Stories We Want to Believe

I cannot say that I was initially suspicious of the story that accompanied this picture.  I was more interested.  I first saw a Facebook link to this story which is posted at countercurrentnews.com and wanted to know more about it.  It is both more and less than it seems.

I started following the story of the Chibok school girls at the same time as the rest of the world: a month after the kidnapping took place in mid-April.  I may have followed it more closely because I was a high school principal.  I may have followed it more closely because I was aghast at the way people with disparate interests managed to shoehorn the details into their own narratives.  I wrote in this space about the parallel callousness of Boko Haram, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and President Jonathan's political opponents, all of whom seemed much less concerned with the girls themselves than with the political points they could score over the story.

Throughout the months, including October when the Nigerian Army bizarrely announced that the girls would be released the next day, I have been looking at accounts in the Nigerian press.  The parents of the girls have not moved on, the women who protest daily in Lagos have not moved on, and so -- unlike the rest of the world media -- the Nigerian press has not moved on.  Boko Haram has continued with horrifying attacks on education, including suicide bombings of a teacher's college in Kontagora and a school assembly in Potiskum.

That's why any sign of successful resistance caught my attention, especially one with a photo like this, with its overtones of female empowerment, reversing the lack of power implied by the kidnapping of several hundred teenaged girls.  So, as I say, I read the story closely for more details, not because I didn't want to believe it.

My first problem was that I couldn't get more information.  The story opens with the phrase "Several Nigerian media outlets have been reporting."  But there was no hyperlink and no citation.  I wanted to see what they have been reporting, but I couldn't.  It was only later that I noticed the weird claims, beginning in the third sentence, about "talismans" that had successfully disarmed the Boko Haram gang members.

I Googled the story, but found the usual verbatim repetitions on other websites.  I was initially completely unable to find any reference to it in the Nigerian press, which was strange considering that these US and British websites supposedly got it from "reports" on "Nigerian media outlets."

Then it occurred to me to do a reverse image search on the picture.  I cannot claim to have been fully conscious that the photo was driving the story.  It was more of an intuitive move.  But things immediately got stranger.  First, I found the late December stories I had already seen, reporting the women's successful armed resistance to Boko Haram as "recent."  Then, I started finding references to this same resistance -- with the same photo -- back in mid-May, at the time of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign on Twitter.  Those stories tended to have much more on magic spells and amulets.  Some had other agendas.  I read one story which claimed that Michelle Obama had initiated (instead of participated in) the hashtag campaign.  That writer argued that the Obamas want to take away our guns and replace them with hashtags.  He implied that leaving us at the mercy of Boko Haram and the US government is much the same.

I finally found the blog of Farooq Kperogi, an assistant professor of journalism in Atlanta who wrote at length about the scandalously bad reporting on the Chibok girls, especially in the Nigerian tabloids.  You can find that article here.  Professor Kperogi identifies the source of the photo as a Times of London article on militias in Mali resisting Tuareg rebels. Yes, that is 1600 road miles (and a 36-hour drive) away.  Yes, there is an entire third country between Nigeria and Mali.  So I sympathize with Professor Kperogi about the sorry state of tabloid journalism in Nigeria.  But I also have to wonder about "news" websites like Counter Current with prominently posted disclaimers that they are "not responsible for inaccuracies" and that neither owners, management, editors or writers are responsible for errors.

But  I am not that interested in fake news or its purveyors.  I am much more interested in our propensity for accepting it, especially when it fits with what we want to believe.  It is all too easy for me to shake my head in dismay at the credulous ways of people who disagree with me, and at how they accept patently ridiculous stories as gospel.  Every one of you can point to multiple examples.  But how are we to discover our own credulity?  That may be the first step to helping other people overcome theirs.

Extrajudicial Murder

I have been reading a book called Grassroots Garveyism about the Black nationalist movement in the American South in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.  This morning I was reading about the Elaine, Arkansas massacres of October 1919.  Black sharecroppers had been cheated of their payments for the cotton crop as a matter of routine, but that year the (shorted) payments were also held up for months while the white minority "planters" spent time "calculating" what they wanted to owe.  The Black farmers met at a local church to discuss their options, including the possibilities of forming a union or filing a class action lawsuit.

In the Arkansas Delta, and throughout the Black Belt South, whites were very conscious of how few they were compared to African Americans and they routinely employed terror along with voter suppression to maintain their power. Phillips County is still 63% African American today.  In 1919 it was 74%.  Understanding the dangers, the people meeting in the church set out armed pickets.  A white deputy sheriff and a railroad detective found the meeting and engaged in a shootout with the guards.

What followed was a days-long massacre.  A "sheriff's posse", the Arkansas National Guard, and US Army regulars killed at least 200 (and possibly four times that number) Black people in the county.  The soldiers arrested another 285.  Sham trials, only minutes long, sentenced more people to death and to long prison sentences.

We have recently seen how the St. Louis County prosecutor transformed what was supposed to be a grand jury investigation of Michael Brown's murder by a police officer into a trial of Michael Brown for his own murder with the DA acting as Police Officer Wilson's attorney and nobody speaking for Michael Brown.  But we also saw how the press tried Michael Brown in the court of public opinion.  They chose pictures of him that showed him throwing up hand signs.  They aired video of him in an altercation at a convenience store that Officer Wilson could not have known about.  When you hear people make statements like "That boy was no angel," then you know that the campaign of press vilification worked.  It is as if his extrajudicial murder was somehow justified.

We also saw how the press preferred to cover fires in Ferguson to protests against the abuse of process that has allowed Officer Wilson to walk free.  I am quite certain that at least two of those fires were not set by Black residents of Ferguson or by protestors supporting them.  The fire at Michael Brown, Sr's church was clearly set by white supremacists.  One of the auto parts stores was set afire by some kind of uniformed paramilitary far from any protestors, too, as documented by a YouTube video of the fire.  But what is more important is that TV news prefers to cover night time fires and that this is the story they are telling us about the aftermath of the grand jury decision.

This morning I awoke to find that two members of the New Black Panthers were arrested for plotting to murder the DA and to blow up the Gateway Arch.  I don't know whether the charges are true.  What I do know is that Officer Wilson was exonerated for actually murdering Michael Brown.  And I also know that local authorities and their friends in the press are very good at telling white people stories about how scary these Black folks are, and why it is necessary to treat their communities as war zones.

Let's go back to 1919 for a moment.  How did  the press explain these massacres in a rural cotton county?  The headlines in the paper, after days of white mob violence read: "Negroes Plan to Kill All Whites."  That's right.  A discussion about organizing a union or a lawsuit  was transformed by the authorities and the editors into a mass murder plot!  And the actual mass murder -- of hundreds of Black people -- disappeared entirely from the news.

We Americans have short historical memories.  And the use of the word "lynching" has somehow been ruled to be hyperbole, regardless of how aptly it may describe what is going on.  But the parallels are clear.  Michael Brown was lynched by the police.  He was posthumously lynched by the prosecutor and the press.  And it may be that these charges against the New Black Panthers represent a continuation of that lynching.

¡NO a la impunidad — más que nunca!

About twenty years ago I heard Rigoberta Menchú Tum speak in person for the second time.  We had used a Scholastic Update magazine excerpt from the book I, Rigoberta Menchú for quite a few years with our social studies classes at John F. Kennedy High School.  She won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992. Then, in 1994, I began teaching at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School.  Instead of teaching five 40-minute classes a day, I got to teach two 135-minute classes (plus advisory).  So the following year, when we began a global-studies curriculum on human rights, I had my classes read the entire book instead of just a few selected pages.  She was a kind of hero for me, and she became that for many of my students reading her story.

That second speech I went to was at Synod House, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on Amsterdam Avenue at 111th Street.  She spoke mainly about the need for an international campaign against impunity, like the impunity with which the Guatemalan government was still attacking indigenous communities and activists for labor and human rights.  I was disappointed with this approach.  To me, at that time, it was sufficiently general in scope that it blurred some important particularities.  To me, it blurred the role of the US government, which had overthrown the elected government of Guatemala in 1953, replacing it with a series of increasingly violent military dictatorships.  It blurred the role of US corporations in financing these violent dictatorships as a means of protecting profits on their plantations.  And it blurred the role of racism against Native Mayan peoples which allowed their treatment as less than human.

That was a long time ago.  I still see the need to clearly identify and denounce imperialism and racism, but I also see the need to identify and denounce all kinds of systems and ideologies that subordinate the lives of individual people to the glittering promises of their "larger" goals.  It is over six months ago that the criminal gang calling itself "Boko Haram" kidnapped hundreds of high school girls in Chibok, Nigeria.  They have since then carried out more kidnappings and killings, including the bombing of a teacher's college in Kontagora.  They have done all this with impunity, in part because the government of President Goodluck Jonathan seems only to be able to imagine these attacks in terms of his own re-election.  He first attacked the reports of the Chibok kidnapping as the work of his political opponents.  Then he attacked the demonstrators demanding the girls' return as agents of his political opponents.  He only belatedly acknowledged that the kidnappings had, in fact, taken place!  Impunity in these cases has been a result of both Boko Haram and the government treating regular people as disposable.

The police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri this summer was committed with impunity.  The police were surprised initially that the case got traction in social media and then in mass media.  That's why they scrambled around with a series of unsustainable lies, like the story that police officer Darren Wilson had suffered a fractured orbital socket at the hands of Michael Brown.  But the unprecedented grand jury hearing, in which the district attorney submitted mounds of exculpatory evidence (including Wilson's own testimony) turned the indictment process into a trial of the victim himself, without -- of course -- any cross examination, because the DA was acting as if he were Wilson's attorney, instead of speaking for the dead.  I keep hearing this described as the rule of law.  It may be the rule of a vicious order but the only law demonstrated is that power corrupts.

The "disappearance" of 43 teacher's college students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico was committed with impunity.  Acting on orders from the local mayor, police opened fire on a bus carrying a football team, thinking it was the student teachers, killing three people.  They also fired on the students' bus, killing six and capturing the rest.  The police then turned their captives over to assassins from a narco cartel.

I can write about the Israeli murders of thousands of Gazans, about Massey Energy's murders of dozens of miners, about Russian troops masquerading as "rebels" shooting down a passenger airplane.  I can write about gang rapes by University of Virginia frat boys, or by gang members styling themselves an "Islamic State."  But I have come to believe that disregard for individual humans, along with the ability to act without fear of consequence is -- itself -- a particular kind of crime that we have to identify and denounce.

Efrain Ríos-Montt was "president" of Guatemala in 1982 and 1983.  What he presided over was mass murder, torture, rape and genocide.  He was eventually charged with these crimes, but won a seat in the Guatemalan Congress in 2007, giving him congressional immunity from prosecution.  In May 2013 he was convicted in Guatemalan court of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to seventy years.  In May 2014 that conviction was vacated by the Constitutional Court of Guatemala.  It is a reminder to me that impunity is not just a crime of the vicious sociopaths who commit the murders, rapes and tortures.  Impunity is a crime of the politicians and judges and police who collude to allow these people to walk away as if they had done nothing.  Impunity is a crime of the press that chooses not to report on these murders, rapes and tortures.  And if we know and do nothing, it is a crime of those of us who remain silent.

No Bad Deed Goes Unrewarded

Remember the debate a decade ago about privatizing Social Security?  During the Bush Administration there were REPEATED pushes to transform Social Security into an individual account system in which every working American could decide for themselves how to invest the money that was withheld from their check.  Wall Street was positively drooling over the massive influx of capital for them to take fees on.  One University of Chicago economist estimated the windfall to the brokerage houses at over $900 BILLION.   And that leaves aside their tendency to scam their own customers by advising them to buy securities that the houses themselves are dumping.

More important in some senses was the fact that lots of regular people were looking enviously at the stock market.  The Dow rose from about 10,900 when George Bush was sworn in to 14,600 in the fall of 2007.  Everyday working people wondered why only the rich were benefiting from this boom.  They wanted some, too.  As Rockefeller says to the Hell Hound in my short story "Who Could Have Foreseen It?":  "I sometimes think that the most painful thing in the world is watching other people make money that you think should be yours.”  One of the characteristic features of a market bubble is investing by people who have no experience in the market.  It is a sign that a crash is imminent.  And, of course, the arrival of these credulous newcomers is also an invitation to theft.  But even crafty traders fall victim to enthusiasms.  They convince themselves that there is no downside.  As Fritz exclaims in that same story, "The demand has no ceiling!  The price will never go down.”

Now the Social Security privatization debate had another feature, which was the drumbeat of calamity, the constant repetition of the warning that the system was "broken" (there's that phrase again) and that there would be no money left in ten years.  How interesting that we have stopped hearing all these dire predictions!  But a bigger reason why we stopped hearing about private accounts was what happened in the stock market AFTER October 2007.

As most people still remember, the market lost TWO-THIRDS of its value in 18 months.  Suddenly those private accounts looked a lot less enticing.  Many people who had tied up their supplementary retirement accounts in stocks lost those accounts completely. 

I often wonder, though, how long it will be before everybody forgets about the risks.  Working people may not have their jobs back.  Their income may have fallen.  But the Dow has gained 256% since it bottomed out five years ago.  People have short memories and I am certain that soon everybody will conclude -- again -- that we have entered a period of "permanent prosperity."

We do get occasional reminders of the costs of normalizing risky financial behavior.  The Chicago Tribune has been running a series about how the Chicago school system was induced to fund itself with a shady scheme that is now costing the children and parents $100,000,000.  That is not a typo. ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.

The CEO of Chicago schools ten years ago was our current US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, a person with NOT ONE MINUTE of teaching experience.  He brought in David Vitale as his Chief Administrative Officer.  Vitale's own teaching experience consisted of chairing the Chicago Board of Trade and running Bank One Corporation's Commercial Banking, Real Estate, Private Banking, Investment Management and Corporate Investments.  (Sarcasm. Poe's Law.)

It was Vitale who came up with the convoluted scheme which I will not detail.  Check out the Tribune's pieces http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/cpsbonds/ct-chicago-public-schools-bond-deals-met-20141107-story.html#page=1  Suffice it to say that Vitale was rewarded by being named President of the Chicago Board of Education.  And Arne Duncan is still Secretary of Education.  This, too, is part of the culture of impunity.

Weaponized Credulity

Democratic-leaning blogs and tweets this week have been jubilant about the findings of the latest investigation into the Benghazi affair. The facts themselves are simple.  As the Associated Press reported: 

"A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees."

The "left" (meaning pro-Democratic) response to this has been many versions of "we told you so" coupled with demands for apologies from both Republican politicians and Fox News.  There has been an accompanying gleeful observation that these apologies are not forthcoming and that the report was issued on a Friday afternoon, a traditional ploy for hiding news.  I think the truth is that the invented Benghazi "scandal" has already successfully lodged itself into the thinking of the people who want to believe the worst of either Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton (or both.)  These people are ready to believe the worst of Obama and Clinton, no matter how bizarre or farfetched.  There is simply no way to disprove their beliefs with fact.  They are credulous -- meaning willing to believe anything -- about the Democrats they demonize.

This campaign cycle we have heard Republican politicians publicly dismiss fact checking and admitting that the truth doesn't matter.  Way back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the term "truthiness" during the inaugural episode of "The Colbert Report."  He explained in a later interview,

"It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything."

But I am not so interested in pointing to how credulous others can be.  That's easy.  I am much more interested in recognizing my own credulity.  This week a satire post circulated claiming that Sarah Palin insisted on Sean Hannity's show that undocumented Mexicans be put on commandeered cruise ships and deported back across the Mexican Ocean.  When I first heard this I correctly assumed that it was a joke.  But a close and trusted confidant assured me that it was true, citing an exchange between Hannity and Palin in which Hannity gently corrected her but Palin insisted.  I wrongly believed that my friend had SEEN this exchange instead of merely reading it.

Another very close friend posted a link to the satire on Facebook (as truth) with the comment: "Can't make this up.  Holy crap."  And what did I do? I commented, in agreement, that I had been skeptical until I saw Hannity gently correct, etc. which I had not!  Despite my initial skepticism, I piled on with the false claim that I myself had seen the exchange because I believed somebody I trusted had!

This is weaponized credulity.  Poe's Law states that without a winking smiley or something, it is impossible to create a satire on the internet that cannot be mistaken for the real thing.  I will grant that there may be some difference between (on the one hand) satire that people accept as real and (on the other hand) intentional misstatements that become part of the general discourse.  But what they both point up for me is the incredibly fracturing of the fund of common knowledge.  In fact there appears no longer to be any "common knowledge."

Again, regarding the common knowledge of the Right,  I have been astonished to see repeated internet references to "welfare," meaning huge numbers of people who sit home watching TV and collecting checks from the rest of us.  This form of welfare has not existed since the Clinton Administration.  Instead, working people receive food and housing subsidies, which is a subject for a whole other post.  But how is it possible that EIGHTEEN YEARS after the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, "ended welfare as we know it" people still believe in the Reagan Era myth of the "welfare queen"?  And I say "myth" because even then it was based on political legerdemain characterizing a serial felon and identity thief as a typical ADC recipient.

But what about the common knowledge of the "Left?"  If we are getting our political facts from carefully crafted Facebook posts that are designed to become viral memes, and if we share those posts without checking, how are we different from our political antagonists whom we readily decry as gullible and unconcerned with truth?

I am much more interested to see people call themselves out for "truthiness" than to call out their opponents.  And not because I believe it will open the minds of our opponents, but because I believe we need to open our own first.

Playing in a Rigged Game

I am, in effect, thinking aloud here.  A week ago, after Andrew Cuomo won the New York gubernatorial election, and after Republicans swept Congress I started to think about where we can contest power in a game that isn't totally rigged.  In New York, we have a long history of so-called "third parties" cross-listing the candidates of the two major parties.  This year, Cuomo ran on the lines of the Democratic Party, the Working Families Party and the Women's Equality Party.  Four years ago his big win swept a Democratic majority even into the state Senate.  So he collaborated with a group of Democratic state senators who suddenly decided to caucus with the Republicans, giving them continued control of that house.  This year he eliminated that embarrassment by refusing to support Democratic candidates, while Republican Senate leader Dean Skelos reciprocated by refusing support to the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Rob Astorino.  This isn't about party, ideology or platform.  It isn't about working "across the aisle."  (I am so fed up with that hackneyed phrase.)  It is about two politicians collaborating to keep each other in power.

Then there was that big electoral sweep which gave the Republicans control of both houses of Congress.  Yes, they took over by winning the support of an impressive 19% of eligible voters!  I have to wonder what they are going to do with their legislative majorities: Vote to overturn health care for underserved people again?  Impeach Obama like they impeached Bill Clinton?  Pass a Constitutional amendment against abortion?

And I am ever mindful of what the Democrats did with their majorities in both houses of Congress back in 2008, which was nothing.  They didn't strengthen the NLRB.  They didn't pass immigration reform.  They didn't even pass health care reform.  They did jack shit.  Because they need an obstructionist GOP, just like Cuomo does, to rationalize their utter refusal to serve the needs of the people who elect them.  That is why all the fundraising emails I receive from the Democrats are filled with scary Koch Brothers stories: because they want my support despite their complete lack of interest in anything I believe is important.

Leaving aside the backwardness of our AFL-CIO it has been horribly difficult to organize the unorganized in this country because the NLRB does nothing.  The massive (and massively illegal) intrusion of Tennessee elected officials into the UAW's campaign at Volkswagen is a good example.  It just means that we are left to find other arenas for organization.

So where is the playing field on which we can actually accomplish something?

The New War of Each Against Each

In Spring 2007 we were preparing our first senior class at Global Enterprise High School for graduation.  We encouraged those students who were totally up with their credits and Regents to complete the last semester of English and Social Studies requirements with supervised internships or individual projects.  We got some interesting work, too.  One boy, now an elementary teacher in New Orleans, interned with the consulate of Antigua and Barbuda.  They loved him (honestly, everybody loves this kid) and he had the opportunity to travel for them to tourist-industry fairs and to meet their government ministers.  Another boy simply began pursuing his career goals as a magician and a booking agent for other magicians.  His presentation of his work was very professional, did not include illusions, and showed a lot of learning.  He is now deeply involved in the work of Magicians Without Borders.

Then there was M.  When he first began trying to map out a project for himself, he was passionate about mountain biking.  We spent a lot of time figuring out a challenge that would involve actual learning and fill his days.  After much metaphoric spinning of wheels, he switched his interest to tuning and racing import cars.  It was easier to imagine study and work with this topic, but not without amounts of capital that he did not have.  Around that time a friend of M's dad announced that he was starting a new business and would be happy to have M intern with him.  Since Global Enterprise was a business-themed school, with a four-year sequence in marketing, business planning, accounting, etc. this was not a bad idea.  The challenge, as with any internship, was to ensure that learning was primary.  The business was ice cream distribution and I imagined how easy it would be for M to simply be an unpaid helper on the truck, loading and unloading that ice cream.  His journals and our weekly meetings were going to have to be very directed.

In the event, the learning only required his attentive observation to what this business really entailed. It was another example of large corporations turning to independent contractors to do the work of their employees... or simply turning their employees into independent contractors.  M's mentor had purchased a route from Haagen Dazs.  He had purchased a used truck from Haagen Dasz.  He now had to insure that truck.  He had to maintain that truck.  He had to purchase health insurance for himself and his family.  He had to do his own accounting, billing and quarterly taxes.  It appeared to me that Haagen Dasz had simply offloaded all the costs of an employee while keeping the profits.  I had heard of this phenomenon, but it was really eye-opening to see it up close.  M's mentor started with the core idea of being his own boss, but as the months went by, he wondered whether he was.

I am reminded of this today because of the parallel successes and disruptions we are seeing in the rise of Airbnb and Uber.  These two companies exist without any significant fixed capital.  They are both still privately owned and so their market valuation is different than publicly-traded companies, but Airbnb is valued at $10 billion and Uber at $18 billion.  They are essentially apps for transferring costs to workers, but they can be imagined in many different ways, depending on the angle at which you look.

Airbnb is an app for matching people looking for a room with people who have a room.  Homeowners facing foreclosure have been able to keep their homes by renting rooms.  People in apartments in tourist destinations have been able to turn them into a supplementary source of income.  Travelers have been able to find less-expensive lodging with real people in real neighborhoods.  Like any good matching app, Airbnb can be a win-win for people who otherwise would never have been able to find each other.  For the hotel industry, Airbnb is a competitor that has found a way to operate without an inventory of rooms, without staff to maintain and clean those rooms, without security staff, without insurance and without licensing.  When an Airbnb lodger robs or trashes a home, all the cost is born by the "host."  The success of Airbnb eliminates the jobs associated with the lodging industry by putting all the work of cleaning and security on the "host."  I live in New York City.  I can certainly see the appeal of generating side income by having strangers in my house.  But I cannot see how the collapse of the hotel industry here would be good for the city.  And, honestly, rereading that previous sentence, I can see the appeal of side income, but I cannot see the appeal of strangers in my house.  It only emphasizes the fact that Airbnb would allow my employer to pay me less than a living wage because I can make up the difference by lodging strangers.

Uber represents the same phenomenon for public transportation.  It is an app matching people with cars with people needing rides.  Initially an improved mechanism for getting a car service (a non-yellow livery cab) to your location, it has expanded to any kind of car or driver.  A livery driver can use Uber to find fares without time-wasting (and gas-guzzling) cruising.  But anybody who owns a car can also supplement their income with Uber if they spend a few hours ferrying people around.  Again, for both the medallion taxi and livery industries, Uber is a competitor that has found a way to operate without investing in cars, insurance or maintenance, without licensing, and without employees.  But riders don't know who they are getting in with.  Drivers are on their own and discover that their conventional auto insurance will not cover them for anything that happens to them, their cars, or their Uber passengers while they are "working."  I think the possibility of supplementing own's income with Uber is just another way of elongating the work day and allowing my primary employer to underpay me.

The power of markets is in their ability to make things available.  I can go to a store and buy beans even though I don't know anybody who farms them.  I can buy a book online that nobody near me would have thought about stocking on their shelves.  Nowadays I can even generate startup capital for an art project on the internet.  But a free market in labor has always been another beast entirely.  It denies our humanity, reducing us to that single element that generates money.  It devalues our children and our elderly.  It drives our working people into poverty.  Even capitalists with vision recognize that paying market rates (meaning the lowest wages possible) means reducing the market for their products.  And most employers really don't want workers leaving at 9:45 am because they hear about another 10¢ an hour up the street.  Or suddenly demanding a new, higher rate in the middle of a harvest because otherwise the crop will spoil.  In fact, our capitalist class is very interested in normalizing employee relations where it benefits them.

The rise of Airbnb and Uber is a new phase in the war of each against each.  That is just a phrase for the radical individualism that denies any "we".  It denies our mutual responsibility to each other.  It would have fire fighters arrive at our homes with credit card scanners, unwilling to turn on the hydrants until our payment clears.  It would have us pay tolls every time we drive onto a highway, with a lower toll for a crowded lane and a higher toll for a freely-moving lane.  It would, as our newly-reelected governor said last week, break "one of the only remaining public monopolies:" in other words, do away with public schools.  Some people associate this crazy ideology with Ayn Rand, others with so-called "Austrian economics."  For some advocates it is mainly a belief system.  For others it represents a chance to cash in on the privatization of a public service.

But Airbnb and Uber represent something different than we have seen before.  Corrections Corporation of America profits from incarceration, but they actually have to build, maintain and guard their private prisons.  Cofiroute, SA profits from its variable congestion pricing on the private toll roads of Southern California, but they actually have to build and maintain those roads and install the electronic transponders for toll collection.  Airbnb and Uber don't have to build, own or maintain anything.  And they depend for their existence on us cannibalizing the parts of our private lives: our homes and our cars.  We have heard anecdotes from other countries of people selling organs to buy iPhones, and of families selling one child to raise enough money to care for their others.  The internet market model could systematize and regularize these practices.  Somewhere, right now, somebody with more entrepreneurial imagination than I possess is concocting a scheme for the next company that will offer me the opportunity to surrender some part of me for money.  And they will make enough money with this that they can also privatize our political process.  Oh, wait.  That has already happened.

Extremely Perverse Incentives

In the 1942 film "Casablanca", Captain Renault closes up Rick's Cafe.  "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" he exclaims as the croupier hands him his winnings.  Today, after years of excessive testing and numerical targets that actually widen the "achievement gap" they are supposed to close, we have no more right to be shocked by the perverse incentives of so-called "data-driven decision-making" in schools than Renault had to hypocritically hyperventilate at finding gambling in Rick's.

Beverly Hall was already a star when she was made superintendent of Atlanta schools in 1999.  She had been head of NY high schools under Chancellor Ray Cortines, and then Newark Superintendent after the State of New Jersey took over those schools.  She was named Superintendent of the Year in 2009 before the whole thing came crashing down in a massive cheating scandal.  People were "shocked, shocked" to discover that teachers and principals faced with enormous pressures to produce score increases might find alternate means of producing those results.  Superintendent Hall was fired and indicted.

Reform superstar Michelle Rhee has a similar scandal in her past.  She still pretends to be "shocked, shocked" by the revelation that her intense insistence on test score improvement might have led to cheating by teachers and principals.  But investigators with subpoena powers discovered a memo to her from an outside consultant she hired to look into cheating.  That consultant was clear that this wasn't about kids copying: "191 teachers representing 70 schools."  And the report points to principals, too: "Could the erasures in some cases have been done by someone other than the students and the teachers?"  But Michelle Rhee is a golden child with the corporate reformers.  She had already been removed -- by a new mayor, which enhanced her "non-political" credentials -- and there has, to date, been no indictment.  I will not dwell on the most obvious difference between Michelle Rhee and Beverly Hall.

These perverse incentives act at all levels.  When I was a high school principal in the Bronx, two of my colleagues in Brooklyn informed me that they had mandated a 90% passing rate for all classes.  I said I thought that was a reasonable target.  They each gave me a look, and then one stressed that this was no target, it was a mandate.  I asked what would happen if there were more than 10% with excessive absences, or inadequate work.  I wondered how the cooperative kids would react when they discovered that their classmates who were blowing off classwork and homework received passing grades.  I asked what would be the eventual effect on Regents' scores.  They told me not to worry.  They were going to improve their data by increasing the proportion of kids receiving enough credits to be promoted to the next grade.  That is data-driven decision-making, too.

We see it in fields other than education.  The entire Enron scandal came from accountants who were driven to make the balance sheets look more attractive to investors.  The "friendly-fire" shooting of NFL linebacker Pat Tilman by his fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan was finally due to officers who had to check off a certain number of villages entered by their men, regardless of whether that meant towing a broken Humvee through a rocky path after discussing their itinerary in front of Taliban sympathizers!

But there are still times when I am "shocked, shocked."  Today's BBC world news revealed that the Chinese government is trying to get its citizens to stop burying their dead and to cremate them instead.  This means setting quotas for cremations that local Party functionaries have to meet.  So (I suppose I should insert an "of course" but this case beggars my imagination) some local officials have contracted with grave robbers!  The thieves dig up corpses from cemeteries in other districts and these corpses can be cremated in order to meet the quotas.  I would call these extremely perverse incentives.

Except.  Except that, as grisly as this case is, I don't think that abusing the dead is worse than abusing our children.  I spoke to a friend today who has a young son getting ready to start kindergarten.  They live two blocks from a well-regarded public school.  He could have the autonomy to get to school and have friends in the neighborhood.  But she is a public school teacher herself.  She sees herself driven to test prep instead of teaching.  She sees herself driving kids instead of allowing them to develop intellectually.  And she is starting to think that in the current climate of data-driven decision-making, both public and charter schools are becoming torture chambers for kids.  Desecrating graves to meet cremation quotas may be extremely perverse.  But so is the constant testing and preparation for testing that we do to our children, who are -- after all -- still alive.

Land Dispossession

Land dispossession is a recurring theme in the short stories making up Stones from the Creek.  Alchesay keeps the Apache land together by insisting that logging and cattle ranching make more sense than farming on the White Mountain reservation.  Creighton Foraker actively seeks to dispossess the Mexican farmers of New Mexico and is opposed by the Herrera brothers.  Smedley Butler finds himself working for local banana planters who want to seize Garífuna lands for plantations.  And the Creek Indians struggle to find a way around the Dawes Commission's mandate to privatize all the land in Indian Territory.

For me, though, one of the most painful tales of dispossession is in the second Mingo Sanders story, "Scars," which finds him imprisoned and leased to work mining phosphates in the South Carolina Low Country.  I wrote:

Hundreds of mostly young, Black men stood up to their chests in cold water, digging the valuable phosphates from under the soil for the Edisto Phosphate Company, which leased the land from the state.  Some of the prisoners were actually children of the land’s former owners, incarcerated and removing the topsoil of their parents’ own land in order to mine the precious mineral beneath. (Emphasis added for this posting.)

 I am quite certain that I had already thought about this tragic irony before I visited Viet Nam in March 2009.  But on our third day of visits to rural communes in the Red River Delta south of Hanoi I saw this same thing myself.  My journal entry for March 11 tells the story:

Today's commune was crowded with people who were given this visit as a sop to accommodate their anger and frustration.  They are being displaced from their paddies to make the land available for cement quarrying.  Many are breaking stones all day for pennies instead of raising rice, etc.  It is now one of the poorest communes in the country.

 Tam spoke to a woman who had walked 15 km and arrived at 6 am and wasn't getting an appointment.  Her son left the district to get a job (which he hasn't -- he is probably living in an alley somewhere.)  She moved to the mountain where she really doesn't know how to make a living.  The district health officer said they are seeing profound health and nutrition issues as a result.

He also said many people have moved to the mountains and are trying every crop available.  But they don't really know about raising crops in this unfamiliar environment.  They are trying whatever they can, but in order to buy rice, which is, after all the only real food.  This year the experiment with potatoes failed and the government had to distribute rice.

 I remember hearing these stories from Tam and thinking immediately of convict laborers in South Carolina forced to dig underneath their own families' soil to mine phosphate for fertilizing other families' soil elsewhere.  (And here I must thank Tam again.  Had it not been for his empathy in questioning the people visiting our medical mission, and had it not been for his generosity in sharing the stories he heard with me, I would have been standing around doing crowd control and completely missing everything that was in front of my face.)

Now the cement industry of Viet Nam is privately owned but subordinate to the "Socialist" government which has decided that the rich limestone resources of the country are now a greater asset than one commune's rice, especially since Viet Nam is the world's second largest rice exporter.  So all these people can be dispossessed in the name of a larger "socialist" good.

South Carolina, on its face, looks like a totally different story.  An explicitly racist regime dispossessed Black landowners to deny them any home, security or power.  The convict lease system ensured a continuing supply of low-cost labor to white "planters" and industrialists alike.

So if the circumstances appear different, why are the outcomes identical?  I will just say -- again -- that we have to stop looking at "allies" and "enemies", "left" and "right", and start by assessing effects on regular people.

 

The Vergara Decision and Teacher Tenure

The Vergara decision yesterday made teacher tenure unconstitutional in California.  The teacher feeds I subscribe to on Twitter are howling about it... and howling about Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's enthusiastic response.  But it reminds me that tenure is not well understood outside teacher circles.  It sounds like some bizarre union work rule designed to protect the jobs of coal shovelers on diesel locomotives.  It sounds as though a teacher who sneaks through the first few years of employment can then have a free ride in perpetuity.  Teacher tenure sounds to outsiders like what the plaintiffs in Vergara claim it is: a way to protect grossly incompetent teachers at the expense of their students.

First it is best to say that teachers with tenure are not invulnerable.  As a New York City public high school principal I could (and did) fire and take the licenses of tenured teachers who weren't doing their jobs or who were otherwise hurting kids.  It took a little longer than I liked, but that is often the nature of due process.  Hell, it took me longer than I liked to fire untenured teachers.

But as you read this you should be wondering to yourself: "Why trust this guy about who should and should not be teaching our kids?  He says they're incompetent; why should I believe him?"

I know of teachers who have been falsely accused of heinous offenses because their principals didn't like them.  And I mean, just personally didn't like them.  There are principals who have thrown away any notion of fairness.  Teachers who speak up against that get accused of incompetence, too.

But look at the current larger political climate.  New York -- like many other states -- has adopted commercial tests as a way of evaluating teacher work.  It's a big profit center for the publishing companies and there have already been financial scandals and grotesque incompetence in both writing and grading the exams.  More importantly, the entire enterprise has been proven incapable of successfully identifying weak and strong teachers.  Results fluctuate wildly from year to year.  Outstanding teachers are marked as failing.  The tests simply fail to do what they purport to.  And so tenure is a protection from politicians introducing a statistically invalid system to fire teachers.

Then there is evolution.  And climate change.  A science teacher who actually teaches science (as opposed to something cooked up by an oil industry lobbyist) needs tenure to protect their students from the junk "knowledge" that circulates in political circles.

Good principals can always get bad teachers out.  Tenure protects good teachers from craven politicians and from corrupt principals.  So why the big push against tenure now?

Well, as I noted at the outset, tenure doesn't sound right to outsiders, so it is a weak spot in the defenses of our system of public education.  Getting rid of tenure is also a way to get rid of the best and most experienced teachers, career teachers, in favor of temps who come and go every two years.  Newbies without tenure certainly cost less.  But would you pick all rookies for your own child?  People who are going on to their "real" careers just as they are beginning to gather clues about how to do the job?

Experienced tenured teachers are the ones who understand how to teach.  They are also strong advocated for our system of public education.  So if you are a Koch brother, or an Eli Broad, or a Michael Bloomberg or a Rupert Murdoch... in other words if you eliminate all public schools and replace them with something you can profit from, then you need to FIRE all those experienced teachers.  They're already doing it in Philly and Chicago.  New Orleans just closed its last public schools.  Getting rid of tenure is how you fire your GOOD teachers, not your bad ones.  It's how you privatize schools.  It's how you destroy our democracy.

Fifty-Degree Morning

In January I said that there was nothing like a windy, five-degree morning to make a still, ten-degree morning feel tropical by comparison.  Today, after two sunny, eighty-five degree days that reduced me to torpor, I really enjoyed a cloudy, fifty-degree morning.

My parents are 86 and 87.  They are falling a lot.  Right now my dad is recovering from a broken shoulder and my mom is recovering from a broken pelvis.  Right now they require 24 help in the house.  We had to encourage my mom to recognize the increasingly untenable situation they are in, living in a split-level home: stairs to the bedroom, stairs to the front-door, no shopping within walking distance.  Negotiating those stairs with the assistance of a home health care aide puts those aides in physical jeopardy.

So yesterday my mom calls me to say they will be moving to an assisted-living facility sooner rather than later.  And -- apparently because I am not steeling myself to make the argument that this is a necessary change -- this hits me really hard.  I don't really mind them giving up the house.  True, I barely remember any other place (they moved there when I was four) but they rearranged everything long ago.  The bedroom my brother and I shared no longer exists; it is an office for my parents' desks and computers.  My sister's bedroom had its walls knocked out; it is a loft for the living room.  Our playroom? The front two-thirds are an entryway, with the door to the house where the window used to be; the back third is part of the utility room, along with the original utility room and part of the original garage.

No, it's not the house.  It is my parents themselves.  For several years I have had to look closely to actually see their age and frailty instead of just habitually seeing the robust strength of their former selves.  But this?  This inability to even remain in their own house?  That is something new and very frightening.

It frightens me that I will have to visit them in some other kind of place.  It frightens me that their strength may be irrevocably past.  It frightens me that my grandson will only ever know them as elderly.  And, truthfully, it frightens me that this is my future, too.  How will I be able to live out of a vehicle if it is hard for me to stand, unsafe for me to drive, dangerous for me to walk?  Who will care for me?

Today is cloudy and still (1:30 pm) in the fifties, so my optimism is back and the world feels better.  But I need to be strong when it's in the nineties, too.  I am still capable in MY sixties.  Who can say what MY eighties and nineties will bring?

"Hashtag Activism"

People describe "hashtag activism" as cheap.  And, yes, when there is the ability to do more, and all you do is express your sentiments on Twitter, that can be construed as cheap.  But this last week that "hashtag activism" has brought the attention of the world to the 200+ girls from Chibok Government Secondary School who were kidnapped en masse by Boko Haram.  The Federal Government of Nigeria was choosing to ignore this, or to pretend that it had never happened, or to claim that they had already freed the girls.  The world's media outlets were interested in Ukraine and the LA Clippers and a deadbeat rancher in Nevada.

The #BringBackOurGirls campaign was successful first in bringing the kidnapping to the attention of all Nigeria and then to the rest of the world.  Goodluck Jonathan stopped "investigating" after three weeks.  Patience Jonathan stopped arresting the girls' advocates in the capital.  Who knows?  Perhaps the news media might pool their resources and send an actual reporter to Maiduguri in Borno State, or even to Chibok itself, where the kidnapping took place.

There are several ways to view all this, but I want to address two.  In one view, the FGN and Boko Haram are adversaries.  They exist at opposite ends of an axis on which the Federal Government of Nigeria sees itself as the defender of order and sees Boko Haram as a force for chaos and lawlessness.  Boko Haram apparently see themselves as defenders of northern culture and the FGN as a vicious occupier.  In this view, everybody who gets in between the two deserves to be chewed up and destroyed, because they should have chosen the "right" side... "right" being defined by Boko Haram and the FGN.

There is another view.  In this second view, both Boko Haram and President Goodluck Jonathan are forces of callousness and inhumanity.  They regard the lives of individual humans and their families as a matter of less import than some "big" question, like "who gets to rule?"  There are people supporting #BringBackOurGirls who are in this camp as well.  They view the protests as an opportunity to attack the Jonathans and advance their own political careers.  When Patience and Goodluck accuse the movement of this, they are seeing their own self interest, but they are also accurately seeing some of their opponents.  The problem is, they are so lost in this way of seeing the world that they will not (and maybe can not) see the majority of the Nigerian protesters.

Because the other end of this second axis is people.  First, the girls who have been enduring the unimaginable for over three weeks for the crime of wanting to take their exams and go on to university and -- honestly -- for the crime of being female.  Then, the families and friends of these girls.  Again, I retreat from trying to imagine what they must be going through.  And finally, the people of Nigeria and the world who are outraged by both the kidnapping and the delays by the military in going to bring back the girls.

Today I found another group who have chosen to join the BK/Jonathan camp.  They are chatterers on the cable news channels who want to make political hay, not out of the crisis, but out of the response, out of so-called "hashtag activism."  Instead of trying to get actual news out of Nigeria, they want to sit in their studios and denounce people sitting at home and publicizing the kidnapping.

It is now three years since my last Global Enterprise freshmen graduated.  I told them at their commencement to beware any "big ideas" that ignore their impact on actual individual people.  I was speaking then about the Bloomberg "reforms" that had doctored data to make GEA look like a mediocre school, then declare it a failing school and move to close it.  I told them that there is a wolf right outside that feeds on doubt and hatred and greed, and that the wolf is always hungry.  But I told them the wolf is not the only one there, that there is also our love and our care and our support for each other.  In our moments of doubt, we have to reach out for the one and not for the other.

#BringBackOurGirls

Orioles

Today the orioles appeared to me.  Last year I spent all of March and April wondering where they were.  In May they appeared one day everywhere I looked, and I realized that they simply hadn't returned from Central America yet.  This year I didn't start worrying about my failure to see any until last week.  My son-in-law saw some this weekend in Brooklyn.  I hope I showed him that I was excited.  I am certain I revealed my envy.

We were on Hunter Island in Pelham Bay Park, way up on the northwest corner near the peninsula that I think of as blueberry island.  There were three of them, way up high in the oaks, and they were hopping from branch to branch and dancing in the air.  I stood watching them and appreciating this blessing for a good long time.  Prophet eventually got bored and signaled his desire to move on.

Baltimore Orioles are by no means rare.  But my sightings of them seem to be.  They are not especially showy or grand, but they make me very happy.  Smaller than robins, they have similar markings except that their red is much more vivid.  They make me really happy.  Today I was reminded again that I have to appreciate everything that comes my way instead of looking for things -- like orioles -- that really amaze me.

On the west side of Hunter Island is a path through a marsh to a rocky point that was a smaller island before the construction of Orchard Beach shut down the tidal flushing.  I think of it as Strawberry Island because I used to go there to pick wild strawberries, starting when I was in my late twenties.  I gathered so many that I made strawberry corn bread.  Maya and I went there every June when she was small.  I read her a picture book (which is on my shelf above me now) called The First Strawberries.  I tracked down my own copy of Roger Williams's (founder of Rhode Island) A Key into the Language of America largely because of his observations about strawberries, including a quote from Dr. William Butler: "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did."  One of our best trips out there was with Maya's grade school friends, the twins Makeda and Samori.

Prophet and I walked out to the edge of Strawberry Island and I looked at the sad remains of the strawberry patch, overgrown with briars and poison ivy, few strawberry plants visible.  Then I heard a bird call, looked up, and saw another oriole!  I had a lot of years enjoying those little wild strawberries.  Why am I bemoaning their loss when I have a smiling GSD at my side who gives me a reason for a long walk in the woods every day!

Hammering home that point is a fallen oak further down the west side of Hunter Island.  It used to tower over the marsh right next to the trail.  Maya and I sat on a rock near it with sketch books more than once to try and convey it.  I got a pretty good drawing once, which I should still have somewhere in the house.  I can miss that tree, just like I miss sitting and drawing it with my eight-year old daughter.  But that daughter is 32 now, and a mother.  I am a grandpa and retired from the schools.  And that oak is lying on its side in a marsh.

It is hard work for me to remember to appreciate my blessings.  Occasionally I am struck dumb by that realization and then the old glass-half-empty habits return.  At least I am no longer angry at myself for this.

#BringBackOurGirls

It is now three weeks since a terror gang that opposes education broke into a girls school Borno State, Chibok Government Secondary School, and kidnapped over 250 students.  The school had been closed because of attacks by "Boko Haram," but it was reopened for the girls to take their Senior School Certificate Exams, and despite the dangers, these girls showed up because they want to go on to university.  Most of them are still missing.  The international press seems more interested in Russia's machinations in Ukraine and the comic stylings of President Obama at the White House Press gala.

This is a time when a social media campaign that only requires of its participants that they retweet and share postings may actually make sense.  How are people even supposed to know what's going on when the racist ravings of NBA owners and deadbeat Nevada ranchers take precedence in the news?

But I am not choosing to write about the horrors of misogyny or of fundamentalism here.  I am, instead, wondering why it took me two weeks to get agitated about this story.  The entire outrage here is a world that allowed this horror to take place and then did not respond to it.  That is precisely what I did.  I chose to believe that the Nigerian military would get right on this.  I didn't see the need for 24/7 reporting on an absence of news, a la Malaysian Air Flight 370.  It wasn't some other person who knew about this for two weeks without totally freaking out.  It was me.

In the Nigerian press I have read recent stories that US Secretary of State John Kerry has promised our help in finding the girls.  I have seen nothing similar in the US press; only assurances by Kerry that we will continue training the FGN army in counter-insurgency tactics.  When I read the stories in the Nigerian press through to the bottom, I find the same quotes from Kerry, but apparently with a different interpretation.

In the US press I read that the Nigerian first lady, Madame Patience Jonathan is promising to go to Borno herself to coordinate the search for the girls.  In the Nigerian press I read that she accused the girls' mothers of being Boko Haram and ordered two of them arrested.

Last Friday, almost three weeks after the kidnappings, I read that FGN President Goodluck Jonathan was about to "investigate" them, despite the "lack of cooperation" by parents.  Today I read that he is going to find the girls.

All of this is unconscionable, but so is my delayed reaction.  Two years ago, when she was 12, Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head, pointblank, while on her way to school in the Swat district of Pakistan.  The Taliban also poisoned 150 girls at their school in Takhar Province, Afghanistan.  I have not spoken out about these horrors.  Now I am.  But I cannot get exercised about the silence or ignorance of others when it took me two weeks to start worrying about this.  I have no excuse.

The New York Times's "Misunderstanding" of Corporate Education Reform

Two months ago the New York Times published a feature story reporting (with apparent fright) growing opposition to education reform in Democratic states.  At the time I derided this as the Times's version of "late-breaking news" because this development has been growing for a couple of years at least.  I should clarify that by "education reform" I mean the current variety, which has been conceived and funded by billionaires like Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Eli Broad and Rupert Murdoch.  Its central tenets seem to be endless high-stakes commercial testing, the final destruction of developing kids' curiosity in favor of test prep, the privatization of schools through the use of charters, destruction of teacher unions, and the replacement of teachers themselves with low-cost (and ill-trained) temps through programs like Teach for America.

Who could possibly oppose such noble aims?  The Murdoch-owned New York Post describes this program, with its implicit war of all against all, as "the civil rights movement of the 21st Century."  They even had the colossal hubris to describe a big rally in Albany by charter schools as the equivalent of the Selma March.  We are supposed to forget that Alabama Governor George Wallace violently opposed (literally) the Selma March; he did not speak alongside Martin Luther King in favor of voting rights as Andrew Cuomo spoke in favor of charter schools alongside Eva Moskowitz at the Albany, New York rally.  We are supposed to forget that the Alabama State Police and sheriff's posse viciously attacked the Selma marchers with truncheons and knotted ropes; they did not protect them as the New York State Police did the Eva Moskowitz rallygoers.  And we are supposed to forget that the Selma marchers knew they were risking their lives by supporting voting rights.  The original purpose of the march was to carry the murdered corpse of Jimmie Lee Jackson's to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery.  Eva Moskowitz's supporters were given paid bus rides to Albany, the children were their in lieu of school attendance, the teachers were ordered to be present.

The Times has not engaged in such bizarre fabrications.  What the Times has done is probably more insidious.  It has played along with Arne Duncan's claims that the test refusals are by middle-class parents who choose to opt their children out of an unpleasant experience, making the resistance analogous to parents who refuse vaccination of their children.  They have failed utterly to report on the fact that teachers are not allowed to see itemized breakdowns of their students' results, which alone makes assessment worthwhile.  They have failed to report that these tests are treated as trade secrets.  They have failed to report on the children who used to love school and now hate it.  They have even avoided discussing some of the stranger test questions, like the talking eggplant, which came out because the kids didn't understand that they were bound by a gag order.

The Times has avoided discussing the replacement of experienced teachers with the five-week wonders of Teach for America in a number of cities, especially Chicago, New Orleans and Newark.  Instead it discusses the enthusiasm of the Corps Members and the challenges they face.  That is all true, but it is easier for a Times editor to identify with those young temps than it is with the parents of kids who never get an experienced teacher.  If TFA is so great, why don't the parents at Horace Mann and Trinity beg for them to teach their kids?

The Times has reported -- slowly and belatedly -- on the fact that charter schools don't get better overall results than public schools.  But they have resisted reporting on the way many charters cheat on their lotteries.  They have resisted reporting on the large number of children, especially boys, who are forced out of the charters.  And they have avoided altogether reporting on the horror that is "zero tolerance" or "no excuses":  children suspended for slouching, for looking around the room, for failing to keep a silent and perfect line in the halls.

Opposition to all this comes from both left and right.  Some of it is ideologically motivated, or narrowly political: Obama is for this so I am opposed.  But most of the opposition has to do with these three simple ideas:

1. Children deserve to learn, explore and create.
2. Children deserve teachers who are experienced, trained and committed.
3. Our communities deserve public education.

The New York Times pretends that none of this exists.  The Times pretends that opponents of corporate reform don't care about poor kids.  The Times wants to portray this opposition as a movement of the lunatic right, with maybe some union hacks who want to protect their jobs.

The Times is not confused.  The Times is engaging in a big propaganda job.  The Times Corporation is allied with the other media giants like Pearson Education and Murdoch's News Corporation who stand to make gigantic profits out of this "reform".  The Times lies.

Vandalizing the berms that protect your home from the sea

Since Prophet and I started walking together I have been thinking a lot about shared space.  I really enjoy letting him walk off leash.  There should be a name for this activity, or for the people who engage in it.  Off-leash walkers?  It is legal now in New York City, in certain parks and at certain hours.  The dogs get in fewer fights, because they have the physical space to negotiate their own relationships instead of being confined to a six-foot radius around their owner.  Dog bites of people are down, too.  And since it brings dogs and their owners into those parks at off-hours, other people, with less wholesome interests in the isolation of the park find less isolation there.  Am I being too obscure?

But we still share those parks with people who have every right not to be disturbed by dogs.  There are solitary walkers.  People sit and meditate.  Artists set up in the early morning to take advantage of the quiet and the light.  Many of those people don't like dogs, so when I see a person without an accompanying dog I immediately put Prophet on leash.  Many of my fellow dog walkers don't.  Now I will readily admit that a full-sized German Shepherd can be more intimidating than a Yorkie to somebody who isn't a dog lover, but I think there should be a recognition of shared space.  Instead, I frequently hear from my dog-walking associates that this is "our time" in the park and people should stay out if they don't like dogs.

These are the same people who feel that they are not obligated to observe New York's poop-scoop law in wooded areas, that dog poop is natural.  When this winter's snows were melting the trails along the Hudson became disgusting with their "natural" contributions.  Some don't even license their dogs, and when the police (very occasionally) come around checking for dog licenses they get irate, wondering why the cops aren't chasing "real" criminals.  Which is, in part, my point: we tend to think that everything we do is benign.

The flip side of this is that other park users can be intolerant of us, too.  When I see joggers or cyclists on the trail I always lead Prophet off and put him in a sit.  Rarely somebody will nod, or smile, or even say thank you.  Usually they refuse eye contact.  Do they think they simply deserve this courtesy?  Or are they outraged that they have to share the trail with me at all?

When our kids were young and playing in Little League baseball the parents arrived early to rake and lime the fields.  There were other park lovers who felt that this was a terrible use of Riverside Park.  Mowing the fields reduced bird habitat and shouting children frightened wildlife.  Frankly even dog people and children people get into conflict about the appropriate use of the park.  I have seen too many dog owners allow their pooches onto athletic fields to chase the children, steal their soccer balls, and shit in the grass.  And when parents complain, they are denounced for it.

But these selfish uses of shared space paled for me today when I heard the news that ATV riders have been destroying the sand berms that the Parks Department created on Staten Island after superstorm Sandy.  Neighborhoods that had eight feet of seawater received these incipient dunes to block the direct impact of waves before the next big storm.  Grasses were planted to try to stabilize the berms.  But apparently, some people in these neighborhoods were so thrilled by the creation of these new fun parks that they couldn't resist tearing them up.

I wonder often why we all have to pay for the reconstruction of seaside homes that we didn't all get to enjoy.  But if people want to destroy their own storm protection?  It leaves me wondering.

A Morning Walk on Hunter Island

This morning Prophet and I made the 15-minute drive over to Pelham Bay Park to walk on Hunter Island.  In a few weeks we will have to pay to park over there so I want to make a few visits first.  And it is the time of year that I hope to catch a few songbirds in the woods.  I counted the cars in the (enormous) Orchard Beach parking lot: 13.  For those of you who don't live in New York City that is the equivalent of almost zero.

It was forty degrees and sunny.  We went through the picnic area and headed north on the big trail alongside the rowing basin.  There were a few shells out: two female crews and some individuals.  The girls' coach was yelling at them across the water and Prophet was really interested in who was out there.  When we cut through the marsh to Strawberry Island I was reminded again of how amazed I am at Prophet's sense of geography.  He always knows exactly where I want to go, although he often has ideas of his own.  (Hint: Foreshadowing.)

A Black Lab interested Prophet as we were returning to the main trail, but he and his owner were walking counter clockwise, so I waved, Prophet sniffed their trail, and we continued on our way.  Returning from the blueberry peninsula a little terrier ran up on us from behind.  Prophet greeted him happily and jumped around with him for a few minutes.  Then we followed the trail east across the channel from Glen Island Park.

When we got to the broken former bridge to Twin Island we turned east again, climbing through the woods to the high point of the island.  We ran into two people there with large dogs.  Again, Prophet happily negotiated those greetings with uncertain strangers.  He is getting really good at this.

Near the site where the Hunter Mansion once stood we turned south on a secondary trail.  It runs roughly parallel to the main, paved path and through mixed woods where I was still hoping to see some warblers.  But not many yards along, Prophet really wanted to turn off on a tertiary trail.  He had been such a good boy that I couldn't see the harm in saying no.  The path got less and less obvious until is simply petered out in the middle of what will be a tangled thicket once the leaves are out.  Prophet confidently continue west.  I wondered where he was going, but the visibility is still good and I could see the water, so -- again -- what was the harm?

And then I saw, finally, what his nose must have been telling him ever since we first set out 90 minutes before: deer.  He broke into a run, but didn't pursue them.  Instead, he stopped and waited for me with a huge grin on his face.  And when I caught up, he continued bushwhacking due west toward the trail along the water.

We had one last encounter, with twin female Rotweilers who had been rescued from being chained in a wooden shanty with a concrete floor.  They were a little spooked, but Prophet made himself small, greeted them gently, tried to initiate play, and then calmly walked on when they remained uncertain.

I wonder what my regular mood would be if I didn't have a buddy to go adventuring with every morning.  But I do.

Becoming the Soviet Union

Yesterday I read the excerpt from Michael Lewis's new book (Flash Boys) about high frequency trading that was published in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times.  What interested me most while I was reading was the ongoing incentive to understand a system better than everybody else and arbitrage that understanding.  With high frequency trading, if I grasped it correctly, that means seeing an impending bloc of trades in the physically closest electronic exchange milliseconds before they go on to a further exchange, and then quickly buying the stock at the current price in order to sell it to the putative buyer a few milliseconds later at a higher price.

We think of a stock exchange as a market for capital, in which firms can acquire "partners" from a pool of unknown people.  But it has always been a place to make money.  When abuses become egregious (and visible) the market has to be regulated or the supply of capital for actual commerce will evaporate.  Nevertheless, people are always searching for a new way to make money.  It is like an ecosystem in which life will radiate into any available niche.  I know that seems like a pretty metaphor for theft and greed, but since the phrase "available niche" already disguises the blood of prey, I also think it is apt.

What only interested me secondarily when I originally read the article was the fact that most of the programmers who discovered this "niche" (millisecond delays between exchanges) and who wrote the code exploiting it were Russian.  Lewis quotes one of them saying that Russians spend a lifetime finding angles in a corrupt system so they are most attuned to this kind of work.  Hmm.

This morning on WNYC I heard an interview with Matt Taibbi discussing his new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.  He talked about the huge decreases in crime we are experiencing, along with the continued burgeoning of our prison population.  He discussed the single prosecution of a bank after the great collapse of 2008, Abacus Bank, which he described as a clear message saying,  "These guys are small enough to be prosecuted."  And he compared the US today to the old Soviet Union, in which the written laws were much less significant than the unwritten laws.  He referred to Soviet teens imprisoned for selling jeans on the street, while the president of the university he (Taibbi) attended for a year wore Western suits every day.

And it occurred to me that we have a gigantic gulag system.  We have a dual system of justice.  We have a political process dominated by oligarchs.  We have massive distortions of the market through collusion.

We didn't defeat the Soviet Union in 1989; we became the Soviet Union.

Joey Quintana

Some of the characters in Stones from the Creek are actual figures from history, however little known even in their own day.  Others, like Joey Quintana in the story "The Sun Shone So Brightly," are more composites.  Names popped up in my reading that caught my imagination, but -- in the absence of full-length biographies -- I was left to flesh them out in my imagination.  Then characters like Joey became stand-ins for one or more of those figures.

I think I first encountered the name Abrán Salcido in the late seventies when I first read Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America: A History of Chicanos.  Here was a young guy who was already a leader of the Mexican community in Clifton, Arizona when the copper miners struck in 1903.  He became a leader of the strike and served two years in the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma.  As soon as he came out he went to the huge mines at Cananea, Sonora and soon was among the leaders of the 1906 strike there.  He was again imprisoned, this time at San Juan de Ulúa.  The conditions there were truly horrific and less than 100 of the 300 strikers who were incarcerated survived.

That's really all I know about Salcido.  When I read Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction his name popped up again.  That book is about class and race and religion and the border and what childhood and orphanhood meant at the turn of the twentieth century.  The Clifton strike was a year before the orphan abduction and in the same town.  Linda Gordon includes all the relevant events of that time in Clifton, including the presence of la santa de Cabora, Teresa Urrea.

Salcido seems to have been a member of the Partido Liberal and a Magonista.  Ricardo Flores Magón was an inmate of the Territorial Prison at Yuma around the same time as Salcido.  In my mind, stories like that of Salcido's are begging to be told.  But he is just one source of Joey Quintana.  And Joey has a different history, born on this side of the border.

Today I discovered the photo above.  It is from the archives at Yuma.  I don't know how to interpret Abrán's expression.  What I do know is that he looks across 110 years demanding to be seen.  I end up feeling that I am going to have to return to his story.

Fording the River

When I was a boy I discovered pretty early that the same word or phrase could have very different meanings depending on whether it was used at home or outside, in school or in Hebrew school, on TV or in the synagogue.  A favorite example, from when I was twelve, is "the golden age of Spain" or el siglo de oro.  

A little background here is in order.  At Hebrew school we got a weekly magazine, World Over, which had articles about Judaism and the world Jewish community.  Every issue had a comic strip about some important figure in Jewish history.  When I got interested in one, I could often find a biography, written for young readers, in the synagogue library.

I learned that Abraham ibn Ezra of Córdoba had been a great astronomer, grammarian and exegete and that his friend Yehuda ha-Levi was one of the greatest poets ever in the Hebrew language.  I learned that Hasdai ibn Shaprut had been the court physician and then vizier to the Caliph, Abd ar Rahman.  I learned about the poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol of Málaga.  And even the most indifferent students couldn't avoid hearing about the physician, rabbi and philosopher known as Maimonides.  All these figures and more added up -- we were told -- to a "golden age" which lasted roughly from the tenth to the twelfth century.

And so I was a little surprised to discover that there was also a public school "golden age of Spain" which lasted from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.  It was the ear of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, El Greco and Velazquez.  I say "a little" surprised because I knew that between those eras fell a major line of demarcation, 1492, the year when the Jews and Muslims were expelled by King Fernando and Queen Isabela.  So the earlier "golden age" was for Jews and Muslims and the later one was for Christians.  That dichotomy fit what I knew of the world when I was twelve.

A more complicated word was "frontier".  We all learned that word early, because "Davey, Davey Crockett" was the "king of the Wild Frontier."  I have no idea when I first learned that.  The Davey Crockett films started running on the Disneyland TV show when I was three years old.  I don't think my family had a TV yet.  But the song and the hats were ubiquitous.  I feel as if there was never a time when they weren't part of my life.  Disney opened "Frontierland" as part of the original Disneyland in California when I was three, too.  I guess I saw scenes of Disneyland on television a lot, because I know I dreamed of going, without really expecting it to happen.  I was, I think, twelve when we actually made it.

So the word "frontier" had more associations for me than an actual definition.  It was definitely associated with guns: six-shooters and lever-action carbines and muzzle-loading long rifles like Davey Crocket had.  And buckskin clothes.  And cowboy hats.  And saloons with swinging doors.  And paddle-wheel steamers.  Riding horses.  Plenty of fighting with guns and knives and fists.  And -- mostly in the background -- plenty of Native Americans.  Some like Tonto on "The Lone Ranger" and Mingo on "Daniel Boone" were friends of the hero.  Most were screaming, barely articulate enemies.

I was ten or eleven when I discovered that there was also a Jewish meaning for the word frontier.  I may have first encountered it in Sholem Aleichem's Motl the Cantor's Son.  Leaving Russia and heading for the United States he had to cross a frontier.  It took me a while to realize that this was a border, with gates and guards, much like the ones I had seen between the US and Canada.  I used the dictionary, which confirmed that as a meaning.  That just left me confused about the Davey Crockett frontier that I had know for my entire life (or the last five or six years, which was the same thing.)  I finally deciphered the idea of a "moving" frontier between American settlements and however we chose to mythically define what was on the other side.  I think I am still exploring that "frontier", which seems to be the entire domain of post-modern thought.

What connects all of this to Stones from the Creek?  The twin towns of San Miguel del Vado, New Mexico and Brod, Ukraine.  Let me get the names out in the open immediately.  San Miguel del Vado means St. Michael of the Ford, in this case the ford of the Pecos River.  Brod, or in Ukrainian "Brody" means "ford", too.  Brod is on the ford of the Styr River.

In the nineteenth century, San Miguel del Vado was the port of entry into Mexico.  There was a customshouse and contemporary travel writers, like Susan Shelby Magoffin, describe crossing the open plains, fording the Pecos, and arriving in New Mexico at San Miguel del Vado.  Similarly, Brod was the port of entry between Romanov Russia and Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, the two great empires of Eastern Europe.  In Joseph Roth's novel of Austrian decline, Radetzkymarsch, the second Baron Trotta is sent to be an administrator on the edge of the empire, at Brody.

The population of San Miguel del Vado was what the New Mexicans called genízaros.  They were captives of the Comanches, by birth Pueblo or Apache or Navajo Indians, who spoke Spanish and were repatriated by the Mexicans in the capital of Santa Fe.  They were given land in great grants to protect the borders from Comanches and Americans.  Most spoke fluent Comanche and did a lot of business with them.  Brod was predominantly Jewish.  They did a lot of cross-border business with the Russians.

I have discussed in previous blog posts the reasons that have been offered for the decline in population of San Miguel del Vado.  For our purposes here, let's just say it is not even listed as a "place" in the US Census.  The tiny (but larger) unincorporated community of Ribera, just north of San Miguel on Rt. 3, has about 400 people.  New Mexico hasn't been another country since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Pecos River no longer marks one's entry into New Mexico.  Brody is now just a town in Lviv Oblast in western Ukraine.  Like San Miguel, Brod declined in significance with the construction of a railroad.  Like San Miguel, Brod declined in significance with the movement of the border.  Unlike San Miguel, Brod still has about 20,000 residents.  Few Jews, though, survived the Nazi Holocaust.

So both towns are on river fords.  Both were once important border crossings, and therefore "frontier" towns by definition, or what I used to think of as the Hebrew school meaning of the word.  Both could be rough places in the other meaning of "frontier."  Brody was a major crossing point for Jews fleeing the pogroms of Odessa between 1880 and 1906.  It was the line between the Austrians and the Russians in World War 1.  During the Second World War, Aktion Reinhardt, the operation to exterminate all the Jews of Europe, was initiated in Brod.  Later the Soviets encircled and killed all the German troops in Brod.  Regarding the extermination of the Native Americans of New Mexico I will just say here that Pecos Pueblo, a few miles north of San Miguel, was a thriving community of thousands until not that long ago.  Today it is an archeological site.