The Style of Self-Righteous Disgust

I am very sad I missed the 50 year anniversary of JFK's assassination, or as it is sometimes remembered with melodramatic excess "the day hope died." However, the shoehorning of the Liberal Kennedy into the conservative co-opting machine just will not die. Personally I am afraid to look for all the ways (alright, here is one) in which movement conservatives, singularly responsible for the decline of America, have latched their meat hooks into Kennedy's corpse and hauled it rightward. Why? Because people like JFK, therefore he MUST BE OURS! Anecdotally, I know angry white men who believe in the worst conspiracy theories who also believe that JFK was our last great president.

Mythology is a constant in American politics. This country was founded on the ideas of imaginative men (imagine if ladies could have participated as well?). The founding fathers knew they were trying something new and would need stories to tell and popularize the idea of no kings, no above the law privileged classes, no ancient traditions to bind the people for well or ill. America is an idea, and in our spirit of democracy ideas can take all sorts of shapes, nestling in among good ones and solid foundations. Charles P. Pierce took the misshapen ideas to the woodshed in Idiot America where he states that charlatans and cranks have a unique place in our republic. This is a good thing, Pierce argues, because once in a while a visionary arises from the ranks of cranks and in any case these goofballs make life interesting. When it gets out of hand, as in the modern conservative movement though, someone (ideally all of us) need to stand up to the cranks and knock down their insane ideas before we invade Iraq while cutting taxes and creating creation museums of humans riding saddled dinosaurs again.

While they will never admit it, movement conservatives live in a fairy tale of myths they have injected into the public sphere. First through the subtle inoculation of the erudite William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review magazine, to more and more blatant assaults on reason culminating in Fox News. An alternative world exists in the minds of right-wingers today, and the money men behind it all cultivate willing rhetoricians to defend and maintain Idiot America. You may have encountered "conservasplaining" where your dittohead coworker or relative explains away any deviation from the script with some canned talking points of the day. A pretty simple formula, assert an alternative view and never relent or admit any other points. Paradoxically, the bigger the lie, the easier it is for small minds to internalize and regurgitate it. By now, this universe exists with only weak challenge from outside and practitioners can exercise well-honed defenses of their heroes through a style of self-righteous disgust. To demonstrate, let us take this example of parodied outrage.

Someone named Emily Hulsey, writing for a site I had never heard of called independent journal review, decided to be offended by something Bill Maher said about former President Ronald Reagan. Who is Emily Hulsey? What is this site she is freelance writing for because her newly-obtained MBA wasn't worth shit after graduation? Why would anyone care what she has to say about someone "bashing" her hero on a cable show?

You can almost hear her gasp and stamp her feet, "how dare you" permeates the prose. There is an adage about people who can dish it out but cannot take it, somehow the irony is lost on wingnuts.

From criticizing Ronald Reagan’s style to his friends to his sex life, Maher held nothing back. He even made time for a shot at Sarah Palin.

By resorting to childish insults, Maher completely ruined what was supposed to be a tribute to a fallen President of the United States. There was nothing presidential in Maher’s monologue, and I’m sure Kennedy would have been completely ashamed of it.
Honoring the deceased – particularly our fallen leaders – should be done with dignity and class. Obviously, that is something that Bill Maher just doesn’t get. 

It is difficult for Kennedy's biographers to discern what he would have thought about anything, let alone this hack freelancer. As to honoring the deceased, well okay but by that logic the living are fair game right? So have a glance at this article on how conservative proto-tea baggers treated JFK while he was still alive. And if you are still unsure how seriously conservatives take this self-righteous disgust, you can read further into how they treated JFK in the book posted at the footer. How about another example?

When ever rush limbaugh makes a vicious comment about someone, vile, racist, misogynist, or other some wingnut will come to his defense by asserting "oh, rush is just an entertainer, lighten up you libs." Well, no a great many republicans treat the oxycontin addict as a leader, but if we accept this assertion of rush as comedian then why is Maher held to a higher standard? You know why, I know why but it is convenient when on a tirade of self-righteous disgust to forget and pretend that Bill Maher is some kind of respected authority and leader, not a sometimes entertaining comedian on television. The firewalls thrown up by conservatives between mental files that keep them from connecting relevant information are impressive bulwarks of insulation from the real world indeed.

Depressed? You might be a sinner.

Oh those whacky "christian" fundamentalists.

The nemesis of all real historians, david barton, showed up on a televangelist snake-oil salesman's program for Veteran's Day to hurrah for a (so far) fringe item of faith. Kenneth Copeland claimed that post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a manifestation of unfaithfulness to his vengeful god. So, if you have witnessed or participated in the horrors of war, or been in a car accident, or even just survived one of the all-too-common gun massacres lately, and seek help outside of the Bible for treatment: you are by this insane charlatan's definition, a sinner. For his part, barton squeaked that if veterans of America's recent wars, which by definition must be just, claim they have suffered psychological damage from their participation, then they must not have acted in a "biblical" way and are therefore responsible for their own illness.

A better example of why these types are "christians" and not actual followers of Jesus Christ would be difficult to come by. "We armchair Rambos sent you off to war to kill 'the other' and if you come back and complain about it, we wash our hands of you and wave that magic authoritarian wand. Voila! You, the formerly patriotic and righteous tools of American aggression, are now an 'other' yourselves!" Isn't that great? But, this is the logical progression of fundamentalist zealots; expel the impure little by little until your movement is whittled down to insignificance. Unfortunately, this process is not happening fast enough to save anyone caught in this web of lies. Prayers for the sick are fine and good, but a certain segment of "christians" would force anyone they can reel in to reject science and medicine for faith.

The rest of Shryock's article deals with the fundamentalist rejection of psychology and psychiatry, and the alarmingly high proportion of fundamentalists who believe prayer alone can heal mental illness. So, we have an isolated and insulated pro-war religious community that proudly and unabashedly raises their captive young to "serve this christian nation" by going off to kill infidels and such that simultaneously ostracizes any among the flock who complains. Mental illness as punishment for your sins. Depressed? You only have yourself to blame, please make sure you off yourself quietly and away from the rest of the congregation.

Arne Duncan Nice Guy

The Kraken recently sent me this link.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/16/arne-duncan-white-surburban-moms-upset-that-common-core-shows-their-kids-arent-brilliant/

You know, it was a very clever remark by Arne. Reading that you might imagine you are near Lake Wobegon where all the “Women are strong, the men are handsome, and the children are above average”. You might imagine that Mr. Duncan is a sensible public servant dishing out the hard truth that nobody wishes to hear. But he is not.

Standardized tests are normalized, meaning that students' raw scores are converted to percentiles that follow a normal distribution curve. In other words in addition to a score of minimal, basic, proficient, or advanced (in the case of the WKCE), students are given a number between 1 and 99. This number indicated the percentage of students who scored less than the student. While giving more “difficult” tests might change the raw scores (numbers converted to minimal, basic, proficient, advanced) the more difficult tests will not change the normalized scores (percentile rank). So white suburban mom's can rest comfortably knowing that if Johnnie is scoring in the 90^th percentile on the current test he will also score in the 90^th percentile on the new test.

However, the raw scores are important. According to the WKCE data available on the WI DPI school report cards only 36% of students in the state scored proficient in reading (41% for West Bend West). As bad as the schools maybe believed to be, certainly at least half of our local high school students can read! One might be tempted to laugh off the ridiculousness of such results, but the scores have consequences.

Schools who fail to make AYP (adequate yearly progress) will have their school taken over. Principals and school boards will lose the ability to make funding choices, will be forced to adopt curriculum, replace staff, hire school repair “experts”, and eventually the school will be turned into a charter school.

The provisions for this are under NCLB. Have no fear Arne's is improving NCLB! He is not just going to punish schools: forcing public schools to turn into charter schools, forcing states to adopt the curriculum and teacher training/rating that he approves. Under Race to the Top, Arne is going to let each state voluntarily adopt standards and lift charter caps for a chance to win millions of dollars.

Arne Duncan, Nice Guy

The Perfect Crime

You may have seen this meme floating

around lately. The story behind it made the rounds on ThinkProgress, The Daily Banter, Salon.com, among other places. And that story is well, pretty much explained by the meme. Deep down, we all understand that there is nothing we can do to walmart. This is a symptom of the perfect crime perpetrated on Americans by some of the most sophisticated criminals in history.

Recently, the "left" gave it their best shot. With boycotts, protests, strikes, legal actions, and more we dug deep to try and do something to this giant criminal enterprise. And all for nothing. It is hard to say how this idea, the food drive for slave laborers, originated. I can only imagine some combination of management types at this one store had a pang of conscience and this show of compassion was the result. Maybe they really meant well, who knows for sure.

The American business corporation, our singular gift to the extinction of all life on Earth, is a completely closed system. The outside world has almost no real influence on it. A corporation is entirely hierarchical, intensely bureaucratic, and legally mandated to make as much money as possible. It is one of many ways of organizing economic activity, there is nothing written in stone about a corporation in this conception. Every time a story like this comes up to give evidence of how a corporate giant like walmart is simply sucking the very life out of so many lives, I am reminded of a quotation I came across in Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center. It was from a 17th Century theologian, roughly that "an evil which would weigh heavily on a single conscience is quite bearable when pressed lightly upon many souls." Theoretically, all the evil and harm walmart as a legal entity does to the communities where it operates rests upon the conscience of one individual, the CEO, but he is so heavily insulated from the mortal world as all members of the golden elite are that what would probably kill us from guilt rests softly if at all here.

 

The food drive for its associates is part of the one two punch in this most perfect of perfect crimes. Do something utterly evil, paying poverty wages, then with the most sincere doublethinky smile, offer a helping hand and congratulate yourself to the world for your benevolence. Walmart began it's meteoric rise in the 1970s and 1980s when the provincial hinterland of America was being devastated by deindustrialization, deregulation, and deunionization which led to social disintegration and atomization of the communities. Like an opportunistic disease, walmart swept in with promises of jobs and low-priced goods all wrapped up in a safe, white, sterile one-stop shopping experience. People abandoned the outlets they formerly patronized because, let's face it, the mom and pop stores that inspire so much weepy-woo on the part of liberals today were often seedy or at least unpleasant to shop in. So factories closed, throwing many out of work and forcing most to seek bargains, which dried up downtowns all over rural America to the benefit of walmart.

 

What walmart really represents is the triumph of retail in America, the transition from an economy that produces things to one that sells things. The "service" economy existing alongside the high tech economy, bringing segregation and a wall between city and country. Putting the retail store in the driver's seat was a tipping point in American economic relations. Walmart gets to dictate, because of its size, what is produced and for how much to the outside, and what is done and how much they pay on the inside. This reordering of power is the culmination of that perfect crime. And why all the finger-wagging, pouting, and direct action is meaningless. Walmart won the war before America even knew what hit it, and the rest of our diminished lives will reflect that victory. There is no choice for a great deal of infected areas, work for them, shop there, or die of starvation. There is no chance of meaningful change within the company, and no chance of really influencing walmart from the outside. So this is what we get for not recognizing the cancer, food drives, government assistance to keep the slave laborers alive, no hope.

 

 

Last Chance

Go and teach. I will integrate this into my classes in the American survey for the coming semester. If we cannot engage and anger this generation, we might as well give up. If those who have been locked out of the marketplace cannot become willing to promote change, we can kiss goodbye any pretense of democracy. Unless we can undue the ideological damage of the Reagan/ Tea era, then we must acknowledge that we are governed by a corporate junta.



Add It Up: The Average American Family Pays $6,000 a Year in Subsidies to Big Business

-Lincoln Log

Common Core Delusions

Recently the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel posted an article about the low standardized test scores African-American students received.

Henry Kranendonk, a retired Milwaukee Public Schools math curriculum planner and NAEP board member, said Wisconsin's failure to narrow the disparity — which has existed for decades — is a challenge for Milwaukee in particular because it has the highest concentration of minority students. Kranendonk said the problem has long been weak standards for what students should know, and he was hopeful the recent adoption of standards more in line with NAEP, called Common Core State Standards, would help.

"If we use (the standards) seriously and provide resources for schools to help teachers, and provide structure for implementing those standards, I think that would help us address the achievement gap, and the biggest beneficiary of this would be Milwaukee Public Schools," he said.

Read more from Journal Sentinel: http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/states-black-students-rank-lowest-in-reading-math-scores-b99136626z1-230903121.html#ixzz2kExY3m9Y
Follow us: @NewsHub on Twitter

A MPS teacher should know better. MPS has serious problems. Absenteeism is high, teen pregnancy is high, drug use is high, violence is epidemic, and poverty is a blight on many of the communities that MPS serves. The common core will not fix any of these problems. Is Mr. Kranendonk paid to say what anyone who has worked in MPS cannot possibly believe; that the common core is a silver bullet for education.

If we are going to fix MPS we need honest conversations. To those unaware of the problems of MPS, click a few of the links below.

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/111470829.html
MPS worker put on administrative leave over talking to the press.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibyDn47dDTs

Fight at Vincent , this is a regular occurrence in many schools and neighborhoods in Milwaukee.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKmMinWFFys

Fight at Washington High School

More fights

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gV8ziqiXe0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4PUjbVLQsk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUIMb7d71Tc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5m-frb1Bro

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBUcyMePdJ8

Colonial Wisconsin

On the embrace of fracking:

Wisconsin has a colonial economy--exploited for extraction of raw ,materials and cheap labor. Frac sand with its concomitant fine particulate matter is slowly hurting people in this area. Sadly, politics will likely not permit a full fledged study here at ground zero--the Farm/Rural Medicine center at the clinic would be perfect start for research.

-Lincoln Log

see also: http://www.cleanwisconsin.org/index.php?module=cms&page=774

see also: http://www.pca.state.mn.us/index.php/air/air-quality-and-pollutants/air-pollutants/silica-sand-mining/index.html

CB: Flyover Land in western WI experienced first hand how the sand companies just rolled over any local opposition to their dirty operation that includes frequent blasting.

Amusing ourselves to death in Idiot America

I just started listening to Charles Pierce's book Idiot America and cannot help but notice the similarity to an earlier book I've written a little about. In fact Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death could almost be a prequel or the other way around. Postman attributed the decline in seriousness and intellectual fervor in America to television though, while Pierce charts the American propensity for elevating cranks to an unknown status all the way back to the post-Civil War era.

One observation I can relate right away is how much talk radio, specifically the mouth-frothing right

winger kind, is responsible in Pierce's analysis for making "experts out of everyone, and when everyone is an expert no one is." I once wrote a paper on the use of radio by Nazi Germany, expecting to find Sieg Heiling Rush Limbaughs all over the place. What a let down to find that aside from occasional "radio alarms," basically breaking news alerts, there was little in the Third Reich to rile up the populace, just a steady diet of light music. Although I did find quite a few essays and diary entries praising radio by Goebbels, he went so far as to state that National Socialism triumphed through use of radio.

Sorry for the digression but what you hear on the AM dial is almost unique to America. Occasionally radio is used for good, as in FDR's fireside chats, but mostly the airwaves are abused to incite fear and anger or outrage among the gullible. Pierce argues that truth is what sells, assertions become true when enough people believe them and so forth. Orwell would have agreed. I am looking forward to Pierce's treatment of internet trolling.

If you have any interest in why we seem to be getting dumber, definitely check out the former if not the latter books at your local library. Before it is too late!!!! (Pierce even noted how there is no place in Idiot America for something as orderly as a library, where fiction is over here and nonfiction over there, theology and science do not get jumbled together, and cranks and con men have to pass the filter of professional librarians before they can peddle B.S. to the public)

Health Care is not a Commodity

As regards health care as simply another commodity for capitalists to use in pursuit of wealth, let me say plainly,

That economic misfortune should not impair access to health care. And yes, there are many people in our society who do not function well--they cannot figure out the complexities of the best health care plan for the dollar. I know and have worked with the impaired, with people who suffer from mental illness and other damages that limit cognitive skills.

Health care is *NOT* the same thing as any other commodity to be bought and sold like grapefruit or toilet paper. And here I will never agree with those who advocate free-market solutions to all social problems. Life itself is not a commodity to be bought, sold, or speculated on by the greedy.

-Lincoln Log

Quote of the Day

Posted by an old Army buddy:

What's this world coming to...........can't go to the airport without looking over my shoulder, can't shop at the mall without wondering if the weirdo pacing around is gonna open fire, I'd like to go to a theater to watch a movie hoping no one pissed in the person in front of me popcorn and they get up shooting, can't even go out anymore without a fight breaking out and an idiot who has no business with a gun starts popping off rounds!!! Pretty sad that we have to start arming ourselves just to take our families out for dinner, or arming ourselves for a quick trip to Circle K!!!

Why the common core won't improve education

Imagine you are attending a high-performing school; your school has high standardized test scores, high graduation rates, with a large percentage of graduates matriculating into college. Or imagine you are attending an under-performing school with low test scores and poor graduation rates. Or even imagine you are attending a mediocre school with mediocre results. In any case the adoption of the common core standards will not help you.

If you are in a high-performing school then you are already doing well and the common core will not help you. Your school is already graduating students and sending them to college.

If you are in an under-performing school then you are not meeting the current standards, you and your peers are behind grade level and the drop out rate is high. New standards will not help you.

If you are in a mediocre school then some of your students are doing well and some are doing poorly and neither the students who are doing well nor the students who are doing poorly would pretend to imagine that their success or failure is a result of standards adopted by the state.

Yet, bureaucrats, pundits, and bloggers, imagine that they can improve your school by adopting the common core standards. Teachers, administrators, parents, and students spend their days teaching, learning, and interacting in the schools. If their success could be enhanced and their failures could be succored by such standards why would they not have already implemented such standards in the district, building, classroom, and household?

The answer is simple, standards are not the problem. Students do not drop out of school because the standards adopted by the state are hazy. Students do not struggle to read, write, or learn arithmetic because the state has not properly articulated defined notions of reading, writing, and arithmetic. While the reasons why students drop out or fail to excel in academic endeavors are varied it is seldom, if ever, a result of standards.

Students drop out because they do drugs or have become pregnant. They may suffer from a learning disability or have experienced childhood trauma which adversely affects their education. Crime, transportation, and poverty are often causes for poor performance in school. Conversely students who do well come from parents of higher socioeconomic status. They have parents who care about them and support them. They are healthy and have had opportunities to develop physically, socially, and academically.

You cannot legislate educational success. Students' success is a result of their own actions, which are aided by parents and teachers. Students who do well are motivated and supported by those around them. Students who fail are unmotivated and/or hampered by poverty, trauma, and drugs. Much of the current discussion around the common core would be better spent on examining the historical and material successes and failures of our education system.