Boycott, Yes!

  

China’s attempt to protect itself from a boycott of the Olympics by crying Don’t make the Games political is ludicrous. As David Wallechinsky pointed out in an interview on NPR yesterday, they already are political. It is the nature of a world event to be political. Wallechinsky, author of The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics, is an expert on the Games. Interestingly, he also compiles the top ten list of the world’s worst dictators for Parade every year.

Wallechinsky says the Olympic Committee is to blame for giving the Games to a dictatorship in the first place. Yeah, hello.

If anybody is to be held responsible for ruining the Olympics, it’s not the Tibetans or those who will boycott China for its treatment of them (not to mention the Sudanese; not to mention Chinese citizens; not to mention China’s support of Burma). How about laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Chinese government for its behavior, and then pointing a finger at the IOC for supporting a brutal dictatorship?

Hu Jintao, leader of The People’s Republic of China, and number four on the worst dictators list, has befriended number one, Omar al-Bashir, of Sudan. How cozy.

“Last week China’s leader, Hu Jintao, provided Sudan with an interest-free loan to build a presidential palace. With that gesture, Hu demonstrated his contempt for the Western understanding of the world — and for Western policy toward his own country.” And: “China is not financing a presidential palace by mistake; it is doing so deliberately. It is not financing just any presidential palace; it has chosen a president so odious that his fellow African leaders hold their noses at him.”*

Birds of a feather. . . .

Who Is the World’s Worst Dictator? (2007)

1.)    Omar al-Bashir, Sudan
2.)   Kim Jong-il, North Korea
3.)   Sayyid Ali KhamEnei, Iran
4.)   Hu Jintao, China
5.)   King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia
6.)   Than Shwe, Burma (Myanmar)
7)    Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe
8.)   Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan
9.)   Muammar al-Qaddafi, Libya
10.) Bashar al-Assad, Syria

Olympic Boycotts** (take special note of number three, below—I thought the PRC didn’t believe in making the Games political?—oh, guess that was then)

1956, Melbourne:  Boycotted by the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, because of the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising by the Soviet Union. Cambodia, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the games over the Suez Crisis.

1972 and 1976, Munich, Montreal: African countries threatened the IOC with a boycott, asking it to ban South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand. The IOC conceded in the first 2 cases, but refused in 1976. Twenty-two countries (Guyana was the only non-African nation) boycotted the Montreal Olympics because New Zealand was not banned.

1976, Montreal: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) pressured Canada to bar the Taiwanese team from competing under the name Republic of China (ROC). The ROC refused the compromise that was suggested and did not participate again until 1984, when it returned under the name “Chinese Taipei.”

1980, 1984, Moscow, Los Angeles: Cold War opponents boycotted one anothers’ games. Sixty-five nations refused to compete at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The boycott reduced the number of competing nations to 81, the lowest number since 1956. The Soviet Union and 14 Eastern Bloc nations (except Romania) countered by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.

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See this BBC article about current protests by Tibetan children in Katmandu

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* Sebastian Mallaby, February 5, 2007, The Washington Post

**From Wikipedia

Tibetan Monks Attacked In Nepal

From VOA:

Police in Nepal armed with batons dispersed a protest Tuesday by Tibetan refugees and monks in front of the Chinese Embassy.

About 100 protesters in Kathmandu were loaded into trucks and vans and sent to detention centers.

There have been almost daily demonstrations in Nepal against China since March 10, when protests began in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa. At least 400 protesters were detained in Nepal Monday.

The U.N. human rights office in Nepal has said it is deeply concerned at the arbitrary arrests and detentions.

Nepal’s border with China in the Himalayas is a key route for Tibetans fleeing Chinese rule in the region.

Photo:  ”Police officers drag away a Tibetan monk while he attempts to nurse an injured fellow monk in Kathmandu, 25 Mar 2008″
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For steps you can take to help, please see Linda’s post,  Tibet: less talk, more action

Boycott The Olympics

The violence against Tibetans must stop. The Chinese are perpetrating these acts prior to the Olympic Games as if they are certain the world will do nothing. It is a slap in the face to all who care about human rights. In Lhasa, at least 80 people have been killed so far.  They are not limiting themselves to Tibet, they are also attacking Tibetans living in Chinese cities.

From The New York Times:

For now, Beijing’s line on Tibet is likely to harden. Military police officers are pouring in to stifle new protests. Nor are the demonstrations winning much public sympathy in a nation where Tibetans are a tiny minority. The state media has tightly controlled its coverage to focus on Tibetans burning Chinese businesses or attacking and killing Chinese merchants. No mention is made of Tibetan grievances or reports that 80 or more Tibetans have died.

Less than five months before the opening of the Olympics, Beijing is acutely worried about an international reaction and is arguing that its response to the protests has been reasonable. Qiangba Puncog, the taciturn chairman of Tibet’s government, said during a hurriedly convened news conference on Monday that the military police and other officers were not carrying lethal weapons and had not fired a single shot — despite multiple witnesses reporting gunshots.

They’ve not fired a single shot, eh? What killed all those people? Slingshots? They think they can control the information that gets out, keep the truth a secret. Maybe that worked pretty well fifty years ago, not now.

The Tibetans are a peaceful people. They simply want the freedom to practice their religion and live in peace.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Asked why his fellow Tibetans were protesting now, Aron lowered his head, pondering the wisdom of a frank answer. The silence of the monastery, a warren of brightly painted temples straggling up a dusty hillside, was broken only by the cooing of pigeons and the musical tones of wind chimes fluttering from temple eaves.

He looked up, clearly resolved to speak from the heart. “Because we want freedom,” he replied.

By that, he said, he meant both political independence for Tibet, which Chinese troops occupied in 1951, and religious freedom for Buddhist monks, who complain of restrictions by Chinese authorities.

“We want our culture to survive and to pass it on,” said a fellow monk, who also asked not to be identified. “But we don’t want to use violence; we want to solve this problem in a peaceful way.

As if that weren’t enough reason to boycott the Olympics, how about this?  China is supporting the Burmese regime by buying up great quantities of jade and other gemstones to use in trinkets to sell at the Games.

According to Human Right’s Watch (HRW), Burma’s junta owns a majority stake in each of the country’s mines – many of them sitting on land confiscated from local communities – sanctioning both unsafe working conditions and forced and child labor. The European Union passed rules in November banning imports of Burmese rubies and jade, and Canada and the US Senate followed suit in December.

And then there’s the Chinese presence in Sudan.

But the Chinese [oil] operations were marked “from the beginning,” by a “deep complicity in gross human rights violations, scorched-earth clearances of the indigenous population,” says Sudan activist Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Giving expert testimony before the congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission last August, Mr. Reeves claimed the Chinese gave direct assistance to Khartoum’s military forces which, in turn, burned villages, chased locals away from their homes, and harmed the environment while prospecting for oil.

Brad Phillips, director of Persecution International, an aid group working in South Sudan, has seen the destruction firsthand. “The Chinese are equal partners with Khartoum when it comes to exploiting resources and locals here,” he says. “Their only interest here is their own.” He would love to see the Chinese sponsor a school here, he says, or a clinic, or an agricultural program, or “anything for the people.” But there is nothing like that in sight. Just miles of desolate land.

“The Chinese simply do not care about us,” says Martin Buywomo, Paloich’s mayor. “They have no contact. They never even came to my tent to pay respects. They think we are lesser people.” A member of the Shilluk tribe who attended British mission schools, Mr. Buywomo puts down the worn copy of George Eliot’s 19th-century classic “Silas Marner” he is reading and continues sadly. “We see them in their trucks but they overlook us. If they saw us dying on the road, they would overlook us.”

China cares only about money. The only way to make them listen is through the pocketbook.

And the Olympics? They are not what they once were. The Games are all about money nowadays. I remember the excitement of watching the Olympics when I was a kid. That excitement is gone. Who can sit through the hours of over-produced, schmaltzy life stories and ten thousand ads and believe all that has anything to do with amateur athletics? The realness is gone. The sports are an aside—athletes are being used and we shouldn’t buy it.

Why should China make piles of money off of sports lovers when their government is committing grave human rights abuses? And, Linda reports, “Ironically this week the US removed China from its list of human rights abusers.” What? Great timing.

Boycott the Olympics. Write to your members of Congress.

Linda has written a lot about the Tibetan situation, please see her site. You can also sign petitions here.

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I want to be clear here that when I say China and the Chinese, I mean the government. Just as it is not fair to assume that all Americans support our government and its actions, neither is it fair to blame all Chinese for their government’s actions.

Kristof: Hero

I’m biased. I prefer my heroes to be women. Maybe it’s because when I grew up history books celebrated Betsy Ross as a female hero. Hello, she sewed! I’m sorry, but big deal. Now Nikolas Kristof is simply an amazing human being, so I grudgingly bestow upon him hero status. He can’t help that he’s male. He travels to the places in the world where people suffer and shares their stories with us. He shines light in the dark places, and I, for one, am grateful for this. He also keeps a blog, which I’ve recently subscribed to. And if you watch his videos and read his columns, you will find that many of his heroes are women.

For instance, Mukhtar Mai, a Pakastani who ”survived a gang rape to become a fervent campaigner for voiceless women in Pakistan.” Mai runs schools, an ambulance service and a women’s aid group.

And this Pakistani woman whose husband was kidnapped in Pakistan and who bravely stood up to the government.

And the amazing Edna Adan Ismail, who founded Edna Adan Maternity Hospital—the first maternity hospital in Somaliland.

Kristof is a tireless voice for the downtrodden, especially women and children, because, in much of the world, they are most often the victims of horrendous human rights violations.

He also spotlights health crises that could be solved if the world would step up.

In his latest column, he wrote about the American Presidency and saving lives in Africa:

Saving children’s lives in rural Africa or Asia, where millions die of ailments as simple as diarrhea, pneumonia or measles, is achingly simple and inexpensive. The starting point is vaccinations and basic sanitation. 

. . .

For years, the rationale for opposing foreign assistance has been that it doesn’t work. It’s true that humanitarian aid is devilishly difficult to get right, money is squandered and the impact of aid is often oversold.

But President Bush’s record underscores that other policies are difficult to get right as well: Iraq is a mess, and social security reform and immigration reform both failed. Mr. Bush’s greatest single accomplishment is that his AIDS program in Africa is saving millions of lives.

That makes it all the more stunning that Mr. Bush’s proposed budget for 2009 cuts U.S. funding for child and maternal health programs around the world by nearly 18 percent.

Fortunately, all the candidates are saying the right things about malaria, AIDS and support for education in Africa (although John McCain is fuzzier about commitments). You can compare the candidates’ positions on global humanitarian issues at www.onevote08.org.

Voters should remember this: A president may or may not be able to improve schools or protect manufacturing jobs in Ohio, but a president probably could help wipe out malaria. Compared with other challenges a president faces, saving a million children’s lives a year is the low-hanging fruit.

See Nicholas Kristof’s page at the New York Times.

OneVote08 is a project of One—the Campaign to Make Poverty History.

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And historical women heroes?

How about Jane Addams? Susan B. Anthony? Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Marie Curie? Fannie Lou Hamer? Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)? Margaret Sanger? Sojourner Truth? Harriet Tubman? Etc.

I Hope, I Hope This Guy Is Wrong

Douglas Schoen writes: Wrong About Nader: Far from being a vanity trip, a maverick candidacy could upend the presidential race — again.

Nader is undoubtedly a less appealing candidate than he was in 2000, when by winning 97,000 votes in Florida he famously cost Gore the election. But that doesn’t mean 2008 is going to be a repeat of 2004, when Nader attracted a mere 0.038 percent of the popular vote. On the contrary, the circumstances for Nader’s candidacy could hardly be better. The conditions this November will be more favorable to an independent, third-party candidacy than ever before. As a result, Nader stands a real chance of matching or even exceeding his 2000 performance, when he won 2.74 percent of the popular vote.

And:

In 2004, Nader faltered because it was apparent that George W. Bush and John Kerry offered stark alternatives. But 2008 is not 2004. George W. Bush isn’t on the ballot this year. What the public wants is change. Research done by Rasmussen Reports in September shows that Nader’s candidacy is well positioned to capitalize on that desire. In a four-way race, Nader could get 4 percent, considerably more support than he received in 2000. A centrist alternative could do even better, easily attracting 15 to 30 percent of the electorate. Even Ron Paul could receive as much as 8 percent as a libertarian, fourth-party candidate.

In the Washington Post.

I think he is wrong. I hope he is wrong. But hoo-boy was I shocked when GW was re-elected—I thought the writing on the wall was crystal clear after four years. However, this may simply be a case of wishful thinking on Schoen’s part. The title of his book is Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System. He’s probably the one who convinced Nader to run. (Thank you Mr. Schoen. Not.)

Middle Name Meme

The rules:

1. Post the rules before you give your answers.

2. You must list one fact about yourself beginning with each letter of your middle name. (If you don’t have a middle name, use your maiden name or your mother’s maiden name).

3. At the end of your blog post, tag one person for each letter of your middle name.

K is for kaleidoscopic (it’s a cool word, and hey, aren’t we all kind of kaleidoscopic?). K is also for krazy (this is my blog, I can spell it how I like), because we’re also all a little krazy.

A is for art because I love art. One of my hobbies from the time I was eighteen has been photography and early on, I embraced the digital revolution by learning how to use Photoshop and creating in that way. I also love words and the art of putting them together. When I grow up, I hope to be a poet.

Y is for yellow, the color my bedroom was painted when I was a kid and the color of a little truck I drove around from the time I was nineteen until my late twenties.

The lovely Jan tagged me with this meme.

And guess what? Isabel was tagged by Diane and Scout! Only Isabel doesn’t have a middle name! No matter—I’ll use the name we called her when she was teething and biting our hands like crazy: Little Monster. Only, I’ll cheat and make it shorter and say her middle name is L.M.

L is for love, because Isabel is full of love and loves getting love.

M is for mayhem, because that’s what happens when people come over because Isabel loves people. She tries hard not to jump on them but sometimes she can’t help herself.

Tagging? Hmmm. If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine, but I tag: Linda at her new blog, and anybody else who wants to play.

Doggy Joy

And doggy dignity:

The Noise Machine & Obama & Health Care

My husband sent me a link to a blog by Marc Andreessen. Since I’m not a tech-head, I’d never heard of him (he was a founder of Netscape, it turns out), but I read his post about Obama (An hour and a half with Barack Obama) with interest. He met with Obama in person before the campaign began and his insights are worth taking into consideration.

I have not jumped on Obama’s boat, but I’ve got one toe in. Whether or not I end up on board, I am disgusted by how successfully he is being smeared. I’m well aware that there is a Noise Machine out there, but it is disheartening to watch (yet again) how very well it works. Recently, Diane wrote about a conversation she witnessed between two women in South Dakota:

Woman #1: They aren’t ready for a woman president there.

Woman #2: They aren’t ready for a black president either.

Woman #1: I hear he’s Muslim, but he’s not active in his faith.

Me: (Interjecting) He’s not Muslim. His father is Kenyan, but he’s not Muslim.

Woman #1: Well, he’s not active.

Me: (Interjecting) Actually, he goes to the same church as Oprah Winfrey. He’s a Christian.

The effectiveness of the Noise Machine is clear. It doesn’t matter if the info put out is false, all they have to do is make a connection in people’s minds and they’ve succeeded. Obama. Muslim. That’s it—that it’s not true is irrelevant. And, as Naomi Klein pointed out in this editorial, it wouldn’t be a smear if it were true—but the fact that people perceive it as one is evidence of yet another successful Noise Machine campaign. Code words: Muslim. Terrorist.

Truth should matter. Whichever side you’re on, the end cannot justify the means. If we waltz down that road, where does it end? The lies and deceit grow larger and uglier the longer we dance. Step by little step, before we know it, we’ve become an immoral nation.

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Obama’s message is about hope and change. Yesterday, I heard Jim Wallis speak and he made the point that, no matter who is elected, they will not be able to make sweeping changes. For instance, try getting a meaningful universal health care plan passed when there are three lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry for every member of Congress (some interesting facts here). And how about this:  Pharmaceutical, Insurance Industries Lead Way In Lobbying Spending; New Study Provides Comprehensive Look at Washington’s $1.26 billion Influence Industry (that was published ten years ago—think things have improved?).

Gee, I wonder if the drug and insurance giants are planning to sit on their tushes while their industries stand to lose boatloads of moola? You can bet they’re right now this minute blueprinting a massive, unrelenting attack. Code word: socialism. They’ll dredge up nightmare stories from people in England and Canada about waiting years for a needed treatment. We won’t hear about all the Americans who simply can’t get treatment, about the people who lost everything when a loved one got cancer. About ambulances being turned away from hospitals because the patients didn’t have insurance—and the people who died as a result.

The fact is, we need change.

Wallis said change comes from social movements, not politicians. I agree with him. We need a sweeping social movement in this country that says, among other things, yes to decent health care for all people. No, demands it.

It wouldn’t hurt to have a president who can maybe stir up a social movement, would it?

Jesus And Voting

Came across an editorial by Amy Sullivan in the Washington Post this morning, How Would Jesus Vote? I’m an Evangelical — and a Liberal. Really. This followed on the heels of Charlotte’s excellent post about Sullivan’s recent Salon interview.

Salon asked Sullivan, “Do you think that many Democrats underestimate just how religious many of the members of their party are?”

Well duh. Naturally, Sullivan answered in the affirmative.

I can attest that I am one of many liberal religious tired of being maligned by my own people. I mean, sheesh, too many liberals seem to assume that their fellow liberals are 99% agnostic or atheist. Think again. I am not an evangelical, but I am a Christian and I do vote.

And with the popularity of books by religion-haters like Dawkins and Hitchens, some anti-religious are becoming more vitriolic than ever in their rhetoric. So certain of their rightness, they appear more fundamentalist than many of the religious they deride. Talk about rigid. Talk about closed-minded. Talk about arrogant.

We don’t co-exist by attacking one anothers’ religion, or lack of. One lesson that we would all do well to remember: We are unlikely to convince others by becoming louder, brasher, uglier. (In fact, on issues like this, we are unlikely to convince one another at all—we’re likely each preaching to our own choir.)

In the Post article, Sullivan writes that she was at a panel discussion in Manhattan when “a man stood up to declare that Democrats who reached out to religious voters, especially evangelicals, were akin to those who collaborated with the Nazis.”

Nazis. Wow.

And:

“Walking through Dulles Airport not long after losing the 2004 election, John Kerry was stopped by a supporter. The man shook Kerry’s hand and told the senator that he was an evangelical. ‘I voted for you,’ he said, ‘and so did a lot of evangelicals. But you could have gotten more of us if you’d tried.’ Kerry was floored. Evangelical Democrats?”

Truthfully, I am not sure that reaching out to religious voters is a great idea, because separation of church and state is important—but why alienate us? Why does the Democratic party so often seem aligned with the anti-religious, the oh-too-vocal atheists? The fact is that many of the issues that are important to Christians also happen to be liberal values—putting people before corporate interests, feeding the hungry, ensuring access to health care for all, peacemaking.

I find it interesting that (according to Sullivan) many evangelicals seem to be questioning their alliance with the Republican party. Sullivan writes:

Between November 2004 and July 2007, the percentage of white evangelicals who identified themselves as Republican declined from roughly 50 percent to 40 percent.

That dramatic slump was driven by a stampede of younger evangelicals away from the GOP. Christian colleges have become even bigger centers of political activism than secular universities, protesting the Iraq war and demanding that campuses “go green.” A recent Time magazine poll of voters ages 18 to 29 found that 35 percent of young Democrats and 35 percent of young independents identify themselves as born-again.

Jesus was all about serving the disenfranchised, lifting up the poor; he was not aligned with the privileged, the wealthy, the big wigs. He did not promote tax cuts for the rich, or war, or intolerance of people who are different.

In my mind, it makes sense that Christians would tend toward the liberal end of the political spectrum—as long as they’re not driven away by liberal atheists. Democrats should make peace with the fact that most Americans—yes, even liberals—are religious.

Who Speaks For Islam?

Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, [is] based on six years of research and more than 50,000 interviews representing 1.3 billion Muslims who reside in more than 35 nations that are predominantly Muslim or have sizable Muslim populations. Representing more than 90% of the world’s Muslim community, it makes this poll the largest, most comprehensive study of its kind.
What the data reveal and the authors illuminate may surprise you:

• Muslims and Americans are equally likely to reject attacks on civilians as morally unjustifiable.
• Large majorities of Muslims would guarantee free speech if it were up to them to write a new constitution AND they say religious leaders should have no direct role in drafting that constitution.
• Muslims around the world say that what they LEAST admire about the West is its perceived moral decay and breakdown of traditional values — the same answers that Americans themselves give when asked this question.
• When asked about their dreams for the future, Muslims say they want better jobs and security, not conflict and violence.
• Muslims say the most important thing Westerners can do to improve relations with their societies is to change their negative views toward Muslims and respect Islam.

The research suggests that conflict between Muslims and the West is NOT inevitable and, in fact, is more about policy than principles. “However,” caution Esposito and Mogahed, “until and unless decision makers listen directly to the people and gain an accurate understanding of this conflict, extremists on all sides will continue to gain ground.”

Who Speaks for Islam? is an important book that challenges conventional wisdom and sheds greater light on what motivates Muslims worldwide. It is a must-read for anyone committed to creating peace and security in our lifetime.

The above from Gallup.

I hear a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment, even among liberals (who are supposedly accepting and open-minded). One friend has read several books (including Infidel) and is adamantly opposed to Islam, largely because of the oppression of women that she says is part and parcel of the religion. All I can say is, we don’t have to like or agree with others’ religions, but we still have to learn to live with one another. If you don’t like Islam, don’t become a Muslim.

In whose interest is it for us to be enemies with Muslims? The weapons contractors maybe. But ordinary people are in no way helped by the animosity that has developed. Wouldn’t it be better to work together for a peaceful world than to harden our hearts against a whole religion and everyone who follows that religion?

Read this excellent editorial by Naomi Klein at the Huffington Post: Obama, Being Called a Muslim Is Not a Smear

Also see this BBC article: Islam-West Rift Widens, Poll Says

Spoiled. I Am SoSoSoSo Spoiled.

My daughter didn’t just make lunch for me yesterday, she put together a beautiful feast.

Look at this! Apple fritters! OMG, these were DE-licious. (And sparkling cider there on the left.)

Two types of sandwiches! Egg salad and cucumber. Plus, a beautiful Polish (or Ukrainian, maybe) salad. And another (!) dessert—strawberries with Balsamic vinegar and mascarpone. Heavenly!

And tulips for the table.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

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Strawberry Mascarpone Dessert (alternatively, could be called Died and Gone to Heaven Dessert)

4 pints fresh strawberries
1 cup mascarpone cheese; or more
2 teaspoon Balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 cup heavy cream

Slice strawberries and place in bowl. Add the balsamic vinegar and sugar and toss to distribute. Let macerate about 1 hour.

Remove 1 cup (or more) strawberries and reserve. Put remaining berries in a food processor along with the mascarpone and process till smooth. Beat heavy cream till whipped and gently but thoroughly combine with the mascarpone mixture.

Divide reserved sliced strawberries among 4-6 footed clear goblets and top with the mascarpone cream. Garnish with a whole berry.

This recipe was found here. (I think it’s funny that it says “let macerate.” Ha! Makes me think of insects chewing. Oh, I guess that’s masticate.)

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Dear P’s dinner went all wrong. He was making a curry from one of my recipe books and there was an error in the recipe! How annoying. It called for 12 cups (CUPS!) of water—in a curry to serve six. Don’t think so.  But I have to say, the beautiful lunch more than made up for it!

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And after this morning, I can attest that heavy cream and oatmeal do not a delicious breakfast make. Wouldn’t've tried it, except we were out of milk.

The Chicago 8 (er, I mean 10)

I happened to catch part of Fresh Air in the car today, on my way to meet a friend for lunch. Terry Gross was interviewing Brett Morgen, director of the new documentary Chicago Ten. Now this sounds like an excellent movie. Listen to the interview, or read a little about it, here.

At the end of the interview Morgen says:

The film is set in sixty-eight, but I never thought I was making a film about 1968. I thought I was making a film about today . . . telling a story that is ultimately about the time that I’m living in and the war I’m living through.

What the film is ultimately trying to do is to put a mirror up to the audience and challenge them—to ask them—how far are you willing to go? We’re not suggesting that people need to get beat over the head to make a statement. Ultimately what the film tells you is that each person needs to make that decision for themselves and all we’re doing is asking them to take a moment to ask, Am I doing enough?

Am I doing enough? It’s a question we should frequently ask ourselves. A film that helps us do that is a good thing.

Background, from the NPR site (see link, above):

Outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, protesters rallied to show disapproval of the Vietnam War. They hadn’t been granted demonstration permits, however, and for a week, they were involved in violent conflict with Chicago police.

Less than a year later, eight of the protest leaders — the so-called Chicago 8 — were indicted by a federal grand jury on counts of, among other things, conspiracy and incitement to riot. All were eventually found not guilty on conspiracy, but five were found guilty of violating the 1968 Anti-Riot Act. In 1972, those convictions were reversed.

I know an ageless hippie chick who probably knows something about the Chicago Eight (or ten)!

And lunch? Dim sum. Yum. My friend was taking me out to celebrate my birthday and I realized, whilst listening to Terry on the radio, that we have known each other since I was pregnant with my daughter in 1985! How wonderful to have a friend who’s been around that long—we played volleyball together for a long time (until I injured my shoulder thirteen years ago), worked together for eight years, have celebrated one another’s birthdays every February and October. He watched my daughter grow up—in fact, tutored her for her SAT and also in physics. He attended her college graduation in December. He is a true friend! I am so blessed.

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Finally figured out how to add to the blogroll. Duh. At gartenfische, I use a separate page for my blogs and links, so I had to be really smart and use all my brain cells. I should’ve asked Scout, she could’ve told me. So I’ve got a blogroll! At least the beginnings of one. This is the non-religious blogroll, for the religious variety, see gartenfische.

Gil Scott-Heron: Cooooool

Listen to this:

Okay, I admit it—I grew up isolated from reality; in my whitebread SoCal suburb, the outside world may as well have been the moon. Not surprisingly, then, musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron didn’t find his way onto my record player. I hadn’t even heard of him until recently. Makes me wonder: What else have I missed?

Obviously a precursor to rap, which I’ve never gotten into, but this—this—is awesome:

Wow.

What was I hearkening to in high school? Whitebread teenage music of the day: Led Zeppelin, Boston, Heart, Queen (we don’t want no education . . . hmmm, that’s good cuz we didn’t get one [oops, that was Pink Floyd]). Oh, and I went through a serious Beatles obsession when I was 17/18. Black artists? Not in my whitey-white world. Stevie Wonder was the one exception, but I didn’t get into his music until later.

I’m gonna have to buy me some Scott-Heron, get me some soul, man. And yeah, I get it that he was protesting exactly the world I grew up in—what can I say? We can’t help where we come from, only where we’re going.

And speaking of the seventies and insular white folk, I wonder how many conservative whites, other than my dad, loved Archie Bunker and All in the Family, not getting that it was a farce? That it was making fun of them? Or did they not care, reveling in the audacity of a fellow bigot?

If you have time, watch this, and stick with it, cuz the end is priceless:

And reading some of the comments at this video, it’s clear that some people still don’t get that AITF was a farce.

Curves: A Student’s Best Friend

I finally read Doris Lessing’s Nobel lecture. I had been intending to for months, but kept getting sidetracked; you know how it is (yes, it’s that attention thing mentioned by Jacoby in the We Are Idiots post of a couple of days ago). My belated reading resulted in a timely convergence because Lessing reiterates the point made by Jacoby, that we live in a time in which education is not valued—even worse, according to Jacoby, is derided by a society that has become anti-intellectual. (Of course, Lessing’s speech came first; had I been up on my reading, Jacoby would have been reiterating Lessing’s point.)

You might say that more young people than ever are graduating from college, but I would argue that education is generally not valued; what is appreciated is the income-enhancing benefit that degrees afford.

As the parent of a recent college graduate, I can honestly say that most students don’t have to do a lot to earn their degree (grading curves are a wonderful invention for those who don’t study and teachers are as loath to fail a college student as they are a high school student). I’m not talking about my daughter, who did work hard; I’m talking about the high percentage of her fellow undergrads who ended up collecting the same piece of paper she did, but who coasted right on through, never missing a party, relying on those beautiful curves.

It seems to be accepted now that kids go off to college to have fun. This is a very prevalent attitude—college is the big fling before you have to settle down and get serious about life. Students who are interested in learning, not just drinking for a few years and collecting a pair of initials at the end, are being cheated. It seems there was a time when education was the objective and parties the well earned perks.

Here is a portion of Lessing’s speech:

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention — computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked, What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print? In the same way, we never thought to ask, How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and our great store of literature. Of course, we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the founding of working men’s libraries and institutes, the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Reading, books, used to be part of a general education.

Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it is because they have not read.

She talks about poor, poor Africans who are desperate to read—who crave books—comparing them with Westerners, who have access to an incredible cornucopia of knowledge and literature and cannot be bothered to read, turning their backs on the feast laid out before them.

A young African man, eighteen perhaps, in tears, standing in what he hopes will be his “library.” A visiting American seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. “But,” we say, “these books were sent to be read, surely?” “No,” he replies, “they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?”

How spoiled we are.

I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a Black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well cared-for huts of the better off. A school — but like one I have described. He found a discarded children’s encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.

We cannot imagine. How very much we take for granted.

And, as Jacoby pointed out, education is not merely a luxury that we can take or leave: “Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.” Very low expectations.

Lessing’s speech can be found here.

We Are Proud To Be A Bunch Of Idiots

I don’t post entire articles here, out of respect for the limited time (and attention!—ha!) of my readers (all two of them), but this is so important that I am posting the entire article. Please, please read it. And share it. I think it will hit home for you as it did for me.

The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces

By Susan Jacoby, The Washington Post
Sunday, February 17, 2008; Page B01

“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today’s very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”) Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country’s democratic impulses in religion and education. But today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter,” the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their “vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen.” But these zombie-like characteristics “are not signs of mental atrophy. They’re signs of focus.” Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time — as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web — seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. “With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information,” the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. “A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.”

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible — and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University’s Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate — featuring the candidate’s own voice — dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping “I’m the decider” may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio “fireside chat” so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, “they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.”

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today’s public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. (“Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a “change election,” the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

Susan Jacoby’s latest book is “The Age of American Unreason.”

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Found this one at PoodleDoc’s blog.