Long-Term Commitment

Student activism, again. This time, the authors who've graduated continue working toward passage of their bill, as current students enlist in the cause.

“The bill, borne out of an AP Government class, would make secret or redacted government files on cold cases from the Civil Rights era public.” https://t.co/AuYO94mmAs

— Stacey E. Singleton (@staceyNYCDC) March 28, 2018

Worth A Thousand Words

It speaks, this image of bored, uncomfortable children forced to be there. The picture says, too, that these undoubtedly are children of White House staff. And volumes are spoken by how strikingly white they are.  

Most telling of all: the starkness of contrast between this and all pictures taken on such occasions in the previous eight years. But during those eight years, kids weren't used as props, and they were thrilled to be with the adults in the picture.

This time, the adult in the picture couldn't appear less simpatico with children. But her sole reason for being here (and in her job) is her being a fundamentalist billionaire, eager to siphon public money into family profit and theocratic control of schools.

So much going on in the image itself, it took a minute for me to see the story told by the caption.

If At First They Don't Suceed

They will try again, and again.

And as he again proves: "Scalia Better Off in 'Less Advanced' Court"

Check-Offs

It's not hard to fill in the boxes of the "Atlanta Cheating Scandal" story.

Demonizing public shools: check
Locating accountability at the bottom: check
Meting out disproportionately harsh punishment to those deemed accountable: check
Those punished happen to be black: check, check, anddouble-check

Charles Pierce observes—

... the ahistorical explosion of bullshit that is Judge Jerry Baxter, who called the convictions of eight former Atlanta school administrators in connection to a fairly massive scandal involving cheating on standardized tests "the sickest thing that ever happened in this town." (Somewhere in the bowels of a SuperMax in Colorado, Eric Rudolph finds himself off the hook.)...

After listing the individual prison sentences, Diane Ravitch adds—

...all of the convicted educators lost their license, their pensions, and five years of compensation.

If only all those bankers who nearly destroyed the economy in 2008 had been dealt with as harshly. But they were "too big to fail."

Richard Rothstein makes it all clear—

Eleven Atlanta educators, convicted and imprisoned, have taken the fall for systematic cheating on standardized tests in American education. Such cheating is widespread, as is similar corruption in any institution—whether health care, criminal justice, the Veterans Administration, or others—where top policymakers try to manage their institutions with simple quantitative measures that distort the institution’s goals. This corruption is especially inevitable when out-of-touch policymakers set impossible-to-achieve goals and expect that success will nonetheless follow if only underlings are held accountable for measurable results.
...

Certainly, educators can refuse to cheat, and take the fall for unavoidable failure in other ways: they can see their schools closed, their colleagues fired, their students’ confidence and love of learning destroyed. That would have been the legal thing to do, but not necessarily the ethical thing to do. As one indicted teacher told the judge before the trial, "I truly believed that I was helping these children stay in school just one more year," something from which they would have benefited far more than being drilled incessantly on test-taking strategies so they could pass tests legally.

As Pierce says—

The sentences are preposterous, but the sentences are not about the crimes involved. The sentences are a message that the power in this country is behind the "reform" grifting movement no matter what the cost to children or to public education in general. They will have their testing. (Ravitch finds one New Jersey superintendent who "hopes" kids will feel bullied by the testing regime. Bravo, sir.) It doesn't matter even if the people sharing in the grift -- like, say, the people involved in designing and running the computers on which the testing system depends -- are any good at their jobs or not. They will have their testing, and I include the current administration in this, come hell, high water, or hangin' judges, and you best not offend against it, or you are the worst thing that ever happened to Atlanta. Leo Frank wept.

Hands-On

Puff piece this may have been, but the subject was one of great interest—

For 160 years, the pianos made by Steinway & Sons have been considered the finest in the world. So when hedge fund billionaire John Paulson recently bought the company, it struck fear in the hearts of musicians: Would the famously handcrafted pianos be changed, for the sake of efficiency? Paulson, who owns several Steinways himself, says nothing will change.

[music]*

Great pianists need great pianos. Vladimir Horowitz, the famous Russian pianist, used to travel with his own personal Steinway when he concertized around the world...

*Seque here was a Horowitz clip: the opening notes of Mozart's C major Sonata (K330). It's music that always takes me back to the first time I heard it: played by the fine pianist who taught my keyboard literature course in college.

Classes were memorable, both musically and in Dr. T's use of sometimes corny jokes as teaching aids. The jokes worked: quite a few years later, I remember them well, as I do the musical points they illustrated.

Memorable, too, was the class trip organized by Dr. T.: a charter bus ride through several states to Astoria, Queens, and a tour of Steinway factory.

Here's a transcript of the NPR piece, describing the many hand crafting processes in use, and quoting veterans of 30, 40, 50 years at the factory. Some workers' families were employed there for generations before them; other workers just happened to grow up in the neighborhood and get interested in the place. Despite use of newer technologies, much of the hand crafting (and the generally good job security) is a throwback to old modes of work. The factory's atmosphere was a focus of the documentary filmed a few years ago, and it's something I remember from touring the place (even if that was... ummm... about 40 years ago).

We visited rooms where small groups worked on different stages of piano making, and they were enthusiastic about showing us what they were doing. People really seemed to enjoy their work and appreciate meeting a class of interested music students. A woman cutting leather (for key action dampening) offered us scraps to take home. We were puzzled, so she tried again—"Do you do crafts?"—until she had a taker. In other areas, other workers looked around their discarded materials for some possible souvenir to share.

In the room where a tester played a finished instrument, he ended the piece, spun his stool around to face us, then said, "Ya like Goishwin?!" Not waiting for a reply, he spun back to the keyboard. We listened to some spirited playing, from someone who was likely a former kid from the neighborhood.

The tour ended at an instrument showroom, where the guide invited our professor to play. He chose the first movement of the Mozart K330, one of the loveliest pieces we had studied. We all were fans of Dr T's playing and approach to teaching music history; our group's applause at the end was very heartfelt.

I'm no musician, but I've never forgotten the keyboard course, the class members, or Dr. T. And I haven't forgotten the high school music ed experiences that later led me to look for more.

The key was my year of singing in the H.S. choir. It was very much a group of average kids who listened to pop music most of the time. But we were the raw material for an ambitious plan of our director's: that we would learn the choral parts of the Bach "Magnificat" and perform them with professional soloists.

At that age (16 or so) I liked some classical music, but thought of Baroque as a repetitious, tinny harpsichord sound. Learning and rehearsing Bach's choral writing opened a new world, though. It was a revelation, just encountering the beauty of individual parts as we learned them. But when the vocal sections later combined to rehearse an entire chorus, the results were new and awe-inspiring.

All these decades later, I remember an afternoon after rehearsal. As the group walked through an empty hallway outside the gym, someone began singing his choral part; soon, everyone else joined in with their respective parts. The acoustics were pretty damn good, and I'll never forget that moment and the rush of feelings it inspired: awe at the music's beauty, as well as the powerful physical sensation of sound reverberating through my body; thrill at the possibilities that seemed ahead of us all; the sheer joy of spontaneously creating this together—and of doing something so out of the ordinary as impromptu mass singing in a school corridor.

It's a scene that always comes to mind in recent years, as arts education has been the first thing cut.

But, my school experience was in another century...

This is the 21st, after all, and art is meant for the elite. If the public deserves a look or a listen, surely a benevolent hedge fund manager will be willing to endow it. Maybe he even won't fire (for now) the craftspeople who contribute to his hobby.

November Read (II): Lost in Idiot America

Ohio: WPA Art Program
Library of Congress

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free,
Charles P. Pierce; 2009

Pierce's tour of this terrain is expanded from magazine pieces, for which he traveled to some varied places—historic and intellectual, as well as geographic.

The historic context has two intellectual touchstones.

One is the notion of "the American crank," as

... one of the great by-products of the American experiment. The country was founded on untested, radical ideas...

The American crank stood alone, a pioneer gazing at the frontier of his own mind the way the actual pioneers looked out over the prairie. American cranks fled conventional thinking...

... Very often, it was the cranks who provided the conflict by which the consensus changed. They did so by working diligently on the margins until, subtly, without most of the country noticing, those margins moved...

Pierce's premise is that the freedom to test ideas made America a great place for cranks, even though the public tended not to accept their ideas readily. If some cranks were self-deluded or mere snake oil salesmen, others dreamed up innovations with merits that might eventually be recognized. In our time, TV can make any charlatan an instant success.

The life and work of James Madison serves as the other point of historic reference. Of the Constitution's authors, "Madison was always the guy under the hood, tinkering with the invention he'd helped devise."

Madison believed in self-government in all things, not merely in our politics. He did not believe in drift. "A popular government," he famously wrote, "without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a tragedy or a Farce, or perhaps both." The great flaw, of course, is that, even given the means to acquire information, the people of the country may decline. Drift is willed into being.

Pierce surveys that "drift" in our current intellectual landscape.

First stop: Kentucky's Creation Museum. Where, to make the point about humans having co-existed with them, the museum entrance features a dinosaur—

Which was wearing a saddle.

It was an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur that performed in dressage competitions and stakes races. Any dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would have worn a sturdy western saddle. This, obviously, was very much a show dinosaur.

From there, Pierce goes on to examine the war on expertise, waged via "Three Great Premises of Idiot America"

... Any theory is valid if it moves units...
... Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough...
... Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

We are surrounded by illustrations, and Pierce writes terrific stuff about the ones he's selected.

He looks at 2008's Republican presidential candidates in "debate," rushing to establish their fundamentalist Christian credentials and to outdo each other in promises to "double Guantanamo," and to claim the mantle of fictional torturer Jack Bauer.

This was not a serious discussion of the reality of torture, any more than the discussion about evolution had anything to do with actual science. It was an exercise in niche marketing. Evolution and torture were ... being discussed... in the context of what they meant as a sales pitch to a carefully defined group of consumers. They were a demonstration of a product...

After all, these candidates were competing to succeed a president with whom 57% of the electorate once wanted to have a beer—

Consider all the people with whom you've tossed back a beer. How many of them would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? How many of them can you envision in the Oval Office? Running a cabinet meeting? Greeting the president of Ghana? Not only was this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it wasn't even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.

A chapter on AM radio tells the story of how, during World War II, visionary white DJs broadcast black music from Nashville's WLAC. Their late-night shows transmitted over a signal that reached much of North America; in the process, "integrating the country, even if the country pretended not to notice."

It's a sad commentary on cultural decline that AM was remade in the 80s, and that WLAC now follows the formula of airing nationally syndicated hate-talk shows.

Pierce visits a talk radio industry conference, where attendees puff with pride at the sponsor's praise of G. Gordon Liddy, the First Amendment, and America as "process," mashed together into a speech that "sounds like de Tocqueville filtered through Tony Robbins."

Since right-wing populism has at its heart an "anti-elitist" distrust of expertise, talk radio offers the purest example of the Three Great Premises at work. A host is not judged a success by his command of the issues, but purely by whether what he says moves the rating needle... If the needle moves enough, then the host is adjudged an expert... Gordon Liddy is no longer a gun-toting crackpot. He has an audience. He must know something.

This time around, Michael Savage is given the annual "Freedom of Speech" award.

He does not attend, but sends a DVD performance that plays "like a hostage tape"—

There is some stirring in the theater. This display is not what many of those present had in mind. This is the acknowledged leader of their profession, and he's acting like a guy you'd run away from on the sidewalk.

Pierce visits with some people particularly affected by the dumbing down. He writes the moving story of Alaskan natives watching their land sink into the sea; all while well-funded climate change denial efforts, including Bush administration suppression of NASA evidence, are being positioned to overcome science.

And there is a powerful chapter about the Florida hospice workers whose years of dedication led to their working in the face of death threats, as Terry Schaivo was made into the focus of fundamentalist political rage.

Pierce, as always, is a great read. Along with righteous anger at deserving targets, he supplies laughter at the darkness.

November Read (I): Unreason

Ohio: WPA Art Program
Library of Congress

The Age of American Unreason
Susan Jacoby, 2009

This title and Charles Pierce's Idiot America (post to follow) are fitting reads, post-election. Both were published last year, but need no election tie-in—not when there's always ample evidence of the 'Murkan public's cluelessness. It just happens that we now are experiencing the full effects of the Right's mid-term election tactics. Having engineered the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and made sure the media played up Koch-sucking tea partiers, the Right just keeps improving upon its ways of making the electorate stupider and more delusional than before.

Taking Richard Hofstadter's 1963 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life as a point of departure, Susan Jacoby offers a guide to the history of that anti-intellectualism, along with its forms and uses today.

From the country's start there were tensions between desire for learning and disdain for it, stemming from common disapproval of book learning or knowledge without obvious practical gain.

Also early was the divide between Jefferson and others who wanted to build public education, versus those unwilling to pay taxes to finance it. Southern plantation owners were the major opponents, and the strongest educational institutions would develop first in New England. By the end of the nineteenth century the mid-Atlantic, mid-West, and Pacific had caught up; the South would stay close to its origins in "a slavery-based class system... indifferent to the education of all but the rich."

Adult education would also take root in New England, with the start of the lyceum movement in the 1820s. The public popularity of lectures on serious topics grew in the 1840s and 50s, as a national literature was also emerging, with the first publications of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman.

Even so, "America stood with its intellectual house already divided." By 1800, what we now call Christian fundamentalism had developed in response to the social upheaval of the Revolutionary War and the freethinking of the Founding Fathers.

The period after the Civil War saw the rise of an "ideologically driven pseudoscience intended to rationalize the Gilded Age's excesses of wealth and poverty." Though the term was not yet in use, Darwin's work was distorted to become what we know as "social Darwinism." Business tycoons and important intellectuals would embrace what Jacoby deems America's "first mass-marketed wave of pseudoscience."

During the period

...there were really two culture wars over evolution—the first centering on the challenge to traditional religion posed by Darwin's real science and the second rooted in a pseudoscientific social theory that attempted to transpose Darwin's observations about man in a state of nature into a prescription for the way human beings ought to treat one another in a state of civilization. In the first culture war, nearly all intellectuals were on the side of science; in the second, many (though not all) succumbed to the pseudoscience... The attraction of upper-class intellectuals to a theory maintaining that "tooth and claw" laws of survival in nature were appropriate and inevitable in society did much to exacerbate a religiously based anti-intellectualism already aroused by evolution's challenge to biblical literalism.

Herbert Spencer's books won adherents to "the gospel of laissez-faire economics as the only way to ensure that the fittest would triumph in society through a process of 'social selection.'" Promotion of eugenics would become the next stage in upper-class intellectuals' embrace of these ideas.

Both poles of this "culture war"

...shared an inability to distinguish between science and social pseudoscience, and they passed on their confusion to a public that worshipped the fruits of science but was fundamentally ignorant of the scientific method.

Of the biblical literalist camp of the time, Jacoby writes that the influential William Jennings Bryan had a narrow education and no understanding of scientific method. Yet—

Bryan would no doubt have been astonished had anyone told him in 1896, when he made his "Cross of Gold" speech, that by the end of the twentieth century, many Americans who shared his religious beliefs would ally themselves with the political party favoring the interests of the rich—and that the Social Gospel, enjoining Christians to help their fellow man, would be replaced by the conviction that the Lord helps those who help themselves (and that the Bible tells us so).

Jacoby has an enlightening take on the "middlebrow" culture of the 1950s and early 60s, which she sees as a largely unrecognized secularizing trend, developing from changes in the publishing industry that began around the 1920s.

Those innovations began with Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius, son of an immigrant Russian book-binder, and

... a publishing genius who combined the pamphleteering of the Enlightenment, the ideas of cooperative economic effort that characterized the Progressive Era, and the new mass-marketing techniques of the 1920s.

His publications,

with a ... strong debt to... nineteenth-century freethought as well as twentieth-century psychology, philosophy, and sociology, represented the traditional American ideal of self-education...

Calling his project a "university in print," Haldeman-Julius published pamphlet-sized, 15,000 word books and sold them for $.25 each. These passed from hand to hand in the Depression, thus reaching a vast audience. 300 million Blue Books were published from 1919 to 1949; soon after that, large publishers would seriously enter the paperback market.

Jacoby sees a parallel between the aspirations of education-hungry readers who bought Blue Books and readers like her own parents, who later became Book of the Month Club subscribers. "Middlebrow" culture may have been derided by intellectuals, but along with forgettable novels, the BOMC published 1984 and Catch-22; Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and titles by James Baldwin. Non-fiction included The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Silent Spring.

"Middlebrow," notes Jacoby,"was a reading culture"; readers were willing to buy thick books, and it wasn't unusual for popular novelists to incorporate solid information into their tales. Irving Stone's 1961 The Agony and the Ecstasy was a "703-page novel... faithful to what is known about Michelangelo and ... suffused with real art history." In contrast, Dan Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code, "distorts art history in the service of a supernatural thriller that has nothing to do with the real Leonardo..."

Jacoby cites figures on the post-war boom in symphony orchestras and local art museums [to at least some degree, I believe this may have grown from seeds sown during local WPA arts projects]. Jacoby also notes the growth of "art film" houses by the early 60s.

Jacoby finds the high point of American magazines lasted into the 70s and late 80s, years when she "made a good living writing serious articles for women's magazines—most between 3,000 and 5,000 words." She notes her 1988 assignment for Glamour, to write about the status of Soviet women under Perestroika. Jacoby also worked for Cosmopolitan; she cites a thank-you note she was sent by Helen Gurley Brown, in appreciation of a a long article and Jacoby's use of a quote from Paradise Lost.

A glance at either magazine today shows what a very different world we live in.

Chapters on recent years cover right-wing spin; the attack on science; the political rise of the religious right; Bush's wars; and the mass media's overall contribution to stupefying the public mind.

Which brings us back to elections. Jacoby tells how her relatives and most of their circle voted for FDR and Truman, but believed Adlai Stevenson—the prototype of an "elitist" Democrat, decades before the right's branders hit upon that term—"was too much of an egghead to have any understanding of ordinary people and their problems."

My grandmother, who before her death at age ninety-nine boasted that she had never voted for a Republican, was able to overcome her distaste for Stevenson's syntax and elevated vocabulary only by recalling the Depression and her beloved FDR. "Adlai talked down to people," she recalled, "and he didn't have the common touch. Ike had the common touch and I loved him, but in the end, remembering which party gave us Social Security and which party couldn't care less about starving old people, I just couldn't bring myself to vote Republican."

Stevenson lost, but Eisenhower was probably to the left of Obama in most things. Certainly, he never would have considered messing with Social Security, just to please "a few... Texas oil millionaires."

But Ike faced an electorate that knew very well what the New Deal had done for them.

The decades of dumbing down have paid off; the more we descend into feudalism, the larger the segment of the peon class willing to vote for having their lives made even worse.