Read Your Way Across the USA

What is this fad about lists?  Is it just a 21^st century thing or a social media thing or a lazy person’s “100 places to visit before I die” thing or an American thing?

So here’s an interesting new list: “The Most Famous Book Set in Every US State.”  From Alabama (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) to Wyoming (“The Laramie Project”). 

Check it out and get a sense of each state’s ethos, quirks, famous authors. Nebraska – “My Antonia,” wonderful Willa Cather.  Massachusetts – “Walden” – everyone should read Henry David Thoreau.

Think about how the states differ from each other; what would “Mockingbird’s” Jeb and Scout have been like in Alaska?  Would the vampires of the “Twilight” series been more or less appealing in Hawaii instead of Washington State? 

Check out a state you know well and dispute the choice: “What?  California is “East of Eden?”  What about “The Joy Luck Club” or The Maltese Falcon?”  Or Washington – vampires?  What about David Gutterson’s “Snow Falling on Cedars?”

Then there’s the competition – how many have you read?  Does it count if you haven’t read the book but have seen the movie?  (Georgia– “Gone with the Wind,” Connecticut – “Revolutionary Road.”)  (Bragging – I’ve read 23, plus seen the movie of four more.)

Do some literary analysis – is the state just the setting, or is it an actual character in the novel?  Oh wait, they are not even all novels – they’ve got “The Great Gatsby” (New York) next to “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (Nevada.)

Yeah, the more you look at it, it’s a pretty silly list.  (3 by John Grisham?  Come on, he’s fun to read, but surely we can add in someone else for Arkansas and Tennessee?)

But it reminds us of our great diversity (“e pluribus”) within this strange nation (“unum?”)  Is there a similar list in the UK or France or China?  Probably. 

Lists like this can also give you some new ideas of things to do.  Or read.  Like for my home state of New Jersey, the choice is a short story collection, “Drown” by Junot Diaz.  I’ve never heard of it or him.  So of course I had to research this mystery confrere.  Born in the Dominican Republic, his father was working in NJ to support his family and Diaz came to live with him as a boy.  They are now estranged and the short stories are said to have a common theme of the absent father.  He’s now an English professor in Boston and the first Hispanic to be named to the Pulitzer Prize judge panel, a prize he has won himself.  Local boy makes good.

But if I’d gotten to chose a book about my beloved home state it would have been “Are You There, God?  It’s Me, Margaret” by Judy Blume.  It’s a 1970 young adult novel about a 13 year old girl who moves from New York City to the New Jersey suburbs and faces identity challenges about faith, puberty and identity.  It was the first popular book actually to discuss in print such taboos as menstruation and sanitary napkins.  And she questions her own faith (hence the title) because of the tension between her Jewish father and Christian mother.  For these controversial topics – blood! God! – the book was widely banned from school libraries and classrooms. 

That was my New Jersey – a young girl growing up, questioning and being told, “We don’t speak publicly about these things!!” 

But that was many years ago. Always good to find out about new books. I’ll check out the Diaz book.

What’s your favorite book about a place you know and love?

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Christian Dominionism Shuts Down the US Government

Chris HedgesWhat motivates Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and other Tea Party “extortionists” (Pres. Obama’s description) who are holding the nation hostage, by shutting down the government and refusing to raise the debt ceiling? Political journalist Chris Hedges has some hard-hitting, scary, and I think, accurate theories for their actions.

So for this week’s column I just give him to floor, in an edited version (for our readers used to about 900 words) of his weekly column on Truthdig.  Voted Best Political Website at the 2013 Webby Awards, its slogan is “Digging Beneath the Headlines”.

 I first heard of Hedges when my son’s sociology prof. assigned his book War is a Force the Gives Us Meaning. Son of a Presbyterian minister and a seminary grad himself, Hedges has been a foreign correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner for the New York Times and other outlets.  Active in the Occupy Movement, he calls himself a socialist.  

(I recommend the whole column. Hedges writes in a dense style; I’ve reformatted some long paragraphs into shorter separate lines to emphasize key points, like, “They sanctify their rage.”)

There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America.

Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives.

….

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire International ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism.

This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism.

The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.

…….

Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white. They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will.

They sanctify their rage.

This rage lies at the center of the ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and political domination.

All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion.

Its adherents are using the space within the open society to destroy the open society itself.

…….

I spent two years inside the Christian right in writing my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I attended services at megachurches across the country, went to numerous lectures and talks, sat in on creationist seminars, attended classes on religious proselytizing and conversion, spent weekends at “right-to-life” retreats and interviewed dozens of followers and leaders of the movement. Though I was sympathetic to the financial dislocation, the struggles with addictions, the pain of domestic and sexual violence, and the deep despair that drew people to the movement, I was also acutely aware of the dangerous ideology these people embraced.

Fascist movements begin as champions of civic improvement, communal ideals, moral purity, strength, national greatness and family values. These movements attract, as has the radical Christian right, those who are disillusioned by the collapse of liberal democracy. And our liberal democracy has collapsed.

We have abandoned our poor and working class. We have created a government monster that sucks the marrow out of our bones to enrich and empower the oligarchic and corporate elite. The protection of criminals, whether in war or on Wall Street, is part of our mirage of law and order. We have betrayed the vast and growing underclass.

Most believers within the Christian right are struggling to survive in a hostile world. We have failed them.

Their very real despair is being manipulated and used by Christian fascists such as the Texas senator. Give to the working poor a living wage, benefits and job security and the reach of this movement will diminish. Refuse to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and working class and you ensure the ascendancy of a Christian fascism.

The Christian right needs only a spark to set it ablaze. Another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism, hyperinflation, a series of devastating droughts, floods, hurricanes or massive wildfires or another financial meltdown will be the trigger. Then what is left of our anemic open society will disintegrate.

The rise of Christian fascism is aided by our complacency. The longer we fail to openly denounce and defy bankrupt liberalism, the longer we permit corporate power to plunder the nation and destroy the ecosystem, the longer we stand slack-jawed before the open gates of the city waiting meekly for the barbarians, the more we ensure their arrival.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Senate Chaplain Calls Lawmakers Unreasonable and Proud

Rev. Dr. Barry Black When the New York Times writes about clergy on the front page (very rarely), it’s only about a scandal or death.

But this week the Senate Chaplain, Rev. Dr. Barry Black , got a page one feature because of the morning prayers he offers at each Senate session.

“Remove from them, O God, their stubborn pride.” 

“We acknowledge our transgression, our smugness, our selfishness and our pride.”

 “Save us from the madness.” 

“Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable.”

“Forgive them the blunders they have committed.”

What can I say to our international readers about the madness known as the US government shutdown?  Headlines use words like “self-inflicted,” “held hostage” “neither side will blink,” evoking very American, violent images.  Our history is full of shootouts at the OK Corral and armed embassy standoffs; here we go again.  So far the violence is only words, threats.  No guns pulled yet. 

Although it feels like violence when 9 million mothers and babies in poverty lose their federally funds for healthy food, breastfeeding support and infant formula.  Nearly one million government workers are on the job but not getting paid and they’re getting more desperate each day.  A few years ago, after a series of postal workers went crazy and violent and murderous, we started saying that a violent worker “went postal.”  I think I’ll stay away from the post office this week.

But Rev. Black is calm.  Even though he, too, is not getting paid, he daily does the work he likens to being pastor of a large church; he touches the 6000 workers in the Senate with those opening prayers, daily Bible studies, counseling, teaching, leadership training, weddings and funerals for senators and their families and staff. 

(He prayed at the funerals of Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Rosa Parks.  Sen. Edward Kennedy asked him to be on the boat for the burial at sea of his nephew, John F. Kennedy, Jr.   He prayed one day in 2009, “Merciful Lord, may the members of your body feel your peace and power today, restrain wandering thoughts and break into pieces those temptations that lead them away from your will…Lord this is the first time in nearly 50 years that the Senate will convene without Senator Edward Kennedy as one of its members.  Thank you for his life and legacy.  Amen.”)

Interesting guy; first black Senate Chaplain and first Seventh Day Adventist.  (For decades it was Episcopalians, then a few Presbyterians and Methodists.  Never been a Catholic or Jew or Moslem, although Black invites them to be guest prayers and teachers.)  A smart guy; Navy Admiral, former head of Navy Chaplains, Ph.D. in psychology.  Private about his own politics, but pushes senators to study religious ethics and to vote with a conscience.  Took part in a Capitol Hill “Hoodies on the Hill” protest last year after the murder of black unarmed youth Trayvon Martin for looking threatening in his hooded sweatshirt.  He’s also spoken at Evangelical Christian meetings.

Washington old timers lament the end of the era when you could find Republican and Democratic senators who were good friends, went out for drinks after work, rose above self interest to the nation’s good.  Rev. Black seems to be trying to change the tone, with a little divine assistance.  The Times profile said:

Inside the tempestuous Senate chamber, where debate has degenerated into daily name-calling — the Tea Party as a band of nihilists and extortionists, and Democrats as socialists who want to force their will on the American people —  Mr. Black’s words manage to cut through as powerful and persuasive.

During his prayer on Friday, the day after officers from the United States Capitol Police shot and killed a woman who had used her car as a battering ram, Mr. Black noted that the officers were not being paid because of the government shutdown.

Then he turned his attention back to the senators. “Remove from them that stubborn pride which imagines itself to be above and beyond criticism,” he said. “Forgive them the blunders they have committed.”

Senator Harry Reid, the pugnacious majority leader who has called his Republican adversaries anarchists, rumps and hostage takers, took note. As Mr. Black spoke, Mr. Reid, whose head was bowed low in prayer, broke his concentration and looked straight up at the chaplain.

“Following the suggestion in the prayer of Admiral Black,” the majority leader said after the invocation, seeming genuinely contrite, “I think we’ve all here in the Senate kind of lost the aura of Robert Byrd,” one of the historical giants of the Senate, who prized gentility and compromise.

We’re desperate here in America, God.  We are ignoring the poor and feeding rich egos.  Open our ears to more like Rev. Black.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

How to Grade the Los Angeles Students who Hacked School Computers?

In this last session of our month long seminar on American education we consider a story about Los Angeles high school students being smarter than their tech teachers. I imagine teachers in every nation want to use more computer technology in classrooms, but this story seems so American…..  

(I haven’t been writing about US political news for a while because it is so depressing and predictable; the Republicans are doing all they can to shut down the government, defund or repeal Obamacare, cut off food stamp assistance to millions of hungry citizens, and simply avoid governing.  

 (But I will try to force myself to write something about what happens when Obamacare goes into effect next week.  Our friend Ed Kilgore recommends a good primer on what might actually happen, contra all the lies and scare tactics of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and others. ) 

An IPad for every student K-12!  That’s 600,000 IPads that the Los Angeles School district bought from Apple and started handing out (free) this month. (The whole project, with IPads and wifi upgrades and embedded education material, cost the district $1 billion.) 

The second largest school district in the nation (NYC has just over a million students) has the usual challenges facing a large multi-ethnic urban educational system: over 2000 schools, a $7.3 billion budget that’s nowhere near enough, some problem teachers (big scandal of a molesting teacher at one school, the whole faculty reassigned), over 25% dropout rate, huge income gaps between students, who are 72% Hispanic, 10% African America. 

No one said IPads would solve all these problems, but it does seem that Americans (and others?) just love throwing technology and money at problems that seem a lot more complex than anything a tool and cash can solve. 

So the happy students took their IPads home, as assigned, to do homework, but were chagrined to find they couldn’t go on Facebook or play music or games.  The school had blocked their computers from entertainment and social media sites.  

What the f****!? was the general response.   So the students did what their teachers encourage, what Apple encourages: they got creative, they thought outside the little box the IPad came in.  It only took a week for quite a few of the first 47,000 pilot program recipients to figure out how to delete their personal information and hence break the handcuffs of the Big Brother school district.  Voila!  All their favorite websites free for the taking.  Some students even started a black market, charging other students to unlock them also. 

Until the school district found out and ordered the IPads brought back, could only be used at school.  Most of them came back, not all; 50 or so are missing.  

What’s so American about this Los Angeles high school hacking scandal? Faithful readers of my column (are you out there?) will remember that in my very first column a year and a half ago, I described America as individualistic, materialistic, big, young, diverse and segregated, practical and entrepreneurial, musical, religious, violent and criminal.  This story exemplifies practically all of those adjectives.

 My favorite letter to the editor in the LA Times was from a retired LA school teacher, responding to a story headlined “Give Students an A+ in Hacking.”  He wrote, “As a former high school teacher of technology going back to 1978, I would have given these students no better than a ‘C.’ What took them so long?” 

He goes on to say, “A computer is a tool, just like a pencil is a tool.  It is not possible to prevent the misuse of either.  The school district should expend less resources on policing and blocking usage and more on making students smart and safe users of all tools.” 

Education, especially public education, has long been touted as the great equalizer in US society, giving less advantaged students a way out of lives of poverty and few choices. School administrators argue that the IPad project equalizes access to educational technology across the student population.  Upper income kids have computers, lower income don’t. 

Indeed studies show that the ever increasing income inequality in America extends to how much parents spend on education for their kids; in 1972 upper income parents spent five times as much as low income parents.  By last year it was nine times as much. 

I looked at those racial ethnic stats for the LA students; 72% Hispanic, 10% African American.  Where do all the white kids go to school?  Oh, I found out that LA has an additional 250,000 students in private schools, 1500 private schools, almost as many as public ones. 

Is that where the children of all the creative Hollywood folks go?  They’ve had IPads since birth.

Copright @ 2013 Deborah Streeter 

College Newspaper Scores Big Story

We’re still going to school here at the US campus of the Back Road Café.  We’ve already sat in on a high school US history class  and tried to find a preschool. Today we visit the offices of The Crimson White, student newspaper at The University of Alabama 

CNN and Jesse Jackson both came to call this week at the offices of The University of Alabama student paper The Crimson White after student reporters broke a big story; sororities of the legendary Tuscaloosa school continue to refuse membership to black students.  

“Are we really not going to talk about the black girl?” began the story “The Final Barrier: 50 Years after the integration of the University of Alabama, the greek system remains segregated.” A member of Alpha Gamma Delta, one of many elite residences and societies known as sororities (and fraternities for men) that play a large role in student status and success on many US campuses, told the paper that she asked this question during a closed meeting to vote on new sorority members.  The meeting ended abruptly with no votes, she said, because alumna on the committee did not want to accept any black members. 

The “black girl” in question had a 4.3 grade point average (4.0 is all A’s), was a track star and salutatorian of her high school class, and granddaughter of UA trustee and retired Alabama Supreme Court Justice John Englander, Jr. 

That is, she was qualified, over-qualified, to join the powerful sorority. And well connected.   But they have never had black members.  This at the campus where 50 years ago this fall there was the famous “Showdown at the Schoolhouse Door” between US Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, demanding the school admit black students, and Alabama Governor George Wallace blocking the door, having said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” 

Most US colleges and universities have a newspaper with eager journalism students seeking to write more than the weekly dorm lunch menu (that’s on page 2 right next to this story) and sports stories.  This article was part of a series The Crimson White was doing to mark the 50 years since desegregation.  

When we mark anniversaries, like all these 50^ths this year – 1963  March on Washington, fire bombing deaths of 4 little girls at a church in Birmingham, the Showdown at the Schoolhouse Door – we encourage media stories; 50 years ago….What has changed? 

Not much, it seems, in the so-called greek system of sororities and fraternities at ‘Bama.  On campus (and funded and supported by student fees) are historically white sororities and black sororities and Jewish sororities.  After previous complaints and newspaper stories, the administration has simply said, essentially; these are private organizations, they can do what they want, and we can understand why people would want to hang out with “their own kind.” 

(The administration ignored the fact that the black sororities have accepted white members and the Jewish ones have taken black members.) 

And they underestimated what might happen if the story got out past the kiosks of the cute free student paper. (It’s called The Crimson White because those are the school colors, and the athletic teams are called the Crimson Tide.  “Roll On Tide!”– a cheer at the football games of their #1 nationally ranked football team.  Which is integrated – no problem having black athletes.) 

So the story went national and viral.  NY Times, CNN in nearby Atlanta, Time Magazine, The Guardian.  The school paper has been writing about this for at least three years.  Why hadn’t it caught the public attention earlier? Was it a slow news day?  Were people more interested because of the anniversary stories?  The fact that the student’s grandfather, the trustee and justice, heard, he said it was time for this to change?  I don’t know. 

But it took me to the paper’s website.  Check out page one of the issue with the original story.

Is it just me or is this photo a bit more provocative than necessary?  Sex sells, even for a free paper.  The story starts on page 3.  What’s here on page one, below the forlorn babe sorority wannabe, is another in the 50^th anniversary series, this time about ‘Bama’s legendary football coach Bear Bryant, holder of all school records, who is presented as relatively proactive on integrating football (Wow! In 1971 he welcomed two black players, almost ten years after the Schoolhouse Door.) 

Rev. Jesse Jackson, legendary civil rights leader and aide to Martin Luther King, Jr, often shows up magically at many scenes of prejudice or hate, and he happened to be in the neighborhood for a commemoration of the firebomb murder of the four girls at the 16^th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham. 

All the attention – CNN, Justice Grandpa, Jesse Jackson - seems to have taken the administration by surprise.  They started quickly backtracking on their previous helpless responses.  The president issued various statements of concern, the Faculty Senate condemned the sorority, the paper had follow up stories and letters. 

Then students organized a march, “The Final Showdown at the School House Door.”  Nice connection with their own history.   500 students, mostly white (the school is only 12% black in a state which is 26% black) were joined by faculty and staff demanding the administration be more active in desegregating the sororities (and fraternities? – they are left out of these stories.)  Even the regional federal civil rights office of the Dept. of Justice issued a warning to the school.  By week’s end the sorority had extended the deadline and raised the number of students who could be accepted.  And – surprise! – they admitted four black women. 

This is all to say that US universities are not just classrooms and research and diplomas.  They are microcosms of their communities.  They teach by example as much as by lecture.  Students learn on marches as on tests. 

And that US universities are incredibly beholden to alums, for their big money donations to sororities and athletic programs.  (And, oh yeah, maybe to faculty support and student scholarships?)  The money in college football is obscene; football coaches regularly earn far more than university presidents.  Alums fuel this mania. 

So it was no surprise that page one of the news breaking issue of The Crimson White had a story about football.  And that the current online version of the paper features, after the sorority story, a big story about how the administration is concerned that the 17,000 seat student section of the 101,000 seat football stadium is not selling out each Saturday to watch their national champion team.  

What?  The students would rather stay home and study?  Or maybe they just prefer to hang out with their own kind?

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter