Friday, September 29, 2006













Friday Catblogging


For those who do not hate on kitties, here is our cat Simon, on his third home because of his little "bungling bombardier" problem around the litter box, and his insistence on sleeping in the bedroom with his people. Lucky for him the first problem was solved with a litter box top; the second was solved after he basically outlasted us--he did his clawless scratching on the door thing til we realized he was going to win eventually. So now he gets to sleep with us (and takes up a third of the bed).

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

AP Programs (and Class and Race)

This guy suggested in USA Today last week that AP programs create a kind of class division among students, who are divided by their potential to go to college, and thus need AP classes:

All parents want their children to be with the nice kids, the bright and well-behaved types who will pull classes up, rather than with kids who will drag them down. In big, economically and ethnically diverse high schools such as mine, T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va., where there is enormous variation in academic abilities, average kids run the risk of ending up in one of two tracks: in classes full of students with weak skills and lousy attitudes or in so-called advanced courses where they find themselves in over their heads.

All this AP stuff came about after my time (when I was growing up we all wore propellor beanies and kneesocks to school and said "Gee!" and "Golly" a lot, and then hurried home to churn butter and milk the cows) so I am wondering: do AP classes result in a kind of de facto (unintended) segregation of the kids by race or economic level because parents who expect their kids to go to college tend to themselves be of a certain class or race? What is your experience? Were AP classes exclusive or elitist, or were they diverse in those ways? Or what?




Friday, September 22, 2006

Bad Guys Wanted?

We just watched Russell Crowe in Ron Howard's Cinderella Man, a movie that leadenly tries to be what critics calls "Capra-esque," as in Frank Capra, director of It Happened One Night and It's a Wonderful Life, and thirties Hollywood's sentimental champion of democracy and the "little guy" against the excesses of capitalism. Sure enough the movie had a cigar-chewing, suspendered "fat cat" capitalist (played by the explosive character actor, Bruce McGill, awesome in another Crowe movie, The Insider, where he out Pacino-ed Al Pacino). He looked a lot like the cartoon capitalists our book included in the last chapter!

Anyhoo: the movie was not content to make their "good guy" metaphysically Good in contrast to the Evil Capitalist, but also gratuitously made a villain of thirties heavyweight champ Max Baer, making of Baer a monstrous killer in the ring, and an insatiable, misogynist womanizer outside of it. Well, as it turns out, Baer, a Nebraskan butcher's son who famously killed two of his opponents in the ring, was a warm, clowning guy who was wracked with remorse for the accidental deaths (for one of which he was prosecuted, but acquitted). Baer was proud of the fact he never had a fight outside the ring: he once rather heartbreakingly said, "I never harmed anyone outside the ring. I loved people." His son, Max Baer Jr. (yes, Jethro!), said his father put the children of one of the dead opponents through school:

My father cried about what happened to Frankie Campbell. He had nightmares. "In reality, my father was one of the kindest, gentlest men you would ever hope to meet. He treated boxing the way today's professional wrestlers do wrestling: part sport, mostly showmanship. If I were to make a comparison, he was more like Muhammad Ali than the Sonny Liston of his day. He never deliberately hurt anyone."
Now I am not saying that "fat cat" capitalists weep at night over the poor and excluded. But it may be that such black and white versions of reality as Ron Howard tends to dispense in his films are confusing and unhelpful: is capitalism really a deliberate and sadistic assault on the hated poor by greedy old men like Mr. Potter in Its A Wonderful Life? Or is it something more complex? In fact, to personalize it in that way seems to be the reverse of what our book calls "blaming the victim," emphasizing personal failings of individuals over the systematic obstacles presented by class inequities. Doesn't representing capitalist abuse as similarly "personal" and malevolent also obscure more complex realities at work? Is there really a bad guy to blame? This is not to minimize the class inequities of capitalism, but to notice how Hollywood, even when it professes "good" intentions, tends to simplify problems in ways that make it difficult to think clearly about the complex and systematic forces at work in the American class system...

I mean I hate your evil fat cat as much as the next person, but does he really exist?

Monday, September 18, 2006

Pool Closed

We are embarking on the unit on racial inequality soon, and this story struck me as sad. After racial segregation of public facilities (aka Jim Crow) was banned by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it took some years for it to be seriously enforced. When it finally began to be enforced in the early '70s, whites across the South chose to close (or in this NY Times story, to bury!) their public swimming pools rather than risk their children sharing the water with black children.

With the mounds of freshly dug dirt now lining the sides of the partly unearthed pool, memories of a town’s lost summers have also emerged, along with painful recollections: a bygone era’s racism and children — white children — bewildered by the closing.

"It just hurt their feelings awful, because they couldn’t understand why they didn’t have a place to swim anymore,” said Ardell Covington, 87, a former mayor. Pools all over the South closed in that period; many, if not most, stayed that way.

It is interesting that the pools were not just abandoned to common use (as mandated by the federal government), but closed or filled. And still in my lifetime. Also in my lifetime (yes I am godawful old) was the integration of UT. It seems likely SEU was segregated as well--does anyone know? The Times story, however, tells of a philanthropist who is paying to excavate the pool for shared, public use in the struggling town.


Saturday, September 16, 2006


Ruling Class Hair?

As you know I am trying to keep our class away from "partisan rancor," so everyone feels comfortable exploring and discussing different views. In that spirit of bi-partisanship I would propose that one of the things our representatives in congress share without regard to party is, frequently, terrible hair (not counting the basic cantilevered "political side-part" [see Senate Majority Leader, Frist, Bill] endemic to local weathermen, and older males of the ruling class species).

I didn't read all the way through to search for bias, so with that caveat, for your pleasure....

Update: some of Radar's copy is kind of racy but you are the Myspace Generation so I am leaving it up...read at your own risk; by the way this page's text is the definition of "snark."

Friday, September 15, 2006

Blogging Assignment Due Sunday Night at 7:00pm
(Reflection, Readings)

For your next assigned post (you should start producing about 1 post a week beyond the assigned posts from here on out), I'd like you to reflect on the American Dream as an ideology--as a set of assumptions about American opportunity and capitalism as YOU encountered them growing up. In other words, I'd like you to reflect on how you were socialized into whatever social class you felt a part of (or dissented from) in growing up. What level of success seemed possible to you, or is expected from you? Do you believe in the American Dream today, or do you see it as a myth, a false promise? What was expected from you as far as work ethic, independence, educational level? Were you expected to exceed the position of your parents? Did your parents have any "downclass" fears--anxieties about "keeping up," or lapsing into a lower class, perhaps by marriage, or through badly chosen friends? My mom's downclass fears came out in the form of grammar policing--people who could not speak "correctly" were seen as sort of slovenly and careless--a class to be avoided! How else did class, class identity, or class anxieties figure in your upbringing?

Update: I keep (with sad hope) checking out my own blog posts to look for comments, so I am realizing that we need to all comment more on each other's stuff--it makes it feel like more like sharing instead of "talking to the void," as the philosophers say. I realize y'all are busy leading your hip, exciting, trendsetting lives doing things like parasailing and hot dog eating contests, and "boogie boarding" (is that a thing?). But do your best...
More Survivor Blogging...

Washington Monthly Blogger Kevin Drum's take on Survivor before it aired last night...Drum thinks the show will also end up supporting blandly proper attitudes toward race in America (treacle, by the way, is a sticky molasses-based substance associated with cloyingly sweet emotional appeals):

American TV has always been a yeasty blend of simple storylines and treacly moralism, and I'll bet that when all is said and done, the treacly moral of this season's Survivor will be exactly what you think it will be: we need to look beyond racial stereotypes and accept every individual on the basis of their true inner gifts. Do you honestly think it will end up any other way?

Thursday, September 14, 2006














In Survivor news, here is a New York Times article on the new Survivor race ratings stunt. The producer, Mark Burnett, suggests that old-fashioned, straight-up racism is no longer much of an issue in the US:

In America today,” Mr. Burnett said, “I really don’t believe there are many people who hate each other because of their race. But even though people may work together, they do tend in their private lives to divide along social and ethnic lines.”

Mr. Burnett noted that in many cities, members of ethnic groups tended to cluster in neighborhoods. “In New York you will find areas like Little Afghanistan,” he said. “Maybe in the year 3010, when we’re all coffee-colored, it really will make no difference. But right now, it is what it is.


Burnett points to this tendency of ethnic groups to self-segregate by race as the factor that gives salience to the network's decision to divide the contestants by race. But then he suggests that, in the heat of the competition, race will not be an issue:

People here are playing for a million dollars. They’re going to want to know if you’re going to vote them out. Or if they’re hungry, they’ll want to know if you know how to catch a fish. They’re not going to care if you’re green or Martian.


So which is it? Is race going to matter? And lead to increased viewership? Or will it be a non-factor? Which do you think CBS wants? My own theory is that race is simply the buzz factor in what will emerge as a pure affirmation of corporate-style multiculturalism, that is, a multiculturalism that represents diversity visually, (as in the catalogs and ads that now include people in wheelchairs) but never addresses the issue in any concrete way, like, for example, actual hiring practices...

But we will see.

Here is a more in-depth article from, well, CBS (news), giving space to critics of the show....

Tuesday, September 12, 2006


Astroturf Alert?

I have long suspected, without evidence, that PETA, the lobbying group seeking ethical treatment of animals, was created and financed by the meat industry in order to discredit real activist movements seeking more humane treatment of animals. PETA is unwaveringly blunt and offputting in their communication strategies--so much so that they seem not to care about achieving their stated aims so much as offending as many people as possible with the harshest, LEAST PERSUASIVE rhetoric they can muster.

Today we have a prime example of this, where a PETA spokesman uses Steve (The Crocodile Hunter) Irwin's death not as an occassion to reflect on injustice to animals, but a way to infuriate and offend potential supporters, driving them to reject PETA as an extremist organization that no feeling person could ever support.

I am not sure how serious I am about this, but how else to explain such bad public relations?

Sunday, September 10, 2006


Hunter posted on his blog about a crackdown in Iran on "liberal professors" by Iran's fundamentalist government. That is something conservatives have also complained about in the US as well! And that is one reason I am encouraging you to explore your own politics, the moral and political views contained in the St. Ed's Mission Statement, and the values informing our book and this course. The mission statement, with its emphasis on internationalism, social equality, and individual rights, could be considered at least somewhat "liberal" by some on the right. St Ed's does not try to hide its values, and as a private university it can teach whatever values it wants, since no public funds are involved. But I wonder what your experience has been--have you met "liberal professors" on campus (or conservative ones) who have tried to "indoctrinate" you? Or are students too sophisticated and independent to get pushed around like that? Or are there forms of influence at work at SEU that are more subtle than that? For your Monday blog post, if you don't want to blog about your topics, you might reflect on these questions, and comment around on your classmates' blogs...I think it is an important question in a class that focuses on diversity (in this case, of ideas) and on controversial social issues....

Thursday, September 07, 2006


LET'S BLOG!

Because blogger is lame, I can't give a title to my post. But that won't impede me from my official duties, which are dictating official duties to you guys. For this weekend I want you to start blogging using the specified tags in the blogging assignment instructions, and produce at least one post (two if you feel inspired), as well as comment and read each others' posts and comments. Get your post done by Sunday so people have time to comment.

Don't forget to TAG your post at the top with 1-2 approved tags in parentheses. This post, for example, would be tagged: (Paper, Values).

My suggested topic for at least one post is, while you are reading up on your paper topics, to link to some good, general articles you have found and discuss the VALUES of the major stakeholders--determine, that is, what outcomes or "social goods" they desire, and ask yourself: why do they want these things? This will get you started on the anti-bias, "walking a mile in someone else's shoes" part of this course, where we all try to understand where people who are different from us are coming from, so to speak. Its hard! This also means being respectful in the comments, though polite, fact-backed disagreement is encouraged.

(post edited to lessen workload!)

Friday, September 01, 2006


OK--your blogging for the weekend will be to practice two basic blogging skills: linking to another blog or news story, and posting a picture. One thing bloggers on left and right do peacefully is catblogging--posting cute pictures of the blogger's lazy kitties. You don't need to blog your pet rat, Willard, but I would like you to figure out how to post a picture, which tends to be very attractive to readers, adding color and often some irony to your post. Irony, sarcasm and scorn are the lifesblood of the "blogosphere"--what is known as "snark." I'd rather we be a little more civil, but don't fear the snark--its kind of fun...

OK? Two posts: a picture, and a news post, with linking.