Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, Washington Mutual is in bankruptcy court, and Livejournal is running ads in the margins inviting me to open a checking account and a savings account with them. “4% APR!” the ads announce.

No, thanks… I’ll stick with my ([for now]solvent) bank… at least for the moment.

Call on Congress

From the New York Times:

By the end of the day, the Dow had fallen almost 778 points, or nearly 7 percent, to 10,365. Credit markets also remained distressed, with bank lending rates rising and investors fleeing to the safety of Treasury bills.

Among opponents of the rescue plan, some Republicans cited ideological objections to government intervention, and liberal Democrats said they were of no mind to race to aid Wall Street tycoons. Other critics complained about haste and secrecy in assembling the plan. But lawmakers on both sides pointed to an outpouring of opposition from deeply hostile constituents just five weeks before every seat in the House was up for election as a fundamental reason that the measure was defeated. House members in potentially tough races and those seeking Senate seats fled from the plan in droves.

There you have it, folks.  It doesn’t matter whether the bailout plan is a good one or a bad one; what really matters is that you express your opinion to your Congressmen, Congresswomen, and Senators again and again and again.  American citizens objected to the looting of the Treasury, especially in a way that allowed Wall Street execs to walk off with hundreds of millions, and Congress voted against allowing it to happen.

Call your Congressional representatives.  About Everything.

Charitably, we’re up to about 10 of 14.

Neo-fascism in America by Jim Macgregor

Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, published research on fascism in which he examined the fascist regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each fascist State:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism – Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights – Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarceration of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause – The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists; terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military – Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military are glamorized.

5. Rampant sexism – The government of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media – Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security – Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined – Government in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected – The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation are often the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is suppressed – Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated, or are severely restricted.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts – Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment – Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption- Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections – Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassinations of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

In progress

In progress
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

I’ve blotted out a student face in this photo (as in many others), but I think the process itself is interesting to document. Here’s a de facto white board, a sheet of white scroll paper that I unrolled over and taped to a blackboard. Students had sticky notes in five colors: I gave hints in yellow. They used orange for technologies, pink for hominid species, green for domesticated species, and blue for cultural elements.

When we began this process back at the beginning of school, this group of kids generated fewer than twenty chunks of information about the whole of the Stone Age. Thanks to this teaching style or methodology, they were able to generate more than a hundred. It’s showing up in their writing and their thinking. They discuss and argue about the placement of these elements in class, and at lunch. Kids are asking me questions about Stonehenge and the pyramids, which hasn’t happened in years. And mostly I’m just getting out of the way of their learning. It’s kind of cool.

Our next challenge is going to be to read Pyramid by David Macaulay at the same time that we read the next chapter in the book. Are they up to … (gasp) … two books at once!? I don’t know, we’ll see.

Thucydides on TARP

in ancient Athens, Thucydides tells us, they put aside a sum of talents in gold and silver for the use of the army and the navy, and for the defense of the city of Athens. It was treason to suggest that it be spent for any other purpose, and the penalty was death.

They also decided to set aside and keep intact a special fund of 1,000 talents from the money in the Acropolis. The expenses of the war were to be paid out of other funds, and the death penalty was laid down for anyone who should suggest or should put to the vote any proposal for using this money in any other way except to defend the city in the case of their enemies coming to attack them with a fleet by sea. To go with this money they set aside a special fleet of 100 triremes, the best ones of each year, with their captains. These, too, were only to be used in the same way as the money and to meet the same danger, if it should ever arise.
—Book 2, paragraph 24, The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.

The question is, is this $700 billion (actually, it merely says the US gov’t can only hold $700 billion at any one time, not that there’s a limit on how much it can spend) part of the 1000 talents set aside for the defense of the state, or the 1000 talents set aside for prosecuting the war, or the 1000 talents set aside for infrastructure/rebuilding the Acropolis?

Oh, right. We’re proposing to spend it on paychecks for companies that have misbehaved over the last 20 years.

Students at work

Students at work
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

The first day of classes, I put up a scroll of paper and let the kids put sticky notes all over it. Post-It® Notes are wonderful. You can shift them around, you can engage with other people’s information, and you can draw links between them, just like they were pages in a WWW. They put up only 19 for the entirety of the Stone Age: 1.8 million years ago up until about 3000 BC and the first pyramids. It’s an appalling length of time, and we/they knew virtually nothing about it.

Fast forward to day 12 of school. Here’s some of my students at work. The first week they got bored of the Post-It® Notes, and groaned every time I pulled them out. But look: instead of 19 Post-It® Notes, we’re talking 75. And today was only ‘rough draft’ time. Tomorrow is going to be ‘final draft’ time in class. They’ll be experimenting, documenting, discussing. And the discussions they’re having!

Here’s the really cool thing. They’re not listening to me. They’re talking with each other about what happened when, and where. They’re arguing with each other. Sometimes they use words that aren’t appropriate, but they’re learning. They’re being respectful with each other. They’re learning to respect one another’s academic opinions, and manage content together. It’s a classroom of people networking.

And I’m not doing very much beyond facilitating any more. They’re doing a lot of hard work to understand the tools and skills, and the content that I’ve put into their hands, but I’m not droning in lecture formats, and they’re learning a tremendous amount. It’s a tremendous evolution in how I teach; not what I teach, but how.

I haven’t been this happy as a teacher in years.

Sarah Palin qualified?

Vote in this PBS poll…

http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html 

Early farming villages

Early farming villages
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

This is the kind of thing I’ve been doing of late: drawing pictures on sticky Post-It® Notes, and creating little frameworks or visual outlines of the papers I’m expecting kids to write. It’s kind of a visual or sketchy shorthand which helps kids see or imagine the world I’m expecting them to understand. It’s not at all easy to think of a productive visual framework for them to consider, each and every day. I wish I’d photographed today’s in my history class, where I had them create sticky notes for different record-keeping types, and different complex organizations, that affected their lives, and then sort and order them by both size and complexity on a Cartesian graph. There’s some very interesting stuff that I could do with all of this, and am doing with all of it.

I’m aware that in doing it, I’m drifting very far from the poetry that used to be such an important part of my daily practice. I wonder if it matters that much, but I’ve also not had as many poetry ideas of late as I’d like. In the meantime, I seem to be drawing at least some creative energies from this kind of work, so I guess it balances out.

Future Shock

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008585.html

I think this is a pretty important article/editorial about the US’s reaction to the pace of accelerating change in the world.

I think we actually had two paperback copies of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock floating around the house when I was a kid – at least, I can remember its “computerized” type running against both pale yellow and pale blue covers.

Between the ages of six and fourteen, roughly, you could have wrapped just about anything from Sunday-matinee dystopia to extra-farty prog rock in that particular typeface, and I would have at least given it a look-see; I was a future-oriented kid. So even though this Toffler book seemed conspicuously lacking in sentient starships, lunar bases and the like, I flipped it down from its place on the top shelf and spent a few days paging through it.

Most of it sailed over my head at that age. What I do remember sticking with me was the notion of accelerating change, an idea which did then and still does make the hairs at the back of my neck tingle. I also quite clearly remember Toffler’s most succinct definition of the syndrome which gave the book its name, a definition which didn’t even necessarily refer to anything technological: to suffer from future shock was simply to be paralyzed by “too much change experienced in too short a period of time.”

For a long, long time thereafter, I’d sit in idle moments and wonder just when future shock was going to happen. In my childish conception, it was something that would happen all at once, be precipitated by some obvious event – the proverbial straw – and stand out just as vividly and obviously as an outbreak of the flu when it did roll across the land. It took me years to understand the words as pointing toward something more poetic and metaphoric than clinically diagnostic. It’s a thought I’ve had occasion to dig up and reconsider this last week. Because this is what I’ve come to understand: Here we are. This is it.

The GotPoetry Live Reading is ! Excellent!

GotPoetry Live (late of Reflection’s Cafe in Providence,RI) has found a new home in Providence [The City So Nice, We Buried H.P. Lovecraft Under It!]. Starting October 7th we will be at Blue State Coffee (300 Thayer Street, Providence, RI 02906 ) from 8-10pm. There will be our award-worthy open mic and we are working on features.

PLEASE, re-post this ad if you are our friend and wish us well. We really want to impress the wonderful owner (who not only is giving us a shot, but has hosted Barack the Mic evenings as well as a lecture by David Amram, and other awesome events) and support a Fair-Trade venue that gives a lot to the community and supports the good causes. But most importantly, please come some Tuesday in October so we can show this guy that we would be, not only a worthy social/arts cause, but that we can support his non-chain business with Tuesdays that bring in some coin.

as it so happens, I’m on duty on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the foreseeable future, but I do wish them well in their new location.