My country hasn’t been liberated: it’s still under the warlords’ control, and Nato occupation only reinforces their power
In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie.
On behalf of the long-suffering people of my country, I offer my heartfelt condolences to all in the UK who have lost their loved ones on the soil of Afghanistan. We share the grief of the mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters of the fallen. It is my view that these British casualties, like the many thousands of Afghan civilian dead, are victims of the unjust policies that the Nato countries have pursued under the leadership of the US government.
Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.
You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.
For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the “democracy” backed by Nato troops.
In the constitution it forbids those guilty of war crimes from running for high office. Yet Karzai has named two notorious warlords, Fahim and Khalili, as his running mates for the upcoming presidential election. Under the shadow of warlordism, corruption and occupation, this vote will have no legitimacy, and once again it seems the real choice will be made behind closed doors in the White House. As we say in Afghanistan, “the same donkey with a new saddle”.
So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire. Like many other Afghans, I risked my life during the dark years of Taliban rule to teach at underground schools for girls. Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists. A growing number of women, seeing no way out of the suffering in their lives, have taken to suicide by self-immolation.
This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that “more loss of life [is] inevitable” in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the “national interests” of both the US and the UK.
I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don’t believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers’ money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.
What’s more, I don’t believe it is inevitable that this bloodshed continues forever. Some say that if foreign troops leave Afghanistan will descend into civil war. But what about the civil war and catastrophe of today? The longer this occupation continues, the worse the civil war will be.
The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination. We want a helping hand through international solidarity, but we know that values like human rights must be fought for and won by Afghans themselves.
I know there are millions of British people who want to see an end to this conflict as soon as possible. Together we can raise our voice for peace and justice.
A Manifesto for the San Francisco Collage Collective
by Paul Occam
Few people can tolerate a long silence in the middle of a conversation these days. It is the sound of someone pulling a pin on a hand grenade.
As the interior world of the individual is increasingly mapped and occupied – it is primarily the imagination that has been decimated or taken over. People are no longer able to dream beyond their circumstances.
The vacant lots are filled with trash and they are no longer outside. Colonization no longer applies only to the world at large – it is an internal state.
America, once the nation of dreams for a better life, now careens forward as the standard bearer of personalized hallucinations – the unsurpassed leader of colonization – not of places so much as the mind. The dreams we currently export and enact are off the shelf factory made fetishes. If you think we are not talking about you then ask yourself – do you not wish to be a rock star, actor, writer, artist, entrepreneur, captain of industry?
Just consider this: In some places vast numbers of the population still believe they will win the lottery.
This manifesto may be redeemed as a coupon for your life. For those with a little more ambition there is a soul crushing existence awaiting you – the mundane dramas of the ‘good life’ – which to us resembles a happiness like Disneyland – a miniature golf-tournament with despair.
At no time in history has the individual faced such a barrage of relentless amusements, commands, empty pleasures and distractions. Every sense is continuously occupied, every waking moment filled, every orifice spoken to, pleasantly stroked or assaulted. All of it a series of carefully constructed events which are meant to distract.
The silence and emptiness that looms ominously in the background stands as a kind of terrorism. Possessed by the disembodied voices of radio hosts, aversions, favorite things, bosses, red lipstick, TV shows, the local news, advertisements, sexual escapades, movies, media, – a person has no choice but to wander through life as a ghost lost in a supermarket.
Yet at odd moments the plaster falls off, – a moment comes when the ocean draws back and reveals all the dead things left on the shore. It was for this reason that the surrealists loved ruins.
There are instances in which time opens – one becomes cognizant of the infinity behind things – that silence holds a tension like the electricity in the air before lightening strike, revealing everything in a flash of insight. It is out of such cracks in the architecture of life that our most inspired thoughts and sentiments come into being.
Small outposts against the storm have always existed in recondite art movements through history, seeds that like wheat may germinate only after a hundred years. The San Francisco Collage Collective takes its modest place among them. In such cases it is the Freedom of the margins that is lived, the things that were once thrown away become a graveyard for new meaning. Where nobody is watching there is always possibility. A collage made of artifacts from a walk; a celebrated ‘drift’ provides a window to the future. It was Phillip K. Dick who rightly observed that trash was “the intersection of the divine.” and it was Guy Debord who declared in 1953 “We will change the world by wandering.”
The apparent uselessness and idle strolls, the turning of pages as we inspect the picture book, all with an eye for a new assembly and terrain is the antidote we have discovered. We declare now that it will set us free.
Paul Occam is the pen name of a San Francisco writer. This piece was written on the occassion of the SF Collage Collective’s first exhibition in early 2008. It has been disseminated by hand, but not otherwise published.
Photographic negative of Charles Baudelaire by Félix Nadar, 1862, Musée d’Orsay.
PRODDING BAUDELAIRE
by Eve Toliman
These days find me hunting through my books, searching through the past, tracking down the random bits that have survived time’s unrelenting sedimentary procession through my life. I am assembling a collage from these pieces, a collage of me.
Today I am prodding Baudelaire. Wasn’t that your story, Charles, the one about the beggar who beat you up? Don’t you remember, you told me that he asked you for some change and you punched him in the face? Later, bruised and battered, you limped up the stairs to your apartment, proud of your accomplishment, happy to have paid the price with your own pained body: He asked you for a handout and rolling in the dark empty street, fists flying, beggar and patron indistinguishable under the dim lamplight, you made him claim his dignity.
I’ve always liked that story. It’s messy, full of the kind of love I recognize. I have envisioned a noble love, serene and dignified, but what I have known is fists flying under dim lamplight and liberation in the wake of our foolishness. When we have been leveled by stubbornness or circumstance, too tired to play the game of beggar and patron anymore; when idiocy or pain has vanquished our civilized pantomime, we fall headlong into the ever present arms of love. Startled into hearty laughter, we make our irretrievable, reverberating contribution to that resilient web of humanity — humanity shared or not at all.
It’s too early to weigh the efficacy of Barack Obama’s administration in a practical way (putting aside personal feelings about vampiric bailouts), if only because six months is merely an eighth of his guaranteed tenure—he deserves a reasonable chance to find his sea legs before the daggers fly. Then too, no one can deny the country’s sense of relief after eight years in the unventilated political abattoir that passed for government during the Bush‑Cheney regime. Nonetheless, Mr. Obama has exhibited a lapse in judgment with potential to derail not only his administration but the world. He has committed himself (actually not himself, but potentially countless lives, along with resources we’ve been told we do not have enough of for our own needs) to an amorphous war he neither understands nor knows what to do with—at least he hasn’t adequately explained his presumably major battle plans. In that respect, his resembles every failed war presidency in recent US history. He is engaging in war for political reasons (there appear to be no other grounds), and the armored hatch through which he can escape the greatest threat to his young presidency is closing fast.
Since the end of World War II (though not exclusive to that period), many presidential candidates have run for office on promises to end or wind down this or that war—as part, if not the whole, of their platforms—but not one ultimately elected in the past sixty five years actually did so, with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Korean War, and he didn’t exactly end that; it was brought to a negotiated truce. The country’s WW II war‑weariness forced him to take what he could get, saving an incalculable number of lives in the bargain. Unfortunately, he canceled out that good work by imitating predecessor Truman’s snub of Ho Chi Minh’s pleas for recognition of his government in Viet Nam, thus setting the stage for the U.S. war in Viet Nam, which his youthful successor JFK positioned between other foreign invasions in his own vision of U.S. world domination and set on the road to becoming the nightmare of the 1960s and 70s, LBJ’s wet dream, and Nixon’s gift horse (manipulated mercilessly to distract the public while attending to lesser crimes).
At this point it already sounds clichéd to draw analogies between current U.S.‑Middle East wars and the U.S.‑Viet Nam War, and so, though such comparisons can be instructive, it’s more practical to recognize that something worse (and very different) is afoot, and that no amount of usual protest will be enough to stop it. Things set in motion by the Bush‑Cheney regime have taken on a life and direction of their own, and only a completely different approach to U.S. policy and the concept of world peace can avoid the coming disaster. Mr. Obama could possibly be the last U.S. president in a position to call anything close to a near‑term halt to what promises to be the ultimate slide of humanity into an abyss of war beyond anything previously conceived or experienced—the longest, most destructive war in history. And that assessment is not intended as apocalyptic rhetoric, but moderate, realistic evaluation.
The problem with current U.S. wars is that the military is in control of policy, and asking a general for advice on what to do about war is like asking a mechanic whether or not you should fix that irritating rattle in your car. And no one is better at charming the good sense out of a president (short of elections) or the public (short of reality TV) than a general. Take, for example, the current general‑in‑chief, bedazzling medals and all, along with his personal army of advisors and experts, hell bent on solving the world’s problems with military precision and know how, mix in tribes of desert people with religious zealotry, endless landscape to escape across and access to the richest troves of oil and poppies on the planet, and (somehow) you have the perfect formula for convincing a man with no military experience whatsoever outside of Hollywood movies that it is in the best interest of the U.S. to pursue a fifty (at least) year war. That’s where we are now.
The Iraq War may look like it’s winding down, but it’s only moving into a different phase. Then there’s Afghanistan, a war with renewed traction now cranking into full gear with Washington approval (complete with increased‑troop‑death‑is‑imminent disclaimers, a surreal rider that should blast shivers down Main Street). And then there’s Pakistan, a third war, in motion but only at its beginning and barely catching the media spotlight—that will change once the subject of India, Pakistan, the Taliban and nuclear weapons can be said in one breath without anyone scoffing. And there are other, smaller related conflicts, and possibly even invisible mini‑wars for all we know. Generals never tell everything, only enough to keep their strategies afloat, and even politicians who know better (who have read war history or been on the receiving end of a barrel) keep their heads down, worried over employment at the local munitions factory and how it might affect their reelection.
War can be sold as a good thing if you’re winning, but winning in war is a conundrum. Those who could provide strongest testimony to the success and effectiveness of winning any war are the dead, both victor and loser. In war, triumph and defeat are the same in the end because death is the only possible outcome, of the body or spirit. War’s purpose is death (no matter what it’s waged in the name of). It is meant to kill, maim, destroy and poison. It has no higher purpose, no matter what politicians claim for it. It’s a short cut, a crass, brutal form of nationalized bullying that reduces human potential to it’s lowest nature. Anyone can argue the virtues and necessities of self defense, and even revolution, but brief or protracted, mechanized, wide spread aggressive destruction is not self defense (particularly in foreign lands where the self one is protecting does not belong)—it is murder, pure and simple.
But strategies of the moment don’t have to produce immediate results: a potentially endless war has been launched, and if the generals have their way, and if our promising new president does not reverse his course and commitments, the following will be true: If you are ten years old today and reading this, your grandchildren will be fighting these same wars (and related others). The relevance of our generation—this era—will have been completely erased and forgotten by then; the country will have become financially, politically and artistically bankrupt; the environment will be a hot sewer (no such things as ice caps and potable water); and the extinction rate will have surpassed imagination (creatures we consider common will be mysterious and unheard of to your grandchildren—squirrels maybe, housecats, who knows?). Everything original and creative about the human imagination will be swept into the effort of continuing and supporting endless war, and your life—you who are now ten years old now—would not (if we were given a chance to see you again in fifty years) be recognizable to us, we who stand at this crossroad on the verge of allowing the remnants of our battered republic to be taken over by ancient, tedious visions of conquest and enforced peace, designed and executed by a pejoracracy of generals and other lesser beings. We will have ruined the planet for you, and will have done it purely for the sake of war itself, a human preoccupation as ancient and primal as sex and food gathering, but it will all have been for nothing because unlike the other two, war is unnecessary to survival. Then again, so are most political decisions.
George Evans first witnessed and experienced martial violence as an Air Force medic in Libya during the Six‑Day War of 1967, then in Viet Nam. His books include The New World (Curbstone Press), and Sudden Dreams (Coffee House Press).
Broadway & 3rd: “The Pope of Broadway,” by Eloy Torrez
In February I hiked 9 miles (18 round trip) from Eaton Canyon Nature Center in Pasadena about four thousand feet up the old toll road to Mount Wilson, arriving four or so hours later with a sandwich and water left in my water bottle at a parking lot near the radio television broadcasting towers and the complex of observatories that date back a century. There was only one vehicle in the parking lot and a few people enjoying the view at the top, with a patch of dirty leftover old snow along the southern edge, where a marker that noted the altitude at 5,500 feet. Brilliant sun shone across the mountain tops (Mount Lowe to the west, Mount Baldy to the east) emerging from a soft sea of white clouds like rocks in a Zen garden. The cloud cover had made the early hours of the hike very cool in a couple ways, as I ascended through fragrant misty oaks and pines.
9 miles back downhill was of course easier, sweeter because I knew by then that I’d have no problem with the ankle I’d broken a couple years earlier in the Stehekin River, in the North Cascades National Park, some 40 miles from my vehicle.
A lifetime of electronic media, flat screens, movies, TV, books, music, the radio, news, the newspapers, pictures, photos, billboards, bumperstickers—all such things that produce us (even if, or as, we produce them), 24/7, day in and day out—dull the senses immensely. This stuff makes us retarded, it retards our reactions physically, spiritually and intellectually, it blurs, blunts and distorts our understanding of and feeling for the experiential, the actual and the real. Like any addict, I am in love with the fix because it works, it takes instant effect, I am in love with intelligence in any kind of medium, paper or plastic, electronic or 2-D. I got it going at all times of the day, at any given moment: music blasting, computers on, unread magazines scattered about, papers everywhere, artwork by friends and family on the walls and shelves, books piled everywhere, DVDs falling out of a basket by the TV, pictures on my flash drive and on my mind, telephone about to ring… Citified in who knows how many ways, penetrated and infiltrated, I find my only sure means of escape is by walking.
Walk away.
Walking is a form of resistance. You are not encapsulated by the steel vehicles which license your identity, you are not face first in a screen, you are not insulated behind glass, you are not listening to electronic voices beamed into your head. I have so far resisted carrying a cell phone precisely because then there’s no escape if you carry the various sorts of media accessible via the little screen in your pocket. Everywhere you go in an urban space, drivers are texting, drivers erratically proceed with phones clasped against their heads, people are trying to focus on buttons to punch, strollers advance oblivious to the day, verbalizing and spouting forth in the air, preoccupied persons are driven compulsively to check their cell phones at every opportunity for the next psychosocial twittering or voicemail to tell them what to think or to do. After a lifetime of resisting being a drone, I continue to resist being told what to do every hour, every minute, by little messages, by gangs of associates or random acquaintances, by people I already owe so much to, by my peers and by my betters, I am resisting final inroads into those last places where I actually am forced to reflect and think on my own experience and originate thought, as it happens, on walks.
My sister Hannah and her husband Dave run Smallhouse Art Glass in Northern California where he makes art glass vases, bowls and art objects including squids and frogs that are sold at galleries and places like the Long Beach aquarium. They brought their sons, Marcus and Caius, to visit L.A. and had already been to Disneyland and the Norton Simon Museum, took in the L.A. Philharmonic production of Porgy and Bess at the Hollywood Bowl, went to the Alhambra cineplex for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as well as the Griffith Park Observatory where they saw myriad exhibits where they could press buttons to find out their weight on each planet of the solar system while simultaneously watching videos taken by space probes to distant planets and moons in outer space, as well as reclined on plush seats in the planetarium to view a digital laser program on astronomy, “Centered in the Universe,” projected against the inside of the great dome by “the most sophisticated star projector in the world, the Zeiss Universitarium Mark IX,” and had reservations (which I made for them on-line because my mother refuses to own a computer) for “Pompei and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples” at the L.A. County Museum of Art. In short, they were getting the pre-programmed and mediated version of experience of place which is produced for tourists everywhere (and so in that way homogenized, Disneyfied), with on-line reservations and computers and cell phones telling them where and when to go. However, Los Angeles is my home town and I believe after a lifetime of resisting capitalist ideological programming, consumerist dogma and my own preconceptions that it was my duty to treat them to some alternative to that experience, a Los Angeles you cannot purchase, undelivered in digital formats, not preserved behind glass, not virtual, instead—actually, strangely, real.
In short, I suggested we go on a walk.
I know, practically unheard of in Los Angeles, slightly impractical in the 90 degree heat of July days, and—coming in at five to ten miles—more of a hike than a stroll. But, “real” in a way the touch-screen can’t touch. Unheard of, impractical, subversive—sun blasted streets, tarry pavements and long sidewalks, buildings and distinct neighborhoods, traffic and crowds, the real L.A. The Smallhouse family could bring their cell phones and digital cameras, but I was confident the actual city would render the virtual Matrix wholly secondary, subsidiary, derivative, an afterthought.
We left the van behind, parked a couple blocks from the Mission Street Gold Line station in South Pasadena—a couple blocks away because 2 and 3 hour parking zones aren’t sufficient for a walk that might take most of the day, given that my group of hikers might need to rest, might slow toward the end. Gold Line tickets are $1.25 one way, and even with a party of five, this is cheaper than all day parking in a downtown lot. Besides, it made us all pedestrians as soon as we took seats on the train and it left the platform. Escaping your own car is the necessary first prerequisite.
It feels old-fashioned, taking the Gold Line light rail into downtown Los Angeles. Like the red car trolleys and trains of the early 20th century, the Gold line follows an older route through Highland Park down the middle of Marmion Way, a residential street a block off Figueroa, where driveways open onto the street used by the train, where children bike and people stroll. Dave happened to be wearing a T-shirt featuring a block print image by Artemio Rodriguez, which I’d purchased at the Avenue 50 Gallery and I pointed out the gallery as the train scooted alongside it. At Marmion and Museum Way, the train stops at the Southwest Museum station—and I remarked on surviving century old Victorian houses hidden amidst palm trees and stucco box apartment blocks on the way and the “Casa de Adobe,” a 1920s reconstruction of an 1850s Californio adobe. A gray haired gent wearing a white plastic hard hat and a student’s backpack volunteered his own information, jumping into the conversation.
When Dave responded to the announcement, “Next stop, Chinatown,” by admitting he’d never seen L.A. Chinatown, I decided to add another mile or so onto our hike by getting off at the new Chinatown Station. Downstairs to the street shining in summer heat, across College into a two story maze of junk, trinket and dry goods stalls, a rats warren of a market, endless baubles and knick knacks for sale, from pots and pans to plastic AK-47s “in case you want to get shot by police,” knock-off clothing and souvenir T-shirts for $2 each. Stacks of T-shirts with Michael Jackson or “Hollywood,” on them, “Lakers,” or I love San Francisco,” “I Love Los Angeles,” “California,” or “I [heart] NY.” Mickey Mouse steering wheel covers ($8) and live turtles ($5). My party began enjoying shopping, and I didn’t even have to mention that some stalls in this market sold the most potent (if illegal) insecticide chalk. We went east across Broadway by the stone lions at doorways to various “benevolent association” headquarters, and walked through the Chinese gate to the Central Plaza and Gin Ling Way, which I suggested they’d recognize if they visualized it in movies or car commercials, sprayed with water and diffused at night by steam or smoke, the bad guys entering from one end and advancing on the protagonists. This late summer morning, Chinese dudes sat on folding chairs under big umbrellas in the plaza hunched over board games. Across from the Mountain Bar, part of the new Chinatown scene with literary readings and a hipster crowd, I handed out pennies to toss into the fortune fountain, with its waters splashing on cups marked “LUCK,” “MONEY,” HEALTH,” “indecipherable,” etc., and although all five of us tried pitching pennies at every cup in sight, none of us made a penny into any—perhaps because we already have all we need?
Across Hill to Chun King Road, I showed them the new Gallery row where “people from the west side” (read: white) bought out failing or dusty old mom and pop junk stores and trinket shops and remodeled them into new art galleries—gentrification if you want to call it that, but one that brings a new generation of people, customers, cash, new energy and new life into the neighborhood. Little Asian girls pushed their scooters up and down the otherwise quiet and empty Chun King Road. The art crowd doesn’t show up until the evenings, and till then the neighborhood is still full of multigenerational Vietnamese and Chinese families. We peeked into a couple galleries, then I led the group through a greasy back alley where the Calarts crowd converges in a basement called Betalevel for readings and music, down College and across Alameda to Homeboy Industries Headquarters, where we lunched at the Homegirl Cafe.
Patricia Zarate, her white hair short, who started Homegirl Cafe a couple incarnations back in the direction of Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights was chatting with friends at the next table, but I don’t think that’s why service was particularly good. Some days are just good days for the homegirls cooking up a storm behind the counter and for us, chowing down on their sandwiches and tacos, nine kinds of tacos like beef tinga with pickled onion, carnitas with minced green apple, celantro green turkey chorizo. Hannah bought a chocolate brown (cream-colored lettering: Homegirl) T-shirt in the souvenir shop (next to the full bakery case) for one of her Chicana activist friends. The waiting room in the bottom floor of Homeboy Industries was full of restless black and brown street encrypted youths, waiting for referrals and counseling, working their way of out that life.
A block west we walked in the rear door of Phillipe’s Original French Dipped Sandwiches, just to give them a glimpse of the next luncheon choice up the street, with the crowd lined before the counter where countergirls in their aprons carve the meat and the long tables stand amid sawdust scattered on the cement floor. Old school! I pointed out to the boys the row of telephone booths along the wall near the cigarette stand: “You may not recognize these things, and this may be your last chance to see them. Check them out. They are called telephone booths and they were once common across the United States.” Caius stepped into one ands his mother snapped a shot of him holding the telephone to his head. Marcus stepped into one and his mother snapped a shot of him holding his cell phone to an ear.
Westering, across Cesar Chavez at Alameda (kitty-corner to Terminal Annex Post Office, which offered 24 hour postal service for generations but no longer, and across the street from a particularly ugly heap of new “luxury condos” which block out the 1939 Union Station “colonial revival” train station), we worked our way up Olvera Street, that tourist trap which previously had featured as the rundown empty setting for street scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 short, “The Kid” (according to wikipedia), and was officially renovated in 1930 as a civic and commercial project by a woman named Christine Sterling, with the backing of Harry Chandler of the L.A. Times. Marcus located a Betty Boop belt buckle to his liking in one of the stalls and Caius tried out two plastic pistols, one in each hand, which when the trigger was pulled, played music and spun either a revolving basketball or baseball on the muzzle, which as the music played, opened to reveal a spinning basketball player or baseball player. Certainly I regret that I did not buy one of those pistols now! Sometimes objects of great value look like the purest trash.
We crossed the placita by the mission-era 1861 chapel under the great ficus trees, crossed over the 101 freeway with its bumper to bumper northboard traffic crawling at perhaps ten miles an hour (several hours later when we returned, the traffic was exactly the same) and I suggested that we must wave at the traffic and laugh, and walked past the Federal court house to try to enter City Hall for a look around (“Mayor Villaraigosa grew up in City Terrace, too, you know, but he did not answer my letter asking what the old address for his childhood home had been. He must have bitter memories…”). The guards at the door with their metal detectors and X-ray machine rejected us because Dave carries a big folding knife. So we went outside and Dave stashed the knife in the shrubbery and we went back inside and took the elevators, three of them in succession, up to the top of the building. At the 27th floor you can climb the stairs past a bronze bust of Tom Bradley (his predecessor, Republican Sam Yorty, called Bradley a communist during the campaign), to the large empty Tom Bradley room, a big meeting or banquet hall with an immense high ceiling and windows all around. The room was full of tables and chairs with a podium and microphone at the front of the room, where I improvised a short speech welcoming everyone to City Hall. In fact, as we (skittishly, some of us) went outdoors on the walkway outside that runs around each side of the building and you can stand in the breeze at the railing and look out over the smoggy city in four directions, we were the only visitors to the top of the building the entire time we were there, except for one young office worker with her city hall ID badge pinned to her blouse, who apparently was looking for a quiet, private place to smoke. We circled the building a couple times while I pointed out landmarks such as Dodger Stadium, General Hospital and the El Sereno hills to the east, the Disney Opera Hall atop Bunker Hill to the north, and architect Thom Mayne’s futuristic steel-skinned Caltrans Building and the old L.A. Times building to the west. Hannah took digital pictures of the views in all directions.
Continuing north from City Hall, we crossed the lawn in welcome ficus shade of muggy summer, strolled past the Rockefeller plaza-stolid facade of the 1935 L.A.Times building with fascist-style eagles flanking the front doorway, and the words “Truth/ Liberty Under the Law” on the one side, “Equal Rights/ True Industrial Freedom,” on the other. I commented that for the original owner Otis Chandler, like the Rockefellers, that meant no unions for workers, selling out to the Chicago Tribune, massive lay-offs and eventual bankruptcy for the newspaper. We hiked First Street uphill to the Disney Opera Hall, which Dave admired for Frank Gehry’s sculptural extravagance in stainless steel. The front doors were locked, so we went round the back to the garden, which was full of groups of foreign teenage tourists lounging, posing, shooting photos. We strolled through the crowd of kids speaking Hebrew or Greek or Hungarian, down the steps on the other side of the building, and out along Grand Avenue, in the shadows of immense bank skyscrapers and tall condo towers. The skyscrapers towering above MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art and California Plaza cause a wind tunnel effect, which on a blazing hot day is nice enough. Dave stepped to corner of the severe sharp edge of the blade-like Wells Fargo bank building, sheathed in chocolate granite, and looked straight up.
Crossed to Hope, and down the Library (or Bunker Hill) Steps (Hannah shot the Robert Graham female nude statue atop the fountain that squirts the cascade that runs down the center of the steps)—across West 5th, and into the bustling Central Library where Charles Bukowski discovered the work of John Fante, and Fante did important work as well as Carlos Bulosan, and then some pyro-arsonist set it on fire in 1986. We escalated up to the balcony at the top of the great eight story atrium, where everyone could use the restrooms and get a drink of cold water, not to mention cool off and enjoy the terrific air conditioning after walking all the way from Chinatown. I mentioned I ran a writing workshop out of the library once for six months. We looked at the library visitors, most of them young, all kinds, really, scruffy and studious, business-like and wild, going about their intellectual duties. I noted there were art exhibits (usually photography, this time by Paul Outerbridge) to see in the galleries in the building. A quick perusal of the gift shop off the central foyer, and we were off again south on 5th Street, alongside the Biltmore Hotel, which I couldn’t recognize from the back when Dave asked me what it was, down to the once dull and sun-stricken and full of winos but now terribly ugly (after remodeling) Pershing Square, full of people getting on the bus, businessmen, tourists, citizens of the city, citizens of the day. Young tourists, students, hurried all about downtown, maps or guidebooks or cameras in hand, talking quizzically about where they might be going, I’m sure. French, Korean, German or Dutch, all young, traipsing around with their lives in their hands, having adventures. I glanced at them going by with envy as we crossed from street corners. Did the weather-beaten and torn up alcoholics strewn along the benches at the base of Bunker Hill register us in the same way? People with their lives in hand, rushing about through the broad daylight, doing whatever they wished, free?
At Pershing Square (5th & Hill) they installed an Automated Public Toilet for $250,000, which resembles a green oblong tube sticking out of the ground like an ornate green steamship smokestack, and I saw a homeless guy enter to use it, urinating as the door rotated closed behind him. The Downtown News notes, “Each APT’s oval-shaped kiosk contains a small toilet and a sink. After every use, the door shuts and the toilet retracts into a behind-the-scenes cleaning area, where it is pressure-washed, disinfected and dried. Meanwhile, the unit’s floor and sink are pressurized with water and drained. The toilet bowl swings back around and is ready for use again within minutes. While some APTs cost 25 cents per use, the Skid Row facilities are free.” Nearby, two bicycle mounted cops wearing shorts and bike helmets listened to a homeless man.
Crossing Hill, below the immobilized Angel’s Flight Funicular draped in orange industrial netting and closed down in 2001 after it malfunctioned, crashed, killing an elderly tourist, we always look at the funicular wistfully because Dolores first lived in tenements on Bunker Hill when she came from Mexico, and took the funicular in its previous location, when Bunker Hill was actually a much taller hill full of old SRO old men’s hotels. That was the ghost city I recall from my father’s time, when we would visit him and he lived in furnished rooms in buildings which announced, in paint peeling off the brick, “hot water, shower and bath, fully furnished” or “rooms $10, monthly rates.” The current old folks residential towers and luxury condos on Bunker Hill bear no relation, except to evoke ghosts. For stories of that Bunker Hill neighborhood life, see John Fante’s stories and his 1939 novel, Ask the Dust. Across Hill we entered Grand Central Market, straight to the juice bar with its metal juice machine which has served all kinds of juice from carrot to pomegranate, from cherry to garlic, from celery to strawberry, for generations. I had pomegranate, Caius a cherry smoothie, Marcus a frozen coffee drink, and Dave a root beer float.
Of course into the market (dating to 1917), concrete floor strewn with sawdust, neon lights glowing in the dim piping and ducts of the high ceiling over the produce, confection, and cooked food stalls. Voices and street sounds reverberating inside the deepness of the open building from Hill Street to Broadway. The stalls have changed a lot over the years, and now, clearly, Centroamericanos and Mexicanos have made the market largely their own, with a few others, Koreans selling fried food, Chinese women waiting beside their massage tables, practically asleep under a big banner, “CHINESE MASSAGE.” There’s a 99 Cents store in the basement. I’ve never wandered through the whole establishment. It was one of those places our parents frequented. Dolores’s dad figured it was his duty as a Mexicano to barter with the vendors, arguing about the price, quality and worth of their produce. He used to bring home wilted, crummy old vegetables, proud he’d stood up to the cheap vendors; they couldn’t cheat him! Nowadays you can get a whole fried fish with some rice or French fries for a couple dollars, but who knows how long those fish sit under the overhead lamps. There’s gotta be some good eateries in all those stalls somewhere.
“The Million Dollar Movie Theater,” one of the big empty movie theaters on Broadway is next door; dad took us to see movies here when we were kids and he was living in an empty storefront on Wabash, years after he and mom had split up and he was in town from Central America or the merchant marine—maybe this theater was one my grandmother played keyboard or organ in as a teenager during silent movies, her job was to perform the soundtrack on sheet music, before she married my grandfather and they moved to the Bay Area because he (Long Beach chief of police) thought L.A. was “too dangerous” in the 1920s. They had lived in South Central when it was all white. Ah, what Los Angeles was that? Typically, no teenagers are interested at all in this type of information, but I feel bound to point out these traces of their ancestors as we go down the sidewalk. Cross Broadway at 3rd, I held open the door to the Bradbury Building, so they can check out the wrought iron grillwork, the 1893 architecture in the five story atrium lit by the skylight they’ve seen in numerous movies like Chinatown and Blade Runner, those movies most emblematic of the city. We can’t play in the two elevators, kids in one, adults in the other, chasing each other up and down the floors; the security would kick us out, the upper floors are LAPD Offices of Internal Affairs. It was all pretty quiet on a Thursday afternoon. The Smallhouses located a life-size bronze statue of Charlie Chaplin on a bench at the other entrance to the building and snapped pictures beside him. “Why is that here?” Marcus asked.
There is no why.
Outside, with a cop looking the other way, the teenagers and I ran across 3rd nto the parking lot and stood directly underneath one of the best murals in L.A., “the Pope of Broadway,” Eloy Torrez’s 8 story tall portrait of Anthony Quinn on the side of the Victor Clothing Company. I’d never seen the mural up this close before. We could touch his shoes. Up close, the brush strokes were wild and energetic. I could see the paint was peeling and sun-faded. Next to it, partially hidden by another brick commercial building from the previous century, appeared a mural of a flying horseman by Frank Romero that reminded me of the expressionist style of Carlos Almaraz. He was a terrific painter who died of AIDS in 1989, and Romero’s mural is ghostly, stripped and blasted by the weather of decades, almost entirely faded and gone. With their mom taking photos of us from the other side of 3rd street, the boys didn’t notice this secret mural; it’s just another ghost I saw from the corner of my eye—there’s one almost everywhere I look.
Down 3rd, left on Main Street, past the alley where the entrance to the Smell is located (where I had to park outside, waiting to pick up my daughter and her teen friends in the middle of the night), to the corner of 2nd (Santa Vibiana’s where Dolores went to Catholic school when she lived on Bunker Hill, now it’s been sold to a private developer, who will turn the church into a party or banquet hall), 2nd to Los Angeles Street where we crossed to the New Otani Hotel, enjoying the blast of air conditioning in the ritzy huge lobby with its grand piano and eateries, I held the door to the elevator for them. I took them out on the 4th floor garden level, but it’s been ruined—it used to be quiet little oasis of a Japanese garden several floors above the pavement and street noise, but the garden’s been taken over by restaurants, which set tables and chairs on the grass, lounge chairs and speaker systems on the pathways, and instead of the babbling brook only there’s lame disco lounge music. We walked through Little Tokyo down 2nd Street (we’ve been through here so many times and it’s so old now that it feels like “our town”), and the Japanese American National Museum was having a Thursday free day, but the kids were burnt out on museums so we skipped it, besides the famous Kogi Korean barbecue taco truck isn’t around so there’s less incentive. We strolled through the pedestrian alley behind the East West Theater, which used to be Union Church where they sent us when we were kids for our Christianity and Japanese Americanization, before we returned to East L.A. I still remember the old lady clothing rack and toiletries smell of that old church.
Nobody stops at the ugly monument to the 442nd World War 2 all JA regiment (anyway it’s not the ugliest war memorial around, we’ve seen worse) as we moved east along Alameda, fire engines spinning their light bars in front of the U.S. Metro Detention Center “downtown Hilton” jail whose tiny windows never open. Crossing over the 101 freeway (bumper to bumper traffic still, hours later), we strode through the high-ceilinged hall of Union Station, with the tables of the upscale restaurant Traxx cordoned off on the left and the postcard rack at the snack stand and people enjoying drinks at the bar to the right, and all kinds of travelers resting in the great old comfortable leather seats in the great space and golden afternoon light. The crowd was streaming through, lines waiting for Amtrak trains, but we headed upstairs to the Gold Line, jumping aboard the last car and zooming in snaky curves all along the Arroyo Seco, standing till we got some seats, and off at Mission Station, where we negotiated the crowd at the South Pasadena farmer’s market, and my sister and her husband picked out peaches and nectarines.
As we walked through the muggy late afternoon light of a summer’s day, toward the vehicle and other machines we would shortly wire or otherwise attach to our selves, we had weariness in our toes, we had perspiration in the fine hairs of the skin, we had peaches, plums and nectarines, we had the day away in the real L.A.—not to mention the ghost city of the past and all the ghosts we might conversate with on street corners tangential to the moment.
About the Author: Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 25 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project NYC is Mp3 archived at www.salon.com and local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook (City Lights).
I spent a hot morning in Ukiah reading a book ofKay Ryan’spristine, turn-me-inside-out poems.“Carrying a Ladder” knocked a little hole in me. All day, I heard these lines repeat: As though / one had a way to climb / out of the damage / and apology.
Beneath the damage and apology, a yawning blackness obliterates the threat of collision. In this spaciousness, the weight of my regret and the binding straps of fear dissolve. They are not set aside, they are not resolved, they simply lose utility. My unfettered movement in this dark world gathers force, a cyclone of freedom, until it bursts above the midline, unconcerned with what the light of day can do. One burst of joy, a geyser of being-not-being, sizzling hot, spewing wild until light vaporizes lightness and gravity reclaims each drop, down, down, down into the earth, cold water in cold ground. A wet and ashy heap, unfit for any use, impossible to clean up, there is nothing to be done but wait until the last of it dries up and blows away.
These are the seasons of my life, glorious fits of unadorned joy followed by long patient silences during which the ghosts of roads-not-taken taunt me with the false beauty of what-could-have-been. Cruel and bitter with the life that I denied them, they eclipse the waning moments of my real life with impenetrable, leaden regret. The weight of my regret accumulates and drags me deep into the underworld where the cycle begins again. These are the seasons of my self-absorbed life.
But love, always and only love, liberates me from this self-concern. A will to serve recasts the thought of ‘me’, refashions my self-consciousness into a thin ribbon pulled taut like floss, past my eyes, through my brain into the vacuum where it all begins and ends. Dissipated in communion, a small bright cloud of newly-me forms at each fulfillment. The fall to earth is gentle but as I recongregate in breathe and blood, the lonely ache begins. This pain is different than the taunting shame or binding fear. This ache does not press me into myself, it accompanies me, reminding me of this flesh over this muscle over this bone, each step a sinewy ripple, particle and wave. I am here, we are alive.
I view my curation and art criticism for the popular press as an educational cultural interventions aimed at addressing how art and exhibitions embody historical and ideological discourses, concerned with how contemporary artists utilize diverse formal means as personal aesthetic social strategies. As such, I am concerned with addressing linkages between art practices and the complex social structures that inform the content of the work through myriad forms.
In the past, I was particularly interested in politically motivated art, and art as a politics of articulation, in which images and aesthetic strategies — drawn from an international reservoir of ideas and discourses formed from histories of cultural contact and conflict — constituted a counter-hegemonic cultural social discourse.
This resulted in identifying political art as: work having an overt or accessible political message often aimed at demystification; issue identification aimed at inciting political action; the transformation of consciousness as a vehicle for social transformation; the creation of solidarity centered in political identification; and more inclusively, as a means of affirming the “human” in an otherwise alienating world in which people are separated from nature, from each other, and from themselves in processes of social reification.
This led to developing and refining a tactically based criticism centered in specific goals, questions, and issues:
1. Addressing and analyzing how artistic practices that serve as a means of addressing social histories through self-representation and political identification, are connected to, but not wholly informed by, Euro-American institutional standards of “quality,” “value,” or tradition.
2. Addressing the potential of “identity politics” to degenerate into ethno-nationalist sentiments, and conversely de-legitimizing Euro-Americentric characterizations of “othered” artists as exotic, and challenging simplistic characterizations of artists with agendas that challenge the hegemony of mainstream art institutions by addressing issues related to address race, class, and gender.
3. Recognizing and addressing the diversity and complexity of Latino, African American, and various “ethnic artists,” in an effort to combat essentializing and simplistic view of artists who have been “othered” because of race, class and gender.
4. Recognizing the social and culturally syncretic nature of “ethnic” artistic practices as constituting a complex range of artistic practices, and to challenge and undermine the schismization/segregation of “ethinic” art from a legacy of Euro-american art, since this simplistic division along nationalist/ethnic lines, marginalizes certain artists and militates against a more complex understanding of their work and its potential for cross-cultural communication, and an inclusive and expanded redefinition of “American” art.
5. In all cases, to connect a range of diverse artistic practices to present, living, historical and contemporary cultural discourses, via a discussion of the complex specificity of the each work or artist under discussion.
My focus over the last few years has been to translate and apply a range of theoretical discourses — cultural studies, semiotic theory, post-colonial theory, into accessible language, and make it available to the general public through a free community based street press. This orientation has in one way or another conditioned all the reviews I have written, based on the dictates of the particular tasks and issues I hope to address in the reviews.
The first publicly supported secondary school in the United States, the Boston Latin School, founded in 1634, in its current location in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood.
HECKUVA JOB, ARNE
Why is Obama continuing the failed conservative & corporate-driven “education reform” policies of George Bush?
by Horatio Guernica
It’s not been a great few weeks for Obama’s education secretary and basketball buddy Arne Duncan.
A new report shows that the so-called Chicago Renaissance 2010 that happened on his watch as “CEO” of Chicago’s public schools for seven years before being tapped by Obama didn’t actually happen as stated. Writes Greg Toppo:
The Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, a supporter of Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s push for more control of city schools, issued the report June 30. It says city schools have made little progress since 2003.
Its key findings stand in stark contrast to assertions President Obama made in December when he nominated Duncan as Education secretary.
Uh oh.
Toppo continues: In December, Obama said that during a seven-year tenure, Duncan had boosted elementary school test scores “from 38% of students meeting the standards to 67%” — a gain of 29 percentage points. But the new report found that, adjusting for changes in tests and procedures, students’ pass rates grew only about 8 percentage points.
It would appear that many measures President Obama touted to explain his promotion of Duncan to top edu spot have turned out to be false.
The article likens this story to a similar tale of trumped up “improvements” that happened in Texas on Superintendent Rod Paige’s watch, who became George Bush’s education czar. Unfortunately, Obama’s education guy and Bush’s education guy share more than padded resumes.
In fact, through Arne Duncan, Obama is pretty much continuing the failed No Child Left Behind mindset and policy of the Bush era, which lashes everyone to the whipping post of standardized testing, blames teachers for all of schools’ (and by extension, society’s) ills, and quashes pretty much all chance of creativity, ingenuity in the classroom and, essentially, happy kids and schools. The so-called “education reformers” are now comprised of an unholy alliance of conservatives and neo-liberals who meet on the board of the Broad Foundation or their indoctrinating retreats. They preach the gospel of the business model as the panacea for all that ails our public schools, and are frothing at the mouth to privatize one of our last remaining public assets, public schools. They weren’t able to convince the nation of the virtue of vouchers so now they demand charters –or else!– which follows a similar scheme: public funding gets rerouted into private hands.
Until recently, Duncan was on the board of directors of the Broad Foundation, the pro-charter, pro business-model organization of AIG billionaire Eli Broad, which practices what it labels “venture philanthropy,” along with Obama’s checkered economic advisor Larry Summers, KIPP charter’s CEO Richard Barth, Teach for America CEO Wendy Kopp, and controversial reformite school superintendents Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Maria Goodloe-Johnson.
It’s the “or else!” part of the equation that’s the most disturbing and, frankly, offensive. Duncan has said he will award grants from the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund, education money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, only to states that implement merit pay for teachers and allow charters into their public schools. (The 10 states that currently do not allow charters are apparently SOL.)
President Obama and Arne Duncan are essentially dangling money over funds-starved school districts and saying “Do it our way, or no stimulus money for you!”
The problem is, it’s becoming more and more evident that the reformers’ “solutions” don’t work, and above all, may even harm the very kids whom they claim to be concerned about.
In fact, according to a recent (6/15/09) study by the Center For Research On Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University (ironically funded by the pro-charter Dell and Walton foundations), charters schools do not necessarily perform any better than public schools. In fact, 37 percent perform worse. And 46 percent perform no better than public schools. Only 17 percent of charter schools performed any better than public schools.
Education Week reported, “If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters,” said Margaret E. Raymond, the director of the center and the study’s lead author. “That’s a red flag.”
Actually, let’s pause for a moment on this simple image: a school without books or pencils. Is that a school that anyone would like to go to? That doesn’t even sound like a school, but some kind of sterile institution. It would seem that Gates and his allies want to prepare our kids for a life as computer drones.
Meanwhile, Duncan’s record in Chicago is more troubling the deeper you look.
The disturbing alliance between private charters and the military has brought multiple ROTC schools to Chicago, also on Duncan’s watch. This makes Chicago’s school system “the most militarized in the country,” reported writer Andy Kroll back in January when Duncan was first tapped by Obama. In “The Military-Corporate Legacy of the New Secretary of Education,” from Tom Dispatch, Kroll wrote of Duncan:
“He was described as the compromise candidate between powerful teachers’ unions and the advocates of charter schools and merit pay. He was also regularly hailed as a “reformer,” fearless when it came to challenging the educational status quo and more than willing to shake up hidebound, moribund public school systems.”
“Yet a closer investigation of Duncan’s record in Chicago casts doubt on that label. As he packs up for Washington, Duncan leaves behind a Windy City legacy that’s hardly cause for optimism, emphasizing as it does a business-minded, market-driven model for education. If he is a “reformer,” his style of management is distinctly top-down, corporate, and privatizing. It views teachers as expendable, unions as unnecessary, and students as customers.
Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan’s belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago’s school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he’s started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well.”
In March, blogger Kenneth Libby at Our Global Education also cast doubt on Duncan’s accomplishments. At Ariel Community Academy, for example, kids are indoctrinated in the glories of capitalism. They are given a $20K portfolio to manage. When they graduate from eighth grade, they are expected to hand over the profits to the first graders. This past year, their investments have suffered the ravages of the economy and profits have been scarce. Talk about a “teachable moment.” Maybe the Ariel kids are learning a valuable life lesson after all, about the empty values and promises of capitalism.
Meanwhile, over in D.C., the accomplishments of another “education reformer” have come into question recently. According to the Washington Post on July 16, a report says D.C. School Chancellor Rhee tweaked test results too. Writes Bill Turque,
“These include intensive test preparation targeted to a narrow group of students on the cusp of proficient, or passing, scores, and ‘cleaning the rosters’ of students ineligible to take the tests — and also likely to pull the numbers down. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee described some of these approaches as the pursuit of ‘low-hanging fruit.’”
The practice is not illegal, but it does spike test results and create the illusion of student “improvement.”
The saddest part about this is that the kids who need the most help are not getting it from these schools district chancellor/CEOs/superintendent “reformists” who appear to care more about test scores and their own self-aggrandizement than actually educating kids.
So why is Obama forcing bad policy down everyone’s throats? Moreover, why is he continuing the conservative NCLB policies of George W. Bush? And why does the president persist in dashing everyone’s hopes with policy capitulations like “education reform” and by consorting with discredited recidivist capitalists who helped bring our economy down in the first place?
The original idea of charter schools was a much more organic one. Parents, community members banded together to create schools that can have some independence in curriculum while still open to public school kids. Most public school parents I know have no problem with that idea. But that model has been hijacked by the free marketers who want a piece of that public funding action, and think they know better how to run a school, or can at least feign it long enough to cash in before they ship out. They talk about “eliminating the achievement gap” but measure that solely, it appears, through test scores. But their real results are questionable. There are too many reports of charter schools that limit or don’t admit special needs kids (that’s one way to keep test scores up, right?) or throw challenging kids out of the school mid-year, after they have cashed in the kids’ per-pupil state funds, and sometimes before the testing season so these kids’ scores don’t sully the schools’ records.
Do these kinds of practices help the most needy kids at the bottom of the gap? Obviously not.
Is it good business though? You betcha—it makes these “enterprises,” which are run by CEOs, by the way, so much more “efficient.” Why, after all, waste resources on a troublesome product (or is it “customer”)?
This is pretty damn unconscionable.
It appears that more and more of these ‘miracle’ charter corporations are discovering that educating a child takes something other than a laptop, a uniform, rigid discipline or an energetic young teacher with a shallow education background who is easily spent and replaced after a couple of years.
Educating kids is hard work that takes a long time. A lifetime, even. Results are not always immediate or tangible. Sometimes the most significant measure of a child’s development is that spark in their eye when they understand something for the first time, and not by how many little eggs they can fill out correctly on a Scantron test card using a No. 2 pencil in a set amount of time. Knowing how to teach well doesn’t happen immediately either. Time, experience, familiarity with what comprises an inspiring curriculum, a deep understanding of the ways and wiles and woes of children–these conspire to make a teacher great. And yet another mantra of the reformists is that all older teachers are bad and need to be replaced. This of course has more to do with the privatizers’ mission to break the teacher’s union, than actually support of good teaching in our schools.
President Obama should can No Child Left Behind. He should sic his basketball pal on the harder task of listening, observing, talking to local school communities and finding out what really works, what parents really want, and expand and duplicate those models.There are terrific public schools out there giving kids a great and nurturing education. They should not be destroyed in the name of “reform” or because they represent someone’s idea of “the status quo.”
If Obama is going to play the conservative game, then why doesn’t he honor state’s rights and let each state decide for itself, each school district, even, how it will spend the stimulus money, with a plan and goals that are germane to the children in their community?
And how many more signs of the Apocalypse will it take for these “reformers” to see that the American way of doing business is not necessarily the best way to run things? It hasn’t worked well for our economy, has it, so why foist it on our kids’ schools?
Right now, schools and school districts are being ravaged or short-changed in the name of “education reform” from Oakland to Antioch to Seattle.
I am willing to believe that if Barack Obama were to listen to the parents, teachers and communities of America’s public schools – instead of just the Gates, Broads and Walton billionaires who have no background in education, but financial incentives to meddle with education — he would not continue with this failed agenda.
The president should read ex-Microsftie Scott Oki’s book Outrageous Learning in which he says things like: “When it comes to education, one size does not fit all. Despite our highly-industrialized modern society, there is no way to automate learning. Even today, every child’s education should be hand-crafted, with knowledge patiently passed from the teacher to the mind of the student.”
“It is possible to maintain high standards for all children, to help students learn how to speak thoughtfully, think through problems, and create imaginative representations of the world as it is and as it could be, without forcing them through a regime of high-stakes testing. Attention has to be paid to the richness of the curriculum itself and time has to be allocated to thoughtful exploration and experimentation. It is easy to ignore content when the sole focus is on test scores.
Your administration has the opportunity, when NCLB comes up for reauthorization, to set the tone, aspirations, and philosophical and moral grounds for reform that develops the intelligence, creativity, and social and personal sensitivity of students.”
Perhaps this punitive approach to “reforming” public schools is a way for the neo-liberal Democrats to divert attention from the fact that they too have failed our poorest, most vulnerable families and kids, with their bankrupt rah rah Wall St. alliances and capitulations on issues that would make everyone’s standard of living better, from single payer health care to gun control.
That’s really what’s at the heart of the matter—how to help the kids who already have hurdles in their life. To what extent can a teacher or a school be expected to transcend all the obstacles of poverty, racial inequity, language barriers?
It’s all too easy for the rich “philanthropists” to blame teachers or public schools for failing our most vulnerable kids, rather than acknowledge and address the truly difficult, profound and complex social injustice and class inequality in our country that hold too many kids down – and the free market system that helped create this inequity in the first place, not least of which by sending our economy into its current Depression.
Our nation’s public schools should not be forced to accept failed “solutions” devised by corporate myopics. It says something about the legitimacy of such “reforms” when the president has to have his education secretary threaten states with ultimatums rather than winning community support.
That was the Bush/Cheney way of doing things. Didn’t American voters just vote to end all that?
Horatio Guernica is the pen name of a West Coast writer.
Photo at the Crosses of Lafayette by Jeremy Maurer.
TILT AT WINDMILLS, SLAY GIANTS
Congress, CA10
by Adriel Hampton
My campaign for the Democratic nomination in District 10’s special election to replace Rep. Ellen Tauscher – with just six weeks to go after yesterday’s filing deadline – vies at the same time for the most creative and the most destructive thing I’ve ever done.
You don’t wake up one morning and run for Congress. You think about it, you meditate on it, you discuss it. In my case, I’d been pondering it since 2002, surfacing it in conversations interrupted by months or years. You see, when your local Congresswoman is a Blue Dog, a go-to Democrat for Wall Street, it’s not just the authorization of force in Iraq that’s got you holding a grudge.
And it’s not just your local Congresswoman. It’s that the entire system is rigged against everyday folks. It’s tightly managed candidates and a political and corporate reality where elites float along while the masses suffer or numb out with TV and other distractions.
These struggles are not from one administration to another, they are fundamental, generational.
And while I’ve been mocked as delusional for running against the entrenched power of the Contra Costa Democratic Party and its candidate, Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (a former Pete Wilson appointee), I’m also pragmatic. Elections have consequences, winners write the histories.
I’m a Democrat because I believe that there is a large element within the party that understands the generational struggles we face. On Friday, I spoke to a room of die-hard progressive Democrats, most of whom wore proud heads of gray. Progressive youth cannot deny their fight. It’s time to pick our battles and take our shots.
We can build a better body politic on the common dreams we share. We must use the tools, the vehicles, the sacrifices that have blazed the trails, and we must keep on fighting for an economy that serves us instead of we serving it, for an end to global war, for sane agriculture policies and an end to the Drug War.
We must tilt at windmills; we must slay giants.
Adriel Hampton is a journalist, Gov 2.0 and new media strategist, public servant, and licensed private investigator. He is running for U.S. Congress in the 2009 special election for California’s 10th District. He has pledged to vote against funding for expansion of the Iraq and Afghan wars.
When I leave my house it’s inevitable: I cork my ears with trusty earbuds, sheathed in silicone, to create a steely seal against the blaring cacophony of the outside world. All this so I can continue the heady love affair with my current iPod playlist – from hearth to, say, the Hayes-21, providing my own personal musical soundtrack.
There have been times, pre, mid, and post corking, that I have wondered if it might be a better idea to pocket the headphones and the iPod and walk the streets, or ride the bus, with naked ears. I get a nagging feeling that sometimes I’m missing out by this constant corking, no matter how much the songs on my current playlist light up my brain. I’ve been wondering what kind of price I’ve been paying for this musical corkage.
I may be strikingly close to the textbook definition of an introvert, but I’m not one entirely. I actually do cherish random, spontaneous conversations with strangers – not limited to, but somehow mostly on MUNI – but I rarely invite these experiences. In fact, I’ve been consistently bent on thwarting them by filling my ear canals with music and podcasts, pretty much effectively nullifying the outside world.
It began innocently enough. As a newly minted college graduate and San Francisco resident a decade ago, I created my own music bubble to deter “the crazy” – in all its forms – and especially when I rode public transportation after twilight. After a few random – and awesome – interactions with strangers (likely when my iPod had died or I was in between headphones) it began to dawn on me that I was cloaking myself with a sonic veil, so every now and again I would gingerly stow the music away as if conducting my own personal experiment in approachability. But this was rare.
Recently, as I was taking a walk through my parents’ suburban neighborhood on the way to a soul-boosting mocha, I crossed paths with a young jogger. Despite having exchanged an urban landscape for a suburban one, I hadn’t discarded my modus operandi for daily walks: earbuds firmly embedded, my focus was on the sonic landscape rather than the one through which I traipsed, the one with trees and flowers and, you know, other living things.
As the jogger came closer we made eye contact. He raised his right hand. In fact, his hand was poised as if to give me a…high five? This stranger? With, what is that? A smile stretched across his face? Sometimes, I’m slow. By the time it occurred to me to raise my own hand to meet his cheerful intention with a conclusionary, flesh-smacking handclap, a random and transient thing that could have boosted me more than a mocha, the moment passed. His right hand never met mine because it remained at my side, gripping my iPod, that sonic seal I had created unbroken. And it sucked.
I regretted my reticence, and I marveled at the stranger who had just dashed by, and his in-the-moment inclination to boost us both with a fleeting act: a freaking high five, a sort of impromptu namaste. And then it hit me: how many times have I thwarted a simple “good morning,” or “hello?” while ensconced in my cocoon of musical bliss? How many meaningful exchanges have I missed out on that could have been pleasant or thought-provoking punctuations to the daily routine, to otherwise ordinary days?
Last week I was in the same neighborhood. I offered a nod and a smile to those with whom I made eye contact. I paid attention. And if I hadn’t been, I would have missed the flyer. It was a “Thank You” to those in the neighborhood who had helped return their beloved and heretofore wayward canine. I stood in front of the flyer for a while, outside of my usual cocoon, hearing the mechanical wooshing of cars going by, squeaking breaks, occasionally thumping bass lines, and fragments of conversations spilling out of open windows. This flyer was a high five in paper form, and though it was not meant for me, I was absolutely moved by the earnestness of the message.
I’ve decided to build windows in my sonic wall, so it’s less barricade and more permeable membrane, allowing for greater connection/interaction with the outside world. There’s no changing my clinical (or technical) introversion, but I’ve seen that the outside world, this planet, is a good place and worth connecting with – if sometimes to the soundtrack of my making.
Gabriela Barragan is a recent MBA graduate, freelance writer, marketing consultant, and extremely dedicated musicophile. She wakes up in either Salinas or Emeryville, CA. Her blog, “House of G”, focuses on music and musings.
As It Ought To Be 
