The Liberal Politics & Current Events Book Club discussion
Reality-Based Chat. Speak!
Mark, DailyKos is about the top ranked (in terms of visits) progressive site on the Internet - a couple million visits a month. So it is good exposure.It also is good for instant posting. With other sites, the editors have to review the submissions, and as you saw with Truth-out.org, it took almost two weeks. They have done much faster turnarounds on pieces that were not complicated.
Today I woke up with this idea, did the research and wrote the piece all in about six hours. And I thought it was something that needed to get out right away.
Paul, I don't think third parties can do anything in the system we have. The two major parties are too entrenched. What happens when there is a third party candidate is that of the other two candidates, the one the third party voters would least likely support is likely to win if the race is close. That is what happened in Florida and it has happened many times.
I think because of the 2000 election, there is almost no chance of a significant third party effort. The funding isn't there. No progressive money bags wants to see a Republican elected because he gave support to a third party candidate.
When and if you get a chance to read my book, you will see my solution: progressives have to organize like the Tea Party and take over the Democratic Party.
Dan wrote: "Mark, DailyKos is about the top ranked (in terms of visits) progressive site on the Internet - a couple million visits a month. So it is good exposure.It also is good for instant posting. With ot..."
Dan, I knew dailykos was top-ranked, but I had no inkling the monthly traffic was in the millions of visits -- which it's extremely encouraging to hear. Your article really needs maximal attention. It's the best I've seen, and I'm hugely impressed that you managed to generate it in six hours. Typically, it takes me that long to type, "I hate Republicans." :)
It has made the "Recommended" list on DailyKos. I've gotten the most positive feedback I've gotten on anything since my review of Naomi Klein's book.
BTW, I was committed to doing something else today...
Dan wrote: "Mark, I probably am one of the few progressives who doesn't believe the 2000 election was stolen. I followed virtually every minute of the coverage of the vote count and the court battles, and I re..."Dan, though I deeply respect your journalistic expertise, I'm afraid you're likely to remain one of the few progressives not utterly persuaded that Bush stole that election. Stipulating for the sake of argument that Rehnquist's decision wasn't delivered up on a plate, or in a pizza box as ordered by the GOP, and that it made some kind of nominal sense, I still don't see how, just to take one instance, Katherine Harris' multiple acts of malfeasance (as enumerated, e.g., here: http://archive.democrats.com/display....), to say nothing of those of Jeb Bush, could possibly be discounted. And if there is a viable legal argument whereby all those miscreant acts and abuses could be discounted (and since that's your assessment of Rehnquist's decision, and I know you have a law degree, I'm prepared to consider that there may be such an argument), then it still would not negate the flagrant immorality of that "long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices." (pace Locke) So alas, though, again, I respect the personal integrity of your opinion, I think you're going to remain the last progressive standing on that outpost of acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the Bush presidency. :)
(See, also, this overview: http://archive.democrats.com/display....)
Dan wrote: "BTW, I was committed to doing something else today..."That's okay. I think it was a worthwhile trade-off, and in any case, I'm nearly "committed" practically every day. :) :)
Mark, re Florida, of course, it really doesn't matter now. Florida is a very strange state. I don't understand why they elected Rick Scott, who is a crook and a terrible governor. On the other hand, they voted for Obama twice. I don't get it.There actually have been a number of cases of stolen elections in the past when there was far more election corruption. There were a lot of people convinced that Kennedy stole the 1960 election. To his credit, Nixon did not challenge the results. Some really terrible stuff went on in the late 1800s.
But even more recently...
There used to be a thing called "walking around money" in Maryland elections. It was illegal, but its use was widespread. In the 1968 election when Humphrey beat Nixon in Maryland by a very small margin (and I, as the UPI bureau manager, called the race for Nixon!), the man who became governor after Agnew became Vice President sat in an office in Baltimore with stacks of cash on his desk to pay to precinct workers to get out the vote. People were paid to vote. It worked very well. Humphrey got a big vote there.
Another time I got a call from our election stringer in one of the towns on the Eastern Shore. She said the voters were standing outside the polls, not voting, because the walking around money had not arrived yet.
Eventually, the legislature legalized walking around money, and so far as I know it still is used in some areas.
Dan wrote: "Mark, re Florida, of course, it really doesn't matter now. Florida is a very strange state. I don't understand why they elected Rick Scott, who is a crook and a terrible governor. On the other hand..."Dan, I long resided in Florida, and believe me, it is "strange" beyond your wildest imaginings, but I think the reason people routinely elect transparently heinous crooks is just that they've been brainwashed to do so. My impression is that, whenever a gubernatorial (or other) election is sufficiently close for it to be stolen, the Republicans will infallibly steal it (and put in place a creature with hooves, like Scott), but I don't remotely deny that the Democrats, historically, have stolen elections as well (and I'm as much, if not more, convinced than you that irregularities in Chicago may have thrown the 1960 election to Kennedy -- even though I'm quite glad of that). The thing is, the game has been taken to hitherto unseen levels of ruthless predation and egregious criminal fraud, and worse, the ones who stand to take power in virtue of that electoral fraud and criminality are (in my view) incomparably more evil and destructive of this country and humanity than any we've seen before -- in my lifetime, at least. So Kennedy's arguable theft of the election was not an irremediable disaster for the country; a theft in 2016 by the Republicans -- a president the likes of, say, Walker -- would be cataclysmic beyond our capacity (or that of the world, in light of Klein's revelations) to recover.
If I'm to be perfectly honest, it's not the fraud that bothers me so profoundly as the parties it benefits (and by whom it's being perpetrated). They represent, in my view, the worst (and possibly the last) threat this country will ever have to contend with. The ecosphere is disintegrating, we're in the midst of an extinction event on which action needed to be taken yesterday, the economic center cannot hold, and we, the innocent, are about to be drowned in a Republican ceremony of blood.
Mark, I think there is another novel in what you describe!
Dan wrote: "Mark, I think there is another novel in what you describe!"You could title it, "What Rough Beast Slouches towards the White House?" :) :) (slouches very slowly, since it won't arrive until Jan. of 2017)
Don't read this first, but USA Today reports that the home city and state of the two expelled SAE "ringleaders" was the same, and YOU get to guess! I'm sure you'll all be astonished to learn the truth, as was your moderator, of course, but here's:THE FIND-RACIST-WALDO CONTEST
Did the two students come from:
1) Oslo, Norway
2) Montpelier, Vermont
3) Los Angeles, California
4) Chicago, Illinois
5) Dallas, Texas
6) Portland, Oregon
7) Portland, Maine
8) Seattle, Washington
Submit your entries now! (The internet servers are still open!) The person who guesses first may be eligible to receive a free certificate of mental competence and a year's supply of pixels!
Just off the top of my head …… my guess is #5…. could it be Dallas, Texas?!!!!!!!!
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!THE WINNER IS DARLENE!
(Pixels will be delivered by goodreads messaging.)
As a resident of Texas, you can only imagine how surprised I... wasn't!
More seriously (and somewhat unbelievably), there has yet to be any action on the other participating SAE students. And from the same USA Today article, "Bill Powers, the president of the University of Texas at Austin, said the school's dean of students was investigating rumors that a similar song was sung at the SAE chapter there, WFAA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth reported."
Thank you, Mark! :) A girl can never have too many pixels!!!:) I read a statement made by the national president of this fraternity and basically he was as much as admitting that these types of bigoted songs MAY BE SUNG….. but of course, these attitudes are not condoned by the national fraternity! HUH? And I couldn't help but think that people really are BAD at offering apologies, aren't they? Saying you're sorry but then offering excuses for your behavior…. "I had too much to drink at the frat house" or "I learned the song from other members"… somehow the apology fell flat and seemed insincere. Perhaps it would have been better if he had just stated he was sorry for the unacceptable, stupid, racist song he was singing at the top of his lungs. But maybe it's just me…..
When I read that SAE is a fraternity dedicated to ... oh, let me find the wonderful phrase the NYT used... ah, here it is:The fraternity — started in 1856 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., before the Civil War — celebrates its Southern heritage. Its online magazine, The Record, described an initiative “to bring Sigma Alpha Epsilon closer to its antebellum roots, closer to the original experience and goals shared by the founding fathers.”
... I thought to myself, "This will not be the end of the recriminations." Now with word coming out that this is a song that might date back decades across multiple college campuses, it looks like maybe they'll be coming swifter than I thought they would. Anything or anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line celebrating their "antebellum roots," no matter how inoffensive they claim those roots to be, is practicing astounding naïveté, at best, and it's pretty hard for a whole organization to be that naïve.
Paul wrote: "When I read that SAE is a fraternity dedicated to ... oh, let me find the wonderful phrase the NYT used... ah, here it is:The fraternity — started in 1856 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., before the Civil Wa..."
Paul, you're absolutely right, and it's deliberately calculated disingenuousness deployed as a cover, and not "naïveté" at all. This is who they are, and who they seek to be, and whereas every single member of every single chapter may not individually knowingly harbor intense racist feelings, he has, at the very least, knowingly chosen to affiliate himself with an organization whose roots -- and whose continuing ethos -- is, not to mince words, sick and evil. I believe this entire "fraternal" collection of hate-embracing zealots, yearning for the days of antebellum domination and dehumanization of an entire separate race, and the restoration of their status as "masters," ought absolutely to be comprehensively banned from every respectable university in the country. Let them find somewhere else other than academe in which to wear real or metaphorical hoods, and engage in this kind of deeply sick nostalgia.
Darlene wrote: "Thank you, Mark! :) A girl can never have too many pixels!!!:) I read a statement made by the national president of this fraternity and basically he was as much as admitting... And I couldn't help but think that people really are BAD at offering apologies ..."Darlene,
I think they're "bad at offering apologies" (when they're absolutely backed against the wall and have no option but to apologize) because it's part of the prevailing corporate and Republican NPD ethos: "never complain; never explain." They view it as an inadmissible sign of "weakness" and expect to be leapt upon by their kindred rabid predators (which they will be, in most cases, though the behavior of SAE is so far beyond the pale, that even the deranged wingnut politicians who covertly share their revulsive ideology will probably step back a bit for pragmatic reasons, and disingenuously proclaim themselves utterly innocent of any such abhorrent proclivities -- just before meeting in a back room to strategize their next exercise in racist voter suppression).
Anyway,the pixels are forthcoming, and I'm delighted that you'll be able to supplement your collection! :) :)
Mark wrote: "Darlene wrote: "Thank you, Mark! :) A girl can never have too many pixels!!!:) I read a statement made by the national president of this fraternity and basically he was as much as admitting... And ..."I haven't heard, but I assume it was one of their own members who recorded the song? If so it is fitting that they have "hung themselves" with technology. As a lifelong southerner, I'm not at all surprised by this. But please don't paint all southerners with the same brush, I can assure you we are not all racists. I certainly know where to go if I wanted to associate with that mentality however. When I discover someone with that attitude I distance myself from them so I don't have to listen to it. Unfortunately, nothing I could say would change their minds.
You're right that not all Southerners are racist, Barbara, and you might add racism doesn't end at the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, one thing I noticed in my dealing with whites my age and older is the transplanted Southerners were more at ease discussing race than were whites born in places like California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. The first reader for my memoir was a seventy-something white man who is called Tall Texan in the book. Bill (his real name) and I used to make our white colleagues uncomfortable by joking about race. At one point, he was telling me about that humorous book describing rednecks (The title was something like "You know you are a redneck when. . .), and I said, "Bill, I don't have to read that book to know you're a redneck." Bill laughed, but a couple of other white men who heard our conversation looked uncomfortable.Paul, I think that fraternity will have to disband or at least change its mission statement. I would suggest that the fraternity brothers may not know about their mission the way I didn't know that the private schools that I attended were originally connected to religions ( I think Protestant ones, but I've forgotten if USC was originally Methodist or some other religion), but don't the brothers have to learn about their history as part of their pledge activities? Wouldn't they have to chant about their antebellum roots? I'm somewhat sympathetic to the Southerners who want to keep part of their culture, the part involving food, dance, art, music, and great literature. But we should not celebrate the part of that culture that denied the humanity of a whole race of people.
The fraternity houses at Johns Hopkins are off campus and not supervised by the school, or by any adults. There was a fraternity at Johns Hopkins, Kappa Alpha, which is a national fraternity, that at least when I was a student back in the 60s, was a militantly Southern fraternity. They searched out and rushed southern boys, especially ones from prominent and wealthy families. They had Confederate flags and pictures of Confederate generals all over the house. They had wild parties. The only girl I dated my freshman year I met at a rush party there. Whether or not we were interested in them, most of us freshmen went to all the rush parties at all the fraternities to get free liquor and see if we could pick up girls. The only social life on campus consisted of a few really bad mixers.
One of my friends, who was from Louisville, pledged them, but they grossed him out before the year was over and he dropped out. I don't know if KA still is there.
Dan wrote: "The fraternity houses at Johns Hopkins are off campus and not supervised by the school, or by any adults. There was a fraternity at Johns Hopkins, Kappa Alpha, which is a national fraternity, that ..."Dan, I was curious, so I looked. Apparently, they do still have an active chapter at JHU (http://www.kappaalphaorder.org/ka/act...), but there's also a Kappa Alpha Theta there, and a Pi Kappa Alpha, so it was actually difficult to find -- not prominent on google, so they may have dwindled in importance. I really like Hopkins' policy of "separation of academic estate and Greek houses." That seems to me very reasonable, and also helpful for the university in that they have no legal exposure. They really can't prevent students from living where they choose off-campus, unless they actually require on-campus residency all four years. (I still think your food would have been better, if the wealthy "legacies" had been compelled to live in the dorms, though. :))
I think Mary is right that SAE is either going to have to disband or "change its mission statement," but I'm pretty sure they'll just do the latter, and will become "NRINO" (Non-Racist In Name Only). I still think that they ought to be banned from presence on or affiliation with all universities, no matter what. I haven't read the Chronicle in years, but I'm wondering if anyone's published an opinion piece. I'll have to check.
Ok.. I have checked, and there's actually a piece that expresses concern about the legal repercussions of acting swiftly against flagrant racists! ( http://chronicle.com/article/Oklahoma...) I don't actually get this, because I think virtually all colleges and universities have "moral codes of conduct" to which students implicitly subscribe in virtue of matriculating, and I've certainly seen numerous students expelled for violating them. From a legal standpoint, this would seem to me to be a simple "breach of contract" on the student's part, but since you're the lawyer here, Dan, I'd be curious to have your opinion.
Mark, the other two may be sororities. I don't know they developed after the school went co-ed. The only power that anyone in the school had over the fraternities was the Intrafraternity Council (composed of the presidents of the fraternities) that set the rules for rushes and sports (there was an intramural sports league among the fraternities). There also were some codes of conduct. They could deny fraternities the right to take pledges, which was almost a capital punishment for some.In general the system worked very well. We kept out of trouble with our neighbors and the cops (we constantly violated the liquor laws) by having cocktail parties for the neighbors periodically and doing favors for them, and inviting the beat cops to our parties. When we had hay - like for hay party (really seems stupid now and I even thought so then) we would donate to the police stables. Never had a problem.
Mary wrote: "You're right that not all Southerners are racist, Barbara, and you might add racism doesn't end at the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, one thing I noticed in my dealing with whites my age and older is ..."Mary, One thing that you said that I found interesting is that more people in the north are uncomfortable talking about race. In the past few years, I've found that many people are uncomfortable. I've been surprised by this since I never had any difficulty discussing it. My background: I grew up in a Long Island suburb of New York where many people had racist attitudes. There were two black girls attending my high school. My parents and a few other people formed a fair housing committee in our suburb and I was active in the youth group. I was very outspoken about it at school and it didn't win me any friends there. I've been trying to run away from Suburbia ever since but have gotten trapped in it any way. I did meet people of all ethnicities thanks to my parents so maybe I'm comfortable because I grew up speaking about race. What do you think makes southerners more comfortable talking about it than northerners?
THE THOMPSON LETTERS - PART IQuite a long time ago, Lisa and I engaged in a long, epistolary conversation about Chuck Thompson's (mostly whimsical and satirical, but also semi-serious) "manifesto" in favor of Southern secession. We have intermittently discussed posting the whole transcript since then, not because either of us remotely advocates Southern secession (and nor, probably, does Chuck Thompson, with any earnest intent), but because the book does explore some serious questions about the residue of yearning for restoration of the antebellum South still quite prevalent in this region. (I live in the South, and have for over forty years, including 20, in the aggregate, spent in my current locale -- Texas -- so it is not as though I'm speaking as an "outsider." I have personally observed these refractorily persistent aspects of "Southern culture," and know, even as my fellow Texan, Barbara, does "where to find" racist attitudes and behavior, and they're *not* hard to find.) Of course, as Mary correctly observes, there's racism everywhere in the country, and there's certainly no minimizing that lamentable circumstance, but there isn't, in the North (unless I'm mistaken), a strong residue of yearning for the restoration of the Confederacy, or for the legitimization of still-felt racism and misogyny. Northerners who are racists are, I think, aware that they are outliers, so they try to hide it: there's more of a ubiquitous social stigma. Actually, in my opinion, that's why Northerners are less comfortable talking about race: they're aware of the stigma, and much more worried about giving inadvertent offense (even if, covertly, many of them still harbor racist feelings). There aren't the same consequences for egregious overt racism here in the South, and racists can more easily find others of "kindred" outlook. That, anyway, is my personal opinion, after four decades spent residing here -- even though they were spent mostly among fellow liberals in an academic milieu, and like Barbara, I would actively distance myself from racists. But I couldn't be on campus all the time, I do live in the wider community, and so I couldn't avoid seeing it. ("L'hôpital existe à Hiroshima; comment aurais-je pu éviter de le voir?"*)
Anyway, the recent events at SAE (of which the two ringleaders were residents of my own state), seem to us to provide an entrée, if anything does, for an exploration of why it is so intractably (if not impossibly) difficult to extirpate this element of Southern "culture." Again, Lisa and I agree emphatically that the overwhelming majority of Southerners are not notably racist (or, in any case, not more so than Northerners), and I live here. But that doesn't exempt a certain undeniable reality from inspection or discussion. So herewith:
THE THOMPSON LETTERS [between Mark and Lisa, and between Nov 19, 2014 and Dec. 8, 2015]
(Letters are separated by dotted lines.)
Hi, Lisa, [Nov 19]
Sometimes, even when one genuinely believes that something is true, even when there's overwhelming, undeniable statistical evidence that it is true, it's still not a good idea to say it.
The fact that the South is a hotbed of conservative sentiment (which is *very* different from saying that all Southerners are conservatives, because they're clearly not)... is a real political problem for the country. And I live here, and I can't ignore what I see every day, but maybe it's still a bad idea.
I wrote the following screed, then posted it, then quickly decided to unpost it.
But since it was basically a reply to you, I thought I'd send it just to you, and then massively re-edit, to avoid inadvertently offending Southern whites (of which, at this point, I rather count as one, even if not by birth).
So here's the original post:
You wrote:
"I finished reading "Better Off Without 'Em" today as I did doorkeeper duty at Interfaith Action of Evanston's hospitality center, a drop-in center for homeless people. As I sat there, the book cove..."
And I responded:
The title of the book and the author's lack of reticence to pull punches in the matter of generalizations were both at the root of my earlier reluctance (expressed in message #18) to make the book an "official" selection -- and I do cavil at stereotyping -- but I still think the author's overarching observation has some validity (though it obviously has to be taken more as a lament or as a Gedankenexperiment, than as an actual solution to our current national inclination to afflict the afflicted, many of whom you observed this afternoon). I've lived more than half my life in the South -- which has, for me, driven home the point with a stake-to-the-heart that (statististically, and it's impossible to make demographic observations that aren't statistical), a subset of white Southerners represent a bloc intractably hostile to every form of progressivism, and that the deep, toxic residue of racism, militarism and antebellum attitudes in general has not dissipated. It's an entrenched part of the culture, it's conveniently unendingly politically exploitable (ironically) by a plutocracy whose economic goals (upward wealth transfer, and the effective immiseration of *everybody*) are well-served by the repository of reliably retrogressive, anti-science, anti-reality, and anti-humane attitudes to be found in the "reddest" states, which moreover strongly resist the expenditure of public funds on education.
Yes, it would be nice (it would be heaven, in fact) not to have fight tooth-and-nail (and ineluctably to be losing ground on a daily basis) the forces most inimical to basic humanity -- and least disinclined to leave people prostrate, dying in the streets, on the very strange pretext that it's "moral" -- just to maintain funding for what is still the worst social safety net among all first-tier countries. And I feel certain we're going to lose that fight on every front (even to keep nominal Medicare and social security), largely to the political forces whose armies of electoral benightedness (the self-sabotaging wretches yearning to breathe Hannity and Limbaugh) are most deeply, strongly and intractably entrenched in one part of the country.
That said, very obviously, secession is never going to happen (and I'd hate to be trapped here in Gilead if it did, for all that Thompson envisions a ten-year window of unconstrained migration). But:
1) Do you think he's wrong, statistically, about the attitudes entrenched in the "red states," or about the proposition that they not only haven't changed in 150 years, but that they're irremediable in principle and that they're infecting the balance of the country?
2) Even given that Thompson's solution will never come to pass, it does represent an attempt both to propose some solution (and to provide us with some cathartic levity). Are there any other solutions (even impossible ones) that would have the desired effect? There's a persistence of racism, misogyny and homophobia at work, here: a yearning to move backwards. Do we want to try to cure it (by providing the education and social programs the South so intransigently resists), or do we want to throw up our hands (because it's definitely worsening and spreading) and resign ourselves to becoming the US of Gilead? It's probably a pointless question, because "we" (you and I and other social progressives, not members of the plutocracy) have probably already been deprived (through electoral nuliification) of the ability to stop it. But where is it still possible to elect progressives (or, at least, moderate Democrats)? There's at least one part of the country where it's certainly not.
[I think it's interesting that you and Mary and I sort of represent the "Evanston axis" of this group, so perhaps that would be a good place for a new "Capital." :-) :-) (Mary and I both attended NU, and you're still holding down the Evanston fort.) Something about the place (maybe just NU) seems to beget or attract progressives.]
Best wishes,
Mark
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Hi Mark, [Nov 20]
I don't disagree with the book. Most stereotypes have some element of truth in them at their core. Nevertheless, since most of this discussion is on a public forum, I don't think it facilitates dialogue to stereotype people and call them names. The book was written as satire, but I guess I didn't find it funny partly because I was put off by his crude use of language.
I also probably didn't identify with a lot of it because the only part of the South that I've spent much time in is South Florida. A lot of my family members are the liberal stereotype he talked about who've moved there from New York.
My grandparents moved to Florida when I was three. My parents moved down there when they retired, also as did several other relatives. Right now I wouldn't mind following in that stereotypical pattern myself at least to be a snow bird but I can't get my husband to leave Chicago for more than 2-4 weeks at a time. It's been freezing here for a couple of weeks.So greetings from beautiful Evanston known by the Tea Party as "the belly of the beast." If they could only build a retractable dome over the entire Chicago area, Evanston would be a perfect place to live.
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Hi, Lisa, [Nov. 20]
I'm a white male who's lived for 45 years in the South (with the remainder spent in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Evanston). So I suppose that I feel I'm, in a way, an atypical member of the targeted (or maligned) demographic of the book (in that I'm socially ultra-progressive). So I don't feel too guilty about appreciating satire directed at a group of which I'm nominally a member.
Anyway, that's just by way of explaining why I found it somewhat amusing and cathartic to suffer collateral damage as part of a group whose overall political proclivities really do seem to need the counterweight of mockery. But on reflection, as I explained, my instinct was the same as yours. Incendiary rhetoric (howsoever cathartic in the composition) that perpetrates (even statistically defensible) stereotyping does not belong on a public forum, so I posted it, then quickly deleted it. It's really a fine line, though. Certainly, all old white male Southerners do not deserve to be maligned, but what about old white male Southerners who are active members of the KKK? What about neo-Nazis? At what point (if any) do the aggregate political positions of a group (as of, say, the Tea Party) so affront humanity, itself, that it becomes admissible to mock them?
I honestly don't know the answer. But I do know that I'm capable of producing some very vituperative prose if I don't watch myself, when I'm annoyed by genocidal plutocrats or their victimized ignorant supporters, so I'm trying to be a little better behaved in deference to my accidental ascension to the position of moderator. :) :)
Best wishes,
Mark
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Hi Mark, [Nov. 21]
Everyone has different senses of humor. It's okay for you to laugh at whatever you want. I'm just saying that I personally didn't find the book that funny. Is there some way you could move this discussion back to the group forum? I think there are some interesting things to discuss here.
By the way, it was kind of funny being reduced to a cultural stereotype but at the same time, it was a bit insulting. It gave me some insight into why the southerners were reacting like that.
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* Hiroshima Mon Amour
[Continues on the next post: it turns out there really is a limit to the size of posts, and I've finally reached it! :)]
THE THOMPSON LETTERS - PART IIHi, Lisa, [Nov. 21]
I think that's a good idea, and it might really stimulate some discussion.
I was thinking I'd concatenate all our correspondence (with a few redactions) in chronological order -- commit further editing to avoid misconstruction (because we are both averse to stereotyping, but it's a touchy issue), then send you back the whole lengthy "epistolary" discussion to subject it further to the filter of your own good judgment. And *then* just post the whole discussion, en bloc, on the "Reality-Based Chat."
So, if that's congenial to you, give me a little while (I'm actually very much under the weather, which has been impeding my output), then I'll send you a pre-final version for your own scrutiny, and post it if you think it's okay.
Best wishes,
Mark
(who would rather be in Evanston -- or Oslo)
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[Lisa to Mark, Nov. 21]
That sounds good to me. I'd be glad to look it over. I think it will be a good discussion.
I guess no place is perfect all the time. I'm feeling ready to be a snow bird (someone who goes to Florida for the winter) but my husband doesn't hate cold weather the way I do. We've compromised by being gone in February to somewhere warm. It's been working.
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Hi Mark, [Dec. 5]
I read again what you wrote about "Better Off Without 'Em." I didn't find any of it offensive. Why don't you post it back on the group discussion along with my comments? I'd like to see what other people have to say about it.
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Hi, Lisa, [Dec. 6]
I had been somewhat ambivalent (I know you'll think it odd for me to be worried about potentially offensive rhetoric), mostly because of the possibility of seeming to be biased against all Southerners (which I'm certainly not), but since you've vetted it and don't think there's a problem, I'll try to make it my next project. (It would also be helpful to change the subject, at this juncture -- away from my having to elaborate on the rules of conduct). I don't want to restrain anyone who hasn't actually committed ad hominem offenses, but I also don't want to put people off who prefer much less confrontational rhetoric. I'll try to steer a reasonable course. I'm not going to allow any personal vitriol within the group or personal attacks on politicians for reasons wholly unrelated to their ideology or egregious personal behavior (e.g., racist attacks on Obama or misogynistic remarks -- which would count as egregious personal behavior, but by the attackers and not by Obama).
Thank you for your patience!
Best wishes,
Mark
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[Lisa to Mark, Dec. 7]
That sounds like a plan. I wasn't really asking you to censor anyone. I was hoping to encourage people to self-censor in terms of coming out against the opposition's actions and ideology. There's plenty of that to rant and rave about without calling the people saying it stupid or ignorant or whatever. Even though between you and me, I think they are.
It's just another indication of where our society is headed. People don't have friends who they can rant and rave to in-person and need to vent to people on a website. I wish there was a way we could save things as drafts and look them over before sending them. I haven't figured out how to do that on Goodreads the way you do it on regular e-mail or a blog. Do you know how? I might start doing that.
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Hi, Lisa, [Dec. 7]
I do a lot of copying-and-pasting, which was how I inserted the text of your last message at the beginning of this one. (I also used HTML to italicize it.) Often, rather than composing lengthy replies -- or unprompted screeds -- directly on goodreads, I'll first write them on Notepad (the simplest possible text processor, of which there are versions on all the major platforms and devices), and then copy-and-paste the finished product into the goodreads comment box. If you tell me what sort of device (Android or Apple smartphone or tablet, PC with Windows, or Apple Mac) you're using to communicate, I'll be happy to tell you the simplest way to compose (with less chance of losing text) and copy-and-paste between the text/word processor and goodreads (either within the browser, or the gr app).
You're certainly right about people lacking others of like mind IRL to whom they can vent (especially here in the South, if you're a liberal) -- and sometimes for other reasons (in my case, because I have health problems and am very isolated). So I'm sympathetic to people's frustration, but I also see considerable danger in anathematizing private individuals (which is the thing that would worry me most) -- and like you, was brought up with a preference for civility (though it's amazing how uncivil discussions can become -- even in an academic environment).
Don't worry! I plan to finish the copy-paste/edit of our "Better Off" discussion tonight, and I'll send it to you for vetting via goodreads message. I've been under the weather, so it's just been a hard day, and I'm a tad behind.
Take care,
Mark
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Hi Mark, [Dec. 7]
Thanks for the reply. Feel better soon. Whenever you get to the discussion we had, you'll get to it. It can wait.
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Lisa, the Southerners who are my age or older lived through the civil rights era, so they saw the racial struggle up close, and of course they were on the right side of the struggle, which was pro-integration. I also noticed something when I moved to Evanston that writers have commented on; while the schools may have been more integrated in the North, the neighborhoods were often more segregated. My maternal grandmother lived next door to a white woman in Kentucky, and wherever we or our friends and family lived there were always white people down the street or around the corner. But the street I lived on (I think my address was 1828 Lemar Avenue, Lisa, just off Emerson, two blocks East of Skokie, if you want to check out my old home, which was still standing the last time one of my Chicago relatives saw it) was all black as were most of the streets surrounding the high school. And while the Kentucky hospital had a black wing, and the cemetery had a black section, Evanston had a separate black hospital when I moved there in 1964, and my stepfather is buried in a black cemetery that is in or near Evanston. I interacted with white "friends" at school in both Henderson (my Kentucky hometown) and Evanston, but none of those "friends" visited my home, and I didn't visit theirs.I have read so many writers' descriptions of the differences between the North and the South that I no longer remember who said what, but one writer, possibly Ralph Ellison in INVISIBLE MAN, claimed that Northern whites love blacks as a race but don't care for the individuals while Southerners love individual blacks but don't love the race. He might have added that the Southern whites are more likely to be related to blacks than Northerners are. If O'Malley does have a black child, he's following in the footsteps of former Democrat turned Republican, always segregationist Strom Thurmond.
By the way, one of my much older colleagues (he's a year younger than my mother) is almost too comfortable discussing race with me. In fact, his problem is that he thinks of me only when a black person or black issues are involved. He called me when August Wilson and Chinua Achebe (whom I never taught) died but not when Eudora Welty, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, whom I taught regularly, died. Still, I prefer him to the "colorblind" whites. Anyway, this guy is originally from Baltimore.
I think familiarity with blacks is what makes the difference in how comfortable whites are discussing race, no matter where they live or lived. I was talking to my white friend from Rhode Island about how my friendships with whites evolved. I told her that I didn't actually start hanging out with white friends outside of the classroom, not even to have lunch, until I was in graduate school and met her and several other friends. By that time, I had been a high school teacher for a year and ate lunch with some of my white colleagues (in Evanston). She was originally from New Jersey and is three years younger than I am (in race relations, every year counted during the sixties and seventies), so I found out during this discussion that her best friends in high school and college were black. I said, "Oh, that's probably why you didn't get nervous when I talked about race back in the seventies." I think she felt more comfortable with me than she did with some of our white friends.
I probably would find that book that you're discussing funny, Mark and Lisa, the way I found Honey Boo Boo's Mama June funny until I realized she was a pervert. Laughter is the best revenge. And the stereotypical Southerners need to be ridiculed. But we also have to keep an open mind. I remember how I responded to John Edwards when he was running in 2003-4. He opened his mouth, I heard that accent, and I wanted to slap him off the television screen. When he would talk during the 2003-4 debates, I would just yell at him. After eight years of a real good old boy (Clinton) and almost four more years of faux good old boy Bush, the last thing I wanted to see was another Southern white man in the White House, but when Kerry lost, I looked at history (Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Gore, who actually did win, Dan, were all from the South), held my nose, and picked Edwards for the win. Even when I knew his best friend in high school was black, I preferred his wife until after the scandal when I saw how he behaved and compared him to how she and the other more privileged white folks (the mistress, the aide) around him behaved and decided that he was like me, a born-in-the-working-class Southerner who worked his way to the top (in my case, the middle, but I'm a black female) instead of riding someone else's coattails into the spotlight and who took responsibility for his actions, both bad and good. I now prefer him to most politicians.
That's why I say we have to recognize that we stereotype, that we all respond to people based on race, gender, class, region, etc., and be prepared to change our views based on reality.
There are so many different subgroups in America, so many different classes and regions that it's mind boggling. Personally, I find it interesting. Nevertheless, we are all part of the United States of America and somehow we have to learn to coexist. While the satirical suggestion that we let the South secede often sounds like a good one to me, I know it's never going to happen.I guess the understanding can start one person at a time as we listen to people as individuals refusing to pigeon hole them. I found it funny when the author of "Better Off Without 'Em" stereotypes the Jewish liberals from New York who've moved to south Florida because he was describing a lot of people in my family. At that moment, freezing in Evanston, I only wanted to be one of them. After a few minutes, however, I felt vaguely insulted. I hope the discussion we'll have about this book can help in a little way to get away from that stereotyping.
By the way, Mary, I think that Evanston has gotten somewhat better since the 1960's. There is no black hospital. The doctors and patients at all the hospitals are totally ethnically diverse. The schools were integrated with busing because of defacto segregation. It still exists but not as badly. (I don't have statistics on it.) Skokie has become the United Nations of the North Shore with people from 90 different countries living there. No neighborhood is composed of any particular ethnic group. I'm glad to say that I live in a racially mixed building.
I don't think anyone has mentioned it here or in any of the stories I have read, but Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) stands for Sex Above Everything. I knew a guy in the fraternity in my college days. It is not intended to be a racist frat. To say that would be not true in my view. But individual chapters can be, of course.
Evanston was more integrated by the time I left in 1972, Lisa, although the neighborhoods were still segregated. I'm not sure when the black hospital closed, but when my mother went to the hospital in 1969, she went to the "white" hospital. Skokie, which was where most Jewish people lived in the mid-sixties, was also already being integrated before I left in 1972. Two educators (she taught elementary school while he eventually became the principal of the junior high) who attended Second Baptist Church with my parents were among the first blacks to move to Skokie. Speaking of churches, as far as I know, Second Baptist is still all-black, and most churches in all parts of the country are still segregated. But my mother attends a mixed-race church in Claremont even though the preachers have always been white, and another Baptist church out here (Pomona First Baptist) has had both black and white ministers.I heard a Jewish stereotype joke on Bill Maher's show last night. He was talking about this new watch that will tell us when to do things and said it was like wearing a tiny Jewish mother. Bill, of course, prides himself on being politically incorrect, and I support that attitude. If everyone is afraid to say anything about anyone who is not part of their subgroup, we will never find out what we think about each other. During the one year I worked at Tufts, I was annoyed by the privileged students (black and white) I found there. They were so obnoxious that they thought UCLA and UC Berkeley were second-rate because they are state schools, and one little princess wondered why we were discussing poor people since everyone in the room (I think she meant their parents) made at least $40,000 a year. This was 1979, and I was making $15,000 a year. But one of my favorite students was a young football player from Highland Park, Illinois. We bonded because we had lived in the same area, and I had actually worked in Highland Park. So imagine my surprise and horror a few years ago when a friend of mine was reading a letter I wrote to her during that year, and I heard my thirty-year-old self call that favorite student "the Jewish Prince." Even before I taught at Tufts, I had a couple of close graduate friends who were Jewish, and some of my best friends and favorite colleagues at Cal Poly were also Jewish. I initially blamed my behavior on living in the Boston area where everybody was biased, I claimed, but one of my non-Jewish friends smartly pointed out that the privileged Tufts students probably reminded me of my teenage years when my mother and I both worked for Jewish families in Highland Park. I liked my student, but I didn't like them, and my politically incorrect label for him reflected my continued resentment of them.
Jimmy, also on Bill's show last night, two young women were discussing a documentary they produced that focuses on campus rapes. They talked about how many of those rapes occur at fraternity parties. I would suggest we get rid of fraternities and sororities, but students will just find other ways to form cliques. There are already ethnic, political, and religious clubs on most campuses. Princeton has eating clubs, and I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't already gun clubs, drinking clubs, maybe even sex clubs, and if there aren't, there will be if we eliminate fraternities and sororities. We humans, especially the adolescents and young adults, love to clique.
Bill Maher is half Jewish, half Catholic and all atheist.Except for the town pharmacist, I never knew any Jews when I was growing up until I went to an advance placement summer session at the Manlius School, near Syracuse, NY. My roommate was Jewish, but I didn't know it. One night he asked me to guess his religion. I went through a list of Christian religions, but never mentioned Judaism. He laughed and laughed and finally told me. My reaction was the same as it would have been had he told me he was a Methodist.
Then, at Johns Hopkins I joined a mostly Jewish fraternity and eventually was elected its president. Twice I was hired later by people who had been members of that fraternity at other schools and who thought I was Jewish. One of them was the Governor. I never told him I wasn't.
Mary wrote: "Evanston was more integrated by the time I left in 1972, Lisa, although the neighborhoods were still segregated. I'm not sure when the black hospital closed, but when my mother went to the hospita..."Hi Mary, That's interesting. My synagogue Beth Emet has done a lot of social political action projects with Second Baptist. My husband and I have been there several times and were always warmly and courteously welcomed. It is still predominantly black but a few whites attend as well. We did a joint volunteer day with them and a couple of other churches, planned several Martin Luther King Day celebrations (I was on the planning committee) and done a bunch of other things. One of the most exciting was on Pres. Obama's first inauguration, Second Baptist rented a giant screen TV and invited our congregation to watch with them. I was so transfixed that I couldn't take my eyes off the TV until George Bush got in the helicopter to go back to Texas. We've had other joint activities with them since. At one point, the two youth groups made a joint tour together of the civil rights spot in the South. Anyway, after all these times, I feel pretty at home at Second Baptist. A few other churches in Evanston are somewhat mixed also.
Mary wrote: "Lisa, the Southerners who are my age or older lived through the civil rights era, so they saw the racial struggle up close, and of course they were on the right side of the struggle, which was pro-..."Strangely, Ellison's Invisible Man had a profound impact on me long before I had any concept of racial inequities -- because I read it at 8, lived in a segregated (white) neighborhood, and had had virtually no contact with anyone of another race. But what I had experienced was speaking not as a child, when I was one (and experiencing ostracism and derision on that account). My offense was much less consequential than Ellison's: I was an antisocial geek who spoke in the language of books, and I had never met another. I was guilty of AWG (articulating while geeky). But Ellison's character's initial offense (that of being OWYAB -- orotund while young and black, and subjected to beating and humiliation for it) resonated as nothing else had previously. I was never oppressed in a way remotely comparable to the manner in which both Ellison and his protagonist must have been treated, but whether or not intending to, he was speaking not only to black people, but to one completely alienated eight-year-old white boy, and if I'd been able to find a hiding place with about a thousand lights and a thousand books and no other people, then I'd certainly have done so at that age. That's when I became conscious of race, not because Ellison's character was black, but because he was other, and that part, I could certainly understand. I had read a great deal of literature very early, but Ellison was the first one ever to communicate that to me. Anyway, I hadn't thought much about it since childhood, and I don't suppose my experience was one of invisibility so much as inadmissibility -- I didn't fit -- but still, the book touched me, and it's a good thing I had parents who paid no attention to what I read and didn't care. Because whereas they were certainly "liberal" by the standards of that era, I don't think they'd have approved of my sense of identification. Anyway, I never mentioned it, and I rather suspect they would have thought I'd been reading H.G. Wells, if I'd dropped the title. Were they Northern whites who "liked blacks as a race" more than as individuals? I don't know. They seemed not to know any individuals: there was one black student in my suburban high school, later on, and I don't think I encountered a non-trivially integrated educational environment before I went off to college. (Of course, I also don't think I encountered an educational environment before I went off to college.) One thing I remember is that, as an undergraduate (majoring concurrently in math and French lit), I took a course in French African Literature (in which I read, among the books I remember, "L'enfant noir," "Les damnés de la terre" and something by Senegalese president Léopold Senghor about "Négritude," of which the title escapes me), and the professor was African but there were only white students. So I think there was de facto segregation by availability of foreign language education in public school systems serving black communities. Hence few black French majors.
At Engelhardt Hall, the graduate dorm at Northwestern, my first suitemate was a black industrial engineering student, and I don't think either of us thought it unusual (in 1974). We were amicable enough, but not close, and had separate friends. On the other hand, I was less close to the white math grad student who replaced him, the following year. One of the great anomalies about Northwestern was that it had a linguistics department most distinguished by faculty expertise in African languages, but I think there was exactly one black African student enrolled in the Ph.D. program -- and no African-Americans (to my recollection). I was following the "computational linguistics" track, in any case, so I may not have taken the usual range of courses.
I do recall that, as you note, Mary, the neighborhoods in Evanston were markedly segregated.
All the cities in the North with which I am familiar were segregated, not by law, but by custom. In many cases it wasn't racial segregation, but also ethnic. There were black neighborhoods, Polish neighborhoods, Irish, Italian, etc. When I was a kid there was a section of Buffalo so Polish that it had Polish street names and a Polish newspaper. Now that area is largely Muslim, I believe.
In Baltimore the lines were marked by streets. I covered a "white riot" in East Baltimore in 1966 for UPI. There was a National States Rights Party rally in Patterson Park, a very large park touched by several different neighborhoods. (At one end was fought the battle in the War of 1812 that stopped the British advance on Baltimore). A gang of white kids ran into a black neighborhood and threw rocks at the blacks. They returned the same. I quoted the black kids in my story saying they were most offended because the white kids crossed the street into their neighborhood. That went against the "code" that generally prevailed.
Then we went through a period of "block busting," where one home on a street of homes owned by whites would be sold to a black, and the real estate agents would panic the whites on the street into selling their homes, usually at below market prices. I had a friend who was a senior member of the administration at Johns Hopkins and who had been the first 20th century black student at Hopkins. He said every neighborhood he moved into soon became a ghetto. Eventually, blockbusting was outlawed.
The new city of Columbia, MD was built by the Rouse Company about 15 miles southwest of Baltimore, beginning in the late 1960s. It was designed to be a fully integrated community both economically and racially. We moved there in 1971 when it had 10,000 people. The first child born in Columbia was from a mixed race, white/black couple. Now Columbia has around 100,000 and it is racially integrated.
In my neighborhood I think about a third of the homes were owned by blacks. Our house was sold to a black family. There also were Indians (from India), Chinese, and other Asians. I don't recall any Hispanics, but there may have been. The county, Howard County, has one of the highest per capital incomes in the country. Asians had the highest average incomes, followed by the blacks, and then the whites. So I guess the economic integration worked as well as the racial integration.
Mark, you and I missed each other at Northwestern by just a few years. I graduated in 1971 and left Evanston for USC in 1972. But my parents lived there until 1976. I lived with white people (as their servant) when I was fourteen and fifteen, and I had been raised to believe that integration was good, segregation bad, so I had some trouble with the idea of special black corridors in the dormitories that the black students fought for during my freshman year (1968). But now I think I would have been bothered by living with white students in a dorm room and not so much because of their race but because of their class. Most of the Northwestern students were privileged, maybe not quite as wealthy as the Tufts students, but certainly wealthier than I was. Of course, during my freshman year, my mother worked as a maid in the freshman dorm; I think it was called Willard Hall, so that would have been a problem as well. I lived at home, and fortunately my white pot-smoking roommate at USC was kicked out after about three weeks, and I never had another one. I moved off campus when they threatened to move an undergraduate into my on campus studio apartment. Lisa, my mother will be excited to hear about your involvement with Second Baptist Church. She still gets the bulletin from that church every week even though most of the people who were there when she attended have died or left. We know a woman named Ava, who attends that church now; her late mother knew my mother when they were children in Henderson. Ava teaches in the journalism department at Northwestern, and I think occasionally does the news on one of the Chicago stations. She's really interesting to us now because she went to school with Michelle Obama. I'm one degree of separation from the Obamas in several ways. One of my brother's in-laws attended (and probably still attends) Reverend Wright's church, but that church was so huge she didn't know the Obamas. Then we knew another woman from Henderson who lived next door to Michelle and met Obama when he was a community organizer, so she knew them before they knew each other. We don't know what happened to that woman whose name is Juanita; she is a couple of years older than my mother, so she's probably in an assisted living facility now since her only child, a special needs son, died years ago.
The segregated neighborhoods are not totally about racism. As I said in my last post, we like to clique, and we clique around common interests--race, ethnicity, gender, religion, education, etc. We're in a liberal politics/writer/reader clique here on goodreads. On Linked/In, I'm in a couple of English Literature and Language cliques. I just think it's interesting that the neighborhoods seemed to be less segregated in the South than in the North and the West. I'm sure everyone knows about Watts because of the riots, but there are other segregated neighborhoods out here. Monterey Park, for instance, is predominantly Asian as are a few other towns. When my mother moved to San Fernando, her street and quite a few surrounding hers were all-black, but most of the people on her block were teachers. She had bought a repossessed house and was surprised to be surrounded by more professional blacks. But then as they moved out and up, the class of the blacks in her neighborhood lowered, so when the teacher on one side of her (she was married to a white man who had previously been married to a Latina) moved to a more expensive area, the young couple who bought her house were not as well educated, and he was a garbage collector. Then Latinos started moving into the area, and the blacks moved out. My mother sold her house to Latinos. That area is now predominantly Latino, as are several formerly all-black neighborhoods in Southern California. I call it "black flight," similar to the "white flight" that happened when blacks integrated neighborhoods in places like Chicago and Detroit.
I'm now having some problems with racism in the community that my mother and I have lived in for sixteen years. I call us the original settlers because we were literally the first people to move into this new neighborhood of 54 homes. I was discussing the current situation with the couple who (along with their son) were the second family to move in. I pointed out that among the first group of people to live here, there were twelve people living in five houses. My mother and I were the only blacks; they were a mixed couple; he's white and she's Thai, so their son is, of course, mixed. The third residents were a mixed race (Latino and white) gay couple, then came a Vietnamese woman, her mother, and her brother, and finally a Latino (he was Cuban; she was Mexican) couple, so there were only two white people among those original settlers, and one white man was married to an Asian woman while the other one was living with his Latino lover. I said that we looked like the future; we represented the California of 2050. Interestingly, the next two families to move in were Chinese and African. Now there are two families from India; the mixed race son of our former neighbors is married to a white woman, and the half-black, half-Philippine man across the street has divorced his Latina wife with whom he had a daughter and is now also married to a white woman with whom he has a son. I think their children represent the future. But there are still old white folks around with the old scars, causing the same old problems, and I'm not as cool about it as Obama is because I'm also scarred by Jim Crow.
It's interesting given our discussion of Anti-Semitism that Michael Douglas wrote an article that appeared in today's L.A. Times about his son, who is Jewish by choice, encountering Anti-Semitism in Europe. He made the point that Anti-Semitism is more common there than here, although I was just debating a closet racist (against blacks) on a site where another racist was making openly anti-Jewish comments so vile that the closet racist who was calling the Obama girls "brats" was offended (he's not Jewish), and the originator of the site shut down the debate. American blacks, of course, have always seen Europe as less racist. In fact, when I first started having someone clean my home, I hired a company that was owned by a white man from Europe (I never asked him where he was from; I guessed Germany). I didn't have any problems with any of his employees (European-born whites and Latinas) until an American white couple came to clean my house one day. I always left after the cleaning folks arrived and left the check on the table. That couple took my check and did not clean the house. They didn't vacuum and didn't use any of the products that you can smell when your house has just been cleaned. I told that owner never to send that couple to a black person's house. I hope he fired them.
Mary, Send your mother my regards. I don't know the people who you mentioned but have met several others. There is latent racism and anti-Semitism everywhere. We have to try to set a climate where people cannot act on those feelings. For the most part, I've felt safe as an American Jew that our government would not allow people to act on their anti-Semitic feelings in any significant way. I would hope that someday, we will be able to say the same thing about racism although that doesn't seem like it is imminent. There are all kinds of ways that people find to separate into subgroups - based on race, religion, political views, national origin, regional origin, etc. Although there will probably always be anti- feelings that people have about The Other, we have to work to create a society where people aren't allowed to act on those feelings in any meaningful way. I think it can be done but I don't think the current Congressional Republicans are trying to very hard. In fact, they seem to be doing the opposite.
A slight diversion from the topic, though still somewhat related:I got into a big debate with my sister-in-law and her husband over all of the basic philosophical differences a democratic socialist like myself would have with folks who are pretty hardcore right wing.
Their views seem to be influenced primarily by two sets of experiences:
1. He worked for HUD for a while to inspect public housing projects, and 2. She is a public school teacher in a school filled with low-income, at-risk kids.
In both cases, they say, they saw/see a culture in which people were/are content to live off whatever public assistance they can get without actually trying to better their lives. Thus they argue the system should let them fail, so that they will be appropriately motivated to better their lives.
Not wanting to either dismiss their experience or tread into waters over my head (neither public housing nor public education are my areas of strength, unlike say health care or taxes or broader economic policy), my main argument was that even if we accept that there should be a level of consequences for people who willfully make bad choices, their children should not be punished for those bad choices. I also argued that we as a society should have a floor beneath which we allow nobody to fall because all human life has intrinsic value, regardless of the decisions made during the course of that life.
Needless to say, no one was convinced either way. But it was a rousing, even fun debate, but it did leave me wondering whether anyone here has more expertise than I on the nitty gritty of public housing and/or public education. Mainly, they seemed to feel that public housing should be "term-limited," for lack of a better term, and that in public education, students too often are passed through the system by design, instead of being allowed to fail.
Thoughts?
Paul wrote: "I also argued that we as a society should have a floor beneath which we allow nobody to fall because all human life has intrinsic value, regardless of the decisions made during the course of that life. .."Paul, I think this is the inviolate bottom line, and that anyone who rejects it, whether or not intentionally (with all due respect to your relatives), is advocating inhumaneness.
It does not require expertise in public housing administration or public education to find it wholly unacceptable that *anyone* -- anyone at all -- should be denied education or left homeless. I think there is a deep "punitive" streak -- typically moralistically rationalized as a desire to "motivate" the disadvantaged and afflicted -- that permeates this society, and I think it's why we elect members of the "abusive daddy" party.
Americans do not typically accept that "human life has intrinsic value." If our public education system is ineffective -- and in broad swathes of the country, it is -- then it's typically because it's been starved for resources by conservatives, that the kids are frequently "starved" in a literal sense because we do not provide an adequate social safety net, and that Republicans want to obliterate learning among all but the upper classes and are also strong proponents of a level of intellectual enlightenment suitable for particularly retrograde 9th-century peasants. Their fundamentalist constituency does not want to know that they've got the age of the universe off by fourteen billion years. We are the intellectual laughingstock of the civilized world, as Scott Walker discovered in England. But much worse than that is how inhumane we are.
Mary wrote: " I'm not as cool about it as Obama is because I'm also scarred by Jim Crow. ..."Mary, I don't think you should be "cool about it." You don't have to worry about the political calculus of running a country, and whereas I may have to accept certain conditions of existence, it pretty much outrages me that you should have to, in 2015. Your "old white" neighbors with "old scars" (as though they had been the ones oppressed (!)) ought to be publicly exposed for anything they've said or done. It just infuriates me when victimizers nurture resentment for having been the least bit impeded in their ability to victimize.
Mark wrote: "Paul wrote: "I also argued that we as a society should have a floor beneath which we allow nobody to fall because all human life has intrinsic value, regardless of the decisions made during the cou..."It's all about the children. Starving, homeless children are not prepared to learn. The old models do not work any longer, but no one is trying to figure out what does work. All they know how to do is test, test, and more test. Demanding more and more while at the same time slowly taking away funds. I work as a librarian in a public elementary school. Real learning is slowly being phased out. Everything that has been proven to be truly beneficial to a child's learning has been taken away. We need smaller class size, arts education, foreign language instruction, and recess. We treat public schools as a "one size fits all" and then wonder why so many fall through the cracks. Teachers are being harassed. At this very moment, every teacher in Texas is afraid of losing their job at the end of the year. Everyone. From the top to the bottom. Even custodians could lose their jobs if the school does not meet an arbitrary standard. I don't know if that will really happen. Can they really fire every teacher in Texas? I don't know, but stress levels for teachers have got to be at an all time high.
Our kids are 50% free lunch and so many of them have problems far beyond simply not having enough to eat. These kids need help. They WILL fail if we don't do something.
Public education is being deliberately set up to fail. Take away funds, make the standards impossibly high, and then point out how teachers aren't doing their jobs. Legislators have no business making education decisions. Testing is not getting us where we should be going. There needs to be a new model, but I don't know what that should look like. I just know that what we are doing now is not working.
Sorry for the rant.
I was a social worker and worked a lot with low-income and no income people. It was pretty obvious that when people are malnourished and at risk of becoming homeless, it's much harder for them to learn.Of course, we need a social safety net.As for pushing kids through the educational system, educators are between a rock and a hard place. If kids repeat one grade, it's not too bad. If they repeat two grades, they're so much older than their classmates that they're out of place. I've seen those kids drop out of school as soon as they could. I don't know what the answer is. If any of you have seen the extremely well thought out documentary "Waiting for Superman," it gives us some clues. I think that the public schools in low-income areas would do well to follow some of the programs of Jeffrey Canada. The children's whole environment needs to be addressed in order for them to do well.
Paul, trying to argue against anecdotal experience almost never works. There are people who game the system at every level, from the fabulously wealthy to the dirt poor. That is human nature. It is not the fault of the system, any system.Have you ever been in a public housing project? I have, and the ones I have seen were pretty horrible. Not many people would want to live there if they had a viable choice.
The viable choice comes from being able to earn a living wage. We could dramatically lower the need for welfare and public housing if we had a minimum wage at a living wage level, which today would be around $15.00, but it also would have to be indexed to inflation, which the present minimum wage is not.
We also should have much better childcare programs so that single parents can work and have their children properly taken care of.
The basic philosophical difference between conservatives and progressives is over the role of government. The argument goes back to the founding of the nation with Hamilton the intellectual founder of the the concept of an activist government and Jefferson the intellectual founder of the small government concept.
The issue has been joined many times at key times in the nation's history. When we have overcome significant problems and made major advances as a nation it was the result of activist government, not conservative government. Right now we are in a major crisis and we are not solving our problems because our government is dominated by conservatives.
What conservatives fail to recognize is that the problems we face today - enormous economic inequality and climate change - cannot be solved by the people themselves, or by private enterprise. They only can be solved by activist government.
I think it's interesting that I'm not only the primary (only?) black voice in this discussion, but the primary born-in-the-working-class voice. Clearly, we literate liberals reflect America quite well. I not only lived in public housing in Kentucky, I knew people (my stepfather's relatives) who lived in public housing in Chicago. The Henderson projects (as we called them) were brand new when we moved in around 1953 or 4, and they were much better than the two-room shack with an outhouse that I was born in. Not only did they have indoor plumbing, but the kitchen and bathroom facilities were modern. They were also built like townhomes, so we had upstairs and downstairs, and no one was above or below us. The rooms were small and the walls thin, but we thought we were living large when we moved into the projects (We also were lucky enough to have a corner unit, so we only had to listen to our neighbors' fights on one side of our walls). Interestingly, despite what I said earlier about integrated neighborhoods in Henderson, the projects were segregated. The low-income public housing for whites was in another part of the town. I saw pictures of those projects recently (they're now integrated). They have been upgraded and look really nice. The projects that I visited in Chicago were not as nice. One of my stepfather's many brothers, Homer, who had about ten children, lived in one; I don't know when those urban projects were built, but they were looking pretty seedy in the sixties. I think Homer was able to buy a home because he was injured on his job in the steel mill or wherever he worked. We had to move out of the Henderson projects when my father came back from rehab in Baltimore and started making too much money. The house that my parents eventually bought (because he was a WW II veteran) was larger than the projects but not as modern or nice.Paul, I'm not sure how much an inspector of HUD houses knows about the people whose homes he is inspecting, but I wonder if the teacher really knows what her children's parents do for a living. I remember when I was a 22-year-old high school teacher having a 26-year-old co-worker ask me what my father (she didn't know he was my stepfather) did for a living because I wore really nice clothes, and I reminded her that I worked for a living just like she did and bought my own clothes. A few years earlier when I was babysitting for a woman who lived in Skokie, she picked me up one evening and asked how some children who lived on my street could afford bicycles. Our street looked relatively middle class, and the children on my street attended the same public school that hers did because our neighborhoods were within a few blocks of each other, but she didn't think the black children should be able to afford nice bicycles.
Often poor people are hard workers who just aren't well educated enough to make high salaries. When we lived in Evanston, my stepfather worked as both a Pullman porter and handyman/painter. And for a couple of years, my mother worked as a maid in one of the dormitories at Northwestern five days a week and as a nurse's aide in the Health Center three evenings a week. Despite all of that hard work, I qualified for the largest amount given for Illinois State scholarships because I was attending expensive Northwestern (I paid only 50% tuition my freshman year because my mother was working there), and my parents' salaries were low (however, I don't think my stepfather declared his handyman income either on my scholarship applications or the income tax forms). During my freshman year at Northwestern, my mother also attended night school, learning key punch and other skills that would no longer be useful, so she moved to an office job at Portland Cement when I was a sophomore at NU and never worked as a maid again.
There are still people working multiple jobs today. Our Latino handyman, who works for a Handyman Company, told us today that he also paints for some of his clients, but he's not a painter for the company. We like for Juan (as opposed to some of the white handymen) to work for us because he's almost always on time (today was an exception), and he's very polite. My mother doesn't understand his accent, and she's clearly loopy at this point, but Juan treats her with respect.
Speaking of my mother, Lisa, she was happy to hear that Second Baptist is still a "big thing" in Evanston, although she's not clear how you and I are connected. She doesn't get social media, so she probably thinks you are a high school or college friend, still living in Evanston. My mother and stepfather originally attended Springfield Baptist, which I believe is (or was) on Emerson. They met there, in fact, and he married her about six months after his first wife died. Since a Pullman porter with his own home was considered a catch at Springfield (the "bourgie" blacks always went to Second Baptist), my mother was not popular with the widowed and unmarried women, especially the older ones (my mother was 17 years younger than my stepfather), after they married, so some of them "picked at" (now we'd call it "throwing shade") her and even me. That's why my parents moved to Second Baptist, where most of the members were teachers and even a few doctors. I never joined Second Baptist, but it was the last church I attended. I say Springfield (which I did join) turned me off of religion because of the scandalous behavior of the members, and Second Baptist turned me off because of the performance of the choir. The Springfield folks may have been sleazy, but they could sing. While I appreciated that the classier, more dignified Second Baptist folks didn't shout and seemed to be more moral, their choir put me to sleep. Can the Quakers sing, Dan and Mark? I don't see any point in attending church if I can't hear some good singing.
Many of the projects in Baltimore have been torn down, but there still are lots more, as any viewer of "The Wire" certainly knows. Mary, the evangelical Quakers (who I think have moved a fair distance from George Fox) sing but the more traditional ones do not, except music may be permitted at events at Christmas separate from the meetings.
Thanks for the responses, everyone! I'll try to respond to all of the various threads in one post:Mark wrote: It does not require expertise in public housing administration or public education to find it wholly unacceptable that *anyone* -- anyone at all -- should be denied education or left homeless. I think there is a deep "punitive" streak -- typically moralistically rationalized as a desire to "motivate" the disadvantaged and afflicted -- that permeates this society
Talking about it with my wife afterward, it seemed we both felt there was a big emphasis in the debate on this notion that people should be allowed to fail, and very little – really, none at all – acknowledgement that many, probably most, people who fail in life do so through no fault of their own. We didn't get into it much (because you know how these things go), but he said something about people having the opportunity to make their own choices, and I responded, "Well, except for slavery," and his response was telling: "Slavery ended a long time ago," as if another 10-13 decades of Jim Crow, lynchings and housing discrimination (never mind ongoing atrocities like the situation in Ferguson) didn't happen. Perhaps, for him, a privileged white male, they haven't. I regret not hammering that point harder, or at all, really.
Barbara wrote: Public education is being deliberately set up to fail. Take away funds, make the standards impossibly high, and then point out how teachers aren't doing their jobs. Legislators have no business making education decisions.
This was another theme I noticed in the debate: that since public education, as experienced in one school in the city of Austin, Texas, was a mess, therefore anything run by the government is a mess. It's a classic fallacy that I see applied to the post office and the IRS. It seemed they were unaware of just how many hands are in the education pot – school districts, states, the feds, and failure to understand that complexity – both the complexity of the problem and the complexity of the system trying to solve it – leads to oversimplification and unhelpful demonization.
Dan wrote: "Paul, trying to argue against anecdotal experience almost never works. There are people who game the system at every level, from the fabulously wealthy to the dirt poor. That is human nature. It is not the fault of the system, any system."
This is a really good point, one I wish I'd made. When you look at what groups receive the largest amount of government largesse, it's overwhelmingly wealthy white men (i.e., the owners of businesses and corporations). I did shy away from making the conversation about race because they mostly didn't mention it, and although I don't doubt they were speaking mostly of black people, but it's pretty tricky to call out someone's race-based assumptions without making it sound like I'm accusing them of racism.
I ended up saying multiple times – both on the issues of public housing and education, and on the Affordable Care Act, which is making them pay more money for insurance since they're a dual-income, no-children family – that I wasn't going to dismiss their experiences, but that it seemed the data indicated their experiences were anomalous.
Dan further wrote: What conservatives fail to recognize is that the problems we face today - enormous economic inequality and climate change - cannot be solved by the people themselves, or by private enterprise. They only can be solved by activist government.
Yes, the prevailing assumption was overwhelmingly, "Government makes things worse; private enterprise makes things better." The strongest, angriest pushback I got was when I said capitalism had failed multiple times – in 1839, 1873, 1929, 2008, etc, and that government involvement had made the failures less frequent and not as bad. The notion that capitalism had failed at all seemed to be an utterly alien concept.
Mary wrote: I'm not sure how much an inspector of HUD houses knows about the people whose homes he is inspecting, but I wonder if the teacher really knows what her children's parents do for a living.
Yes, my wife and I talked about that afterward, as well. There was no sense that they had ever spoken in a real, empathetic, "tell-me-your-story" way to a single one of the children/families they had decided needed to be allowed to fail. Empathy was utterly lacking, which was really surprising to me, and not a little bit saddening, as well.
I suspect that if/when politics comes up again, the subject of history – especially our nation's history regarding race and capitalism – will be a major feature. The assumptions at play seem clearly ahistorical to me. I doubt I'll be able to change anyone's mind, but if someone can at least introduce the notion that American history is replete with examples of capitalistic failure ameliorated by government intervention and redistribution (the primary examples of which are the ending of slavery in 1865 and the creation of the modern safety net from 1935-65), it may not be a total loss.
Thanks again for the great comments!
Mary wrote: "I think it's interesting that I'm not only the primary (only?) black voice in this discussion, but the primary born-in-the-working-class voice. Clearly, we literate liberals reflect America quite ..."Beth Emet and Second Baptist have also done some joint choral things. Some of the people in the Second Baptist choir have really good voices. Their music wakes me up but I don't know what they had back when you were going there. Our own choir is nice but they usually only sing on the High Holidays. Most of the time it's just the Cantor who sings.
By the way, I visited several housing projects as a social worker. Most of them in Chicago have been torn down. Granted, they were horrible places and should have been torn down but they did it without a plan for where all the people living there were going to move. As a result, this has caused more problems than it solved.
I grew up in a middle class environment, but my father was laid off every three to five years. He was a salesman in the textile industry and the mills he worked for would close and he'd get laid off. The fluctuations in his income gave us a lot of economic anxiety and it gave me insight into what people go through.
Dan, I concur absolutely that it is only activist government that is going to ameliorate any of our dire problems (and that it is activist government that we are least likely to get under the current constellation -- other than "activist" in a pernicious sense). On the other hand, whereas you are also unambiguously correct in your characterization of the historical antecedents of "conservatism" and "progressivism" (because, unlike conservatives, you're extraordinarily erudite), my own conviction is that most contemporary self-identified "conservatives" have no more read the works of Thomas Jefferson (or the Federalist Papers, for that matter) than the Tao Te Ching or the Principia Mathematica, and that their reasons for cleaving to right-wing positions have nothing whatever to do with historical or philosophical knowledge (of which they typically have none). I believe they are simply personality types devoid of empathy and who like to see other people suffer: it feeds their sense of "righteousness" to dole out punishment, and validates their narcissistic sense of earned privilege and entitlement to think that people who've had to work a thousand times harder than they, merely to stay alive, are indolent and undeserving. Such "people" are not Jeffersonians. They are ignorant, sociopathic, Schadenfreude-engorged, judgment-savoring, heartless, soulless, tortured excrescences of malformed human genomes. They are not historians or philosophers, and they are not interested in the size of government except to the extent that they've absorbed a mindless mantra and can regurgitate nothing else -- and perhaps to the extent that they recognize that drowning the government in the bathwater will have genocidal side-effects immeasurably gratifying to their relentless meanness of spirit. (Not that I have any negative feelings about mean, heartless people, mind you. But I certainly do not want to dignify them by allowing them the cover of an ostensible "philosophy," or the presumption of greater historical knowledge -- or knowledge of any kind -- than a pathogenic virus, when they steadfastly maintain that their forbears cavorted with dinosaurs and that scientists have no idea what they're talking about: only prodigiously ignorant, blathering idiots who could no more quote Jefferson than define a "synthetic a priori" or solve problems in tensor calculus, do. I am totally out of patience with bellicose, inhumane morons, and I will no more argue with them than try to explain Kantian epistemology to my toilet seat. "Gegen Dummheit streben Götter selbst vergebens.")There. I feel much better, now. :)
There are new surveys out showing that both Democrats and Republicans have a record low opinion of government. I think there is a misperception at work here that is being exploited by the rightwing and not understood by the media. When people are asked their opinion of government, they don't think of Medicare or Social Security, or the weather service, or the forest service, or any of the many government services that operate every day almost flawlessly. They think of Congress and the White House and the politics at work.Ronald Reagan exploited this to the utmost, saying government was the problem. The problem never was government. It was politics. I think if this were explained in depth, maybe opinions would change. I think I might write something about this in the near future.
People want good government. They have been led to believe it isn't possible when the evidence of its existence is all around them. It is just that the focus of the media is on the politics, the gridlock in Washington. But that gridlock does not stop the SS checks (or deposits) from coming on time all the time, nor does it interfere with the efficiency of Medicare (a less than 1% overhead compared to 20% or more for private insurance companies), or the reliability of the postal service. (Over a 14 year period in the book business we shipped tens of thousands of books almost entirely through the postal service all over the world and less than a half dozen were lost).
Now, if you are a contractor with the government, you may think it really is a trainwreck. Just the paperwork and various requirements a contractor has to deal with can be overwhelming. And it has been this way a long time. At some point it can generate a good deal of hostility.
Back in the late 1960s when I was working for United Press International in Baltimore and responsible for both news and sales, I got a call from the CIA. They wanted to buy the UPI newsphoto service. UPI had a great deal of business with government agencies, but it was all newswire material, not photo material, and they would not sign conventional UPI contracts. Government contracts were required, and this was before much more stuff got added to government contract requirements.
These also were the times of massive antiwar protests and obviously, news photos had considerable intelligence value. I had no idea what to charge for the service so I went up the chain of command. A few days later I got a message from the President of UPI, "tell those sons of bitches that the cost is $5,000 a week." (That probably was several times what the NY Times was paying for the service). That was too expensive even for the CIA.
Dan, I think the Republicans are exploiting the government is bad idea even more now; it's the only way they can win. If most people think it doesn't matter who the President is or who is in Congress, that all of them are equally bad, then they won't vote, and of course the Republicans win when voter turnout is low. Low voter turnout is the only way they can win now. We have to counter their lies by reminding people what government is--the firemen, the police (I think most whites still respect the police), the library, as well as Social Security and Medicare.Paul, people see what they expect to see, so if a police officer, for instance, thinks all young black males are capable of murder, he will mistake a cellphone for a gun and a worried or serious look for a menacing one when he sees a black man. In education we call it the self-fulfilling prophecy. Teachers who think their students are stupid will look for evidence of their stupidity and find it. I agree with Maya Angelou that nonwhite people (and working-class people) need to tell their stories to counter stereotypes.
Lisa, some of the people in Second Baptist Church had good voices back then; the problem was that they didn't sing gospel, at least not the black Southern Baptist way. Back then, the great gospel singers were Mahalia Jackson and James Cleveland. Now they are Yolanda Adams and BeBe Winans (who also sings r&b). Jennifer Hudson and Aretha Franklin, among many other soul singers, are even better gospel singers. The Springfield choir sang like Aretha when she was singing such soul songs as "Respect" and "Natural Woman." The Second Baptist choir sang like Aretha did that one time at the Grammys when she filled in for the opera singer. This born-in-the-working-class black woman is not an opera fan.
I was joking about the Quakers' singing, Dan; I would definitely not attend their meetings expecting to hear good singing. I'm sure the peaceful, abolitionist Quakers have great souls, but I doubt that their singing is soulful.
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"What would it be like to have a war with Iran? Obscenely expensive in cash and lives"
http://tinyurl.com/qd7rta6"
Another comprehensively informative article everyone should read. Regrettably, most Americans are oblivious to -- and will never understand -- most of these nuanced issues, and perceive Iran as indistinguishable from all other Islamic nations, and remain intractably jingoistic, so they'll readily support a Republican call to war against Iran (and I wouldn't preclude even a Democratic one, if Hillary is elected). The military machine demands to be fed, and the character of the enemy is irrelevant because the enemy is just a pretext for the feeding. Howsoever, it is vitally important to get this information out, and yours is the clearest summary I've seen, so I hope it gets disseminated even far beyond the audience of dailykos!