Elections & Issues of Interest to the Public

by Gary Berg-Cross

I think that Noam Chomsky was the first author I read that pointed out the fact that issues that the public consider important are often not those deemed important for discussion & action by the ruling and elite class.  And the ruling elites often have different opinions on the issues that the public considers important which are things that affect them every day and are close at hand.  Examples include employment opportunities, debt and health as well as related items such as political corruption.  Add to this things like jobs going overseas, tax breaks for the wealthy, trade deals that lead to jobs going overseas, too-big-to-fail banks that escape responsibility and soldiers going to war and we have a host of problems that an oligarchic system doesn’t handle issues to public satisfaction.  Chomsky put it succinctly in an 11 year old article (October 29, 2004), called “The Disconnect in US Democracy”

“  Often the issues that are most on people’s minds don’t enter at all clearly into debate"

True.  But every four years or so we have elite candidates who stand up and say they are talking about the issues that really matter to the American public.  Often this is lip service and a search for some OK words that will get ruling class candidates support from funders and action by their base of 10% or so.  It is enough to get through the election cycle.

Nearly eleven years ago  Noam Chomsky commented that,the national presidential election obsession misses the significantly greater relevance of social movements:

“Every four year yeas a huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics…

Polls often suggest what is on people’s  mind. You can see some analysis of what non party folks think at a recent Vox posting  by Lee Drutman "What Donald Trump gets about the electorate".

So while elite-funded an supported Republicans want to cut social security a majority of voters in both parties (in the abstract) want to do the opposite & increase it. But during a campaign pols find ways of brushing them off with fears like deficits from SS but not the military expenditure or tax breaks.

Back around 2004 then Vice President Dick Cheney showed how power speaks to people’s interests in response to ABS News’ Martha Raddatz question about recent polls showing that two-thirds of the U.S. populace thought the U.S. war in (on) Iraq was “not worth fighting.”

You may remember that Cheney gave one of his snake cold smiles  and smirked, “So?”

Raddatz  seemed surprised at the candor and followed up with “So…you don’t care what the American people think?” Nonplussed Cheney gave a simple “No” followed by “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in public opinion polls.” 

Steven Kull, director of Program on International Policy Attitudes, noted four days after Cheney’s remarks that, the preponderant majority of Americans disagreed with this undemocratic, power monger sentiment.

Which brings us to this era’s political campaign when we the (disheartened) people have a constrained say about “how the way our system is set up” as Chomsky puts it.  Polls show that 90+ percent of U.S. citizens agree that “government leaders should pay attention to the views of the public between elections “ but it often comes down to this narrow window of time when pols have to appeal to public sentiment.  But pols have many things going for them in the United States of Amnesia.  There is the power of money, spin doctoring, disingenuous people and invested interests, the fog of hot button emotions, appeals to making America great (again) all playing to gullibility. Hearing a blend of populism, anger and nationalism, people can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. It’ results in the phenomena  of “What’s the matter with Kansas” evolved and writ large.

We are misled by many superficial things such as a connected feeling evoked by crafted, confident messages that candidates sound like me or feel our pain although our past experience is that this is largely faked by people with practice skill that plays like reality TV.

Or every 4 years accumulated anger and the search for someone to blame leads to one thought- stick it to them and throw the bums out.  This works well for some outsiders who position themselves for that gorge-like space yawning between the 2 established parties.  This may appeal to some moderates as some new, exciting centralist position but is it?  A recent WaPo article on democratic challenges and the misleading middle by E.J. Dionne cautioned us about the emotional impatience of falling for empty authenticity as we cast old pols out:  

In country after country, traditional, broadly based parties and their politicians face scorn. More voters than usual seem tired of carefully focus-grouped public statements, deftly cultivated public personas, and cautiously crafted political platforms that are designed to move just the right number of voters in precisely the right places to cast a half-hearted vote for a person or a party.

The word of the moment is "authenticity," and that's what electorates are said to crave. There's certainly truth here, but the science of persuasion is advanced enough that authenticity can be manufactured as readily as anything else. In any event, I am not at all certain that an authentically calm, authentically moderate, authentically practical and authentically level-headed politician would have a prayer against the current tide. Voters instead seem in a mood to demand heavy doses of impatience, resentment and outrage, whether these emotions are authentic or not."

Some advice in the midst of this includes a healthy dose of critical thinking and skepticism about what goes on in these media circus info tents and a larger movement prospective along the lines of, again, Chomsky’s earlier advice for a manufactured consent culture.  We need something that transcends this every 4 years I get to chose from the already chosen list of options.  We need a ground up movement that is responsive to people real interests.

“The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in progressive direction – often in close conformity to majority opinion – is to grow and become strong enough so that that they can’t be ignored by centers of power. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its foundations include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, every day, not just once every four years…election …choices…are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome.” Chomsky in“The Disconnect in US Democracy

Critiques of Pure Arrogance Intellectual or Political?

by Gary Berg-Cross

Disciplined insincerity & confident ignorance are already evident in this spectacle we call the primary season.  Well it’s still the money primary I guess, but there is a steady effort to test market ideas for the later campaigns. It’s already evidenced an unhealthy dose of arrogance to go along with the insincerity & ignorance (not to mention those flashes & dashes of egoism, conceit, intolerance, sub-surface anger, quarter truths, & light, gossipy slanders.  

I’m thinking of, for example, of Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s sharp-tongued & perhaps dimmer-witted comments.  These started at the winter meeting of the free market Club for Growth winter economic conference in February.  It was a good time to be Palm Beach, but perhaps too comfy an environment for well-reasoned arguments. I’m already tired of people who want-to-be-in-charge of things saying “I’m not a scientist” followed by an awkward opinion that back hands real scientific understanding out of the conversation. In Jeb’s case it was his opinion about climate change, an important topic for Florida and the rest of the world.  Ok, so you are not a scientist or an economist but why not get informed?  There are advisors.

Perhaps we can be disappointed but not surprised with the opinion, since he is very much a politician fitting George Bernard Shaw comment in Major Barbara :

“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points

 clearly to a political career.” 

But it gets worse, because Jeb was just starting on the not-being-humble path. More recently in New Hanpshire he upped the attack as one sees from the headlines:

‘Jeb Bush Says People Who Accept Climate Science Are ‘Really Arrogant’

It is one thing to be “not a scientist” (Re climate change.) and another to attack scientists for their inconvenient evidence, if not a good approximation of reality.  Why are they not to be believed?  Well their explanations are too complicated – he used the more manipulative work “convoluted” in comments reported by CNN.  Then we have the pithy punch:

“For the people to say the science is decided on this is really arrogant, to be honest with you,” ... “It’s this intellectual arrogance that now you can’t have a conversation about it, even.”

Well I think that was a swing at President Obama as much as at Science. He’s speaking up.  But it is easy to believe that the arrogance (perhaps anti-intellectual arrogance in this case) really dwells in those politically conservative people.  Sure, one can perceive strength as arrogance in fact-based people, who are right but the not believed. They have a lot to go on. Evidence-based belief comes from the various climate scientists who actively publish research, 97 percent agree that humans cause climate change. Further the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

leveraging research  from ~ 800 climate experts across the globe,  concludes that  it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities are the main cause of atmospheric and ocean warming since the 1950s. Scientists speak in probabilities, how’s that for arrogance?  Well pulling math on you seems arrogant to some, I guess.

I think that the more dangerous arrogance is this.  It is the acted upon and emotion-centered belief of people who are wrong on the evidence (see above), don’t like testing evidence (what is the trend for the next decade?) and for one reason or another can't face this reality and projected reality.  This type of arrogance is manifested in Jeb's attack on the evidence based community and is especially true of political leaders who need to comfort the flock.

Unfortunately, this is just an early, primary season example of the attack on intellect, facts and critical thinking. We are likely to have more as part of 2015-16 silly season. I know that I will still be upset when I see  how many hands get raised this year when the candidates are asked about their belief/non-belief in evolution. Sort of a reverse American Exceptionalism demonstration.

Ideoplogy and Religion Mix at the National Prayer Breakfast

by Gary Berg-Cross

The National Prayer Breakfast often stirs up controversy, although different ones in the secular and religious communities. In the past, for example, we had the context of the  Hobby Lobby Case and we found there was a link to  a somewhat
“secretive group" called "The Family” playng a role of hosting the  National Prayer Breakfast. This was reported on the  MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, by author Jeff Sharlet who publicly accused "The Family" of this role.

This year I was at a discussion group after the Breakfast event and the buzz was about Obama’s “crusader” comment:

“And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

As the Post noted, “Critics pounce(d) after Obama talks Crusades, slavery at prayer breakfast”

There was lots of ideas and symbols wrapped up in the spaces between the words and suggestive connections to other parts of the speech.  An example is that patriotic, hot button issue of American exceptionalism. Well, as noted, the Greeks think their country i special, too). Then there is the contrast with uncomfortable Bush-era practices such as those interrogation practices, euphemistically called “harsh” for years, but in the Obama era more correctly called  torture that goes along with the invasion of Iraq a tragic, hubristic mistake. Perhaps we should pray for forgiveness for these things as well as our prior heavy hand in Central and South American.

Are these things too sensitive and ideological to discuss at a “prayer” meeting or ask forgiveness for?  Do they downplay ISIS evil too much?   Well conservatives like The Family and Baltimore’s Ben Carson believe so. Any number of outraged Republicans voices could be heard such as former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore who said,

“The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime. He has offended every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.”

Well it  seems to some of us as a good use of the Prayer Breakfast pulpit to talk about the moral side of things and for the Religious-American complex to take an historical,  self-reflective stance. It is a timely context seeing something bad done in the name of Religion to humbly note that Faith, and not just one Faith, can be perverted and its name used to justify revenge killing and harm.  It’s about the need for the prayerful to”stand up against those who try to use faith to justify violence, no matter what religion they practice.”

Virtuous Circles

by Gary Berg-Cross

Thanksgiving is certainly family and togetherness time that is an opportunity for a bit of reflection on values and internalities as grand as gratitude and as considered as kindness.  It is a time to graciously take what we have with gratitude rather than to take good things for granted. And as Richard Dawkins suggest it is a nice opportunity to “teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”

It seems a bit odd, though that the day after Thanksgiving much is taken for granted and some may be grateful that the local Box Store opens early to allow the externality of charitable shopping that pre-ritualizes the winter present season of gifting.  

Our market system has found a way to take some inward feelings of kindness and the generous impulse to give more than we have and expresses these as ritualized, wrapped presents.  It’s probably not the largely solitary behavior without expression of thanks that William Arthur Ward was thinking of when he said:

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

Nor is it the connection that Henry Van Dyke made between the kindness-gratitude-thanksgiving trilogy when he hypothesized that:

Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.

Family and friends set around the table are a nice way to spark action on feelings received kindness. It affords an opportunity to rekindle each

others kindness flames and reflect on those who in the past have contributed to our kindness flames. Such virtuous circles can parent many good things and well on the wise path to the Confucian practice that:

To practice five things under all circumstances constitutes perfect virtue; these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.

All the more reason then in today’s times to think a bit more broadly and inclusively about thoughtful generosity reflecting kin kindness. To paraphrase Tom Stoppard, the generosity between kin can apply not only

to our extended family but inclusively to our neighbors, our village and globally beyond. After all we are the beneficiaries of exceptional American resources and its people's historical, collective generosity. With a global view we can hope, if not expect, some inclusive generosity like immigration reform and the virtuous fires it sparks for those who were not born here but seek its kindness.

There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity.

Nathaniel Branden

Getting Sound Advice from MLK

By Gary Berg-Cross

Agonizing over the various conflicts around the globe I wondered what Martin Luther King might have said.  At the time he spoke up about the Vietnam war the main street press largely criticized him:

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position

of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.

It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together.

The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.

This is where we are. "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind," and the best way to start is to put an end to war in Vietnam.

Well we are long past Vietnam but justice and judgment are still issues. 

Pushed by Neocons and ill served by career politicians lobbyists and a careerist, collaborative press we stumbled into Iraq.  We still brandish weapons at Iran, support authoritarian regimes, military-security states, occupations and drone populations into enemies at will.  We are grid locked and unable to stop the various wars that threaten.

The neocon voices are heard loudly in the land so perhaps a quick visit to the MLK memorial and some quotes brought up to date from him can put us in a better peace perspective.  What would MLK say?  And what goes through people's mind as they face the challenge of a moral life?

"I oppose the war in Vietnam (add your favorite here – Gaza, Ukraine, Iran etc.) because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world."
Anti-War Conference, Los Angeles, California, February 26, 1967.

"Injustice anywhere (again add your favorite here – Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lybia, Syria etc.) is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Letter from Birmingham, Alabama jail, April 16, 1963.

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits." (Only we aren't going to pay for any of it.)
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, 1964

"It is not enough to say 'We must not wage war.' It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but the positive affirmation of peace." (I hear in Congress that we must restore full funding to DoD.)
Anti-War Conference, Los Angeles, California, February 25, 1967.

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." (OK, I think we have the challenge and controversy, who’s standing where?)
Strength to Love, 1963.

"Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."
New York City, April 4, 1967. (Oh that UN thing again.  What about American/Israeli/Russian etc. exceptionalism?)

"If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective."
Christmas sermon, Atlanta, Georgia, 1967. (See above….our loyalties are too important to give to the world for free it seems.)

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, 1964. (OK, this temporary has gone on long enough.)

"Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a better person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in."
March for Integrated Schools, April 18, 1959. (I might make this a career, after all jobs are hard to come by  What does it pay?)

Contemplate these and see where you stand on events. Comments appreciated. 

Freedom from Religio-Politics

By Gary Berg-Cross

The recent dust up on Arizona’s SB 1062 provides some opportunity to discuss the idea Freedom and the phrase Freedom of Religion. But of course in most circles this isn't an intellectual opportunity as much as one framed by political and ideological differences that generate mind-numbing emotions. There is obviously a long history and associated philosophy to these terms, but increasingly there is political and legal context to them.  Conversations quickly get a bit complex and discussion gets muddled as we jump from a word sense to the history of the concept (The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson) to a philosophical perspective and then to an ensnaring political view.

As reported early in the debate SB 1062   expands Arizona's earlier (1999) "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" (RFRA). That law was applied with this idea of Religious Freedom - when the "victim" of religious discrimination is either an individual, a religious assembly or a religious institution. SB 1062 would have added businesses to the list of “victims” and thus to its “protection”. But what was really allowed by the law? Sure we heard loud claims of religious rights violation when a restaurant refused to serve a gay man, and was then sued for discrimination by the man. Under existing RFRA law they could be sued. Under SB 1062, they could not. 

The arguments was that this right to refuse service is a religious freedom. But other’s point out that “Religion” is what you BELIEVE not what you impose on other people. You are free to believe in all sorts of things, but a person's religious belief,s which may be tribal and certainly emotion-laden, stop at the boundary of the next person. My beliefs should not impose a burden on others.  And they should not be imposed in the secular marketplace for society’s transactions take place.  They can be practiced in Mosques, Temples and Churches etc. but not intrude into the secular space.

The problem is that if they overflow from the personal and the temples, we can ask the old question of “where does belief imposition stop?” As a theoretical question we can ask if some employer with a fundamentalist view deny employee coverage of the treatment of cancer because they would inadvertently be using something based on stem cells?

Or we can ask if  the 'Hijab is a fundamental human right of female Muslims since it is part of religious belief.  Can a store owner, with particular preconceived biases insist that any female who enters the stored wear one? Does a Jehovah's Witness owner who won’t employ blood transfusions get to say to an employee policy that pays for blood transfusions violates their faith and hence their fundamental freedom?

Historically we've stayed away from such Big Brother religions since they violate other values such as rights to privacy, private decisions and human dignity. In the 19th century, for example, the idea of American exceptionalism was undeerstood an assembly of special American social features.  We were a relatively free Republic based on democratic ideals and personal liberty, but also freedom from religious control.  As part of the separation idea we didn’t/don’t grant religious institutions the right to muscle into secular culture and mold it to the Procrustean bed of their preconceived ideas of society. Separating the state from religion should mean that there are no additional laws that people with religious beliefs levy upon others.  There is precedent here. We protect children from parents who won’t allow medical treatment for religious reasons. Of course, with things like abortion conservatives have argued that they are protecting a child-like unborn. Cathi Herrod, the president of the Center for Arizona Policy, the conservative Christian group that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and pushed SB 1062, claims that the bill is:

 "simply about protecting religious liberty and nothing else".

I'm not alone in distrusting the claim. I worry that SB 1062 was not innocently about faith or religious freedom. Rather it and similar efforts, is about political and ideological wedges and precedents. It uses a poorly formulated idea that provides a guise of preserving religious freedom.  What the advocates and activists behind it really want is some social action. In this case making discrimination against gays and the LGBT community legal.

To me it seems that we can keep religious freedom as a fundamental right, but not let it be invoked to harm others. In a proper setting we can have an informed discussion of terms like Freedom, and Freedom of Religion but behind this is a social struggle with a emotional engine driven by a hybrid of politics and religion. It helps to remember legal precedents defining the fine balance between the freedom to exercise one's religion and the civil rights of others.

Images

Stop Squirming: http://lesfemmesvoice.wordpress.com/

Open : http://kjzz.org/content/20736/after-sb-1062-backlash-gay-rights-advocates-help-businesses-declare-they-are-open-all

A Meaning Too Far: Macaca and Holocaust Moments

By Gary Berg-Cross

Words are used as surrogates to look into what people are thinking about candidates. Below is a partial list of unweighted word counts that people apply to President Obama. These are emotional words and part of sentiment analysis (which was pioneered to see what people thought of car and brand names):

Good/good man/good job 38
Trying/Tried/Tries 30
President 27
Failed/Failure 25
Incompetent 24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpewpoll_20120903.html

As you can see it is a mixed list of good and bad, but the good polarity sentiments outnumber the bad.

That’s analysis of what people think. Analysis going the other way looks at how speeches are crafted to make people think a certain way about a candidate or topic. There was a bit of a word storm of analysis after the recent political conventions. Commentators made much of the fact that Romney ignored the Afghan war and hadn’t said the word. But beyond that papers such as the NY Times did detailed analysis on which words were actually used and what we might surmise was the “message” being thrown out.

The graphic below is from the Times and shows that Barack Obama used the word “Health” or the phrase “Middle Class” much more than Romney who used God and Business much more. You can also see a chart of the words used by just Romney and other speakers from the NY Times. Words associated with foreign policy accounted for a small part – but the recent events in Libya have turned that around a bit. Pundits have always discussed campaign wars of words and the stories they tell, but text analysis has gotten incrementally more sophisticated to get closer to understanding the meanings that speech writers try to evoke and the images they cast. Words & phrases like “American Exceptionalism” used this way may have an uncertain alignment with history and external reality.

It has all to do with evoking powerful concepts a person already believes in. The skill is often in getting that fine tuning of moving people just a little way from where they are to where you want them to be. Use a phrase like “American Exceptionalism” often enough and it becomes a tool. You can then wrap your statements in this familiar language with just a hint of evidence (I created jobs) and hope your audience makes the connection you want. You might suggest that Entrepreneurs are part of “American Exceptionalism”. Tell that story and imply that community organizers are less a part of this. They don’t create jobs and are not “Exceptional”– look at the trouble they make.

Of course the story may go wrong if you deviate too widely and seem unfair.

Language requires massive amount of  commonsense knowledge, knowledge

 that a 5 year old has based on experience, but a computer problem doesn’t have. Connecting certain words makes sense and conveys an meaning in normal circumstance. So we may talk about picking up a “blue toy”, but not “burning a blue virtue”. Older kids may even understand a proposition such as “ the far table needs some more soda” even thought tables don’t drink.  We understand that the table includes people who do drink. We buy into the idea being communicated with an interpretation.

But political language can stretch our comprehension system a bit beyond its comfort zone and into interpretations we may find aesthetically disturbing. I’m thinking of the language of politicians like George Allen, Virginia’s 67th Governor, who had a "Macaca” Moment caught on camera. It seemed extreme and racist to label a citizen with an oblique monkey reference this way. It’s a triangle of meaning as I've blogged on before, with words too far from the concepts most of us have. Of course Allen just thought he had chosen the wrong word, but people judged a meaning in the word and perhaps too cheap a political trick to stir the crowd's emotions. More recently Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett a 10-term incumbent from Frederick County MD,  had a difficult moment. Bartlett is battling Democratic challenger John Delaney, a financier from Montgomery County in a redrawn district. He was asked during a town hall meeting in Cumberland MD if he favored government-issued student loans. Bartlett replied that such loans are unconstitutional - bad sentiment there. He thought that ignoring the Constitution to do something good (helping students has a good sentiment) can be “a very slippery slope.” What was he trying to connect government loans to? What was the path he saw? He cited the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews during World War II as an example of something bad that could happen if we support the federal government’s role in subsidized student loans. Here’s what he said about that slipper slope:

“The Holocaust that occurred in Germany -- how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope."

He’s apologizing vigorously for this poor choices of words and may be on a slippery slope himself, but what about his concepts? He finds no evidence in the U.S. Constitution that the federal government should be involved with education or that student loans were “a good idea.” This seems so 18th century and what, I guess, some call strict constructionism. Well at least people in parts of MD will have a chance to think about what a simple term like "student loans", "federal government" and "slippery slope" mean to people like Bartlett. The truth is that we often need more than commonsense to interpret political talk which is full of gaps and jumps and historical and cultural reference. There' s a plethora of things not spelled out in the constitution such as privacy rights that slick talk may make seem easy issues, but they are not since they involve more than some obvious meaning in a phrase like "student load" and who is responsible for what as part of that commitment. It's important to inquire into what is really being argued in these seemingly simple statements.

Image Crdits

Sentiment Analysis: http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_search/google_gamed_by_cyber_bullies_needs_sentiment_analysis.html
George Allen: http://www.answers.com/topic/macaca-slur

5 Mythic Stories and Real American History

By Gary Berg-Cross

James Baldwin said famously:

“What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.”

Baldwin is just of many quoted in James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong which exposes a series of such myths. Secularists are often involved in exploring and exploding such concepts as the U.S. is being founded as a Christian nation. It’s often a heated debate as seen in the exchange between Blake Dunlop & Bruce Gourley. The secular Gorley side has to put things in context:

Yes, theocracies existed at the colonial state level prior to the American Revolution (and persecuted Baptists, Quakers, and non-Christians). However, at the insistence of Baptists, Deists, and many others, our founding fathers rejected theocracy and chose a secular government structure. Yes, some states continued to collect taxes for churches into the early 19th century, because some Christians yet yearned for some degree of theocracy. And yes, people of all manner (not just Christians) in the late 18th and 19th centuries spoke to the vague notion of “providence.” John Jay’s reference to “providence” is akin to the deism of most of our founding fathers, as is the formal offering of prayer to a distant universal force or supreme being.

Waldman’s relatively new book Founding Faith contributes some balance to this type of debate. At least according to Beliefnet :-) :

In Lies we see a larger myth challenging effort. Lowen surveyed 12 large books used to teach high school history and in circulation during 1994. What he found, and documented is that American History textbooks seem to portray the American experience in a very rosy optimistic way despite facts that make for a much more checkered story. The coverage is filled with a version of blind patriotism mixed with mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies (see various blogs on American Exceptionalism). Hence the Lies title.

Lowen examines several important topics to demonstrate the divergence from historical facts. Why the discrepancy? There are several reasons including tradition and custom that creates a confirmatory story. Its confirmatory bias working again on a grand scale (as covered in previous blogs). And of course there is the challenge of covering so much material. Book feel compelled to cover every President and boil down conflict in American history losing much of the real story. Some conflicts such as the Civil war or intervention in Mexico and the treatment of the Indians are too hot to handle at times.

Lowen also points out that American history textbooks are approved by school boards and are consciously edited to guarantee that they contain acceptable, dare I say, politically correct perspectives on events. Textbooks authors and their editors avoid difficult topics and steer to what will sell textbooks Add to this the political agenda of rabid, right-wing boards such as in Texas and there is plenty or reasons for problems with the real American stories. Much safer to take an American Exceptionalism tope and say that, sure there were some problems like racism, but great (white and wealthy) Americans overcame it all and here we are now.

In the first chapter, Loewen talks about the process of hero- making which he calls heroification details (both important and trivial) are left out or changed to fit the archetypical mold of the flawless, inhuman "heroes." This Lowen notes is a "degenerative process" that turns "flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest “

So we see American history textbooks filled to the brin with biographical vignettes of the very famous. Each of us could create a good list Heroification so distorts the lives of people like Helln Keller and Woodrow Wilson that “we cannot think straight about them.” There is a simple reason Loewen points out. History textbooks are actively edited to present the famous as heroes, minus most all of the negative attributes, so that impressionable kids will not think badly of them in any way and we can all be proud of our country. But in the process we may miss the larger issues which the nation has faced and learn from the failings as well as the success. Below are 5 people/issues that Lowen covers as examples of where the texts often go wrong.

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1, Columbus – Columbus is one of only two people the US honors by name in a national holiday. We all remember 1492, and sure enough, all twelve textbooks Lowen surveyed include it. But he notes that they leave out virtually everything that is important to know about Columbus and the European exploration of the Americas. Meanwhile, they make up all kinds of details to tell a better story and to humanize Columbus so that readers will identify with him.”

The truth is that Chris was in it for the fame and fortune.

“The way American history textbooks treat Columbus reinforces the tendency not to think about the process of domination. The traditional picture of Columbus landing on the American shore shows him dominating immediately, and this is based on fact: Columbus claimed everything he saw right off the boat. On his first voyage, Columbus kidnapped some 10 to 25 Indians and took them back with him to Spain. “

As Lowen further notes:

“ Only seven or eight of the Indians arrived alive, but along with the parrots, gold trinkets, and other exotica, they caused quite a stir in Seville. Ferdinand and Isabella provided Columbus with seventeen ships, 1,200 to 1,500 men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs for a second voyage.,,,

On the whole Columbus introduced 2 phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass. All of these are important issues through American history and they start with Columbus and colonization. Understanding the current world is difficult with out this frame.

2. The Indians and those Pilgrims

Lowen notes that “There has been some improvement in textbooks’ treatment of Native peoples in recent years. In 1961 the best-selling Rise of the American Nation contained 10 illustrations featuring Native people, alone or with whites (of 268 illustrations). But and here is the catch most of these pictures focused on the themes of primitive life and savage warfare. This is note the way the early reports on Indians went and such things as primitive life and savage warfare is not supported by much of the modern research cited in Lies.

Loewen discusses America’s shameful treatment of the Indians and the problems with racism. For example, “The American Republic,” the authors of The American Pageant tell us on page one, “was from the outset uniquely favored. It started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely peopled by Indians that they were able to be eliminated or shouldered aside.”

Vast and virgin continent? Not according to modern research. The textbooks twist things with selective presentation. Take the Pilgrims, who textbooks say “started from scratch,” when they really started with a fully functional American Indian village previously emptied by European plagues (pg 90 of Lies). Loewen can quote primary sources to the effect of Pilgrims “settlment”, (they proceeded to rob Indian graves to find whatever else they needed!) And the early wars with Indian partners against other Indians.

The ugly truth is that many Pilgrims were thankful and grateful that the Native population was decreasing. Even worse, there was the Pequot Massacre in 1637, which started after the colonists found a murdered white man in his boat. Ninety armed settlers burned a Native village, along with their crops, and then demanded the Natives to turn in the murderers. When the Natives refused, a massacre followed.

Captain John Mason and his colonist army surrounded a fortified Pequot village and reportedly shouted: “We must burn them! Such a dreadful terror let the Almighty fall upon their spirits that they would flee from us and run into the very flames. Thus did the Lord Judge the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies.” The surviving Pequot were hunted and slain. (Quote from Lies)

3. Hellen Keller

Most of us carry a strong image of Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps. Made into a move with scenes in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen's hand at the pump it has been an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren. A McGraw-Hill educational film version concludes with:

"The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those who taught us what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can make us is to help another reach true potential."

Hellen Keller’s truth is that she was a radical socialist. As Lowen notes:

She joined the Socialist party of Massachusetts in 1909. She had become a social radical even before she graduated from Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized, because of any teachings available there. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new communist nation: "In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the old order has given birth to the new, and behold in the East a man-child is born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!" ~ Keller hung a red flag over the desk in her study. Gradually she moved to the left of the Socialist party and became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) the syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson’s truth is also covered in Lies.

4. John Brown

I thought that I knew the core of the John Brown story. But since it is tangled with racism and the Civil War, the story I heard was a later construction. Lowen puts it like this - “Just as textbooks treat slavery without racism, they treat abolitionism without idealism. Consider the most radical white abolitionist of them all, John Brown.” I didn’t know of his family roots or the events in blood Kansas preceding his raids or what was revealed in the trial or how he was a hero to the North.

Despite the fact that Brown's lawyers may have used the insanity plea to get him off, Brown was hardly thought of as insane during his time. As Loewen puts it in Lies:

(Brown) favorably impressed people who spoke with him after his capture,

including his jailer and even reporters writing for Democratic newspapers, which supported slavery. Governor Wise of Virginia called him "a man of clear head" after Brown got the better of him in an informal interview. "They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman," Governor Wise said. In his message to the Virginia legislature he said Brown showed "quick and clear perception," "rational premises and consecutive reasoning," and "composure and selfpossession."

(Loewen, pg. 167).

Lown supports the view of a culturally convenient view of Brown this way:

“The treatment of Brown, like the treatment of slavery and Reconstruction, has changed in American history textbooks. From 1890 to about 1970, John Brown was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane, and after 1970 he regained his sanity. Since Brown himself did not change after his death, his sanity provides an inadvertent index of the level of white racism in our society.”

5. The Government

Most the 12 textbooks describe the US system of government as being as close to flawless as humanly possible. Here are some snippets from Lies.

“What story do textbooks tell about our government? First, they imply that the state we live in today is the state created in 1789. Textbook authors overlook the possibility that the balance of powers set forth in the Constitution, granting some power to each branch of the federal government, some to the states, and reserving some for individuals, has been decisively altered over the last two hundred years. The federal government they picture is still the people’s servant, manageable and tractable.” pg 217 which continues with specific book treaments

“In Frances FitzGerald’s phrase, textbooks present United States as “a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world.” In so doing, they echo the nation our leaders like to present to its citizens: the supremely moral, disinterested peacekeeper, the supremely responsible world citizen.”


“Since at least the 1920’s, textbook authors have claimed that the United States is more generous than any other nation in the world in providing foreign aid. The myth was untrue then; it is likewise untrue now. Today at least a dozen European and Arab nations devote much larger proportions of their gross domestic product (GDP) or total government expenditures to foreign aid than does the United States.”

The truth Lowen argues is that there is almost no mention at all, in these textbooks, about the way things really worked including elements of alternative (inckuding conspiracy) theories, abuses of power, or anything else negative.

Lowen surveyed the 12 history textbooks to see how they treated 6 U.S. attempts to subvert foreign governments that occurred before 1973, More than enough time to be covered as history. The episodes were:

1. US assistance to the shah’s faction in Iran in deposing Prime Minister
Mussadegh and returning the shah to the throne in 1953;
2. our role in bringing down the elected government of Guatemala in 1954;
3. our help rigging of the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the Christians on top and led to the Muslim revolt and civil war the next year;
4. our involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire in 1961;
5. our repeated attempts to murder Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba and bring down his government by terror and sabotage; and
6. our role in bringing down the elected Alende government of Chile 1973.

Looked at objectively if these happened to us we would call actions such as these “state-sponsored terrorism.”

Blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies all of which helps to explain why we have lost touch with our history and why high school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history is always at the bottom. They consider it the most irrelevant of twenty-one school subjects; bo-o-o-oring and confusing too. What could be interesting is the recent past, but it isn’t covered and disappears, unexplained down what Lowen calls the Memory Hole. And because important details are omitted the stories it tells are often incoherent.

Picture/Image credits:

Columbis: http://pagsapush.blogspot.com/2011/07/columbus-lies-my-teacher-told-me.html

Lies book cover: http://america-lives.blogspot.com/2010/12/james-w-loewen-lies-my-teacher-told-me.html

Lowen: http://leaksfree.com/2012/05/conversations-with-great-minds-dr-james-loewen-lies-my-teacher-told-me-p1/

Lowen with the Texts: http://www.stthomas.edu/bulletin/2010/03/02/faculty-invited-to-a-conversation-with-james-loewen-author-of-lies-my-teacher-told-me/

Skywoman: http://lifeafterhate.org/2010/11/the-reeducation-of-thanksgiving/