Category: Politics

A people set apart

“What doesn’t kill makes one stronger.”
–Japanese proverb
For two weeks now we’ve watched horrendous news footage on TV of  Japanese suffering following the 9.0 earthquake and its tsunami aftermath of 30 foot water swirling into Sendai streets, bursting over banks, uprooting houses from their foundations, turning ships upside down, drowning everything within its mindless path; even then, in Job-like fashion, venues of more calamity and angst with the loss of electrical power necessary to cooling the six reactors of the nearby Fukushima nuclear plant and daily heroic efforts to limit radiation fallout and, worse case scenario, prevent meltdown. 
But nightly we’ve also seen the Japanese people up close in their dignity and discipline.  While sorrow abounds and mounts—at present count, 6700 dead and thousands more missing, whole towns and villages swamped by the sea, their inhabitants presumably dead__there isn’t any panic or looting.  Soldiers are here to rescue, not impose order.  In personal interviews the tenor is the same:  a stoic acceptance of life’s engrained insecurity; the solace of being alive; the sense of dependency on each other.  I shudder to think what might be the situation in our own country were we to experience a calamity on the scale of what’s befallen the Japanese.
I’m not surprised by their equanimity, orderly and quiet resolve, absence of rancor at the failure of government to react quickly and sufficiently, and refusal to politicize calamity by pointing fingers.  (I think of our BP disaster in the Gulf last year, high in economic consequences, but low in fatalities.)
I first met the Japanese as a 17-year old serviceman enroute to Korea.  Dakota Air Base outside Tokyo was my initial touch-down.  Their cleanliness, kindness, and ubiquitous honesty lent a lasting impression.  Leave something behind in a restaurant or train station, rest assured, they’ll keep the item for you.  Theft, like most crime, is generally rare in Japan.  Travel books abound with the good news that Japan’s a place where you don’t have to look over your shoulder.  When I think of Japan, I associate several prominent characteristics unique to the country that help us see their present response in cultural perspective:
1. collective identity:  The Japanese value the group more than the individual. They think as one.   It’s not what’s in it for me, but how will it affect others—nation, family, friends.   Westerners sometimes disparage this, finding it regimentation or group sanctioned inhibition of self-identity.  But I think this a shallow view prejudiced by contrary cultural values.  We have personal freedom to do pretty much what we like in the West, but at what cost?  I lament our greatest loss and primary source of our national and personal fractiousness: the erosion of the communal ethic.  That ethic remains salient in Japanese culture, particularly with regard to the primacy of family.  Japanese find it difficult to fathom that parents might live 3,000 miles from their children or that children might seldom visit an aging parent.  The Japanese language itself reflects the culture’s guardianship of the interiority of the family and its special intimacy and potential solace in a wider, impersonal world pursuing material values. There are separate vocabularies designating family members:  one for family and one for outsiders.
2. Discipline:  Perhaps it derives from Buddhism, reflected in Zen, that you have this sense of integration, or self-mastery, the ability to delay gratification, a sense of the goal and the patience to pursue it.  Discipline was at the heart of the samurai warrior code and is embedded in today’s Japanese schools that are centered in more than the academic as repositories teaching pragmatic values:  social etiquette, obeying the law, esteeming the nation.  In the home, parents reenforce these values as well.  Japanese children are well-behaved. Through self-discipline, the Japanese are often better able to master deprivation and pain.  I’ve watched with fascination their patient queuing in line, accepting their beverage and bread stick in the crowded shelters.   
3. Courtesy:  related to discipline, it’s a fine art in Japan and another aspect of the primacy of the social fabric.  When we think of Japan, we often notice the extended politeness on saying hello in its accompanying ritual of bowing. The lower you bow, the more respect you convey.  Humorously, this ritual is so engrained that often you’ll see Japanese bowing as they converse on their cell phones.  Rites of etiquette extend seemingly everywhere.  There are conventions for entering and leaving trains, getting on and off an escalator.  I remember my GI delight visiting a department store in Fukuoka (Kyushu) and being taken on and off escalators by the white gloved hands of dimpled, smiling Japanese girls. 
4. artistry:  I can’t think of any place I’ve been where the creative is so much a staple of daily life from flower arranging to public  gardens and tea rituals.  Westerners sometimes say that Japanese art is imitative rather than creative.  This simply isn’t so; in fact, we’re more apt to imitate them as seen in our own penchant for Japanese gardens. One of Japan’s contemporary artistic legacies is its  sophisticated anime and comic book genres, along with video games.  We’re still catching-up.
5. Simplicity:  There exists an understated elegance to Japanese culture in its advocacy of minimalism, whether in gardening, the haiku and tanka poetry genres, or its cuisine, a simplicity that seeks not to use, but reflect nature.  Living on a crowded archipelago of  islands, the Japanese are nonetheless able to bring nature into their very living rooms with bonsai renditions of pine and cypress..  Traditional Japanese homes are furnished lightly, tables and chairs low to the floor, beds that are futons folded and stored each morning in keeping with a spatial emphasis allowing, reconfiguration.  Materials in a Japanese home are drawn directly from nature: fine woods, bamboo, silk, rice straw mats, and paper.  Colors are always subdued, light diffused.   I experienced all of this first hand when I stayed briefly in a mountain inn, or ryokan,  in the vicinity of the Shinto shrine city of Nikko in northern Honshu, wearing the kimono, eating Japanese food, largely fresh from the sea, sleeping on the floor  
It isn’t a perfect society.  In recent years the economy has struggled as other Asian nations, principally China, compete with Japanese exports in the global market; women have yet to gain full equality; the population is aging, with 1 out of 4 Japanese over 65; vestiges of an ugly nationalism is on the increase; and there exists a defensive hostility towards other ethnicities (Japan remains a homogeneous society).  While all nations have their freckles, the virtues of the Japanese nevertheless far exceed their blemishes, underscoring their likeliness to right themselves.
In its long history, Japan has faced many crises and always transcended. 1n 1730, an earthquake killed 130,000; nearly a century later, a tsunami killed 27,000; then, in 1923, in Japan’s greatest natural disaster, an earthquake striking the Kanto plain near Tokyo and subsequent fire took up to 200,000 lives.  More recently (1995), an earthquake struck the Osaka area, taking 6,000 lives. The Japanese are a resilient people who will rebuild just as they have always done.  They did it after WWII.  If character is fate, then surely the Japanese are a people set apart.


I want it now!

In 1998, a U. S. president is impeached by the House of Representatives for sexual impropriety in the White House.  In 2008, a New York governor and former state attorney general resigns in the wake of public censure for his involvement in a prostitution ring.  The same year, banker greed unhinges the global economy. In  2009, a gifted golfer forfeits his marriage, perhaps his game, because of an ability to curb his sexual appetite and a Wall Street  investment counselor pleads guilty to eleven federal felony charges, costing his clients billions.  This year, 2011, an Italian prime minister faces trial for sexual and financial improprieties.  In Egypt, a nation of impoverished millions, a ruler for nearly thirty years, is ousted by his people for misrule.  Defining his nonchalance, he liked $25,000 suits with his name imprinted to form pinstripes.
 
For some thirty-five years as a university English prof, I taught courses several times a year called Western Classics I and II.  I found it a privilege to teach these courses, even though their subject matter was more often outside the pale of  traditional English literature:  Homer, Sophocles, Vergil, Dante, Quixote, Voltaire. While I was enthusiastic about all these works, the one I liked best was Vergil’s The Aeneid.  If I measure a book by its utilitarian value, then The Aeneid exceeds the norm.
 
Like epics generally, it’s an extended narrative poem, this one in Latin, consisting of twelve books.  In the 19th century, school boys in the prep schools of Britain and America toiled with translating it.  It’s seldom taught now, and when it is, largely as anthologized selections.  In my enthusiasm, I required students read the poem in its entirety. Imagine their joy.
 
Vergil was an interesting chap, to say the least, living in a turbulent political era which saw the assassination of Julius Caesar.  Ultimately, his nephew Octavian (Augustus) would succeed after a protracted civil war.  Many historians regard him as the greatest ruler the world has known.  Vergil penned this work as a member of his coterie.  In it, he offered his idea of the sound ruler by way of the poem’s protagonist, Aeneas, who’s modeled on Octavian.  It might well have been written today, given its keen observations that still jell with contemporary life.  For me, I also found it acutely practical at the personal level.
 
Central to its message is the concept of pietas, or balance.  As such, it resembles the Greek notion of arête, often translated as “virtue.”  The good leader avoids excess, not only in state matters, but more importantly, with regard to masterly over himself.  The bad leader is characterized by furor, or imbalance.  Pietas also connotes the idea of order or discipline.  On the other hand, its opposite, furor, connotes disorder or lack of discipline.  In The Aeneid, Dido, the Carthaginian queen, represents furor.  In her passionate self-indulgence, she imperils Carthage and poses a temptation for Aeneas. While the poem surely is multi-faceted in its themes, it’s ultimately about having self-control.
 
I think about this work often, even after nearly six years in retirement.  I suppose I’m fond of it because it expresses many of the issues I’ve faced in my own wrestlings to get a headlock on the meaningful life; it also confirms, for good or bad, character dimensions in myself and others, even friends; and, of course, it helps define much of what we observe in our public world.  While the ancient world often emphasized the role of Fate in human affairs, it also held the individual responsible as a free agent of Reason to soften its consequences.  As Aristotle argued in Poetics “character is fate.”  In agreement, I would extend Aristotle’s insight to humans generally: what primarily ails us is precisely our frequent inability to master ourselves.  I might even proffer that, in great measure, history is a legacy of excess.
 
Lately we’ve been reading and hearing a lot about the imbroglio between the Wisconsin Republican governor, Walter Scott, and public sector unions.  While very few of us want to see collective bargaining abolished, neither do we admire union greed that increasingly threatens the welfare of all of us, mirrored in exponential budget deficits.  Near where I live, Lexington, KY, the new mayor warns the city cannot adequately invest public employment pension funding.  Layoffs are highly likely.  (39% of firefighters have retired early on disability; police have worked excessive overtime.)  What’s happening in Wisconsin and locally in Kentucky aren’t isolated scenarios. They are occurring in most states and even many countries.
 
Contributing to the financial morass nationally is the exponential cost of medical treatment, currently at the rate of 10% a year, far outstripping the cost-of-living index.  Kentucky is now looking at cutting its Medicaid aid to the poor and reducing funding for education.  How do doctors and hospitals justify such increases?  Even the newly legislated Health Reform Bill will not help, since it lacks a mechanism for controlling costs.
 
In sports, entertainment,  the media, and on Wall Street, we’re witnessing the continuing erosion of the middle class as oligarchy siphons money in enormous amounts for themselves.  Does a news anchor warrant a 120 million dollar contract or a Yankees athlete 200 million?  Movie stars often garner16 million or more for one film.  Banking CEO’s, many of them arbiters of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, aren’t prosecuted and are even bailed out.  Their mind-boggling salaries and perks continue, even as they’re quick to foreclose on mortgages of those they’ve lured into financial jeopardy.
 
Nationally, our federal debt exceeds 14 trillion dollars.  Net interest (2011) on that debt runs to 202 billion.  Current federal spending stands at 3 ½ trillion, 1½ billion of that deficit spending. 
 
At the state level, it doesn’t get any better.  Consider these sobering figures:  California’s deficit is now 25.4 billion; Illinois, 15 billion; Texas, 123 billion. In what should serve as a sobering warning to other states, California’s liability on unfunded public sector pensions stands at a staggering 240 billion dollar shortfall.  See U.S. Debt Clock
 
What’s happening nationally reflects us as individuals.  We simply find it difficult to distinguish between wishes and needs.  More to the point, we’re unable to delay gratification.  We want the single marshmallow now, not the hazy promise of two marshmallows if we simply wait a bit.  Our appetites imperil us.  Sadly, studies indicate we have something in common with criminals in this respect.  Recent research abundantly indicates that most criminals are urge-driven.
 
Even our children increasingly reflect this syndrome, made all too easy by a pethora of technological distractions such as cellphones, videos, media games, and TV.  Why do homework?  The consequences, of course, are significant.   As renowned researcher of self-control, Walter Mischel, inventor of the marshmallow test measuring self-discipline, confirms, there’s a huge gap in SAT performance between those children who can wait and those who can’t (Akst, We Have Met the Enemy, Kindle edition, 1662).
 
An inability to delay gratification can affect weight, with children who are able to delay gratification consistently thinner.  Daniel Akst reports researchers have “found that self-discipline was correlated with school attendance, grades, standardized achievement test scores, and eventual admission to a competitive high school… School discipline turned out to be a vastly better predictor of grades than was IQ” (Kindle Edition, 1691).  Just maybe the crux of our difficulties with our schools lies not with teacher incompetence and inadequate funding, but with the students themselves, comatosed by a culture of indulgence, often fostered by parents dulled to indifference in their own pursuit of the good life.
 
Individually, the consequences of our inability to cage our desires, the furor Aeneas talks about, are enormous.  Lives shattered by financial excess, addiction to alcohol and drugs, poor health regimen by eating too much and wrong foods, smoking, lack of exercise, diminished futures in school dropout, quality goals unaccessed through wasted time.  The list is endless.   For the pleasure of the moment we forfeit the promise of tomorrow.

Spring cleaning

After a long winter, even for Kentucky, it feels good to awake to early eastern skies of long-fingered pink, harbinger of Spring’s seductive balms of  radiant, yet gentle warmth, arousing the earth to new dress in verdant green,  With nature’s facelift, browns and grays transmute into daffodil and tulip riot.  My mind swirls excitedly as I anticipate grabbing a shovel, turning the yielding earth over, planting  azaleas and rhododendrons, restoring pathways, adding mulch, pruning roses. I leap out of bed.

I wonder how many poems have been written about spring.  Here’s a passage from a child’s poem that, simple as it is, resonates spring’s melancholic capacity to remind us of its temporal nature like all things in life and, by extension, our need to live in the Now.

    “If spring lasted forever
    I’d never have to say good-bye
    to when summer ended
    or when the fall leaves died.”

                             (James Meaney)

Yet despite the temporal nature of the seasons, the arrival of   spring reassures us of  a permanence amidst  change or as   Hal Borland reminds us:  “No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”  It’s one of the few assurances we have in life.

I think I like spring best for its ability to suggest we can redeem what’s been lost or made a mess of through cosmic caprice or our finite limitations.  In this way, it represents the end of winter’s hiatus and rebirth of  resolve to do better.  While the traditional New Year on January 1 is  synonymous with resolutions,  ancient calendars often began the new year with the coming of spring, or season of rebirth.  This makes sense to me.  This archetypal notion of spring as an opportunity for a fresh start is embedded in our own language when we speak of “spring cleaning,”  an undeclared domestic rite when we often toss relics of the past.

I Iike that kind of spring cleaningI

An empty spot

I finished Carl Safina’s The View from Lazy Point yesterday, and I’m feeling an empty spot, or something missing, after spending several weeks in silent discourse with this eloquent work.  Safina, a MacArthur Prize recipient, is well known in the conservation movement.  Recently, Audubon magazine listed him among the 100 leading conservationists  of the last century. He’s the founder of  the Blue Ocean Institute.

Safina could have been a poet, given his metaphoric penchant and passion for seeing what most of us miss in the delicate tapestry of nature and our role in its weave.  If the book has a constant, it laments humanity’s increasing indifference to that world beyond itself, a callousness to its intrinsic connection with nature at large, and a harbinger of its penchant for self-destruction.  With coal-fired power plants belching carbon in exponential quantities into the atmosphere, our insatiable appetite for material goods, our conflation of growth with well-being, the explosion in our numbers, we are depleting our resources, accelerating climate change, and imperiling our children and grandchildren.  We live for today, impoverishing tomorrow

Every act has its consequence for good or bad, and now we live in a world where flora and fauna lie increasingly threatened, the seas emptied.  Even our trees, those sentries protecting us from breathing carbon dioxide’s toxic fumes, are in decline, decimated by disease, drought and a chainsaw pursuit of material gain and comfort.  Each year, the birds are fewer, the water tables of nations more contaminated or declining, the seas relentlessly rising.

At times, Safina nearly loses it, tongue-lashing market greed and political connivance.  He’s traveled to all the world’s environmental hot spots and, universally, the message is the same: man’s degradation of  the planet with its calamitous consequences.

Several scenarios standout in the book, one of which had all the earmarks of potential violence when Safina and a friend find themselves confronting a pick-up driver who’s  come to the Long Island shore to shovel horseshoe crabs into the bed of his truck.  Horseshoe crabs have been here for 450 million years, surviving even the extinction of the dinosaurs.  Individuals can live up to twenty years.  After all that, even these well-adapted creatures are facing depletion as a consequence of humans. They are now used for bait.

Shafira manages to drive him off, only to find he’s been replaced by scores of pick-ups in the early morning.  New York state may have reduced its quotas, but who’s watching?  As Safira remarks, “There is something in man that hates natural abundance, and something that clings to excess” (p. 196, Kindle edition).  Without horseshoe crab eggs, migrating shore birds cannot find the sustenance to complete their journeys.  We live in a world of delicate linkage.  Destroying one entity in that linkage doesn’t confine its results.

This book isn’t for the faint-hearted.  It gives you the trenchant truth; still, it also offers hope.  After all, when man has cared, he has succeeded.  Peregrines, bald eagles and red-tailed hawks show increased numbers.  Once they were threatened species.  But such successes are all too few.  Between 199 and 2005, horseshoe crab eggs have declined 90 percent along Delaware Bay.  Concurrently, Red Knots have declined 80 percent, or from 150,000 to around 30,000 (p. 138, Kindle edition), and here we’re considering just two species.  By 2021, some two thirds of animal and plant species will be gone.

Safina sounds the alarms at the end of his book:  “For twelve thousand years or so, humanity has lived in a period of very stable climate.  That stability has been the climate envelope for all of civilization so far. Now we are committed to leaving that stable period for points unknown. It’s humanity’s most hazardous journey yet” (pp. 349-50, Kindle edition).

Not many seem to be listening.

 

Searching for Dad

Lately I‘ve seen Ron Reagan, son of the late president, on TV several times in conjunction with his new book about his father on the occasion of the centennial of his birth.  Titled My Father at 100, it’s an interesting read, except we’ve been on this road before, familiar apart from several turnouts affording us new vistas such as Ron’s suspicion that his father may have already been displaying incipient Alzheimer’s disease when he fell into sudden, prolonged  silence, fumbling for notes and looking confused, in the first presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1984.  Of course, he subsequently routed his opponent on the age issue in the second debate with his rejoinder that he would “not exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”  

What we do know is that Howard Baker, the respected Tennessee senator who replaced Donald Regan as White House chief of staff, found the President mentally lucid and focused.

Much of what Ron says about Dad is speculative, as in the preceding.  He offers that Reagan embroidered the facts when it came to his own father, hardly a profligate alcoholic heedless of his family: “If he was weak, he was also principled.”  But how does Ron come by this knowledge?  

Whatever one’s political persuasion, Reagan was hardly the “affable dunce,” as Clark Clifford dismissively remarked.  During his tenure, the country prospered economically, regained its pride, halted inflation, and saw an end to the gas crisis.  Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was negotiating a nuclear arms reduction with Gorbachev, ultimately moving the two Super Powers towards an ending of the Cold War to the chagrin of many conservatives and the surprise of most liberals.  It can be argued that a revived economy and massive defense outlays ultimately weakened the competitive Soviet economy, precipitating communism’s collapse.

Yet the fact remains that, domestically, the Reagans had a strained relationship with their children.  When Patti moved in with an Eagle rock singer, Reagan could not accept its morality.  Nancy, not just Reagan, quarreled with Patti on other issues and the two did not reconcile until 1993, when Reagan’s Alzheimer’s affliction became known.

When Ron dropped out of Yale, opting to become a ballet dancer, his parents suspected homosexuality.

There had been bad moments, too, though with lesser fallout, with Maureen and Michael.

One of  the book’s most fascinating passages recalls a supper time argument that many American families with teenagers will find familiar.  Ron can’t recall what precipitated the uproar, accept that when he got up to leave, his father said, “You’re not going anywhere, Mister,”  cocking his fist.  They wouldn’t  talk for several days.

At home, the Reagans represented old values in a new era, the incompatibility of old wine in new bottles.  Well meaning, they got into controlling, reacting rather than listening.  While they enjoyed an exceptional relationship as husband and wife, they unfortunately erected a firewall against intruders, including their own children, hungry for love, yearning to be heard, needing validation in their adolescent quest for emancipation from the shadow of extraordinary parents and the forging of their individual identities.  In their denial, came resentment and rebellion.

Ron’s book isn’t unfriendly. He calls his father “Dad” throughout. and yet resentment lingers like smoke from a fire, reduced to blue embers, seeking exit:

    “I could share an hour of warm camaraderie with Dad,  then once I’d walked out the door, get the uncanny feeling I’d disappeared into the wings of his mind’s stage, like a character no  longer necessary to the ongoing story line.” 

Tolstoy wrote famously at the outset of Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”   Ron recalls his father telling him, “You’re my son, so I have to love you. But sometimes you make it hard to like you.”  This becomes painful reading.  As parents, many of us have been there.  Reagan’s domestic failures despite his public success as the Great Communicator, hint at our own private follies as parents, made wiser by time, yet remorseful that we might have done better.

But it’s never too late to learn how to listen; to love our children unconditionally;  to undo past wrongs in the warm embrace of reconciliation.

Addendum: from journaling to blogging

Starting a blog has been one of the better things I’ve done lately and in just three weeks I’ve posted a dozen entries, as polished and informed as I can make them, though humble submissions compared with those professionals I read elsewhere, characterized by vivacity and creativity on hosted sites that sparkle with amenities.
But then I don’t write to compete.  I blog for the sheer joy of it, the sense of renewal, or vigor, or like how I feel when I work out daily on our elliptical machine, not giving in to urges to postpone or cut short, but following through.
I like blogging because it seems to keep the cerebral juices flowing,   Suddenly I am like some sentry on “qui vive,” or full alert, mindful of not allowing trespass. I aim to take the senses captive.  
Sometimes I find myself unable to sleep, a high tide of stimuli flooding my consciousness, forcing me to reach for my adjacent iPad and stack sandbag notes.  What happens nightly resumes at every dawn as I prepare to plant my feet on a winter floor and participate in a new day.
I think this is what I like best about blogging’s contribution to my daily round–this sense of connection with a wider world, not only with readers, but as one sentient creature among others who must earn his daily bread, grateful for morning, but never certain about nightfall.  Living in a crap-shoot universe it’s incumbent we sanctify the Now. I treasure each day and hoard its treasures.
I am immensely fond of how Helen Keller, in her inimical way, put it:
    “Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail.  Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again.”
Blogging helps me make this happen.
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Why I shut the door on Facebook

I spent at least two years in Facebook, only to become increasingly chagrined about the site. On the one hand, I valued its putting me in-touch with friends, many of them my former students that time and space had relegated to a diaspora of specters. Still, I was uncomfortable with several features. I wanted outreach beyond my circle, with the option of linking with those with whom I shared compatibility of interest.

I also wanted substance, not shibboleths, only to find Facebook a shallow water trough with its drive-by narcissism, the self-pitying, sentimental and hyperbolic.
I tired of the plethora of “I’m going to bed now”; “I’m married to the best husband in the world”; “I thought Friday would never get here.”  Some used the site as a platform for in-your-face political statement.

Then there were those legions of turf conquerors, anchoring their egos in a competitive tally of friends. How can one possibly have 200 or more genuine friends, particularly in Facebook where you often as not get a request for friendship without any message or any to appear in kingdom come?  It vaporizes the very meaning of the term.

What really made me head for the exit was the ubiquitous tampering with member privacy in Facebook’s exponential subordination of one’s profile for mercenary ends revealed in ever more ads.  Now comes the investiture of 1.5 billion from Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technology (a Russian conglomerate) lifting the site’s estimated worth to around 50 billion. This investiture, however, will not apply to the U. S. site and its members.  The United States Security Exchange Commission requires companies having more than 499 shareholders to file quarterly reports, a number Facebook anticipates exceeding shortly.  As CNN tells it, “Keeping American investors out of the pool limits the scrutiny   U. S. regulators can apply to the deal” (CNN Money, Jan 21, 2010).

As in life, you sometimes find the noise too much and you shut the door, I shut the door on Facebook.  Did you hear the slam?

The crowning of Colin Firth

I was delighted that Colin Firth won for best actor in this week’s Golden Globe Awards for his role in the spectacular The Kings Speech.  When the film concluded in our local theater, the audience erupted in applause. I can only remember this happening one or two times in many years of seeing movies.  Like many, I first saw him in BBC’s stellar TV production of Pride and Prejudice (1995), where he plays Mr. Darcy, now nearly a pseudonym.  As he wittingly commented in a French magazine interview, “There are three women in my life:  my mother, my wife, and Jane Austen.”  Indeed, he’s played Mr. Darcy in the films, Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001) and its sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004).  In a 2003 film, he plays Henry Dashwood from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in What a Girl Wants (2003).  

I was struck with his wit, eloquence, and sensitivity in his acceptance speech.  I found it the most memorable acceptance speech, not only of the night, but of any similar award ceremony I’ve viewed with their plethora of thank you’s, tears and, sometimes, political advocacy.  Several seasoned commentators on the celebrity scene picked up on this as well.

What I like best about Firth transcends his acting prowess.  A man of conscience and compassion, he waxes hot at injustice.  Founder of  the website, Brightlife, he is engaged in the formidable struggle to bring dignity and resolution to the plight of refugees and indigenous people worldwide.  A splendid actor,  he’s for real as a “royal” human being.

Bashing teachers

Teachers have been taking a terrible bashing lately and are increasingly blamed for the woes plaguing our public schools.  Behind this is the assumption that if Johnny and Susie don’t get it, then it’s the teacher ‘s fault. This assumption, familiar to students of logic, is a non-sequitur, since other factors may be at work, among them, a large influx of disadvantaged students, inadequate funding, competing priorities, and a lack of parental involvement.  For me, while there’s no single factor, I hold that parents are vital to their children’s success. Unfortunately, many homes lack both parents, although many single parents do compensate with valiant, and successful, efforts.  If you ask teachers about what happens when they assign homework, a key indicator of parent involvement, they’ll tell you that much of it never gets done. They may send emails home, make phone calls, yet the problem will persist among some students.  And the teacher is the blame? The assumption that bad teachers are responsible has exacerbated in the incipient efforts of “civilian” cadres to rid the schools of tenure, seen as protecting these alleged incompetents.  Again, this is another non sequitur.  Tenure does not protect a teacher from dismissal. It does assure, however, due process.  Consider what might otherwise happen, given extraordinary federal, state, and local budget deficits consequent with our economic downturn: one can maximize reductions by targeting senior teachers.  Age discrimination can be neutralized under the pretext that it’s incompetent performance that is the criterion of dismissal.

This debate is now sharply underway in the NYC school system.  It’s further premised that talented new teachers shouldn’t be sacrificed for entrenched, ineffective teachers protected by tenure. Now there is merit to this view, but only if exercised in a context of due process with empirical evidence of incompetence assessed from multiple criteria.
I remember well how a few years ago a troubled suburban school district in Illinois found they could maximize savings by dismissing teachers with master degrees.  In fact, the district got rid of all of them.

The No Child Left Behind approach with its reliance on performance measurement, initially of schools, now increasingly of teachers, began in the Republican administration of George W. Bush. Its subsequent implementation is supported by Arne Duncan, current Secretary of education.  Its best known proponent in the DC schools was  Michelle Rhee, who resigned following the defeat of the mayor, who supported her policies. The truth is that despite years of investiture in the billions and reliance upon testing, our schools continue to decline.

I will bring more to this discussion in a later entry.

Bashing teachers

Teachers have been taking a terrible bashing lately and are increasingly blamed for the woes plaguing our public schools.  Behind this is the assumption that if Johnny and Susie don’t get it, then it’s the teacher ‘s fault. This assumption, familiar to students of logic, is a non-sequitur, since other factors may be at work, among them, a large influx of disadvantaged students, inadequate funding, competing priorities, and a lack of parental involvement. 

For me, while there’s no single factor, I hold that parents are vital to their children’s success. Unfortunately, many homes lack both parents, although many single parents do compensate with valiant, and successful, efforts.  If you ask teachers about what happens when they assign homework, a key indicator of parent involvement, they’ll tell you that much of it never gets done. They may send emails home, make phone calls, yet the problem will persist among some students.  And the teacher is the blame?

The assumption that bad teachers are responsible has exacerbated in the incipient efforts of “civilian” cadres to rid the schools of tenure, seen as protecting these alleged incompetents.  Again, this is another non sequitur.  Tenure does not protect a teacher from dismissal. It does assure, however, due process.  Consider what might otherwise happen, given extraordinary federal, state, and local budget deficits consequent with our economic downturn: one can maximize reductions by targeting senior teachers.  Age discrimination can be neutralized under the pretext that it’s incompetent performance that is the criterion of dismissal.

This debate is now sharply underway in the NYC school system.  It’s further premised that talented new teachers shouldn’t be sacrificed for entrenched, ineffective teachers protected by tenure. Now there is merit to this view, but only if exercised in a context of due process with empirical evidence of incompetence assessed from multiple criteria. I remember well how a few years ago a troubled suburban school district in Illinois found they could maximize savings by dismissing teachers with master degrees.  In fact, the district got rid of all of them.

The No Child Left Behind approach with its reliance on performance measurement, initially of schools, now increasingly of teachers, began in the Republican administration of George W. Bush. Its subsequent implementation is supported by Arne Duncan, current Secretary of education.  Its best known proponent in the DC schools was  Michelle Rhee, who resigned following the defeat of the mayor, who supported her policies. The truth is that despite years of investiture in the billions and reliance upon testing, our schools continue to decline.

I will bring more to this discussion in a later entry.