OlsonOnline

A couple of more things: Books and student 'engagement'

It's worth pointing out that Sara Allan, in her presentation to the school board on high school redesign, emphasized the importance of student engagement in reducing the drop-out rate.  Allan listed "frequent low student engagement" as perhaps the most important "challenge" facing the high school system.

"We fundamentally believe that if we can increase student engagement that many of our other problems are solved, graduation rate, we could increase achievement ...we could decrease boredom of students.  We believe it's a key ingredient in the success of our high school system."

Sounds like a no-brainer, but coming from Sara Allan (I've been misspelling her name), originally a fellow from the neoliberal Broad Foundation, that's a step forward.  Business oriented outfits like Broad usually stress academic rigor over relevance.  As I've argued before, if you want to keep students in school, it's a good idea to make the school experience more "engaging" --and less boring.

One way to do that, and to improve student achievement learning, is to give students good books to read, ones they can actually relate to, books they may actually enjoy reading.

Speaking of books, that's the other thing I wanted to mention.  The Washington Monthly has an article up recommending 25 books President Obama should read. 

Most, as you would expect, are non-fiction, including one by the man my brother said nobody paid attention to anymore --Howard Zinn.  The book?  A People's History of the United States.

The fiction category includes Graham Greene's The Quiet American (about Vietnam), and, thank goodness, THE Great American Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  One would assume that Obama has already read the Twain classic, but it never hurts to re-read great novels. 

I have, probably at least four times.  Huckleberry Finn, that is.

Bacevich on politics

Andrew Bacevich describes himself as a distant observer of politics.  He admits to being a conservative.

Nevertheless, the former Army colonel, West Point graduate, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, and author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, decided in 2006 to vote for every Democrat possible on the promise of the Democrats ending the war in Iraq.  

As we know, they failed to deliver on that promise.  Instead, as Basevich puts it, the Democrats

"... absolutely, totally, completely failed to follow through on their commitment. Now, there was a lot of posturing. But, really, the record of the Democratic Congress over the past two years has been - one in which, substantively, all they have done is to appropriate the additional money that enables President Bush to continue that war."

Congress has in effect "thrust power and authority to the executive branch" and abdicated its responsibility to advocate for the "common good".  Congress has become a thoroughly dysfunctional branch of government:

"The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress."

Will it be different under an Obama presidency?   In response to Bill Moyers question about whether he expects either John McCain or Barack Obama to "rein in the imperial presidency", Bacevich replied:

"No. I mean, people run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents. The people who are advising these candidates, the people who aspire to be the next national security advisor, the next secretary of defense, these are people who yearn to exercise those kind of great powers. They're not running to see if they can make the Pentagon smaller. They're not."

Nevertheless, Andrew Bacevich will vote for Obama (and here) come November solely on the grounds that Obama "...has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq."  But, as he wrote in the Boston Globe, Obama must go further:

"The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict."

As a progressive, I for one am not convinced that Obama will go further, that he has in fact learned the lessons of preemptive war.  He has already announced, for example, that he wants an expanded military, that he wants to send more soldiers to Afghanistan, that he will leave some combat troops in Iraq.  And he has threatened the use of military force against Iran.  

A vote for Obama, by the standards Bacevich lays out, requires a long leap of faith.

Bacevich on Carter

I've long held that Jimmy Carter is our greatest ex-President.  Those who agree say Carter's legacy will be determined not by his single term in the White House but what he has done since.

Andrew Bacevich, the author of a stunning new book on the militarization of American foreign policy and the growth of the imperial presidency, has a different perspective.  In an interview Friday night with Bill Moyers, Bacevich declared that Carter is the only President in the last 60 years, Democrat or Republican, who "...recognized, I think, the challenges awaiting us if we refused to get our house in order."

Bacevich is referring to the energy crisis, and more specifically to Carter's 1979 "malaise speech", which many blame for Carter's loss to Ronald Reagan a year later.  Bacevich views that speech as prophetic:

"It's a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. ...

"He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded."

I've only heard one other person speak of Carter as President so favorably --Portland-based progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann.  One of Hartmann's favorite riffs is telling how Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof only to see Reagan take them down as soon as he moved in.

That's an apt metaphor for Ronald Reagan, the "modern prophet of profligacy", as Bacevich dubs him in his book.  Indeed, profligacy --the "non-negotiable" American life-style of extravagant consumption-- is at the heart of Bacevich's critique of American militarism and the quest for empire.  Americans have been conditioned to believe that the "...problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere, beyond our borders."

Bacevich calls that notion, the belief that the looming limits on American consumption --the price of gas, for example-- are caused by conditions in other countries, an illusion.  He begins the book with a quotation from the Bible:

"Set thine house in order."

"Our major problems", Bacevich says, "are at home."  We won't find their solutions in the oilfields of the Middle East. 

(More on Bacevich and The Limits of Power coming soon.)

History and cultural apartheid

Maybe I should sue Marie Cocco for plagiarism. She says what I said on May 19 about Michael Moore --- that he's a filmmaker, not a journalist:

"Moore has never claimed to be a journalist. He's a filmmaker and political satirist with a point of view, and a provocative one that rarely gets an airing in the mainstream media. Maybe that's why Moore makes documentaries - so that those who want something stronger than political pabulum can go out and buy it."

She's right of course, but so was I.

****************

William Manchester, the much adulated historian /biographer, is dead. Manchester brought history to life with his extraordinary narrative skills, and, as exemplified in his personal memoir of World War II, Goodbye Darkness, with brutal honesty. His description of his reaction to killing a Japanese soldier should be required reading for all those who glorify war:

"I began to tremble, and next to shake all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear, 'Im sorry.' Then I threw up all over myself...At the same time I noticed another odour; I had urinated in my skivvies... I remember wondering dumbly: Is this what they mean by 'conspicuous gallantry?' "

But Manchester was also a snob of sorts, a cultural elitist, which colored his take on popular, or social, history. In The Glory and the Dream, he excoriates early TV fare as "trite" (Hopalong Cassidy) or "inane" (Ozzie and Harriet). The good stuff on TV was "televised operas outstanding by any standard", news doumentaries, "serious dramas", Edward R. Murrow, and Alistair Cooke (Omnibus). The $50,000 CBS paid Elvis Presley to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show "would have bought a lot of" those dramas and documentaries. Presley's appeal, Manchester claims, was that he was "lewd".

I'm no philistine, but I would rather listen to Elvis (great voice) than to opera, with its (mostly) silly stories and its outrageously artificial voices. Times change, and so does culture. Whoever said that TV is a "vast wasteland" is mostly right. But maybe that just reflects the commercial cultural wasteland that has always pretty much defined the American experience.

***************

Which brings to the bigger point of cultural and economic apartheid. Al Franken quoted a survey the other day that 19% of Americans believe they're in the top 1% of income earners. That may seem odd, but the truth is that Ameicans tend to hang out with people of similar economic status. Most of the people that I know and socialize with, for example, are in the top 20% of income earners, maybe even in the top 10%. Here are the tables from OMB Watcher:

Household income thresholds, by quintiles (20% blocks):

--Bottom Quintile: Income Range: $0 - 17,970; Share of Total Income: 3.5%
--Second Quintile: Income Range: $17,970 - $33,314; Share of Total Income: 8.7%
--Middle Quintile: Income Range: $33,314 - $53,000; Share of Total Income: 14.6%
--Fourth Quintile: Income Range: $53,000 - $83,500; Share of Total Income: 23.0%
--Top Quintile: Income Range: $83,500 and up; Share of Total Income: 50.2%

Well maybe some of my neighbors and associates fall into the fourth quintile, but mainly I don't have much contact with those who are, culturally and economically speaking, greatly different from me. And that's true of most Americans. We live in a stratified society. And according to the OMB Watcher article, the trend toward isolation by class and income is growing as the rich get richer and the poor, relatively speaking, get poorer.

I don't think that's a good trend. To paraphrase what I said about Neil Goldschmidt , associating exclusively with people of similar background and economic status, rich or poor, warps one's perspective. Which again is why I'm such an ardent supporter of public schools and the democratizing and unifying influence they exert on a society trending toward separatism.

I don't believe "apartheid" and democracy can coexist.

Toni Morrison and the pernicious fruits of racism

As I mentioned yesterday, Toni Morrison writes about the black experience in America as truly and honestly as any writer I know, including Mark Twain, who wrote the Great American Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, about slavery and the ignorant white culture that supported it, as seen through the eyes of the title character, Huck Finn, and its archetypal hero, Nigger Jim.

The Bluest Eye is Morrison's attempt to deal with the issue of "racial beauty". The book was inspired by the memory of an elementary school classmate saying she "wanted blue eyes". Here's how Morrison describes the book:

"The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that; to say somehting about why she had not, or possibly ever would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. Implicict in her desire was racial self-loathing. .... Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was?

... "I focused therefore on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female."

In his 1999 review of The Bluest Eye, Cat Moses cites the effect of blues music on the book's narrative tone and structure:

"Morrison has stated that her narrative 'effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in music... ' The Bluest Eye is the genesis of her effort 'to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization'. "

The blues music culture pioneered by poor rural blacks was once as reviled by mainstream whites as the hip-hop culture of young urban blacks is today. Only today, the white mainstream includes many middle class blacks as well.

Ironically, Toni Morrison graduated in 1953 from Howard University, the site of Bill Cosby's contentious and controversial remarks.