They lived in a system that had grown organically along with human evolution itself. The Agricultural Revolution and especially the Industrial Revolution were changes in human  social systems that were made to benefit a few people but not the species as a whole and for that reason may not be sustainable as more than just a few people now demand to be included in the once small group of elite humans that designed the system for their little clique alone.

Excerpts from the book would make good fodder for conversation in the first week of a World History class.

Question for Comment: How important is "sustainability" in your lifestyle? If everyone in the world used resources and produced resources in the same way you do, would the world survive the load?

OK. you want to see a bizarre movie?  I mean just absolutely bizarre? a movie that will make you wonder just what the limits of human irrationality are. I can't talk about this movie without spoiling the story so
I won't but these people redefine the word "coo-koo" for me.

I am reminded of Petrarch, the Italian Renaissance poet/humanist.    Apparently, he fell in love with a woman named Laura in 1327 (He was 23). She never returned his affections but he continued to write about her for some 47 years. She actually died when he was about 40 but that didn’t seem to keep him from writing about her. A love affair of unrequited love for some 47 years, half of that with her deceased is quite the accomplishment I should say. .
 
He writes in one of his sonnets.

MY vital power was buttressed in my heart

And well defended, there and in my eyes

Until the harsh stroke landed, where before

All arrows that had come had glanced away

 

Love found me wholly undefended, with

The way from the eyes to the heart completely open

Eyes that are now the conduit for tears.

 

He [Cupid] got no glory from it; I was helpless

And he let you escape with no attack

When you were well defended, fully armed.

Question for Comment: Why is Cupid so illogical? Why does he hit ONE person but not both? Is there some god of insanity that he owes some favor to? ;-)

The following lines from Pride and Prejudice come to mind:

I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love

I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love, said Darcy.

Of a fine, Stout, healthy love it may.  Everything nourishes what is strong already.  But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.

'Tonight's documentary was a Discovery Channel special on the roots of 9/11 by Thomas Friedman.

Thomas Friedman argues that it is not the differential in wealth that has introduced hatred into Islam's relationship with America but the differential in dignity ("A poverty of dignity" as he expresses it). As one young Arab put it in one of Friedman's focus groups, America assumes that "its blood is expensive and Arab blood is water".  The single most important force in international relations is humiliation, Friedman insists.

If you have ever been humiliated, you know what this insanity feels like. If you have ever stood on one side of a boundary looking at someone who lives with dignity while you live with little, you know what a stone-holding savage it can make you feel like being.

Herbert Kelmen, in an address to the Convention of the International Studies Association, defined human dignity in the following memorable terms:

"Human dignity can be said to refer to the status of individuals as ends in themselves, rather than as means toward some extraneous ends."

The Conditions, Criteria, and Dialectics of Human Dignity: A Transnational Perspective
International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3. (Sep., 1977), pp. 529-552.

As my old friend, Art Corsons used to say "The unloved are the loved who never knew it was so"

The book of the day today was a City Upon a Hill: How Sermons Changed the Course of American History by Larry Witham. It was an interesting book about the place that public discourse of a religious persuasion has influenced American life. The author takes a chronological stroll through the various periods of national life to highlight the key oratorical events and personalities behind them.

I enjoyed a section on Billy Sunday in particular. The book notes that Sunday spawned a host of copycat evangelists with names like "Rodney "Gypsey" Smith, Dan "Cyclone" Shannon, and "Sin Killer" Griffin. These preachers would seize upon reputations as  "cowboy" evangelists, or  "the singing evangelist" or the "railroad" evangelist.

There was also a section on the preaching war underlining the Civil War and a section on the preaching support for the eugenics movement that also was well worth reading. The year after the Scopes trial, the American Eugenics Society sponsored the first of three eugenics sermon contests, "the topic being 'Religion and Eugenics: Does the Church Have a Responsibility for Improving the Human Stock?'." The prize was $500. Hundreds of sermons were submitted for evaluation? As one minister put it, "THE CHURCH CAN HELP POPULARIZE THE KNOWLEDGE NOW IN POSSESSION OF THE SCIENTISTS.'

Already, the school textbooks were serving the function well. See a page from the textbook John Scopes was using in his classes here. There is clearly a direct link between the Scopes trial, eugenics, discriminatory immigration laws, the KKK, and American isolationism in the 1920's and 1930's. and, it is no accident that America's leading opponent of Darwinism in the schools William Jennings Bryan was also America's leading voice AGAINST race based imperialism.

“You can love, perhaps for a year, a month, a day, even for an hour . . . and in that hour, I do believe you love as well and deeply as any man. But after that hour, you love not. You love another and then another. Your love is most generous where it is most hurtful.” - Princess Margarette, The Tutors

It is somewhat interesting to note that the famous (or infamous Dr. Kinsey) concluded from his studies that social class has an interesting effect on the faithfulness of human males: "The most striking thing about the occurrence of extramarital intercourse," Dr. Kinsey stated in 1947,

 ". . . is the fact that the highest incidences for the lower social levels occur at the younger ages, and that the number of persons involved steadily decreases with advancing age. Lower-level males who were married in the late teens have given a record of extra-marital intercourse in 45% of the cases, whereas not more than 27% is actively involved by age 40 and not more than 19% by age 50.

"In striking contrast, the lowest incidences of extra-marital intercourse among males of the college level are to be found in the youngest age groups, where not more than 15% to 20% are involved, and the incidence increases
steadily until about 27% is having extramarital relations by age 50."

50% of Men Ignore Vows
The Science News-Letter, Vol. 52, No. 22. (Nov. 29, 1947), p. 342.

“Given a history of an inaccurate tactile perception, it is understandable that the student with an LND does not pay attention to that which cannot be trusted.”

I had a chance to read Dean Mooney's book on Nonverbal Learning Disabilities tonight and was reminded again how important it is to understand how my students percieve things and not just how I think they must be perceiving them from my understanding of the context of their learning. I asked Dr. Mooney what inaccurate tactile perception is and he said that young children with NLD can't really tell the difference between an X and an O when you draw it with a stylus on their finger tips. In other words, things that they may feel or see may be much different when they arrive as something to be thought about.

[Caveat! NOTHING I say in this post should be taken with authority and certainly not as though Dr. Mooney was the source of it. these are all my thoughts and attempts to understand and may be totally erroneous.]

Sights and tactile impressions have a tendency to be "diluted" by words before they are consciously grasped and thus it is that someone with NLD may need to take more time to "decipher" what should have just been an automatic impression. Something felt or seen may wind up getting lost in a tangle of words that has to be untangled to be "known". I said "So its like a tactile version of being color blind, then?" One could not necessarily assume that what was sent along those neural pathways was understood as such when it "arrived" to be thought about.

Perhaps I am searching for an understanding of something that I can have little experience with but what if ... what if you saw something green. In a normal brain, the color green would immediately be perceived as green. But what if in your brain, a conversion of that color took place that turned it into the WORD "green" ... and then your brain had to take the word to library of words relating to color to find a card in a card catalog with that word on it ... and on that card was a dab of green paint. "Ahhhhh ..." you might say. "Thats what I just saw!"

Its a longer process. And may help to explain why S. has that "gravity well syndrome" - - that tendency to think about something that should be -- or would be more automatic in someone who was not going through this process. It is not a "gum ball response" - coin in - gumball out. It is more like a gravity well in which you slide a penny and it circles around and around and around narrowing in on the center. The advantage is that you get an answer that has been around the universe. The frustration is that it arrives three hours after class is over.

Dr. Mooney writes:

“As these students discover that visual input (i.e. what they are looking at) conflicts with what they see, they learn to rely less on what they see and more on what they hear.”

“As a result of their need /reliance on auditory input, students with NLD do not need to make eye contact or appear to pay attention.”

So in reality ... they may actually LOOK inattentive to be attentive.  Every student in that situation needs a different social contract with his or her teacher . . . about time and about non-verbal cues. S. often perceives life with what I have often called "the miner's helmet" on. Its like a person in a dark room with a helmet on equipped with an intense headlight. What is IN the headlight is being seen with more clarity than would ever be seen in a well lit room where attention must be diffused. But what is OUTSIDE the beam may not be being noticed at all ... SO if a tactile or visual package has been "delivered" it has to be run through an airport scanner ... a Geiger counter  ... a thermal imager ...  etc. to be "known". That takes time and will lead to a student who "knows" the package better than you did when you posted it. But by definition, the student HAS to NOT pay attention to what you are going on to say next. In short, by NOT paying you any mind after you have shown them what you showed them, they ARE paying attention to what you showed them. Actually, probably better attention than anyone else in the room once all is said and done.

I remember taking S. on a field trip to Billings Farm once. He and his classmates were taking a tour of the different exhibits. Every three or four minutes the tour guide would move on to a new exhibit but S. was clearly not ready to leave any of them. Four minutes was not enough for someone looking at an exhibit with a miner's helmet on. Just as you might scan a room in 30 seconds in daylight but take 45 minutes if you had to do it with a flashlight in a power outage. He found his attention "yanked" out of about three of these exhibits and then you could almost physically say to himself "Well, dammit, if you aren't going to let me look at the thing, I am not going to even start. I will pay attention to something I can carry with me and to heck with these exhibits!" [These were of course my words and my interpretations.]

What NLD kids and adults get in exchange for the hassle of their "different drum" perceptual idiosyncrasies is an amazing (they say) ability to scan books and computer text FASTER than their classmates and colleagues. They might for instance be able to read Dr. Mooney's book in under a half an hour. Grin.

Question for Comment: Where is the best learning environment for a kid with this skill and challenge set? Would he thrive in an unrelenting two hour verbal debate in an online chatroom for example?

I finished my Al Qaeda Reader tonight. I wonder if I should stop writing the word Al Qaeda. What if the Department of Homeland security watches these blogs for suspects? Ah well ... I am wracking up a list of betrayals lately. Having the U.S. government put me in jail for trying to understand someone who has sworn to kill me would just be another trophy for my case. I typed up about eight pages of notes from the book so it is impossible to share everything I learned.

One of the more interesting aspects of Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri's rhetoric is how laden with projection it is. They themselves believe that their Islamic movements will some day take over the world and they believe that it is appropriate to camouflage those ultimate objectives for tactical purposes. For that reason, it is impossible for them not to assert to themselves that this is what America and Israel are up to with respect to Islam. They completely externalize their own great ambitious vision of world dominance onto appropriate, Koran approved, counterparts. Bin Laden fuses the past history of the Crusades with his future plan for Islam and declares that he knows exactly what Us and Israeli foreign policy are seeking to achieve. Osama Bin Laden writes:

“One of the most important objectives of the new Crusader attack is to pave the way and prepare the region [the Middle East], after its fragmentation, for the establishment of what is known as the "Greater State of Israel", whose borders will include a extensive areas of Iraq and Egypt, through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, all Palestine, and larger parts of the land of the two holy places.

Come let me tell you what is meant by greater Israel at what disasters will be sent to the region.  What is happening to our people in Palestine is merely a model that the Zionist -- American alliance wishes to impose upon the rest of the region: the killing of men, women, and children, prisons, terrorism, the demolition of homes, the razing of farms, the destruction of factories.  People live in perpetual fear and paralyzing terror, awaiting death at any moment from a missile or shell that will destroy their homes, kill their sisters, and bury their babies alive. . . . the founding of "Greater Israel" means the surrender of the countries of the region to the Jews.” P277

No one I have ever spoken to or read about has overt plans for doing what Bin Laden assures his listeners they are doing. He reminds me of Patrick Henry, the Virginia slaveholder who insists that British taxation (an attempt by the British government to pay down a debt incurred defeating colonial America's rival, France) has as its ultimate objective the complete and abject (with chains) enslavement of white colonial America. In other words, what he is presently doing to others, he is convinced, King George wants to do to him. And thus he insists that war is inevitable.

Fear of being done to I suppose is the karmic debt people who do rotten things to others must pay. Maybe that is one reason why Israel builds its wall. It has a feeling that something it has done is about to be done to it? God, these cycles we all get into.

"When we deny something, some energy or potential within, we do not destroy that energy or potential; on the contrary by denying it a place in the pool of light shed by our conscious attention and forcing it to live it's life in the dark, we free it to roam around and act at will, beyond our conscious awareness and control. . . . We begin to see the very things which we are denying in ourselves as the exclusive property of others around us." Karl Jung

Question for Comment: Have you found this to be true in your life? Do you have fears that correspond to things you have done to others? OR plan to do?

Henry VIII walks into the apartment of his devoted wife, Katherine and informs her that their marriage is over. Though he has taken a good number of lovers, he is sure that the lack of a male heir is God's doing. Henry says he is conscience stricken about the fact that Katherine had been betrothed, even married to Henry's brother and that the marriage should never have taken place. (Naturally, he has someone else in mind already.)

What is so interesting is that he actually brings the news with what seems like sorrow. But it is delivered as an announcement. There is no discussion. She does not get to plead a counter case. She does not get to work it through. Henry is the initiator and he has worked it all out, theologically, emotionally, psychologically, sexually, spiritually, economically, militarily, ... he has had time to work it all out. Difficult as the moment of the announcement may be for him, he has gradually pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall in his head months ago and put the pieces altogether again (or at least mapped out how he will). She is going to get the whole 1000 pound gorilla all at once and the actress who plays Katherine does it exceptionally well. She collapses on the floor ... barely able to breath.

The following lengthy excerpt from a book entitled Uncoupling by Bücher Vaughan may help to explain:

“Having a partner is socially acceptable. Getting rid of one is not. This value is so ingrained in us that leaving – or considering leaving – someone who is still loving or dependent produces enormous conflict. When the partner has obvious good qualities, ending a relationship is even harder still. In order to violate the imperatives of the dominant social order – that people should come in two’s like animals of Noah’s Ark – initiators [of the divorce] transform partner and relationship, emphasizing the flaws. They justify the leave taking by stating to others the reasons why this case is an exception to the rule of togetherness. By doing so, initiators reduce the negative social consequences of uncoupling. They create the possibility of exiting from the present relationship and at the same time avoid the appearance of condemning the dominant value system. Thus initiators forestall social embarrassment should they later decide to take on a new partner.

Henry has it all figured out. He even has his own personal Cardinal (Wolsey) to agree with him that his marriage should have never happened in the first place (most people only have therapists). But he runs into a problem. Someone objects. Someone says "no". Someone defies his royal will. And that someone is the Pope, a man who, for political reasons, will not relent.

These are heady times. Henry must or must not cross his Rubicon. "Pope be damned" he says. A reminder that nothing stands in the way of a leaver. Might as well forget trying to stop it from happening.

I feel sorry for Katherine actually. She seems to have been a decent person. And to have one's heart just straight up and hacked apart like that ... Better to have your head chopped off first ... but I suspect that will take place in a future episode. The politics of royal families in Europe ... sigh ... its like Jerry Springer with machine guns. It is just a bad idea to have armies attached to family disputes. A bad idea.

Question for Comment: Is there a decent way to end a relationship when the recipient is still in love, still trying, unsuspecting that they are about to get fired?  
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The last few weeks, I was able to take in most of the HBO Television series on ROME. There was altogether to much pain and suffering and violence and abuse and family dysfunctionality, and venality, and betrayal, and vice, and cruelty, and greed, and ambition, and deceit, and infidelity, and backstabbing and war, and crime, and manipulation, and seduction, and general overall decadence for anyone to enjoy but it certainly helped anyone with the stomach to make it through the 25 or so episodes to understand why this world was looking for some sort of salvation ... why they were desperately in need of someone who could be both heroic AND decent (for in first century Rome, the only way to get enough power to have a chance at being heroic was to be avaricious, duplicitous, conniving, and cunning).

God, what an awful world. Having just finished reading the Al-Qaeda Reader, it occurs to me that people like Osama Bin Laden regard America as some sort of modern day Rome, teetering on the brink of valuelessness, about to self-implode. It is only after watching something like this (and I could only take it in weekly installments) that you begin to realize the sense of utter "salvation" that many in Rome would have seen in a new religion that could offer them absolution from all this moral carnage and some hope of change. Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Goodness, Gentleness, Meekness, Kindness ... Rome had been gutted of these things like intestines from a fish. Conflict within families, conflict between classes, conflict between political factions, conflict between generals, conflict between ethnic groups, conflict between criminals, conflict between genders, conflict between religions ... its pervasive. Its every where. And the use of force and craft and lies are ubiquitous as water out of the new aqueducts.

Character after character aspires to some semblance of happiness only to be dragged down into an abyss of human sorrow like the poor damned in Michelangelo's painting of the Last Judgment, appropriately placed in the capital center of Rome itself now.

What is so interesting about the series is that the character who seems to have the most vices, has the best heart. He falls time and again ... but never meanly ... or if meanly without a sense of offended decency. But no one is above some kind of betrayal or pain. No one.

Some days, I feel myself even so being dragged down.

Question for Comment: How does one keep the fingers and claws of bitterness off their ankles. How does one defend the world against the ROME that wants to make its way back into the world (if it ever left) through the conflicts of their life?

“I am an adjunct; I know hypocrisy.  I'm often surrounded by liberal men and women who cluck and coo about the plights of ‘women, people of color, gays and lesbians, the old, the poor, the ill, the Third World, and the working classes’ with all the politically correct and plastic emotionalism academe has given its stamp of approval to.  In the process, they either ignore, endorse or propagate the injustices done to the underclass of faculty that surrounds and outnumbers them. . . . Perhaps they have failed to realize that equal pay for equal work should be a tenet of any consistent liberal philosophy.  Perhaps they have been able to dismiss inherent liberal concepts like the right of all people to earn a decent living wage.  In fact, academe itself, the bastion of liberalism, according to supporters and critics alike, turns cold, cruel and despondent over its own underclass.”

I am an adjunct; and to be pitied.  I bought a bag of lies we call the American dream.  I was intoxicated on the Nitrous Oxide of idealism forced upon me in graduate school.  I believed caring, working hard,and doing a good job mattered and would add up to something concrete.  Instead I find myself on the wheel that turns but goes nowhere.  I don't expect the situation to change.  I know I have joined the huge group of teachers who become permanent adjuncts, who do a good job only to get one more chance to do it again. 

“I have known 30-year-old men living at home with their parents, 40-year-old women teaching college and going hungry, uninsured 50 years olds with serious illnesses.  I've known adjunct teachers who hand out A's and B's like vitamins and help students cheat on their exams so they will get good course evaluations.  I've watched people fall into obsessive relationships with their idealism and their pedagogy because it is the one defense against despair.” I am an Adjunct by Theodore Swift, found in Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of Adjunct Faculty – and the Price We All Pay edited by Michael Dubson

The following comes from the slave narrative of Frederick Douglas and captures the feelings of one faculty adjunct I know almost precisely.

" In the early part of the year 1838, I became quite restless. I could see no reason why I should, at the end of each week, pour the reward of my toil into the purse of my master. When I carried to him my weekly wages, he would, after counting the money, look me in the face with a robber-like fierceness, and ask, "Is this all?" He was satisfied with nothing less than the last cent. He would, however, when I made him six dollars, sometimes give me six cents, to encourage me. It had the opposite effect. I regarded it as a sort of admission of my right to the whole. The fact that he gave me any part of my wages was proof, to my mind, that he believed me entitled to the whole of them. I always felt worse for having received any thing; for I feared that the giving me a few cents would ease his conscience, and make him feel himself to be a pretty honorable sort of robber. My discontent grew upon me. I was ever on the look-out for means of escape; and, finding no direct means, I determined to try to hire my time, with a view of getting money with which to make my escape."

Question for Comment: Should one protest? Or give up teaching?