Delivered 9 June 1954 during the Army-McCarthy Hearings in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Welch: You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
“Exhuming McCarthy”
R.E.M., Document
UNDER CONTRACT CFP: Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America
Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America
Co-editors P.L. Thomas and Christian Z. Goering
UNDER CONTRACT:
Critical Media Literacies and Youth series[1], Sense Publishers
Series Editor, William Reynolds
Rationale
In the fall of 2016, just after the U.S. elected Donald Trump president, a black female first-year student submitted an essay on the prospects for Trump’s presidency. The course is a first-year writing seminar focusing on James Baldwin in the context of #BlackLivesMatter; therefore, throughout the course, students have been asked to critically investigate race, racism, gender, sexism, and all types of bias related to the U.S.—through the writing of Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay, Teju Cole, and Arundhati Roy, among others.
The student’s discussion of Trump’s policies, however, were hyperlinked to Trump’s campaign website. Discussing the draft with the student revealed that the current post-truth America is a significant issue among youth who seem unable to distinguish between facts and so-called fake news.
To blame youth for this lack of critical media literacy seems misguided since the mainstream media itself plays a significant role in misinforming the public. For example, as a subset of the wider media, edujournalism represents a default lack of critical perspective among journalists.
Claims by mainstream media are impressive:
Education Week is the best independent, unbiased source for news and information on pre-K-12 education. With an average of 42 stories posted each weekday on edweek.org, there is always a news, multimedia, or opinion piece to keep you up-to-date on post-election changes in policy, and to help you become a better practitioner and subject matter expert.
The reality is much different. When journalists at Education Week were challenged about their lack of critical coverage of NCTQ, Juana Summers Tweeted, “I’m not sure it’s my place to say whether the study is credible.”
In other words, mainstream media are dedicated to press-release journalism and maintaining a “both sides” stance that avoids making informed decisions about any claims from their sources—including the campaign of Trump.
This volume, then, seeks contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following in the context of teaching and reaching youth in the U.S. about critical media literacy:
- Unpacking the lack of critical perspectives in mainstream media.
- Examining “post-truth” America.
- Confronting issues of race, racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia as related to the media.
- Exploring the promises of the New Media as a haven for truth.
Contributions should seek ways to couch chapters in practical aspects of teaching and reaching youth in the U.S., but can reach beyond the traditional classroom into youth culture as that intersects with critical media literacy.
UPDATED CALL:
We have room for about 3-5 more chapters. Please send a proposal ASAP (by April 1) or a full chapter draft within the following guidelines:
Submit 5000-6000 word chapters by June 1, 2017. (double-spaced, APA 6th, please)
To: paul.thomas@furman.edu and cgoering@uark.edu
Mss guidelines:
- Minimal formatting as we have to prepare a camera-ready manuscript.
- 12 pt, New Times Roman font, double spaced, 1” margins
- Format block quotes and hanging indents with the Word ruler (NOT return/tab)
- Do NOT use auto-formatting citation Apps
- Do NOT use Word templates for header or anywhere in the mss
Chapters returned for revisions by August 1, 2017.
Final Chapters due by September 1, 2017.
Proofs to authors by October 1, 2017.
Book published in fall 2017.
Please include the following information with proposals or draft chapters:
- Your commitment to follow through and meet the deadlines as stated.
- All contact information (email address REQUIRED) for each author of your chapter.
[1]
The Bootstrap Lie and the Politics of Privilege
This is going to be difficult and uncomfortable.
I invite you, then, to be patient while I start with something slightly less uncomfortable but just as difficult.
The tragic but real story of Pat Tillman is many things—one of which is a complete unmasking of how powerful and dangerous cultural mythologies are and how often our cultural mythologies prove to be both false and serving the interests of privilege (primarily white, male, and wealth privilege).
Tillman believed in the sacred duty of a person to serve his country, and then, in that service, Tillman not only lost his life, but also had his death story fabricated to perpetuate the very false myth that failed him.
Those with power sullied Tillman’s legacy to reinforce that the false myth of patriotism could be preserved in the service of their power — and were willing to sacrifice anyone buying the myth.
Again, that is a very hard discussion, a nearly impossible reality to recognize and digest.
But this is even more difficult because it entails race and racism as well as the very ugly stereotypes the U.S. perpetuates and embraces about people in poverty.
And as a very privileged and successful white man, I am walking onto very thin ice by confronting and naming black leaders who, as I will outline, represent a tragedy similar to Tillman’s.
Next, before I become more pointed, my caveat here is that I offer this as a witness in the tradition of James Baldwin, to whom I will return at the end. These are critical views of the world that I have learned by listening carefully, by setting aside my own urge to mansplain, whitesplain—to be the authority.
I am not the authority, but I am a diligent student.
To be considered:
Lawyer Michelle Alexander has detailed a disturbing dynamic: many black communities have advocated against their own best interests by embracing the “get tough on crime” myth perpetuated in the service of privilege. Alexander’s best example, I think, is that police often sweep black neighborhoods (are often invited to do so by blacks themselves), but choose not to do similar sweeps in white and affluent areas such as college campuses—although both are likely to have recreational drugs being used and sold.
Critical educator Chris Emdin, writing on his Instagram page, confronts a parallel paradox in education: “Black teachers with white supremacist ideologies [are] just as dangerous as white folks who don’t understand culture.” From Geoffrey Canada to Steve Perry to Joe Clark—many black educators have embraced the essentially racist “no excuses” ideologies that target black, brown, and poor children while perpetuating that the problems with educating these children lies in deficits of the children, and not any systemic forces. Education designed to correct, “fix,” fundamentally broken children (racial minorities, impoverished children) is inherently racist and classist.
Scholar Stacey Patton advocates against corporal punishment, specifically addressing how many blacks have internalized racist demands that the black body be punished, reaching back to U.S. slavery. As Patton explains:
Dr. Stacey Patton: People think that hitting a child is a form of teaching. We think it will protect them. And people grow up to invert the violence they experience as children as something that was good, particularly in African-American culture. As a people, we attribute our success to having had our bodies processed through violence and quite frankly what it does is confirm a long-standing racist narrative about Black bodies. The only way to control us, the only way to make us “good,” law-abiding, moral people is with a good whupping. It seems that we unconsciously agree with that narrative.
Alexander, Emdin, and Patton represent a much larger body of work that recognizes how often privilege recruits outliers of marginalized groups in order to distort those outliers as proof of false myths, specifically pointing to any successful black person as proof that the bootstrap myth is real, that we have achieved a meritocracy.
Popular culture is filled with examples—O.J. Simpson, Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, Bill Cosby, just to name a few who have become spokespersons in the service of privilege, who, as Emdin notes, are “just as dangerous.”
So here is the very hardest and most uncomfortable part, forced by the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, an ideologue billionaire hell-bent on perpetuating the choice myth that serves only people like her at the expense of marginalized people, especially children who should not have to wait for the Invisible Hand and who should be served immediately by leaders of the wealthiest country in human history.
Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) has eagerly supported DeVos within his own unwavering advocacy for choice, often invoking that poor and minority families and children deserve the same choices as white and wealthy families and children.
Scott has sold his political soul (much like Clarence Thomas) to an ugly and harmful bootstrap myth, as expressed on his biography page:
An unbridled optimist, Senator Scott believes that despite our current challenges, our nation’s brightest days are ahead of us. As a teenager, Tim had the fortune of meeting a strong, conservative mentor, John Moniz. Moniz helped instill in Tim the notion that you can think your way out of poverty, and that the golden opportunity is always right around the corner. The American Dream is alive and well, and Tim’s story is a concrete example of that.
Scott is an outlier, and his story of success is commendable—except it is an ugly thing to hang one’s success over the heads of others, demanding that their not reaching a similar success is simply due to not “think[ing] [their] way out of poverty.”
No, the American Dream is not alive and well:
At the same levels of effort, women and racial minorities remain disadvantaged by systemic forces that work against them; these inequities are not the result of the ugly “laziness” myth about black, brown, and poor people that lies underneath the bootstrap myth, the rugged individual myth, the meritocracy myth.
The free market and all sorts of choice are crap shoots, and they are in no way mechanisms for equity, for justice.
Scott’s “notion that you can think your way out of poverty” is a slap in the face of adults and children who are already working and trying as hard as they can, and worst of all, this bootstrap mantra maintains the very systemic forces it refuses to recognize.
Billionaires from Trump to DeVos are spreading cultural lies, and they depend along the way on recruits into these narratives, recruits—as Alexander, Emdin, and Patton reveal—who may even look just like the people being cheated.
And so I will end by coming back to Baldwin, whose legacy is being renewed, and whose message still resonates as Rich Blint concludes:
As the latest entry of the brilliance of James Baldwin on film, I Am Not Your Negro (along with Baldwin’s scathing account of American film-making, The Devil Finds Work) lays bare the rhetorical and imagistic sleight of hand that enables the fiction and terror of race in American life to persist with such a renewed and deadly power. As he suggests, the extent to which we truly wrestle with our psychic need for the myth of the “nigger,” will determine the future of the country. It is still the only song left to sing.
GUEST POST: Bigger than Sputnik, Christian Z. Goering
GUEST POST
Bigger than Sputnik: How Betsy Devos’ Nomination for Secretary of Education just Saved Public Education
Most people are familiar with American educational history to the point to remember that the Soviet launch of a satellite into space in 1957 before the launch of a US satellite struck great fear that our country was falling behind and thus needed to double down on our efforts, especially those in education. This little blinking light meant the Cold War could be lost and the years after Sputnik were marked by the National Defense of Education Act in 1958 and an onslaught of programs designed to improve teaching and learning and strengthen our system of public schools. A friend who began teaching in 1963 often shared with me the different ways in which he benefited from this urgency—paid summer workshops for teachers, support for graduate degrees, and just plain old-fashioned support for education.
I’m going to be bold in predicting that Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education will be remembered as a watershed moment in educational history, the point in time where public education was saved. I believe Betsy is bigger than Sputnik.
Before you rush to think otherwise, I don’t believe Ms. DeVos has any business leading the US Department of Education. Her religious adherence to the school choice movement, one I believe is designed to tear down (not improve) our system of public education, is single-handedly a disqualifier. The comment about bears and the fact that she has zero experience ever working inside a school of any kind seems like enough further evidence that she has no business setting foot in the Department of Education, much less leading it. When then President-Elect Trump passed on Michelle Rhee—the former Chancellor of the Washington D. C. schools and arguably the most hated educator in America—to instead nominate billionaire DeVos, it seemed apparent that only the most non-logical and most offensive choice was the goal. In this case, President Trump went too far.
While I’d love to tell you that Betsy DeVos is the worst nominee for President Trump’s cabinet and to place all of the blame for this nomination squarely on the President’s shoulders, she’s not and that wouldn’t be fair. Rather, a hefty amount of blame must be placed at the feet of the Democratic party, which over the past twenty years has increasingly drifted towards the school choice movement, interestingly one of the few areas of agreement in our divided country. Following eight treacherous years for public education under President George W. Bush and No Child Left Behind, Barack Obama gave legitimacy and real teeth to the failed policies of his predecessors. The name and shame, test-punish-rinse-repeat cycle did nothing for our education system. What’s worse is that President Obama provided funding for the biggest expansion of school choice in our nation’s history. His picks for Secretary of Education were both unqualified and considered by teachers to be outright attacks on our sensibility of what education actually is and isn’t. So, a hearty “thanks Obama” is in order.
How’s Betsy bigger than Sputnik, one might ask? She has singlehandedly united the Democratic party against the destructive school choice movement, one they almost universally supported previously and she has unified teachers and public education groups for a cause like I’ve never seen. She’s such a bad nominee for this position that she’s taken the place of a satellite blinking across the night sky. As a teacher, I’m looking towards Satellite DeVos with renewed hope and a sort of religious reverence.
Even school choice magnate Eli Broad came out to denounce her nomination. This guy drinks school choice Kool-Aid out of a platinum cup for breakfast and he’s against her? Anyone interested in perpetrating the school choice ruse is likely screaming from their rooftops or smashing their heads against a wall. BB (Before Betsy) everything was sailing through a dark night sky towards unprecedented spreading of vouchers and charters and the opportunity for the greedy to make money off of our nation’s most vulnerable—our school children. The Democrats were shamefully sitting at the same gilded table as the Republicans, no difference in their vision for education. AB (After Betsy), I project a future where public educators are again valued and where programs are initiated to support teaching and learning, a return to doing what is best for all of the students, a vision lost over the last couple of decades. I project a future in which the Democrats are stronger than ever supporters of public schools, unflinching and unwilling to accept anything less than the best for all of our nation’s students, especially not risky and fraudulent school choice schemes.
Thanks Betsy for being such an egregious choice for Education Secretary that you’ve united and revitalized the opposition to your broken ideas. If you are somehow confirmed, the unified force of all teachers—not just the Democrats—will have the brightest blinking light to look towards and know immediately what we need to work against.
U$A: Beware Capitalism as well as Fascism
Often accurately praised as a deft and almost idealizing satire of religion, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle also can serve as a fictional examination of political science.
Central to the politics of the novel is the fabricated tension among military, government (dictatorship), and religion (Bokononism):
“But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.” (pp. 174-175)
The U.S. has existed for much of its history on a similar tension between democracy and capitalism, but other tensions have been incredibly important also, many of which are as fabricated as the one in San Lorenzo: the U.S. versus [insert foreign country/enemy], capitalism versus communism (McCarthy Era, arms race with Soviet Union).
With the election of Trump, many have raised concerns about the creeping threat of fascism, and then, some have countered that with arguments that Trump is not a fascist threat.
Lost in that debate, I think, is a very real and present danger: Trump is the logical consequence of the manufactured tension between corporate America and “government” (here, well represented by Bokononism).
For much of the existence of the U.S., the ruling elites of corporate America have created a public demon, “Big Government,” and used that mischaracterization of the democratic purposes of government to meet the very narrow needs of business leaders.
While fanning the flames of the general public’s hatred of the evil Big Government, corporate America has remained mostly unscathed, and then, as a result, the rise of Trump may be about fascism, or it may not be, but it is clearly about the ultimate triumph of naked capitalism and the end of democracy, even as weak as democracy has always been.
The problem with this is that we are now fully committed to an amoral way of being as a people. The rightful tension between capitalism and democracy, what was essential to our becoming a free and equitable people, depends on the moral imperative of democracy to guide the essentially amoral mechanisms of capitalism.
Government as a moral lever has ended slavery and child labor; has expended voting and marriage to all adults; and has corrected innumerable unethical and abusive elements that were created and sustained by naked capitalism.
Left without a moral barometer, heroine sales would be shaped by market forces to respond to heroine addicts; the same if true of snuff films, and the most abusive forms of pornography.
There is no market that would not be shaped by capitalism in ways that are “right” for that amoral paradigm: heroine priced at the level the market will bear, and so on with snuff films and child pornography.
Without the collective moral imperatives of a people—government—people become mere consumers at the whim of the Invisible Hand—and some become sacrificed along the way (slaves, children, women, etc.).
And here we are: Trump is the embodiment of naked capitalism, in which no moral standards exist, just ratings—the crassest reduction of market forces.
Trump’s administration is not a reality show, but an infomercial on replay, a shitty product that depends on the force of overstated (and false) claims that simply have to convince enough people to buy in to not only survive, but thrive.
But Trump has not caused this ugly erosion of a people; he merely represents who we are.
And who we are is a culture in which millionaire pro athletes enjoy the necessary tension between labor and billionaire owners through unions while the rest of the country sits by after electing Trump who is marshaling in the very real possibility of a national right to work law—a federalization of erasing the necessary tension between labor and owners.
All decent people should fear and work against the rise of fascism, but right now, the U.S. is experiencing the real and horrible consequences of abdicating our moral and ethical boundaries to the naked capitalism that is Trump, that is us.
We have become lost in very garbled ends and have completely ignored the means.
Government is rightfully the collective will of the people, a necessary moral and ethical check to the amoral forces of the free market, in which the “free” is not about liberty but about being free of any ethical concerns.
And thus, I see no need for fascism because there is no resistance; the fall of democracy in the U.S. serves the same interests whether by fascism or the slowly creeping cancer of naked capitalism.
The fall of democracy in the U.$.A. is about a people freely admitting we have no soul, no real concern for anyone except “me.”
The branches of government be damned; we have the Home Shopping Network, the foma of a lost people drunk on crude oil.
BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Trumplandia: Unmasking Post-Truth America (Garn Press)
Dear New York Times
It is the end of the month, and as I click on what appear to be important articles in my social media feed, you, The New York Times, alert me that I have exhausted my free access to your news and commentary, including options for subscribing to your publication.
For a long time now, those messages have, frankly, irritated me because I have been blogging extensively as an educator about how your publication as a leader in mainstream media as well as other highly regarded outlets such as NPR and Education Week has been using my field of education as toilet paper.
Mainstream media consistently misrepresent the quality and problems with public education and teachers; routinely honor reform advocates, politicians, and organizations/think tanks with essentially no credibility; and remain trapped in vapid “both sides,” so-called objective, and press-release journalism.
Since I am just a blogger, only an 18-year veteran of public school teaching, and a current college professor and scholar of education, race, and poverty, I realize you really do not care about my informed positions, but since you are soliciting my money and my support, let me simply remind you here of some of my work highlighting your truly careless and harmful reporting:
- UPDATED: Mainstream Media in (Perpetual) Crisis: More Education Meat Grinder
- The New York Times in an Era of Kool-Aid Journalism
- Mainstream Media, Not Fake News, Spawned Trumplandia
However, I am not addressing this open letter to you, The New York Times, to rail yet again about your failures as a major aspect of the free press in the U.S.
For the first time, when you blocked access to an article and waved your subscription options before me, I paused because unlike NPR, you have done something that many are calling “bold,” but is actually what you should have always been doing: In a Swirl of ‘Untruths’ and ‘Falsehoods,’ Calling a Lie a Lie, Dan Barry.
If I may be so bold, let me counter your solicitation of my patronage with a request of my own.
The New York Times, as major voice in a fading field, could you please acknowledge the failure of mainstream media, a failure far more damaging than fake news, and along with your commitment to name lies as “lies,” could you please take a foundational stand for moving mainstream media in the U.S. toward rejecting “fair and balanced” and then embrace the tenets of being a critical free press?
Again, as a lowly blogger/educator/scholar, I know my voice really doesn’t matter, but I have laid out this problem often:
- When Fake Is Real and Real Is Fake: More on Crossing the Bigfoot Line
- Fair and Balanced Education and Journalism: On the Death of Democracy
- U.S. and Education Reform Need a Critical Free Press
- My Open Letter to Journalists: A Critical Free Press, pt. 2
- Invoking “Oliver Rule (Expanded)” for Education Reform Debate
- O, Free Press, Where Art Thou?
I am very cautiously willing to crack open the door I have long ago closed about the failures of mainstream media, beholden to our consumer society, because of your willingness to do something that any ethical person would do—confront lies, especially from the highest levels of our society.
But as I detail above in a recent blog, about the same time you made your stance about lies, you published a truly awful and harmful article about people living in poverty and depending on government assistance.
It was a hate piece that feeds the very lowest stereotypes (hint: lies) about poor people as well as triggering racism; others as I link in my piece have shown that the article was both filled with gross stereotypes and factually misrepresented the study it cited.
So, thank you for pointing out Trump’s lies, but as I was admonished as a child, when you point a finger at someone, three are pointing back at you.
Will you simultaneously clean your own house, become a leader for your field in the pursuit of a critical free press, as you challenge the current administration?
If yes, I will eagerly open the door, and subscribe with glee.
See Also
Sam Waterston: The danger of Trump’s constant lying
Fair and Balanced Education and Journalism: On the Death of Democracy
Once I posted a reader for Trumplandia, based on the increased sales of George Orwell’s 1984 as well as the related thought pieces on important texts from Orwell and other writers, I was not surprised by the expected response calling for teachers and classrooms to be somehow politically neutral.
I have rejected this idea often, focusing on Howard Zinn’s brilliant metaphor of being unable to remain neutral on a moving train. Both calling for no politics in any context and taking a neutral stance are, in fact, political themselves—the former is a political strategy to deny some Others their politics while imposing your own and the latter is the politics of passively endorsing the status quo (in a society where racism and sexism, for example, continue to thrive, being neutral is an indirect endorsement of both).
Education and journalism—universal free public education and the free press—share many important and disturbing qualities: they are essential to the creation and preservation of a free and equitable people, they remain mostly unachieved in the U.S. in practice because they are often the tools of powerful people and forces who distort their ideal contributions to democracy and equity, and at the heart of that failure (we have failed them; they have not failed us) is the shared traditional code of education/teachers and journalism/journalists assuming neutral poses, being forced into a state of objectively presenting both sides in a fair and balanced way.
Particularly in the post-truth times we now find ourselves—and I argue we are here because of our failures in education and journalism—demanding that educators and journalists remain neutral is not the right goal and not actually how either functions.
In fact, education and journalism are always political, and in most contexts, educators and journalists routinely break the rule of neutrality—and thus, when anyone wags a finger and exclaims “We must be fair and balanced! Show both sides!” the truth is not that educators or journalists are being ideological or biased, but that someone in power feels that his/her politics is being challenged.
Let me illustrate in both education and journalism, starting with the media.
As I have noted before, when we compare the Ray Rice inspired public debate about domestic abuse to the Adrian Peterson motivated public debate about corporal punishment, the unbiased press myth is completely unmasked because domestic abuse (men hitting and psychologically abusing women) was entirely examined throughout the media as wrong (no pro-abuse side aired) while that same media almost exclusively presented corporal punishment as a debate with a fair and balanced presentation of both sides to adults hitting children.
What is clear here is incredibly disturbing: The media, in fact, make decisions about when to honor credible positions, when to reject or even not cover invalidated and unethical positions, and when to shrink back into the “both sides” cover.
While decades of research and the same ethical concerns about power and abuse related to rejecting domestic abuse entirely refute corporal punishment, the media have chosen to remain neutral on a moving train aimed at the health and well being of powerless children.
In other words, when media shirks its role in creating and maintaining a free and equitable people behind its tin shield of objectivity—think about always framing evolution or climate change as debates, as if “both sides” are equally credible when they are not—this is a dishonest pose because the media routinely take sides.
Finally, I want to highlight that education represents this same dishonest dynamic—claiming to be apolitical, or aspiring to be apolitical, while often taking sides.
Unless I am misreading the current mood of the country, the rise of interest in 1984 and other works of literature similar to Orwell’s is along a spectrum of concern about to fear of the rise of fascism and totalitarianism. Concurrently, with the public discussions about fake news and post-truth, we are experiencing a renaissance in examining how power and language are inseparable.
So what does it mean when teachers call for presenting both side of this debate when we bring politically charged novels by Orwell or Margaret Atwood into high school and college classes?
Before answering, let me offer a few examples from typical lessons found in high schools for virtually every student.
Both the Holocaust and slavery in the U.S. are taught as foundational content in anyone’s education; these are disturbing topics, and hard issues.
When we teach the Holocaust, notably through Night by Elie Wiesel in an English course, do we rush to have students read Hitler’s Mein Kamft to fairly represent both sides, treating each position as morally equivalent, allowing our students to choose whichever position she/he wishes?
When we teach U.S. slavery, possibly having students read Frederick Douglass, do we also find eugenicists’ and racists’ declarations demonizing blacks to fairly represent both sides, treating each position as morally equivalent, allowing our students to choose whichever position she/he wishes?
As in the media, educators at all levels routinely take sides—the answer to the two questions above reveal.
And thus, returning to the push back to my Trumplandia reader, I am lost on how or why educators would find ways to present pro-fascist ideas to balance literature study about the threats of fascism and totalitarianism.
Using Orwell and all sorts of powerful literature to help students on the cusp of or early in their roles as active participants in a democracy to better read the world and better act on that world in informed and ethical ways is the very essence of politics, one not corrupted by simplistic partisan politics of endorsing Democrats [1] or Republicans (which is worth resisting in education and journalism).
In 2017, the U.S. and even the entire world are faced with whether or not we truly believe in freedom and equity, whether or not we are willing to invest in the institutions that can leverage both that freedom and equity—institutions such as formal education and the media. And we have been here before, in the same words and the same actions. [2]
If the answer is yes, then our resolve must be linked to demanding that our teachers and journalists are grounded in taking informed and ethical stands, not the dishonest and uncritical pose of objectivity.
As I have shown above, neither is really being neutral now, but instead, pulling out the objective card only when it serves the interest of the status quo.
Critical educators and critical journalists must not serve the whims of power and money, and must be transparent in their pursuit of credible evidence and ethical behavior.
To frame everything as a debate with equally credible antithetical sides is dishonest and insufficient for the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Teachers and journalists are always political agents; both professions must choose in whose interest they are willing to work.
The neutral pose by either is to take a seat on the train, to keep eyes down, and to allow the train to rumble along as if the tracks are not leading to a cliff.
Pretending that cliff isn’t now on our horizon will not stop the train from crashing on the rocks of the coming abyss.
[1] My political work is not partisan, for example, as I have been warning about the Orwellian failures of political parties for many years; see Orwellian Educational Change under Obama: Crisis Discourse, Utopian Expectations, and Accountability Failures by Paul Thomas.
[2]
A Reader for Trumplandia
My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World, Andrew Postman
‘It will be called Americanism’: the US writers who imagined a fascist future, Sarah Churchwell
George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Is Suddenly a Best-Seller, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura
Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s America, Adam Gopnik
1984, George Orwell
The Orwell essay that’s even more pertinent than “1984” right now, Maxwell Strachan
Politics and the English Language, George Orwell
Uneasy About the Future, Readers Turn to Dystopian Classics, Alexandra Alter
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
Newt Gingrich: Margaret Thatcher is the real model for the Trump presidency
1987’s “Document” feels especially applicable to America in 2017, Annie Zaleski
On Jan. 20, Paste ran a clever article titled “An Inaugural Day Message via the Words of R.E.M.” The piece creates a narrative about politics and life by jumbling together and rearranging phrases culled from the Athens, Georgia, band’s song lyrics. Workload-wise, the 2400-word piece is impressive; mixing and matching sentiments from a 30-plus-year career certainly isn’t easy….
The last record R.E.M. released via I.R.S. Records — and the first LP the band recorded with producer Scott Litt — “Document” addresses the corrupting nature of money; political witch hunts concerning free speech; circumstances that are both bewildering and unprecedented; and economic and employment oppression. Appropriately, the record’s music is glinting and electrified, and nods to post-punk, folk, funk and fiery rock ‘n’ roll….
In 2003, Stipe admitted that “Disturbance at the Heron House” is his “take” on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”…
“That song is so fucking political, and it’s so appropriate to what’s going on right now,” he told Filter. “Like, the kind of arrogance that some of the policy makers and world leaders are carrying with them right now is, I think, reflective of the very worst of the United States. It’s that teenage arrogance, as a young country, the know-it-all-kind of thing. That makes me crazy.”
R.E.M. – Disturbance At The Heron House (see also here)
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Additional Recommended Texts
Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler
Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Day 2 Year 56: The Moment
I am at the annual South Carolina Council Teachers of English conference in Kiawah, SC.
This has become the “Glad You’re Alive Tour” since this conference is composed of dozens of my friends and colleagues, most of whom know about my recent car/bicycle accident but haven’t seen me in person since then.
Today is also day 2, year 56.
As I challenged myself in my most recent poem: “who writes about turning 56?”
I am not entirely sure what has spurred this burst of narcissism, this navel-gazing—aging or the accident, or some combination.
Both, I am sure, have flashed mortality before me more brilliantly than ever. The consequences of that are paradoxical, an urgency to notice every moment and a dull realization I am now confronted with way too much time far too often.
The persistent back-handed compliments of my adult life have revolved around how much I accomplish, the praise a thin veil for the nudges that something must be sacrificed to write and publish so much.
But few people ever saw the full experience of me who writes every day and then also cycles 10-15 hours a week, all year, for about 30 years.
The very perverse secret to my productivity has always been that I cram so much into every day that it forces me to be efficient and productive. My motor runs far too high, and I suffer for that with trouble sleeping and pervasive anxiety.
Day 2, year 56 also marks a little over a month with a fractured pelvis, a mostly stationary life that now has huge chunks of time that once was devoted to my bicycle.
I am not a stationary person. I am not one who enjoys free time.
This has been the sort of hell on earth that my existential leanings recognized was the human condition, but this experience has kicked my ass with a vengeance.
The greatest insult added to injury has been that my only refuge for exercise has been riding the recumbent stationary exercise bicycle in the past few days.
I detest exercise bicycles. I loathe exercising inside.
My life as a cyclist has had life-giving qualities I have recognized only in hindsight.
The constant motion of cycling and the hours cycling requires are irreplaceable balms for my OCD and ADHD.
And cycling outside, in the most glorious thing of this world, the sun, is my only real defense against depression. I probably have seasonal affective disorder, and nothing keeps me closer to the boundaries of happiness as sunshine does.
As awful as the exercise bicycle is, this has relieved the pain that has plagued me since being hit by the car, and I also have begun to sleep better (although I have never slept well).
Here at the conference, my return to exercise has been interrupted again, although only for a couple days, but I feel the same creeping anxiety that has defined my life for 30 years when I fear I cannot ride my bicycle as planned.
So I am here on my “Glad You’re Alive Tour,” and the thing that I know has changed in my life is I notice people looking at me as I never have before.
It began in the ER when family arrived.
Maybe it was the accident, or growing older, or a combination of both—but I see other people and myself now in ways that are more distinct.
Anxiety, you see, is being always prisoner to what may come next, to be alienated from the moment.
Day 2, year 56, and I am now being newly introduced to the moment.
The moment yesterday morning when I found on Facebook the video of my granddaughter posted by my daughter in which Skylar is telling me happy birthday, that she loves me.
After a horrifying nose bleed on the morning of my birthday, I sat on the couch and cried hard.
The moment.
I am not sure I know what to do with that, but I am more eager than ever to try.
The accident has lowered the bar, people are glad I am alive, and I am filled nearly to bursting that they are glad and that I too am glad to be here.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 