Great Nations Do Not Impoverish Their Intellectuals

Tenured professors continue to get early retirement buy outs.  Not only are they costing the university money with their higher salaries, but they are a “bad” example for the newbie profs who are already, or about to be, getting shortchanged.  That is, no retirement program other than the false one available to most private sector employees these days, and lower wages.

The independence of intellectuals, so needed for society, was under siege before. 

And now, another wall has been breached. 

In Form

If Americans continue to get “informed” about political candidates from 30 second to 1 minute ads in the month up to the election, they will continue to vote on emotion and distortion, and not from reasoned fact and careful consideration.

The political scientist in me looks at the data and says the odds are against good sense prevailing in the 2014 elections.  That I should not work myself up and cause more stress, expend time and energy when there is none to spare, or risk more friendships and other relationships.

Then I look at my daughter, and know there’s no letting myself off the hook.

Even if failure comes, and malevolence, ignorance, delusion, fear, selfishness, evasion, and escapism prevail yet again, I must be able to look at her and say I REALLY did what I could toward something different.

And know that, when enough individuals are determined like that, change becomes possible.

Some Words For Literacy

Our reading of lengthy works is at an 80 year low. 80 years ago, those considered educated had a vocabulary of 42,000 words.  Today one is considered educated with a vocabulary of 8,000 words. 

Does that mean we communicate more clearly today, with little “unnecessary” verbiage?  Or does it mean we have more difficulty communicating complex subjects and so do not delve into them?  And one could easily surmise that not reading lengthy works and stunted vocabularies become intertwined, self-degenerative, ever-decreasing concentric circles. 

High School Lows

The de-emphasizing (the mildest or most generous term I could think of) of the middle class in favor of the wealthy is in evidence at my high school’s alumni basketball tourney.  Once a crowded, boisterous, broadly supported fundraiser, it is now a ghost of its former self.  A wealthy alum, who gives to the school, has his wife (who didn’t even attend the school), run the tournament.  She banned all alcohol, including the beer garden, “for liability purposes,” and because “it shows a poor example to children.” She designs the brackets herself, but only releases them less than a week before the tourney, making impossible the return of those who must schedule flights.

The result?  It is minimally attended, gets few spectators or non-players, doesn’t even raise a tenth of the money it used to, the sense of community and camaraderie are hollowed out, and even general contributions to the school are down (forcing the school to rely more and more on a small number of wealthy donors).

Oh, the school now has a new gym and a new football field, compliments of this wealthy donor.  Yet has far less “glue” and community than when it had an old gym and no football field.  And far less enrollment.

I wonder how much people think about the second and third order effects of emphasizing one class and dismissing another.

I guess with the hollowing out of the middle class, and their resultant fewer and fewer “spare” resources, maybe there wasn’t much of a choice.

Ed, Win

This week is all a guest quote from a passionate, terrific political scientist who deserves more attention than he gets:

“Citizens need to care! We need to be involved! Participation matters!”—Edwin Taylor 

The Self-Stabbing Pen

This week I was approached at a store by a woman who wanted me to sign a petition.  It was to get tax credits for tuition to private schools. It was being promoted as being “fair.” 

Forget for the moment that tax credits drive up deficits.  This woman, like her companion at the other end of the store, was almost certainly a product of the state-starved (declining revenue) local school system, a system that would be even more starved if this went through. 

I asked her if she was paid to gather signatures.  Yes.  I asked her if she knew who was paying her.  A non-profit company, she said.  Did any of that seem strange, I asked.  No, why would it, she answered.

I didn’t ask her if she made enough to send her children to private school, even with some tax credits. 

I let irony be enough.  Bitter irony she can chew on later.

Plutocrat Service Doesn't Generate Enough

People want to do useful work.  There’s just not enough of it in a plutocratized economy, one designed to serve the wealthy, because there’s just not enough wealthy people.  The shrinking middle class doesn’t have the economic wherewithal to make enough of a difference, and certainly isn’t going to borrow much more.  Even the mismatch of skills, where a number of good jobs go begging because there’s no one qualified to fill them, does not account for enough to truly make a difference even if they were filled.

And so you don’t get a real “recovery.”

See It

“The Act of Killing”

Heroes

Are we an educated people, or an easily directed and emotionally-malleable one?

We readily identify with the emergency-related “heroes,” the police and first responders whenever some “incident” occurs, and that’s fine.  But there are heroes of other sorts.

How many people know who Yuliya Tymoshenko is?  Her bravery in fighting a thoroughly corrupt and often evil system that wants to see her dead goes unnoticed outside of Europe and a few State Department people.

And where are all the Ayn Rand lovers when the relatively unknown in America Mikhail Khodorkovsky is their John Galt?  

The Emphasis Balance

It’s the triple team, the full-court press.  This week, all three blogs (mine, Madame’s, and ours) get the same theme, a theme as old as, well, time: You reap what you sow.

We don’t finish what we start.  We let ourselves be led astray by diversions.  Other societies don’t.  And they are walloping the bejeezus out of us.

We reap what we emphasize.  If we value a 20 foot jump shot or a touchdown pass more than we value the ability to use math and engineering to construct and maintain our infrastructure, we lose.  The fact that the average person knows WAY more about sports or various forms of entertainment in general than that person knows about science, math, or engineering, says volumes about how out of balance we are.

Time to get back in balance.  That’s all.

Starting today, not tomorrow.

The No-Coddle Zone

In my undergrad days, we all complained about the amount of work that teachers gave us, how out of touch they were, how they didn’t coordinate the amount of work or the timing with other teachers, how uncaring they were whether we had any quality of life, etc.

And the faculty, rightly so, mostly ignored us.

Because all students complain.  It’s not that there doesn’t need to be real transformation in “higher” education; there DEFINITELY does.  But elevating the student to coddled prima donna status is not the needed reform.

Why was society smarter back then?

Government and Society Are, Directly Or Indirectly, Our Reflections

One of the clearest things that poll after poll reveals is the profound civic, political, and historical ignorance and apathy of most Americans.

Ethic-less Youth or Rational Response?

It would appear our youth are in large part embroiled in illusion and delusion. 

Or is it because the system itself, both the school system and the larger society, is not doing anything relevant or real anymore, not doing anything to have faith in?  Kind of like the old joke in the Soviet Union, “the government pretends to pay us, so we pretend to work.”

The reader can decide.

US high school students are, at best, “apathetic” about ethical standards (there’s good spin).  64% of students said they cheated on a test in the past year, and 30% said they stole from a store.  Yet they also reported they were “satisfied with their personal ethics and character,” and “when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.” From a Josephson Institute survey, 2010.

Compare and Contrast

After listening to superintendent, principal, education board directors and just walking around watching and listening to people at a high school graduation, I got the feeling that people are just trying to manage lives and situations, not fashioning their society.  I sensed no energy-infused purpose, for themselves or their society. 

I contrasted that with viewing Chinese TV, which, despite its occasional heavy hand of government interference, seems to reflect a society that, despite its deep problems, feels it is going somewhere, that it is making progress, that it is doing things that infuse pride.   Oh, they have problems, deep ones, some of character, but being economically sound gets you breathing room to deal with that.

We Americans get excited about things that divert us, not things that propel us, as individuals or society.  How will Americans react when they wake up down the road to find they are not number 1, maybe not even in the top 5 anymore?

Spank Daddy

A prime reason the country is in bad shape because you, the citizen, probably know WAY more about:

Your favorite sports and sports teams

Your house and homes in general

Your car and cars in general

Shopping and bargains and stores

Clothes

Pets

Food

Grilling and barbecuing

Drama

Video games

TV, internet, social media, and entertainment and diversion in general

Making money

You get what you focus on, because that’s what you consider important.  And what you don’t focus on gets dictated to you.  And then you claim you are “powerless,” to do anything about it.  Which converges to be self-fulfilling prophecy, manufactured reality, and dictated result.

Correcting the B.S. Machine

The tremendous amount of misinformation about “energy” being infused into the media outlets:  I often wonder how much  the transmitters really believe, how much is just fed to them, how much they do just to deliberately deceive and deflect, and how much they do solely because it’s their job. 

For instance, the current drivel, pushed by Levin and his ilk, about “the nation’s energy being controlled by the government,” and “nothing has been done by this administration, even when they controlled all the government.”

And to heap bizarre absurdity and outrageous falsehood upon bizarre absurdity and outrageous falsehood, the duplicitous then accuse others of being duplicitous.

Let’s just look at one small piece of ONE of the many assertions:  “Control of the government.”  Leaving aside what government really “controls” in a capitalistic economy dominated by wealthy and powerful corporations, “control’ of the (national) government means what exactly?  This current administration, of which I am no great fan, has found opposition in the judicial branch, especially at the top, so one of the main three branches has never been in its corner.  When its party “controlled” the Congress, the other of three branches, it didn’t really, because the vagaries of Senate rules allow a minority of 41 senators to block anything significant they want.  It is MUCH easier to obstruct and to subvert than it is to actually accomplish something.

The purveyors of disinformation are banking on people not knowing how their government “works.” 

And so the republic suffers in its ignorance.  And we get mindless clamoring for oil pipelines that will create few jobs, bring little oil to use here, do little to change prices, and, most importantly in our disconnected-from-results illusory culture, have no consideration of the perpetuation of how we poison ourselves and our biosphere.  And avoids TRANSFORMATION to a better world, to solve the problems of the present and future.  No, we would rather reach for the “easy” solutions offered by the visionless, the corrupt, the greedy.  Pay no attention to the climate effects of more oil. Particularly pay no attention to the incredibly polluting extraction methods of this “new” tar sand/shale oil supply.  Pay no attention to how heavily corrosive it is.  Pay no attention to how, when it spills--and it WILL spill, in both pipelines and tankers--it can’t really be cleaned up in any effective manner.  There is a 40 mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan which is still off limits to use because of a “small” spill of this “new” oil TWO YEARS AGO.

And don’t find out what pair of brothers have their hands in many aspects of the proposed pipeline.

And don’t figure out that the price of gas is in large part a reflection of hedge funds, speculators, futures contracts, and international demand.  Or that there are taxpayer subsidies for refining, not just drilling.  Or that refined oil is our biggest manufactured export.

And don’t realize that climate change, unchecked, will cost, from weather devastation alone, greater than WW1, WW2, the Great Depression, and the Cold War, COMBINED.

Americans have become exceedingly proficient in straining at gnats and swallowing elephants.  And, of course, accepting most of the illusions that come their way.

The Ancients

The ancient philosophers took a great deal more opportunities to truly THINK than we usually do.  Consider, in this political season of hyperbole but without further comment, this quote from Aristotle’s Ethics, on what people should do in their behavior and their thinking “in order to become happy or to avoid unhappiness, the principal emphasis being placed on the cultivation of the virtues, both moral and intellectual, although other goods are also recognized as necessary for happiness, such as wealth, health, friends, and a just society in which to live.”

Our challenge is to holistically see and value all the parts of what he said, and not just pick out pieces.

Whispering Back To Power

At the rate that has been demonstrated, and the lack of concern on the part of so many, we may lose most of what was obtained by the longest and hardest struggles (see your history fellow citizens!). What rights that workers have obtained will have to be fought for long and excruciatingly all over again.

Congress is not a collection of representatives “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” but instead a club of, by, and for millionaires, billionaires, and corporations.  Working for, or at least compromise for, the common good, is so rare it is effectively inconsequential.  We have a one-party system with two factions, effectively controlled by a five letter word, MONEY.

A system that, on its present path, cannot deliver the one thing that the most extensive worldwide polling ever done has revealed is the most ardent desire of the present-day adult the world over:

A good paying (livable wage) job.  The very thing that this corporatist, maximum short-term profit, world system is least capable (and least desirous) of delivering.  And because the system doesn’t do that most foundational thing it NEEDS to do, nearly every other problem we have cascades into near insolvability.  The system is on track to so monumentally under-deliver, it doesn’t take a soothsayer to see the problems coming at us.

And yet we keep thinking the “magical market”—yes, the twisted, manipulated, corporate-and-plutocrat-controlled “free market”—is somehow going to deliver for us what we desperately need.  But it is the same system whispering its continuous barrage of weakening diversion and subjugation: “Embrace The Illusion.”

Boy, do we need a lot of people to, with quiet but firm determination, whisper back: “Not Me.”

Energy For Non-Reality and Little to None For Reality

There was a recent Korean study of people who played computer games more than 30 hours per week.  The subjects reported they couldn’t reduce their playing even though they wanted to.  When they were given an MRI while shown things that reminded them of the game, their brains had virtually the same reaction as drug addicts when shown something about their addictive drug. 

As psychologists and sociologists have been warning, to no avail, the country is awash in an epidemic of obsessive video gaming.

Neil Postman said over twenty-five years ago that we were going to amuse ourselves to death.  One of the questions I have, though, is: How much is the allure of virtual reality, and how much is the depressive outlook of so much of reality—that the society is offering little real opportunity, let alone truly exciting avenues, for what should be the up and coming?

The Flailing Sick Giant With No Memory

We live in a culture that continually emits the undercurrent thought that history is not important. That culture, and the society and country that house it, suffer so because of that lack of valuing, and worse, suffer in ignorance and arrogance, losing so much as so much spins away.

“A country losing touch with its own history is like an old man losing his glasses, a distressing sight, at once vulnerable, unsure, and easily disoriented.” George Walden