Highlights from Henry Giroux, "The War against Teachers as Public Intellectuals in Dark Times"

12/17/12: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13367-the-corporate-war-against-teachers-as-public-intellectuals-in-dark-times

"What these individuals and institutions all share is an utter disregard for public values, critical thinking and any notion of education as a moral and political practice.[8] The wealthy hedge fund managers, think tank operatives and increasingly corrupt corporate CEOs are panicked by the possibility that teachers and public schools might provide the conditions for the cultivation of an informed and critical citizenry capable of actively and critically participating in the governance of a democratic society.  In the name of educational reform, reason is gutted of its critical potential and reduced to a deadening pedagogy of memorization, teaching to the test and classroom practices that celebrate mindless repetition and conformity. Rather than embraced as central to what it means to be an engaged and thoughtful citizen, the capacity for critical thinking, imagining and reflection are derided as crucial pedagogical values necessary for "both the health of democracy and to the creation of a decent world culture and a robust type of global citizenship."[9]"

"A pedagogy of management and conformity does more than simply repress the analytical skills and knowledge necessary for students to learn the practice of freedom and assume the role of critical agents, it also reinforces deeply authoritarian lessons while reproducing deep inequities in the educational opportunities that different students acquire. As Sara Robinson  points out,

"'In the conservative model, critical thinking is horrifically dangerous, because it teaches kids to reject the assessment of external authorities in favor of their own judgment - a habit of mind that invites opposition and rebellion. This is why, for much of Western history, critical thinking skills have only been taught to the elite students - the ones headed for the professions, who will be entrusted with managing society on behalf of the aristocracy. (The aristocrats, of course, are sending their kids to private schools, where they will receive a classical education that teaches them everything they'll need to know to remain in charge.) Our public schools, unfortunately, have replicated a class stratification on this front that's been in place since the Renaissance.[15]'"


"While the political and ideological climate does not look favorable for the teachers at the moment, it does offer them the challenge to join a public debate with their critics, as well as the opportunity to engage in a much needed self-critique regarding the nature and purpose of  schooling, classroom teaching and the relationship between education and social change. Similarly, the debate provides teachers with the opportunity to organize collectively to improve the conditions under which they work and to demonstrate to the public the central role that teachers must play in any viable attempt to reform the public schools."


"A starting point for interrogating the social function of teachers as public intellectuals is to view schools as economic, cultural and social sites that are inextricably tied to the issues of politics, power and control. This means that schools do more than pass on in an objective fashion a common set of values and knowledge. On the contrary, schools are places that represent forms of knowledge, language practices, social relations and values that are particular selections and exclusions from the wider culture. As such, schools serve to introduce and legitimate particular forms of social life. Rather than being objective institutions removed from the dynamics of politics and power, schools actually are contested spheres that embody and express struggles over what forms of authority, types of knowledge, forms of moral regulation and versions of the past and future should be legitimated and transmitted to students."

Books to Acquire, Then Read

King Leopold's Ghost
The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair
News for All the People, Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres
Harvest of Empire, Juan Gonzalez
The Last Colonial Massacre, Greg Grandin
Fordlandia, Greg Grandin
Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, Martin Gilens
Paulo Freire's Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis
Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert L. Allen
A Match on Dry Grass, Mark Warren
Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Black Jacobins, CLR James
Practice What You Teach, Bree Picower
Neoliberal Education, Pauline Lipman
Other People's Children/ Multiplication is for White People, Lisa Delpit
Race, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore
Visions of Emancipation: Italian Workers' Movement Since 1945, Joanne Barkan
Italian Immigrant Radical Culture, Marcella Bencivenni
The Tailor of Ulm, Lucio Magri
The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture, Gerald Meyer
Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America 
WOP!: A Documentary History of Anti-Italian Discrimination, Salvatore J LaGumina
The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen
Pedagogy of Hope, Paolo Freire
Open City, Teju Cole
In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty
Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy: from Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri, Andrea Righi.
Towards Land, Work & POWER .

Essay thoughts:

-Homeland makes a clear anti-drone strike statement. Obama confesses to personally loving the show. Obama has authorized many, many drone strikes.

In "Do school closings knock students off course?" by Umut Özek and Michael Hansen, published in the Washington Post Opinion section on November 30th, 2012, the authors argue that their study of longitudinal data indicates that, when a public school is shuttered, student test scores drop for the year of uncertainty and transition before bouncing back to their previous level.

The data may bear this out, and I am still exploring their report in depth. What I take major exception to is Özek and Hansen's conclusion:

"Let’s worry instead about the learning setbacks that come from protracted contentious battles and be guided by what research indicates: Kids bounce back after school closings."

Sounds an awful lot like, "Shut up, take the medicine, and leave the decisions to the grown-ups."

I implore the authors to offer similar longitudinal analyses of the young men and women who sat in at Woolworth's in 1960, or the young members of Voice of Youth in Chicago Education (V.O.Y.C.E.) and the Urban Youth Collaborative (U.Y.C.) in New York who continue to organize to stop school closures. As Shawn Ginwright, a Professor at San Francisco State University, has said:

"Social science research must consider how economic, social and political realities intimately shape the civic and political engagement among black youth. A deeper understanding of these forces will yield greater insight into new forms of politics among African American youth..."

Regardless of the return on test scores, to argue that organizing a critical response to the Mayoral-Controlled, largely unaccountable D.C.P.S. leadership causes "learning setbacks" for students, ignores  flies in the face of years of research. Anyone who has organized or advocated for anything of personal significance can speak of the passion that real-world, practical problem solving engenders. It is far more engaging than the rote memorization and standardized-test-induced data we as a nation encouraging students to consume today, with the Obama administration's recommendation of the Federal Bank of California's Monthly Report as a high school text.

Özek and Hansen also fail to account for the multitude of data that suggests students who engage in activism, advocacy, and organizing are far likelier to graduate on time, go on to college, and develop successful careers.

No "long-term harm"? Tell that to the students at Taft High School in the Bronx, a school that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Department of Education closed in 2008. The dropout rate at Taft spiked from 25% the year closure was announced to 70% the year that the school closed. At Morris High School, also in the Bronx, the discharge rate rose from 33% the year closure was announced to 55% the year that the school closed.

I am not a data researcher but I am a student of history and an ally to students fighting for educational justice in D.C. and nationwide. The data researchers would be well-served to consider more than the numbers before making such sweeping claims that contradict hundreds of years of practical evidence: young people who organize become more committed to creating solutions within their communities.

Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore

Links:

Conversation between Marisela Gomez & David Harvey: http://indyreader.org/content/baltimore-conversation-between-david-harvey-and-marisela-gomez

Indie GoGo: http://www.indiegogo.com/east-baltimore-books

Activist walks away: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-01-01/news/bal-md.activist01jan01_1_smeac-neighborhood-east-baltimore-development

Marisela Gomez now: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-protest-20120607,0,227730.story

Video talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2tJJYgWM9Q

Red Emma's Baltimore Free School: http://freeschool.redemmas.org/

Dead White Men

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is two-and-a-half hours of rhetorical one-upsmanship, passionate posturing, and good intentions from white men -- the film allows speaking roles to only a handful of women and people of color -- who legislate in abstract from those who will benefit.

Representatives talk plenty about how the 13th amendment will or won't impact their white male constitutents -- they favor the end of war but beyond that would not hope that African-Americans be given the same opportunity for success, trade, or business as they already fight to eke out amongst their lilly-headed brethren. Lincoln's secretery of state asks one farmer who is brought into Lincoln's study what he would hope the government might do regarding slavery once peace has been declared. His wife, in a rare display of matriarchy for the film, announces that he would much prefer to have less competition in his trade.

Lincoln wishes for the passage of the 13th ammendment, which abolished unwilling servitude (with the notable exception of prison labor), on supremely moral grounds. He believes that it must be his legacy to free the slaves. He deters a peace delegation from the Confederacy because he knows that they would not offer surrender, nor would they free their slaves. Many of his Lincoln's cabinet contemporaries call him mad -- not only because Peace is so widely wished for that in most hearts it hits closer than abolition (because these are white, landed gentry who have sons in the war, the war for them is more real than the horrors of Southern slavery, which they don't have to see or experience in an emotional way, rather only intellectually). And yet for Lincoln, he will send his son to war. He acknowledges that if he and his wife prevent their oldest from enlisting, he will hate them for the rest of their lives. And so he lets him go. For Lincoln, the intellectual and moral world trumps the emotional. His wife, whose character exudes emotion in an overly stereotypical portrayal of maternal hysteria, wonders why Lincoln must be caught in his head rather than swayed by feelings of grief. She cries on the floor while he threatens to throw her in the madhouse.

There is one scene that hints that Lincoln may be swayed to consider the emotions of another. Considering his daily litany of potentially pardonable cases, Lincoln comes across the case of a 16-year old boy who went AWOL and beat a horse. While talking to one of his staff members -- whom he awoke at 2 a.m. to discuss the minutiae -- Lincoln receives a nugget of advice that at once seems to portend an investigation into the emotions of black folk he may know. When Lincoln asks his staffmember what he thinks a suitable punishment for the young man should be, his staff replies, "Why don't we ask the horse?" What follows is a lingering medium-shot of Day-Lewis as he appears to experience a "eureka" moment. With such directorial attention focused on the man, it appears that he is considering asking slaves (in this extremely problematic allegory, the "horses," the victims of a dispute) what they think ought to be done in the dilemma of primacy between Peace and Abolition, or even what they imagine the fate of the Confederate leadership ought to be in the era of Reconstruction.

Lincoln's follow-up investigation never happens.

During his conversation with the woman of color who works for Mrs. Lincoln, Day-Lewis does not bend his character to ask what she may feel on the subject of the Ammendment. Indeed, she tells him off, and he does not appear to flinch. For Lincoln this is an intellectual crusade of historical importance rather than a question of how he may identify with an emotional appeal.

---

How much to be accorded to this issue -- white men debated in the House for a month, putting one another down in haughty flourishes of grandeur. Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is the most dogmatic defender of "equality before God" rather than simply before the law -- in other words, he favored a more sweeping racial equality accorded to "radical Republicans." And his is the character most prone to putting down his elected compatriots by showing off his superior vocabulary. He enjoys flaunting his superior education more than anyone else. Ignorant of privelege, he reveals to Lincoln in their basement chat that he stopped caring a long time ago about his people. They elected him to make smart decisions for the rest of them. While Lincoln does not show his hand in this conversation, it appears that he too experiences his election as a vindication of his moral and intellectual superiority to make decisions on behalf of others.

The gerrymandered 3rd district of Maryland, which in 2012 threw out the Republican Roscoe Bartlett. In 186?, Lincoln bought off Democratic Representatives to vote for his amendment. Are we better off? Am I assuming my own moral high ground by arguing that if the guardians of good don't play by the rules, then they sully the impact of their victories by opening themselves up to perfectly legitimate cries of foul?

Liberalism, or leftism, based in force, will not establish a harmonious or equitable society. We have seen that with the 13th amendment and the lingering racism and discrimination which continue to plague this country. We may soon see the same as Democrats stack certain decks in their own favor.

Misha Glenny's thesis about the Balkans

In The Balkans 1804-1999, Glenny recounts the First Serbian Uprising and the Greek civil war/war for independence, both of which took place in the early part of the 19th century. The Serbs were led by tribal bands of peasants and sheep farmers known as pashaliks; the Greeks likewise but with also a substantially Westernized intelligentsia who were influenced by Enlightenment ideals. The peasants who led the revolution, meanwhile, were not educated -- Glenny recounts a telling example of a Greek scholar visiting one of the klephts (brigand, guerilla warriors who had expelled the Turks) and calling him "Achilles" as an honorific. The influential leader responded, "What rubbish are you talking about? Who is this Achilles? Handy with a musket was he?"

Russia, France, and Britain also played a strong role in establishing modern Greece -- the so-called philhellenes, led by Byron, called for the Great Powers to support the fledgling Greek nation. The European nations ultimately resolved amongst themselves to establish as Greek autocrat the Bavarian prince Otto, who would "guarantee the controlling interest of the great powers over the young state." This paragraph appears to portend Glenny's overarching analysis of the region:

"The First Serbian Uprising began over half a century before the unification of Italy; the first modern Greek state was proclaimed forty years before the unification of Germany. But the national identities of Serbs and Greeks were ill-defined. Both national movements owed their success more to Ottoman decay than to their own inherent strength. To compensate for their political and economic weakness, the national elites sought support for their aspirations from the European powers. Herein lies the start of the Balkan tragedy -- these were peasant societies poorly equipped to assimilate the ideas of the Enlightenment, and located at the intersection of competing absolutist empires. The result was a stunted constitutional development whose shortcomings would inevitably be exploited by the great powers as competition between them intensified in the region in the second half of the nineteenth century." -- p. 39

Charter school graduation data

I'm starting to feel like a broken record, but I feel like this article explains something I hadn't understood before and which might be helpful to those wishing to understand why charter school data is skewed and thus impossible to compare with data from traditional public schools.

In some cases, charter schools are able to have higher graduation rates than neighborhood high schools (i.e. regular public schools) because they can transfer out students at will, whereas the neighborhood school is a "school of right" which guarantees education to every child who lives within their boundary district.

For example, if a charter has 50 10th-grade students on their books, but only 30 who look like they might meet graduation requirements on time, they can transfer out those 20 problematic students at the end of 10th grade. If the rest succeed as expected, the charter school will have a 100% graduation rate two years later.

When a charter transfers students out of their school, those students must enroll at another school in order to shift out of the charter school's cohort (i.e. so that they do not read as a student of that charter school who failed to graduate). Many re-enroll at their local neighborhood high school. However, if a student drops out of a neighborhood high school and does not re-enroll elsewhere, that student remains on the books of the neighborhood high school as a non-graduating student. Charters will never, ever have this particular issue because they can push out students at will. Neighborhood high schools have nowhere else to dump students.

One remaining question I have is: is the onus at all on the charter school to ensure that a student is re-enrolled elsewhere, or when they are removed from the charter school, are they automatically added back to the local neighborhood school's cohort?

This was brought to my attention by an excellent analysis by Erich Martel, a retired DCPS social studies teacher who unrelentingly excoriates the neoliberal education reform sweeping Washington, D.C.
"Don’t students drop out of the regular public school?  Certainly.  When they drop out, they are still counted in the school’s cohort (denominator).  A student can only be removed from the denominator/ cohort, if he or she is transferred to another school and enrolled. The regular public school has no equivalent “default” LEA into which it can unload unwanted students.  Since charters are all in the same school zone as the regular public school, they can transfer at will.
After a student has been transferred to the LEA school of right, i.e. the “traditional” public school, he or she is removed from the cohort.  The US Department of Education introduced the Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate (ACJR) calculation with the graduating class of 2011.  It starts with the grade 9 enrollment, students transferring in are added; those transferring out are subtracted from the cohort.
When there are multiple LEAs in the same geographical district, but only one is required to enroll all students, the other LEAs have the privilege of cherry picking and then getting rid of students who don’t fit in.  That’s what they all do in DC, including much acclaimed KIPP."
As posted on GF Bradenburg's blog, here:

http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/from-one-washington-to-the-other/

Yugoslav

• Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric.
• Cafe Europa, Slavenka Drakulic.
• A novel by Ismail Kadare.
• Travelouge by Rebecca West.
• Cinema of Dusan Makavajev.

Added 11/19:

• The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers: 1804-1999, by Misha Glenny.

A course of action

Sparked by, of all things, the Ben Affleck film Argo (2012).

• Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution -- a documentary on Iranian cinema, intertwined as it has been with politics.
• The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd -- a Westernized Iranian's perspective of his ancestral country's contemporary intricacies -- learned about ta'arouf, a custom of excessive politeness, in which one must beg a taxi driver to tell you what is owed and then to accept the pay.
•  Close-Up (early 1990s), film by Abbas Kiarostami -- documentary with re-enactments, depicts the trial and story of a working class man who impersonates a famous Iranian director to gain favor with a family.
• The People Reloaded -- a collection of essays on the 2009 uprisings.
• Shah of Shahs -- shared with Michael.

Research Program

Neoliberal Education Reform in Washington, D.C.

Resources:
-Pauline Lipman
-Thomas Pedroni

I need to post thoughts on:

• Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Antonio Gramsci's Political Writings v.1 and v.2
• Pier Paolo Pasolini's In Danger (collection of poetry, cultural criticism, and political agitation). Pasolini detests the style of the hippies, who wore the rags of revolution rather than fight its battles. Long hair does nothing for him, an openly gay communist.
• How to Survive a Plague, documentary depicting AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) and their direct action to demand AIDS treatment from the FDA, NIH, etc.
• the Allied Media Conference, in which media activists from across the country met to "decolonize minds."
• personal, internal transformation vs. collective, political action (have I, at the age of 23, already soured on organizing vs. personal liberation? Life is short -- a quote from Detroit: "No matter how many maps or studies we [i.e. 'the people'] bring, we will never have as many nor will we be as articulate as those in power." In other words, as long as we speak the oppressor's language, we are compromised, and they will always win when they set the rules of the game. The alternative, stagnation or perpetual disaffection from day to day clockwork on-the-ground work, is what disgusts me. Freire himself made the transformation from organized agitation and political engagement to personal, almost spiritual liberation.

These notes are from March 2011.

Political pranksterism has seen a rise in the past three weeks. On February 22nd, a call between the editor of the Buffalo Beast, purporting to be David Koch, and Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker, surfaced on the internet.

On March 8th, James O'Keefe's "Project Veritas" released a sting video of NPR VP of Giving Ron Schiller and

"I'll talk personally instead of wearing my NPR hat," Schiller says, before describing the "anti-intellectual" turn in Republican fearmongering and Fox News backlash. In how many campaigns in 2010 and in 2008 did we hear Republican nominees decry "liberal elitism"? This is what Schiller gets at when he discusses how universities are now considered liberal just by virtue of serving the intellect. In O'Keefe's video, the accompanying text highlights "liberal because it's intellectual," as if Schiller is saying that all support for critical thinking is inherently liberal. If one watches the tape, you can see Schiller make air-quotes, and he is clearly disagreeing with this 1:1 association of academics with liberalism. This is the state of affairs as rendered by Fox News' supposedly populist rhetoric for the "everyday" person, against education but not against the money that the "conservative elite" has earned through capitalist development, union busting, and free market exploitation.

The undercover video that depicts Ron Schiller calling the Tea Party "xenophobic" and "seriously racist people" does not give us any new information. James O'Keefe's goal is to shut down public funding for supposedly liberal causes.

Conservative activism through video. Recording the biases of corporate executives within a government-funded, supposedly objective journalism organ. But NPR is not the liberal organ of news the way that Fox News vociferously champions a right-wing agenda.

O'Keefe is trying to make change, even if we don't find ourselves on his side, through the dissemination of damning and irrefutable video evidence. Yet it can be refuted because of its presentation: through editing. Words taken out of context? Hardly. But words re-presented as insider chatting.

When Juan Williams was removed from NPR, he also said some hateful things about Muslims.


O'Keefe's expose of ACORN led Congress to defund the community organizing group. Will this clip have the same effect?

Activism in Egypt?

The news is not what's breaking, it's the damning evidence. He could say whatever he'd like in his personal life. He could not say such things on stage or publicly as a representative of NPR. I suppose this is a work-related conversation and thus he would represent the organization.

This event says much more about the echo of media than it does regarding news or analysis.

Yes Men

Prank call to Scott Walker!

It's impressive that within 24 hours of video footage of a VP of corporate giving -- in no way a journalist who is supposed to remain objective -- NPR fires its chief executive. In the wake of the prank call to Scott Walker, in which a fake David Koch asks him if he thought of planting violent protesters in the crowd. "Yeah, we thought of that," Walker said. A man whose job is to funnel money to NPR but who plays no role in content creation. A Governor of a state who considered hiring Mubarak-like thugs to assault his citizens.

These notes are from March 2011.

Things I learned today/arguments I encountered:

-The creation of modern Lebanon as a Maronite Christian nation was initiated by the Zionist movement in order to strengthen the argument that the Middle East was a religious mosaic (David Hirst, "Beware of Small States").

-Lebanon is approximately the size of Connecticut and has 15 religious denominations represented. I would bet that Connecticut has also.

-The pan-Arabist movement was intended to be a secular movement.

-Syria used to be the name for Syria-Lebanon-Jordan.

-Twitter and Flickr posts from smart phones include GPS information that can be decoded by anyone to get your specific coordinates (On the Media, 3/11/11).

-Jerusalem may represent the fundamental human condition: as animals, we are compelled to war, but as conscious beings, we are laden with compassion and grief (On Point, "James Carrol's Jersualem," 3/8/11).

-All of life is a flow. Capitalism and industrial production are no exception (D&G, "Anti-Oedipus)

Madness and Civilization: Asylum on the National Mall

This piece was written during the summer of 2011.

 In the 11th hour of the so-called "debt ceiling crisis," I settled onto the lawn of the National Mall for a screening of Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), a film which I've seen many times but never in such a thought-provoking setting.

Every summer in D.C. an enormous screen is erected on the Mall, and crowds gather with picnic baskets and blankets on the west side to take in old classics. The architecture of the screening provides the spectator with an imposing image behind the screen -- the Capitol building looms in the background -- lest we forget who's running the show.

The film itself and the conditions of my viewing it mirror one another in their display of how power shapes its subjects through consent, and buy-in, rather than coercion.

Forman's film, based on the novel by Ken Kesey, stars Jack Nicholson as the charismatic rogue whom we meet upon his arrival to an insane asylum. We learn that he had been in prison but that he convinced the prison warden to transfer him to a mental institution, perhaps to get out of his work detail. He passes an entrance interview and is admitted to the asylum, where he meets the residents of the ward, half of whom are vegetative and the other half more-or-less functional.

The inmates of the asylum hearken back to Michel Foucault's observations in Madness and Civilization (1964), in which the author traces a history of how civilizations have isolated their undesirables. Madness, Foucault would say, became codified only in the 18th century, when formal institutions were established to control those deemed mad by society. Here they are subjected to a hierarchy of power, between the warden, nurses, and security, who restrain the inmates and reinforce their otherness.

As the film develops we learn that all of the non-comatose inmates of the asylum are self-committed. These men exhibit the self-repression common in modern societies, which use a combination of coercion and consent to wield power over their populace. Drawing on Foucault again, it is knowledge that exercises power over the inmates. They have incarcerated themselves, voluntarily. Society has ostracized these men and their behavior, causing them to self-imprison, self-diagnose, and inculcate their inferiority. In Antonio Gramsci's world, these men would experience the soft power of education, culture, and civil society by indoctrinating the ideals and keeping themselves in check, although within society. Forman's inmates, however, have so consumed the messages of power in their society that they have decided they cannot follow such rules, they cannot be trusted to obey Order, or Law. Thus, they take it into their own hands and have themselves put away.

Discipline functions through coercion and consent. Formal and legal frameworks prevent many of us from shooting one another, because we fear the consequences of our actions (some would argue morality prevents us as well, but I won't get into that). However education, religion, and the media exercise power over us differently, sowing seemingly innocuous seeds that take root as thoughts and one day sprout into beliefs and actions. These cultural and discursive expressions of power, I would argue, are preventive and placatory. They are the types of power that seek to keep our desires in check, that induce us to support the status quo, that prevent us from imbibing in the Weird.

The asylum is such an interesting place because it reenacts political society on a microcosmic scale. There is the despot, Nurse Ratched; her henchmen, the other nurses and security; and the subjects, the inmates of the ward. Within the asylum the inmates attempt to establish their own rudimentary democracy when Nicholson tries to get the World Series on the ward's television. Nurse Ratched, who initially approves of the democratic polling of the other inmates, breaks the social compact by disrespecting the late vote of Chief. She administers Law here, and no matter how arbitrary, her rule is absolute.

The under-educated lack self-policing skills, lack the opportunity to buy in through consent, and end up facing the consequences of coercion in prison and execution.

In many ways, then, we can view Cuckoo as an allegory. Many of the men are self-educated to the point of regulating their own actions. Thus they confine themselves in the film to the asylum. Foucault would also say that the asylum-industrial complex now holds sway.

The other men of the ward -- the 8 "crazies" who stare ou the window, glide around the ward dancing, or mutter to themselves the day long. These inmates are those stashed away for public good, not personal desire. The line between the will to incarcerate oneself, to limit the varieties of experience in submission to Order, to the mechanisms of Power, that is the dilemma of live, at least so far as I have lived it. That is why I am sitting here, in the corridor of might, taking in an old movie in the summer night.

Pedro Noguera, Paolo Friere, A.G., M.F. - education, il popolo, incarceration, consent, POWER.

"Kicking the can down the road," "cooptation," and other considerations: Reconciling international socialism and community organizing

This piece was written in late 2011.

In the current Occupy Moment, I have asked myself this questions repeatedly:

How to reconcile the revolutionary with the practical? The systemic with the experiential? The ideological with the tangible?

Now first I must state that, for the purposes of this musing, I am in some ways conflating Occupy's outburst of 99% anger-about-everything with socialism's goal of a complete overthrow of capitalism. I realize, of course, that there are myriad problems in doing so. For one, we know that not all Occupiers are socialists. And furthermore there are some socialists who believe that Occupiers are disaffected middle-class kids. Nevertheless, the two share such an indignation with business as usual that both are cautious to support reformism, concrete and limited demands, and extensive dialogue or interaction with establishment candidates and electoral politics. That is what I want to talk about here.

Community organizing has a different focus. Rather than beginning from the premise that the revolution must be total, Saul Alinsky and those who have come after him operate under the assumption that power is wielded by people and money working consistently and persistently to achieve a shared goal. Community organizers seek to agitate and develop leaders who realize -- read, actualize -- their own liberation through incremental, measurable change. By building power among people acting on their own interests, community organizers allow the people to lead the process. Rather than deductively working toward an articulated endpoint -- rather than organizing teleologically, as socialists do -- community organizers listen to people and offer frameworks for addressing issues of all shapes and sizes.

Where I imagine tension arises between these opposing viewpoints:

The orthodox socialist would argue that community organizers' reformist agendas and issue-based campaigns do not address the root of the problem called capitalism.By calling for X new jobs, Y corporate taxes, and Z community benefits -- so the argument goes -- Alinsky-style organizing allows the ruling elite to remain in power. It focuses on incremental changes that do not fundamentally remake our society. It kicks the can down the road, cleaning up after the systematic inequalities that persist under capitalism.

The community organizer would contend that socialists speak about the World-as-it-Should-Be while organizers live in the World-as-it-Is.

Community organizers spend their waking hours talking with working people, perfecting the truly radical face-to-face relational meeting, and facilitating a process of liberation led by those most deeply affected. Rather than import an ideological project, they respond to the needs around them and achieve measurable "wins." Furthermore, their work is not issues. Their work is power. Members and constituent institutions select issues, but the goal -- always -- is building the power to act again and again.

In my personal experience agitating youth to act upon injustice in their communities, the language of Marx has not been effective. Speaking about jobs, homes, and educational opportunities has.

The project then for the truly radical organizer -- and by radical I mean, literally, getting to the roots -- is to bridge the practical with the ideological. To take lessons from history and the systemic analyses of socialists throughout the world, and to speak with people and value above all their perspectives and experiences. I believe that community organizing plays a vital role in the quest for socialism, if by that condition we mean a world in which all people are truly, systemically, fundamentally afforded equal opportunities and freedoms. People will only realize their capacity to change the world around them and to upset the dominant order through lived experiences, through a taste of change. We can't hold out on building power because a methodology is not doctrinally pure.

And those experiences must involve processes of organization, consciousness-building, and achievement. Otherwise we're battling against an ingraspable foe for a pie in the sky.

From Rome with Love

From Rome with Love, Woody Allen's latest foray into European adoration after last year's Midnight in Paris, channels the Spanish juggernaut of surrealist cinema, Luis Bunuel. In his Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, three middle-class French couples try to meet for dinner but are perpetually and absurdly interrupted each time – by a monsignor, by an army. In The Exterminating Angel, guests at a dinner party are unable to leave after finishing their last course. They are not held by bars or guards but by an invisible force. In Bunuel's films, we read in the cultural significance where the director has repeatedly claimed there is none. The figures in Bourgeoisie may kindle thoughts in the viewer about the diddling around of the self-fulfilling (and selfish) lifestyles of the well-cultured. Angel's characters may be bound not by physical constraints but by ideology or cultural forces which we do not see.

In Allen's film, Roberto Benigni plays a middle-class Roman who wakes up one day to find throngs of reporters outside his door. They ask him what he had for breakfast and his thoughts about the weather while young women clamor for his signature. He is the mediocre man suddenly made significant. In one particularly memorable scene he is brought onto a news program to share his thoughts on the most mundane of life's activities. He is scrutinized from every angle until, suddenly, one day, the press's attention shifts to another man walking down the street who “looks much more interesting.” Benigni is saddened and shares a pathetic scene with his wife when he hounds passersby to recognize him and ask for his daily forecast.

In another Bunuelian moment, a middle-aged mortician is thrust into the classical singing world by a retired director, played by Allen himself. The mortician's gift, however, is confined to the shower, and during an audition he fails to impress. Allen decides that in subsequent performances, the singer will be allowed his natural habitat. A mobile shower is constructed, and the mortician performs magnificently on stage in front of hundreds, all the while scrubbing his back and lathering his beard.

Another thread of the film follow Jesse Eisenberg, a young architecture student, as he slowly falls in love with his girlfriend's visiting friend. Alec Baldwin is the flourish – a semi-omniscient devil-on-the-shoulder to Eisenberg – who is recognized by all characters but somehow external to the world of the characters in the love triangle. The final stream involves a newly married couple from the Italian countryside who come to Rome to make their fortune. They get separated, the husband becomes involved with a voluptuous prostitute (Penelope Cruz), and the wife sleeps with a burglar after nearly bedding a movie star. Neither of these pieces are as compellingly surreal as the former. Baldwin's character and his presence is half-baked, and the couples comedy lacks the absurd magic of the other segments.

I am struggling with a summation of what I saw, but I enjoyed it. The film was cheerfully absurd and, in the Bunuel tradition, I must deny my impulse to interpret it.