Deliver US, Oh Lord, From THEM. . .

Having just received my latest edition of Mother Jones Magazine (the Koran for a card-carrying member of the Godless political left), I read the cover story on the latest incarnation of right-wing paranoia, the "Oath Keepers."  Now here is a group that makes the Tea Party and Birther crowds  look like a collection of moderate intellectuals.  Were Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh still alive, I have no doubt that he would be a leading figure in this movement.  They purport to be an association made up mostly of military and law enforcement personnel, whose mission is to protect Americans from assaults on their basic freedoms.  Beyond their re-packaging of the same old militia nonsense that converted McVeigh from a social misfit into a terrorist bomber, the Oath Keepers have revived the pre-Civil War states-rights agenda and included it among their sacred tenets.  Ho hum, just another fringe movement taking advantage of the First Amendment, right?  Maybe not.

These nutballs have themselves convinced that America is on the verge of becoming a martial law imposed police state within the very near future.  In fact, they are predicting that the federal government will begin to move against our cherished rights sometime before the end of this calendar year.  And what, you may ask is the catalyst for the apocalyptic destruction of American liberties?  Is it  a Bin Laden led attack on our homeland?  Is it the final meltdown of our financial institutions?  Is it a pandemic scourge of some horrible virus?  Or is it, as we hear so often, the fear of our huge federal deficits? No, no, no, and no.  It is instead an attack against America from the liberal left, led by, you guessed it, Barack Obama.  And when it begins, Oath Keepers all over the country will refuse to follow any government orders to help enslave us.  In fact, they are planning to rise up and begin a violent revolution to "take back" America and restore our country to the values upon which it was founded. Wow!

And if that is not enough to make you want to stand up and whistle Dixie, the Oath Keepers have begun to receive popular media attention from Fox News's Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.  Oh well, at least we now know where all those guns ended up that were purchased right after Obama won the 2008 presidential election.  Other than wishing I had purchased stock in Colt Fire Arms last summer, I began to take a closer look at all the ultra-conservative groups that materialized since the election and I think I figured out what is going on.  All this paranoia is not about an erosion of our civil liberties, or a government take over of health care, nor is it a populist reaction to a faltering economy, this is about something much more central to the agenda of the far right.  All of this citizen uprising nonsense is about race.

If you think not, then take a look at two groups of people, those who started these movements and those who have joined.  I defy you to find anyone among the Oath Keepers, Birthers, or Tea Partiers, who are not white.  Yes, these movements are indeed about the Constitution, just not the version we have now.  What these groups want most is a return to a version of our cherished document before the addition of the 14th Amendment.  Again, if you think I am wrong, take a look at the websites for groups like the KKK and the Arian Nations.  You will find the same anti-government, pro-liberty rhetoric now employed by contemporary right wing groups.  But unlike our current batch of gun toting malcontents, the Klan and neo-Nazi organizations are at least honest and open in their hatred for racial minorities.

All you have to do is listen closely to the rhetoric coming out of the Oath Keepers and Tea Party crowd and you can almost hear them dropping in a racial or ethnic slur. But unlike their historic antecedents, the new patrons of white supremacy would lose all their media support if they were to play their race card.  Unfortunately, for them anyway, Obama got elected in 2008, not 1958.  Back then there was not much of a  price to pay for a bigot to let fly the "N" word. Today, unless one is a rapper or Def Comedian, such overt exposure of one's real agenda would be a public relations disaster.  Just ask ex- Republican Senators Trent Lott of Mississippi or Virginia's George Allen Jr. what happened to their political stars after just one racially charged gaff.

Low and behold all this angry and frenetic energy spewing out of the American right now begins to make sense.  It isn't that these people are worried about our Constitutional rights, it is that they are pissed off that they now actually apply to people they have long hated.  For if saving the Constitution were really their agenda, they would have risen up six years ago when the Bush administration began its warrantless wire taps.  Nor is it about the war on terror, as the Obama administration has picked-up right where the Cheneyites left off.  We are still aggressively chasing down and killing Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders whenever and wherever we can find them.  It certainly can't be deficit or debt phobia driving the far right wing, as nary a peep was heard from them as Bush and his big spending pals pushed the country to the verge of economic collapse.  Hell, it isn't even that President Obama is a liberal, which of course he is not.  Any self-respecting liberal, like me, would never sign on to a health care bill that did not include a Medicare-for-all centerpiece.  All the way back to the primary election season, Obama never endorsed such a system, but instead proposed that we could keep our health care system in the hands of private interests. Hmmm, some liberal.

That only leaves one thing, and that one thing is R-A-C-E.  Think about it, first they tried "tagging" Obama by loudly enunciating his middle name, remember?  Barack HUSSEIN Obama.  Then there was the issue of his suits not being adorned by an American flag pin.  Next, they were in a tizzy about the man's citizenship and whether, what, Hawaii counts as a state?  When that failed they claimed that he was actually born in Africa or Indonesia, and that he was a Muslim. Then there was the flap over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  You know, that uppity black preacher from, well. . . Chicago.  And when none of that worked, they went after Mrs. Obama for blaspheming America when she said she could finally be proud of her country.  How dare she imply that white America ever did anything to make life difficult for racial minorities?

Yup, I think all this is much ado about color.  And the Birthers, Tea Partiers, Oath Keepers, and all their fellow travelers are trying their best to create a 21st century version of DW Griffith's, "Birth of a Nation."  That said, it may be time the rest of us quit pretending that these people represent a legitimate political and economic agenda.  The sooner we can begin to mobilize our forces to really protect our basic liberties and our constitutional traditions from the only real evil force that has ever threatened them, the proponents of extremism and hatred, the better.

BUDDY CAN YOU SPARE ME A TRILLION?

I have been reading quite a bit lately about the causes of our latest economic woes.  Without a doubt, much of the blame must rest upon the shoulders of multi-national banks, Wall Street Investment Houses, and all those Washington politicians, both Republican and Democratic, who thrust their faces into the huge money trough provided by the above mentioned financial giants.  For none of what almost plunged us into a 1930s-like depression could have happened had not our elected officials willingly dismantled most of the economic regulatory system created during the New Deal.  No I am not about to let any of our movers and shakers off the hook, but it is time to take a hard look at some others who were complicit in our economic collapse.  You know--us!

First, you and I elected every one of the members of Congress and all the presidents who marshaled in the era of unchecked capitalism.  Beginning with the Reagan Revolution in 1980, and ending, well it hasn't really ended yet if you look at how many Wall Streeters have been appointed to key economic and political offices by President Obama.  Did anyone with an IQ of more than two digits really believe that fundamental change would result from the political campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain, which amassed over 1.5 billion dollars to buy our votes?  All the real reformers were choked to death by the big money boys early in the primary season and we all just sat back and watched.  And what, now we are shocked by the outcome?  Bigger than ever Wall Street bonuses, huge profits for investment bankers, and no financial reforms of any kind.  Representative democracy does not work if the electorate allows its votes to be purchased by the biggest spender.  Oh yeah, in case you haven't noticed, those same toadies of Wall Street bought themselves the Supreme Court too.  With a 5-4 deregulation majority now firmly in charge, we got to witness the transformation of corporations into real people with full constitutional rights.  Which isn't even close to an earlier decision by the same court that determined that money and speech were the same thing, and therefore equally protected by the First Amendment.

Ah, but today's rant is not just another populist diatribe against American economic elites. For you and I are not just politically complicit in the mess we now find ourselves in, but we own a great deal of the economic blame too. Now before you think I have drunk the Libertarian Kool Aid, let me explain.  In 1973, the year we suffered through OPEC choking off the supply of gasoline to the United States, and while we were watching the televised Congressional Watergate hearings, something very important began to happen to middle class America.  That was the year that our real income stopped growing.  From that year, right up to today, the value of our wages and salaries has not increased. . . at all.  Oh yeah, that was also the last year that top corporate salaries and bonuses averaged from ten to twenty times higher than ours.  Today, while we have not seen any real economic growth in our families, the moguls of Wall Street now make hundreds of times our annual pay.  Can anyone say billionaire?

From 1945 to 1973, thanks to a combination of industrial, rather than financial growth, robust government regulations, a real graduated income tax system, the collective bargaining power of organized labor, and a willingness on the part of the American people to pay their way, we all got wealthier. So what the heck happened?  Beyond neglecting our basic constitutional duties to both send qualified representatives into government, and then monitoring their behavior while in office, we began to substitute personal debt for real income.  One can make a pretty good argument that American consumers would have paid more attention to the stagnation of the middle class, at the hands of the latter day robber barons on Wall Street, had we not been able to convert our homes into ATM machines.  But every time we re-financed our mortgages, or took out a second to buy a boat, a car, or that custom pool in the back yard, a personal choice was made to assume more debt.  No matter how enticing the combination of Wall Street and Madison Avenue made things look, in the end we all were to blame for the great housing bubble.  To put it simply, there would have been no bundled mortgage securities and no credit default swaps if we had been more prudent and less greedy.

But once the bubble burst, the latter day populists, like the Tea Partiers, began to build their constituencies by blaming the evil triumvirate of Big Banks, Wall Street and Washington. The economic conspiracy theory goes as follows:  Americans were tricked into buying sub-prime loans to get into homes they could not afford. Then, they were wooed by consumer advertisements to chase a standard of living they could not afford.  At best, this is about a half truth.  To be sure, predatory lenders were out there and they were aggressively marketing their voodoo lending packages.  But it was always our choice to assume any unwise risk. All the truth in lending laws mean nothing if consumers were so desperate to buy into a materialistic version of the "Good Life," that they did not read the contracts they were about to sign. Certainly, shame on the banks and our political leaders for creating this mess, but shame too on us for blindly going along like so many brainless lemmings.

Imagine where we might be today if we hadn't borrowed to sustain our life styles, but only spent what we were making.  Do you think that we would have stood idly by while a few of us amassed trillions of dollars in speculative wealth?  By 1980 we would have seen that we were actually falling behind economically and the rush to deregulate the financial industry might instead have been a rush to more fairly distribute the great wealth of our country.  Meanwhile the fat cats are laughing all the way to their "too big to fail" bank.  For while our wages went down over the last forty years, our economic productivity went up.  So let me see. . . if I was actually making less, but I was ever more productive, then where did all that wealth go that I created?  See, I knew you would get it.

Time to Throw Some Rocks at the Glass House

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After commenting so freely on all that is wrong with so many other institutions, it is only fair that I take a critical look, and well deserved shots at my own profession, American secondary education.  It is not, as you might think, that I am so parochially loyal to my own place in the educational status quo, that I have avoided turning my acidic prose loose on the outdated and self-serving colossus we call American education.  Nor have I avoided assailing this arthritic relic of the 19th century because I might be chomping down on the very hand that feeds me. Instead, believe it or not, it is because I have been saving many of the criticisms you are about to read for a book I plan to write when I retire.  But then it occurred to me that if I did not get a few things "out there," I could very well go toes north and room temperature (that's die for those of you less crude than me) before I ever get any of this said.  And I do want to go on the record, albeit with a woefully incomplete polemic at this time.

First, after thirty plus years of standing before thousands of college prep teenagers, I have come to the conclusion that my dedicated colleagues and I have done a pretty good job of preparing our students to take their places as citizens and adults in the late 1800s.  Everything about our physical plants and the ways in which we socialize our kids is as outdated as if we were conducting lessons on the intricacies of managing a team of oxen along the Oregon Trail.  Actually, that is an incomplete analogy, as we are also getting our young charges ready to assume positions on Henry Ford's Dearborn assembly line making Model T sedans and coupes.  For while the rest of the post-industrial world is training its young people for life in the 21st century, we are still pretending that our kids need three months off to help their Homesteading parents plant the crops, tend to the livestock, and harvest the autumn bounty. For most American high school students, the school year runs for about 180 days.  At my school, a private Catholic college preparatory institution, we are in session for about ten fewer days than that.  I guess tuition paying Catholic school kids need more time back on the farm than their peers in the public sector.  Most of the secondary students in the rest of the developed world are in session from between 210 to 240 days per year.  When you add that all up over thirteen school years, our kids are behind by as much as three academic years when they graduate from high school.  Can everyone say, "Would you like fries with that sir?"

Then there is the way we structure our classes.  Ringing bells, assigning detention to late kids, sitting them in rows, mandating mind-numbing and tedious busy work, are all excellent ways to get kids ready to go to work in a factory.  Think of this if you will, the vast majority of school discipline problems are related to issues of rules of conformity.  Most kids who are assigned detention, or even suspended, are are in trouble for being late to class, out of their assigned seats, or talking to someone sitting near them.  Truly disruptive or disrespectful behavior is much more rare, even in some of our worst schools. But the model we are using was designed to condition-out any spark of individuality, as that would have been disastrous on a factory assembly line.  Think of it, for thirteen years, American kids cannot use the restroom when they need to go.  Again, a wonderful idea on an assembly line where one missing worker disrupts the entire process, but a useless behavior trait in a post-industrial society.  So we ring bells, kids move, we ring bells, kids sit, we ring bells, kids eat, we ring bells, kids go home.  One hundred years ago, we blew whistles, factory workers came in, we blew whistles, factory workers lined up at their work stations, we blew whistles, factory workers rested, we blew whistles, factory workers ate lunch, we blew whistles, factories workers went home.  They all came to work at the same time, they dressed alike, they were punished for being late or talking during work, and they were conditioned to do the same boring tasks over and over for eight hours a day, five days a week, month after month, and year after boring year.

No wonder a quarter of our American high school students drop out of school every year.  Even the way we evaluate our kids makes no sense any more.  Grades are assigned based on a system of rigidly scrutinized individual mastery of a narrowly defined curriculum.  We call cooperative work "cheating," and punish kids for doing exactly what will be demanded of them in the modern adult workforce.  Since most of the really good jobs awaiting our young people involve highly complex communication and technological skills, a premium in the real workplace is placed on cooperating, rather than isolating.  No wonder so many of our valedictorians can't seem to fit in as adults.  The best jobs of the 21st century are going to demand workers who are highly creative, adaptive to rapid change, skilled critical thinkers, and stimulated by peer interaction.  Think back to your school years and reflect for a moment on all the tasks you were forced to do that rewarded those real-world skills.  You may find, as I have, that your athletic teams and other extra-curricular activities were more nurturing of modern workplace skills than anything you did in the classroom.

As far as rigidly enforced dress codes go, there was indeed a time in American history when a person's attire immediately marked them as working or middle class, as educated or destined for manual labor.  After World War II, when the new middle class fled the cities and factories for brand new row houses in the suburbs, they demanded that schools teach their kids how to look like future members of the managerial class.  Denim pants and shirts were symbols of the manual labor jobs of their immigrant parents' generation, not their GI Bill financed entree into the good life, and so were banned from schools. Thus, we find that an outdated 1940s and 50s social agenda is still being enforced well into the 21st century.  I think it would be fantastic if our shirt and tie school administrators could all take a one-day field trip to some of the top high tech companies to see how modern capitalists actually dress. Plus, it would really be cool to see them all sitting in those ridiculous yellow buses.

Finally, at the risk of violating that over-used adage of always avoiding fouling one's own nest, I have some criticisms of my fellow faculty members around the country.  First, why is it that so many of us are militantly opposed to any kind of performance-based evaluations?  I cannot think of another profession where outcomes are not used in determining whether one moves up, down, or out of a job, other than in education.  Perhaps it is because of the ridiculous way in which most of us are economically compensated.  To make more money as an elementary or secondary school teacher, one must earn more college credits while hanging around for another year.  To put it simply, pay is about units and years. Since most public school districts post their salary schedules online take a look and see if I am wrong.  Actual performance as a teacher has no bearing on salaries, other than in those rare cases where a teacher might actually be dismissed.  It seems that the only way for a talented teacher to move up economically, short of units and years, is to make a transition into administration.  Now there is a great idea, incentivize our best teachers to leave the classroom and take on jobs for which they may have absolutely no aptitude or innate interest.  Which may explain why academic administrations are so dysfunctional in this country.

Oh, but I have so many other items on my educational agenda, but that is enough for now.  Suffice it to say that as I am getting ready to step away from a profession that I love, I am so disheartened as to the limited progress we have made to improve education in America.  In fact, during my tenure within its confines. . hmmm, tenure, now there is a topic for another discussion.