Colbert Interviews Basil Marceaux and Laura Ingraham, and I Ponder the State of the Nation

I blogged recently about the ugly anti-immigrant messages Steve and I heard on television on our drive across our neighbor state of Tennessee in the final part of July (disclaimer: we could probably hear equally horrific statements from our own state’s candidates for the fall elections, but 1) we mute or fast forward through all commercials, and 2) we’re not in a gubernatorial election cycle as Tennessee is).

But when I posted about this on July 20, I had no idea how bad things were.  Yesterday, I watched a clip of Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central as I slogged away on my treadmill for daily exercise.  It contained this grotesque segment about Basil Marceaux, who’s running for the governor’s position in Tennessee. 

Town-Hall Protests and Populist Rage: As AstroTurf Is to Grass

You know how those raucous town-hall meetings are supposed to be all about populist furor rising up among a people who feel left out of the political process? And who are showing up at these meetings to re-enfranchise themselves and claim a voice in deliberations that have shut them out?

Well, if you think that’s what these tempests in a teapot have been all about, I have news for you. I had lunch yesterday with a friend who is working hard to organize a national convention to take place in Little Rock later in the year.

One of her many tasks is to verify conference registrants who are also staying at the conference hotel, one of our grand local downtown hotels. On a regular basis, the hotel photocopies documents showing who has registered at the hotel and is also a conference attendant. Those folks will get a special conference discount at the hotel.

As my friend was going through her latest list earlier this week, a name and address stood out. She couldn’t place the name, though the hotel thought this person had signed up for the conference discount.

My friend googled the name and the address, and discovered the following interesting bit of information: he belongs to a right-wing think tank in northern Virginia. In fact, he had already visited Little Rock a few weeks back, from that Virginia address. He's not attending the conference, and his documents had gotten mixed into the conference bunch by mistake.

And the activist group for which he works has been tracked to a cluster of organizations known to be staging the faux populist astroturf demonstrations at town-hall meetings.

The date of his visit to Little Rock? The day before the town-hall meeting about which I wrote in early August, one of those featured in national television coverage of these teabagging events. That was the meeting at which a “local” stood up and shook and cried about losing her country and how afraid it made her to lose control.

From Virginia to Little Rock to organize and script “local” “populist” discontent, at a hefty price: these astroturf protests are about as close to real populism as, well, Astro Turf is to grass.

Sara Robinson on Dealing with Thuggery: A Choice Between Two Outcomes

And, to complete the circle I tried to draw in my posting earlier today about corporal punishment of children, slavery, and the right-wing mobs now rampaging at town hall meetings, I offer the following illuminating analysis of how one should deal with thuggery, by Sara Robinson at Alternet:

Back in elementary school, most of us learned that when a bully learns that intimidation and threats work, he'll will keep doing more of it. In fact, the longer he goes without comeuppance, the bolder and badder he becomes, and the harder it is to make him stop. Every success teaches him something new about how to use terror for maximum effect and tempts him to push the envelope and see what else he can get away with. Do nothing, and he'll soon take over the whole playground.

And it happens like this for bullies in groups, too. Living in a fascist regime is just living in a town dominated by the Mob, a street gang, the KKK, or a corrupt sheriff.

It only takes a small handful of thugs to terrorize people into giving up their civil rights, abandoning democracy and doing what they're told, just so they can keep their jobs, windows and families intact.

The main imperative in life becomes staying off the goons' radar. All the enforcers need to do is make an horrific example out of one or two troublemakers every now and then -- and the resulting fear will keep everybody else quietly in line.

Conservatives have tried to subdue other Americans this way for centuries, so there's nothing new going on here. And this is the way they've always done it: they used race (and yes, the birthers and anti-health care rioters are, at root, all about race) and economic calamity to whip up a posse of terrified, well-armed vigilantes, and then turned them loose on society to "enforce order."

Given their colossal investment in organizing and indoctinating the teabaggers, we'd be stupid to believe that this is all going to go away when Congress returns to Washington in September. Having had a taste of power and publicity, these newly empowered mobs are very likely to stick around town and see what else they can do to keep the muck stirred up.

Our choice now is stark: knock them back while they're still new, small and not yet entrenched; or deal with them later, when they've got some real power to fight back with, and the cost to all of us will be so much higher.

This is our new reality -- and it comes straight out of Hitler's playbook (check out Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf). Their intention is to keep the outrage junkies high by giving them a never-ending supply of new, made-up reasons to act out.

When the birth certificate fracas cools, they're standing by with "death panels." When that one's run its course, there will be something else -- over and over, every few weeks, for as long as the Dems rule.

Which means that even if we win this round, we can't stand down. We're going to be pushing back against these bullies, over and over, for the next three to seven years.

There are only two outcomes here. Either we get very good at spotting and stopping these attempts at a brownshirt takeover the minute they crop up; or they're going to get very good at public intimidation and keep ratcheting it up further toward outright violence and goon rule.

That's how it's going to be for the rest of this administration. The sooner we resign ourselves to the zero-sum nature of this fight, the sooner we can get on with getting good at it.

Continued Beating of Children in the South and Slavery: Making the Connections

A day or so ago, the Arkansas Times posted a piece about the continued use of corporal punishment for children in Arkansas schools. Yes, it does still go on all over the South (here and here), one of many vestiges of barbarism that we like to sanctify with hand-picked biblical passages that conveniently justify our barbarism, while we ignore the overweening weight of other biblical passages that expose our barbaric cultural norms as cruel, immoral, and unjustifiable.

And a vestige of slavery: when I saw the Arkansas Times article, what caught my eye immediately was the photograph of the paddle still used in Southern schools to beat children. This is exactly the kind of paddle used in schools in south Arkansas when I was growing up. And it’s apparently the kind of paddle that many slaveholders used to punish slaves in antebellum Arkansas.

I did not know of that connection between ongoing corporal punishment of Southern children and slavery until I recently read Grif Stockley’s Ruled by Race, surveying the racial history of Arkansas, a state in which race trumps everything, Stockley thinks. Stockley notes that the WPA slave narratives, transcripts of interviews that WPA workers held with former slaves in the 1930s, indicate a high level of violence against slaves in antebellum Arkansas. Approximately a third of the WPA slave narratives collected in Arkansas recount violence done to slaves by slaveholders and overseers (p. 3).

Arkansas was unique among slave states in that there is no appellate record at all of prosecution for excessive force used against slaves (p. 26). The record suggests that whites could abuse blacks with impunity in antebellum Arkansas, without any “interference” from a state government totally enmeshed in and supportive of slavery, and of churches totally captive to the slave system. Shortly before Arkansas became a state, its citizens succeeded in running off Jesse Haile, a Methodist preacher who followed his church’s teachings against slavery and advocated abolition (p. 38). By 1850, a large majority of Methodist ministers in Arkansas owned slaves themselves (ibid.).

And Stockley includes a detail about one of the ways in which slaves were punished in Arkansas that makes a light bulb go off in my head, one that illuminates the connection between slavery and corporal punishment of children which had previously eluded me. Stockley notes that, on many plantations, paddles were used to beat slaves, which had holes in them to raise blisters on the skin of those being beaten (p. 6).

As I say, this historical tidbit catches my eye, as does the picture of the paddle used in Southern schools today, because that same paddle with holes bored into it was used in the schools I attended as a child and a teen in south Arkansas in the 1950s and 1960s. I myself was never beaten—not in school, at least (home was a different story). I knew in my bones that I was “different,” and that whatever nameless thing defined my difference was likely to attract unwanted attention from older boys predisposed to violence.

So I kept my head down, went my way, and found myself in an uncomfortable spotlight only when my tendency to excel at schoolwork, joined to my refractory willingness to say honestly what I thought when asked my opinion, even when said opinion countervailed popular ideas, got me into trouble. I know about the paddle only vicariously.

But what I learned about it even vicariously was enough to make me know its power to inflict considerable pain, and to make me determined to avoid being the recipient of its pain. In junior high and high school, paddling was a privilege reserved for the most part to the coaches (though the male principal and vice-principal that ran the school were also known to beat boys in their offices).

Many gym classes were preceded by periods in which all of us in the class were required to sit in silence as one and then another boy got called outside into the hallway to be paddled, while the rest of us listened. All the male coaches who taught physical education in our school were burly, gruff men, heterosexual (or heterosexual-posturing) men prone to violence who stood at the top of the social pecking order of their world and intended to remain there, through force, if necessary.

When they beat boys, they really beat them. Sitting in the gym and listening to the beatings, we could hear the paddle with the holes bored in it whistling through the air. We could hear its solid splat on the naked buttocks of the boys being paddled. We could hear their yelps of pain.

These were normally tough boys, boys who wouldn’t whimper or cry out if their lives depended on it. We knew, as we listened to them being beaten again and again, and yelping after each thwack of the paddle, that the pain had to be considerable, to bring these toughs to any admission that they felt the beating.

And then, after they had been whipped and limped—often in tears—back into the gym, the coaches would appear. With the paddle they had just used. They’d swing it casually around so we all could see it. And then they’d put it away in their office, until it needed to be brought out again for another round of punishments.

These beatings were clearly designed to be public. They were about more than just the punishment of individual malefactors. They were about intimidating—terrorizing is not too strong of a word—the rest of us, showing us who had the power and who didn’t. And what was likely to happen to anyone who ran up against the power of those who owned the paddle.

Just as in the slave system: when slaves were beaten with the same implement, or forced to lie splayed on the ground as they were scourged brutally across their naked backs, or put into stocks, the point was not merely to punish an individual slave. It was to terrorize a whole group of people. It was to show those people that they did not count as human beings, and that if they decided to pretend they counted, swift, horrific reprisal would follow immediately.

And does the beating of children in schools (or at home) work, as many bible-spouting social conservatives like to tell us it does? Not in the schools I attended. Those beaten were beaten repeatedly. Their offenses (sassing teachers, violating school rules, and so forth) were repeat offenses. Beating did not deter them from continuing their refractory behavior. It even seemed to spur them on to acts of larger, more insouciant defiance.

And to violence: the violence done to them by the coaches, the humiliation they endured at the hands of the big men? They simply passed it on to smaller, weaker boys, boys who needed to be shown that they were not big men and could never attain big-man status. The violence bred more violence, so that school became a torment for any child who stood out in some way that attracted the negative attention of the thugs.

Just as the violence of the right-wing thugs now seeking to shut down national debate about health care will inevitably breed more violence, as long as the bullies go unchecked and are afforded the luxury of believing that their tactics are productive, that they truly hold in their hands the unchecked power they believe they have. Thugs whose faces don't look a great deal different from those who wielded the paddle in my schools, or those whom they taught through their beatings to use violence as a tactic of social domination and control of the "weak." Thugs whose faces remind me and many others (here, too) of the faces we saw in mobs determined to roll back integration in the South of the 1950s and 1960s.

Thugs who surely look a great deal like those standing over slaves with whips and paddles in the South of the slave days, beating and beating and beating again, as they spouted bible verses to justify their savage behavior.

School Bullying: We Have Met the Bully; He Is Us

“Truth that makes a difference,” I wrote in my last blog entry. That’s the kind of truth I’m interested in discovering on this blog pilgrimage. That kind of truth requires doing battle—with oneself, first and foremost, so that one keeps pushing to expand one’s horizons when the human impulse is to close in on oneself and become comfortable with the familiar, with the well-worn little truths that comprise one’s grab-bag of certainties.

Discovering truth that makes a difference also requires collaborating with others who are battling for the truth. Truth is not just out there, to be plucked, like a fruit ripening on a tree. Truth has to be searched for and found. It has to be made. It has to be struggled for. Truth that makes a difference is the goal of dialogic exchange in which a community of truth seekers struggle together for the truth. Truth that makes a difference is agonistic: it is found at a certain cost, the cost of challenging the purveyors of misinformation that passes for truth in any society, the cost of struggling with oneself, and the cost of forming bonds of trust and collaboration with others.

Finding that kind of truth in the world in which we live is not easy. For one thing, many forces collude to rob us of the power of solidarity. Believe it or not, there are those—many “those”—who do not wish for us to find the truth. There are many power brokers for whom the solidarity of truth-seekers, the formation of communities of discourse seeking together the truth that makes a difference, is extremely threatening.

These power brokers do all they can to distort plain truth, so that the quest for truth is always fractured, always across a terrain full of crevices and boulders, never simple. They do all they can to sow seeds of suspicion among those who would, in the natural course of things, benefit from seeking together the truth that makes a difference. The power brokers who wish for the world to remain the same (since they benefit from how things are currently arranged), who try to stand astride history and shout stop—these power brokers do everything in their power to thwart the formation of communities of solidarity that band together to engage in a shared quest for truth that makes a difference.

I have been thinking about truth, solidarity, community, and social transformation lately, against the backdrop of questions about how to address school bullying. Even that conversation, about what seems such an obvious need, an urgent need, is fraught with complexity because of the inability of many of us to find common ground regarding issues of gender and education. The plain truth—that children ought not to be beaten into submission or to have their futures mortgaged because they do not conform to preconceived societal expectations about gender behavior—even this plain truth is not plain to many folks, because of political currents that have twisted and distorted our social lenses about gender roles and about the goals of education.

To be specific: I have been listening to responses of people in my own area to the bullying of Billy Wolfe in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, school system. And I have been dialoguing with e-friends who share my concern about school bullying. As I listen and engage in dialogue, I notice some key issues surfacing, which ought not to demand attention, but which have to be discussed, because the right-wing talk machine has been so successful for so long now in distorting the consciousness of Americans about gender issues and the education of our youth, that we cannot see plain truth, and cannot discover the truth that makes a difference, as we look at the phenomenon of school bullying.

Some of those to whom I have been listening lately are asking whether the phenomenon of school bullying really is any different now—any more pronounced—than it was in the past. After all, as they point out, in schools all over the world, bullying of the “weaker” by the “stronger” has been going on from time immemorial. Are things really any worse now? Isn’t the process of taking boys who are prone to wear their feelings on their shoulders and toughening them up good for everyone concerned—for society, which needs men to be men, and for the bullied boys themselves, since they will live in an adult world that expects men to be men?

It’s not that these assumptions are always vocalized outright in discussion of what happens to boys such as Billy Wolfe. But they are the kind of strong unexamined social assumptions that make addressing school bullying difficult in American culture today. These are the unvocalized justifications that many school administrators and some parents use to shrug off school bullying: it goes on all the time; it has always gone on; it’s salubrious practice for real life, particularly for the “too sensitive” boy. Lighten up. Boys will be boys. Don’t intervene in the benign social Darwinism of the school playground, unless you want to tip longstanding scales that keep our social mechanisms functioning, and cause social chaos.

My own take on the bullying problem is that it probably has always been there, but is more serious today for a number of reasons. First, there's the rise in violence in schools (and society at large), and the ready availability of weapons. Grudges that used to be settled by a fistfight are now settled with knives and guns. The growing tacit social acceptance of violence as a way to resolve disputes in adult life, as well as in the lives of the young, when combined with the availability of weapons and the willingness of school children to use them, raises school bullying to an entirely new level at this point in history.

Then, too, the Internet has made communication—including communication in which bullies egg each other on and organize to target an individual—frighteningly easier. As the story of Billy Wolfe (and other recent stories of school bullying) indicates, websites, email, and other tools of e-communication are now being used to make school bullying more “effective” by far than it ever could be in the pre-Internet age. Posting a child’s picture on a website and goading others to hate him allows more and more people to join in the blood-sport of chastising the “weak” link in social chains of power. It allows the bullying to become organized, to extend beyond schools into every area of a youth’s life. It produces a new level of refined cruelty, in which a taunt can pop up in an email at any time, or leap out from a webpage on which the bullied person clicks.

And, finally, I think that there's a heightened awareness of gender and sexual orientation issues, again, partly due to the Internet. Youth today are more aware of their sexual orientation or more willing to explore gender variance at ever younger ages. To a degree almost unimaginable to us who grew up in a world in which the flow of information was confined to print media or the relatively localized media of television and radio, the Internet allows for instant worldwide communication about issues of gender and sexuality that permits ready access to information unavailable to youth in the past.

For many of those who have a vested interest in seeing rigid societal thinking about gender roles shift, this heightened information flow has seemed promising. What I think many of us have not anticipated, however, is the effect of that information flow on the lives of youth exploring gender identity, in a world in which the same information flow permits those opposed to questioning of traditional gender roles to organize.

LGBT youth, and youth questioning traditional gender roles, are now in a double bind. In a way previously unimaginable, they have access to information regarding sexual orientation and gender issues never before so readily available to youth. They also have ready access to information about others who have fought through these issues and become role models for LGBT youth today.

But their bullies also have access to information that permits them to organize, to target, to extend the taunts and threats to every area of a youth’s life. LGBT youth today experience increasing backlash precisely because there is, at one level, increasing ease about coming out. The easier the process of coming out becomes—on the surface—the more difficult it simultaneously becomes, because of the intent of organized groups full of hate to counteract the easy transmission of information about gender and sexual orientation in the Internet age.

I speak deliberately of “organized groups full of hate.” The real bullies, the real villains in the school bullying tragedy, are not first and foremost the youth who kick, hit, taunt, or shoot. The real bullies are the parents, school administrators, church groups, bogus therapists, ex-gay ministries, the media, and manifold right-wing think tanks that disseminate ugly, false information about the gay “lifestyle” and about gender roles to youth inclined to bully.

The problem of school bullying won’t be resolved effectively until the real bullies are exposed and addressed. As Alice Miller’s stunning reflections on how Western culture treats youth note, we are a culture saturated with belief in our extraordinary concern for our youth, who at the same time constantly murder the souls of our young people. Miller’s life-long study of the societal issue of violence towards the young convinced her that the flip side of our sentimental belief that we do everything to protect the young is that we ultimately care very little about the well-being of youth. The too-much protestation in which we engage hides the sordid reality that we do not truly care a great deal about the well-being of our youth.

As a society, we have long been callous about acts of violence perpetrated against the young right in the family circle—the key locale in which young people suffer assault. We do very little to protect young people from what Miller calls “soul murder”—the death of hope, of belief in oneself and one’s potential, the belief that one’s life counts and will make a difference in the world. Miller concluded, after years of exhaustive psychotherapeutic research, that even when youth are not physically assaulted in our culture, their souls are often subjected to murder, because we do so little to safeguard and cultivate the souls of the young.

As an educator, I have become increasingly convinced that something is very awry in our educational system, and that this dislocation of the goals of our educational system is intimately related to the murder of the souls of our youth. We do a decent enough job (in some cases, in some areas, depending on income levels and social status) of educating young people’s heads. We do a dismal job of educating their hearts, of cultivating their souls.

We cannot, in fact, cultivate the souls of youth when we do not cultivate our own souls. I am not talking about the soul here in classic religious terms. I am talking about what is inmost in a human person, what makes that person tick, about what shines forth inside a human being to make that person different from any other human being.

Though for some people this language has specific religious reference, for others it is a useful way to describe humanistic goals without reference to a specific religious tradition or any religious tradition at all. The language of soul need not be left out of our school system and our educational objectives on the ground that it has religious roots. It is a language that is also spoken by those who want to build a better world without necessarily adverting to religion at all.

Our educational system cannot speak the language of soul, or address the murder of the souls of our youth, or stop the problem of school bullying, because our educational leaders themselves too often lack soul. I have thought this for a long time, as an educator. I thought about this problem of lack of soul with a renewed interest yesterday, as I read Patrik Johnson’s article “Rise of the ‘Rock Star’ School Superintendent" in the Christian Science Monitor at
www.csmonitor.com/2008/0331/p01s03-usgn.html.

Johnson reports on a troubling phenomenon in American education today: the ascendancy of a generation (and class) of highly paid bureaucratic “educators” who administer schools, but who have little apparent interest in or understanding of education itself, and of the classic humanistic goals of education. The name of the game in American education today is, frankly, to beat the testing game. Schools—at every level, from kindergarten through higher education—must demonstrate tangible results in the form of test scores.

This impulse in American higher education has resulted in a system of scamming by which schools do all in their power to up test scores, without caring much about what students actually learn—or about who students become, in the educational process. Even worse, the need to scam results in the hire of more and more educational administrators who are, frankly, simply, appallingly soulless.

These administrators thrive in climates in which they can balance fiscal account books, even when doing so requires the same scams that delude people into thinking that test scores are rising. They thrive in climates of obfuscation of the truth, of half-truths, of deliberate lies to governing boards that are, increasingly, comprised of hard-nosed business leaders and not educators.

These “educators” are also highly paid, disgracefully so. The Monitor reports on one candidate for a position in a suburban Atlanta school system, whose demands prior to hire include not merely a very cushy salary (many times more than a teacher is paid), but a Lincoln town car, a chauffeur, and a personal bodyguard.

I speak of what I know. I speak of what I have seen and heard with my own eyes and ears.

I know these “educators.” I have had to interact with them. I have tried to talk to them about educating youth, about shaping the character of future leaders, about cultivating the soul of youth. I have had no success in reaching these “educators.” Their interest is not in the soul. They are tone-deaf to the language of soul and character.

The increasing prevalence of these “rock-star” educators throughout the American system of education points to problems with the system itself—which is to say, problems with us. The Monitor article quotes Walter Fluker, executive director of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College in Atlanta, regarding what I am identifying as a loss of soul in American education today. Fluker says, "Leadership always is symptomatic, a warning sign of what's happening at deeper and more fundamental levels.”

I conclude from this observation that if the scam artists who are increasingly the rock-star “leaders” of our educational institutions thrive, it is because we allow them to thrive. The problem is us. We are the problem. We do not value our own souls or the souls of our youth.

Until we do so, we will not successfully make our schools places in which the souls of children—and the bodies of youth deemed gender-inappropriate—are safe from murder. We have met the enemy: he is us.