OPEN LETTER TO GREG LEWIS AND CHA CONSULTANTS

I would like to see serious effort put into publicizing the Niagara Communities Comprehensive Plan(NCCP) meetings. The Clough, Harbor & Associates consultant, Walter Kalina, a highly paid “consultant,” who spoke at the first public meeting, appeared embarrassingly far less than enthusiastic about increasing publicity to get the people involved to participate let alone educating anyone as to how this process can or should work. Very little money, he indicated, would be put into publicity or education. Why? This is unacceptable if not outrageous to anyone, unless of course you are one who is passively, unconsciously sleepwalking your way through life while our government drifts dangerously away from its democratic moorings. Where was Greg Lewis at the first public meeting of the NCCP project??? Why were only 25 people there? We are planning a possible future and 25 people minus a County Manager and only one County Legislator in attendance, Jason Murgio.

This planning process can be a great thing. It could be in itself quite an educational experience in democracy. However it will take more than the appointed few, and the other usual suspects of local government, to turn out to plan a possible future for Niagara County. Those leading this planning process are morally obligated to take responsibility to publicize this project and educate the people regarding exactly what this planning project is all about, how it’s done and how people might participate. Or it’s business as usual. Insular! Hermetically sealed “government” behind the backs of the people. Business as usual!

The first public meeting two weeks ago at NCCC was negative, pessimistic and cynical. Twenty five people or so showed up. The attitude of virtual despair at that meeting can only be overcome if some effort and enthusiasm is shown on the part of our putative leadership and hired consultants to further involve, motivate and help our people to participate.

If this is going to be more than an insider governmental process, then representation needs to go far, far beyond the appointed representatives of the so-called stakeholders. Or it’s business as usual.

For the most part, I fear, the appointment of stakeholders is an inside job. I’m sure some will think the appointees are enough in number and qualitatively representative. I hope they are adequately representative of the people of Niagara County essentially and as a whole. I don’t believe that they are. Right now it appears as business as usual. Of course it does not appear this way to the insiders. But business as usual never appears as business as usual to the insiders. To them it’s just the way it is and just the way it has to be.

I asked one councilman from North Tonawanda, Kevin Brick, appearing on Tom Christy’s Legislative Journal on LCTV, about this project when I called in to the show. He knew very little about the NCCP planning project of a substantive nature, if anything at all. When I asked who the representative was from North Tonawanda, he didn’t know. How are the citizens supposed to know if the councilmen don’t know???

Did the Mayor of NT do a search for a good representative? Did he bother to consult or inform the people as to this process that “we” are involved in. Who knows? I heard nothing. Did he send out notice asking if anyone was interested in representing North Tonawanda? Not as far as I know. Is this government degenerated into bureaucracy at its worst?! Business as usual? I hope not. There is much reason to believe it is.

We must do more to encourage this democratic process. It could be amazing. Or it could be business as usual. Democracy, when nurtured at its source, must be nurtured at its “grass roots.” Think about that metaphor. The nutrients must come in through the roots, the people, all of the people. Democratic governmental process is “for” the people, but if not “by” them, then at best it’s just “about” them and not “of” them.

Wake up Niagara County! Your tax money, your representation and your governmental rights are being pissed away. This plutocratic oligarchy is pretending to be democratic but is nowhere within the most meager limits of democracy. The specialists, experts, managers, bureaucrats and patronage appointees are devolving toward a centralized administration of the few over the many. It is a “show” of the forms of democracy without the specifics and particulars of democracy’s substance. Business as usual? Not if you demand to be involved, accounted for and respected.

FIVE 800 LB GORILLAS LOOSE IN NIAGARA COUNTY

Whether the Niagara Communities Comprehensive Plan is too messy, too expensive or simply a way of legitimating a “comprehensive plan” whose recommendations have already been reached in some hidden agenda, the process should continue. Despite the naysayers who may obstruct, exploit or attempt to enervate the project, something quite good can come from this democratic process. Possibly the Republican juggernaut of Niagara County finds it potentially just a little too threatening to its local hegemony to allow such a potentially authentic democratic process to succeed. For the same reason it chooses to conjure up reasons to gag or eliminate Tom Christy on LCTV’s Legislative Journal, and prevent him from giving voice to others such as Louis Ricciuti who has tried to inform us about the extent of nuclear pollution in our backyards. (cf. “The Bomb that Fell on Niagara” in the Buffalo publication, ArtVoice.)

The Tonawanda News editors also jumped on the naysayers bandwagon regarding the county communities planning process, complaining that such a process should already have taken place. But it hasn’t. They want the citizens to hold their legislators feet to the fire if they voted for this project. But this seems to imply that they don’t get that this is more than a project for the legislators. This is about the people entering into the process. In fact is it not the case that it is so often the citizen seeing the problem and bringing it to the legislators, the courts or the press that can lead to real change. Witness Lois Gibbs, Erin Brockovich, Karen Silkwood and so many more citizens who must plead and fight for change while our local pusillanimous parliamentarism fails to produce.

Duvalle & Co at Tonawanda News conclude their editorial rallying the people to “take back control of their county” but fail to see that this project and process has the great potential to enable that to happen. Why quibble over the cost when the benefits could be so great. The Republican business crowd seems not to wince a bit when they throw money at our problems through the IDA’s PILOTs. Isn’t this just another form of ‘throwing money at the problem?’ The only solution some people seem to know is the mantra of cutting taxes. It seems this tax break theory should have long since been discredited. William Greider in Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of Democracy in America maintains that since the 1920’s, of all the tax breaks given the rich at the Federal level only one time did there result any appreciable increase in investment in American business and industry. I wonder where the money went? Switzerland, Monaco? Or, maybe instead wherever the desperate and starving will work for slave wages?

Despite the various voices who believe we shouldn’t need to spend thousands of dollars to get the municipalities to talk to one another, the fact is I don’t think we have yet proven ourselves really capable of it in a creative way. We need to use this process to educate us in democracy and do so by using the planning project’s real problems as the training ground. But simultaneously it will be the staging ground to demonstrate that democracy can solve real problems. And if networking does in fact begin and a dialogue is established, then possibly we can begin creating a communion of communities out of the municipalities. We might actually engender a participatory democracy. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the towns and villages may retain their identities or traditions, if you will, yet still find a way to cooperate to integrate and streamline administration, infrastructure and services. The by-product may be an education in democracy for us all not to mention potentially reducing costs. That is, the internal unity and relatedness may be the greatest outcome in the long run even if no recommendations are acted on immediately.

If the process of the project is sufficiently publicized and thus involves the communities in a shared narrative, it may well loosen up the power structure which seems to have a stranglehold on Niagara County. Why would one want to stop a process with such potential? Probably only to protect one’s power and network of patronage. If in fact the Republican power structure here is, as I’ve read in the Tonawanda News article recently by Jill Tierreri, so influential if not domineering, then it may itself be interested in this process given that it has gotten so little done for the county. Yes, a fair number of lucky followers are rewarded and some few others benefit but the county as a whole continues to sink, losing population and languishing in despair. Such power as we suffer here has not necessarily translated into creative productivity.

Given that we still suffer from water pollution, chemical pollution, the threat from the nuclear waste sites, a city at the falls that is largely an embarrassment and a highway that scars the rim of the gorge preventing us moving forward with consequential restoration of the natural ecology – the five 800 lb gorillas – one would think that the leadership might benevolently want to loosen the reins on power and empower the process in which creative thought and action can begin in good faith. Given that all we’ve really got is the natural aesthetic power of the Falls and Gorge to revive the area as the class act it could be, why should we not stop allowing ourselves to be the doormat for America while, contradictorily enough, presuming to be a world class tourist destination equally worth visiting? Is it that if we started making the kind of noise that might lead to a serious clean-up and restoration that the world would find out that Niagara is a hazard zone. Visit beautiful Niagara Falls and, oh by the way, bring your gas mask and Geiger counter with you. And don’t eat the fish you’ve caught in the river. Let’s leave the denial behind and finally pay the piper.

It seems that we should seriously now consider the recommendations of Niagara Heritage Partnership et.al. Their plan offers a coherent strategy consistent with a vision that is concrete and positive. It offers relatively immediate productive possibilities while generating open-ended future projects and possibilities. This plan renders visible the jewel in the crown that is Niagara. It could be the unifying moment of the County’s Comprehensive Communities Plan. It integrates business, ecology and education. What are we waiting for? Check out the proposal at www.nfwhc.org and sign the petition at www.niagaraheritage.org.

NIAGARA COMMUNITIES COMPREHENSIVE PLAN

Have you heard of this plan? I’ll bet not. Actually it’s a year-long effort to create a plan, a County-wide brainstorming process to figure out what we need to do to improve life in Niagara County. More concretely, it's a series of meetings of representatives of supposedly all the "communities" and "stakeholders" in Niagara County. These representatives constitute the Steering Committee. There will also be 4 more open-to-all public meetings apparently of an informational nature but also open to comments and questions on the part of the public regarding the progress of the process.

It’s just getting under way although the representatives for the steering committee have already been chosen. I'm not sure how often they will meet. If you did hear of this project, I fear that it appeared as another HoHum technocratic endeavor that begins and ends with a lot of talk by business, managerial, and bureaucratic types but nothing happens.

That was the fear that a few people at the first public informational meeting expressed quite vociferously with sharp overtones of anger, cynicism and pessimism. Nevertheless, this project is a countywide comprehensive plan to serve as a concrete vision of our future that will include specific recommendations at its conclusion next Fall. New York State does not require this planning process but encourages it.

The meeting was held at NCCC last Wednesday, Feb. 27 in the Fine Arts Auditorium. There were roughly 25 people in attendance. If there are about 250,000 people in Niagara County that’s about 1 in every 10,000 people in attendance. There was a “stakeholders” meeting earlier in the day. I wasn’t invited. Were you?

I’ll take responsibility for not knowing anything about this until I saw it in the paper last week. But I suspect that even if I did know about it at the start, I still wouldn’t have been able to get myself invited. I jest of course. Why should I be invited? What “stake” do I have, mild-mannered insignificant philosophy professor that I am.

My point is that it seems the choice of stakeholders while based on a reasonable if not obvious criterion may still be suspect. But why should I be suspicious? After all the brochure says, “Each phase of the process relies on participation by the stakeholder communities and the public for its input.” Ok, fair enough. But in the first place, why distinguish ‘stakeholders’ from the ‘public’? Could that mean, pray tell, that there could be some citizens who aren’t stakeholders but still get to count as part of the “public?” But since the “public” isn’t a stakeholder, that means that they only get to participate in these “informational” meetings. They don’t really get to “plan.” Did anybody consider that with such a criterion, that the public itself is really at "stake?"

Does that mean that the stake-less public gets to be “informed” after the real decisions by the people that matter have already been made? Well, my fear is that the usual suspects or their spokespeople will be on the Steering Committee. Yes there will be some ordinary, average everyday citizens who will represent their communities, at least I hope. Nevertheless I seriously doubt that the representation will really be representative. And I doubt that the “public” will be represented. My last doubt is that the summing up of the whole process at the bitter end by those leading the process will resemble the data gathered.

I have many more doubts and questions. I hope you look into it. After all we’ve apparently spent a lot of taxpayers’ money on this little adventure. One attendee at the Public Meeting asked the speaker representing CLA, the consulting firm running the show, if it was true they were getting over $300,000 for this love fest. Walter Kalina, the consultant representing CLA, refused to answer.

I have my doubts but I am really not cynical. Possibly a skeptic and not really yet inspired. Yet it could be a great thing if it spurs public discourse and stirs a sense of community. Hopefully it will not continue in the spirit of the naysayers who set much of the tone of the first public meeting.

My lingering puzzlement is why I don’t hear about these things until after the players are picked. It reminds me of reading in the paper that Wal-Mart in NT was a “done deal” even before I knew the big-box monopoly was possibly setting up shop on the Boulevard. It reminds me also of reading in the paper that some other “consulting firm” had completed their plans to “improve” Gratwick Park before I even knew they were hired to do so. From what I read of their proposals my cat could have come up with something considerably more creative for much less than the $50,000 bucks I heard NT spent. Ok, ok maybe I’m just out of the loop. But will someone please tell me where/when the “loop” starts?

RESTORING THE POLITICAL TO POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

Certainly the practice of attempting to denigrate peoples’ character and show them in the worst conceivable light is clearly the lowest moral road in politics. Americans who understand our democracy are for the most part done with this. Surely we continue to see such practices of character assassination continuing. On the national scene, for instance, most recently Hillary Clinton in concert with shadowy figures on the lunatic red-neck fringe are doing their venal best to destroy Obama’s reputation. The Niagara Times blogger, “Hobbes,” is doing his best to disparage the person of LCTV Legislative Journal talk-show host Tom Christy. At the state level there were recent revelations regarding Karl Roves paying off a Republican lawyer to “find dirt” on a democract (imprisoned, former governor, Don Siegelman) running again for Governor in Georgia, in particular sexually compromising pictures which she never found. Nevertheless the Republican assassination machine eventually got the democratic candidate on trumped up bribery charges. And of course the sad and demoralizing list could go on of other heinous acts of corruption of the democratic and political process.

But America is waking up to the fact that destroying people struggling to practice democracy is really not politics at all. It is violent, elitist and arrogant actions of authoritarian types who prefer to achieve power through whatever force is necessary. But democracy is about creative ideas, rational persuasion and a competitive yet cooperative social self-determination of a people. To keep open this fragile space of freedom between people in the public sphere for the practice of such self-determination is to be political and to create a political space. One herein and hereby engages in debate, critical self-examination, reflective self-inquiry, sharing new ideas and suspending judgement long enough to allow oneself to listen to the voice of the other with whom we must engage and actually hear. That is, actually be affected. As the Old Testament says, “He who does not hear must suffer.”

But attempting to prevent the flourishing of an informed public by refusing to engage in democratic dialogue with respect to what one feels should not be discussed nor heard by others; by suppressing issues, information, questions and problems that people actually have, is to attempt to destroy the political content of discourse and discussion. By trying to control what is discussed by controlling who gets to talk and how it is talked about is to destroy democracy and the political sphere. Such attempts and efforts are usually on the part of people to whom, in order to stop open, public engagement and dialogue or debate, it must seem necessary if not actually more right, to assassinate character, control the media, dumb down education and dis-inform the public. The alternative would be to engage one’s adversary openly and honestly in the spirit of truth, listening to one’s fellow citizen with the respectful anticipation that someone else may really have something to teach us.

The local issue that Niagara County faces in the attempt of the LCTV board of directors using bureaucratic rules to silence Tom Christy is an example of the de-politicization of politics. Their reason for gagging Christy is to enable objective talk about Government to take place and prevent biased political talk from taking place. However what goes unseen in this repressive tactic of speech control is that the politics will still be there if they continue to have their heavy-handed way. Where is the political bias? It lay in the assumptions that the Board makes that allow them to distort to their seeming advantage bureaucratic rules that then construe suppressing speech as editorial privilege. So these days at LCTV the politics has already taken place before the show starts. It seems the Board is either consciously “playing politics” to achieve political advantage or possibly they are afraid as individuals or as a group to lose the favor of local politicians. And, by the way, these Government officials who are after the purging are going “only to talk about government” are politicians first and foremost. Those, like “Hobbes,” who believe that Government exists independently of “the political” or that the self-justification and vision of such officials are not political acts are suffering from double vision. To believe that the democratic struggle for political self-determination stops when a politician is elected as a Government official is naïve or simply lying.

So, such supposedly Governmental purists would rather take the politically self-destructive road of villifying individuals rather than the high road of building democratic communities of creative self-determination.

Political intelligence in its present state in Niagara County is inadequate. The communities are for the most part failing. Thousands of people have left the area over the past decade or so. To stop any speech is to curtail creative thinking even though it is in short supply and there is nothing we need more.

It is sad that “Hobbes” chooses virtual cyber-terrorist tactics hiding behind a blog non-identity and carrying out the dirty work of someone’s political agenda in the name of preserving the purity of Government discourse on the public air waves. We don’t know who you are. And you aren’t using bombs but to attempt to destroy the free political space of intellectual inquiry and discovery is a form of terroristic violence and tactically proto-fascist.
However when the freedom of the political space between people is suppressed and its pressing subject matter repressed, then the political emerges everywhere. If the space of Government is not permitted to express the tensions, oppositions, differences and possibilities of political existence, then the very forms of Government are subject to dissolution in the medium of “politics through other means,” namely war, violence, corruption and the forceful, manipulative misuse and destruction of speech, language, discourse and dialogue, not to mention mutual distrust, suspicion and cynicism.

On LCTV Legislative Journal is educational. It is not news or mere journalism. It is political discourse as it is mediated and constituted by the forms of institutions which are forms of political expression. To censor politics out of government discourse is to bureaucratize its very being or to strive to wrest from its democratic aspirations a fascist future. I’m not sure which is worse, maybe government conceived on a business and crisis management mode.

DISMANTLING PUBLIC DISCOURSE AT NIAGARA TIMES

The Niagara Times blog administrator seems to be going off the loony deep end. Hobbes, whomever that is, whom I’ve had some civil exchanges with by e-mail, seems to revert compulsively back to an agenda of political assassination usually of Tom Christy. He seems to exhibit or to be motivated by a kind of stalker mentality at this point.

Now I get a lot of good information from his/her(?) site and some interesting insights. I respect just about anyone who participates in the public sphere whether as citizen or government official. But unfortunately there is an aura of ill-willed pernicious partisan politics on the Niagara Times site. And moreover when we don’t know who you really are it is not really public, should not be taken equally seriously and should of course be held under suspicion. Attacking from behind his moniker, Hobbes refuses to confront and challenge publicly as him/herself and prevents democratic dialogue from moving forward toward a political ethos worthy of the values and virtues of America.

The best I can deduce from that site is that it is a republican blog promoting a programmatic agenda to further their cause, projects and power structure. Their particular attacks on Christy are undoubtedly focused on controlling the airways in Niagara County. Of course the logic, be it as it may, is veiled in a bureaucratic rationalism that strains to appear as if it has the interests of clear and unadulterated discourse at heart. In truth it is obscurantist at best and tactically proto-fascist at worst. The substantive argument proffered as reason to remove Christy is that government education on LCTV should, apparently, contain no “political” content. Hobbes, in the name of, well what? Purity, justice, bureaucratic cleanliness?, insists that Christy’s exercise of free speech, his practical questioning in effort to unfold the meaning, implications and possibilites of the matter at hand, not to mention his jokes, violate the sanctity of legitimate educational discourse on government. Yet government actions which can be construed as containing or implying no political content actually presupposes a Fascist social context. A Fascist social sphere is purged of political possibility. All political decisions are already made and embodied in the formal institutions of the “government.” Maybe Hobbes would really like to go beyond Republicanism or possibly even neo-conservatism toward the image and ideals of Cheney’s war machine and dictatorial Executive branch and bring about a neo-Fascist regime.

In truth, government actions engender concerns in the public sphere that are exactly of the nature of “the political.” The real intention of Hobbes' sustained attack is to continue to inflame the fears, defensiveness and anger that can be released with the accusation that language is “politically incorrect” in a political culture that is deeply divided and afraid that the real divisions in our society will surface. So the attempt is made to control speech, dialogue and substantive content such that we cannot move politically beyond the bureaucratically sustained divisions of society that are real.

The cat really slips out of the bag however when Hobbes takes faux “offense”, only in the name of what is “legally” correct of course, at Christy’s “foggy memory” joke. This is really reaching for straws. Not to mention just a little slimey pretending to be sensitive to and getting the humor as if he’s really really down with it. Sorry but this pretense just doesn’t fly. There is an underlying hostility in such subterfuge but it fails to cover up the violence perpetrated against democratic freedom and openness in the name of and in the form of formal concern about following the rules.

So let’s censor political content, humor and then next possibly questions themselves. In fact the reports and opinions of our government officials are really not even opinions when torn out of the concrete context of a dialogue that flows from the interests of the people affected by governmental decisions, projects, attitudes and expectations. Without honest, multi-faceted examination of government officials especially by people without a voice, such opinions are mere propaganda. EDUCATING the public about government comes about through discussion. Mere unexamined information is not EDUCATION. Such discussion need not necessarily have government officials present. In fact much of such discussion would benefit more form the absence of the officials. Reportage by the legislators about the legislators is mere declamation unless placed within the living context of real people with real questions flowing from their lived concerns and interests. Christy seems to fill that bill.

No, Hobbes, there is not an absolute identity of government and politics. They are two sides of the same coin of civic life. To pretend they can be other than analytically separated as concepts useful for intellectual study is to fall into a form of thought called positivism. It imagines or pretends to imagine that each word can refer to a distinctly separate thing in the world. It tries to put such artificial separations to practical advantage as Hobbes is doing here by using highly interpretable bureaucratic rules to separate and alienate what in reality always go together especially if one wants to talk about them as they affect the real world.

But the key word here is "educate." And if Hobbes is truly serious about education, then he should allow what belongs together in reality to be together on LCTV. And, by the way, there is nothing more educational than a good laugh.

I suspect that if the Government channel is finally antiseptically purged to Hobbes liking and all Politics exiled to another channel, probably then the Host on the Politics channel won’t be able to talk about Government. You see it can all get a little absurd can’t it? Rather than become more “politically correctly” paranoid if not stupid, let us lighten up and give up this fear of open public knowledge and discourse.

Moreover, why doesn’t Hobbes come out from the shadows and publicly thematize and debate what he finds so deleterious to the public sphere? Why hide and snipe and beg like the King in "A Man for All Seasons" trying to guilt trip his princes into killing Beckett for him? Why not give up these insidious attacks and be openly and publicly political.

Why not come out of the closet, be a man or woman as the case may be, and talk about what you feel is really at stake. Why can’t you take responsibility publicly for your insights and your errors. There’s something quite anti-democratic and unjust about the secrecy. I’m not quite sure what it is. When I put my finger on it, I’ll let you know.

CENSORING POLITICS ON LCTV

It seems it doesn’t take much rumbling among the pundits in Niagara County for the local politicos, that is, bureaucratic servants of the status quo, to start tightening the reins on democracy. After having read several posts over the past couple months on the Niagara Times blog attacking Tom Christy and calling for a letter writing campaign for his removal for various crimes against political correctness, it did begin to look like there was some attempt underway to oust Christy from Legislative Journal.

As it turns out, through some tortured interpretation of apparent state regulations, LCTV Board of Directors felt “obligated” because of “some complaints,” yet undisclosed, to enforce certain restrictions as to format. The “reasoning” is that a Government channel should only be about “government.” That means to the Board that only elected officials of government are permitted to be on the show. Moreover the Legislative Journal is now limited to non-political discourse and Christy is limited to being only a facilitator of “discussion.” Christy is not permitted any editorializing. READ: No new thoughts that might embarrass the politicians! Lastly, alternate guests who are not elected officials and alternative guest hosts are also barred from the hallowed halls of LCTV.

This not so subtle, yet unabashed and really very embarrassing power play, the motivation for which may be varied, surely is partly about local political sycophants unwilling to displease their bosses, whether in Albany or locally, and defend the principles of democracy not to mention the first Amendment.

At worst, such cleansing is proto-fascist. At best it continues a historical process of modernity in which the realm of the political is forcibly displaced from the public sphere to institutions of government and then finally removed from government itself. What this means is that the kind of discourse and ethos of openness and inquiry that constitutes democratic culture, is now even being expunged from within the realm of the governmental. In terms of the censorship at LCTV, it is happening by trying to control who gets to talk such that what gets talked about is in effect safe, propagandistic and thereby depoliticized. Only the interests and issues of those in power may be articulated and argued. Only the questions that limit discussion to institutionally circumscribed means and ends are permitted—especially the ends of the local party machine, in this case probably Republican.

The ideologues at LCTV do not want the talk show to become “politicized.’ The same “reasoning” continues that such “talk” belongs on the public access or possibly educational channel. This is such utter faux-analytical non-sense, I don’t know where to begin to critique this sophistry. The only reason that they might get away with this, other than that they have the power and can prevent any information from surfacing as to how and why this is really being done, is because our political consciousness and language is so completely hypostatized, that most of us may actually believe that government officials once purged of nasty questions and commentators that might ask them some real questions regarding who and what they really serve, can talk about what they do in a non-political language. They want us to believe that such reportage regarding what the politicians are doing is not really political. They want us to believe that there is this isolable thing called “government” that doesn’t include, imply and require political analysis. And, they want us to believe that there is another thing, equally hypostatized, called “politics” that can be safely placed on another channel. I guess then on that other channel it means you can talk all the “politics” you want without embarrassing or implicating any government officials, government policies, government actions, well, you get the idea. Do they really believe we are that stupid?

But the actual fact of the matter in social reality is that everything that government officials do in session, on talk shows and probably even at home is wholly and essentially political. One blogger on the Niagara Times site who would like to see Christy deep-sixed said he would just like the Legislative Journal show to “give him the facts” of what’s happening in government session. The naivete of such a wish is incomprehensible. Unless of course you wake up to the fact that the degree of reification of our world allows people to believe that there is this thing out there called a “fact.” And this innocent fact innocently imparted by our innocent government servants will be like an aspirin that we can take when we have a headache. Or, such a wishful thinker may argue that he just wants the bald, unadulterated “facts” such that he can bravely make up his mind himself as to what they mean. Of course our wishful thinker can imagine that such thought is possible without being troubled by the opinions, questions and interests of others in his world, because he lives in a politically alienated fantasy land of so-called “facts,” partisan formulas and supposed leaders who will show him and his party the way back to “Kansas.” In short his de-politicized thought is really a de-democratized thought and discourse. “Facts” don’t come with their meaning and historical context written on their face. They must be examined from many perspectives, people and points of view.

So what we might need to understand here is that all the flack that Christy has taken regarding his loud voice, impulsive interruptions, oh so very vulgar and offensive language and bad haircut is really simply the excuse and cover for not wanting to suffer the openness, honesty, passion and unpredictability of the democratic process that he represents. It is an attempt, seemingly successful, to artificially squeeze the politics out of the government and the separate the politician from the people. The tactic is common: get people worked up with some politically correct hot button issue, usually “bad speech,” and then transfer that angry, indignant energy to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Where have we seen this before? Well, we’ve seen it all over America from the President who can’t hear the press shouting at him as he walks to his helicopter; to the White House Press conference where a nicely trained and polite press corp can ask as many insipid questions as openly as they like; to a news media that progressively becomes more entertainment than investigative journalism; to an educational system that no longer teaches Civics and a secondary/higher education establishment that worships abstract, pseudo-objectivity as learning drifts further and further from any relevance to the lives we lead and the passionate self-interest that generates inquiry, research and questioning is stigmatized as irrationalistic and biased.

It is incumbent upon LCTV to stop relying upon the coercive and manipulative distortion of language and democracy and stop pretending that politics can be separated safely from the words and actions of legislators. Stop pretending that the “facts” can be alienated from their examination, interpretation and critique from the standpoint of ordinary everyday people. This bureaucratic maneuver is repressive, oppressive and, very simply anti-American.

The censorship of Legislative Journal on the part of an obviously partisan Board of Directors is blatantly political but egregiously anti-democratic. But who still believes that the partisan parties are still interested in defending democracy and promoting such education, whether in the schools or media, that furthers democratic culture and action? Let speech be fairly and robustly freed by freeing the airways from such bureaucratic “reasoning” and regulations that serve the well-placed and powerful. Stop repressing and oppressing passionate participation in the creative dynamics of democracy.

COMMUNITY AS POLITICAL COALITION OF THE PEOPLE

Who the American people really are I’m not sure. “We the People” is clearly a political idea that it is the project of the declared union of these people to achieve. I don’t believe any real configuration of this project has been achieved. ‘We the people’ has not been secured any more than its definition and self-understanding has been clarified. This is surely the case despite the apparent economic success of the capitalist program and ideology that exploits its vision—even to the detriment of capitalism.

Certainly America has worked admirably for some. But in the face of its globalist economic expansion and concomitant militarily maintained empire, it’s doubtful at best that its productive capacity and sovereignty is any longer oriented to care for and promulgate the well-being of America as an integral whole. There is little doubt that it is oriented to the privileged class that has exploited and perverted America’s project of a free nation of autonomous communities and self-responsible social individuals.

Though the value of family in particular and human rights in general is constantly held up as fundamental, the state of family is decayed and in disarray both as it exists and as it understands itself. Without the ethos of community that is its fertile soil, it is unlikely that family life and the life of the family will survive. It is unlikely that the communal defense of human rights as they are lived daily will stay rooted in the hearts of the people. Today such community itself goes without identity and those populations which claim to be in tact as a community exhibit all the signs of decay of those who clearly have no real community other than in name and legal constitution.

Given that most communities are at the mercy of their economic stability and those economic and pseudo-cultural forces that can alter their structure and ethos, it is fair to say that in America community as cradle of family life does not exist. What exists is a functional collectivity externally mediated by economic, pseudo-cultural and media forces. The cooperation that manages to work for collectivities of people that continue to maintain proximity and coherence does not flow from the primacy and priority of cultural and social integrity but the contingencies of economic enterprises that permit them to associate and temporarily and conditionally live a life together.

If in fact the life of community has failed as an existential reality that lives, acts and understands itself as a socio-cultural whole, a whole whose project of self-fulfillment is the foundation of its being, then community finds itself in the position of positing its being as follows: as the possibility of survival and self-realization in a political coalition of the people whose political agency defines community itself. It is measured by the abundance of the individual personalities and their political capacity to limit and constitute a Federalist central administration based on the principle of subsidiarity.

Politics today in America is the politics of community. It is a variation of “all politics being local politics.” It does presuppose the primacy of place and the irreducibility of community beyond the condition of place or geography. Community does have structure and loses its ground and purposefulness when conceived in its coherence and identity as a function of utility. It is the politics of community whose purpose it is to transform the capacities of capital and the powers of government to secure and nurture its place. Capital and its Class cannot presume a society of communities when the later are its mere raw material and staging ground for profiteering and preparing people to serve the interests of globalization and empire.

Community’s real power is measured when it so situates itself politically that one man actually means one vote and such principle displaces the practice of ‘one dollar one vote.’ Its ethos is measured by the realization that its culture is an expression of the realization of an identity of autonomous and responsible individuals. Such an ethos is created in creating a new culture out of the many cultures, traditions, practice, languages, wisdoms, religions and histories with which it has contact actually and educationally, historically and in the problematic present. Its first criterion of thought and action, especially political action is the self-constitution and regulation of the good for a multi-culturally concrete, communal social whole.

The individual of such real community knows that when returning home from a “sojourn,” he returns to what he is, yet knows that what he brings back is gifted in further enriching what has always existed for him. The “sojourn” refers to an Indonesian tribal practice of excursion into the world but the inevitable return to community and thus home. This tradition preserves a virtual ontological awareness of the primacy of place and community in determining identity, belonging and purposefulness for both individual and society.

The politics of community is seen as necessary when we allow ourselves to realize that the effects of corporatism, globalism and militarism is playing itself out in our back yards. It is only here also where it can be effectively confronted. The task follows from the human right to reappropriate environment, community, culture and thought. Life itself must be politicized, not to mention the education which has been hermetically sealed, away from its heart beat in the political life of the people. That is, education must be made the medium of self-reevaluation and recreation the values of a life worth living not to mention the constitutively radical democracy through which it takes place.

Many simple truths are yet to be awakened to. Is it so difficult to see that the the control of our food source and substance is to take control of our bodies and our land? The rationalized interest of the food processing industry and factory farms is not in the interest of health let alone the genuine enjoyment of good food. Culture is not the Wal-Mart congregation of conditioned drones brainwashed to believe in the sanctified infallibility of such a cancerous corporation. Sam Walton’s motto was “lower the cost of living.” He actually lowers the value of living.

Our unfortunately still lingering fear of communism and our distortion of the history of populism prevents us from fairly looking at how the privatization process is de-communalizing community. Bureaucracy, state “authorities,” management consultants, law in the service of capital and control of democratic process, education as domestication for job suitability and the political exploitation of religion water down and homogenize community and uproot the individual from a life oriented to place and traditional purposefulness. In the light of this rarifed atmosphere continually sliced and diced by these mechanisms of social processing and societal placement, a concrete, constitutive democracy of community can of course look like nothing but the romantic, animated fantasy of a resurrected Walt Disney.

As a political consequence a real “politics” struggling to find the real opposition that delineates a productive confrontation of interests must appear is inherently corrupt, if not evil and hopeless. Party partisanism does not stimulate a creative belonging to political process, as it should. It does not legitimate and guarantee being heard and being taken seriously. It creates a disruptive hostility and mutual contempt. It encourages the antagonism of a consciousness of distrust—political paranoia. It proffers pseudo-issues, moralistic condemnations, near delirious distractions from a thoughtful discourse and dialogue. And this done in the name of the advantages of power, destroying the validity of the claims of any valid opposition, and securing the totalizing acceleration of expansionism and a finalized post-historical Universalism.
Party partisanism, a ruse of the New International Economic Class, is at best humanly and politically divisive encouraging unnecessary and deleterious conflict, defensiveness and reactionism. Party partisan pseudo-politics assumes and seeks the worst in its genuine opposition.

It is only through a neo-populist federalist reconstitution of the political, that democracy can continue to unfold human creativity and integrity and rehabilitate the possibilities of an organic, multi-cultural social individual, concrete local community and the proper centralization of a “federal” administrative government.

A PEOPLE'S POPULISM

No, the title of this essay is not redundant. What needs to be acknowledged is that there is a “people” who must recognize and acknowledge itself as a new political form and the ground of a new force for human social self-determination. A populist force. For some reason, even the likes of Alan Greenspan finds good reason to polemicize in his recent book, The Age of Turbulence, against a rising political populism or, what some have called an economic populism. What is Greenspan, this archetype of transnational, post-modern capitalism, worried about or afraid of? What is he trying to nip in its democratic and cultural bud?

It is clear for one who does not have his political head in the non-political sand, that there are significant stirrings of the people. These “people,” potentially radically ‘political,’ recognize that the putative intentions of the liberal-democratic, political “party system,” the promises of traditional state-controlled educational systems and the surface successes of progressive economic capitalism, are essentially and ultimately romantic illusions. Such illusions and ideological distractions, such false hopes, are not to be realized as validly universal or socially concrete in any imaginable material future. And they should not be.

What Greenspan is worried about is signs that “the people” are awakening to these illusions and delusions propagated by the established elite. They are becoming aware of the false hope of the--supposedly merely incomplete but imminently realizable-- projects of Modernity, the Enlightenment and the Liberal-Democratic Capitalism especially as envisioned by Neo-conservative proto-fascists. What Greenspan is afraid of is that “the people” are beginning to define themselves in terms of the primordial interests of local community and social individuality. He is afraid of people who no longer buy into the now long defunct“American dream” of pasteurized peace, leisure, security and prosperity. He is afraid of the dissolution of the deceptive imago of the individualist “self” that is realized by buying into such other false identities as the heroism of the amoral, imperialist American soldier putatively saving the world from communism, terror, or Islamo-fascism.

As posited in the Declaration of Independence and considerably substantialized in the American Constitution, “we the people” exist. “The people” is not merely a metaphor for some fantasy of innocent unity. We constitute the cultural and social possibility of any principled “American” future and must reach a sovereign, disseminated identity without being reduced to the mythic mass identity of the “melting pot” as thematized by American ideologists or equated with the rugged individualist of American cinema and media.

Such neo-populist “sovereignty” and identity realizes itself in a people’s democracy of federalized, neo-populist, multi-cultural communities and regions. This new community can be the only locus of political agency, reference and action. It will replace the ‘party system’ of elite partisan special interest groups who manipulate, degrade and corrupt the democratic heart and ethos of America. Only such a political formation developing a local culture of peace can stop their labor and wealth from funding the toxically extravagant life styles of the super rich, manning the barbarism of imperialist oil wars and enabling the militarist ideology and economics of empire and global homogenization.

This new populism is not the fascist populism of the Nazi’s, not the imagined regional populism of obsolete ruralism, let alone the bureaucratically administered and instrumentalized populism of Ross Perot’s past autocratic imagination. This “populism” is not the circumscribed, temporary movement of currently dissatisfied consumers, students or disaffected intellectuals. It is the “populism” of pro-democratic, self-possessed individuals who are beginning the revolution of community, of local belonging and the self-fulfilling abundance of historically and multi-culturally concrete, social individuality.

This Neo-populism realizes that its communities are not the raw material nor disposable labor of trans-national, post-modern globalism. Such social individuals are the historically self-conscious people who are open to and eager for the task of building new democratic, multi-cultural and spiritually based communities of a nurturing belonging and an existential purposefulness. Its task is to reappropriate the production, expression and experience of self, family and community from the simulacra of Hollywood, politicized media, the music-culture industry and the sports monopoly not to mention, of course, the phantasmatic purposelessness of post-Modern Capitalist pseudo-development. The latter is an errant virtualized pan-Ethos that denies the private, personal experience of body, organic-communal sociality and that critical intelligence which grows and matures in the historical process of creating and sustaining its own home.

Such individuals and such communities own and take responsibility for their own self-constitution socially, culturally and spiritually. Their State is one construed as regulative and not constitutive. It is envisioned in terms of the mediating principle of subsidiarity. Its State is one that negotiates the cooperation and sharing between regions and communities. It’s state is not one that controls, shapes and insturmentalizes the social individuality of communities in the name of GNP, Empire or a Utopian future that’s its ideological ‘advertisers’ imagine and promise. Populism’s future is here and now.

Such a populism sees beyond the fantasy of the neo-Imperialists false universalism, a project which seeks only to ensure the privilege and power of the old Colonialists and original imperialists. It sees beyond the role attributed to them of robotized expendability, utility and planned obsolescence as a function of a perennialized profit motive. This is a motive whose motif scoffs at and attempts to annihilate human autonomy, ethical responsibility and spiritual self-determination. It has no faith in local democracy. It knows no organic, rational limit nor criteria of real, human fulfillment.

For the new Populist Humanity, life is to be lived not used. Life is to be enjoyed not invested. Life is to be experienced not consumed in observing and obeying the aesthetic representations and imperatives of institutionally authorized artists, experts and image entrepreneurs. In the new Populist world one’s limit is one’s own and not that of calculated time, domesticated space, pharmaceutically engineered feelings and the fabulously fabricated futures of progressivist utopias. Here and now in the neo-populist vision, one’s future is not mediated externally by the wait for some new but equally fictional Godot but internally by the living re-creation of the new, different, other and possible out of the living traditions of the past. In this world one can accept that Other, whether an individual, religion or culture, that exists beyond one’s own limit, who need not be dominated, exploited, destroyed or, necessarily even understood. The third world, the foreigner, the cultural stranger need no longer be construed through the hungry eyes of militant Christian proselytism or Capitalist consumerism. They may be merely experienced, enjoyed and possibly even loved.

PROFESSIONAL POLITICS OR PEOPLE'S DEMOCRACY?

Recently some rule changes in health care provisions for Niagara County legislators has sparked debate as to whether the people should provide health care for their legislators. Of course the legislature had already taken care of that decision themselves—in the name of the people. All of our legislators here in Niagara County, New York, also have other employment or sources of income. So the question arises as to why “we” should provide them healthcare.

What’s really at issue, beyond the practical fiscal concern, is any compensation or advantage of service that contributes to or facilitates the “professionalization” of government service, democratic roles and political agency. What we want, I would think, are ‘servants’ who want to serve the greater good of the community or county and stand for democracy. We should be concerned with creating conditions of service that promote the democratization of government and politics not the professionalization let alone the “class infestation” of democracy. We should discourage conditions that encourage service for secondary reasons such as health insurance or salary or any other imaginable personal or social class (big business) benefits.

This is a matter more and greater than just saving money for the county. Dealing with such an issue as only a fiscal concern plays into the all too prevalent notion that politics is about the pragmatics of economy, jobs, taxes, , in short, business, therefore social class, interests. Once we get beyond the cynical, self-serving gossip and hyperbole regarding legislators who misuse government for personal gain, we ought to be discussing the conditions of honorable “politics” and democratic integrity. If procedural governmental politics is a “game” that the insiders know how to “play” and benefit from, then democracy, government and politics are hopelessly corrupted. In effect, then, government becomes institutionalized violence against democracy itself.

Democracy, government and politics have to be made “openly public,” also a matter of public education from an early age and moreover a matter of the values that inspire the next generation, who have a stake in our county, to play an everyday part in social self-determination. The “new guard” will be merely a younger “old guard” if how the game is played is not changed, radically and in principal. The problem is whether the powers that operate within if not exploit the procedural parameters of local or national institutions can be dealt with by those very institutional procedures without radical social and educational change.

Given that no “ideal”, democratic or otherwise, ever existed as such, I wouldn’t want to use the history of the compromise and corruption of democratic practice as a rationalization or excuse to limit what’s possible today. I wouldn’t want Jefferson’s self-interest and his other more blatant shortcomings to define what we should aim for as if that historical situation defines the very nature of democracy. In short the facts of the matter of democracy don’t define its possibilities or imperatives. How we conduct the democratic process at least partly if not essentially determines what can be achieved. But just as the moral whining and wailing about the ethical or intellectual shortcomings of the likes of Eliot Spitzer, for example, doesn’t really further any civic discourse that ultimately matters, moralizing about the non-participatory, unconscious masses doesn’t help either. But that’s the modus operandi, if not vivendi, of the kind of discourse we’ve fallen into: character assassination politics, moralistic expectations of ‘voluntarism’ on the part of people who don’t know what they’d be politically volunteering to participate in, etc. When the discourse starts dealing with what’s at issue from the standpoint of who it’s at issue for, then the people will get active and politics will begin to be de-professionalized.

So I’m not an Idealist but more a materialist. But the material issues have to be dealt with in ways beyond how the business community and party discourse sees them. Ideas have material force. But when nihilistic mythologies about what’s possible for democracy determine whether we support democratic education and whether we continue to reflect on how we conduct ourselves in civil discourse, then the discourse degenerates into the whining, wingeing and personality denigration we see in all too much civic discourse.

Nevertheless I too think there is an “enemy” among us. But it takes the form of misguided individuals and special interests who are misdirected to identify with and defend values (building empire), ideas (democratization by force, manipulation and deceit) and political forms (esp. “parties”) that don’t serve the good of our community let alone the country. So, in short, rather than just talking to ourselves in acceptable political jargon, we have to “talk” in such a way, that we open up the political sphere as such and not just the sphere of established interests, ideas and old political habits.

So are we really surprised let alone moved to meaningful discourse or action by the fact of Eliot Spitzer’s ethical failings and by doubts as to whether mayor Paul Dyster will “save Niagara Falls?” And are we really surprised let alone inspired that the changing of the guard is more often like the march of the zombies in the night of the living dead? To “fall back” on “democratic principles” is not to return to some imagined romanticized past, but to guide one’s judgment by what we stand for not by the lowest common denominator of those who would merely exploit democracy rather than treat it as a constitutive cultural, educational and communal form.

So, in short, if democracy becomes the politics of professionals serving a “new trans-national political class” (call it the New Class) or corporate interests (Corporatism) that destroy communities and decimate workers’ rights, then democracy will cease to strive to fufill its possibility as cultural dynamis and measure of the social, self-determining political “individual” and potentially new multi-cultural, neo-populist “communities.”

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND THE END OF AMERICA

The real reason nothing will be done about the “illegal immigrant problem” is because for the Neo-con oligarchy now in control of America, there is no problem. Illegal immigration is another “shock crisis” providing opportunity to further disenfranchise, disorient and dumb down the workforce and what remains of the authentic impulse toward democracy.

With any luck, from the Neo-con perspective, this will give the terrorists the best possible opportunity to easily gain entry to the our country to pull off some semblance of 9/11 again, thus affording the Neo-cons sufficient reason, that is, excuse, to finish tightening the vice grip of their neo-fascist technocracy. More control from above will adequately demoralize and infantilize us. Such frightened, dumbed down pseudo-citizens, that is, human mediocrities, make for good worker bees and super-soldiers capable of carrying out orders to finalize the securing of the new “Americanized” global empire.

Moreover the infusion of Hispanic culture will not necessarily strengthen America's economic culture as the myth of the melting pot presumes. But it will serve to continue the homogenization of community, the collapse of cultural differences and any genuine re-creation of potentially new multi-cultural, neo-populist communities which can build on the traditions of the past and fulfill upon democratic self-determination.

America is being used by the Neo-con’s for nothing more than a launching pad for the new transnationalist political class. Given that nation-states are now too small to deal with international problems and too big to deal with internal issues, the New (Political) Class must dissolve national boundaries of supposed sovereignty and emulsify the particularity of indigenous peoples such that there is nothing to defend or protect, that is, identify with as homeland. We can then all be citizens of the world, interchangeable and therefore essentially exploitable if not expendable. You can belong everywhere and nowhere. If we can’t secure peace, we can thus always instrumentalize the shock of crisis and chaos. It’s a good business model.

LIBERTARIANISM LANDS IN NIAGARA COUNTY, N.Y.

The Libertarian values of personal liberty, small government and business autonomy are obviously, on the surface, attractive. Yet they are, of course, vague and leave many questions to be answered. As such one is left with the perception that the general problem is one of quantification: more liberty, less government and more autonomy for business. The qualitative questions, however, are what should interest us.

To what extent does the primacy of personal liberty take into account or presuppose the social being which determines the kind of individual personal liberty we will enact? After all we are "social individuals" before we are "individuals." Are Libertarians flip-flopping in reaction to the social engineering/social welfare model that has dominated American politics? That is, are they creating the exact opposite problem: further atomization and an alienated mass of individuals without individuality yet paraded shamelessly in the name of individual liberty? When, in other words, does individual liberty become socially irresponsible opportunism and license? Given that we now live in a mass culture that seriously threatens family and community, is the emphasis on personal liberty beside the point? The point being that continuing emphasis on the primacy and priority of the "individual" and personal freedom overlooks the continuing disintegration of social and cultural identity, belonging and purposefulness as and in community.

Moreover, rather than smaller government, possibly we should be talking about authentically representative government, and what kind of public openness, commonality of values and shared interests would assure such representation. Obviously, great leaders for the Republic do not seem to be able to rise to the top. When the people at the grass roots level are systematically excluded from real, rational democratic discourse not only at the national but especially at the local level, the moneyed interest blocs choose who will lead “us”, not the people. The likes of unabashed offering of Dan Quayle and George W. Bush as great leaders does not inspire my trust in the Republican system of government nor my faith that the best leaders will rise to the top. Such leaders as we have seen recently are dupes, mouthpieces, empty vessels for extra-political ideologists and business lobbies such as the neo-cons and Halliburton. When a democracy is gounded in mass alienation and media-constituted culture, we have neither democracy nor authentic representation let alone the kind of process in which intelligent, courageous and authentically representative leadership can emerge.

Lastly, the market is not an invisible magic wand that guarantees good and prosperous business. The “business model” that I keep hearing about is possibly not even good for business. At best, the “business model,” whatever it really is, seems to be good for business but not necessarily for people. The history of the labor movement, the practice of planned obsolescence and the militarization of industry bring the value of the “business model” into serious question. Business practice and creativity does need freedom but business itself should not become the cart that leads the horse.

Whether another party with highly questionable precepts will serve Niagara County well I don’t know. Nevertheless, it seems that we need to think beyond the party model of political organization and action and imagine what politics would be like if the community were the operating agent of poltical action. The party system will likely continue to facilitate business and ideological interests that are socially and culturally destructive and divisive. It will probably continue to mimic the model of national politics, a practice that fails to express and explore the interests of people in community. It will most likely further stimulate a discourse about pseudo-issues and more distractive talk about the bad behavior of candidates, their strategies, performance and prospects. It will lead us further into the darkness of the proceduralist democracy that we now have. We need a constitutive democracy which does not presuppose that all is well at the social, cultural and community level of American life. Why not work at building a community and region as opposed to another party that will probably play into the perversions of power politics, class elitism, and the bureaucratic centralism which is the real poltical problem in America and in New York and in Niagara County.

NORMALIZED VIOLENCE AND MALIGNANT NEGLECT IN THE SCHOOLS

The unwillingess to address the downward spiral of educational quality in the classroom and the increasing contagion of violence in school environments, seems to reflect our utilitarian, self-serving neglect of any institutional issues or community concerns that do not compromise market efficiency and prevalent political or pedagogical ideology. Insofar as the usual crop of high school graduates and dropouts seems not to stall productivity in the private sector, and insofar as further meaningful increase in educational investment is not seen to improve economic productivity nor secure political advantage for the power elite, the necessary revaluations of and essential improvements in the educational arena will not be forthcoming. Yet the violence and indignity of American secondary education will continue.

Secondary education in particular will continue to graduate the usual batch of non-problematic students while the problematic students, 30% of the population in conservative estimates, will fall by the wayside, dropping out, or at worse, being victims of terminal student-on- student violence. Administrations will continue to play the role of ‘violence managers’ allowing teen culture to work out many of the conflicts in the schools through a policy of “survival of the fittest” and balance-of-power cliques and gangs. Failing that, they will impose various punitive measures which, though merely repressive, serve the purpose of controlling some of the more unruly and rebellious. It’s a penological approach to institutional education.

The real issue of educating youth about the reality of the world in which they live and suffer is systematically displaced, denied or distorted. Thus students are trained in formal skills of questionable value in the real world beyond the job, and entertained with “social issues” that are whitewashed in censored, sophomoric curricula that are embarrassing at best and insulting at worst. An education that remediates the emotional and social issues they deal with daily is no part of curriculum content. Rather than the content of curricula including the experience of the lives they live, they study life all too abstractly and as something which will be lived in the future. Life issues are studied as if they are external to the events occurring in their own lives. I’m personally no longer really sure whether more violence is done to those students forced out of the system by bullying or boredom or to those who remain, lulled into mindless conformity and social acceptability.

Of course the ‘tragic fruits’ of school violence in general show up in the death statistics which are surely unacceptable. Unfortunately, we do not make the connection between the school culture of violence and the most tragic of its fruits, namely, shootings and stabbings. School shootings are not really the worst of school violence. School shootings are the symptoms of the worst violence that precedes and causes the shootings. The shootings are the consequence of the hidden violence that daily cultivates defensiveness, aggressiveness and finally acting out. The source of acting out is in the violence born of suffering that is normalized as the “gowing pains” of the teen years. Such normalization of pain and violence is itself born of the misdirection of the students pains and problems and the mal-administration of the social ethos of the school in what amounts to a malignant neglect. Such neglect is the presumably benign permissiveness which “lets the kids learn to work it out for themselves” thus excusing the adults from being adults and educators. Such malignant neglect is a betrayal of the children's childhood and a forsaking of adult responsibility to nurture and guide the young.

A recent Oprah program visited a high school in which a group of some 60 students volunteered to discuss and deal with the hostilities and pain of being a high school student. In a group setting, the students described in emotion-filled confessions various forms of violence that suffused the school environment. They shared the anger, hatred and fear that permeated their lives and marginalized what space remained for learning. Oprah's guest hosts who worked with schools to help students disclose and resolve their pain and conflicts showed how with various simple transformative techniques it was possible to reconcile and resolve the hostilities between students and the painful feelings within students. Seemingly, an administration, faculty and staff, apparently operating at a level of maturity not much above that of the students, despite their education and training, were not prepared to detect and deal with their excruciating pain. The Oprah team was, however, able to do so in one short day.

My suspicion that the maturity level of the educators was not sufficiently developed to deal effectively with the students was sparked by recent events near my hometown of North Tonawanda, N.Y. In the neighboring community of Tonawanda, a gang of boys consecrating themselves “The Fresh Boys” gang, have become somewhat of a nuisance as gangs will be. Apparently unable to diffuse the puerile problematic assemblage, the Mayor of Tonawanda recently threatened the boys that they should know that “We own the town. You don’t.” If that isn’t a red cape in front of the bull, I don’t know what is. Kudos go out to the Mayor for having just descended to the level of The Fresh Boys letting them intuitively know that the impotent Mayor and ineffectual school and community are really perplexed and don’t have a clue what to do with them. Apropo a dysfunctional community, the “authorities” of this town threaten and, in effect, bully them in return. So the circle of pain and violence will probably continue.

Rather than the adults in Tonawanda recognizing in the boys behavior a plea for meaning, relationship and leadership, the Mayor reacts with impotent bravado seeing only a threat rather than the opportunity for instructive intervention and the opportunity for teaching and learning. Rather than taking creative action the mayor reacts with the same behavior as the boys. The standard plethora of excuses which are waiting in the wings from the various segments of the community for failing to deal with the gang will not fly. The community needs to acknowledge that the community itself is not working. Resistant, reactive behavior, habitual in nature and based in anger and fear, is hardly creative let alone ameliorative action. The gang of boys is a red flag, a plea for help to grow, mature and participate in some sphere of creativity and self-expression that has not been forthcoming. We all must ask ourselves how the wonderment so easily experienced through the eyes of youth can be allowed to rot into the disillusionment expressible only through rebellion, violence and destruction.

When students form gangs, cliques and marginal identity groups such as “heads,” “Goths,” “trenchcoat mafia,” or are passively marginalized as nerds, geeks, fags, etc., they are seeking ways to fill the void of self-understanding. They seek ways to deal with what they don’t understand or what upsets them emotionally. They seek bridges beyond these social and psychological impasses. The abusive school ethos, this subculture of inciviliity and cruelity, in short, has not provided these bridges, at least not in sufficient number or quality. Surely it is time for a virtual Nietzschean revaluation of all values that have led to this dismal if not nihilistic educational cul de sac. Why allow the schools to continue to be symptoms expressing the refusal of the community to deal with its own immaturity if not inhumanity? Ways are available to deal with hatred, fear, anger and violence. Why allow these blocks to metamorphose into personality deformation and social sclerosis only because the community itself refuses to continue to learn and transform.

SCHOOL VIOLENCE AND THE LIMITS OF LEARNING

The particular violence directed against gay teens in our schools raises the question as to the nature, prevalence and consequences of other forms of violence in shool culture. Teasing, harrassment and death threats map the range of violence that gay teens face in our school systems. Other forms of violence may well be similar to, yet also vary from, these all too familar hostilities. It is important to draw attention to these other forms and manifestations given that it's likely that such behavior has a deeper and more wide-ranging effect upon the experience of learning in the schools.
This is certainly not to say that the more overt and specific violence directed especially at gay teens does not have a deep and wide-ranging effect upon the teens immediately targeted. Obviously it does. The point is that any form of violence in a learning community will suppress the freedom of expression and inquiry that is a necessary condition of learning for all students.
In the case of Michael Mangus, the gay teen attending the North Tonawanda High School in North Tonawanda, N.Y., violence took the form of harrassment regarding his manner of dress and his mannerisms of personal self-expression. It also took the heinous form of overt threats to his life. Over a period of two years, such violence against Michael took a toll far beyond the fact of having to withdraw from school in order to feel safe. Non-attendance clearly affected his opportunity to learn. However even when in attendance, what is so blantantly overlooked is the toll taken by suppression of any subsequent attempts to express himself in the learning process once his very being is subjected to vilification and excommunication. If a student knows that his very self is deemed unacceptable how willing can he possibly be to enter into the vulnerable space of inquiry, doubt and dependency in order to seek knowledge and experience? Surely he would not be very willing to risk providing more opportunity for bullies to further snipe at his manner of being. Additionally however, when the bully, that is, the abrasive, aggessive and belligerent student, is given carte blanch to vent his anger, how many other students may hold back being fully self-expressed as individuals in fear that some distinguishing characteristics of their own person will draw fire and create suspicion that there may be something a little too "different" about them also. Moreover the violence that can prevent even information-gathering must surely put a strangle hold on the possbilities of inspiration, curiosity and interactive inquiry regarding feelings, values and issues of culture and society. Additionally is it not inevitable that exploration of real issues in terms of the experiences of the individuals whose lives embody those issues will inevitably be ruled out of bounds?
In my own teaching of philosophy at the college level, I have often wondered about the source and genesis of the reticence and self-censorship of innumerable students most of which have just completed high school. The fear, self-doubt, inhibition, lack of apparent curiosity, excuses for lack of participation, and rationalization of passivity, may all well be the sypmptoms of a variegated history of shool violence. It is the potential for such violence that has taught them that it is not safe nor even right to explore and inquire beyond the boundaries of conformity wherein noone is offended, made to feel uncomfortable, provocatively challenged or confronted.
Those who are blinded to the constant threat of violence and threatening, prejudicial attitudes may even think that, on the whole, the occurrence of considerable learning as it does occur by the "normal" within the usual "normal" bounds, is a domain that is free of violence. It may be thought that such a domain testifies to the "good job" our schools are doing. However I would like to suggest that such normal, standardized, conflict-free zones have themselves achieved their apparent placidity and eduational effectivity through not unrelated forms of violence. Intimidation need not only do its work through physical threat and social intimidation, it may also occur in the the censorship of questions that may even intimate an experience or discussion that offends the comfort zones of the status quo of conditioned compliance. The provocative question or expression that discloses our discomfort regarding a new realm of possible freedom points to the unfreedom upon which much of contemporary education is based.
We might ask ourselves what hidden authority structures and mechanisms of social control are being condoned by exonerating the bully from guilt or punishment? What fears and insecurities, doubts and dilemmas are being suppressed by student identification with cliques, gangs or other one-sided, one-dimensional identities? Isn't the school a play-ground of experimentation as opposed to a training ground for intellectual and social retreat and resignation? When the school cannot retain or revive the curiosity of the innocent child, then it becomes the apologist for the interests of a community that thrives on the repression and marginalization of those not benefiting from the present ethos and ethic of our so very troubled, divided yet homogenized society. We are in a particularly stifling sort of cultural cul de sac when conformity appears as belonging, herd behavior substitutes for individual identity and not-being-condemned serves as the measure of being on the approved path of productive purposefulness and creative self-fulfillment.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE HALLS OF LEARNING

The case of Michael Mangus, the gay North Tonawanda, N.Y. high school student whose life was threatened at school, is both alarming and edifying. It is an alarm sounded many times in America. Like any alarm, however, which is neither acknowledged nor acted upon, one simply no longer hears it. But why is it we don’t hear this alarm which might awaken us to an awareness that the first condition of learning is being blatantly violated in the very institution charged with protecting it? What is that condition? It is freedom from violence, intimidation and threat. And why do we not hear it? Could it be that such freedom is infinitely more terrifying than the manifold of quotidian terrors that now shackle and shadow our freedom? Possibly all this is not the least surprising if we consider the bigger picture of the normalization of violence in many forms in our daily life. A society numbed and indifferent to societal self-abuse could hardly be alarmed let alone edified by the tribulations of one teenager suffering the supposedly “normal” stress of teenage culture. If another ‘alarm’ didn’t just go off in your head when you heard the word ‘normal’, that is also not surprising. Why? Because American culture, if we can call it a culture, is capable of normalizing anything no matter how deleterious to health and well-being: e.g., death by drunk drivers, guns, drugs, obesity, suicide, reckless medical care, irrational wars, rape, hate-crimes, gangs, child neglect, etc. etc. etc. Yet rather than proposing and acting upon constructive solutions given all these symptoms of decadence and real deviance, all too many of us choose rather to blame the victim or scapegoat the innocent and vulnerable. Compared to the lethality of ordinary everyday existence, the “deviation” of Michael Magnus from the predominant social norms, should have been seen as a slight ripple on the waters of the ocean during a typhoon. But it wasn’t. Instead his expressiveness and apparent “difference” unleashed hatred and threat. Possibly more heinous than this were the denial and inaction on the part of a school which implicitly condoned such harassment. But what is it that is so threatening about someone like Michael, a young gay teen stumbling and struggling to create and express the secrets of his own being? Could it not be that Michael reminds us of a softer and gentler side that contrasts so starkly with the horror of the violence to which we have grown accustomed if not addicted. Could it not be that Michael’s very way of being might remind us of our own possibilities for sensitivity, idiosyncrasy, compassion and self-expression which we might actually have to begin to “feel” in ways that can be more threatening for some of us than even death itself. Some people, if not most, would probably rather die than feel compassion for and try to understand those who differ significantly from ourselves. We might have to become something new and better. Seemingly the homosexual “coming out” in America has so provoked the fanatical wing of the Christian community that it has conveniently forgotten Jesus’ fundamental imperative of “judging not lest you yourself be judged.” Obviously, like the church on Meadow Drive in North Tonawanda, N.Y. that recently displayed mean-spirited, anti-gay signage, it denies the very gospel of love for which Jesus died. Instead it finds it more righteous to moralistically hate and condemn “the least of them.” It is such ineluctable hypocrisy that led the great German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, to say that surely “God is dead.” That is, God is surely dead in the lives and hearts of those who in blind self-righteousness fail to practice the most obvious requests that Jesus made. Although the institutions of education are not required to fulfill upon Christian values, it would seem however that the schools should at least meet the minimum requirement of learning. But they do not. Whereas the public institution of the school is created to guarantee inclusion and satisfy designated needs of the people, too many have degenerated into mechanisms of exclusion, censorship and conformism. They suffer not only from “dumbing down” but also from moral and human “numbing down.” The schools and its professionals should be nurturing “identification upward” toward transformative knowledge, higher modes of existence and nobler values. But it seems they “normally” function to feed the mind- and soul-numbing status quo of adaptation and mere survival. The school is a place for imagination and inspiration not inquisition and intimidation. To tolerate such abuse as Michael suffered, and to fail to address its conditions and causes especially in the school curriculum itself, is to fail as an educational institution. It is not merely a matter of stopping toxic behavior but of promoting optimal conditions of openness, inquiry, new experience and relentless questioning and grade-appropriate life-related research. It is the task of the school to translate adolescent aggression and “attitude” into analysis and creativity. The schools should lead the community and not succumb to the lowest common denominator of its fears and fallacies. It was my great privilege to have known Michael Mangus as a child. He was a sweet, gentle, creative child with a vibrant sparkle and spontaneity. That energy is still there. Yet it would be one more American tragedy to see a reactive, insensitive school and indifferent community allow such vibrant energy to be bullied into survival paranoia and a life reduced to apology for an existence as God-given as yours or mine. Michael’s struggle is the greatest of learning opportunities for the school, the church and the community. Or it can be another round of selfish circling of the wagons for the sake of self-justification, defensiveness and a return to the safety of “normality.” This struggle can be a time for shining a new and brighter light on our humanness or a return to the dark insidiousness of smug, self-righteous complacency. Let’s not once again let fear win and fail Michael Mangus a second time.

JOEL OSTEEN: OBSCURANTISM LITE

Several days after having seen Joel Osteen interviewed on the Larry King Show I'm still recovering. I'm recovering from the shock that this man, Joel Osteen, heads one of the largest Christian congregation in America. Let me get right to the issue: Please forgive my anger, but how in God's name is it possible that this latter day obscurantist can have the largest Christian congregation in the USA? Yes, he inherited it from his dead father to be sure. But another answer, which may be adequate, is that America is filled with cretins. Or, on a kinder note, possibly we are so desperate for comfort, reassurance and ever simpler answers and directions for formulaic living that such 'twinkification' of consciousness is quite effective and thus welcomed and even demanded by the American populace. As I recover from watching King's inteview of Osteen,still quite dumbfounded, astounded and befuddled, I find myself now being somewhat frightened by this phenomenon. This smooth-sell Elmer Gantry markets millions of dollars of books, apparently, about "faith" obviously to millions of the faithful. And as if this publishing horror show isn't bad enough, now his wife is getting in on the publishing act. She says she is writing about "women." I really can't wait for this intellectual giant to tell us all about 'women!' Suddenly, thanks to her husband, she's famous and just as suddenly she's an expert on "women." Have you heard Joel Osteen?!?! He has nothing to say. He could answer none of Larry King's questions regarding some of the major issues of the day not to mention of all times. None! Not one!!! He was blathering in short well articulated cliches, vague oh so vague generalities and disclaimers that he "just didn't know" but ever so smugly as if none of these questions mattered, as if he has the real and only answer. Yet, to the real questions that the world is asking, he had no positions, no answers at all. Not even an opinion. Not a guess. He's just so self-righteously sure that his "lite" version of faith and god will take care of everything. Cliches, generalities and positionlessness. It wasn't that he was non-judgemental. He simply had nothing to say. Every response to King was a matter of excusing himself from knowing anything or sharing any understanding of anything that literate people today are discussing. Apparently the major issues of the day never even occur to him as something he should possibly take some responsibility to think about, to discuss, to deal with in concrete Christian terms. But he is exempt from participating because he has "faith." His message is not to worry because your faith guarantees that god will take care of all the big issues. That gives him permission for relentless smugness, importunate smiling and absolute ignorance regarding real life. Obviously he never considered John F. Kennedy's famous statement that "God's work must truly be our own." Osteen exhorts with a soft-spoken intensity, selling the eternal panacea without argument but with much downhome persuasion, a Christian good 'ol boy kind of logic. All one must do is plan for faith and put it into action. After all, if you don't water the garden the tomatoes won't grow. The real question though is what all this has to do with the Bible since presumably this is a "Bible based" church. It seems to me that the Bible recommends a life in the world but not of the world. And yet the likes of Osteen always advertise a pragmatic faith whose value is measured in terms of the standards and practices of the world. What's missing here is the religious experience and that mode of spiritual being that permeates one's life. What's missing is that struggle with faith that Jesus endured to the very moment of his death on the cross. Osteen's brand of religion is about getting it all for me in my way without this "religion thing" getting in the way. Osteen's 'Christianity' does not ask, as Jesus did, "what am I for" but it opportunistically asks "what can this religion do for me." Not "what can I be for" in the eyes of God and in terms of the religious life but "what good can God and religion be for" in the eyes of my ego and in the light of my worldly desires. For Osteen, religion is a self-help forum in which one plans for what one wants on the basis of one's desires, begins to act on that plan, then presumes that "faith" will assure that it will happen. That's decent advice for common sense living. It also amounts to your run of the mill conformism, banal materialism and egregious know-nothingism. Questioning, creativity and critical thinking amounts to the work of the devil or at least a lack of faith. The text of the Bible is surely no longer a problem for Osteen's brand of parasitism. It's there merely to extract useful quotes in order to verify Osteen's common sense, quaint logic and abundant reassurances. All you need do is plug yourself into the faith circuit and the spirit will begin to flow. This is complacent Christianity for the comatose. Innocuous, yet insidious if not diabolical.