Posted inPolitics: National

Atlas mugged

I've been on a mission for several years to right the wrong done to Charles Erwin Wilson, the president of General Motors from 1941 to 1953. He later served as Defense Secretary under President Eisenhower, a man with a keen interest in the well-being of the military. You know Engine Charlie: He's the one who said, "What's good for General Motors is good for America." The very epitome of the selfish, imperious chief executive. Except he didn't actually say it. His real words were, "for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." In other words, the interests of big business couldn't be divorced from the well-being of the nation. This represented the best ethos of our business leadership when America stood at its zenith.

James Cash Penney, founder of the department store chain, operated not by exotic swindles cooked up by his Ivy League MBAs, but by the golden rule. The vinegary head of National Cash Register, John Henry Patterson, turned his factories into boat-building plants to save residents of Dayton during the 1913 great flood. Henry Ford, crackpot and anti-Semite though he became, established his business on this foundation: "I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large
enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and
care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men
to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can
devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary
will be unable to own one." In doing so, especially paying good salaries, he made one of the seminal steps to create the modern middle class. Ford also said, "A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large."

Now we have a different breed of cat running our largest companies. Their model is not J.C. Penney or even Henry Ford, but Jack Welch and the moguls of Wal-Mart. And they may be on a mission to sabotage the chief executive of the United States.

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Posted inPolitics: National

What is to be done?

So this is where we stand: The financial doomsday machine, equal parts the creation of feral greed and deregulation, has been saved by taxpayers and IOUs on our future living standards. With its billions to lobby, it has avoided the prosecutions and re-regulation that followed the laissez-faire-caused crash of 1929. So it continues to gamble with dangerous play money called derivatives and other financial "innovations." Billions more from big business ensure corporate control of a broken government. All of these entities live to send jobs offshore or engage in job-killing mergers, as industries become more consolidated than at any time since the Robber Baron Age. Income inequality has returned to that era, too. And for the first time in history, most of the next generation will see worse prospects than those of their parents.

Twenty-six million workers are unemployed or forced into part-time jobs when they want full-time positions. Five unemployed workers are chasing every available job, and yet the Republican minority, aided by Sen. Ben Nelson of the populous state of Nebraska, continue to deny an extension of jobless aid. Schools, transit, parks, libraries and assistance to the most vulnerable are crumbling. For the first time in a century, the world does not look to the United States to lead the world to recovery. Instead, Asia powers ahead while this shadowy thing called "the markets" holds guns to the heads of Western governments, with elite commentators saying all the public foundations that make an advanced civilization must be ruthlessly slashed. Who are these "markets"? And how do we explain that the zenith of American might was built on much higher taxes for the wealthy and corporations, as well as capital markets that raised money for productive, job-creating businesses? Meanwhile, America is bogged down in endless wars, making more enemies through our military adventures and appetite for oil. Oh, oil. The Gulf of Mexico is perhaps irretrievably damaged by a BP spill that has fallen off the front page. Expect more such events.

After all this, voters seem poised to return control of the House of Representatives, and perhaps the Senate, to the Republicans, the party that wrecked America. Speaker Boehner. It will mean the end of President Obama, a man who somehow has managed to squander America's best and perhaps last chance to right itself. The genuine hope and relief of January 2009 is long gone. In its place is a sentiment I heard from many as the Bush years dragged on — including, in private conversations, from people of national prominence. Their words were always the same: "For the first time in my life, I am afraid for my country."

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Posted inPolitics: National

This time is different

Anyone who thinks our economy and the rest of America is in a familiar cycle, with perhaps different music and new electronic gadgets, hasn't been paying attention. Unfortunately this includes much of the media and the economic experts they choose to quote. It's like 1981-82. Well, no, even though in severity that event was the worst up to that point since the 1930s. Jobs were shed in this recession at a faster and deeper rate than since statistics began to be kept in the late 1940s, and by this time after the start of the 1981 downturn we had regained virtually all the lost jobs. Now we have nearly 26 million unemployed or underemployed (temps who want full-time work) Americans. Thanks to Republicans in Congress, 2 million have lost their unemployment insurance. In any event, that was a Fed-caused recession to defeat inflation, and the underlying American economy was strong and diverse, with the middle class at its zenith and Wall Street a dowdy joint tasked with raising capital for real productive, job-creating enterprises. None of that is true in this disaster.

It's like the Great Depression. That was an economic collapse fueled by financial speculation and fraud, high leverage, laissez-faire, and extreme income inequality, too. Unfortunately, there the parallels end. America was the world's largest creditor nation, manufacturing exporter and oil producer/exporter, with state-of-the-art factories and a skilled workforce just waiting for an upturn. Government was much smaller at the start of the Depression, allowing FDR plenty of room to experiment; he was not weighed down in the 1930s by two endless colonial conflicts and defense spending greater than all other nations combined. The bad was worse: Unemployment was estimated at 25 percent; poverty was much more widespread; the country was still heavily rural and small-town. And, importantly, the "old order" that brought on the crash was discredited and, for the next several decades, shut out of political power.

It's just a normal business cycle being made worse by government. When people say this, they don't mean that the government has made inadequate and poorly targeted stimulus or helped prop up the Wall Street casino prepping us for another panic. They mean Obama is a "socialist/fascist/communist" and America needs to let the "free market" rule, while slashing "wasteful" government spending. This would be dark comedy if it were not fervently believed by so many voters. It is most definitely not any kind of business cycle we've seen. But this dangerous minority may well get their way come November — they're already getting much of it, with painful consequences.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The president and the general

Mindful of the saying that a bitching soldier is a happy soldier, I'm hard-pressed to join in the oft hysterical condemnation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal for said bitching by him and his staff in the Rolling Stone article. Many on what passes for the "left" today, having seen that President Obama is neither Lincoln nor FDR, now want him to be Harry Truman and enjoy a MacArthur moment. They forget, or don't know, that Truman's dismissal of the five-star general from command in the Korean War helped make him the most unpopular modern president — before George W. Bush, that is. In addition, Truman had served as an artillery captain in World War I and had little use for top military brass, particularly one with MacArthur's temperament and the intolerable situation in which the general had placed Truman. MacArthur wasn't trash-talking Truman but disobeying direct orders. As Truman said, "I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the
President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch,
although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it
was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail."

I even admire McChrystal on a certain level. Historically, America often had political senior officers in peacetime, ones good at keeping their civilian masters happy and maintaining the status quo — even if it meant, say, ignoring the meaning of air power or the tank. In wartime, which was not a continuous national endeavor at one time, the political officers were shunted aside for the fighting officers. McChrystal is plainly one of the latter. But what about the Tillman cover-up and the prisoner abuse that happened under his command? Worse, much worse, happened in World War II, the "good war." This is why William Tecumseh Sherman's full quotation should always be at our national shoulder: "I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all
moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the
shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for
vengeance, for desolation. War is hell." These may seem like different times, when our forces are being asked to do impossible tasks driven by incoherent policies. But the brutality of the enterprise remains the same, and its coarsening effect on a democracy, as feared by Woodrow Wilson, is as potent as ever.

Maybe McChrystal's self-immolation in the Stone was a subliminal desire to get the hell out of this chickenshit unit.

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Posted inPolitics: National

And that’s the way it is

I wondered if Barack Obama became a one-term president with his astonishingly vapid Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster. But maybe Mr. Obama has the pulse of the nation better than any of us who wanted real change and the fierce urgency of now. It was grotesquely ironic that a few days after offering the usual presidential platitudes about the need to wean ourselves off oil, he was in Columbus, Ohio, touting his stimulus by dedicating work on a road expansion. It was, he said, the 10,000th road project that the stim has funded.

Around the nation the transit systems that had been dramatically expanding ridership as gasoline prices rose are now starving from state and local fiscal crises. Amtrak, despite the vice-president's supposed love of it, remains a shadow of the passenger rail system it succeeded and a political pawn awaiting further cutbacks and the demand that it "pay for itself." This even though no major transportation network pays for itself, certainly not roads. And this despite evidence that road projects don't even have much of a positive effect on unemployment. High-speed rail? It's being studied, even though other advanced and ambitious nations already have systems and are expanding them. Cincinnati, a lovely central city that has been devastated by freeways and sprawl, can't even
muster the civic sanity to fund a streetcar line. America will continue its dependency on roads and cars — something far beyond our competitors in Europe or China. Why? Because that's the way it it.

We care about the poor birds and fish being killed by the oil spill. But not enough to give up our cars. We live magical thinking: That technology will simply replace the inexpensive light sweet crude that powered the automotive age. Rather like the technology that was supposed to allow BP to drill miles down into the earth to extract the remaining crude in the Gulf of Mexico. Electric cars will be expensive and require minerals from places other than America — many of them unstable — as well as demanding electricity from power plants that will be run on…what? Fossil fuels most likely. Beyond that, the dreams become loopy. Space aliens are not going to drop by and give us magical hydrogen cars. Tar sands are not going to yield inexpensive gasoline. Few seem to understand that the fossil fuel "imputs" into most alternative fuels are greater than the new energy produced; many also have nasty environmental or other unintended consequences. Nowhere is this more true than with any alternative to the big oil hog: automobiles.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

The Arizona syndrome

Arizona Democrats may have thought they were on a roll in recent years, at least in congressional elections. Harry Mitchell beat J.D. Hayworth in a solid red district and Gabrielle Giffords won a swing seat. Much of that was actually anti-Bush, anti-J.D. sentiment. Now Arizona seems poised to rejoin the South and most of the Plains and Intermountain West states as solidly red. My recent sojourn to my home state did nothing to dissuade me from this view. Many Democrats are dispirited. The party lacks the infrastructure of the right — from "think tanks" and big corporate money to endless right-wing talk radio. In a state with a fairly recent past of vigorous two-party competition, the Democrats were largely asleep as the extreme Republican right took control from the ground up, starting with school boards and obscure boards, eventually taking commanding power in the Legislature, by far the most powerful branch of government.

This is a crying shame for Terry Goddard. I heard the meme of "he thinks he deserves to be governor because his old man was." Far from it. Goddard is the most qualified candidate, a smart, open-minded public servant who has earned his way in elective office and actually did the most to attack border crime. The Democrats have a number of excellent candidates for statewide races, including David Lujan, Andrei Cherny and my old colleague and friend John Dougherty. They stand little chance against the vast capacity of the right. Mitchell and Giffords may well go down.

The big weapon against the Dems is, of course, SB 1070, the Jim Crow anti-immigrant bill.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Top kill

Our front page editor translates into honest English the typical hate letter that comes to Rogue Columnist:

Dear Mr. Talton: If it wasn’t for
you I’d have an additional 200 percent
equity in my house in my gated community in North Scottsdale. If you
would stop pointing out the minor problems we face in PHX, we could win
the NBA
and my greens fees would be lower.

He adds in his own voice: "We are a
nation of spoiled shits living off of debt and about
40 years past the high water mark of America. The real shame is that it
could all be fixable, but will never be. We live in Scamistan. The U.S. government scamming taxpayers and lenders. CEOs scamming shareholders.
Military
scamming the President. Corporations offloading the real cost of their
fat/salt laden food. BP/Massey Coal on the real cost of energy. Iowa corn farmers on ethanol and water/pesticides killing the Gulf
before BP…. 
People delusional in thinking short term and not long term in fixing
our
problems.  Pols worried about the next election, not the next 20-plus years."

And you think I'm gloomy. To paraphrase Emerson, God offers every mind its choice between truth and American brightsided "optimism." Take which you please — you can never have both. So, tell me, ye brightsiders, what are we to make of the unparalleled, at least in this country, environmental disaster happening off the coast of Louisiana?

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Posted inPolitics: National

Screwed 3.0

Now we enter the next phase of the Great Disruption, where political dysfunction meets unsustainability. The Greek debt crisis is helping prepare the way for American panic about the federal deficit and national debt. These two maladies are a cause célèbre for the Tea Party. The supposedly left-wing media are on board. USA Today headline: "Nation's soaring debt calls for painful choices." Tom Friedman of the New York Times: "After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving
things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things
away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics." Isn't he cute? I can't wait for the idiot David Brooks to weigh in. (He's already written about how "as
government grew, the anti-government right mobilized. This produced the
Tea Party Movement — a characteristically raw but authentically American
revolt led by members of the yeoman enterprising class…As government became more threatening…" Funny, he means the Obama administration, not the Bush wars, shredding of civil liberties and crony capitalism leading to trillions in federal bailouts, i.e., government growing.) You see, we're just like Greece — a profligate nation that needs to tighten its belt, cut government.

The reality, of course, is very different. Whatever his failings, Bill Clinton showed that seemingly intractable red ink could be turned into surpluses. The present deficit and debt is almost entirely a creation of the Bush tax cuts, the Bush wars and the Bush bailout of Wall Street (for which Sen. Obama voted). The fiscal situation was made more severe by the worst recession since the Great Depression. It's as if FDR fought World War II twice as long, cut rather than raised taxes, and did all this in the worst part of the Depression while using federal money for the banksters rather than the people. It's a wonder the deficit is so low as a percentage of GDP. It is not a cause for hysteria.

But, ah, dear reader, it will be used. "You never want to let a serious crisis to go to waste," said White House tough guy Rahm Emanuel, who is letting the real crises of the Great Disruption do just that. The extreme white-right — the idiot David Brooks' "yeoman enterprising class" — and the plutocracy will use the "crisis" of federal spending to their own ends. And if the effectiveness of their party as the minority in Congress is any indication, wait until they take the House this year from a feckless Democratic Party. And then the Senate and White House. Prepare for Screwed 3.0

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Roll over, Gene Pulliam

The Arizona Republic on Sunday published a remarkable front-page editorial concerning the pile of feces into which the state has done a face-plant, otherwise known as its attempt to "address" illegal immigration. It was not remarkable for its placement — old-time newspaper publishers often did page-one opinion pieces, perhaps most famously the Republic's own Eugene C. Pulliam. Rather, this article, pretty as it was with the paper's current obsession with design, proved astonishing in its intellectual shallowness, dishonesty and desperate pretzel-twisting to cast "blame" equally in every direction. And all the while demanding "leaders." Rarely has an institution in the broad land of vapid corporate newspapers made such a gaudy display of its daft cowardliness. One is reminded of Lincoln's line: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

"Old Man Pulliam," who ran the Republic and Phoenix Gazette for decades, occasionally published — and even wrote, for he was a newspaperman to his marrow — thundering page-one editorials. They were not intended to compete in the Society for News Design. They were sometimes long, always trenchantly and even intellectually argued. I recall one from the late '60s (I believe) that was a fierce jeremiad against rising government bureaucracy. You always knew where his newspaper stood. Pulliam was a man of the right but he would not be allowed into today's Republican Party or corporate journalism club. He was too independent, endorsing LBJ over Barry Goldwater in 1964 and renouncing the idea of a newspaper as merely a business. It is said he wrote a trust to prevent the sale of his beloved papers to the likes of Gannett, but that's another story.

There's no doubt that were he alive today and running the Republic, he and his famed investigative reporters would make short work of Russell Pearce and Joe Arpaio.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Friday night lights

CHS mural

Joe Gatti's iconic Seven Arts mosaic on the old Coronado High auditorium

Everybody paid attention to the round, white clock on the west wall. The room was big and carried sound. We were suited up and while some sat silently preparing or exercising, others congregated, working off nerves with jokes and stories. Those tales of past exploits were entertaining in themselves, but they often contained important lessons. The jokes let off steam. Individuals handled the stress of these moments differently; a few thrived on it, others tried to set aside their self-doubt. As the hands of the clock moved, the payoff from months and even years of training and preparation would come — or not. What began in the new few minutes, and it would be over so fast, all you had was what you brought tonight. Except…except, those seconds of improvisational magic on which everything might turn.

The reputation of the school was at stake, its deep traditions, its prestige. Everyone was deeply invested in the event that was to come, but many of us had college scholarships at stake, a few even hoped to turn pro. As the time approached the noise in the room grew until Mr. Newcomer made his entrance, his customary clipboard in hand. Silence. In an authoritative baritone, he ticked off a few last notes to a quiet team. Then we all stood and clasped hands — as I recall it was arm-over-arm, so one's right hand held the other's left hand and so on, bringing the circle closer, making the fellowship unbreakable. And we all recited the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done… Afterward, one of the assistants opened the door and we filed out, ready.

This was theater at Coronado High School, in what is now "south Scottsdale," in the early- and mid-1970s. While many high schools had a "senior play," we have a theater season that usually consisted of eight major productions, including two musicals (one with faculty), spring repertory and a summer play. The fare was ambitious in its difficulty and scale: Twelfth Night, Fiddler on the Roof, Of Mice and Men, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, A Midsummer Night's Dream and West Side Story among them. Under the leadership of Jim Newcomer, the theater program's excellence was always at the college level, often surpassing it. Theater instructor Judie Carroll and Ralph Bradshaw from the fine English department also directed productions. Nor was the theater program unique.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

Arizona crazy

From the Jim Crow anti-immigrant law and birther bill to the reality television show Sunset Daze, Arizona is gaining an international reputation for being crazy. It's not just "image" or "bad publicity." How did this happen to my beloved home? It took decades and tectonic shifts. Some will sound familiar to regular Rogue readers, but for the sake of the thousands of newbies that have found Rogue Columnist and are curious/frightened about Arizona, here's a primer:

The new Republican Party: Arizona always had a strong reactionary element, going back to its dependence on mines and railroads. Even the Democrats were mostly conservative. Arizona never produced, for example, a William Borah, the progressive Republican senator from Idaho. But even among the Republicans, there was independence and an understanding that Arizona would blow away without massive amounts of federal money. Republicans were a minority until Barry Goldwater slowly built them into the state's dominant party in the 1960s. Even then, Goldwater, Arizona Republic publisher Eugene C. Pulliam and others kept the John Bircher element at arms length, happy to use them but never let them take control. This changed with time and massive influx of new people. By the 1980s, conservative extremism was in the governor's seat. From the 1990s onward, the Christian Coalition and other national right-wing groups began taking control of the party from the lowest levels up, and purging old Arizona Republicans who now were labeled RINOS (Republicans in Name Only). They also focused on winning offices that held the most budget power, from school boards to the Legislature. The result is an entirely different creature: militant, frozen in ideological conformity, hostile to the facts, deeply committed to enacting "conservative" abstractions with little evidence they succeed. And, as the evidence shows, racist. Now, the Republicans have pretty much ruled for decades and the state is a catastrophe. Questions? That doesn't stop them from acting like victimized outsiders and the duhs and ignos in this ill-educated state fall for it.

The Big Sort: The journalist Bill Bishop used this as the title of his book on the dramatic clustering of like-minded people in different regions. It's a big change from most of American history, and as Bishop puts it, the Big Sort "is tearing us apart." Arizona is Exhibit A in this self-selecting process, especially among the Anglo population that votes, has money or is easy pickings for the demagogues. Arizona doesn't have its Austin (sorry, Democratic Tucson's strings are ultimately pulled by a car dealer and the sprawl barons). Despite the notion in the mid-1990s that population growth would moderate Arizona politics, or even the Democratic seats picked up during the nadir of the Bush presidency, Arizona has become redder and redder. People increasingly seemed to move to Arizona or the Phoenix suburbs to be with their co-religionists on the right, while progressive-minded folks moved out.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

State of cruelty

America is starting to catch on that something's happening in Arizona and that it matters. The New York Times has opened a Phoenix bureau and the LA Times reporting is such that it might as well. This isn't Idaho. This is the third or even second most populous state in the West, contains the nation's fifth most populous city and 13th largest metro. And it's insane.

The focus for now is the draconian anti-immigrant law passed by the Legislature and signed by the Kook-tool Gov. Jan Bewer. It will turn law enforcement into a baby border patrol and essentially require racial profiling and further marginalization of the Hispanic community. This is the capstone of the career of state Sen. Russell Pearce, the Mormon East Valley lawmaker who has gone from the lunatic fringe to the height of power. (And I mention Pearce's denomination to ask, where are the powerful LDS voices denouncing him for actions that go against Mormon values of compassion? I hear many LDS oppose this.). Beyond this, everything gets murky. Arizona can't deport people (they tried with me); it lacks the funding to operate its current prison-industrial complex, much less incarcerate a million illegal aliens. This is only the beginning of what's wrong here.

The measure, like the other anti-immigrant laws of recent years, is hypocritical. Arizona's low-wage, low-quality economy is built around the inexpensive labor of illegal immigrants. Construction, tourism and landscaping companies have made huge profits on the backs of workers making less than citizens and lacking even the minimal protections and safeguards that Arizona provides. Why do you think you "get so much house for the money"? The remains of the state's agriculture industry would die without illegals. Anglos from the toffs in north Scottsdale to working stiffs in Phoenix get housekeepers and yard care for a fraction of its real cost. As Phoenix, especially, became a narrower economy focused on house building, illegals became more important. The people in power sure as hell weren't going to pay competitive wages for citizens, much less allow unions.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

A volcano at the party

A tiny pinprick in the earth, as author Simon Winchester puts it, offered an object lesson in just how vulnerable our high-flying, high-tech civilization has become. The American media are obsessed with the grounded airline passengers, and, because our society now must always put a price tag on everything, how many hundreds of millions of dollars it is costing the airlines.

They are oblivious to other things: How much of Europe is doing fine because of its excellent rail system. How the global interconnections that have arisen over the past 30 years bring dangers more profound that the intertwined investment banks that nearly blew up the world economy. These connections are complex yet highly limiting and unsustainable. Consider Wal-Mart's 10,000-mile "supply chain" facing a future of higher energy costs and shortages. Yet just as America once had a great intercity rail system, it could once feed and clothe itself. In many cases, that's no longer true. Phoenix once produced a huge variety of foods, from strawberries to steaks. Now if the global links shut down, Phoenix would starve. You can't eat foreclosed houses.

I think about that when I am at Pike Place Market in Seattle, five blocks from my home, watching the tourists ooh and ahh over the bounty of food and flowers, most of it grown and harvested locally. Then they go back home and shop at Wal-Mart. Do they even wonder if their towns once had such markets? Most did, if not the size and abundance of choices available here. Now, except for a few hippy-dippy eat-local places, they're gone. It might not prove to be the best choice in the decades to come.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Confederates in the attic

The tut-tutting that in some cases verges on hysteria about the
Virginia governor proclaiming Confederate History Month is misplaced on
many levels. For one thing, it only reinforces the bunker mentality of
many Southern whites — who do not by any means all live in the South —
that their customs, culture and history are under attack. Thus, it
drives them even more into the propaganda ministry of the white-right on
Fox "News" and talk radio. I'm also uncomfortable with the implied
censorship of those who would ban discussion of the Confederacy except
as an indictment of slavery. And it's an invitation to yet more
conformity in a big-box, chain-stored America that was once much more
diverse in its cultures.

President Obama is right in saying that one can't understand the
Civil War without understanding slavery. One can't understand even
today's America without understanding the Civil War, a lifetime quest.
And, I am sorry to tell my liberal and progressive friends, that one
can't understand all these things, as well as many of the questions
facing the union today, without a deep study of the Confederacy. Note
"deep study." Not a white-right call to ignorant "heritage."

Slavery was a great evil, one that was only partially atoned for at
places such as Antietam, Chickamuga and Gettysburg. It was not merely
the creation of the South, but the nation as a whole. More and more
histories of slavery are available, showing it in all its brutality but
also the courage of the people and richness of the cultures they
developed. Historians have also made great progress in plumbing
Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the era of lynchings — all essential knowledge
of our quest to make a more perfect union. As for Confederate history,
bring it on.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Conservative history

Reading about "conservative" efforts to change history textbooks, one is reminded of many good quotes. George Orwell, once a hero of conservatives, said, "He who controls the past controls the future. He who
controls the present controls the past." Napoleon: "What is history but a fable agreed upon?" Or, more alarmingly, Hitler, who in one of his many formulations on the topic, said, "Give me the youth…let me control the textbooks, and I will
control the state." On the other hand, I remember high school, and, although I loved history, my mind was consistently on only one thing, and the only historical reasoning involved was "today's miniskirt is even better than yesterday's!" A good and timeless quote, too.

The move in Texas, one of the largest buyers of textbooks and in theory influential nationally, is less about history than propaganda. Thus we get the failure of Jamestown as "socialism" long before such a political-economic formulation existed. As Dick Armey would have it, starvation in the colony was because of those hippy-dippy libs, rather than a variety of complex factors, including that the English noblemen in the party (the class equivalent to what Armey represents today) didn't want to work to grow food, thinking it beneath them. Similarly, Jefferson is to be erased because he advocated separation between church and state (as did virtually all the founders) — a messy inconvenience for those advocating theocracy. We know who they are. We know the power they lust after. This is one more path to it.

My bigger worry is summed up in the fuller quote from Alexander Pope: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring." We don't really teach history in most of our schools and haven't for decades, it being subsumed in "social studies," and now sidelined by teaching-to-the-test and indoctrinating young people to be good worker bees. This latter is alarmingly true even at universities, where students are funneled into business schools and vocational training, not the "universal education" including the humanities. And such necessary study for a self-governing society is virtually non-existent at the for-profit "universities" once called business colleges.

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