Friday, May 30, 2008

Simon Hattenstone: A Good Loser

A good loser: His understated portrayals of psychos, weirdos and oddballs have turned Steve Buscemi into one of Hollywood's finest character actors. So what does that say about him?
by Simon Hattenstone
The Guardian



Steve Buscemi was four years old and out shopping with his mother when he was caught short at the butchers. She took him home, just across the road, and told him to wait for her while she completed her order. But he got scared all by himself. He remembers it like yesterday. "I came out to the door, and stood yelling for her, but she didn't hear me, and I just panicked and ran across the street. I remember there were these high-street girls hanging out on the corner, and I remember one of them said, 'Watch out for the bus.' I must have looked the wrong way."

To say young Buscemi was accident-prone is an understatement. But he bristles at the idea that he was unlucky. No, he says, the opposite - he was lucky to get away with a fractured skull when he was hit by the bus. In fact, as it turned out, the accident might just be the most fortunate thing that ever happened to him, helping to pave the way for his acting career.

A few years later he was playing ball in the school yard when the ball rolled away from him into the road. He chased after it. Smack. This time he was lucky to get away with cuts and bruises when the car hit him. Sure, he was born on Friday the 13th, but he's not the superstitious type. Five years ago he tried to break up a bar brawl between his friend, the actor Vince Vaughn, and a stranger. For his pains, he was stabbed in his throat, face and arm. Perhaps that was his luckiest escape of all.

His characters don't usually get off that lightly, often coming to gruesomely sticky endings. As contract killer Carl in Fargo, he is described by a woman who has just slept with him as "funny looking, even more so than most men", before being hacked with an axe and fed into a woodchipper. In Ghost World, his younger-than-is-strictly-appropriate friend, played by Thora Birch, says he's such a "clueless dork, he's almost cool" - this time he ends up half-strangled and hospitalised. In The Big Lebowski, whenever he tries to talk, he is told "Donny, shut the fuck up." He's such a wimp that he dies of a heart attack when threatened with violence, such a failure that his ashes have to be kept in a Folgers coffee tin because the cheapest urn is too expensive.

Even when he gets to play seemingly cool gangsters, he's left disappointed. In Reservoir Dogs, the hoods receive colour-coded aliases and he ends up humiliated as Mr Pink ("Why am I Mr Pink?" "Because you're a faggot.") His characters mumble and bumble, querulous and whiny, but they are usually articulate philosophers of low-rent life.

To Read the Rest of the Article

George Orwell, Susan Sontag and Frank Lentricchia: Infantilization of the Public

"The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."
---George Orwell, 1984

The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outrageous deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?

---Susan Sontag, New Yorker, two weeks after 9/11

Intolerance of political dissent in the United States at the present time makes it necessary to say, before we exercise our right to work against the grain, that we, also, abominate the slaughter of the innocent, even as we find it unacceptably childish that Americans refuse to take any responsibility for September 11th; unacceptably childish because the Americans in question are not (presumably) children.

--Frank Lentricchia (and above quotes), "Introductory Notes." Dissent From the Homeland: Essays After Septemeber 11th. ed. Stanley Hauerways and Frank Lentricchia. Duke UP, 2003: 3.

Matt Noller: Review of Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)
Reviewed by: Matt Noller
The House Next Door



It doesn’t matter how big a Kaufman devotee you are, how many times you’ve seen Being John Malkovich or Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It doesn’t matter what you’ve read or heard about Synecdoche, New York, his directorial debut, because nothing could possibly prepare you for the overwhelming mindfuckery on display. It is easily Kaufman’s most ambitious project, which means that it is easily one of the most ambitious films I’ve ever seen. The role of the artist in society; coming to terms with death, God and fate; and the importance of escaping from the trap of solipsism in order to connect with others are among the most prominent themes, but they are far from the only ones. The sheer depth and complexity of the ideas Kaufman is out to explore here is mind-boggling.

Obviously, Synecdoche, New York is not an easy film, or a clean one. The first twenty minutes or so are relatively straight-forward, all things considered, as they detail the day-to-day life of a theatre director named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his wife Adele (Catherine Keener). When Caden’s health begins to deteriorate in strange and grotesque ways (the possibilities of these sicknesses being all in his head or being meant as a literalization of his fear of death seem quite likely), Adele takes his daughter to Berlin for a week-long trip. They never come home, and as the film becomes increasingly focused on Caden’s mental state, things like temporal and narrative cohesion start to feel like a distant memory.

To Read the Rest of this Review and Reviews of More Films Premiering at Cannes

John Dickerson: Scott McClellan burns the Bush administration

Flack Attack: Scott McClellan burns the Bush administration.
By John Dickerson
Slate

Now he tells us. Scott McClellan's memoir offers more candor in a chapter than he let loose during his three years as the president's spokesman. Often kept in the dark by his boss and, at least in one case, deliberately sent out to mislead the public by his superiors, McClellan writes as if he went home after he left the White House in 2006 and purged. Disgorged onto the pages of What Happened, due out next week, are all of the emotions, regret, and doubt that apparently bottled up even as he eternally presented a sunny, largely unflappable demeanor while on the job selling the president's policies.

Because McClellan was such a team player, the book comes as a bit of a shock to those of us who covered the White House during his tenure. Yes, I knew he was angry at Karl Rove and Scooter Libby for using him to spread the falsehood that they had no role in the CIA leak case. That's in the book: "Top White House officials who knew the truth—including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney—allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie." But the denunciation expands from there, and it's that breadth I never thought that his memoir would offer. McClellan outlines the "obfuscation, dissembling, and lack of intellectual honesty that helped take our country into the war in Iraq." He suggests the president and his aides were in permanent campaign mode, putting politics above principle, and chronicles how a "state of denial" led to the mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina. (He also includes a critique of the press, which he says acted as "deferential, complicit enablers" of Bush administration "propaganda.")

In small ways, McClellan still seems at times like he's working for Bush, correcting misperceptions about the president's smarts and absolving him of intentional wrongdoing in the leak matter. But on all the major fronts, the president is still his biggest target. McClellan had worked for Bush since the president was Texas governor, and so he can show us how the scales gradually fell from his eyes over time. In one bizarre episode, during the period of Bush's presidential campaign when the press was constantly chasing rumors about his possible cocaine use, McClellan hears a conversation in which Bush tells a friend that he can't remember if he tried cocaine when he was younger. At the time, McClellan wonders how the then-governor could not remember such a thing but portrays it now as the first inkling of Bush's penchant for self-deception.

In general, McClellan describes the president as someone who lacks inquisitiveness and is also deceitfully self-delusional. Long money quote: "As I worked closely with President Bush, I would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment. It is not unlike a witness in court who does not want to implicate himself in wrongdoing, but is also concerned about perjuring himself. So he says, 'I do not recall.' The witness knows no one can get into his head and prove it is not true, so this seems like a much safer course than actually lying. Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory defense to protect himself from potential political embarrassment. Bush rationalizes it as being acceptable because he is not stating unequivocally anything that could be proven false. If something later is uncovered to show what he knew, then he can deny lying in his own mind."

McClellan's account adds another set of insider anecdotes to the already heaping stack built by previous Bush officials and advisers. Paul O'Neill first described the president's blindness to inconvenient facts six years ago when he talked about Bush's lack of appetite for "analytical rigor, sound information-gathering techniques and real, cost-benefit analysis." The list of administration officials turned bashers includes John Dilulio, Larry Wilkerson, Rand Beers, Richard Clarke, David Kuo, Paul Pillar, and Matthew Dowd.

To Read the Entire Hyperlinked Response and to Access a Video of McClellan

More:

Reporter on CNN says News Execs Pressured Her to Make Administration Look Good

Networks Still Ignoring Pentagon Pundits Scandal

Bush's Former Spokesman Scorches White House with Tell All Memoir

Who'll Unplug Big Media? Stay Tuned

Studio 360: Sontag, Hemon, War

Sontag, Hemon, War
Studio 360 (WNYC)
Host: Kurt Anderson



How artists help us to make sense of war. ... Kurt Andersen revisits his conversation with the late writer Susan Sontag. Recorded a month before the war in Iraq began and only a year before her death, Sontag looks at how we interpret images of war, and tells us how she staged theater in the war zone. Also, novelists who escaped war find meaning in poetry, and two film critics look at how American filmmakers have fought and refought the Viet Nam war on-screen.



To Listen to the Episode





Thursday, May 29, 2008

Collection of Urgently Needed Items for Earthquake Victims in Sichuan, China (May 31)

From: CHINESE STUDENT &SCHOLAR ASSOCIATION on behalf of UK CSSA
Sent: Wed 5/28/2008 11:49 PM
To: CSSA@LSV.UKY.EDU
Subject: [FW]Report from KYCAA ( 肯塔基华人协会)
Dear Friends;

This Saturday morning, May 31, 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM, the Kentucky Chinese American Association (KYCAA) will hold a send-off event at the Lexington Chinese Christian Church (LCCC) for urgently needed items that are being collected, including household water purifiers, medical gloves, sleeping bags, comforters, tents, etc., for earthquake victims in Sichuan, China. This event is co-sponsored by LCCC, the Lexington Chinese School (LCS) and UK Chinese Students and Scholars Association (UK-CSSA). Please see attached flyer for more details.

Besides packing the supplies, we STRONGLY encourage anyone who cares to write their own loving words and blessings, or even simple drawings, and pack them into the packages, in order to show our support to the victims, to the rescuers, and to the volunteers. Our theme is to let those who suffered know that people in a small Midwestern American city care.

If weather ! is good, the event will be in the LCCC parking lot. If it rains (or snows), the Fellowship Hall will be the location.

We will be selling the T-shirt with the Association logo (and the old Association name) on spot for $5.00 apiece, with all proceeds going to the disaster relief fund.

Through the courtesy of Culmei Productions, a PSA video of calling for donations/help has been produced and posted on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhHbUn9f79M

Should you need any additional information, please contact myself or Jianhua Su . Thank you again for your support.

George

Z. George Zhang, PhD, MBA
Vice President, KYCAA - http://www.kycaa.org

Hester Prynne: Sinner, Victim, Object, Winner

Hester Prynne: Sinner, Victim, Object, Winner
by Andrea Seabrook
In Character (NPR)



Hester Prynne, protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterwork The Scarlet Letter, is among the first and most important female protagonists in American literature. She's the embodiment of deep contradictions: bad and beautiful, holy and sinful, conventional and radical.

At first glance, Hester may seem more victim than heroine. The adultery she committed when her husband was thought lost at sea leads Boston's Puritan authorities to brand her with the bright red "A" of the title. She's forced to stand in shame before the mass of Puritan citizens, enduring their stares, their whispers and their contempt. In the self-righteous eyes of the townspeople, she is the ultimate example of sin.

Hester Prynne is also the object of a cruel and shadowy love triangle between herself, her minister lover Arthur Dimmesdale, and her husband, now called Roger Chillingworth.

"The drama is really the drama of the patriarchial society's need to control female sexuality in the most basic way," says Evan Carton, literature professor at the University of Texas at Austin. "This classic male anxiety: How do you know for sure whether your baby is yours? If you don't know if your woman and your child are actually yours, then you have no control over property, no control over social order, no control over anything — and that's the deep radical challenge that Hester presents to this society."

America was in the midst of a growing feminist movement when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. Professor Jamie Barlowe, of the University of Toledo, says that Hawthorne — living in Salem, Boston and later Concord, Mass. — "was very, very aware of the growing feminist insurgence. Women's rights were a part of the cultural conversation."

The first women's-rights convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., was held in 1848, two years before The Scarlet Letter was published. Strong women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were gathering other women to talk about science, politics, and ideas. For the first time in America, women were challenging the firmly established male patriarchy. Hester Prynne can be seen as Hawthorne's literary contemplation of what happens when women break cultural bounds and gain personal power.

To read the rest of the introduction and to listen to the episode and to hear excerpts from The Scarlet Letter

Barbara Pell: "Should Christians Read Dirty Books"

I was once told that some naturalistic scenes in a contemporary novel that particularly offended me were moderate compared to the scenes of human squalor and hopelessness witnessed by my friend, who was a public health nurse in a city slum. She implied that if I could get out of my ivory tower and my middle-class suburban community and experience the degradation and suffering of the majority of the world’s people, if only through the realism of a modern novel, maybe I could begin to understand what the nurses and social workers and street missions were trying to do in a society where one couldn’t run away from the consequences of human sin and need simply by closing the covers of a book.


Quoted by the Christian film critic Jeffrey Overstreet (62) who follows it up by stating "If we are shocked by something as common as a spoken obscenity, it may reveal more about our distance from people in need than it does about the person who blurted out such coarse language" (63).:

The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Betrayal of Judas

The Betrayal of Judas: Did a 'dream team' of biblical scholars mislead millions?
By THOMAS BARTLETT
The Chronicle of Higher Education



Marvin Meyer was eating breakfast when his cellphone buzzed. Meyer, a professor of religious studies at Chapman University, has a mostly gray beard and an athletic build left over from his basketball days. His friends call him "the Velvet Hammer" for his mild demeanor. He's a nice guy.

The voice on the other end belonged to a representative of the National Geographic Society. They were working on a project and wanted his help.

"That's very interesting," he remembers saying. "What do you have in mind?"

"We can't tell you," was the reply.

That was not the answer he expected.

"Let me see if I understand this," Meyer said. "You'd like me to agree to do a project with you, but you won't tell me what that project is. Is that right?"

"Exactly."

He would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement first — which, in the end, he agreed to do. Not long afterward, Meyer found himself locked in an office in Washington, with a desk, a pile of dictionaries and lexicons, and one of the most sought-after religious texts in recent history, the Gospel of Judas. For a week he worked almost nonstop on the 26-page text, translating the Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language written with Greek letters, into English. As he translated, a startling portrait of Judas Iscariot emerged. This was not the reviled traitor who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. This was the trusted disciple, the close confidant, the friend. This was a revelation.

When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April 2006, it made headlines around the world — with nearly all of those articles touting the new and improved Judas. "In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal," read the headline in The New York Times. The British paper The Guardian called it "a radical makeover for one of the worst reputations in history." A documentary that aired a few days later on National Geographic's cable channel also pushed the Judas-as-hero theme. The premiere attracted four million viewers, making it the second-highest-rated program in the channel's history, behind only a documentary on September 11.

But almost immediately, other scholars began to take issue with the interpretation of Meyer and the rest of the National Geographic team. They didn't see a good Judas at all. In fact, this Judas seemed more evil than ever. Those early voices of dissent have since grown into a chorus, some of whom argue that National Geographic's handling of the project amounts to scholarly malpractice. It's a perfect example, critics argue, of what can happen when commercial considerations are allowed to ride roughshod over careful research. What's more, the controversy has strained friendships in this small community of religion scholars — causing some on both sides of the argument to feel, in a word, betrayed.

To Read the Rest of the Article

The Treatment: Neil LaBute on His Play Some Girls

Neil Labute
The Treatment
Host: Elvis Mitchell



You might think it difficult to make fear, weakness bulling a career. Writer-director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Nurse Betty) disagrees with you. He's proved it works in film, on stage and with the West Coast premiere of his new play, Some Girls.

As with much of LaBute's work, Some Girls deals with the sexual politics within a relationship; LaBute discusses how, despite being labeled to the contrary, he's harder on his male characters than female; the influence of growing up with a scary Dad in a small house reading a lot of Harold Pinter; and the differences between working in film and theater.

To Listen to the Episode

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Patrick Smith on "Freddie vs. Jason: Depictions of Community in Horror Films" (5/29)

(Message from Danny Mayer.)



Come one, come all to hear Patrick Smith speak at Al's Bar tomorrow
(Thursday) from 6:00-7:30(ish).

Patrick Smith on Freddie vs. Jason: Depictions of Community in Horror Films.

Next week is the last of the Slightly North of Center public talks.
Michael Marchman will be giving that talk on Geographies of Global
Capitalism and Resistance.

Bring friends. Tell friends.

danny

Kicking Off the Summer with the Raconteurs

Their new CD Consolers of the Lonely has been playing non-stop in my car for the last two weeks and I even find myself driving the long way home so that I can listen to it longer.............



"Salute Your Solution" (from Consolers of the Lonely)



"Level" (from their previous album)

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

In Our Time: King Lear

King Lear
In Our Time (BBC)
Host: Melvyn Bragg



Around the turn of 1606, a group of London theatre-goers braved the plague to take in a new play by the well-known impresario, Mr William Shakespeare. Packed into the Globe Theatre, they were treated to a tale of violence, hatred and betrayal so upsetting that it languished among Shakespeare’s less popular plays until re-written with a happy ending.

The play was King Lear – a drama on the folly of age, the cruelty of families and the futility of ambition, set amidst the wilderness of Ancient Britain. A place where, as the Duke of Albany declares in the play, “Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.”

But why did Shakespeare take a story from the deep history of Britain and make it so shockingly his own and when, from the Civil War to the Second World War, did this powerful and confusing tragedy emerge as Shakespeare’s greatest?

Contributors

Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Tutorial Fellow in English at Somerville College, Oxford

Catherine Belsey, Research Professor in English at the University of Wales, Swansea

To Listen to the Episode

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Jake Horsley on Sam Fuller



It's impossible to imagine ... a movie like Pick-Up on South Street (which Sam Fuller made in 1953 with Richard Widmark) being made as an A picture by any of the studios. It is simply too subversive. The sentiments of the pickpoket 'hero'--cynical, brutal, anti-patriotic, misogynist--seem more in line with the 70s, and the movie is so much fresher and more alive than most of the 'classics' from this period (the 50s marked a low point in Hollywood filmmaking) that the only wonder is why it took the French to recognize Fuller as a formidable film artist. (Unlike Aldrich or Siegel, Fuller never graduated to A pictures; he did not enjoy even retrospective success in the US.)


Horsley, Jake. Dogville vs. Hollywood: The War Between Independent Film and Mainstream Movies. London: Marion Boyars, 2005: 47.

ACLU "Blog of Rights": Because Freedom Can't Blog Itself!

A great idea:

ACLU: Blog of Rights

Film School: Jennifer Baichwal Director of Manufactured Landscapes

(A nod to Michael Marchman who gave me a copy of this film!)

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES
Film School (KUCI)
Hosts: Nathan Callahan and Mike Kaspar



An interview with Jennifer Baichwal director of Manufactured Landscapes. Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.

To Listen to the Episode (MP3)









A Perfect Song for a Sunny Spring Day!: "Instinct Blues" by The White Stripes

"The Slightly North of Center" series: Erik Reece on Lost Mountains and Just Societies

(Kudos to Josh for being the coolest bar owner in town and for being a supporter of Lexington community activism/arts!)

Sponsored by Al's Bar



Description:
Al's Bar presents "The Slightly North of Center" series - talks for and by the community. (This means you!)

This week: Erik Reece on Lost Mountains and Just Societies.

Cost of admission: Caring.

Where:
Al's Bar at the corner of Sixth & North Limestone
Lexington, KY
40508

When: 06:15 PM - 07:45 PM

More:

Erik Reece: Death of a Mountain

Film School: Brett Morgen Director of Chicago 10

CHICAGO 10
Film School (KUCI)
Hosts: Nathan Callahan and Mike Kaspar



An interview with Brett Morgen director of Chicago 10 — an animated docudrama about the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention anti-war protests. Mixing animation with archival footage, Chicago 10 explores the build-up to and unraveling of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial of 8 activists set up as scapegoats by the US government. The mash-up film is a parable of hope, courage and ultimate victory, the story of young Americans speaking out and taking a stand in the face of armed oppression. Starring the voices of Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider, Liev Schreiber, and Jeffrey Wright, Chicago 10 premiered on opening night of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Morgen is an Academy Award nominated producer and director. His credits also include the Robert Evans biopic The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002), which he wrote, produced, and directed (with Nanette Burstein).

To Listen to the Episode (MP3)

Merriam-Webster Word of the Day: Ramshackle

(Kind of like "Kentucky's ramshackle educational system teetered on the edge of collapse as state legislators once again refused to ensure the future success of the commonwealth.")

ramshackle

\RAM-shak-ul\

adjective

Meaning

*1 : appearing ready to collapse : rickety
2 : carelessly or loosely constructed

“Ramshackle” has nothing to do with rams, nor the act of being rammed, nor shackles. The word is an alteration of “ransackled,” an obsolete form of the verb “ransack,” meaning “to search through or plunder.” (“Ransack” in turn derives, via Middle English, from Old Norse words meaning “house” and “seek.”) A home that has been ransacked has had its contents thrown into disarray, and that image may be what caused us to start using “ramshackle” in the first half of the 19th century to describe something that is poorly constructed or in a state of near collapse. These days, “ramshackle” can also be used figuratively, as in “He could only devise a ramshackle excuse for his absence."

Podcast of the Bands that Played at the 3rd Annual Peace and Global Citizenship Festival

(This is a great series of bands and thanks to Ben Worth we can listen to them online! Below is his announcement...)

I am pleased to announce the first in a series of podcasts presenting music from the May 10, 2008 BCTC Peace Festival. The music was recorded on a beautiful Spring afternoon on the Cooper Campus of BCTC. You’ll be treated to a truly diverse group of musicians spanning many popular genres: folk, blues, bluegrass, rock and roll, and world music.

This music series is part of LexTunes, an ongoing podcast of local musicians. Episode three of LexTunes is the first to feature music from the Peace festival. The full festival will appear in subsequent episodes over the course of the summer.

You can listen to the music online or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or as an RSS feed in your web browser. Here are the links:

Listen online

Subscribe in iTunes

Subscribe as RSS

Lastly, my thanks to all the musicians and organizers who helped make the Peace Festival such a success. A great time was had by all,

Ben Worth
Lextunes

Justin Reich: Teachers who co-opt Web tools for class have the best of both worlds

(Courtesy of NCTE)

Turn teen texting toward better writing: Teachers who co-opt Web tools for class have the best of both worlds.
By Justin Reich
Christian Science Monitor

...

Imagine 20 students in invisible groups of three, all silently, furiously typing and reading, immersed in conversations about the dialogues of Socrates or the teachings of Confucius. That classroom time is incredibly intellectually productive: all 20 students are simultaneously sharpening their arguments, supporting them with evidence, and questioning their colleagues.

My students know that they must practice these analytical conversation skills, which are easily transferred to the realm of formal writing, since I'll be reading and grading a copy of their transcript.

Students who use interactive Web tools in the classroom learn that certain features of effective communication transcend media. Strong arguments; compelling evidence; and clear, concise language are prominent features of analytical writing on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in those oral debates themselves, or on a blog post persuading friends to support a current presidential candidate.

It would be nice if all students wrote essays in their spare time, but Pew tells us that only 8 percent do. Nearly all of them, however, use text and instant messaging, so if the far shore turns out to be a chat room, then we should start teaching critical thinking skills in chat rooms.

One of the remarkable findings of the Pew Internet research is that intellectual stereotypes based on race and class do not hold up under scrutiny. Black and Hispanic teens are more likely than their white peers to write outside school, and 47 percent of black teens keep a journal.

Over half of teenagers from all races and income levels have social networking profiles, like on MySpace or Facebook. This flourishing of creativity and expressiveness should be harnessed in all schools.

Unfortunately, equity in MySpace is not the same as equity in digital educational environments guided by adult educators, and anecdotal evidence suggests that online learning networks are far more common in affluent, white, suburban schools than in hypersegregated, urban schools. Closing the digital divide is not just a matter of plugging in classrooms, but of providing teachers in low-resource schools with the training, prep time, and support to nurture this blossoming of student writing through online learning communities.

Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption.

Failure to harness that potential energy would prove a terrible misstep at this junction in American education. As educators, we face two choices. We can scorn youth for their emoticons (☺), condemn their abbreviations (Th. Jefferson would have disapproved), and lament the time students spend writing in ways adults do not understand. Or, we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.

To Read the Entire Article

Monday, May 19, 2008

Douglas Rushkoff: Coercion

(This is one of my favorite readings to share with my ENG 101/102 students. Courtesy of Bookbrowse)

From Coercion: Why We Listen to What 'They' Say
by Douglas Rushkoff

Introduction
They Say

They say human beings use only ten percent of their brains. They say polyunsaturated fat is better for you than saturated fat. They say that tiny squiggles in a rock prove there once was life on Mars. They say our children's test scores are declining. They say Jesus was a direct descendant of King David. They say you can earn $15,000 a week in your spare time. They say marijuana leads to LSD, and LSD can lead to suicide. They say the corner office is a position of power. They say the elderly should get flu shots this season. They say homosexuality is an environmentally learned trait. They say there's a gene for homosexuality. They say people can be hypnotized to do anything. They say people won't do anything under hypnosis that they wouldn't do when conscious. They say Prozac alleviates depression. They say mutual funds are the best long-term investment. They say computers can predict the weather. They say you haven't met your deductible.

Who, exactly, are "they," and why do they say so much? More amazing, why do we listen to them?

We each have our own "theys"--the bosses, experts, and authorities (both real and imaginary) who seem to dictate our lives, decide our fates, and create our futures. In the best of circumstances they can make us feel safe, the way parents do. They make our decisions for us. They do our thinking for us. We don't have to worry about our next move--it has already been decided on our behalf, and in our best interests. Or so we hope.

For not everyone to whom we surrender ourselves is deserving of our trust. The pretty young "sales associate" at the Gap may not be the best judge of how that pair of blue jeans looks on us, or of which belt we should wear to a job interview. Even though she seems genuinely concerned with our well-being, we must not forget that she's been trained in the art of the "upsell" and is herself under the influence of a barrage of incentives conceived at corporate headquarters. One scheme leads her to compete with her colleagues on the sales floor for daily prizes, while another threatens penalties or termination if she does not meet a certain quota of multiple-item sales by the end of the week. The coercive techniques inflicted on her, and the ones she in turn inflicts on us, are the products of years of painstaking research into methods of influencing human behavior.

The justifiably cynical among us have come to expect this sort of treatment from the professional people in our lives. When we walk into a shopping mall, we understand that we will be subjected to certain forms of influence. We recognize that retail sales are about the bottom line, and that to stay in business, shop owners depend upon our behaving in a predictable and somewhat malleable fashion. If instructing a salesgirl to unfasten the second button of her blouse may garner a larger volume of sales, the store manager owes it to himself and his superiors and their shareholders to do so. And, chances are, it will work.

But these techniques are rapidly spreading from the sales floor and the television screen to almost every other aspect of our daily experience. Whether we are strolling through Times Square, exploring the Internet, or even just trying to make friends at the local bar, we are under constant scrutiny and constant assault by a professional class of hidden persuaders. In most cases, if the coercion works according to plan, we don't even realize it has been used.

It's not always easy to determine when we have surrendered our judgment to someone else. The better and more sophisticated the manipulation, the less aware of it we are. For example, have you ever attended a sporting event, rock concert, or political convention in one frame of mind, but found yourself inexplicably swept away by the emotion of the crowd? How many times have you walked into a mall to buy a single pair of shoes, only to find yourself purchasing an entire outfit, several books, and a few CDs before you made your way back to the parking lot?

Have you ever picked up the phone, realized the caller was from an organization you'd never considered supporting, and gone ahead and pledged a sum of money or bought a magazine subscription? How did that automobile salesman get you to pay more than you'd planned to for a car, and add more features than you wanted, even though you came armed with your Consumer Reports?

Why do the advertisements in fashion magazines make us feel inadequate, and after they do, why do we feel compelled to buy the products advertised anyway? How can we feel we're so aware of the effects of advertising and marketing, yet still succumb to them?

Why are our kids tattooing themselves with the Nike "swoosh" icon? Are they part of a corporate cult? If young people today are supposed to be beyond the reach of old-fashioned marketing, then why do they feel the need to find their identity in a brand of sneakers?

No matter how many coercive techniques we come to recognize, new ones are always being developed that we don't. Once we've become immune to the forceful "hard sell" techniques of the traditional car dealer, a high-paid influence consultant develops a new brand with an entirely new image--like the Saturn, whose dealers use friendly "soft sell" techniques to accomplish the same thing, more subtly. Media-savvy young people have learned to reject advertising that tries too hard to make its product look "cool." In response, companies now produce decidedly "uncool" advertisements, which appeal to the cynical viewer who thinks he can remain unswayed. "Image is nothing. Thirst is everything," Sprite advertisers confess to their hype-weary target market. Our attempts to stay one step ahead of coercers merely provokes them to develop even more advanced, less visible, and, arguably, more pernicious methods of persuasion.

To Read the Rest of this Introduction (it is worth it to read it to the end)

Federico Mayor: Wars Are Never Won

(Courtesy of Claire Glasscock)

“It is a good moment to repeat that a war is never won. Never mind that history books tell us the opposite. The psychological and material costs of war are so high that any triumph is a pyrrhic victory. Only peace can be won and winning peace means not only avoiding armed conflict but finding ways of eradicating the causes of individual and collective violence: injustice and oppression, ignorance and poverty, intolerance and discrimination. We must construct a new set of values and attitudes to replace the culture of war which, for centuries, has been influencing the course of civilization. Winning peace means the triumph of our pledge to establish, on a democratic basis, a new social framework of tolerance and generosity from which no one will feel excluded.”

-- Federico Mayor (Spanish scholar and former head of UNESCO)

Ziga Vodovnik: An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

(Courtesy of Michael Marchman)

An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism: Rebels Against Tyranny
By ZIGA VODOVNIK
Counterpunch



...

ZV: Anarchism is in this respect rightly opposing representative democracy since it is still form of tyranny – tyranny of majority. They object to the notion of majority vote, noting that the views of the majority do not always coincide with the morally right one. Thoreau once wrote that we have an obligation to act according to the dictates of our conscience, even if the latter goes against the majority opinion or the laws of the society. Do you agree with this?

HZ: Absolutely. Rousseau once said, if I am part of a group of 100 people, do 99 people have the right to sentence me to death, just because they are majority? No, majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok. That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things – proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. And also has to take into account that majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. So yes, people have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.

ZV: Where do you see the historical origins of anarchism in the United States?

HZ: One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists. The word was first used by Proudhon in the middle of the 19th century, but actually there were anarchist ideas that proceeded Proudhon, those in Europe and also in the United States. For instance, there are some ideas of Thomas Paine, who was not an anarchist, who would not call himself an anarchist, but he was suspicious of government. Also Henry David Thoreau. He does not know the word anarchism, and does not use the word anarchism, but Thoreau’s ideas are very close to anarchism. He is very hostile to all forms of government. If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist. You do not really encounter anarchism until after the Civil War, when you have European anarchists, especially German anarchists, coming to the United States. They actually begin to organize. The first time that anarchism has an organized force and becomes publicly known in the United States is in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair.

ZV: Where do you see the main inspiration of contemporary anarchism in the United States? What is your opinion about the Transcendentalism – i.e., Henry D. Thoreau, Ralph W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, et al. – as an inspiration in this perspective?

HZ: Well, the Transcendentalism is, we might say, an early form of anarchism. The Transcendentalists also did not call themselves anarchists, but there are anarchist ideas in their thinking and in their literature. In many ways Herman Melville shows some of those anarchist ideas. They were all suspicious of authority. We might say that the Transcendentalism played a role in creating an atmosphere of skepticism towards authority, towards government.
Unfortunately, today there is no real organized anarchist movement in the United States. There are many important groups or collectives that call themselves anarchist, but they are small. I remember that in 1960s there was an anarchist collective here in Boston that consisted of fifteen (sic!) people, but then they split. But in 1960s the idea of anarchism became more important in connection with the movements of 1960s.

ZV: Most of the creative energy for radical politics is nowadays coming from anarchism, but only few of the people involved in the movement actually call themselves “anarchists”. Where do you see the main reason for this? Are activists ashamed to identify themselves with this intellectual tradition, or rather they are true to the commitment that real emancipation needs emancipation from any label?

HZ: The term anarchism has become associated with two phenomena with which real anarchist don’t want to associate themselves with. One is violence, and the other is disorder or chaos. The popular conception of anarchism is on the one hand bomb-throwing and terrorism, and on the other hand no rules, no regulations, no discipline, everybody does what they want, confusion, etc. That is why there is a reluctance to use the term anarchism. But actually the ideas of anarchism are incorporated in the way the movements of the 1960s began to think.

I think that probably the best manifestation of that was in the civil rights movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – SNCC. SNCC without knowing about anarchism as philosophy embodied the characteristics of anarchism. They were decentralized. Other civil rights organizations, for example Seven Christian Leadership Conference, were centralized organizations with a leader – Martin Luther King. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were based in New York, and also had some kind of centralized organization. SNCC, on the other hand, was totally decentralized. It had what they called field secretaries, who worked in little towns all over the South, with great deal of autonomy. They had an office in Atlanta, Georgia, but the office was not a strong centralized authority. The people who were working out in the field – in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi – they were very much on their own. They were working together with local people, with grassroots people. And so there is no one leader for SNCC, and also great suspicion of government.

They could not depend on government to help them, to support them, even though the government of the time, in the early 1960s, was considered to be progressive, liberal. John F. Kennedy especially. But they looked at John F. Kennedy, they saw how he behaved. John F. Kennedy was not supporting the Southern movement for equal rights for Black people. He was appointing the segregationists judges in the South, he was allowing southern segregationists to do whatever they wanted to do. So SNCC was decentralized, anti-government, without leadership, but they did not have a vision of a future society like the anarchists. They were not thinking long term, they were not asking what kind of society shall we have in the future. They were really concentrated on immediate problem of racial segregation. But their attitude, the way they worked, the way they were organized, was along, you might say, anarchist lines.

ZV: Do you thing that pejorative (mis)usage of the word anarchism is direct consequence of the fact that the ideas that people can be free, was and is very frightening to those in power?

HZ: No doubt! No doubt that anarchist ideas are frightening to those in power. People in power can tolerate liberal ideas. They can tolerate ideas that call for reforms, but they cannot tolerate the idea that there will be no state, no central authority. So it is very important for them to ridicule the idea of anarchism to create this impression of anarchism as violent and chaotic. It is useful for them, yes.

To Read the Entire Interview

Howard Zinn: Democratic Education

(Courtesy of TruthOut

To me, a democratic education means many things: it means what you learn in the classroom and what you learn outside the classroom. It means not only the content of what you learn, but also the atmosphere in which you learn it and the relationship between teacher and student. All of these elements of education can be democratic or undemocratic.

Students as citizens in a democracy have the right to determine their lives and to play a role in society. A democratic education should give students the kind of information that will enable them to have power of their own in society. What that means is to give students the kind of education that suggests to the students that historically there have been many ways in which ordinary people can play a part in making history, in the development of their society. An education that gives the student examples in history of where people have shown their power in reshaping not only their own lives, but also in how society works.

In the relationship between the student and the teacher there is democracy. The student has a right to challenge the teacher, to express ideas of his or her own. That education is an interchange between the experiences of the teacher, which may be far greater than the student in certain ways, and the experiences of the student, since every student has a unique life experience. So the free inquiry in the classroom, a spirit of equality in the classroom, is part of a democratic education.

It was very important to make it clear to my students that I didn't know everything, that I was not born with the knowledge that I'm imparting to them, that knowledge is acquired and in ways in which the student can acquire also.

...

Skepticism is one of the most important qualities that you can encourage. It arises from having students realize that what has been seen as holy is not holy, what has been revered is not necessarily to be revered. That the acts of the nation which have been romanticized and idealized, those deserve to be scrutinized and looked at critically.

I remember that a friend of mine was teaching his kids in middle school to be skeptical of what they had learned about Columbus as the great hero and liberator, expander of civilization. One of his students said to him, "Well, if I have been so misled about Columbus, I wonder now what else have I been misled about?" So that is education in skepticism.

From a World Without Borders

Chalmers Johnson: Review of Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated

(Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision is one of the best political science/theory books I have ever read. I plan on reading it again and I am going to get his new book described below...)

Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled
By Chalmers Johnson
Truthdig



We now have a new, comprehensive diagnosis of our failings as a democratic polity by one of our most seasoned and respected political philosophers. For well over two generations, Sheldon Wolin taught the history of political philosophy from Plato to the present to Berkeley and Princeton graduate students (including me; I took his seminars at Berkeley in the late 1950s, thus influencing my approach to political science ever since). He is the author of the prize-winning classic Politics and Vision (1960; expanded edition, 2006) and Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (2001), among many other works.

His new book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States -- including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The hour is very late and the possibility that the American people might pay attention to what is wrong and take the difficult steps to avoid a national Gtterdmmerung are remote, but Wolin's is the best analysis of why the presidential election of 2008 probably will not do anything to mitigate our fate. This book demonstrates why political science, properly practiced, is the master social science.

Wolin's work is fully accessible. Understanding his argument does not depend on possessing any specialized knowledge, but it would still be wise to read him in short bursts and think about what he is saying before moving on. His analysis of the contemporary American crisis relies on a historical perspective going back to the original constitutional agreement of 1789 and includes particular attention to the advanced levels of social democracy attained during the New Deal and the contemporary mythology that the U.S., beginning during World War II, wields unprecedented world power.

Given this historical backdrop, Wolin introduces three new concepts to help analyze what we have lost as a nation. His master idea is "inverted totalitarianism," which is reinforced by two subordinate notions that accompany and promote it -- "managed democracy" and "Superpower," the latter always capitalized and used without a direct article. Until the reader gets used to this particular literary tic, the term Superpower can be confusing. The author uses it as if it were an independent agent, comparable to Superman or Spiderman, and one that is inherently incompatible with constitutional government and democracy.

Wolin writes, "Our thesis is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively 'strong democracy' instead of a 'failed' one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos -- "a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office." Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.

"No working man or ordinary farmer or shopkeeper," Wolin points out, "helped to write the Constitution." He argues, "The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. The republic existed for three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred years before black Americans were assured of their voting rights. Only in the twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete: women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered." Wolin can easily control his enthusiasm for James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, and he sees the New Deal as perhaps the only period of American history in which rule by a true demos prevailed.

To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has "emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions."

The genius of our inverted totalitarian system "lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual. A demotion in the status and stature of the 'sovereign people' to patient subjects is symptomatic of systemic change, from democracy as a method of 'popularizing' power to democracy as a brand name for a product marketable at home and marketable abroad. The new system, inverted totalitarianism, is one that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed."

Among the factors that have promoted inverted totalitarianism are the practice and psychology of advertising and the rule of "market forces" in many other contexts than markets, continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the penetration of mass media communication and propaganda into every household in the country, and the total co-optation of the universities. Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation. Wolin reminds us that the image of Adolf Hitler flying to Nuremberg in 1934 that opens Leni Riefenstahl's classic film "Triumph of the Will" was repeated on May 1, 2003, with President George Bush's apparent landing of a Navy warplane on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to proclaim "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.

On inverted totalitarianism's "self-pacifying" university campuses compared with the usual intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes, "Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. For the first time in the history of American higher education top professors are made wealthy by the system, commanding salaries and perks that a budding CEO might envy."

The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of Superpower. The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the "selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry" under cover of improving "efficiency" and cost-cutting.

We now have a new, comprehensive diagnosis of our failings as a democratic polity by one of our most seasoned and respected political philosophers. For well over two generations, Sheldon Wolin taught the history of political philosophy from Plato to the present to Berkeley and Princeton graduate students (including me; I took his seminars at Berkeley in the late 1950s, thus influencing my approach to political science ever since). He is the author of the prize-winning classic Politics and Vision (1960; expanded edition, 2006) and Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (2001), among many other works.

His new book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States -- including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The hour is very late and the possibility that the American people might pay attention to what is wrong and take the difficult steps to avoid a national Gtterdmmerung are remote, but Wolin's is the best analysis of why the presidential election of 2008 probably will not do anything to mitigate our fate. This book demonstrates why political science, properly practiced, is the master social science.

Wolin's work is fully accessible. Understanding his argument does not depend on possessing any specialized knowledge, but it would still be wise to read him in short bursts and think about what he is saying before moving on. His analysis of the contemporary American crisis relies on a historical perspective going back to the original constitutional agreement of 1789 and includes particular attention to the advanced levels of social democracy attained during the New Deal and the contemporary mythology that the U.S., beginning during World War II, wields unprecedented world power.

Given this historical backdrop, Wolin introduces three new concepts to help analyze what we have lost as a nation. His master idea is "inverted totalitarianism," which is reinforced by two subordinate notions that accompany and promote it -- "managed democracy" and "Superpower," the latter always capitalized and used without a direct article. Until the reader gets used to this particular literary tic, the term Superpower can be confusing. The author uses it as if it were an independent agent, comparable to Superman or Spiderman, and one that is inherently incompatible with constitutional government and democracy.

Wolin writes, "Our thesis is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively 'strong democracy' instead of a 'failed' one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos -- "a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office." Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.

"No working man or ordinary farmer or shopkeeper," Wolin points out, "helped to write the Constitution." He argues, "The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. The republic existed for three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred years before black Americans were assured of their voting rights. Only in the twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete: women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered." Wolin can easily control his enthusiasm for James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, and he sees the New Deal as perhaps the only period of American history in which rule by a true demos prevailed.

To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has "emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions."

The genius of our inverted totalitarian system "lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual. A demotion in the status and stature of the 'sovereign people' to patient subjects is symptomatic of systemic change, from democracy as a method of 'popularizing' power to democracy as a brand name for a product marketable at home and marketable abroad. The new system, inverted totalitarianism, is one that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed."

Among the factors that have promoted inverted totalitarianism are the practice and psychology of advertising and the rule of "market forces" in many other contexts than markets, continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the penetration of mass media communication and propaganda into every household in the country, and the total co-optation of the universities. Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation. Wolin reminds us that the image of Adolf Hitler flying to Nuremberg in 1934 that opens Leni Riefenstahl's classic film "Triumph of the Will" was repeated on May 1, 2003, with President George Bush's apparent landing of a Navy warplane on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to proclaim "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.

On inverted totalitarianism's "self-pacifying" university campuses compared with the usual intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes, "Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation funds, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. For the first time in the history of American higher education top professors are made wealthy by the system, commanding salaries and perks that a budding CEO might envy."

The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of Superpower. The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the "selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry" under cover of improving "efficiency" and cost-cutting.

Managed democracy is a powerful solvent for any vestiges of democracy left in the American political system, but its powers are weak in comparison with those of Superpower. Superpower is the sponsor, defender and manager of American imperialism and militarism, aspects of American government that have always been dominated by elites, enveloped in executive-branch secrecy, and allegedly beyond the ken of ordinary citizens to understand or oversee. Superpower is preoccupied with weapons of mass destruction, clandestine manipulation of foreign policy (sometimes domestic policy, too), military operations, and the fantastic sums of money demanded from the public by the military-industrial complex. (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China's at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.)

Foreign military operations literally force democracy to change its nature: "In order to cope with the imperial contingencies of foreign war and occupation," according to Wolin, "democracy will alter its character, not only by assuming new behaviors abroad (e.g., ruthlessness, indifference to suffering, disregard of local norms, the inequalities in ruling a subject population) but also by operating on revised, power-expansive assumptions at home. It will, more often than not, try to manipulate the public rather than engage its members in deliberation. It will demand greater powers and broader discretion in their use ('state secrets'), a tighter control over society's resources, more summary methods of justice, and less patience for legalities, opposition, and clamor for socioeconomic reforms."

Imperialism and democracy are, in Wolin's terms, literally incompatible, and the ever greater resources devoted to imperialism mean that democracy will inevitably wither and die. He writes, "Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter's conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could 'participate' substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire."

To Read the Entire Review

More:

To Read the First Chapter of Democracy Incorporated

To Read the First Chapter of Politics and Vision

John Cusack: Outsourced Warfare Represents a "Radical, Dangerous, Disgusting Ideology"

(This film looks good and Cusack's interview is refreshing... The entire interview is highly recommended!)

John Cusack: Outsourced Warfare Represents a "Radical, Dangerous, Disgusting Ideology"
Interviewed by Joshua Holland
AlterNet



John Cusack's new film, War, Inc., is set in a fictionalized Iraq. It's a funny film. It might have been tough to watch if it weren't, given the level of destruction that five years of occupation have wrought on the real country.

Cusack, along with co-writers Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, offer up a dystopian vision of the future of privatized warfare set in "Turaqistan," a presumably oil-rich country that, if it really existed, would surely be somewhere that most Americans couldn't find on a map.

The film's humor rests on very real and demonstrably disastrous trends in neoconservative foreign policy of recent years -- a lethal war of choice and profit, the dismantling of states and plundering of their resources, a profound cultural insensitivity, lack of accountability and reckless disregard for easily-predicted consequences -- which are then pushed to the absurd.

In Iraq, journalists are embedded with troops and tour Potemkin villages to demonstrate progress; in Turaqistan, they're given virtual-reality tours of combat without leaving the cozy confines of "Emerald City," War, Inc.'s version of Baghdad's Green Zone. In Iraq, contractors like Halliburton have squeezed billions out of the treasury for substandard work that has left the country's infrastructure decimated; Turaqistan is wholly-managed by the Halliburton-esque Tamerlane corporation, and the tanks that patrol the country's burned-out streets are covered with NASCAR-style logos for everything from Popeye's Chicken to Golden Palace online gambling.

Fans of the underground classic Grosse Pointe Blank will find much that is familiar. Cusack plays a conflicted killer -- this time a lethal assassin -- an extreme kind of corporate fixer -- whom Tamarlane dispatches to far-flung locales whenever someone of influence threatens the company's bottom line. The film has the same kind of sardonic and referential humor, and employs the same over-the-top ultra-violence pushed to comic extremes. Joan Cusack, in a role reminiscent of the one she played in Grosse Pointe Blank, again steals the show with her few minutes of screen time.

With sharp writing and strong performances by Marisa Tomei, Hilary Duff and Ben Kingsley, War, Inc. is provocative and satisfying. But it may have failed in one notable regard. Turaqistan, for all its insanity, is not all that much crazier than the reality of post-invasion Iraq; a week after the film arrived at AlterNet's office, and with mortars raining down in Baghdad's heavily-fortified Green Zone, a Los Angeles-based company announced that it's planning to build a Disney-like skateboard- and theme-park in Baghdad. Never mind that most Iraqi kids have never seen a skateboard -- a spokesperson for the company promised that a shipment of free boards would arrive in Iraq before the park's opening.

AlterNet caught up with John Cusack recently to discuss the inspirations for his film.

Joshua Holland: Tell me a little bit about your new project.

John Cusack: Well, we thought of it as an incendiary political cartoon that would hopefully put America's current imperial adventures in Iraq into a kind of a larger context. And maybe put a different lens on what privatization means; what this plan has been and what it's been like when people try to privatize the very core things it means to be a state. And what it means to spread an ideology like that across the globe.

There are 180,000 contractors in Iraq and about 160,000 troops, right? And if one just takes that trend to its logical conclusion, well that's where "War, Inc." is set. It takes place at a time in the near future when warfare us an entirely corporate affair.

Holland: As a political nerd, it struck me as a highly referential film. I felt like your character, to some extent, was loosely patterned maybe on John Perkins, who wrote Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Cusack: You know, that book came out when we were already making the film, I believe. And I know we were writing it when Naomi Klein's groundbreaking piece called "Baghdad Year Zero" came out in Harper's. She's a journalist I've always greatly admired and respected. And then as we were making the movie, she was writing the Shock Doctrine. I remember being aware of it while we were writing it. And I remember talking about it. But you know, this character was also based on [former U.S. Envoy to Iraq] Paul Bremer flying in while Baghdad was still burning and literally ruling by Fiat. Sitting down in Saddam's old palace and banging out 50 or 60 new laws that would allow 100 percent foreign ownership of previously state-owned industry by these outside corporations. And he was running around in those Brooks Brothers suits and the military boots when he did it.

To Read the Rest of the Interview and to Watch a Trailer for the Film



"Time to Go Home" by Michael Franti and Spearhead

Eileen Jones: Sugarpuff Christian Propaganda Dressed Up As a Dark Children's Movie

Prince Caspian: Sugarpuff Christian Propaganda Dressed Up As a Dark Children's Movie
By Eileen Jones
AlterNet



The second film in the Chronicles of Narnia franchise, Prince Caspian, is so big, so long, so slow, so stilted, so cheesy, so pumped full of phony-looking CGI that there's nothing to stop it from making a billion dollars. Because, God help us, this is the gelatinous form the fantasy genre has taken in the past few decades and now everyone has learned to love it, the way we learned to love Spam and Jello and many other products that hold a pre-molded shape for mysterious reasons we don't want to go into.

You'll read other reviews claiming that, compared to the first film, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), this one is dark and maybe even disturbing for the hordes of kids worldwide who will flock to see it. Don't you believe it. This film is dark the way pearl grey would seem dark if you lived in the Land of Blinding Whiteness. Prince Caspian earns its PG rating through bloodless war, reversible deaths, tiresome moral preachiness, and the cutest, blandest kid heroes ever assembled.

These kids are the four Pevensie siblings of C.S. Lewis' famous children's classics, London youngsters who periodically slip off to the magical world of Narnia to lead epic lives. Here's how you tell them apart: Peter (William Moseley) is now in his sullen teen years and scowls all the time; Susan (Anna Popplewell) shoots a mean arrow and has the poutiest red lips of the four, which is saying a lot; Edmund (Scandar Keynes) has the most upstanding hair; and Lucy (Georgie Henley) is the small, pious girl forever reminding the others to worship the giant holy lion Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson) that nobody can see but her since he was martyred in the last war.

At the end of the first film, the kids had been crowned young kings and queens in honor of their leadership in defeating the forces of the magnificently evil White Witch (Tilda Swinton). As the sequel begins, they are one year older and very bored when they're transported back again to Narnia via the enchanted London tube (also Harry Potter's main mode of travel to the world of magic). However, in Narnia it's centuries later, and the castle in which the children were crowned is now an ancient ruin. The Narnians, a motley assortment of dwarves, centaurs, minotaurs, gryphons, talking animals, feisty trees, et.al., have been driven into hiding by the cruel tyranny of the Telmarines, led by the usurper King Miraz, played by Sergio Castellitto. (The wicked Telmarines are clearly Spaniards, by the way, probably for reasons having to do with C.S. Lewis' willingness to hold a permanent grudge against all former foes of dear old England) The Narnians, reunited with the Pevensie children, pin their hopes on the rightful heir to the throne, young Telmarine Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) to unite and restore the kingdom.

It's all very plotty and ponderous. Director Andrew Adamson (the Shrek franchise) isn't exactly the surest hand in the West when it comes to mobilizing the troops for exciting action sequences. Luckily horses galloping are always beautiful to watch, and that helps the dragging pace of the battles a bit. But the entrancing White Witch who did so much to enliven the first film is sorely missed here. Tilda Swinton as the Witch makes only a brief appearance in Caspian, but she really knows how to goose up the stodgy proceedings of contemporary fantasy. With her odd-angled Renaissance-era face, her cold grandeur, her convincing battle-readiness and barbaric furs and sledge pulled by wolves, she was the perfect antidote to all the glutinous scenes with children learning to have unquestioning faith in a giant supremely-fake-looking lion. I spent the whole first film rooting for her.

There are a few other actors struggling valiantly to breathe life into the proceedings, including Peter Dinklage as the grumpy dwarf Trumpkin. But just the fact that he is a grumpy dwarf shows you how hopelessly recycled all this fantasy material has gotten. In this genre by now, all dwarfs are grumpy, and all characters spend huge amounts of time staring off into space with awed expressions that are cut together with CGI effects meant to represent the things that awe them. All fantasy scores sound like John Williams on his most bathetic day, heavy on the triumphal horns and the celestial choir voices. Fantasy lands must now look like New Zealand. Fantasy talking animals must be voiced by stars like Eddie Izzard as the swordfighting mouse Reepicheep, who's a less amusing version of the swordfighting cat Puss-in-boots voiced by Antonio Banderas in Shrek II.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Charlie Kaufman: "Maybe You Have the One Thought..."

“Maybe you have the one thought that’ll change everything for me. The one thing I haven’t considered in my relentless, obsessive, circular thought process. Is there that one thing? Is it possible for one person to impart any transformative notion to another person?”

Charlie Kaufman Script for Being John Malkovich (New York: Faber and Faber, 2000), p, ix.

Andre Malraux/Human Nature/Dance, Monkey, Dance

"The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell."

---Andre Malraux

Quoted by Frank in:



Dance, Monkey, Dance

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Democracy Now: 1968, 40 Years Later

1968, 40 Years Later: Student, Worker Protests Sweep France, Leaving Indelible Mark on the Country and the World
Host: Amy Goodman
Democracy Now



May 1968 was a watershed month for France, when a wave of student and worker protests swept the country and changed French society forever. We speak to George Katsiaficas, author of numerous books, including The Imagination of the New Left: The Global Analysis of 1968.

To Watch/Listen/Read



More:

Democracy Now: Huge Archive on the Significant Events of 1968

New documents obtained by the ACLU state that torture of prisoners in US custody abroad was "widespread and systemic."

ACLU Obtains Defense Department Documents About Prisoner Deaths And Interrogations
American Civil Liberties Union



NEW YORK - The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained previously withheld documents from the Defense Department, including internal investigations into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody overseas. Uncensored documents released as a result of the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit shed light on the deaths of detainees in Iraq and internal disagreement within the military over harsh interrogation practices used at Guantánamo Bay.

"These documents provide further evidence that the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad was not aberrational, but was widespread and systemic," said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU. "They only underscore the need for an independent investigation into high-level responsibility for prisoner abuse."

One of the documents released to the ACLU is a list of at least four prisoner deaths that were the subject of Navy Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) investigations. The NCIS document contains new information about the deaths of some of these prisoners, including details about Farhad Mohamed, who had contusions under his eyes and the bottom of his chin, a swollen nose, cuts and large bumps on his forehead when he died in Mosul in 2004. The document also includes details about Naem Sadoon Hatab, a 52-year-old Iraqi man who was strangled to death at the Whitehorse detainment facility in Nasiriyah in June 2003; the shooting death of Hemdan El Gashame in Nasiriyah in March 2003; and the death of Manadel Jamadi during an interrogation after his head was beaten with a stove at Abu Ghraib in November 2003.

Another document obtained by the ACLU provides further context to objections raised by the Army's Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) about the use of harsh interrogation methods applied on Guantánamo prisoners. The memo prepared for CITF commander Brittain Mallow appears to have been drafted for September 2002, and identifies "unacceptable methods" involving "threats," "discomfort," and "sensory deprivation," while also providing guidance to CITF agents on permissible interrogation methods for use on detainees. The memo suggests that CITF expressed disapproval of abusive methods used at Guantánamo as far back as September 2002. In December 2002, Mallow instructed his unit not to participate in "any questionable" interrogation techniques at the facility.

To access the rest of the report and the original documents

KCRW: The Beijing Olympics Put a Spotlight on Human Rights in China

To the Point (KCRW)
Host: Warren Olney

Will Violent Protests in Tibet Derail China's Olympic Games?
Host Lawrence O'Donnell

The German chancellor has decided to boycott the Beijing Olympics in protest of China's treatment of Tibet. The French president is considering the same. President Bush plans to attend the opening ceremonies, but has publicly expressed his concern about how harshly China has reacted to protests in Tibet. Guest host Lawrence O’Donnell explores how the protests will affect the Olympic Games as well as China's policy toward Tibet. Also, the final meeting between Presidents Bush and Putin, and how the Pentagon allowed a 19-year old Miami masseur to provide arms to Afghanistan.



America, China, Tibet and Double Standards

As China prepares to welcome the Olympic Games, world leaders are under increasing pressure protest China's treatment of Tibet. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Britain's Prince Charles are all boycotting the opening of the Beijing Olympics, and some American politicians want President Bush to do the same. Will public embarrassment of China help Tibetans? Will protests in Tibet derail the Olympics? Should world leaders boycott the Olympic Games in Beijing? Are western leaders applying double standards when it comes to human rights?

Guests:
John Ackerly: President, International Campaign for Tibet
James Lilley: Former US Ambassador to South Korea and China
Michael Chugani: Columnist, South China Morning Post
Doug Cassel: Director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights, Notre Dame

To Listen to the Episode and for more Resources



Also:

Amnesty International: China

UChannel: Will human rights have a sporting chance at the Beijing Olympics?

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Media Czech: Fun at the Creation Museum

(Reposting this because I needed a good example of a photo-essay)

Fun at the Creation Museum
by Media Czech

This Saturday, I made my much anticipated field trip to the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum, a $27 million monstrosity devoted to religious fanaticism, disguised as “science”.

Two of my heretical friends and I ventured an hour north up I-75 from Lexington, just short of Cincinnati, to discover a museum full of shocking idiocy and unintentional humor.

Early in the museum, the visitor is given advice on the proper mind frame to have for your visit: “Don’t think, just listen and believe”. As you can see in the picture below, Human Reason is the enemy and God’s Word is the hero. Descartes represents Human Reason, saying “I think, therefore I am”. But God tells us there no need to waste your beautiful mind, for God says “I am that I am”.



To Read the Rest of this photo-essay

M.S. Enkoji: Older students are hot new thing on California college campuses

Older students are hot new thing on California college campuses
By M.S. Enkoji
The Sacramento Bee

College acceptance letters aren't going out to only new high school graduates. More than ever, it's their parents waiting for that letter.

The number of California college students between the ages of 50 and 64 rose 61 percent between 1986 and 2006. Among people ages 40 to 49, enrollment increased 32 percent. Overall enrollment climbed 33 percent during the same two decades.

Like the wave of college students that washed into schools on the GI Bill after World War II, baby boomers could create a ripple of their own.

Often, baby boomers return to school for economic necessity. Some are single parents; others are raising their grandchildren.

But they also enroll because they choose new careers after years on the job, possibly less physically taxing ones.

"There are a heck of a lot of these people and they're going to be out there for a while," said Jim Blackburn, director of enrollment management services with the California State University system.

Some schools, particularly public and community colleges, already offer flexible hours, urban campuses and targeted services to accommodate nontraditional students.

"I need to get over that age thing," said Elizabeth Hall, 48, a Granite Bay mother of two and a new college student.

Hall scrambles from behind her office desk when students wander in for help on the American River College campus.

She'll give directions to another office. She answers questions about parking passes. Her main job is to help returning students who haven't been in school for a while, students like her.

She first attended the two-year Sacramento college in the early 1980s, before she married, had children, then found herself divorced and in need of a career.

When she returned to school in the spring 2007 semester, she worried about her studying skills and how she would fit in.

"I was afraid I would be treated like an old lady," she said.

When other students sought her as a team member for a group project, she relaxed.

"They found me as an asset," she said. "I just feel like part of the team. I love it. I really love it."

To Read the Rest of the Story

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Andres Cruz, editor at La Voz, on Lexington's Immigration Routes (5/15)

Come to Al's this Thursday to hear Andres Cruz, editor at La Voz,
speak on Lexington's Immigration Routes. Talk begins at 6:15. Future
talks below.

danny

Al's Bar Presents

Slightly North of Center
talks for and by the community
(This means You.)

Price of Admission: Caring

May 15: Andres Cruz on Lexington's Immigration Routes

May 22: Erik Reece on Lost Mountains and Just Societies

May 29: Patrick Smith and Shanna Sanders on Freddy vs. Jason
(Community and Place in Horror Movies)

June 5: Michael Marchman on Global Capitalism and Geographies of Resistance

*Unless otherwise noted, all talks begin at 6:15 on Thursday

**Al's Bar is located on the corner of Limestone and Sixth. For music
info, please visit Al's Bar on My Space

Monday, May 12, 2008

Thinking Allowed: Superheroes

SUPERHEROES
Host: Laurie Taylor
Thinking Allowed (BBC)



General fascination with the idea of a superhero is extraordinarily enduring. Superman, Batman and Spider-Man have survived translations from the comic page into a range of media and have somehow been able to adapt to social circumstances quite different to those which surrounded their original creation.

Laurie Taylor talks to cultural commentator Roz Kaveney about her study entitled Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films; They are joined by Kim Newman, author of Cat People and Apocalypse Movies to discuss the enduring appeal of Superheroes.



To Listen to the Episode