Hold on, folks, because this one will veer all over the place, like an 18-year-old kid high on Wild Turkey behind the wheel of a Hummer H2 on an icy downhill road in the black of night.
Yeah, this week felt that perilous. The shootings at Virginia Tech were horrifying enough when the story first broke, and as more details emerge the picture gets worse. Despite laws, good intentions, security procedures and evacuation plans, one armed and determined crazy willing to lose his own life can’t be stopped. That’s no solace for the families of the dead or the kids and faculty who survived, but it’s essentially true. I heard some radio talk about the shooter’s Korean ethnicity, and how discrimination – real or perceived – might have played a role in pushing the young man over the edge, but I’m not sure ethnicity had much to do with it; mental illness crosses freely between and among ethnicities, and this young Korean-American man was certainly ill.
Another eerie aspect of the VT shootings is the way digital technology – cell phones and laptops -- allowed the rest of the country, and the world, to witness the events almost as they happened, and to record those events from a variety of angles and perspectives. The number of sources and the sheer volume of information make the whole effect more chilling, though even with the benefit of all this information, we will never know with total certainty what made the young man go off. Was it a particular event, a look from a classmate, a rejection from a girl, or just the steady accumulation of perceived slights and injustices that snapped the camel’s back?
Rush Limbaugh blamed American Liberals for the massacre, though I’m hard-pressed to understand how that is possible in a society where Conservative ideology has been ascendant for nearly thirty years. Limbaugh is a pill-popping hypocrite who should join Don Imus in retirement.
The New York Times reported that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said, “I can’t recall,” fifty times during five hours of sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It always amazes me how men and women trained in the law, graduates of our finest universities, torture the truth once they are sworn in and placed on the hot seat. Gonzalez is clearly a lying little weasel trying to save his ass. In the same breath he accepts full responsibility and denies ever doing anything improper, and asserts that he’s in charge and completely unaware of what his subordinates are up to. "Senator, I don't have a recollection of not having a recollection about that specific meeting or any other meeting about which I have no recollection." I wonder if he can remember what he ate for breakfast yesterday morning or the last time he had sex with his wife. Does Gonzalez suffer from amnesia all the time or is his affliction merely situational?
Moving to more local issues…this will not be a restful weekend for members of the Santa Barbara School Board, faced as they are with slashing millions from the District budget next Tuesday night. The Board bought the ticket when it struck a multi-year salary agreement with the Santa Barbara Teachers Association, and now it must take the ride; the only problem is that most of the reductions on the big board suck and are sure to piss off one interest group or another. The Board’s standard fall back position – defer and delay, hire consultants and study – isn’t an option this time around, unless the Board wants to repudiate the agreement with the teachers that they approved on April 10. If you’re interested in watching a five-ring circus, check out the Board meeting at 7:00 P.M. on the 24th.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Bob's Big Night
The folks backing school board member Bob Noel’s brainchild, the American Charter High School (ACHS), came out in force Tuesday night, among them former board member Ray Franco, dapper Das Williams from the City Council, Frank Schipper of the eponymous construction firm, a UCSB professor whose name I didn’t catch who also happens to be a Nobel laureate in Physics, and a horde of lesser luminaries. All in all, it was a very impressive and organized bunch, all united in their desire to break the iron grip of educational bureaucracy and create a school that will keep kids interested in learning. Noel’s band arrived on the heels of Op-Ed pieces in the News-Press that claimed that the Board and Superintendent Brian Sarvis stood in opposition, even outright hostility, to the ACHS proposal – a position that none of the other Board members or Dr. Sarvis was willing to own. Twice Sarvis denied ever calling charter schools “economic parasites.”
As one of, if not the prime mover behind the ACHS idea, Bob Noel was expected to be in rare form, and old Bob didn’t disappoint. As a member of Noel’s posse noted, what else is a 77-year-old PhD going to do with his ample free time if not dream up solutions to the many dilemmas facing public education in Santa Barbara? Noel was geared up for combat from the start, jousting with Assistant Superintendent Jan Zettel over various aspects of vocational education, debating fine points of charter law with the District’s legal counsel, and ardently stressing that he, Bob Noel, had no financial interest or official capacity in the ACHS hierarchy, and therefore no conflict of interest as a sitting board member poised to cast a vote. That position appeared to be a helluva stretch, but when it comes to questions of basic ethics, Bob’s a triple-jointed kind of guy.
Like most Board meetings in the wacky world of the Santa Barbara School Districts, this one offered moments of delicious weirdness. I sat up and paid attention when my all-time favorite wing-nut, Kenneth Locke, inter-disciplinary guru of the emerging avant-garde, took the microphone for another installment in his long-running series of three-minute lectures. Somewhere in this great land of ours, the padded cell where Locke once resided stands empty; the walls of that cell are no doubt covered with squiggles, arrows, triangles, rectangles, mathematical formulas, grocery lists, koans and runes. Following Locke as he darts and skips from Aristotle to Jackson Pollock to Arthur Ashe is always a mental trick: “The abstract of the 20th century is that yoga is related to painting and painting is related to tennis, and between painting and tennis is pumpkin pie. Without a paradigm shift, young people will never understand what this means! The only way they can find themselves is through this paradigm shift! What I’m referring to is recycling, like when you take a milk carton and turn it into art, glorious art! In other words, the non-object object, the process by which something becomes nothing and nothing becomes everything!”
Watching the audience watching Locke is half the fun. Mouths fall open, eyes bug out, heads are scratched, earlobes are yanked, some folks cough nervously, some laugh, many whisper “What is that guy saying?” to the person next to them.
Yes, strange weirdness abounds in the Santa Barbara School District. Issues that pass unnoticed in other school districts are subjects of intense scrutiny and debate in SB, along with much hand-wringing and tears. Take Laura Baker for example. Ms. Baker teaches at La Cumbre Junior High and is waging a one-woman crusade to save La Cumbre from an invasion of elementary students from the Santa Barbara Community Academy, who may soon be housed on the La Cumbre campus. Ms. Baker has made dire predictions, sounded warnings, voiced numerous complaints, and advanced visions of mayhem during public comment at something like eighteen consecutive Board meetings. Tuesday night she asserted that the “Eastside” Academy kids would stir up resentment among “Westside” gang-affiliated kids, and who knows what terrible consequences might result from such an ill-conceived co-mingling of students. Ms. Baker would have the Eastside kids move to Cleveland – where they will be among their own kith and kin, safe from the predations of the Westsiders. Rumor has it that Ms. Baker’s true intention is far more personal and pragmatic: she stands to lose her private bathroom if the Academy kids move to La Cumbre.
The ACHS gang trooped to the microphone, one after the other, to express their unqualified support for the new charter school, asserting that it would provide a place for kids who fall through cracks in the pedagogical floorboards, for potential gang-bangers, for misfits with hidden potential, for English learners, for 8th graders reading at 3rd grade level, and for nascent mechanical geniuses under-served by the traditional curriculum. Not only that, the ACHS would flood the local labor pool with highly-skilled, employment-ready kids prepared to earn big wages framing buildings, policing the streets, and extinguishing fires.
After the Nobel Laureate whose name I didn’t catch spoke and was enthusiastically applauded, it was clear that the ACHS was the greatest thing since sliced bread, the plastic ice tray, and Botox and Viagara combined. Former Board member Ray Franco clinched the deal in a ten-minute rant that began in Spanish and concluded in English, describing his own immigrant success story and quoting Thomas Jefferson for good measure. Seven times Franco said, “Finally,” and then took off on another tangent. I looked at Bob Noel as Mr. Franco was speaking and finally understood what people mean when they say, “grinning like a Cheshire cat.” I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Bob had a hard-on, perhaps the biggest stiffie he's had since he became eligible for Social Security; he was basking in the light of his own brilliance, his soaring intellect, his organizational ability, and his “juice” in the community. To his fellow Board members and Superintendent Sarvis, Bob’s countenance seemed to say, “You can’t stop me, you can’t touch me, I am King of the World! My brainchild will be born and it will thrive!”
As one of, if not the prime mover behind the ACHS idea, Bob Noel was expected to be in rare form, and old Bob didn’t disappoint. As a member of Noel’s posse noted, what else is a 77-year-old PhD going to do with his ample free time if not dream up solutions to the many dilemmas facing public education in Santa Barbara? Noel was geared up for combat from the start, jousting with Assistant Superintendent Jan Zettel over various aspects of vocational education, debating fine points of charter law with the District’s legal counsel, and ardently stressing that he, Bob Noel, had no financial interest or official capacity in the ACHS hierarchy, and therefore no conflict of interest as a sitting board member poised to cast a vote. That position appeared to be a helluva stretch, but when it comes to questions of basic ethics, Bob’s a triple-jointed kind of guy.
Like most Board meetings in the wacky world of the Santa Barbara School Districts, this one offered moments of delicious weirdness. I sat up and paid attention when my all-time favorite wing-nut, Kenneth Locke, inter-disciplinary guru of the emerging avant-garde, took the microphone for another installment in his long-running series of three-minute lectures. Somewhere in this great land of ours, the padded cell where Locke once resided stands empty; the walls of that cell are no doubt covered with squiggles, arrows, triangles, rectangles, mathematical formulas, grocery lists, koans and runes. Following Locke as he darts and skips from Aristotle to Jackson Pollock to Arthur Ashe is always a mental trick: “The abstract of the 20th century is that yoga is related to painting and painting is related to tennis, and between painting and tennis is pumpkin pie. Without a paradigm shift, young people will never understand what this means! The only way they can find themselves is through this paradigm shift! What I’m referring to is recycling, like when you take a milk carton and turn it into art, glorious art! In other words, the non-object object, the process by which something becomes nothing and nothing becomes everything!”
Watching the audience watching Locke is half the fun. Mouths fall open, eyes bug out, heads are scratched, earlobes are yanked, some folks cough nervously, some laugh, many whisper “What is that guy saying?” to the person next to them.
Yes, strange weirdness abounds in the Santa Barbara School District. Issues that pass unnoticed in other school districts are subjects of intense scrutiny and debate in SB, along with much hand-wringing and tears. Take Laura Baker for example. Ms. Baker teaches at La Cumbre Junior High and is waging a one-woman crusade to save La Cumbre from an invasion of elementary students from the Santa Barbara Community Academy, who may soon be housed on the La Cumbre campus. Ms. Baker has made dire predictions, sounded warnings, voiced numerous complaints, and advanced visions of mayhem during public comment at something like eighteen consecutive Board meetings. Tuesday night she asserted that the “Eastside” Academy kids would stir up resentment among “Westside” gang-affiliated kids, and who knows what terrible consequences might result from such an ill-conceived co-mingling of students. Ms. Baker would have the Eastside kids move to Cleveland – where they will be among their own kith and kin, safe from the predations of the Westsiders. Rumor has it that Ms. Baker’s true intention is far more personal and pragmatic: she stands to lose her private bathroom if the Academy kids move to La Cumbre.
The ACHS gang trooped to the microphone, one after the other, to express their unqualified support for the new charter school, asserting that it would provide a place for kids who fall through cracks in the pedagogical floorboards, for potential gang-bangers, for misfits with hidden potential, for English learners, for 8th graders reading at 3rd grade level, and for nascent mechanical geniuses under-served by the traditional curriculum. Not only that, the ACHS would flood the local labor pool with highly-skilled, employment-ready kids prepared to earn big wages framing buildings, policing the streets, and extinguishing fires.
After the Nobel Laureate whose name I didn’t catch spoke and was enthusiastically applauded, it was clear that the ACHS was the greatest thing since sliced bread, the plastic ice tray, and Botox and Viagara combined. Former Board member Ray Franco clinched the deal in a ten-minute rant that began in Spanish and concluded in English, describing his own immigrant success story and quoting Thomas Jefferson for good measure. Seven times Franco said, “Finally,” and then took off on another tangent. I looked at Bob Noel as Mr. Franco was speaking and finally understood what people mean when they say, “grinning like a Cheshire cat.” I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Bob had a hard-on, perhaps the biggest stiffie he's had since he became eligible for Social Security; he was basking in the light of his own brilliance, his soaring intellect, his organizational ability, and his “juice” in the community. To his fellow Board members and Superintendent Sarvis, Bob’s countenance seemed to say, “You can’t stop me, you can’t touch me, I am King of the World! My brainchild will be born and it will thrive!”
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
An Echo Forty Years Old
On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King made a speech at the Riverside Church in New York City that was heralded as historic by some and something of a crime by others, but either way, much of what Dr. King said that day sounds eerily familiar in light of the economic, military and political morass the United States finds itself in today.
One parallel between the observations Dr. King made forty years ago and today is how little we understood or even considered what the Vietnam War meant for the millions of Vietnamese in the North and South who were just trying to live their lives. America’s focus was on our troops, our strategic interests and on propping up the US-installed government in Saigon.
Fast forward forty years to the American Occupation of Iraq. The plight of ordinary Iraqis is almost completely ignored by the American news media, as is any comprehensive coverage or explanation of Iraqi society, culture and history; most Americans couldn’t explain the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite if their home and hearth depended on it. It’s next to impossible for Americans to understand what it must feel like to live in an occupied country, to see foreign soldiers on street corners, to hear fighter jets and helicopters thundering overhead day and night, and to be reminded, every day, that your destiny rests in foreign hands rather than your own.
Forty years ago Dr. King quoted a Buddhist leader who wrote: “Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instincts. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies.”
Same in Iraq today. The folly of our invasion and occupation has created enmity in the hearts of Iraqis that will last at least a generation if not longer. We could “surge” forty or sixty thousand troops into Iraq and not come close to eradicating the hatred Iraqis feel for America and Americans. Dr. King feared for American troops in Vietnam, feared that we had placed them in a situation that was not only brutal but cynical: “…for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.”
I wonder how Dr. King would feel if he could see how many steps backwards America has taken in the forty years since he spoke at the Riverside Church. The militarism he feared is still alive and well; the economic and social injustice he spoke and marched against is as strong as ever; the racial intolerance he dedicated his life to fighting is alive and well. The words Dr. King spoke echo down the years, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and down to the Gulf of Mexico, through the ruined streets of the 9th Ward in New Orleans, through small-town churches and big-city synagogues, through the halls of government and the plush offices of corporate titans; the words echo and fall on ears gone deaf.
One parallel between the observations Dr. King made forty years ago and today is how little we understood or even considered what the Vietnam War meant for the millions of Vietnamese in the North and South who were just trying to live their lives. America’s focus was on our troops, our strategic interests and on propping up the US-installed government in Saigon.
Fast forward forty years to the American Occupation of Iraq. The plight of ordinary Iraqis is almost completely ignored by the American news media, as is any comprehensive coverage or explanation of Iraqi society, culture and history; most Americans couldn’t explain the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite if their home and hearth depended on it. It’s next to impossible for Americans to understand what it must feel like to live in an occupied country, to see foreign soldiers on street corners, to hear fighter jets and helicopters thundering overhead day and night, and to be reminded, every day, that your destiny rests in foreign hands rather than your own.
Forty years ago Dr. King quoted a Buddhist leader who wrote: “Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instincts. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies.”
Same in Iraq today. The folly of our invasion and occupation has created enmity in the hearts of Iraqis that will last at least a generation if not longer. We could “surge” forty or sixty thousand troops into Iraq and not come close to eradicating the hatred Iraqis feel for America and Americans. Dr. King feared for American troops in Vietnam, feared that we had placed them in a situation that was not only brutal but cynical: “…for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved.”
I wonder how Dr. King would feel if he could see how many steps backwards America has taken in the forty years since he spoke at the Riverside Church. The militarism he feared is still alive and well; the economic and social injustice he spoke and marched against is as strong as ever; the racial intolerance he dedicated his life to fighting is alive and well. The words Dr. King spoke echo down the years, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and down to the Gulf of Mexico, through the ruined streets of the 9th Ward in New Orleans, through small-town churches and big-city synagogues, through the halls of government and the plush offices of corporate titans; the words echo and fall on ears gone deaf.
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