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.

POLITICS OF HUMOR: THE ISLAMIC REACTION

As of today, Feb. 15, 2006, street protests continued in the Islamic world over the Danish cartoons apparently lampooning Muhammad. The protests seemed to be continuous for the last 10 days or so, the protestors indignant, enraged and often vengeful. The fire of this protest was fueled and fanned when various European presses reprinted the cartoons. To this writer the moral and political status of the cartoons are questionable and should be questioned. The reprinting of the cartoons seems unnecessary if not irresponsible. Western presses continue to reprint the cartoons asserting their right to publish in the face of pressure to censor the cartoons. Muslims around the world were obviously offended by these cartoons. Such taking of offense is understandable to me. What is not understandable to me is the degree of offense, the fury if not hysteria of their outrage. Possibly I should be able to understand. Possibly I am insensitive, unempathetic or just ignorant. I am not sure. What I do know is that I had no such feelings as I saw last night on CNN. Possibly it is not accurate to call the cartoons a lampooning of Muhammad since they were not intended ultimately to ridicule. Maybe better to characterize them as caricatures or satires. As a political cartoon, however, it seems its main intent was not to demean but to criticize. Now if the furor was over the fact of depiction alone of Muhammad no matter what the meaning or context, then there is no explaining let alone justifying the intent of the cartoon. If however the furor was over the content or meaning intended in the cartoon, then we have, I believe, a different matter at hand. Again it seems the essential intent was not merely to ridicule nor insult Muslim sensibilities. The cartoonists, strictly speaking, are not blasphemers because they are not carrying out these offenses from within the Muslim world. They are not Muslims. They may be accused of being sacreligious or being infidels but not blasphemers since they are not believers in the first place. These cartoonists are artists or caricaturists making a political point. What is that political point? It is that the insult to Islam is really coming from within the Muslim world by Muslims who would turn their religion into an instrumentality for ultimately political purposes. To kowtow to Muslim pressures and protests would be to surrender the political and religious criticism being made. It is extremists within Islam who belittle, insult and compromise the integrity of the religion of Islam. No show of disrespect to Islamic sensibilities could touch the degree of damage done to Islam by extremists, zealots and exploiters who would use Islam to support their political purposes. The theological laxity demonstrated in the predominant silence of the Islamic world in the face of egregious interpretations of Islam to justify any and every imaginable political action is deafening. Any damage that Western attitudes and even cultural exports have done to Islam does not hold a candle to the damage done by Islam itself through theological and political laxity, laziness, opportunism and zealousness. Possibly this unacknowledged self-abuse explains the degree of outrage at the cartoons, an outrage that covers the truth being spoken by some of the cartoons: once again, this truth is that Islam is being politicized from within to the detriment of its religious content and to the denigration of its prophet. The justice which the very concept of "Islam" represents is turned into revenge and the peace which it avows is disavowed in unbridledled violent reaction against putative infidels at every crossroad. ..... It is also unfortunate that the leaders of Islam should make the same mistake that Catholics have made in the face of the sex scandals in America in which a large number of children have been molested by priests. The Catholic bureaucracy delayed, stonewalled, denied and covered up the scandal, exhibiting the callousness and indifference that finally exposes the cruelty, that is the lack of love, that characterizes its state of decay, distortion and inexorable hypocrisy. Islam should have learned from Catholicism's self-destructiveness. Apparently it has not. Instead it itself remains reactive, defensive and self-righteousness. If the rational and reflective leadership of Islam had taken as proactive a role critiquing Islam's divergence from its inner truth as its extremist fringe has taken in promoting violence, then possibly the world's respect for Islam would be greater than it is. ..... Lastly let me say that our probable failure in the West to fully comprehend and appreciate the beauty, wisdom and treasure that is Islam does not go unrivaled by Islam's ability to underestimate the value placed upon freedom of speech in the West. How infinitely often has the truth gone unsaid for fear of reaction, retaliation, offense, shunning or excommunication. When is the defense and exercise of freedom of speech too great especially in striving to express and comprehend the infinite wisdom of God. When the emperor has no clothes, for his own good, should we wait for the innocent child to speak up? Or should we recover our own authentic innocence and speak the truth about the hegemony of religious hypocrisy in our world today, hypocrisy of which countless cartoons could never speak enough truth sufficient to rectify its depth of corruption, perversion and perdition.

IDEOLOGICAL SHOWSTOPPERS

Recently on Bill Maher's "Real Time" HBO political talk show(Oct. 27, 2005), the logic of ideological economistic diversion was illustrated quite nicely. When discussion turned to the exigencies of national health care, the discussion was diverted quite effectively with, euphemism and subterfuge, nicely imperceptibly mixed. During the discussion, the issue was shaping up as to the virtue and necessity of national health care in the face of, some say, 45 million people without any health care insurance. The fools we are for the forceful sway of ideological discourse became apparent quickly. Rather than continue to deepen discussion as to the exigencies of such health care, Tucker Carlson, liberal obscurantist of the highest order, with mechanical ideological efficiency raised the point that in fact health care in Canada costs much more than in the U.S. Innocent enough, seemingly, but note the insidious tactical "logic" of deflection and diversion. Rather than discussing the questions of the priorities and problems of "national health care", Carlson, with calculated conservative yet seemingly mechanical unconsciousness, swerves the topic to 'the measure of money' as the determining and defining factor in the discussion. The ultimate concern for Carlson here is the condescending reassurance that if such a plan costs more than we already spend, how could it possibly be worthwhile. Of course the hidden assumptions in Carlson's sleight of hand are several. Surely Canada's model is not the only model as he would seem to assume. If it were, surely we could learn from such a model and not repeat their mistakes; and, surely there are variations on the Canadian approach. Though the talk show went temporarily into dead air space at Carlson's interjection, one of the other guests recovered from Carlson's 'sucker punch' and pointed out that the real question is not what it will cost but firstly what our priorities really are. Do we really care that millions are without health care? And if it were to cost more than, God forbid, CANADA, then might it not be worth paying the bill? In addition Carlson assumes that we can compare Canadian apples and American oranges in health care. But with proper pundit panache Carlson ups the ante with the claim that 'in fact' fewer Canadians are satisfied with their health care than Americans. God forbid, such powerful polemic, such forceful social scientific data. Surely, therefore Carlson adeptly implies that we must therefore have an inviolably better system. Fortunately Maher saved the day by noting that the dissatisfied Canadians could not possibly have been less satisfied than the 45 million Americans with no health care coverage. We surely should note how quickly and potently the spectre of ''too high a cost" or "not enough money" stops the show. Of course we at such times also quickly forget that billions upon billions are readily available for unjustified wars such as Vietnam and Iraq. Carlson's crowd which includes the AMA, conceivably the most powerful lobby in the world, obviously do not have national health care anywhere on the agenda, at least in the 21st Century, if ever. So the conservatives/neo-conservatives throw up the panoply of idiots such as Carlson proffering the ideological smokescreen of such idiocy, obfuscation, subterfuge and distortion. The "mental block" that we all suffer in the face of such ideological obfuscation extrudes itself in the name of "being realistic" and "mature" about the matter at hand. If one were to "think", so "think" the neo-cons, one would see that such health care is unrealistic and one who considers the possiblity is not (politically) mature. ..... In a college classroom one of my students pulled a similar (unconscious) maneuver. While discussing the costs of repairing the long neglected levees of New Orleans, the student argued that certain federal money couldn't be appropriated for local repairs because it was legally slated for federal use. Well of course. But the point that has to be made once again is how easily our supposedly democratic discourse avoids the human issue of human well-being and safety. One can so easily explain why for decades money could just not quite find its way to the repair of said levees. Now if said levees had been near Santa Barbara or some other wealthy white community, "the money" would have found its way through the bureaucratic barbwire, around the administrative mud holes and out of the coffers of the overly abundant military budgets in time and in sufficient amount to save the day. But the ideologized idiotic mind so easily blocks, diverts and explains away through supposedly "sufficient reason" the anxieties of analytic, bureaucratic-technocratic administrative defensiveness and self-justification. In the meantime, the forgotten "living dead" lost in the margins, intersticies and backwashes of "America" never seem to find a voice and logic capable of sidestepping the ideology of economistic, bureacratic and administrative "reason" long enough to have an effective and affective accounting. That is, we can't stay "conscious" long enough to deal with the human issues in a human language. The spectre of the unconscious mechanical mind is effective enough only to "mind the business" at hand. And the business at hand is always tending to and nurturing the forces preventing the fading of that very black bottom line.