tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62252321612217612902024-03-13T21:20:54.160-07:00Empirical MagazineA literary and current affairs magazine with an openness and pioneering spirit, Empirical aspires for truth by boldly introducing thought-provoking points of view and new paradigms. A forum for discourse on contemporary issues, the magazine is "radically empirical" in considering the broad range of human experience. You can subscribe to Empirical, buy single issues, or preview issues by clicking the links below or visiting our website: www.empiricalmagazine.com
Randall Auxierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07945429178447058758noreply@blogger.comBlogger338125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-89012474030789707212013-08-30T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-30T10:00:05.343-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Genius or Folly?<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Genius or Folly?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Marianne Werner</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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At face value it may seem like folly. But beyond its bizarre incompleteness, its exaggerated surrealistic orchids, and its concrete carcasses of sculpture, is an unimaginable outdoor museum, hidden inconspicuously in a tropical jungle high in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico.</div>
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Spend hours meandering in dense, seductively growing rainforest foliage; uncover unique flowers beneath enormous hanging leaves; follow staircases to nowhere while gazing up through multiple stories of massive architectural dinosaurs: you will experience nothing short of a triple E ticket at Disneyland, as a friend and I did when we recently visited Las Pozas. Reflecting on the uninhibited awe we both had felt during our wanderings while pausing at the clear, blue-tinted pools of Edward James’ dream-creation, Kate remarked, “Who says he’s not a poet?”</div>
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Las Pozas (the pools) is the result of the creative imagination of Edward James combined with the cultural spirit and hard work of indigenous people of Mexico living in the mountainous jungle area that lured him because of its natural beauty and magical ambience. Over the course of several decades, his vision of paradise came to life as huge surreal concrete forms that rose from the rainforest surrounding gorgeous natural pools near the village of Xilitla (He-LEET-la) in the state of Huasteca, north of Vera Cruz. What remains today is evocatively fascinating: incredible sculptures that rise mystically from thick rainforest growth, perhaps one of the most underappreciated architectural feats of modern times.</div>
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James was born in 1907 in Scotland to parents whose enormous wealth enabled him to have a lifetime of privilege, and early on he became a lifelong patron of the arts. His own youthful creativity was thwarted by Stephen Spender’s critical review of his collection of poems, The Bones of My Hands. He became particularly enmeshed in the Surrealistic movement that began in the early 1920’s and was a sponsor and supporter of Salvador Dali and René Magritte. However, Avery Danziger, in his 2009 documentary Edward James, Builder of Dreams, states “… he was not a surrealist. Rather it was his life as he lived it that was surreal.”</div>
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As fond as he was of the Surrealists, over time James tired of patronage, and he began searching for his own artistic outlet. That search came to fruition when he visited Mexico in the mid-1940’s. During his travels he befriended a young man, Plutarco Gastelum, and the evolving lifelong friendship between the two was to become a driving force behind realization of James’ dream. Under Gastelum’s guidance, James purchased 80+ acres in the Mexican jungle near Xilitla.</div>
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The town sits on a green hillside amid a coffee-growing region. James was particularly attracted to the area because of its abundance of orchids. His love of nature made Xilitla an ideal location, and the work he provided over 25 years indebted him to and made him part of the community. James planted thousands of orchids on his land, but a freak snowfall killed most of them in 1962, an event that compelled him even more to continue creating an enduring Eden on earth.</div>
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Inspired in part by the surrealistic Watts Towers in Los Angeles, James’ vision began to unfold until his death in 1984. In Mexico, he found what he had been unable to find in Europe: a culture where his unusual, eccentric imagination was embraced and not ridiculed. Myth, magic, and dream, such an integral part of Mexico’s art, were coupled with a strong personal connection James made with master carpenter José Aguilar Hernandez, who built his own works of art in dozens of wooden molds that would be filled with concrete, dried, opened, and their resulting creations displayed in the flora where James’ ideas would come to life. However, until recently, Las Pozas remained safely sleeping in its own obscurity, known only to locals and to the few souls who journeyed to reach James’ surrealistic dream.</div>
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That obscurity and Las Pozas’ remoteness are part of its appeal, but reaching our destination was no easy mission. We drove from San Miguel de Allende, in the state of Guanajuato three hours north of Mexico City, through breathtakingly beautiful country an additional 10-11 hours before reaching Xilitla. Encountering unfamiliar roads, steady rain, infrequently marked directional designations, and eventual darkness, we finally reached the village built on a hillside, arguably speculating about James’ geographical choice for his fantasy. </div>
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Las Pozas is impossible to imagine before you venture inside; it is so enormous in construction and has become so much a part of the jungle that it is reminiscent of ancient Mayan civilizations, a comparison not lost on James. Margaret Hooks, in her book Surreal Eden (2007), references George Collins and Michael Schuyt in their book Fantastic Architecture, in which James speculates how hundreds of years in the future, some people might come upon Las Pozas and “…attempt to determine what civilization had built them.”</div>
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Once you pass by the bright orange front door of the multi-leveled skeletal building that welcomes you to Las Pozas, you follow stone walkways and walls green with moss along Avenue of the Snakes. You must envision the structures as they are: concrete bones, without walls, without ceiling, all of them seemingly incomplete, intentionally unfinished. Unfinished buildings are what they first seem to be; in fact, they are immense sculptures, and as such complete in their own unique way. These are sculptures you walk through and on and up–interactive by nature, beckoning you to discover them.</div>
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Most walking is up–Las Pozas is angled on hills–and viewing is up since most structures tower above you. One structure has three wall-less levels, and various sets of stairs wind on top of one level. You can wander Avenue of the Orchids, peer into the Secret Garden, look inside the Houses of the Ocelot and of the Flamingos, or rest on the Plaza of the Three Crosses. Discovering Las Pozas remains thrilling as you wander along, and the feeling only intensifies as you sight the next creation emerging from the forest, another unusual vision.</div>
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Floral monuments grow out of the various structural floors or from the earth.</div>
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Curlicued metal doors open to rainforest jungle. One set of stairs of about 30 steps simply ends on the last step. Concrete bamboo protrudes from giant leaf fronds. Walking around a bend will find you staring at a previously unseen sculpture, obscured by immense foliage. If you climb upon a concrete square structure and peer over the wrought iron fence, you might see water gliding downhill from pool to pool below the waterfall. Each step is an adventure.</div>
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What continued to surprise us was that wherever we looked, we would be overcome with amazement. Mostly the structures were secreted within the vegetation so we would be walking along, duck under some enormous trees, walk up some steps, and find ourselves gazing at yet another sculpture. We’d climb over floors and climb up stairs–no use “at your own risk” signs here–and stare at an unfinished creation we hadn’t seen before. This experience repeated itself throughout the afternoon spent at Las Pozas, as most of the 36 identified concrete structures revealed themselves.</div>
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I kept returning to one that became my favorite. It had the most color of any other still visible: a 10-12 foot tall concrete orchid in red, blue, green, and yellow, faded, but still with strokes of brilliant color. Originally, many of the sculptures had been painted, but time and water have weather-beaten most shades. But with its dulled colors, this orchid still had allure, so I photographed it in different light at different times. Its image I will never forget.</div>
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The rich emerald coloring of the jungle and the pools from the multiple waterfalls also enhance the enchantment of Las Pozas. Waterfalls cascade from the hillside and form a series of seven pools of fresh, clear, water, reflecting a turquoise blue from the light. Built around the largest pool are large designed cement walls, creating different angles for viewing. The swimmable pools add a natural peacefulness to the falling waters and they intersect a tropical jungle, lush with banana palms, odd orchid family flowers, enormous ferns, over-sized dieffenbachia, and multiple varieties of philodendron, some with huge elephant-ear leaves, all richly green.</div>
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I tried to imagine the labor it took to make Las Pozas. At its busiest, close to 70 families from Xilitla had someone working on the project. The execution of the dream represented constant, arduous toiling, much of the effort uphill and energy intensive. Work was essentially by hand and over the decades it never actually was completed. But the open, unfinished sensation and the freedom associated with those feelings are part of its magic, amid a kind of jungle-gothic.</div>
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Walking the grounds, I kept feeling like I was in a museum. I suspect it feels like a museum to many other visitors, too. For what purpose is a museum, but to enjoy and appreciate art for art’s sake? At Las Pozas, embedded discretely in the jungle, huge, distinctive structures display the essence of “building” sans walls, roof, windows, carpeting, but nonetheless, they are creative sculptural renderings. Set in a tropical Mexican jungle, this otherworldly artistic display is a unique experience, its allure distinctive and enduring, its color fading, yet a romantic flair enclosing each piece of structurally remarkable work.</div>
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Edward James wanted to be an artist in his own right and he was, but even he recognized that Las Pozas would be seen as pure madness by some in Europe. But in Mexico he found a culture where anything seemed possible, so these strangely mesmerizing concrete sculptures evolved into a breathtaking feat of architecture that should have made an impressive mark in the international artistic community. Somehow Las Pozas did not achieve that possibility, though my friend Kate saw poetry in the imaginative form of Las Pozas. His poetry simply took a much different shape than Stephen Spender could have foreseen. Certainly the feeling of the poet is embedded in the sculptures. Even in Surreal Eden, Margaret Hooks raises the issue of James’ work being that of genius or folly.</div>
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As for that question, Las Pozas enters and inspires you in its own inarticulate way. Visiting there is an experience unlike any other I’ve ever had. Genius has its eccentricities, and looking at the elaborate undertaking and astounding outcome of James’ imaginings, unfinished as they may have seemed, I for one, can find no man’s folly.</div>
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In fact, I think James knew exactly what he was creating and why. At a museum in El Castillo, the Xilitla home of Plutarco Gastelum where James often stayed, is a poem hanging on the wall that he wrote about his “house” at Las Pozas entitled “This Shell”: “My house grows like the chamber’d nautilus…my house has wings and sometimes in the dead of night she sings…This house is all assuaged and waiting for that sea whose child I am…” Perhaps it was the child-like aspect of James’ surreal imagination that finally found root in Las Pozas, where he created his ingenious slice of the world, an eccentric yet highly personal imagining. Perhaps with its recent re-discovery and support by the foundation, Fondo Xilitla, Las Pozas will re-emerge as a testament to Edward James’ enduring vision. For what we can see today in his unfinished garden of Eden is even more engaging than it was originally.</div>
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In the last 35 years it has evolved its own unique identity–a rich green enchantment, a mystical ride, though lacking the glitter, the hype, the technology, and the merriment of Disneyland, a concrete jungle of poetry no less magical.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-22538952814259437492013-08-29T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-29T10:00:05.271-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Nights Such as These<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Nights Such as These</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Emily Grelle</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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The wind in the eaves,</div>
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playing frisbee with my father</div>
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counting up, hands clapping</div>
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under the impact of the moment</div>
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in which the flying disc, like a UFO,</div>
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hit home, my plan— it</div>
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was to reach 100 without breaking</div>
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the count, the value</div>
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of which exceeded the thousands</div>
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of summer nights hence that I have dreamed</div>
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of returning to that season of unseason,</div>
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when all I had to offer was handed back to me</div>
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with equal fervor, and we were counting on each other</div>
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and my mother, on the porch unrivaled</div>
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in love, rooting for us like the grass, waving</div>
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in the breeze, with wishes full in the heads</div>
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of dandelions growing gray to plant our hopes</div>
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in fields where they’ll grow bright as suns</div>
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and even the blades are gentle enough</div>
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to ease the inevitable fall.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-55951782004347911202013-08-28T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-28T10:00:01.654-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Second Time Foster Child<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Second Time Foster Child</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Toni Hoy</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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A child is bruised and battered. He is hungry and cold, lacking such basic necessities as safety and nurturing. However, all is not lost. Hope lurks around the corner when a loving foster family feels a connection to one such child. The family brings the child home, first as a foster child, and some time after, makes a forever commitment to the child through adoption. Years later, generally at or just before the onset of puberty, the same child is once again facing foster care re-entry. If it was bad enough being a “first time foster child,” it really stinks to be a “second time foster child.”</div>
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During the early 90s, state child welfare agencies were taking children away from parents in alarming numbers. Once a child received the foster care sentence, he never seemed to get out, at least until he became an adult. Foster care rolls swelled to the highest levels in history shorty before President Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) into law in 1997. How did so many children end up in the foster care system anyway?</div>
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The feminist movement, widespread drug abuse, health hazards, and media pressure contributed to increasing foster care rolls. The role of women in society changed drastically during the 1970s. Women spent less time at home and more in the workplace. The crack cocaine epidemic created a population of addicted mothers who were unable to properly care for their children, landing their children in foster care.</div>
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The crack cocaine epidemic was followed by the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, landing even more children in foster care, as mothers became severely ill or deceased. About the same time, several children “known to the system” died at the hands of their birth parents due to severe neglect and abuse. Across the nation, child protective services caved to media pressure to remove children from their families.</div>
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State agencies agreed to “err on the side of the child.” In Illinois, the foster care rolls ballooned to 52,000 state wards, while parents were haphazardly blasted with false allegations.</div>
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Teachers and other professionals involved in childcare-related careers lost their jobs over rampant false allegations. In 1994, in an Illinois class action suit, 150,000 parents filed DuPuy v. Samuels, alleging that child protective services were taking too many children away from their parents for too little reason. The landmark case, which settled in favor of the parents, resulted in new rules that expedite hearings for parents and workers in childcare-related fields. Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer referred to it as “…a staggering risk of error…” What were states to do with tens of thousands of children languishing in foster care?</div>
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Advocates proposed federal change, demanding safety, permanency, and wellbeing for children in care elements which became the foundation of ASFA. Amongst other things, ASFA offered to pay states to move children out of foster care. States received $4000 per finalized adoption and $6000 for every child that met standards for a “special needs” adoption. ASFA urged parents to resolve their substance abuse, domestic, and financial unrest quickly, by threatening to terminate their parental rights. Under ASFA, states may legally sever familial ties for children who remain in foster care 15 to 22 months. With the premise that prospective adoptive children came with a myriad of trauma-related mental health issues, ASFA also offered assistance for adoptive families. Children moved out of foster care with the aid of Medicaid cards and financial subsidies for their new parents. In 1997, President Clinton passed ASFA into law. With the exception of the birth parents, who often couldn’t comply with systemic demands quickly enough, ASFA worked like a charm. Children moved in droves from foster care to permanent, adoptive homes. Child welfare workers made quick work of ASFA, blasting the public with adoptive media campaigns, hosting adoption parties, and advertising waiting-child profiles.</div>
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Child welfare agencies challenged caseworkers by assigning definitive quotas to move children from transience to permanence through adoption. Caseworkers met the challenge by downplaying the children’s mental health concerns, assuring prospective adoptive parents that once the children were placed in loving, permanent homes, the children would certainly be “just fine.”</div>
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Once again, Illinois led the way, drastically reducing the 52,000 state wards to 15,500. Department of Children and Family Service Director, Jess McDonald, lined his office walls with adoption awards. State agencies and adoptive families rejoiced while birthparents grieved. Meanwhile the effects of prenatal substance abuse, neglect, and physical abuse lay dormant in the children’s brains, waiting to explode with the onset of puberty.</div>
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It wasn’t generally long before adoptive families discovered that something with their new additions was a little “off.” The children were hyperactive. They scrounged for food and displayed odd behaviors. They demanded constant attention, bullied other children, triangulated adults, and destroyed property. Traditional sticker charts and behavior programs failed miserably.</div>
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The children ignored limit setting and natural consequences. In the heat of frustration and exhaustion, parents sought professional help. In the early 2000’s, the ASFA generation hit puberty and the odd behaviors increasingly manifested in unsafe and unmanageable behavior.</div>
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A plethora of psychiatric evaluations and inkblot tests soon uncovered an alphabet soup of diagnoses including: ADD, ADHD, PTSD, RAD, ODD, OC D, BD, CD, LD, BPD, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Many children responded well to medications and/or therapies.</div>
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For others, symptoms escalated to self-harm, aggression, and violence. Families were living in a constant state of turmoil. Psychiatric hospitals made attempts at stabilization; however, psychotropic drug treatment is not an exact science. Repeated hospitalizations cycled children through the “psychiatric revolving door” with no answers, edging families to the brink of giving up. Seeking help, adoptive parents returned to the same state agencies who once promised them that in time, the children would be “just fine.”</div>
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Which state agency should serve this population of severely traumatized youth, who needs intensive in-home, community-based, or residential services? Is it the state agency in charge of education, mental health, or child and family services? In many states, lack of synergy between agencies directs parents in an endless round robin without answers. Hospitals and therapists discourage parents from bringing their children home, due to the safety risk to other family members. Taking such a drastic step automatically defaults “the case that nobody wants” to the child welfare serving agency. Child welfare agencies respond to hotline calls of child psychiatric lockouts with “the Devil’s Deal.” Illinois reports an alarming 104 psychiatric lockouts in 2010. To put it in perspective, that is about two per week and more than one per county.</div>
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As mandated reporters, hospitals are required to report incidences of suspected abuse, neglect, or abandonment to a state child abuse hotline, placing them in the quandary of reporting the very parents they seek to aid and protect. A hotline call generates a child abuse investigation against the family that is unable to attain intensive in-home, community based, or residential services.</div>
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The child protection investigator walks through the motions of a procedural Catch 22. Bring the child home and be charged with child endangerment for failing to protect your other children, or leave him at the hospital and be charged with neglect. The politically acceptable term for this unethical dilemma is “custody relinquishment for mental healthcare” a.k.a., legally forcing parents to trade custody for treatment, a.k.a., “the Devil’s Deal.” Legal charges send parents to juvenile court, in hopes of getting neglect charges amended to “no fault dependency” as well as to administrative law court to get their names removed from the state central register of indicated child abusers. Worse, some states additionally file felony charges against the adoptive parents, threatening them with jail time for failing to rectify a situation in which every state agency has staunchly refused to offer help. In still other states, parents are charged outrageous amounts of mandated child support over threats of jail time. To add insult to injury, birth parents who caused the brain disorders get off scot-free.</div>
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If all that were not bad enough, the case proceeds through juvenile court under “the child abuse lens.”</div>
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Juvenile justice systems are typically equipped and designed for cases of neglect, abuse, and dependency. What is a judge to do with a case that lands in his courtroom for which there is no applicable law?</div>
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They use existing laws, tweaking and twisting them, trying to make them fit a situation for which they were never intended. Judges, Guardian Ad Litems (GAL), child welfare workers, and CASA volunteers lump no fault dependency cases right in with the rest of the child neglecters and abusers. Such cases are viewed under “the child abuse lens,” subjecting good parents with sick children to be continually investigated, interrogated, separated, and humiliated through a court process that was never intended to serve them.</div>
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Processing no fault dependency cases in the same manner as child abuse cases inhibits therapeutic progress for children, while oppressing parents. Large percentages of these children have Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) due to infant or child neglect. Bonding and attachment therapy is in order for these children a therapy which, when effectively done, creates a stronger bond between the child and his parents or primary caregivers. The child’s basic needs of food, shelter, clothing, warmth, and nurturing were not met in early stages of development.</div>
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He learns very early that since no one is present to control his environment, he must control it himself. He develops a lack of trust in adult caregivers along with an unhealthy, weak bond with his parents. Bonding and attachment therapy seeks to rebuild the parent/child relationship with strong bonds and healthy relationships, which provide the child with vital trust.</div>
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The child learns to rely on others, and is more apt to give up his need to control his environment. When his needs are met, he feels safe and secure, and the violent and aggressive explosions cease. However, “the Devil’s Deal” works contrary to appropriate treatment when it pits child v. parents in a court of law and assigns ents), creating a “systemic wedge” between child and parent. With so many others filling the role of parent, there is no room for the parent to fulfill his parental responsibilities. Thus, while the therapists seek to strengthen the bonds between children and parents, in order to heal the child from pre-adoptive trauma, the system is simultaneously driving them apart, stalling therapeutic progress.</div>
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No longer does the educational meeting invitation arrive in the parent’s mailbox. Rather, it is re-directed to the child welfare educational surrogate, who has little information on the child’s education or the fact that the parents are not to blame for a system which failed their child. In plain sight of child and parent, the educational surrogate not only makes decisions in lieu of the parent, but also signs on the signature line marked for parents. The GAL makes legal decisions for the child without input from parents.</div>
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The caseworker makes the rest of the decisions and the judge monitors them all. With so many individuals and organizations acting as the parents, there is really no room for the parents to parent. As a result of constantly being viewed under “the child abuse lens,” parents’ credibility is lost in the mix. Their input is largely overlooked and promptly dismissed, resulting in chronic oppression.</div>
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Parents are emotionally beaten down in the process. Over constant threats of negative reports to the court, threats of losing their other children, and threats of complete termination of parental rights, parents are forced into silence and submission. While it all sounds unethical, it is perfectly legal. Or is it? What happened to all those provisions that the federal government strategically placed into ASFA to address severe mental health conditions due to pre-adoptive trauma? Would a few hundred dollars per month of adoptive subsidy provide the level of services such a child needs? In a word, no. Rarely do health insurance plans cover costly, intensive in-home or community based services, which are recommended by therapists. Residential services can cost upwards of $150,000 per year with zero dollars of available funding to assist parents. These are the issues that force the hand of “the Devil’s Deal.” What about that Medicaid card? Most states advise parents that it does not cover intensive services, once again steering them toward “the Devil’s Deal.” Some states advise parents that the current state laws supersede federal law. Parents once again face a dreaded dead end. However, let’s take a closer look at what the Medicaid law says in regards to treatment that is “medically necessary.”</div>
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Medicaid contains a provision called the Early, Periodic, Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment (EPSDT) which states, in part “if a practitioner of the healing arts deems that a treatment is medically necessary to correct or ameliorate a condition, the state must provide it, whether or not it is covered under any other state plan. If they cannot provide it, they must arrange for it. The time period for arranging it is six months…” Since nearly all children adopted through a subsidized adoption have Medicaid, their treatment is covered as required by federal law. Passing state law which contradicts or supersedes federal law is unequivocally illegal. How do states continue to get away with denying treatment?</div>
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The answer is that the same parents who naively bought into the idea that the children would be “just fine” also bought a bill of goods that incorrectly stated that treatment under the EPSDT provision of Medicaid is not covered. Not enough parents have challenged the states’ failure to apply the law in federal courts. The temporary solution is a parent-led federal lawsuit against the state Medicaid agency. The permanent solution is to amend ASFA by inserting the EPSDT wording directly into ASFA, making clear that states may not deny treatment that children are legally entitled to under federal law–the same federal law that awarded them the promise of ASFA–safety, well-being, and yes, permanency.</div>
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Because of failure to comply with the EPSDT provision of Medicaid, the federal government awards permanency to children through adoption and stands idly by as the states take the child’s permanency away from them. Children face compounded issues of abandonment and adoptive families grieve, while states gain the benefit of drawing down federal funding for treatment.</div>
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Historically speaking from a social perspective, the pendulum sails large numbers of children into foster care, swinging them back into adoptive homes and finally flips them all the way around, forcing them back into foster care, rendering them “second time foster children,” just to repeat the cycle all over again. Adoptive families made the commitment to children’s permanency. The federal government provided two vehicles to assure children that “permanency” is truly permanent–EPSDT and ASFA.</div>
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Now, if we could just get the state agencies to obey the law.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-73953012661796915702013-08-27T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-27T10:00:06.602-07:00From the Empirical Archives: A Moment with Mary Nash-Pyott<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_vbxMBa05wI/UR1jQqePBTI/AAAAAAAABdk/4h0rPljll5c/s1600/Mary1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_vbxMBa05wI/UR1jQqePBTI/AAAAAAAABdk/4h0rPljll5c/s400/Mary1.bmp" width="270" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">A Moment with Mary Nash-Pyott</span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>February’s featured photographer, Mary Nash-Pyott discusses her photography in motion. She shares with us her keen eye for the serene and the sacred.</i></span></div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Hi Mary. We first became acquainted with your work through a regular contributor to Empirical, Randall Auxier. We’re glad he brought you to our attention. How did you get started in photography?</div>
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<b>Mary:</b> It happened in fits and spurts. My adopted father is a successful photographer, now retired, but active in experimenting and astrophotography. But my early experiences with cameras were disappointing. The ones I could afford were the little instant cameras for snapshots of the family. I was intrigued but had little control over the process. When I could finally step up into an SLR , I selected the Canon Rebel, and began shooting 35 mm. I was able to get some fairly nice shots, enough to wet my thirst, but I was unable to master the camera. This is mostly because I am inherently disorganized. Finally, in 2007, as I entered midlife, I received a Canon Powershot A530, and silly as it sounds, went nuts with it. I finally had the instant feedback I needed, and I fell in love. I quickly ran into the limitations of that camera, but I challenged myself to never shoot in any setting but manual, and no flash except when absolutely necessary.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> Do you think the advancement of camera technology has made the field better or worse? Most young photographers today don’t have to challenge themselves the way you did.</div>
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<b>Mary: </b>My goal in using manual was to learn the relationships between the adjustments until I could manipulate them intuitively and without looking at the camera. But now I am seeing excellent quality pictures taken even by cellphones! It’s a lovely development that places a delicious creativity in the hands of anyone with a thirst for it. I like to press myself to learn. And I trained my hand to make the adjustments and shoot without needing to look through the viewfinder, and coupled this with my pilot training to scan my environment while driving.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> Driving and photographing at the same time?</div>
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<b>Mary:</b> My family expressed concerns about that, but I felt more aware of the road than I ever had been plugged into music, the audiobooks, or even talking to a passenger, which I found so much more distracting. I attribute the fact that I am still alive to mindfulness practice and good procedural discipline, plus learning to play the guitar as a youth. I discovered as I played in the dark and in secret that my fingers have eyes, and I can trust them to learn the way. Plus keeping my eyes on the road! I am proud to say I’ve never had an accident, though I did push the edge of the envelope a few times.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Did you ever come too close to pushing the envelope all the way?</div>
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<b>Mary: </b>Yes, but not as often as you’d think! I am what may be described as a sedate driver: I rarely exceed the speed limit and continually scan the environment as well as my mirrors and gauges, drawing heavily from my pilot training. But yes, at times I would get too excited about a shot and might swerve or slow down abruptly in traffic, which would provide the feedback I needed to bring me back to reality, causing me to re center and reconsider my priorities. I think that was the hardest part, to learn to not take a shot when it may cause an accident.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Was there a certain point that you began to take photography more seriously … that is, to see yourself as a photographer?</div>
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<b>Mary:</b> I can’t say that I truly see myself as a photographer even now! I see myself as helplessly pursuing something that sets me on fire. I’ve thought of going professional now that I am between jobs, or maybe careers (though that hasn’t been decided yet). But I do not in my mind even approach the stunning works I see others produce who know their stuff and have the frequent-flyer miles and equipment to prove it. My dream is to wander the wilds of both nature and civilization, and to compile a publication of my journeys at home, while I prepare for the next jaunt and save for that next tank of gas.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Any wilds in particular you wish to wander first?</div>
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<b>Mary:</b> Goodness! Where to start? I dream of spending a couple of weeks in the Appalachians, and maybe walk a section of the trail around Asheville, NC. New Orleans is calling to me as well. And I have an opportunity to visit a ranch in British Columbia. The west always beckons, too. I love the Rockies, the high plains, and deserts. The low humidity causes colors to snap, rather than the haziness that is almost always present here in Illinois. It seems you can’t take a bad picture!</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> Do you like any particular kinds of shots over others?</div>
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<b>Mary: </b>I love surprise, so wildlife is fun. I have only recently begun stealing candid shots of people, but that makes me feel like a thief, so I generally approach and ask if they want a copy. I truly don’t know how other photographers overcome that social compunction!</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Not knowing how is one thing–is there a desire to overcome it?</div>
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<b>Mary:</b> Absolutely! I do not want to go to my grave with compunctions that I do not choose for myself. And I fiercely love the stories I see in the lines of the face, in the glint of the eye and the poetry of movement. I have learned that faces are like wildflowers in the wind: if you hold still and wait, you can capture them in a slivered moment between expressions, which for singers can make or break a shot.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>What kind of equipment do you like to use now?</div>
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<b>Mary:</b> I’m currently using a Canon T3 with a kit lens and my trusty XSi with its 55x250 telephoto zoom. I am experimenting with ways to keep these stable on my body as I move. These are pretty tough cameras, and take a lot of abuse, believe me! But I do try to minimize the battering. But my needs inform my designs, and slowly I develop the ways and means to both wander freely and keep my cameras intact.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>You believe the camera has given you the finest education you can buy. What has it taught you about yourself ?</div>
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<b>Mary:</b> I married my husband and moved to our 15 acres and a sturdy farmhouse in rural southern Illinois in 1986, where we raised two beautiful, exceptionally talented, and fiercely independent daughters who are now up and out on their own. Our property abuts what was once a major Indian trading post prior to white settlement, just north of the breathtaking Shawnee Forest. The forest tumbles 60 miles south to the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. I have grown to revere that rugged terrain, and walk the Trail of Tears, where the natives of the south were cruelly shunted toward their barren reservations to the west. There is almost a hush in those towering hardwoods, which rise like a cathedral over the bloody footprints and buried corpses of a once-proud people.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Do you do some other kind of work other than photography?</div>
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<b>Mary:</b> I was forced to graduate in 1996 with a Master’s degree in social work, and began a career in mental health counseling, which draws heavily on my psychology minor. I practiced individual psychotherapy until I left my position in May of 2011 due to deteriorating conditions in the state systems and working seven-day weeks for more years than I care to remember. The camera is what saved my life.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Where are you from originally?</div>
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<b>Mary:</b> I was born in Bellingham, Washington, but moved to southern California when I was very young. I grew up running the cliffs of Del Mar, just north of San Diego. It was there I developed that love of adventure and surprise as I ran the trails and clambered the beautiful red rocks like a little barefoot goat, drinking from puddles and heading home when the coyotes howled. It was a time of great freedom and expansion for a very lucky little girl. I will always be grateful for an amazing childhood, and will never forget the moment I returned to see those beautiful cliffs of my homeland covered with condos. It is a grief I still bear.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Does that memory move you to partake in your adventures today?</div>
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<b>Mary: </b>Seeing the condos shocked me into recognizing that the world can shift at any time from beneath me. It stole something from me, something deeper than I could name. And while the adult in me understood the practicalities of expanding populations and the booms and busts of commerce, the child in me held even more fiercely to the memories of running wild, and the magical world revealing itself all around me.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Thank you very much for sharing your photos and story with us, Mary.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-51480175362654911792013-08-26T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-26T10:00:07.189-07:00From the Empirical Archives: In the Shade of a Cave<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d7AgHdxQdJM/UR1iDzksiCI/AAAAAAAABdc/KXeiJZYgLHU/s1600/Cave1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d7AgHdxQdJM/UR1iDzksiCI/AAAAAAAABdc/KXeiJZYgLHU/s400/Cave1.bmp" width="306" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">In the Shade of a Cave</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Wally Swist</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empircal</i></div>
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We hike halfway up Mount Toby to where the gorge drops</div>
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off and takes the thin stream of Roaring Brook down</div>
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toward the culvert beneath train tracks to Cranberry Pond</div>
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I explain that the water is normally roaring every spring</div>
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from the snowmelt; however, not having much of a winter</div>
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has affected the watersheds. I illustrate that usually</div>
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the force of the brook hammers the stones, that the sound</div>
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mixes with the ionization of the water rising above the cliffs,</div>
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so that you can see, hear, and smell the torrent all at once.</div>
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In giving Bob a guided tour of the flora bordering the trail</div>
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this mid-April, I find the Quaker Ladies grouped in blue</div>
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and white clusters at the bottom, in the scrub meadow that</div>
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overlooks the pond. Farther up where I warn him</div>
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that here is where the trail begins to become steep, I spot</div>
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one nodding purple trillium, then point out the others</div>
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blazing their own trail up the slope. He aims the camera</div>
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to shoot his photographs of what he describes</div>
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as their flowers looking downward, and I explain that is why</div>
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part of their name includes the word nodding. He blurts out</div>
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how he was an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge,</div>
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one of four soldiers out of a platoon of forty who survived</div>
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the surging stormtroopers. I point to the bright yellow</div>
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discs of inflorescence of coltsfoot flourishing beside</div>
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a trickle of a stream cutting its way through the black mud.</div>
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There! I exclaim, and identify the four-lobed lush purple</div>
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flowers of hepatica, whose royal hues can be easily missed</div>
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due to their diminutive size among leaf litter. I speak</div>
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with an intended ebullient clarity that I hope he remembers</div>
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when we find the clearing beneath the mossy cliffs halfway</div>
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up the mountain, speckled white with the luscious</div>
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blossoming of bloodroot. I inform him that there is only</div>
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a two-week window of our seeing this perennial in the wild,</div>
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of which he shows his rapt appreciation by taking one</div>
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photograph after another. Do you see that one, I say, placing</div>
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one of his hands in one of mine, as I draw a straight line</div>
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to where one bloodroot flower grows in the shade of a cave</div>
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in the cliffs. Oh, I see, he answers, then continues:</div>
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Yesterday I couldn’t feel my hands and feet from the trench foot I got</div>
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in the battle. They only gave us thin gloves, so we could fire our rifles.</div>
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My feet froze, since the boots they gave us were not much,</div>
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and the socks were too goddamn thin! We look at each other,</div>
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with mutual understanding beneath green cliffs, whose</div>
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natural architecture we both admire, among blossoms</div>
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of bloodroot that star the entire vertical rise in the sunlight.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-27773624725891648402013-08-23T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-23T10:00:09.322-07:00From the Empirical Archives: In Search of a Good Teacher<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PsaVcfeOUVk/UR1cl-zTlzI/AAAAAAAABc4/qKvu2kRPWTQ/s1600/Teacher1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PsaVcfeOUVk/UR1cl-zTlzI/AAAAAAAABc4/qKvu2kRPWTQ/s400/Teacher1.bmp" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">In Search of a Good Teacher</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Jaime O'Neill</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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<i>“The teacher is like the candle which lights others in consuming itself.”</i><br />
<i>—Giovanni Ruffini</i><br />
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<i>“I am not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead–ahead of myself as well as of you.”</i><br />
<i>–George Bernard Shaw</i><br />
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Not long ago, I stopped at a local bakery for coffee and a bit of pastry, accompanied by my wife and visiting daughters. A woman ahead of me in line said hello, and though I recognized her face, I couldn’t place her.</div>
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“Do you know where you know me from?” I asked.</div>
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“I took English from you,” she answered.</div>
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That comment is always a little fraught with tension because, when I can’t remember a former student, there’s a possibility that person left my class with bad feelings caused by a bad grade. Sometimes, they just didn’t like me, or they hated the fact they were required to take the course I taught, and they blamed me for that requirement.</div>
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Over the years, whenever I was at a party where people were making small talk by asking one another what they did for a living, I had grown sheepish about admitting that I taught English because, more often than not, the reply was, “Oh, I hated English when I was in school,” followed by the confession that they weren’t good at it, though they rushed to assure me that they had excelled at other subjects.</div>
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In other words, they fell back into the role of being students again, and casting me as the teacher, a person to whom they had to make excuses.</div>
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The woman in line at the bakery was kind enough to tell me how much my course had meant to her, and I made the awkwardly appreciative noises one makes at such a time. And, as we talked, I gradually began to remember her, albeit a bit dimly. She was that rare student in community college, one of those who always turns up for class, is always prepared, always does the work. Most probably, her assessment of my skills as a teacher owed as much to her dedication to her studies as anything I did or didn’t do in that class she took from me. Good students are often likely to give the teacher credit for things they did themselves, and poor students are more likely to blame teachers for the things they, themselves, did not do. They would have studied harder if the teacher had been more interesting, or they would have been more conscientious if the teacher had somehow convinced them that this stuff mattered.</div>
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I spent most of my working life as a teacher, sharing what I’d learned about language and literature from those who had taught me. I took several dozen classes in order to acquire the degrees that allowed me to presume I had something worth hearing to students who signed up for the courses I taught. By rough estimate, there were 320 of those courses, taught over a span of four decades spent in classrooms at four different colleges. Figuring a low-ball average enrollment of 20 students per class, that figures out to well over 6000 students, nearly all of whom have evaporated from memory. Similarly, the teachers who taught me are mostly forgotten. Those professors who still hold a place in my recollections are a mere handful of truly exceptional people–both exceptionally bad and exceptionally good. The good teachers served as role models for what I should do when I began my own teaching career, and the bad teachers lingered in memory to remind me of what I should avoid doing.</div>
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The exceptionally bad were conspicuously lazy, determinedly dull, or utterly unmotivated, dead to all enthusiasm for students or for the subjects they taught. If there had ever been fire in these people, it was lost by the time I sat before them in classes I was required to take, or had signed up for because the material seemed interesting until I learned it was being taught by people who no longer found it interesting themselves.</div>
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I sometimes wonder how many students sampled certain subjects and then rejected entire disciplines simply because of one bad teacher who turned what might have been a lifelong passion into an abandoned intellectual exploration.</div>
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Fortunately, the truly bad teachers were few, but then so were the truly great teachers. </div>
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My experience on both sides of the lectern has brought me to the conclusion that 10% of teachers are simply awful, 10% are truly inspiring, and the rest can be found somewhere along a sliding scale between those two poles. Those in that broad middle are varying degrees of serviceable, people who can convey information, organize material, administer tests, and evaluate student performance. But few of them are likely to be remembered by former students, and even fewer have the capacity to reawaken curiosity and the keen desire to learn that is so often squelched by the dull routine found in far too many classrooms fronted by sausage grinder teachers who crank out students from whom the natural desire to learn has been successfully extracted. Uninspired and uninspiring teachers inadvertently teach students that serving the system supercedes substance.</div>
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They teach students how to play the game, subordinating learning to racking up points awarded for complying with whatever systems of measurement the teacher or the school have contrived to evaluate student performance.</div>
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Rather immodestly, I count myself among the “good” teachers, though I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that self-assessment. But, if I wasn’t as good a teacher as I’d like to think I was, it surely wasn’t for lack of trying. The job consumed me, woke me up nights, made me toss and turn with worries or with ideas for things I wanted to try. Like parenting, teaching can always be improved upon, and each new semester provided the opportunity to finally get it “right,” an elusive and perhaps unachievable goal. If there was a single student I felt I hadn’t reached, or a day when I couldn’t seem to capture their interest, those failures took up residence in the back of my mind, often overpowering whatever successes I may have had. Though it will seem immodest to say so, I think that the nagging sensitivity to the prospect of failure is one of the primary reasons I can call myself a good teacher. I’ve known more than a few colleagues who seemed not to care too much about whether they succeeded or failed at the task of actual teaching, an attitude of indifference that ensured their status as not very good teachers.</div>
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Throughout my long classroom career, it was common for students to ask me to recommend other teachers I thought were especially good. Most of the time, I evaded the question, telling them how difficult it was for teachers to assess one other. After all, we were seldom, if ever, in one another’s classes. Someone who seemed interesting in casual conversation in the faculty lounge or at a staff party might turn out to be a martinet or a malingerer in the classroom, one of those who shirk their responsibilities by dividing students into little learning circles and then letting the blind lead the blind while he or she circulates among them like a supervisor on an assembly line.</div>
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These are the people who eschew the word “teacher,” redefining themselves as “facilitators” as a way of doing less. There’s lots of stuff offered as rationalization for this approach, anodynes for whatever bouts of bad conscience might afflict teachers who have found this way of evading the time and effort of classroom prep, or the energy required to bring off an engaging lecture or maintain the thread of an engaged classroom discussion. Because it decreases the demands of actual teaching, the “collaborative learning” approach is persistently peddled at teacher conferences, and it’s a pill that goes down easy, eagerly swallowed by those who really don’t like teaching all that much.</div>
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Many, maybe most, of the people who make their way into ranks of education management are teachers who didn’t make a good “fit” in the classroom, people who beat a hasty retreat from contact with students in favor of better paid jobs overseeing their former colleagues. In their new roles, they hire consultants, form committees, draft mission statements, attend conferences, count various varieties of beans, and issue occasional documents defining just what constitutes good teaching. At the highest levels of ambition, these former teachers scrambled out of schools entirely, making their way to political appointments, or garnering national attention by proposing “reforms” that nearly always boiled down to less power for teachers, and more “accountability,” which always meant defined “outcomes” that could be charted on graphs. Perhaps the only real purpose those graphs served was to make the case for effective management because, when the “outcomes” spiked upwards, that was always a cause for administrative self-congratulation.</div>
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And, in these realms, way leads on to way, ever farther from students and classrooms, ever closer to the abstractions and numbing clichés that constitute the talk of educrats who take as their model the captains of business and industry, and who come to think themselves entitled to comparable pay.</div>
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So it is that we have a system of higher education in California, for instance, where university presidents and chancellors command salaries larger than the one earned by the President of the United States, where tuition costs rise along with those administrative paychecks because, we’re told, talent this rare cannot be purchased for less.</div>
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And, as these corporatized academic CEOs proliferate, so does the view that education should emulate the business model. As that view gains dominance in “the ed. biz,” the less measurable “outcomes” continue to make themselves plain as we grant degrees to people who cannot find jobs, or who leave their colleges weighed down by levels of indebtedness that will blight the very futures they’d hoped to brighten by seeking advanced degrees in the first place. That doesn’t matter much because the system is still churning out “product,” granting degrees to ever more students.</div>
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The fact that the broader system doesn’t know what to do with all that product is of little concern to the people who run the colleges and universities, but maintenance of their pay and perks surely does, and lots of their time seems to be spent schmoozing with their trustees and boards to keep that notion firmly in place that without people like them in charge, the system just might not be so good, and that people like them need to be paid handsomely or they’ll take their balls and go home. And they’ve got some pretty big balls, no matter their gender, because they make these claims in a job market where nearly everyone else is taking hits, and in the face of lots of criticism of just how well their leadership is serving either students or the society that pays their salaries.</div>
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If the ratio of good teachers to not-so-good teachers isn’t as high as everyone would like, we might begin by looking at the people who are creating the environment for teaching, and defining just what teachers are supposed to do.</div>
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Over the course of four decades spent in classrooms, I’ve known lots of people like Michelle Rhee, the former Chancellor of the Washington, DC school system. Rhee has gained mega media attention as the latest savior of American education. She’s made the cover of <i>Newsweek</i>, won accolades from Oprah (a kind of secular sainthood), and she was the heroine of Waiting for Superman, a well-intended documentary that played upon the audience’s legitimate sympathies for DC area students trying to win a lottery to get into better schools, and out of the bad schools they’re in. Rhee has emerged as the Joe Arpaio of ed. reform, anointed by the media as a tough-talking woman who cares only about students, and who is willing to take on lazy, incompetent, and indifferent teachers in order to better serve them.</div>
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Which is all well and good, I suppose.</div>
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Who wouldn’t support that narrative, especially in the current climate, where unions–especially public employees unions–are so consistently vilified and scapegoated for woes we are suffering? Who is not against lazy and/or incompetent teachers? And who is not in favor of giving young people the very best possible education we can provide? Who wouldn’t oppose unions, portrayed by Rhee and the opportunistic politicians who praise her, as special interest advocates for less work, more pay, and bad instruction? After all, in the popular script Rhee reads from, unions do little beyond gouging taxpayers and protecting the jobs of bad teachers.</div>
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Americans are suckers for bad narratives, any tale that neatly compacts our problems into a fable featuring heroes, villains, and victims. Ronald Reagan got lots of traction laying the blame for government deficits at the door of “welfare queens” while masterfully overlooking the engorged defense budget. And the debate over health care was muddied by bogus stories of death panels that imperiled “grandma.” Similarly, Michelle Rhee’s rise to prominence has been buoyed by the story she’s telling, one in which she is cast as the brave heroine, willing to take on the bad guys who, unlike her, are not putting students first.</div>
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Throughout my own decades of “putting students first”–reading millions of their words, correcting their mistakes in writing, listening to their excuses as well as their legitimate woes, struggling to find ways to engage their interest and keep their attention, attempting to build their confidence, worrying about their attendance, fretting over grades, and sharing what I knew about writing–I also taught classes in literature. When I started teaching, I believed in the power of stories and, after all those years in the classroom, I believe in that power even more. Stories can convey understandings in transformative ways, allowing those who read or hear them to see things in clearer perspective, more refined nuance, and greater depth. But stories can also be used to sentimentalize, oversimplify, or perpetuate misconceptions and lies.</div>
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Even big lies.</div>
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Each of the years I worked as a teacher began with a series of mandatory meetings in which administrators much like Rhee would tell assembled faculty members their business, providing lectures for people who dealt with students every day delivered by people who’d decided that dealing with students every day was just not their cup of tea. It always galled me to be told to value students by people who didn’t share my experience in valuing them daily. That gall rises in a similar fashion when I turn on cable news to see Michelle Rhee talking about how so many teachers are sub-mediocre, and the standards for teaching so low that “anyone with a pulse” is welcomed to our ranks.</div>
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As it happens, my youngest daughter is a middle school teacher in Sacramento. On some nights, while my daughter is grading papers, doing classroom prep, or an assortment of other duties, Michelle Rhee can be found at a Kings’ game, squired there by her hubby, the mayor. While Rhee gains accolades for her willingness to denigrate hardworking teachers, my daughter, and most of her colleagues, volunteer time and money to make up for the budget cuts that chip away at their ability to put students first. These teachers do that work while incurring and enduring the kind of disrespect nourished by ambitious and self-serving people like Michelle Rhee.</div>
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Education needs reform. I’ve never known a time when that wasn’t so. But, generation after generation, the calls for reform lead to scatterbrained and scattergun “programs” touted in thousands of conferences for “educators,” forums to which teachers are seldom invited. Led by bureaucrats who mostly stand apart from the process of teaching and learning, these confabs bring up ideas that get discussed, briefly implemented, then discarded in favor of the next new orthodoxy. The leadership circles of the ed. biz promote fads that boost careers, but in the trenches where the teachers are called upon to enact the latest notions and also, incidentally, deal with the myriad personal demands of actual students, the struggle to teach young people is engaged and successes are routinely achieved. That work gets done, often in spite of the burdens imposed by educrats who keep reinventing wheels and finding substitutes for the passion that motivates real teachers and facilitates real learning.</div>
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Though Michelle Rhee has a few words of criticism for the often bloated and overpaid administrators who oversee the educational enterprise, her primary message is to blame the troops, not the generals. There’s not much new in that story, though it draws an appreciative audience every time it gets told. It’s difficult to see, however, ways in which insulting generalizations glibly offered by storytellers like Michelle Rhee are going to create legions of better teachers. Sweeping indictments of teachers don’t make the task easier for the people who occupy the ranks of a profession people like Michelle Rhee fled from long ago.</div>
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Back in the 1980s, I was asked to serve on a panel of “educators” assembled by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, headed up that agency at that time, and she’d selected me to serve on that panel not because she had any idea at all about my qualities as a teacher, but because something I’d written about education had attracted her attention. That’s usually how it goes whenever educrats assemble panels, whether at the national level, or at the local campus. Administrators gather little posses of the like-minded from their own ranks, add a token teacher or two, people selected either for their qualities as toadies, or because they’ve earned some recognition that usually has little or nothing to do with what they do when they’re with students, and then they have some chats and collect some data based on an agenda set by the “chair,” who then has the results written up in a report never really meant to be read by anyone. </div>
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These circle jerk confabs always involve lots of studies of studies, lots of “breakout sessions,” and more jargon and cant phrases than you’re likely to hear anyplace this side of the Pentagon. Jargon is almost always dehumanizing, and the language used to discuss education is no exception; the phrases are mechanistic and abstract, borrowed from the worst bins of sociology. This specialized language betrays a mechanized and largely dehumanized approach to learning. It’s also mostly stupid in the way that jargon always tends to be stupid, replacing clear and concrete ideas with numbingly pretentious abstractions designed, it seems, to make what is obvious seem more profound and/or scientific. Go to a meeting or a conference of “educators,” and you’re going to hear words and phrases as soul depleting as these: criterion check, differentiated instruction, constructivism, extrinsic motivation, formative evaluation, standards-based teaching, summative evaluation, verbal-linguistic intelligence, visual-spatial intelligence, manipulatives, attitudinal assessment, and cooperative learning.</div>
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This sort of language issues from the graduate-level courses in education teachers or would-be teachers are usually required to take in order to earn credentials. Few people in their right minds would take such content-free courses by choice, of course, but administrator wannabes flock to them, nonetheless. Perhaps you’ve heard that old joke that makes the claim that PhD stands for “piled higher and deeper.” When it comes to education as an academic discipline, that ain’t no joke.</div>
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So, if you’re looking for what defines good teaching, the last place you’re likely to find such a definition is where good teaching goes to die.</div>
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When I was a junior in high school, my English class was assigned to read The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s early 20th century novel about working conditions in the Chicago stockyards and meatpacking plants that galvanized public opinions in ways that ultimately lead to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. We also read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, and poetry by Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and William Shakespeare. This was not an honor’s class, I hasten to add. If it had been, I wouldn’t have been in it because both my grades and my attitude precluded my presence in such a class. I also read the James Joyce story, “The Dead,” that year, as beautiful a piece of prose as I would ever come across in the half century that was to follow. Miss Luebbing, the woman who taught that class, instilled in me a love of reading that would reward me through all of my days after high school, an invaluable gift. Would I have developed the habit of reading had it not been for the stroke of luck that put me in a room with such a teacher? Perhaps. But I know far too many people whose curiosity or love of reading were killed off at the hands of bad teachers to take away any credit away from Ms. Luebbing for the joys I’ve since found between the pages of books.</div>
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In the years since I sat in her classroom, I’ve taught college-level English to a couple generations of high school graduates. With each succeeding year, I’ve seen fewer and fewer of them who enter college having read anything as challenging–or as interesting–as that old Upton Sinclair novel, let alone Shakespeare or James Joyce. Many of my students over those years told me that they’d never been required to read a novel throughout their high school years, and some of them bragged of having gotten their diploma without ever having cracked a book at all.</div>
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I took a look at Emerson’s essays as I was getting ready to write this little piece, and I also dipped back into The Jungle for a few pages, and I know from experience that the sort of vocabulary found in those texts would confound most college students these days, in part because what they have been asked to read has generally been dumbed down with readability formulas that expunge any vocabulary that is likely to be unfamiliar. And, because it has been expunged from what students are asked to read, it remains unfamiliar.</div>
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I’m certain that back when Miss Luebbing was exposing her students to the thoughts of a man then thought to be one of America’s thinkers, much of that vocabulary I encountered was unfamiliar to me, too. But, as I did the work that learning requires, some of those unfamiliar words adhered to me, enlarged my ability to understand things, and broadened by capacity for further learning.</div>
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There are, I have no doubt, teachers like Ms. Luebbing in schools across America, though people as inspiring as she was will always be exceptional. But everything I read, see, or hear from students convinces me that it is more difficult than ever for the really exceptional teachers to challenge students in the way Ms. Luebbing challenged–and changed–me.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-49300351988238859272013-08-22T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-22T10:00:04.260-07:00From the Empirical Archives: The Circle and the Pyramid<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">The Circle and the Pyramid</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Lorna Davis</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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It seems that empires always leave a stain,</div>
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A toxic pattern in the conquered soil,</div>
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A ruddy mix of tears and blood and toil,</div>
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Impervious to a thousand years of rain.</div>
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The hearts of human leaders once were true;</div>
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Their duty, to secure the people’s needs.</div>
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But empire’s logic grips the ground like weeds:</div>
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The many just exist to serve the few.</div>
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Where freedom’s eagle rests upon her seal,</div>
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The pyramid inside the circle reigns</div>
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And slowly works to cancel freedom’s gains</div>
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With quiet laws that help the mighty steal.</div>
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Our promise lies in leaving none behind;</div>
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The circle needs each part to be complete.</div>
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The pyramid just lifts up the elite</div>
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To ride the trudging ranks of humankind.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-85857634098456091422013-08-21T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-21T10:00:01.060-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Why Human Rights Matter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Why Human Rights Matter</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Emanuel Stoakes</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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When, on occasion, I get challenged about why I bother with human rights, I’m usually surprised. The questioner must, I am often tempted to reply, be happy for me to come over to their house that night with an armed gang and torture them, and follow that by kidnapping them without trial for an indefinite period, only to be protected under law because I’m friends with the attorney general? (This is all hypothetical, of course.) When I sink to such an artless rejoinder, no one ever says “Yes” and means it. While I concede that the above may be a fatuously extreme thing to say, it raises meaningful points. If we want to be free from unimaginable suffering and injustice ourselves, then we surely have to accept in principle that all human beings should be free from it. It is this notion (the universalist principle, one which runs counter to the intellectual constructs that have so long supported the conceits and whims of power) that is found immovably at the heart of the philosophy of human rights.</div>
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Of course, this concept is nothing new. It is so ancient as to be an almost archetypal principle. In this sense, the human rights movement is a meeting place of apparently irreconcilable streams of thought, in that it echoes values common to intellectual movements both modern and ancient–for example, the enlightenment and the Abrahamic religions.</div>
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What’s more, it posits an equality of worth for all human beings that political systems devised to empower the poor, such as Communism, failed to grant in practice. Indeed, in some cases, the human rights movement has achieved what the various left-leaning political revolutions have always aspired to bring about: radically positive transformation in the lives of the most needy. Moreover, such advances did not come at the cost of individual freedoms or through the agency of an intrusive and corrupt government, as in many ostensibly socialist societies.</div>
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A case in point occurred in India in 2001, when a group of campaigners managed to secure school meals for 50 million children, many of whom suffered from extreme malnourishment. This was achieved through public interest litigation in which the indivisible right to food was invoked. This legally-mandated system already looks set to reach out to a further 50 million children–and is continuing to expand its reach. It is easily the biggest program of its kind in the world.</div>
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The central text of the rights movement, the Universal Declaration of 1948 asserts that certain fundamental entitlements are granted to all global citizens, without distinction. This was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The principles it contains were timely and momentous: they prefigured the end of American segregation, the break-up of apartheid and the final collapse of European colonialism. The Declaration, and the codification of the values it upholds, represented a landmark moment in the modern era, one that has helped to form the world that we inhabit now with laws and protections we take for granted. Its span covers all the essential human requirements for life and dignity ranging from freedom from slavery to the right to food.</div>
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The declaration also calls for “an international order in which human rights can be fully realized”–something that, to this writer at least, sadly remains an aspiration for the global community, the world being as it is. This is something to which I will return.</div>
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Above all else, the great beating heart of the human rights cause is its affirmation of the importance of humanity, its ability to transcend normally incommensurable differences without alienating anyone; and doing so by appealing to that most definitively human of our instincts–our ability to feel compassion for our fellow human beings.</div>
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The principles upheld are free from the prescriptions, meta-narratives and/or dictations of any belief or exclusionary creed. Rather, the defining features of human rights law and the values it seeks to honor are drawn from the common cultural treasury of our species: in it we see echoes of the Ubuntu philosophy from Africa, the ancient Manu Smriti traditions from ancient India, the central teachings of the Abrahamic religions and the liberal humanist ideals of the European Enlightenment.</div>
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Thus, the human rights outlook encompasses a remarkably flexible, inclusive “consensus narrative.” In this way it is politically and culturally neutral. Because of this, people of humane impulse from all backgrounds have joined the international justice movement, and can find common cause in seeking the implementation of the laws associated with it.</div>
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There’s plenty of ground to be made. The human rights project is a work in progress. If we just look at recent years, incidents that occurred during the Global War on Terror, the Sudanese and Sri Lankan civil wars, even the treatment of Bradley Manning by the US are considered serious offenses that remain unpunished.</div>
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Despite the fact that some of those considered responsible for the alleged crimes have not been held to account, many human rights abusers live in fear of being sent to The Hague in the future. We can thank the HR community for having brought this far.</div>
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Recent victories underline such progress.</div>
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As mentioned before, not long ago, Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, was sentenced (effectively for the rest of his natural life) for his part in what presiding Judge Richard Lussick described as “some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history.” Among the many terrible acts believed to have been perpetrated by his soldiers, perhaps the most abominable was the practice of cutting fetuses from the wombs of pregnant women for sport. Rape, maimings, and torture were widespread under his reign of terror.</div>
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To the countless victims of the Sierra Leonese civil war, seeing Taylor sentenced was no small matter. What’s more, his arrest and prosecution still stands as a powerful reminder that those who commit crimes against humanity can be made to pay. That’s no small victory for justice. Likewise, several of the big players in the Bosnian genocide have now also been caught and had their day in the dock.</div>
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However, it must not be forgotten that great exceptions to the proper adoption of the regime of global justice endure. At the time of writing, several pertinent cases of justice–evasion have passed through the news.</div>
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I will first attend to the most striking of such examples. Late last year, the BBC leaked an internal UN report on the international body’s failures during the finale of the Sri Lankan civil war. It makes for a terrifying read, particularly given that it has been estimated that tens of thousands of civilians may have been killed during that time, allegedly by indiscriminate shell fire issuing from government forces.</div>
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The UN, it transpires, as Frances Harrison–the BBC’s former Sri Lanka correspondent–put it, had received “unconfirmed reports of 50,000 casualties in a war off limits to journalists” in the late stages of the conflict but did not raise the alarm. This came about, according to the report, because of “a culture of trade-offs” whereby UN workers played softball with Sri Lanka in order to try to influence their behavior in an attempt to improve the situation for the victims.</div>
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However, this tactic did not work–and moreover, the numbers of those reportedly killed was so high that it is scandalous that the UN did not speak out. According to Harrison, senior figures received briefings by staff “which showed that almost all the civilian casualties recorded by the UN had reportedly been killed by Government fire” but still did not inform the world about such horrors. To compound the appalling character of the alleged crimes, the fatalities reported were concentrated in “no fire zones” that had been unilaterally declared by the government as a place of refuge for civilians.</div>
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Perhaps the strongest complaint about the conditions of the civilians stuck in the “no fire zones” came from the International Committee of the Red Cross who, at the time, stated that an “unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe” was taking place for the ethnic Tamil civilians there who were deprived of medicine and food–and under fire. Other NGOs would later describe Sri Lanka’s war effort a little under four years ago as having been “an assault on the entire regime of international law”–during which time disregard for human life was so brazen that hospitals got hit repeatedly–in one case, 35 times according to Human Rights Watch.</div>
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To this day, no one has been punished for the credibly alleged war crimes that reportedly took place, despite increasing international pressure being brought to bear on Colombo. One of the reasons for this has been the aggressive resistance shown by the government of Sri Lanka to call for an international inquiry undertaken under the auspices of the United Nations.</div>
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The government did commission its own internal inquiry, which failed to address many of the worst allegations against it, and which–predictably–exonerated the government. Amnesty International wrote of the probe that it was “fundamentally flawed and provides no accountability for atrocities.” This outcome was itself entirely predictable. An American diplomat expressed in one Wikileaks-released cable “There are no examples we know of a regime undertaking wholesale investigations of its own troops or senior officials for war crimes while that regime or government remained in power.”</div>
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“In Sri Lanka this is further complicated,” she continues, “by the fact that responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country’s senior civilian and military leadership.”</div>
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The slow-moving carriage of international justice is easily set off course by sitting governments. While misbehaving politicians maintain their grip on power, it is hard to bring to them to an international court without causing unrest in their native country–or invoking a host of sovereignty issues. Unauthorized military action to remove a criminal regime is itself a crime, and trying to do this legally (as in the case of Assad in Syria) is a torturous process, often impeded by division at the UN Security Council.</div>
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This being as it is, war crimes suspects are much more vulnerable when they have left power.</div>
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This was the case with Charles Taylor, who, despite all his best efforts, was forced to face up to his crimes after leaving office, albeit a decade later. Likewise, Radovan Karadzic was indicted in absentia by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for his role in crimes that he committed during the Bosnian war. He is currently being held in the UN’s detention center in Scheveningen in The Netherlands, after having been in hiding for decades; in 2008, Karadzic was identified and arrested in Belgrade. Despite having cultivated a long beard, living under the assumed name D.D. David and posing as a “quantum energy healer” in Vienna and Serbia, Karadzic has finally been brought before a court.</div>
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Despite such encouraging achievements, there are major obstacles to the universalist principle being applied without exception among the world’s nations where it comes to human rights, especially those associated with the conduct of armies in times of war.</div>
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The existing global power structures effectively mean that the world’s elite powers, in particular those that hold the veto on the United Nations Security Council, cannot be held accountable for offenses. The train of justice cannot move up road-blocked channels.</div>
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Russia is one example. The United States and Britain are others. When Russia crushed Grozny in 1999 in response to the invasion of Dagestan by Islamist Mujahadeen, a wide range of grave war crimes were credibly alleged to have taken place. Even long after the assault ended, Grozny was described by the UN as “the most destroyed city on earth.” Journalists reported appalling abuses. Mass graves were found. Rights groups criticized “blatant and sustained violations of international humanitarian law” committed by both sides.</div>
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Yet the military and political elite in Russia remained unaccountable, given the country’s status in the world. External criticisms could be endured. And domestically, too, because many Russians supported the action, which meant that popular uproar was not a threat; this worked well, as Moscow had achieved her strategic goals and installed a pliant suzerain. The cost-benefit analysis in pure, cynical political terms equated to net gains. By comparison, behaving ethically or proportionately once Russia’s territorial integrity was threatened was not a priority.</div>
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Likewise, the questionable conduct of British and American troops in Fallujah in 2004 during the Iraq war attracted floods of criticism but is unlikely to result in any consequences for the military command that oversaw it.</div>
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That is not to say that coalition troops planned to go in and behave criminally–it is just that the retaking of Fallujah was probably considered a significant enough strategic goal that a full-scale assault on the city was considered necessary, as in Grozny.</div>
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Due to the ferocity of the invasion, however, hell-on-earth was visited upon Iraq’s “City of Mosques.” The city was devastated by an attack that was designed to send a clear message to those forces that opposed the invading party.</div>
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This appears to be reflected in the testimony of those who served there. One Iraq veteran told me that “Right before we entered the city, I remember our company commander saying something like ‘all the civilians have left, so be as violent as you need to be to go home in one piece.’ I’m not sure at which level in the chain of command they were genuinely misinformed and at which level they were deliberately lying. Until I was in Fallujah and saw civilians with my own eyes, I believed what my command had told me.”</div>
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As the fighting got more intensive, cruel expedients were allegedly deployed. According to the same source, units in Fallujah “used a tactic called reconnaissance-by-fire, which is when you fire into a building to see if anyone is inside. There might have been civilians inside, but the point of reconnaissance-by-fire is that you don’t know what you’re firing at. We used tanks to fire into houses that had resistance fighters inside, and sometimes we used bulldozers to flatten the house on top of them."</div>
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“I watched a unit to our right flank flatten an entire neighborhood, one house after another, without checking to see if anyone was inside these houses,” he added. Without going into the full range of legal complications associated with the invasion of Iraq, or the sort of possible offenses described latterly by the source, if Russia leaders cannot be held to account because of the nation’s relative stature in world affairs–how much less so is this the case for the political elites in the US?</div>
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Indeed the unlikelihood of an American, or indeed any high-profile western politician, being sent to the Hague underlines the chief criticisms leveled at the international justice system as it currently is. So far, the International Criminal Court has focused overwhelmingly on hosting cases against Africans. Such facts, sadly, remain an enduring testimony to the limitations of the system. Some, like legal expert Chris Mahony, have argued that, in the realm of international justice “the world’s great powers . . . decide who is prosecuted, and who is not.”</div>
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This desperately needs to change–yet these are flaws which can be traced to government policies and the realities of the world’s international order–not the designs of the human rights movement.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-53073610297545367992013-08-20T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-20T10:00:00.668-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Arizona <br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vaa7gzcIZ0U/UR0swwsy0EI/AAAAAAAABbY/tf4cs_PA0OI/s1600/Arizona1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vaa7gzcIZ0U/UR0swwsy0EI/AAAAAAAABbY/tf4cs_PA0OI/s400/Arizona1.bmp" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Arizona</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Tara Malcom</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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We were drinking malteds</div>
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when we saw - them -</div>
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chicanos, or mexicans (?),</div>
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honking upstreet, flags flaring,</div>
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celebrating a victory,</div>
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possibly a war won,</div>
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or even a game of futbol -</div>
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they were waving out windows</div>
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we did it! lo hicimos!</div>
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we mocked them high-fiving</div>
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& boy, did we do it -</div>
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me the mick</div>
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& you the jew.</div>
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Now, I look at the state</div>
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I spent my young summers</div>
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in uproar.</div>
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“They’re devouring the words of chicanos</div>
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& pretending every word is laced</div>
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with the devil’s LSD.</div>
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It’s terrible” I say now,</div>
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silently remembering the day</div>
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we walked amongst the murals.</div>
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At the corner of 24th and Hampshire</div>
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a young boy waved his flag at me</div>
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& I smiled, an itch at the back of my throat</div>
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that swallowed like hot shame.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-87359954350686317292013-08-19T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-19T10:00:02.308-07:00From the Empirical Archives: The Offer by Jennifer Hanno<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5z6s3dEl-2Q/UR0pgZOaofI/AAAAAAAABbQ/DnRf5lX18Pw/s1600/Offer1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="362" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5z6s3dEl-2Q/UR0pgZOaofI/AAAAAAAABbQ/DnRf5lX18Pw/s400/Offer1.bmp" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">The Offer</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Jennifer Hanno</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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Bob clutched the rifle and considered that this might be a turning point of some kind. He had never been so close to such a great specimen . . . even he could not miss a shot like this. He froze into the background, the cold metal of his rifle burning into his clenched hand.</div>
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Watching the animal move with majestic grace, he was reminded of the basketball games of his youth, of the strong, young athletes whose fluid movement with the ball seemed a mystery to him as he sat on the bench. His grip on the rifle tightened and it seemed as if the animal could sense that imperceptible movement.</div>
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It lifted its head, suddenly alert and on edge. Yes, this could be a turning point, Bob reasoned, one shot here and he would be the hero of the hunting lodge tonight. They would be telling tales about it for months. This was what Darwin was talking about; this was survival of the fittest. Maybe not actual survival, but social survival, which was more important anyway.</div>
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His finger on the trigger, he raised the gun slowly, ever so slowly as he had seen his companions do. It was, after all, the chance of a lifetime. Suddenly, he knew his companions were near. He sensed them even as the animal seemed to become aware of danger. It was now or never, one shot and it would be over and any guilt he may feel would be diminished by the praise of his hunting partners.</div>
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He could almost see the pictures of him holding the antlers of the dead beast, its eyes a glassy and still window into death. He could feel the other hunters bearing down on them and he felt more like the prey than the predator. His hand cramped as it held tightly to the instrument that would bring death to one of them and an assertion of manhood to the other. Sweat collected on his brow, his chest tightened. Not too far off, he heard a footstep. The animal heard it, too, but seemed frozen, as though Bob held it immobile in the scope of his gun.</div>
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Suddenly, he lowered the rifle.</div>
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“Run, you idiot,” he hissed to the majestic beast. “Get out of here.”</div>
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Like the bullet that might have been fired from his gun, the buck shot through the woods and out of Bob’s life. Later on, his companions would ask him how he could have missed it. He would make up a story about how he fell asleep, drowsy from the drinking the night before. They would laugh and jest at his expense for some time to come, but he would dish out the mushroom stew he had meticulously prepared and all would be well. He would settle back into the bench.</div>
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Ah well, he sighed. He went to the woods so that he could live deliberately, he told himself, as he shivered in the tree stand. With a sigh, he took out the tattered copy of Walden he always carried with him when he went hunting.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">*</span></div>
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“I went to the woods so I could live deliberately,” Bob read to his second period class, his deep voice resonating with what he hoped was the power of the written word. “To front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived.”</div>
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He paused for effect and a deep silence settled into the room, like a blanket of snow over the Adirondack hills. Then it was broken by a loud belch from a student in the front row.</div>
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The room erupted into laughter as Bob set his book down on the podium and gave the student an icy glare.</div>
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“This is gay,” the belcher said, more to his audience than to Bob, and his classmates heartily expressed their agreement with high fives and more laughter. Bob felt that familiar tightening as his anger rose to the surface.</div>
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“Really, Mr. Pearson?” Bob said, “What is it about Mr. Thoreau’s writing that you find homosexual in nature?”</div>
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This caused a round of sneering and laughter and Bob knew it was Darwin time again. Survival of the Fittest. Only one of them would emerge with control of the class. He suddenly felt a wave of anger wash over him as he surveyed the battlefield. He was becoming reckless as his retirement neared, caring less and less about the consequences.</div>
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“You seem to use that word a lot, Mr. Pearson. Tell me, why would a young man like you see so many things as gay?”</div>
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The boy twisted uncomfortably in his chair, squirming under the laughter of his classmates. Bob watched as the boy transferred the tobacco he was chewing to the alternate cheek.</div>
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“Cause all the stuff you have us read is gay,” he countered, angry defiance flashing in his adolescent eyes.</div>
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“What’s so gay about it?”</div>
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“Going into the woods just to sit there for no reason . . .” the boy sneered and Bob could feel him pulling the class away from him. The young man seemed to feel it too and it was gaining him confidence. He continued, pushing further.</div>
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“It’s not like he is going in to shoot something. The guy’s a fag. Maybe this guy Thoreau is gay. . . . ”</div>
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“Maybe you’re ignorant,” Bob could feel thirty years of anger bubbling to the surface.</div>
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“Maybe you’re gay,” the boy sneered.</div>
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“And you are a horse’s ass. . . . ” The laughter stopped and Bob acknowledged the sinking feeling that is common when one recognizes one went too far.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">*</span></div>
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“Did you even consider the ramifications such a comment could have on the developing personality of a child, Mr. Jazinski?” she asked, her expression promising infinite patience. Bob’s jaw clenched as he sought a professional and confident retort.</div>
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“He started it. He called me gay!”</div>
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“Now really, Mr. Jazinski,” she said with a sad, complacent smile. “Who is the adult here?”</div>
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Bob had a comment all prepared for her, but his union representative seemed to sense that and interjected. She was an old friend and they had taught together for twenty years.</div>
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“In Bob’s defense,” she began, “He has a very challenging class. If you recall, I have spoken to you about seeing if we couldn’t balance it better. Over 50% of his class are chronic discipline problems and most are reading 3 grades or more below grade level.”</div>
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“All the more reason why a little compassion and empathy are needed if we are to change these youngsters’ lives around,” spoke the voice of administrative optimism.</div>
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Or idealism. Or fantasy, depending on your outlook, Bob thought.</div>
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He made a conscious effort to control the look of incredulity that crossed his face, but he knew he was doing a bad job of it.</div>
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His union representative tried again. “I am sure Bob understands that his comments were inappropriate, but Jason Pearson has been a discipline problem for years here. He has been a disruption to Bob’s instruction for five months now and …”</div>
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“I understand that, Mrs. Hayes, but how can we ask considerate behavior of our students if our staff do not model that behavior?” She did not wait for a reply, but continued on. “Therefore, I am directing Mr. Jazinski to apologize to Jason for his unprofessional and hurtful comments…”</div>
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“Apologize?” Bob sputtered. He was so angry his chest clenched and his words came out garbled and strained. His friend reached out and nudged his leg in silent warning as he visibly fought for self control.</div>
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“In addition,” the principal continued, “I have spoken with the superintendent and he agrees that, because this is the third infraction in the past five years, you will be registered in an Employee Anger Management class.”</div>
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He watched her overly white teeth smile at him through her overly tanned face. She was a slim blonde but she began to resemble an eight-point buck.</div>
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“Do you really think that is necessary?” his colleague was saying, trying to choose her wording carefully to defuse the situation. “After all, this is Bob’s last year teaching. As long as the settlement is passed, he has already decided to retire this June. I mean, anyone can have a bad day and suffer a lapse of judgment.”</div>
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The principal smiled at her with benevolent patience.</div>
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“We have our rules for discipline, Mrs. Hayes. Consistency is always the key.”</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">*</span></div>
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In the faculty room later, Bob’s fury began to slowly dissolve in the warmth of conversation. The tightness inside was loosening, but he was still mad at his friend.</div>
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“This is partly your fault,” he grumbled at her. “Literature for the Outdoorsman…what kind of a class is that?”</div>
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“Well, we were trying to make it more student-centered…you know, engage the student and all that. Besides, I thought you would like teaching it,” she said a little sheepishly. “I just thought you would choose different pieces of literature to do with them…”</div>
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“Like what? Deliverance?” he said.</div>
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Was it wrong to try to give them a little culture? Was it wrong to expose them to the greatest thinkers of our time? Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, Thoreau had written and Bob knew he was one of them. But awareness wasn’t enough. How do you change the plan at this point? It was easy to advise others to “simplify, simplify,” but what about health insurance? Two kids in college? A retirement fund? No, once Bob retired he would live deliberately and until then, he only had to hang on. It was strategy, not cowardice that kept him here.</div>
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After all, one might argue that it took certain courage to try to teach Thoreau to a class of four-wheeling rednecks . . .Pearls before swine, he thought. Pearls before swine. Maybe there were always students like Jason Pearson, but they were the exception not the rule. There was a time when he shared Steinbeck and Emerson and he could feel at least one or two students connecting with him. Now, they sat, their eyes on him, but their fingers under the desk, busily texting their friends even while he lectured. Their insults became more disrespectful, more biting, and more frequent. There were days he dreaded facing them and looking into the eyes of a world he feared and could not understand.</div>
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Now, he sat trying to put his grades into the computer that perched on his desk and mocked him daily. Back in the day, he did his grades by hand, with a calculator and entered them neatly into his black covered grade book. He smiled at the thought, as he remembered his neat and clear handwriting gracing the blue columns. He loved all things ordered and neat. Technology was supposed to make it easier, but instead it wound up taking him twice as long as he pecked his way around the keyboard, muttering curses not loud, but deep.</div>
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When he retired next year, he would regain that sense of peace and security that escaped him. He would buy a season ticket to the theatre and go every month, with the exception of the month he would go to Italy. His coveted trip to Italy now hovered just within his grasp. He had been planning it for years, researching old churches.</div>
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He had purchased some CDs on learning Italian, but he couldn’t figure out his CD player in the new car, so they had sat, unused. There would be time for all of that, he thought, once he retired. He felt that uncomfortable feeling in his chest ease a little at the promise of the voyage. Just the thought of his retirement cheered him.</div>
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A short month later, with the state budget in desperate straits, discussion of retirement incentives dominated union meetings. He had waited, licking his lips in anticipation until it was decided. When his friends asked him if he would definitely take it, he smiled. It was an offer, he told them, he could not refuse.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">*</span></div>
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The letter signed, his grades submitted, his career roasted, he stood now looking out at the vast lawn that stretched before him. While he was teaching, he had hired a lawn service to mow as it was a huge task and he had not invested in a riding mower. Now, however, there would be no need to waste money on that when he had all the time in the world for lawn maintenance.</div>
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Well, eventually, he would. For today, time pressed gently but insistently on him. He had to get the lawn in shape for the party tomorrow.</div>
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He had plenty of time, even though he knew it took a full two and a half hours to finish the job. No matter, the sun rose high in the sky on an unusually warm June day. He was sweating already as he fumbled with the earphones of the iPod his children had given him as a retirement gift. They had preloaded it with Italian operas and Jimmy Buffet and now he concentrated carefully on their instructions regarding its use. It took a few minutes for him to adjust the volume, then he tucked the small device into his chest pocket and revved the mower.</div>
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Looming before him was a field of green that beckoned like the Mediterranean Sea. It was his time now. He marched toward his destiny with a determined stride, the sounds of the Italian tenor mingling with the whine of the mower as he peeled away the overgrowth, one row at a time. He hacked away the excess, leaving only fresh green grass, peeling away the past with a sweep of metal. He relished in the power of it all, despite the enormity of the task. It warmed his soul to see the fresh growth he left in his wake.</div>
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And this was what it all was about, he sighed with contentment as the scent of summer reached his nostrils, and the roar of the tenor battled with the whine of the mower. This was his time. And the sun beat down on the older man and the mower, with no malice or forethought. But, this time there was no warning. It snuck up on him, so intent was he on peeling away the old and releasing the new. The sweat had begun to drip down his back and forehead, and the heat rose up in him as the tenor’s voice rang clear and true.</div>
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So when the unseen hand seized his heart in its vice-like grip, he froze for an instant in surprise, his sweaty hand clutching at his chest, even as his other hand held fast to the mower. He saw it all then, in the haze of the early afternoon sun. He saw the joy in his dog each time he arrived home, the laughter of the faculty room, and hunting lodge and his grades as he carefully arranged them in alphabetical order. He saw the deer raise its majestic head and look into him before he disappeared into the woods. He saw that empty spot on the bench where he had waited to enter the game. He understood then, in the final seconds, the futility of his plans, the random and incomprehensible arrangement of life, and his struggling heart accepted with regret the greatest betrayal of all.</div>
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Momentum. That’s how it all ended. The mower shifted under his weight as the song ended, pushing through the last four feet of grass at the mercy of the unseen force. And momentum propelled Bob’s body to follow as he hit the freshly mowed grass with a dull and gentle thud, the earphones dislodged from him, settling in the grass a few yards away. Dimly, he could hear the rattle of the mower and the dog’s alarmed barking eclipse his own anguished gasps.</div>
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The half finished lawn loomed just ahead, just out of his grasp.</div>
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And so the quiet desperation crept out of him, seeping into the green grass. He was not alone, though. In his ear, he heard the whisper of gentle reassurance, “Simplify, simplify…”</div>
<br />
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-5204757683845520452013-08-16T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-16T10:00:01.305-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Dancing with Shiva by Lorna Davis<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wvx-IcolS0I/UR0oTZU1tGI/AAAAAAAABa4/bluhbzjGLKY/s1600/Shiva1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wvx-IcolS0I/UR0oTZU1tGI/AAAAAAAABa4/bluhbzjGLKY/s400/Shiva1.bmp" width="260" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Dancing with Shiva</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Lorna Davis</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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I have seen Shiva lately, dancing through the world</div>
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In a bright spinning blur like the blades of a harvester.</div>
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I have seen him on the freeway in the spinning of wheels</div>
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As I ride glassy-eyed to another intrusion.</div>
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I have seen him in the hospital in the resolute faces,</div>
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And we danced down the halls to the click of a gurney</div>
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As I watched ceiling tiles flash by in time</div>
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Until he stopped, open-armed, and hovered above me</div>
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In the cold bright lights of the operating room.</div>
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I have felt his quick hands in the surgeon’s blade,</div>
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And I still taste his breath in the poisons that carried me</div>
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Lifeless and limp to the door of his realm,</div>
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Only to let me fall, tumbling and reeling,</div>
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Back down to earth.</div>
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Then the dark dance led me to his inner sanctum</div>
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Where smiling acolytes in blue scrubs</div>
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Brought me to sit before the high priest</div>
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With the sacred stethoscope hung on his neck</div>
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And robed in a long white coat.</div>
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And the high priest, stern but not unkind,</div>
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Warned of the dangers of dancing with Shiva:</div>
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You may be healed, he said, but at a cost,</div>
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For the god of destruction will demand a sacrifice.</div>
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You will fast, and purge, and become a hollow shell,</div>
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And still he may take every strand of your hair,</div>
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And even the marrow of your bones.</div>
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But there is hope in the juxtaposition</div>
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Of opposites in this dance,</div>
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Where the kind-hearted nurse gently and carefully</div>
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Pumps poison into my veins,</div>
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And cheerful attendants burn me with dark rays,</div>
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For the enemy of my enemy is my friend.</div>
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So I go through the motions, spinning and reeling,</div>
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Following every step in this dance of destruction,</div>
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Struggling to hold on to equilibrium</div>
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As Shiva leads me from poison to poison,</div>
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Carefully balanced between sickness and death</div>
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As if dancing on the edge of a blade.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-51520878251318136142013-08-15T16:50:00.000-07:002013-09-06T05:26:46.909-07:00Picktures and Pieces 30: Urd or The Enigma Project<div style="text-align: center;">
Urd, or The Enigma Project</div>
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by Randall Auxier</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jcWA73dptSQ/UgdEAL3LkEI/AAAAAAAAAbw/0gE7Ra4DaYo/s1600/enigma.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jcWA73dptSQ/UgdEAL3LkEI/AAAAAAAAAbw/0gE7Ra4DaYo/s320/enigma.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
You might not think you know this sentence, but you do: "Oy esd yjr nrdy pg yo,rd. oy esd yjr eptdy pg yo,rd/" I just spent a couple of weeks in Poland, and for all the world, the language, lovely as it is, sounded very much like this reads. But in fact this is not Polish. Not even close. This is the result of my own Enigma Project. <br />
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If that name rings a bell, well, it should. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine" target="_blank">Enigma</a> was the name of a machine that created the top secret Nazi communication code during the Second World War. Having the machine that creates the codes was not, by itself, enough to break the codes. One needed to decipher protocols for setting the machine and many other things to break the code. The Nazis believed it couldn't be done. But the Poles and then British were able to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma" target="_blank">break the code</a>. Seeing the war coming, the Poles shared their work with the Allies, and later the British were able to use this work and some of their own to decipher almost all German communications. So the Allies knew, in advance, some of the most sensitive and important information about German plans, strategies, troop movement, and spies. Obviously, if the Nazis suspected the code had been broken, they would have taken further steps to protect their communications, but the Allies were judicious in the use of the code. It affected the outcome of the war. <br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x1CqBzqDcd8/UgdMyQ0hmDI/AAAAAAAAAcA/BaO76LOTSyo/s1600/Germany-Scandlines-Launches-New-Ferry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-x1CqBzqDcd8/UgdMyQ0hmDI/AAAAAAAAAcA/BaO76LOTSyo/s320/Germany-Scandlines-Launches-New-Ferry.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I am currently sitting on a gigantic ferry that is crossing the Baltic Sea, surrounded by people who are speaking German (some are speaking Danish, but I can't understand a word they say). Our ferry is leaving Denmark and will arrive on the German shore in about 45 minutes. I'm also actually in the middle of a <i>train ride</i> from Copenhagen to Berlin. They drive the whole damn train onto the ferry, empty it out. We all get a boat ride, and then pile back on when we get to Deutschland, to continue on our merry way. It occurs to me that if we stayed on the train while crossing, and something went drastically wrong, we'd be joining some U-boat crews on the bottom, sunk with the help of the cryptanalysts at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park" target="_blank">Bletchley Park</a>. And I suppose we would look very much as they must have, shortly after their demise, trapped in their long tubes. Perish the thought.<br />
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The prospect of sharing Davy Jones' Locker with some German sailors is not the reason I am thinking of the Enigma Project, or, as I now rename it: Yjr Rmoh,s {tpkrvy. It's about re-entering Germany after what I've seen in Poland. <i>My</i> project depends upon my own machine, in much the way that the Nazis depended on theirs. Their mistake was the sin of pride, or perhaps just arrogance. We all know German engineering prowess is second to none, so, you see, when Germans were Nazis, they made <i>a machine</i>. The code was kept inside a mechanism, and a set of protocols (books kept by all Enigma users), and all of it resided <i>outside</i> the brains and hearts of those who communicated with it. The communications were accordingly also mechanized. It was arrogant to believe that it would be impossible for an enemy to break the code. The Poles had effectively broken the code well before the war. The Germans had never quite grasped how good at math the Poles were, but they were better at it than the Germans, by a fair stretch.<br />
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The breaking of Enigma (and the Naizs' failure to discover it had been broken) alone didn't lose the war for the Germans, but perhaps arrogance of this sort was behind their ultimate military failure. Or maybe it was just something deep within the structure of perfect wickedness that undid them. In any case, information gleaned from the Enigma Project, along with other intelligence operations, probably added a significant advantage to the D-Day Invasion. Its success was far from assured, but I think its failure could have been guaranteed if the various misinformation and misdirection efforts hadn't worked. The Allies knew where the Germans were (and weren't) and the Germans did not know where the Allies would invade. It mattered greatly.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e25vc0QxN04/Ugz_uvt0i3I/AAAAAAAAAcU/2wCIc6G4pwU/s1600/!paratro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e25vc0QxN04/Ugz_uvt0i3I/AAAAAAAAAcU/2wCIc6G4pwU/s400/!paratro.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
I just attended a meeting in Poland where one of the featured speakers was Professor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Margolis" target="_blank">Joseph Margolis</a> of Temple University. He was among the young allied troops who invaded France on that day, and he mentioned to me once that after the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald, he found a good deal of personal purpose in the continued fight, since he is Jewish. For all I know, the Enigma Project saved his life --he was a paratrooper in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/82nd_Airborne" target="_blank">82nd Airborne</a>, I think. A lot of them didn't come back. Joe Margolis's twin brother didn't.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k-axwMGIsCE/Ug0ddDPdc-I/AAAAAAAAAc0/CvuGTBdvCI8/s1600/douglass-frederick-mid-150x150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k-axwMGIsCE/Ug0ddDPdc-I/AAAAAAAAAc0/CvuGTBdvCI8/s200/douglass-frederick-mid-150x150.jpg" width="200" /></a>I also visited Auschwitz on this trip. Afterwards I mentioned to a Polish friend that I felt all Germans should be required by law to go there and to see. You don't really "get it" until you see, I said. And when you "get it," you wish you hadn't. One is face to face with the unimaginable. But my gentle Polish friend, although much younger, was wiser than I am. He said, "no, Randy, not just the Germans, everyone." After all, I then thought to myself, as a citizen of the United States, it is not as if my own government is innocent of the crime of systematic, protracted genocide. At the time Frederick Douglass gave his <a href="http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/douglassjuly4.html" target="_blank">famous speech</a> (1852) about what the 4th of July means to a slave, he was, I believe, entirely justified to lay at the feet of the US government the charge of being the most evil power on the face of the earth, in its bestial, hypocritical murderous inhumanity. Every citizen of the US should be required by law to read it, I now realize. Or you can listen to someone <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tTkHJWxfP0" target="_blank">read it</a>, a survivor.<br />
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I have been to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre" target="_blank">Sand Creek</a> too. The strategy of concentration and removal, developed by the US government, was studied by the Nazis and praised by Hitler, according to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Toland_%28author%29" target="_blank">John Toland</a>'s biography of Hitler (p. 202). It was deemed a suitable method for rendering a civilian population helpless. There was, after all, an American "final solution," too, and the numbers involved were not so different, even if the period of implementation required many decades. Apparently Henry Ford also served as an inspiration, ally and friend to the Nazi cause. I don't think it's an aberration among Americans, I think we have selective memory regarding this period. Hitler had plenty of American supporters. And he still does.<br />
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Yes, my wise Polish friend, everyone should be required to go, and perhaps me most of all. And this indictment fails even to mention the co-operative European and Euro-American slaughter and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of the people of West Africa, and their subsequent history of rape, murder with impunity, and torture that followed upon it for hundreds of years. What began as the fruit of greed and an absence of legal control in North America came, over time, to be first carefully ignored, then legally allowed, then legally required, then a matter of centralized, bureaucratic planning, and then defended at the cost of hundreds of thousands of young lives. I speak not of Nazi policies but of American history, in terms general enough to accommodate both the institution of slavery and the genocidal policies toward Native peoples.<br />
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I most of all, and maybe you as well. Perhaps not all of us are "Nazis," in the relevant sense. But there is no corner of the world untouched by this extended holocaust called colonization and modernization. It continues today, in fits and starts, in small and large increments. Am I less arrogant than those who perpetrated the Nazi crimes with their hands and heads? I don't know. It's an enigma.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DQQP0ZNzbDA/Ug0WaGrsVoI/AAAAAAAAAck/_89XwZkE2EE/s1600/platoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DQQP0ZNzbDA/Ug0WaGrsVoI/AAAAAAAAAck/_89XwZkE2EE/s320/platoon.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
And there you have it. In this moment, riding across the Baltic Sea on a deck above a German train, I remembered that the US (which has never been especially adept at the spy game) managed to develop a code no one could break during the Second World War. Perhaps you know the story of the <a href="http://www.navajocodetalkers.org/" target="_blank">code talkers</a>. I won't retell it, apart from saying that the Navajo language is, evidently, pretty subtle and unrelated to other languages that would be known by the Axis Powers. To create a fairly simple code in a little known language embeds the key in the living knowledge --in the minds and culture-- of living human beings, not machines.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wfKIFse8Ljo/Ug1Ra5MClRI/AAAAAAAAAdI/jvmZDeqUSsQ/s1600/navajoCodeTalkerMem.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wfKIFse8Ljo/Ug1Ra5MClRI/AAAAAAAAAdI/jvmZDeqUSsQ/s320/navajoCodeTalkerMem.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The indigenous code talkers wouldn't be tortured for the code, if captured, because it would never occur to the (arrogant) captors to demand the code from them, specifically. They would assume we were as arrogant as every other "master race," and I don't know how wrong they would be, but we avoided one mistake: we didn't mechanize our code. I don't think that makes us better. Keep reading. Our code wasn't failsafe. Nothing is. One code-talker could give away the secret and that would destroy the code as well as the <i>idea</i> for the code. But it didn't happen. If you think through it, you may see why, but I will give you a hint: once the Japanese (for example) discovered that Native peoples were the source of the codes, what do you suppose would happen to Native peoples who were subsequently captured (whether they were really code talkers or not)? A still more uncomfortable thought: how different would that be from what was done to them by the US government, and every other government in the Americas? No, they didn't give away the code. Would you, if you were in their place?<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KFfdhoMPU3s/Ug1c0v00q_I/AAAAAAAAAdg/fSneBylpCIY/s1600/20071107_2_m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="144" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KFfdhoMPU3s/Ug1c0v00q_I/AAAAAAAAAdg/fSneBylpCIY/s200/20071107_2_m.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
And this brings me back to the Enigma Project. There were plenty of ways the Nazis and the Russians and the Japanese and the Chinese, and even the French and British, could have created unbreakable codes using the languages of indigenous peoples within their own borders. It didn't occur to them. In a way, the principle behind it <i>did</i> occur to the Nazis, but they made a machine instead of recognizing (diabolically?) that the human version was more secure. And that is why everyone should be required to visit Auschwitz. It is a giant machine, an Enigma Project covering many square miles. This is the concentration and work camp called Auschwitz I, where prisoners were tortured, twins and those with defects were experimented on, and Nazi doctors tried to figure out how to sterilize women belonging to undesirable races --this undesirability did not keep the German officers from raping them in every imaginable way (a point that may be made for the treatment of slaves in the Americas over a span of 400 years). Here they also determined by experimentation how much Zyklon-B was needed to kill an entire room full of people. The first test subjects were Russian prisoners of war and Polish dissidents. One thing I hadn't known was that in the project to de-populate southwestern Poland and make it "fit" for Germans, the Nazis wiped out the entire leadership class of those provinces, murdering every mayor, city council member, teacher, professor, and civic leader in the region. By the end of 1940, they were all pretty much dead.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EJJB0Cx2OPQ/Ug1cybU2veI/AAAAAAAAAdY/AeuJkPiySqE/s1600/20071107_1_m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EJJB0Cx2OPQ/Ug1cybU2veI/AAAAAAAAAdY/AeuJkPiySqE/s320/20071107_1_m.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
This is Auschwitz II, called Birkenau, a couple of miles away. This was the death camp. Only the women's quarters are clearly visible. The men's quarters were three times as expansive and the foundations are on the right in the picture. There was more space for men because they were more useful for working to death. Most women, and all children and old people were gassed upon arrival. The train station is lower right, and the strip through the middle is a massive platform, almost a mile long, where prisoners who survived the trip in cattle cars were sorted. In the upper left is where the gas chambers and crematoria stood. The Nazis blew these up as the Red Army approached.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5bYcQpclzWQ/Ug1kDnqAqBI/AAAAAAAAAds/3AxTOma5vM8/s1600/CrematoriumII.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5bYcQpclzWQ/Ug1kDnqAqBI/AAAAAAAAAds/3AxTOma5vM8/s320/CrematoriumII.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
At first the Nazis thought they wouldn't need to conceal their machine, because they expected to win and to proceed with the further plan to sterilize the Slavic women, and then move on to the gradual elimination of every troublesome source of difference. This is Crematorium 3 at Birkenau. There were five altogether, blown up when they ran. You can't get a sense of the scale of it since most of it was underground. They planted flowers outside and manicured the exterior sharply, to ease the prisoners into a sense of security. As you know, they were told they were going to the showers. There were signs and arrows pointing them in the right direction. All of it was, well, quite efficient, like clockwork, and just as mechanical. They would require other prisoners to do the worst work --shaving heads before-hand, extracting gold teeth afterwards, cleaning the gas chambers. They would gas the prisoners who did this work every couple of months. They were witnesses, after all. One wouldn't want the information to fall into enemy hands. But it's hard to kill everyone.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CkvjurWZ65k/Ug1obpo2EYI/AAAAAAAAAeA/3wL382s4N_0/s1600/AMS.bw_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CkvjurWZ65k/Ug1obpo2EYI/AAAAAAAAAeA/3wL382s4N_0/s1600/AMS.bw_.jpg" /></a></div>
Meanwhile, the American version of the Enigma Project was slower, more organic, but every bit as monstrous. Revealing its secrets requires that one ask an indigenous speaker. Here is <a href="http://www.thecaliforniamissionride.org/2012/07/13/interview-ann-marie-sayers-ohlone-storyteller-and-tribal-chair-of-indian-canyon/" target="_blank">Anne Marie Sayers</a>. Maybe if you are very, very lucky, she'll tell you a story. But you should ask in humility and you should listen until the story is fully told, and you should not interrupt, and you definitely shouldn't argue. Pretend you're at Auschwitz. Well, don't pretend. You're there, but you are talking to a survivor. I think every American (and I mean Americans --North and South) should be required by law to ask and listen for the full answer, and go away chastened to at least the same degree as any German citizen would be upon visiting Auschwitz. No, as I think about it, everyone should.<br />
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My ferry is docking on the shores of Germany, within shouting distance of the cities and towns that were reduced to rubble by British and American bombs. I need to change trains. But you may wonder about my little code. I will help you with it. The solution is very near to you. Very near. So close you can't see it. And that is the whole problem. But I will help you this much, if you really care to know: The word in the title of this piece is "Yes." You'll know you have it figured out when you can read the familiar sentence I typed in code, and you'll also know what I think about all of this, for whatever it's worth. Randall Auxierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07945429178447058758noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-68820919105354058312013-08-15T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-15T10:00:00.339-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Trees by Sayuri Yamada<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-H6a8jVB9gSQ/UR0lm8Y5ztI/AAAAAAAABaw/lCuzICs7e3c/s1600/Trees1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-H6a8jVB9gSQ/UR0lm8Y5ztI/AAAAAAAABaw/lCuzICs7e3c/s400/Trees1.bmp" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Trees</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Sayuri Yamada</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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Somebody is coming at last.</div>
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It has been a long time. Who is it? Is it a man or a woman? Young or old? It is still too far to see it clearly. The trees have been hungry for people. They have been alone for a long time, because of the incessant rain. How long has it been? A week? Ten days? A month? They aren’t sure. Time passes without touching the trees.</div>
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They stand there without consciousness.</div>
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A week ago or two, a girl carrying a blue umbrella with a dog came in through the gate. The sodden dog with the water dripping from its long fur trudged after her, with its head down. When she’d walked to almost the center, she slipped and fell into a puddle, splashing muddy water into the moisture-heavy air. She shrieked.</div>
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The dog whined. They soon left the park.</div>
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Two days ago or three, the rain stopped for a while. The sun shyly peeked from the grey clouds. A mother with a baby on a pushchair came in and went to a bench by the gate. She jumped up as soon as she sat there. The bench must’ve been still wet. She wiped the bottom of her skirt and left. The rain started again soon after that. It has been good for the trees and underbrush. </div>
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The birch tree leaves shine with the water.</div>
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They have been growing so much. The pass from a clearing to a clearing has been almost disappeared, covered with the long boisterous leaves. But nobody has come. The leaves are curled with sorrow. Their barks have splintered with misery. The dead leaves on the ground are rotting with loneliness.</div>
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The person who is coming now is whistling with his/her hands in the trousers pockets. S/he kicks a pebble on the ground along with some dead leaves. S/he must be relaxed with no worries.</div>
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It is good. The leaves on the trees shiver with anticipation. A person is coming, a person is coming. The information has spread rapidly from a tree to a tree through the leaves.</div>
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It is a man, the trees can see now. He has short black hair and pale skin, medium height, medium weight. He stops now. What is happening? Is he going to change his mind? No. He is smiling to himself. He must be remembering something good. He is a happy person. It is a good sign. A grey pigeon flies above him and drops its poo onto his shoulder. He jumps and looks up, cursing to the bird that has already flown away. </div>
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Does he have a temper? In that situation, anybody could curse. Don’t worry. He is a nice person. He produces a white handkerchief from his trousers pocket and wipes the mess on his shoulder, and then sniffs the handkerchief and winces a little. Not many people carry handkerchiefs nowadays, as far as the trees can see. He must be a neat person. His room could be tidy, all books arranged alphabetically, all shirts stacked by colors, all dishes in drawers, the kitchen sink gleaming. Or he is neat outside and messy inside: dirty dishes stuck in the sink, empty take-away food packages piled on the coffee table in the living room, old newspapers strewn everywhere on the floor, an unmade bed, dirty socks dangling from a chair. Which one is he? He is coming near. He must be long-sighted, since his black-framed glasses show big eyes as if they were about to tumble out of their sockets. His t-shirt says, ‘Just Do It!’ Is that what he does or what he wants to do? His blue jeans have sharp creases. Not many people wear creased jeans. Is he old-fashioned? Or is he strange?</div>
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He is now almost under the trees. He stops again and looks around. Nobody else is around. The park is deserted except for a lone dog sauntering by the gate far away. The man trots into the trees, looks around, and goes behind a thick pine tree. And he starts peeing there. That is what he has come here for. His penis isn’t circumcised. He pees for a long time, sighing, ‘Ahhh.’ Then he zips up and walks away. Lucky pine tree. It’s got bonus nutrition.</div>
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The next day, the sun is smiling in the blue sky again. No trace of black rainloaded clouds. It is good. The trees have had enough water from the long rain to keep going for a while. Two squirrels chase each other from this branch to that branch.</div>
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They are always busy running. But they don’t do anything else. Boring. </div>
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The trees prefer people, who do all sorts of things.</div>
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Who is coming today, if anybody comes? Of course, somebody will come. The rain is gone.</div>
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A middle-aged man comes through the gate, carrying a skateboard under his arm. He puts it down on the paved path and starts riding, or rather practicing. He is clumsy, must still be a beginner. The trees haven’t seen many middle-aged people riding skateboards. He rides for a minute slowly and stops. Then rides again for a short time and stops. He should try to keep riding longer, the trees think.</div>
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Behind the man, a family comes in: a fat father pushing a push chair with a big bag of McDonald’s in his right hand and jingling keys or something in his left hand, and a fat mother with a fat toddler in her arms. The toddler is fingering a dreamcatcher at the end of a leather necklace on her mother’s huge breasts. They are all in tracksuits.</div>
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Those clothes with stretching waists are for fat people, the trees know from watching many kinds of people.</div>
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They come in the trees and sit on the small clearing with the thick pine standing beside it. Lucky pine. Its position attracts many people.</div>
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The mother puts the toddler down by the pine, where the man with creased jeans peed yesterday. The toddler is a girl with very long hair, that drapes onto the dark soil, where the man’s pee soaked happily yesterday. Lucky girl. She will get good nutrition and get big like her parents.</div>
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Not many small people have hair that long. She must have kept her hair without cutting it since she was born. She laughs, punching the pee-soaked soil with her chubby hands. The mother and the father laugh with their daughter. The father gets out hamburgers, fries, pies, muffins, and cups of coke and puts them on the ground. The trees know people usually spread a blanket on the ground and then put their food on it. But this family doesn’t bother to use one. They must be relaxed people. That could be why they are big. They must have eaten whatever they wanted.</div>
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The trees like happy and relaxed people.</div>
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The mother gives a couple of fries to her daughter, who eats one and drops the other. She looks at her mother with big eyes, ready to wail. The mother hurriedly picks it up from the pee-soaked soil and blows the dirt away and gives it back to her daughter. She eats it with a big smile on her face. The parents smile as well.</div>
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They keep eating. The father licks ketchup from his fingers. The mother licks mustard from around her lips. They keep feeding their daughter. They keep talking. The father’s voice goes among the trees. The mother’s voice goes to the sky. They keep feeding their toddler. </div>
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They keep laughing. The father’s big stomach wobbles. The mothers big breasts sway. They keep giving food to their child. Before they have finished all the food, the toddler vomits by her chubby legs. She looks up at her mother. She looks up at her father. Then she starts crying with a big open mouth that still has some half-digested food from her stomach.</div>
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The mother hoists her to her chest. The father pats her heaving back. Then they pack everything into the big McDonald’s bag, put the daughter into the push chair and walk away, leaving the vomit on the ground by the lucky pine.</div>
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They are a happy family.</div>
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The trees look at them with glee.</div>
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The sun is shining. The air is warm. The birds are chatting.</div>
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It is a nice day.</div>
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The dew on the trees’ leaves and undergrowth sparkles in the next morning.</div>
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By lunch time, the park is full of people, lying on the grass, sitting with their hands on the ground, sitting on benches. The sun shines on the unwinding people.</div>
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An ice-cream van comes in and parks by the gate. A man in a yellow t-shirt hops out and starts connecting a couple of cables to a green box on the ground. People start queuing there. The man doesn’t pay any attention to them. Now he is moving some boxes in the van. Two people leave from the line. Three people join the queue.</div>
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At last, he is ready. The two women at the front of the line order soft cones and argue about who will pay. Both try to pay for the other. The next one is a man with a black briefcase, who buys a tub of chocolate ice cream. He sits on a bench and puts the briefcase on his lap as a temporary table. He then produces a sheet of paper from his trousers pocket and starts reading it and eating the ice cream on the make-shift table. The next is a woman in a pink sari.</div>
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She gets two soft cones and carries them to her friend sitting on the lawn.</div>
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The ice-cream business is going very well today.</div>
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A young couple with soft cones with chocolate sticks poking out from the top come to the clearing and sit where the happy toddler vomited yesterday. The woman has a pink sleeveless shirt with green bra straps on her shoulders. The man is in a dark t-shirt that used to be black.</div>
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The trees now believe that people can smell the good nutrition, so they keep sitting there to absorb it. Good for them.</div>
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The young man licks his girl’s soft cone.</div>
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The young woman eats a part of her man’s soft cone. He pats his cone to her face. She shrieks and does the same to the man’s face. He licks the ice cream on her face. She does the same to his face. Then start kissing. The soft cones are abandoned on the ground by the pine. Lucky pine. More food. They lie down with their legs intertwining like tree branches. They pant, not like trees. They gasp, not like trees. He gets on her and starts moving fast. She starts crying out in her mouth that is cupped by his hand. They move together. Good harmony.</div>
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With a shrill high-pitched cry at the same time, they stop. He gets off her and lies next to her with his still biggish penis gleaming with semen.</div>
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The trees have watched their joyful pollination.</div>
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They wish them copious reproduction.</div>
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When they leave, leaning against each other, a little semen is left on top of the girls’ vomit by the pine. How lucky the pine is! They silently cheer the tree’s fortune.</div>
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At night, two people, a man and a woman, come, carrying a big sack and shovels. They start digging a hole by the pine. The man’s pee, the girl’s vomit, and the man’s semen are put aside. They keep digging. It looks they need a big and deep hole. The trees hope they won’t damage the pine’s roots.</div>
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White stars are in their positions. The full moon peeks out from the clouds. The moonlight greets the sack by the digging people. It has some dark stains about the middle and from the top a foot salutes back to the moon. The foot is big and pale even in the dark, with a long second toe that is the same length as the big toe.</div>
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The man’s forehead drops his sweat into the hole. The woman’s cheeks let her sweat fall down into the hole. Lucky pine. It’s got more nutrition.</div>
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Somewhere deep in the trees, an insomniac pigeon coos. A candy froth moon comes out from behind dark clouds. The wide-awake pigeon blinks its eyes.</div>
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Finally, the hole is done. The man and woman push the sack into the hole, with their hands thrusting the bag, their legs kicking the soil, and their bottoms high.</div>
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The sack goes down into the hollow with a thud. The couple draw breath. The pigeon stops blinking. </div>
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Silence.</div>
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The fuzzy moon scurries behind the clouds.</div>
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Big sighs from the people. Blinking from the pigeon.</div>
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They start filling up the hole with the black soil with pee, vomit, semen, and sweat.</div>
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With the ground smoothed out, they leave the dark trees without looking back. The trees know what is in the sack from the smell. Lucky, lucky pine. And lucky, lucky trees around it. That big nourishment is going to be sucked into many trees there.</div>
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Lucky, lucky trees. It is a very good night.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-37018715300948749552013-08-14T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-14T10:00:01.516-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Policies of Polarization<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Policies of Polarization</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Ahmed M. Soliman</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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With the 2012 election now behind us, the country is focused on the importance of uniting again behind our president, and hopefully changing the tone in Washington. It is what we ultimately do as Americans: we aspire to unite in strength and resolve. In fact, it is because our aspiration to solve problems is so innately woven into our DNA as Americans that presidential candidates often make “bridge building” and “changing Washington” a common theme in their campaigns. George W. Bush campaigned on it in 2000, as did Barack Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.</div>
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In 2012, Romney pointed out that Obama had promised to change Washington, but failed to do so because, he argued, Obama was a failed president. The hard truth, however, is that times have changed, and the task of uniting Americans in Washington has become about as feasible as herding mice. But, contrary to the assertions of Mitt Romney and others during the recent campaign, it is not the former community organizer’s fault that Washington remains so divided. Nor was it George Bush’s fault. The fact of the matter is that the divide in America today exists as a matter of public policy, literally enshrined in our modern American law.</div>
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One who wishes to understand why America’s divisions have become so entrenched needs only to examine two critical–and conservative ideologically-driven–policy decisions that have fully fermented in the last 25 years: (1) President Reagan’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine; and (2) conservative Supreme Court Justices’ refusal to rein in gerrymandering.</div>
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The first of the two, the Fairness Doctrine, was a Federal Communications Commission (FCC ) regulation that required broadcasters to provide news and issues-oriented programming that fairly presented opposing viewpoints on controversial subjects. The doctrine’s genesis was the Radio Act of 1927, created to regulate competing signals on the finite radio frequency spectrum. The chief proponent of the bill, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who would later become President Hoover, argued that regulating a limited number of broadcast licenses and requiring the licensees to provide current events programming with opposing points of view satisfied the First Amendment because the freedom of speech listener is paramount over the freedom of the speech maker. </div>
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This concept was upheld as passing First Amendment muster by the Supreme Court in the 1943 decision of National Broadcasting Co. v. United States. The National Broadcasting Co. decision paved the way for the FCC to create the modern Fairness Doctrine in 1949. Specifically, the FCC required broadcast media licensees to: (1) provide coverage of vitally important and controversial issues of interest in the community served by licensees; and (2) provide a reasonable opportunity for the presentation of contrasting viewpoints on such issues.</div>
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The Fairness Doctrine was the key regulation of news broadcasters for nearly forty years, until its demise in 1989, when President Ronald Reagan’s tidal wave of deregulation washed it away. The official removal of the Fairness Doctrine began in 1987, when the FCC repealed the doctrine as contrary to the public interest. The Democratic-controlled Congress then passed a law reversing the FCC ruling. However, President Reagan vetoed that law in 1989, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had again ruled the Fairness Doctrine to be constitutional in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC.</div>
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The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine at the conclusion of the 1980s paved the way for a slew of unchallenged right-wing broadcasts on radio and on television throughout the 1990s. They included the program of Rush Limbaugh on AM radio, and the subsequent introduction of Fox News on cable television. The ratings bonanza of those media efforts soon caused another television news network to follow suit and abandon its self-imposed commitment to a fair presentation of both sides of controversial issues: MSNBC shifted toward an unchallenged liberal presentation of current events.</div>
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In presenting only one perspective on any given issue discussed in the new kind of broadcast news, “news channels” often leave out information that their audiences deem unfavorable as well as challenges to inaccurate information. This causes the audience of one channel to base their judgments on a myriad of issues upon a different set of perceived facts than those presented to an audience of another channel. The subsequent result upon public perceptions of current events and issues has been catastrophic.</div>
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It has left much of the country in a grossly misinformed bubble, and severely polarized. Whereas, in the past, Americans had different opinions based on the same set of facts, the current trend is toward large groups of Americans having different opinions and different understandings of the facts. As a consequence, each group often accuses the members of the other group of “lying” in their factual assertions during debate, or being severely “stupid.”</div>
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For example, in a December 2010 World Public Opinion.org poll, a whopping 63% of those who watched Fox News incorrectly believed that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States or that it was unclear whether he was. Only 39% of MSNBC viewers were operating under that same incorrect information. Additionally, an incredibly high 63% of Fox News viewers also incorrectly believed that President Obama’s economic stimulus package in 2009 did not include any tax cuts, whereas only 34% of MSNBC viewers believed the same thing. Likewise, 60% of MSNBC viewers erroneously believed that the US Chamber of Commerce was spending foreign money to back Republican candidates in the 2010 Congressional elections, whereas only 23% of Fox News viewers were under the same misguided impression. As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.” At least they didn’t used to be.</div>
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The primary argument of opponents of the Fairness Doctrine is that it chills coverage, rather than expands it. Specifically, they argue that the burden of finding and airing an opposing point of view for every issue they would like to present has proven to be cumbersome and, as a result, many broadcasters end up abandoning or avoiding coverage of issues altogether. This arguments, however, fails scrutiny in light of the fact that: (1) the Fairness Doctrine was successfully practiced for decades; and (2) cable news networks such as CNN continue to act under a self-imposed fairness doctrine, and have had no apparent trouble in covering the same issues that their competitors cover. In fact, as the polling cited has already shown, without the Fairness Doctrine, there is a chilling effect on the public’s understanding of facts and issues. </div>
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The Fairness Doctrine did not take away from free speech. To the contrary, it ensured speech of multiple perspectives on any given issue, thereby painting a complete and accurate picture. Take, for example, television coverage of two controversial rulings from the United States Supreme Court: whether the state can execute individuals who were under 18 years of age at the time of their capital crimes, and whether a law prohibiting consenting male adults from engaging in acts of sodomy is constitutional.</div>
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Following the Court’s citation to foreign law in Roper and Lawrence, many conservatives in the media who did not approve of the Court’s opinions led the public to believe that such a use of foreign law is unprecedented (therefore implying that the basis of the rulings were invalid).</div>
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One such incident was when Sean Hannity of Fox News said that what concerns him most about the Roper (or Lawrence) decision is “Justice Kennedy in particular, he’s citing in this particular case foreign law, which is almost unprecedented.”</div>
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Hannity’s like-minded guest responded to Hannity’s statement, saying, “It is unprecedented... It’s unprecedented in terms of citing law, or using a law for basis of overturning a state law as it’s done here… In [Lawrence] they actually relied on foreign law.” Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly cited foreign sources of law in various rulings since the birth of the nation.</div>
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However, the opposing side of the issue was not presented, therefore Hannity went uncorrected, and Hannity’s viewers were left misinformed as well. In this country, we have freedom of any speech including at times inaccurate and misleading speech but we now have situations in which the inaccurate or misleading speech is disguised and aired as a factually correct “current events program” that is aired on a “news channel” that labels itself as “fair and balanced.” Such branding explains why people believe the assertions of opinion program hosts to be factually true, even when they are not.</div>
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Despite the controversial debate surrounding the possible reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, the political reality is that the doctrine currently has little chance of being implemented again. President Obama and the Republican majority in the House of Representatives oppose reinstating the Fairness Doctrine for two primary reasons: (1) the government can’t regulate cable channels or the Internet the way regulating the limited radio frequency spectrum could be justified; and (2) reinstating the Fairness Doctrine would be painted as a pro-active attempt at quashing freedom of speech. In short, new media (including the Internet) has gotten used to being as partisan as it wants, and it’s impossible to put toothpaste back in the tube.</div>
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The second–and equally damaging–law that makes it nearly impossible to unite Washington is gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is defined as the practice of dividing a geographical area into electoral districts, often of highly irregular shape, to give one political party an unfair advantage by diluting the opposition’s voting strength. The average American does not realize that Congressional districts are drawn by state legislatures. The legislatures of each state must use the changes in state populations and subsequent shifting number of seats that any given state will have in Congress, as demonstrated by US Census information, to conduct the redistricting.</div>
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As a state gains or loses seats, the Congressional districts of that state must be redrawn. The party in control of the state legislature uses gerrymandering to draw the districts in such a way that the incumbents of their party represent as many conservative, or liberal, neighborhoods as possible. This not only helps to ensure the reelection of the incumbent candidate, it also means that the Republican or Democratic candidate no longer has to consider the demands of a moderate or diverse constituency; they need only represent the interests of an ideologically monotone constituency. In fact, compromising with the opposing party would yield no reward among the representative’s constituency, many of whom are living in the bubble of their partisan news media, and therefore entrenched in their positions.</div>
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Although the practice of gerrymandering has been challenged in the courts, the conservative justices of the Supreme Court have refused to end it. In Vieth v. Jubelirer, the Court was faced with a case in which the 2000 Census reduced the number of congressional seats in Pennsylvania from 21 to 19 and the Republican dominated state legislature assumed the task of drawing a new districting map. The plan was designed to give Republicans 13 of the 19 congressional seats, even though the two political parties shared almost equal support among the overall Pennsylvania electorate.</div>
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The negative consequence of such an act was not only political. It was also legally damaging to the non Republican constituency, whose votes were diluted by being intentionally placed in a district in which they were a minority voice. Opponents of the move saw that as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution.</div>
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The Supreme Court disagreed on how such cases should be adjudicated, and whether they were even justiciable. The conservative majority ruled that gerrymandering is a political issue best left to the political branches, and not justiciable by the Court. In dissent, Justice Stevens had proposed a legal test for what qualifies as illegal gerrymandering. Stevens proposed to examine whether partisan considerations dominate over neutral considerations. If there is no identifiable neutral criterion used that can justify the district lines, and if the only possible explanation for the district’s bizarre shape is a desire to increase party strength, there is a valid partisan gerrymandering claim under the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. Justice Scalia, however, successfully convinced the majority of the Court that Stevens’ test was not practical, because, unlike a racial gerrymandering case, political gerrymandering cases are not apparent on their face (i.e. political leanings are not as judicially discoverable as race is). Justices Rehnquist, O’Connell and Thomas joined Scalia in his ruling.</div>
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More recently, Democrats have cited gerrymandering as the reason why, in the 2012 election, the House of Representatives remained in the control of the Republicans, even though Barack Obama was able to win the presidency. Speaker of the House John Boehner said that the election results showed that the American people did not want to have any taxes raised. But such an interpretation would require one to believe that the American electorate is, as NBC broadcaster Tom Brokaw described it, “schizophrenic,” in that they vote for a House of Representatives that will not raise taxes on the wealthy, while simultaneously voting for a President that will.</div>
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Such an interpretation of the election results fails scrutiny. The inconsistent voting is more indicative of how difficult gerrymandering has made unseating an incumbent Congressperson. Nonetheless, the effects of the election are undeniable: a polarized Congress in which each representative has an ideologically-strict constituency that would vote them out of office for compromising their ideals. While lameduck sessions–which lack the political consequence of regular sessions–provide rare opportunities for compromise, they do not last long.</div>
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But despite the consequences of these two policies, changing Washington is still possible. There’s a role for the American citizen to play in effecting change. Specifically, the American citizen can foster a public discourse that moves people toward common understandings by seeking legislative reform of gerrymandering, and boycotting networks such as Fox News and MSNBC for being nothing more than echo chambers. Indeed, the American citizen can use the same incentive to eliminate partisan programming that created them in the first place: ratings. If people stop tuning in to Fox News and MSNBC, those networks will quickly rethink their platform, and hopefully return to the journalistic values that CNN still adheres to.</div>
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Unless and until that happens, President Obama will be faced with public opinion that is deeply divided thanks to the partisan and unfair presentations of our media, and a Congress that has little incentive to compromise due to the legally-sanctioned practice of gerrymandering. It is a climate that other Presidents including the Roosevelts, Kennedy and Reagan did not have to contend with. It makes the task of uniting Washington under a common purpose extremely difficult.</div>
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In fact, if President Obama is to pull it off, he can only do it in the same way that the famed Pied Piper finally found a way to herd his mice: he will have to somehow find a tune that everyone can get behind, despite all the challenges that are memorialized in our current public policy. One can only hope that he, and future presidents, finds the right tune.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-63438222426284472622013-08-13T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-13T10:00:03.023-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Aldous Huxley Revisited<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Aldous Huxley Revisited</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Hugh Mercer Curtler</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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A few years before I retired from college teaching, I was asked to direct a freshman course designed to introduce new students to the university. It was a one-credit course that met for one hour each week. I was especially excited about the academic portion of the course which focused on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I have always thought the novel was a great book–not great literature, as Huxley himself admitted, but remarkable for its prescience and the well-told tale that holds the reader’s attention and raises so many provocative questions.</div>
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My plan was to have a professor from English, biology, psychology, and philosophy each talk about the novel from the perspective of their particular disciplines. I thought this would not only give the students insights into the novel itself, but also give them an idea how different academic disciplines approach problems: killing two birds with one stone.</div>
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Well, like a stone tossed into the air, the plan fell with a thud. An astonishing number of the students couldn’t read the novel: they couldn’t understand the words. Many of them bought “Cliff Notes” and some of them complained they couldn’t understand those either. Others simply didn’t bother to buy the book at all; many students just dropped the course. Very few actually seemed to enjoy the experiment. We started with over two hundred students and ended up with a little over one hundred. The course evaluations filled out by the remaining students were nearly unanimous: what does this have to do with me?</div>
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I would like to take the opportunity in this short essay to answer that question. I think Huxley’s novel has everything to do with not only those students, members of what some like to call the “millennial” age, but also about all of us and, more to the point, about our culture. The book is set in the future in London, but it applies to all of Western culture and, increasingly, many Eastern cultures as well.</div>
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Let me begin by alluding to another provocative book written in 1985 by Neil Postman, to wit, Amusing Ourselves To Death, in which he promises to discuss the question whether Huxley might have been right in his predictions in the 1930s about what was to become of Western culture. In his “Foreword,” Postman contrasts Huxley’s remarkable book with Orwell’s equally remarkable book, 1984. I shall largely ignore what Postman said about Orwell, but will take a quick peek at what he said about Huxley since it is most apt and provides an excellent point of departure.</div>
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In America, especially, we love to boast about our freedoms, which we would insist are numerous. But I often wonder if it is possible that this freedom is merely an illusion. Huxley certainly suggests that it is. We have a great many choices, but we seldom think about those choices. Freedom would seem to presuppose some sort of thought process, not just unfettered reaching and grabbing. Is it possible that our conviction that we are a free people is a delusion? Is it possible at the very least that we are bound by invisible chains we are unaware of to the gadgets that make our lives easier?</div>
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In Huxley’s view, Postman tells us, “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” Anyone who claims it is possible to remain free despite their inability to think is indeed deluded. Moreover, “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” Further, Huxley feared that we would be so inundated with information that “we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalence of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.” Now we don’t have those specific diversions, but we do have Disneyworld and its imitators; and we have countless games, around the clock sports, and “reality” TV. And if you live in the vicinity and have a spare $150.00 you can enjoy a “simulated killing of bin Laden experience” in a Minneapolis suburb that will leave you so jazzed up you will have trouble falling asleep the night after. Or so I am told.</div>
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In a word, “As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’” In 1984, Postman added, “people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we loved would ruin us.” With this as a preface, I will return to the students’ question: what does this have to do with me?</div>
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The fundamental similarity between Huxley’s world, and ours is that the sole purpose of human life in Brave New World centers around experiencing pleasure, which we too have come to identify with happiness. As is the case in Huxley’s world everything in our world has been jettisoned that might stand in the way of our enjoying ourselves. Sex is readily available with no strings attached. Marriage is becoming passé. We have limitless entertainment. We are not permitted to suffer. We are rapidly losing the desire to read. History is bunk (or “irrelevant” as the kids like to say); and if we are sick or sad we can just take a pill. . . . or two. Or we party hardy.</div>
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The novel predicts a day when citizens can flee from pain and anxiety by popping a pill. The citizens of Brave New World fill their lives with endless diversions and vapid gratifications, immediate and shallow–but certainly not fulfilling. It’s all about doing their thing, whether or not it’s worth doing. Indeed that question is never raised. History is bunk, of course, because the only thing that matters is the present moment and the pleasure that can be milked from that moment. The citizens of Brave New World have “ . . . no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think.”</div>
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There are no meaningful human relationships, and communities are tied together artificially by means of community sings, free sex, and heaps of Soma. The community matters because the brave new world cannot stand individuals, that is, those who stand apart. If the individual dares to assert himself, he is deported to an island where he cannot bother others who are intent on making sure they never have time to think or experience genuine human emotions.</div>
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Let’s consider the dialogue between Mustafa Mond, the Controller of Brave New World, and John the savage, a late-arriver who has spent his early years on a savage reservation in far-off America trying unsuccessfully to fit in and finding solace by reading Shakespeare. In one of the late chapters of Huxley’s novel John asks Mustapha, “Art, science–you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness. Anything else?” </div>
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Mond replies, “Well, religion, of course…” </div>
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And the conversation proceeds apace. But let us pause. Have we also sacrificed science to pleasure or happiness? Of course we have. We have done it in two stages: we first reduced science to technology, ignoring the “why” question that is central to theoretical science and focusing exclusively on the “how” question which is key to the technical approach to solving problems, easing pain, and making our lives easier. Among other blessings, this reduction has delivered to the world in excess of 80,000 nuclear weapons, a fraction of which can end all life on earth. And we have no idea why but we continue to produce them not knowing how we would ever use them. But for most of us the technological imperative translates into reducing stress and avoiding pain at all costs while we mindlessly pursue diversions that will fill our empty lives. In the second stage we have allowed pseudo-science to pass for the real thing and even to be taught in the schools. An alarming number of high school biology teachers, for example, teach their students that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. And then there is “creationism” posing as science in many schools–officially sanctioned in Texas–and the various biological fictions that lead half-witted politicians who deny climate change to speak with a straight face about “legitimate” rape.</div>
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We have also replaced religion with “pop” psychology, the analyst’s couch, and the escapist “religion” of the televangelist, and so many of the “free” churches that have sprung out of thin air. The idea here is to get in touch with our inner selves and to replace the uncomfortable demands of traditional religion–which requires sacrifice and self-denial–with feel-good sessions every week in which parishioners are told that all is well with the world and they should climb back into their SUVs or pickups and go on doing just what they want in the name of Jesus who loves them regardless (though we’re not sure about those damned secular humanists. And we sure as hell can’t stand the homosexuals).</div>
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But we need to think seriously about the elimination of all pain and suffering in our version of brave new world. We take it as a given that this is a good thing, but the savage may be right: it’s too easy. We might be much better off if we struggled and suffered a bit more, strange to say. Fyodor Dostoevsky, for one, thought suffering made us more human and was the only possible route to real human freedom. If we don’t suffer, we float along on the surface of human experience and never really feel the deprivations and losses that deepen our perspectives and bring us closer to one another and to our common humanity.</div>
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Furthermore, as we are now finding out, a society that revels in animal pleasures will rarely produce a Jane Austen, a George Eliot, a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, a Dostoevsky, a Beethoven, or a Dante. All of these people suffered during their lifetimes and many of their greatest creative inspirations came as a direct result of some of the darkest moments in their lives. Dante, for example, wrote The Divine Comedy while exiled from Florence where his family was held captive. Mustapha Mond thinks the sacrifice of great art and literature is worth it. The savage who knows his Shakespeare disagrees.</div>
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In a word, the brave new world we would create which eliminates pain and suffering is worthy of denizens of an ant-heap (as Dostoevsky would have it); it is not worthy of human beings. That, it seems to me, was Huxley’s point in writing this novel, and the fact that young people could read the novel and wonder what on earth it could have to do with them tells us that the chains Huxley points to which bind them are indeed invisible to them. These people seek amusement and are easily diverted; that is all they ask of the world in which they live–just as Huxley feared.</div>
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Among the many parallels with Huxley’s world, we too have become a society of people who want what we want when we want it. I have always thought a major step we took in our culture toward the brave new world was the credit card, strange to say. It came on the scene in a large way in the 1950s and within ten years had pretty much become a necessity in every pocket or pocketbook. In itself it is merely a convenient way to make purchases. But its significance is worth contemplating: it translates into immediate gratification. We no longer have to wait for anything, we can have it now. “Have any of you been compelled to live through a long time-interval between consciousness of a desire and its fulfillment?” asks Huxley. No indeed! It doesn’t matter if we can’t pay: we have plastic. But what have we lost in the process? What price have we paid? Anticipation greatly increases the delight from the receipt of a thing long awaited. And the discipline that comes from postponed gratification helps build character in our children. We tend to forget these things.</div>
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In the end Huxley saw clearly what was coming; we have realized in so many ways precisely the delights that those denizens of the ant-heap in Huxley’s world reached out for and grabbed with little or no real effort. And we have become just as shallow. It is ironic (but not puzzling) that many who read Huxley’s book fail to see its implications.</div>
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I suggest, however, that it is not Huxley’s fault; it is ours alone. In this regard it might pay us to take a closer look at those students who wondered what this novel had to do with them, the representatives of the “millennial” age (or “Gen-Y”), many of whom find novels like Huxley’s hard to read and/or irrelevant to their lives.</div>
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A new study of “Millennials” summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education tells us a great deal. The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and was conducted by Jean M. Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University. In the minds of many, the newest generation of young people now attending high school and college were the hope of the future, committed to helping others and making the world a better place. They would surely clean up the mess we are leaving behind. Unfortunately it happens that the generation that was supposed to be “we”-oriented turns out to be even more “me”-oriented than the generation that produced them.</div>
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The study shows that, contrary to popular opinion, those born since 1982 are increasingly self-absorbed and unconcerned about others or their environment. They are focused on “money, image, and fame” rather than such things as “community involvement or acceptance by others.” Countering the popular image of today’s youth as engaged, high-achieving, confident, and concerned about their world, Twenge rejoins, “I see no evidence that today’s young people feel much attachment to duty or to group cohesion. Young people have been consistently taught to put their own needs first and to focus on feeling good about themselves.”</div>
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The article appeared in a recent issue of the Chronicle because educators were being alerted that the students in their classrooms may not be the least bit interested in what they are being taught. This will come as no surprise to the men and women in front of those students who have become increasingly aware that it’s all about entertainment and dumbing down the curriculum to disengaged students. I saw it happening before my eyes in my 41 years of college teaching. I mentioned above my unfortunate experience with the freshman course, but I can readily recall other examples. As the years went by since I started teaching in 1964, I simply could not ask the students in 1990 to read the same material I routinely required twenty years previously.</div>
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Their reading skills were seriously lacking and their interest in and openness to new ideas was practically nil, though there were occasional exceptions that kept me hoping. We should not be surprised if the young people growing up today are self-absorbed. After all, theirs is the world of “self-esteem” in which they have been told since day #1 that they are great and can do no wrong.</div>
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Indeed, they have developed an iron-clad sense of entitlement that leads them to the conviction that they are the only ones that matter and they deserve only good things. They are the spoiled product of busy families and our child-care and education system that demands little and rewards greatly. The chickens are coming home to roost.</div>
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But this study has important implications for more than just the teachers around the country who must figure a way to get through to increasingly disengaged, self-absorbed young people. It has ramifications for society in general. As Twenge says, “Having a population that is civically involved, is interested in helping others, and interested in the problems in the nation and the world, are generally good things.” But this is not happening. These young people are “more isolated and wrapped up in their own problems. It doesn’t bode well for society.” In a word, the individualism that Huxley hoped would save the Brave New World has in our world turned into ego-centrism, which is not the same thing at all.</div>
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At a time when we need people who can see beyond the stunted world of self to others and the larger world, it is unsettling to learn that the trend is in the opposite direction. What the world needs now is not more self absorbed egoists, it needs heroes whose attention is directed outward and who care about the world and people around them. Let’s hope enough of them continue to sneak through the cracks the system has put in place to make a difference.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-1533298487786487812013-08-12T10:00:00.000-07:002013-08-12T10:00:01.116-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Lincoln and Radical Defense of Liberty<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Lincoln and Radical Defense of Liberty</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Olav Bryant Smith</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the February 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln began a speech with these words at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”</div>
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The speech became known as the Gettysburg Address. It is widely known as one of the great speeches in human history. One aspect of its greatness is that it re-asserts a principle of American political philosophy as the touchstone of our republic–this principle that “all men are created equal.”</div>
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Nations–as opposed to a collection of more-or-less isolated individuals, or individual states–must have some philosophical principles that guide it through thick and thin, and bind together an otherwise disparate population. Teddy Roosevelt astutely pointed to the real power of the presidency when he referred to his “bully pulpit.” Time and time again, it is the president’s primary role to rally and unify the nation around one or more foundational principles.</div>
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For Lincoln, it was the principles of liberty and equality, and the preservation of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” I turn to Lincoln in this issue partly because February is the month that we celebrate the birthdays of Washington (22nd) and Lincoln (12th). But I turn to Lincoln especially because the movie sensation of late autumn was Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, with a wonderful screenplay written by Tony Kushner, and with Lincoln portrayed by actor Daniel Day-Lewis.</div>
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In the first 26 days, Lincoln grossed almost $86 million in ticket sales. As I watched this film in a local theater, twice, I saw a wide variety of citizens (from young to old), wanting to participate in this democratic experiment of ours, on the edge of their seats as they waited anxiously to find out the resolution of a story that was in fact resolved 150 years ago. What was the hook? Why were we drawn to a movie about the struggle between a president and congressional leaders over a legislative action taken during the Civil War? What does this interest say about us as a people? Why are we drawn to the feet of Lincoln once again to learn what it is to be American?</div>
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One clue, I believe, is that Spielberg has repeatedly directed films that reveal heroes in struggles of good versus evil. The great dramas of world history are always struggles of good versus evil, though it is not always easy for those caught up in the struggles to recognize their own evil. World War II has provided the backdrop to a number of Spielberg’s films, such as Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. This time, Spielberg has clearly recognized an opportunity in something much closer to home. In his films about World War II, we never stray far from the fact and horror of the Holocaust.</div>
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In this film about Lincoln, we never stray far from the fact and horror of slavery. The film begins after Lincoln’s second term has begun and African-American troops had begun to serve in the Union Army. Using special war-time powers, Lincoln had freed slaves through executive fiat–The Emancipation Proclamation. But he was concerned that this would not hold up in the courts in the long run. Thus, a constitutional amendment was introduced, and had been passed by the Senate once, but had subsequently failed in the House. With the closing days of the war ahead, Lincoln was determined to see it through to passage this second time before reuniting with the southern states.</div>
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Familiar enough to contemporary ears, we learn of a divided Congress. Deals would have to be made to assure enough Democratic votes to reach the required majority of two-thirds. The amendment had failed the first time due to a vote strictly on party lines: Lincoln’s Republican Party voting in favor, and Democrats voting against. The film thus becomes an entertaining adventure of political wrestling and intrigue as Lincoln’s administration, led by Secretary of State Seward, unites various factions of Republicans and attempts to win over Democrats by any means possible.</div>
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The movie is great fun, and I leave it at that, recommending that you see it for yourself. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln has left many of us in awe. Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals,1 when she saw the film, said that she felt like she’d seen the real Lincoln.</div>
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In real life, we are often confused by the issues. Lulled to sleep and complacency by the habits and ethos of our own culture and times, it is not always easy to see the evil in our midst. In fact, Lincoln once called a speech by Stephen Douglas about the harmlessness of leaving the issue of slavery to the voters in the new Kansas-Nebraska Territory a “lullaby.” We are too often lulled to sleep by words that suggest we can rest satisfied with lives where we have needed to sacrifice little.</div>
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In a time much nearer to us than the Civil War, it happened in Germany. But it is always easier to see the foibles of the distant past and one’s enemies. One wonders in retrospect how millions of otherwise good Germans could have allowed the gross inhumanity to man that the Nazis perpetrated against their Jewish population and others.</div>
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But it was accepted during “hard times” (and so many times are “hard times”) as a “necessary evil.” The German people were suffering, wanted a way forward, and were convinced by Nazi rhetoric that it was necessary to galvanize the German people into a military force opposed to the rest of Europe and against a significant portion of its own population.</div>
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In the same way, one wonders how millions of otherwise good Americans could have rested comfortably with the idea that so many of our African-American sisters and brothers were hopelessly enslaved for the entirety of their lives. The same sort of lulling to sleep and complacency of accepting a “necessary evil” was at work. Also, consciences were appeased with absurd rationalizations of the inhumanity of those with dark skin. In fact, we should not forget that these rationalizations were still widely used to support segregation in the south as late as the 1970s. Only concerted political challenge over decades led to the changing of the hearts and minds of a majority of southerners on that point.</div>
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Slavery had been an institution implicitly acknowledged in the US Constitution. That slaves (referred to as “all others” as opposed to “free persons”) were to count as 3/5 of a person was an ugly compromise of the Constitution that would later have to be amended. The Founding Fathers, North and South, were drawn together in the fight for liberty against a common foe: the King of England. The battle over slavery would have to wait, and hence the concept of states’ rights was born for this, among other reasons. Goodwin writes: At the time the Constitution was adopted, Lincoln pointed out, “the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity” since slavery was already woven into the fabric of American society. Noting that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” was ever mentioned in the Constitution, Lincoln claimed that the framers concealed it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise nevertheless, that cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”</div>
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From a northern point of view, slavery was seen as a necessary evil that was to be contained like a disease until it came to a natural end. But a series of events suggested to Lincoln’s generation that the disease was spreading. Things almost came to a head in 1820 with the emergence of the new state of Missouri. But Henry Clay of Kentucky was among those who suggested the Missouri Compromise, allowing slavery in Missouri, but in no other state in the North.</div>
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Then, in 1845, many Northerners (such as Lincoln, Thoreau, and Emerson) opposed the Mexican-American War and the annexation of Texas as an unjust war threatening to expand slavery further south and west. Clay again oversaw the 1850 Compromise, which admitted California as a “free” state, but expanded slavery into other newly emerging western territories. Goodwin tells the story of Lincoln’s shocked reaction to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act: He told his companion [a fellow circuit court counselor] – “I tell you, [T.L.] Dickey, this nation cannot exist halfslave and half-free.” Lincoln later affirmed that the successful passage of the bill roused him “as he had never been before.” It permanently recast his views on slavery. He could no longer maintain that slavery was on course to ultimate extinction. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise persuaded him that unless the North mobilized into action against the proslavery forces, free society itself was in peril.</div>
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Another factor that proved to be a tipping point for Lincoln and other northerners was the Fugitive Slave Act, which was part of the Compromise of 1850. As Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us: I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave Institution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa or the Feejees, for me. There was an old fugitive law, but it had become, or was fast becoming a dead letter, and by the genius and laws of Massachusetts, inoperative. The new Bill made it operative, required me to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors. Moreover, it discloses the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was becoming aggressive and dangerous.</div>
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In this way, slavery became the focus of the 1860 election. Lincoln defeated Douglas, immediately prompting the secession of southern states. Lincoln offered continued containment as a way to avoid secession and war, but the South was determined to fight this out. Two years of bloody battles in the South, with little Union success, followed. Union forces fared better in the west under Ulysses S. Grant, but the heart of the war was in the east. Knowing that they must do more than endure Union attacks, the Confederate forces of General Robert E. Lee made their strike into the North. It was only with terrible losses at Antietam and Gettysburg that the tide of the war turned against the Confederate army.</div>
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It is widely known that Lincoln suffered many disappointments due to a lack of aggressiveness on the part of several generals, and that he finally brought Grant in from the West to take charge of the Union armies and end the war. It was with the end of the war in sight that Lincoln moved to make permanent through Constitutional amendment the freedoms he had already granted through executive fiat–the Emancipation Proclamation.</div>
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Usually there are deeper philosophical principles at work when things seem to be going awry. As different as Nazi Germany and the US are, the “lulling to sleep” I mentioned above may have similar roots. George Will, in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft, has pointed to a danger built into modern Western political thinking from Machiavelli and Hobbes, through Locke, and beyond to our times. Rejecting the classical theory of natural law and all it applies, these modern political philosophers started from the assumption that all human beings are motivated primarily by self-interest.</div>
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Rather than offering a suggestion to encourage a sense of the common good, and service thereto, many modern political philosophers have defined the “public good” (the common good by another name) as what arises spontaneously from individuals pursuing their own self-interest. Will argues that the West has slipped from a belief in natural law, with eternal principles and a divine source of guidance, to a belief in the construction of social institutions as the driver of history, to a belief in the power of individuals, sometimes “heroic” individuals alone, to chart the course of nations. Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “overman” may not have perfectly dovetailed with Nazism, but Nazism was able to build on Nietzsche’s destruction of “thou shalts” and his call to the primacy of the individual will of great men.</div>
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In the liberal democracies of the West, this theory of self-interest has been tied to the idea of free-market capitalism. The invisible hand guiding us, taught Adam Smith, brings our self-interested exchanges in the marketplace around to the best-to-be-hoped-for public good. Everything gets reduced to bargains in a marketplace. This is so much the case that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get accepted in the competition of the market.”</div>
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Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s primary political rival at both the state and national levels, reduced the question of slavery to economics when he said in a campaign debate against Lincoln: We of Illinois have decided it for ourselves. We tried slavery, kept it for twelve years, and finding that it was not profitable we abolished it for that reason.</div>
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Upon hearing this, Lincoln responded: This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. . . . I hate it because it deprives our republic an example of its just influence in the world–enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because its forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty–criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.</div>
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The hypocrisy of tolerating slavery while claiming that the nation was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” defined the election of 1860 for Lincoln. It had to be overcome either by containment or war. He preferred the former, but was forced into the latter by the South. It may have been an economic issue for Douglas, but it was a deeply personal issue for Republicans like Lincoln and Henry Seward, who became his Secretary of State after losing the nomination to Lincoln.</div>
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Goodwin describes how Seward and his brilliant and influential wife Frances took a trip to Virginia in 1835, and were overwhelmed by what they saw. Henry Seward wrote, “How deeply the curse of slavery is set upon this venerated and storied region of the old dominion.” Henry recounted one experience that stayed with him through the rest of his life: Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two by two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope, up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep. Frances demanded that they halt their journey and return to the North. She wrote: “Sick of slavery and the South, the evil effects constantly coming before me and marring everything.”</div>
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There are some things that matter more than money, and one of those things is the dignity of our fellow human beings before God and before the law. This is something that movie viewers want to be reminded of when they flock to Spielberg’s film. It is right to be concerned with the manipulative political power of money in our country, and the so-called “conservative” defense of the use of those powers at the expense of the rest of the nation. Could it be that the true conservative, as Will suggested, should be cautious about defining the government as a villain and defending laissez-faire economics? Should the true conservative be more concerned about values than money? And could it be that the government is useful in defining the character of our nation?</div>
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Lincoln was born in 1809. Thomas Jefferson’s presidency had just ended, and Madison’s was just beginning. Lincoln’s generation revered the Founding Fathers, and they saw themselves in a privileged position. With that privilege, they recognized a responsibility. They were determined to move beyond the limits their fathers’ generation had necessarily struggled under as they moved toward independence from Britain, to take advantage of the opportunities that had been won for them, and to spread that freedom to as much of the rest of mankind as possible. Goodwin writes: It was a country for young men. “We find ourselves,” the twenty-eight-year-old Lincoln told the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, “in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The founding fathers had crafted a government more favorable to liberty “than any of which the history of former times tells us.” </div>
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Now it was up to their children to preserve and expand the great experiment. These passages capture concisely, I believe, the spirit that draws us in to a film like Lincoln. We, too, generations later, find ourselves in the midst of “the great experiment,” and recognize the weight of that responsibility. The question now, as it was then, remains whether we can govern ourselves at all, in the first place, and, secondly, whether we can, and in what ways, expand that freedom. The question now, as it was then, is whether we are a people guided only by self-interest, or whether there are principles that transcend self-interest. As historical observers, we enter back into the fray of the Civil War to learn what lessons can be taught about the limits to freedom and how we, as a people, can learn to overcome them in the midst of contentious political dynamics.</div>
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Barry Goldwater, as the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, spoke these now famous words written by his speechwriter Karl Hess, who thereafter became one of the primary spokespersons for the libertarian movement in America: “I would remind you that extremism in the defensive of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” There are times when radical response is necessary, especially when justice is at stake. As John Cobb wrote in “The Importance of Being Radical” (Empirical, July 2012): [M]odern society has needed radicals as much as earlier. A century ago, few voices were pointing out that American society was rooted in racism and sexism. The vast majority of Americans dismissed such talk as ‘radical’ and therefore irrelevant. They were right that it was radical. But these radical voices finally forced themselves into the public consciousness. More and more people recognized that the call for radical change had truth and righteousness on its side…. The work of radicals has changed society radically. Even many who were once irritated and even angered by them are now grateful for their work.</div>
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In most cases, it is true that one can hardly go wrong abiding by principles of moderation. But in the face of extreme injustice, protected by the current ethos of a particular culture–especially when that culture has become blind to the evils of its own ethos–it is necessary to step outside of the common refrain and sound the radical call to change in one’s own time.</div>
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That is what people are drawn to in the story of Lincoln. He is a bigger-than-life heroic figure who, along with Seward and other members of Lincoln’s “team of rivals,” answers the call of conscience to stand up to injustice–even at the cost of his own life. It is a story of the passionate pursuit of the attainment of liberty, and the expansion of that liberty. That is always a radical notion, coming (as it does) as a challenge to conventional wisdom.</div>
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Lincoln paid for his leadership soon thereafter with his life. The sadness of his loss reverberates through history to create a heaviness in our hearts almost 150 years later. The Civil War has become for us, as citizens of the United States of America, a mythological symbol of the fight of the forces of good against the forces of evil.</div>
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Myths, in the truest sense of the word (and not in the disparaging sense) are stories that lift up truths about reality that purely descriptive language can’t get at. We can participate in myths, allow those myths to become a part of us, and allow our own egos to give way to the higher ideals contained within the myths.</div>
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Thankfully, we have rid ourselves of the accursed disease that was institutional slavery. But we face other diseases in our midst that must be eliminated, including other kinds of slavery just as vile–human trafficking and the sweatshop labor that we support through the demand for cheap goods from overseas. History offers the possibility of a purification of the human spirit. The evils of our own time seem subtle and debatable to us only because we have become accustomed to them. They are part of our ethos, these “necessary evils” that we tolerate because they seem so difficult to overcome.</div>
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They are tolerated, too, because of individual self-interest and the worry that upsetting the proverbial apple cart will lead to personal economic adversity. May we reach a stage of maturity where we can do our own part to stand up to the injustices of our age. We must become radicals, reaching first for the root of those evils in our own hearts, only thereafter to see and remove the root of those evils in the world around us.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-16699168648258279242013-08-08T08:06:00.002-07:002013-08-08T14:41:51.408-07:00Picktures and Pieces 29: Easy as 3-6-9<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">by Randall Auxier</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">At the moment, a dollar will buy you 6 Swedish Crowns, roughly.
The Swedes decided not to convert to the euro, a decision that is looking
better every day. It comes as no surprise to the Swedes. It is not that Swedes
can’t be surprised, but perhaps they are just a bit more down to earth than
your average sub-ethnicity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">Decorum is important here, and so
we will not speak of snubbing the EU, or of self-interest above common
interest. We won’t mention neutrality in the Second World War, while the Danes
were annexed, the Norwegians conquered and occupied, while the Fins were
obliged to choose between Stalin and Hitler (and no win proposition if ever I
heard one).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">But people of questionable self-control remark in this
country (in soft voices) that the Nazis, examining their task of world
domination, stopped in Sweden, looked around, said: “everything is in order
here,” and passed on –to the great relief of the Swedes, one supposes. I have
never heard anyone express disappointment at Swedish neutrality, really. I
think anyone who can read a map can see that a declaration of neutrality was
worth trying. Resistance was futile and more could be done to aid the cause of
good from a neutral position than from contributing a few hundred thousand
Swedish corpses to the pile. It isn’t an accident that the Swedes played such a
crucial role in the formation and stabilization of the United Nations after the
war.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">Like the current troubles of the EU, the coming of peace was
foreseeable, and had Hitler prevailed, we still would have needed the Swedes.
Indeed, they would have been even more important to that world (may we never
see it, and throw some salt over your shoulder). This studied independence of
character is not to be despised. It is coupled with a disinclination to be
aggressive, although the Danes haven’t forgotten the battles of the 1660s, when
they lost control of southern Sweden for good. The Fins can tell similar
stories, but these could be justified by the Swedish insistence upon a realm
suited to their long-term survival, which is something every sub-ethnicity needs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">In a way, this is just my point. But in another way, this is
about the 6 crowns you can get for a dollar. It’s actually 6.6. Or in other terms, one crown is about half of 33.3 cents. Half of 33.3 cents is about
16.6666666 cents. One cannot work with these numbers. Not at all. I am as good
at doing math in my head as anyone you are likely ever to meet (ask my wife),
but I cannot spend money intelligently in Sweden. These thirds of thirds refuse
to compute. I became desperate. I needed a system –some way of looking at a
Swedish menu with some sense of what things cost <i>to me</i>. Is a bottle of wine
listed at 230 crowns expensive? Go on, do it in your head if you can. Get back
to me when you’re done.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">Got it? Yes, that’s a pretty dear price for a bottle of
wine. It’s about $35. But what relation
is 35 to 230? It doesn’t want to fall into its computational place. On the
other hand, there are about ten crowns in a euro, and even an idiot can figure
that. That bottle of wine is about 23 euros, or 24, since the euro is on the
decline, but that calculation will get you in the ball park. And with that
thought, I discovered the mathematical secret of the Swedish crown. Ballpark.
Baseball. Our national pastime is set up on 3’s, 6’s and 9’s. If one could only
get the right baseball analogies, one could compute Swedish crowns in one’s
head. Now, understand, this is ballpark. So here’s how it works:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">Every crown is a strike. Nine (meaningful, individual)
strikes is three outs. Three outs is half an inning. It's as easy as that. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">If I moved too fast, think in inning-portions.
You can think of a meaningful strike as an inning-part, one ninth of an inning.
You’re only pitching (buying) for half of the inning, so you don’t care how the
other team’s pitcher is doing. You want <i>your</i> pitcher to throw strikes. And
you’re the home team. You are counting only your own pitcher’s strikes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">You look at a product costing 23 crowns, and you say “how
many innings?” Answer: you’re in the top of the third and the second batter is
in a hole. Three bucks and goodly change. Is it time for a mound visit? Hell
no, he’s only throwing strikes in this game. You don’t need a bullpen. This is
to say: when shopping in Sweden, Wainwright is always pitching. And he’s always
having a good outing. Take my word, 23 crowns is three bucks and change.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">What about 230 crowns? Extra innings, right? Not necessary.
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pbTsD7EXbtM/UgO2vqepP8I/AAAAAAAAAaA/0gR3OzYBc5Q/s1600/Adam-Wainwright_photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pbTsD7EXbtM/UgO2vqepP8I/AAAAAAAAAaA/0gR3OzYBc5Q/s200/Adam-Wainwright_photo.jpg" width="153" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">Ignore the zeroes and figure out what inning –top of the third, still. But then
add the zeroes back in. 30 bucks and a few more. Thus, your marker-increments
are actually in base 9, and Wainwright is pitching, so no walks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d1wWq7TfzsM/UgO2IUCAfRI/AAAAAAAAAZs/afesNEJ4U88/s1600/4ea104b31bcb5.preview-620.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="155" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-d1wWq7TfzsM/UgO2IUCAfRI/AAAAAAAAAZs/afesNEJ4U88/s200/4ea104b31bcb5.preview-620.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">With this method, you can defeat the evil Swedish plot to
make us spend all our money. There are, to be honest, balls as well as strikes,
but remember, Wainwright is pitching. The balls will not result in walks –and if
they do, Molina will gun them down at second base, because the Swedes don't have meaningful currency units below the crown. So you can round off.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: large;">Now, when my spouse asks
me “how much did you spend in Sweden?” I can answer with all honesty “I had an
excellent season! Twenty wins!” Oh wait. I forgot the zeroes. . . . "Hall of fame career, dear." </span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cQFYKcvK2sg/UgOtl1-9QLI/AAAAAAAAAZQ/anRwT9uxvjY/s1600/Nika-Saperavi-2009-Georgian-Wine-230x306.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cQFYKcvK2sg/UgOtl1-9QLI/AAAAAAAAAZQ/anRwT9uxvjY/s1600/Nika-Saperavi-2009-Georgian-Wine-230x306.jpg" /></a></div>
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Randall Auxierhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07945429178447058758noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-83858123972234096742013-07-31T10:00:00.000-07:002013-07-31T10:00:04.080-07:00From the Empirical Archives: A Review of Tenzin Norbu's "Ocean of Compassion"<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_yf8aOshn4c/URwRRMV0eyI/AAAAAAAABV0/bOw0VgDgnGU/s1600/Ocean2.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_yf8aOshn4c/URwRRMV0eyI/AAAAAAAABV0/bOw0VgDgnGU/s400/Ocean2.bmp" width="269" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">A Review of Tenzin Norbu's "Ocean of Compassion"</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Tim Gannon</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the January 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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The ocean is complex and so is the Ocean of Compassion. It is complex because the simple parts go together in a surprising way. Ocean of Compassion breaks into three interrelated parts. The Introduction is extensive, and it itself falls into three parts. The second is the poetic expression of progression in the virtues to reach the Bodhisattva state. The final part continues in poetic style to present how the foolishness of philosophy since Kant is overcome by love.</div>
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The whole book, but especially the chapters on progression in virtue, is intended to appeal to individuals of every religious and spiritual persuasion. It mostly succeeds at this. The traditional Eastern references to rebirth and reincarnation are not essential to spiritual progress and can be ignored by those who do not believe in reincarnation. The progress in virtues is the key to a good and happy life and serves all who aspire to it. This progression also leads to the Bodhisattva state–the state that desires to end the suffering of all sentient beings.</div>
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The introduction previews the whole project. Tenzin Norbu lays out the origin and goal of the book. The poetry rose from his need for images that will inspire him on the spiritual path and the book is to help all others who wish to attain enlightenment and end the separation between the perceived small self and the ground of all being. He points out the similarity of the path of virtue between all religious traditions.</div>
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Three items in the introduction are noteworthy. Tenzin mentions analytic meditation and placement meditation as the two main types of meditation to utilize with the passages. His treatment of these two meditations is sketchy in the introduction but in his blog talk radio presentations (http://www.blogtalkradio. com/the-life-of universal-loving), he clarifies each type of meditation and does guided meditations on each. A passage from Ocean of Compassion is used for each guided meditation. Also, Tenzin frequently has guest musicians on each show that are on various spiritual paths. The congruence of their spiritual experience of the virtues and the ground of being reinforces Tenzin’s insight into the unity of spiritual truths.</div>
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These are interesting and entertaining interviews.</div>
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The third item in the introduction is more of interest to philosophers, but the presentation is useful to anyone who has puzzled over reconciliation between relative and absolute truth. Many people float in a frustrating morass of relativism. There is a yearning for absolute truth. Tenzin’s approach is a useful reconciliation of the concern that everything is changing and the desire for an absolute.</div>
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The poetic chapters on the virtues and progression in the virtues are very practical. They bring the truths of Shanti Deva’s (8th century CE) Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life into the 21st-century Western mind. As humans become what they think, these verses are worthy of memorization and meditation. They progress from the desire to become a Bodhisattva to arrival at the state of Bodhisattva equanimity.</div>
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These passages are also well adapted to passage meditation, a form of meditation made popular in the United States by Eknath Easwaran, a meditation teacher who moved from India to the United States in 1959 and taught the first accredited course on meditation at UC Berkeley.</div>
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Passage meditation exists in many religious traditions and Sri Easwaran’s followers keep it alive on line at eknatheaswaran.org. Passage meditation is a practice of sitting quietly with the eyes closed while reciting a passage of spiritual import as slowly as possible while keeping the flow of the passage intelligible. It develops great concentration.</div>
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The entire poetic text of the Ocean of Compassion is well suited to this type of meditation.</div>
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Also the progression in virtue in the chapters is natural. Moving through the chapters, one first raises Bodhichitta. Pema Chodron is very delightful as she begins each dharma talk asking the student to first raise Bodhichitta in preparation to receive teaching. Then one raises effort, the desire to walk the path. Here again Pema has a pithy injunction that the desire to walk the path is an important step on the path. As desire and joyful effort are raised, one is prepared to the openness of heart, generosity toward oneself and others. With heart opening comes patience. In this context patience is the critical virtue that overcomes anger and anxiety. As this time in the world is extremely anxious and angry, this virtue is the key first to our own peace and the peace of all around us. It is a virtue that continues the growth of Love in us. Love is the desire for the good of the other as the other. It is also the desire to end the suffering of all sentient beings.</div>
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Moral discipline is a frightening virtue and a frightening idea. Patience moves the spiritual aspirant to undertake it. One usually thinks of discipline as something imposed from without. This is a virtue imposed from within. Discipline implies pain. One is prepared for the internal pain of moral discipline by the pain endured by the practice of patience. It is not easy to turn the other cheek. Remaining patient while enduring anger and anxiety prepares the self to embrace moral discipline. It prepares us to grow in Love. As patience is a response to acts, moral discipline is a response to, and guarding of, thoughts.</div>
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Buddhism has the best understanding of how the mind works. It has identified all the tricks of the mind. This section on moral discipline goes through the trick set in three manifestations. Each phase of mental treachery manifests as pain or suffering. Each suffering is a hell. Reflections on the hells created in the mind are motivation to heal the mind. The hells of the mind are Jungian. The subconscious creates and contains every horror. Each horror manifest in life. The poetic images of hell are motivation to seek remedy. The images are the stuff of “Fire and Brimstone” sermons. The poetry suggests a skillful response to each suffering to experience peace. Perfection of moral discipline leads to the virtue of concentration.</div>
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Concentration is the ability to hold the mind on one thing. This is very difficult. (Except if you are watching British TV drama.) Practice of both analytic and placement meditation improve concentration. Also memorization and recitation of the passages improves concentration. These skillful means prepare the mind to see wisdom, the ultimate virtue. One who dwells in wisdom is a bodhisattva. The ultimate wisdom is love, a dwelling in the ocean of compassion.</div>
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Many statements in each chapter inspire the careful reader or daily reciter to seek more information. For example, when practicing concentration, one seeks to develop nine altitudes of mental repose. Careful study is needed to determine what these altitudes are, and how to place the mind to arrive at “Placement in equipoise.” Progress on the path brings up a subject to study within in both placement and analytic meditation and without by scholarly investigation.</div>
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There are many opportunities for study and reflection in these chapters. Perfection in wisdom is clarity of seeing. The reflection and meditation stated in the previous paragraph is required in every line to see and experience truth in the mind and in life. Wisdom and the chapter on wisdom are very challenging. The transition from statements about the mind and the outside world to the Ella-Guardian story is abrupt.</div>
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It is an amusing story that continues mental events and words and the world in another genre. The statements and dialogue in the story ask for the same serious consideration as the earlier poetry. The story raises the question, “What is going on here?” The Ella-Guardian story is an example of philosophical silly talk about truth, persons, and life. It’s amusing to imagine Immanuel Kant reincarnated as a disoriented young woman. Unfortunately, despite the disorientation and other humorous events, Ella is committed to the Kantian view.</div>
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There just are noumenal and phenomenal persons. The world views of Annette Baier and Richard Rorty are introduced. They both maintain that only relative or conventional/contextual truth exists. Universal absolute truth is a wishful figment. Persons are only relative contexts. The Guardian argues poetically that there are two truths, one relative the other absolute. The argument is interesting. It gives a useful context for recognizing that absolute truth is possible and what it looks like. Ella experiences absolute truth in the compassionate love of the mother.</div>
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Life is complicated and lived one simple moment at a time. This is Tenzin Norbu putting life together. He served as a United States Air Force Officer (Navigator) and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the USAF Academy at Colorado Springs. After his retirement from the Air Force he continued to teach philosophy in Colorado Springs. Frustrated by the lack of certitude in philosophy, he studied and taught the religions of the world. He was attracted to Buddhism and is currently a dedicated practitioner who seeks to end the suffering of all. Oddly enough as his meditation practice deepened, his philosophical views became clearer and compassionate. Ocean of Compassion is his first published effort to make the Bodhisattva path easily available to all.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-2460357435853168252013-07-30T10:00:00.000-07:002013-07-30T10:00:05.103-07:00From the Empirical Archives: The Loss of Many, The Loss of One by By Peggy Aylsworth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4w1gpN24TMk/URwP3vUUM1I/AAAAAAAABVo/A0OPvSyyBwQ/s1600/TheLoss+of+Many.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4w1gpN24TMk/URwP3vUUM1I/AAAAAAAABVo/A0OPvSyyBwQ/s400/TheLoss+of+Many.bmp" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">The Loss of Many, The Loss of One</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Peggy Aylsworth</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the January 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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It’s August. The sea lies still.</div>
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The air grows thick and heavy.</div>
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What’s new</div>
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is old.</div>
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Young soldiers reverse artillery.</div>
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“Tough” is the word that drowns</div>
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in sorry</div>
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blood,</div>
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pushed to a pressure without a human</div>
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name. The spirit flogged to this:</div>
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obey,</div>
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prepare</div>
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for the kill, to face another face,</div>
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shatter its grace, less worthy, as</div>
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the story</div>
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goes.</div>
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Is this his brother, created equal,</div>
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condemned for the crime of other?</div>
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A bullet</div>
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to the head,</div>
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his own, crosses the divide to choice.</div>
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The land grows empty as lightning strikes.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-5604779454336452102013-07-29T10:00:00.000-07:002013-07-29T10:00:06.412-07:00From the Empirical Archives: The Photograph: A Wish for Stillness by Peggy Aylsworth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cNVjTEAvGVQ/URwPTqX__fI/AAAAAAAABVg/u_MHmasJEQs/s1600/ThePhotograph.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cNVjTEAvGVQ/URwPTqX__fI/AAAAAAAABVg/u_MHmasJEQs/s400/ThePhotograph.bmp" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">The Photograph: A Wish for Stillness</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Peggy Aylsworth</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the January 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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The wing of the plane cut the sunrise</div>
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in half,</div>
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but couldn’t diminish the aurora</div>
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exploding</div>
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its orange, its yellow. Everything is on its way</div>
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to somewhere.</div>
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But look, the stanchions</div>
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on the bridge,</div>
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like children waiting to throw stones,</div>
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watch ripples</div>
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in the lake foretelling the clamor of their lives.</div>
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The stillness</div>
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of bare winter, its illusion could convince</div>
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the eye</div>
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nothing would change, but reflections</div>
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in the water</div>
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shimmy, wriggle, promising, promising.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-45021514336679063372013-07-26T10:00:00.000-07:002013-07-26T10:00:06.529-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Paradigm Lost by Emmanuel Williams<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2jYPhAIHT5A/URwM2nH5DsI/AAAAAAAABVE/3FvWdqy-sA4/s1600/Paradise1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2jYPhAIHT5A/URwM2nH5DsI/AAAAAAAABVE/3FvWdqy-sA4/s400/Paradise1.bmp" width="265" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Paradigm Lost</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Emmanuel Williams</span></div>
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Originally published in the January 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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Most of our ways of doing things–our priorities, processes, and systems–are increasingly dysfunctional. We face huge problems environmentally and economically, and we don’t seem to be able to collaborate to solve them, or even agree that they exist. We urgently need to break our habits, to disrupt our patterns. We need a new paradigm.</div>
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I’ve spent nearly 50 years working as a teacher with all age groups in countries all over the world. For most of my life I have, like all teachers, been working to create the future. I now believe that if we are to have any future at all then two things must happen: There is a worldwide, spiritual revival. We revolutionize our schools.</div>
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A worldwide spiritual revival is God’s business. A revolution in our schools is way beyond my aegis, but I do want to talk about it. I don’t have major answers to propose; I intend rather to raise some issues, consider some possibilities, and include ideas I’ve come across in my reading.</div>
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Currently I work as a poetry-teacher member of California Poets In The Schools. Most of the schools I teach or have taught in are organized and run in ways that no longer work. The factory-style school is obsolete. As Diamantis and Kotler suggest in Abundance: “The industrialized model of education, with its emphasis on the on the rote memorization of facts, is no longer necessary. Facts are what Google does best.”</div>
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Children learn best when they have at least some freedom to decide what they are doing, when they’re interested in what they are doing, and when they feel safe and valued. Most schools, however, give students little or no freedom to choose what they do, and most students most of the time aren’t interested in what they’re doing in the classroom. (According to the research, boredom is the primary factor behind the rising drop-out rate among American high school students). Most teachers like their students (if they don’t they shouldn’t be teaching!) but at the middle and high school levels particularly, because of the increasing size of their classes, they are unable to give individual students the time and attention they need. Also, most teachers I talk to are less motivated than they used to be. Their freedom to choose what they teach according to the abilities and interests of their students has been drastically curtailed, and their effectiveness as teachers is measured largely by test results, a totally inadequate criterion. Additionally, children are spending more time in the media-rich, addictive world of cell phones and video games and TV than in the much less stimulating environment of the classroom with its tests, grades, and homework assignments.</div>
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So our schools aren’t working. I believe that even if they were working within the parameters imposed upon them by schemes like No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top, they’d be failing, because the parameters themselves are no longer relevant. Our systems of education are based on what Sir Ken Robinson, in Out of Our Minds, calls: “… one dominant way of thinking–the verbal, mathematical, deductive and propositional…. intelligence as a linear process of rational thought.”</div>
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When I stand in front of a room full of teenagers for the first time I ask them what they think the purpose of writing poetry might be. “You have the right to know why you’re expected to work at something in a classroom,” I tell them. Often someone says that poetry is a way of expressing feelings. I agree, and ask them if their feelings are important–“Yes!”–and if their feelings are often acknowledged in classrooms–“No!”–Then I ask if anyone knows the differences between the left and right brains. Usually someone does, and we put together a description of the two hemispheres and what they do. “Which hemisphere do you think is dominant in school?”–“Left!”–“What happens to any part of your body you don’t use?”–“It doesn’t develop.”–“So now you have two reasons why writing poetry can be of value.”</div>
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I talk about answers to left and right brain questions. “A left brain question usually has only one right answer. How do you spell because? Who is the president of the United States? Right brain questions don’t have single correct answers. Here’s a right brain question: What happens on page 27?”</div>
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I ask the question, and wait. And wait. Silence. Students gaze at me blankly. “There’s no right answer. You create the answer. You decide for yourself what happens on page 27. It’s no good looking at me and telling me you don’t know. Of course you don’t know . . . ”</div>
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Finally someone says something like: “Joe dies.” Laughter ripples around the room, but I take this answer seriously and explore it. “Joe dies” is the opening of a door. Our purpose is to step through the door and find out what’s on the other side. “How old is Joe? Where is he when he dies? Why does he die?” Almost invariably the moment arrives when the student takes charge of the story. Joe becomes real. The tale becomes real in its unfolding, and everyone in the room is absorbed.</div>
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The spirit of creativity is indestructible.</div>
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But, like curiosity, it’s buried more and more deeply the more time children and young people spend in school. Tony Wagner, in Creating Innovators, writes: “Anyone who has spent time in an elementary school classroom knows that every student starts school with unbounded imagination, great curiosity, and creativity–until he or she learns that knowing the right answer is far more important than asking a thoughtful question.” It’s alive, yes, but its potential is far from being realized. Creating a character, for example, working out how the needs and circumstances of that character generate tension and therefore a story…thinking deeply and writing a poem about a tree or a hand, discovering metaphor or symbol… these are unfamiliar acts for most students, and I find that my students’ early efforts are mostly thin. I remember teaching in an elementary school in North London in the mid-sixties. It was the era of the Open Classroom. I had a big room up at the top of the school; there was an art center, a music center, a science center and a writing center all in the classroom. There was no boundary between play and work.</div>
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The level of the children’s creativity was extraordinary, because they did creative stuff every day. They exercised and developed their creative muscles. They got good at it because they worked at it. Such work, I’m convinced, should be an integral part of the school life of all children and young people.</div>
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Why? Daniel Pink gives us part of the answer in his book, A Whole New Mind. Work that involves left brain linear thinking, he says, is increasingly being taken over by automation or by relatively low paid, technically adept workers in developing countries like China and India. What the economies of developed countries like America, Japan, and most of Europe need are people who can innovate, who can think outside the box. The success of the big Silicon Valley companies attests to the truth of this. We need young people who ask good questions, who are willing to risk failure, who collaborate rather than compete, who have higher aims than acquisition. Pink adds that “creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving” are the skills that “have been repeatedly stressed by everyone from corporate executives to education experts as the fundamentals required by today’s jobs.</div>
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They have become the new version of the Three Rs–the basics of what’s been recently dubbed “21st-century learning.” I often tell students the story of Rene Descartes–one of the pioneers of modern left-brain thinking–waking up from a dream in which he saw (or experienced) himself bent over to the left, as though his left brain with its self-referential–“I think, therefore I am”–was so monstrously developed it pulled him physically off-kilter.</div>
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Creative work should be an integral part of our education system, because without it children and young people develop lop-sidedly. I’m always grateful to be invited into classrooms and to be given time to do what I do, but I also feel uneasy, because administrators and teachers are thereby allowed to believe that they’ve ‘done’ creativity. Creativity isn’t a subject, it’s an approach, a way of thinking. It seeks connections, relationships, wholes. “We need a new Renaissance that moves beyond . . . old categories,” says Ken Robinson in Out of Our Minds, “and develops the relationships between different processes rather than emphasizing their differences.”</div>
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So, for the sake of their balanced development, AND for the sake of the healthy growth of our economies, we need to give children ample opportunity to exercise their creativity. Just one of these would be reason enough to revolutionize our educational system. But there’s a bigger reason…If the new paradigm is to emerge, I believe it must be shaped by young people. The world has changed too much for middle-aged and older folk like me to see clearly what needs to be done… or, if we do see it, we’re not visionary enough, not idealistic enough, not fierce enough to bring about real change. We’re too deeply ensconced in the box to be able to think outside it. We can see, many of us, what’s not working; we see what needs to be changed, but I really don’t think we can do it. We can pass along some practical, worldly advice. We can, at best, help young people avoid making some of the mistakes they need to make to learn from… but I believe that the most valuable thing we can do at this point is get out of the way.</div>
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If it’s true that young people will need the qualities we’ve considered above–creativity, curiosity, collaboration, etc.–to play an important role in shaping the new paradigm, what else will they need? In his book Future Shock, written in 1970, Alvin Toffler looked at how our educational system would have to be modified to meet the challenges and needs of the future. Young people, says Toffler, must learn to trust their inner “steering,” or power of guidance, which will make possible the right choices out of a wide range of new concepts and values. With this firm footing, in a world full of constant change and unforeseen situations, they are able to put information back in order, or in new order; verify information; move from the concrete to the abstract and back again; consider problems from many different sides.</div>
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I’ve known many students who had this quality of “inner steering.” They like and respect themselves. They know who they are and where they’re going, partly because they know their talent or their talents. I consider this characteristic of inner guidance to be crucial.</div>
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Can schools help young people discover or develop this inner guidance? Is this a matter of respecting what A.S. Neill, founder of the famous Summerhill School in England, calls “the god in each child”? I remember talking to a young Scottish teacher who visited a school in Ecuador years ago because she was impressed by what she’d read about it and wanted to witness it for herself. She said, “Being with children who were so strongly themselves brought me closer to being who I really am.”</div>
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I think the inner evolution of children is beyond the scope of what a school can properly influence. This domain is too subtle and, in a sense, too vulnerable for ‘outsiders’ to enter. What’s important is that we be aware of and respect the inner space of the child. As children grow in strength and purpose, as they become familiar with their environment and trusting of the adults around them, then they will be free to follow their will, their impulses. This, I believe, is how they develop the inner guidance Toffler spoke of. “For the activity that makes its way from inside to outside, we as educators must provide a corresponding outer room and learn not to stand in the way in it.”</div>
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Rebecca Wild, who, with her husband Mauricio, founded and ran the aforementioned school in Ecuador, wrote a brilliant book, Raising Curious Confident Creative Children. I quote this passage from her book because it crystallizes much of what I’ve been exploring: When children are truly occupied, involved in an activity, each shows his or her individual character; in the manner of movement, in way of talking, laughing, expressing pain, or making contact with others. If we try to suppress the strong sides of a child, to convert it to our adult perspectives as quickly as possible, to get it to become an analytic and reflective thinker, the child comes to lose its natural curiosity. The child’s senses become dull, apathetic, “insensible”; its inborn practical intelligence goes undercover, only to reappear later in undesirable ways.</div>
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To sum up: we need to bring about a drastic change in our public education system. We need to nurture creativity and curiosity, the ability to think critically, ask searching questions. We need young people who have developed the ability to think both logically AND creatively, and who have an inner strength, a capacity for self-guidance. We need to awaken (or rather not put to sleep!) what Rebecca Wild calls “the active search for comprehension.” I think this is doable. Reforming the public school system will probably take too long, but establishing schools (or, as I’d rather call them ‘learning centers’) within the Charter School movement is quite possible. They’d be schools based on what I once heard described as the “theory of diminishing crutches”–to the extent that students show that they are able to direct themselves and take responsibility for their own learning, to that extent the supervision and control (but not the authority) of the teacher is withdrawn. We need to be around. They need us there, for support and encouragement. But we need to get out of the way.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-2455072258983869982013-07-25T10:00:00.000-07:002013-07-25T10:00:04.970-07:00From the Empirical Archives: A Moment with Francisco Diez<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">A Moment with Francisco Diez</span></div>
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Originally published in the January 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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We start the new year with January photographer Francisco Diez, a mechanical engineer by training, who also excels at capturing familiar places in unique ways.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> Hi Francisco. I first discovered your photography when I was looking for a shot of Wall Street for an article we were doing in August. And then I ran across your work again when we were publishing an article on the Mexican elections. You have a phenomenal talent, and you seem to get around. I see that you’re in Canada now. Is that where you were born?</div>
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<b>Francisco:</b> I was born in Mexico. My father was from Spain (from the Catalonia region, which many consider to be an independent nation within Spain). My mother is from Mexico (Guanajuato, a lovely state). I moved to Canada in my teens where I finished my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. After finishing university, I moved to Liechtenstein (a small country nestled between Switzerland and Austria) where I lived and worked for a few years. I then decided to return to Toronto in pursuit of a master’s degree. The program included a study term in Barcelona as well as a study/work term in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Following my graduate studies, I worked for a number of years in Toronto. More recently, I spent three years living in New Jersey while based out of New York City. My wonderful wife is Canadian, of German background, with whom I have four beautiful daughters. So, I am originally from Mexico (which gives me immense pride), but I have also been greatly influenced by places where I have lived and people that I have met in my travels.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>So, you went to Canada to go to school? What made you want to return? Are you enjoying it there?</div>
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<b>Francisco: </b>I have been based out of Toronto for about a year now, and I think for the next while, it will be home for myself and my family. I was drawn to Canada primarily for the quality of life. Canada is truly a fantastic place to live and raise a family. I have traveled the world, and I believe one would be hard pressed to find a place with a better work/life balance. Toronto is a world-class city that is characterized by its unique diversity and tolerance. Canadians are also extraordinarily polite and friendly.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> It’s a very nice city. You remind me of how much I enjoyed my visit to Toronto. How did you get started in photography?</div>
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<b>Francisco:</b> I took a course back in high school, an optional photography course. It was on both how to take pictures and how to develop them in black and white in a dark room. I found the process fascinating and I was immediately hooked. Photography became more than a hobby, it was a passion that I felt compelled to follow. As it turned out, it was an expensive hobby, and considering that I grew up in crisis-ridden Mexico, the cost factor proved to be limiting. Although I had considered it, from an economic standpoint, photography was not practical as a career. I decided to go for a degree in mechanical engineering.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> Did you take any further courses, or are you mostly self-taught?</div>
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<b>Francisco:</b> I was never enrolled in a proper post-secondary program. In this age of technology, there is such a wealth of knowledge both in the print media and via the internet that can be easily accessed and that can provide the information and the fundamentals needed to become proficient in basic photography skills. I find old-fashioned print magazines very helpful, especially those from the UK.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>Do you find that you learn from other photographers?</div>
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<b>Francisco:</b> I find it incredibly helpful to look at the work of other photographers. Some of my favorites are (in no particular order): Jay Maisel, Bill Fortney, Ian Plant, David DuChemin, Joe McNally, Vincent Versace, and Scott Kelby. Most of these photographers have blogs and on-line galleries. Photographers as a group are also very generous in sharing their experiences. Scott’s website is particularly good if you are interested in entry-level courses. Social networking can also be a good information source. I particularly like Google+. It seems to be designed for photographers. One can learn a lot about composition, exposure, framing, etc., by just looking at the work other photographers do.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> When did you realize this was more than a hobby, and that you had, in fact, become a photographer?</div>
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<b>Francisco:</b> That is a difficult question to answer. I don’t think there is a particular point in time when I realized I had become a photographer. It’s been an gradual process–incremental steps taken over a long period of time. However, photography has really developed into a primary passion over the past five years when I began to post my work online. Feedback was just phenomenal, which really encouraged me to explore and experiment with photography in ways that were new and exciting for me. Getty Images contacted me about two years ago asking to copyright some of my images. Being commercially successful is not of primary importance to me at this point in my life; however, the fact that one of the largest stock vendors was interested in my work made me realize that my work had the potential to appeal to a large audience.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> Are you a full-time photographer at this time?</div>
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<b>Francisco:</b> I have a day job in the financial services industry. My current position is challenging and fulfilling and I enjoy what I do. However, change is always a good thing and it is my dream to eventually transition to full-time photography. I do look forward to the time when photography will be a full-time pursuit.</div>
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<b>Empirical: </b>What equipment are you using?</div>
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<b>Francisco:</b> I am a big believer that it is not the tool that makes a good photographer, but how it is used. Granted, most professional photographers use high-end cameras and you do need one to produce high quality pictures that end up in exhibits or magazines, but I think there needs to be less emphasis on the type of gear you use. I try to travel light, I shoot with a Nikon D300s and I use basically four main lenses (a prime lens, zoom, wide angle, and a fisheye). Because I tend to shoot at dawn and at dusk (at the day’s edges, when light generates wonderful colors), a tripod is essential. Filters are also needed in some circumstances. Recently, I have been shooting with neutral density (ND) filters to be able to capture long-exposure shots. I have more equipment, that I use depending on the situation at hand, but most of my work can be done with the D300s, these four lenses, and a tripod. I will, however, upgrade my equipment soon–professional full- frame cameras are more accessible now. I will probably get either the Nikon D600 or the D800E.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> What types of projects do you like working on?</div>
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<b>Francisco:</b> I love urban and landscape photography. To capture images that relay what men and God can create is truly inspirational. I find as much beauty in a pristine autumn landscape in Canada as in a busy street in Barcelona. I have traveled around the globe, and no matter where I go, there is always that scene, if captured properly, that will portray the essence of the place and its people. One can think of photographers as history’s stewards, documenting people and places for posterity. As for near-term projects, I will be travelling to Scotland next month.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> Do you like any particular kinds of shots over others?</div>
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<b>Francisco:</b> Perhaps not surprisingly, my work, and by default my taste, has evolved over time. I do not prefer a particular kind of shot, and in fact, my interests are constantly changing For a period of time, I was drawn primarily to black and white photography. Black and white images have this artistry, a timeless feel. Then I moved to highly saturated, high-contrast color shots, which work well in landscape photography. Then I became curious about HDR (high dynamic range) for a while, but I found the final product not to be natural looking. Recently, I have been experimenting with long-exposure shots which make water look silky when shooting seascapes. Long-exposure pictures in black and white look phenomenal. My next area of interest is likely to be portraits, not in a studio, but urban portraits. One’s challenge as a photographer is to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. It is a moving target, but most definitely one worth pursuing.</div>
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<b>Empirical:</b> Well, you have done that with remarkable success so far. Thanks for sharing with us, Francisco, and we look forward to following your photography career.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-30722645849303263572013-07-24T10:00:00.000-07:002013-07-24T10:00:06.650-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Small Change by Richard Hartwell<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Small Change</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Richard Hartwell</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the January 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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Like so very many kids raised and suckled at the beach, particularly those reared in the Newport Beach of the early fifties–descendants of divorcees and married boredom–my cousin and I learned to build sand castles repeatedly. It’s too bad that relationships can’t be rebuilt as easily as sand castles. The lap and lapse of waves did not trouble or defeat us, as day upon day our moods changed in the early summer from the somber gray of dawn in May or June to the brilliantine of cobalt blue and then to gold by mid-afternoon in August and September. By then our rosette bodies were speckled with the whiter dots and dashes of the Morse code created by un-rinsed salt and sand.</div>
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Salt-matted blonde hair was usually strewn to the left of my cousin’s face, revealing her right-handed cowlick, balanced by a small mole on her left cheek that she tried to hide. My own hair then was always cut way too short to hang anywhere but straight up, like a severed shock of hay, each stalk raised in supplication to the sun and sky. Like my back and shoulders and nose, my scalp too was pitted with the itchy white shadows of sand and salt and the inner red glow of sunburn almost matched the outer beacon of what they called carrot-red hair, much too short to hide any of my outside blemishes.</div>
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I have no memory of our clothes; perhaps swimming trunks or bathing suits sometimes, but most likely cut off jeans for both of us and an old white tee shirt for my cousin’s blooming modesty. I only remember the bodies; both growing lithe and strong, chubby fat giving way to stretched muscles, elastic and elongated, pulled by years and adolescence, like taffy lying bulbous in the pan and then stretched out and thinned and fine and resilient.</div>
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We shared much together, my cousin and I: our interwoven dysfunctional families; our money-making scams; a love of the beach and sun and air and sea; and, of course, the company of each other, separated only by eight months in age. We had even been enrolled in kindergarten together until the educational power brokers realized that the dissimilarity in last names didn’t cancel out the similarities in build, features, temperament, or sanguinity. I was quickly hustled away and into another classroom. I remember we both cried. Still, other than at school, my cousin Jocelyn–Josh as she was called then–and I were most often inseparable boon companions; at least inseparable by others until the time when I created a chasm in our youthful camaraderie into which we both slipped and from which we never escaped.</div>
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That day of our distancing started much the same way as any other early summer day did for us at the beach. That dawn was inseparable from any other gray dawn. Our interests for that day were as like-minded as those of the day before, and, as far into the future as we could see; they were as alike as those expected of the days to follow into infinity. The only anomaly that seemed to mark that day different from all surrounding others was the fact that we had money.</div>
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Now, by money I don’t mean to imply we were flush and fulsome with loose spending change donated happily or begrudgingly by others, be they parents or guardians or other relatives or unsuspecting bystanders. No, what I am noting is that we had between us that day money acquired by ill means and, therefore, needful of immediate use. It was burning holes in our pockets!</div>
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Usually the two of us spent just enough time after surfing to scavenge the beach and collect the few overlooked bottles left by the tourists and daytime pleasure seekers, those too solvent or too hurried or too lazy to collect them and return them for the deposit. At two cents per bottle, we only needed five bottles each to cover the ferry both ways, the Island to Balboa ride and then back again. Anything else was donut and soda money. This was the era of only glass containers when both bottles and relationships could be easily broken.</div>
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But yesterday, the day before that last day, after we’d returned to the Island, we had cut down the alley behind the market intending to hit Turquoise Avenue. We’d spotted an open garage in the alley with stacks of empty Coke bottles in wooden trays on the side near the door. No one was around. The lure of found money was just too much for us. On impulse we grabbed a flat each and ran. We ran down the alley and then dodged down an unblocked walkway between two houses. We knew the Island well together.</div>
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We took the bottles to the Island Market, down on Marine, and cashed them in, acting furtive and guilty the whole time, so that the clerk had kept a wary eye on us but could detect nothing. He probably thought we were shoplifting. The total refund had come to a buck-ninety-two, plus twenty-five cents each for the bottle flats. That was two-forty-two, or a dollar-twenty- one each. We realized we would be flush for once and didn’t have to worry about change for the ferry the next day.</div>
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The next day, that last day, we followed routine. Josh tapped lightly on my bedroom window about five a.m. to wake up only me and get a start on the day. I didn’t need to dress. I was still in cutoffs from the previous day. I gently closed the back door then ran down the back alley to meet her on the corner. We walked down to the ferry, using Park and then cut over to the South Bay sidewalk, careful to avoid broken glass and dog poop, and careful to avoid the alley near the market across from the ferry landing. We caught the second ferry of the day, paid and passed across to the Peninsula without incident. The bay was a deceptive, oily calm.</div>
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We hit Mabel’s Balboa Donuts behind the Pavilion, as we always did, agonizing over our choices until I settled on the usual, not really fooling anyone but myself by my constancy. Only Josh made different choices from time to time. I settled on the cherry-filled and took it without the tissue paper or a napkin.</div>
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Rather than sucking the donut from the side with the filling hole, I bit the donut from the wrong side. The cherry filling oozed and dropped to my chest just above the left side of my chest near my heart. For a moment it appeared like an augury of things to come. I deftly wiped it off with the tops of the fingers of my right hand that still held the unfinished donut. With my tongue I lapped up the red jelly from my fingers and swallowed the remains of the premonition. Josh paid the tired woman behind the counter, not Mabel today, ignoring the straggles of hair that fell from under the paper cap and matted to the sweat coursing down her cheeks. She was pleasant, but not pretty.</div>
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“See ya tomorrow, guys. Have a good day,” and she turned her back to serve the next customer, a fisherman tourist, probably just returned from the midnight sailing of the Frontier.</div>
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“Yeah, thanks,” we chorused and Josh shoved her remaining change deep in the front pocket of her faded jean cutoffs.</div>
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I was thinking out loud, “Five cents for the ferry back. Ten cents for a soda later. And an extra nickel just for the heck of it.” I might have said “hell” in other circumstances, just to impress someone, but Josh wouldn’t have been much impressed, so I said “heck” instead. I didn’t know how much money Josh had left. She’d paid extra for a cinnamon twist today, as well as a jelly donut. Even at that, she must still have had thirty or forty cents left from yesterday’s bottles. I remember casually thinking she’d puke after eating all that and then going surfing. We headed across the two blocks to the beach.</div>
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We spent the rest of the lazy, overcast morning near the Balboa Pier. We surfed and sunned and talked and didn’t talk until we had our fill of our immediate environment. We were now filled with a need for a sense of movement, or passage, or relocation along the beach; a need for change. We took our bikes, and with the towels wrapped around the handlebars, we started pedaling north along the wide beach sidewalk. We pedaled slowly, soaking up the day and dodging joggers and skateboarders. We were past the Newport Pier, somewhere up around 17th, when I spotted Gail walking up the beach toward the boardwalk. It was early afternoon, perhaps about one, and the sun had burned off the overcast.</div>
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She was tossing her hair to one side, toweling it dry, and the beads of water glistened on her brown body and emerald-green two-piece. Her hair sprang back up in ringlets of black curls. I was captivated by the vision. I stood on my rear pedal, nailing the brakes, and skidded sideways to a stop. I heard a distant commotion behind me. I dropped my bike to the edge of the sidewalk and started walking towards Gail. </div>
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Somehow I managed to stammer out, “Hi.”</div>
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I was totally unaware of my cousin’s plight behind me. She had swerved to avoid hitting me, struck a trashcan, and fallen against a concrete bench, cutting open her right leg with a long gash below the knee. To all of this I was oblivious. I only had eyes and thoughts for the girl in the sea-green suit, the new vision in front of me.</div>
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Gail was the first to notice the blood coursing down my cousin’s leg. Josh was stoic. Gail was politely concerned. I was, well, I was just stupid. I told Josh to go in the water and rinse off the wound. I never said, “Sorry,” or even showed concern or regret. I guess I was saving all that up for later, when it would be too late. I probably mentioned something about how the salt water was good for it and such. Such were the myths before polluted beaches and the contagion of televised news. Gail wasn’t so sure and suggested that Josh go to the lifeguard stand for some basic first aid. I continued my stupidity and just said, “Nah. She’s okay. Right?” never taking my eyes from Gail.</div>
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Josh didn’t answer and she didn’t go to the lifeguard. She went off, into the water, and left me alone on the beach with Gail. I don’t know how long we talked, perhaps an hour, perhaps a bit less. Eventually Gail stood up and said she had to go. She’d spotted someone in the crowd, a tall sophomore who was, so I was to learn much later, her boyfriend of many days. He was one link in a long chain in which I was to become entangled. Gail left me standing there and I could only stare after her longingly.</div>
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Eventually I closed my mouth, turned and scanned the surf line for my cousin. I couldn’t see her anywhere and, eventually, I walked back up to where we’d left our bikes, at least where I had left mine, as hers was nowhere around. She had gone. Like I had abandoned her, she had now abandoned me and left me to myself.</div>
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Somehow I had lost my money for the ferry. Somewhere it had dropped from my pocket. Perhaps I lost it when I was surfing. Perhaps I lost it sitting on the sand talking to Gail with my knees tucked under my chin. But the fact was that I had lost it. Because I had my bike, I couldn’t just swim across the South Bay back to the Island. I could have done it, had done it in fact on a dare from Josh, but I had my bike.</div>
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Slowly, over the course of that afternoon, I rode my bike down the rest of the Peninsula, past Lido Island and over the bridge to Mariner’s Mile. I turned south on the highway and eventually cut off past the bluffs and the Mummy and back over the bridge to the Island. The inside of my thighs were rubbed raw from the sand in my cutoffs.</div>
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I didn’t think to check on Josh when I got back. Perhaps that was a mistake too. It was late afternoon and my back was scorched with sunburn from the bike ride and I just sort of collapsed from exertion and disappointment. It was after six when I woke up the next morning. There had been no tapping on the window at five, to wake me up, to continue our routine.</div>
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I went over later to check on Josh. My aunt answered the door and said that Jocelyn didn’t feel like going surfing today. Instead, she said that they were going to go shopping for a new swimsuit. I didn’t see Josh, Jocelyn, for about a week after that and then only in passing. She was on her way to a pool party with some new friends.</div>
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She looked sort of strange, in a bright orange swimsuit covered by a white blouse with matching orange trim. Her hair was combed back in a ponytail. The scar on her leg was almost healed. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her, but something was different besides her calling herself Jocelyn.</div>
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Slowly over the next few months, perhaps even over the course of a year, I began to figure things out. My disappointment with Gail and then with another, sort of broke up my routine. I began to realize I had to change and Josh, Jocelyn, had just changed sooner. Sometimes I can catch my ideas before they get away. </div>
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Sometimes.</div>
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Sometimes I can’t or I’m too slow. I guess that’s as good as it gets. Most of the time I have trouble working in absolutes anyway. So, I guess I’ll just settle for–sometimes. I enjoy the suspense anyway.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-72813273732167985222013-07-23T10:00:00.000-07:002013-07-23T10:00:01.905-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Kung Fu and Spiritual Ground of the Martial Arts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Kung Fu and Spiritual Ground of the Martial Arts</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Olav Bryant Smith</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the January 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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When I was little, one of my many heroes was Bruce Lee. Not the version of Bruce Lee who the world primarily thinks of now, having become popular with films like Fists of Fury, and The Way of the Dragon in the ‘70s, but the earlier version–the Bruce Lee who played Kato, the sidekick of The Green Hornet in the ‘60s television series. The series, like its sister-series Batman, was a little comicbookish in retrospect, to be sure. But for a 7 to 8-year-old boy, this just made it better. The thing is that Bruce Lee, the actor and martial arts expert, brought something of the spiritual foundations of the martial arts even to that role. The Green Hornet may have been meant to be the primary hero of the series, but it was Kato who captured my imagination. The mysteries of eastern spirituality informed my growth from then on.</div>
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Another of my heroes was Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., who changed his named to Muhammad Ali in the midst of “float(ing) like a butterfly,” and “sting(ing) like a bee.” Ali not only was a great athlete, certainly in the conversation on the finest boxers who ever lived, but he was centered in a spirituality and a political awareness that elevated him from the sports pages to the front pages of the major newspapers. I meditated on the movements of Ali–without realizing it was a meditation. I immersed myself in the feeling of what it was like to be centered in devotion to God while sharpening my body, mind, and spirit to defend my faith against all comers. He influenced me to investigate and to think kindly of Islam, long before the American relationship with Islam became so tainted by wars in the Middle East and terrorist attacks. There does not need to be endless antagonism between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–“the people of the Book” as they are collectively called in Islam. But that is the stuff of another essay.</div>
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So, with these influences running deep in my life, I was primed for an open-armed reception of the series Kung Fu when it came to television in 1972, one year after Lee’s Fists of Fury had made such an impact. The series was directed by Jerry Thorpe, and written by Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander. The main character, a half-American, half-Chinese man named Kwai Chang Caine was played by David Carradine, the son of the legendary actor John Carradine. </div>
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I cannot tell you how many times I’ve met spiritually oriented people around my age who were greatly influenced by Kung Fu. Like another highly influential television series, Star Trek, it only survived for a few years. But in those few years, it managed to do something so special that its positive karmic affect continues to work its magic in the lives and creative imaginations of many who were fortunate enough to watch it. So let’s take a peek back at what was so magical about this humble film.</div>
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The key to its effectiveness, and the depth of the series, is its use of flashbacks from the late nineteenth-century Old West (California) setting that the adult Caine finds himself thrown into, to his earlier life in the Shaolin (Buddhist) Temple in Hunan Province in the southwest of China. From start to finish, we are gently introduced to the way a Zen Buddhist monk would incorporate his meditation and training into his daily life in the Western world. As we quickly learn to identify with this lonely figure thrust into a strange and often unfriendly land–and many of us, of course, often feel this way–we begin to meditate with Caine on these ways of integrating a spiritual understanding and awareness of reality with our daily activities.</div>
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The first frames of the film show the adult Caine walking across a desert in California, barefoot. The flashbacks show him as a boy standing outside of the Shaolin Temple, hoping to gain admission for training as a monk. The boy stands in the profane world of everyday life with a yearning for instruction in the sacred realm of the temple. He thirsts for a deeper understanding of life’s mysteries–not to escape this world, but to find ways of applying this deeper understanding to life.</div>
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As Caine stands outside the temple, it is sometimes raining, but the boy endures. This is then contrasted with walking across the vast expanse of the hot, dry desert as the images switches back and forth between his childhood in China and adulthood in California. Even before his official training, there is something in the boy that the monks are looking for. The Buddha calls it Right Intention. It is having one’s heart in the right place. </div>
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Caine demonstrates sincerity and single-mindedness of purpose. He shows that he will genuinely appreciate the gift of training if he is accepted. We see some other young boys, however, who had been standing at the front door with Caine, giving up. They step off to the side and begin to play games. The monks inside, who are secretly keeping an eye out to see who really wants to get in, notice the distracted boys. The monk at the door comes outside and tells the boys, “Please go home.” They had not exhibited the character to gain admittance. Once inside, this character of Right Intention will be needed to advance further in spiritual training. This early determination, which we see by observing the adult Caine walking barefoot through the great expanse of the desert, has deepened into an almost superhuman ability to endure hardship in pursuit of an enlightened goal.</div>
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Several of the boys are admitted for an audience with the temple’s headmaster, or sifu. We see that early character-training, often through religious guidance, does matter in children’s lives. All of the boys are polite. They sit before the monk. They are served tea. The monk indicates through gesture that they may drink. And most of them do so. They’re hungry. They’re thirsty. They’ve waited a long time to get inside from the elements at this point. Of all the boys, Caine alone does not drink the tea, because the master had not begun to drink his. Because of this, Caine is allowed to stay for training, and the other boys are sent home. The master inquires where the boy has learned such good manners, prized perhaps more in Confucian cultures than others. Caine says that he learned from his grandfather.</div>
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In traditional cultures, the relationship between grandparents and young children is crucial to the development of children’s understanding of the world and their characters. Parents are often busy with maintaining their households. In fact, in India, where these relationships are clearly defined, the parents are said to be “householders.” The youngest children spend much of their time with their grandparents, who by then, are in the retirement phase of their lives. In the West, where children often never really get to know their grandparents well, much that is vital to the continuation of a civilization has been lost.</div>
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Generational bonding and unity is part of the glue that holds cultures together. And as Herman Daly wrote in his article “The Renewal of Ignorance,” in the December issue of Empirical, every generation of elders must decide what is most important to pass on to young people. Equally, every generation of young people decide what is most important to make the effort to learn. This transmission of wisdom and knowledge from one generation to the next goes through this double filter. We are always one step away, Daly warns us, from losing the basis of our culture and civilization. </div>
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It is a precarious business, and there is no guarantee of continual progress.</div>
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When Caine arrives at a town in California, if you are able to watch these frames in slow-motion, you will see that the director arranges for Caine’s image to immediately merge together with an elder Chinese man named Han Fei. Not only will their paths intersect in the way we usually think of this, but this also illustrates the interconnectedness of all beings. They have not met yet, but they live in a world of continual mutual influence. As the English poet John Donne understood, “No man is an island/Entire of itself.” We are all parts of a greater whole, interconnected.</div>
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Thirsty, Caine approaches a saloon. Again, if you are paying close attention, you will see him peek into the saloon through a side window first. He does not walk blindly into this new situation. He practices Right Awareness, and looks to see what he’s getting himself into as best he can. Inside, he asks for a drink of water and adds some minerals to it that he has carried with him in a small pouch. The bartender inquires where he has come from, but scoffs when told that he has just walked across the desert. “Liar!” he retorts and laughs. He doesn’t understand the disciplined and simple life that the monk has been trained to sustain. He doesn’t realize the inner resources that Caine has developed over time before arriving there.</div>
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Han Fei, having seen Caine enter the bar, is alarmed. He does not know Caine, but he empathizes with him (a trait emphasized by Confucius) and has compassion for him (a trait emphasized by the Buddha). Han Fei knows that someone who is Chinese will not be welcome in this saloon, so he sticks his head just inside the door to warn Caine, but is rudely told to leave at once by the barroom bully. Having gotten rid of Han Fei, this stout, bigoted ruffian takes notice of Caine, and though he is only half-Chinese, decides Caine must leave as well.</div>
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He attempts to remove Caine by force, and fails. But we do not witness the typical barroom brawl here. Caine uses his highly developed martial arts skills to side-step and neutralize every attempt to remove him. It is clear that he could inflict severe damage on the bully, but he does not. He applies the great guiding principle of every spiritually grounded martial art–to restore order with the least amount of force necessary. For the aim in spiritually grounded martial arts is purely defensive. The ethically superior martial artist does not seek to show off his abilities, but rather uses them modestly and only when needed. The great founder of the martial art Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, insisted that his training was really “the art of peace.”</div>
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Having gotten his drink of water, and countered the effort to remove him forcibly, Caine then goes on his way peacefully. Han Fei greets him outside, and is thrilled, saying that he’s heard of advanced skills like this before, but has never seen them in practice. Caine is not full of himself. He is humble and honors the older man, who had risked his safety to warn him. Each has his own role to play. They enjoy mutual respect immediately. And each has something to give to the other. Saying that he is in need of work, Han Fei arranges for Caine to go to work, as so many Chinese and Sikh workers did at that time, on a railroad line laying ties.</div>
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Caine climbs onto the back of a horse-drawn wagon, about to embark on a new chapter of his life. Immediately, we see a flashback to the Shaolin Temple, where Caine had experienced new beginnings before as a boy. There, his head was shaved.</div>
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This is somewhat like baptism in Christianity.</div>
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It symbolizes a previous life that is shed and left behind. It symbolizes cleanliness and simplicity in the new life. And it symbolizes a commitment to the new beginning being embarked upon.</div>
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We observe Caine doing chores around the temple–tasks like sweeping the steps of sand and snow in different seasons. We also see him scrubbing the floors. These are more than necessary jobs to help the temple community to continue to function. These become for the monks an active meditation.</div>
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There are various kinds of meditation.</div>
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One can meditate with the chanting of a mantra. There are recitations of sacred writings in passage meditations. Many kinds of meditation begin with the most basic of all–a sitting meditation. In a sitting meditation, one learns through various techniques to still the mind and find the sacred center within.</div>
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For some, such as Zen Buddhists, the emphasis is placed on this sitting meditation.</div>
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In an active meditation, one attempts to take what one finds in the sitting meditation, and apply it to our work in the world. Perhaps the most well-known of the active meditations in the Western world is hatha yoga, which comes from India. Another, which I have practiced for many years, is the latihan kejiwaan of Subud. But an active meditation, if it comes from the right place within us, can take place in any activity that we do, such as these basic chores of a monk at the monastery.</div>
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Ideally, according to the teaching of Right Livelihood, one should be able to operate from one’s compassionate, creative center in our work in the world. We should endeavor to spread our peace and love to the world around us through our activities. At the railroad camp where Caine begins to work as an adult, we are shown a conflict arising in a simple morality play between a good-hearted geologist and the camp’s supervisor. </div>
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The geologist predicted that the railroad workers were likely to hit pockets of an explosive gas if they continued on the path they were going. The supervisor understood what was being said, but did not allow the facts to get in the way of his goal. He pointed out that it would take too much time and cost too much money to change the route of the railroad, and it was his job to see the rail through. The lives of the workers were not a major concern for the supervisor.</div>
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Today, in the United States, we have reached a crossroad in our attitude toward labor. After a nearly century of progress, those gains have been scaled back. Instead of aiming for an ideal relationship between employers and employees, we sometimes seem to be racing toward the lowest common denominator by pitting our workers in competition against the most poorly treated workers around the world.</div>
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As we watch the immigrant laborers in Kung Fu laying ties for the railroad, we should remember the value of labor, which we cannot do without. There are class systems around the world that are quite oppressive with regard to labor. In India, for instance, those in the lowest class have been called “outcastes” because they’re seen as so low that they exist outside of the caste system. Where others saw only worthless “untouchables,” the Mahatma (great soul) Mohandas K. Gandhi saw “Harijan” (children of God). In the United States, generations of Africans were forcibly put on ships and imported like objects into this country to serve tyrannical masters. A war between North and South had to be fought largely to assure the liberty of our African-American brothers and sisters. We should look to this history and remember the often thin lines that run between marginally subsistence wages and slavery. And we should ask ourselves if we really want to support a system that depends on such slavery or quasi-slavery.</div>
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This was the situation that Caine was thrown into when he joined the crew of railroad workers. The camp was at a crisis point. They were cold. They were not fed well. And their lives were in danger. The workers were looking for leadership. One of Caine’s fellow laborers, Fong, ridiculed him for keeping silent. He was looking for Caine to step forward with his observations, if not a plan for action. And he didn’t know if he could trust someone so quiet.</div>
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But Caine responded to this criticism by saying that “If one’s words are not better than silence, one should keep silent.” This is in keeping with the Buddha’s teaching on Right Speech. The foundation of Buddhist ethics is the restraint from harming others. With regard to one’s work, one should do work that is helpful to others, and certainly not work that is harmful. The same principle should be applied to speech–to do some good with our words, or to remain silent.</div>
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Caine was also practicing the principle of Right Awareness here. He had to observe the situation at the camp carefully before taking action. This point will come up again, soon, when Fong presses him again for action.</div>
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Soon after this, Caine is recognized and honored as the Shaolin monk that he is when a wagon load of supplies comes into the camp. As one crate begins to fall from the wagon, Caine reached up to catch it, thus exposing the tiger and the dragon branded into his forearms. The tiger, symbol of the powers of the earth, and the dragon, symbol of the powers of the sky, were the signs of completed training at the Shaolin monastery. His fellow workers bowed with reverence at the discovery of this identity. A man of special gifts was in their midst.</div>
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As we see Caine pondering his position in this difficult and frightening situation at the railroad camp, it is not coincidental, I think, that we are then taken through another flashback to the heart of his training at the Shaolin Temple. More than anyone else at the Shaolin Temple, Caine was influenced by the blind Master Po. At first, Caine is inclined to dismiss Master Po as a simple, blind old man. But on their first encounter, Po hands Caine a broom and tells the young boy to attack him with it. Caine is reluctant, but the old man insists. </div>
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Time and again, Caine rushes Master Po with the broom, only to be thwarted with deft movements. With a new-found admiration and feeling for Master Po, Caine comments that “Of all things, to live in darkness must be the worst.” Master Po smiles and brushes this sympathy aside, saying “Fear is the greatest darkness.” Several years later, we would see for the first time Yoda, in a similar role, telling the apprentice Luke Skywalker that “Fear is the path to the dark side.”</div>
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Master Po had smiled because he knew that he had not only overcome the lesser darkness of blindness, but the greater darkness of fear. And he invited Caine to follow him on a journey that starts with a quiet and humble awareness of everything that was going on in and around him. This, to me, is the spirit of radical empiricism.</div>
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“Never assume,” said Master Po, “that because a man has no eyes he cannot see.” Such an idea is shocking to the ordinary empiricist, for whom visual affirmation means so much. Master Po then directed Caine’s awareness. “Close your eyes,” he commanded. “What do you hear?”</div>
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Caine obeys. “I hear the water. I hear the birds.”</div>
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“Do you hear your own heartbeat?” Po asks.</div>
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“No,” admits the boy.</div>
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“Do you hear the grasshopper at your feet?” asks Po.</div>
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Caine opens his eyes and sees the grasshopper there. Amazed, he asks, “Old man, how is it that you hear these things?”</div>
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Po responds: “Young man, how is it that you do not?”</div>
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It is clearly implied here, though, that there is something more going on that extraordinarily acute hearing. The suggestion is that Master Po’s awareness has grown to such heights that he has developed a kind of “sixth sense.” We see this clearly in another scene where Caine as a boy is introduced to the practice of walking on rice paper. He is told that if he can learn to walk across it without tearing it, then his approach cannot be heard. So, when Caine as a young man finally accomplishes this feat, he goes to Master Po to test his skill. </div>
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Master Po is aware of Caine’s approach anyway.</div>
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To many in the West, such phenomena are mere fairy tales. But as skeptical an observer as Jean Paul Sartre pointed to the truth of such awareness in human beings. He pointed to the phenomenon of what he referred to as “The Look.” We’ve all had experiences of sitting somewhere and having the “feeling” that someone is looking at us. We turn to see if it is true, and sure enough, someone had been looking at us–“burning,” as some say, “a hole in the back of my head.”</div>
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This awareness of connectedness to the world around us comes through careful phenomenological observation made acute through meditative practice. Again, such phenomenological observation allows us greater awareness of the paradoxes of time. </div>
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A monk asks Caine at one point how long he’d been at the temple. The quick reply was “a long time,” for surely it seemed such to the young monk. But asked again how long, the boy thought about it. “Not long,” was the second response. The elder monk was pleased, and said, “Soon you will learn.” How is that he could have been there both a short time and a long time?</div>
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What does this mean?</div>
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Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, says that he knows what time is until someone asks him. Then he wonders if time really exists at all. For the past is no more, the future is not yet, and the present would be eternal if it did not slip into the past where it is also no more. Augustine concludes that if the present and future really exist, they exist in the tri-fold present where we experience a past-present and a future-present.</div>
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Again, this is a gift of careful observation.</div>
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We begin to glimpse in these observations a steady march of temporal transitioning from one present duration to another–or, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, a transition from one actual occasion of experience to another.</div>
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After observation, comes action. And with action comes decisions of import that we do not always get right. In many cases, we’re not even sure ourselves whether we have done the right thing. Life is teaching us many lessons at once.</div>
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In one of the more straightforwardly philosophical moments in the film, Han Fei and Caine discuss the seeming paradox between destiny and free will. Are our actions determined by our destiny, or are we free to act as we please? Han Fei’s conclusion, though he admits that he doesn’t know how it works, is that both are at play and that they somehow go together.</div>
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In Alfred North Whitehead’s process system of metaphysics, we are guided by an ideal at each moment of our lives, and our decisions are influenced by the weight of all the decisions we and others have made in the past. But in the end, we still have a choice to make between a range of options, including our felt perception of the given ideal for that circumstance. After our decisions are made, we inevitably find ourselves comparing what we have done with our awareness of that ideal.</div>
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It turns out that Caine had not simply come to America out of curiosity. He was fleeing the wrath of the Emperor of China for having killed his nephew. Joining Master Po on the road to the Forbidden City, the old master was fatally shot by the Emperor’s nephew. Caine, seeking to stop the violence, killed the imperial nephew with the throw of a spear. Dying, Master Po, told Caine that he was like a son to him, handed over his pouch with his few possessions, and instructed Caine to leave the country.</div>
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Fong heard through the grapevine of an imperial search in America for a Shaolin monk for murder. There is a price on Caine’s head. One of the other Chinese laborers in the camp, who has sold out as a spy, or informant, to management, overhears this and takes this new information to the supervisor of the camp. In exchange for this information, he is given a little warm, nutritious food. Abraham Maslow wrote about a hierarchy of needs. When human beings do not have their basic survival needs met, it is much more unlikely that they will seek to develop their higher human capacities, including their spiritual life. So, the Chinese government is informed from afar, and we realize that it’s only a matter of time before Caine is confronted by their representatives.</div>
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In this way, the web of life is spun. Many people acting for different reasons with different goals. The effects of their actions overlap, and people are hurt along the way. It is not always immediately clear as people do what they think is best for themselves, their families, their friends, and their countries, what is right and what is wrong.</div>
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Having seen too many of his fellow workers die, Fong understandably becomes frustrated and wants to take action quickly before any others die. He is ready to use violent means to take the camp away from the camp management. Caine, partly because he knows that management has the means to put down such a rebellion, urges Fong to remain calm, but he fails. Fong is now hot-headed, and the supervisor’s men shoot Fong after he takes but one step in their direction. The other men are obviously angered by this killing. But Caine urges restraint. They must wait for another time, and not rush to their deaths unwisely and needlessly.</div>
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Caine’s willingness to wait for action also reveals a trust in the way of nature. There is an old saying that “good things come to one who waits.” Such a belief implies implicit faith that the universe is good, and that with time, even the most evil things must fall before the forces of good. This type of crisis is what Caine had been trained to deal with. He was taught to avoid conflicts like these when possible. But when unavoidable, they have to be dealt with in the right way.</div>
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Three great spiritual philosophers taught of the importance of the middle way in governing our actions. Both Confucius and the Buddha taught of middle way ethical theories. Aristotle, who referred to his own middle way theory as the golden mean, used the virtue of courage as his primary example. In most situations, it is possible to either do too much of something or too little. The real key is to learn to get it just right–in the middle. Most of us, he taught, shy away from something that is frightening. To the extreme, this is called cowardice. In overcoming this tendency toward cowardice, it’s possible to overcompensate and rush into confrontation with something that is frightening. This is often called rashness. Fong, in this scene, acted rashly. He got himself killed needlessly.</div>
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True courage involves the wisdom of holding one’s center in the midst of something frightening. This is why Hemingway identified courage as “grace under pressure.” Caine also had been taught to recognize the difference between a subtle strength, energy, or life force called chi, and the more obvious, gross strength of the physical body. The latter depends on youth and muscle mass, and fades in old age. The former can be carefully refined and developed throughout one’s life. The acute awareness that comes through meditation increases one’s ability to develop the use of this subtle energy. In turn, one’s awareness is increased through attunement to this subtle energy. Caine’s actions would have to be guided by careful attunement with this chi, or what in Star Wars became popularly identified (just a few years later) as the force. This often involves an appropriate channeling of energies. You learn not to confront an aggressive force head-on, but to redirect those energies and thereby neutralize their destructiveness. Nature is full of such lessons, and the careful observation of nature can be the best classroom.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">*</span></div>
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I wish I could say that after watching this series, one could clearly see when self-defense is appropriate and when it is not. Alas, it is as muddled for us as it is for the characters. Caine defends himself in the end against the Shaolin monk turned bounty-hunter who is sent after Caine by the Emperor. Caine emerges victorious, but says “there is no honor in the taking of a human life.” We do find ourselves in conflict in the world. </div>
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Sometimes it is unavoidable.</div>
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And sometimes we are right, but at other times, we are wrong. It is a murky business filled with pain and danger. At least we can see in “Kung Fu” that Caine is saddened by the web of conflict that he finds himself in. He does not revel in it. And perhaps that is the best lesson to be taken away about the violence. Yes, people step on each other’s toes in this world. Yes, people get into conflicts. But the proper and wisest attitude to have toward these conflicts is to avoid them when possible, to redirect aggressive energies in ways that neutralize their damaging effects, and only use as much force as is necessary to restore harmony to the situation. Our judgments may not always be accurate, and we may not achieve the ideal we were aiming for, but we will minimize the damage when acting on these principles.</div>
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6225232161221761290.post-84088443879691174092013-07-22T10:00:00.000-07:002013-07-22T10:00:03.581-07:00From the Empirical Archives: Driving by Carol V. Davis<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WO-7AE-9aK4/URv4MwFBTAI/AAAAAAAABPA/z8W52bd8C38/s1600/Driving.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WO-7AE-9aK4/URv4MwFBTAI/AAAAAAAABPA/z8W52bd8C38/s400/Driving.bmp" width="307" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Driving</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Carol V. Davis</i></span></div>
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Originally published in the January 2013 issue of <i>Empirical</i></div>
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I never did drive in Russia,</div>
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even after all those years.</div>
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The possibility of it so horrifying.</div>
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The way drivers there carve out a lane</div>
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between two others, even in city center.</div>
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Some would say it’s their right, having waited</div>
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all those years to buy a car and then having to suffer</div>
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such indignities: windshield wipers swiped at night,</div>
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even with glaring streetlights spying on you.</div>
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And the GAI, the traffic police, waving cars over</div>
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into their webs, not freeing them without a bribe.</div>
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But maybe you deserved what you got</div>
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when your car was vandalized, fool that you were</div>
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to leave those blades lying so prettily on the windshield.</div>
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Those were Soviet times.</div>
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Now there’s no waiting to buy a car, though</div>
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not everyone has that kind of cash lying around.</div>
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Still a Land Rover is pretty tempting, the lovely</div>
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wooden dashboard just asking for it, windows that smoothly glide.</div>
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Just consider the people trudging along the sidewalks</div>
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or stranded by trams that never come when</div>
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the temperature plunges below zero.</div>
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You wouldn’t want to trade places now, would you?</div>
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