What's With the Politicization of Education

One of the easiest ways to oppress a people is to systematically deny them a quality education. One of the easiest ways to systematically deny people a quality education is to defund education. One of the easiest way to hide the racist/classist/elitist motives behind defunding education is through subterfuge and opacity. Thus, we have the modern-day American educational system.

N'gugi wa Thiong'o once said that after the canons of the night came the chalkboard of the morning, and of the two, clearly the chalkboard has been most effective in colonizing the mind. That may be true of the British colonial educational systems left behind in Anglophone Africa and Caribbean nations. America, however, operates by a different strategy. Simply keep people stupid. Keep people stupid concerning the real history of America. Keep people stupid concerning how policy eventually effects the pocketbook. Keep people stupid by using confusing and emotionally-charged rhetoric that will guarantee the person using it that he/she will get poor white people to vote against their own interests.

So far, this has been the Southern/conservative/Republican strategy. There is a reason why they always rally against the national department of education -as if it matters in the first place. Heaven forbid if the American public receives a real education and political discourse must be elevated past anti-intellectual gabble. How would they ever win office? Would the governor of Wisconsin have won office had he explained that he'd be a union-busting corporate pawn? Probably not. So he used flowery languaged and slipped one past the people of Wisconsin, and now they are sorry.

As a person who is pursuing a degree in the humanities, I am also the victim of Americans' beliefs that the only professions are in law and medicine. When was the last time you saw a riveting television drama about a history professor? An English degree? It's just a big waste of time, and I feel that from most of my friends who are outside of the humanities. I have a friend who is an education major that I love dearly, but every time I talk to him concerning what it is that I do, I get a hint of condescension from him. They feel that our degrees do nothing practical. I say that they have everything to do with practicality. It's the reason why humanities professors, and not business, law, or education professors, are perpetually listed by Conservative think tanks as the most dangerous intellectuals in America: we PURPOSELY expose the politicization of America's educational system. When we see the state of Texas literally try to rewrite American history, stripping it of the ugly truths it contains, we are not afraid to say that the educational system here (sadly) serves the same purpose as those of the imperialist European nations: to keep certain races and classes at the bottom, and to maintain an elite hegemony.

Words DO Mean Something

Words mean everything to me. They have to, I'm attempting a Ph.D. in English. And even though some may call me melodramatic, the recent shooting of a United States Congresswoman should prove that there's something behind my bombast.

I'm not trying to be too cold here, but Saturday's shooting was no surprise to me. With today's gun rhetoric and political labeling, I'm only surprised that it didn't happen sooner. I'm not playing the blame game here. As a student of history, violence can come from the Left and the Right. Indeed, there was a time in this counry when most of the violence came from the Left via war protests and bombings.

However, with 95% of talk radio time being consumed by the Right, it is safe to say that most of the gun talk and revolutionary rhetoric comes from the Right. Just listen to the hate-filled speech of Rush Limbaugh and the gun play of Palin. To some, what they say is just red meat for the base. To them, I personally believe that their talk is just a way to make $12 million in one quarter. To some psychopathic fringe elements, their words are God-sent gifts. Their words give them a way to dehumanize people who don't agree with them. Crosshairs on a map become real political targets. People become enemies. Enemies that must be snuffed out by any violent means necessary.

Ironically, Right-Wing Conservatives play down the importance of words. Some even advocate the eradication of English departments across America; afterall, we don't DO anything productive for our societies. We only deal with the words of dead men and the bitter ones of living minorities. Thereby, we poison the minds of the youth of America, with words.

What then, after this horrible tragedy has occurred, do we call the hate-filled, fear-inducing rhetoric of someone like Glenn Beck? Even more dangerous, gun lobbyists, with words, successfully lobbied Congress to let the assault weapons bans to expire. What words, following this horrific act, will convince our conservative public servants to place a stricter ban on assault weapons that could more than likely harm or kill them?

Scrambling for a Story

I'm always talking about how President Obama does not give the political journalists enough controversy from week to week. Well, with all of the legislative battles taking place in Washington, it would have been hard to prove my theory earlier in the year.

However, turn to the political shows now. Take your pick. FOX, CNN, MSNBC has a plethora of them every afternoon. What are they talking about? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The pundits keep trying to drum up controversy over what President Obama saide about Vick, but is that all they have? Really, that's all they have. President Obama is in Hawaii enjoying a shaved ice cream treat and keeping his briefings and other official dealings away from the prying eye of the public. That leaves the pundits with a ratings rotten egg.

So, whether you are coming from the Left or the Right, before you criticize the President on anything, turn down the volume on your television. Though I am a liberal-leaning Southern Democrat, even I have learned to turn down the yacking. Those shows exist to stir up controversy instead of representing the true views of most Americans, which are right in the middle. But, if you notice, reader, there's a reason why it's called the "boring middle...."It's bad for ratings.

Exactly How Many Political Pundit Shows Did We Have in the 1980s and 1990s?

For the life of me, I cannot name more than four politically-driven shows from the 1980s and early 1990s. Let's see, there was "Washington Week" on PBS, "Face the Nation" on CBS, "Meet the Press" on NBC, and "This Week" on ABC. That's it. Unless my memory fails me and there's more, but we only got politics on Sunday morning. One hour on each network. I knew who the president was in the 1980s, the iconic Ronald Reagan, but America did not see him on television every day. As the 1980s drew to a close and George Bush I became our president, we didn't see his face on television every day, either. Instead, we saw the REAL Gulf War, and we heard about it from real soldiers and saw the real sands of the desert instead of Saturday morning cartoons.
Then in 1992, a young president named Bill Clinton took office. He was every Republican's nightmare. They went on a crusade, following each and every scandal, trying to dig up something that would impeach him. In 1996, a new network, FOX news, sprang up and it followed these details, exclusively. It started a crusade against the "liberal news media," and claimed to be both fair and balanced. If offered conservative political pundits, people who questioned Clinton's sexual life as well as his domestic/foreign policies.
It did not take CNN long to also follow FOX. And for the first time in our nation's history, we saw the President on television every day. Every day was a new episode in the live-action soap opera that was the Clinton Whitehouse. From Hillary's horrendous outfits to the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the government shut-down, there was always something new. Every day.
Then, George Bush II came to office in 2000. Though MSNBC and FOX were roughly founded at the same time, MSNBC began to be a counterbalance to FOX in 2001 by publicly offering more progressive-leaning opinion shows and news. While FOX only offered glittering generalities of the Bush-Cheney Whitehouse, political pundits on MSNBC rose to fame by pointing out the deep flaws of Republican-driven, Reagan-inspired Bush-Cheney policies. And so, once again, we saw our president on television. Every day.
Then came the 2008 Presidential campaign. It was so exciting. So divisive. So filled with distrust and strife. It made for good news. Every day. I mean, I put in 20 hours per week or more between FOX, CNN, and MSNBC. After the election, I was thoroughly let down because I didn't have anything else on television to watch. Then Obama was elected. A cerebral candidate. One who views the chess board from a thousand different angles before he makes a move. One who does not give the press privy to his sharp political intellectualism. One who does not give the press a story. Every day.
After almost two decades of seeing our leaders on television. Every day. We have one who takes his time and refuses to feed into the 24/7 world of media division and political punditry. On the left and the right, we've gotten so accustomed to seeing our Presidents. Every day. That we call Obama's deliberateness a lack of leadership. Is it a lack of leadership, or a lack of a news story which angers us? Several times, on the Left and the Right, media outlets have written President Obama off, saying what he's going to do before he even has a meeting about what he's going to do. For instance, The Huffington Post ran a story saying that President Obama caved on tax cuts for the rich, and he wasn't even in the country and had not met with any of the negotiating parties involved.
Instead of seeing the war on television so that we can empathize with our soldiers, we see a bunch of political pundits talking about how there's a lack of leadership and confusing vision concerning the war. Instead of waiting on a word from the President, the media, on both sides, hangs onto every word even a Whitehouse staffer may say. There are times when I see them literally stretching the smallest details in order to drum up controversy and ratings.
Pundits on the left and the right should be thankful for Sarah Palin. Lord knows she says enough silly things to keep them taking, and that's why she receives so much political news on both sides: our current President is not giving FOX News any controversy by participating in any sexual affairs, and the Vice President is not giving MSNBC any news by shooting somebody in the face.

Do Republicans Want a Fedual Society?

I remember the William Blake class I took in pursuit of my Master's Degree. I took it for purely nostalgic purposes. As an undergraduate, I did most of my course work in British Literature. So, returning back to the Romantic Era was like going back to my intellectual home.
Well, Blake, at first, was extremely difficult to understand. And the professor assigned this one book, Reflection on a Revolution in France by an Edmund Burke. Reading it was like watching paint dry, and my eyes began to fill with tears of sheer boredom. Besides, I thought, we live in America, why in the Hell are we reading something a British Whig Party member wrote about the French Revolution?
Over the years, as American politics have gotten crazier and dumber, I've come to appreciate that boring book. I've come to see it, the very long letter to a colleague, as the foundation for conservative thought.
Harshly critical of Populist political movements and anti-intellectual in tone, this long letter seemingly, advocates a two-class society: the very rich who Lord over the very poor. And ironically, this long letter has everything to do with modern American conservative thought. There are many allusions to Burke's original philosophical thought. If Republicans accuse Obama of secretly conspiring to turn America into a Socialist society, all we have to do is listen very carefully to John Boehner and conclude that Republicans are secretly conspiring to turn America into a feudal society: a society in which the richest two percent control both wealth and political power.
I don't have to waste time here quoting the grim economic statistics that would support my theory. As a nation, we've been looking at and experiencing this for the past eight years. For people in lower economic classes, the American Dream seems further and further out of reach, even with extensive education. We know, as actually finishing graduate school looms closer and closer, that we will be faced with massive student loan debt, and will have to delay home-ownership, retirement savings, and childbirth for several years, yet. Thus, the birthrate continues to decline, and the average age for first-time mothers keeps rising.
As Republicans continue to cloak their secret agendas in the rhetoric of "small-business" talk, how long will we shut our eyes to their truth. They want a modern-day feudal society, whatever that may look like. I wonder if they'll want to practice Enclosure in a few years?
Reader pick up Burke, and get back to me with your thoughts.

Mississippi is not a real place

Earlier this week, I read something in the Huffington Post about the poorest states in the nation. Not surprisingly, the poorest states were all red states, and mostly Southern. No argument there. The numbers don't lie, and of course, Mississippi is the poorest. It is not the reddest state in the South, the numbers show from the last presidential election that it was more Democratic-leaning than Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. But, like its neighbors, Mississippi does have a Republican governor who is testing the waters for a presidential run in 2012.

I was not offended at any of these things. What angered me the most, what really, really chapped my behind, was the number of times people used "uneducated" to describe the populace of Mississippi. People made these random assumptions that everybody from Mississippi is "uneducated" and "behind the times". A quick Google search would reveal that Mississippi actually has more universities and community colleges than states comparable in size and population. And even the most dilapidated school systems of Mississippi do not have the drop-out rate as high as Wayne County's of Detroit. Yet, nobody calls the populace of Detroit, or any other metropolitan area where the dropout rate is above 50%, "uneducated."

Then, I had this sudden realization: Mississippi is not a real place with real people in the minds of most of Americans. Mississippi is an idea. It is an ideological dumping ground for everything that America doesn't love about itself: homelessness, racism, uneducated masses who slavishly follow the Republican party against their own will, poverty, failing school systems, low-paying jobs that are non-unionized, teenage pregnancy, rises in sexually transmitted diseases and abortion rates among teens, sky-rocketing divorce rates, etc. All of these things are Mississippi's problems. I don't need to waste any space here outlining all of the "good ole' boy" and "cotton-picking" stereotypes about Mississippi that circulate in our national culture. According to Hollywood, there are no paved roads, it is never winter, and nobody has air-conditioning. We all talk lak Hai-leeeeeey Baaaaaaarbour (Whose accent is very questionable. Some people believe he has a coach so that he can appeal to his base. He certainly didn't talk like that at a commencement ceremony I once attended), and the state doesn't extend past the Delta region where white folks are forever night-riding with white sheets over their heads and Black folks are forever sitting on their porches singing the Blues about how miserable white folk done made them.

Mississippi exists as a psychological booster for the rest of the United States. When all else fails, when all looks bleak, when everything looks substandard and subpar, every state in the United States has the privilege of saying, "At least we're not Mississippi."

Blue Dog Dems in the Bush Era

I have but one question: where were these Blue Dog Democrats during the Bush/Cheney era?