Cut taxes, close the universities

Talk is going around again (actually it always is) about closing a South Dakota university.  In South Dakota, such talk will probably always go around.  A predominant part of the electorate values low taxes more than it does smart people.

In fact, in looking at the public comments in newspapers, discussion boards, and blogs,  one finds that smart people are considered the bane of existence on the plains.   During my first year of teaching at Northern State, I attended a conference of state humanities faculty and went to a  reception sponsored by the regents of the state higher education system.  A few of us faculty were chatting with a staff member who was indulging liberally in  the white wine  that was otherwise being politely dispensed and sipped,  At one point he said, "Just remember that the regents have one major objective to carry out:  to make sure no brain cells or good ideas get out of the state alive."  To those of us listening, we had no idea what inspired his warning, but just weeks later news came that he got out of the state alive.  He took a job working for the higher education system in another state.

Those words haunted me throughout the 20 years I was a professor at Northern, because so many of the policies and decisions seemed to be based upon the premise that brain cells are dangerous and smart people are a threat to the values and way of life.  Although higher education officials and politicians constantly whined and moaned about the brain drain from the state, that most bright kids went to college out-of-state and never returned and those that did attend South Dakota institutions tended to skedaddle as soon as they had a diploma in hand,  they enacted policies and practices that discouraged ambitious students and faculty from staying.   And, of course, there are few opportunities for the bright and talented. 

Northern State University has undergone one of its periodic frenzies of self-justification. It has had an economist assess how much money Northern students inject into the Aberdeen economy.  I don't know how many such studies I have witnessed.  And the local newspaper always runs a big editorial on how important NSU is to the local economy.  Of course, if NSU were closed,  Aberdeen would experience  a pronounced decline.   But the prospects raised by these periodic assessments of NSU's value to the community are always put in terms of the money the university brings to the community.
I have still to see an assessment that outlines the intellectual, cultural, and, yes, educational benefits it supplies.

When I came to Northern, I experienced genuine culture shock.  Having studied and taught on campuses in Illinois and Iowa,  I was not prepared  to encounter the anti-intellectual, anti-educational attitudes that were part of the academic environment at Northern.  Many on the faculty resented the Ph.D. and the teaching experience brought from a college that celebrated the humanities, the arts, and sciences, its faculty, and its students.  That is not to say that there were not people at Northern who  valued the academic disciplines and practiced and taught them, but they did so with constant reminders from administrators and politicians and regents that they were merely employees, and nothing more. 

Over time, as I traveled the state in various programs that are part of the faculty work,  I learned of the role that NSU--and the other institutions--play in South Dakota.  In an account of a woman who homesteaded near Pierre, became a country school teacher, and attended Northern to get her teaching credentials, she recalls how her experiences with professors and studies inspired and sustained her.  Her most thrilling memory and lasting inspiration was when she heard a nationally known opera singer perform at Northern.  ;She saw that event as transforming in that she experienced Northern as a place that sent forth beacons of possibilities and modes of life that raised people above drudgery and struggle for survival.

Northern opened pathways to knowledge and more satisfying lives to  many South Dakotans during its century-and-a decade history.  One college president, who was obsessed with image and slogans, recognized the intellectual and artistic aspects of Northern as important reasons students came there.  He saw that Northern had acted as a gateway to better lives and he made up a slogan that termed Northern "the gateway institution."  This slogan quickly drew the ire of the regents office because it suggested that Northern was a way to get the hell out of South Dakota, and many citizens took offense to the suggestion that anyone would obtain an education in order to leave the state.  The slogan was withdrawn and suppressed.

During my time at Northern, it underwent considerable retrenchment.  The curriculum experienced cutbacks.  Foreign language majors were eliminated, even though the college boasts a major in international business, for which one would assume that the study of languages and cultures is important.  Faculty and course offerings in English--my department--were cut and largely limited to the service courses in composition with a smattering of literature, the basic essentials for maintaining accreditation for the baccalaureate degree.  Throughout the 1980s, Northern supplied more teachers to South Dakota schools than any other state university, but retrenchment, faculty infighting, and some horrendous leadership diminished the education program.  My department supplied many fine and effective teachers of English.  They were heavily recruited by systems from other states, who paid considerably more than South Dakota.  Many academic programs at Northern lapsed into mediocrity and below.

The number of lectures, performing artists, conferences, and academic-related events also diminished over the years.   Northern was the headquarters for the Dakota Writing Project, a program that greatly improved the teaching and quality of writing from the grades through graduate schools.  We literally ran the project from the trunks of our cars, and we raised the funds for it through grants.  It left the campus when the college president appropriated its funds for other extension purposes.  During the time I was at Northern, we sponsored some conferences and institutes that gained national recognition, but they were conducted through the efforts of a few faculty with little administrative support or promotion, and many people on campus dismissed them because they involved the humanities and the arts and not the hard core issues of making money.

It is absurdly ironic that people in and around Northern get severe knicker knots when the possibility of closing a state campus is brought up and they have been preparing for years by reducing the curricular offerings and diminishing the programs in the humanities and arts to the point that high school counselors refer their bright and promising students to other institutions.


The outmigration of people with talent and ambition intensifies.  And organizations whose operations require people of talent and ambition take their businesses to communities that supply a vital and vibrant community for such people.

Closing a campus will save little money.  But it will satisfy the cultural need for many people who see much of academics as merely something to disparage.  It will accelerate a population shift that has been going on for a century, and parents will follow their children to more conducive places.

It's called sedition

 Pres. Obama inherited two botched wars, an economic crisis with programs put in place by the Bush administration, and crises in North Korea and the Middle East that developed under the policies of the Bush administration.  As his administration attempts to work through the problems, he is accused of violating the Constitution and leading the nation into Marxism, even though none of the actions they cite began with his administration, and none of the things that are happening violate any express provisions of the Constitution or fit any of those policies that define Marxism.  


Like Jimmy Carter, we see the accusations against Obama as hate-accusations manufactured as expressions of what is essentially racial hatred.  There is no other explanation for the stupid pretenses of the lies.


The article below appeared on Newsmax, but was quickly taken down.  But not before a number of people noticed that it was an article of outright sedition. 

 


Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention
By: John L. Perry
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

# Officers swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."

# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.

# They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

# They can see that the economy -- ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation -- is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.

# They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.

# They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America's troop strength is allowed to sag.

# They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.

# They can see the nation's safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.

So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?
Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam?

Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?

What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by this president (who now says, "I'm not interested in victory") that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out, consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse?
Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims?

Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America's military leadership is lost in a fool's fog.

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

The honkey and his ho

A new movie about global pollution is titled "The Age of Stupid," but climate change is not the only topic that seems to overstimulate those who regard stupidity as a virtue.  Journalism also provokes an outpouring of ignorance, illiteracy, and the fence-post brand of cognition.

The demise of journalism and its failings  are  favorite themes on blogs.  There is no doubt that the news media performs miserably at times. It deserves a constant stream of criticism.  That is why journalism reviews were instituted, and why many newspapers have daily editorial conferences to review performance and plan future coverage and assignments.  However, the criticism coming from blogs is mixed.  Many national blogs feature commentary by established, competent journalists.  A few South Dakota blogs also feature the perspectives of journalists.  But the most vociferous  anti-journalists in the South Dakota blogosphere have never read a real book on journalism. negotiated the first chapter of a journalism text, or, apparently, been exposed to even a high school course in expository writing.  The anti-journalists know one thing for certain:  they don't like journalism, whatever it is.  They sure as hell don't practice it or any of the fundamentals of writing that make communication possible and even productive at times.

The fact is that politics has shifted from being a representative forum for identifying and resolving issues to a game of malignant character assassination.  There are people possessed of witless malevolence throughout the political spectrum, but those who call themselves conservatives have adopted the presence of malice as the essential definition of their political belief system.  As is demonstrated on the South Dakota political blogs, character assassination, gross misrepresentations, insult and abuse are the only kind of grammar that the conservative faction can command.

What is ridiculous is that bloggers, on the basis of publishing a few bits of gossip and hearsay that turn out to have some truth, claim they are making the mainstream press irrelevant.  They take up the case of young Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe who dressed up as ho and pimp, like middle-schoolers going out to trick-or-treat, and went into ACORN offices to set up a sting by saying they were asking advice on setting up a whorehouse staffed with juveniles.  They videotaped the proceedings.  The conservative movement thinks the young pair set a standard of journalism that the mainstream should either emulate or get out of the news business.  Legislators and government officials have ended any federal funding that ACORN gets.  A few of us old hands in the news business are puzzled and disturbed that the press has taken this story seriously at all. The Columbia Journalism Review has two articles covering the matter.  (Number 1; Number 2.)

First of all, most credible news agencies have policies against investigative reporters misrepresenting themselves.  Investigative reporters do on occasion get positions at organizations to learn their inside operations.  An example is a series of stories about abuses in mental institutions  by a reporter who got a job as an orderly in one.  Editors questioned whether the reporter could use information obtained by deception, but the stories were not based upon setting up phony identities and deceiving people, but were based solely on careful gathering of documentary evidence.  The ACORN stings were based totally upon a deceptive scam and no documentary evidence was gathered.

The Better Government Association in Chicago often video-tapes reporters who confront government agencies about their finances and practices, but their videos deal with documents and the gathering of  evidence that can be brought into  court.  They do not record reporters misrepresenting themselves.

The New York Times public editor explains why that newspaper treated the story as one of political dirty tricks, not as one that qualifies as valid news in terms of what it claims to have revealed.

A new movie to be released in October, titled Yes Men, features the same kind of scam when two men represent themselves as business entrepreneurs and scam executives in major corporations with outlandish schemes.  In a Washington Post op-ed piece, its makers wonder when the government will take the same reponse to big business that it did with ACORN.


As I have suggested in a previous post, there are obvious aspects of the ACORN scam that raise questions  that have not been addressed.  The impersonations of pimp and ho are so childishly outlandish that it seems ridiculous that any hip community organizers would fall for it.  As was the case with at least one of the people interviewed, it seems more likely that the ACORN people were putting on a pair of presumptuous and foolish kids.   That some politicians, officials, and journalists did not examine the actual circumstances of the videos says  more about their fearful gullibility than it does about the activities of ACORN.  And if ACORN personnel were taken in by the pair of impostors and seriously gave the advice they did, then ACORN needs to be exposed as a refuge for the terminally stupid.  But these matters need thorough investigation and fact-checking,

The O'Keefe-Giles videos are part of the "new media"  hate-based campaigns that include blogs, talk radio, and openly propagandic cable news.  Michael Gerson in a Washington Post essay puts the real significance of the new media in the perspective of journalistic purpose.

...the challenge of this technology is not merely an isolated subculture of hatred. It is a disorienting atmosphere in which information is difficult to verify or critically evaluate, the rules of discourse are unclear, and emotion -- often expressed in CAPITAL LETTERS -- is primary. User-driven content on the Internet often consists of bullying, conspiracy theories and racial prejudice. The absolute freedom of the medium paradoxically encourages authoritarian impulses to intimidate and silence others. The least responsible contributors see their darkest tendencies legitimated and reinforced, while serious voices are driven away by the general ugliness.

Whatever the method, no reputable institution should allow its publishing capacity, in print or online, to be used as the equivalent of the wall of a public bathroom stall.

The exploitation of technology by hatred will never be eliminated. But hatred must be confined to the fringes of our culture -- as the hatred of other times should have been.

No doubt, the media, particularly print journalism, is undergoing some drastic changes. American democracy may well be changing in ways that its critics have warned about since its inception.  It may sink from popular rule to mob rule and the political structure of government may no longer be able to moderate the factions of hate and violent passions.

Or maybe the general populace may awaken from its media-drowse and become hip enough again where it cannot be taken in by juveniles carrying out a parody of a honkey pimp and his ho.  The big question is if the nation can survive The Age of Stupid.

Who opposes health-care reform?

We are the only leading democracy that does not support health-care for all citizens.  The cost of our health-care systems has squeezed a significant portion of our citizens out of the system, is squeezing more out daily, and is a major contributor to family bankruptcies.  The private sector, as in finance and banking and the auto industry, is putting on conclusive demonstrations that it has neither the interest nor ability to provide essential services to the nation.  So, people turn to government as the last, best hope.

Just who is it that supports the inadequacies in health-care and resists any federal mandate for reform.

An Aberdeen hospital executive for one.  Here is what he said, as reported in the Argus Leader, at a health-care forum:

"Truthfully, I wish it would go away. I don't think politicians understand our needs in small-town South Dakota," said Kellie Ecker, marketing and public relations director for Avera St. Luke's Hospital in Aberdeen.

Rep. Herseth Sandlin says there is some relenting of Blue Dog opposition to public option

 Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post reveals in an interview with Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin that there is some shift in the Blue Dog opposition to the public option in health-care reform.

The Blue Dogs have been surveying their membership over the last several days; coalition co-chair Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) has been collecting the responses. She listed the four top priorities that have emerged: Keeping the cost under $900 billion, not moving at a faster pace than the Senate, getting a 20-year cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office and addressing regional disparities in Medicare reimbursement rates.
So, the Huffington Post asked, the public option is not a top priority?

"Right, the group is somewhat split," she said.

That leaves the Senate and the conference committee between the two chambers as the final battlegrounds for the public option. While several Senate Democrats have said they oppose it, no Senate Democrat has yet said publicly that he or she would oppose any bill that included a public option.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was the catalyst for the Blue Dog self-reflection when she floated the idea that roughly 20 Blue Dogs could support a public option.
"There was some suggestion that there were 20," Herseth Sandlin said. "There clearly are not. From the numbers that I have seen, although not everyone has submitted the surveys, even if they had and they all said yes it wouldn't be 20. Right now it's less than a dozen."

What about a public option not tied to Medicare rates?

 

 "We haven't drilled down on that. I understand the media's focus on the public option, but for the Blue Dogs right now it's much more on cost," she said.

The lack of concerted, ideological opposition to a public option opens the possibility for negotiations in the House. Blue Dogs, along with other rural lawmakers, very much want an increase in Medicare reimbursement rates in certain areas to fix what they see as a disparity.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/24/blue-dog-opposition-to-pu_n_298637.html

Puttin' on the honkey

This attractive young couple put on outlandish costumes as a whore and her pimp and canvassed ACORN offices looking for some kind of scandal.  They played stereotyped roles as conceived by privileged white bourgeois children of what they think black street life is all about. 

If this pair came traipsing into  my office  I would immediately know that some kind of tomfoolery was taking place.  And if they said to me that that wanted information on how to set up a brothel featuring the services of 13-year-olds,   I would go along and tell them that they would be missing out on the marketing of perversion if they  did not not include some sheep, chickens, and a pack of dogs for servicing the right wingnut contingent of  the South Dakota blogosophere.  When people make absurd presumptions about other people based upon their own prejudiced and bigoted notions, they deserve and leave themselves open for being fooled as much as they hoped to fool someone else.  This is an old motif in English literature called "gulling the fool."

One of the ACORN women interviewed kept asking if the interview she was involved in was a trick and, deciding it was, she gave the pair ridiculous stories about murdeirng her ex-husband.  They fell for it, and it resulted in the police investigating the woman's tales and finding her ex-husband alive and in good health.  She was  carrying out an old African-American tradition of gulling the fool called "puttin' on the honkey" or jiving the fool.    In it, you tell the white man what he wants to hear to confirm  his stereotypes and the certainty of  his ignorance.  The premise is,  "You want a wild, lewd, and scandalous tale, I'll give you a wild, lewd, and scandalous tale.  Other offices threw the couple out and some called the police on them for their fraud.

Many urban legends have their origins in circumstances where some presumptuous jerk is fed a line of jive, the more preposterous the better.  As one who has worked in folklore and literature, I find it extremely difficult to think that the people who worked for ACORN were taken in for a moment by the impostors.

The most famous example of jiving the honkey occurs in Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man.   The episode centers around a black brothel where white folks gather to have their sexual proclivities serviced.  One black man who lives in an old cabin tells a wealthy donor to a nearby black college a tale of incest there.   The story he tells puts the wealthy old white man--who some of the brothel inmates call old monkey balls--into a fit of gasping shock, but produces a generous gift of money from him for the black man.  The story deals with how the man came to have a huge scar down the center of his face.  Living in cramped poverty, the man and his wife share a bed with their teen-age daughter.  The story has the young woman feeling some sexual inclinations during the night and in turn arouses the man who consumates those urges with the girl while sharing the bed with his wife and i;mpregnates his daughter.  In the man's version of the story, his wife hits him in the face with an ax, leaving the scar.  The man, who also sings some of the spritiual songs of his ;people, makes money going around to academic "researchers";and tellling this tale. The black college students feel shame and chagrin at the man.  Ralph Ellison  lets the circumstance stand in his novel as a portrayal of the racial attitudes that pervade the general culture. 

Putting on the honkey is a game played in Native American literature, too.  One of the early first-hand accounts of a Pueblo childhood was written at the instigation of missinoary who paid his informant by the word and stressed that he wanted all the lascivious details of an Indilan boyhood.  The informant wrote and wrote to bolster his earnings.  One of the details he includes involves fornication with a chicken.  The problem in the narrative is that episode occurs when the lad was five years old.  To alert readers the improbability was apparen;t, but many professors of anthropology put the book on their reading lists and became the object of ridicule and scorn among the Indian people whose stories they presumed to tell.

One of the more profound fooleries involved the head of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution.  He worked extensively with the Mesquakie people of Iowa, recording their ethnology and, particularly, the accounts of their sacred ceremonies.  These ceremonies are often built around a sacred pack, which is a bundle of symbolic objects which form memory devices for the performance of the ceremonies.  Michelson made himself a bit of a pest by constantly asking informants to provide him with accounts of sacred rituals that are to be performed only by designated holy men.  Finally some young ;men decided to give him what he asked for.  They gathered together some old cow bones and other bits of trash, wrapped them in a cow hide, and made up a story about them.  They dubbed it the Whie Owl Sacred Pack.  Michelson took it all down and published it the Smithsonian proceedings.  It,f course, was totally made up to show the presmptuous attitude and gullibility of the white anthropologists.

Still today, if you go to the Mesquake settlement and mention the White Owl Sacred Pack, the people will break into laughtet at the ingenious trick and what it reveals about the general culture.

ACORN, like all organizations that become large enough to become bureacraciies, may have problems.  However, it stretches credulity that people who are expeienced on-the-street organizers fell for the poses of young Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe.  In his interviews, O'Keefe has said that his motive for the "sting" was because of ACORN's vogter registration efforts which he thought led to the defeat of Republican candidates for office.  In his explanation lurks a racial motive. 

The devastating irony is that this all occurs when there is a great furor over whether or not racism is driving the hate rhetoric and demonstrations against Obama and his programs.  While the right wing almost unanimously protests that their hatred is not racially motivated and the accusations of racism are unfounded and irresponsible, they laud the crude racial stereotypes assumed my Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe, and conclude that their own attitudes and notions have been confirmed.

The question is just whose racial perceptions have been confirmed?  Who really got stung?

(The journalistic implications of the deception and the coverage given it are another story.)

A question that may save health-care

By Tom Toles in the Washington Post.